OWS. US Trade Union Leaders. US working class consciousness

It has to hedged about with all sorts of caveats. But this does not mean it is meaningless. At the moment the approval rating for the US Congress is about 8%. This is lower than the percentage of people in the US who think that it might not be a bad idea if the US was communist. It is dramatically lower than the 36% of the US population who look "favorably" on socialism. Incredible.

With these albeit not the most concrete of attitudes, for example what do people think communism is, what do they mean by socialism, we have to look at the role of the Union leaders. Revolutionary socialists, otherwise known in some instances as Trotskyists, have been known to say that the most conservative forces in society are the union leaders, the union bureaucracy. It is good to keep these attitudes of millions of US workers in mind when we hear these union leaders absolute refusal to talk of capitalism never mind of an alternative, that is socialism. It is good to keep these attitudes in mind when we see them boot lick the Democrats and this party's role in doing whatever Wall Street and US capitalism wants.

Look at the crisis in US politics at the moment. The Republican Party candidates contending to run for President are a joke. Obama is a slick cowardly bourgeois politician who has even increased the armed military action of US capitalism around the world while bailing out his backers in Wall Street. It is hard not to say he is worse than Bush in many ways. And there is no workers candidate being put forward in the coming election!!!! What cowardly conservative forces the union leaders are.

A final note. We should not rule out a third candidate appearing to tap the anger. This could be on the left or on the right. We live in times of great change, great opportunity but also great danger. If the mass workers organizations do not lead and fight and recruit tens of millions more into the unions and build a mass workers party a vicious right wing movement could develop. The union leaders are a scandal. They are cowardly buffoons. They have forfeited the right to be at the head of the union movement. New opposition movements must be built in all unions and workplaces, a new workers party must be built, the bosses political monopoly which they exercise through their two parties the Republicans and the Democrats must be broken. This means that the left and the radical and working class fighters must come together in a united front of struggle to build an alternative, to end capitalism and build a democratic socialist society. If we do not get over the sectarianism, ultra leftism and opportunism which has plagued so much of the left for so long then we leave a vacuum for a mass right wing movement.

Sean.