Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
12-2-24
Juliet Stevenson is great and I commend her in addition to the respect I have for her as an actor. But what’s missing whenever well known people speak out like this, even labor party members or musicians or academics, and this is throughout the world, not just the UK, they never raise the obvious. Call on the trade unions and their leadership in your country to enter this battle as allies of the Palestinian people. It is workers that move the goods, load the ships, the planes, drive the trucks, make an issue of this and call on them in one way another to stop and down tools as we used to say. Given the crisis of leadership of the working class in the trade unions and political parties, I understand the omission but that's a mistake.
Mention the trade union leaders and leaders of any party that claims to be a party of the working class, and that includes communist and socialist parties throughout the world; they cannot claim to represent workers and not be involved, and certainly not silent in the struggle to defeat the Zionist Apartheid states’ genocide or any other assault on workers and the poor internationally.
As she says, silence is assent, and you are complicit in the genocide. Biden and Harris in the US and Starmer in the UK are beyond complicit in this genocide, they are orchestrators of it.
It is the working class internationally that can stop this and ultimately offer a future for humankind. And in some way or another those speaking out have to come to recognise this. They are not key players but can be important allies.
We do not have a labor or workers’ party in the US, or even one whose leading figures falsely claim to be representatives of the working class, like the toady Starmer et al do in the UK. Here in the US, The Democratic Party is a dead end for workers; it's the war party.
It matters not what the Party or trade union labor bureaucrats say or do, the issue must be raised that it is workers, union and non-union alike that move the goods, the weapons and other crucial commodities that allow the Zionists to commit genocide. Passing a resolution on paper is not enough. A resolution in the trade union has to have teeth to it, has to explain what should be done and directed at those that have the power to do it.
Those of us that have spent much of our political lives active in the trade union movement are well aware that the present leadership of organized labor here in the US and probably the western world, will not challenge capital and the capitalist system as they see no alternative to the market and when capitalism enters its inevitable recurring crisis, they move to bail it out at the expense of their own members and the working as a whole.
When leaders refuse to take action where the rank and file can, we must lead. If we are in a union the leadership should not stop us from raising the issue, introducing resolutions that spell out what it is and what needs to be done; that workers have to “down tools” have to refuse to move the agents of death but also any product in or out that enables the perpetrator; force a debate on it. That’s how we can counter the propaganda. We have to have a struggle within the trade union movement, and there are many union locals in the US where this is possible.
The ruling class supresses any ideas or worldview that challenges the established narrative through their control of the mass media and public education; and they are assisted in this by the folks in the public bar a few exceptions. Universities are primarily capitalist think tanks.
Believe it or not, organized labor in the US has the resources to have our own press, our own party and so much more and we have 14 million members. The California Labor Federation has two million workers affiliated to it. The LA Labor Federation alone has over 800,000 workers. Do not tell me we are weak. California is the sixth largest economy in the world
But we are in a war on two fronts my brothers and sisters in organized labor. One is against capital and big business which is the easy one, the other is against the pro-market policies of the heads of our organizations that took a century or more to build. Unions were not built by the mafia as Hollywood would have us believe, nor by lawyers, and there are lawyers that are good allies. They were built by working class men and women, despite the racism the violence the sexism.
If you are in a union and silent on the genocide and international affairs in general and not fighting for organized labor to step to the plate here then you’re are complicit as well.
Sorry about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment