It's going to take a bit of time. But the fightback Against the Gangsters in the White House is Growing

 

Richard  Mellor

Trump and co are clearly on the defensive. They have a lot of options to disrupt and display presidential power. That's what having this office can do. But, contrary to what a lot of people are arguing, we are not in a fascist society and the Trump regime is not a fascist regime.

We are starting from a low level. We have not seen a mass movement since the Civil Rights movement in the 50's and 60's. We saw an uptick in labor struggles in the 1980's with some mass strikes and in the case of the P9 strike at Hormel, flying pickets and attempts to shut down other plants like the 1930's. We had two greyhound strikes that took on a mass character as well as a strike at Eastern Airlines that drove the company in to bankruptcy.  Unfortunately, the trade union hierarchy tried to paint this as a victory But how is a whole group of workers losing their jobs a victory? The head of Eastern, I think his name was Lorenzo, simply moved his capital. These people don't lose like we do. What should have happened was the taking over of that airline and the entire industry under workers control and management.

These battles in the eighties were defeated through a powerful combination of the trade union hierarchy and the bosses. In the nineties we had the Pittston Miners strike, another strike that could have been won and I remember Jacky Stump running as a write in candidate for office put forward by the miners. This strike was defeated not becasue we are weak but because the trade union leadership are supporters of the market and capitalism and when capitalism enters a crisis they immediately move to rescue it, at the workers expense. 

In the same mid nineties there was a huge labor battle in Decatur Illinois, three strikes and a lockout. Workers lost that too. You can read about that in many places, here's a quick link.  Dan Lane who I have known a long time and Early Silbar were very involved in that battle. I think maybe Navdeep Singh was as well. Earl was there as a supporter as he has been of other workers' struggles all his life. 

There are too many opportunities when workers rose up against capital to mention, but the Battle in Seattle is one. In 1999 when the US bourgeois overconfident as they can be at times, agreed to a WTO meeting in Seattle. There were massive protests with some 50,000 unionised workers involved, many of them younger workers. The Anarchists and socialists and other radicals were participants in a mass protest that shocked the US and global bourgeois. The global capitalists responded in following WTO meetings with extreme violence and one young worker was killed in Genoa. 

Finally, so as not to go on too long and also because I am only writing from memory here, not referring to my notes or books for the period, we had occupy in 2011 and I have to mention the educators strikes in 2018-19. These were strikes that took place in mostly red states (Republican led) where unions are illegal and striking is illegal. Those events were the largest number of strike days in 30 years. 

This movement terrified the union hierarchy, in the teachers' unions and the AFL-CIO in general and what could have been a springboard for a major uprising of organized labor was lost. In two contract disputes after those battles, in Oakland and LA, it was back to normal. I think it's fair to say that the unofficial strikes in the red states, against the trade union leaders position, could not have happened and did not happen in a similar way in Oakland and LA where the bureaucracy was more powerful and entrenched. They were able to contain the movement and prevent the mood and militancy of the red state strike within a framework that is acceptable to the bosses and in particular their friends in the Democratic Party.

That's it.