SOCIALIST
ALTERNATIVE
TRASH THE TWO PARTIES
ISSUE #105 l JULY/AUGUST 2024
ELECTIONS 2024: NO MORE ‘EVILS’ page 3
CAN STUDENTS CHANGE THE WORLD? page 5
UNIONIZE EVERY WORKER! page 12
WE NEED A WORKING CLASS ALTERNATIVE
WHY I JOINED SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE
KAT REYES, NORTH CAROLINA I was raised by immigrant parents who sought refuge in the US after the Salvadoran Civil War in the 80s (a war US imperialism led, committing war crimes and other atrocities). Living in low-income neighborhoods, I saw that the reality of the ‘American Dream’ was working endless hours for demeaningly low pay and still not being able to afford basic life necessities. I always wondered why so many people suffered while a few flaunted extreme wealth. I was tired of seeing people struggle to
survive. I thought that if I chose a career focused on helping people, the hopeless feeling would slowly subside. It didn’t. The solution presented to me during college was to vote, but I was reluctant, because what has that ever done for the people in the communities I was raised in? I was told I was lucky to even be able to participate in the electoral process at all, so for one election cycle I did vote for Democrats, as they were presented as the more working-class friendly option. I watched in real time how the Democratic Party did absolutely nothing for the collective and maintained the status quo. In fact, the situation significantly worsened with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the increased attacks on migrants, among other things. My breaking point was in October 2023 as I watched footage on my phone every morning of the most atrocious crimes committed against Palestinians that were eerily similar to the trauma my family endured. I was in the midst of falling into the pits of doomerism when I saw Socialist Alternative tabling at a local protest against the genocidal war in Gaza. Talking with working-class and young people on a weekly basis, learning how to fight for a socialist world, and supporting working-class struggles locally has helped me develop revolutionary optimism.
WHAT WE STAND FOR A New Political Party For Working People
No To Imperialist Wars • We call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza; an end to US military aid to Israel; and an end to the occupation and siege of Palestine. • Build a massive anti-war, anti-imperialist movement linking up student protests with workers across borders, for the end to Israel’s massacre in Gaza and to challenge the capitalist imperialist powers, whose geopolitical chess game throws working people into the meatgrinder of war. • Rebuild student protests in the fall! Labor unions should mobilize their resources and members to support student protests and demand a ceasefire. • Socialist Alternative completely opposes Russian imperialism’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. We oppose military aid from Western imperialist countries, which only fuel this war and devastate the lives of working people.
• No votes for Biden, his potential Democrat replacement, or Trump! Vote for independent left anti-war candidates Jill Stein or Cornel West. • Build a mass anti-war protest at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in August. No support for Biden or the pro-imperialist Democratic Party. • We need a working-class alternative to the two corporate parties! Republicans are using divide-and-rule scapegoating against migrants and other oppressed communities because the GOP have no real answers to the questions facing working people. But the corporate Democratic Party offers no effective resistance to right-wing attacks, and has repeatedly failed to use their majorities to protect our rights. • Unions that have endorsed Biden should immediately rescind their endorsements and endorse a pro-worker, anti-war candidate like Stein or West. • Shawn Fain and the UAW, who organized a powerful strike in the auto industry last year, • Inflation, unaffordable healthcare, sky high rents, and a lack of basic respect on the job should call a mass assembly to found a new are pushing hundreds of thousands of workworking class party before inauguration day. ers to go on strike. We need effective strikes This should include other labor unions and that hit the bosses where it hurts most – their social movements, youth and students, and wallets – to win lasting victories like Cost of progressive faith organizations. Living Adjustments (COLA). • Take the hundreds of millions of dollars unions • Unionize every worker. Autoworkers have waste on Democrats every election year, and launched a massive campaign to organize use it to organize every worker into a union, the South, which would be a huge step to and launch an independent political party building a united resistance to corporations that refuses corporate donations and fights to and their political allies who profit most from unite working class people at the ballot box keeping us divided. and in our workplaces. • Union leaders across all unions should accept the average wage of a worker in their industry
Rebuild A Fighting Labor Movement
and should be accountable to their membership and the broader working class. • An injury to one is an injury to all! Unions need to fight all manifestations of racism, sexism, queerphobia, and all forms of oppression as part of the struggle to rebuild a fighting labor movement. • Unions should form consumer protection committees to monitor price increases, which should have the power to review corporate finances, especially when money is squandered on CEO pay and stock buybacks.
livelihoods. • In the wake of ecological disasters like chemical spills, corporations should immediately be responsible for relocation costs, health costs, and home remediation. • We need a union jobs program to rapidly expand green infrastructure including a massive expansion of free, high quality, fast public transit. • Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable future – ban new oil and gas drilling and take the top 100 polluting companies into democratic public ownership, while implementing a democratically planned, just transition to 100% green energy!
Mobilize Against Gender Oppression & Attacks On Bodily Autonomy No Deportations & End Racist • The overturn of Roe v. Wade opened the door for vicious attacks on bodily autonomy Policing across the country. We need a mass movement against the reactionary right on the scale of the 60s and 70s when Roe was first won. • Free, safe, legal abortion. All contraception should be provided at no cost as part of a broad program for reproductive health! Resist all right-wing attempts to criminalize abortions, and drop all charges against doctors and pregnant people who have been targeted by these laws. • Fight back against brutal anti-trans legislation and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. Unionized workers like teachers who are targeted by these same laws should unite with students to organize mass noncompliance, strikes, and walkouts. • Full legal rights and equality for trans and queer people! End employment discrimination and unionize all workers to end at-will employment. • Fighting gender oppression means fighting for our rights to bodily autonomy, reproductive justice including universal childcare, and Medicare for All including free reproductive and gender-affirming care.
Invest In Our Basic Needs • Housing is a human right! Pass strong rent control. End economic evictions. Tax the rich and big business to fund high quality, socially owned housing that is permanently affordable and where renters are legally protected from discrimination. • We need a significant raise in the minimum wage and to tie raises to inflation. • An immediate transition to Medicare for All. Take for-profit hospital chains into public ownership and retool them to provide free, state-of-the-art healthcare to all. • Capitalism failed to stop COVID-19, with the “post-pandemic” new normal consisting of total indifference to public health. We urgently need permanently free and accessible testing, paid sick leave, and to take Big Pharma into public ownership – vaccines should be for public health, not profit! • Bring back the COVID-era child tax credit and make it permanent. Fully fund highquality, universal childcare. No cuts to food stamps! • Fully fund public education! End school privatization. Give educators an immediate 25% raise and increase staffing. Cancel all student debt and make public college tuition-free.
A Socialist Program For Environmental Disaster • We need fully-funded emergency systems to protect and evacuate people from everincreasing storms, floods, and fires, and we need to tax the rich to reimburse working people for their destroyed homes and
• The crisis at the border need not be a crisis for working people: we need to rebuild a movement that unites immigrants and native-born workers against the billionaire class to fight for good union jobs, social housing, and education for all. • No migrant detention and deportation! No border wall expansion! We need full legalization and citizenship rights for all migrants! • There is still a massive fight to be waged against police violence. We need a new movement in the streets and mass organizations of struggle to fight for Black liberation! • Arrest and convict killer cops! Purge police forces of anyone with known ties to white supremacist groups or any cop who has committed violent or racist attacks. • End the militarization of police: ban the use of “crowd control” weapons and disarm police on patrol. • Put policing under the control of democratically-elected civilian boards with power over hiring and firing, reviewing budget priorities, and the power to subpoena. • Beyond fighting to end racist policing, we need a struggle against all forms of racism in our society, including segregationist housing and education policies.
The Whole System Is Guilty • Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, racism, transphobia, environmental destruction, and war. We need an international struggle against this failed system. • Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership. • We need a socialist world! This means a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people and the planet.
FIND US ONLINE
www.SocialistAlternative.org info@socialistalternative.org @Socialist_Alternative @SocialistAlt /SocialistAlternative.USA /c/SocialistAlternative @socialistus
EDITORIAL SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE There’s a general feeling in American society that things are going to hell. A recent survey found that one in four Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, because we’re spending everything we have just to stay alive. Some economists are predicting an even worse economic crisis in the next months or years. We’re suffering through historic deadly heat waves because of climate change (during which we’re told to use less air conditioning, while AI companies use enough energy to power the entire country of Sweden). As if that wasn’t enough, we’re being forced to live through another Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden (or whoever the Democrats choose to replace him with) presidential matchup. It’s hard not to feel like you want to just completely get off the carnival ride. But socialists and the left can’t afford to just sit this out – presidential elections especially are where many working people are far more engaged than usual, and we can’t just cede that ground to the corporate parties’ narratives. We need to use that opportunity to put forward a vision that things can be radically different. Anything could happen between now and election day, but right now it looks like Trump has an excellent chance of winning. He has promised to carry out an even more reactionary agenda than in his last term, with a more determined team of operatives. And he even has a small but increasing section of big business and the billionaires starting to line up behind him. Meanwhile, Biden is still supporting Israel’s horrific onslaught on the people of Gaza. All of this leaves a lot of working people with burning questions: Who can I vote for and still sleep at night? What do we do if Trump wins? If Biden wins, does that actually solve anything?
We Hate Both Of Them Biden and Trump’s first debate at the end of June triple-underlined the horror that millions of Americans are feeling, that either choice leaves us absolutely screwed. It was an unmitigated disaster for the Biden campaign – headlines like this one from the Wall Street Journal summed things up: “Biden crashed in his first debate with Trump, delivering the kind of performance Democrats were fearing.” There is now a very real possibility that the Democratic Party tries to replace Biden with another candidate, but that won’t fix the real problem, that both parties answer to big business and the billionaires. Even before the debate, corporate media outlets were dubbing a new category of American voter: the double hater. The “double haters” aren’t just radical college students protesting the war on Gaza and disgusted with both candidates, but also Midwestern retirees and one 64-year-old homemaker who begrudgingly voted for Trump in 2020 but now doesn’t know what to do – she told the Washington Post she’s praying every night that we have a different choice come election day. Most Americans say the economy and inflation are their top issues this election. Biden has overseen an economy over the past four years that gives many Americans a sense of anxiety. Since early 2022, Americans have consistently been most likely to describe the economy’s current conditions as “poor,” according to Gallup polls. Biden failed to implement even a $15 federal minimum wage (it remains $7.25), which is still far too low at this point. He has gone J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
ELECTIONS 2024
NO MORE ‘EVILS’
BUILD AN ANTI-WAR
WORKING-CLASS PARTY back on every climate promise, making the US the number one oil and gas producer in the world. In June, Biden announced an immigration policy so reactionary Trump was probably mad he didn’t do it first: a total ban on asylumseekers entering the US whenever the government deems it necessary. Trump’s answers on the economy are somehow worse, saying he’ll extend and expand tax cuts, especially for wealthy estates and big business. Many Americans associate Trump with the pandemic-era stimulus checks, but those aren’t coming back again. Trump has also promised to carry out mass deportations, build immigrant detention camps, and even end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants born in the US. He also plans to use federal troops to crack down on protests in Democrat-controlled cities. Many working and marginalized people are absolutely correct to fear a Trump 2.0 presidency. But the “lesser” evil has also just become more and more evil. So how many times are we supposed to hold our noses and vote for the lesser evil before things actually get any better?
HOW Is Trump Happening To Us Again? In 2016, working people were long fed up with Obama and the Democrats bailing out the billionaires while working people lost their jobs and homes. That’s when Bernie Sanders promised a political revolution of the 99%, speaking to millions of Americans who knew the establishment and politics as usual were rotten to the core. When the Democratic Party crushed his campaign and Bernie obediently got behind pro-corporate warmonger Hillary Clinton, Trump
promised he would be the one to upend the system. With the main alternative being Hillary Clinton, many people who didn’t necessarily share Trump’s reactionary views, including some who voted for Bernie in the primaries, voted for Trump in a desperate bid for an alternative to the status quo. In 2020, after four years of Trump’s rightwing chaos, enough working and young people came out and held their noses and voted for Joe Biden to defeat Trump (who still got 70 million votes). It was more a vote against Trump than enthusiastic support for Biden. But Biden winning didn’t make Trump or the right wing go away. So now we’re looking at the real possibility of another Trump presidency, even more dangerous than his first term, precisely because the Democrats have no answers to the multiple crises we face. We need a vehicle to express the desire of millions of working-class Americans for radical improvements to our lives – we need a party that actually will do all of those things the Democrats never will. We need a workers’ party that can be a political home for working and young people to get organized around inspiring demands, where we can run candidates who will be held accountable to the working class, and build movements that can actually change society. We need a new party because our movements need a place where workers and youth can come together to discuss strategy and tactics, where unions and other working-class organizations can coordinate their struggles for a more powerful impact. That’s what the Gaza solidarity movement needs right now, in order to escalate and expand to involve a wider layer of the working class and youth. We need to get better organized if we’re going to beat the billionaires and the ruling class.
Vote Jill Stein Or Cornel West & Build Movements To Stop The Right Wing It’s time to end the idea once and for all that voting for the lesser evil will get us anywhere good. Voting for Biden won’t stop Trump and won’t stop the growth of the right wing, it will just put it off to deal with in the future, when the right will only be stronger. The only way to actually stop the right wing is to confront it head-on and show a way forward based on class solidarity to address the real issues rather than the fake “solutions” they push aimed at maintaining divisions among working people. That means that regardless of whether Trump wins in November, we need to build mass movements in our workplaces and in the streets to fight for the things we need. We should start this summer with the biggest possible protests at the Democratic National Convention, calling for an end to the slaughter in Gaza and for the billions spent on war to go to massively popular demands like Medicare for All and a huge expansion of affordable housing. If Trump wins and tries to carry out the range of authoritarian attacks he has promised, only a mass movement led by the organized working class can stop him. That means we will need the labor movement to help lead the way with coordinated actions and strikes, like in 2019 when Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants threatened mass strikes and ended Trump’s government shutdown. If Biden wins, we will also need a mass movement to fight for real gains and against the right-wing attacks on immigrants, trans people, and the right to abortion. In the meantime, those of us who recognize that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent our interests should instead vote for the strongest left, anti-war independent candidate, Jill Stein or Cornel West. Independent candidates have a historic opening this election season, but neither Stein nor West have properly seized it to build dynamic, energizing campaigns based on movements and clear demands that working and young people could get actively involved in. Stein got arrested with campus anti-war protestors, which is very important, but there is much more that could be done to make hers and West’s campaigns engaging for a wider section of working people. Despite that, either is still a radically better choice than continuing to accept the lesser evil. While they’re not likely to win, if left independent candidates get millions of votes, it could show many working people that there’s a hunger for these politics and put pressure on progressive labor leaders to launch a wider political organization or even a new party. Voting for Stein or West is an important step toward giving voice to the millions of us who want fundamental, radical change that neither corporate party represents. Under capitalism, we go to the supermarket and we get choices no one really asked for between forty different kinds of toothpaste, but when we vote for president we’re forced to choose between two rancid, decrepit servants of the ruling class. Capitalism has failed, it’s a bankrupt system that has well outlived its usefulness. We don’t just need a new party, we need an entirely new system to save the planet, end wars, and give working people the kind of lives we deserve. J
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his November, millions of Americans elections for European parliament. These of this. Ukraine, for its part, hasn’t held its will vote in a presidential election elections saw gains for Marine Le Pen’s scheduled elections this year because the where we’re expected to choose between two National Rally in France, Geert Wilders’ country is under martial law. candidates nobody wanted. For all of Amer- Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and For countries trapped between the big ica’s formal democratic structures, most of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Alternative imperialist blocs in the new cold war, elecus feel we have little say in society. We’re for Germany, a party plagued by associations tions have turned into intra-imperialist proxy not alone. The year 2024 is seeing national with the country’s Nazi past, has become the battles. Taiwan’s January presidential elecelections in 64 countries second biggest party in Germany. Far right tion was seen as a referendum on the island’s across the globe. This forces also made gains relation to China. The aftermath of the elecadds up to nearly half in Romania, Bulgaria, tion has seen the Taiwanese nationalist the world’s population. and Slovakia. Outside president Lai Ching-te in a deadlock with a A key thing that distinguishes But this “year of elecof Europe, Nayib Buke- parliament led by the pro-China Kuomintang. Marxism from reformism and tions” accompanies sevle’s victory in El Salva- Bulgaria’s June parliamentary elections saw eral years of democratic dor’s February general a similar deadlock with numerous pro-Russia liberalism is how we engage back-sliding globally. election, following on and pro-EU parties having no clear path to a in elections. The expectation With the collapse of from the election of government. In Moldova’s July election, this Stalinism, the neoliberal Javier Milei in Argentina is also exacerbating national tensions with the isn’t that capitalism can be order ushered in more last December, shows Russian minority in Transnistria Gagauzia. voted out of existence. Real “democracy” than ever the dangers of the far In some countries, elections have seemed before, at least formally. right extend far beyond to reveal a turn to normality. India’s election, change is made through But this was accompaEurope. held from April through June, was expected the mass movement of the nied by entrenching the This is only one side to see a landslide for the right-populist Modi. power of the capitalist of the anti-establish- Instead, his Bharatiya Janata Party lost its working class.” class. Now that order ment polarization. After majority with more traditional capitalist paris in crisis. Martin Wolf, the European elections, ties gaining. In the UK, the much hated the chief economics French President Emman- Tories have called a snap election in July, commentator at the ual Macron called a snap which is expected to be a landslide victory for Financial Times, warned last year in his book election. After the National Rally, the the Labour Party. In spite of the Labour Par“The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism”: “Our main beneficiary of the elections has been ty’s past as a workers’ party, Keir Starmer’s economy has destabilized our politics, and the New Popular Front, a coalition of mostly current leadership has been dominated by vice versa. We are no longer able to combine left parties headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon. uninspiring politics and witch hunts against the operations of the market economy with This shows how the capitalist crisis can open the left. Both countries show that reactionary stable liberal democracy.” up opportunities for the working class as well politics is also unstable in the age of disorder As the neoliberal order gives way to a new as dangers. and, even without a credible alternative, can age of disorder, the political center has been In places where new left formations are be swept from power. crumbling. The result has been increased being built, they can tap into the popular That’s what happened in the US in 2020 polarization. Initially, this polarization saw the mood and thwart the growth of the right. when Trump growth of new left formations, from Syriza in In Mexico’s June election, the left-wing was swept out Greece to Podemos in Spain, to the move- Morena party won of office, not ment around Bernie Sanders here in the US. a sweeping majordue to any However the same capitalist crisis that ity, with Clauenthusiasm allowed those new left formations also put dia Scheinbaum about Biden, them under intense pressure in a period very becoming the first but through unlike the postwar boom where mass work- woman president in pure revulers parties achieved significant reforms. The North America. While sion against new left formations were put to the test and Morena is a loose forTrump. Howfound wanting. The same polarization then mation with competever, as this gave way to right-wing populist figures: from ing political trends, year’s elecTrump in the US to Modi in India to Orban in its victory brings about tion shows, Hungary. But these right populist forces have significant openings for that’s not no solution to the capitalist crisis either. This struggle, and has horrienough to provides new openings for left and working- fied big business. The get rid of class forces. same happened after Tr u m p There is no simple trend in the year of elec- Senegal’s election in tions consistently to the right or to the left. March, when the newly However, the elections taking place around formed left-wing PASTEF the world are all reflections of the growing party won in the face of capitalist crisis and the age of disorder. severe state repression from the US-aligned presiCapitalist Democracy World Tour dent Macky Sall. The Senegal example shows 2024 by George Brown, both openings for the left and Madison the danger of democratic backA common theme in the recent elections has been the ousting or weakening of incum- sliding. Many of the elections bents. In South Africa in May, the ruling Afri- making up the “year of elections” can National Congress (ANC) lost its majority are shows put on by authoritarian for the first time since the end of apart- governments. Following the death heid. Years of corruption and austerity have of Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s instead benefited the Democratic Alliance, June elections are a stage managed show the traditional party of the white ruling class, to keep the old guard in power the vaguely left-populist Economic Freedom in the aftermath of the mass Fighters, and uMkhonto we Sizwe, a populist protests that shook the country in 2022. Similar stage split from the ANC led by Jacob Zuma. Without an adequate left alternative, the managed affairs occurred in popular anti-establishment mood can be Bangladesh, Pakistan, and seized by far right and right-populist forces. Chad. Russia’s March elecThe far right saw sizable growth in the June tion was a prime example
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ism. Without a serious left-wing challenge to the capitalist system, reactionary forces will find a way to return.
Marxists and Elections Under capitalism, elections are fundamentally run in the interests of the ruling class. In “State and Revolution”, Lenin famously said: “To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament – this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” However, Marxists recognize the value of participating in bourgeois elections, which Lenin saw as “training the proletariat for revolution.” Like it or not, elections are the time when working class people most consistently engage in politics, and that shouldn’t be ceded to the capitalists. A key thing that distinguishes Marxism from reformism and liberalism is how we engage in elections. The expectation isn’t that capitalism can be voted out of existence. Real change is made through the mass movement of the working class. But the platform of elected office can be used to build such movements. This is how Socialist Alternative used our Seattle city council office through Kshama Sawant over the past decade. Failure to understand this is what led to the betrayals of Bernie Sanders, the squad, and countless other new left formations around the world. Ultimately, meaningful long-term change requires the overthrow of the capitalist system. This can only be accomplished through the activity of the masses. Since the rise of neoliberalism, the organization of the working class has been massively thrown back and hollowed out. As such, Marxists are faced with a dual task: to build the revolutionary forces of Marxism, and to build the mass organizations of the working class. New left formations, like France Insoumise, or Morena can act as initial steps towards rebuilding those mass working-class organizations. But the pressures of capitalist crisis constantly threaten to derail such movements. The role of a revolutionary party is to navigate these challenges. To understand the complexities of the age of disorder, to engage in the day to day struggles of the working class and help develop a strategy to win real victories while pointing to the objective need to end capitalism in order to win fundamental change. This is how we can transcend the limited “year of elections” capitalism is willing to offer us and create a whole new, genuinely democratic, socialist world. J
E H T F L HA S I D L R O W VOTING R A E Y S THI ... AND INCUMBEN T S ARE IN TROUBLE
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YOUTH & STUDENTS at the time, dominated by Stalinists but still with deep roots in the working class, denounced the student protesters as “trouble-makers” and “adventurers.” Faculty unions defied the Communist Party, choosing to enter the struggle with the students.
Students Linked Up With Striking Workers
STUDENTS & THE FIGHT TO CHANGE THE WORLD by Rachel Wilder, Philadelphia In recent months, we have seen students reignite the struggle against the genocidal war on Gaza with campus encampments and protests that caused major disruptions at universities, sometimes interrupting major events and ceremonies. We also saw the massive police and administrative repression of these protests, with students getting arrested and expelled for peaceful demonstrations. Youth have been at the forefront of many struggles in recent years – student walkouts against right-wing attacks on trans youth, against the overturn of abortion rights, and even climate walkouts. The Black Lives Matter movement was largely led by Black youth across the country, outraged at systemic oppression and police violence. Student and youth protests can make powerful statements by blocking streets and shutting down campuses, which can have a big impact under the capitalist system, where higher education is a multi-billion-dollar business. Student walkouts historically have been able to win real victories, like in Chicago and Philadelphia during the Civil Rights movement. In November 1967, amid a climate of broad social revolt, 3,500 high school and college students in Philadelphia walked out and marched on the Board of Education building, protesting against racist policing and discriminatory policies in schools. At the following school board meeting, the board caved to all of their demands. In Chicago in 1968, a more prolonged student protest movement emerged. When administrators refused to negotiate with students’ demands for equitable schools for Black and Latino students, 500 students walked out in September and built to a 35,000 strong student walkout in October; students were able to win demands including more Black and Latino teachers and counselors in schools, as well as the implementation of ethnic studies classes in the curriculum. And of course, in the summer of 1968, tens of thousands of young people fought Mayor Daley’s police in Chicago as he sought to crush protests against the Vietnam War during the Democratic National Convention. As they faced the cops, they chanted “the whole world is watching!” In order to build the strongest movement against war, oppression, exploitation, and J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
capitalism, student movements must spread to the wider working class, which has the power to completely shut down society. Historically, student protests are often initially bolder and quicker to escalate than broader movements, and can push working class struggle forward by inspiring workers to fight alongside students. Students elevated the Gaza solidarity movement with the new bold encampment tactic, which directly led to UAW student workers at University of California schools striking in solidarity. The encampments today have drawn comparisons and inspiration from the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War. At the same time as the student protests in the US against the war abroad and racism at home, student protests in France in May of 1968 helped inspire the entire working class to move into struggle, leading to a massive general strike and potential for a revolution.
Historic Student Rebellion The global context surrounding May 1968 in France was filled with tumult and uprisings. In addition to the massive student anti-war protests and the civil rights movement in the US, the Prague Spring challenged Stalinism in Czechoslovakia, and student protests in Mexico and Spain fought against dictatorship and for democratic rights. Seeing the atrocities of war and imperialism internationally, students in France connected this with dissatisfaction with their own government – then-president of France, Charles De Gaulle, played a significant role in the atrocities of the Algerian independence movement and took increasingly authoritarian measures domestically. These international connections were on full display in the student protests, displayed by banners reading things like, “Fascists escaped from Dien Bien Phu [Vietnam] / They cannot escape from Nanterre [France].” The protests immediately faced severe repression from police. While they could try to shut down the protests, the state could not crush the students’ willingness to fight and their anger that had reached a boiling point. The repression only served to inspire other students, and more protests broke out on campuses across the country, with 20,000 students and teachers marching on May 6, 1968. Unfortunately, the French Communist Party
On May 10, the Minister of Education forbade universities from reopening due to the explosive protests, leading to further riots in the Quartier Latin where there were 596 arrests, and hundreds injured by police, as 60,000 people marched in Paris in solidarity with students. Sparked by the massive student protests, the major unions in France felt pressured to call for a 24 hour general strike on May 13: one million workers marched in Paris, with tens of thousands in other cities as well. The union leaders had hoped the one-day strike would be enough for the workers to let off steam, but they did not realize the extent of the pressure valve they had released. Following the strike, workers started occupying factories, sometimes locking managers in offices; workers called for higher wages and a broader program for the ousting of De Gaulle as president as well as worker-run factories. The workers were inspired by the radical calls and actions of the students, showing the role that student movements can play under certain conditions in helping spark wider struggles. While the union leadership attempted to restrict
“As a youthful advance guard of the working class, student protests can be a beacon of hope to the broader class, showing that it’s possible to stand up and fight back. Workers can be inspired by radical demands of youth and social movements to fight for, and win, broader societal changes.” strike demands only to economic issues, workers saw their power to fight for broader societal change beyond just their factory. This was in no small part because of the more far-reaching demands and calls of the students’ protests. Strike committees were set up as the union leaders and the Communist Party lost control of the struggle.
Revolutionary Potential Lost Capitalism in France ground to a halt, with shops closing unless they had stickers showing they were authorized by the unions to operate. Prices were substantially decreased to be affordable for working-class people, and defense committees were set up to head off police repression. The pressures of the escalating protests forced De Gaulle to flee the country and call for a referendum; however, the actions and calls of De Gaulle’s government at the time were essentially powerless. Striking print workers refused to print out ballots for a referendum.
However, the Stalinist-controlled French Communist Party was unwilling to seize on this momentum to see the potential revolution to its conclusion. The Communist Party refused to link the workers’ committees with the students to prepare for a socialist transformation of society and a planned economy based on the needs of the working class and youth. They instead settled for negotiating with the defunct French National Assembly – instead of taking power, the Communist Party called for new elections and deferred back to the capitalist state. The de-escalation caused the general strike to lose momentum and allowed the state to take control back of the situation, leading to increased repression, arrests, and expulsions. In the early 60s, many on the far left drew the conclusion that the Western working class was “bought off” and unable to fight in its own interests. Instead they looked to other social layters, including students, to lead the social revolution. May 1968 in France proved these ideas wrong and showed the actual and powerful dynamic that can exist between youth movements and the revolutionary movement of the working class.
Lessons For Today Young people today are living in a world plagued by capitalism, and are often among the first to take drastic action against its many forms of exploitation and oppression. However, in order to change society, youth and student movements must become linked to the wider struggles of the working class and the oppressed. Most students and workers have connected interests. The majority of students – though obviously not those at elite universities – will join the ranks of the working class after their graduation, and many of them are workers while they are still in school. In the US, 40% of full-time college students, and over 80% of part-time students, are also workers. Youth struggle can often be a catalyst to spark broader working class struggle. Workers are often inspired by radical demands of youth and social movements to step up their own struggles to fight for, and win, broader societal changes. The encampments at Columbia University, that then spread to dozens of other campuses, have been compared to the student protests against the Vietnam War in the US in 1968. Student movements today should look to the lessons of May ‘68 in France and how students today can also help inspire the working class to help build a powerful movement against the US imperialism’s drive to war. While it is the working class that is actually able to make profits and production completely grind to a halt, student protests can accelerate, and sometimes even ignite, this process. Workers’ and youth movements are the strongest when intertwined and interconnected; together our movements are capable of overthrowing this rotten capitalist system! J
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about the revolutionary uprisings of students and workers in 1968 France!
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IMMIGRANT RIGHTS
BIDEN SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR NEAR-TOTAL BAN ON IMMIGRATION BENSON GILKISON, MADISON
Immigration at the US-Mexico border hit an all-time high at the end of 2023, and into this year has been a key issue on the minds of working-class people. Attacks on immigrants from prominent Republicans, from Trump’s ramping up of anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail, to Governor Abbott’s repulsive eviction of over 37,000 migrants to sanctuary cities across the US, have sought to exacerbate anti-immigrant sentiment that pits asylum-seekers fleeing economic hardship and political repression against US-born workers facing a struggle to stay afloat. In the wake of these attacks, many people are left hoping that the Democratic Party will take a sharp turn away from further riling up xenophobia and take decisive action in favor of strengthening immigration protections across the US. Instead, Biden has displayed the exact opposite of this. In a stark parallel to four years of vicious Trumpian gutting of immigrant rights, Biden has signed an executive order aimed at further eliminating options for asylum seekers in the US. On June 4, Biden used his executive authority to set new policies that would highly restrict asylum-seeking migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The order prevents migrants who cross the border illegally from seeking asylum, as long as the daily average of border crossings remains over 2,500, a threshold that is currently far exceeded. Already faced with a dehumanizing and inhumane immigration system, migrants will now be turned away by the thousands, instead sent back over the Mexico border or to the very home countries
they are desperate to flee. This is a flagrant attempt from the Biden administration at enacting a near-total ban on immigration. Shortly after this draconian executive order, Biden put through another executive action protecting undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation. While this will no doubt come as a huge sigh of relief to those roughly 500,000 immigrants, it is clearly an attempt to draw fire away from the bulk of Biden’s immigration policy ahead of the election, which has overwhelmingly sought to “project strength” at the US-Mexico border. Though his 2020 campaign was full of lip-service pointing to an era of “pro-immi-
grant” democracy in the United States, Biden has consistently proven his commitment to furthering Trumpian anti-immigration policies, even continuing construction of Trump’s border wall. In May 2023, Biden adapted Title 42 – a holdover Trump-era policy stifling immigration – into his own cruel array of red-tape measures, barring asylum-seekers from legal protections unless they had
SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE SAYS: • The crisis at the border should not have to be a crisis for working people: There is more than enough money in the hands of the billionaires to ensure good lives for all of us. • We need to rebuild a movement that unites immigrants and native-born workers against the billionaire class to fight for good union jobs, social housing, and education for all. • No migrant detention and deportation! No limits on asylum seekers! No border wall expansion! We need full legalization and citizenship rights for all migrants! • We need to wage an international, working-class struggle against capitalism’s imperialist wars and exploitation, which have forced millions to leave their homes in search of safety and stability.
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already been denied asylum from another country they traveled through. This is a no-holdsbarred attack on migrants, who are then left forced to seek asylum in countries with bleak and outright dangerous conditions for immigrants. Migrants who have been allowed to stay in the US over the last year have often been put through the dehumanizing experience of being shunted from city to city by bus, taking up shelter in makeshift tent cities or wherever they can. Public money allocated to house, feed, and clothe migrants has been mopped up by a cottage industry of private contractors, lining the pockets of their executives. The reality is that it doesn’t have to be this hard: migrants seeking asylum need housing and well-paying jobs, as do millions of US-born families. We urgently need to tax the rich to build hundreds of thousands of units of high-quality, publicly-owned affordable housing and fund a huge public jobs program. In fact, thousands of well-paying jobs could be created simply by putting adequate resources into aid and processing for asylum-seekers at the border. A massive public jobs program creating affordable housing for all would make Biden instantly popular as he seeks re-election, but as a staunch representative of the political establishment and the ruling class, he never would – instead, his plan is to absorb some of Trump’s voter base by projecting a “strong border.”
With the Democratic Party upholding its role as the party of deportation, war, and big business, we desperately need an organized political alternative to xenophobia and austerity. Immigrants fighting to defend their human rights desperately need the strength of an independent working-class party behind them. Come November, we need to drop all reliance on the two capitalist parties and instead rally our votes behind the strongest independent left presidential candidates, Jill Stein and Cornel West. Neither Biden nor Trump, who have both spent entire Presidential terms (and in Biden’s case, his long political career) attacking working people, deserve our votes. Voting instead for the strongest independent left candidate can show millions more people in the US that it’s time to build something fundamentally new. The working class has nothing to gain from giving in to the divideand-conquer politics of capitalist politicians. When the ruling class and its political parties pit native born working-class Americans and immigrants against each other, we all stand to lose. The only way out of this endless cycle is by breaking from it and building a mass movement uniting native-born and immigrant workers for our united interests, and building a new party entirely – a party that stands boldly alongside workers and oppressed people everywhere. J
“The reality is that it doesn’t have to be this hard: migrants seeking asylum need housing and well-paying jobs, as do millions of US-born families.”
S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G
We need a new mass movement against racist police brutality CHRIS GRAY, MINNEAPOLIS Ten years ago on August 9, Mike Brown was murdered by police officer Darren Wilson. His death sparked a rebellion in the Black working-class suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, which developed into a decade-long movement that we now refer to as “Black Lives Matter.” I was on the ground in Ferguson with Socialist Alternative. I’m also a lifelong resident of Minneapolis, where neighbors and tourists alike still deliver flowers every day to the site of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Despite this decade of struggle, there is a pervading feeling among many people that very little has changed as a result. Police murders have increased almost 30% since 2013, and it’s still working-class Black and Latino people who are disproportionately killed. Black unemployment is still consistently twice as high as that of white workers, and Black workers still make up 37% of the homeless population while being just 13% of the overall US population. What went wrong? How did a movement that at one point had tens of millions of people across the country, including in “red states”, and a moment in which the act of burning down of the Minneapolis Third Precinct had more support from voters than either Presidential candidate, fail to dramatically alter the situation for Black workers in America?
An Organic Uprising During the Great Recession, tens of millions of working class families lost their homes, retirements and savings. Black people were hit hardest. Obama’s promise of “Hope and Change” raised the expectations of millions of people, especially young Black people. But as Occupy Wall Street proliferated the slogan of “the 1% vs. the 99%”, Obama became the chief spokesperson of the 1%. An opening emerged between expectation and reality – a space for mass protests. In 2014, 18-year-old Mike Brown was shot on a small street in the center of an apartment complex in Ferguson, a working class, Black community outside of St. Louis. The whole neighborhood heard Mike Brown scream his last words: “Don’t shoot”. Brown’s lifeless body laid out in the hot
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An Entrenched Enemy Following the Ferguson Rebellion, high profile police murders started sparking waves of mass protests. People with lives and families, loved by their communities and coworkers, became names in an ever-expanding procession of obituaries. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Philando Castille. The movement had to grapple with what could be done. A loose program emerged around de-escalation training and body cameras, but these demands proved to be ineffective against the many-headed hydra of police violence. De-escalation training went out the window, dominated by the overwhelming attitude towards self-preservation within police departments. Body cameras were widely adopted, but had little impact on police brutality – police departments simply selectively release footage to paint themselves in the best light, or turn cameras off at critical times. Even when the footage of horrific violence was made public, often officers still weren’t prosecuted. When the movement re-emerged explosively onto the scene after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, protesters demanded more. “Defund the Police” became the common refrain, reflecting the deep hypocrisy of feeding more and more tax dollars into violent policing while inflicting austerity and desperation onto the Black working-class population. While this could have been truly transformative, to retool city budgets to prioritize housing and social services over policing, it was not done by the Democratic establishment almost anywhere. The few cities that did cut police budgets in 2020 generally only did so by a few percentage points, and redoubled their investments the following year.
Leadership and Strategy Why wasn’t this movement able to defeat, or significantly deter, racist police violence in the US?
At the height of the movement, nearly every politician and even corporation gave lip service to the fight against racism – but in practice, they systematically demonized, violently repressed, and worked behind the scenes to undermine the mass movement. On either side of the political aisle, Democrats and Republi-
“Brown’s lifeless body laid out in the hot August sun for four hours as the community gathered, first to mourn, and then, to rebel. Ferguson’s working class and youth defined the new Black freedom movement that followed.”
politics, echoing the “divide and rule” tactics that the bosses and billionaires use to keep workers divided. They did not emphasize that the whole working class needed to fight all forms of oppression to eradicate the roots of racism: capitalism.
Fighting For Black Lives Today Learning the lessons of the last ten years of struggle since Mike Brown’s murder is essential to rebuilding a fighting movement against racism today. Police budgets need to be cut, and police departments need to be put under the control of democratically elected civilianreview boards. However, truly reducing crime and gun violence requires a program to tax billionaires and corporations to fund schools, jobs, housing, healthcare and social services. Such a social transformation would benefit the whole working class, but especially Black workers. What the decade of struggle following Mike Brown’s murder showed was that large sections of the working class are willing to fight police brutality and racism. However, racism won’t go away as long as the racist foundations of US capitalism remain intact. We need a revolutionary, socialist program to eliminate racism along with all forms of exploitation and oppression. J
cans defend capitalism, and in a country where capitalism developed on a foundation of chattel slavery, and where today a few billionaires own as much wealth as half of the working class, the ruling class needs a tool of violent repression – the police – to maintain order. While the organic nature of the early movement lended it power, the ongoing lack of democratic structures in the movement • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS handed authority to unaccountable, self-appointed leaders, some with careerist ambitions. This unaccountable leadership was then susceptible to getting sucked into processes of closed-door meetings with Democratic Party politicians promising change that never came. This led to the rise in prominence of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, a section of the BLM leadership that was essentially bought off – millions of dollars that poured into that organization from working-class people desiring a fighting lead actually went to buy houses and luxurious lifestyles for the members of its executive board. This layer of selfappointed leaders maintained their positions by weaponizing identity
SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS
Ten Years Since Mike Brown’s Murder
August sun for four hours as the community gathered, first to mourn, and then, to rebel. Ferguson’s working class and youth defined the new Black freedom movement that followed. The protests were incredibly organic – people would get off work, congregate along the main street in the evening with homemade signs, and eventually young people would start marching and chanting. Then everyone else would join in. The political establishment tried everything to put the protests down. First the local police, and later the state patrol, tried to enforce a curfew by showing up with a tank and assault rifles, indiscriminately spraying people with mace and tear gas. The nonviolent rebellion continued undeterred. The traditional “leadership” of the fight against racism, people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, were swept aside by a new, younger, and sharper force, armed with a much wider goal of eliminating racist police brutality once and for all and prepared to confront anything that stood in their way. This allowed what became Black Lives Matter to develop into a national phenomenon.
FIGHTING RACISM
PUBLIC MEETING HOSTED BY SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE’S BLACK CAUCUS!
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WHAT IS NEEDED TO W PALESTINIAN LIBERAT by Leon Pinsky
The world has watched over eight months of heinous criminal war by the Israeli
military against the Palestinian masses with an overwhelming number of the casualties being women and children. With no clear ending in sight, millions are asking what it would take to end the deeper conflict that lies at the root of the current brutal war. While a ceasefire is urgently needed, it is by no means an end to the long national conflict. Even if the war ended tomorrow, the Gaza Strip has been wrecked by months of ongoing bombings and mass destruction to infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and houses and of course the incredible cost in life and the trauma that millions of Palestinians will continue to carry with them. Who will oversee the process of rehabilitation is a question that remains unanswered. The Israeli and U.S. regimes share no interest with the working class of the region, let alone the Palestinian masses, with Israel’s goal of turning Palestinian workers into nothing but a subservient source of cheap labor. But Hamas and Fatah, the two leading Palestinian factions, have also shown time and again that they are incapable and unwilling to advance the interests of the Palestinian masses. Proposals for a joint coalition of reactionary Arab monarchies to take control of the Strip have been outright rejected. That proposal is correctly seen by the masses in the region as a collaboration with the Israeli regime and would have posed these governments directly against the interests of the Palestinians for
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independence and security. Nevertheless, it is clear that the first step towards any solution is to immediately end the war and occupation and pull out all military forces and settlers from the occupied territories.
The Right for Self-Determination – One or Two State Solution? Marxists support and fight for the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, including the right to form their own independent state. This is not a moral question, but a democratic right that capitalism has failed to ensure to all nations. This right has been denied to the Palestinians for over a century by the brutal intervention of European and U.S. imperialism and by the Israeli state and the nationalist Zionist forces pre-1948. The complex history of the region which includes the mass expulsion of Palestinians since 1947, the prolonged occupation, and the just Palestinian struggle for independence, as well as regional wars and the constant feeling of insecurity among Israeli Jews cannot be summarized in a simple formula. However, the issue is often simplistically reduced to the choice between a one or two states solution, a paradigm that has different meaning to different people. We of course reject the reactionary Israeli far-right’s version of a one-state solution under Jewish rule. Achieving this will require mass expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their lands and homes which can only be carried out through a bloodbath on a scale not seen before in the region. While not a mirror image of the far-right, some on the left call for the establishment of one Palestinian state with Israelis forced to leave
their homes. We reject this idea as well not only because it is utopian, but primarily because it points directly against working class solidarity and interests. It is clear to the majority of people in the region that a real solution will have to consider that both national communities have developed their own deep national consciousness over the years and are not going away, willingly or otherwise. In the late 1980s, the long struggle for Palestinian independence erupted into a mass uprising, known as the First Intifada. Ordinary workers, many of them women, organized general strikes and mass protests. This rebellion forced the Israeli and U.S. ruling classes to negotiate a way forward while preserving their interests. The Oslo Agreements, while sold as a step towards peace and ultimately a Palestinian state, were instead an effort to sub-contract the oppression of Palestinians to the newly formed Palestinian Authority. While these agreements fell apart shortly after, the idea of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel - or a two states solution - was favored by the U.S. ruling class with the verbal agreement of a wing of Israeli capitalism and the Palestinian Fatah Party to serve their privileges and interests. But for Marxists the key question is not the number of states, but their social character. For a section of the Israeli ruling class, the most beneficial outcome is a weak and poor Palestinian state, subservient to Israeli capitalism and ruled by an emerging loyal Palestinian capitalism. No other type of Palestinian state would be allowed to develop by the Israeli ruling class. This scenario would inevitably ensure continuous social explosions and nationalist oppression. The call for one bi-national state that includes Gaza, the West Bank, and modernday Israel flows from the genuine struggle of Palestinians to return to lands they were expelled from. On the basis of capitalism, however, there cannot be real equality and peace, particularly
S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G
WIN TION? along national lines. Nationalist explosions due to the ongoing exploitative nature of capitalism under this solution, even if it could be achieved, would more likely end with an actual Apartheid state with Palestinians losing basic democratic and labor rights. Furthermore, the current Israeli state, with the strongest military in the region and a deep nationalist sentiment shared by a large portion of the Jewish population, will use all its might to fight against such a possibility as it would put them in a minority within a few years. The century-long mistrust and fear between the communities – largely due to the reactionary role played by nationalist pro-capitalist forces – which has only risen in historical proportions since October 7, also means that the vast majority of Jewish Israeli workers will see this as an attack on their own right to self-determination including security and the ability to manage their own lives. Given the current level of violence and suspicion between ordinary Palestinians and Israeli Jews, Marxists support the rights of each nation to decide on their future, including the formation of separate states. However, we should never limit ourselves to what seems possible within the capitalist framework. There is no escaping the fact that all capitalist plans for the region, based on the narrow interests of the ruling classes, have completely failed in providing basic rights including the right to security for ordinary people, and that a fundamental systemic change needs to happen throughout the region in order to win real liberation - a change that would put working people in power to organize society democratically and collectively to provide the basic needs to all based on genuine solidarity. We think that ultimately the only solution is a socialist confederation of the Middle East based on the shared interests of all working people, with the right of nations to join or leave based on their democratic decision. Such a structure would allow free movement of people with collective stewardship of the region’s resources as part of an international planned economy democratically run for the benefit of all working people. All this while ensuring full protection of national, religious, and other minority rights. The Russian Revolution of 1917 enshrined the right of all nations, formerly trapped in the Tsarist Russian Empire, to self determination. This was the basis of the original voluntary Soviet Union, not the Stalinist caricature that came later. We believe any future border between socialist states must be reached by democratic agreement not be imposed by force. But what is necessary to solve the conflict is first and foremost a socialist revolution to overthrow all J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
the reactionary ruling classes of the region. It is possible that In the course of struggle both communities will find a shared interest which would allow an agreement to form one bi-national state by and for all working people. But we need to be sober in understanding that due to the prolonged and deep-rooted nationalist consciousness and mistrust we are very far from this point. In winning people over to the idea of socialism and against the brutality of the occupation and siege, we have to respect the right of both communities for self-determination, especially when today the Palestinian masses are fighting to throw off the yoke of occupation and achieve self-rule while most Israeli Jews see their own national independence as under threat. It is more likely that genuine independence and security for both communities will become the strongest factor strengthening solidarity as a basis for eventual merger. While this issue remains incredibly polarizing and complex, we have seen plenty of examples of struggles against the ruling elites in the region, that point towards the potential for cross-community solidarity. Protests in Israel against the corrupt Netanyahu regime and his attempt, in collaboration with despicable far-right figures, to push through a far-reaching reactionary agenda shook the country from the beginning of 2023 up until October 7. While protests haven’t returned to the 2023 levels, large rallies and marches are regularly organized blocking main highways and outside government buildings to demand a return of people abducted on October 7 as part of a ceasefire deal, as well as for bringing down the far-right government, with some calling for the Histadrut trade union to step in to organize a general strike. A series of protests in Palestinian towns and cities within Israel have also been organized under ongoing police repression to call for an end to the war and against anti-democratic repression of anti-war organizing. In the West Bank, protests in solidarity with Gaza have been brutalized by the Palestinian Authority police forces and, while protests in Gaza itself are almost impossible under conditions of incredibly brutal war, sentiment against Hamas had been growing before the war for their inability to provide any way forward. This included labor strikes and pro-democracy protests. To be clear, we do not think that it is correct to draw comparisons between the oppression carried out by the Israeli state and that of Hamas or the PA. The main responsibility for the situation in the region lies with a series of nationalist Israeli governments over decades, backed by European and U.S. imperialism. They have used divide-and-rule tactics against the Palestinian factions while ensuring that the Palestinian masses live in dire conditions under constant threat of war while Israeli Jews are kept in constant fear and their living standards are being eroded. This, again, shows that Jews within Israel have far more in common with Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and within the Green Line, than they do with “their” governments. Some on the left would point towards certain reactionary ideas within Israeli society, such as racism and ultra-nationalism, as the reason for why Israelis will never be won to true solidarity with the Palestinian masses. We think that this idea itself is nationalist and does not see political outlook as something that changes with experience rather than being
tied to one’s nationality alone. The reason that Israeli workers have a key role to play is rooted in their position in society. Just like workers in all other countries, workers in Israel - including the large Palestinian population living within Israel - are the only section of society with the potential power to shut down the Israeli capitalist economy and replace the bosses’ government with a democratic workers’ government. This might seem far-fetched right now, but ultimately there is no other way to bring down Israeli capitalism, the main imperialist regional power. This is not to suggest that Jewish workers in Israel will be the “liberators” of Palestinians. Palestinian liberation has to be the result of a mass united struggle of workers from both national divides. Therefore, a reactionary political mood is something that needs to be battled against by pointing forward in a way that ensures the security and right for self deter-
“There is no escaping the fact that all capitalist plans for the region, based on the narrow interests of the ruling classes, have completely failed in providing basic rights including the right to security for ordinary people, and that a fundamental systemic change needs to happen throughout the region in order to win real liberation.”
mination for both communities as a starting point. This requires an explanation that all previous “peace” agreements were constructed in the bosses’ interests and that their failure also reflects these interests rather than some natural hatred between the two communities. Just as we reject billionaires’ attacks on our living standards and working conditions, we need to reject their self-serving nationalist plans for the region and instead support the creation of mass democratic and militant workers’ organizations that can organize all workers to find a solution based on common class interests. This is not fundamentally different from how we should fight xenophobia and racism in the U.S. by explaining how the ruling class profits from racial division and the need for common struggle to win good jobs, housing, and healthcare for all. There’s a need in Israeli society to form a genuine mass party of working people to pose a real alternative to Netanyahu and capitalism in general, as well as fighting for a genuine democratic and fighting leadership of the trade-unions. A strong union movement, unlike the current Histadrut leadership, must point towards workers’ solidarity rather than spread nationalist sentiment in society. This struggle must demand an end to the bosses rule, bring big business under democratic workers’ control, and divert all profits to social programs, jobs, and infrastructure to increase living standards for all. There is also a necessity for a mass alternative to the reactionary Hamas and Fatah regimes in the occupied territories. A mass party of struggle, working in coordination with a similar formation within Israel, can strike a
blow against the regime of war, occupation and nationalism - all rooted in the crisis-ridden capitalist system. This means an uncompromising fight against the fanatic far-right settlers, for community self-organization, and a struggle against the anti-democratic attacks on all those organizing against the war in communities and universities, particularly Palestinian citizens of Israel. We, therefore, call for a democratic, independent, socialist, and equal Palestinian state and for a democratic and socialist struggle in Israel and throughout the region which includes guaranteeing the safety and equal rights of all nationalities and minorities; for a shared capital city in Jerusalem; a just solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees which guarantees the right of all to return if they so wish, while guaranteeing equality and higher standard of living conditions.
Next Steps for the International Solidarity Movement Millions have participated in the international solidarity movement, making their opposition to the war clear. Socialist Alternative has been out in protests across the country since October, including on a number of campuses. With some Israeli officials threatening to continue the war for several more months, we think that students should rebuild campus occupations and hold large rallies at the start of fall semester. But we also need to expand this movement. Labor actions in academia, such as the UAW 4811 strike in California, and the sickouts taken by City University of New York educators on May Day need to be organized on a larger scale, as well as spreading to other industries, particularly logistics, transportation, and weapons manufacturing. We should also organize to occupy public spaces, such as city squares and offices of politicians who support this genocidal war or refuse to act against it. Unions representing the majority of unionized American workers have passed ceasefire resolutions and the potential is there for their leaderships to put their money where their mouth is. Struggle should not be kept outside this year’s presidential elections. We’ve already seen the significance of the “uncommitted” vote, as well as the “Abandon Biden’’ campaign. We strongly support a political vote against both Biden and Trump – the current and former bankrollers of Israeli capitalism – and instead urge a protest vote for the strongest left candidate, either Jill Stein or Cornel West. This should be paired with strong mobilization to protest at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago. We should see this movement and the revitalizing labor movement as a step towards constructing a new party for working people in the U.S. Already, demands for a higher minimum wage and universal healthcare have mass support, but no political home. Neither is there a political home for those serious about fighting for LGBTQ rights and against racism, sexism, and xenophobia. The broad solidarity with the Palestinians, paired with rejection of U.S. imperialism’s role around the world is another important basis for a new workers’ party, pointing to the rejection of the thoroughly pro-business and pro-imperialist agenda of both Democrats and Republicans. Socialist Alternative is open to work with other groups to build campaigns to assert as much pressure as possible while showing solidarity with those facing continuous war in Gaza and the West Bank. J
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C L I M AT E C H A N G E by Olive Kuhn, Philadelphia When Chappell Roan said “get it hot like Papa John,” she wasn’t talking about the whole planet. And yet, here we are. At the time of writing, large parts of the continental US are experiencing a record-breaking heatwave: a heatwave that was made 35 times more likely by climate change, according to World Weather Attribution. Heat alerts have been issued for over 70 million people, as cities and states struggle to meet the need for heat relief. At least thirteen migrants and asylum seekers have lost their lives attempting to cross the southern US border in these extreme conditions, leading one local fire department to treat heatstroke by placing patients in body bags full of ice. In early June alone, at least 77 people, including over 30 poll workers, died due to extreme heat during India’s general election. How are young people growing up in this environment coping with this news? Some people recycle religiously, bike to work, and buy heatprotecting booties so the scorching sidewalk doesn’t burn their dogs’ paws. Others retreat to the AC and try to simply live their lives. The youth climate movement of 2019 has receded, and politicians are focusing on electric vehicles as a solution while carbon emissions just climb higher. Particularly stressful is the compounding nature of the climate crisis; it can seem as though the problem preempts the solution. The acts people take to beat the heat can feel counterproductive: ninety degrees in your bedroom? Time to install a second window unit. Too hot to walk a short distance? You’ll have to drive. We feel it getting hotter. We look around and see that public transit is sparse and unreliable, that many of our neighborhoods don’t have trees. We want to fight back and win a survivable world, but the path to fight back is not always clear.
Political Inaction Running Out The Clock With a Trump vs Biden rematch looming, workers and youth hoping for serious climate action have little to look forward to within mainstream American politics. Four years of the Biden presidency have seen increased climate catastrophe, a broken promise to stop drilling in the Arctic, and increased funding to the US military, one of the largest sources of carbon emissions in the entire world. We don’t have numbers for 2023 and 2024 yet, but the EPA has reported that the US’s net carbon emissions increased by 1.3% from 2021-2022. In face of these realities, some are drawing
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We Deserve A Green Future!
no longer has a headphone jack. The antidote to climate pessimism is not to accept the waffling reforms peddled to us by the ruling class, but to realize how many “necessary” contributors to climate change are only necessary in a broken system. Much of the technology necessary to mitigate climate change already exists, and if implemented correctly, could vastly improve the standard of living for most working people. We already know how to create massive systems of electric public transit, which emit 33% less greenhouse gasses per passenger mile compared to cars. By creating reliable, free-to-use systems of public transit in every major US city and powering them with a combination of wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy, we can not only put a massive dent in emissions but also drastically reduce traffic and cut down on the time Americans sacrifice to their daily commute. By breaking up big agricultural monopolies, replacing factory farming with sustainable models, and spreading out food production to be geographically closer to the point of consumption, we can reduce not just the carbon footprint of livestock and food transportation, but also the enormous risk of disease among over-crowded livestock – on top of that, we can produce betterquality food that is less dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The US is already massively short of high-quality affordable housing – and much of the publicly-owned housing that does exist is dilapidated. A campaign to retool existing public housing and build more that is powered by green energy and designed to absorb solar energy rather than reflect it could be transformative for US cities, reducing the enormous heat-island effect on major urban areas. This would not only bring down the energy needed to cool cities in frequent heatwaves, but it would also reduce the lethality of these heatwaves and relieve some of the growing burden on emergency services. This could be followed up with a campaign to expand parks and green zones in cities to further cut across the heat-island effect. This labor, of course, should be completed by well-paid union jobs and funded by taxing the rich. The point being – we don’t need to choose between fighting climate change and having good lives. We can, and should, have both. We need a planned economy run for and by working people in which industries produce according to society’s democratically agreed needs, not profit. Technology alone won’t save us if it continues to be mishandled by corporations competing with one another. We can start by taking the 500 top companies into democratically run public ownership, with workers’ councils replacing CEOs and corporate boards. This kind of revolutionary system change would require the organization of millions of workers and youth, on a completely different scale than what high profile climate organizations like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion have accomplished. It will not be simple or easy. But it starts with the understanding that green transformation can, in a longer-term sense, dramatically improve the standard of living of working people. J
“We don’t need to choose between fighting climate change and having good lives. We can, and should, have both.”
the conclusion that there is simply no solution to match the scale of the climate crisis. But what we’re seeing is really a reflection of the fact that the existing political ruling class has no solutions to resolve the crises that they caused. Policies like the European Green Deal or the Inflation Reduction Act in the US are insufficient because they operate within the capitalist framework that necessarily squeezes workers and prioritizes profit over the planet. The details of these policies betray their underlying contradictions. For example, the EU’s Green Deal still includes an “emissions trading system,” also known as “cap and trade” which allows corporations to essentially buy “carbon credits” from one another. Imagine your house was on fire, and you and your neighbors stood outside, selling each other bottles of water.
Capitalist Problem, Socialist Solution The capitalist system is based on the pursuit of ever-increasing profit. This is incompatible with what is needed to sustain planet Earth, whose resources are finite. It also leads inherently to conflict. War is not an occasional tragedy under capitalism; it is a near-constant reality. Modern warfare leads to widespread ecological destruction, a horror second only to the immediate horrors of war. From Ukraine to Gaza to the Democratic Republic
of Congo, the wars taking place today are waged largely by capitalist states seeking to seize territory, resources, and global power, often while overcompensating for unrest at home. Meanwhile, 5.5 percent of all global emissions are produced by militaries, with the US military alone belching out more carbon than the entire country of Portugal. In addition to the criminal cruelty and wastefulness of war, capitalism squanders resources in more banal ways. How many spam emails did you get today? According to the United Nations, 36 million tons of CO2 are emitted by the sending of just spam emails in a single year. Paperless communications might appear not to create waste, but in reality “the cloud” is a series of data centers that use massive amounts of electricity and water for power and cooling. Meanwhile Bitcoin, the digital currency nobody asked for, used up more energy than Pakistan in 2020 and 2021. Generative AI, the latest tech bubble that is currently instructing Google users to eat rocks, now requires “hyperscale data centers” to run. The list of useless but profitable capitalist waste goes on and on. Fast fashion guzzles water and gorges landfills (not to mention the industry’s criminal labor practices, predatory trend cycles, and ugly clothes). Planned obsolescence, the practice of designing products to break or become unusable over time, thus requiring consumers to re-purchase and spend more money, is a profitable inefficiency that keeps the ruling class rich and the masses buying AirPods because their phone
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C U LT U R E
God – It Really Is Brutal Out Here by Jozi Uebelhoer, Seattle
Ticketmaster’s monopoly on live music is a loselose-lose for concertgoers, musicians, and venue workers. How can we break the corporate hold on art and enjoy ourselves again? In the fall of 2023 when Olivia Rodrigo announced her Guts World Tour, my roommates and I knew we had to get tickets. After countless moments screaming Drivers License and Good 4 U in the car and around the house, it was the only option. But sadly, I logged on to buy tickets just a few minutes after the sale started, and was immediately the 2,000th person in line. When I was finally able to purchase tickets the only ones left were $500+ tickets, which we knew would just inflate with fees – we definitely couldn’t afford it. I first thought it was because as a 27 year old, I just couldn’t keep up with the kids anymore – but really it was because the whole ticket selling system is a scam. Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, is a monopoly. About 70% of tickets for all major concerts are sold through Ticketmaster and the company has its hands in 256 concert venues around the country. What does Ticketmaster do with that control over this process? Jack up prices. Ticketmaster routinely adds fees to purchases that are up to 80% of the original ticket price. It’s so clearly violating antitrust laws that the Department of Justice has had to step in and sue the company, and even Biden, a staunch defender of capitalism, has criticized their practices. These sky-high fees make the cost of going to see your favorite artist out of reach for many working people and youth. Though seeing your favorite artist live is priced like luxury, and we all know that if we just stopped indulging in Starbucks and having fun on a Friday night we could all afford a house, fun shouldn’t actually be an infrequent luxury. Gathering with friends and community to listen to music and enjoy ourselves is much more fundamental to the human experience than paying rent. Music is important to the human psyche, a timeless part of culture, and a necessary break from an often crushing reality under capitalism. Music is a huge and vital part of human expression across the globe. Ticketmaster as a company is a symptom of capitalism’s reach into every aspect of our lives and its ability to exploit even our most organic experiences. Ticketmaster and their monopoly choke out small performers who, in the era of streaming, have to gamble on making revenue by touring in order to make a living, as well as the many workers who make the performance industry run, like sound and light engineers, coordinators, and designers. J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
Even if an artist outwardly calls out Ticketmaster and sympathizes with fans about the outrageous prices, there’s little they can do as individuals to get around it. Ticketmaster has deals with many major concert venues who can then only sell tickets through Ticketmaster. During their 1995 tour, Pearl Jam attempted to work around Ticketmaster by having shows outside of Ticketmastercontrolled venues, but this meant they had
“Workers and artists can liberate art from the hands of corporations. The precedent set by the WGA strike, which won profit-sharing from streaming for the first time last year, shows that these same fights can be taken on in the music industry.” to perform in state parks, fair grounds, and soccer fields outside of or far away from major metropolitan areas. This was nearly 30 years ago, and Ticketmaster has only acquired more exclusive deals since then. Most small or medium-audience artists are stuck with wanting to perform and needing to make a living from it, but only being able to do it within the confines of Ticketmaster’s rules. Some artists, like Maggie Rogers, have attempted to work around these confines by having tickets sold in person at venues for a specific amount of time which limits the service fees that can be charged. But these concerts are still happening at Ticketmaster venues and the venue workers and artists are still seeing little of the profit that Ticketmaster is making. Everyone in the industry is getting screwed over except the Ticketmaster bosses. From 2022 to 2023 the CEO of Ticketmaster’s pay jumped from $13.8 million to $139 million, which is 5,414 times the median income of a Tickermaster employee, $25,673 a year. This profit is being brought
in by the Ticketmaster employees who saved the site when it crashed selling Taylor Swift tickets, the artists bringing in thousands of fans, the workers who run the lights and behind the scenes of these major shows, and the workers at the venues. The people in the executive suite are doing little to bring in profit for this massive company – it’s their workers filling their pockets. Workers and artists can liberate art from the hands of corporations. The precedent set by the WGA strike, which won profit-sharing from streaming for the first time last year, shows that these same fights can be taken on in the music industry. The streaming giant Spotify has made record profits in 2024 after laying off 1,500 staff. Spotify pays artists a paltry amount per listen, when their domination over streaming depends on having the biggest collection of music available. A strike of music industry artists and workers could win profit-sharing from Spotify like writers did, as well as develop a program for what else workers and artists need, like
residency programs with venues to reduce dependency on touring which is often bankrupting and exhausting, and taxing the rich to fund arts programs and state grants for independent venues. Massive companies like Tickermaster need to be in the hands of the workers and run in a way that works for all of us and ensures that the profits are shared fairly among the people actually running the company and the artists and workers making the shows possible. Having one site where many venues can share infrastructure for online purchases is useful, and reduces duplicate work in the industry. But done on the basis of capitalism, all this does is make bank for a few “shareholders” rather than make music easier to access and more enjoyable. Concerts and leisure activities are not luxury, but a necessity to human existence. Capitalism can’t be allowed to control our culture – from concerts and music, to fashion and makeup, to sports, to art; we deserve to be able to enrich our lives, rather than enriching CEOs. J
Read more culture from Socialist Alternative
DRUNK ON PROFIT: How Luxury Skincare Is Preying On Young Girls EVA METZ – JANUARY 2024
The skincare industry benefits from blurring the line between cosmetics and “healthcare” – at worst, these products are downright dangerous for young girls.
Why Watching Your Favorite Shows Is Getting More Expensive ELLA RAPP – FEBRUARY 2024
How did cutting cable for a $7 Netflix subscription turn into this? And will good TV and movies ever be cheap again?
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L ABOR MOVEMENT TY NOLAN, BOSTON The US labor movement is on the rise. Union popularity is at a historic high. 2023 saw the highest number of workers going on strike since 1986. Young workers are increasingly seeing unions and workplace organizing as a key battleground to fight for economic and social change. Starbucks baristas, overwhelmingly millennials and Gen Z, are combining the fight for higher wages with the need for the labor movement to take an anti-war stance against the genocidal war in Gaza. Older workers are also looking towards workplace struggle to claw back declining wages relative to inflation, benefits lagging behind, and a growing sense of a lack of dignity and respect on the job. UAW auto workers who have worked at the Big Three for decades explicitly saw the stand up strike as an opportunity to win back everything that has been lost since the 2007-8 contract. While union popularity is at new highs, workers still face steep obstacles. Union density sits at an abysmally low 10%, and in a year that saw a record number of strikes and high profile union drives at Starbucks, Amazon, and auto, union density continued to decline. Mainstream unions have generally not taken up the fight to organize the unorganized in the way that is needed. Millions of dollars paid by union members’ dues are still being poured into electing Democrats (and even some Republicans) rather than initiating bold, nationwide union drives at major companies like Amazon and Walmart. With rising militancy by workers also comes a growing backlash by the bosses. The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of Starbucks (8-1) against SBWU on the issue of rehiring seven baristas in Memphis who were unjustly fired for union organizing and ordered to be reinstated by a lower court. Major victories at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island and Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga have been followed up by ramped up union-busting and union election losses at Amazon’s ALB1 in Albany and Mercedes’ plant in Alabama. At the end of the day, the labor movement has a long climb back to powerhouse status. At its peak in 1954, union density in the US was at 35% – fighting to triple the number of workers currently unionized, and go further than before, will be an uphill battle. Overcoming the decades-long decline of US labor and rising backlash of the bosses will require a bold, cross-industry, long-term strategy involving the mass involvement of workers and a fighting leadership aiming to organize every workplace in this country. Above all else, opportunities to organize non-union workers will come from the existing union movement taking strike action and actually winning things.
Turning Strikes Into Organizing Even with union popularity sitting at its highest point in decades, for many workers organizing their workplace, taking a stand against their bosses and staring down vicious union-busting feels like a huge risk – and it is. Many workers do not have the direct experience of the benefits that come with a union, or a memory of a time where workplace militancy was more common. The task
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of organizing every worker must include strengthening the existing union movement and showing the huge gains that can be won when workers go on strike. The stand-up strike carried out by tens of thousands of UAW workers last fall is a reference point for millions. Auto workers took on the bosses at the “Big 3” automakers and secured 25% raises and an end to the hated two-tier system. Now, the victory of the stand-up strike is being leveraged by the UAW into a bold organizing drive of the non-union foreign automakers largely located in the South. Over 10,000 non-union auto workers have already signed cards to file for a union election with the UAW largely based on momentum from the stand-up strike victory. The victory of over 4,000 auto workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga shows what’s possible in this new era of organizing. Following failed votes to unionize in 2014 and 2019, nearly three-quarters of workers at the plant voted in favor of joining the UAW. Workers involved in the Volkswagen union drive, including some who had taken part in the previous efforts, directly credited the momentum built from the stand-up strike victory with finally pushing them over the hump. Volkswagen workers paid close attention to the strike, and took notice when their counterparts down the road at Ford’s Spring Hill assembly line won raises topping out at $43/hour, compared to the $32/ hour top out rate at Volkswagen. Other unions need to take note of UAW’s strategy. For example, the Teamsters should have immediately leveraged a strike at UPS into UAW-style organizing drives at Amazon and FedEx facilities across the country. Settling for a deal without a strike at UPS, and being slow to move at organizing Amazon in particular is a missed opportunity to build off of momentum. Still, now that unionized workers at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island have voted to affiliate with the Teamsters, leading a strong fight for a contract at JFK8 as well as the bold organizing drive at Amazon’s KCVG air hub which has now also affiliated to the Teamsters can embolden Amazon workers across the country to lead their own union drives. The UAW’s loss at Mercedes in Alabama shows that momentum alone cannot indefinitely beat the bosses’ union busting. As the labor movement grows stronger, so will resistance by the bosses. One lesson from Volkswagen that should not be lost is that it took
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO UNIONIZE EVERY WORKER? three tries to successfully win a union. Momentum generated by strong strike actions can certainly push new organizing forward, but to unionize a wider layer of workers will mean needing to build worker-led campaigns with real strategies to defeat the bosses’ union busting tactics. In many cases, building a worker-led campaign may mean needing to fight a battle on two fronts, one against the bosses and another against conservative union leaders. Reform caucuses such as United Auto Workers For Democracy (UAWD) and Teamsters Mobilize, and campaigns like the letter carriers’ Build A Fighting NALC show that many union workers today are committed to building militant, democratic unions even when their union leadership won’t.
“As the labor movement grows stronger, so will resistance by the bosses.”
We Need A Party Of Our Own
One of the main barriers to a full resurgence of the US labor movement is the deep commitment union leaders have tragically shown to supporting the two parties of big business, especially the Democrats. Millions of dollars in union dues are spent every year on electing Democrats and in some cases Republicans rather than putting that money towards new organizing. The power of the working class ultimately comes from its power on the shopfloor, its power to refuse to work and give another dime of profit to the bosses. But to fully harness working class power, this struggle needs to be taken into the political arena as well. Neither party of big business offers anything to workers, and so workers need a party of their own. A workers’ party would need to fight beyond workplace struggles, but would need
to connect with social struggles and the antiwar movement as well. Labor leaders like Shawn Fain should use their authority within the labor movement to begin building a viable third party to actually represent workers. While Fain has already unfortunately endorsed Biden, there is still the basis for him and other union leaders to begin building a mass workers’ party in the US, a party that connects with the rising anti-war mood against the genocidal war in Gaza, a party whose representatives only take the average workers wage, and a party that stands unabashedly with workers against the bosses.
General Strike May 1, 2028 Building the social power needed to truly unionize every worker will require a war on several fronts – the labor movement needs its own party and it needs its own media to put forward a pro-working class analysis of the news that can reach the millions of workers who see no solutions coming from both major parties. Fain and the UAW have put out a public call for all unions to align their contracts and join in a general strike on May 1, 2028. While strikes in individual workplaces, and in individual industries can act as a catalyst for union drives popping up, a cross-industry general strike could trigger an avalanche of new organizing. To accomplish this, the labor movement needs to start organizing immediately. This involves far more than just aligning contract dates, and it would in all likelihood actually require unions to defy labor laws like TaftHartley that prevent strikes against issues beyond compensation and workplace conditions. This would necessitate union activists across industries organizing together towards a common strategy, and a program of common economic and political demands. Unfair labor practice strikes and public rallies across unions and industries should be organized. Reform caucuses within unions with leadership hostile to this militant approach should start organizing against them immediately by calling their own actions. J S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G
What We Can Learn From UAW’s Gaza Solidarity Strike STEPHEN THOMPSON, CHICAGO This spring, students at University of California, Los Angeles were among the thousands across the country who set up encampments to protest the genocidal war on Gaza. On the evening of May 1, police in riot gear stormed the UCLA protest encampment and shot at the students with rubber bullets. Nationwide, police have arrested over three thousand students in similar crackdowns against the Gaza solidarity movement. But the University of California system is distinguished by the fact that student workers there are members of United Auto Workers Local 4811, a powerful 48,000-member union that launched the largest academic strike in US history less than two years ago over low pay and other issues. In May, the union called a new strike in response to the police violence against members who were at the Gaza solidarity protests. The strike demands included amnesty for student protestors and divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s attack on Gaza. This strike represented an important step forward for the anti-war movement; it demonstrated how the movement can escalate, rather than retreat, in the face of police attacks on the solidarity encampments. Unfortunately, the union quickly called off the strike after being ordered to do so by an Orange County judge. What happened here, and what lessons can be drawn?
Political Strikes In the US, the infamous Taft-Hartley act severely restricts the conditions under which workers in the private sector can legally strike, and other legislation puts similar restrictions on government employees. Generally speaking, these laws prohibit workers from using strike action to fight for anything except improvements in their own pay and working conditions. Strikes for political demands, and so-called “secondary” strikes, in which workers strike in solidarity with workers who are employed elsewhere, are typically illegal. Thus the University of California administration argued that the UAW strike last month was illegal “because the goal [was] to pressure the University to concede to a list of politically motivated demands closely linked to the protests occurring across California and the nation.” The union countered that, because the police were attacking its members at their place of work, the strike was actually against unfair labor practices, and was therefore lawful. But when a judge ordered an end to the strike anyway, the case served as a potent reminder of the oppressive restrictions on workers’ rights in the US.
A Rigged System Even as workers are legally prohibited J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
from withdrawing their labor to fight for political demands, wealthy people routinely work to shape government policy by threatening to withhold or relocate capital investments. For example, in May of 2020, as over a thousand Americans per day were dying in the pandemic, Elon Musk threatened to relocate Tesla’s headquarters out of California to protest the state’s COVID lockdown. In more dramatic cases – such as Greece during the 2010s – left reformists have been elected to office, only to retreat from their campaign
J. Sherman, the Orange County judge who ordered UAW’s strike last month at the University of California to end. Before becoming a judge, Sherman spent over two decades working at the corporate law firm Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth, where he was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year to do things like defending businesses accused of poisoning children. Obviously, workers can’t depend on people like that to defend their rights.
“If workers hadn’t been willing to break the law, we probably wouldn’t have a labor movement in the first place.”
In a rigged game, we can only win by breaking the rules. This means being willing to organize illegal strikes, and openly defy judges like Sherman. In fact, if workers hadn’t been willing to break the law, we probably wouldn’t have a labor movement in the first place. In the US during the twentieth century, some of the biggest increases in union membership took place during the 1930s, when industrial workers had to strike for union recognition. These strikes were only successful
promises in the face of economic crises caused by investors rapidly moving their money out of the country. In short, because they have the ability to withdraw their investments whenever they choose, wealthy people have enormous leverage over government policy, and this is one reason why every capitalist society, even if it has a nominally democratic political system, functions in practice as a dictatorship of the rich. But when workers engage in political strikes, they turn this “dictatorship of the rich” upside down, and demonstrate the possibility of a completely different type of society, in which ordinary people assert control over the economy, thus creating a basis for democratic working-class rule. Hence the continuation of capitalism depends on an outrageous double standard in which businesses are free to withhold capital investments to win political concessions, but if workers try to withdraw their labor for political purposes, they face prison time. The courts are an integral part of this rigged system. Because judges generally live amongst the wealthy, and in many cases have even built long careers doing the bidding of rapacious corporations, they can be expected to support the basic social norms upon which capitalism is based. Just consider Randall
Break The Rules
A N T I-WA R M O V E M E N T
rank-and-file members without legal authorization, after workers refused their union leaders’ orders to go back to work. Different strikes will require different tactics, and illegal action comes at a risk to workers’ jobs that has to be taken seriously, by fighting tooth and nail to win. For example, workers in the 1930s had to physically fight against National Guard troops to defend the picket lines. On the other hand, when Nixon called out the national guard in 1970 to break a wildcat postal worker strike, the workers won in part by convincing the soldiers to disobey their orders and instead support the union. But the common thread in all these cases is that striking workers organized the broadest possible support from the rest of their class, and understood the need to openly confront, rather than seek accommodation with, the capitalist state. These tactics can be contrasted with the half-way approach of the UAW 4811 leadership, which – against objections from members, who overwhelmingly voted for strike authorization – only mobilized a small minority of the union to participate in last month’s strike. After Sherman’s ruling to call off the strike, the union called a meeting at which fewer than 300 members committed to continuing the pickets, leading to the strike’s end. To build the momentum necessary for winning a strike like this, the union would have needed to mobilize the full force of its membership from the beginning.
Unions Can Lead The Fight Against The War On Gaza
because workers organized mass picketing, an illegal tactic in which large numbers of strikers and supporters gathered to physically block scabs from entering workplaces. More recently, 2018’s West Virginia teachers strike, which kicked off a new wave of action by education workers across the US, took place despite being declared unlawful by the state attorney general, and continued even after leaders of the union asked the teachers to return to work. More recently, 2018’s West Virginia teachers strike, which kicked off a new wave of action by education workers, was illegal as well. The strike turned into a “wildcat”, which means it was executed by
Today, polls show that a majority of Americans want the US to halt arms shipments to Israel, but Biden continues to send weapons anyway. As the world looks on in horror, the brutal onslaught against Gaza continues, and Netanyahu has now pushed a million Palestinians to the brink of starvation. Union leaders should call mass meetings across the country to discuss the need for political strikes against the war, and mobilize the broadest possible sections of the working class behind a banner for ending arms shipments and instead using government money to serve human needs. They should also explain the need for mass community pickets to defend the strikes, while making a class appeal to National Guard troops, explaining to them why it is in their interests to support, rather than crush, the strikes. Few union leaders would be likely to carry out a strategy like this without massive pressure from below. But to help get from here to there, anti-war activists must appeal to the working class for support. This means supporting basic economic demands that are in the interests of all workers, but also explaining and demonstrating in practice how workplace action can be used to fight for wider political demands. J
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Socialist Alternative is a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council in 2013, the first independent
socialist elected in a major US city in decades. We then led the successful campaign to win a $15/minimum wage in Seattle, the first such victory in any major city. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power. We are for a democratic socialist world where ordinary people will have control over our everday lives.
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Tacoma Educators Organize Campaign To Defeat Cuts To Schools How rank-and-file caucus members successfully forced school administration to hire 10 new custodians and reduce cuts to school counselors JEREMY CRAGIN, TACOMA Jeremy Cragin is a Tacoma educator and a member of Socialist Alternative. Public Education in Washington State is criminally underfunded. Washington state’s tax system overwhelmingly taxes working-class people rather than its many billionaires, which makes the pool from which to fund schools and social services artificially small. On top of the statewide underfunding, many school districts prioritize exorbitant pay for the top bureaucrats over the needs of students and workers. In Tacoma, the state’s third-largest district, Superintendent Joshua Garcia raked in a salary of $366,095 during the 2022-23 school year. Meanwhile, educators are struggling with wages far outstripped by the cost of living, and students and staff are left with unsafe drinking water, filthy schools due to cuts in custodial staff, and no career-guidance specialists. Learning from the successful struggles of rank-and-file teachers in Chicago, Oakland, L.A., and especially the historic 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike, Tacoma Educators for the Common Good (Tacoma ECG), a caucus in the Tacoma Education Association, is beginning to organize rank-and-file educators, students, parents, and community members to fight back and win the schools our communities deserve with a contract that serves our needs, even beyond staff pay and benefits. We began our first official Tacoma ECG meetings in January of 2024 and our first direct action campaign started in March to combat the filthy schools caused by the district’s refusal to fully staff custodial positions. We encouraged hundreds of community members to send letters to school board members, flooded the public comment sessions with staff and students during April school board meetings, and convinced the press to cover our fight. Our collective efforts forced the district to hire at least 10 new custodians, proving that when we fight, we can win! On May 28 the district claimed they were prioritizing “keeping cuts away from the classroom and avoiding layoffs of any school staff” for the 2024-25 school-year. Not surprisingly, the district reneged on their promise, and immediately began making cuts to
services directly affecting students, this time eliminating careerguidance counselors from high schools. We launched another petition calling for the reinstatement of career-guidance counselors to the five comprehensive high schools and one alternative high school in the district, this time encouraging over 3,500 community members to write letters to the school board! We also held an informational picket outside the school board meeting with parents, students, educators, and union siblings from other locals. We, again, flooded the public comment section of the meeting, this time with incredible testimonials from students whose lives post-graduation were tremendously impacted by the efforts of their career-guidance counselors. Hours before the school board meeting, the district decided to return two of the four recently displaced career-guidance counselors to their original buildings.
“In order to win the fully funded schools our students deserve, educators must take the same class struggle approach to building fighting movements. We need to build rank-and-file power within our union halls, build community power with the working class families we serve, and use our collective power to go on strike – shutting down business as usual.” Predictably, the responses from the school board members at the conclusion of the meeting were very hostile and defensive. We know that we can’t rely on district administrators and elected officials tied with the two parties of big business, the Democrats and Republicans, to provide our students with the schools they deserve and public school workers with decent living standards – both parties have systematically sought to undermine public education across America for decades. Educators, students, and parents are going to have to continue the fight. That’s why Tacoma Educators for the Common Good is organizing around three key demands: 1) Fight for the “common good” of educators and the families we serve, including more social workers in schools, better supports for immigrant students and families, and limits on standardized testing 2) Expand our union’s bargaining unit to include under-represented members of our union, like school psychologists, nurses, office professionals, and
counselors 3) Open the union’s collective bargaining sessions to provide membership with regular updates Since launching our caucus, aside from directly combatting the district’s gross mismanagement of resources and under-prioritization of student and worker needs, we’ve also been working inside our union to fight for democratic decision-making, organize rank-andfile members at the school level, and get our members elected to leadership positions. Understanding the struggles of working and oppressed peoples throughout the world are connected, we also put forth and passed resolutions urging our national union, the National Education Association, to call for a permanent and immediate ceasefire to end the genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. Additionally, our members supported and pushed our union to endorse Tacoma For All’s Tenant Bill of Rights. Fully-funded schools designed to meet the needs of students and families will not be won by pleading nicely to elected officials of either parties of the ruling class, Democrats or Republicans. In fact, Democrats have controlled the Washington State Governor’s mansion for 30 out of the last 30 years, the Senate for 20 years, and the House for 23 years. Democrats have controlled all three for 15 of those 30 years, and at least two for 28 out of the 30 years. Both nationally and in Washington state, it is very clear that working people and union members need our own party. And educator unions won’t win at the bargaining table by pleading to or forming “good relationships” with district officials. Our demands will be won as a result of a fighting strategy, the same approach Socialist Alternative used throughout the last decade in Seattle with Kshama Sawant’s Seattle city council office where we won the first $15/hour minimum wage of any major city in the country, the first-ever tax on Amazon to fund affordable housing and other vital services, and a citywide ban on evictions of students and educators during the school year, among other victories. In order to win the fully-funded schools our students deserve, educators must take the same class struggle approach to building fighting movements. We need to build rank-and-file power within our union halls, build community power with the working class families we serve, and use our collective power to go on strike – shutting down business as usual. We must reject both ruling class parties and build a new party for working people. This includes voting for the strongest independent anti-war candidate for president, Jill Stein or Cornel West, as a step towards building a new party run by and for working-class people. Support Tacoma Educators for the Common Good by following us on social media, and get in contact at Facebook. com/TacomaEducatorsForTheCommonGood to get involved! J S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G
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NYC High School Students Organize Walkout For Gaza
LENA STEHLE AND JESSE SHUSSETT, NYC
Lena Stehle is a student organizer and member of Socialist Alternative. On May 31, our monthlong organizing effort culminated with over 70 high school students from LaGuardia High School and all around NYC walking out in support of the antiwar movement. More than 1,000 students during class and during our lunch perifrom all over the city marched to Tweed ods to spread the word and gauge interHall, the historic courthouse in Manhat- est. There were many who were cautious tan. Chants of Free Palestine, Student about participating, fearing backlash from the administration, or from their Power, and Ending friends or classmates Genocide filled the that are pro-Israel. We streets. “Our tax dollars pointed to the culture We walked out to that had developed at are funding Israel’s stand in solidarity with the school of silencing the tens of thousands brutality. Money discussions about the of innocent Gazans that could go to war in Gaza, and how killed since the start of we needed to make our our schools is being the war, as well as with the college encamp- used to drop bombs voices heard and make a stand on the obvious ment protesters, who on Gaza. Money injustice happening. have been arrested, that could fund our The school ultibrutalized, expelled and mately was pressured in other ways penalized healthcare is fundenough to put out a for their protests. Fre- ing the NYPD to statement about the quent connections were dismantle the colwalkout in advance of made by the students it as well, threatenlege encampments. between this struggle ing disciplinary action and the need for military This so-called ‘war’ against any students and defense funding to does not serve anytaking part. While that be cut and instead be was clearly meant to one but the people put into things we actuintimidate students ally need, like librar- in power.” from participating, it ies, transportation, and also drew attention to most importantly for the - Nadine, Student Organizer the action for people high school students at who didn’t already the march, education. know about it. So far, We had some planned speeches from no students have been impacted by this the core organizing group at LaGuardia, threat and we likely have our strength but also had a vibrant open mic that in numbers to thank for that! The more was packed with students who wanted people involved, the harder it is to pin to speak their thoughts openly about down who to punish for the activity. the genocidal war in Gaza and how they This walkout was not easy to organize, wanted to fight for it to end. Over a given the significant pro-Israel populadozen students spoke during the open tion at our school, and the Department mic! of Education’s insistence on painting Banned from putting up posters at anti-war protests as “anti-Semitic.” school that weren’t first approved by the Despite this, we had a diverse turnout administration, we had individual conwith Jewish and Muslim students alike, versations with friends and classmates J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 4
as well as many who simply recognized the urgency of this antiwar movement to spread, for the benefit of everyone. “We owe it not just to the people of Palestine, but also to ourselves,” said one student organizer, Nadine. “Our tax dollars are funding Israel’s brutality. Money that could go to our schools is being used to drop bombs on Gaza. Money that could fund our healthcare, is funding the NYPD to dismantle the college encampments. This so-called ‘war’ does not serve anyone but the people in power. Which is why it is up to us to be as loud and disruptive as possible, and demand an immediate ceasefire, no more war funding, and an end to the occupation!” We hope that this energy will extend beyond the walkout, and most signs point to that happening. At the walkout, countless students expressed how they wanted to continue the fight, asking about next steps and how they could be involved. There are now even a number of students getting involved from another high school, Bronx Science! We have plans to have a Students For Palestine contingent at the upcoming Queer Liberation March, with merch and a speakout. Our demands include a permanent ceasefire now, for charges against student protestors nationwide to be dropped, for funding to the bloated police budget to be redirected to our schools, and an end to the occupation. Students have a huge role to play in this movement, including high school students. If you want to organize a walkout at your school, odds are, you have classmates who agree with you and will want to help. If we fight, we can win! J
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Editorial Board: George Brown, Tom Crean, Chris Gray, Jesada Jitpraphakhan, Josh Koritz, Bia Lacombe, Keely Mullen, Greyson Van Arsdale, Tony Wilsdon Editors@SocialistAlternative.org
15
SOCIALIST
ALTERNATIVE
ISSUE #105 l JULY/AUGUST 2024
ERIC JENKINS, PHILADELPHIA Nearing a year since the beginning of the invasion, Palestinian families are still being torn asunder by the relentless onslaught of Israeli
protests throughout the Middle East and growing pressure within Israel, are playing an important role in limiting how far Israel and the US can go with their campaign of bloodshed. This is shown in the recent symbolic criticism of Netanyahu by leading Democrats who have stood by the Israeli occupation for decades, as well as Netanyahu’s reluctance to go as far as his far-right government partners are pushing for, which would include
Simultaneously, the desire to reach a ceasefire that would include bringing all hostages back home is growing within Israeli society, with tens of thousands marching in June calling to reach a deal and for immediate elections to bring down the Netanyahu regime. The continuous “war of attrition” between Israel and Hezbollah, the organization in Lebanon aligned with Iran and Hamas, is now threatening to explode into an all-out war, backed by significant support in the Israeli population after tens of thousands of Israeli civilians had to flee their homes without sufficient government aid or prospect to go back. Instead of deescalation, we are seeing Israel ramp up its attacks on Hezbollah, including bombings and targeted assassinations. This raises the real threat of a wider regional war, which would mean bloodshed and destruction on a vast scale. A war between Israel and Hezbollah would almost certainly turn into a regional conflict. Iran is closely connected to Hezbollah, and could be pulled into the conflict. Despite warnings and diplomatic efforts to defuse the situation, US imperialism would likely be drawn in especially if Iran becomes involved.
BUILD A SOCIALIST MOVEMENT TO END THE WAR
CAPITALISM CAN’T BRING LASTING PEACE TO GAZA bombs and missiles, largely supplied by the US government. The horror in Gaza continues to deepen with the growing threat of mass hunger and starvation. Locked in an open-air prison turned into a horrific war zone, more and more Palestinians are relying on crowdfunding to reach food or be able to escape the Strip. 12,000 GoFundMe campaigns raised $77 million by March, showing the deep level of solidarity that exists among working-class people for Palestinians. These donations are only one part of a global solidarity movement fighting in the streets, workplaces, and campuses with a burning desire to do whatever they can to end the war. Pressure from this inspiring global movement, including mass
the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and a resettlement of the Strip by Israeli settlers.
Threat of Wider War The Israeli government proclaimed target of eradicating Hamas is widely admitted to be unachievable, and they have also failed to free all of those abducted in the October 7 Hamas attack. The recent military rescue of four Israeli hostages came with the devastating massacre of over 300 Palestinians, including an estimated 64 children. The desperate mass-media campaign attempting to celebrate this rescue to lift morale in the Jewish population was temporary, as the war cabinet fell apart over disagreements and splits and has now been dissolved altogether by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Capitalism Needs Imperialism, Imperialism Needs War War is fueling more war. Biden continues to support Israel militarily despite the war’s profound unpopularity. Biden and the Democrats cannot afford more upheaval if they want to win the 2024 election. So why are they continuing this? The logic of capitalist development, based on the nation-state, leads to the development of imperialism and the fight over territory, and especially markets. The US was previously the unchallenged imperialist
INSIDE WHAT IS NEEDED TO WIN PALESTINIAN LIBERATION? p. 8-9 power in the world, but now, Chinese imperialism has risen to confront it. All “regional” conflicts are now being drawn into this wider battle for global domination. Israel and key Arab countries are the US’ allies in the region against Iran and its various proxy forces, which are aligned with China. Both Democrats and Republicans are united in seeing ongoing support to Israel as essential to the interests of US imperialism. So the saber-rattling of the ruling classes isn’t due to personality quirks of ruling elites, or even solely due to reactionary ideas. Capitalism’s drive for profit, and its need to secure political control and stability, based on its interests, over as much of the globe as possible, underlies the support for this genocidal war by US and Israeli imperialism. The US desperately needs Israel as a strong ally in the Middle East to ensure China and Iran are not able to gain political and economic control of the region. Devastating war and destruction is baked into the capitalist system. As more and more innocent lives are lost, the mobilization of the masses becomes a significant danger to the ruling elites. Millions of protestors internationally have organized massive demonstrations for an immediate ceasefire. Thousands of students across the US and internationally have fought for Palestinian liberation by occupying their campuses to demand universities divest from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. What is needed in the movement now is escalation based on clear demands. We can look to the graduate students in UAW 4811 at the
University of California system, who not only called for a ceasefire and an end to repression of campus protesters, but went on strike to demand it. Despite the strike being called off fairly quickly, this is an example for the entire labor movement, and shows the next step for every union that has called for a ceasefire. Students should renew the campus protests in the fall, and link up with campus unions and other local unions to shut down campuses completely if demands for full divestment from profiting from Israeli occupation are not met. This also means not backing down once administrations have conceded to make task forces or said they’ll “look into” investments, which are usually empty promises designed to get students to pack up and go home. Ultimately, we need to turn this fight into one against the entire global system of capitalism and imperialism, which drives the war and oppression our movements are seeking to end. We can and should fight to replace this rotten system with a socialist world, where we can finally have an end to war once and for all. J