Socialist Alternative Issue 65 - July/August 2020

ALTERNATIVE

ISSUE #65 l JULY-AUGUST 2020

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INSIDE ECONOMIC CRISIS END RACIST POLICING REVOLT IN SEATTLE

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WHAT WE STAND FOR: JULY-AUGUST 2020 WHY I JOINED SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE

Defund the Police: Fund Public Services J Cities should slash police budgets by at least 50%, and reinvest those funds in needed public services.

J With states facing huge deficits, they are already looking to cut spending on public education and healthcare. The federal government should use a tax on big business to provide disaster relief to states. This money should not be used to bail out banks or major corporations, but should be put directly into providing needed social services.

A Safe and Just Society: End Racist Policing J Immediately fire and prosecute all cops who have committed violent or racist attacks.

J End the militarization of police. Ban police use of tear gas, rubber bullets, chokeholds and military equipment.

Disarm cops on patrol.

J Put policing under the control of democratically elected civilian boards. These should have real teeth, including power over hiring and firing policies, reviewing budget priorities, and the power to subpoena. All of this should be done openly and publicly.

J Police unions are dominated by reactionaries that defend abusive police, and should not be given cover by the labor movement. Labor must demand that police unions reject racist policing policies and agree to support a purge of the police in order to remain in or join labor councils.

Workers Program to Restart the Economy As the billionaires try to drive through a shoddy reopening of the economy, we need to discuss in our workplaces and communities what a return to work that prioritizes the needs of the working class would look like.

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Workplace Needs to Be Safe: While still on a small scale, workers are starting to rediscover their real power – the power to stop production through a strike.

The recent upturn in walkouts and strikes have won important gains in safety.

We need to organize safety committees in all workplaces. They should be elected by workers, without the bosses present.

These committees should demand the right to social distancing protocols and personal protective equipment (PPE). This could include staggered shifts or an expansion of workspace per worker. If that means slowing down the pace of work - then slow it down!

No retaliation or threat of unemployment against workers who refuse to work in unsafe environment!

Program for Full Employment: The economy is collapsing into a new depression. Unemployment has reached the highest level since the Great Depression.

We need an extension of current unemployment benefits - including the $600 a week top up.

The labor movement should be on the front lines fighting for a massive jobs program, for a reduced workweek to share out the work with no reduction in pay, and for a living wage for all those laid off or unemployed.

For a massive Green New Deal jobs program to tackle climate change and provide jobs for tens of millions of workers. To be successful this needs to be tied to public ownership of the massive energy companies and banks.

No Evictions or Foreclosures: J We need an extension of eviction and foreclosure bans through this depression.

J We need to organize to fight every attempt by landlords at evictions.

J Rent should be cancelled for the duration of this pandemic and back rent should be forgiven.

J For universal rent control and a tax on the wealthiest corporations like Amazon to build high quality, publicly owned social housing.

Before becoming a socialist I wasn’t political at all. I grew up in a middleclass home; both of my parents had union jobs, but politics were never really important. After the 2016 presidential election there was an explosion of political activity in my neighborhood of Astoria and New York City as a whole. During this time, my roommate dragged me to a public meeting that Socialist Alternative was hosting, and I was blown away by the intensity and passion of it all.

The public meeting really opened my eyes to a different kind of politics.

As someone who loved history class in school, I didn’t realize just how little we actually learned. The following month I tore through all the left media and history I could consume. I was especially inspired by the huge international effort of the Spanish Civil War and the more radical nature of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Black Panthers, and MLK. The real politics of these leaders, and the movements behind them are completely ignored or buried in surface level things we learn in high school.

At this time in my life I was working for a health insurance company that was lobbying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. During the day I would make websites for this ultra-conservative company while listening to Malcolm X speeches in the background: the stark contrast was not lost on me. I saw how the company had to lobby against the ACA because the way they made profit was off our public health care system not being able to provide for

Labor Movement Needs to Step Up: Trade unions are the only organizations workers have to directly defend their rights.

However, the leaderships of most major unions have been woefully inactive during this pandemic and have not stepped up to defend their members or organize the unorganized. (With a notable exception being National Nurses United.)

J Out of this pandemic and depression, we need to build radical fighting unions, which help organize social struggles against eviction, poverty, racism, and for full employment on living wages.

For a New Political Party for Working People:

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Amidst the Justice for George Floyd protests, the Democrats and Republicans have demonstrated their loyalty to the racist and oppressive system of capitalism. Democratic city mayors and city councils have done little to stop the killer cops and bloated police budgets. This demonstrates how the Democratic

Joseph Wegmann New York City, NY everyone’s needs. At the same time, our busted political system couldn’t (and still can’t) even solidify the idea that we should all have healthcare in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Being a socialist to me feels like a no brainer when I live in a city that doesn’t seem to care about its residents, and when so many of my friends are so run down by their job, they barely have time to focus on things that really matter to them. It solidifies to me that we should be striving for the working class to be able to determine how we spend our lives and what work is necessary for our society. I am a socialist because I want people to liberate themselves from the meaningless grind of capitalist society. J

Party is not a vehicle working people can use to transform society. We need a new, multiracial workers party that organizes and fights for workers’ interests and is committed to socialist policies to point a way out of the horrors of capitalism for working people.

The Whole System is Guilty J Capitalism produces poverty, inequality, environmental destruction and war. We need an international struggle against this failed system.

J We need a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people and the planet. Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership.

J Malcolm X said: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” To win lasting change, the fight against police racism and the corporate political establishment must be expanded into a fight against the capitalist system itself and for a socialist alternative. J

2 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

FIGHTING RACISM

The Rebellion Against Racial Oppression and Law Enforcement Terror Eric Jenkins On May 25, four Minneapolis police officers killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Floyd’s death became the spark that lit the flames of rebellion both in Minneapolis and around the country. Millions of people poured into the streets calling for Justice for George Floyd chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police.” Cities and rural areas alike have seen protests, with the latter in some cases seeing the first protests ever!

In a continuation of the 2019 global revolt against neoliberal capitalism, millions of people have joined protests all over the world in solidarity with #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd.

They are also questioning the legacy of colonialism and racism in their own countries. In Belgium, protesters pulled down a statue of King Leopold II, the butcher of the Congo, among other such reckonings.

As we said in early June: “It is clear from a mile away that the rage goes far deeper. It hangs like a cloud over the demonstrations.

For many protesters demanding justice for George Floyd, it is obvious that our entire economic and political system is broken.”

The movement has already won the arrest and indictment of all four officers involved in George Floyd’s killing, a ban on police use of chemical weapons and choke holds in some cities and states, and reduced funding for certain local police departments. Despite all these concrete victories, the most significant accomplishment of this movement is the shift in consciousness of ordinary people in an anti-racist direction. Sixty-seven percent of adults across racial lines have expressed support for the protests and the popularity of this movement has put reactionaries in the U.S. like Donald Trump and the leaders of police unions on the back foot.

COVID-19 Provides the Backdrop This sudden burst of struggle wasn’t random. The world is currently in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions around the world are infected with the disease. Over 120,000 have died in the United States which became the epicenter of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the push that sent the economy off the cliff, plunging it into crisis. Tens of millions of people are currently unemployed or furloughed. Congress was forced to respond with a $2.3 trillion stimulus package. However, the crisis is still here. Federal Reserve Jay Powell said, “Millions of workers will not be able to go to their old jobs.”

These crises have torn through the Black J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

working class. Black people are dying at higher rates from COVID-19, have the highest unemployment rate, and make up a large section of essential workers who hardly have any protection against COVID-19. On top of all this, the epidemic of police brutality has raged on. Black people have been repeatedly harassed and targeted in every city and town in the U.S. It was only a matter of time before the working class responded with revolt.

This mobilization of the multiracial, multigender, working-class youth, headed by young Black people, has shaken this country to its foundations. In 23 states, Democrats and Republicans called in the National Guard to shut down the protests. Trump has touted himself as a “Law and Order” president, threatening to send in the National Guard or even federal troops to cities where he deems that Democrats aren’t effectively crushing the protests.

Protests Explode Out of Lockdown The #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd protests are a continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement from a few years ago, but have started at a much higher level. They took on the character of an all out rebellion and occupation in some cities. The movement today is more widespread and is starting with demands such as “Defund the Police,” which shows an understanding that the previous reforms were woefully inadequate.

While so-called “riots” were a feature throughout the country, the majority of protests were peaceful. Protestors have rejected violent tactics while also arguing against those who demonized rioters and “looters.” Many quote Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insight that a “Riot is the language of the unheard.” There is a growing recognition among the working class that Black communities are routinely looted by the capitalist system through wage theft, low-pay, little to no health care coverage, and slashes in vital social services.

Young people, activists, and workers see this rebellion as not just being against police brutality. Hundreds of thousands across the

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd rally in Philadelphia, June 2020. country have called to defund the police and redirect money toward social services such as education and housing. Systemic racism in all of its forms is being called out as the target. The slogan, “Enough is Enough,” crystalizes the mood. Many, especially Black youth, are no longer appeased with ineffective police reforms like body cams or implicit bias training. Many are desperate for a complete restructuring of the racist system that plagues working people of color.

While generally the labor leaders have been woefully inactive in this struggle, some local leaderships and rank-and-file groups have launched into action.

In Minneapolis, the bus drivers union ATU Local 1005 denied the police use of their buses to perform mass arrests for the first days of the rebellion. In response to a Minneapolis post office being burnt down, postal workers stood in solidarity with the rebellion by marching with the slogan, “You can replace a post office, but you cannot replace the life of George Floyd.”

Many workplaces, union and non-union, held 9 minute walkouts to honor the death of George Floyd. This growing solidarity between the labor movement and the protests is the basis on which coordinated days of action could be organized. Mass protests combine with workplace actions would bring far more pressure to bear on the ruling class.

No Answers in the Halls of Power Both the Democratic and Republican Party have been completely taken aback by these rapid developments.

The Democratic Party establishment

continues to try to funnel the momentum of this movement into a vote for Biden in November. However, they refuse to acknowledge their own role in police brutality and systemic racism or fundamentally change their positions on mass incarceration and policing.

Joe Biden said that he doesn’t agree with the movement’s main demand of defunding the police. Knowing full well it would not pass in the Senate, the Democrats in the House put forward the boldest police reform package they could come up with. Even their most robust proposals are extremely limited.

The Republican Party, more overtly the party of “Law and Order,” has gleefully ordered militarized forces to descend on protestors. However, they have also had to deal with protests in small towns and suburban communities, which is their voting base.

Both parties have made clear their hostility to working-class people taking to the streets for Justice for George Floyd.

Both corporate parties know that they are unable to deliver on the demands of ending systemic racism. To do so would require eliminating the economic order that allows racism to flourish: capitalism. Ending systemic racism would mean working people controlling their communities and workplaces under democratic control — putting the needs of the community over profit. This largely points to the need for socialism to end racism.

Tens of thousands of working people are desperately looking for the way forward in the fight against capitalism and racist policing.

Only the working class is the force in society to deliver on these demands by taking control of our workplaces and communities under the nose of the capitalist class. J

3

ECONOMY

The Reopened Economy: Depression or Recovery?

Bryce Callaway and Tony Gong As the first half of 2020 draws to an end, economic forecasts portend a global economic decline unlike any other in history.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is currently predicting a 46% decline in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP in the second quarter of 2020. Even conservative estimates still predict the U.S. economy shrinking 36%. This would be the worst economic decline in modern U.S. history — during the Great Recession the sharpest single-quarter downturn was “only” 8.4%.

The rest of the world is not doing much better, with the Eurozone’s GDP expected to fall 8.7% this quarter and China’s GDP having already fallen by 6.8% last quarter. The global economy is experiencing an unprecedented crisis.

Trump and the U.S. political establishment, including both Democrats and Republicans, are eager to deny the seriousness of the economic collapse. They blame the current depression exclusively on the coronavirus lockdown and rather than extend stimulus checks and benefits, they are rushing to reopen the economy against the advice from public health experts.

Trump and others promise a “v-shaped recovery,” meaning that once coronavirus health restrictions are lifted, consumers will very quickly return to shopping like before, profits will surge to pre-pandemic levels, and all the workers who lost their jobs will be rehired. We are not seeing this quick recovery. Instead, the chaotic reopening of the economy is increasing the danger of more deaths, lockdowns, and quarantines in a “second wave” that could deal more lasting economic damage than the first.

A Successful Rebound?

The corporate media badly wants a “v-shaped recovery” to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, trumpeting successful “rebound” figures — retail sales surging by 17.7% and the stock market’s brief rebound - that in actuality represents only a temporary improvement over the complete collapse of recent months. Compared to the tens of millions of jobs still missing, the current rebound is miniscule and fragile. With massive unemployment, ordinary people don’t have enough money to prop up businesses with spending.

In the immediate term, millions of families need further assistance to prevent falling into poverty.

The official 13.3% unemployment rate erroneously excluded almost six million workers – the corrected unemployment rate is 16.3%. But even this measure excludes commonly understood definitions

of unemployment, such as part-timers who want to work full-time, or people who’ve given up looking for work. When those people are included, the unemployment rate is estimated at around 20%, near Great Depression levels, with a strong possibility that the real rate is even higher.

On top of that are new waves of layoffs in many industries and in the public sector.

That is how we continue to see new jobless claims top one million a week despite officially declining unemployment.

The rebound is unlikely to accelerate into a full recovery because though coronavirus was the trigger, the current depression is more than a crisis of demand and is a reflection of the long-term stagnation in productivity facing capitalism. This fundamental weakness and the hollow recovery from the Great Recession made corporations dependent on debt and speculation to maintain profitability.

Retail chains, in particular, struggled with corporate debt and closed stores before the pandemic and are now facing total dissolution. Vast swathes of small businesses already on razor-thin margins before the crisis are going bankrupt. The collapse of commercial real estate, which would deepen the crisis because it is woven into the financial sector, is already in motion with almost half of stores and offices failing to pay rent in April and May.

Cuts and Layoffs for Workers, Bailouts for Corporations Shockwaves from the initial downturn are ripping through the fragile post-recession economy much faster than in 2007-2009.

The post-recession “recovery” was built on massive corporate debt and speculation in unprofitable businesses, especially in tech, that is wildly vulnerable to even the smallest downturn. That is why layoffs have spread unusually quickly from customer-facing jobs, hit first and hardest in a crisis, to capitalreproducing and research jobs like engineering. Professional white-collar workers, who are generally buffered from downturns by time if not effect, are suddenly facing mass layoffs. The profit squeeze is forcing corporations to pull back investment in expansion and productivity, further weakening the fundamentals of the economy.

Public sector workers are also facing massive cuts. State and local governments have cut approximately 1.5 million jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. While the layoffs are being described as temporary, two-thirds of lost jobs are related to public education. Nationally this equates to an over 9% decrease in jobs in this sector, a scale that has eclipsed the Great Recession.

The $600 unemployment top-up in the CARES Act has illuminated the perpetual

crisis of stagnant wages, as two-thirds of laid off workers received more money in unemployment than they made at their jobs. The supplemental benefit has saved additional jobs from disappearing, temporarily staving off a deepening of the economic crisis.

However, it has not stopped other crises in motion.

Almost a third of the U.S. population, 106 million people, couldn’t make payments on their loans in May. This figure is triple that of April. The supplemental benefit will expire on July 31 and is still not enough for working people to weather the impending storm.

While Congress is deadlocked over the next stimulus bill, the majority of which will be even more corporate bailouts, bills are due and jobs are being lost.

Unemployment benefits, including the $600 top-up should be extended, while the federal minimum wage should be immediately raised to $15 an hour. In addition, we need immediate rent forgiveness, massive defunding of the police to fund education and housing, and full unemployment benefits with Medicare for all. A green energy program should be developed, with unions leading the call, that will provide high-quality public jobs.

Winning these gains will require a sustained mass movement centered on the social power of the working class, including the building of a new party representing our interests.

A World in Crisis The worldwide capitalist economy is at the beginning of a long phase of depression, though it can be punctuated with temporary upturns. The International Monetary Fund is now beginning to warn that the real effect could be much worse than their initial forecast.

Making matters worse, developing countries have over $2 trillion in outstanding loans to the IMF, World Bank, imperialist nations like the U.S. and China, or private investment firms. The financial institutions will aggressively seek to recoup their investments from these defaulted countries, forcing them into a spiral of vicious cuts and economic contraction just to claw back loaned money.

As the knock-on effects of supply-chain disruptions and bankruptcies work their way through the global economy in the coming months, the crisis is likely to deepen. In addition to mass layoffs, cuts, and evictions, we are likely to see politicians in country after country ramp up racism, sexism, and xenophobia to protect the interests of national capitalists.

All the negative features of capitalism are on full display, and are likely to get worse.

Meanwhile, corporations continue to massively pollute and climate experts are sounding the alarm on the rapidly shrinking window for averting climate crisis. Working people did not crash the economy, or fund police brutality, or create the climate crisis — capitalism did. In order to solve these crises, we need a worldwide system change, a socialist transformation of society with a democratic, rationally planned economy that prioritizes need, not profit. Human productivity can be redirected to providing for the needs of society and the planet and avoiding “business cycles” that plunge us into crisis every decade. Only such a society can guarantee safe, sustainable, comfortable living standards for workers in every corner of the world. J

4 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

POLITICS

Defeat the Right-Wing Agenda with Mass Struggle

We Need an Alternative to Corporate Politics

Bryan Koulouris Trump’s support is plummeting in poll after poll. He has grossly mishandled the pandemic, downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 crisis. The economy is tanking on a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with tens of millions unemployed, yet Trump is seemingly oblivious to the poverty and deep uncertainty faced by millions.

Yet the biggest contributor to Trump’s crash in the polls was his response to the Justice for George Floyd rebellion. He tweeted about crushing the rebellion while hiding in a bunker, called for shooting looters, and wanted to classify antifa as a terrorist organization — despite the fact that antifa isn’t an organization at all, and the KKK isn’t even designated as a terrorist organization! In this context, support for BLM protests skyrocketed in every poll. One survey showed that more people approve of burning down a police station in Minneapolis than support either Trump or Biden!

Biden now has a significant lead over Trump with a double-digit margin in many polls. Many working-class and young people would understandably be excited to see the end of Trump’s regime. However, this isn’t due to any enthusiasm for Biden or the corporate-controlled Democratic Party leadership.

Nearly every revolt against racism is in cities with Democratic mayors and city councils, with protesters often correctly calling for their resignations for overseeing decades of institutional racism. Virtually every major city in the U.S. has been run by Democratic politicians for decades, and inequality has been increasing. Biden himself has performed no better in this uprising.

While protesters demand cuts to bloated militarized cop budgets with the slogan “Defund the Police,” Biden has proposed spending more money on law enforcement.

Biden has been largely missing in action for months, but his rare appearances have been marked by quasi-racist statements; he said “you ain’t black” if you don’t vote for him, and recently said instead of fatally shooting Black people, cops should “shoot them in the leg” when confronting suspects. Biden is a long standing supporter of policies which made institutional racism worse. He worked with arch-segregationists on a series of “law and order” bills in Congress and was a key architect of legislation in the 1990s that fueled mass incarceration. Despite his sizable lead in the polls, Biden could still lose this election because virtually nobody is enthusiastic about his campaign.

We Need More Uprisings We are faced with mass unemployment that isn’t going away with the pandemic and

J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

could become all the more devastating if the federal $600/ week unemployment top-up expires on July 31 and isn’t replaced with similar measures to help people out of work. On top of this, state and local governments are discussing drastic budget cuts that would slash away at already under-funded schools. Making matters worse, millions are faced with the prospect of evictions for being unable to pay their rents during these crises. Mobilizing around the demands to “Defund the Police,” taxing the rich, and housing justice is the way to maintain the momentum of the mass movement for racial justice.

The uprising after George Floyd’s murder won more victories against racism and changed consciousness more dramatically in just a few short days than decades of electing moderate Democrats backed by big business.

Building and linking up powerful movements against racism, evictions, bloated police budgets, and tax-dodging corporations should be where activists put their efforts rather than into supporting Joe Biden.

While Biden says he wants an “FDR-sized presidency,” we’ve heard this rhetoric before from mainstream Democrats. Also, we should remember what it took to pressure FDR to enact the New Deal, increased union rights, and other concessions won from the ruling class in the 1930s. There was a mass movement of the unemployed and an unprecedented strike wave, in which socialists and communists played a crucial role. While some pro-capitalist politicians will want to put more money in the pockets of workers and young people, this is only to prop up spending in their decaying system and to try to cut across demands for more far-reaching change. It also won’t be enough in the face of the colossal crisis we face. We need to get organized to win more than the crumbs the billionaires and their politicians are willing to give us.

We Need a New Party of Class Struggle When we organize in the streets, campuses, and workplaces without a political tool for working people, we’re fighting with one arm tied behind our backs. The calls for resignation of mayors who tried to crush the uprising are correct, but who do we replace them with? Electing more big business politicians, no matter what their rhetoric, is not the way to win real changes to policing or

Joe Biden is a tool of Wall St. decisive measures to end the structural racism that is inseparable from this capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. We need independent working-class candidates that are accountable to the movement and its demands. This requires organization and ultimately a new party for working people.

In both 2016 and 2020, the Bernie Sanders campaign brought together union activists and young people in grassroots campaigns for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” This could have provided the framework for a new working-class party, but Bernie remained stuck in the straightjacket of the Democratic Party. Now Sanders and his program are isolated as he supports Joe Biden and opposes calls to defund the police, remaining largely absent from the recent uprising. The attempts to transform the Democratic Party have failed, and we need to build a new force.

If the Democrats win decisively in this year’s elections, they would be oversee a system in decay and extreme crisis. They would respond with half measures that suit their corporate backers. This would create rage and a huge opportunity to build a new working-class party, but there is also the danger that the far right would benefit from this situation. If the unions, the left, and social movements remain tied to the Democratic Party and don’t organize for a clear alternative, then something worse than Trump could emerge. We should remember that it was the Democratic establishment that created the space for Trump’s ascendancy in the first place with years of empty promises while doing the bidding of the billionaire class.

History Knocking at Our Door History is knocking at the door of the left, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to union leaders and the growing Democratic Socialists of America. If we don’t break from the vicious cycle of corporate parties and politics, then the future for humanity is dire. We need a strong left protest vote in this election to demonstrate that we refuse to be taken for granted by the Democratic Party yet again.

Despite the big weaknesses of the Green Party, Howie Hawkins’ campaign seems best positioned for this. Socialist Alternative members will be debating our approach to the 2020 election this summer through our democratic structures.

To lay the basis for a new party, socialists have more important tasks than voting and elections this year. To be successful, a new party can’t just be focused on getting people elected; it needs to be rooted in struggle with grassroots participation in democraticallyorganized mass movements.

An explosive new movement against racism has emerged with working-class and black youth at the forefront. With the twin horrors of the pandemic and economic catastrophe, millions more people could be moving into action against budget cuts, unemployment, and a deepening housing crisis.

Calls to defund the police, combined with demands for fully funded public education, a massive housing program, Medicare for All, and taxing the rich, could bring together an ongoing rebellion. This time, we’ll need to be better organized and lay the basis for a new working-class party that we can use to defeat this rotten, racist, capitalist system, once and for all. J

5

THEORY

Socialists and the State: How to End Racist Policing Tom Crean The nature of policing in the United States is inseparable from the violent, racist history of capitalism in this country. From slave patrol; to Bull Connor unleashing dogs and fire hoses against black protesters in Montgomery during the Civil Rights movement, to the police lynchings in black communities today — there is a consistent thread.

Police and state repression has also historically been unleashed against workers trying to unionize, radical organizers, and any serious struggle that threatened the interests of the ruling class. In 1932, President Hoover sent in infantry and tanks to smash the encampment of white and Black veterans in Washington, D.C. demanding their longpromised World War I bonuses. On May 30, 1937, the Chicago police shot 40 unarmed striking steelworkers outside the gates of Republic Steel, killing ten.

The Role of the Police As Frederick Engels explained over a hundred years ago, the emergence of the state repressive apparatus — including armies, police, prisons, etc. — historically reflects the division of society into social classes with antagonistic interests. The state consists, in Engels’ words, of “armed bodies of men,” which keep class antagonism “within the bounds of order” but at the end of the day defend the interests of the dominant class – which, in our society, are the billionaire capitalists. An inevitable part of maintaining the wealth and domination of the ruling class in a society as unequal as ours is repression and the threat of violence.

From slavery to Jim Crow to the institutionalized racism and segregation of today, maintaining racial division has always been an underpinning of capitalist rule in the U.S. In order to form powerful industrial unions like the United Auto Workers in the 1930s and ‘40s, radical union organizers had to push back against poisonous racism, fostered by bosses like Ford to maintain their control.

Without taking a clear, anti-racist position they would not have succeeded in convincing white and Black workers to fight together and win historic victories that benefited the entire working class.

The aggressive policing of poor Black and Latino neighborhoods today is meant to keep people literally penned in to substandard, segregated housing and schools. But racist politicians have also sought to present poor people of color as a threat to better-off white working-class and middle-class communities to gain wider support for these repressive policies.

It is not possible to create a completely

“non-racist” policing as long as institutional racism and segregation are left intact. Nor can the police be “abolished” within the framework of a capitalist society. As long as the capitalists rule, they must and will find a way to protect their interests and their property. But that does not mean that there is nothing we can do short of getting rid of capitalism itself.

Real Change The changes won in the first phase of the Black Lives Matter Movement, including more training and body cams, have proven to be completely inadequate.

Nevertheless, policing can be changed significantly and mass incarceration can be wound down. However, such gains can only be won by a mass movement of the type which has burst forth after the horrific murder of George Floyd. To win real and lasting gains, the movement needs to be sustained, refuse to be co-opted, centered on mobilizing the social power of working people, and articulate a wider social program.

The current movement has demonstrated that the mass of the population rejects the odious racism which is rampant in the police forces as well as exposing the massive web of protection around the police. They have been given virtual legal immunity for almost any crime. They are a caste which is not under any democratic control. Sent by the ruling class on a mission to keep the population, and especially the black community, “in line,” it is now difficult for even the establishment to rein them in.

The mass movement has exposed real divisions in the political establishment about how to deal with policing. The position of Trump and the most reactionary elements to massively increase repression has been isolated. Another wing of the establishment represented by mayors Durkan in Seattle and de Blasio in New York seeks to maintain the status quo but is in retreat at the moment under the pressure of the movement. A third wing seeks to co-opt the movement by adopting the movement’s call to defund the police and then weaken it. In Minneapolis, the majority of the city council went as far as to commit to “disband” the police department.

But almost immediately they began to retreat from this position, saying they are opening a one-year period to look into alternative policing arrangements. This is a time-wasting exercise. We need change now!

Police officers at Justice for George FLoyd protest in Seattle, WA. We need to make the demand for defunding more concrete. We must demand once and for all that police policy, including hiring and firing, be brought under the control of democratically elected civilian boards. There must be an immediate purge of the police of all cops with a record of racism and excessive force in the community. As in many other countries, the police should not be armed on patrol. A police force that is brought under democratic control, even to a degree, would lessen the oppression of the Black working class especially but it would actually benefit the working class as a whole.

Divisions Among the Police We must also recognize that the police are not one homogeneous mass. The reactionary wing is very strong and dominates most local police forces around the country. But while there have been performative acts of “taking a knee” by cops who later violently attacked protesters, there have also been signs of genuine sympathy from some ordinary cops. A recent letter from 14 officers in Minneapolis claims to speak for hundreds of other cops in denouncing Derek Chauvin and supporting reform. This is a limited and positive step but it would have been completely inconceivable without the pressure of the mass movement.

If there are ordinary cops who really want reform and a different relationship with the communities they work in, then now is the time for them to stand up and push out the likes of Bob Kroll – the Trump-loving, farright head of the police union in Minneapolis.

We believe in the right of the police to form unions so that they have a way to resist being used by the ruling class against working

people. But that’s clearly not the role these unions are playing today.

The truth is that the police forces in many cities have used their participation in the wider labor movement to give themselves cover. The labor movement cannot be silent. It must defend the Black working class and immigrant communities abused by the police. It must demand that police unions reject racist policing policies and agree to support a purge of the police to remove those with a record of violence and racism in order to remain in or join labor councils.

A Safe and Just Society To live in a society where people do not have to fear state repression and racist subjugation, we have to get rid of capitalism. As we point out in a recent article on the rebellion in Minneapolis: “A central task of a workers government, where key corporations are brought into public ownership and working-class people have democratic control of the economy, is to combat the racist legacy of slavery, imperialism, and inequality of all forms, and create the conditions for a society truly free from racist policing, exploitation, and oppression.

This will include working-class communities organizing their own safety and protection.

“The process of dismantling the police, prisons and state repression generally is intertwined with the process of ending and moving beyond capitalism, and establishing a truly egalitarian, classless socialist society.

This will not be done by Minneapolis City Council, but through the conscious organization of working-class people into a revolutionary movement.” J

6 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

L ABOR MOVEMENT

Interview with Minneapolis Union Activist

The Bus Driver Who Refused to Transport #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd Protesters

During a #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd protest on May 27, Twin Cities bus driver and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005 member Adam Burch refused to drive a bus filled with arrested protesters to jail for the Minneapolis Police Department. His action inspired other bus drivers around the country to take similar action and, along with Socialist Alternative, he launched a union member petition supporting demonstrations.

go about organizing that?

What made you refuse to transport arrested protesters that night?

How important was your union in being able to do that and in backing you up?

I had participated in the first night of protests the night before, including the rally at 38th and Chicago and the march to the 3rd precinct. At work the next day, there was a message put out to all drivers that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) needed “police buses” for the intersection at the 3rd precinct where I knew an occupation had developed from the previous evening. I knew that this meant that MPD was planning on making mass arrests of protesters because they need Metro Transit buses to do so. I wanted to use my position as a bus driver and union member to refuse my labor to at the very least - make it difficult for MPD to arrest protesters and suppress the movement for justice for George Floyd. I wanted the mass protesting to continue until all the movement’s demands were met.

Very important. If I didn’t have membership in a union that protects my rights as a worker I never would have had the confidence in the first place to withhold my labor as a political statement and encourage my coworkers to do the same. Also, I’m only one driver in one garage.

Metro Transit eventually decided that it wasn’t going to ask any drivers to take arrested protesters to jail, and that drivers could refuse to shuttle police around. It was the union that forced the company to take that position which was a win for the movement. It was the union that took up an initiative from a rank-and-file member and turned it into a mass collective action. It really showed the strength of the union in real time, and made me an extremely proud member of my union.

How did you and your co-workers

After my initial social media post received a lot of reactions and engagement, Socialist Alternative Minnesota decided to launch an online petition to use as an organizing tool among my co-workers and fellow union members. I also had shop floor conversations with other drivers in my garage. The conversations were already very politicized making it easy to discuss with them what we as drivers should do and not do.

What kind of action do you think other workers can take in the workplace to help

Adam Burch at the garage he works out of in Minneapolis.

build the Black Lives Matter movement and win justice for George Floyd?

Since launching the petition we used it to organize other workers and union members beyond just transit workers. During a big rally planned at the fifth precinct in South Minneapolis we organized a labor contingent that then joined the main rally. We had signs and banners that clearly identified ourselves as union members in solidarity with

the movement for justice for George Floyd.

A handful of rank-and-file union members spoke, linking the role labor can play in social movements. People there were excited to see a section of the labor movement in such strong solidarity with the BLM movement.

Other union members were inspired by what we were able to do with our position in ATU and wanted to do something with their union.

J

Minneapolis Postal Workers Organize For #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd Tyler Vasseur Member of National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 9 (Minneapolis) Two post offices in South Minneapolis, both located directly next to police precincts, were burned to the ground during the first week of mass protests for Justice for George Floyd. I am a letter carrier in Minneapolis and the post office I work at also delivers in South Minneapolis, just a few miles north of where George Floyd was killed. Every one of my coworkers was talking about the protests and, after the first week, it was clear to me that many of us were attending the protests as individuals. I wanted to find a way to have us go as a group to represent our union and the communities we live and work in.

We are in for a fight of our own at the postal service, as Louis Dejoy, a Trump Administration appointee, just took over as Postmaster

J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

General. He comes from the background of running a logistics company that specialized in automation and union busting, with a long history of labor violations. He is clearly being appointed for a reason, to attempt to carry through the Trump administration’s plans to privatize the postal service, and attack the postal unions.

The fight to save the public postal service is directly connected to the broader struggle to defund the police, tax the ultra-rich, and fund jobs programs, affordable housing, quality education, and social services instead.

In this context, it is important that union postal workers participate in the Black Lives Matter movement and take up the demand to defund the police.

In early June after the first week of mass protests, a few co-workers and I decided to hold a press conference in front of the burned out Lake Street post office, with the main message being “You can rebuild a post office, but you can’t rebuild the life of

someone murdered by the police.”

Due to the fast pace of events, we felt it was necessary to get an action organized with a time, place, basic messaging, and Facebook event page as soon as possible. Once we got the ball rolling, we were able to win the support of the local union leadership. A huge help in winning over local leadership to actively engage in the Black Lives Matter movement was citing work done by Amalgamated Transit Union members (see above) and UFCW co-op grocery workers (who staged a nine-minute walkout in solidarity with the movement). We pointed to these actions as examples that can help show the power of organized labor to an entire new generation of radicalizing young people.

Around 40 postal workers representing most post offices in Minneapolis attended the press conference. The action was a huge success, and can help to build the Minneapolis labor movement’s involvement in Black Lives Matter and other social struggles going

forward.

We are following up our initial organizing by broadening our future actions including a “Labor United Against Police Brutality” rally.

The goal is to bring together unions from across Minneapolis to oppose police violence against people of color.

It is crucial that organized labor is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. This is first and foremost about winning justice for George Floyd, and all victims of police violence. It’s also about fighting for good-paying union jobs, access to quality education, and housing for all workers which will disproportionately benefit workers of color. If unions took this lead and organized mass demonstrations of working people against police violence and discrimination of all kinds it would further escalate the discussion in society as a whole, as well as point the way forward around concrete demands and next steps. J

7

The Role of the Working C in Fighting Racism Keely Mullen Two nights after George Floyd was murdered, Minneapolis bus drivers received an urgent request for a fleet of buses at the corner of 26th Street and Hiawatha Avenue in South Minneapolis. The request came from the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) who were gearing up for mass arrests at a Black Lives Matter protest and intended to use the buses to transport protestors to jail.

The leadership of the Minneapolis bus drivers’ union, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, refused. They urgently declared their support for protestors and refused to be used by police as a bludgeon against the movement. The next night, New York City bus drivers followed suit.

The action taken by these drivers went viral.

It was picked up by major news outlets and made its way onto the social media feeds of millions of Americans. In the context of a labor movement that for decades has limped behind social movements, this act of working-class solidarity was a sign of what’s possible.

Solidarity with BLM The action taken by Minneapolis bus drivers kicked off a limited but important wave of labor solidarity with the #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd movement. In Minneapolis, union postal workers organized a solidarity rally outside of a burned down post office with the main slogan “you can rebuild a post office, but not a life.”

(See page 7 for more).

On Juneteenth (June 19), which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., actions were taken by some major unions. The

International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a union with a long record of supporting social movements, shut down ports along the west coast in solidarity with protestors. The United Auto Workers (UAW) urged their members to organize nine-minute slow downs symbolic of the nine minutes police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck before killing him.

While these actions are important, they’re rather isolated and are not connected to an overall strategy among labor leaders to fight racism. The AFL-CIO hosted a virtual panel after the movement broke out with several key union leaders who all issued lifeless statements that, indeed, racism is real and yes it is bad and people should vote in November.

Considering the ranks of unions in the U.S. are now more racially diverse than ever before, this lackadaisical approach amounts to a complete abandonment of their own members.

In 1981, Black, Latino, and Asian workers made up 15-16% of total workers in the production, transportation, material moving, and service industries. Today, in each of those categories, the number is 40%. In the building trades, workers of color now make up 37% of the total workforce compared to 15-16% in 1981.

The multiracial working class is now facing mass layoffs, cuts to social services, rent that’s too high, and wages that are too low — attacks that will disproportionately devastate Black and Latino workers. All of this is an attempt by the ruling class to make us pay for an economic crisis they themselves created.

Fighting for our jobs, our schools, and adequate health care will require a working-class movement that is united across racial lines.

The working class derives its social power from its ability to shut down the profits of the capitalists by refusing to work. Harnessing this power to its full extent requires the broadest possible participation of working people, something that is impossible if we are divided by race.

Building a united movement does not mean that the demands of Black and Latino workers should be subsumed into the most basic economic demands. It means the broader working class needs to take up the demands of Black and Latino workers. Building the unity needed to win the battles ahead will require the building of a labor movement committed to fighting for overarching economic demands alongside demands against racist policing, segregationist policies in housing and education, and against white supremacist and vigilante violence against communities of color.

We need to build a labor movement committed to overcoming the divide-and-conquer mentality of the ruling class which has used racism for centuries to keep workers fighting among ourselves.

The Color Line Racism affects Black people in America most consistently, sharply, and with life-ordeath consequences. However, racism also directly harms every single working person regardless of race by keeping us divided and prevents us from uniting against society’s real oppressors: the wealthy elite. This division has played an important role historically in preventing workers in the U.S. from achieving many of the gains achieved by workers in other countries including developing our own mass

political party or universal health care.

Racism has been used for centuries as a central weapon by the ruling class to assert its dominance. The U.S. ruling class has also used imperialism to build support for their rule in sections of the population. As the most powerful ruling class in the world over the past century, they have successfully used divide-andrule tactics, strategic concessions, and brutal force to keep the working class from directly challenging their control over society. But they are in decline and some of their old tricks, like crude racism, may not work the way they used to.

The North American ruling class realized early on that the greatest threat to their system was the unity of Blacks and whites who had more in common with one another than either did with the wealthy elite.

In the 1600s, hundreds of thousands of impoverished British and German people arrived in North American colonies as indentured servants. Alongside them was a steady arrival of African people purchased from slave traders who were integrated into the large pool of indentured servants.

In the fields, Black and white indentured servants worked together. They were dehumanized across the board and were all regarded as “filth and scum” by plantation owners. Their shared misery led to a natural sense of class solidarity.

This would change dramatically following what became known as “Bacon’s Rebellion” in 1676 in Virginia. In this uprising against the planter elite, Black and white indentured servants stood together arm in arm. They were brutally slaughtered and the rebellion was crushed. Though overall a victory for the aristocratic landowners, they were terrified by the unity they saw between Black and white servants.

In reaction to this, and to prevent further rebellions, the ruling class set about consciously dividing Black from white. The legal position of white indentured servants was improved. Whipping white servants was forbidden and when the period of indenture finished, whites were provided with “corn, money, a gun, clothing, and fifty acres of land.” Meanwhile, Black indentured servants lost all of their rights. Indentured labor became lifetime, “chattel” slavery.

The American ruling class’ use of racism to divide workers and continue their steady stream of profit has transformed and morphed throughout history.

After the Civil War, the revolutionary Reconstruction period in the South, when poor whites and ex-slaves began to collaborate, ended in a bloody counterrevolution with the unleashing of white supremacist violence by the planter aristocracy. This opened the door to what became known as Jim Crow, a system of racial subjugation based on outright white

Union members march in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in Philadelphia, June 2020.

8

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

Class supremacy comparable to Apartheid South Africa.

Through all subsequent phases of American history, the division of white and Black workers from one another was consciously maintained.

Whether it be denying Black people basic legal or civil rights under Jim Crow, waging a culture war to depict Black people as dangerous or violent to justify mass incarceration policies in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, or the ongoing segregation of housing and education — racism and American capitalism cannot be separated from one another.

This is precisely because the ruling class recognizes that at the end of the day workingclass whites have more in common, despite all the differences, with working-class Black people than either do with the wealthy elite of any color. Despite all the rhetoric we hear today from many corporations “standing with” BLM, they know full well how profitable structural racism has been and they have no intention of paying the price required to end it. While the bosses generally do not see the need today to resort to the crude divide-and-rule tactics of the past which would not work, now the corporate media cynically encourages a toxic form of identity politics in an attempt to maintain the idea that working people of different races have nothing in common with one another.

The Multiracial Working Class vs.

Capitalism Capitalism in the U.S. has been exposed as a bankrupt system incapable of providing a decent life to millions of ordinary people. It is in the best interest of every single workingclass person to build a mighty struggle to take on and end corporate rule. However, American capitalism and racism are so thoroughly intertwined that there is no way to defeat one without taking on the other.

It is possible to win limited anti-racist reforms absent a full scale revolt against capitalism as we’re seeing play out through the current Black Lives Matter rebellion where certain concessions are being made. However, even significantly reducing the funding of the police, a demand which we wholeheartedly support, would not in and of itself address institutional racism.

It would not change the fact that it would take a typical Black family over 52 million years to reach the wealth currently held by the Walton family, owners of Walmart. It would not change the fact that the Forbes 400 richest Americans own more wealth than all Black households plus a quarter of Latino households. Or that majority-white public schools receive on average $773 more dollars per student than majority-Black schools.

The multiracial working class has a crucial

Multiracial contingent of CIO members march in New York City on May Day, 1946.

The CIO and Black Workers One of the most dramatic leaps forward in the living standards of Black workers in the U.S. happened through the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and ‘40s. The leadership of the labor federation from which the CIO was born (and later expelled), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which based itself on the more privileged craft workers and largely excluded “unskilled” workers, had a rotten record of enabling racism within affiliated unions.

In the run-up to the 1935 AFL Convention there were multiple attempts made by a section of both Black and white union leaders to transform the racial policies of the AFL,.

However, these attempts were largely swatted away or dramatically watered down. This confirmed for many Black workers that the AFL could not be transformed into a vehicle that would advance their needs.

The refusal of AFL leaders to champion even the most modest demands of Black workers coincided with their unwillingness to alter their structures to accommodate industrial unions which could be home to millions of workers in mass-production industries.

Unlike the conservative craft unionism of the AFL, industrial unionism advocates organizing everyone who works for one employer into the same union. The AFL’s stubborn opposition to industrial unionism led to a revolt that coincided with the realization by many that the AFL leadership was content to sit on their hands in the face of racism within the labor movement.

This, in many ways, created a perfect storm and out of the 1935 AFL Convention, where the leadership’s conservatism was exposed across the board, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was born.

Soon after its founding, the CIO embarked on one of the largest scale organizing campaigns in American labor history. They targeted a number of key mass-production industries such as steel, auto, rubber, and meatpacking. A central tenet of organizing these industries was winning over thousands of Black workers whose experience of the labor movement was not positive. Organizing

mass, multiracial industrial unions meant not only convincing Black workers that the new American labor movement would not bear the marks of the conservatism of the AFL. It also meant convincing white workers that the only way they could advance their own interests was by fighting alongside Black workers.

Organizing Steelworkers in 1936 The first test for the CIO came in the dramatic battle to organize steelworkers across the U.S. in 1936. After taking over the Association of Iron and Steel and Tin Workers, the CIO established the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC) which was tasked with rallying the more than 500,000 steel workers across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama.

There were 85,000 Black workers in the steel industry, 20% of the total workforce.

They occupied the worst possible position within the mills and were paid between $16 and $22 a week, far less than their white counterparts. In an attempt to buy the loyalty of Black workers, the steel industry poured money into Black churches and fraternal societies. They were confident this investment would pay dividends as the SWOC began their organizing campaign.

However, what the steel barons did not account for was the determination of CIO leaders or the position of the National Negro Congress (NNC) which was determined to write a new chapter for Black workers.

The NNC, with deep ties to the Communist Party, was formed in 1935 with the goal of fighting racism in the context of the Great Depression. In early 1936, John P. Davis, co-founder of the NNC, said of the SWOC campaign: “There is no effort in which the National Negro Congress could possibly engage at this time more helpful to large numbers of Negro workers… than the organization of negro steel workers… 85,000 negro steel workers with union cards will signal the beginning of the organization of all negro workers.”

The NNC did far more than issue statements of support to the steel workers’

organizing campaign. At a national level, they recommended dozens of Black organizers to be hired by the union and sent to key steel towns to build support for the organizing drive. On top of this, wherever there were local councils of the NNC, they contributed volunteer organizers to build the campaign deep in the Black community.

They approached Black churches, clubs, and organizations encouraging them to sponsor mass meetings to recruit Black workers into the union. A typical NNC leaflet read: “we colored workers must join hands with our white brothers… to establish an organization… which shall deliver us from the clutches of the steel barons. We appeal to all colored workers in the steel mills to join the union.”

By the end of 1937, the SWOC represented the entire steel workforce including the 85,000 Black workers who at that stage constituted the largest group of Black union workers in the U.S. After a year of determined organizing by Black and white workers, wages were raised by one-third, working hours were reduced, and certain Jim Crow practices were ended in the steel industry.

While conditions remained very difficult in the industry, the situation had dramatically improved.

By 1940, 200,000 Black workers had joined the ranks of the CIO. However, this forward march could have gone further. In 1945, the CIO launched “Operation Dixie” to organize key Southern industries. To win this campaign would have required a decisive battle against Jim Crow itself whose racist laws were meant, among other things, to keep unions and radical organizers out of the South. The campaign ended in failure because of an insufficiently bold approach, which contributed to eroding the strength of the unions in the North over time. If Operation Dixie had triumphed it would have opened a new and possibly much more decisive phase in the class struggle in the U.S. But what was once again confirmed, this time in a negative way, is that the advance of the labor movement requires a fight against racism as a central strategic task. J

continued on p. 15 J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

9

HOUSING

Fight Your Eviction: You Are Not Alone!

Rob Rooke

Millions of renters are in the same boat.

They are laid off. They have been juggling payments: student loans, utilities, health care, and credit cards. They can’t afford to move. And the landlord is leaving curt messages: where’s the rent?

In an average year, landlords file three million eviction cases in the U.S. But this is no ordinary year. Tens of millions of workers are currently unemployed. The establishment has dismally failed to protect the country from COVID-19, which continues to spread nationwide. Despite this huge economic-health crisis that has fallen hard on the shoulders of the 110 million renters, the big developers and landlords single-mindedly want their money.

Forty-two states enacted COVID-19 eviction moratoriums earlier this year. Most expire this summer — the same time as the $600 unemployment top-up — creating a severe income crisis that will likely see a tsunami of evictions.

The COVID-19 lockdowns did not deter some landlords from illegally sending tenants threatening notices to leave, kicking some tenants out of their homes, and in some cases even changing locks on renters while they were out shopping. For the worst landlords out there, money is more important than life.

Staying and Fighting Your Eviction The dark cloud over all renters is homelessness. Like so many of capitalism’s ills, homelessness is systemic and built into the system to terrorize tenants into paying exorbitant rents and to be constantly in fear of evictions. Job loss and evictions are major causes

of homelessness. There is only one solution: organize!

Rent Strike 2020 (RS2020) is the broad group that was initiated at the beginning of the pandemic to fight for federal and statewide rent relief and to organize tenants to withhold rent in May. The group has Facebook pages in 15 cities with thousands of members. In recent months, RS2020 has helped organize tenants around a stay-andfight framework. Tenants have organized their buildings, begun negotiations with landlords, and have either won rent reductions or refused to pay rent.

Those evicted in America are more likely to be people of color and single mothers with kids. Black women are the most likely demographic to face eviction. Many of these families will be anxious about their housing security and desperate to avoid the streets.

What to Do When You Get a “Notice to Leave” The key moment for all renters will be when they get a 30-day “Pay or Quit” notice on their door. RS2020 is arguing: do not leave! In most states this is notice to pay up your rent or the landlord will take you to court. Many states have increased protections during the pandemic; find out the law.

But remember the laws were never written with the notion that everyone has the right to housing, they were likely written by landlords and developers.

Our real protections are ourselves. Flier your fellow renters, the other buildings owned by your landlord, and your whole neighborhood. There is safety in numbers. Contact your local RS2020 group for advice and back up. Let the landlord know they are fighting a whole community, it will cost them their reputation, and if others join in withholding their rent money, it might cost them money.

From 2012-2014: Occupy Homes MN successfully defended several homes through mass action.

If the landlord pushes forward to take you to court for an eviction, that will cost them money too, and they are all about the money.

The courts will be swamped with cases. In Michigan, there are 75,000 eviction cases waiting to be heard. We want to pack the court rooms, build the movement, and expose landlord greed on social media. This is homelessness prevention. Once homeless, climbing back onto the rental merry-go-round with a big security deposit plus first and last is almost impossible for the low paid.

If the courts don’t back off under public and political pressure, then the sheriffs will attempt to remove your things from the building. This is not personal. This is a fight between the system of extracting money from working people on the one side and renters on the other. Mass demonstrations, including blocking the road in and out of the neighborhood can prevent evictions. This is how

workers have fought historically to defeat evictions.

The confidence in police has also taken a dive over their handling of demonstrations for Justice for George Floyd. Many people already think they are a force to defend racism, but them being exposed as a force to defend developers and landlords is not a good look for capitalism.

Ultimately we need a society with decent and secure publicly-owned homes. We want to cut the landlord out of the picture, and with it, the constant fear of homelessness.

Ultimately, we need a socialist society. But to get there we must have a united workingclass movement, independent of big business and its money, and built through struggle. If we do not organize, we will lose our homes.

If we organize, en masse, we can win a whole new and better world. J

Rent Strike 2020: Evictions Threaten Communities of Color Grace Fors Racism is built into the foundations of our for-profit housing system. The coming economic depression will hit Black renters in particular, as those who have struggled to pay rent during the pandemic fight to stay in their homes. Soon the millions activated by #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd will need to join the struggle against evictions and rental debt that threaten to devastate communities of color.

Roots of Housing Segregation Racism has been at the center of U.S. housing policy, linked with the development of U.S. capitalism in the 20th century.

In the 1930s, the federal government created guidelines that were used by public and private interests to systematically deny loans and mortgages to people in poor, Black neighborhoods. The segregationist agendas of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, and later the National Housing Authority, shuttered people of color into packed, underserved public housing and thus directly created “ghettos” whose residents were criminalized and overpoliced.

Now, 58% of Black households rent, and gentrification is pushing working people and people of color out of cities to make way for big business and the wealthy.

This has paved the way for the current crisis to severely impact black workers. While

the overall unemployment rate fell slightly in May, Black unemployment rose. A quarter of black and Latino renters reported nonpayment or deferment of rent during the pandemic, and 44% of Black tenants said they had “little or no confidence” they would be able to meet their next rent payment.

When sheriffs show up to force people out of their homes, this is an act of police violence. The threat of evictions is yet another way the cops terrorize communities of color to fuel the profits of greedy landlords and investors.

How We Fight Back The #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd protests have

shown the potential of mass struggle to win victories. When people of all backgrounds flood the streets, we can demand no evictions or foreclosures, cancellation of rental debt, and evictions to be struck from tenants’ records. We must also call for rent control to stop gentrification, and fund affordable social housing by taxing the rich and defunding the cops.

Under capitalism, a unit of housing is just another poker chip for landlords and investors to pile up at the expense of working people. It will take a powerful, revolutionary movement to reverse the long history of racism in housing and build a new system where quality, permanent housing is a human right. J

10 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

E D U C AT I O N

Defund the Police and Tax the Rich to Fund Our Schools

Education Under Attack Teachers are currently faced with an impossible task: educating students online, many of whom don’t have access to technology, with little warning, preparation, or training. Teaching under COVID-19 is an entirely new job that no teacher signed up for. Now, because of budget crises, teachers across the country are facing mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and the risk of returning to school without proper safety measures. Educators are grappling with how to fight back.

Budget Cuts We are up against brutal budget cuts.

These will be far worse than the 2008 Recession, when 350,000 educators lost their jobs. Even now, in 2020, 29 states are providing less school funding than they were in 2008, and states are still down 135,000 jobs. Job losses were worse by April 2020 than in the entirety of the 2008 Recession.

Poor and rural districts are going to be hit particularly hard by these budget cuts.

We are also anticipating ramped up attempts to privatize schools. Following Hurricane Katrina, many public schools shuttered and were replaced by privately run charter schools. In cities and states run by Democrats and Republicans, schools have suffered budget cuts and “charterization.”

Meanwhile, the rich have received massive tax cuts over the past decade. The richest corporations in the world have increased their wealth substantially throughout the pandemic. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has made over $33 billion.

The National Education Association, one of the largest unions in the country, is pointing to the HEROES Act – which passed the House of Representatives and is now stalled in the Senate – as a saving grace for educators because it proposes direct aid to state and local governments. Additional federal aid would be a very important step, as it could be used for public education and to protect hundreds of thousands of educators from potential layoffs.

However, the approach of the NEA is limited. Their call to action is “people should contact their Senators.” It will take much more than emailing our Senators to get the Republican controlled Senate to pass sweeping aid to state and local governments. The aid proposed in the HEROES Act is also just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed to provide students with the education they need! The NEA should instead be mounting a serious campaign for fully funded public education paid for by defunding the police and military and taxing the rich and big corporations.

As 80% of public K-12 funding goes to educator salaries, when cuts come, it will directly affect the education workforce. Our

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unions must actively take up the fight to defend public education jobs and learning conditions.

Educators can take inspiration from Somerville, Massachusetts where paraprofessionals just won a 25% salary increase, even in the context of statewide education budget cuts. This was the result of a year-long campaign by union educators and the community.

Reopening Schools Given the lack of national coordination, states have been left up to their own devices when it comes to reopening schools. The guidelines released by the CDC call for smaller class sizes, but how will we have smaller classes if we don’t hire more staff?

Sweeping proposals have been put forward to address the need for social distancing in schools. One such proposal is shift-based learning where students come on alternating days of the week. This would help address the overcrowded classrooms that predate COVID-19, but even fitting half of the students in a classroom with proper social distancing would be difficult. In reality, we need dramatically reduced class sizes and more classrooms. This would require mass hiring of educators and the transformation of currently empty buildings and community spaces into additional classrooms.

Additionally, students will have been out of the classroom for nearly six months, meaning they will likely be behind socially, emotionally, and academically. This will be especially true for students who did not have adequate technology at home.

To respond to this, we need more counselors in schools, a reduced teacher-student ratio, professional development for educators, and wrap-around social services for students.

We must reimagine the very way that public education works, because even before the pandemic, our schools were severely underfunded. Our schools were failing to provide for many of our students, particularly students of color and students with disabilities.

Educators and families must be the ones to decide when and how schools reopen. School or community-wide reopening committees must be set up made up of educators, parents, and students.

Fighting for the Schools We Deserve: Black Lives Matter

Students in Brookline, MA organize against layoffs at their high school. are disproportionately affected by poorly funded schools. As Eric Blanc lays out in his book Red State Revolt, during the 2018 teacher strike wave the movement for fully funded schools disproportionately improved the lives of families and educators of color in places like Arizona.

In many places, the call to defund the police to fund education is gaining steam.

This is something educators should energetically take up. The backwards priorities of our society are exposed when state and local governments leave bloated police budgets intact while slashing school budgets. Fighting for Black students and educators means fighting for fully funded public education.

There have been calls across the country to get armed cops out of our schools and some school districts have already severed ties with local police departments. 42% of high schools have police officers. Seventy percent of students involved in school arrests or referred to law enforcement are Black or Latino. Students with disabilities are three times as likely to be arrested at school than students without disabilities. Understandably, many educators and parents worry about taking police out of school in the context of school shootings. This is a real problem, but school resource officers or police in schools have actually not been able to stop a single school shooting.

Instead, school safety is an issue that should be taken up by democratically elected safety committees in schools, made up of educators, students, and parents. The goal of these committees should be to identify restorative justice practices and school safety measures that can be an alternative to having police in the building.

Demands for Black Lives Matter and Educators in Struggle We have an unprecedented opportunity to fight for the schools that our students and communities deserve! In the context of an economic depression and a mass movement against racism, educators have an obligation to demand the resources needed to provide for students across the country. Schools prepandemic were brutally underfunded, and we don’t have to go back to that normal.

We must reimagine the way that we educate young people.

Demands for the Educator Movement: J No Layoffs! Reinstate all pink-slipped educators!

J Defund the police, fund our schools! Cut police budgets by at least 50% to fund education!

J No faith in corporate politicians! The Democrats and Republicans alike are failing educators in pushing for the schools that our students need. We need a new party beholden to working people!

School safety should be determined by educators and families, not police departments!

J Reopening plans should be made by educators, families and community members, not corporate politicians or big business!

J Link up with other public sector unions also facing vicious cuts to fight for the working and living conditions we need! J

In education, Black and brown students

11

I N T E R N AT I O N A L

Conflict Opens Up Within Regime

China Faces Serious Economic Crisis Vincent Kolo ChinaWorker.info

since the mass anti-authoritarian struggle of 1989.

On June 15, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) cancelled its press conference in Beijing. It was due to present May’s economic data, showing that China’s economy continues to “gain momentum” following the shocking crash of the first quarter.

The cancellation was forced by the new wave of coronavirus infections in Beijing which caused authorities to sharply reverse plans to fully re-open the city. Schools, which only re-opened the previous week, were again closed and 40% of flights from the capital’s two airports were canceled. Over 90,000 residents near the outbreak’s center were put under strict lockdown with armed police cordoning off the area.

It underlines a bigger global problem: that much is still unknown and unpredictable about COVID-19 and governments that are everywhere rushing to re-start profit-making economic activities are still cutting corners where public health is concerned. The World Health Organization warns that a second wave of the pandemic is “a very real risk.”

China and India

Unprecedented Crisis The pandemic and the global economic crisis are bringing fundamental and historic changes. Global capitalism as a whole, including China’s authoritarian state-guided capitalism, have decisively failed this test.

Humanity faces a period of economic depression, record unemployment, and sharply deteriorating international relations.

Xi’s regime has attempted to shield itself from a massive global blowback. Rival capitalist governments, most notably Trump in the U.S., want to place the whole blame on China for the health and economic crisis, while of course hiding their own crimes.

Above all the CCP is concerned about public opinion at home – more than its global reputation. Favorable reports in global media or praise from foreign governments mainly have value for the CCP in showing Chinese people the regime is respected. With unemployment soaring in China and the economy in a worse plight than at any time in the past 40 years, Xi’s regime is desperate to generate “positive news” while tightening its crackdown on dissenting voices from whichever direction.

Since March, as part of trying to improve its image, Beijing has engaged in global “mask diplomacy” selling or donating over four billion face masks worldwide. The shocking incompetence of the U.S. government’s response, which pushed it to the number one spot for COVID-19 infections and deaths, enormously helped the CCP’s propaganda campaign.

But despite this, the regime is facing a storm like no other, certainly the most serious

In the high reaches of the Himalayas (Ladakh region), Chinese and Indian troops have clashed repeatedly since early May. In June this conflict escalated with 20 Indian soldiers killed while China has refused to reveal its own casualties. While the two sides have clashed before these were the first fatalities for 45 years.

Both governments – almost like a mirror image of each other – rely heavily on nationalism to shore up their rule, something the pandemic has accentuated. Both sides have recently strengthened their defenses and infrastructure on each side of the disputed border.

This is one front in the sharpening power struggle inside the CCP, with Xi’s hardline foreign policy seen by some as increasingly counterproductive, alienating and pushing foreign governments into the U.S. camp in the burgeoning Cold War. A layer would prefer a return to the CCP’s traditional pragmatism and a more tactful approach.

Desperate Economic Situation Foreign policy is a continuation of domestic policy. That Xi’s regime is flexing its muscles from the Indian border to the South China Sea is a reflection of its insecurity in the face of the deepening global and domestic crisis.

China’s recent economic data is rather contradictory. The monthly data for May, which the NBS had intended to present at its canceled Beijing press conference, shows a further rebound in industrial production, up 4.4% from a year earlier, and within this a 5.2% increase in manufacturing output. But while these figures suggest China’s industry is “recovering,” the bigger question is where will it sell its goods?

“Supply is significantly exceeding demand,” stated Larry Hu Weijun, chief China economic expert at the Macquarie Group (Australia). The problem is underscored by May’s retail sales figures showing a fall of 2.8%. This follows contractions of 7.5% in April and 15.8% in March. If the capitalists cannot sell their goods due to depressed demand at home and in overseas markets, then they won’t invest in increased production no matter what tax incentives and credit easing measures are offered. For the first five months of 2020, investment in the

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang at the National People’s Congress meeting. manufacturing sector declined by 14.8%. It is hard to envisage a worse performance in the “world’s factory.”

At the National Peoples Congress (national legislature) in May, Beijing shifted its focus from chasing a GDP target to focusing on employment and trying to stop the collapse of the job market. Some regime economists still believe the economy can achieve 2-3% growth in 2020, while the IMF in April forecast only 1.2%.

China’s official unemployment figure is 6%, but few believe this. Even based on this low-end estimate, which only covers the urban (wealthier) half of the population, 26 million are currently unemployed.

While this is bad enough, the real picture is much worse. No official figures are provided for unemployment among China’s 290 million migrant workers (classified as “rural” under hukou rules) who make up 36% of the workforce. In March, as the lockdowns and travel bans were being lifted, only 129 million – less than half – of these workers had returned to employment.

By April, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of migrant workers who had returned to their cities of employment was at 90% of levels in previous years, indicating that almost 30 million had still not returned. Independent studies indicate a much lower return to work.

“In late April, only about half of those rural workers who were working last year were [still] working,” said Scott Rozelle, an economist who led a study by researchers at Stanford University and Renmin University in Beijing based on samples with nearly 700,000 villagers from seven Chinese provinces. The

crisis has “so dramatically reduced migrant workers’ incomes that most have been forced to buy less food,” this study found (Emily Feng and Amy Cheng, NPR, June 8, 2020).

Some unofficial but credible estimates say that China’s real unemployment rate could now be around 20%, with up to 80 million migrants unable to find jobs and returning to their villages because the wages offered do not support life in the cities where costs are high.

Still Poor In May, at the press conference that always follows the annual NPC session, Premier Li Keqiang dropped a political bombshell. He remarked that China has 600 million people (43% of its population) with a monthly income not more than 1,000 yuan ($140).

“It’s not even enough to rent a room in a medium Chinese city,” the Premier said, shocking many listeners whose perception was that such extreme hardship no longer exists in China, and certainly not on such a colossal scale. Li’s moment of honesty demolished at one stroke the CCP’s keynote propaganda claim that China will by next year become a “moderately prosperous society” (by doubling 2010 per capita GDP).

In the following days, Premier Li also gave his personal endorsement to the creation of a “stall economy” (street vendors) as a means to generate employment in the current crisis.

Overnight, “stall economy” became a major

continued on p. 15

12 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

STRUGGLE

Autonomous Zone, Tax Amazon, Defund the Police

Seattle in Revolt Logan Swan On May 30, mass protests in Seattle demanding justice for George Floyd broke out, and were immediately met with the same police violence experienced by protestors across the country. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) deployed teargas and rubber bullets in such volumes that it choked out neighborhoods and left scores of pellets in the gutters. Small children and passengers in vehicles were maced in pictures and videos that managed to stand out in their graphic character nationally.

Seattle is a city with a long-standing record of police violence and racism as well as sky-high rents which are pushing people of color onto the streets and out of the city at a disproportionate rate. This brutality inspired the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone/Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHAZ/CHOP) sustained occupation. Already, with the support of a working-class representative in City Council, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant, these protests have led to important victories in driving the police out of the East Precinct and passing a historic ban on chemical weapons and chokeholds. The Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle has the potential to win major victories including massively defunding the police and taxing Amazon and big business to fight gentrification, but there is a need to channel the explosive energy of these protests into a sustained and ongoing movement.

Police Retreat The daily protests in Seattle quickly developed into a standoff around SPD’s East Precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, with barricades and rows of armored riot police attacking protesters with teargas, mace and other so-called “crowd control” control weapons. After a week of stalemate, on Monday June 8, after teargassing Councilmember Kshama Sawant and hundreds of other protestors in spite of the mayor’s supposed temporary ban, the police were forced to abandon the East Precinct. This victory was a result of the movement’s determination and the overreach by the Mayor and police in their brutal attacks on protesters.

Following the SPD’s retreat, demonstrators declared the six-block area around the precinct an “autonomous zone” (the CHAZ or CHOP) under the control of the movement and free of police. While this is a positive development, we also recognized it would not be sustainable in the long term. Socialist Alternative called for democratic structures and elected leadership, to keep the occupation focused on fighting for the movement’s demands, further develop the movement’s program and strategy, and organize self defense committees and the organization of J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

the encampment.

On Tuesday, June 9, Kshama Sawant’s Council Office organized a mass public meeting in the protest zone. Activists, local community and faith leaders, and rank-and-file union activists spoke to the demands of the movement and the need to continue organizing this mass multiracial struggle to win concrete gains.

Demands and a Fighting Program While the protests have put forward many demands, the three demands which have gotten the broadest resonance are: defund the police by at least 50% to invest in our communities, drop all charges against protesters, and Tax Amazon to stop gentrification and fund affordable housing.

Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s office is bringing forward legislation to cut the SPD budget by at least 50%, but we also have argued that cutting $200 million from the SPD budget won’t be enough for schools, restorative justice, housing and job creation. We will need to fight to make sure big business, which is making mega-profits off the poverty wages permitted by structural racism, is forced to pay for an investment in our communities.

There has been an incredible reception amongst protestors to the Tax Amazon campaign, which was re-launched in January of this year by Socialist Alternative and a coalition of community, labor, and progressive organizations. In just three weeks, the Tax Amazon Initiative 131 has gathered 20,000 signatures, overwhelmingly at the protests.

Many are eager to sign immediately upon hearing “Tax Amazon,” as Bezos’ company has used its political power in the city to crush working people’s demands for a city they can afford to live in. Seattle has seen some of the nation’s fastest rising rents for more than a decade as working-class communities of color have been pushed into the south end suburbs. For instance, the historically black community of the Central District has plummeted from being home to a 70% black community in the 196a0s to less than 20%.

Many people calling into City Council meetings have added Tax Amazon to their demands for addressing the rampant and racist inequality in the city.

As Rev. Carey Anderson, pastor of Seattle’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church, added at a recent press conference with Kshama’s office, “Simply put, if

Kshama Sawant speaking to Seattle #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd protestors occupying City Hall .

Black Lives Matter, then affordable housing for Black families in the Central District should matter. Taxing the big businesses like Amazon that are profiting off a pandemic disproportionately killing minimum wage workers and workers of color, for green union jobs and permanently affordable public housing, is concrete in the foundation of building an equitable city.”

Union Power and Solidarity The Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), which represents the officers in the city’s police department, has consistently obstructed justice in individual cases of police violence as well as reforms mandated by the 2012 federal consent decree which was the result of the SPD’s appalling record of brutality. Affiliating with the Martin Luther King County Labor Council in 2014, some had expressed hope that including SPOG in the labor movement would bring them closer to the communities they had been attacking.

After a rally organized by union activists, Highline high school educators, DSA, and Socialist Alternative, and a four-hour meeting, delegates to MLK Labor voted to kick out the Seattle Police Officers Guild. This was a huge victory, but it is important for union activists to understand that this is only one battle on the way towards bringing organized labor further along into a class struggle approach to fighting racism.

Criminalization of Protest Scores of people have been arrested over the past few weeks of struggle, many of them being indiscriminately attacked and seized

by law enforcement as they wage a political struggle for an end to police violence and systemic racism. All of these workers and youth must be freed, their “crime” being that of resisting injustice.

Throughout the history of working people’s movements, organizers and protesters have been labeled violent criminals. The repression of the ruling class and its political establishment goes on brutally today, and the political prisoners of this struggle must be freed.

Socialist Alternative in Seattle, along with Kshama Sawant’s council office, will continue to use our elected position and our organization to help win the demands of Black Lives Matter, and bring them into the labor movement and City Hall. We will continue to put forward demands and strategies to take the struggle forward, and connect them with the fight for a society free of racism and oppression: J Defund SPD by at least 50% - Cut the police budget and fund social services and education!

J Create an elected community oversight board with full powers over the police, including policy and procedure and hiring and firing!

J Free all the protestors and drop all charges!

J Turn the East Precinct over permanently to the community - For a restorative justice center!

J Tax Amazon to fund green union jobs and social housing!

J Abolish capitalism to abolish racism and the police!

13

ENVIRONMENT

Climate Meltdown & COVID-19

Capitalism is Sick, Working People Pay with their Lives Rebecca Green In April, as countries across the world shut down and millions sheltered in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, daily fossil fuel emissions plummeted to 17% lower than the previous year. Just two months later, emissions are on track to resume at pre-pandemic levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a sampling of what is to come in a time of unbounded environmental degradation. Public health crises of this scale, combined with mass displacement of people from areas that are susceptible to extreme weather events, will become the norm.

We need a dramatic and rapid transition away from fossil fuels. The reopening of the economy presents an opportunity to lay the basis for this transformation by putting millions of unemployed workers back to work, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure on a green basis. Instead, big business and corporate politicians have put their full weight behind reopening economies before it is safe for workers, and with no regard for their environmental impact. As long as profit is the bottom line, the type of fundamental changes that will be necessary to avoid a full environmental and public health meltdown cannot happen.

Worst Hurricane Season and Hottest Summer Yet The Australian mega-fires that kicked off 2020 were a massive warning of the dangers of increasing global temperatures. Permafrost is melting faster than predicted, threatening to release huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, an even more dangerous gas, into the atmosphere. One hundred fifty million people live in areas that will be below the high tide line by 2050, and many more live in coastal areas that will be decimated by increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes.

Deadly viruses like COVID-19 often appear in areas where humans are dramatically changing ecosystems through expansion of agriculture, manufacturing, etc. While many species are displaced from this development, bats are highly adaptable and often remain.

They are the original hosts of six major epidemics in the last 26 years. Scientists think the COVID-19 virus spread from a bat to another animal in the wild that was then brought to a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Animals are kept in packed cages and with their immune systems weakened from the stress, viruses can easily spread between species, including humans. Animal agriculture practices globally pose serious threats to public health, and are the leading cause of deforestation, ocean contamination, and soil erosion.

If lockdowns had been implemented weeks earlier in the U.S., tens of thousands

of people would not have died.

Scientists have been warning about the likelihood of a pandemic for years. While the criminal incompetence of Trump played a critical role, the dramatically under-resourced disaster response agencies and a for-profit health care system made Americans particularly susceptible to COVID-19.

How did we get here?

The global ruling class have made trillions of dollars from the extraction of fossil fuels, development of luxury properties, construction of military equipment, and mass production of unnecessary goods from unsustainable materials. They exert enormous control over political systems everywhere.

Politicians and lawmakers cater to their needs by slashing environmental regulations, providing completely toothless oversight, and attacking workers’ rights in order to prevent organizing against hazardous work and environmental degradation.

This profit-driven approach is apparent in the chronic and criminal mismanagement of critical utility infrastructure. The owners of the Sanford and Edenville dams that breached in central Michigan in May, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands, had been cited by federal regulators for safety issues since 2004. The 2019 California wildfires that destroyed 14,000 homes and killed 85 people started when a live wire broke free of a tower that was a quarter century past what PG&E, the state’s largest utility company, considered its “useful life.”

Our Infrastructure is Crumbling: We Need a Green New Deal Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has spent a whopping $2.2 trillion in three stimulus bills. $500 billion was granted in loans to major industries, $58 billion of which was in grants and loans to the airline industry, and tens of billions to the Department of Defense and Homeland Security. The U.S. military produces more greenhouse gas emissions than 140 countries combined.

The problem is not a lack of resources. It’s who is in charge of them.

It is democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders alongside a powerful movement of young people who have helped to popularize the idea of a Green New Deal in the U.S. We urgently need to fight for this massive program that

Wildfires tore through Australia in early 2020. would create millions of union jobs that would directly address historic levels of unemployment and tackle climate change.

Jobs could be created to fix and retrofit green infrastructure, including a massive expansion of public transit and high quality, public, affordable housing; rapidly develop renewable energy sources; rewild and reforest ecosystems; develop and expand urban green space; massively invest in and scale up organic farming; and build infrastructure to mitigate the worst effects of natural disasters. We also need to massively increase jobs in health care and first response (such as wildfire containment teams).

This is where trillions of stimulus dollars should go, not to bailing out corporations that got us here in the first place.

System Change not Climate Change The fight for these fundamental changes will be met with tremendous opposition from powerful corporate interests and the political establishment. While some gains can be made under the pressure of a mass movement, they will not happen quickly enough given the short timeline we have to dramatically cut emissions and prevent irreversible climate change.

The economy needs to be run in the interests of the vast majority of people. To achieve this, we need democratic public ownership of the major polluters, including fossil fuel, utility, and major agricultural companies under the control of a workers government.

Democratically elected councils of workers

and consumers would make decisions about how industries are run on the basis of what is needed, efficient, and sustainable. These councils could rapidly, and immediately begin transitioning polluting industries towards 100% renewable energy and environmentally sustainable practices.

Because of the global nature of the capitalist economy and the climate crisis itself, we would eventually need international, socialist, democratic planning to achieve a fully environmentally sustainable future.

We can draw important lessons from the #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd movement on how to fight for real change. It is a grassroots, multiracial movement taking to the streets that has forced convictions of killer cops and reductions in police budgets. Democrats and Republicans alike have ruled over police brutality and an impending climate catastrophe for decades and have done little to nothing given the scale of these crises. We need to move beyond these thoroughly corporate parties and build our own political voice for working people. We need an independent left political party representing the interests of the multiracial working class and youth to take on and take over polluting industries.

We cannot afford to wait. The political establishment will see to it that we pay for the triple crises of the pandemic, economic depression, and climate meltdown even with our lives. The system of capitalism is sick, and the global working class is getting sicker.

COVID-19 is a warning sign of the massive public health crisis, inextricably linked with environmental degradation, that is to come.

But a healthier, safer, more equitable world is possible: if we’re willing to fight for it. J

14 S O C I A L I S T A L T E R N A T I V E . O R G

C O N T I N U AT I O N S

The Role of the Working Class in Fighting Racism continued from p. 9 role to play in the ongoing fight against racism in the U.S. and we need a labor movement comprised of unions that do more than issue sympathetic statements.

Unions are the central organizations of the working class because they allow us to act as a cohesive unit in the workplace where we have the power to shut down profits.

However, following decades of union leaders preferring backroom negotiations with the bosses to real class struggle, many working people today do not look seriously toward the unions as a vehicle for social change. If we are going to build a working-class fightback

capable of taking on the diseased capitalist order, we will need a transformation of the labor movement.

This needs to include mass organizing campaigns in non-union workplaces like warehouses, call centers, the service industry, and the gig economy. It will need to include the democratization of existing unions to allow for real debate and discussion. It will also mean ending the unions’ political practice of writing blank checks to Democratic Party politicians, a practice that has hamstrung the movement for decades.

Achieving this transformation will mean

multiracial slates of worker activists contending for the leadership of existing unions. In other cases it may mean the creation of new unions. It will require a rank-and-file rebellion to overtake unions as a central tool for our class in the ongoing battle against exploitation and oppression. If we are able to transform the labor movement into a force committed to uniting the working class in the fight against the bosses and billionaires, we could begin the project of taking down capitalism and building a new world that does not require racism, sexism, or oppression of any form. J

This policy dispute reflects a more fundamental process: the reopening of the fierce

power struggle within the CCP which we were told belonged to the past. With Xi succeeding in abolishing presidential term limits in a 2018 constitutional change, he had allegedly fully consolidated his hold on the regime and was moving unchallenged toward a third term in power. This no longer looks so certain.

The reaction from state-controlled media (under the CCP’s Propaganda Department which is controlled by Xi Jinping’s camp) has been immediate and overwhelming, going far beyond clamping down on the “stall economy” issue. Speeches and articles by Li Keqiang are now being deleted or changed. The last time this happened to a Chinese Premier, formally the second-ranking official in the state hierarchy, was against Zhou Enlai during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Li represents the tuan pai (so-called Young Communist League) faction within the CCP,

which has been pushed back and driven from many of its positions during eight years of Xi Jinping rule. But Xi’s hardline power struggle tactics and increasingly serious policy setbacks at home and internationally could see new factional combinations come to the fore, whether or not Premier Li is their standard bearer, to challenge Xi’s position in the next period.

For socialists, the shifting of tectonic plates within the Chinese regime is an important sign of the social and political upheavals that lay ahead. Revolution, as the saying goes, starts at the top. We do not place any confidence in any wing of the thoroughly pro-capitalist, thoroughly authoritarian CCP apparatus. We stand for independent working-class struggle in China and globally around the program of socialism and a genuine working-class government. J

Marxism and the Fight for Black Freedom New 2018 Edition Purchase a copy for $5 from a Socialist Alternative branch near you.

This pamphlet by Socialist Alternative looks at the role of Marxist ideas and socialist organizations in the black freedom movement from a critical perspective. It outlines a materialist view of the origins and development of racist ideology and structural racism. Finally it explains the Marxist view of the tasks confronting the movement today.

Check out the pamphlet at www.socialistalternative.org J U LY - A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

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continued from p. 12

Power Struggle

SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE ISSN 2638-3349 EDITOR: Keely Mullen

China Faces Serious Economic Crisis trending topic on social media and there was even a buying boom for shares in companies linked to this idea. Li praised Chengdu’s city government for allegedly creating 100,000 jobs by opening facilities to support street vendors. It was reported that 27 other cities are promoting similar policies.

This changed dramatically, however, with the Beijing municipal government, which is factionally allied with Xi Jinping, denouncing the stall economy concept as “unhygienic and uncivilized.” This marked a sudden policy swing and within days the “stall economy” policy was largely expurgated from official media.

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Public Sector Under Attack Tax the Rich and Corporations Fully FundTrump’s Public Services Broaden theto Fight Against Agenda Erin Brightwell State and local politicians around the country are telling us we need to “tighten our belts,” as the fallout from the pandemictriggered recession hits the public sector.

Already, 1.5 million workers from state and local governments were furloughed or laid off in March and April. Budgets are still being negotiated, but it’s clear that the consequences of the economic crisis for public sector jobs and services will be grim.

The initial wave of layoffs was due to pandemic-related closures and most layoffs were classified as temporary, but there is no guarantee of getting called back in the midst of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The next wave of job cuts will likely be permanent as cities, counties, and states attempt to deal with massive budget shortfalls by slashing vital public services.

By one estimate, collectively state and local budget deficits are in the neighborhood of $1 trillion. This is about $300 billion more than what state and local governments annually spend on k-12 education.

If the downturn in the economy and cuts to education and public services sounds familiar, well it should. This is a repeat of what corporate politicians — Democrat and Republican — push down our throats during the Great Recession a decade ago, cutting to the bone. Since then, they’ve refused to return funding to pre-2007 levels while waving billions at corporations like Amazon.

States Cutting Funding for Services in Downturn In California, state workers are taking a 10% pay cut and legislators have passed a budget that relies on $14 billion in federal aid — money that is unlikely to arrive with the Republicans controlling the Senate. The governor of New Jersey warned that layoffs would soon hit firefighters and other emergency workers. Michigan educators have determined that $1 billion more is needed to open schools safely, at a time when the state is cutting school funding by $2.39 million over two years.

For workers who were laid off when lockdowns hit, federal stimulus dollars and the $600-a-week top-up in unemployment cushioned the blow significantly for those who qualified. But the unprecedented number of layoffs meant that, without the stimulus, ordinary people’s inability to pay for goods and services would have led to an even deeper economic collapse.

The Republicans in particular are now eager to push people back to work, regardless of the health risk. Public sector workers who are laid off in the coming months will be in a dire position if federal unemployment benefits, set to expire on July 31, aren’t extended. Black people and women are more likely to work in the public sector, meaning layoffs will hit those sections of the working class hardest.

Cutting government jobs in the middle of the pandemic will not only hurt laid-off workers, it’s a serious threat to public health. With

COVID-19 cases surging in California, Florida, Texas, and other regions, we need more spending on PPE, contact tracing, testing, facilities for sick people to quarantine, health care, and emergency services — not less.

Anything less than an infusion of resources into shoring up public health measures, especially for the most vulnerable people in society, puts millions more at unnecessary risk.

Tax the Billionaires and Corporations State and local politicians, even many Republicans, are lobbying for the federal government to deliver another stimulus package for state and local governments. However, the ruling class has fierce determination to put the bill for the crisis onto working people, and slashing public services to the bone is one way to do that. We shouldn’t have an ounce of sympathy for any politician who votes for cuts to jobs and public services, no matter the crocodile tears they shed.

Besides lobbying the federal government, local and state leaders could take a page from Seattle socialist city Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s playbook, and use their elected position to build a grassroots movement to tax big business. The billionaire class has been amassing inconceivable fortunes for years now, reaping their profits from the labor of millions of low paid workers, while paying minimal taxes, if any at all.

However, the political establishment, including the Democrats, will generally

oppose any attempt to tax their major donors (really their bosses) in the billionaire class. It is only under the pressure of serious grassroots campaigns, such as the Tax Amazon initiative in Seattle, or the Our City Our Homes measure in San Francisco, that Democratic politicians will give support to a new tax on the corporations. Elected leaders who truly represent working-class people must abide by an ironclad promise to never pass cuts to the working class.

To cancel the cuts to public services and jobs and force the political establishment to get the money from the billionaire class will require a mighty movement. The tremendous uprising against racist police killings provides a reference point. As a result of determined and sustained mass action, killer cops are being arrested and some initial gains are being won. Public sector workers and their unions need to launch fierce fightbacks against cuts, uniting workers with the communities. We need to escalate the level of action from phone calls and emails to demonstrations, occupations, and strikes. Public sector workers should take up the demand put forward in the Black Lives Matter movement for defunding the police and instead investing in public education and crucial social services.

For millions of U.S. workers, belts have been tightened for years now. We didn’t create this crisis, and we shouldn’t pay for it. The billionaire class and their capitalist system are responsible for the criminally negligent response to the virus, they’re hoarding the wealth, and we need to make them pay. J