Socialist Alternative #87 – October 2022

ALTERNATIVE

SOCIALIST

ISSUE #87 l OCTOBER 2022

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INSIDE p.6 p.11 ENERGY CRISIS LOOMS LARGE WISCONSIN ABORTION VICTORY p.13 PHILADELPHIA NURSES STRIKE

WHAT WE STAND FOR A New Political Party For Working People

corporate finances, especially when money is squandered on CEO pay and stock buybacks. Profits off basic goods should be heavily taxed and price-gouging companies should be brought under democratic public ownership.

• The Democrats’ main angle this Midterms basically amounts to “at least we’re not Republicans.” While this might save them from a big loss in November, on the whole this strategy has done nothing to stop the Mobilize Against Attacks On right-wing advance in general, nevermind Bodily Autonomy stop (or reverse) the vicious attacks on • The overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme oppressed people from the right.

Court opened the door to a series of vicious • While Biden has committed to canceling attacks on bodily autonomy in states across some student debt and passed limited envithe country. We need a mass movement ronmental protections, his overall record against the reactionary right on the scale of is a series of broken promises to working the 60s and 70s when Roe was first won. people.

• We need a new, working-class, multiracial • Fight for free, safe, legal abortion. All contraception should be provided at no cost as left party that organizes and fights for workpart of a broad program for women’s reproers’ interests and is committed to socialductive health! ist policies to lead the fight against the right and point a way out of the horrors of • We need a robust fightback against the brutal anti-trans legislation in many states capitalism. and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people, including noncompliance organized by the Expand The Social Safety Net & labor movement among workers tasked with Fight Inflation enforcing these bigoted laws.

• Fighting gender oppression means fighting • Pass strong rent control. End economic for our rights to bodily autonomy, reproducevictions. Tax the rich and big business to tive justice including universal childcare, fund permanently affordable, high-quality and Medicare for All including free repropublic housing. ductive and gender-affirming care.

• Make the child tax credit permanent and fully fund high-quality, universal childcare.

Cancel all student debt and make public Rebuild A Fighting Labor college tuition-free.

Movement • No pay cuts! We need pay raises that exceed the level of inflation and a signifi- • As thousands of workers are winning union recognition for the first time, it is critical cant raise in the minimum wage. that unions fight to win strong contracts.

• We need an immediate transition to MediWe need unions that are armed with clear care for All. Take for-profit hospital chains demands and prepared to go on strike to and Big Pharma into public ownership and win them. retool them to provide free, state-of-the-art • Union leaders across all unions should healthcare to all. accept the average wage of a worker in • Fully fund public education! End school their industry and should be accountable to privatization. Give educators an immediate their memberships and the broader working 25% raise and hire more educators. class.

• Unions should form consumer protection committees to monitor price increases. • An injury to one is an injury to all! Unions need to fight evictions, poverty, racism, They should have the power to review sexism, and all forms of oppression.

• Building off the historic union victory at Amazon in New York and the ongoing Starbucks organizing drive, unions should stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on electing Democratic Party politicians, and spend it instead on efforts to organize the unorganized. www.SocialistAlternative.org

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No To Imperialist Wars • Socialist Alternative completely opposes Russian imperialism’s brutal invation of Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians who already suffer exploitation, oppression, corruption,

WHY I JOINED SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE RYLEE ANDERSON, CHICAGO I grew up in a household that was constantly facing financial anxiety. Some of my most vivid memories of childhood are conversations about money.

To my knowledge most of my immediate family didn’t vote and didn’t feel particularly connected to either Democrats or Republicans. Ultimately politics were never a priority in my household so I never took interest in it until 2015. With the buzz around the upcoming Presidential election and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement I had a major shift in my political consciousness.

I became a supporter of Bernie Sanders and growing poverty conditions now face the horror of war and bloodshed.

• We also oppose the aggressive imperialist agenda of NATO and the U.S. for whom Ukrainians are a pawn in the wider Cold War conflict with Chinese imperialism.

• De-escalating the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine requires the return of Russian troops to the barracks in Russia and the withdrawal of all NATO troops from Eastern Europe.

• Build a massive anti-war and anti-imperialist movement linking up workers and youth across borders! Sending increasingly destructive weapons to the conflict only serves to escalate & poses a greater risk of all-out war – only socialist internationalism can end war and destruction and win lasting peace and stability for the working masses around the world.

End The COVID Chaos

during the primaries and participated in protests after Trump’s election.

In high school I started to canvass for Democratic candidates, and was a vocal supporter of many liberal ideas. However the more I learned more about liberalism, the less I felt comfortable aligning myself with Democrats.

Not until college did I seriously look into Marxism. After learning about the historic role of the working class, I was able to connect the wealth inequality that always plagued my family and my peers to capitalism, a system that needs to exploit us to exist.

At first, I thought that the system was broken and that Democrats had potential to fix this system – but the more I understood capitalism, the more I began to think that the system works exactly how it’s supposed to and can’t be reformed.

I joined Socialist Alternative because I believe that socialism is the only way we can assure that all people have a chance to live their lives with dignity. We must empower and unite the working class of all countries, and we need a revolutionary party to lead that fight. J • While taking climate change head-on, we also need to expand infrastructure to keep people safe from natural disasters and extreme weather as these become more frequent.

• Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable future – take the top 100 polluting companies into democratic public ownership while implementing a democratically planned, just transition to 100% green energy.

End Racist Policing And Criminal (in)Justice • Arrest and convict killer cops! Purge police forces of anyone with known ties to white supremacist groups or any cop who has committed violent or racist attacks.

• End the militarization of police. Ban police use of “crowd control” weapons. Disarm police on patrol.

• Put policing under the control of democratically-elected civilian boards with power over hiring and firing, reviewing budget priorities, and the power to subpoena.

• While alarming acts of violence have risen, the Democrats’ pivot to “law and order” policing is reactionary and will only bear down on people of color and the poor.

• Capitalism failed to stop the pandemic – we need a People’s Plan to end the COVID chaos!

• We need free, easily accessible tests available in every community across the country.

Workers exposed to COVID should be given paid self-isolation days after exposure or after developing symptoms.

• We need to take Big Pharma profiteers into The Whole System Is Guilty public ownership, dramatically ramp up • Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, vaccine research and production (especially inequality, environmental destruction, and for new variants), and distribute it freely to war. We need an international struggle the rest of the world. against this failed system.

• Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership.

For A Socialist Green New Deal • We need a democratic socialist plan for the • We need a union jobs program to rapidly economy based on the interests of the overexpand green infrastructure. whelming majority of people and the planet.

• Massively expand public transit and make it free.

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

THE UNION WAVE REVIEWING A LANDMARK YEAR OF ORGANIZING THE UNORGANIZED

Pittsburgh Starbucks Worker From Striketober to Starbucks, Amazon to Trader Joe’s, we are witnessing the sleeping giant of U.S. labor stir amidst the global crisis created by capitalism. The new union wave represents an important organizational shift for workers and young people everywhere.

Now, with millions alive to the power of workplace organizing, it’s crucial that we distill the best lessons from this wave of new union campaigns.

Radical Transformation The American labor movement in 2022 is in many ways unrecognizable from the situation a few years ago. According to The Guardian, “The NLRB has seen a 58% increase in union election petitions in the first threequarters of fiscal year 2022. The number of strikes increased 76% in the first half of 2022 compared with 2021, with nearly three times the number of workers on strike.” This stands in contrast to a decades-long resistance from major unions to take up campaigns to organize the unorganized. Union density has fallen dramatically since the Reagan administration, when one out of every five American workers were union members. By 2021, that number had diminished to one in 10.

But the recent union surge, particularly in the service and logistics industries, is breathing new life into the movement. As of August 30, 220 Starbucks stores have won union elections with nearly 6,000 workers represented by Starbucks Workers United (SWBU).

The Amazon organizing wave, spurred on by the breakthrough victory at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, is spreading across the country in a sector located at the heart of U.S. and global capitalism. Now, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) is beginning to expand the struggle to other parts of the country, including Kentucky and Albany.

Other drives and victories at Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, Google, Apple, REI, Activision Blizzard, Condé Nast, and more demonstrate that enormous swaths of the working class are excited by bold demands like a $30/hr starting wage at Amazon or coverage for gender-affirming healthcare at Starbucks. While motivated by the same deep frustration with our working conditions, the recent labor upswing is the inverse of the Great Resignation. It is a compelling and inspiring indicator that workers are increasingly more willing to fight back rather than quit.

Why Now? The 2020s are shaping up to be a decade of explosive organizing activity. The latest Gallup poll shows that public opinion of

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unions is at its highest since 1965 at 71% favorability – a level of enthusiasm on par with that of the groundbreaking labor movement in the 1930s.

Many freshly-minted union members have been essential workers in retail, service who faced enormous workplace pressure throughout the pandemic. One of the first major workplace clashes this year was a storewide walkout organized by Buffalo Starbucks baristas in protest of the corporation’s abysmal COVID safety measures.

Gen Z workers inherited a laundry list of burdens created by generations of capitalist rule. Student debt, high housing costs, inflation, the global economic crisis – and the resulting growth of left-leaning, pro-working class consciousness – have radicalized a key section of the current workforce, which is now seeking to fight back in the workplace.

Many of the workers now turning to workplace organizing were first politically energized by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns and the Black Lives Matter movement. Bernie’s ultimate capitulation to the political establishment and the 2020 BLM protest movement falling short of winning concrete victories against police violence and system racism, have no doubt contributed to these workers turning to this new arena of struggle.

The broader political situation in the U.S. makes the importance of militant worker organization even more clear. As the far-right grows, the Democratic Party and its corporate pedigree have not only failed to provide for workers, but ceded ground to the GOP and big business interests.

Still, amidst consistent betrayals to workers – including the death of the PRO Act which would have been a game-changer for union organizing – the Biden presidency and other establishment forces survive because of the threat of further right-wing reaction.

Victories And Setbacks While the organizing tide is still high, it’s important we’re soberly aware that so far, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, and their fellow union busters have p roven to be ferocious combatants in the class struggle.

JFK8’s victory was a shot in the arm for Amazon workers across the country, but it’s become clear that replicating this achievement is no simple matter. Mere weeks after workers at Staten Island wiped the floor with Bezos, Amazon picked up its entire anti-union

operation and threw it all at neighboring sortation center LDJ5 to prevent the victory from spreading. The rate of Starbucks union filings has also slowed significantly, and as of August 25, Starbucks has reluctantly begun bargaining with just three of its more than 200 union stores.

Workers are now seeing just how brutally companies are willing to bring their vast resources to bear. Retaliatory firings are a central weapon used to demoralize and deter organizers, but we have yet to see the leadership of SBWU launch an appropriate fightback. Although the NLRB ordered Starbucks to reinstate the fired Memphis Seven, the court ruling came six months after their firing in February, with dozens more having been fired in the meantime.

Corporations are deploying slimier tactics still! Amazon is pouring money into Pinkerton spies and union-busting consultants disguised as concerned coworkers. Their business executives infamously considered developing an employee chat app last year that would have banned the words “slave labor,” “plantation,” and “pay raise.” Starbucks is offering benefits exclusively to non-union stores, creating hostile work environments for organizers, forcing captive-audience meetings, and going so far as closing stores. Companies have also been using the courts to challenge election results at every turn, leveraging the NLRB in their favor instead.

The current National Labor Relations Board, in dispensing a few paltry progressive decisions, receives glowing praise as a state apparatus that’s “friendlier” to unions.

Socialists know, however, that like the Supreme Court, the NLRB is managed and appointed by big business politicians who have zero interest in truly tipping the scales against capitalists. Labor history teaches us that nothing important to working people has ever been won through clever legalese or arbitration through corporate hacks.

For workers who have won union elections, delayed bargaining is now a fact of life. Winning a strong contract is absolutely crucial for building concrete gains in the

EDITORIAL workplace and for inspiring workers at the 8,000+ non-union Starbucks stores, 109 non-union Amazon fulfillment centers in the U.S., and countless other shops, to join the national union push.

Lessons For Workers It may seem like the billionaires have an impossible advantage against us, but make no mistake: they don’t. Any movement will have its peaks and lulls, but future success relies on our ability to learn from setbacks.

First and foremost, we need to remember that our power as workers comes from the shopfloor, not the courts. If the boss keeps making profits, they can endlessly pay for lawyers to delay, appeal and sap our momentum. Coordinated strikes, large and effective pickets, and mass protests are essential to force the bosses to negotiate.

However, to wield our power on the shopfloor we need to have our own clear demands, especially if the boss is willing to grant some limited reforms hoping to derail the union drive. Our demands need to start from our needs as workers, not what’s acceptable to the boss. They can only be developed through democratic discussions with our coworkers.

Along similar lines, the bosses already have two political parties to represent their interests, while workers don’t have one of our own. The Democrats won’t ever be ours: they oppose issues like guaranteed access to affordable healthcare as viciously as the boss does. We need to support independent, working class fighters who will unapologetically bring our collective demands into a hostile political system.

Finally, we need to rapidly ramp up our efforts to organize the unorganized. Organizing drives can be launched in workplaces across the country, led by democratic organizing committees armed with clear demands and the knowledge that we will need to confront the boss on the shopfloor. On this basis we can rebuild a fighting, democratic labor movement that fights all the bosses, their political allies, and the capitalist system itself. J

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U. S. POLITICS

PANICKED ESTABLISHMENT RAIDS MAR-A-LAGO one would have assumed that there was no chance the Supreme Court would support this, but given the firmly reactionary majority on the Court, it can’t be excluded.

How Do We Defeat Trump And Trumpism?

W E C A N ’ T RELY ON T H E STAT E TO BE AT T RU M P TOM CREAN, NEW YORK CITY ​​The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-aLago estate on August 8 was presented as an attempt to recover boxes of documents that Trump took from the White House, including many that were top secret. In reality, it appears to be part of an attempt by a section of the state apparatus to prevent Trump from running in 2024. This desire to block Trump reflects a widespread view among the ruling class that capitalist democracy in the U.S. might not survive another four years of him in the White House.

Socialist Alternative has warned about the threat of Trump and Trumpism, but we do so from an independent working class position. We relentlessly defend democratic rights against any threat from the reactionary right, but we do not place any faith in the Democrats or the FBI to defend those rights. That is why we have to carefully look at what’s going on here and how it could play out from an independent class standpoint.

Will Trump Be Indicted?

The investigation into the documents taken by Trump is only one of several investigations currently targeting him and his business. In the weeks since the August 8 raid there has been an escalating war of words between the Trump camp and the Department of Justice. Trump’s poodle, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, has said there “will be riots in the streets” if Trump is indicted. Trumpers in Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene have called for “defunding the FBI.” Trump world has also doubled down on counterclaims that the FBI sought to suppress news about the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The Justice Department distributed a photograph of various documents strewn around Trump’s office, many clearly marked “top secret.” It has also revealed that there were an incredible 11,000 government documents in Trump’s residence, including 100 marked either secret or top secret. Now it is

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reported that some of the documents may have been related to the nuclear weapons capabilities of different nations. There can be little doubt that Attorney General Merrick Garland is seriously considering indicting Trump, probably for obstruction of justice.

What Are The Consequences?

Garland and the Justice Department are playing a high-stakes game with a very uncertain outcome. If the goal was to tarnish Trump among his supporters and weaken his popularity, this has definitely not worked. It has actually strengthened Trump’s already tight grip on the GOP. The FBI’s action, unprecedented against any former president, only reinforces to his base Trump’s narrative that the “deep state” and the Washington elite are out to bring him down at all costs.

In this period of extreme political polarization, the ruling class’ ability to control the political process has waned. The political institutions of U.S. capitalism (Congress, the Supreme Court, etc) are all, to one degree or another, discredited. The FBI and Justice Department that are going after Trump are certainly deeply discredited in the Republican base. After all, it was former FBI director Robert Mueller who played a key role in the attempt to impeach Trump over his alleged connections with Russia. “Russiagate” turned out to be a giant distraction with almost zero real content. It helped give Trump cover as he sought to blatantly use the state apparatus to pursue his vendettas.

Meanwhile, the Trumpist GOP is determined to step up its drive to undermine the election process so as to be able to steal elections “legally” in the future. A number of states have enacted brazen voter suppression measures. Meanwhile the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could allow state legislatures to completely control the conduct of federal elections without judicial oversight and also allow states to pass endless measures of suppression or repeal protections. In any previous period,

Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he said that “MAGA Republicans” threaten “the very foundations of our Republic.” In this speech and on several other occasions, Biden has gone even further and said that people who support Trumpism support “semi-fascism.”

In fact, the Democratic Party has played the key role in creating the space for the dangerous growth of right populism and the normalization of far-right ideas. But it is utterly false and dangerous to insinuate that tens of millions of ordinary Americans are “semi-fascist” because they voted for Trump. This is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton talking about the “basket of deplorables.”

Trump’s crimes are very real. He relentlessly sought to divide people in this country on racial and other lines. He stood by fecklessly as hundreds of thousands needlessly died of COVID. He tried to force election officials in various states to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election. Stealing (a lot of) government documents for no very clear purpose is not high on this list.

George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and was based on an outright, concocted lie. However, the Democrats who voted for that vile imperialist adventure never talked of indicting him.

The difference is that killing hundreds of thousands for imperialism is perfectly acceptable and has been done by both parties historically. When certified war criminal and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left office he took a huge trove of highly incriminating records with him which

he treated as his personal property. No one in the state apparatus suggested retrieving these or raiding his home. But of course they related to the dirty war in Indochina where millions died that both parties were responsible for.

The hue and cry over democracy from Biden is rooted in the desire to maintain “political stability” in order to retain the dominant global position of U.S. imperialism. But the level of extreme polarization in the U.S. and the fact that the state apparatus is having to resort to such overt measures as raids on the home of the former president and threatened criminal indictments shows how the previous model of political rule is no longer working. The Democrats may be able to prevent the electoral disaster they originally seemed headed for in the midterms in part by invoking Trump, but they have no answer to the grip of reactionary right populism on sections of the population.

Actually defeating Trump and Trumpism will require an ongoing mass mobilization of working people around a program of demands that are proven to have overwhelming support including a $15 federal minimum wage, Medicare for All, ending mass incarceration, massive investment in renewable energy, and guaranteeing the right to abortion across the entire country.

The potential for building such a mass movement was indicated by the millions who supported Bernie’s platform in 2020 or took to the streets for Black Lives Matter the same year; by the tens of thousands who took to the street this year to oppose the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and by the wave of strikes and labor organizing we have seen in the past year. The willingness to fight is there but clear leadership and organization is missing. A fighting labor movement and a new workers party could appeal to millions who supported Trump while isolating the actual far right and fascist elements. J

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

ANDREW TATE

& THE DANGER OF VIRAL MISOGYNY

GREYSON VAN ARSDALE, CHICAGO

He’s actually the equivalent of a burst sewer line – an explosion of hot garbage spilling out into the street, flowing from a much larger wave of gack under the surface.

Andrew Tate, vicious and irredeemable cockroach that he is, is not solely responsible for this normalization of open misogyny. Though he’d certainly want to take credit for the tangible shift in the politics of school classrooms, university halls, and workplaces, that particular unsavory stew has been cooking since long before Tate’s summer of stardom.

Mass social movements of the past five years – both #MeToo and Black Lives Matter – unfortunately failed to produce concrete victories. The natural result of these failures, and of the betrayal of the Democrats who used hollow “woke” slogans while balking at making any substantive change, is that

Stopping The Tate Train

The left and labor movement have to provide a genuine counterweight to If you’ve been on TikTok or Twitter the right. They need to tell the truth in the last two months, or if you know about why things have gotten so bad for any person under the age of fifteen, you working people. That decades of neolibknow exactly who Andrew Tate is. eralism has left us with abysmally low Tate’s claim to fame is that he was wages, starved public services, and genkicked off of reality show Big Brother erally fighting for scraps.

UK after a video of him brutally abusOrganized labor must take a stance ing a woman surfaced, alongside some in building unity of working people. This virulently racist and misogynistic tweets. will require unions taking a firm stance Since then, Tate has clung tight to viralfighting the attacks on women, queer ity in the way that entitled con men do – people, and immigrants coming from by feeding fandom and outrage in equal the right. Teachers’ unions need to reject measure, cultivating a base of primarily and mobilize against attacks on queer young men who feel betrayed by the teachers and students, nurses’ unions modern dating scene and want justificashould organize mass noncompliance tion for their desire to subjugate women. with abortion bans, and these actions Tate’s reach has grown dramatically should be based on building mass movein the last few months, with millions of ments of the vast majority of people who views on TikTok and a large following on want to fight oppression. In reality, the Twitter. His fans rabidly defend him from policy on offer from all criticism as he asserts the Republican Party that women deserve viois deeply unpopular, The right wing has tapped into working class lence and secretly crave though characters like male domination. Like people’s general and correct sense that their Tate make the virulent others on the media rights are under attack in order to build support minority seem larger. right – from Fox News to The fact that the ideInfoWars – Tate uses the for their reactionary divide-and-rule strategy. ology of Tate and people controversy as a moneylike him is tied to the making machine, funneling the views into momentum for his it has empowered right-wing reaction. right wing means movements to defend online course on how to control women. The pundits of the right wing have used abortion rights, and to defend trans stuThough Tate is not a broadly popular these movements to peddle the narra- dents and gender-affirming healthcare, figure in society, he has made an impact tive that white, cis men are under attack cut across their popularity. Students, among a swath of school-aged boys and – a tenet that underpins the new wave young people, and workers should mobiyoung men, resulting in teachers report- of what used to be ‘dogwhistle sexism’ lize to fight on these issues, and winning victories along these lines – like abortion ing that some of their male students have reaching megaphone-volume.

The right wing has tapped into work- sanctuary victories in Seattle and Madireturned for the school year refusing to take any assignments from women, ing class people’s general and correct son (see page 13) – will do much to curb as one teacher explained in a Reddit sense that their rights are under attack the proliferation of bigotry.

As this year has clearly demonstrated, thread. This has rightfully shocked and in order to build support for their reacterrified a section of youth, especially tionary divide-and-rule strategy. The fighting bigotry and prejudice is not a young women and queer people, as they right has seized on people’s fear that clear line of historical progression from come back to classrooms for the new the world is “going down the drain” as a point A to point B – there can be huge setbacks in attitudes, which result in a means to build their own authority. school year.

Tate’s celebrity is a ripple effect of real threat to the safety of marginalized this broad right-wing push – the same people. Eradicating the Andrew Tates of What Tate Represents push that overturned Roe v. Wade, that the world, and the ideology that sustains Ultimately though, Andrew Tate is an is passing trans sports bans and eradi- them, is an active battle that must be insect. He’s a cockroach, earning super- cating trans healthcare for youth, that driven by masses of working people, latives only in the categories of “viscer- is outlawing “critical race theory” building multi-racial and multi-gendered ally repulsive” and “hard to get rid of.” from schools. movements based on class unity. J

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GENDER OPPRESSION

Abortion Trigger Bans Go Into Effect: Fight for Reversal!

JESSE SHUSSETT, NEW YORK CITY On August 25, abortion bans in Tennessee, Idaho, and Texas took effect. Not long after, a similar ban took effect in West Virginia. These are just four of thirteen states across the country that had trigger bans in place in anticipation of the Dobbs decision. By now, almost all of those trigger bans have become law.

All four states have put forward near-complete blanket bans, with some exceptions only in cases of rape and incest or medical emergency.

The response to the bans has been chilling, with media outlets sharing stories of pregnancies turned into medical nightmares and doctors withholding care while their patients are in danger of losing their lives, for fear of committing a felony while doing their jobs.

Those charges are nothing short of barbaric, not the least of the issues being that they force healthcare workers to make decisions directly at odds against the Hippocratic oath, stating that they “will do no harm or injustice to [patients].”

Nurses and other medical professionals will be put in an unbelievably difficult position of choosing the care they have promised to provide or the law preventing them from giving it.

Attacks From The Right These attacks on reproductive rights are part of a string of attacks from the right wing, which has been emboldened by the lack of a fightback from the Democratic Party and mainstream women’s organizations.

At the same time as we see these trigger bans going into place, we’re also seeing attacks on queer and trans youth across the country, and there has been absolutely no real pushback or response from liberal NGOs or the Democratic Party.

We Need A Socialist Feminist Movement The landslide victory against an anti-abortion ballot measure in Kansas shows that abortion rights remain extremely popular, even in traditional Republican strongholds. Activists in Seattle, led by socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative, won legislation making Seattle the first “abortion sanctuary city” since the Dobbs decision, allowing all those targeted in other states by anti-abortion laws to live in Seattle safe without fear of prosecution.

Measures like this are possible, and necessary, elsewhere as well. Socialist Alternative members have successfully achieved abortion sanctuary status in Dane County, WI, where abortions were halted in June following the draft leak of the Dobbs decision.

While the far right is loud and growing, it is no match for what can be won if working people come together on the basis of a militant movement, prepared to do whatever it takes to defend our rights. If we want to win back the right to legal abortion, it will have to be done through a genuinely mass movement on the scale of the movement that won Roe in the first place. J

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L ABOR

Temple University Hospital Workers Prepare Potential Strike

WHAT STRATEGY CAN WIN? MARTY HARRISON, VP OF TEMPLE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL NURSES ASSOCIATION (PERSONAL CAPACITY)

​​ Healthcare workers bore the brunt of their employers’ and both political parties’ criminal mishandling of the pandemic.

The hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic stimulus granted to the hospitals by state and federal government agencies have not been invested in frontline, bedside care.

For-profits have squandered it on stock buybacks to enrich their portfolios. Our own notfor-profit, Temple University Health System, has purchased one hospital outright and has announced it has acquired a 60% share in another.

We are fighting to retain our experienced staff, attract new grads, and pull enough of those who threw in their scrubs back to the bedside to ensure safe staffing and quality care for our patients. To recruit the staff our patients need, we are demanding wage increases that compensate for the loss of buying power inflation has already inflicted on us and that will keep pace with future inflation. We are also demanding student loan payment assistance; paid parental leave; full tuition remission for our dependents at Temple University; and enforceable, safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios.

At Temple, we have experience with tough labor fights. In 2010, nurses, techs, and professionals struck together for 28 days and successfully defeated administration’s efforts to bust the union and muzzle our calls for safe staffing legislation at the state level. The contracts we won in 2010 set the standard for wages and benefits. On the strength of our victory, 5,000 other healthcare workers in Philadelphia and its suburbs voted to join Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) in the following years.

2022 is not 2010. In many ways, the union is in a stronger position now than it did then: PASNAP has grown, as has each local at Temple. The labor market is tight; healthcare workers are in high demand, forcing hospitals to compete for staff. Perhaps the most significant difference is the fresh momentum in the labor movement. In addition to last year’s “Striketober” and new unionization drives at Starbucks, Apple, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon, healthcare workers are fighting back, too. A 300-day strike of nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts earlier this

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year ended with safe staffing language in the contract and every nurse offered their pre-strike position.

Last month, 2,000 mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii began their open-ended strikes for the staff needed to provide the basic level of care required by law for their patients. 15,000 nurses in Minnesota made history when they struck at 16 hospitals for three days starting in September.

Even with a strong track record of success and a favorable labor environment, victory is never guaranteed. Hospital administration signaled that they are not prepared to accept our terms by unleashing a wave of discipline and insisting on harsh concessions at the bargaining table. Winning will require a strong campaign by united locals, armed with clear demands and united around a strategy – including a viable strike plan – that can make the hospital do what it doesn’t want to do.

Clear, Bold Demands For A Winning Struggle At Temple and across the country, healthcare workers are demanding safe staffing levels and wages that keep up with inflation.

Short staffing did not start with the pandemic, but was exacerbated by it. More than 3,600 healthcare workers died from COVID in the first year of the pandemic alone. Many workers retired or otherwise left their professions entirely. Others quit their hospital jobs and signed up for high-paying temporary positions with staffing agencies. All of this has left staffing levels dangerously low and patients and workers are suffering.

The simple answer to recruiting and retaining healthcare workers is to hire enough staff to allow us to do a good job and pay us a wage commensurate with the value of that work. Demands for safe staffing ratios challenge more than the hospitals’ profit margins.

To hospital executives, these demands are an unacceptable intrusion into their control over the business. It is our position that there is no “nursing shortage,” only a shortage of jobs nurses are willing to take. Safe staffing ratios will attract enough of the 84,000 Pennsylvania registered nurses not working at the bedside to solve our staffing problem. Nurses never work alone. We need our entire team – from the loading dock to the IT help desk – fully staffed to provide quality care.

After setting wage and benefit standards for the city after the 2010 strike, TAP and

TUHNA members are now among the lowest paid. Hospitals all around us increased wages and overtime bonuses to compete for staff while Temple insisted on linking concessions on union rights with every incentive offer. TUHNA’s first-year wage demand is $5 plus 10% and TAP is demanding 12% across the board.

Build A Strong Strike At Temple University Hospital, nurses are members of TUHNA; the technical and professional staff are members of TAP and both are locals of PASNAP, our statewide parent union. Management regularly tries to pit the two groups against each other by planting rumors and rehashing the very old lie that this is a zero-sum game, that is, anything the nurses win will be at the expense of the techs and vice versa. Solidarity is the foundation of our strength as a union but it doesn’t happen automatically, it must be built and nurtured to counteract management’s attempts to pit us against each other. This type of solidarity will only become more important as the situation heats up and both locals approach contract expiration and a potential strike.

While we are engaged in substantive bargaining, we need to continue preparing how we will respond if Temple fails to make an acceptable counteroffer. To prove to the hospital that we are serious and will not back down from our core demands, we will hold a strike authorization vote. The threat to strike must be real to be effective. Every member must be prepared to walk out if they want the choice to accept or reject whatever Temple offers. The strike is a union’s most powerful weapon but must be used correctly to be effective.

In 2010, arrogant hospital administrators forced Temple nurses and allied professionals to go on an open-ended strike, confident that they could break the union in the slack labor market conditions of the lingering Great Recession. TUHNA and TAP thoroughly prepared for the grueling showdown, relying on the active and democratic participation of their members every step of the way to keep the strike rock solid. 96% of the membership was still out on the picket line on day 28 and we won a historic victory. We should be proud of that win and the work we did to get there.

Surrounded by economic, social, political and environmental instability, it’s not surprising that members are seriously discussing and debating the pros and cons of different strike strategies. There is no doubt that a balance sheet of the experience of the last 30 years with traditional weak, open-ended, “one day stronger, one day longer” strikes is not broadly in workers’ favor. The unfair labor practice (ULP) strike is seen by many unions, especially in healthcare and education, as a good alternative.

A huge disadvantage is that ULP strikes are linked violations of labor law by the employer, so unions can’t talk about demands. It can be more difficult to mobilize workers to the picket line and to solidify community support for the strike. Another significant disadvantage is that it’s common practice for ULP strikes is to set the duration of the strike in advance.

It’s easier for bosses to hire scabs to wait out the strike. The scabs in Minnesota were hired for a 60 hour week at $10,000. On balance, I think a well-timed, all-out, open-ended strike would be a shorter and more direct path to the contract we need in the long run.

There is no “nursing shortage,” only a shortage of jobs nurses are willing to take.

Mobilizing The Wider Working Class

Temple nurses and staff know our working conditions are our patients’ healing conditions and any strike would be about meeting the needs of the wider community. This is especially true at Temple which serves some of the poorest zip codes in the country, communities that have been failed most by capitalism and corporate politicians.

Temple nurses and staff also know that the wider community, especially after the COVID19 pandemic, will stand with them. However, it’s one thing to know this support exists, and it’s quite another to mobilize it into a force that can have a positive impact on our struggle.

Temple University students can also be mobilized in support, alongside TUGSA (the grad students’ union) and AFSCME members who are also bargaining with the university.

There should be regular meetings to discuss how the community and students can support the strike, invitations to participate on the picket lines, and mobilizations to larger protests.

continued on p15 S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

EDUCATORS

PARENTS

STUDENTS

E D U C AT I O N

UNITE AGAINST BIPARTISAN ATTACKS ON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

ERIN BRIGHTWELL, OAKLAND

Teacher shortages, particularly in schools that primarily serve lower income students and schools in rural areas, are not new. But like a lot of issues in society, the pandemic badly exacerbated the school staffing shortage at the same time as it worsened the youth mental health crisis. This all contributed to students being well behind where they were expected to be given their age and grade level. As recent teachers’ strikes in Seattle and Columbus, and earlier this year in Minneapolis, indicate – teachers feel under immense pressure as schools have increasingly become convergence points for all the crises of society.

Pressures on school staff are at an all-time high, precisely at the moment when workers everywhere, in the “Great Resignation,” are reevaluating their work-life balance. Teachers and school staff historically work long, hard hours, at times spending their own money to supply their classrooms. Now an increasing number of school staff and educators are leaving the profession – for an array of reasons – and students are paying the price for the refusal of the capitalist system to respond to the needs of staff and kids as the impact of lockdowns and remote learning become clearer.

The Political Establishment Has No Plan At a time when the federal government has increased its funding of education, most recently with the Biden administration’s injection of $122 billion to K-12 education as part of the American Rescue Plan, it seems like schools should have the ability to offer more money to attract new hires. However, teacher and school staff salaries have not been increased alongside these new funds, and are often abysmally low in school districts serving poor and rural students.

In New York City, newly elected Mayor Eric Adams used the pandemic as an excuse to cut education funding, instead diverting funds to the already bloated police budget. With the tight labor market and the extremely demanding nature of being a public school teacher, workers are able to consider jobs in other sectors that may not involve spending hundreds of dollars out of pocket on classroom supplies, or hours of unpaid lesson preparation and grading.

School districts are having to resort to some extreme solutions to the staffing crisis. More and more districts are moving to a four day per week schedule to attract teachers, which is associated with poorer learning outcomes, and OCTOBER 202 2

creates childcare problems for working parents.

Some districts are hiring teachers who don’t have credentials or experience. In Florida, Ron DeSantis recently signed a law allowing districts to hire military veterans as teachers despite lacking credentials or college degrees. Teacher quality is a big factor in kids’ learning, and teachers with little or no training are 2.5 times more likely to quit after one year compared to their better prepared colleagues, so hiring uncredentialed and unprepared teachers is kicking the can down the road on the staffing crisis.

Without improving working conditions – and therefore student learning conditions – it will be difficult to turn around the crisis in the education system. Teachers know best how to improve their working conditions, add more teachers and more staff, and make other needed changes.

Without a bottom-up approach based on teachers organized in unions fighting for more hiring, higher pay, and lighter work loads, the politicians will continue to jerk our communities around while not investing in education.

Kids Are Struggling Inside understaffed schools, kids are struggling. Learning loss from remote schooling is a serious problem, with a key national measure of student learning, the Nationalized Assessment of Education Progress, showing substantial declines in both math and reading. This test data also showed that lower achieving students scored far worse than when the test was given in 2020, putting kids at serious risk of disengaging from learning and dropping out.

Standardized tests and other data miss the massively important social outlet that school provides. Kids are behind in social-emotional learning, study skills, self-discipline, and responsibility – not to mention the physical impact of not having daily opportunities for sports and physical activities, music, art, theater, and numerous other extra curricular activities. Of course lower income kids whose parents couldn’t work from home, or pay privately for activities, missed out more than kids from wealthier families.

The youth mental health crisis is raging everywhere, and this is having a major impact on schooling. Suicide rates among adolescents rose 60% from 2007 to 2018. In 2021, more than a third of high school students said they had poor mental health during the pandemic.

Virtually everywhere there is a shortage of mental health providers, and increasingly, as the New York Times found, kids are being put on multiple psychiatric medications, often without adequate therapy and follow-up.

Skeleton-staffed schools are creating a

vicious cycle, putting even more pressure on workers to try to help kids who are dealing with mental health issues, and who are behind in learning, risking more burnout, and more educators leaving the field. This is why many recent educator strikes have raised the demand for set ratios of trained nurses, counselors, and social workers in every school building.

Meanwhile, right-wing school boards and state legislatures are responding by actively policing teachers in classrooms in a paranoid reaction to culture wars on race and gender. In Oklahoma, public school libraries are essentially prohibited from having books about LGBTQ issues or human sexuality more generally.

A proposed Missouri law would require schoolteachers to personally pay a $10,000 fine if they are caught teaching “critical race theory,” a law school topic that is being broadly redefined by the right to mean virtually any teaching of racism and its history in the U.S. Right-wing politicians have latched onto the term “groomers” for teachers who are sharing basic information on LGBTQ identities.

Transforming Our Schools The collective trauma of the COVID pandemic – the millions of families who had to cope with severe illness or deaths of loved ones, the job losses and economic hardship, the fear of getting sick in the early months of the pandemic, and the social isolation – has taken an enormous toll on nearly everyone in society, but especially children and young people. The capitalist class, which lives and breathes only for profits, is in no way prepared to or even interested in meeting the needs of students and school workers, unless they are forced to from below.

Educators need an immediate 25% raise and additional funds for classroom supplies. Columbus teachers just won climate controls in their classrooms, a model for teachers working in decrepit, poorly ventilated buildings. We need to make college free, with special incentives – like accelerated certification programs – for those studying to be educators to immediately fill vacancies, and then to reduce student to teacher ratios.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have attacked public schools for decades. It’s going to take a united movement of educators, students, and families to win a massive investment plan for our schools, curriculum that meets the needs of students (not out-of-touch politicians), and policies that address the underlying issues that background public education, like affordable healthcare, good jobs, and quality housing. J

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pulled back from the SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE EDITORIAL BOARD Just a few months ago, the Democrats were headed for a complete bloodbath in the midterms. In July, Biden’s approval ratings hovered around 38%, lower than Trump’s at the same time in his presidency. Democratic leadership cowered in the shadow of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to explain why nothing was getting done.

Biden’s administration has been haunted by the ghost of “Build Back Better,” and all of the crises that drove people to the polls in 2020 remain unresolved. In fact, new crises have been introduced like sky-high inflation and the looming energy crisis (see page 11).

But now, two months out from election day, in an extraordinary turn of fate for the party consultants and PACs who were projecting doom back in spring 2022, the Democrats’ chances don’t look quite as bleak as they did.

However, this 11th-hour semi-resurrection has almost nothing to do with what little they’ve managed to deliver to working people. Rather, it has everything to do with the fact that the Republicans overreached on abortion rights, startling voters who may otherwise have nothing nice to say about the Democrats’ performance to nevertheless urgently prepare to cast their ballots to block a right-wing onslaught.

While Congressional Democrats’ ability to pass limited reforms like the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden’s limited executive order to cancel $10K in student debt over the summer may provide a small boon in their midterm results, overwhelmingly it’s not their achievements that will blunt Republican chances – it’s the Republicans themselves.

Democrats Rely On Old Standby Of Lesser Evilism For decades, “lesser evilism” has been the Democrats’ life raft. This is the notion that no matter how pathetic they may be, they’re

8

brink FLATLINING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY REANIMATED BY REPUBLICAN EXTREMISM

better than the alternative. This strategy is the political equivalent of selling snake oil.

It is sold to working people as the only solution to a more and more dangerous Republican Party, and this election cycle proves that it remains the Democrats’ most valuable insurance policy, to the point where they’re even financing the far right in primaries. Even when they fall completely on their faces as they’ve done the past two years, so long as they can bank on the Republicans getting scarier, they’ve got at least half a leg to stand on for the campaign trail.

It is entirely understandable that working people feel motivated to register a vote against Republicans who are determined to carry out a barrage of attacks on our rights. The question on a macro-scale, however, is does this strategy of year-after-year voting Democrat actually prevent the right wing from becoming more dangerous, and will voting alone stem the growth of the threat? The answer is a resounding “no.”

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a key reference point for the cycle of lesserevilism we’re seeing today. Obama, despite his promises of hope and change, bailed out Wall Street while unemployment and foreclosures wrecked working class communities, paving the way for the Tea Party’s victories in 2010 and Trump in 2016. As a consequence, the states where Obama defeated McCain

by record margins in 2008 are today considered reliably red. Trump has pulled the whole Republican Party even further to the right, paving the way for an even more grotesque set of figures running in this year’s midterms.

The lesson from the Democrats’ point of view is that despite failing to pass a $15-anhour federal minimum wage, any immigration reform, any effective climate legislation, the pro-labor PRO Act legislation, the Equality Act to protect the rights of LGBTQ people, federally codified abortion rights, or any substantial tax on the rich and corporations, you can still win elections. But only so long as the other guy on the ballot is simply too terrifying.

Just as the course of events from 2008 to now illustrate how the process of lesser-evilism plays out over time, the Democrats’ midterm boost in 2022 shows its logical conclusion and disastrous consequences.

Republicans Overreach On Roe The Republicans scored a long-awaited victory with the overturn of Roe. They were finally able to trigger the abortion bans they’d been sitting on for decades and rile up their most fervent pro-life supporters with a victory lap and a taste of power. But they overplayed their hand: by failing to take into account just how unpopular these attacks are to most voters across the country, Republicans will soon find

that this “win” will cost them electorally.

Going into November, we’re seeing an unprecedented spike in women registering to vote, especially in states where abortion rights are most at stake. Kansas voters’ resounding rejection of a ballot measure which sought to decisively deny the right to an abortion in the state constitution was a dramatic demonstration of popular backlash against this attack on reproductive rights.

Whereas the Democrats had previously said it wasn’t “strategic” to make abortion rights a main focus of their campaigns – from their absurd fixation on picking up Republican voters through a “moderate” message – they’re now opportunistically changing their tune.

Since the Dobbs decision was announced, 30% of Democratic campaign ads have mentioned abortion, compared to just 5% of Republican ads. Seizing on people’s genuine fear of the horrific, sometimes life-and-death consequences of abortion bans for women and people who can get pregnant, the Democrats have quickly pivoted to making this a cornerstone of their campaigns – despite not having lifted a finger to codify Roe in advance of the Dobbs ruling or afterward.

This is not going unnoticed by Republican leaders, a section of whom are panicked about the consequences of their overreach. This panic was shown by the feverish efforts of the Republican establishment to prevent “ultra MAGA” Donald Bolduc from winning the primary in the New Hampshire Senate race. This was not for any principled reason, but is precisely because they worry his extremism would threaten their electability.

Many Republicans complained when Senator Lindsey Graham introduced legislation to ban abortion across the country. A political strategist and former Trump campaign aide in Georgia said he is “a little fearful that the way it’s going to be sold to the public could hurt Republicans in the midterms.”

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

The language in the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe also made clear they are prepared to take aim at other hard-won rights, particularly marriage equality. Fearing the way this could damage the party, over 400 prominent Republicans – including swing state Senate candidates like Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania and Joe O’Dea of Colorado – signed an open letter calling on Republicans to codify gay marriage.

This gets to the core of the crisis in the Republican Party: the Trump wing has succeeded in consolidating the party around itself, giving oxygen to more and more reactionary forces within it. While this has led to a hardening of the Republican base, it’s also alienated more moderate Republican voters who will not cosign the most extreme conclusions of the party’s right-wing. The national attention to the avalanche of state attacks on abortion, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and others like it, and the targeting of trans people – while leading to a winning streak for the most belligerent right-wingers in primaries with a narrow electorate – is proving to be a double-edged sword as it’s resulted in a fearful mood among voters around just how severely their lives and rights could change under Republican rule.

“The Democratic Party, rather than campaigning on plans to deliver relief to working people, is banking on these runaway Republicans to deliver them a victory in November.”

OCTOBER 202 2

Runaway Republicans With a few exceptions, Trump loyalists and insurgents from the right fringes of the party dominated the Republican primaries. Backing from multiple Republican political dynasties and millions of dollars of corporate money could not stop Senator Liz Cheney’s crushing defeat in Wyoming.

Many of these insurgents are proving to be real liabilities in the general election. Mitch McConnell cited “candidate quality” on his party’s end as the main factor protecting Democrats against all-out Republican overwhelm this November.

The Democratic Party, rather than campaigning around plans to deliver desperatelyneeded relief to working people, is banking on these runaway Republicans to deliver them a victory in November.

They’ve even campaigned for some of these most reactionary figures in the Republican primaries in order to ensure they have a smoother path to victory in the general. They have poured in $53 million to boost MAGA-aligned, anti-choice Republican primary candidates.

It’s a dangerous game for Democrats to consciously amplify and normalize far-right ideas in an effort to win a few seats this election cycle, especially if those right-wing ideas can pose as anti-establishment alternatives to the

pro-corporate ideas of mainstream Democrats.

This was precisely the Democrats strategy in 2016 when they amplified Trump, hoping he’d be easier for Hillary Clinton to beat.

Furthermore, the Democrats funding a rightwing insurgency poses an active threat to the immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and workers who live in Republican strongholds that the Democratic Party abandoned long ago.

The Democratic Party’s election strategy of repeating “Hey, at least we’re better than those guys!” only works if “those guys” keep getting worse, which as we’ve painfully been forced to watch in recent years, has real consequences for millions of working people who bear the brunt of their vicious attacks. This is why corporate Democrats fund fringe Republican candidates, even if this risks channeling populist anger at the political establishment into scapegoating immigrants, women, trans people, and social movements like Black Lives Matter.

And for what? Out of all this gambling from the Democrats, propping up extremely reactionary individuals as a boogeyman to win elections, what is the most likely outcome? At this stage, it seems that the Democrats can hang onto the Senate in November, but will in all likelihood lose the House. This means a divided Congress where, because of the deep partisan divide, it’s extremely difficult to imagine how anything meaningful can get passed in the next two years.

Of course, we have to be conditional about these estimations. With the possibility of a major recession being triggered in the near future, things could still go belly-up for the Democrats in the final weeks before the elections. If this happens, and they do not offer farreaching solutions to dig working people out of the hole, we could see a return to the forecast that prevailed earlier in the year.

Workers Need Our Own Political Party With the options presented to us each election cycle, it’s no wonder nearly 100 million

THIS ELECTION CYCLE, DEMOCRATS HAVE SPENT $53 million bolstering far-right candidates.

Americans didn’t bother to cast a ballot in the 2020 election. There is an innate understanding that, no matter how much the political players get shuffled around, workers are still left holding the bag by both major parties.

Of course, there have been politicians who have broken through that despair and inspired people to get active in the political process – most famously Bernie Sanders. Both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns served as lightning rods for the working class and young people fed up with the domination of corporate politics and desperate to fight for a program to take on the billionaires.

But unfortunately, Bernie and the left-wing Democrats elected in the wake of Trump’s election have completely failed to “transform the party” as they purported they would. As Socialist Alternative has warned for years, any attempt at a “left takeover” of the Democratic Party is doomed to fail. Even the most well-meaning politicians cannot overcome the political, economic, and structural barriers the party has erected to keep the left in its place.

AOC went from saying in early 2020, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” to claiming he had “exceeded progressives’ expectations” just one year later. This is the dismal end result of fighting to take over a party that is built to defend the interests of the bosses rather than working people.

Ultimately, we need a real choice in the political process. If beating the increasingly reactionary right requires a left wing alternative, then we will have to build that alternative outside the confines of the Democratic Party.

With a likely showdown between a listless Biden and an increasingly unhinged Trump in 2024, we need to begin building a new political party for working people and the oppressed

that can serve as a genuine counterweight to the extreme right.

Rather than getting endlessly swallowed up by the Democrats, as we’ve seen happen with countless labor struggles and social movements, the left and labor movement need to urgently begin the project of constructing a new political party that is completely independent of big business.

This is of course not a project that can be completed overnight, but it’s one we need to initiate as soon as possible to resist the cycle of lesser evilism getting even worse. There are steps we can take now to begin this process.

For example, we can launch campaigns in the unions demanding an end to the practice of using members’ dues to send blank checks to Democratic Party campaigns. We can also put forward resolutions in our unions to support the creation of a new independent workers’ party.

Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America can commit to running all future candidates as independents rather than on the Democratic Party ballot line. These campaigns should be democratically accountable to the organization, with common political platforms that are discussed and debated by members.

With inflation eating away at our already meager paychecks, climate disasters becoming seasonal realities, and the growth of an increasingly dangerous right wing, we can’t afford to wait to begin building a working class political challenge to the politics of the rich.

Regardless of the outcome in the midterms, unless there is a major factor like COVID forcing them to act, it is unlikely that either major party will be prepared to do much of anything to make life better for working people. So we need to build a working class movement, and political force, strong enough to become that factor. J

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AGE OF DISORDER

UKRAINE’S UNEXPECTED ADVANCE IS IT A TURNING POINT IN THE WAR?

PER AKE WESTERLUND, ISA IN SWEDEN That the Ukrainian army could retake the key city of Izium in just a few days, drive Russian troops out of the entire Kharkiv region, and put pressure on the front in the Donbas was not foreseen by anyone. Several analysts discouraged a Ukrainian offensive, assuming it was about retaking Kherson city and the region in the south.

From September 5, when the offensive began, and in the following weeks, up to 8,000 square kilometers were recaptured from the Russian occupying force who fled in near panic, leaving behind weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and even still-hot food.

The possibility of victory for Ukraine in the war is being discussed in Kiev and in the West. The territory captured is larger than that occupied by Russia in five months.

A Destructive War Mass graves have been discovered in Izium, with over 400 victims, many of whom were tortured. The brutality of the Russian “liberators” is once again made evident as they are forced to retreat. More massacres and mass graves will be uncovered.

Since the Russian invasion began on February 24, 5,827 civilians have been killed and 8,421 injured according to the UN, and both figures are most likely underestimates, especially in occupied areas.

After Izium, the operation has slowed down, although Ukrainian forces have opened up the possibility of continuing on towards Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, cities that Russia captured in early July bringing the entire Luhansk region under Russian control.

Since then, Russian forces have advanced extremely slowly and have not achieved Putin’s stated goal of taking control of the entire Donbass (Luhansk and Donetsk) region.

Military analysts in the West believe this is a turning point, but warn against the belief that the war is over. Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter quotes the most widely consulted Swedish expert: “In recent days, there have been reports from various quarters around Ukraine of ongoing fighting. But Joakim Paasikivi thinks that it is difficult at the moment to form an opinion about the situation in Donbas, for example.”

In Donbss, there are also sections of the population that are on Russia’s side, as has already been shown in protests by locals against Zelensky’s visit to Izium on September 14, as reported in The Economist.

So far, Russia has responded with rocket attacks on infrastructure and civilian targets, as well as continued artillery fire and attempted advances in Donetsk, around the town of Bakhmut. Russian defense lines

10

around Kherson and in Luhansk have been reinforced while the Ukrainian army aims to cut Russian maintenance lines.

The Russian Response In Russia, the setbacks in Kharkiv have led to open discussion in the media, with war hawks such as “Communist Party” leader Gennady Zyuganov calling for general mobilization (assembling and readying troops for war) and that the war should be called a war and not a “special operation.”

So far, Putin has resisted a general mobilization, instead opting for a “partial mobilization,” probably for several reasons. A general mobilization would mean admitting the error of judgment that the war would be short-lived.

It would be unpopular and expensive, while conscripts would not have sufficient training.

While Ukrainian soldiers are motivated by resistance to the invasion and defense of their homes, Russian troops have been mobilized by money.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly relying on irregular volunteer and proxy forces rather than on conventional units and formations of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” writes the Institute for Study of War in one of its daily reports and analyses.

Other growing demands are for the “republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk to be officially annexed to Russia, like Crimea in 2014. Plans for “referendums” in Kherson and other areas have been shelved following the Ukrainian offensive. Officially, Russia has not given up its goal of taking control of all of Ukraine, although since April efforts have been focused on the Donbass and the Black Sea coast. Now, in early autumn, Russia has made new arms purchases from Iran and North Korea.

Ukraine’s Advantages How was the offensive possible? From day one, morale and motivation have been by far stronger on the Ukrainian side. Russian soldiers and even officers have testified about how they were not even informed that they were on their way to a war. At the beginning of the war, the Russian military columns were open targets and later on it became clear their equipment is not as modern as on the Ukrainian side.

During the summer and autumn, Ukraine has had more soldiers in combat. Russia has lost about a third – dead or wounded – of the 200,000 soldiers who started the war, while Ukraine has no problem mobilizing an army with hitherto high combat morale that has now been further strengthened.

The fact that the war is also part of the global power struggle between imperialist powers is a crucial explanation for the latest military developments. For U.S. imperialism

and its junior partner, the EU, the war is being waged directly to grind down and inflict a defeat on Russian imperialism and as a strong warning to China. The second cold war between U.S. imperialism and Chinese imperialism, with its position of pro-Russian “neutrality,” remains a priority for both sides.

One of Western imperialism’s main organs, The Economist, declares, “the U.S. and other friendly states have sent rockets with sufficient range and accuracy to change the terms of battle. Ukraine can see and reliably hit enemy ammunition dumps, command centers and logistical hubs far behind the front lines, which Russia cannot. Russia’s supposed air superiority has been suppressed by mobile air defenses. And while Russia is reducing its weapons stockpile, Ukraine’s is becoming both more plentiful and more powerful, as superior NATO equipment replaces the old Warsaw Pact equipment.”

U.S., NATO & EU The fact that the Ukraine war is also the war of the U.S., NATO and the EU is increasingly emphasized by the capitalist establishment. The success of Ukraine in recent weeks is “a victory for Biden’s foreign policy,” wrote a leading Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne Jr. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen devoted most of her annual “State of the Union” address to the European Parliament to the war. “Europe has been on Ukraine’s side from day one. With weapons.

With means. With hospitality for refugees.

And with the toughest sanctions the world has ever seen. To date, Team Europe has provided more than €19 billion in financial assistance.

And that’s not counting our military support.”

Western imperialism wants to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, but to avoid extending the war beyond its borders. There is concern about how Putin will respond, with the risk of escalation with chemical or even nuclear weapons, although that is not the most likely outcome now. Hawks in the West, like the right-wing governments of Poland and the Baltics, are arguing for escalated military action.

Still Far From Over In Russia, warmongers dominate the debate, without seriously threatening Putin’s power. It is also possible the protests against the war will eventually pick up again. A local district council in St Petersburg has attracted attention for its demand that Putin be court-martialed.

In Ukraine, success on the battlefield at the moment most likely means that Zelensky’s government has even greater support.

Hopes for a military victory and an end to the war are growing. But Ukraine’s workers and poor cannot rely on Zelensky and his allies in Western imperialism.

The EU, promising closer ties, and the IMF, coming up with new so-called aid packages and demands, will shift the heavy costs of the war onto the Ukrainian population.

Already, the government has abolished labor rights for 94% of workers, according to the international trade union federation ITUC, and implemented privatization schemes.

The working class and the left must organize themselves independently, with a program of struggle, internationalism and workers’ rule, including rights for all minorities.

The crises of global capitalism had devastating consequences for Ukraine’s working population even before the war. The risk of war will not disappear after any agreement in the future any more than the 2014 agreements led to peace.

Globally, the war has greatly sharpened imperialist antagonisms, as well as the nationalism and militarism of governments.

New conflict hotspots await as the economic crisis and the struggle for energy resources deepen. For Beijing, and especially for Xi Jinping’s one-man dictatorship, a defeat for Russia would be a major setback, while the Chinese dictatorship does not want to incur sanctions from the West and has therefore refrained from military support.

The war in Ukraine is part of the very serious and deep

crises of the capitalist system in the 2020s. There is no other solution than the common struggle

of the working class against capital, imperialism and militarism, for a completely different, democratic socialist social system. J

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ENERGY CRISIS THREATENS MILLIONS

coal from remote mines across Africa, particularly Tanzania, Botswana, and Madagascar. In July, global seaborne coal imports hit a record high.

This energy scramble exposes just how anarchic capitalist society is. Rather than ushering in a rapid, global transition to renewable (and reliable) energy which is clearly what’s needed, we are seeing dirty energy supplies being divided between the two blocs of the new cold war centered on the U.S. and China.

Where the past four decades saw the world’s energy supply go truly global, the current crisis is proof that the era of neoliberal deglobalization has reached its limit. We are a long way away from the grand vision of oil and gas tycoons who, in the ‘90s and ‘00s, imagined a limitless and permanent global market for their products.

WAR & WINTER BRINGING SKY-HIGH PRICES KEELY MULLEN, CHICAGO “Unprecedented.” “New normal.” “Trying times.” The ruling class hoped that COVID was a blip on the radar – an extreme event no one could have predicted, prevented, or prepared for. They hoped that after it was resolved, the system would course-correct and their well-oiled profit machine would start grinding again.

As the energy crisis hangs suspended over the world like a thundercloud, it is clear that the chaos of this era in world history is only just beginning. From the standpoint of the ruling class, the biggest danger now is that the energy crisis triggers, as the Prime Minister of Belgium said, “fundamental social unrest.”

Energy Crisis Bears Down Energy markets were tight even before Russia invaded Ukraine. This was due to a combination of factors including the drop in energy demand during the pandemic, the supply chain chaos which stressed the delivery of petroleum, and climate shocks.

Then, in late February, Russia invaded Ukraine and set off a geopolitical grenade.

Western powers issued sweeping sanctions (or tightened existing ones) largely targeting the Russian energy sector which large parts of Western Europe previously relied on. China started buying more and cheaper Russian gas, propping up the Russian economy and deepening the two countries’ “no-limits” friendship. India has also made consid e r able purchases.

In 2021, Russia supplied the European Union with 40% of its natural gas.

While stopping short of a total ban on Russian gas, since the outbreak of the war the EU has already decreased imports by nearly half with plans to reduce them even further.

This has provoked Russia to turn off the tap on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, restricting the supply of gas to Europe and pushing the wholesale price of gas up. The energy market is so frenzied that when Putin announced Russia would restrict supply in July, the wholesale price of gas jumped by 10%.

In one day.

In modern industrialized society, OCTOBER 202 2

energy is like air. It is a fundamental ingredient in our survival, and in this analogy, the current energy crisis feels quite a lot like suffocation. Without stable energy sources, it’s not just our ability to fill up our cars that’s threatened. We use energy to grow food, to generate power, to stay warm, to transport ourselves, and to turn just about any raw material into a usable good.

The Ruling Elite Scramble For Solutions

The energy crisis poses a very serious Nightmare Scenario For The problem for the capitalist elite in many parts of the world. From their standpoint there are World Working Class And Poor two main dangers: one, profits will be dramatically slowed down by energy shortages, We are lookand two, skyrocketing ahead to an ing prices will trigenormously difger massive social ficult winter for unrest. working class Already energy and poor people prices have trigaround the gered protests in world.

Sierra Leone, BanHigh energy gladesh, Sri Lanka, prices drive Ecuador, Panama, high prices in Peru, the Czech nearly every Republic, Germany, other industry.

Italy, the UK, and Food and elecmore. tricity costs soar To prevent alongside high more generalized gas prices. And mass movements, it’s not just at governments all the checkout over the world will counter or gas intervene directly pump that the to get prices under costs mount: control. This interhousehold bills vention is not motiare expected Steam rises from cooling towers at a vated by principles, to skyrocket as coal-fired power plant in Germany. so we’ll see money well.

Housegoing both to strugholds in the UK gling consumers and to the very corporations can expect to pay almost triple the price to swindling them. heat their homes this winter compared to Already EU governments have blocked off last. over $350 billion in subsidies for consumers, If energy-intensive businesses are unable energy corporations, and utilities companies. to keep the lights on that means layoffs. In The Greek government has committed to northern France, energy prices have climbed spend 4% of its annual economic output on so fast that Arc International glass factory has subsidizing energy bills for consumers, paid had to dramatically reduce their production. for by taxing the profits of energy compa- Just recently, 4,500 workers were put on nies. We may even see some capitalist gov- partial furlough and four out of nine furnaces ernments looking toward nationalizing parts were idled. Nearly every industry in Western of the energy sector, as Germany as already Europe is vulnerable to a similar situation. done, in order to stave off total disaster.

This crisis is already producing shortages On top of the mad dash to deal with the of essential goods. Soaring natural gas prices cost of widely-used energy sources, Euro- will inevitably drive up the price of producing pean governments are now looking to “diver- fertilizer, a key component in food producsify” their energy portfolio. Many Western tion. Producing food without fertilizer reduces countries are even looking at bringing coal yields by half. We are now on the brink of a plants back online to get through the winter. food crisis on top of everything else.

Buyers in Europe are paying top dollar for

AGE OF DISORDER Every component of this scenario will be especially excruciating for the billions of people living in poor countries. From Ecuador to South Africa, blackouts and energy shortages have already plunged millions into total turmoil. Like with COVID vaccines, we’re likely to see wealthy Western countries scramble to buy up energy reserves at astronomical prices while debt-laden countries get left behind.

This nightmare for working people and the poor also presents a nightmare for the ruling elite: a winter of mass uprisings. The number of countries that have been rocked by protests over energy prices so far this year, already in double digits, will skyrocket as cold months draw nearer in the Northern hemisphere.

Winter Is Coming The workers movement in the UK gives us an inspiring model to look toward (see page 14). The momentum of workers struggles across Britain to fight for wage increases, along with growing demands fprice caps on energy bills, and a major tax on corporations has put the question of a general strike firmly in the cards.

The leaderships of several key unions have signaled support for coordinated strike action across industries to fight for these demands.

This is precisely what we’ll need in countries around the world – a mass movement, coordinated and led by the organizations of the working class, demanding the rich pay for this crisis out of their mega profits rather than working people’s couch coins.

This movement will need to be crystal clear in demanding that we break from the shackles of the oil and gas industry. We need a global transition to green energy, executed by creating millions of good paying jobs. This will ultimately require bringing these industries into democratic public ownership and putting workers in polluting industries to work building the infrastructure for a green transition.

As the drivers of this struggle, working people need militant and truly democratic unions. In the U.S. this will require ousting the conservative union leadership whose conciliatory attitude toward the bosses poses a key obstacle.

It is critical that this struggle isn’t waged solely around immediate issues of wages and energy prices, but is connected to an overall vision of the type of world we need to build.

We need a world where we’re not handcuffed to the frenzied groping of the capitalist class who have no coherent plan to meet society’s energy needs in a way that is both affordable and sustainable for a rapidly warming planet.

We need to fight for a transformation of our entire economic system. In addition to bringing the energy industry into democratic public ownership with workers’ control, we need to also take aim at the parasitic interests in other industries like the big banks and pharmaceutical companies.

It’s only on this basis that the shocks of capitalist instability can be truly put to an end and replaced with rational planning where the needs of people and the planet come before profit. J

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BL ACK HISTORY

In 1874, the General Assembly in South Carolina set aside funding to open the State Normal School where Black women were trained to become teachers.

ALVIN MURAGORI, SEATTLE The era of Black Reconstruction tells the story of perhaps the most transformative event in U.S. history. During this unprecedentedly progressive period, four million Black workers played a decisive role in ending slavery and completing the bourgeois revolution that the Declaration of Independence set in motion 89 years prior.

In this period of revolution and counterrevolution, though, it was counter-revolution that got the last word in. The gains made during Reconstruction in the span of just a decade would be wiped out in a few short years, and wouldn’t be won again until the Civil Rights Movement of nearly 100 years later.

Massive Social And Political Change During Reconstruction

since the Civil War, through widespread terror and intimidation, Democrats won back a majority in Congress.

The Klan and the Democrats launched a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi, and Republican President Ulysses S. Grant refused to use federal troops to curb the violence.

The disputed presidential elections of 1876 saw a compromise between different parts of the ruling class that ceded control of the South back to the Democrats, with the “promise” that they would respect the civil rights of Black people and the Republicans would end federal intervention in the region.

The North was also preoccupied by labor unrestas the recession had spurred workers to take strike and workplace action. From the point of view of the capitalist class, Reconstruction had served its purpose and was no longer necessary. They left Black people to their fate without a second thought.

The South, in the control of Democrats, quickly got to work undoing all the gains made during Reconstruction. Constitutions were reverted back, Jim Crow was introduced, and the system of segregation was put in place that would take another mass upheaval nearly 100 years later to overturn.

The greatest tragedy of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era was the white and Black working classes not uniting in their shared interests to end the domination of the planter and industrial ruling class. A key factor was the deeply ingrained racism of American society. In the South particularly,

made throughout the South and some Klan leaders saw imprisonment. But again they ran into the same problems of public support. The armed resistance dwarfed the scale of violence carried out by the Klan – Black workers were afraid of carrying out large scale armed resistance.

A key weakness of the “radical Republicans” was their ardent belief in the letter of the law. The Democrats were willing to use any means necessary to fight for the previous order, but the Republicans believed the Constitution, despite everything, would save them. They believed if they used violence to defend the constitutional rights of Black people, they would be no different than the Klan.

many poor whites bought into the alleged benefits of white supremacy. In the North, white workers were fighting the same capitalist class that was temporarily enforcing Reconstruction in the South. Here too racism was deployed over time to try to convince workers that they could advance materially without class organization.

It would take further bitter experience to demonstrate that advancement for the working class required united struggle by Black and white workers. This culminated with the building of the mass industrial unions in the 1930s and 40s, but tragically this struggle was cut across by misleaders before it could decisively challenge the rule of capital.

The capitalist class which sold out Reconstruction still rules, its power still rests on structural racism and will not hesitate to foment overt racism to maintain that power.

The task of overthrowing it remains. J

REVOLUTION & COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN POST-CIVIL WAR SOUTH

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the presidential executive order ending slavery, many plantation owners did not inform workers of their freedom, and blamed them for the Confederacy’s loss. Newly-refounded states immediately passed “Black codes” to control the labor force. The state militias and newly-formed KKK committed terroristic acts of rape, murder, torture, and lynchings, causing a national uproar and widespread condemnation. This brutality propelled the anti-slavery Republicans to a crushing victory in the Congressional the elections of 1866.

Under the leadership of the “Radical Republicans,” reconstruction began. After the elections of 1866, Republicans passed the Reconstruction Act, dividing the South up into five military districts and outlining how universal male suffrage was to be implemented.

The army was stationed in the South to ensure that Black people could exercise their right to vote and participate in civic life. The

12

military registered formerly enslaved Black men to vote. By the end of the 1870s, scores of Black men had been elected to public positions, including several in Congress. This marked the start of a social revolution that was the most far-reaching in the history of the Union.

But the conflict between the needs of the new Black workers and the bases of both major parties left economic demands of

in every southern state.

The KKK wanted to bring back the white supremacy of the pre-war South, punish and prevent Black people from exercising any of their rights as citizens by violence, destroy Republican party infrastructure, and undermine the efforts of the Reconstruction state using lynching, murder, rape, and burning property of Black people and their allies.

This level of violence was also necessary, from their standpoint, to prevent any steps in the direction of united struggle by freed Blacks and poor whites. In pockets of the South and throughout Appalachia, there were instances of cross-racial class solidarity, but what it lacked was a conscious leadership, program, and party to unite and consolidate these disparate struggles.

In Piedmont, North Carolina, in October 1870, the Republicans gained a slight majority in the county. In response, nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan, and by February of 1871 thousands of Black people were fleeing to the woods each night to escape from nightly raids.

Throughout their reign of violence, the KKK did meet organized resistance from ordinary people and the federal government. Former Union soldiers in Blount County, Alabama threatened the Klan with reprisals if they did not stop burning Black schools and churches, which curbed the violence in the area.

The federal government did pass the KKK Act of 1871, which for the first time put certain crimes under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Hundreds of arrests were

Black workers by the wayside.

During Reconstruction, the stationing of federal troops did ensure massive change in the southern states, which also resulted in the first publicly funded schools, more equitable taxation, laws barring racial discrimination in transportation and accommodation, and public funding for railroads and other enterprises.

But it did not go far enough to crush the resistance of the planters, expropriate their wealth and power, and lay the basis for a society based on genuine racial equality. All these gains would be wiped away.

The White Planter Class Turns To Terrorism While racial violence had been endemic to the South before the war, during radical reconstruction it proliferated. By 1870 the KKK and other organizations like the Knights of the White Camelia were deeply entrenched

How Did Reconstruction End? In 1874, an economic recession dropped the South into poverty, and the support for Reconstruction waned. For the first time

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

S O C I A L I S T A LT E R N AT I V E I N A C T I O N

SOCIALIST FEMINISTS WIN ABORTION PROTECTIONS IN TRIGGER BAN STATE MADISON SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE A grassroots movement in Dane County WI, just won immediate protections for abortion rights – in direct defiance of Wisconsin’s 173 year-old abortion ban and the state’s GOPdominated government. The abortion sanctuary legislation, which the Dane County Board passed 29-5-1 on September 22, came out of a campaign led by Socialist Alternative.

This victory came after months of organizing, alongside Dane County Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner and inspired by Socialist Alternative’s similar victory in Seattle. The sanctuary legislation provides protections for people in Dane County seeking abortions, preventing County agencies from working with the state of Wisconsin to enforce the ban by threatening to take away funding from any city in Dane County that does.

How We Won – We Need More Than Protests!

After the Supreme Court’s threat to Roe leaked, Democrats and the liberal feminist organizations were telling us to stay home until November. But we weren’t satisfied with that.

Socialist feminist activists in Madison took to organizing walkouts, Senate office sit-ins, and protests of thousands, which eventually culminated in this victory. When the Dobbs draft leaked in May, Socialist Alternative’s Madison branch organized a protest of 3,000 at the State Capitol.

Building on this, we held several Action Assemblies, where workers and young people eager to fight back were able to discuss next steps to build a stronger movement. From these assemblies, we helped organize walkouts at five high schools, where students were already looking for ways to escalate the fight for abortion rights.

While we were organizing in Madison, Socialist Alternative in Seattle was waging a very similar fight for legislation that would protect people seeking an abortion, both those who live in the city and those coming from trigger ban states. The legislation was introduced to the Seattle City Council by Socialist Alternative member and Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant. We mobilized people to rallies and council meetings to keep the pressure high, and using this strategy we won!

OCTOBER 202 2

This was a major inspiration to abortion activists in Madison and we knew we could do the same thing here, despite the statewide trigger ban, if we applied the same method.

To win in a trigger ban state, we knew we needed to constantly apply pressure. In June, we organized alongside several groups for another big protest, which drew in 3,500 people. We built on the momentum from this protest and subsequent Action Assemblies to organize a sit-in at Senator Ron Johnson’s office. We then used this to launch a signature gathering campaign where 2,000 people signed onto the sanctuary legislation at tables we set up all over town. The petition was also unanimously endorsed by the South Central Federation of Labor! We mobilized dozens of people to County Board meetings throughout August and September to give public testimony, keeping up pressure until it passed.

By thinking about our next actions strategically, and linking them to the goal of forcing the hand of the Democrats rather than waiting for them to take the lead, we avoided the problem of “protest fatigue.” Protests on their own are not enough, but they can help create momentum, which then must be organized behind a common program and a farreaching strategy to win.

for mass protests until they reopened the session. Instead Evers went home and requested a legal brief to weigh his options, putting the decision back in the hands of right-wing courts.

While fighting for this legislation, the Democrats refused to do what would be necessary to strengthen the legislation.

We need direct controls on the Sheriff’s and DA’s offices – prohibiting any avenues to enforce the abortion ban – but the Democrats balked this demand with superficial excuses about county jurisdiction.

Even without direct controls, Democrats on the Board fretted about the Sheriff and DA’s “right” to enforce the abortion ban, rather than focusing on defeating the draconian and life-threatening law. Several County Supervisors attempted to derail the legislation even while claiming to oppose the ban.

This comes as no surprise, as they have consistently sided with the police against movements like ours – most notably in response to the George Floyd uprising, with Democrats like Ron Johnson’s Democratic opponent Mandela Barnes calling for increased funding to the police. We need a party that actually represents working people, and we need to build our movements independent of the Democrats.

Wisconsin Dems Give Ground To Trump’s GOP

We Can’t Stop Here, We Need A Socialist Feminist Strategy For The Movement

The approach taken by activists in Madison stands in stark contrast to the approach of Democrats, who will no doubt want to take credit for this victory despite their total passivity.

After the Supreme Court’s gutting of Roe v. Wade, local Democrats responded by passing the buck to the right-wing dominated state government.

When Gov. Tony Evers called for a special legislative session to overturn the 1849 abortion ban, Republicans immediately closed the session. If the Democrats really wanted to win the right to abortion in Wisconsin, this should have been met with calls

Even with sanctuary legislation, the right to abortion is under threat from an increasingly rabid GOP. In Wisconsin, far-right Gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels is trying to protect the abortion ban from scrutiny by promising paid parental leave – a demand that is massively popular, and which Democrats have refused to fight for. This leaves the door wide open for the right-wing to cynically pose as the party of working parents.

After the victory in Seattle, we knew we could win immediate protections in Dane County if we used a movement-based approach. This win in Wisconsin shows that working and young people can begin fighting for immediate protections in trigger ban states across the country.

If activists in trigger ban states across the country took a similarly militant approach, we could organize a much wider mass movement, independent of the Democrats, to win even wider protections. Socialist Alternative continues to organize for abortion rights and the rights of all working people across the country, join us in this fight! J

13

WORLD

UK: TRUSS COMES TO POWER IN PERFECT STORM OF CRISIS CLAIRE LAKER-MANSFIELD, ISA ENGLAND, WALES, AND SCOTLAND

As Liz Truss begins her tenure as the UK’s new Prime Minister, she inherits deep unpopulararily from her predecessor Boris Johnson, presiding over a major downward trend of the average person’s living standards. The average worker has had a 3% real-terms pay cut over a period of just three months. This is the biggest single decline since the 1970s. The Bank of England predicts a lengthy recession.

The Tory party’s internal divisions have deepened over the course of the leadership race. Truss will suffer from weak authority in a parliamentary party that overwhelmingly backed her rival. Even before she assumes office, pressure is mounting from multiple directions. Inflation is now expected to reach an enormous 18%+.

It is no wonder then that the issue which dominates discussion in workplaces and mess halls, at school gates or in pubs, is the rising cost of living. Truss has so far insisted on not outlining any concrete policies which might alleviate this crisis. Attempting to play to the reactionary base of the Tory party, she has instead emphasized tax cuts. In practice, she means tax cuts for the rich.

This contest has revealed a capitalist political elite who seem to live on a different planet to the rest of us. This includes Labour’s New Blairite leadership. Keir Starmer has spent the summer opposing workers taking action to fight real-terms pay cuts — sacking ministers who dare to appear on picket lines. At the same time he has systematically ruled out policies, such as energy nationalization, which actually offer the prospect of some relief from the onslaught on living standards.

But back in the real world, a profound

radicaization is taking place across huge swaths of society. With fuel bills set to hit an eye-watering £4,266 this year ($385/month) and parasitic private providers recording record profits, even a majority of Tory voters express support for energy nationalization when polled.

Workers’ Fightback Building At the same time, determination to fight back is building, with striking rail workers and postal workers currently in the vanguard.

Among the working class as a whole, support for strikes is strong and is growing. More than 62% of the public say they sympathize with rail strikers, for example, compared to 25% who say the same for the government.

Workers who face sweatshop conditions in Amazon warehouses have also begun to struggle, following in the footsteps of their

colleagues in the US who have been fighting to unionize (with support and solidarity from Socialist Alternative there). Bravely, staff have organized walkouts and sit-ins at at least 4 different sites in the UK so far. At the same time, 91% of workers organized by Unison in NHS Scotland have just voted to reject a derisory pay offer, with 83% indicating preparedness to take action.

With a clear lead from the union leaders, including the TUC, generalized action would be possible which would shake the foundations of the Tory government. But a barrier to this huge potential being realized is the poor record of many trade union leaders. In recent years, they have all too often failed to call for and help organize the massive ground floor operation needed to smash draconian antiunion ballot thresholds.

It’s this vacuum of leadership that currently threatens to derail what should be an autumn of mass struggle and of big victories for the workers’ movement. It is positive, therefore, that the CWU and RMT seem to be seeking to help fill in this gap, and to help draw wider layers into the struggle, through the launch of the Enough is Enough campaign.

To succeed, Enough is Enough must be a forum for a huge democratic discussion on the fighting program our movement needs. It should link up with social movements against sexism, racism, and queerphobia and for climate justice. It could build massive demonstrations and solidarity actions in support of workers on strike, and ought to play a part in helping to organize currently unorganized layers of working-class people.

There has been an explosion of discussion about a mass boycott of energy bills. Drawing upon the example of the anti-poll tax unions (led by Socialist Alternative’s forerunner organization, Militant), which built huge networks in communities which could defend those facing bailiffs (or worse) for refusing to pay the hated tax, a non-payment campaign could go from being mainly an internet phenomenon, to something with far more potential.

Socialist Alternative fights for nationalization of not only energy and utilities, but of all the banks and major monopolies that currently dominate our economy. And we see workingclass people, who generate wealth and keep everything running, as the key agents for change within society. J

The Queen’s Death, King’s ‘Ascension’ and the British Monarchy ISA NORTHERN IRELAND On September 8, Queen Elizabeth II died, ending the longest reign of any British monarch. The death of the Queen is being used across Britain and Northern Ireland by the capitalist establishment to stoke feelings of “national unity” in the face of economic uncertainty.

This has gone alongside rhetoric attacking rail workers for taking strike action. Over the past week there have been reports of several arrests of peaceful protesters. It is vital that the trade union movement defends the right to protest.

For many Protestants, the monarchy is connected to their sense of British identity.

For others, including most Catholics in the North, there is a long association of the monarchy with some of the worst atrocities in Ireland. There is also a sense among many

14

Catholics of the need to be respectful, primarily reflecting a desire to be respectful towards Protestant and Unionist friends, workmates, and neighbors.

Across the UK, support for the monarchy has been declining in recent years, with support among 18-24 year olds having shrunk to just over 30% with a similar percentage supporting replacing the monarchy with an elected head of state.

Contributing to this decline have been the numerous allegations of sexual assault against Prince Andrew and his association with billionaire serial predator Jeffrey Epstein.

The monarchy has also been impacted by the substantial and credible allegations of racism made by Meghan Markle.

It is also the case that the Queen was seen in much higher regard than Prince, now King, Charles. He was investigated for taking £3

million in cash donation from Qatari Sheikh for his charity foundation. Forbes magazine estimates that “Monarchy PLC” holds nearly $28 billion in assets. They remain the largest landowners in Europe and were exposed in the Paradise Papers for offshoring millions to avoid taxes while receiving around £100 million a year in public money.

The institution of the monarchy is used as a tool under capitalism to strengthen a sentiment of national unity and identity that masks the class differences in society. Also as head of state it has real power to reject popular legislation, though this power is typically reserved to be used against the working class.

It is part and parcel of the undemocratic nature of the state under capitalism. We are not in favor of such riches and power being passed from one generation to the next in a privileged family. In fact, we are not in favor of

such unaccountable power full stop.

We stand for a socialist, and genuinely democratic, society in which the workingclass — the people who actually make society and the economy function — democratically control, own and organize society, leaving no place for p rivile ge d and unaccountable positions in any aspect of the state or society. J

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

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

“WE TOOK TO OUR FEET FOR THE WORLD WE KNOW WE CAN WIN.” A REPORT FROM THE SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE SUMMER SCHOOL

SAWYER SMITH, NEW YORK CITY

The effect that more than three hundred dedicated socialists in one room can have on one’s morale cannot be overstated.

The fight for a socialist world can feel demoralizing, frustrating, and often isolating. There’s no point in denying that progress in this struggle more closely resembles the outline of a mountain range rather than a straight line. But attending Socialist Alternative’s 2022 summer school just outside of St. Louis, Missouri this Labor Day weekend was a remarkably energizing experience for myself and hundreds of other Socialist Alternative.

This summer was the first time since the beginning of COVID that members of the entire national organization were able to meet in person. The weekend-long event was centered around discussing Marxist theory, the history of the workers’ movement, and the tasks for today.

The event opened with a series of discussions on our global perspectives, with several members of our international, the International Socialist Alternative (ISA), having flown in to discuss and elaborate on the struggles taking place in their home countries. Pairing these international perspectives with the following day’s discussions on U.S. perspectives did a lot to strengthen and clarify the links between the work we do here and the

work we do on a global scale.

Equally important to the more formal educational seminars was the mingling and bonding that took place both inside and outside them. From the moment I stepped off the plane in St. Louis, I was learning names and getting to know people with a genuine interest in fighting for the international working class. It’s one thing to have an abstract sense of your organization at large in your mind; it’s another thing entirely to see it with your own eyes.

Despite having spent the weekend digging deep into a vast array of very serious topics, I left St. Louis with a heightened sense of optimism for the continuation of our fight for socialism. The mood throughout the whole weekend was unmistakably positive, with excited conversations about the state of the movement and in-depth discussions of history, theory, and action echoing down the halls of the convention center.

Each session ended with the takeaway that while the world can look bleak at a glance, there are huge opportunities on the horizon – our task is to assess the situation and take action. That’s precisely why everyone in that room was there: rather than sinking into apathy at the current state of the world, we took to our feet for the world we know we can win. J

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY NURSES’ STRIKE Socialist Alternative members have already begun collecting thousands of solidarity petition signatures, especially from students, and will be mobilizing them to joint actions and picket lines.

If the union does not make serious efforts to organize students and the wider community ahead of any strike action,

Temple’s anti-union propaganda will get an echo. We should not be apologetic for demanding a living wage, especially when the average CEO makes 235 times the average worker. Better jobs and safer hospitals are better for the whole community.

We won big in 2010 by fighting unapologetically for the needs of our patients, our families and our

co-workers. We based our fight on rank-and-file union democracy and relied on our unity and solidarity with the wider community and labor movement. When our contracts expire at the end of the month, we must be fully prepared to do it again.

The drive for profits has completely broken healthcare in this country. Without another big win,

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EDITOR: Keely Mullen EDITORIAL BOARD: George Brown, Tom Crean, Grace Fors, Chris Gray, Joshua Koritz, Greyson Van Arsdale, Tony Wilsdon

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15

SOCIALIST ISSUE #87 l OCTOBER 2022

ALTERNATIVE

WHY DOES IT CO$T SO MUCH TO BE ALIVE? GRACE FORS, DALLAS Just about every young person has asked themselves this question in the more stressful times in their lives. You’ve budgeted your paycheck and will barely afford your bills just when a dreaded “check engine” light appears on your car dashboard. Your rent went up and you need to find a new place, which means bracing to come up with first and last month’s rent, application fee, and security deposit. In the constant stress of scraping by paycheckto-paycheck, we can’t help but ask: why is it like this?

“The cost of living.” It’s a common phrase that gets increasingly dystopian the more you turn it over in your head. Most of the time we try to keep our heads down and not think about it too much. It’s depressing and you can’t afford to sink into a nihilist gloom when you’re juggling your rent, utilities, car payments, gas, phone bill, and insurance payments. And that’s just for necessities, to say nothing of the countless monthly subscriptions required nowadays to access TV, movies, and music to make it all slightly more bearable.

That said, these days the “cost of living” is getting harder to ignore. With the price of common consumer goods and services shooting up, you can hardly go outside without bleeding money.

It’s not like most of us are asking for luxury mansions or superyachts. Let’s say you want a one-bedroom apartment in the city where you work. Rents in the first half of 2022 increased by 31% from last year – a double digit increase that’s brought housing costs to all-time highs. For too many young workers, this basic desire for a stable and accessible roof over their heads is aspirational.

Inflation is at a 40-year high and pandemic-era cash assistance is long gone. We’re all having to tighten our budgets because we simply can’t afford to spend as much. Average savings are plummeting, with even top earners making $200K salaries increasingly strapped and reporting living paycheck-topaycheck. Nearly 40% of consumers can’t afford to put any money aside for savings

– to say nothing of the quarter of American households with no emergency savings to begin with. As interest rates are creeping up, twenty percent of Americans are scared to check their credit card statements.

So Really – Why? This state of deprivation is a fundamental condition of the working class under capitalism. If we’re not in desperate need of cash, we’re less desperate for work. The threats hanging over our heads are why the bosses are able to offer us jobs with low pay, no benefits, and awful workplace conditions and still find workers.

While the capitalists can pile up the money that pours in, ours is immediately eaten up by our basic necessities. Our paycheck starts to disappear as soon as it lands in our account.

We even get charged money for not having money – from overdraft fees, to late fees on bills, to fines for broken tail lights.

When we have to work for a wage to get by, we’re not just “selling our labor” as some refer to it in shorthand. We’re selling our skills, our capacity, and the time in our day – the boss has ultimate control over our time and our lives.

“...Labor-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live…He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another.”

Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital

This explains why living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t always feel like living at all.

So much of our lives revolve around earning money for ourselves by creating wealth for our bosses and then shelling it out just to survive. We’re even pressured to turn our hobbies into “side hustles” so that no time that could have been spent earning money goes “to waste.”

The entire capitalist system is built around making the most money for the bosses. Our very means of survival like food and healthcare are built around this same profit motive.

Our unconscionable for-profit healthcare system, run by massive corporations and insurance companies with the sole aim of raking in money, has raised countless young people for whom a surprise infection or dental emergency is their worst nightmare – not because of the pain, but because of the cost.

It’s intolerable, especially now when our day-to-day lives are being impacted by global crises completely out of our control in a fundamentally unstable system. But the same ruling class that created these crises depends on keeping us in this situation.

Does it Have To Be Like This?

Between 1979 and 2020, workers’ productivity – meaning the value you’re creating when you’re at work – shot up 68% while compensation increased only 17.5%. This is even more staggering when we think of how much more we’re paying for housing, tuition, and bills since 1979 when a part-time job could get you through college. All that value added to the economy from productivity growth – that’s real existing wealth that has to have gone somewhere.

If it didn’t go to workers, where is it? Sitting in the pockets of the top 1% in the form of executive salaries and shareholder returns.

There are ways working people are fighting to

redistribute the wealth we created in the first place back into broader society. The housing crisis caused by completely unnecessary and parasitic speculation and profit-seeking can be fought with successful campaigns for rent control and massive public investment in quality public housing.

Winning a Medicare for All system to replace the inhumane for-profit healthcare system in the U.S. would save billions on health insurance premiums and copays for working-class people.

The federal minimum wage is still an abominable $7.25 an hour. We can fight in the workplace to win raises on par with inflation, cost of living adjustments, and with independent working-class politics we can win a minimum wage that reflects a real living wage. These are things we can fight for here and now.

But ultimately, working class people, who built the world and keep it running, need and deserve more than simply what’s required to survive. While we fight for what we need here and now, socialists also fight for a better world. A socialist society built around workers’ democracy would allow a balance between productive work that serves the interests of people and the planet with full respect for individual autonomy and personal and collective enrichment.

This would include measures like a shorter work week, with no loss in pay and benefits, to share out work, the creation of new jobs doing work that benefits society, and productive use of the world’s wealth to provide for people’s basic needs. Work would be an exercise in collective participation based in workplace democracy, not a question of selling your time to the highest bidder under duress.

The alternative is the working class and the environment continuing to get fleeced.

It’s a continuation of a system where there are millions of empty houses and apartments but you can’t have one, where there’s enormous work to be done converting to renewable energy but millions are unemployed, and where we produce enough food to feed the planet but you can’t afford it. It’s not you versus your bank account, but us versus them and the system that works against us. J