Socialist Alternative #89 – Dec/Jan 2022-23

ALTERNATIVE

SOCIALIST

ISSUE #89 l DECEMBER/JANUARY 2022-2023

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INSIDE BIDEN CRUSHES RAIL STRIKE DEFENDING LGBTQ RIGHTS PROTESTS SWEEP CHINA

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WHAT WE STAND FOR Fight Inflation & Expand The Social Safety Net • Inflation and rising costs of living is eating into our paychecks, and capitalist politicians have no solutions – we need a class struggle to turn the tide on this race to the bottom!

• Pass strong rent control. End economic evictions. Tax the rich and big business to fund permanently affordable, high-quality social housing.

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

Cancel all student debt and make public college tuition-free.

• No pay cuts! We need pay raises that exceed the level of inflation and a significant raise in the minimum wage.

• An immediate transition to Medicare for All. Take for-profit hospital chains and Big Pharma into public ownership and retool them to provide free, state-of-the-art healthcare to all.

• Fully fund public education! End school privatization. Give educators an immediate 25% raise and increase staffing.

• Unions should form consumer protection committees to monitor price increases.

They should have the power to review 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.

Mobilize Against Gender Oppression & Attacks On Bodily Autonomy • The overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court opened the door for vicious attacks on bodily autonomy across the country. We need a mass movement against the reactionary right on the scale of the 60s and 70s when Roe was first won.

• Free, safe, legal abortion. All contraception should be provided at no cost as part of a broad program for reproductive health!

• Fight back against the brutal anti-trans legislation in many states and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. Noncompliance should be organized by the labor movement among workers tasked with enforcing these bigoted laws.

• Fighting gender oppression means fighting for our rights to bodily autonomy, reproductive justice including universal childcare, and Medicare for All including free reproductive and gender-affirming care.

Rebuild A Fighting Labor Movement • As thousands of workers are winning union recognition for the first time, it is critical that unions fight to win strong contracts.

We need unions that are armed with clear demands and prepared to go on strike to win them.

• Union leaders across all unions should accept the average wage of a worker in their industry and should be accountable to their membership and the broader working class.

• An injury to one is an injury to all! Unions need to fight evictions, poverty, racism, sexism, queerphobia, 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.

A New Political Party For Working People • The capitalist Democratic Party offer no solution to right-wing attacks against workers and marginalized people and have repeatedly failed to use their majorities to protect our rights.

• We need a new, working-class, multiracial left party that organizes and fights for workers’ interests and is committed to socialist policies to lead the fight against the right and point a way out of the horrors of capitalism.

No To Imperialist Wars

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• Socialist Alternative completely opposes Russian imperialism’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians who already suffer exploitation, oppression, corruption, 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

WHY I JOINED SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE CARIANNA LEONPACHER, HOUSTON I grew up a military brat, moving to a new Air Force base every few years, and found that being raised in this setting was in direct conflict with my growing opposition to war and militarism. I saw how poorly the people lauded for sacrificing their lives for the nation’s “freedom” were treated by their own government. Poor working and living conditions, healthcare, pay, frequent and long-term separation from family, etc., are the norm, even in a nation with a defense budget as sickeningly exorbitant as ours.

I kept all of this in mind each time I was approached by a recruiter at my high school.

I began organizing in various capacities around 2016 (the year I graduated from college and Trump was elected). Most of the organizing I participated in left me feeling angrier. I was attempting to redistribute wealth and privilege by contributing to different mutual aid funds on a monthly basis, which was entirely unsustainable. I realized that I needed to find a space where I could focus on fighting to build a more livable world.

I eventually found this in Marxism. It gave me a “why” to the problems with which I most frequently grappled: why inequality and racism persist in society, why so few of us can “bootstrap” our way out of not being born into wealth.I first learned about Socialist Alternative at a protest here in Houston after the Dobbs decision. News of that decision left me feeling like I had lost all autonomy, was deemed incapable of making decisions about my own body and wasn’t worthy of being taken seriously.Instead of

allowing this hopelessness to breed apathy, I began attending more Socialist Alternative functions.

At branch meetings, I was able to see people putting into practice the theory I was reading about on my own. I used to feel somewhat paralyzed because I wasn’t extraordinarily versed in theory, which kept me ruminating on ideas I would read about but far away from participating in any meaningful action. In SA, I realized that I can simultaneously be actively learning and participating.

I’m now learning from other workers, my peers, and historical events. I’m learning how much power workers hold, and better yet, how we can wield that power. I have an outlet for my frustration with CEOs and landlords that can actually lead to positive, meaningful change, a sense of purpose and hope that voting alone never provided. I’m left fighting for shared human interests, a better quality of life, and an abundance of opportunity for all. J

Eastern Europe.

• Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable • Build a massive anti-war and anti-impefuture – take the top 100 polluting comparialist movement linking up workers and nies into democratic public ownership while youth across borders! Sending increasingly implementing a democratically planned, destructive weapons to the conflict only just transition to 100% green energy. serves to escalate & poses a greater risk of all-out war – only socialist internationalism End Racist Policing And Criminal can end war and destruction and win lasting peace and stability for the working masses (in)Justice around the world.

• Arrest and convict killer cops! Purge police forces of anyone with known ties to white supremacist groups or any cop who has Fight the Pandemic, Invest In committed violent or racist attacks.

Public Health • End the militarization of police. Ban police • We need free, easily accessible tests availuse of “crowd control” weapons. Disarm able in every community across the country. police on patrol.

Workers exposed to COVID should be given • Put policing under the control of democratipaid self-isolation days after exposure or cally-elected civilian boards with power over after developing symptoms. hiring and firing, reviewing budget priorities, • We need to take Big Pharma profiteers into and the power to subpoena. public ownership, dramatically ramp up • While alarming acts of violence have risen, vaccine research and production (especially the Democrats support of “law and order” for new variants), and distribute it freely to policing is reactionary and will only bear the rest of the world. down on people of color and the poor.

For A Socialist Green New Deal

The Whole System Is Guilty

• We need a union jobs program to rapidly • Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, expand green infrastructure. inequality, environmental destruction, and • Massively expand public transit and make war. We need an international struggle it free. against this failed system.

• While taking climate change head-on, we • Bring the top 500 companies and banks also need to expand infrastructure to keep into democratic public ownership. people safe from natural disasters and • We need a democratic socialist plan for the extreme weather as these become more economy based on the interests of the overfrequent. whelming majority of people and the planet.

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

EDITORIAL

Trump Damaged, Trumpism Strengthened

THE LANDSCAPE OF U.S. POLITICS AFTER THE MIDTERMS SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE EDITORIAL BOARD When Trump was running for office, he was lambasted by liberals for his protectionist “America First” policies. On Trump’s foreign policy positions, Hillary Clinton said, “None of what Donald Trump is offering will make America stronger at home.”

Fast forward six years and Joe Biden is carrying out a continuation of Trump’s protectionism, albeit in a less bombastic way.

Under Trump, the average U.S. tariff on Chinese imports went from 3% to 20%.

Biden has upheld the high tariffs and expressed zero interest in walking them back.

The Economist wrote, “the Biden approach looks less like a retreat from Mr. Trump’s brawl with China and more like a professionalization of it.”

The focus of Biden’s economic war on China has been limiting the Chinese regime’s ability to fully corner the market on semiconductors – advanced microchips that are the “brains” of most modern technology. Trump started this process, and Biden has massively escalated it.

A motivating goal for the American ruling class is putting China permanently behind the U.S. in the high tech sector, a key arena for this being in the realm of military technology.

Despite Trump and Biden’s best efforts to erect a wall between the Chinese regime and advanced semiconductors, they have found workaround after workaround. The regime reached a new breakthrough last summer when they made a semiconductor with circuits 10,000 times thinner than human hair, DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

making it comparable to the chips produced in Taiwan.

This prompted Biden to take Trump’s protectionism a step further, not only pushing the CHIPS Act through Congress and signing it in August, but also enacting a new export controls policy in October.

He effectively banned the sale of advanced semiconductors made with U.S. inputs to any entity within China and also forbade any U.S. person (citizen or green card holder) from working in the Chinese semiconductor industry.

Biden’s own “America First” protectionism is threatening transatlantic allegiances.

In his recent visit to the U.S., French President Emmanuel Macron told “Good Morning America”: “The Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act are choices that fragment the West because they create such differences between the U.S. and Europe.”

Biden’s protectionism, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine which has triggered an energy crisis across Europe, has drummed up growing frustration from European allies who are accusing the president of propping up American industry to the detriment of European production.

The fact that Biden and Trump’s priorities in the New Cold War with China look, on paper, quite similar is proof that the Oval Office is, more than anything, headquarters for the interests of U.S. imperialism.

The rivalry between the U.S. and China is increasingly becoming the axis around which all world events revolve. The magnitude of crises facing the world right now are only accelerating this process, from COVID to the war in Ukraine.

Overseeing crisis after crisis has not been straightforward for either party of U.S. capitalism, the Democrats or Republicans. They have both faced foundation-shaking insurgencies since 2015, with Bernie Sanders vying for the Democratic nomination for president (twice) and Trump capturing the leadership of the Republican Party in 2016.

Now, after a midterm result that was not quite as brutal for the Democrats as expected (which is somehow a supposed “win” in our political system) it’s worth looking at the state of these two parties, their “insurgent” wings, and who is really in control now.

In October, Socialist Alternative wrote: “By failing to take into account just how unpopular these attacks [on abortion rights] are to most voters across the country, Republicans will soon find that this ‘win’ will cost them electorally.”

This prediction was borne out just a month later when Republicans dramatically underperformed in the midterms, provoking a crisis within the party’s leadership over what strategy can deliver them gains in the 2024 elections.

It is without question that Trump has been weakened, both in the form of electoral defeats for his candidates, but also in the way those defeats have empowered other highprofile Republicans to blame him for the party’s overall losses. But this is far from the liberal fairytale that this means the end of Trumpism.

In fact, Trumpism as a phenomenon continues to be reinforced by events. The Democrats’ recent decision to crush the rail workers’ strike is proof of this as it allowed space for Republicans like Josh Hawley to pose as “defenders of rail workers” by voting “No.” With a global economic crisis soon to reach the shores of the U.S., the Democrats’ betrayals will almost certainly accelerate, driving working people into the arms of right-populism. The “Never Trump” wing of the Republican party was absolutely crushed in the midterms, leaving no real ideological counterweight to Trumpism.

So, Trumpism is still very much the dominant ideological driver within the Republican Party, but the balance in the party has been disrupted and it’s not clear who’s “leading it.”

Trump himself has been damaged by his fixation on increasingly conspiratorial ideas, and this damage is then reinforced by his courting far-right figures like Nick Fuentes.

That being said, it is entirely possible that he will be able to claw back authority going into the 2024 elections – especially in the absence of a compelling figure to replace him. And it’s certain that if it’s not Trump in charge, there will be someone equally as reactionary (and possibly more competent and therefore more dangerous) ready to take his place.

The Basis For The Growth of Right Populism A recent Pew poll illustrates some pretty shocking realities about the outlook of the typical Republican voter.

The survey asked both Republicans and Democrats to state their views on major institutions, and they found that Republican

confidence has sharply dropped in the past two years.

Republicans who say big corporations have a positive impact on the U.S. went from 54% in 2019 to 30% today. Democratic voters, on the other hand, have become slightly more positive toward big corporations – though the starting point was very low at 23% in 2019 and stands at 28% today.

On the role of big banks and financial institutions, Republican confidence went from 63% to 50% whereas Democrats went from 37% to 48%.

The last two years have been full of crisis after crisis, and in each case working people have been dragged around frenetically by politicians, the media, and their bosses.

Through consciousness-shaping events, the mainstream “left” has had virtually nothing to offer. They have put up zero fight for the establishment of any genuine social safety net, and have totally failed to stand with working people suffering under a generally declining standard of living. This has meant the right wing has benefitted by leaning into old school divide and conquer rhetoric and whipping up fears about “our way of life” being under threat.

Democratic Establishment Coheres Party Around Itself While the balance in the Republican Party has been disrupted, the Democratic establishment has come out of the midterms strengthened – thanks to both the right-wing overreach on abortion and also the total failure of the party’s “left” wing to provide any alternative for working class and poor people.

The Democratic leadership delivered the party a “victory” in the midterms by holding onto the Senate and losing the House by only a small margin. In part this looks bigger because of such low expectations. It has nothing to do with some grand victories they delivered to working people, and everything to do with voters’ fear of Republican attacks.

This is a very fragile foundation for the Democrats, though, because they can’t eternally rely on “look over there” as their only campaigning strategy. Especially when they do things like crush workers’ strikes, and entirely fail to deliver basic protections like codifying Roe, they are handing working people over to the right.

The Democratic establishment defeated not only Republicans in the midterms, but also drove the knife further in the increasingly listless campaign by “progressives” to overtake the party. In the 2022 primaries, progressive candidates were largely defeated by moderate incumbents. In open seat primaries, progressives won by a significantly lower margin than in 2020.

Socialist Alternative has warned for years that if the Squad didn’t change course, the Democratic establishment would transform them from an opposition caucus into loyal co-conspirators.

This was demonstrated most clearly when all but one Squad member voted to crush the rail strike in late November. There have been retroactive justifications for this betrayal from all corners of the left, from Jacobin articles to statements by leading DSA figures, but no

continued on p.14

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L ABOR

BIDEN CRUSHES RAIL STRIKE KEELY MULLEN, CHICAGO Working on the railroads has always been challenging, but until the last several decades, it was a well-paying job with down time. You had a full crew on each train, and your schedule was somewhat predictable.

However, in the last several decades, working the railroads has become almost unbearable for the more than 100,000 workers who keep nearly 30% of American goods moving. In the dusty corners of the internet, you can find forums from 10 years ago where railroad workers urge workers in other industries to think long and hard before joining them on the tracks.

In January 2012, a railroad worker wrote: “You have no life, lose your friends, and cannot plan anything. Your life really is the railroad. Imagine walking a 2 mile-long train in the 100 degree heat, 0 degree cold, pouring rain or snow, then after being on the road 12 hours going home and being called right back after 10 hours. If you already have a decent job, I would strongly advise against it.”

This is the context for the years of negotiations between 12 unions representing 115,000 railroad workers and the handful of corporations that control 90% of freight rail traffic (as well as the tracks that carry most passenger trains). These negotiations have now been brought to a screeching halt under the leadership of the self described “most pro-union President leading the most prounion administration in American history.”

Workers across four unions which together represent a majority of the thoroughly overburdened workforce – the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transport Workers’ Transportation Division, the Brotherhood of Railway Signalmen, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees-Teamsters, and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers – had rejected a proposed contract. But the votes of 80 U.S. Senators and 290 U.S. Representatives were enough to enforce the deal that the rail magnates wanted and prevent workers from striking for a fair contract. This outcome was the one the bosses had counted on from the start, knowing that they hold both political parties in the palm of their hands.

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“As a proud pro-labor President, I’m reluctant to override the ratification procedures and views of those who voted against the agreement,” Biden said in a tweet the day before the sell-out vote in the House. “But in this case – where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions – I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.”

derailed, and exploded in the center of the town, destroying it and killing 47 people. This almost mile-long train had only a single engineer; a crucial brake stability test could have prevented the accident, but it would have required two employees to do it. After this disaster, the Canadian government reversed itself and mandated two-person crews for trains carrying hazardous materials.

It is in this dangerous context that rail corporations are making record profits. In 2016, amidst the flurry of cutbacks at Union Pacific, the second largest railroad in the U.S., CEO Lance Fritz cut himself a $10 million check.

And this is nothing compared to the money these executives give themselves today. In the last three years, the CEOs of the five largest rail conglomerates have been paid more than $200 million. Wealthy company shareholders have been given nearly $200 billion in stock buybacks and dividends.

Democrats Call The Vote To Break The Strike So how does all of this lead us to today, where – under the direction of Joe Biden – Democrats and Republicans in Congress joined hands to crush rail workers’ impending strike?

To understand this betrayal in its entirety, we have to look at the establishment of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) in 1926. The RLA’s legislative ancestry can be traced as far back as the strikebreaking warfare of 1877.

The law allows the president to intervene

in labor disputes that “threaten substantially to interrupt interstate commerce.” This is what Biden did in September. His administration brokered a new Tentative Agreement between the rail magnates and the 12 unions representing rail workers.

The agreement included modest wage gains, though in the context of rampant inflation any wage increase without a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) amounts to a pay cut, but did not give workers any paid sick leave – a key demand of rail workers who currently have zero guaranteed sick days.

When the Biden-brokered TA was sent to rail workers for a vote, it was defeated in four of the 12 unions, representing nearly 60% of all rail workers. This meant that a strike was back on the table, sending the Democratic Party leadership into crisis – knowing it’d be on them to crush the strike at all costs.

Who Voted To Crush The Strike (And Who Didn’t)?

It is a matter of principle that anyone that votes to break a strike is no friend of working people. There’s no amount of “strategic justification” that can undo that fact.

Striking is the single most powerful tool workers have to win their demands because it brings profit-making to a halt – and that’s the one thing that scares billionaire bosses the most.

continued on p.14

Conditions On The Tracks In the 90s, as giant rail corporations grew, gobbling up smaller lines and consolidating a monopoly on the movement of goods across the country, these rail giants implemented a major squeeze on their operations and workforce, professionally referred to as “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR).

PSR meant routes were slashed, railyards were closed, trains were lengthened and expected to run for much longer stretches of time, and tens of thousands of workers were laid off – placing the burden of increasingly difficult work on a smaller workforce. In just the last several years, railroads have cut as many as 35% of workers in certain titles.

Today, these longer freight trains are in some cases operated by a one-person “crew” whereas before, a five-person crew would communicate up and down the train. Now, just one rail worker is responsible for operating the train, while communicating on the radio with train dispatchers, signal maintainers, foreman, other train crews, as well as maintaining all the paperwork – including keeping track of all hazardous materials onboard the train.

If that single worker were to have a heart attack on the job, or even just get sleepy after a 12-hour stretch with nothing more than federally-mandated breaks, the consequences could be catastrophic. And after making it through the shift, they can expect to get a few hours of sleep at a motel in the middle of nowhere while keeping their phone on full volume in case they’re called back to work.

In 2013 a train with 72 tank cars full of crude oil experienced a brake failure while stopped outside the town of Lac Megantic, Quebec. The train ran down the tracks,

July 1941 FDR uses 3,500 federal troops to break a strike by 10,000 UAW members at North American Aviation corporation.

April 1945 Harry Truman issues an executive order seizing the nation’s hard coal mines, making mine workers temporary government employees and ending a strike called by United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis.

March 1978 Jimmy Carter invokes the Taft-Hartley Act to end a three-month strike by soft coal workers.

September 1978 Carter – again – orders an immediate halt to a three-day rail workers strike.

August 1994 Bill Clinton orders striking Soo Line Railroad employees back to work while federal mediators worked at resolving a labor dispute that threatened to spread to other lines.

February 1997 Using emergency powers under Railroad Labor Act, Clinton halts an airline strike, ordering 60-day cooling off period after airline unions called a 3 day strike.

October 2011 Obama blocks a massive railroad strike called for by nearly 25,000 railroad workers.

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

L ABOR of Pramila Jayapal, who wasted time orchestrating a dead-on-arrival vote to shield the party from criticism.

Every excuse in the book has been rolled out. “Some union workers asked representatives to vote Yes.” A clear majority of voting union members had already directly rejected the contract. “Progressives didn’t have enough time to plan their approach to the strikebreaking bill.” The contract battle had been building for a year and the Biden administration’s plans to intervene by the December strike deadline had been on the table for months.

THE SQUAD HACKS SELLS OUT RAIL GOP CASH IN ON WORKERS DEM BETRAYAL

GRACE FORS, CHICAGO

The very fact that there is a law on the books from 1926 allowing the government to restrict rail workers’ right to strike is evidence enough that for the capitalist ruling class, no maneuver is too rotten when the billions in profits of the railroad tycoons are at stake. In the grand finale for the 202122 Democratic majority, Biden’s dreams of joining forces across the aisle has come to fruition in an act of wholly bipartisan collusion to crush the rail workers.

If any force in Congress should be expected to oppose this maneuver – and take a stand against the federal government teaming up with the rail barons and conservative union leaderships to override rank-and-file democracy and deliver a devastating blow to workers rights – it should be the Squad. Astonishingly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush all lined up behind the Biden administration to vote “Yes” on forcing the contract agreement that the majority of affected rail workers had rejected. Meanwhile, eight other Democrats as well as several high-profile Republicans refused. Among the progressives, only Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders had the good sense to vote “No” on the rotten contract.

This is a culmination of years of pursuing an awful strategy of backroom deals wherein progressives have handed over their votes – and their dignity – in exchange for nothing. While the Squad’s gradual capitulation to the party establishment has been on display for years, and has intensified since Biden took office, this is by far the most abominable betrayal to date.

Socialists Can’t Be Strikebreakers The wave of left-wing radicalization over the past decade raised the aspirations of millions of workers and young people as a new opening for socialist ideas in politics emerged after decades of neoliberal hegemony. This phenomenon brought Kshama Sawant’s election in 2013 to the Seattle City Council, Bernie’s transformative 2016 presidential campaign, and explosive growth DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – of which AOC, Tlaib, Bowman, and Bush are all members whose victories DSA fought hard for.

In the midst of this, a group of young political insurgents and trailblazing people of color who pulled off upset primary victories against establishment politicians entered the scene in the House. The “Squad” moniker, coined by AOC in a 2018 Instagram post, echoed through political discourse as a symbol of a new fighting force in Congress that could push back against both Trump and the corporate Democrats. To say the Squad has fallen short of these expectations would be an understatement at this point.

It’s devastating to think of the missed opportunities where the Squad could have had an impact in delivering meaningful progressive change to working people. Since 2021, the Squad has held enough of a balance of power in the Democratic caucus to demand crucial measures. They have not done this once. Instead, they rejected calls to Force the Vote on Medicare for All which would have meant crossing Nancy Pelosi. Fighting to include a $15/hr minimum wage in Biden’s stimulus package was not worth ruffling feathers. They went along with House Democrats in caving on Build Back Better. At any point, the Squad could have broken with the phony ‘Progressive Caucus’ by challenging the right wing’s reactionary “America First” rhetoric on the war in Ukraine by instead putting forward a left-wing anti-war platform based in solidarity with working people across borders and principled opposition to imperialist warmongering. At the very least, when the full forces of big business were bearing down to impose an inhumane contract on rail workers, the Squad of “democratic socialists” could have stood on the side of workers in the most basic of ways by voting “No” on the TA. Instead, they chose to back down, as they have time and time again.

If that wasn’t damning enough, the details revealed in the following days painted an even worse picture. Not only did progressives fail to fiercely condemn Biden’s role in throwing workers under the bus, but they colluded with the establishment to provide cover. It was Jamaal Bowman, with the help

“They wanted to give the separate sick days measure a fighting chance in the Senate.” It never had a chance in the Senate. And in this instance as in any battle against the bosses, the best “fighting chance” for workers to win their demands is to go on strike.

It’s easy to get lost in the specifics of the process of this betrayal. It’s fundamentally not a question of which tactics they used to crush the strike: what we need to evaluate are the principles that underpinned their entire approach. Their strategy flowed from a fatalistic attitude that Congress coming in to crush the strike was an inevitability, something they had no business even trying to prevent. So rather than taking the principled, socialist stance of using every tool at their disposal – including calling on the rail workers to organize mass demonstrations outside Congress leading up to the vote – they played by the rules set by the bosses.

As Seattle’s independent socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant wrote, “A socialist cannot be a strike breaker.”

A 2021 interview with DSA’s official publication Democratic Left describes AOC as the organization’s “foremost socialist superstar.”

From Jamaal Bowman’s vote to fund the Iron Dome that led DSA’s leadership to censor its BDS working group, to the mounting number of betrayals by DSA politicians at the state and local level, it could not be any clearer that the strategy of using the Democratic Party ballot line as a shortcut to socialist change is completely impractical. When we send socialists to the halls of power to fight, but get them there by shackling them to the Democrats, we’re cheating ourselves. It doesn’t take much time at all before any semblance of left-wing politics is dissolved into the prevailing aims of the party establishment.

How enraging this is for rail workers, whose ability to take time off to see a doctor or visit a sick loved one has been robbed, in part, by the biggest Congressional advocates for Medicare for All. How demoralizing this is for workers and youth on the left, including the thousands who knocked doors and donated to their campaigns, to be insulted in this way. And what poison it is for socialist ideas, that “democratic socialist” politics are being presented as essentially a hoax that involves tweeting about the rights of workers only to

pull the same underhanded tricks as the corporate establishment to underut them.

Just as the news was breaking that the House would be sending the TA to the Senate alongside a doomed sick leave vote, Marco Rubio tweeted, “The railways & workers should go back & negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept. But if Congress is forced to do it, I will not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”

It would be foolish to take Republicans at their word. This is the party of merciless destruction of public sector unions, tax cuts for the billionaires, and right-to-work legislation that’s resulted in a devastating setback for union rights. Furthermore, the right-wing’s relentless focus on attacking reproductive and LGBTQ rights serves absolutely no benefit for working class people. These divide-and-conquer offensives fragment working people as a class, deteriorate our living conditions, and restrict our basic personal freedoms – they make our lives worse. Instead of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of Rubio and the Republicans, AOC replied to the tweet that she was “glad we are on the same page.” The problem with this is that between the two, only one voted for the TA that workers rejected. The optics couldn’t be worse.

Alas, the likes of Rubio, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham were able to score brownie points through performative opposition to Biden’s betrayal, and all because progressives left the space for them. Conned by Biden and the Democrats, many working-class people are moving toward Republicans and the right in an incredibly dangerous development. We can be sure that the right-wing Freedom Caucus will organize as a bloc in a Republican-dominated House in all the ways the Squad failed to under a Democratic majority.

Biden’s betrayal will have a profound impact on union workers’ perception of who they can trust to protect their interests. We have to fight to prevent the right-wing capture of disaffected workers, but that raises a core problem. Where does the working class go politically?

In the words of Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, “One party is dangerous. The other does not really seem to mean what it says. America is ripe for a third party – and a fourth. Maybe one day U.S. democracy will offer a better choice.” While Luce accurately characterizes the political rock-and-a-hardplace scenario facing “America’s shipwrecked working class,” U.S. democracy is not going to offer anything.

Elites in Congress, with six-figure salaries and unlimited sick days, have collectively screwed over the people who keep the economy running. Working people need to take the question of political leadership into our own hands. Crucially, the left needs to stop making excuses for its fairweather friends in Congress and focus its efforts on building a militant, worker-driven labor movement strong enough to sustain a winning wildcat strike in the event the billionaires and politicians dare to try to snatch away workers’ power again. We need to fight for a working-class political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans – a new party that can provide a home to the labor movement, social movements, and the struggles of young people. J

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FIGHTING RACISM

CARRYING ON THE FIGHT FOR

BLACK LIBERATION REVIEWING HOW CAPITALISM UNDERDEVELOPED BLACK AMERICA

MANNY VEIGA, BOSTON In his 1983 book “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America,” Manning Marable wrote of the inexorable ties between American capitalist development and the brutal exploitation of Black people.

“Blacks have never been equal partners in the American Social Contract,” Marable wrote, “because the system exists not to develop, but to under-develop Black people.”

This systemic underdevelopment and super-exploitation has been expressed in many forms throughout American history, from the reliance upon the slave trade to build the foundations of the national economy, to the ways in which Black people continued to be exploited for their labor power right up until present day.

New Year’s Day 2023 will represent 160 years since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – the executive order that legally and permanently freed more than 3.5 million Black slaves in the United States. In light of that, we should examine where the fight for Black liberation stands today.

Crisis Of The Black Working Class Published near the start of the Reagan presidency, Marable’s book connected the threads from the beginnings of slavery all the way through to the rising attacks on the Black working class during the early 1980s. Along the way, he noted the specific ways in which Black American society was shaped by capitalist development over 150 years.

He underscored the “triple oppression” faced by Black women – race, class, and sex – in a patriarchal society. He criticized the Black misleadership class in politics, the church, and academia, who had failed to look beyond bourgeois democracy and capitalist solutions for the Black working class. He also enumerated the many ways in which America’s political system was inherently racist.

Racist housing policy restricted the Black working class’s ability to own a home. Periodic capitalist crises led to recessions and rightward shifts in federal policy, both of which disproportionately affect Black Americans. Unequal pay meant Black people were paid less for work than white peers with the same credentials. Decades of outright terrorism held down Black development, including the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century, the state-supported repression of civil rights activists in the 1960s, and the racist police violence that continues to the present day.

Brutal anti-labor practices led to the

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loss of millions of jobs for Black Americans, throwing many into a state of chronic unemployment. A significant portion of the Black working class saw no way out of their financial plight, and turned to jobs in the illegal, informal economy to get by.

The racist prison system stepped in to fill the void left by slavery by warehousing surplus Black labor. This served – in conjunction with the other racist divide and rule policies and a broader attack on the labor movement that particularly affected Black workers – to fragment and destabilize Black communities as the neoliberal era unfolded under Reagan and then Clinton. It was a a counterrevolutionary reaction by the establishment to the Black Freedom Struggle that made massive gains from the 1950s to the 1970s with the goal of preventing any further revolt in the future.

The price for this unequal system continues to be paid disproportionately by the Black community, including the impact of new crises like COVID-19 and our current period of inflation. Both political parties have played a part in perpetuating this system, slowing down progress when profits demanded it, or making reluctant concessions when pressures from below threatened the stability of the system as a whole.

modes of production – Northern industry and finance vs the Southern plantation system – provided one of the primary bases for the Civil War.

Black Capitalism Won’t Bring Liberation In general the smashing of chattel slavery and Reconstruction, which was only possible because of the decisive role of Black soldiers in the Union army, opened up huge possibilities for the advancement of the Black population. But the Northern capitalists chose to cut this possibility off and made a rotten deal with the former slaveowners that opened up

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America

by Manning As long as Black oppression has existed in Marable Published 1983 the U.S., so too has Black struggle for genu-

Where Do We Go From Here?

Racism Is In American Capitalism’s DNA The exploitation of Black people was codified into law from the very start: from the Constitutional clause that declared Black people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining Congressional representation, to federal legislation like the Missouri Compromise which ensured the balance of free and slave states with the goal of protecting the interests of the slave owning aristocracy.

In the same way in which Black exploitation and American capitalist development are connected, so too is the progress of Black liberation tied to the twists and turns of American capitalism.

The end of slavery, for example, could be traced from rising capitalist conflict in the middle of the 19th century: Southern states were running short on arable land as well as cheap labor – due to the increased costs of slaves – to sustain the cotton industry.

Using their dominance of the American political system through the Democratic Party, the plantation owners defied the Missouri Compromise in an attempt to grab more land out west for cotton production. This stood at odds with the interests of Northern capitalists, and this conflict between two

The introduction of Jim Crow laws further hindered Black development, and especially the advancement of this Black business class. Cut off from selling to white clientele, many of these businesses failed, and those entrepreneurs who survived became increasingly separatist as a strategy to nurture and preserve a Black consumer class to sell to.

Ironically, the Civil Rights Movement’s push for desegregation in the middle part of the 20th century later dealt a significant blow to Black capitalism. Recognizing the significant buying power of the Black consumer class, white capitalists were able to come in and start extracting wealth from Black communities.

This direct competition cut into the profits of Black business owners, who again were less resilient toward this change. Black businesses in this period often had to pay higher insurance premiums, charge higher prices due to smaller volumes of commodities, and had to contend with racist policies including redlining, which led to higher interest rates.

a new form of subjugation of Black people under Jim Crow.

During Reconstruction, some freedmen who as slaves had become skilled tradesman in areas such as shoemaking, carpentry, and tailoring suddenly had the opportunity to become businessmen. These early Black capitalists – a burgeoning Black petty bourgeoisie – mainly sold to white customers.

But, once again, their independence was tied to the shifting whims of American capitalism.

As Marable writes, Black business owners who were former slaves were hamstrung by lower rates of literacy, a lack of familiarity with business practices like marketing and bookkeeping, racist laws like annual business licensing fees that their white counterparts did not have to pay, and laws against self-employement that threw them into jail for vagrancy. They also simply had fewer resources than white business owners to withstand the periodic crises that reliably occur under capitalism, meaning Black businesses were more likely to fail during economic downturns.

ine liberation. From the slave rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the struggle to build an integrated industrial labor movement in the 30s and 40s, to the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, to the Black Lives Matter struggle of recent years, it is guaranteed that as long as capitalism continues, so too will the fight for Black freedom. These struggles won enormous victories including smashing the slave system and later Jim Crow and building unions that raised the living standard of a large section of the Black population.

It is also clear that focusing on the development of Black capitalism is a dead end for the freedom movement. The liberation of the Black working class and the Black population as a whole is bound up with the liberation of the working class as a whole and the ending of capitalism in all forms.

As Marable wrote, the U.S. capitalist state will never be convinced to reform through moral persuasion. That’s why socialists must fight for a new society, and set out to build a multiracial, multi- gendered mass movement independent of both parties of capitalism to carry out the fight: “Fundamental change will require a massive democratic resistance movement largely from below and anchored in the working class and among oppressed minority groups.” This is the type of movement we must build. J

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

50 YEARS SINCE ROE

WHAT NEXT FOR ABORTION RIGHTS?

ANNE JIN, PITTSBURGH Half a century after the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, abortion in the U.S. is effectively banned in thirteen states. The bitter repeal of Roe by the Dobbs decision in 2022 enabled the right wing to notch a significant win under its belt by effectively setting the reproductive rights movement back by literal decades. This January 22, socialists and working people can commemorate the 50th anniversary of Roe by charting a concrete path to how we can win back and expand abortion rights for all.

Roe v. Wade: A Sabotaged Victory Like all achievements for the working class under capitalism, the right to an abortion in the U.S. was not granted through the generosity of the rich and powerful. Rather,

Clashes against the capitalist class across the world opened a vein of radical ideas and strategies for working and oppressed people everywhere, including feminists in the U.S. The upsurge in the women’s movement was reflected in the rapid growth of mainstream organizations such as National Organization for Women (NOW) and radical groups inspired by black, anti-colonial, and socialist movements.

A battery of militant action grew from this chasmic well of societal struggle. Strikes, marches, speakouts, and occupations became the bread and butter of the women’s liberation movement and the fight for national abortion rights. The National Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970 saw 100,000 women gather across the country to demand free abortion, equal opportunity in employment and education, and free childcare in what was the largest women’s liberation protest in U.S. history.

Activists and working women finally won a major victory in 1973 when, after legal

WOMEN’S RIGHTS the next step to fight Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Although abortion was technically legal for 50 years, it was never really a right.

Victories won by movements under capitalism will always be rolled back if they aren’t pushed forward, and Roe was no exception. There remained a need to escalate the struggle to win free, safe, and legal abortion access for all, as well as other critical demands raised by the radical wing of the movement, like universal childcare.

Instead, since 1973, the pro-life rightwing has organized and steadily chipped away at abortion access until they extinguished it outright. In the meantime, the conspicuous absence of a strong people-powered movement organizing to defend reproductive rights left leadership in the hands of NGOs and the impotent Democratic Party machine. Under these circumstances, the devastating defeat of the Dobbs decision was never just a possibility, but an inevitability.

It’s Not Over Til It’s Over The repeal of Roe is a heavy blow to millions of poor and working women who face a patchwork landscape of legality on top of already prohibitive costs. Yet, a basis for restoring the protections that Roe provided – and waging a battle that goes beyond its limited framework – is absolutely present in society.

A September 2022 poll showed that a significant majority of Americans see Roe’s death as a serious loss of rights for women.

Even in a variety of Republican-dominated states, most people want some or most abortion rights to remain legal, and the results of state referenda post-Dobbs reflect this broad support. In August 2022, for example, Kansans showed up at the polls in record numbers to defeat a ballot measure that would have struck down abortion as a statewide constitutional right. Three months later, people in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont voted on midterm ballot initiatives to protect abortion in a sharp rebuke to the Supreme Court’s undemocratic

Kshama Sawant succeeded in making Seattle the first abortion sanctuary city in the country since Roe’s demise. Feminists in Madison, Wisconsin – also led by Socialist Alternative – followed suit by mobilizing a grassroots campaign of walk-outs, protests, rallies, and sit-ins to pressure Dane County to protect those seeking abortions.

Ordinary people’s fear of further right-wing attacks on bodily autonomy delivered the Democrats a victory in the November midterms. That said, buoyed by voters driven to the polls to protect abortion rights, it still took Biden less than a week after the midterms to walk back his commitment to codify Roe. “I don’t think [Americans] can expect much of anything,” he said at a November 2022 press conference, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

We Need Fighting Organizations 50 years ago, the U.S. feminist movement overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to win the decision on Roe v.

Wade. Years of grassroots organizing involving millions of working class and oppressed people were needed to tip the scales against a conservative Supreme Court, Nixon administration, and societal misogyny. Workers and youth from all corners of the country held discussions which gave way to strategizing, coordinated action, and escalation with clear demands. Those who sought a future for women’s liberation joined up to fight the fundamentally rotten political establishment – and won.

Today, that establishment is not just pretending to work for ordinary people, but is actively undergoing an emboldened rightwing resurgence. To fight intensifying attacks on women and reclaim and expand the protections afforded by Roe, we need new women’s organizations independent of the corporate two-party system that will unequivocally go to war against all forms of oppression.

These organizations will need to put forward bold demands on reproductive rights that go beyond those of the 1960s and 70s, and beyond the spineless apologies of the Democrats. J

50 YEARS ON FROM ROE, WE (STILL) NEED: Photos from The National Women’s Strike for Equality – Aug. 1970

nothing short of a titanic women’s liberation movement was needed to force the hand of the political establishment under threat of explosive backlash.

The feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s was framed by a whole cascade of social upheavals both nationally and internationally.

In the United States, this took the form of historic mobilizations like the anti-Vietnam War movement and the militant struggles of black activists in the Civil Rights movement.

DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

strategizing by NOW and other reproductive rights groups, the Supreme Court issued its decision on Roe v. Wade. While significant, Roe was not a comprehensive success by any means. The decision protected a pregnant person’s right to terminate only in the first trimester, and did nothing to address the issue of abortion access, which has remained out of reach for many for as long as the practice has existed. The popular demand for free childcare was never realized either, as movement leaders failed to take the movement to

ruling. These outcomes, like the historic 2018 referendum in Ireland, express the vast gulf in interests that exists between capitalist state institutions and the masses.

Over the summer, working people led by the City Council office of Socialist Alternative member

Free, safe, and legal abortion as an inalienable right Free universal childcare Medicare for All with full coverage for reproductive care Affordable housing for all Fully funded public education 7

HOW TO WIN JAMES GRAHAM, PITTSBURGH Organizing a union is a huge achievement and one that doesn’t come easy. If you have gone through it, you probably had to overcome all sorts of vicious union-busting from your bosses to get there: lies about what a union is; captive audience meetings; intimidation and manipulation of you and your co-workers; and outright retaliation like cutting hours; closing stores; or firing.

If you organized a campaign that was able to withstand all that and win a union election, you probably had concrete demands that you and your organizing committee democratically agreed were important and then talked to your co-workers about, explaining how the union is a tool to fight for those. Now you have to fight for a strong contract which puts into writing the things that you wanted to see changed in your workplace in the first place.

This is a much tougher stage of the campaign than winning the union election itself, but all the same principles apply: having high-profile, concrete demands, a solid organizing committee and elected leadership of committed workers, and democratic discussion and decision-making on all aspects of the union.

According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), employers are legally required to “bargain in good faith” with a certified union.

However, there’s the law and then there’s the reality. Employers use every tool at their disposal to stall negotiations and gum up the process. This can begin well before negotiations start, as the results of union elections can be appealed and the certification process delayed – as has been the case at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

None of this is solely a question

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of bosses and big corporations being bad or finding loopholes in the law – the law itself is written and applied in a way which is completely lopsided towards their interests. That’s because the government, the state, and the courts are not “neutral” institutions but exist to defend the wealth and power of the capitalist class that set up those institutions in the first place.

On top of the power of the bosses leveraged against you, the tactics and strategy that most of today’s union leaders use to organize unions and negotiate contracts are quite weak. It takes an average of 465 days for a union’s first contract to be negotiated. Multiple years is not at all uncommon, and some unions never get there at all.

Building a powerful union and winning a strong contract means taking a class struggle approach to organizing. Such an approach recognizes that anything workers gain comes at the expense of the bosses, and vice versa. A class struggle approach, by contrast, is unafraid to engage in the kinds of bottom-up, militant tactics that built the unions into such a powerful force in the first half of the 20th century, and will be necessary to rebuild them today. Nothing short of that will be strong enough to take on the bosses and the power of the entire capitalist class they represent and win.

BUILDING POWER OUTSIDE THE BARGAINING ROOM The bosses’ power comes from their wealth and control over the workplace and political institutions.

Our power as workers comes from the fact that we are the ones who make that wealth and profit for them through the work we do on the job.

That’s why winning a strong contract

Amazon workers and community supporters rally on Staten Island to support the newly-formed Amazon Labor Union in April.

that eats into their profits and gives workers substantially better wages, benefits, and working conditions means building power outside of the bargaining room, and almost always requires strike action, or at least the threat of it.

It will never be enough to simply have “a seat at the table” in the bargaining room when the table itself wasn’t built by or for workers. Bosses care above all else about their profits and control, so there’s no amount of appealing to their good sense of morality through clever wordplay or legal maneuvers that will succeed.

Strong contracts aren’t “negotiated” so much as imposed on the bosses against their will.

THE BARGAINING COMMITTEE Power inside the bargaining room comes from power outside of it, but you still need a team inside, the Bargaining Committee (BC). The BC be made up of strong, serious, trustworthy workers who are able to withstand the immense pressure they will come under from hotshot lawyers, intimidating bosses, and sometimes even government officials. If you are working with an existing union, there can also be pressure from the upper leadership of that union to accept something less than what workers themselves are willing to fight for.

There will be pressure to adapt to the “official” bargaining process, even though this process is fundamentally disempowering to workers.

The Bargaining Committee needs to be elected in a fully democratic process open to all workers in the union, not appointed by the upper leadership of the local or national union. They need to be fully accountable to the workers and should see their role as being the representatives of the workers and directly

There’s the law and then there’s the reality: employers use every tool at their disposal to stall negotiations and gum up the process.

accountable to them in the bargaining room.

First and foremost, that means that the demands of the workers are the demands in the bargaining room – if the workers have democratically agreed on $30 an hour as what they want for a starting wage, then it shouldn’t be $25 that the BC proposes. If the proposal changes, that needs to be a decision made in a meeting of all workers.

OPEN VS. CLOSED BARGAINING All of this is why bargaining is most effective when it is open rather than closed. Most unions today unfortunately use closed bargaining, where it is only the BC in the negotiating room and only its members who know what proposals are being discussed and the language in them.

Unions will even lay down “ground rules” for the BC to enforce this.

The leadership of most of today’s unions have abandoned the perspective of direct confrontation with the employer being the best and quickest way to win real gains for workers, seeing instead “shared interests” between them and the bosses. This means union leaders often tend towards compromise and negotiation, while the system of closed bargaining privileges the “expertise” of union officials, lawyers, and staff over the participation of an active, mobilized base of workers.

Open bargaining by contrast still has an elected BC tasked with communicating with the bosses’ negotiators at the table, but these bargaining sessions are open to any worker to attend and watch. The language of different proposals being discussed during the negotiations is there for all to see, lending the kind of transparency to the process which is crucial for ensuring that the demands S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

workers want to win is reflected in those proposals.

For workers who aren’t able to be in the sessions themselves (which often take place during the work day), there are also regular weekly or even nightly updates depending on the stage of the campaign you’re in.

In these there should be a full update on what’s happened in bargaining, what proposals are on the table, and the opportunity for members to not only discuss and weigh in but to vote on certain critical questions such as major changes to a proposal.

Keeping Up The Pressure Any struggle needs an escalation plan which keeps up the pressure on your opponent and ensures that you keep the momentum you need to win. If you’ve organized a union, you probably have some experience with this already. Again though winning a strong contract is twice as hard and so you’ll have to fight twice as hard.

In addition to the Bargaining Committee, a union should also establish a Contract Action Team (CAT) with representatives on it from across the workforce and including all different locations, shifts, and job categories.

The CAT’s role is to plan and execute the actions and escalation plan.

With escalation you’re also helping workers build the experience and confidence of taking collective action together. This can start with

something as simple as organizing as many workers as possible to all wear a union t-shirt or button together.

That may seem like a small thing, but it can go a long way towards building cohesion and solidarity among workers. That’s essential for being able to pull off something big like a march on the boss or a successful strike or work stoppage, which all require a high level of coordination and discipline.

Protests are an important escalation, where workers mobilize as many of their co-workers as possible alongside other union members and supporters from the wider community to a public location. A protest is also a good tool for engaging the media in order to bring more of a spotlight onto the struggle and use that to build more public pressure on the company. Community support and media attention are not substitutes for a strong campaign on the shopfloor, but they are still important, and in some more public-facing industries like education or nursing can be absolutely make-or-break.

The highest form of escalation is a strike, and it’s effective because when executed correctly, it stops the bosses from making profits.

In recent decades, the labor leaders have largely stopped using the strike weapon, believing being at peace with the boss is the best way to win better conditions. This failed strategy is reflected in the weak contracts that have been passed in many major unions, sometimes

undemocratically over the wishes of the membership like in UPS with the Teamsters in 2018.

Abandoning the strike is a key reason why unions are not as strong as they once were, leading to runaway economic inequality and worsening living standards across the board. In an era where wages aren’t keeping up with inflation and workers are putting in longer hours for less pay and benefits, most workers will be unable to win major gains in a contract, like Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA) or a 30- or 40-hour work week, without going on strike.

When Should You Sign & Agree To A Contract?

A good contract should be an accurate snapshot of the balance of forces in the struggle, it should represent how strong you are versus the bosses. Under normal conditions, and especially in times where workers across society are fighting back more like they are now, a contract generally should include substantial wage increases and improved benefits while also including the full range of issues that workers organized around and may well be unique to that workplace. Contracts can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long and are able to cover literally all aspects of life on the job, so nothing is “too small” to fight to include.

A bad contract is one that’s signed while workers are still willing to fight for more. This doesn’t mean

that more would have automatically been won, but it does often mean that workers never got the chance to try. Too frequently in the labor movement a Bargaining Committee will reach a tentative agreement (TA) with the employer that falls short of what workers want and are willing to fight for, and then the BC will attempt to sell that to the membership as a victory. This is not because members of the BC are bad people or are not genuine, but because they are under immense pressure in the bargaining room. Without open bargaining and an escalation strategy to win, even strong union activists and class fighters can capitulate.

If workers aren’t willing to fight for more, then there’s no point in a small minority trying to push a struggle farther than it can go. Not only would they not win, but it can lead to an even worse defeat along with exhaustion and demoralization.

An orderly retreat, on the other hand, lets workers regroup and fight out another round for the next contract.

This is compromise as a tactic rather than compromise as a principle,

YOUR UNION’S FIRST CONTRACT

the latter meaning that you go into negotiations with the “goal” of you and the employer reaching a happy medium through bargaining down your initial demands.

A union contract represents a ceasefire in the class struggle, and short of ending capitalism itself, will always represent some sort of “compromise” – but trying to achieve compromise off the bat is only a recipe to undercut the demands you and your coworkers formed a union to fight for.

Winning a strong first contract is a major accomplishment and an immense change for the better in the lives of you and your co-workers.

The struggle for one is transformative even beyond the conditions of your immediate workplace, because it teaches people that they have agency and power in the world, and shows them what it means to fight and win. It also inspires other workers around the country, and even the globe, to do the same. J

Starbucks workers in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan went on strike on Red Cup Day in November, alongside over 100 other locations nationwide, to protest Starbucks stalling contract negotiations.

DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

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Tech Corporations In Total Meltdown As Years Of Speculation Collapses

ECONOMY

TONY GONG, BOSTON

DEATH BY MUSK HOW TWIT TER MIGHT FALL TO BILLIONAIRE MISMANAGEMENT

GREYSON VAN ARSDALE, CHICAGO When Tesla owner Elon Musk finalized his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion in October, he celebrated by carrying a porcelain sink with him into the website’s headquarters. He tweeted, “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”

But dreadful 2011-era jokes are the least of Musk’s transgressions. Since his takeover, Elon Musk has fired well over 4,000 of Twitter’s previously 7,500 employees – some in layoffs, others one-by-one as Musk purges workers who criticize his decisions.

Completely unshockingly, a myriad of problems have flowed from this. Twitter users have reported in past weeks that many key systems are now hampered or nonfunctional, like twofactor authentication, hacked account retrieval, and downloads.

While Twitter’s most essential problems pre-date Musk’s purchase of the platform, the billionaire’s acquisition of the company has accelerated them drastically. The very public incompetence of Musk, who is currently ranked as the richest man in the world, has put frontand-center how little billionaires are actually good for.

Downturn Into Nosedive Anyone keeping track of Elon Musk’s business decisions could draw the conclusion that the man would have problems competently running a lemonade stand, let alone one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

Musk’s $44 billion offer overvalued Twitter by at least 38%, and his attempts to pull his poor investment out of its downward trajectory have been characteristically destructive. Within days of his takeover, he announced plans to make “official” accounts (those marked with a blue check mark) cost $20/month to maintain. After a public exchange with famous horror author Stephen King, that got knocked down to $8/month. “Twitter Blue” was subsequently rolled out, with the promise that anyone could buy the image of officialdom for less than the price of a Netflix subscription.

This went … poorly.

For a few days on Twitter, any person could

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pay $8 to impersonate a major brand or celebrity, official check-mark included. This led to a few high-profile embarrassments for big business, including a real-looking tweet from an account impersonating pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly claiming they were making insulin free.

Eli Lilly’s stock dropped 6% that day, and they pulled all their advertising from Twitter. Since Musk’s takeover, Twitter has reportedly lost half of their advertisers, including giants like General Mills, Chevrolet, Chipotle, Ford, Jeep, and Merck.

At the same time, Musk has ushered a return of right-wing figures to the platform, reinstating Donald Trump’s Twitter account (which was removed following the January 6 insurrection) alongside other right-wing figures that were temporarily suspended, like Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. That has been accompanied by a purge of some journalists who monitor farright activity. Besides emboldening the reactionary right, this has also further accelerated the flight of advertisers and some high-profile users from Twitter, because (at least for now) they see association with the reactionary right as a threat to credibility and profits.

Is Twitter Going To Die? In recent days, some major celebrities and influencers have abandoned Twitter or started looking for alternatives. Actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted on December 9 that he was looking for other sites to connect with his fanbase, linking his Tumblr in the thread below.

This is the specter of a problem that could actually kill Twitter. Even before Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s most active users were in “absolute decline” in use of the platform, and interest was flagging in subjects that have previously defined the platform, like sports and entertainment. The appeal of Twitter, for many, is the ability to get quick status updates from actors, artists, sports teams, politicians, and news sources. If these “official” accounts jump ship – though no genuine Twitter alternative really exists yet – millions of smaller accounts could go with them.

Right now, this doesn’t seem like the most likely scenario. But what could drive such an

After years of skyrocketing valuations, tech giants are crashing. Apple started the year with a market capitalization of $3 trillion, larger than the UK’s annual GDP. Today, the company is worth 20% less. Amazon saw its stock drop 50%, and became the firstever company to lose a trillion dollars in value.

Facebook stock is down 65% year-to-date, and it axed 11,000 jobs. Microsoft, Netflix, and Google have all lost significant stock value this year and have cut staff or frozen hiring.

Why is tech falling so hard and fast? For years, many tech companies hid weak profits and lack of innovation behind a veil of hype and market speculation. What was sold as “tech” was actually a digital facade over human labor, and what was exploited wasn’t groundbreaking technology but workers who had no other options.

For example, Uber makes its money by underpaying drivers, busting unions, and violating taxi regulations. Uber’s “innovative” app simply calls a human to drive a car around – the same thing taxi companies had done for decades. Uber’s real advantage lies in its powerful investors, who pay for Uber to subsidize every ride to undercut traditional taxis. That’s why despite heavily exploiting workers, Uber has never made a profit, losing an astounding $32 billion.

Uber’s story is typical of the post-2008 tech boom. After the Great Recession killed profitable avenues for real investment, the Federal Reserve launched “easy money” policies to restart investing. Flush with cash but desperate for returns, rich investors started speculating on tech. Their strategy was to either “flip” tech companies through hypefueled acquisitions or monopolize existing markets by introducing tech products and then massively subsidizing it.

This frenzy poured $330 billion into U.S. startups in 2021 alone, and a cumulative $3.85 trillion into “unicorns” (startups worth over $1 billion) globally. The technology developed this way was not economically useful: U.S. labor productivity only grew 0.8% per year from 2010-2018. Marxists know that labor time determines the market value of goods and services, so without exodus is an acceleration of the technical problems that are beginning to creep around the edges of Twitter.

Surface-level functions of the platform are currently working fine for most users, but Musk bringing Twitter staffing down to bare-bones level could make it very vulnerable. If glitches become too frequent, it could frustrate users and cause them to seek alternatives, even if those alternatives aren’t perfect replications of the service that Twitter provides. That would likely snowball – a minor exodus from the platform would become a much bigger one as users start to perceive their Twitter timelines as a ghost town with nothing worth reading.

The Truth About Information Infrastructure Advertising is a big deal to free-to-use social media platforms like Twitter, as it’s one of the only ways they can make money. But even with advertising money, Twitter has posted yearly losses for eight of the last ten years.

This gets to the heart of a truth about social media sites: while they’re for-profit companies that are often publicly-traded, the services they provide are much more akin to a public utility, which is why capitalists have always struggled to make them profitable. They’re generally free to

improving productivity, these tech companies could not justify their valuation even on a capitalist basis. Now that the Fed is raising interests and ending quantitative easing, the era of “easy money” is over and investors are demanding real profit growth. Unable to deliver, tech has been crashing hard. Total U.S. venture capital funding fell 55% from the previous year and tech companies laid off over 140,000 tech workers this year alone.

Tech has become a major flashpoint in the New Cold War between the U.S. and China. As the two economies decouple, many goods are getting more expensive. Amazon saw the cost of its goods, mostly imports, inflate by 12%. This year it cut 10,000 tech workers and shuttered 10% of its warehouse space, and is looking to end bad gambles like Alexa, Jeff Bezos’s pet project, which is on track to lose $10 billion this year. Apple iPhones undersold, especially in Europe and China, because ordinary people battered by inflation can’t afford $800 phones.

Adding to Apple’s woes, it faces a shortfall of 15-20 million devices because Chinese workers at Foxconn, an Apple subcontractor, went on a heroic strike over unpaid bonuses.

High inflation has also impacted Facebook and Google, as advertisers withdraw spending in the face of declining demand.

This crisis is not limited to tech. The collapsing speculation at the root of the tech meltdown is likely to contaminate other parts of the economy. The world economy is already in a downturn.

Workers did not cause this crisis. At root it reflects the inability of an increasingly parasitic to really develop the economy in a balanced way. The solutions to previous crises in 2008-9 and 2020 have only created new problems exacerbated by bad gambles and speculation by the capitalist class. Tech workers need a union to keep good jobs and ensure just working conditions. This is not a pipe dream: workers in traditionally “unorganizable” industries, like Amazon warehouse workers or Starbucks workers, are organizing.

To ultimately end the madness of speculation and waste that triggered the tech crisis, we need a socialist transformation of society that rationally plans investment and production, and places them in the hands of workers. J use, they provide instantaneous long-distance communication, and attempts to monetize them only hamper their ability to be used effectively. (Looking at you, ad-riddled Facebook.)

Twitter in particular has become a home not just for TIME Magazine but for local and state governments to post frequent updates that would clog up their home sites. Currently, Twitter is the best place to go to find status updates about road and school closures, regional weather emergencies, and traffic accidents. Twitter is an example of “information infrastructure” – if it were to completely fall to ruin, it could be at least temporarily disastrous for how people get critical, timely information.

Important public services like Twitter can’t be held in the hands of people like Elon Musk.

If Twitter does survive, it will be because workers at the company figure out a way to manage his narcissistic whims and point him away from bad decisions – which will pull those workers away from the actual task of making the site run.

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and connected services like WhatsApp (which has two billion users in 180 countries) should be publicly-owned and run democratically by the workers who build and maintain them. All of the energy and time workers spend under capitalism catering to the whims of narcissistic bosses like Elon Musk is time wasted. J S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

ECONOMY

HOW WORKING PEOPLE CAN FIGHT BACK AGAINST INFLATION KAILYN NICHOLSON, SEATTLE

Not only are working people in the U.S. and around the world struggling to keep up with outof-control inflation, but the third major global recession in 15 years appears to be just around the corner. The solutions offered by politicians and economists, such as raising interest rates, curbing wage growth, and cutting public spending, all require the burden of “fixing” the economy to be borne by those least responsible for causing the crisis, and least able to afford it – ordinary working people.

Is it true that our only choices are unmitigated inflation or brutal austerity and belttightening? No. This is a lie designed to protect the rich and powerful whose relentless drive to maximize profits at all costs is the real root cause of the instability now threatening the entire global economy.

Rather than passively accept the growing gap between our stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs of living, working people can and must put our own stamp on the processes shaping the economy. By getting organized in our workplaces and communities, we can have the power to win what they want us to believe is impossible: greater stability for ourselves and our neighbors now while building the forces to fight for a more prosperous future, free from capitalism’s brutal loop of booms and busts.

Raise Wages Contrary to what many economists and politicians claim, wage growth is not a main driver of inflation. In reality, wages in the U.S. haven’t even come close to keeping up with productivity growth for decades. Inflation is a completely predictable result of the breakdown in global supply chains resulting from increased competition and geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, combined with “easy money” policies designed to keep financial markets afloat.

When Socialist Alternative began campaigning for a $15/hr minimum wage in Seattle and Minneapolis in 2015, news outlets exploded with dire warnings that such a “dramatic” wage increase would cause an inflationary crisis that would reverse any benefits working people would experience from getting a raise.

But despite victories by the “15 Now” campaign in both cities, no such crises emerged.

Instead, tens of thousands of low-wage workers were lifted out of poverty, and the upward pressure caused wages to rise for middle-income households as well. Inflation rates stayed consistent with pre-existing trends, but for the first time in a long time, a limit was placed on super-exploitation.

The unionization waves rippling through the service and logistics sectors over the past year show how the power to fight for higher wages on a mass scale can be built. Amazon workers across the country are raising the demand of DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

a $30/hr starting wage as a central motivation of their efforts to form unions. With rent, gas, and grocery bills climbing each month, this demand is sure to resonate with a broad layer of workers. But Amazon has already launched a brutal unionbusting campaign, proving that workers will need to be prepared to back up their demands with strike action if they hope to win.

Due to the universal pressure inflation is putting on workers, similar struggles are taking place across the country and in a variety of workplaces. In Minneapolis, bus drivers in the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) are demanding that their wages be tied to cost of living increases (COLA), so that future inflation can’t erase whatever raise they manage to win this year.

Members of the Union of Academic Workers (UAW) in the University of California system recently went on strike with the same demand. While they didn’t win their full demand of COLA+1, they were able to get their raises tied to broader price increases which is an important victory.

Control Housing Costs The rapidly rising cost of housing is a symptom of rampant speculation by wealthy investors, but it’s ordinary renters and homeowners who are forced to swallow the costs.

The most immediate way to reduce the burden of this crisis on working people is to stabilize prices by implementing broad, comprehensive rent control.

Despite aggressive misinformation campaigns by big developers and their political supporters, rent control has been incredibly effective at stabilizing housing prices for ordinary people as long as it isn’t undermined by gaping loopholes.

As part of a broad struggle for housing reform, workers need to fight for strong tenant protections, including protection against economic eviction. Socialist Alternative campaigned for this demand in Seattle where we have an elected City Councilmember, Kshama Sawant, and after years of grassroots mobilization our movement was able to win six months notice for all rent increases. Additionally, any increases over 10% require the landlord to provide tenants with the equivalent of three months’ rent to assist them in relocating.

Another key tenant protection that working people can fight for are caps on utility bills.

This is especially important in places where energy usage – and therefore bills – fluctuate a lot due to intense seasonal changes. Particularly harsh winters or heat waves can cause spikes in energy demand, which drive up prices at the precise moment when cutting

back on usage can be life-threatening.

This fight is one that can be directed at landlords, requiring that they cover any utility costs beyond the cap through rent reductions, and also at the major utility companies who rake in unbelievable profits while squeezing working people dry. Beyond capping prices, this points towards the need to take utilities into democratic public ownership so the supply and price of basic necessities like energy and water can be determined by human need, not private greed.

Free Healthcare, Education, & Social Programs Decades of neoliberal austerity has left the U.S. working class with extraordinarily starved public services (if they exist at all).

The U.S. is the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare as a right, meaning massive chunks of our paychecks wind up going toward medical bills that could otherwise be covered by a universal, public healthcare system.

We need to fight at the local, state, and federal level for major taxes on the rich and corporations to fund a dramatic expansion of public services. This includes fighting for an immediate transition to a Medicare for All healthcare system, funded by taxing the super rich

and expropriating the massive wealth of the for-profit health insurance companies. It also includes fully funding public schools, establishing free and universal childcare, instituting generous sick and parental leave, guaranteeing free public college, and expanding and upgrading public transit.

A recent example of the kind of struggle that can win demands like these comes – again – from Seattle, where socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant led the successful fight to tax Amazon to the tune of $210-240 million a year to create tens of thousands of green union jobs by building permanently affordable social housing.

Get Organized, Strike Back!

All of these solutions share a common requirement – ordinary working people getting organized to fight for our own interests against the bosses and billionaires. The breaking of the railroad strike is the latest evidence that Democrats as well as Republicans are a key obstacle to workers organizing and fighting for our own interests.

Raising interest rates to drive more people out of work while denying workers the right to fight for higher wages demonstrates that a new independent party based on the power of organized labor and social movements is urgently necessary.

But we don’t need to wait for a new party to start getting organized in our workplaces, schools, and apartment buildings to fight for these demands right now. In fact, this kind

continued on p.14

FROM seattle to chicago:

TAX AMAZON! Socialists in Chicago is are organizing a campaign to tax the rich to fund affordable housing, healthcare and education!

Socialist Alternative in Chicago is spearheading this campaign, inspired by the successful organizing efforts in Seattle that have taxed big business over $200 million a year to fund affordable housing.

Since 2021, we have been organizing working people in support of a citywide ordinance that would tax big corporations like Amazon to fund the things working people need.

This month, independent socialist alderman, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, will be introducing a Tax Amazon ordinance to the Chicago City Council for a vote.

We have no illusions in the Democratic Party dominated city council or the corporate mayor Lori Lightfoot to take up this proposal. In fact, a majority of the city council boycotted the reading of the far more modest “Bring Chicago Home” ordinance in November.

This is the same city council that just voted to allocate an additional nearly $100 million to the already bloated $2 billion Chicago Police Department budget.

We refuse to ask politely for crumbs from the capitalist class or from their corporate controlled politicians. Victory will only be possible through the building of a strong movement.

If you’re in the Chicago area, we encourage you to get involved! J

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LGBTQ RIGHTS MAX NOLAN, BALTIMORE On Trans Day of Remembrance in November, news of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs devastated queer and trans people and our loved ones around the country and the world.

In the years since the last mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida in 2016, LGBTQ rights have been increasingly under attack in state legislatures and in the media. 2022 was a record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ legislation despite massive outrage against bills like “Don’t Say Gay” in Florida and the attacks on families with transgender children in Texas.

Transphobic attacks in the media are not limited to the traditionally right-wing news outlets and political pundits. The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Atlantic have all published opinion pieces this year challenging trans peoples’ participation in sports or genderaffirming care for transgender youth.

As the right-wing political establishment and media personalities like Tucker Carlson spread lies about LGBTQ “groomers,” Hillary Clinton announced this summer that transgender rights should not be a priority for the Democrats. The Biden administration also recently allowed a mandate prohibiting religious hospitals and doctors from denying patients gender-affirming care to be defeated in court without an appeal.

The connection between the ramping up of transphobic attacks in the media and legislatures and the mass shooting at Club Q is undeniable. The shooting in Colorado and the intimidation tactics of the far right this year have trans and queer people asking serious and extremely difficult questions about how we can protect ourselves from the reactionary right.

Mourners attend a vigil near Club Q in Colorado Springs

DEFENDING THE QUEER COMMUNITY

AGAINST RIGHT-WING VIOLENCE

show of force doesn’t address the real reason the reactionary right is growing, and runs the risk of backfiring by alienating everyday people who may already be skeptical of the trans rights struggle due to widespread rightwing propaganda.

So what type of action do we need to respond to the increased threats against LGBTQ individuals, businesses, and community centers?

In Columbus, OH, these threats from the far right led to the cancellation of a drag How Can We Stop The Attacks? queen storytime event, though dozens of community members still came out to counAt Club Q, the shooter was stopped by ter protest the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, two club patrons, one military veteran and demonstrating their staunch commitment one trans woman, who responded quickly to to defending queer and trans people from the violence and rendered reactionary violence. the shooter unconscious.

These counter-demonRightly, some have constrations, while still very trasted the rapid (and The right wing has seized small, are an indication non-fatal) actions of these on the crises facing of the solidarity and colindividuals to the actions lective action that will working people, using of the police during the be necessary to turn the Uvalde school shooting it as an opportunity to tide against the right earlier this year – wherein wing. over 370 cops stood by as point the blame at trans Some five years children were massacred. ago, when Trump had people and anyone or The heroic actions of recently been elected the Club Q patrons have anything except the and anti-trans bathbeen deservedly lionized room bills were being rotten capitalist system. by ordinary people. Once proposed in states violence breaks out, it’s across the country, farexactly this type of bravery right and even explicitly and quick thinking that becomes necessary. fascist forces were publicly organizing in a Though a larger question still looms over the similar way to today. Their organizing reached queer community in the wake of this shoot- a fever pitch at the “Unite the Right” rally ing: how do we disrupt the momentum of in Charleston, WV, where white supremacists the right wing in order to prevent attacks like marched through the streets, attacking counthese in the future? ter protestors and even killing anti-fascist An already-existing mood of fear among activist Heather Heyer. Ordinary people were LGBTQ people has deepened due to the Club horrified by what they saw, and in Boston Q shooting. In this context, it is understand- in August of 2017 a group of working-class able that a few people, afraid for their safety, Black women organized a march of 40,000 have attempted to take matters into their people against a reactionary “free speech” own hands, including a small, heavily armed, demonstration. The far-right was completely pro-LGBTQ presence outside a drag event in dwarfed by the sea of people who came out Texas this summer. But this type of isolated

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to demonstrate their intolerance for reactionary violence.

This scale of mobilization is the key to undermining attacks on trans and queer people. Though recent counter-demonstrations have been small, they have shown the effectiveness of strength in numbers and solidarity. Right-wing protesters who made threats against a drag show in early December in Aurora, IL never showed up after community members and LGBTQ activists turned out in support, and right-wing protesters were outnumbered at a Jewish Community Center in Oceanside, NY in the same weekend.

The broad right-wing, right-populist politicians and far-right groups alike, are banking on low public support for trans rights as a means of propping up their attacks. A coordinated nationwide day of protests in solidarity with queer and trans people could have a major effect in undermining their confidence, demonstrating the broad section of society that’s prepared to go to the mat for queer and trans rights.

Schools continue to be a key battleground for the war on trans rights, and because of that school communities can provide a model of what a real fight back can look like.

In instances where school districts, or even individual schools, are being targeted by transphobic attacks, student organizations, teachers’ unions, local LGBTQ organizations, and progressive groups can urgently organize protests and walkouts. Teachers can refuse to comply with reactionary antitrans mandates, like Greg Abbott’s order that teachers report the parents of trans students to the authorities as “child abusers.” They can use the structures of their union (if they have one) to support student organizing, like opening up union halls to student organizations to meet and prepare walkouts. There are already inspiring examples of school communities resisting reactionary attacks. In Virginia this fall, over 1,000 middle and high school students staged a walkout in protest of antitrans policies.

There have been student walkouts in protest of anti-LGBTQ legislation and school policies all over the country this year, including Florida, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New York, and Colorado. In order to turn the tide against the right wing, all of these smaller protests must be linked through a nation-wide struggle for queer and trans rights. New organizations of workers, students, and oppressed people must coordinate escalating actions around the country and allow for serious, democratic debate about demands and next steps for the movement.

Defeat Right Wing Ideas, Take Aim At Capitalism!

While the cost of everyday goods continues to climb, there’s still been no increase to the minimum wage, no student debt relief, and nearly half of Americans cannot afford basic medical care. More than one in five households are food insecure. Meanwhile the Biden administration has failed to make good on any promise to working class people, while delivering on every promise to big business.

The right wing has seized on the crises facing working people, using it as an opportunity to point the blame at trans people, immigrants, people of color, feminists, and anyone or anything except the rotten capitalist system.

Things are continuing to get worse for working people, and without a powerful working-class movement, based on solidarity and common struggle, the divide-and-rule rhetoric of the right will gain more of a foothold.

The only way out is a mass movement of working and young people independent from the Democrats, prepared to organize against any attack on oppressed groups in our society. Crucially this movement must fight not only for queer and trans rights, or against racism, but for a bold economic program to address the declining standard of living that causes people to look to the right for answers. J S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

QATAR WORLD CUP

WORLD EVENTS

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE (ISA)

An earlier version of this article was published on internationalsocialist.net.

Despite the attempts of oligarchs, dictators, and billionaire owners of soccer clubs to say through their well-oiled PR machines “keep politics out of sports,” soccer has never been more political. Fans pushed back and organized against the Qatar World Cup and the ownership of clubs by bloody dictatorships like Saudi Arabia.

On November 20, the 2022 FIFA World Cup kicked off on the “fields of the dead” in Qatar. More than 6,500 migrant workers died building the infrastructure for the tournament. The real figure is much higher.

Qatar is a dictatorship where there is a systematic violation of workers’ human rights.

Workers preparing the World Cup were forced to sleep on the floor on bed-bug infested mattresses, work in the scorching heat, and were severely underpaid. Due to the Kafala system in Qatar, migrant workers are the “property” of a “sponsor” which means basic work regulations do not apply to them. The Kafala system is seen as a form of modern slavery. Although Qatar has announced that the system has been abolished and that working conditions have improved, Amnesty International reported that some of these reforms are being rolled back.

The hashtags #BoycottQatar and #CancelQatar trended all over the world. In the Netherlands, France, and Germany, fan campaigns called for a boycott of the World Cup,

German players cover their mouths at the World Cup to protest FIFA. and banners condemning the exploitation of workers and the lack of rights for women and gay people in Qatar were unfurled at club matches.

In Brussels, cafés Maison du Peuple and Brasserie de l’Union in Sint-Gillis announced that they will not broadcast the Qatar World Cup in their cafés. Numerous Brussels municipalities are not erecting big screens for the tournament, as they disagree with the “unethical conditions” surrounding the World Cup.

Protesting An Anti-Queer Regime In the UK, LGBTQ pubs in Leeds and Birmingham have announced they will boycott the tournament and will not be showing the games. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, where same-sex relationships can be punishable by death.

Qatar World Cup ambassador Khalid Salman referred to homosexuality as “damage in the mind” and added that LGBTQ people attending the tournament should “accept our rules.” This has enraged LGBTQ soccer fans.

Seven European teams competing in the World Cup originally planned for their team captains to wear rainbow armbands to show support for LGBTQ people. FIFA intervened quickly, promising a “yellow card” for unauthorized armbands. Two yellow cards result in a player’s dismissal from the field. The threat worked; no captains wore rainbow armbands.

Most recently, renowned soccer journalist Grant Wahl was detained by Qatari officials for wearing a gay pride shirt during the Argentina versus Netherlands game. Wahl subsequently collapsed and was pronounced dead – Wahl’s brother has publicly said that he suspects Grant was killed.

A Corrupt Sports Industry Banned pro-LGBTQ rights armband that was sanctioned by FIFA. DECEMBER/JANUARY 202 2-2023

In May, several human rights’ groups called on FIFA to set aside $440 million to compensate migrant workers in Qatar for human rights abuses. Polls indicate that big majorities of fans of all the countries in the

World Cup support this. The soccer associations of England, Germany, France, Netherlands, and the U.S. have also supported the move. Unsurprisingly, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has refused to commit to the compensation plan.

This is no surprise, as there is proven bribery and corruption surrounding the original Qatar bid in 2010. Qatar officials have been charged with buying votes and several FIFA members have been fired for taking bribes.

Most of the FIFA executives who were in the room when the Qatar bid was announced in 2010 have been given or are currently serving sentences and soccer bans for corruption.

Michel Platini, who was then the President of UEFA, has completed a four-year ban from soccer. Jack Warner was a FIFA Executive Committee member and is now banned from soccer for life and is facing extradition from Trinidad to the United States for criminal prosecution.

Sportswashing Can’t Hide The Rot The Qatar World Cup is a clear and blatant form of “sportswashing,” the practice of spending billions on sports to obscure corruption and human rights abuses. Examples of this are Russia’s corrupt purchasing of the 2018 World Cup and the Iranian regime paying fans to attend Iranian games in the World Cup this year to distract from the feminist movement at home.

In the Middle East there is a soccer and sports “arms race” as various dictatorships use the popular events to scramble for influence. Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi took over Manchester City in 2008, and Qatar Sports Investments bought a 70% stake in Paris Saint-Germain in 2011.

The Saudi state could not allow their regional rivals to get the jump on them, so they bought Newcastle United Football Club (NUFC) on October 7, 2021. The acquisition of the club is part of the Saudi state’s “Vision 2030” which they officially claim is “diversifying the nation’s economy away from its fossil fuel reserves and opening the nation’s

culture to the world.”

The regime has spent $1.5 billion to host numerous sporting events, from matches like the Spanish Super Cup to horse races, worldheavyweight title boxing matches, and motorsports, including most recently Formula 1.

The kingdom is spending big on securing the rights to host these prestigious events. The jewel in the crown is the ownership of a Premiership soccer club. The ownership enables the dictators to portray a “modern, forward looking” country. They hope, especially if NUFC can win some cups, that people will look away from their crimes and many human rights abuses.

Unlike at Manchester City and PSG, there has been a small but determined group of NUFC fans who have refused to accept the takeover of their club as an accomplished fact.

NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing was set up at the time of the takeover, and has held meetings on the Saudi’s war on Yemen.

The Saudi state uses UK-supplied weapons and technology to cause a living hell for Yemeni people. Over 23 million people are in need of assistance, including almost 13 million children.

The billionaires, oligarchs, and dictators who use a sport that billions of people enjoy as a tool for exploitation and endless profits like to pump out the narrative that “fans are powerless” and we just have to accept the world the way it is. The same argument is put upon workers and oppressed people around the world. But soccer fans are rejecting this pessimistic perspective.

In the U.S., the Yates Report exposed the systematic coverups of bullying and abuse by wealthy team owners in professional women’s soccer. Now, many players and fans are questioning whether private ownership has any place in the future of sports.

The World Cup is exposing the Qatari dictatorship and no amount of sportswashing can hide the crimes of authoritarian regimes.

The game is on. J

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WORLD EVENTS

Protests (Mostly) Suppressed In China But Continue Abroad ELAN AXELBANK, INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE (ISA) In late November, China was hit with an unprecedented wave of mass protests in around 20 cities and more than 80 universities. The protests have thrown Xi Jinping’s regime into a state of near panic. For the time being, the Chinese dictatorship (CCP) and its security state seem to have succeeded in stamping out the protests, but Chinese society will not return to how it was before.

In recent years, small, localized protests against lockdowns, pollution, or corruption were not out of the ordinary in China, though they’ve always been heavily censored. What made the recent wave of protests different is that they were national in scope, and in some cases had political demands for democratic rights and against the dictatorship.

Protesters called for an end to national policies such as “zero-COVID,” they demanded freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and chants against Xi Jinping and the so-called Communist Party featured in Shanghai and on universities. The airing of such slogans in public has not been heard since the mass movement of 1989. This counts as “subversion of the state” and is punishable by many years in prison.

The downturn in protests, which very well may only be temporary, is partly due to state repression, but also because the working class in China is prevented from organizing in every way by the vicious police state and the ban on trade unions. Therefore all struggles tend to be convulsive, spontaneous, and unplanned.

Strikes in China are rarely organized; more often they “happen” when the brutalization and cheating of workers reaches a breaking point.

The stopping of protests is not universal, however, as recent days have seen multiple migrant worker protests in Guangdong and a protest at Nanjing University. The students in Nanjing protested after the lockdown was lifted at their campus, only to be suddenly reimposed a few days later. This is a process likely to be repeated all over China in the coming months. It is not a question of if the protests will reemerge, but when.

What Is Happening To Zero-COVID? Over the weekend, several of China’s largest cities announced an easing of lockdown policies. In some cities, the requirement to present a negative PCR test in order to travel on public transport was scrapped, and in Beijing some apartment complexes indicated residents could quarantine at home instead of the centralized camps (fangcang) which are often described as worse than prison.

It’s notable that Xi Xinping himself has not made any statements regarding zero-COVID or the easing of lockdowns (apart from private comments made to the visiting President of the European Council, Charles Michel), let alone publicly acknowledge that the protests even

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took place. These changes have been delegated to local officials to protect Xi, who cannot be seen as “going back” on his flagship policy of the last three years, but there is no question they have the dictator’s sanction. While the overseas media is painting these moves as a wholesale retreat from zero-COVID, in reality it is partial, though it may deepen.

Far from representing a “softening” of the dictatorship as a whole, what this change indi-

100 days, will be more and more difficult for the state to enforce.

This is why the China/Hong Kong/Taiwan section of International Socialist Alternative (ISA) has called for, beyond just ending zeroCOVID, massive resources to build up and equip the healthcare system, stepping up the vaccination program, especially among the elderly, and immediately ending the ban on foreign mRNA vaccines. The super-profitable pharmaceutical

Protesters march at a rally in Beijing on Nov. 28. cates is simply that for Xi, the spreading of COVID – even the potential for hundreds of thousands, or as some experts have indicated, up to two million deaths – is a lesser evil to the most public display of resistance to the regime in 30 years. This shows just how scared and unconfident the regime is, especially as China heads deeper into an economic crisis.

The easing of zero-COVID now presents a new set of problems for Chinese society, which clearly underline the limits of “reform” of the authoritarian capitalist system and sharply poses the question of full systemic change.

Ordinary people will be immensely relieved to move more freely outside, to ride the subway, to engage in more social activities, though there is also skepticism that announced measures will really be implemented. But with the virus currently surging, the regime relying on vaccines that are less effective than those in the West (which are banned from entering China), extremely low full vaccination rates among seniors, and a major shortage of ICU beds, it is entirely possible that China could be hit by a major wave of COVID deaths in the winter months.

Without a “plan B,” as the highly-contagious Omicron variant spreads, the regime will violently zig-zag, from lockdowns to partial easing, and back to lockdowns. But in the new period opened up by the recent protests, full and longlasting lockdowns like in Urumqi, lasting over

corporations must be taken into democratic public ownership without compensation, and the massive resources of those companies put into the public hospital system.

The Communist Party, in reality the biggest capitalist regime in the world, however, will never make such moves. These changes would pose a fundamental threat to profit maximization and, in the case of the foreign vaccine ban, would be a humiliating admission of national technological weakness for Xi, who needs to stress national greatness as the New Cold War deepens. Dictatorships are never reformed. The CCP must be overthrown and replaced with a democratic socialist system where the working class controls society and democratic rights are guaranteed to all. Serious change is not possible on the basis of capitalism, which in China and many parts of Asia requires an authoritarian system to secure its rule.

Building The Movement Outside China Is Crucial Fighting back against the brutal exploitation and oppression of Chinese capitalism and its “Big Brother” dictatorship within China is extremely difficult and dangerous, to put it mildly. Immediately following the wave of protests during the last weekend of November, the regime sent out mass calls and texts to those

who attended the protests – known from security camera footage and cell phone tracking – saying their identity and attendance of the protests is known to the police and warning them to stay away next time.

Speaking out against the dictatorship is not without danger for Chinese citizens living outside China either. There have been numerous accounts of Chinese students studying overseas attending vigils in solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire and the recent protests, only to have their family in China then visited at home by police. The dictatorship’s advanced surveillance systems and network of spies and agents both within and outside China is absolutely massive, and reports in recent months have only made this more clear. It is a digital totalitarian state, with the most sophisticated surveillance technology in the world (often developed in partnership with U.S. companies).

By definition, a dictatorship needs an intense security state to remain in power.

At many points throughout history, the efforts of socialists and activists living in exile, with the ability to build organizations and more freely write political material which could then be smuggled into their home country, have been central to the toppling of dictatorships.

This was certainly the case with the socialist Russian Revolution, led by Lenin and Trotsky who lived in exile for most of their political lives and, to a slightly lesser extent, the ending of apartheid in South Africa.

In just the last six months a rapid politicization and in some cases radicalization has taken place among Chinese students studying abroad. After Foxconn workers at the largest iPhone factory in the world, fighting back against lockdown, unsafe conditions, and stolen wages kicked off the recent movement, students played a big role in spreading it after the fire in Urumqi. Similarly, the solidarity protests internationally which have taken place over the last week and a half have been driven almost exclusively by Chinese students studying abroad.

International Socialist Alternative are doing everything we can to help develop this movement. This has taken the form of our branches initiating their own protests, like in London, or helping to build protests like in Taipei, New York City, Dublin, Boston, and more. Wherever ISA is present, we contribute to the vitally necessary discussion and debate within the movement about the way forward – what sort of demands, organization, and strategy are necessary to win.

China is the second most populous country in the world, the second largest economy in the world, and ruled by the most powerful dictatorship in the world. Its working class is gargantuan and potentially powerful. The New Cold War between Chinese and U.S. imperialism threatens to escalate all crises in every corner of the world in the coming years, including the threat of widening inter-imperialist military conflict. The building of a genuine socialist movement in China is not an option, but a necessity, for the working class internationally, and therefore ISA sees it as a top priority. 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

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

continued from p.3

amount of “strategic maneuvering” undoes the very simple fact that progressives in Congress signed their names below a bill preventing rail workers from going on strike.

This vote demonstrates that these progressives value the stability of the Democratic Party and the capitalist system they represent over workers’ right to exercise their power by striking. This would disqualify any of them from using the title of “socialist.”

This whole episode has provided a very useful snapshot of the state of the U.S. left.

The big danger in The Squad’s entire approach isn’t just the consequences it concretely has for rail workers, it’s also a preview of the gifts they will likely hand to the right in the coming years based on the logic of their position.

By hiding behind congressional procedure to vote away workers rights, these “progressives” made themselves functionally

indistinguishable from Biden. And who benefits from this? Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley who were able to pose as pro-worker. They provided cover for the Republicans, more of whom cynically voted against crushing the strike than Democrats.

In the coming years we are likely to see an increasingly vicious brand of right-populism come onto the scene, and the progressives in the halls of power are propping this up by failing to provide a left-wing, working-class alternative.

It is not too late to undercut this danger, however. If the unions who currently write blank checks to the Democratic Party instead made a decisive break and called for the formation of a new, working-class political party, it could turn the tide on the growth of the right.

The biggest organization on the U.S. left remains the Democratic Socialists of America

(DSA). The upcoming national 2023 convention will provide an opportunity to take a similar stand – officially severing ties with the Democratic Party and committing to run independent, socialist candidates across the country. Socialist Alternative members will continue to make this case within the DSA and in our unions.

The stakes are enormously high, and a certain reckoning is in store for the U.S. left if it fails to provide a lead. The clearest step that can be taken is to immediately begin the project of building a mass, working-class political party fundamentally rooted in mass struggles around working-class issues, from skyrocketing prices to racist police violence. Such a party can be built into the sharpest possible weapon in the fight against the interests of the vicious American ruling class. J

continued from p.4

America (DSA) members in the House, can be considered “socialists” should be fully dispelled at this point.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s crucial that workers everywhere learn the lessons of this betrayal, first and foremost that neither the Democratic nor Republican parties will ever prioritize the needs of workers over their system’s thirst for profit. They are both firmly-held tools of the billionaire class.

Workers deserve a political voice of our own.

Second – and connected – union leaders have a well established practice for many decades of fastening themselves to the rear end of the Democratic Party. In the 2020 election, the Teamsters – who absorbed BMWED (the third largest rail union) in 2004 – gave over $2.1 million to Democratic candidates.

And for what? To get sold down the river.

In fact, in the summer Teamsters

leaders Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman “welcomed” Biden’s intervention, even though they tried PR stunts when Biden they got betrayed by the Dems. It highlights the failed strategy of labor leaders relying on Democratic Party politicians to support them in actions, and not just words.

We need an active rank-and-file movement within the unions pushing for genuine internal democracy – including democratic oversight over the spending of union members’ dues money – as well as for political independence from both parties of big business.

The consequences of this betrayal will be brutal for railroad workers who will now be forced to continue working in hazardous conditions. But it can also serve as a wakeup call for the left and labor movement to fight for a fundamentally new strategy, one defined by political independence, genuine democracy, and class-struggle militancy. J

FIGHTING INFLATION of grassroots organizing will need to be the basis for any future party for working people.

We need more workers to be unionized and willing to strike for higher wages, more tenants organized and willing to withhold rent to oppose rent hikes, and more students ready to shut down instruction and make bold public

continued from p.11 demands for free college, free healthcare, and an end to fossil fuel dependence.

None of these steps are easy to take and there is always inherent risk involved in fighting back. But not fighting back means leaving ourselves at the mercy of those already destroying the economy and the planet. This is the real

choice for working people: not between inflation or austerity, but between fighting back or accepting powerlessness. Struggles breaking out all over the world today from Britain to Iran to China show that working people will not indefinitely accept helplessness. We will fight back, so let’s make sure we fight to win. J

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BIDEN CRUSHES RAIL STRIKE For proof of this we can look to the U.S. postal workers strike in 1970 where 200,000 federal postal workers took illegal strike action – and won. They overcame Nixon’s attempts to use the national guard to break the strike, they overcame their union leadership’s conservative hesitancy, and they won. They secured a significant pay increase, faster step increases, a COLA, and ended the practice of postal workers being forced to sit in a “swing room” unpaid, while waiting for work.

Politicians across the aisle, but under the leadership of the Democrats, took away workers’ best weapon to win their demands. And this is what capitalist politicians are there to do. They are not neutral individuals, the entire election system binds them to their funders so that they will defend the interests of billionaires against those of workers.

Shamefully, “progressives” in Congress were accomplices in this. Any notion that AOC or Jamaal Bowman, Democratic Socialists of

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SOCIALIST

ISSUE #89 l DECEMBER/JANUARY 2022-2023

ALTERNATIVE

WINTER WARNING

EXTREME WINTER WEATHER SHOWS THE ‘NEW NORMAL’ OF CLIMATE DESTRUCTION DAVID RHOADES, LOS ANGELES The U.S. has recently experienced winter disasters unlike anything we’ve ever faced.

These are not isolated occurrences, but the opening act of a new era of ecological chaos.

Texas saw temperatures drop to 0˚ F in the winter freeze of 2021, causing massive blackouts and at least 200 fatalities. The same winter brought two massive atmospheric rivers to the Pacific Northwest, triggering floods and landslides throughout the region. In 2023, experts expect La Niña weather conditions to persist: colder and wetter weather in the northern U.S. with drier and warmer weather in the southern U.S. Dry weather is disastrous for the drought-stricken Colorado River, which provides water to 40 million people and five million acres of farmland across the U.S. and Mexico.

These extreme winter weather events are undeniably a product of capitalist destruction: fossil fuel emissions have warmed global temperatures and created the conditions for increasingly extreme temperatures and larger, more frequent winter storms. Now tens of millions of working families are enduring the consequences of unfettered capitalism as our neighborhoods flood, our homes freeze, and our water becomes toxic.

INFRASTRUCTURE BUCKLING We have a double-sided problem ahead of us: we have to prevent the further unraveling of the climate and mitigate the impact of the

climate destruction we’re already facing.

Our most immediate task is building climate-resilient infrastructure, like power plants that won’t break down in freezing temperatures, flood control measures, and water retention and reclamation to reverse water shortages. Chief among these measures is transitioning to sustainable energy.

But Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act – the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history by virtue of the fact that there hasn’t been any significant legislation before – ignores the need for climate-resilient infrastructure. Instead, it pours out lavish funding for drilling permits and pipeline expansions, subsidies for manufacturing electric vehicles (powered largely by fossil fuels), and lifelines for climate catastrophe profiteers. The Democrats’ approach is a suicide pact led by people whose money can buy them out of the consequences.

CAN GREEN CAPITALISM LEAD THE WAY FORWARD? Some capitalists have put forward climate adaptation as a solution. But any attempt at building sustainable, climate-resilient infrastructure under capitalism will be hamstrung by investors’ overriding need for profit. That’s one reason why most companies employ fossil fuels more than renewable energy, despite the fact that solar is now cheaper per watt than natural gas or coal. Investor-owned utility companies receive guaranteed returns

for using fossil plants, making it more profitable to continue pumping emissions into the air than transition to green energy.

We witnessed capitalism’s stunning lack of foresight when last year’s COP26 failed to yield any serious commitments to humanity’s survival. COP27 fared even worse – the most well-represented group at the conference was the oil and gas industry. Hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists attending a U.N. climate change conference tells us everything about capitalism’s inability to meet the moment.

While a few parasites may momentarily profit from climate disaster, capitalism has birthed a monster it ultimately cannot control. Capitalism’s endless grasping for profit, no matter how extractive or destructive, has upended the planet’s ecological balance.

Karl Marx called this monster the “metabolic rift” between nature and capitalism. Like a parasite on the planet, the capitalist system has a single impulse: feeding without limit.

And like a parasite, capitalism will feed until the host is dead – or until it is ripped away.

A SOCIALIST GREEN NEW DEAL Regardless of capitalism’s inability to solve the climate crisis, the solutions society needs already exist.

Large-scale climate mitigation and green energy projects could employ millions of workers while rapidly creating sustainable and durable infrastructure. Oil and gas workers could be retrained to work in sustainable energy production with no loss in pay.

Cities could expand urban public transit and high-density housing, vastly improving traffic, emissions, and quality of life for working class people.

All of this would require capital which is currently being hoarded by companies who’ve spent billions on stock buybacks while allowing vital infrastructure to rot. A Green New Deal program large enough to meet the climate crisis would need to – at minimum – tax the rich and corporations, putting the money into public projects unhindered by mindless profiteering. A tax on the rich would free up billions for disaster relief funding, sustainable energy, and urban climate improvements like high-quality green housing, walkable communities, and more. But just taxing the rich won’t be enough as long as decision-making remains in the hands of the profiteers. We will need to take polluting industries into democratic public ownership under the management of the workers most familiar with the industries themselves.

A program like that will never find advocates in the likes of Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, or Nancy Pelosi. For a Green New Deal to come into existence, workers would need a party of our own to fight for it – a democratic organization willing to fight back in the workplace, in elections, and on the streets.

Workers are the only people who have the power to fight for our collective survival. We cannot rely on the system that created this crisis, or the politicians who aid and abet it, to pull us out of it. J