Working Class Solidarity

No gods - no masters - no slaves https://www.no-gods-no-masters.com

On a border between two States Someone has written, “Fuck your nationalism. We are all Earthlings.”

And on the Mexican border, Someone has ripped through a fence Of reinforced chicken wire With bolt cutters, And erected a hammock By suspending it Between two of the fence’s Concrete pillars.

After swinging gently back and forth, From Texas to Mexico and then From Mexico back to Texas, They doze off; contemptuous Of the security guards Patrolling this artificial demarcation  – For, once upon a time, Texas was Mexico And Texas didn’t exist.

When Eugene Debs was imprisoned For conscientious objection in World War One He said, on September 11th 1915, “I have no country to fight for My country is the earth I’m a citizen of the world.”

– Heathcote Williams, “No Borders”

Um... yeah, basically. Couldn't have said it better myself.

— Assata Shakur, “Assata: An Autobiography”

Perfectly said

I think the world is fucked no matter what. We can't just disappear the billions of weapons already spread across the earth. Just like we can't unlearn the technology to make nuclear weapons. We're fucked as fucked can be fucked and that's without accounting for Climate Change

Hell yeah, that’s the fucking spice

One has been despair. It’s easy to see in the Trump administration’s attacks on the most vulnerable in U.S. society–from undocumented immigrants to Muslims to women–and in the increased organizing by the far right, invigorated by Trump’s hateful policies, evidence that the U.S. is in bleak times, with more of them to come.

The other response has been solidarity–from the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, when people rushed to airports to protest his Muslim travel ban, to NFL players taking a knee to protest police brutality, to the #MeToo wave when women stepped forward to talk about their experiences of sexual assault and harassment.

Today, in the so-called “red states” that voted for Trump, we’re seeing another example of solidarity: Teachers walking out of the classroom to demand the wages and working conditions they deserve, and finding that there are educators in other states who are part of the same fight.

The wave of teachers’ strikes that have struck five states this spring–so far–contradicts just about everything we’re taught in the U.S.: that we and our families are on our own and in it for ourselves; that whether we starve or succeed is totally up to what we decide to make of ourselves.

By contrast, the whole experience of these strikes and protests has been not just teachers working together, but a recognition that their futures are inextricably tied to one another, and they have to struggle together.

As a rural Kentucky social studies teacher explained in an interview with SW, referring to the West Virginia teachers’ strike the month before: “Seeing how those school teachers could come together in solidarity was really awesome. It lets me know that it’s possible for thousands of people to come together for a common cause.”

This is an important point because the society we live in sets up some intimidating obstacles to workers concluding that they have shared interests or that they have a stake in one another’s liberation.

The obstacles include obvious forms of discrimination and bigotry, like racism or sexism or anti-LGBTQ prejudice. But the divisions sown among workers are even more extensive: the unemployed are pitted against the employed; young worker against those who are nearing retirement; low-wage workers who don’t have a union against higher-paid workers who do.

Workers can be isolated from one another within their workplaces for all sorts of reasons.

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Workers make the world run workers should run the world.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Even with automation, workers have to maintain them.

A good run down of Anarcho-Syndicalism

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset in a congressional primary electionagainst one of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. House has inspired discussion and debate about how this campaign fits into the project of advancing the socialist left. SocialistWorker.org is hosting a dialogue in our Readers’ Views column. This installment has a contribution from Todd Chretien.

Like all participants in this debate, I want to thank the Socialist Worker team and all those willing to share their points of view.

I wanted to start my thoughts on the socialist movement today by going back to 2009, when Newsweek ran a cover proclaiming “we’re all socialists now” in the wake of the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s (tepid) economic stimulus package.

Since then, the “we’re all socialists” sentiment has developed — with boosts from the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Chicago teachers’ strike, Black Lives Matter, the rise of independent media like Jacobin magazine and more — from an inchoate rejection of capitalism to a significant growth of organization, most clearly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) growing from 6,000 to 45,000 members over the last two years since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign.

DSA’s membership is outraged by the Democratic Party’s subservience to the “millionaires and billionaires” and inspired by Sanders’ call for a political revolution. Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara has dubbed the majority of new DSA members “Berniecrats.”

I won’t quibble with his characterization as long as we recognize that their radicalization extends beyond a critique of the Democratic National Committee.

Thousands of DSA members are committed to building movements (shutting down ICE, fighting for housing justice, defending reproductive rights, etc.), revitalizing the labor movement (helping organize teachers’ strikes) and taking direct action against the right (mobilizing against fascists from Charlottesville to Boston to Berkeley and hounding Trump’s minions).

Of course, Sanders remains far and away the most influential voice among DSA’s broad membership, and his forthright insistence that socialists must “take back” the Democratic Party holds sway among most. This was the DSA’s historic position, and there are many within it today who remain committed to this goal.

However, there are DSA organizers who forthrightly insist that the Democratic Party is an obstacle that must be overcome. They argue that it is a capitalist institution that cannot be “realigned” or “reformed,” but must be defeated and replaced with a working-class, socialist party.

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This is truly the most important conversation in the US today. Not the happenings of the white house on any given day. Not what Republicans in Congress are doing or saying because they're never going to change and there will always be a new outrage from the party of Trump. The real conversation lies with what the best vehicle for organizing a broadbased left in America. And how to achieve it.

— Jennifer Cobbe, The problem isn’t just Cambridge Analytica or Facebook – it’s “surveillance capitalism”

Ha! The jokes on them. I'm broke af!!!

(Thanks to Neoliberal economic policies that have steadily eroded the value of the minimum wage which hasn't kept up with inflation for the last 40 years)

A fun thing to do when people accuse you of “thinking people should just have stuff HANDED TO THEM! ! !” Is to just cold be like yes. I absolutely do believe that. I think every single person should have their needs met unconditionally without ever having to prove that they “deserve” it based on arbitrary criteria of usefulness. You got me. Busted.

#human….#rights?????????#WHAT A CONCEPT

EXACTLY.

Little known fact, the George W. Bush administration actually experimented with the state of Utah on providing the homeless with free apartments unconditionally with no end date for when they had to leave. They weren’t required to deal with addictions or stop drinking, just an unconditional home. The State Of Utah has nearly eradicated homelessness completely. Each homeless person is offered social services, mental health services and addiction services but it wasn’t a requirement. The project, which was a combined effort between Federal and State agencies and the Mormon church. Most of the homeless people given these apartments eventually did decide to get help now that their lives no longer felt hopeless, and many ended up finding work since they now had an address. Even with a job, though they were asked to eventually contribute some rent, they were not told they had to leave and some were just families that needed a little temporary help and they got it and eventually moved on with their lives. Last I knew the program was still going strong but who knows under the Trump Administration and tea party nutbag Republicans if they haven’t gutted the aid that was used for that program.

Fuck authority!