Elections 2008
• Government Terrorism and Police Brutality Are Election Issues
• Government Increasing Violence Against the Youth
Government Racism in Incarceration Rates • Hearing for UN Representative Affirms Police Torture and Abuse Students in Pipeline to Prison• McCain and Obama Proposals: Changing the Tax Codes Will Not Change Direction of the Economy
A Power to Deprive
Government Terrorism and Police Brutality
Are Election Issues
Juneteenth is celebrated yearly in many cities in the U.S. as part of the struggle for the rights of African Americans. It recognizes the brutality and genocide by the U.S. slavocracy and government, as well as the courageous struggle of the slaves to liberate themselves.
Today enslavement takes a different form, of wage-slavery of all the working class. But it too is enforced through the national oppression, racism, police brutality and genocide of the government against African Americans and all national minorities. Police killings and racist mass incarceration is today’s legal-form of lynching. Segregated, impoverished communities where social spending on schools, healthcare and recreation are all but eliminated are today’s plantations. None of it has any place in a modern society. And all of it demands a central role in the election debates.
State-organized racism, segregated communities and racist mass incarceration are all integral to any discussion on poverty. Now is the time to step up organizing to demand that police killings and brutality and the racist mass incarceration that goes with it are elections issue. Demand that the candidates call for making police killing and brutality against unarmed civilians crimes. Promote this demand through emails, blogs and other means.
The elections will be used by the ruling class to try and pretend that there can be “shared prosperity” and that there is no need to change the status quo. All those in motion on many fronts to bring actual change that favors the people must be vigilant against any such illusion. The violence of poverty and national oppression are problems the existing system cannot solve.
The entire existence of U.S. imperialism has shown it to be a system of world oppression, exploitation, imperialist wars and fascism. It is a system that thrives on the enslavement of the peoples, abroad and at home. The rich get richer and increasingly concentrate wealth in fewer hands, while the poor get poorer and more numerous. Prosperity for the rich is impoverishment for the people. And because this is the economic foundation for the society, problems like poverty and national oppression cannot be eliminated. They require a different foundation, a foundation built by the working class and following its vision for a society where the rights of all are guaranteed.
The reality that fundamental change requires changing the foundations of society is precisely what the government seeks to hide and divert from. Instead, we are all supposed to submit to living in a house whose very foundations are crumbling, in a situation where a virtual tsunami of crises is occuring, where police and military block any effort to escape and build a new society. Organizing to fix a broken window and blaming the youth trapped inside for the breakage, solves nothing. Indeed it is harmful in the face of the crises at hand.
The crises embracing basic necessities of food, water and shelter worldwide need real solutions, including immediate steps to defend our rights to such necessities. We have a right and duty to say no to this rotten system and organize to do so based on our demands and our fight for rights. Make government violence in our communities a crime! Fight today to defend rights and organize the working class to build a future without imperialism!
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Government Increasing Violence Against the Youth
Across the country, people are contending with police brutality and striving to defend our youth from the violence of society. In New York City, numerous mass actions and civil disobedience demanded that the police responsible for killing Sean Bell in a hail of 50 bullets are punished. Bell was unarmed. The actions followed a decision by a judge that the killing was a “reasonable use of force.” In Buffalo, steps are being taken to develop the united action of the people to defend themselves and their communities. This was seen in the demonstration by youth on May 24 and in organizing efforts that followed May 29, to build self-defense organizations in the community and to defend the community from police brutality.
In Philadelphia, more than 200 family members of victims of police brutality and their supporters demonstrated to express their outrage at the brutal beatings of three African American men by a gang of 19 police. The three were also unarmed. Over the past 5 years 219 claims of assault have been filed against Philadelphia police. No police have faced criminal charges — but families did force the government to settle $14 million in claims, confirming police were guilty.
Everywhere, people are demanding that police killings and brutality against unarmed civilians be made crimes. They are rejecting the claims by police that “they had reason to believe” the individuals were armed, or they “thought” they saw a gun, etc. The standard for police conduct must be that killing and brutality of unarmed civilians is outlawed.
Instead, the government is organizing to increase violence and collective punishment against the people. In Washington, DC, for example, checkpoints were arbitrarily placed in a mainly African American section of the city. Everyone driving through was stopped and questioned without cause. The checkpoints were enforced at random hours, with plans to keep them in place 5-10 days.
There is every indication they could become a permanent feature of life, with police sealing off whole neighborhoods. The police chief has been given authority to designate ‘Neighborhood Safety Zones,’ and then seal them. At least six officers will man checkpoints around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who cannot prove that they live or work there or have what police decide is a ‘legitimate reason’ to be there will be blocked from entering the area or face arrest.
Many civil rights activists and lawyers came out to oppose the checkpoints and inform people of their rights. They rejected efforts, as one put it, to turn DC into Baghdad. People in DC and elsewhere are emphasizing that use of force against the people will be resisted and police and military occupation of U.S. cities opposed.
The arbitrary character of the checkpoints can also be seen in the fact that police simply decided if they thought a person had a “legitimate reason” to be in the area. Supposedly cars were only searched if police actually observed guns or drugs. But everyone is well familiar with the fact that police claim they “saw” a gun when none exist. And that those being stopped are not familiar with their right to refuse a search. Indeed, DC police have already taken advantage of this lack of information by organizing to go door-to-door and ask for permission to search homes for guns. This program, like “clean-sweep” and similar programs are used to terrorize communities and make arbitrary police actions, like checkpoints and searches without cause, acceptable.
Arbitrary searches and checkpoints without cause constitute unreasonable searches and collective punishment and should be outlawed. Giving police authority to arbitrarily stop people for no cause, to set up checkpoints as they please, are police-state measures. They are designed to protect a system and government that can no longer provide for the well being of the people from the just resistance of the people.
In Chicago, using the excuse of the tragic deaths of Chicago youth by shootings, there are now plans to arm the entire 13,500 strong Chicago Police Department with military-style assault weapons. Assault weapons are so-named because they are made to carry out assaults. They are not for self-defense. They are by their nature inaccurate and make up for that inaccuracy by their ability to rapidly fire large amounts of bullets. So while parents and community organizers are fighting to find non-violent means to solve problems, the state is organizing to use assault weapons. Already, Chicago’s SWAT units have assault weapons and have been flooded into communities as a “show of force.” It is also the case that other police departments, including those at the state level, are also arming their forces with assault weapons. People across the country are rejecting this militarization of the communities and demanding their rights.
Like the checkpoints, arming police with assault weapons is not only directed against the people, especially African Americans, of Chicago. It serves the drive of the government toward fascism and militarization of daily life. Local police armed military-style in full battle dress with their helicopters overhead and military-like tanks in the streets are a force for occupying communities, for repressing mass rebellions to police violence and the violence of poverty and unemployment that this rotten society produces. They are part of the fascist arrangements of the state that must be vigorously opposed.
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Government Racism in
Incarceration Rates
The American prison and jail system is defined by an entrenched racial disparity in the population of incarcerated people. The national incarceration rate for whites is 412 per 100,000 residents, compared to 2,290 for African Americans, and 742 for Hispanics. These figures mean that 2.3 percent of all African Americans are incarcerated, compared to 0.4 percent of whites and 0.7 percent of Hispanics.
While these overall rates of incarceration are all at record highs, they fail to reflect the concentrated impact of incarceration among young African American males in particular, many of whom reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods. One in nine (11.7 percent) African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 is currently incarcerated in a prison or jail.
Moreover, the uneven geographic distribution of incarceration in communities of color means that the effects of this situation radiate beyond the individual to the broader community. For example, criminologists James Lynch and William Sabol found that three percent of a single Ohio county’s census block groups comprised 20 percent of the state prison population. This concentration among young males presents profound long-term consequences for employment prospects, family formation, and general quality of life.
An analysis by The Sentencing Project provides a regional examination of the racial and ethnic dynamics of incarceration in the U.S., and finds broad variations in racial disparity among the 50 states. The report, Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity, finds that African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites and Hispanics nearly double the rate of whites.
The report also reveals wide variation in incarceration by state, with states in the Northeast and Midwest exhibiting the greatest black-to-white disparity in incarceration. In five states — Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin — African Americans are incarcerated at more than ten times the rate of whites.
The report extends the findings of previous analyses by incorporating jail populations in the overall incarceration rate and by assessing the impact of incarceration on the Hispanic community, representing an increasing share of the prison population. The state figures for Hispanic incarceration also reveal broad variation nationally. Three states — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — have a Hispanic-to-white ratio of incarceration more than three times the national average.
Prior research from the Department of Justice has demonstrated that if current trends continue, one in three black males and one in six Hispanic males born today can expect to go to prison. Rates for women are lower overall, but exhibit similar racial and ethnic disparities.
Since the early 1970s the prison and jail population in the United States has increased at an unprecedented rate. The more than 500 percent rise in the number of people incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails has resulted in a total of 2.2 million people behind bars, [the largest prison population in the world]. This growth has been accompanied by an increasingly disproportionate racial composition, with particularly high rates of incarceration for African Americans, who now constitute 900,000 of the total 2.2 million incarcerated population.
The exponential increase in the use of incarceration has had modest success at best in producing public safety, while contributing to family disruption and the weakening of informal social controls in many African American communities. Overall, data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics document that one in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. The prevalence of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than for men, but many of the same racial disparities persist, with black women being more likely to be incarcerated than white women.
While the disproportionate rate of incarceration for African Americans has been well documented for some time, a significant development in the past decade has been the growing proportion of the Hispanic population entering prisons and jails. In 2005, Hispanics comprised 20 percent of the state and federal prison population, a rise of 43 percent since 1990. As a result of these trends, one of every six Hispanic males and one of every 45 Hispanic females born today can expect to go to prison in his or her lifetime. These rates are more than double those for non-Hispanic whites.
While these national figures are disturbing, they mask the extreme state-level variations in the impact of incarceration on communities of color. This report examines racial and ethnic dynamics of incarceration by state and highlights new information that extends the findings of previous analyses by including data on jail populations and the impact of incarceration on the Hispanic community.
Highlights of this analysis include:
• States exhibit substantial variation in the ratio of black-to-white incarceration, ranging from a high of 13.6-to-1 in Iowa to a low of 1.9-to-1 in Hawaii;
• States with the highest black-to-white ratio are disproportionately located in the Northeast and Midwest, including the leading states of Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. This geographic concentration is true as well for the Hispanic-to-white ratio, with the most disproportionate states being Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
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Hearing for UN Representative Affirms
Police Torture and Abuse
In city after city, African Americans are testifying to the torture and brutality of the U.S. government. Organizations and activists of various kinds have come together to provide testimony on government racism to United Nation Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène. In May and June he is visiting 9 cities, including New York City, Washington, DC, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha, Nebraska, Los Angeles, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In early 2009, he will present a report of his findings to the United Nations General Assembly.
His visit to Chicago was representative. The nightmare experiences of African Americans poured out during a three-hour session, the conclusion to a two-day visit. Mr. Diène listened intently and kept careful notes as a translator repeated the accounts of witnesses.
“Chicago is the most racist city in the United States make no mistake about it,” said Darrell Cannon, a tall, thin, African American who was one of more than 200 black males tortured by Chicago police to extract false confessions. Mr. Cannon spent 24 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Mr. Cannon choked back words and tears in recounting how police officers burst into his home in 1983, dragged him out and tortured him — thrusting a cattle prod into his groin and his mouth, forcing a shotgun into his mouth that chipped teeth, while beating, threatening and degrading him.
“By the time they finished torturing me that afternoon, when they finished torturing me, I was willing to say ‘my mother did it’ just to stop the torture,” he said. While Mr. Cannon was in prison, his mother, father, grandmother and son died. He spent 9 years in the infamous Tamms Supermax prison, where inmates are bolted to the floor at times and sleep on thin mattresses over concrete slabs. No apologies were ever given, Mr. Cannon said. “Torture is alive and well in the city of Chicago,” he said. Indeed, many bring out the infamous torture at Guantánamo was developed and practiced in U.S. prisons, especially against African Americans.
After persistent struggle by Cannon and others against police torture and racism, charges against him were dropped. He was finally released from prison last year. He continues to fight against police torture and is suing the city.
Witness after witness spoke to the militarization of police patrolling neighborhoods, police torture, harassment and brutality of youth, housing segregation, wrongful incarceration and mistreatment of prisoners. African Americans are facing an onslaught of repression and imprisonment as the government prepares to block rebellions before they start.
Heart wrenching testimony came from police torture victims, young organizers, mothers fighting for sons locked behind bars, longtime opponents of discrimination and activists fed up with government at all levels. They spoke to the crimes of the mass destruction of public housing and government refusal to provide the right to housing.
Stan Willis, a civil rights attorney and chair of Black People Against Torture, sees the hearing and international venues as tools to expose the United States government. In February, he spoke in Geneva, Switzerland, before the UN Committee to Eliminate Racism and Discrimination where he presented information about police torture in Chicago and other cities.
“The United States is an imperial power and part of their authority is that they carry this mantle of legitimacy. When you attack that by saying, ‘Wait a minute what is happening to the torture of black men in the United States?’ it kind of takes the sheet off the United States. It exposes their going around to Iraq and telling the Iraqi people ‘We’re bringing you democracy,’ when they do not have democracy here. I can assure you there are massive human rights violations in the United States,” he said.[TOP]
Students in Pipeline to Prison
A 13-year-old girl was handcuffed and arrested at Brockton High School last June for wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt, which she was asked by school officials to remove, bore the image of her ex-boyfriend, 14-year-old Marvin Constant, who had recently been killed in a Boston area shooting. The girl refused to remove the memorial shirt and was arrested for “causing a disturbance.”
In Texas, 14-year-old high school freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her crime was pushing a hall monitor out of the way when she was stopped from entering a school building. The official charge was “assault on a public servant.” While extreme, these cases are not unusual. In Massachusetts and across the country, an increasing number of incidents that traditionally have been handled in schools by trips to the principal’s office are being dealt with by law enforcement officials and judges in the juvenile justice system. Countless school children, particularly children of color in poverty-stricken zip codes, are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile correctional facilities for minor misconduct.
A variety of overzealous disciplinary measures, including a mandatory “zero- tolerance” policy, are removing children as early as elementary school from mainstream educational environments and funneling them into a one-way pipeline to prison. This “school-to-prison pipeline” begins in the nation’s neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country’s expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit- producing prisons.
America’s Promise Alliance released a report in April that said that 17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates of lower than 50 percent. Boston barely boasted a graduation rate of 57 percent, placing it 27th among the 50 cities. It is no surprise that urban public high schools ranked lower in graduation rates than their suburban counterparts.
When school funding is based on student test performance, lack of resources creates heinous incentives for school officials to funnel out “problem” students believed likely to drag down a school’s scores. This bottom line business is a convenient method of concealing schools’ educational deficiencies, but it does little to address the systemic problem of poor performance.
Racial disproportion runs through every level of the system. A black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime compared with a white male’s 1 in 17 chance. Incarceration rates are directly correlated with school performance. Children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their Caucasian classmates. More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. The cycle begins early and is hard to break. A black child is nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent, and children with imprisoned parents far more likely to be imprisoned themselves.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” There remains a deeply ingrained punitive paradigm in the psyche of the American criminal justice system. Our overzealous “get tough on crime” philosophy is totally inadequate to the stormy present. Americans are far more likely to be victimized by a violent assault, rape, murder, or robbery than our European counterparts who incarcerate relatively tiny percentages of the population. There, prison is viewed as a fundamentally “criminogenic” institution that creates more crime than it deters.
Prisoners are a major fiscal burden on the rest of society. It costs Massachusetts $43,000 a year to keep an inmate behind bars. States are spending on average more than three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil. Is it more valuable to imprison than to teach? The majority of suspended students and juveniles in detention did not commit violent offenses. Is society safer with nonviolent criminals in jail or in school?
Relying on incarceration as the sole solution to crime is ineffective. Academic achievement is the leading determining factor for delinquency. Improving school performance will be an effective strategy for reducing chronic court involvement.
We have the resources. It is not a question of funds but rather a question of will. Will Massachusetts be first to dam the flow of the school-to-prison pipeline?
(Originally published in the Boston Globe)[TOP
Changes in Tax Codes Will Not Change Direction of Economy
Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, both now considered their party’s nominee for the presidential election, began their campaigns speaking about the economy. Obama, speaking in Raleigh, North Carolina, titled his talk “Change that Works for You.” McCain, speaking in Arlington, Virginia, spoke before the National Small Business Summit. Both men posed the question of what kind of change is needed for the economy. As McCain put it, “No matter which of us wins in November, there will be change in Washington. The question is what kind of change?” Both then essentially answered that there will be no change in the direction of the economy, but rather some tinkering with the tax code, with each having particular proposals for the tinkering.
The American people and particularly American workers in their large majority think the country is headed in the wrong direction and point to the economy and the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan as examples. A few dollars more or less in tax returns will not solve this problem of an economy headed in the wrong direction.
It is a change in the direction of the economy, from one serving the narrow self-interests of a handful of giant monopolies, to one serving the interests of the working class and people here and abroad, that is required. Proposals from the presidential candidates need to be looked at from the perspective of this aim to change the direction of the economy. What steps will contribute to the change needed? Which will keep the economy headed in the wrong direction? The proposals from Obama and McCain begin with the aim of making the monopolies competitive on the global markets. This is the very aim that has given rise to the current wars and crises in the first place.
Obama put it this way: “My vision involves both a short-term plan to help working families who are struggling to keep up and a long-term agenda to make America competitive in a global economy.” McCain said, “Serious reform is needed to help American companies compete in international markets. I have proposed a reduction in the corporate tax rate…” Workers are not interested in competing with their fellow workers, inside the country or worldwide. Indeed, their slogan of All for One and One for All stands directly against such content. Their stand is one of united action in the interests of all with trade relations of mutual respect and benefit. The drive to make “America competitive” is the drive of the biggest monopolies, it is the drive for U.S. empire. Maintaining this as the aim for the economy serves only to intensify the existing conflicts and crises, not eliminate them. Indeed, this aim guarantees that the change being demanded by the people will again be a casualty.
Obama makes an effort to describe conditions facing the workers. He mentions the massive job losses, increasing unemployment, price of oil, costs of college, healthcare and food — all at record levels, while family incomes have fallen. He speaks to the GM decision to close plants, saying “Go to Janesville, Wisconsin or Moraine, Ohio and talk to the workers at General Motors who just found out the plants they labored their entire lives at will be closed forever.” But he refuses to ask the question, why should GM be permitted to make such a decision, devastating so many thousands of lives and closing a sound production facility? Or put another way, is it GM’s economy, or our economy?
We say it is our socialized economy, built by the workers, with wealth produced by them and belonging to them by right. We need social relations of decision making and governance that reflect the fact that wealth is socially produced by the working class. It’s our economy, our wealth; we decide, not General Motors! Fighting from this perspective and with this direction is needed now. And it is the duty and role of the working class to take up this challenge.
Government has a responsibility first of all to meet the rights of the people of the society. That is the direction people need and want. But in the U.S., with its monopoly capitalist economy, government instead acts to “help American companies compete in international markets.” And it does so, according to the tow governing parties of the rich, the Democrats and Republicans, mainly through the tax code.
Taxes deal with already produced value and generally serve to take more funds from the workers and pay them to the rich. When both McCain and Obama talk about making “investments,” this is what they mean — giving GM, for example, public dollars to produce cars that are more “green.” They refuse to talk about changing the direction of the economy so the wealth produced is organized to meet the claims of the working class and people, both directly through wages and benefits, and indirectly through social programs like housing, education and healthcare. They do not propose, for example, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and guaranteeing the right to a livelihood. By diverting attention from the need for socialized relations to match a socialized economy, the politicians want everyone to accept the status quo as the starting point. We say, hell no!
Obama and McCain also must think Americans are pretty foolish. Everyone just experienced the so-called “stimulus” refund of $600. Everyone knows it changed absolutely nothing in their living and working conditions. Yet one of Obama’s main proposals is a tax “break” which would “provide $1000 of relief to 95 percent of workers and their families.” McCain’s proposal is similar, calling for saving “more than 25 million middle class families as much as $2,000 in a single year.” So we are supposed to argue over these two proposals when neither one changes living and working conditions?!
The answer to what kind of change is needed is change that favors the working class and people, not the monopolies. It requires changing the direction of the economy so as to guarantee the rights of all. It means organizing to block the monopolies from wrecking the economy, not providing them the means to do so. Let us take as a starting point stopping the layoffs and plant closures, stopping all home foreclosures, stop paying the rich and increase funding for social programs. That is the change in direction needed.[TOP]
A Power to Deprive
The GM decision to close the Oshawa truck plant is an attack on the rights and security of Canadians and their sovereign socialized economy. The GM decision to close its plants in Wisconsin and Ohio, the planned closure of the American Axle plant in Tonawanda, are attacks on the rights and security of Americans and their socialized economy. The well-being of workers and the economy cannot be based on the fluctuations of a marketplace infested with parasites and speculators. The working class is charged by history to fight to deprive the monopolies of the right to speculate, make narrow egocentric decisions and otherwise ruin the socialized economy in each country, on which the people of both countries depend.
The GM decision to close the U.S. plants, and the Oshawa truck plant, and transmission plant in Windsor, must be reversed. The destruction of Canadian and U.S. manufacturing to serve the narrow interests of this or that global monopoly cannot be tolerated. The loss of the potential added-value produced by many hundreds of thousands of workers and their means of production destroyed in the recent orgy of manufacturing closures represents an enormous net loss of wealth to the Canadian socialized economy and the U.S. socialized economy — not to speak of the individual hardships and tragedies of lives thrown into turmoil.
The Oshawa truck plant alone in 2007 assembled 316,082 vehicles. Many of the parts and much of the steel, raw material and energy to produce those 316,082 vehicles came from the work-time of Canadians and their factories, resources, mines and transportation system. The GM plant in Moraine, Ohio, which builds the Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy and Saab 9-7x, will end production at the end of the 2010 model run or sooner. The plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, will cease production of medium-duty trucks by the end of 2009 and of the Chevrolet Tahoe, Chevrolet Suburban and GMC Yukon in 2010 or sooner. Thousands of workers are to be permanently laid off.
GM through its actions and statements suggests that all of a sudden because of market forces beyond its control the need for a particular use-value, the Silverado and Sierra trucks, has disappeared and Canadian workers, and U.S. workers, and their socialized economies must suffer the consequences. This shows Canadians and Americans the need for radical restructuring of the economy and the decision-making with regard to the socialized economy and politics. Would a sovereign Canadian people in control of their destiny destroy a perfectly viable means of production capable of producing enormous quantities of use-value needed to sustain social programs and thousands of livelihoods simply because of the negative consequences of market forces that it could very well control? Would Americans in control of their socialized economy do so?
To bow down in the face of those “out-of-control” market forces is either a form of mass suicide or lack of organized power or will to deprive the monopolies of their “right” to speculate and ruin the economy. Canadians and Americans are certainly not suicidal so it must be this missing power to deprive the monopolies of their right to wreck that must be addressed and changed.
Who has decided this treacherous course not only at GM but at all the other manufacturing facilities throughout Canada and the U.S. that have been downsized or closed? It has been the owners of monopoly capital and their henchmen such as the GM CEO Rick Waggoner. They have decided this path of destruction to kill manufacturing in Canada and decimate it in the U.S.
Canadians and American people have not decided to kill an essential source of their well-being. They are not crazy or masochistic. The problem is the lack of power to deprive the monopolies of this “right” to attack Canada’s socialized economy and people. The authority in Canada lies in the hands of those who are one with the monopolies. The authority in the U.S. also lies with those who are one with the monopolies, including the striving of these U.S. monopoles to control the Canadian socialized economy as well as the U.S. one.
The prevailing socialized conditions of production demand an authority to change the backward conditions in the relations of production where private monopolies rule over the working class and the socialized economy. But the prevailing authority in power is one with the regressive conditions controlling the relations among Canadians. The prevailing authority in the U.S. also lies with those who are one with these regressive conditions
The governing bodies and mass media in both countries are one with the anti-social relations suffocating the socialized economy in each country and they find any number of excuses to allow the monopolies to do as they please. They find a million and one reasons to stand idly by as monopoly speculators force up the price of oil from $60 per barrel to $135 in the space of few months. The skyrocketing price of food also receives the same criminal detachment.
In the face of the reality that the authority in power at each monopoly politically refuses to act to renew the conditions, it becomes the responsibility of the working class to take up the task itself. Workers in Canada must begin in an organized fashion to assume the authority to deprive the monopolies of the ability to damage Canada’s socialized economy and the well-being of the people with impunity. Workers in the U.S. must begin in an organized fashion to assume the authority to deprive the monopolies of the ability to damage the U.S. socialized economy and the well-being of the people with impunity.
The power to deprive is the authority to decide the direction of the economy. Assuming the authority to decide the direction of the economy begins with organizing the working class to say No! With this No! the organized workers begin to deprive the monopolies of their ability to wreck the economy and damage the well-being of the people in the here and now.
The decision to change production of a certain use-value, such as the GM monopoly claims it has been forced to do because of the price of oil and falling truck sales, must belong to the people. Once that decision is made for environmental or other reasons such as an advance in science, the change in the direction of that particular aspect of production must be carried out without damaging the overall socialized economy and the well-being of the working class. It is unacceptable to make the working class pay for a crisis of a monopoly capitalist system and relations based on private ownership, which the established powers refuse to renovate and bring onto par with the modern conditions of a socialized economy.
GM is forcing a decision to change the direction of its particular aspect of the economy onto workers and the overall socialized economy with no regard for the well-being of autoworkers in both countries or the needs of Canadians or Americans generally for added-value. GM has made this decision based on self-serving arguments about high oil prices and falling truck sales.
GM’s decision to wreck vehicle production in Canada and the U.S. will not solve the crisis of high oil prices or falling vehicle sales in North America. GM’s decision is merely to serve its narrow private interests to transfer vehicle production to Mexico where Ford recently secured an agreement for workers to assemble Ford Fiestas for $2.50 an hour, a concession from the standard of $5 per hour.
All the global monopolies including GM are salivating in anticipation of forcing down the claims of workers worldwide. They simply point to Mexico or China and declare that workers must accept the lowest standard or watch helplessly as their livelihoods disappear in an orgy of anti-social wrecking and concessions. The monopoly vision of Canada is one of workers providing raw materials and services, where workers claims are forced to a bare minimum through concessions and inflation. This backward vision is unacceptable and unsustainable because wherever the monopolies produce trucks or hybrid cars they must have people with enough income to buy them, and workers making $2.50 in Mexico or $12 in Canada and the U.S. will not be buying.
The backward vision of monopoly capital is unsustainable because workers in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada want a life and they want control over that life and the political power to govern themselves. Workers will not accept to work for $2.50 an hour in Mexico and they will not stand idly by and watch their means of production and livelihoods destroyed in Canada and the U.S. Canadian Mexican and U.S. workers need to channel the strength of their numbers and organization into a power to deprive the monopolies of their ability to deprive workers of their livelihoods and well-being. That starts in the here and now by depriving GM of the power to shut the Oshawa truck plant, the Ohio and Wisconsin plants. The power to deprive the monopolies is gained in the doing and in the constant summing up and theorizing of the doing to keep it on the right track.
Canadian, U.S. and Mexican workers want power to control the direction of the economy and must affirm their right to govern themselves and their national affairs and not be dictated to by a rich minority.
Workers need a power to deprive and they will find that power in their own unity and determination within their self-defense organizations to fight for their rights and security and the rights and security of all. They will find that power to deprive in strengthening their organized fightback to all and every single attack on their rights by the monopolies. They will find that power to deprive by working out their own politics which bring about democratic renewal.
A socialized economy such as in Canada or the U.S. is not designed or suitable for people to fend for themselves individually. The most demoralizing and backward institution is the labor market, which exists to disempower individual workers and empower the owners of monopoly capital. For workers to defend their individual rights they must defend the well-being of their collectives, each and every individual and the general interests of society. Without safeguarding the security of workers’ collectives and their socialized workplaces it is impossible to defend the security of individuals. The security and well-being of the individual can only be safeguarded in our modern world if our collectives are defended and secure and the general interests of society are looked after.
All for one and one for all!
The fight to deprive GM of the power to shut down the truck plant in Oshawa and those in Ohio and Wisconsin is vital to the well-being of all! Join and support GM workers in their fight for the survival of their truck plant, their livelihoods and the enormous added-value they produce!
(With editing by Voice of Revolution)
K.C. Adams is a journalist for TML Daily, Canada (cpcml.ca).[TOP]