Strikes in the United States, Canada, Italy... For three years, the working class has been fighting against austerity!

Everywhere, the bourgeoisie is raining down redundancies, multiplying drastic budget cuts, squeezing wages under the blows of inflation, and increasing job insecurity and exploitation. And there's no end in sight to the attacks! The crisis of capitalism is intractable and considerably aggravated by the wars and chaos that are spreading everywhere, like the deadly conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. To finance the massacres, the bourgeoisie is constantly increasing its insane military spending and demanding ever greater sacrifices from the exploited. The working class is still incapable of taking a direct stand against these conflicts, but it is not prepared to accept the attacks without reacting.

The working class is fighting a massive battle against austerity

At the end of August, as price rises continue to take their toll, rail freight workers in Canada attempted to go on the offensive. Described as  unpredented in terms of its scale, the abortive action brought together almost 10,000 workers in a country where the right to strike is governed by extremely draconian regulations. The government immediately banned all strikes in the name of safeguarding the national economy, ordering new negotiations between the railway companies and the sector's main union, Teamsters Canada. That was all Teamsters Canada needed to nip the movement in the bud by promising that the government's decision would be challenged... in the courts! In short, the union skilfully reduced the workers to impotence by postponing the fight to an indefinite future. As the union's public relations director so aptly put it: “We want to negotiate. Our members want to work, they like it, operating trains in Canada”’. The bourgeoisie could not have found a better watchdog...

A month later, nearly 50,000 dockworkers in 36 ports in the United States, as well as those in the port of Montreal, launched a strike lasting several days. A strike on this scale has not been seen since 1977. In the midst of an election campaign, the Biden administration rushed to play mediator, hypocritically showing its ‘support’ for the dockworkers. With the complicity of the government, the unions were able to put an end to the strike by pushing through a “wage agreement in principle”’, which will be negotiated... in January 2025.

After a number of partial work stoppages since April, 15,000 workers at 25 major American hotels went on strike on 1 September (Labour Day in the United States), demanding better pay, a reduction in workload and the cancellation of job cuts. The 700 workers at the Hilton San Diego even went on strike for 38 days, the longest hotel strike in San Diego's history.

Car workers are also continuing to fight, particularly in the factories belonging to the Stellantis group. In 2023, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis workers tried to unite their struggles at national level and even beyond, with workers in Canada. Of course, the unions had confined the struggle to the car industry alone. But this phenomenon expressed the desire of workers not to remain alone in their corner, not to shut themselves away in the factory, and resulted in a huge outpouring of sympathy from other parts of the working class. Since then, the unions have succeeded in meticulously dividing up the struggle at factory level, locking the workers in to defend this or that production line threatened with closure.

In Italy too, at the end of October, 20,000 employees of the Stellantis car group demonstrated in Rome against the closure of several Fiat plants. The movement was also described as “a historic strike the like of which has not been seen for over forty years”. But here again, the unions did their utmost to reduce the workers to impotence. At the same time as Stellantis was laying off 2,400 employees at its plants in Detroit (United States), the Italian unions called for a single day's strike with nationalist slogans around the Fiat brand, that “emblem of Italy”.

But it was the strike at Boeing's factories in the US that made the biggest impact. For over a month, 33,000 workers have been demanding pay rises and the restoration of their pension scheme. As in Canada, the striking workers are accused of selfishly mortgaging the future of this ‘flagship’ of American industry and threatening the jobs of subcontractors. The aircraft manufacturer has even cynically threatened to lay off 17,000 employees to wipe out the ‘multi-billion dollar slate’ caused by the strikers. Here again, the unions are trying to confine the struggle to Boeing alone, locking the workers into a tough but highly isolated strike.

While the proletariat in the United States and Canada has shown itself to be particularly combative over the past two years in the face of the considerable deterioration in its living conditions, the unions have had to ‘radicalise’ their discourse and present themselves as the most determined in the struggle. But behind their alleged desire to win wage increases, they are seeking above all to strengthen their overseers’ role in order to better sabotage any mobilisation. Wherever struggles break out, the unions set out to isolate and divide the class, to deprive the workers of their main strength: their unity. They confine workers to their sector of activity, their company, their department. Everywhere, they seek to cut strikers off from the active solidarity of their class brothers and sisters in the struggle. This corporatist division is a real poison, because when we fight each in our corner, we all lose in our corner!

Despite the decomposition of capitalism...

These struggles are taking place in an extremely difficult context for the working class. Capitalism is decomposing, all social structures are rotting, violence and irrationality are exploding at unprecedented levels, fracturing society ever further. All countries, starting with the most fragile, are affected by this process. But of all the developed countries, the United States has been hardest hit by the putrefaction of capitalist society[1]. The country is ravaged, from the poorest ghettos to the highest levels of government, by populism, violence, drug trafficking and the most delirious conspiracy theories. The success of extreme right-wing libertarian theories, which advocate individual resourcefulness, hatred of any collective approach and the most idiotic Malthusianism, is a distressing symptom of this process.

In this context, the development of class struggle can in no way take the form of a homogeneous and linear rise in class consciousness and an understanding of the need for communism. On the contrary, with the acceleration of the phenomena of decomposition, the working class will constantly find itself confronted with obstacles, catastrophic events and the ideological rot of the bourgeoisie. The form that the struggle and the development of class consciousness will take will necessarily be bumpy, difficult and fluctuating. The eruption of Covid in 2020, the war in Ukraine two years later and the massacres in Gaza are sufficient illustrations of this reality. The bourgeoisie will take advantage, as it has always done, of every manifestation of decomposition to turn them immediately against the proletariat.

This is precisely what it is doing with the war in the Middle East, by trying to divert the proletariat from its class terrain, by pushing the workers to defend one imperialist camp against another. With a multitude of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the creation of ‘solidarity’ networks, it has cynically exploited the disgust provoked by the massacres in Gaza and Lebanon to mobilise thousands of workers on the terrain of nationalism[2]. This is the bourgeoisie's response to the maturation which is beginning to take place in the entrails of the working class. During the strikes of 2023 in the car industry, the feeling of being an international class began to emerge. The same dynamic was seen during the movement against pension reform in France, when workers at Mobilier National mobilised in solidarity with strikers in Britain. Although these expressions of solidarity remained in the embryonic stage, the bourgeoisie is perfectly aware of the danger that such a dynamic represents. The whole bourgeoisie was mobilised to stuff nationalist muck into the skulls of the workers because these reflexes of solidarity contained the seeds of the defence of proletarian internationalism.

With the growing instability of its political apparatus, of which populism is one of the most spectacular symptoms, the bourgeoisie is still trying to drive a wedge into the maturing of class consciousness. The strikes in the United States are taking place in a deafening electoral context. The Democrats are constantly calling for the road to populism to be blocked at the ballot box, and for the institutions of ‘American democracy’ to be revitalised in the face of the danger of ‘fascism’. Striking workers are constantly accused of weakening the Democratic camp and playing into the hands of Trumpism. In Italy, the arrival of the far right in power has also given rise to a whole campaign in favour of bourgeois democracy.

With the deceptive promises of the American and European left on ‘taxing the rich’ or ‘reform of workers’ rights’, and with the ‘progressive’ rhetoric on the ‘rights’ of minorities, the bourgeoisie is everywhere trying to sow illusions about the ability of the bourgeois state to organise a ‘fairer’ society. No, the bourgeoisie will not restore a flourishing economy! No, the bourgeoisie will not protect black or Arab people from its racist cops and bosses! The aim of all this nonsense is nothing more and nothing less than to spoil the workers' thinking and distract them from the struggles that are the only way to offer a real alternative to the historic crisis of capitalism and all the horrors it brings.

... the future belongs to the class struggle!

Despite all these obstacles, the class is fighting on a massive scale. From the point of view of the vulgar materialist, the current strikes are nothing more than corporatist struggles, depoliticised, directed and led to dead ends by the unions. But if we take a step back historically and internationally, despite the corporatist straitjacket imposed by the unions, despite all the very real weaknesses and illusions that weigh on workers, these movements are part of the continuity of the break that we have been observing for nearly three years. Since the ‘summer of anger’ which shook the United Kingdom in 2022 for several months, the working class has tirelessly resisted the attacks of the bourgeoisie. In France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Greece, the United States, Canada, Korea... The world has not seen such a wave of massive and simultaneous struggles in so many countries or over such a long period for three decades.

Over the last thirty years, the working class has lost its sense of itself and its identity, but it is gradually beginning to see itself again as a social force, and to rediscover some of its reflexes of solidarity. Better still, as the ICC has been able to document, workers are beginning to reappropriate the lessons of past struggles, trying to reconnect with the experience of their class: as with the struggle against the CPE or May 68 in France, with the Cordobazo in Argentina, or the miners' struggle in Great Britain in 1984.

Since the 1980s, workers' struggles had all but disappeared from the North American landscape. With the collapse of the USSR, proletarians in the United States were subjected to the same intense ideological bludgeoning as during the Cold War about the ‘victory of capitalism over (alleged) communism’. Workers' struggles were ruthlessly consigned to the dustbin of history. In a country plagued by violence and populism, where even Kamala Harris is suspected of being a ‘communist’ and wanting to ‘do what Lenin did’, the very fact that people dared to strike en masse again, to ask the question of solidarity and to call themselves ‘workers’, testifies to a profound change in the minds of the working class the world over.

The solidarity that has been expressed in all the social movements since 2022 shows that the working class, when it struggles, not only manages to resist social putrefaction, but also initiates the beginnings of an antidote, the promise of another world through proletarian fraternity. Its struggle is the antithesis of war and the each-against-all that marks capitalism’s terminal phase.

EG, 28 October 2024

 

[1] This also represents a major source of instability in on a world scale. See Resolution on the international situation (December 2023), International Review no. 171 (2023).

[2] Support for “Free Palestine” means support for imperialist war, ICC online