This article was originally published in World Revolution no.350 [2]

This article was originally published in World Revolution no.351 [3].

As the Republican primary elections dominate the media, the battle for the White House next fall is finally beginning to take shape. It’s pretty clear that the main factions of the U.S. ruling class are pushing for an Obama vs. Romney presidential election contest. After months of a chaotic Republican primary contest in which a series of conservative and Tea Party inspired candidates dominated the polls only to fall to one of their many rivals in short order, the field of candidates has finally narrowed. Currently, Romney’s only serious challenger for the Republican nomination is Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Speaker of the House of Representatives who is seemingly poised to emerge as the consensus candidate of Republican right wing. Although the Catholic conservative Rick Santorum and the extreme libertarian Ron Paul continue to complicate the race, with the Republican establishment lining up behind Romney, it appears that the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie will likely get the presidential election match-up they want. Nevertheless, the race remains highly volatile and the unpredictable Republican electorate may yet throw a wrench into the works, forcing the Republican Party to take drastic measures in order to make the presidential election competitive.

Behind all this drama over the Republican primaries stands the much deeper political crisis facing the U.S. bourgeoisie, a crisis that has only deepened in its gravity since the debt-ceiling debacle of last summer. Readers of Internationalism will recall the series of articles we have published since the mid-term elections of 2010 analyzing this crisis. This series builds on the analysis we have developed since the contested Bush/Gore presidential election of 2000, according to which the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been facing growing difficulties manipulating the outcome of the electoral process in order to bring the best possible ruling team to power for the historical moment and reinforce the democratic myth among the population. Although the U.S. bourgeoisie was able to obtain a temporary reversal of this trend in producing the “historic” election of Barack Obama in 2008, the political crisis has only deepened since his election, threatening to destabilize the two-party ideological division of labor and the entire democratic-electoral apparatus of U.S. state capitalism along with it. In our view, the evolution of the internal life of the U.S. bourgeoisie since the 2010 mid-term elections has confirmed this analysis.

In this article, we will review the main developments in this political crisis since the debt-ceiling debacle and show how they are narrowing the bourgeoisie’s room for maneuver in an historic moment in which the grave economic crisis it faces stubbornly refuses to go away and the working class is becoming increasingly restless.

The Aftermath of the Debt Ceiling Debacle: Obama Turns to the Left

The debt-ceiling debacle of last summer was an absolute catastrophe for the entire U.S. bourgeoisie (1). The nation and the entire world beyond was treated to a weeks long spectacle of brinkmanship in which the full faith and credit of the United States was put into question. If the debt ceiling was not raised, the U.S. government could have failed to meet its payments to creditors, social security checks might not have been mailed and even U.S. military personnel might have gone without paychecks. The prospect of a global economic calamity threatened, as the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives vowed to vote against any deal to raise the debt ceiling.

While public opinion polls consistently showed the population believed the Republican Party to be most at fault for the debacle, President Obama took his lumps too. He was roundly criticized within his own Democratic Party base for failing to be tougher in his negotiations with the Republican and Tea Party obstructionists and for appearing far too quick to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block to appease the right-wing desire for drastic spending cuts. Media pundits began to talk about a crisis of the American democratic system itself. Clearly, the population was fed up with both parties and just about all the institutions of government. More and more, the American state appeared to be completely unresponsive to its citizens, its agenda determined by ideological hacks on the one hand and corporate stooges on the other. Nobody – not President Obama, not Speaker Boehner, neither Democrat, nor Republican – seemed to have the interests of the ordinary American in mind.

In many ways, the debt-ceiling debacle was the logical conclusion of the unleashing of the Tea Party insurgency on the U.S. political system. Hell bent on reducing the federal government to a shell and taking orders from ideologues obsessed with the free market fundamentalist meme of “starving the state,” the Tea Party has proven itself to be just as destructive as its opponents feared. So far, the trappings of power and the lure of incumbency have not tamed the Tea Party in any significant way. Having ridden the Tea Party insurgency to victory in the 2010 mid-term elections, the Republican Party – already having made a major turn to the right – is now largely beholden to it. Committed to opposing President Obama at every turn – a man whose Presidency many in the Tea Party constituency believe is illegitimate – they have made it virtually impossible for the U.S. state to get anything done. As long as the Tea Party Republicans control Congress, there would appear to be no hope of passing comprehensive immigration reform, no new revenues with which to pay down the deficit and appease the population’s growing class for tax fairness, and no legislation of any real significance that does not cow toe to their extreme ideology. In the aftermath of the debt-ceiling debacle, it appears to have finally donned on the Obama administration that the current situation is unworkable. Something would have to be done to bring the Tea Party insurgency into line and revitalize the image of the U.S. state or risk the rapid decay of the institutions of American state capitalism itself and the further discrediting of the democratic illusion in the eyes of a population beginning to stir.

It has been in this context that the Obama administration has made a serious tack to the left in the aftermath of the debt ceiling crisis. If the Republican Party has largely discredited itself in the eyes of a large swathe of the population as a party of ideological bankruptcy, Obama’s rather tepid approach to the economic crisis and his closeness to Wall Street were having a similar effect of calling the Democratic Party into question as well – thus threatening the traditional ideological division of labor between the two parties. Since the debt-ceiling debacle, the Obama administration has set about attempting to repair the Democratic Party’s image and revitalize his own persona in preparation for the fall presidential election.

In November, the much-vaunted “Super Committee,” set-up to find additional spending cuts in the aftermath of the debt-ceiling debacle, came to naught and was revealed for the political farce it always was. However, the Democrats were allowed to trumpet the fact that major cuts to Social Security and Medicare have for now been avoided. Later, faced with the threat of a Republican initiated government shut down, Obama took a much harder stance with the House Republicans refusing to back down and forcing them to agree to continue funding the government. Obama then followed this up with a dramatic showdown over the payroll tax exemption – forcing the Republican Party, the party of “no new taxes,” to come out in favor of a tax hike on the working-class at Christmastime. Next, the President utilized Congress’ holiday break to appoint Ohio Attorney General Richard Corday to run a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) and appoint several “labor friendly” figures to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Attempting to consolidate his turn to the left and revitalize the image of his administration as an agent of the common man, Obama used his annual State of the Union address in January to announce his support for raising the capital gains tax, ensuring that the richest American who make their money off of investment income and carried interest pay a tax rate similar to their working class employees – a move clearly aimed at his most likely Republican challenger, billionaire Mitt Romney. Currently, Obama – without explicitly endorsing the movement—is taking up the language of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), seeking to give his presidency a new gloss of legitimacy, and paint his second term as one in which he will fight for “fundamental fairness” in the economy.

It is beginning to appear that faced on the one hand with a Tea Party insurgency that is making it almost impossible to govern and with a growingly restive population on the other – a restiveness that exploded in the Occupy Movement during the fall – the main factions of the U.S. ruling class would prefer to maintain the Obama administration in power for another term. Although historically in times of rising class struggle the ruling class has usually opted for a policy of putting the left-wing of its political apparatus in opposition so as to better control the rising militancy of the working-class, these are not ordinary times. In today’s chaotic environment, it appears that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are counting on a more progressive appearing Obama administration to play the game of the left opposition from within the state itself, in order to give the population the illusion that there is a party within the state that is fighting for the common man against the sheer insanity emanating from the right-wing.

Faced with a choice between trying to enact a more traditional ideological division of labor and attempting to revitalize the image of the state in the context of Occupy Movement, the main factions of the ruling class appear to be moving towards a decision to maintain Obama in power. A second Obama term will be used to try to convince the population that they have a friend in power, even if he is besieged by the right wing on all sides, and thus a stake in the bourgeois state. This rather unorthodox tactic stands as stark evidence of the gravity of the political crisis the U.S. bourgeoisie now faces.

The Presidential Campaign: The Fragility of the Ideological Division of Labor in the Midst of Electoral Chaos

Even as it emerges that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are moving towards a preference for a second Obama term, this doesn’t mean they will get it. As we have analyzed since the disputed Bush/Gore election, as a result of the centrifugal weight of social decomposition on the political system, the main factions of the bourgeoisie are having increasing difficulty manipulating the electoral system to achieve the desired outcome. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that Obama’s Republican opponent be a candidate that the main factions of the bourgeoisie could live with, if the election does not go the way they want it to.

Whatever maneuvers are put into place, regardless of the media campaigns launched on his behalf, the main factions of the bourgeoisie know full well that there is no guarantee Obama will be re-elected. Despite a growing media campaign around a supposed “economic recovery,” unemployment remains very high with young people (Obama’s electoral base) bearing the brunt of the much discussed “jobs crisis.” In addition, a highly politicized, strongly motivated, Tea Party-oriented faction of the electorate wants Obama out at all costs. This constituency promises to be among the most die-hard voters in the fall and they most certainly won’t vote for the President. However, the biggest wildcard in the Presidential campaign remains the highly volatile world economy with the threat that a European meltdown and/or Middle East volatility could send shockwaves through the U.S. economy in the summer and fall making it incredibly difficult for the President to win reelection. In such circumstances, the main factions of the bourgeoisie need a viable Republican candidate, who can govern with at least a veneer of competence and flexibility, should they find themselves in office in January 2013. Currently, there is only one candidate in the Republican race who fits this bill: Mitt Romney. It is not surprising, then, that by and large the Republican establishment has been lining up behind Romney in an attempt to make sure he is the Republican nominee.

However, unfortunately for the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie, this has not proven to be such an easy task. Despite all his advantages in campaign money, name recognition and the backing of the main figures of the Republican establishment, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters despise Romney. Poll after poll has consistently shown less than one-third of Republican voters support Romney’s candidacy. All throughout the summer and fall, the Republican primary campaign resembled a three ring circus with a series of conservative and Tea Party backed candidates rising to the top of the polls as the anti-Romney candidate, only to suffer a dramatic fall from grace. So far, Romney’s best ally in his campaign for the Presidency has been the erratic and unpredictable behavior of the Republican Party’s right wing, as it struggles to coalesce around a single candidate to unseat Romney as the party’s presumptive nominee. Nevertheless, despite the media’s unabashed attempt to build an aura of inevitability around Romney’s campaign following his eight vote victory in the Iowa caucuses and first place finish in the much more moderate New Hampshire primary, the Republican electoral base has proven stubborn. The day before the South Carolina primary, in which Gingrich trounced him, it was announced that Romney had actually lost Iowa to Rick Santorum! This set off widespread panic in the Republican establishment as Romney’s coronation was postponed out of growing fear that the caustic and erratic Gingrich might actually win the nomination.

Currently, although Romney won over Gingrich in the crucial primary state of Florida, several national polls continue to show the former House Speaker leading the Republican field. While a Romney nomination continues to be the most likely outcome of the Republican primaries, this remains far from certain. It is indeed a worrisome time for the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie as a Newt Gingrich (or Rick Santorum) Presidency would simply be imponderable. Some pundits have hinted that should Romney fail to win the nomination through the primary process, the Republican Party establishment would have to intervene at the party convention this summer to install their own candidate. Clearly, these are not the best of days for the U.S. democratic mystification!

If the Republican primary chaos has served to give the main factions of the bourgeoisie pause, they have also probably worked to strengthen their commitment to Obama’s re-election this fall. For all the cynical race baiting, Dickensian rhetoric and downright crazy talk coming from Gingrich and Santorum (2) on the campaign stump, the fierce primary campaign has only served to push Romney to the right, calling his image as a moderate, sensible and flexible Republican into sharp question. Moreover, his rivals have taken advantage of his enormous wealth to paint him as an out of touch billionaire, tax cheat and “vulture capitalist.” In the course of the campaign, Romney has become the virtual embodiment of the “one-percent” itself, making the prospect of his Presidency that much less attractive. In this context, it appears more and more likely that the main factions of the bourgeoisie would prefer to take their chances rehabilitating the image of the Obama administration than risk a direct provocation to the growing revolt of the population against the unfairness of the system and the possibility that this revolt could radicalize into a more direct response to capitalism itself on the working class terrain.

While the main factions of the bourgeoisie may very well get the Presidential election match-up they want in the end, this will not put an end to the seemingly interminable political crisis that further complicates its ability to manage the economic crisis and advance the interests of the overall national capital. Even if Obama is re-elected in the fall, he will most likely still have to deal with an obstructionist Congress that will resist his attempts to govern. Will the Tea Party representatives be more likely to compromise with the President in his second term? It is not possible to say at this time, but it is difficult to envision this taking place in an environment where they will remain beholden to right-wing interests backed by billionaire benefactors like the Koch brothers, hell-bent on advancing the most revanchist agenda. These moneyed interests have now been given free reign by the Supreme Court to flood the political process with money, qualitatively worsening the unpredictability of the electoral process (3).

On the other hand, if Romney wins the election, this would put the bourgeoisie in a perhaps more precarious position. How would a moderate Republican President deal with the ideologues in his own party? Would he be able to resist their calls to indiscriminately slash and burn the federal government bureaucracy and annihilate the remaining vestiges of the social wage, perhaps provoking an even stronger reaction from the working class than we have seen with the Occupy Movement? If he were to try and govern in a more centrist manner, could this risk the definitive break-up of the Republican Party itself and send the two party system into a definitive crisis? We do not have the answers to these questions at the moment, but, frankly, neither do the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Their developing anxiety over the increasingly tenuous state of the two-party system and the democratic illusion itself is well grounded.

So what is the working-class to make of all this chaos, all this electoral maneuvering? In the end, regardless of the outcome of the elections, the imperatives facing the winning party will be the same: austerity, scaling back of the remaining social wage and the general management of the historic decline of the U.S. national capital. While it may be true today that, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie as a whole, the Democrats would likely be able to carry out these tasks with better practical acumen, and they are therefore better capable of serving as the governing party, this does not put them into a fundamental opposition with the Republicans as far as the working class is concerned. While its true that the Republican Party has been largely taken over by a deeply regressive faction of the bourgeoisie with little sense of the overall interest of the national capital, this does not mean that the Democrats will govern in the interests of the working-class. On the contrary, neither party has a solution to the economic crisis. Neither has an alternative to the ultimate imperative for further austerity. In this regard, it is quite telling that whatever the steps the Obama has taken to turn to the left and give itself the aura of populism, he has never backed down on his willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the table in his quest to work out a deficit reduction deal with his Republican rivals. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term.

In response to the bourgeoisie’ ongoing, and now permanent, electoral campaigns, the working-class can only oppose its own autonomous struggles to defend its living and working conditions. The Occupy Movement was an important step in developing this struggle, but we will have to go much further in the period ahead as the attacks against our class continue to mount. In the meanwhile, we must refuse to be taken in to by these incessant election campaigns and recognize that whatever their differences, in the end both parties are obliged to carry out the attacks the capitalist system’s historic crisis demands.

Henk, 01/28/2012

In this two-part series of articles about the employed and unemployed workers’ struggle of the 1930’s we have looked at what seem to us to have been the strengths and weaknesses of that movement. We think that this kind of assessment is important in the context of the present economic crisis and the struggles that it has given birth to, especially regarding the development of protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. In this first part we will look at the present attacks against the working class, and especially the unemployed. Then we will start the examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the movement of the 1930’s. In the next article, we will focus more in detail on its weaknesses and broach the question of what lessons to draw for the present and future struggles of the class.

Unemployment in the XXI century - the bourgeoisie hides the reality

The ruling class finds reason to believe that the recent release of statistics regarding unemployment can give its lie about the economic ‘recovery’ a boost: apparently, the unemployment rate has dropped from hovering above a stubborn 9% national average to 8.6%. The working class, by contrast, has every reason to continue to feel skeptical of the ruling class’ reassurances as to the ‘recovery’ which supposedly started two years ago, and of any rosy perspectives for the future. Such drop does nothing to quell the uncertainty and anxiety about the future of one’s employment and it does nothing to console the throngs of those who are still collecting unemployment benefits, have given up looking for a job altogether, are currently working part-time jobs for lack of anything better, or are about to enter the labor force, either as young college graduates, returning war veterans, or retirees whose pension or social security checks cannot keep pace with the rate of inflation or need to help pay for their unemployed children’s student loan or credit card debt or mortgage. Behind the rhetoric that peddles the lie about the ‘recovery’ there are several calculated manipulations of the statistics. For example, it is not a secret that the method used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate the official unemployment rate is bogus. There was a time when 3% unemployment rate was considered ‘acceptable’, but with the explosion of the economic crisis in the 70’s that number was pushed up to 5%, which was then called ‘natural unemployment’. It is not unlikely that, as the present recession seems to be taking on a permanent character, that figure will be ‘adjusted’ once again. Already, states whose unemployment rate currently drops to 6.5% no longer qualify for benefits, demonstrating how the ruling class has started de facto to regard that rate as ‘natural unemployment’. The current rate calculation excludes those who have stopped seeking work, those who settle for part-time work when they would rather work full-time, and the military. By an alternative measure of unemployment that the same Bureau produces, the unemployment rate jumped to 15.6% as of last November 2011 when those who have looked for work in the past 12 months and those who work part-time even though they would like full-time jobs are included. We can rest assured that even that estimate is conservative. The picture becomes all the more grimy when we add that 43% of all unemployed – 5.7 million people – have been out of work for more than 27 weeks.

Congress has passed extensions on the limit of unemployment coverage several times since the onset of the economic crisis, amidst bitter disputes between Democrats and Republicans. Over the last two years, members of Congress repeatedly have clashed over continuing the current 99 weeks of extended benefits. Although Congressional leaders relented in December to a two-month extension of the current 99 weeks of benefits, there has been no support for providing additional help for those who have exhausted their aid. As part of its ongoing campaign about the ‘recovery’, the ruling class also has to justify the cuts to benefits it is forced to pass. The bourgeoisie has fashioned a venomous attack against the jobless by portraying them as ‘loafers’, shiftless people who “live off other people’s money”, and who rely on government’s handouts because they do not want to take the ‘opportunity’ of the ‘new jobs’ that have supposedly been created during the ‘recovery’. Clearly, for the ruling class there must be joy to be drawn from the humiliating and dehumanizing situation of dire economic need which forces millions to stand in the unemployment lines and welfare offices, once the handouts afforded to them by the capitalist state are over. This demagogy aims at dividing the jobless from the employed, and scapegoats the former for the huge deficits of the federal and states’ governments. It also reveals the racism of the ruling class, which it uses as a dividing tactic to pit black and while workers against each other. But behind their quite blunt racism we find the rabid scorn the bourgeoisie has for the entire working class, for fear that one day it will unite against its rule. This reactionary ideology is the other side of the same coin. While the reactionary faction openly advocates draconian cuts to benefits, the more ‘liberal’ faction of the ruling class score points on the issue of tying the workers to the state by posing as the champions of the exploited, who are unable to do more for them because of their reactionary brothers, and not because capitalism is rotting on its feet.

Behind this shameful posturing and mud-slinging, the necessity to reduce benefits in the face of the economic crisis, the need to divide the workers among themselves, and the necessity to keep them mystified as to the reality of unemployment are very real. In the words of an unemployed worker, “The recently passed two-month extension to unemployment benefits (UE) is a maneuver to further manipulate the statistics regarding the real number of unemployed people. Since the extension does not apply to people that have used the maximum 99 weeks allowed under the present extension program, many of those unemployed people will not be counted as unemployed, and will simply… disappear” (www.unemployed-friends2.org [10]). This is clearly an attempt at further manipulating the statistics regarding the true numbers of jobless workers. At the end of February, when the current two-month extension expires, it is certain that if any other extension is passed, it will be with all sorts of strings attached. Proposals are made ranging from requiring unemployed workers to have a high school diploma in order to be eligible for benefits, or meet with caseworkers for “re-employment assessments”, to making permanent changes to the structure of the program. These changes would loosen federal restrictions on how states administer the benefits. Under a Republican proposal, states could opt to use federal unemployment insurance funds for something other than benefits. As the two-month extension is passed, a number of states, strapped with cash after several cuts to their budgets, look for ways by which they can avoid or restrict the amount of money the unemployed could collect. Here are a few examples:

• In South Carolina unemployment rate is 9,9 percent and has not been below 9 percent in three years. The average unemployment benefit payment there is $235, ranking 45th nationwide. The maximum someone can receive is $326 weekly, which equates to a salary of less than $17.000. Under a new policy, the longer someone is unemployed, the lower the salary they must accept in a job offer. After four weeks, they must take a job offering 90 percent of what they were making. The percentage drops every four weeks, to 70 percent after 16. After federally paid extensions kick in at 20 weeks, it would eventually drop to minimum wage. Another policy change cuts length of benefits for employees let go for absenteeism, poor attitude, violating policies or poor work quality. Yet, Maj. Gen. Abraham Turner, the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce’s director, said, “We’re trying to prohibit that person drawing unemployment from sitting back and not aggressively going after the jobs. The jobs are there.” In his view, continued benefits just discourage people from looking for jobs, and two years of jobless benefits should be enough for someone to find a job. Never mind the unemployment rate and the fact that there are, on average, four workers looking for any job advertised nationwide.

• In Minnesota soon it will no longer be possible to be eligible for 13 weeks of extended jobless benefits. The loss of benefits has to do with the state’s unemployment rate. The state’s three-month unemployment rate dipped below 6,5 percent making it no longer eligible for the Federal-State Extended Benefits. Minnesota is among nine other states that no longer qualify. Statewide, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development estimates 7.000 Minnesotans will be impacted by the change. Locally, Southeastern Minnesota Building and Construction Trades President Mike Krahn said an estimated 30 to 40 percent of his union’s members are unemployed.
• In California, the number of jobless workers who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits is approaching 600.000, the state Employment Development Department reports. By EDD’s latest count, more than 599.000 had been booted off the unemployment rolls as of Jan. 10.

From the point of view of the working class, it is necessary to openly denounce the recently released statistics about the ‘drop’ in unemployment, the continued mystification around the economic ‘recovery’, the latest two-month extension of unemployment benefits, and the revolting racist demagogy of the ruling class for what they are: attempts to fog the rising consciousness of the exploited regarding the obsolescence of capitalism, its inability to offer any perspectives for the future, and the urgency to do away with this moribund social system and build a new world. It is vital for the working class to go back to its own history and draw the lessons from its past struggles and clearly understand how and why they were defeated. What were the weaknesses and strengths of those struggles? What did the ruling class do to confront the militancy of the working class? What can the working class do today to avoid the traps of the past and forge a more coherent, better prepared way forward in the context of the present economic crisis and the attacks against the unemployed and unemployment benefits?

The last time the ruling class was faced with mass unemployment, during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the workers and unemployed waged courageous and very militant battles in defense of their economic interests. However, as we will see, the historic moment and situation were not in favor of a development of a strongly politicized movement which could put in question the continued existence of the capitalist mode of production. To a large extent, the struggles of the 1930’s limited themselves to a call for relief. This is the fundamental reason why the state was able to blunt the class struggle through the creation of programs and unemployment benefits, until then non-existent. Today the perspective is no longer toward the establishment of programs such as the Works Progress Administration or National Recovery Act, but rather toward a drastic reduction of existing benefits, no matter what the present campaign by the liberal faction of the bourgeoisie wants us to believe. The struggles of the unemployed and employed workers of the 1930’s were fatefully impaired by the world-wide failure of the revolutionary wave that had started in Russia in 1917 and the ensuing counterrevolution. We cannot get into an explanation of this here, but the ICC has written extensively on the Russian Revolution, the causes of its failure and the international repercussions on the working class and its struggles. Our readers may want to refer to our articles on our website. The ruling class today looks back at those times to draw the lessons of how to deal with possible or contingent social unrest, but it cannot ‘invent’ a historical defeat of the proletariat such as this had experienced in the 30’s. This historic fact can potentially play in favor of the working class. However, the ruling class’ weapons will be strongly ideological. Its preferred weapon will be that of divide and conquer, a tactic that the U.S. ruling class has great experience with. It will also try to strengthen the presence of the unions within the ranks of the workers, as it did in the 1930’s. We cannot here write about why we think that the unions are the ruling class’ shop-floor police and the working class’ hangman, notwithstanding the idiosyncratic tendency of certain factions of the bourgeoisie to be at times vehemently against the unions. We invite our readers to read the many articles we have published on this issue. These are not the only obstacles the workers are confronted with. It is then of the utmost importance that, as the working class looks back at its own history and struggles, it draws all the lessons to make it powerful to confront the traps its exploiters lay. The fact that the working class has not suffered an ideological and historical defeat as in the years following the failure of the revolutionary wave that had started in Russia in 1917 certainly makes it more difficult for the ruling class to manipulate the consciousness of the workers with nationalist ideology. But this will not help the working class much unless it will be able to surpass the other wrenches the ruling class throws in the works of the class struggle and the development of consciousness that can result from it, and unless the workers learn from their own past shortcomings.

The historic background to the struggles of the 1930’s: the role of the American workers’ movement

While it isn’t the aim nor the scope of this article to show the historic origins of the workers movement in the U.S., or to develop an in-depth analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, familiarity with it is indispensible to place the struggles of the 1930’s in their proper perspective. We then invite our readers to read our series of articles on the history of the workers movement in the U.S. which we published in International Reviews 124 and 125. Here we will merely summarize some important points to help us better understand the historic context in which the struggles of the 1930’s developed.

First and foremost, we recognize the IWW of the years between its founding in 1905 and its disbanding in 1921 as the most important and serious organization of the workers movement in the U.S. The historic context of the founding of the IWW in 1905 is discussed in the International Reviews afore mentioned. Here, we want to draw attention to the international context of the time, which placed the formation of the IWW at the watershed between capitalism’s ascendance and decadence. In large part, its internal debates, divergences, and sometimes contradictory positions were the reflection of the effort to understand the implications of how the change in historic periods impacted the political positions and forms of a revolutionary organization. Its response to these changes was its practice of revolutionary syndicalism. (See our series of articles on revolutionary syndicalism in International Reviews 118 and 120). It was a reaction to the opportunism of the socialist parties and the unions which had infected Social Democracy abroad and the AfoL here.

Certain historical ‘specificities’ of the development of capitalism in America must be taken into account. For example:

• the Frontier, which provided opportunities for the ruling class to diffuse social discontent about the conditions of exploitation by dispersing the working class over a vast geographical area
• the immigration and racial questions, which the ruling class used from very early on to divide the exploited among themselves
• the particularly vicious and brutal use of repression by the ruling class against the working class’ mobilizations and struggles, which led the IWW to regard political action futile and subordinate it to the economic.

These conditions help explain the difficulties of the birth of a unified working class in America and accompanied the IWW’s reluctance toward political action and its theorization that the form of class organization should be revolutionary syndicalism, i.e. the idea that the industrial union should be one with the unitary organization of the workers and that of the revolutionary militants and agitators – or the party. Fundamentally, the IWW’s conception of itself as a mass unitary organization, and not a political party, made it vulnerable in the face of the repressive onslaught the U.S. ruling class unleashed as it prepared to enter World War I. Instead of focusing on closing ranks and preparing for clandestine work, the view of a majority of the General Executive Board in the voice of Haywood, was that the war was a distraction from the important work of union building. Its focus on union-building to the detriment of the theoretical development of political principles and organizational forms and practices left it unprepared and hesitant as to the direction to take in the face of WWI at a time when other revolutionary organizations abroad were drawing the theoretical implications of the entry of capitalism in its decadent phase, taking a clear internationalist position against the war, and helping the class wage its most daring attempt to date at seizing power. The American working class was left virtually leaderless and without clear orientations during the revolutionary wave that was sweeping Europe and Russia in the first part of the century and in the face of the terrible counterrevolution that was to follow the failure of the revolutionary attempts of 1917 in Russia and 1919 in Germany. When the massive wave of unrest and struggles by the unemployed and employed struck in the 1930’s, the working class was to pay the price of the workers’ movement weaknesses. The weaknesses of the workers’ movement in America and the defeat, at the international level, of the great revolutionary wave that had started with the Russian Revolution, help us understand why, notwithstanding the tremendous militancy which the American working class displayed in the struggles of the 1930’s, it could not properly confront the reformist and democratic traps that the Roosevelt administration laid in front of it. Without a clear political orientation, the working class could not assert its own historic project of overthrowing capitalism by seizing political power and only got petty reforms which were immediately wiped out at the slightest relaxation of workers’ militancy.

The unemployed and workers struggles of the 1930’s – their power

The years of the Great Depression saw the largest mobilization of the unemployed in the history of the U.S. The first step in this mobilization was overcoming the ideological and demagogic weight of the bourgeois credo according to which there is shame in being jobless. In this view, joblessness is itself a condition born of one’s own deficiency or laziness, not of the anarchy of capitalist production, the competition that drives this mode of production, and the crises that it inevitably engenders. At the time of the Great Depression, there was no unified or centralized structure or program to provide relief to the indigent. Whatever handouts were given, mostly provided by charities, ‘philanthropists’, or in any case in a very fragmented manner, they were difficult to qualify for – only orphaned, widowed, and the crippled could get it – and were very meager. If one happened not to be orphaned or widowed or crippled, but plain and simple destitute, in most cases one would be incarcerated in almshouses and workhouses. It was not rare that orphans would be indentured on condition of providing whatever labor they could in exchange for being fed. These practices are no longer in place today, but as the examples offered above of proposals to restrict access to jobless benefits suggest, the bourgeoisie is still concerned with both: 1. How to mystify the workers as to the real reasons for their poverty, and 2. How to make use of the indigence created by the capitalist mode of production and the humiliation meted out by capitalism’s mode of relief to terrorize the rest of the working class into submission to the barbaric laws of laboring under capitalist exploitation. Indeed, while it is true that the prospect of joblessness can be a disincentive to enter open struggle, it is also true that a continued, persistent economic crisis lays the foundation for mass unemployment, which makes it difficult today for the bourgeoisie to legitimize its continued existence. This is why it has to resort to demagogy, mystification, and the tactic of divide and conquer. This was true in the 1930’s as well. The exceptional hardship created by the Depression was bound, inevitably, to cause social unrest. This possibility was echoed many times by several politicians and union leaders. In September 1931, the American Legion announced that “...the crisis could not be promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods” (1). The idea that communist ideas were getting a hold of the masses was widespread. The Republican governor of Washington declared, “We cannot endure another winter of hardship such as we are now passing through” (2). Edwrad F. McGrady of the AFL told the Seante Subcommittee on Manufacturers, “ I say to you gentlemen, advisedly, that if something is not done… the doors of revolt in this country are going to be thrown open” (3) and John L. Lewis even pronounced, “The political stability of the Republic is imperiled” (4). The social situation was indeed explosive. In all major cities of the U.S., from Chicago to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland… the earliest uprisings occurred among the unemployed. As unemployment rose, many families found it impossible to pay their rent. In New York City some 186.000 families were served dispossess notices during eight months ending in June 1932. In Philadelphia in 1933, 63% of the white families and 66% of the black were in arrears. San Francisco did not fare better, and in five industrial cities in Ohio eviction orders were issued against nearly 100.000 families between January 1930 and June 1932 (5). This explosive social situation was happening at a time when the ruling class had not yet had a need to mobilize the capitalist state through a myriad of programs, bureaucratic practices, and, above all, the unions apparatus to contain social unrest. In other words, the capitalist state was not prepared to confront this novel situation. This helped create the conditions for the birth of unemployed councils which formed more often than not on the spur of the need of the moment and which had the aim of preventing marshals from putting furniture of evicted families on the streets, or going to the relief offices to request immediate release of cash. This ad-hoc, spontaneous form of the struggle, as we know, is the embryonic form of the workers’ councils, which were formed in 1905 and then again in 1917 in Russia and elsewhere during the revolutionary wave. These forms of organization are the living proof of the fact that, as we shall see in the next part of the article, the formation of permanent mass organizations in the current period is always the prelude to their incorporation in the state or the democratist ideology of the state. The state repression which was often unleashed on the committees and demonstrations or marches, was a burning reminder of the necessity to maintain the ad-hoc form of organization.

In the beginning, rather than discouraging the unemployed from creating their councils, state repression inflamed them even more, resulting in ever wider protests. From the onset, the earliest expressions of unemployed unrest took on a mass character, with marches and demonstrations at times so threatening that the mayors of some cities were forced to promise the collection of funds to be distributed to the unemployed. Unemployed groups also supported and united with striking workers, whose numbers also were swelling under the pressures of the economic crisis. The most well-remembered examples of this tendency toward unifying the struggles of the working class are the Toledo Auto-Lite strike and the Milwaukee Streetcar strike of 1934. In both instances, the support of thousands of unemployed was crucial in breaking the bosses’ resistance. In Toledo it was A.J. Muste’s radical Unemployed League who helped reinforced the employed workers picket lines with large numbers of unemployed. When the auto parts company obtained a court injunction limiting picketing and barring the League from picketing, the League, along with some local Communists, violated the court order and instead called for mass picketing. The striking workers were inspired by the solidarity and militancy shown by their jobless brothers and sisters, and their numbers started to grow. Auto-Lite hired 1.500 strikebreakers and Toledo police, unwilling to have a direct showdown with the workers because of the great sympathy for the strikers even among the police ranks, deputized special police paid for by Auto-Lite. The resistance was so fierce that, the Ohio National Guard was called in to evacuate the strikebreakers from inside the factory, which had been surrounded by 10.000 workers and their sympathizer. Notwithstanding the intervention of the Ohio National Guard with machine guns and bayonetted rifles, the killing of two people and the wounding of scores , resistance continued, with workers gathering again and coming back the next day for a pitched battle against the National Guard. The crowd, armed with bricks and bottles would not disperse. Workers started to threaten a general strike, and finally Auto-Lite agreed to a 22 percent wage increase and limited recognition for the union.

(…to be continued)

Ana, January 2012

Although a ruling is not expected until June, the large measure of support shown by the Supreme Court in the initial Arizona v. the United States hearings for the state’s independent enacting of immigration policy, the political difficulties facing the ruling class in the United States have reached a new level.  Despite US state capitalism’s serious need for comprehensive federal immigration reform (which hasn’t been enacted since 1986, despite drawn-out attempts made in 2007 and again in 2010), no faction of the ruling class has been able to unite the others around a federal immigration reform policy—and a growing segment are engaging in out-and-out obstructionism for purely political and ideological reasons.  In the absence of federal action, states have begun enacting their own immigration policies, Arizona being the first of five so far.  From the perspective of state capitalism, matters so closely affecting the health of the national economy as immigration policy cannot be decided differently across different states.  Yet the difficulties of rationalizing the system, and the increasingly ideological motivations of a part of the ruling class, have not yet allowed for the passage of any comprehensive reforms. 

Until recently, the ruling class had opted for a somewhat porous border policy, separating the different enforcement duties between the state and federal governments to allow a stream of illegal immigration into the country and maintain the flow of cheap labor whilst partially enforcing immigration policy for the purposes of repression and the fear it creates amongst these laborers.[1]  This of course has become increasingly chaotic over the years, as the population of undocumented immigrants living in the United States swelled to 12 million in 2007, and was still estimated at 11.2 million as of March 2010.[2]  For state capitalism it is completely unacceptable to have such a large portion of the population totally unaccounted for, unable to vote, fearful of cooperating with law enforcement, and totally alienated from the state.  Furthermore, in the context of the crisis, states see the need to streamline health care costs, regulate the costs of social programs, and strengthen the border to control the influx of more immigrants.  While Arizona’s SB 1070 law effectively exacerbates many of these problems, it presents itself as complementary to existing federal law—which is specifically what was challenged by the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona.  SB 1070 explicitly criminalizes the obstruction of information sharing about immigration statuses but also mandates that any “reasonable” suspicion that someone is in the country illegally be “reasonably” investigated.[3]  These more controversial parts of the law, which even allow unwarranted arrest of persons suspected of offenses making them eligible for deportation, and have correctly been criticized as encouraging racial profiling, were explicitly left un-discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.[4]  But even the administration’s argument that Arizona was overstepping its jurisdiction was, according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor “not selling very well.”[5]

While net immigration from Mexico has effectively flat-lined with the collapse of the job and housing construction markets, increased repression, and a spike in deportations (in fact, record numbers have been deported each subsequent year under the current administration), the deepening of the crisis means the issue of immigration reform is not going to disappear.[6]  The challenge for the bourgeoisie is to balance their need to integrate 11 million undocumented immigrants into US society, while maintaining their ideological campaigns to create a culture of resentment and scapegoating among the working class in order to have a freer hand in pushing through the cuts in social spending and other austerity measures the crisis will demand, one demographic at a time.  As we wrote in Internationalism 155:

“It would be even better for the bourgeoisie if they could keep this group of people in their current condition--cowed, desperate, and afraid to struggle--as well as countable and regulated. This reflects the need of the bourgeois state to bring all social life under its oversight. …to turn a useful and exploitable group into a useful, exploitable, and controllable group, is at the heart of any bourgeois immigration strategy.”

However it is proposed, there can be no gain for the working class as a whole from any immigration reform.  The myriad ideological campaigns about immigrants taking jobs from “native” workers and the attempts to integrate this population into state structures must be carried out together with a strategy that keeps the working class divided and fighting amongst itself as separate demographic units begging for ever-shrinking crumbs from the ruling class’ table.  The increasing irrationality of extremely reactionary factions of the ruling class which demonize ‘illegal’ immigrants and scapegoats them for the social decomposition and deepening economic crisis of capitalism, may well further fracture the attempts at regulating and systematizing the immigration law, while also risking to create a ‘mob’ mentality among the least conscious sectors of the population.  This could ultimately lead to a situation of intolerable and difficult-to-control social chaos.

The systematization of what was intentionally left nebulous in the past, on the federal level, has proved increasingly difficult as a part of the bourgeois right continues to act increasingly out of ideological rather than political or economic concerns, taking their own demagoguery at face value.7  What is novel about Arizona v. The United States is the degree to which the Supreme Court seems to be prepared to uphold the state-level initiatives around immigration law, regardless of the consequences to national capitalism and the ability of the federal government to assert its authority over the states in matters of dire consequence for national capitalism.  With more than 5 states already taking up Arizona’s example and pushing through their own immigration policy, the ruling class’ lack of perspective and inability to take united action can only push toward more and more problems for state capitalism in the US further down the road.

-JJ

Almost exactly two years after Mr. Obama signed his signature health care reform legislation into federal law, the acrimonious dispute between Republicans (who nearly unanimously oppose this legislation) and the Democrats (who generally support the President’s health care reform efforts, even if they are much less enthusiastic in their support than Republicans are in their condemnation) offers a glimpse into the current state of the political crisis of the U.S. bourgeoisie. From the point of view of the need of the U.S. national capital to tackle the rampant waste, inefficiency and general high costs in the nation’s health care system, the law promises to do little more than move some expenses off the federal government’s books. Depending on which “expert” one believes, so-called “Obamacare” will have only a modest positive impact on the federal budget deficit at best. However, even in this rosiest of scenarios, this only happen if all the provisions of the law are fully implemented, something that is in serious doubt at the moment given the political fall-out over the law. This has manifested itself in a very skeptical Supreme Court, which recently heard arguments about the law’s constitutionality from the Obama administration’s lawyers on one side and a coalition of conservative Republican state Attorney Generals on the other.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments, most pundits strongly expected the justices would uphold the law on the grounds of the constitution’s commerce clause, which gives the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. However, after an almost unprecedented three days of oral arguments in front of the court, the expectations from legal analysts had changed dramatically. Most now expect the court—in a sharp rebuke of the Obama administration—to throw out the law’s central mechanism for “reform”—the so-called “individual mandate,” which would require everyone to buy health insurance or pay a fine collected at tax time through the Internal Revenue Service. Some analysts expect that the Supreme Court may throw out the entire law, dealing a devastating blow to Obama as he gears up for his reelection campaign this summer. As we write, a decision from the Supreme Court is due to be released sometime in June, promising to be a moment of high political drama, regardless of how the court ultimately rules.

So what is all this political fuss about? Why are the Republicans so universally opposed to this law? Why do so many claim to see it as a form of “government run socialist health care”? After all the law is fairly mild in its attempts to “reform” the U.S. health care system. This is clearly nothing like the nationalization of health care delivery that exists in other advanced countries. It isn’t even a single payer system. Obama and the Democrats long ago stopped talking about a public health insurance option to compete with private insurance companies. So what is going on here exactly?

In fact, the law is so mild that it won’t do very much at all to address the underlying irrationality of health care delivery in the U.S. From the perspective of the national capital, the “reform” of the health care industry is necessary to help it maintain a competitive edge on the world market and shrink its enormous federal budget deficit. It is a well-known fact that among the advanced countries, the U.S. has the most inefficient health care system. Health care is much more expensive in the U.S. than in any other advanced country, yet health outcomes are much worse. According to Fareed Zakaria in a recent article in Time, an MRI that costs $281 in France, costs more than $1000 in the U.S.[1] Despite having the most expensive health care in the world, the U.S. has the highest rates of chronic disease, such as Type 2 Diabetes, which only aggravate the cost pressures on the national capital. So irrational is the health care system in the U.S., that chronically ill indigent patients can often only receive treatment in hospitals where care is much more expensive than at other heath care facilities. A recent episode of the documentary news show Rock Center, highlighted the case of a indigent stroke victim who has been hospitalized for two years at the cost of 2.4 million dollars, despite the fact that her care could be achieved 17 times less expensively at a long term care facility. However, because she has no insurance, and because only hospitals and not long term care facilities are mandated by law to care for indigent patients, she has remained hospitalized. Other well-know anecdotes include the fact that many U.S. companies prefer to locate factories in Canada, where they are not directly responsible for the health care costs of their workers and retirees. Thus, the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector—something that certain elements of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been complaining loudly about since 2008—is due in some part to the country’s inefficient, expensive and Byzantine health care system.

All of this is well known to the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It is a problem that has been contemplated many times in the past. Yet, it seems the U.S. national capital missed the boat on the setting up of a single payer health care system, when other advanced countries were doing so in the decades following World War Two. Although, the U.S. bourgeoisie set-up Medicare as a single payer health care system for seniors and some disabled people in the 1960s, the U.S. political system has not been able to go past this stage since then. Previous attempts to reform the health care system, such as the ill-fated “Hillarycare” in President Clinton’s first-term, have crashed on the shoals of U.S. politics. Still, the problem remains and it has gotten so damaging to the competiveness of the U.S. national capital that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are finally getting serious about the necessity to do something about the inefficiency and waste in the system, even if that “something” is not a full nationalization of the health care system or the establishment of a single payer model. Steps must be taken to reign in health care costs and get more people to pay into the system.

However, the ongoing in-fighting within the bourgeoisie are making these tasks more and more difficult to accomplish.  This situation is not novel.  As we have pointed out several times in our analyses of the political situation of the American bourgeoisie, the economic crisis has for some time fueled the development of deep and growing fractures within the bourgeoisie as to which policies to put in place to best protect the competitive position of the national capital.  However, it seems these fractures themselves are more and more taking on a life of their own, whereby they no longer express real disputes as to which policies are more rational to implement from the point of view of the national capital and do not offer real and viable policy alternatives around which the ruling class as a whole can unify.  One example of this in the current ongoing dispute between Republicans and Democrats is that “Obamacare” was originally the Republican answer to “Hillarycare,” and it was first adopted by Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts and proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 in California.[2]  However, no sooner had Obama himself adopted it on the national level, as a supposedly politically viable “compromise” proposal, than the Republicans started to call these plans “government run socialist health care.” So far, the only proposal the Republicans have put forward, through the so-called “Ryan budget,” for reducing the cost of the health care system is to completely dismantle Medicare, giving seniors and the disabled a modest voucher to buy health insurance on the open market. Congressman Ryan has also proposed making Medicaid—the complex federal/state program that provides meager care for the indigent—a so-called “block grant to the states,” meaning that states can do whatever they want with the money.

It is true that neither “alternative”—Democratic or Republican—would do anything to address the underlying issue of the irrationality of care delivery and the skyrocketing costs of it, since neither addresses the underlying issue of the fragmented private insurance industry, each charging increasingly astronomical fees to offset their health care costs by shifting this burden onto hospitals, who in turn shift it onto insurance policy rate payers and the federal and state governments.  However, the Republicans’ proposal could also potentially stoke social unrest by eliminating one of the remaining elements of the U.S. social wage that continues to be supported by wide swathes of the U.S. working-class. Even many Tea Party supporters defend Medicare as a system they paid into during their working lives and which they feel should be there for them when they retire or if they become disabled. Moreover, the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie recognize that the Ryan proposals would likely only worsen the problem in the long run. By kicking more and more people out of the health care system costs would likely only rise as people are unable to get preventive care and adequate treatment for chronic conditions until they show up very sick in the emergency room. It is for this reason that some of the more extreme elements in the Republican Party have suggested eliminating the legal requirement to provide basic care. But the main factions of the bourgeoisie likely recognize the social powder keg such a proposal represents.

Nevertheless, the entire idea that the Republicans would sink a plan that was originally their own seems to be motivated more by an ideological hatred of the President and the developing tendency of “each for themselves” than by any real concern to address the needs of the national capital.  In this sense, the health care crisis has two meanings: one for the ruling class, and another for the working class.  For the ruling class it is taking on the seriousness of a political crisis in which it once again fails to act in the overall interests of the national capital.  For the working class, it is the expression of the increased pauperization of its conditions of life under decomposing capitalism and the fact the ruling class has no real alternatives to offer it that can ameliorate the growing attacks on its living and working conditions. These attacks are in part manifesting themselves in a highly irrational health care system under which workers face increasing out-of-pocket costs, a declining quality of care and the ever present fear of financial ruin should they get sick or losing access to care altogether if they lose their job and thus their insurance.

What will the law do for the working class?

The working class needs to see what is lying behind the revolting rhetoric of the two contending bourgeois factions’ ideological diatribe.  The Republicans do not hesitate in their proposal for even deeper and more hurtful cuts under the pretense that they would protect Americans against the government’s encroachment on their “private lives” and the supposed “freedom” offered by the American constitution.  They claim Obamacare is an attack on “individual freedom,” specifically targeting the law’s provision establishing an individual mandate, which would force individuals who do not receive employer based health care, Medicare or Medicaid to purchase private heath insurance regardless of whether they wanted it or not.  In their view, “individual freedom” means having the choice to refuse purchasing a product from a private company, even if that means tax payers will pick up the bill if you show up in the emergency room suffering from a grave injury or a terrible illness.

The Democrats, being more subtle and sophisticated, find it necessary to lace their attacks with the grace of a few crumbs thrown here and there in order to better sell the legitimacy and “humaneness” of the law.  Herein is the meaning of parts of the legislation that may appear on the surface to be “true reforms,” such as the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, the ability of parents to carry their children on their health insurance until age 26 (but, of course they’ll have to pay for this in the form of higher insurance premiums), or the expansion of coverage to a large number of presently uninsured Americans, either through a modest expansion of eligibility for Medicaid or through the individual mandate.   But these, rather than accounting for real reforms, are actually cuts and measures of austerity against the workers, and will do little to improve the quality of health care for workers and their families. 

In fact, from the point of view of the working class, the Obamacare promises to be a major austerity attack against its already severely eroded and precarious standard of living.  The ruling class’ rhetorical posturing needs to be placed in a historic perspective.  As we wrote in Internationalism #153,  “For the working class, the attack on medical benefits has been a central feature in virtually every contract struggle in the past decade. Large companies routinely used to cover 100 percent of insurance premiums, but management increasingly forces workers to pay for a percentage of the costs and once they pierce the barrier of getting workers to pay, in each subsequent contract management pushes to increase the worker contribution. At the same time, workers and their families face skyrocketing co-payments, fees and deductibles and declining quality of medical care as the government grants doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects. Recent court rulings permit unions and companies to drop retirees from existing insurance plans, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and the purchase of their own supplemental coverage. And this doesn't even include the nearly 50 million who have no health care insurance at all. “

The aim of the current health care legislation is in continuity with this policy of pushing the cost of health care onto the working class by making those who have no coverage purchase their own private policies. The architects of “Obamacare” claim that they are doing this in order to get more people paying into the system and to prevent “free riding.” After all, they argue, there is no such thing as a “free lunch”—either you pay for health care by buying insruance, or as in most other advanced countries, you pay for it through increased taxation. In a sense, this is in fact a rationalization of the system by getting more people to pay into it, but politically it has proved a tough sell. Whereas the other advanced countries tend to finance their systems through general taxation, where the cost of care is hidden in a myriad of different taxes paid throughout the year—Obamacare would see people pay up front for insurance to a private insurance company that would continue to play the same old games of denying coverage, raising premiums, etc. as they do now. Either that, or Americans will have to pay a fine to the IRS! The rather clumsy and unwieldy mechanisms undergriding Obamacare seem to have doomed it politcally from the start, as polls continue to show a majority of Americans opposing it, even as they support indivdual aspects of the law, such as the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions and the ability of parent’s to keep their kids on their insurance plans untill age 26. The pundits tell us that, “Americans seem to want universal health care, they just don’t want to pay for it.” Hmm, and they tell us Americans will never go for communism!

However, we should make no mistake about it, the U.S. capitalist state’s concern in regard to health care reform is not to improve the quality of working people’s lives, its to regulate the impact of the uninsured on the coffers of the state and get the irrationally high cost of health care in the U.S. under control.  Notwithstanding, the measures contained in the various provisions of the Affordable Care Act will not be able to address the issue of the insurance companies charging astronomical fees because doctors and hospitals do the same thing to offset the cost of caring for the uninsured.  In fact, it is important to point out that of the fifty million people currently uninsured, only about half of them would obtain coverage under the law. Care will not delivered at all to the ones who will continue to be uninsured.  In addition, the cost of litigation, medical tools, and pharmaceuticals also is not addressed by the law.  It is a known practice by doctors and hospitals, for example, that more diagnostic tests than necessary are often prescribed in order to avoid the risk of being sued.  It is also a well known practice of the insurance companies that they shift the cost of hospital bills for the uninsured onto the premiums and fees of insured workers.  This will not change significantly because, as already pointed out, about thirty million people will continue to be uninsured.

In the end, the law ultimately fails in its reticence to challegne the existence of private health insurance companies in the U.S and its inbaility to agressively counteract the “fee for service” delivery model that characterizes U.S. health care. Although, it is true that the law contains certain provisions that would work to counter some of the more egregious billing practices of doctors, hospitals and the insurance companies—such as promotion of a “bundled care” model, under which doctors and hospitals receive one payment for a specific condition, rather than charging for each various and sundry service and consultation—these will likely only amount to half measures that will keep the fundamental ineffeciencies in place.  Moreover, its not hard to see what a “bundled care” model would do to the quality of care you receive. Under captialism, the old adage, “you get what you pay for” applies to health care as much as any other commodity, regardless of the percentage of the population who think access to health care should be a human right. And yet, even this “reform,” as modest as it is, is on life support after its day in the Supreme Court, a victim of the increasingly bizzare world of U.S. politics.

Is this law a “reform” for the working class? The clear answer is “NO”.

So, what will this “reform” do?  The first obvious thing to note is that the Congressional Budget Office projects that the legislation would reduce the federal budget deficit by $143 billion over the first ten years, and by $1.2 trillion dollars in the second ten years.  With the claims that the cost of the law would be $940 billion over ten years and that coverage would be expanded to 32 million Americans who are currently uninsured (the actual number is closer to 50 million) one is right to ask: how are the savings possible?   Essentially, the cost will be shifted to the working class through a combination of increased out of pocket expenses and cuts to benefits.  All the talk about how insurance companies face fines if they don’t reduce their overhead costs, or how pharmaceutical companies and medical tool manufacturers face a 2.3 percent tax, or how in 2013 individuals who make more than $200,000 a year can expect a tax hike, do not represent a significant shifting of the cost of care onto the wealthy or the propertied class. Mostly, these are measures put in place in order to try and quell the sense of indignation that an overt attack against the working class may raise.  The fact of the matter is that the major provisions of the law will roll out in 2014, with the expansion of Medicaid and the enforcement of the “Individual Mandate”, and in 2018, with the establishment of the excise tax.  Each one of these provisions constitutes a lowering of the standard of care, or a cut in benefits, or an increase in out of pocket expenses, or any combination thereof.

The hurt inflicted on the working class in the form of cuts to benefits and increased out-of-pocket expenses will be painful.  Shifting the cost burden to the working class at a time when its wages and benefits are already spread thin will result in a further impoverishment of the working class’ standard of living as many people will not be able to afford buying insurance while not qualifying for federal subsidies under the individual mandate provision of the law, while others will simply be dropped by their employer-sponsored health care.   This is because the provision requires employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance or pay a fine of $2000 per worker each year if any worker receives federal subsidies to purchase health insurance required through the individual mandate.  But the health care provided by an employer will be subject to a 40 percent excise tax as of 2018 if it is worth over $27,500 for families or $10,200 for individuals.  According to a conservative estimate, 5,000,000 workers will lose their present employer-sponsored insurance under this provision as their employers gross up their salaries for them to be able to purchase coverage through an exchange, a cost less than providing health care insurance.  For others, their employers will simply provide an inferior, cheaper health care package as they try to bring the cost below the threshold amount.  This is certain to backfire in the long run in the form of inferior coverage which won’t be able to address medical needs adequately. It is possible to envision the increased reliance on emergency room care as a direct result of the urge to reduce health coverage.

Medicaid will be “expanded” to cover most low-income people—defined as a family of four making $30,657 or less each year—under age 65.  But the expansion of Medicaid will result in a poorer standard of care as well, which, in the long run, can only lead to increased health problems both in terms of the numbers of the sick and the seriousness of their sickness.  It is already difficult to find doctors and hospitals that want to treat Medicaid patients because Medicaid does not pay doctors and hospitals very well.  Spreading thin an already-strained program will likely make the care provided inferior. Since the law does not meaningfully address the issues of the continued existence of uninsured people and the added numbers in this category as employers likely drop employees from their coverage, it is not likely that the federal subsidies given to the states in the wake of the law will adequately fund the states’ added financial needs. This is why, while appearing to be an “expansion” of an existing federal program, the measure amounts to a straining of the program, which will in all likelihood lead to a lowering of the quality of care. What the provision will “expand” is not health care, but its impoverishment.  In the long run, this will backfire against the present efforts to contain health care costs.  Already, anticipating having to care for many more patients who do not have adequate funding either from subsidies or in the form of personal income or a decent health insurance policy, hospitals and doctors are producing lists of diagnostic tests that they say they will no longer provide.  The criteria for the decision are a matter of budgetary concerns, and are not based on what is medically necessary to do for the sick.     

The capitalist state will fund the “expansion” of health coverage largely through the individual mandate.  This requires that every uninsured person that does not qualify for federal subsidies for the purchase of health care, purchase it or face a $695 annual fine or a fine of up to 2.5 percent of their taxable income, whichever is greater, starting in 2014.  Anyone on a low income will rather pay the penalty than pay for health care out of pocket, which is much more expensive.  In this case, not only will the person continue not to be insured and therefore rely on emergency room care, but the penalty will punch another hole in their pocket. 

The Democrats like to make a a lot of hay about how many additional people will receive health care coverage under this law. What they don’t like to talk about is that most of them will have to pay for it out of their own pocket or with only marginal help in the form of some government subsidies. What they also fail to mention is that they will be paying for health care from a private insurance company, in business to make a profit the only way they know how: raising premiums, deductibles and co-pays, cutting benefits and denying claims. Hmm, no wonder so many people are skeptical of this law! Perhaps, people aren’t as stupid as the media would have us believe? Maybe they see this law for what it is—a giant attack on the working class? Of course, for some of the people who see through this law, the Republican Party is there with their rhetoric about individual liberty and faux indgnation over being forced by the government to buy a product from a private company—companies whose bidding Republicans are, on a normal day, more than willing to perform. [3]

Of course, for those who see the Republican clap trap for what it is, there is always the far left of the Democratic Party, with their vision of “Medicare for all.” Of course, what proponents of this idea fail to mention is that the much vaunted Medicare program—along with Social Security part of of the so-called “third rail” of American politics—is under serious threat of insolvency. Moreover, as those on Medicare will tell you, it hardly constitutes free health care. Medicare beneficaires generally have to pay a monthly premium for coverage, are subject to annual deductibles and a 20% co-insurance. Many Medicare beneficiaries find health care simply unaffordable without purchasing an additional supplementary insurance plan from a private company!  Even with these “cost sharing” features in place, many doctors and hospitals grumble about treating Medicare patients due to the program’s low-reimbursement rates—rates which are seemingly held political hostage in every confrontation between Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget, as legislators struggle to pass laws maintaining current Medicare reimbursement rates to doctors and hosptials. So frustrated has one world-renowned medical center—the Mayo Clinic—become with Medicare, that they no longer accept Medicare assignment and have stopped seeing Medicare patients altogether at their Arizona facility.

Nonetheless, from the point of view of what is beneficial to the national capital, something must be done, and “Obamacare” is an attempt in that direction.   But the Republicans’ opposition is so hell-bent in their quest to undermine the present administration that they are willing to jeopardize its only selling points for this reform and strip it of the already tenuous veil of legitimacy the law might have with the public: the filling of the “donut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug coverage, children covered by their parents’ insurance until they are 26, the extension of Medicaid to 32 million people currently uninsured and the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.  The Republicans’ intentions seem to aim at undermining Obama’s re-election, which could be more difficult to accomplish if his signature domestic policy acomplishment is tossed out as “unconstitutional.”

Some conclusions

Republicans hotly contest Obamacare, but their contestation is not based on considerations of what is good health care for us.  Their protestations have nothing to do with any sense of worry for the fate of the working class and the more vulnerable sectors of the population.  They claim that their consternation is the result of what they see as the inability of the federal government to reign in the cost of care and address the federal and state budget problems.  But, their “counterproposals” are nothing but a set of drastic austerity measures which would accelerate the already existing tendency toward a poorer standard of care with its attendant  problems of an ever greater pool of sick people who don’t get treated before their ailments become too costly.  This alternative is simply unacceptable from the point of view of the national capital since it does nothing to address the fundamental problems of having to reign in the cost of health care and, not insignificantly, it may stoke social unrest.  While their concerns may well be based in the perceived increasing fragility of the capitalist state’s financial health, their “alternatives” are really nothing more than a war against their enemy faction rather than serious attempts at unifying the ruling class around a set of rational and viable policies.   This is the first time in the 47-year history of the Medicaid program that the Supreme Court, under the pressure of the Republican faction, has had to deliberate on whether the expansion projected in the new law is unconstitutional, while in the past the program was extended to women, children, and the disabled without opposition. 

The legalistic posturing of the various bourgeois factions, and the continuous mudslinging across party lines is an expression of the growing political decomposition of the American ruling class. As the rather unexpected debate over the health care law in the Supreme Court showed, the increasing “politicization” of the judiciary amounts to a challenge to dominance over the state by the executive and thus a challenge to the very foundations of the state capitalist apparatus itself. By all measures, in a more or less healthy state capitalism, the Supreme Court should defer to the expertise of the executive branch in proposing legislation and policies that are designed to protected the overall interests of the national capital. The judiciary should be subordinated to the executive.

Although the Supreme Court resisted some aspects of FDR’s attempts to build American state capitalism as a response to the Great Depression, since then the court has generally deferred to the policy aims of the main factions of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the Supreme Court has often taken a direct role in pushing through certain policies in the overall interests of the national capital that have been resisted by recalcitrant factions of the bourgeoisie, such as desegregation in the 1950s and the 1960s. However, as the recent Citizens United case showed, today’s Supreme Court, with a majority of conservative justices, tends to act as an agent of political reaction rather than a venue to give the policy preferences of the main factions of the bourgeoisie a veil of constitutional legitimacy. The spectre of the Supreme Court throwing out Obamacare AND upholding Arizona’s punitive anti-immigration law (see article in this issue) must be of great concern to the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

On purely ideological grounds, the Supreme Court has a clear opening to uphold Obamacare. It could accept the “free-rider” argument put forward by the administration and decide that the state can force people to buy a private product as to not do so corrupts the health care market as people would wait until they became sick to buy insurance. However, from the transcripts of the oral arguments released, it appears that the conservative justices on the court are not happy with this argument and some appear to have simply gone over to right-wing ideological rigidity, citing simplistic Republican talking points in opposition to the law from the bench. Its not only the politicization of the judiciary that is a threat to U.S. state capitalism, but also the decreasing level of intellectual rigor on the part of the justices, many appointed to the bench not because they are great legal minds or flexible adjudicators willing to apply the law to fit the concrete challenges facing the national capital, but because they fit narrow political and ideological criteria or make a certain constituency happy. This is not the Warren court that overturned school segregation and legitimated the attempts by the main factions of the bourgeoisie to mitigate the overtly racist image of the nation. In the era of Thomas, Scalia and Alito corporations are people, money is speech, and forcing people to buy health insurance is the same as forcing them to eat broccoli, regardless of the implications for the ability of state capitalism to govern in the interests of the national capital.

This situation of political decomposition has been in operation for a number of years already, and the present economic crisis is aggravating it, making it more and more difficult for the ruling class to strategize on what policies best suit the needs of the national capital, and agree on which political team can best carry them out.  These divisions make the orderly, disciplined functioning of government more and more fragile and have turned the political landscape into a turf war littered with the most ugly ideological landmines.  In the context of the health care law, this situation has created so much conflict that it even threatens to undermine whatever legitimacy the public continues to have in government by contributing to its disaffection and doubts as to the vaunted benefits of either the reform or its repeal.  The law is so extremely confusing and complicated to understand as a result of the many tweaks that have already been made to it that it is difficult for anyone without an advanced degree in public policy to know exactly what it will do. The law have already been changed over the course of the last two years, leaving the public puzzled and suspicious as to which parts of the law that may look “progressive” today, will be rescinded to leave the most vulnerable people out in the cold later.  The present economic crisis is lacerating the unity of the ruling class, pushing the two parties to confront each other instead of forming a coherent and unified strategy in face of the crisis. 

The political crisis of the ruling class is reaching the point of paralysis: it is making it more and more difficult to pursue state capitalist policies that may at least afford a little respite to an ailing capitalism.  This should make it clearer for the working class that preserving any more illusions about the viability of capitalism or its ability to bring about real, durable reforms amounts to giving in to the most brutal conditions of impoverishment and de-humanization. 

Ana 4/7/12

It has now been just over one year since the Conservative Party won a majority government in the last federal election, marking the first time in almost two decades that the right wing of the Canadian bourgeoisie has held free reign over the ship of state at the federal level. As we analyzed at the time,[1] a Conservative majority government was not the preferred electoral outcome for the main factions of the bourgeoisie. The Conservative Party—under the stewardship of Prime Minister Stephen Harper—had suffered a long string of political scandals that threatened to undermine the population’s illusions in Canadian democracy and further depress the enrollment of the younger generations behind electoral politics. However, we also pointed out that despite failing to produce a new ruling team, the Canadian bourgeoisie nevertheless emerged from the elections poised to enact the classic ideological division of labor in times of rising working class unrest by engendering a vocal “left in opposition” through the rise of the New Democratic Party (NDP) to official opposition status for the first time in history.

Almost as if the Canadian bourgeoisie had anticipated what was to come, Canada has been hit by a veritable wave of working class struggles and social unrest over the past year. Beginning in the summer of 2011, with tensions at Air Canada and the Canada Post strike and lockout, Canada has witnessed a series of strikes and job actions affecting a number of central industries at the national, provincial and local level. Moreover, although the Occupy Movement in Canada was much less dramatic than elsewhere, students in Québec have been engaged in a fierce and protracted struggle over the debt burdened provincial government’s plans to raise tuition fees, shutting down traffic flow through Montreal on several occasions and forcing the repressive apparatus of the Québec state to show its ugly teeth once again (see separate article on www.internationalism.org [22]).

While the Québec student movement seems to be motivated by many of the same factors that have moved the younger generations of workers to launch similar protest movements across the world over the last several years, the development of the overall class struggle in Canada has been greatly hampered by the Canadian bourgeoisie’s skillful use of the tactic of the left in opposition, which has allowed the NDP—and the unions it is closely intertwined with—to play the role of an “alternative within the state” to the cruel austerity and blatantly anti-working class politics of the ruling Tories.

Thus, although the Conservative’s ascension to majority government status in the May 2011 federal elections was a clear set-back for the Canadian bourgeoisie’s desire to give its state a new image, it has in many ways been able to “make lemonade out of lemons,” by using the rise of the NDP to enact a policy of the “left in opposition” allowing it to control and manage a series of working class struggles that have broken out across the country over the past year. Although the Tories have not ceased their scandal prone ways, the rise of the NDP has been able to serve as a counterweight by giving all those angered by the Conservatives’ apparent disregard for “democracy” an alternative to look forward to in the next federal election.

Undoubtedly, the rise of the NDP has acted as a block on the development of the class struggle in Canada, largely trapping it behind the unions and the opposition’s aggressive verbiage against the Tories’ attacks on the “right to strike.” In a way, the cover the NDP gives to electoral democracy and “struggling through the unions” initially allowed the Conservative government to be more aggressive than it otherwise might be. They know that their rivals on the other side of the House of Commons will work to make sure workers’ struggles do not escape their control and that of their union friends.

Although Canada has certainly seen its share of electoral instability—due in large measure to the increasing pressure on the political system brought by the tendencies of social decomposition, the situation has not reached the depths of that in the United States. The Canadian bourgeoisie has been largely successful—so far—in enacting the policy of the left in opposition allowing it a much greater flexibility in enacting austerity as it attempts to protect the Canadian economy in a chaotic international environment. For example, the Harper government has recently announced a series of changes to Old Age Security, planning to raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. Would it have pursued such a policy without an empowered NDP opposition to capture the dissent such a move would provoke? We can’t say for certain, but it is clear that over the past year, the Canadian bourgeoisie has used the tactic of the left in opposition to pursue an overall agenda of seeking to insulate the national economy from the potential shocks emanating from a chaotic international environment—a situation that the Canadian bourgeoisie seems to expect will negatively impact its own economy in due course. Moreover, the existence of the NDP opposition has allowed it to compensate for the continuing political difficulties of the ruling Conservative Party, which has a very hard time avoiding scandal. These various scandals only become one more moment in the overall tactic of empowering the left opposition.

Nevertheless, it is unclear for how long the Canadian bourgeoisie will be able to play this game. The next federal election is a long three years away. Will the NDP be able to continue to mute working class unrest for such an extended period of time? Will the Conservative Party’s continued political clumsiness and scandal prone ways force some kind of political change that might endanger the ideological division of labor? Will the increasingly restlessness of the younger generations of workers—mainly around the question of the increasing burden of rising tuition costs—serve to radicalize the social situation in general? These remain open questions that pose an ever-present threat to the Canadian bourgeoisie and its state.

The Canada Post Strike and Lock-Out (June 2011):

Just one month after the Conservatives won their majority government, labour tensions at Canada Post broke out in a series of rotating strikes across the country. Angered by management’s intransigent approach to contract talks, concern over their pension security and deteriorating work and safety conditions, militancy had been building among the postal workers for some time, obliging the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to launch rotating strikes in early June of 2011. Canadian postal workers have traditionally been among the country’s most militant sectors obliging its unions to take a more radical line towards industrial action.

Among Canada Post’s contract demands were requiring workers to work an extra five years before qualifying for benefits, establishing a two tiered wage structure with new workers receiving lower pay and rejection of the union’s position on staffing levels. Canada Post claimed these moves were necessary to close a $3.2 billion dollar gap in pension funding and compensate for the decline in business resulting from increased competition from private couriers (UPS, Fedex, Purolator, etc.) and internet bill payment services.[2]

After twelve days of rotating strikes in various cities across the country, Canada Post responded by locking out all 48,000 of its unionized workers in mid-June, completely shutting down mail delivery across the country. Unable to ignore such an event, the bourgeois media jumped into full gear with an intense discussion around the “technological obsolescence” of the post office, with those further to the left expressing the need to “protect vital public services.” The media cried crocodile tears for senior citizens who wouldn’t be able to mail in their bill payments in time, while little sympathy was shown for “overpaid” postal workers whose services weren’t as vital to the national economy as they once were. “Why should taxpayers subsidize postal workers, when the same job can be accomplished by private companies for much less?”, was a frequent question put forward on the talk shows and Internet forums.

Canada Post management complained that the lockout was necessary as the rotating strikes were costing it mail volume and had caused it to lose $103 million in revenue to that point already. How locking out its workers and bringing mail delivery to a complete halt was supposed to remedy this was never made clear. However, no sooner had the lockout been announced that the Tory government began to make noise about introducing back-to-work legislation in the House of Commons—the same tact it had taken in response to the simultaneous strike of customer service agents at Air Canada (see below). Clearly, Canada Post management had federal government intervention in mind when it announced the lock-out. Its tactic was clear: lockout the workers, create a “national crisis” and wait for the federal government to intervene and end the impasse in management’s favor. And this is exactly what the federal government did, mandating the postal workers to return to work on terms less favorable to them than management’s last offer.

According to Conservative Labour Minister Lisa Raitt, the legislation was necessary to “protect Canada’s economic recovery.” This set-off a veritable campaign on the left against the back-to-work legislation, with several NDP MPs doing their best to hold-up the legislation in Parliament with an ill-fated attempt at an American style filibuster. Pundits supposedly favorable to the postal workers lamented the collapse of “Canadian democracy” and the undermining of collective bargaining. According to this view, from now on employers would have no incentive to negotiate in good faith, expecting the government to step in on their side eventually. Soon to be NDP party leader Thomas Mulcair mused the following: "It is the government itself, through a Crown corporation that caused the lockout of the employees. This same government is now turning around and criticizing a situation that it created itself.” [3]

In the end, the NDP and the CUPW proved powerless to stop the back-to-work legislation. Whatever their histrionics on the floor of the House of Commons, they could not prevent the Tory majority government from getting its way. With the legislation passed, the workers returned to their jobs on the terms mandated by the government. Mobilized behind the unions and the NDP, the postal workers had no idea of how to resist the government’s mandated settlement. The thought of further resistance likely came with fear of an even grander defeat should they attempt to keep the struggle alive. Under the union straitjacket, no thought was ever given to uniting the postal workers’ on strike with the simultaneous struggle of Air Canada workers also under threat of a government imposed back-to-work law. Under the unions, every struggle is kept in its own corner, in its own sector of the economy. The idea of uniting the working class across sectors is an anathema and thus every struggle behind the unions is doomed to defeat. Clearly, this was the fate of Canada Post workers in June 2011.

Tensions at Air Canada (Spring 2011 to April 2012):

Air Canada was the second major national concern to be hit by labour tensions over the past year. Just as the rotating strikes at Canada Post entered their second week in mind-June 2011, customer service agents at the national airline went on strike angered by the company’s insistence on pension changes that would switch them from a defined benefit to a defined contribution plan. The customer service agent strike was only the first in a series of struggles to hit Air Canada over the course of the year.

Air Canada workers’ frustration had been building since at least 2003 when the company sought bankruptcy protection under which many of the various unions representing its employees agreed to a series of concessions.  In order to “keep the company in business” unions agreed to wage cuts, changes to work rules and a number of layoffs. Customer service agents were particularly hard hit as their union agreed to a 10 percent wage cut, giving up one week of vacation, paid lunch breaks and sick days. In both 2004 and 2005 the union agreed to additional 2.5 percent wage cuts. Although they received modest increases from 2006 to 2008, by 2009 Air Canada was already threatening further restructuring that meant a wage freeze for 2009 and 2010.[4]  The company’s plans to launch a new “low cost” airline appear to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for many workers, who see this plan as a way to drive down their own wages and benefits.

On June 14th, 2011—unable to reach an agreement with management and with the pension issue a key sticking point—some 3800 Air Canada customer service agents walked off the job. In response, the Harper Government did not wait long to start issuing threats of back to work legislation. Citing the need to “protect Canada’s fragile economic recovery,” Labour Minister Raitt indicated that although she would give the two parties time to reach an agreement, she would not stand idly by while flights were disrupted across the country. Faced with the threat of back to work legislation, the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW)—the union that represents customer service agents—quickly ended the strike after a mere three days by agreeing to binding arbitration on the most contentious issues. Referring to the company’s plan to start new hires on a defined contribution retirement plan, all CAW President Ken Lewenza could say after apologizing to new employees was, “We could not settle this issue in collective bargaining.”[5] How about attempting to settle issue by linking up the struggle with the Canada Post workers on strike at the same time? Of course, such things never occur to union bureaucrats, except as something that must be avoided at all costs!

However, the end of the customer service agent strike was far from the beginning of labour peace at Air Canada. In October, Air Canada flight attendants rejected a tentative deal with the company for the second time in three months, posing the threat of another strike that could disrupt air travel across the country. Despite what Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) negotiators called a “breakthrough” in negotiations on the contentious issue of work rules involving the calculation of paid time during stopovers, flight attendants were in no mood for an agreement. The sentiment in favor of a strike was high, forcing a CUPE official to concede, “The rejection of this second tentative agreement shows how frustrated the membership is with the company, after years and years of concessions.” [6]

Nevertheless, the Harper government had even less inclination to allow a strike to go forward this time around, signaling that it would introduce back-to-work legislation immediately. As it turned out, Labour Minister Raitt didn’t even wait for the House of Commons to debate any legislation, unilaterally referring the dispute to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board for arbitration—a move that made any strike by flight attendants illegal. As academics lamented the Tories’ attack on collective bargaining—something supposedly integral to the healthy functioning of a “democratic society”—CUPE officials stressed to the membership that any strike action would be illegal. In a memo to its over 6,800 members, CUPE wrote, “Our strike is suspended indefinitely. Therefore, the union advises you that you cannot strike.”  However, just to make sure it still held the workers’ confidence, CUPE negotiators lashed out at the Harper Government. In a separate memo it wrote, “Let’s call a spade a spade. This government is not your friend. It is trying to take away your right to strike and it will use whatever tools and tricks it can.” [7]

By now the pattern had been set, workers frustrated by years of concessions respond to stalled contract negotiations or inadequate tentative agreements with a strike posture, management digs in, the federal government threatens intervention, the union caves in all the while crying foul about the government’s attacks on “democratic rights of collective bargaining.” The idea that workers might go on strike anyway—regardless of what the government and unions do, regardless of the strike’s legality—was not acknowledged by the union, the leftist politicians, the academics and certainly not by the bourgeois media.

Moreover, these forces never countenanced the notion that workers in one sector or industry might join forces with those in another under similar threats of austerity. In the case of the Air Canada flight attendants, this could have meant joining up with airport security screeners, who simultaneously to their own strike, had launched a coordinated work slow down at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, causing massive travel delays for three days in early October. Surely, someone in the union hierarchy must have noticed the coincidental timing of these events? All the more evidence that the union’s job is not to spread the struggle, but to keep workers isolated in their own sectoral bunkers and behind the veil of bourgeois legalism.

Of course, in some instances in some countries, it is possible the unions might call for a “general strike.” As had been the case in Europe recently, it is possible that faced with a national mood of resistance to austerity, the unions and left parties might see the need to draw workers out on the streets across industries. But this is only in order to better control them and demoralize them by leading the struggle into nothing beyond symbolism, while the austerity attacks keep raining down. However, over the past year, the Canadian unions have avoided such a tactic, preferring to bury simultaneous struggles in their own sectoral dead-ends.

The next time workers at Air Canada went on strike tensions could not be contained so easily with the threat of government intervention. In late March 2012, Air Canada ground crew launched a wildcat strike at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Although lasting only 12 hours on a Friday morning, the wildcat caused 84 flight cancellations and up to 80 flight delays. Unrest quickly spread to airports in Montreal, Québec City and Vancouver. The wildcat by 150 ground crew workers at Pearson was a response to Air Canada’s decision to suspend three workers who had allegedly heckled Labour Minister Raitt as she walked through the airport the day before. Raitt’s press secretary reported that the Minister had been followed through the airport and “harassed” by workers. In response to the “illegal strike,” Air Canada fired 37 workers who had walked off the job. An independent arbitrator—already working on contract issues between Air Canada and its machinists and pilots at the bequest of Raitt after the House of Commons had passed legislation barring strikes and lock-outs—issued an injunction ordering the strikers back to work. [8]

Nevertheless, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) tried to claim victory by stating that they only agreed to end the “job action” after receiving assurances from Air Canada that nobody would lose their job and all fired workers would be reinstated. Still, IAMAW spokesperson Bill Trbovich was forced to admit that his union might not have total control over the striking workers stating, “We want everyone to go back to work. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.”[9] For her part, Raitt didn’t miss the opportunity to remind workers that they could be punished for illegal job actions by a fine of up to $1000 a day.

In response to the wildcat strike, the media went into full attack mode, stoking the public’s anger at Air Canada and its workers. The call to end all government subsidies to Air Canada and to fly private competitors instead dominated the talk shows and blogs. A campaign was under way to make sure the public had had enough of labour stoppages at Canada’s national airline. However, the bourgeois left was also vocal with Newfoundland and Labrador MHA Gerry Rogers—whose flight has been delayed on the tarmac at Pearson—publicly supporting the workers. Rogers stated, “We can’t continue to have government interfering in these ways and breaking the backs of unions. This is about workers’ rights and I totally support this. If I have to wait in this airport for 10 hours for my luggage, so be it.” [10] Industrial Relations Professor C.B. Smith of Queen’s University (a former employee relations director at Air Canada) was more direct in his criticism of the Harper Government’s approach to labour relations, stating: “There’s a huge trust that traditionally exists between employers and employees and when that trust is broken, this is one of the potential outcomes (…) This is the part that minister Raitt doesn’t understand. And this is the part the Harper government doesn’t understand, is that you can superficially get this off the table and you sweep it way, but there are some issues that have to be dealt with. And these employees are not going to accept how this has been dealt with.”[11]

Clearly, a sense is beginning to emerge in some quarters of the Canadian ruling class that the Harper government may be overplaying is hand. While its direct attack on collective bargaining may have initially had the effect of strengthening the image of the bourgeois left, in particular the NDP and the unions, the federal government may be going to the well too often, provoking the threat of a working class response outside of the ability of the unions to control. Although only lasting hours, the wildcat strike by Air Canada ground crews is clear mounting evidence of a developing will to resist and a growing sense of alienation from the structures put in place to control working class struggle.

The example set by Air Canada’s ground crew was quickly followed by its pilots, when they launched what the media termed an “illegal strike” in mid-April. With their contract dispute with the airline already subject to a parliamentary order establishing binding arbitration (the same order that applied to ground crew) preventing any strikes or lock-outs, pilots launched a Friday “sick-out” that forced the cancellation of some 75 flights across the country, with delays extending into the weekend. Air Canada quickly won an order from the arbitrator forcing the pilots back to work, but the sense of shear frustration among the pilots brought them close to a confrontation with their own union. Air Canada Pilots Association (ACPA) President Paul Strachan was forced to admit the growing sense of anger gripping his membership when he stated, “We all need to be very cognizant of the real risk that, at some point, the pilots will feel so beaten down and so helpless that they’re going to lash back and not even this organization will be able to control the outcome of events.” [12]

The best the ACPA could do was ensure its members it was fighting the law mandating binding arbitration in the courts, but until such time as they prevailed through legal channels no strike was possible. In a memo to members, the ACPA stated, “It is our duty to advise all pilots that the ACPA’s right to strike and Air Canada’s right to lock-out it employees are suspended until a new collective agreement takes effect. (…) Until the law is struck down, we must all comply with it.” Bourgeois legalism triumphs again! According to the union, no strike can take place until permission is granted from the state! Who would have thought that a “right” so fundamental as the right to bargain over the price you receive for your labour time could be suspended? What type of democracy is this? One in which the “right to strike” is returned only after an agreement has been reached! The Harper government may have been taking a heavy hand with the working class, but the unions were clearly the ones enforcing the no strike laws on the shop floor level.

Over the last year, Air Canada has been a focal point for labour tensions across the country.[13] For the most part these have remained within the union fold, as workers have succumbed to the pressure from their unions to obey the various no strike laws passed by the House of Commons. However, a distinct possibility remains that the Harper government may be overplaying its hand. The continued use of back-to-work legislation and binding arbitration may have initially worked to shore up the image of the unions and give legitimacy to the NDP. However, as the examples of the Air Canada ground crew workers and pilots showed, combativeness has been building within the working-class threatening to escape union control. While for now these instances have been contained, the threat of a revived working class militancy that challenges the framework of the unions and bourgeois legalism cannot be ruled out in the period ahead.

Will the Harper government recognize that its methods may be producing an undesired radicalization and start to back off? Or have the Tories, like their Republican counterparts in the United States, gone over to a hardcore ideological drive to smash the unions—the best buffer the bourgeoisie has against the class struggle? This is difficult to determine at this point. But as the examples at Air Canada show, the Canadian bourgeoisie has still been able to reap the benefits of a functioning and credible union apparatus over the past year.

Other Struggles:

While the strikes at Canada Post and Air Canada have been the most notable events on the national level, a number of others struggles have taken place over the past year showing that the working-class in Canada has developed a certain combativeness that the unions have been obliged to control by agreeing to strike action. While we cannot discuss every one of these strikes in detail, some of the more important ones were:

• A fierce contract dispute between British Columbia teachers and the Liberal party provincial government that saw teachers launch a “limited job action” in September 2011 wherein they refused to write report cards, attend staff meetings, supervise extracurricular activity, communicate with principals or perform administrative work. Proving that its not just Tories who can pass back-to-work legislation, the Liberal provincial government passed the now infamous Bill 22 in March 2012—that ordered a six month cooling off period and which made any strike action by teachers illegal on pain of a $475 a day fine for any teacher participating in job action.

The passing of Bill 22 sparked a campaign of resistance among teachers that while it remained mostly within union boundaries, included talk of a possible wildcat strike and led to increasing tensions within the bureaucracy of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF).

• An intense weeks long strike by faculty at Brandon University in Manitoba, marking the second time in four years that faculty at the university were on strike. Faculty went out in October and did not return to work until late November virtually cancelling the fall semester at the university. This strike was marked by a divisive ideological campaign by the university administration and the media to pit students who were effectively locked out of classes against the striking faculty. 

The importance of this strike—albeit at small university on the prairies—should not be underestimated. With the threat of student unrest spreading out from Québec, the Canadian bourgeoisie must be fearful of any possible unification of student struggles with those of faculty members.

• A series of strikes and threatened job actions by workers on a number of commuter bus lines in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that snarled commutes in Canada’s largest metropolitan area.

For the most part, these various actions remained under the union fold, but the fact that so many contract disputes have resulted in strikes or threatened job actions is testament to the growing combativity within the working class after years of talk about the fragility of “Canada’s economic recovery” or the need to “protect the recovery,” which dampened the working class’s response to the recession that begin in 2008. While workers have generally struggled to escape the grasp of the unions and have had little success linking up with other protest movements, such as the Québec student movement or the (albeit subdued) expressions of the Occupy Movement in Canada, there is a growing sense among the workers that strikes and other job actions are necessary to advance their interests in a political climate dominated by an intransigent state that has dropped any pretense of social neutrality and now appears to be in full league with management and administration.

While for now unions have been able to contain the struggle by making sure the various sectors and bargaining units struggle separately and never unite their efforts (thereby also leading to the workers usually losing the battle for public opinion), revolutionaries need to continue to monitor the situation in Canada closely for signs of further radicalization. The possibility that the Tories could actually screw up and radicalize the workers’ struggle by making the unions look impotent in the face of back-to-work legislation is real.

The Class Struggle and the Canadian Political Situation:

Clearly, the Canadian state has emerged from the federal elections of May 2011 with an unexpected strength in the face of the class struggle. Although the Harper Government was re-elected with a majority, the elections produced an NDP official opposition that has allowed the Canadian state to play the card of the left in opposition with a good deal of success over the past year.

Each time a particularly threatening struggle arose, the Tory government was able to suppress it with draconian back-to-work legislation, while the NDP and the unions cried fowl from the left, convincing the workers that they had a friend in the House of Commons. As their argument went, “If the anti-working class Harper government was in power today, perhaps this wouldn’t be the case in a few years when workers could rally around the NDP and elect a truly worker friendly government if they choose.”

Every scandal involving the Conservative government—from the robo call scandal to the accusations of misleading parliament over the true costs of F-35 fighter jets and announcing plans to raise the age of eligibility for old age pensions in Davos, Switzerland—has for now only played into the overall political tactic of the left in opposition.

However, as the wildcat strikes at Air Canada have shown, the possibility remains that the Tories may have overplayed their hand. Their consistent use of back-to-work legislation has demonstrated a complete disregard of the culture of collective bargaining just as bad as anything enacted by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, USA. Whether or not this reflects a similar ideological decay of the Conservative party under the weight of its erstwhile Reform Party/Alberta faction or whether it is a simple political miscalculation is difficult to judge at the moment.  What is clear is that despite being able to salvage the result of the 2011 federal election, the danger of allowing the Conservative Party to remain in power beyond the current term is something that the main factions of the Canadian ruling class must be wrestling with at the moment. This likely factored into the selection of Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair to follow the popular Jack Layton as NDP Leader in March 2012.  The popular and charismatic Layton, who had reaped praise for leading his party to official opposition status in the May 2011 elections, announced just a short time later that he was suffering from another bout of cancer that finally took his life in August. While this has been a clear set-back for the NDP; they have reacted to it by selecting Mulcair as party leader, someone who they hope can shore up their support in Québec and attract enough votes in the rest of Canada and make a future election competitive.

For the working class, the lessons of the past year are clear. While it is true that the Harper Government has been particularly aggressive in its approach to the class struggle, this does not mean that the NDP or any other bourgeois party is our friend. Moreover, the past year has shown us that struggling behind the unions always leads to defeat. We must pick-up where the Air Canada workers left off and begin to take our struggles outside of the union straitjacket. It is only when we take struggles into our own hands and unite across sector and bargaining unit that we have a chance to resist capitalism’s attacks. Moreover, it is also true that in today’s climate we must also look to unite our struggles with other protest movements that are resisting the effects of the economic crisis on the conditions of life, such as the resistance by Québec students to tuition increases and the growing burden of student debt. We are all being made to pay for the bourgeoisie’s self-inflicted crisis, but it is only our own autonomous struggles that can finally put an end to the politics of austerity once and for all.

Henk 23/05/12