What will Sanders’ supporters do when he endorses Hillary Clinton?

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The institution of the Democratic Party has very differ­ ent values from the people who register as Democrats and who vote for Democrats, and that institution has all the power it needs to push Bernie to the side. They insti­ tuted super-delegates who will not be on Bernie’s side, and they have big media. ...

So, what are Bernie Sanders’ supporters going to do when he endorses the Democratic nominee, likely Hill­ ary? She is the embodiment of all the lousy domestic values Bernie has been attacking so effectively. ... People power means we can organize in solidarity and take to the streets. People power also means we can vote, and change our voter registrations. Yes, voting is important. That’s why they change laws and elections to create more hurdles and restrictions for voters and for inde­ pendent political parties. ...

Here is my recommendation if you are feeling the Bern. … AFTER THE PRIMARY, change your voter registration to an independent party, like the Green Party or Peace and Freedom. ... A majority of people want strong par­ ties outside of the Democratic-Republican Party. Here’s how third parties get strong: you vote for them, and you register in them.

IN NOVEMBER, VOTE, but do not write in Bernie Sand­ ers! He is not a movement, he is an individual. We can use as building blocks what Bernie has brought to the table, like injecting the term “socialism” back into our national dialogue. What this country needs now are or­ so-called mistake wherein the U.S. government mur­ dered 1.5 million people, mostly civilians! But was it indeed a mistake, or is imperialist war inherent in U.S. capitalism’s genes?

Bernie Sanders voted for each and every military ap­ propriations bill at some $1 trillion a clip annually. He backed the racist, Zionist Israeli slaughter in Palestine and its near dismemberment today from his first day in Congress. Bernie Sanders’ lifetime voting record has been 98 percent Democrat!

A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders met with Presi­ dent Obama, in effect seeking his support, or at best “neutrality” in his presidential bid. He stated that he agreed with Obama’s purported military policy of try­ ing to “avoid placing U.S. troops on the ground in the Middle East.” Sanders failed to indicate any objection to the 1100 U.S. military bases around the world or the additional 1000 bases at home, or the fact that half of the troops in Afghanistan today are non-gov­ ernmental, privatized death-squad troops like those that operate globally in covert wars, as is the case to­ day in Syria, and in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Bernie Sanders’ calls to tax the billionaire class and for a “political revolution” are aimed at capturing the powerful anti-establishment sentiment that perme­ ates society as Congressional approval ratings have ganizations, including political parties that serve as the electoral arm of the social movements, that take no cor­ porate money, and that are not controlled by the 1%. ...

You may see the small parties as imperfect, but to blame third parties for their weakness is like blaming poor people for their poverty. Yes, we’re imperfect and make mistakes, but it’s the system that makes people poor and independent political parties weak. People power makes us strong, and breaks up the two-party system that has given control of our government to the 1% and their corporations.

IN NOVEMBER, DO NOT VOTE DEMOCRAT. Glen Ford’s description of Obama as the more “effective evil” rath­ er than the “lesser evil” is right on point. Sometimes it takes a Democrat to accomplish a conservative agenda, like bailing out Wall Street, and implementing trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP/Trans-Pacific Part­ nership. … Already in 2016 Jill Stein’s campaign is ahead of the game on multiple fronts. Many people who had put their hearts and souls into Obama’s 2008 campaign are work­ ing with her to see how much headway the electoral arm of the movement can make this year.

In summary, 2016 is a great year to work together to use all the power we have. Let’s not give our money to the 1% and their corporations—as much as we can avoid it! And let’s not give them our voter registrations and our votes. n sunk to all-time lows in the range of 12-14 percent. In truth, banks and corporations, who in essence write the tax codes, avoid most taxes outright. If there ever was an example of the role of government with regard to capitalist profits, it was Obama’s unprec­ edented bailout gift of $32 trillion to the very corpo­ rations whose policies came close to bankrupting the nation. And working people paid for these corporate bailouts! The world’s richest corporation, Apple Com­ puter, pays virtually no taxes!

Bernie’s token tax proposals amount to sheer blus­ ter, as does his notion that he will lead a “political revolution” to transform the U.S. financial system. And transform it on the basis of keeping the system of pri­ vate property and worker exploitation intact! One might ask whether Sanders intends to begin his po­ litical revolution by eliminating the one-trillion-dollar annual war budget that funds the military-industrial complex, or the National Security Administration’s trillions for surveillance operations, or the $89 billion monthly at near zero interest rates—the “economic stimulus” or “quantitative easing” program—that until just a few months ago was gifted to Wall Street banks and corporate America, who turned around to invest these government billions in the nation’s ca­ sino capitalism financial markets. Sanders is silent on (continued on page 9)

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.... Flint: A Tale of two Cities (continued from page 3: “Flint: A Tale of two Cities”) from the river also contains illegal levels of cancer-causing trihalomethanes and other toxins, and is implicated in the spread of Le­ gionnaires Disease.

A massive effort will now be needed to re­ store clean running water to Flint residents and to deal with the long-term health effects from the poison brew people have been forced to use for drinking, cooking, and bathing for over a year.

No auto executives or members of the ruling rich were harmed in the making of this story. The Michigan localities that have suffered the most are majority working class and Black. The population of Flint is over 56% African American. Forty-one percent of city residents live in proverty, and the real unemployment rate for Michigan is over 11 percent. In this conflict so far, it is working people who have taken all the blows. But it wasn’t always that way.

Given Flint’s iconic history, it’s more than a little ironic that the current crisis has its roots in the greed of the auto industry giants and their political plenipotentiaries. A generation ago, another battle was fought in Flint be­ tween the auto barons and the working-class majority. In that fight, which began in Decem­ ber of 1936, the balance of power was decid­ edly different.

The United Auto Workers union (UAW) was found­ ed in 1935 in the wake of a militant labor upsurge that began sweeping the country the year before. Key battles in Minneapolis (truck drivers), Toledo (Elec­ tric Auto-Lite), San Francisco (general strike), Akron (rubber workers), and Huntsville, Birmingham, and throughout the South (textile workers) set the tone. But the big automakers had yet to be breached.

In the 1930s, as now, there were competing ideolo­ gies for how the working people could best fight for their rights. The most conscious, radical workers saw the bosses, their government, and the major political parties as members of the same team, against which the 99% had to wage an uncompromising fight. But the leaders of the newly formed Congress of Industri­ al Organizations (CIO) saw things differently. As Art Preis described in “Labor’s Giant Step”:

The CIO leaders were class collaborationist to the bone. They sought “peaceful coexistence” between predatory capital and exploited labor—between robber and robbed. They believed they could per­ suade the employers that unions are a “benefit” to the capitalists themselves and thereby secure gains for the workers by the simple means of “rea­ sonable discussion” across the conference table. … Fortunately for the success of the CIO, the concepts of the top CIO leaders did not always prevail. The strident notes of the class struggle broke through the “class harmony” chorus and set the dominant tone during the decisive days of the rise of the CIO. The bridge to victory proved to be not the conference board, nor the inside track to Roosevelt in the White House, but the picket line—above all, that “inside picket line,” the sit-down.

An ongoing organizing drive in the Flint auto plants was met with stonehearted resistance by General Motors. The straw that broke the camel’s back came on Dec. 30, 1936, when management provocatively transferred some union supporters. Workers at Flint Fisher Body Plant 2 responded by sitting down and refusing to leave the factory. Later that night, workers saw managers attempting to remove critical machin­ ery from Fisher Body Plant 1. The workers at Plant 1 put a stop to that by sitting down as well. The shut­ ting down of these two plants brought GM’s auto pro­ duction to a screeching halt.

The strike spread to 15 other GM plants, from De­ troit to Kansas City. Finally, the crucial motor assem­ (continued from page 8)

these matters.

All the evils of today—racism and ever-rising police murder, massive incarceration of the op­ pressed, poverty, sexism, union-busting, neverending wars, homophobia, anti-immigrant preju­ dice, skyrocketing college tuition, environmental destruction, and more—are no accident to be explained by the faults of this or that president or elected official, but rather the overt manifesta­ tions of a crisis-ridden capitalist society.

What is needed today is not a change at the top or a political revolution or even a token billionaire tax, but rather a social revolution that ends the rule and control and ownership of the tiny mo­ nopoly finance capital billionaire ruling class over virtually everything including us. bly operation at Chevrolet Plant number 4 in Flint was occupied. Ultimately, 93% of GM’s production workers joined the fight. Preis explains:

Victory or defeat for the GM workers depended on a simple strategy: keeping their buttocks firmly planked on $50 million worth of GM property until they got a signed contract. GM’s strategy was to get the workers out of the plants by hook or crook so that the police, deputies and National Guard could dis­ perse them by force and violence.

The bosses hit the strikers with injunctions, but the sheriff charged with delivering the first of these was laughed out of the plant. The company attempted to recruit scabs to retake the plants, but soon gave that up. Management cut the heat to Fisher Body Plant 2, and police attempted to prevent deliveries of food and supplies to the strikers. Outside, picketers stormed the police blockade. A battle ensued; police guns were answered by bolts and bottles hurled by the workers. Eventually, the strikers aimed a freez­ ing stream from a fire hose at the cops, successfully turning them back. When the dust settled, 24 strikers were injured; 14 had been shot.

Politicians, from the Democratic governor to Presi­ dent Roosevelt, sided with GM. The governor posi­ tioned 1500 National Guard troops to be ready to re­ take the plants by force. Meanwhile, fellow unionists poured into Flint from Toledo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Lansing, and elsewhere, and formed a cordon of soli­ darity around Fisher Body Plant 1.

GM threatened to turn the heat off again, but the strikers threatened to expose the plants firefighting equipment to the cold, freezing the gear and thus invalidating GM’s insurance coverage. Management was livid and demanded that the governor give the order to retake the plants. Governor Murphy passed the buck and tried to pressure CIO President John L Lewis to reign in the strikers. Lewis explained, truth­ fully, that he hadn’t started the strike and he couldn’t stop it.

In the end, GM surrendered. The strikers had dem­ onstrated sufficient determination and ingenuity for GM to realize its plants would be destroyed if they tried to remove the workers by force. The first UAW contract with GM was signed on Feb. 11, 1937.

The working people of Flint won that monumental battle in 1937, but the corporate titans have never given up on the overall war. This is the critical context I am compelled to note that tonight’s pro-Sand­ ers speakers, Tom and Peter, have been explicit. If Bernie loses the Democratic Party primary contest Bernie will support Hillary’s candidacy. No matter their “lesser evil” rationale, this simple fact tells us once again that Sanders’ effort devolves into once again channeling today’s deep discontent at the insults to our lives that a failing capitalism is compelled to impose, back into the billionaire Wall Street system itself. For revolutionary social­ ist parties like Socialist Action, the road forward excludes choosing between capitalism’s latest lesser-evil offerings.

I believe that our democratic, open and honest debate will help to advance future collaboration in the streets and narrow the political gap that cur­ rently divides us on key critical questions. n (Above) Children of Flint sit-down strikers on International Women’s Day, 1937.

for the Flint crisis of today. The forces seeking to vic­ timize working people in Flint now are the same ones that confronted autoworkers in Flint three quarters of a century ago. Those seeking to fight against aus­ terity and mount an effective response to the current water crisis can learn much from that pivotal chapter in history.

Today, as in the 1930s, it’s crucial to understand who is on our side and whom we’re up against. At the second convention of the UAW in 1936, the body unanimously called for the formation of a labor party. It’s no coincidence that the workers who successful­ ly fought back the GM colossus understood that the Democratic and Republican parties were both in the boss’s hip pocket. This realization was essential for navigating the rough terrain as the struggle unfolded.

But by the late 1940s, those who preached class col­ laboration and relying on the Democrats as “friends of labor” had gained the upper hand. Socialists and other radicals who, like the Flint sit-down strikers, recognized the major political parties for the big business appendages they truly are were driven out of the labor movement and isolated. Unions like the UAW turned their back on the lessons of the Flint sit-down strike.

As a consequence, the UAW is a mere shadow of its former self, reduced in numbers and diminished in power. Throughout its steady decline, UAW leaders have held fast to their class-collaborationist outlook. The results of this approach can be seen in scattered, broken pieces all around us, including in Flint.

Today, Democratic and Republican party politicians shed crocodile tears, expressing the utmost regret for the calamity that has befallen Flint. But their concern rings hollow. These are the heirs of the politicians who mobilized the press, the police, and the National Guard to side with GM and the other corporate behe­ moths in the labor upsurge of the 1930s. These are the political parties that have been running our coun­ try for generations, with the result being what we see in Flint and all around us.

Witnessing the suffering of the residents of Flint, it is no exaggeration to say the Democratic and Repub­ lican parties, along with the system they uphold, rep­ resent a deathtrap for working people.

But there is a way out. There are steps we can take to avoid future disasters like the one now unfolding in Flint. This path serendipitously addresses many of the other problems we face—from endless war, in­ equality and exploitation, to racism, unemployment, and environmental destruction. This road has just one rule: human needs must come before profits.

And there is but one way to get there: by recogniz­ ing that only working people—the vast majority of the population and the producers of all of society’s wealth—have the power to build a just and rational world. For that power to be realized, we must orga­ nize collectively and independently of our foes at the top of the economic pyramid, refusing to be taken in by their lieutenants in the Democratic and Republi­ can parties.

While no fight is ever an exact blueprint for another, the guiding principles of solidarity and independent political action, demonstrated in abundance by the heroic Flint sit-down strikers, remain essential tools for the struggles of today. n SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2016 9

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... Threat to public worker unions (continued from page 12: “Friedrichs: Threat to public-worker unions”) union. This dues check-off system originally arose in the private sector during World War II. In return for a “no-strike pledge,” the Franklin Roosevelt administra­ tion offered the “patriotic” union bureaucrats a “deal” in which union dues would be automatically collected by the bosses and turned over to the unions, as op­ posed to the previous practice of union stewards col­ lecting dues directly from the ranks.

The government used the deal to essentially freeze the existing Depression-era wage levels for the war’s duration—and longer, it hoped—while corporate war profiteers amassed incredible profits. Revolution­ aries, while properly not opposing dues check-off, warned at that time that the long-term consequence would be an ever-widening gap between the union ranks and leadership and a corresponding separation of the ranks from democratic control of their unions.

Today, that separation exists in the extreme. In the private sector, unionization rates have declined from a 1955 high of 35-36 percent to today’s low of 6.7 per­ cent—similar to that of the late 1920s. Union democ­ racy in the pitiful and disassociated union conglomer­ ates that remain barely exists, if at all. Petty-bourgeois bureaucratic parasites sit on top of most unions, es­ sentially separated and insulated from the ranks in a myriad of ways, ever negotiating mergers among their shriveled unions to insure their stupendous salaries and privileges.

Mired in the Democratic Party Today’s unions are tied hand and foot to the Demo­ cratic Party. In recent years, they have recorded the fewest number of strikes in the modern era and are largely reduced to begging for pathetic and rarely de­ livered crumbs or promises from lying capitalist poli­ ticians. Tens of millions of dollars from union mem­ bers’ dues are expended in this always rigged and fruitless game of capitalist lesser-evil politics. The ideas that strikes and inter-union solidarity are key to labor’s future—and that working people sorely need an independent democratic and fighting labor party, operating in alliance with all of society’s oppressed— are alien to today’s labor “leader” fakers.

Capitalism is mired in the deepest economic crisis since the 1929-era Great Depression. Nevertheless, the ruling rich believe that even in the system’s ad­ vanced state of degeneration, today’s unions remain an obstacle to capitalism’s compulsion to extract and transfer every possible dollar of public-service expen­ ditures from working people and the poor to the one percent, or better, the .001 percent—the elite group of multi-billionaires who own and control the vast por­ tion of the nation’s property and wealth.

Capitalist privatization of the public sector has al­ ready taken its toll, with city and state governments across the country selling off previously publicly funded social services to private corporations. The growing privatization and massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex is but one glaring example. The de-funding and terrible decline of public educa­ tion and the associated school-to-jail scenario plays out in the nation’s poor and oppressed communities, with more funds expended for prisons than schools and with the latter increasingly subjected to privati­ zation through corrupt charter-school schemes based on the lie that the private sector is more interested and capable of providing quality education than the consciously de-funded public schools.

Union officials’ inadequate response Tragically, to date, not a single public-sector union— SEIU, AFSCME, NEA, AFT, CWA, etc.—has uttered a 10 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2016 word stating or implying that should the Supreme Court’s nine judges, appointed for life to oversee capi­ talism’s interests, make the collection of union dues illegal, they will act to defy the Court and all other government institutions that seek to enforce their anti-union dictates. Not one of the labor organizations has offered to mobilize union power in alliance with their natural allies among the poor and oppressed to effectively void any Court decision. Tragically again, the AFL-CIO has stood virtually mute in the face of an expected decision that may well reduce the ranks of labor to an even more pitiful level than the present modern-era low.

Frightened union officials have essentially accepted the “inevitability” of a negative Friedrichs decision and, at best, suggested that perhaps the damage to union funding might be mitigated by union staff­ ers working harder and more closely with the ranks to collect dues. Others have suggested that perhaps their “friends” in the Democratic Party will advance legislation akin to the private sector’s National Labor Relations Act, wherein the mandatory payment of union dues (closed or agency shop) remains legal. A tiny handful has hesitatingly murmured that unions should consider the possibility of strike action some­ where down the line.

Recent experience has demonstrated that when unions lose the right to collect dues, union member­ ship dramatically declines—a strong indication of the ongoing and deep alienation of the ranks from the union tops. In the case of the 60-hour 2005 New York City transit strike led by TWU Local 100, when the re­ actionary and punishing Taylor Law was imposed and union check-off ended, an estimated 30-40 percent of union members refused to pay union dues.

Similar figures have been reported in Wisconsin in the years following Governor Scott Walker’s 2011 signing of the infamous Act 10, which crippled the public-sector unions. Union membership declined by nearly 40% in the three years following the retro­ grade new law. Wisconsin’s Act 10 not only banned dues collection but prohibited public-sector unions from negotiating over benefits or working conditions; it imposed a ban on negotiating pay increases beyond cost-of-living adjustments; it increased employee health-care and pension costs, and required public-sector unions to win a new union recognition election every year by securing a majority of the entire bar­ gaining unit!

So onerous were the provisions of Act 10 that many Wisconsin unions gave up collective bargaining efforts entirely. To lessen or minimize the impact of the seem­ ingly inevitable negative Friedrichs decision, a number of pathetic union pundits have characterized Act 10 as “Friedrichs on steroids,” as if to say that “things could be worse”—a wacked-out mindset in which Friedrichs is labeled in advance as perhaps a “lesser evil.”

Others, including the CTA and its legal staff and as­ sociated “constitutional experts,” have spent their time presenting refined and well-honed technical ar­ guments as to the interpretation of the Constitution’s First Amendment provisions, including the meaning of “freedom of speech” itself.

Here their arguments aim at legally rebutting the central Friedrichs argument that the mandatory pay­ ment of union dues or an agency fee violates their ba­ sic free speech rights in that the CTA often takes politi­ cal or economic positions on issues with which Fried­ richs and Company disagree. “One cannot be forced to join or pay dues to an organization with which one disagrees,” so the Friedrichs argument goes.

The notion that the U.S. Supreme Court may come to its senses and uphold what has been the law for more than a half century, including the CTA’s defense of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment, seems far fetched in an era when the First Amendment has been shredded beyond recognition.

A prime example is that of U.S. court’s across the country ruling that massive government surveillance on virtually the entire population is justified based on the present “need” to subordinate First Amendment rights to the “national security” interests of the gov­ ernment. Here we have a capitalist legal system that formally denies the entire population its Constitution­ al rights to free speech, association, and privacy on the one hand, while threatening to uphold the “freespeech” rights of 10 reactionary California teachers as opposed to the rights of nine million public employ­ ees!

Socialist Action readers are likely well aware that union rights, including the right of unions to exist at all and operate as representatives of workers, has never been taken for granted in U.S. courts or in those of any other capitalist state. Indeed, before the his­ toric trade-union upsurge of the 1930s, unions were banned and considered a form of “coercion,” contrary to the “ideals of the American Revolution.” Similarly unions were deemed by U.S. courts to be in violation of the “right to contract” in that they “prevented work­ ers from forming individual contracts with their em­ ployers.”

The 1871 Sherman Anti-Trust Act deemed that unions were a form of “restraint of trade or com­ merce.” Using Sherman, the boss class issued an in­ junction against the famous nationwide rail strike led by renown socialist and labor leader Eugene Debs. Debs was imprisoned, and the strike was crushed.

New York State’s Taylor Law includes provisions to fine striking public employees one and a half days’ pay for every day on strike (“overtime in reverse”), as well as provisions for massive fines against striking public employee unions and imprisonment of union leaders. The routine use of employer-requested court injunc­ tions to stop strikes remains the norm today.

In truth, the history of “labor law,” as with “consti­ tutional law,” is a history of the class struggle and its associated relationship of class forces. When labor is strong and united, and when it consistently and re­ peatedly exercises its rights in defiance of each and every capitalist encroachment, it more often than not follows that the “law” is bent or broken entirely in accord with labor’s power in the streets, at the point of production and in its reflection in the hearts and minds of working people. Labor’s moral power, won in mass struggles and usually at great cost and sacri­ fice in defense of the oppressed and exploited, is the real source of its strength, as opposed to union staff­ ers being more receptive to the individual needs of the membership—however important the latter is.

Today’s highly bureaucratized and increasingly cor­ rupt labor mis-leadership— virtually always subser­ vient to the Democratic Party—is a major obstacle to the return of American trade unions to the democratic and fighting working-class organizations that they were in the past and can be once again. Today’s top bureaucrats often pull down salaries and give them­ selves expense accounts akin to their corporate coun­ terparts.

They rarely cease pontificating about the obsoles­ cence of strikes and cross-union solidarity. In place of fighting the boss class they engage in internecine war­ fare via endless raids and other operations to weaken unions they seek to absorb.

Labor retains the power to fight back However, that labor retains the power of massive mobilization is unquestioned. The initial response to Wisconsin Governor Walker’s legislative smashing of union rights was followed by 100,000 workers mobi­ lizing in the state capitol and literally occupying the seat of government power. But after a week of sus­ tained mobilization, the top union brass ended the oc­ cupation and shifted to the electoral arena in a failed effort to recall the governor.

This shift from workers power in the streets to the corporate-dominated, media-controlled electoral are­ na spelled the death knell to a once promising strug­ gle. If the affected unions, in alliance with the whole labor movement, had gone on to close down the entire state—as opposed to the unions’ financing an elector­ al effort, in alliance with the anti-union Democrats no less—the outcome might have represented a historic defeat for the union busters. Instead, the union tops orchestrated a historic defeat for all working people.

Similarly, labor’s acquiescence to Friedrichs, signaled by its abject failure to even consider the massive mo­ (continued on page 11)

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... Climate (continued from page 12: “Friedrichs: Threat to public-worker unions”)

ings that can involve increasing numbers of represen­ tatives and activists from many different milieus, is, historically, the kind of operation that creates political spaces habitable by those taking their first steps into climate action. They are the kind of actions that have the most potential to bring new social layers, more powerful social layers, into motion.

Once a date is set for a common set of mass actions six months or so in advance, the promise of unity, and, thus, numbers that can demonstrate majority support for emergency measures, can inspire activists in ev­ ery region of the country to go deeper and deeper into uncharted organizing territory, feeling some urgency to appear before union meetings, churches, neighbor­ hood groups, school groups. A predictable multi-year calendar of dates for united mass actions can struc­ ture and regularize these pushes outward to broaden the movement, to unleash the power of the newly en­ gaged, renew the pool of activists, and accelerate the development of new leaders. So why isn’t there a call for a big spring mass action?

Is “direct action” a substitute for mass action?

In part, the major climate action organizations in the United States are not convinced that a regular calen­ dar of united mass actions are central to movementbuilding in the manner described above. The general attitude seems to be “been there, done that.”

The People’s Climate March, whose organizers un­ fortunately eschewed the process of struggling over demands in deference to pro-Democratic Party insti­ tutional sponsors, is rightly but one-sidedly remem­ bered as lacking political teeth. Instead of thinking about alternative ways to organize mass demonstra­ tions that can continue the process of broadening the movement while at the same time insisting on its independence from the Democratic Party and on a democratic process that guarantees the selection of appropriate demands, many organizations are turn­ ing back to NVDA alone for the coming period.

A united-front mass action around clear and prin­ cipled demands regarding fossil fuels and renewable energy does not have to devolve into a “big tent” ab­ sent real politics. On the contrary, the U.S. antiwar movement of the Vietnam and Iraq eras, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and many other broad historic movements for social change demon­ strate the viability of this strategy.

Yet, 350, for example, has set it sights on mobilizing not the million or more that one might expect after the experience of the People’s Climate March, but only “tens of thousands of people around the world” in ac­ tions that “disrupt” the fossil fuel industry’s power (see BreakFree2016.org). Organizers are focusing all of their resources and energy on direct actions in which a relatively small number of activists would participate—several thousand each at about ten ma­ jor global sites of extraction, including several in the United States. One of the models for the Break Free of Fossil Fuels effort is the August 2015 “occupation”

of an RWE lignite coal mine in western Germany by 1500 protesters.

The strength of these actions, projected for the week of May 7-15, is that there will be concerted, pressworthy spectacles, coordinated internationally, that highlight some of the most important greenhousegas-producing industrial sites in the world and their impact, especially on the peoples of the global South.

Organizers argue that the civil disobedience will “re­ flect the scale and urgency of this crisis in a way that governments can no longer ignore.”

Activists advocating this singular focus for the spring also are convinced that the sight of 10,000 individuals willingly engaging in action that makes them subject to arrest will inspire greater engagement in the cli­ mate movement.

While it may be true that these theatrical and com­ (continued from page 10) bilization of its ranks, must be considered yet another terrible defeat.

This writer can offer no magical solutions to counter the immediate threat posed by an expected pro-Fried­ richs Supreme Court decision. It is only necessary to note that today, given the increasingly rabid anti-worker attacks of a crisis-ridden U.S. capitalism, any important labor victory requires a level of unity, solidarity, dedi­ cation, and leadership never previously witnessed. A failing capitalism has no alternative other than to take yet another pound of flesh from the workers’ movement and, indeed, from all other social struggles that fight for justice and freedom.

A revived labor movement can do no less than bring onto the field of battle the full force of its minions and pelling direct actions will create some new activism in the United States, it is not true that witnessing the arrests of “good people” will naturally lead to growing and broadening the movement in the places where social power is the greatest. Neither is it necessarily seen as more threatening—and more likely to pro­ duce concessions—by the powers that be. Why is this so?

Movements force concessions from governments when they are perceived by the elites as potentially threatening to the stability of the social order. The def­ inition of social order in capitalist society is the ability to make profits over the long term and to maintain a monopoly on political power via mainstream politi­ cal parties controlled by big business. “Direct action” protests, in contrast, are generally aimed at changing the minds or policies of legislators, and the capitalist parties they serve, via displays of personal individual sacrifice, including spending a few days in jail or pay­ ing a fine.

The very logic of appealing to legislators, rather than threatening them with signs of a growing and mass re­ jection of their authority on energy matters, is flawed. Neither do activist arrests necessarily inspire others to get more active and committed. The manner in which the spectacle of civil disobedience affects po­ tential activists is very much shaped by class and race and very specific historic experience.

Working-class struggle in history Looking at history, civil disobedience actions have been singularly ineffectual in mobilizing large num­ bers of working people, including the ranks of orga­ nized labor, to engage in political protest. For many rank-and-file workers, civil disobedience is associ­ ated with their union mis-leaderships’ failure to or­ ganize genuine fightbacks against the bosses and aus­ terity measures. It has become commonplace for AFL-CIO officials, who have repeatedly refused to try to mobilize labor’s collective power against companies demanding concessions or state governments gutting collective bargaining, to take the staff out for civil-dis­ obedience actions and arrest as a photo opportunity.

For working-class militants who yearn to see their potential power unleashed, CD or NVDA, do not nec­ essarily suggest a new political seriousness or an escalation of the struggle. For many in the African American community, the spectacle of mostly white, middle-class activists acting as if a symbolic arrest is particularly meaningful is just an irony of the rac­ ism of a system that keeps one in three young Black men—to great impact on their standard of living—in the criminal justice system at all times.

For immigrant workers, many of who are climate refugees without papers and for whom arrest will its natural allies and all the oppressed and exploited and champion their causes. In the course of doing so, its still significant power, exercised on behalf of all capitalism’s victims, will inevitably win it the moral and organiza­ tional authority to become a central player in the his­ toric battles in the years and decades ahead.

The forces to accomplish such a bold project will come in part from within the existing labor movement and will led by a fighting class-struggle left wing, aimed at mobilizing the ranks to challenge the bosses and simul­ taneously oust the present bureaucratic mis-leadership that stands in the way.

At the same time, there is no doubt that—given the simple fact that almost 90 percent of working people today have no union whatsoever—the future mass struggles, as in the past, will emerge when bold lead­ Marcos Brindicci / Reuters (Above) September 2014 climate protest in Buenos Aires, as millions demonstrated worldwide.

likely lead to a deportation that might mean the loss of their children or spouse, the most effective moment of struggle was their 2006 collective action of millions in a day of action that they called a “strike.” The ques­ tion that climate activists must grapple with today is how to build a movement that masses of working people and the oppressed layers of society can claim as their own.

If we are to build the “movement of movements,” or a movement that links the struggle to reduce global warming with the effort to get economic justice for those most vulnerable to the predatory fossil-fueldriven capitalist economy, we must become sensitive to the history and logic of traditionally working-class forms of struggle, forms that are rooted in collective power, unity in action, and the avoidance of unnec­ essary risk until the moment when the base seems strong enough to prevail.

Generally, in the current period, the main task natu­ rally centers on building huge demonstrations in the streets. Much later, after broad layers of the working class become deeply involved in protest, they might employ more decisive tactics, such as long-term strikes and plant occupations—which workers used to great effectiveness in organizing the industrial unions in the 1930s.

It is important that activists enter the spring protest season with eyes wide open and in a consciously ana­ lytical frame of mind, so that when it is over we can soberly evaluate the entire experience as a movement. March for a clean energy revolution One opportunity to make progress toward a greater understanding of the power and necessity of broad, politically independent, mass actions will be the July 24 March for a Clean Energy Revolution called by the Americans Against Fracking coalition. The march will take place in Philadelphia a day before the opening of the Democratic National Convention. The march is expected to mobilize thousands of protesters from East Coast communities, including Pennsylvanians whose lives have been disrupted by the fracking of the Marcellus Shale gas fields. It will demand a ban on fracking and other extreme fossil fuel extraction, a halt to the expansion of fracked gas pipelines and power plants, a ban on the export of liquefied natural gas, and a quick and just transition to a 100% renew­ able energy economy.

Activists who use this call to demonstrate the impor­ tance of mass action to broadening and growing the movement will also be making a contribution to the strategic discussion to come. n ers, deeply rooted in working-class life, find a way to “organize the unorganized” while providing the politi­ cal, organizational, and moral authority to win decisive victories. Inevitably, we should expect a powerful and necessary cross-fertilization between the future fight­ ing forces both inside and outside the present union framework.

In the meantime, every inch forward, every body mobi­ lized in struggles large and small, leads in the direction of a liberated working class. Every step backward, as is today’s hurried course of the backward and privileged few who sap workers strength and divide its ranks, en­ sures yet another defeat. The best fighters today will find their way to the revolutionary politics and actions that prepare the ground for the inevitable future fight­ back. Join Socialist Action! n SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2016 11

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