USA/Canada

Something to learn from Tea Party

The Republicans in the US Congress seem set to take the US budget deficit up to the wire on 17 October. And possibly beyond, to the point where the US government not only sends workers home unpaid, but fails to pay its bills. If president Obama and the Democrats campaigned boldly for the principle of universal health insurance — which is what the Republicans want to destroy — then the Republicans could not get away with it. Or even if the Democrats were bold about using unusual financial expedients. But the chief political lesson is on how politicians who are militant and determined can use...

Why Socialists look to the Working Class as the Force for Social Progress

For social change toward a better world, socialists believe the most important and indeed decisive social force is the struggle of the working class. Why the working class? Why do socialists believe there is a special connection between their own great goal of a new society and the interests of labor, this one segment of society? Is it because we "idealize" workers as being better, or more clever, or more honest, or more courageous, or more humanitarian, than non-workers? Isn't it rather true that the workers have time and time again followed reactionary courses and leaders and have by no...

The Special U.S. Background

The American labor movement is different from the labor movement in any other country. One of the ways in which it differs most strikingly from most other national labor movements in the capitalist portion of the world is that it is non-socialist and even anti-socialist. How do American socialists account for this fact? Most important of all, doesn't this non-socialist character of the American working class contradict the socialist analysis of capitalist society and prove that, in America at least, socialism is a Utopian ideal with no real political future? The enemies and critics of...

The Class Struggle and the Trade Unions

"There is no class struggle in America": This precept now belongs in the American catechism along with the little boy who chopped down the cherry tree but wouldn't lie. And, as prescribed by the official Way of Life, unions obstinately refuse to "recognize" the class struggle and boast proudly that they remain aloof from it. But it "recognizes" the unions; in fact, it creates them. Despite the most sincere protestations of labor officials, unions practice the class struggle and a hundred times a day demonstrate its persistence. In his recent quest for a smattering of respectability, Walter...

The Working Class: Bulwark of Democracy

The fate of the working class depends upon democracy, and the fate of democracy depends upon the working class. This simple truth illuminates all problems of modern politics. Where labor enjoys democracy, it will fight tenaciously to preserve it. Where it has lost democracy, its first goal becomes its restoration. It is fashionable sometimes to say that we must choose between the "security" of totalitarianism and the "freedom" of capitalism. Nothing could be more deceptive. For the working class, security and democracy are inseparable. When totalitarianism is imposed upon it, labor loses all...

The Enemy Within: The Stalinist threat to labor and the unions.

Confusion and ignorance on the nature of the Stalinist phenomenon penetrates all areas of contemporary political activity. If that is true of the summits of political rule in the West and elsewhere, it is just as true of most of the labor movements of the world. The confusion, ignorance and, above all, perplexity of the bourgeois world in meeting the challenge of Stalinism, has understandable class roots. It looks upon the Stalinist world solely as a revolutionary threat to capitalism. And the bourgeoisie is correct in looking on Stalinism as a threat to itself, even though it fails just the...

Independent political action - The Next Step: labor's own party

"We live in a world where everybody is bound to take care of himself. Yet the English working class allows the landlord, capitalist, and retail trading classes, with their tail of lawyers, newspaper writers, etc., to take care of its interests. No wonder reforms in the interests of the workman come so slow and in such miserable dribbles. The working people of England have but to will, and they are the masters to carry every reform, social and political, which their situation requires. Then why not make that effort?" The question with which Frederick Engels ended his article "A Workingmen's...

Why Labor Needs Its Own Party - Towards a basic realignment in US politics

Any discussion of politics in the United States must sooner or later get around to the question of a "third" party. Some caution against having "too many" parties. Others insist that another major party could only be a "protest" movement that could never win. Still others insist that the "two-party system" is so deeply entrenched in American life that it can never be replaced. Then there are those who warn against "class" parties, praise the virtues of "broad coalitions" that represent all the people and shun concentration of too much power in too few hands. Most of this argument misses the...

Trade Unions and Politics: The Giant in Short Pants

The union movement is already deep in politics, and not because it is weak but because it is so strong. Basic industry is organized, and labor, by its sheer economic power, is able to win concessions from the employer. But what it wins on the industrial field is taken away in the legislative hall If it wins a union shop, "right to work" laws are passed in the states and the Taft-Hartley Law in the nation. If it raises wages, income- tax laws shift the burden off the rich onto the poor. So it goes. The more powerful the unions become, the greater comes the pressure from Big Business to...

Support the Fair-Dealers? Labor and the Democrats

Remember . . .? Back in 1948, Truman upset the pollsters by his unpredicted victory, after a whistle-stop campaign in which he hauled out all of the best phrases of the Fair Deal and polished them up. In a moment of glowing gratitude, he told the press next day, "Labor did it!" In fact, labor had a great part in doing it. It was done against the propaganda of the one-party press, against the apathy of the Democratic machine itself, and in spite of the fact that Truman himself had done little or nothing as president to make labor happy. He had brought back the most hated of anti-labor weapons...

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