Crisis and Class Struggle
Lessons of History
CRISIS always intensifies class struggle. Within the available space, we can only take brief glances at the most important flash-points of the crises-class struggle interface, historical junctures which threw up new challenges for both capital and labour.
American Workers Win New Deal
Preceding and during the GD all kinds of “direct action” rocked the USA and tilted the balance of class forces in a way that made the New Deal possible. Howard Zinn in his “People’s History of America” gives us a graphic account of this process, which is all Demonstration of the Unemployed in the US, 1931 but suppressed in conventional accounts of the period. Here are stimulating extracts for you:
Democratic Party candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in the spring of 1933 on the promise of relief from hard times. The reforms introduced by him “had to meet two pressing needs: to reorganize capitalism in such a way [as] to overcome the crisis and stabilize the system; also, to head off the alarming growth of spontaneous rebellion ... .”
Right since 1931, “desperate people were not waiting for the government to help them; they were helping themselves, acting directly. All over the country, people organized spontaneously to stop evictions. Unemployed Councils came up all over the country, in many cases organized and led by communists. The Councils’ function was to prevent evictions of the destitute, or if evicted to bring pressure to bear on the Relief Commission to find a new home; if an unemployed worker had his gas or water turned off because he could not pay for it, to see the proper authorities; and so on. In Seattle, the fishermen’s union caught fish and exchanged them with people who picked fruit and vegetables, and those who cut wood exchanged that.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of self-help took place in the coal district of Pennsylvania, where teams of unemployed miners dug small mines on company property, mined coal, trucked it to cities, and sold it below the commercial rate. By 1934, 5 million tons of these “bootleg” coals were produced by twenty thousand men. When attempts were made to prosecute, local juries would not convict, local jailers would not imprison. Breaking through the confines of private property in order to live up to their own necessities, the miners’ action was, at the same time a manifestation of the most important part of class consciousness – namely, that the problems of the workers can be solved only by themselves.
“Were the New Dealers – Roosevelt and his advisers, the businessmen who supported him – also class-conscious? Did they understand that measures must be quickly taken, in 1933 and 1934, to give jobs, food baskets, relief, to wipe out the idea “that the problems of the workers can be solved only by themselves”? Perhaps, like the workers’ class consciousness, it was a set of actions arising not from held theory, but from instinctive practical necessity.
“Perhaps it was such a consciousness that led to the Wagner-Connery Bill, introduced in Congress in early 1934, to regulate labor disputes. That same summer of 1934, a strike of teamsters in Minneapolis was supported by other working people, and soon nothing was moving in the city. In the fall of that same year, 1934, came the largest strike of all- 325,000 textile workers in the South. They left the mills and set up flying squadrons in trucks and autos to move through the strike areas, picketing, battling guards, entering the mills, unbelting machinery. Here too, as in the other cases, the strike impetus came from the rank and file, against a reluctant union leadership at the top. The New York Times said: “The grave danger of the situation is that it will get completely out of the hands of the leaders.” In the rural South, too, organizing took place, often stimulated by Communists, but nourished by the grievances of poor whites and blacks who were tenant farmers or farm laborers, always in economic difficulties but hit even harder by the Depression. In 1934 and 1935 hundreds of thousands of workers, left out of the tightly controlled, exclusive unions of the American Federation of Labor, began organizing in the new mass production industries – auto, rubber, packinghouse. The AFL could not ignore them; it set up a Committee for Industrial Organization to organize these workers outside of craft lines, by industry, all workers in a plant belonging to one union. This Committee, headed by John Lewis, then broke away and became the CIO – the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
“But it was rank-and-file strikes and insurgencies that pushed the union leadership, AFL and CIO, into action. ... A new kind of tactic began among rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, in the early thirties – the sit-down strike. The workers stayed in the plant instead of walking-out, and this had clear advantages: they were directly blocking the use of strikebreakers; they did not have to act through union officials but were in direct control of the situation themselves; they did not have to walk outside in the cold and rain, but had shelter; they were not isolated, as in their work, or on the picket line; they were thousands under one roof, free to talk to one another, to form a community of struggle.” In early 1936, when the Firestone rubber plants in Akron were faced with a wage cut and several union men were fired, a sit-down strike spread through all the plants. “A court issued an injunction against mass picketing. It was ignored, and ISO deputies were sworn in. But they soon faced ten thousand workers from all over Akron. In a month the strike was won.
“... In December of that year began the longest sit-down strike of all, at Fisher Body plant #1 in Flint, Michigan. ... For forty days there was a community of two thousand strikers. ... There were classes in parliamentary procedure, public speaking, history of the labor movement. Graduate students at the University of Michigan gave courses in journalism and creative writing.
“There were injunctions, but a procession of five thousand armed workers encircled the plant and there was no attempt to enforce the injunction. Police attacked with tear gas and the workers fought back with firehoses. Thirteen strikers were wounded by gunfire, but the police were driven back. The governor called out the National Guard. By this time the strike had spread to other General Motors plants. Finally there was a settlement, a six-month contract, leaving many questions unsettled but recognizing that from now on, the company would have to deal not with individuals but with a union.
“In1936 there were forty-eight sitdown strikes. In 1937 there were 477 ... even thirty members of a National Guard Company ... now sat down themselves because they had not been paid.
“The sit-downs were especially dangerous to the system because they were not controlled by the regular union leadership. It was to stabilize the system in the face of labor unrest that the Wagner Act of 1935, setting up a National Labor Relations Board, had been passed. The wave of strikes in 1936, 1937, 1938, made the need even more pressing. The Wagner Act was challenged by a steel corporation in the courts, but the Supreme Court found it constitutional.”
Now, why did the ruling class accept the rapid growth of unions, which appear rather strange to us today? The explanation lies in the difference in situations. In our time the bourgeoisie find non-unionized workers more manageable; opposite was the case in those days of spontaneous, vigorous class action. Writes Zinn:
“Unions were not wanted by employers, but they were more controllable – more stabilizing for the system than the wildcat strikes, the factory occupations of the rank and file. In the spring of 1937, a New York Times article carried the headline “Unauthorized Sit-Downs Fought by CIO Unions.” The story read: “Strict orders have been issued to all organizers and representatives that they will be dismissed if they authorize any stoppages of work without the consent of the international officers. .. .” The Times quoted John L. Lewis, dynamic leader of the CIO: “A CIO contract is adequate protection against sit-downs, lie-downs, or any other kind of strike.” Thus, two sophisticated ways of controlling direct labor action developed in the mid-thirties. First, the National Labor Relations Board would give unions legal status, listen to them, settling certain of their grievances. Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections – just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting. The NLRB would set limits in economic conflict as voting did in political conflict. And second, the workers’ organization itself, the union, even a militant and aggressive union like the CIO, would channel the workers’ insurrectionary energy into contracts, negotiations, union meetings, and try to minimize strikes, in order to build large, influential, even respectable organizations.”
Thus it was that the exceptional circumstances of the GD – and of course the double threat of communism in USSR and fascism in Germany – forced upon the American bourgeoisie a relatively accommodating labour policy as one of the major components of the ND. When the situation improved somewhat after the war, and a new wave of strikes ensued in 1946, a partial rebalancing was effected through the Labor-Management Relations Act (or Taft Hartley Act) passed in June 1947. It amended the Wagner Act, defining, in particular, “unfair labor practices” on the part of unions. Thirty four years later, this very Act would be used by a Republican president to crush a major strike – an event symbolising the rollback of ND and initiation of the neoliberal regime.
Reagan and Thatcher Kickstart Neoliberal Offensive
The crisis of 1970s too saw workers fighting valiantly against job cuts, wage freeze despite high inflation (which meant reduced real wages) and other attacks. But they could not hold out for long against organised capitalist offensive with direct state support. This will stand out from the following diagram
We can see strikes build up from late 1960s (when the ‘golden age’, also known as the period of post-war compromise, was coming to an end) to mid or late 1970s and then go down a cliff from 1980s. Symbolic of this long downturn were a couple of strike struggles in the two countries from which neoliberalism started its world campaign.
These were the US Air Traffic Controllers’ strike and the UK miners’ strike – recognised as defining moments in the post-1970s American and British workers’ movements. Both ended in defeat and emboldened the Reagan and Thatcher governments to go ahead with their conservative economic programmes, which included wider and largely successful attacks on the rights and pay raises achieved by the working class over the past decades. Having inflicted demoralising defeats on the class enemy, capital upheld Reaganomics and Thatcherism – the first versions of neoliberalism – as the new global model of growth.
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was a powerful union in the US. Their strength lay not in numbers but in the absolutely crucial position they held in running the entire network of air transport and communications. In the 1980 presidential election, this union along with the Teamsters and the Air NUM Strike, Britain, 1974 Line Pilots Association chose to back Republican Party candidate Ronald Reagan, who had endorsed the union and its struggle for better conditions during the election campaign, against Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
On August 3, 1981, the union declared a strike, seeking better working conditions, better pay and a 32-hour workweek. They reported sick to circumvent the federal law against strikes by government unions. President Reagan immediately declared the PATCO strike a “peril to national safety” and ordered them back to work under the terms of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Simultaneously, replacements (with supervisors, staff personnel, some controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities including the military) and contingency plans were put in place.
Only 1,300 of the nearly 13,000 controllers returned to work. On August 5, Reagan fired the rest and banned them from federal service for life. Several strikers were jailed. The union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. In October 1981 it was decertified from its right to represent workers.
In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the authorities were faced with the task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired, a hard problem to fix as, at the time, it took three years in normal conditions to train a new controller. The government was initially able to have only 50% of flights available. It took closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.
Reagan’s tough handling of the strike even at the cost of much inconvenience to business and general public came in for profuse praise as well as sharp criticism then and later. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2003: “The President invoked the law that striking government employees forfeit their jobs, an action that unsettled those who cynically believed no President would ever uphold that law. President Reagan prevailed, as you know, but far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.” On the 30th anniversary of the historic crackdown, Michael Moore said that Reagan’s firing of the PATCO strikers was the beginning of “America’s downward slide”. He also blamed the AFL-CIO for telling their members to cross the PATCO picket lines. (30 Years Ago Today: The Day the Middle Class Died, by Michael Moore, Daily Koss, Fri Aug 05, 2011). The same year, Oxford University Press published Joseph McCartin’s book, “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, The Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America”.
No less harsh was Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” of Great Britain, in dealing with the miners’ challenge.
On 6 March 1984, the National Coal Board announced that the agreement reached after the 1974 strike (which had played a major role in bringing down the Heath government) had become obsolete, and that in order to rationalise government subsidisation of industry they intended to close 20 coal mines. This meant twenty thousand jobs would be lost. Strikes started spontaneously in several threatened mines. On 12 March 1984, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – one of the strongest unions in the country – declared a national strike and it took effect immediately.
A bit of background information should be in order here. A strike nearly occurred in 1981, when the government had a similar plan to close twenty-three pits, though the threat of a strike was then enough to force the government to back down. In fact, the government decided to avert a strike at that time because coal stocks were low, and a strike would have had a serious effect. Next year, it offered a 5.2 percent raise based partly on increased productivity. Union members accepted it, rejecting their leaders’ call for a strike authorisation. This clever move enabled the government to stockpile enough coal for the inevitable future showdown.
The government was thus in a position to take the strikers head on. On the day after the Orgreave picket of 29 May, which saw five thousand pickets clash violently with police, Thatcher said in a speech: “... what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed.... The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.”
The impact of the strike was nowhere near as hard-hitting as previous strikes such as those of the early 1970s. With most homes equipped with oil or gas central heating and the railways long since converted to diesel and electricity. The problem of potential power-shortages as a result of a coal strike had been recognised by the Thatcher government which insisted that Britain’s coal-fired power stations create their own stockpiles of coal which would keep them running throughout any industrial action. This strategy turned out to be incredibly successful during the miner’s strike, as the power stations were able to maintain power supplies even through the winter of 1984.
The strike ended on 3 March 1985, nearly a year after it had begun. In order to save the union, the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without a new agreement with management.
The 1980s thus marked the onset of neoliberal offensive by pushing its class antagonist into the defensive. Globalisation became the magic word and when the victory sign “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) was flashed in a post-Soviet scenario, many if not most people willy-nilly accepted it.
Popular Rebellions in Latin America
But it was not a permanent defeat; it could not be. Latin America, the first prey of Western neoliberalism in the Third World, saw the first series of sustained and effective rebellions against the menace at the turn of the millennium: the Indian uprising in Ecuador that ousted the neoliberal president; the insurrectionary waves in Argentina that sent successive presidents packing and developed into a revolutionary crisis in 2001-2002; the popular uprising in Venezuela in April 2002 to bring Hugo Chavez back to the presidency after he was ousted in a military coup; the gas war in Bolivia in 2003 which saw the neoliberal president being ousted; and so on.
Compared to the sporadic outbursts we see in our country, these popular movements were much more sustained (not under communist leadership though) and brought to power forces which opposed US hegemony and the neoliberal programme to different degrees. These governments instituted democratic political reforms and partly restored public control over natural resources (Venezuela from 1999, Bolivia in 2006, Ecuador in 2007). Even Kirchner in Argentina had to implement, under popular pressure, certain progressive measures. Some of these countries – most notably Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador – have advanced much further with staggering but persistent experimentations of building some sort of proto-socialist society.
The World Social Forum (January 2001) also emerged from Latin American soil and spread to the rest of the world with the anti-TINA slogan “Another World is Possible”. This was accompanied by massive mobilisations against the WTO, the World Bank, IMF and the G-8 in Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa respectively between 1999 and 2001.
These struggles gradually flattened out mainly because they lacked a sense of what was to be done next, and also because they came more and more under control of dubious Western NGOs. The WSF in particular, despite its promising initiation, ended up as a safety valve for letting out some steam of grievances. Having said this, we must affirm that the movements did help heighten popular consciousness and activism. On this grounding there developed the next, present round of confrontations with the neoliberal imperialist order.