http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121270725304950289.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
Along with the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal argues that the U.S. is on the verge of victory in Iraq. Seems like the ruling class is trying to shift the debate in the general election from "out when" to "how to achieve complete victory". I think we can expect to see a shift to the right in Obama's foreign policy rhetoric soon, specifically around Iraq. (See his speech to AIPAC). The main arguments being made for why the U.S. is winning in Iraq are the following:
1) The building and "political maturation" of the Iraqi Army, which has won key battles in Basra and Sadr City.
2) Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has broad support from different ethnic groups.
3) The support and collaboration of the Awakening Councils (Sunni militias) with the U.S. military on the ground.
4) Finally, the political and military weakness of Al-Sadr and his militia, which after the Sadr City attack has retreated back to Iran, under a misnamed "truce".
The main problem that the U.S. rulers face is that ordinary Iraqis do not like to be occupied. Which destabilizes all of the four points mentioned above. But I will try to take on the four points below:
1) Iraqi Army: It is true that the Iraqi army has been able to build itself almost to the point where it can begin fighting "it's own battles". After all, Maliki's push to take the port city, Basra, away from small militias and Sadr's forces was a political gamble, that tested the competence of his army. But it is also true, that the stability and strength of the Iraqi army is directly tied to the U.S. military, who financially and military supports the army. This is where the importance of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq falls in.
2) Broad Support for Maliki: The broad ethnic support for Maliki is very complicated to understand. Both Washington Post and Wall Street Journal assert this. First thing that can be said, is that it is true that Sunni militias have began to engage in activity in the Iraqi parliament, in which they had boycotted nine months ago. But does this mean that they support Maliki? Or that they support his latest offensive against the Mahdi Army led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr? I think not!
3) Sunni-U.S. army alliance: The U.S. has been adding Sunni militias to its payroll, to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in what amounts to a united front against a common enemy. Nonetheless, this unity is built on false foundations. There is only so much money the U.S. can give to these militias. Secondly, these same Sunni militias still have an opposition to Prime Minister Maliki and to an ongoing occupation by the U.S. military, albeit in principle not strategy.
4) Weakening of Mahdi Army: It is true that the political strategy opted by Muqtada has been very difficult to understand. At times he is denouncing U.S. imperialism and the puppet government in Iraq, at other times he argues for a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. army and working with the Maliki government. But we should also remember that Muqtada is not just a politician but a commander and chief of the Mahdi Army. So what might look like a political retreat can really end up being a military retreat in which consolidating, planning, and building moral is crucial to any army. As the Time's magazine argued recently: "Sadr-Maliki conflict may cast Iraq into a deeper and more lasting crisis." http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1735034,00.html
P.S. Goodbye Hillary!
Friday, June 6, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
ICE on the Offensive Again
After a couple of months of low activity ICE is back on its racist agenda, attacking immigrant workers. Headlines in the New York Times in the last couple of weeks read like this: "Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?scp=3&sq=immigration&st=nyt ) and "270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?scp=25&sq=immigration&st=nyt)
The latter article details the outcome of the largest raid in U.S. history at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Iowa. Over 389 workers were detained for working with false papers. This raid is unique from others because until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
It is important to keep in mind under what political context this new offensive is coming: 1) an election year, which has divided sections of the immigrant's rights movement.
2) ICE has been up until now on the defensive, with the well publicized mistreatment of detained immigrants by the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News.
3) U.S. economy is heading towards a recession, which means that the Mexican economy shall soon be in a deeper one. (Ruling class also need a scapegoat--immigrant workers)
4) The ruling class in this country is looking for a restructuring of the immigration system in this country, fast.
Fight Back:
The response of immigrant rights activists both in Postville, Iowa and all around California, particularly in the Bay area and San Diego, has been remarkable. Some good coverage can be found at http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/26/san-diego-protest-against-ice. In New York City, the No Raids Committee of Queens along with The Humanist Center, Polo Democratico and other community groups will be marching to demand the right of immigrants to vote in local elections and to show the community that we will not let the Iowa Raids intimidate us. Also, activists in the No Raids Committee are preparing a petition in support of the 270 workers in federal prison, the demands are: to drop the charges of document fraud and to release workers immediately. I will post petition shortly.
Struggle continues:
In spite of the largest ruling class offensive against immigrants in decades activists and family members have been committed to fight for worker's rights. Although this layer of people nationally is small, the dynamics of social movements, i.e. its retreats and victories, will prove to be an invaluable lesson for all of us .
The latter article details the outcome of the largest raid in U.S. history at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Iowa. Over 389 workers were detained for working with false papers. This raid is unique from others because until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
It is important to keep in mind under what political context this new offensive is coming: 1) an election year, which has divided sections of the immigrant's rights movement.
2) ICE has been up until now on the defensive, with the well publicized mistreatment of detained immigrants by the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News.
3) U.S. economy is heading towards a recession, which means that the Mexican economy shall soon be in a deeper one. (Ruling class also need a scapegoat--immigrant workers)
4) The ruling class in this country is looking for a restructuring of the immigration system in this country, fast.
Fight Back:
The response of immigrant rights activists both in Postville, Iowa and all around California, particularly in the Bay area and San Diego, has been remarkable. Some good coverage can be found at http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/26/san-diego-protest-against-ice. In New York City, the No Raids Committee of Queens along with The Humanist Center, Polo Democratico and other community groups will be marching to demand the right of immigrants to vote in local elections and to show the community that we will not let the Iowa Raids intimidate us. Also, activists in the No Raids Committee are preparing a petition in support of the 270 workers in federal prison, the demands are: to drop the charges of document fraud and to release workers immediately. I will post petition shortly.
Struggle continues:
In spite of the largest ruling class offensive against immigrants in decades activists and family members have been committed to fight for worker's rights. Although this layer of people nationally is small, the dynamics of social movements, i.e. its retreats and victories, will prove to be an invaluable lesson for all of us .
Friday, May 2, 2008
Chile's Road to Socialism: Lessons of 1973
The essay below is from a talk given at the annual Northeast Socialist Conference organized by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. (CERSC, November 2007).
On September 11 of 1973, a dramatic revolutionary situation was destroyed and crushed. As tanks roared passed the city streets of Santiago bombs rained down on the presidential palace La Moneda, where the president Salvador Allende now lay dead. This was the tragic scene of a coup conducted by General Agustin Pinochet and the Chilean ruling class with assistance by the C.I.A. In the aftermath of the coup, 3.000 leftists, Allende supports, trade unionists and revolutionary workers were killed. Not only were they killed some were tortured and made examples of for future generations. Victor Jara the famous folk musician--The Bob Dylan of Chile--was beaten, burned in the hands and then forced to play his guitar before being gun down in the Chilean National Stadium where thousands of others were brutally murdered. It has become a ritual on every September 11 for Chileans to protest the Pinochet dictatorship and to fight for the state to recognize the real numbers of those killed by it. What is important for us is not to mourn those killed, but to learn. The best tribute we can pay to thousands of radicals who lost their lives is to draw the lessons from the mistakes they paid for with their lives. It is for this reason why I will not focus on the role of the C.I.A. and U.S. imperialism but instead on the mistakes made by the Chilean left in order to learn from it.
Today I believe that the lessons of the Chilean Road to Socialism have never been more relevant for us to come to terms with. There has been a reawakening of the Latin American working class, from the factory takeovers of Argentinean workers in 2001, the heroic Venezuelan workers defense of Chavez during the attempted coup in 2002, to the uprising in Oaxaca Mexico, there has been a sharpening in class struggle. If we look closer at these struggles against the ruthless free market, we find the movement dealing with key questions: Is there a need for the explicit building of a revolutionary organization? Can the existing state be used for the purpose of the movement? Is the working class capable of leading a revolution? Can we reform capitalism? The Chilean revolutionary process and its rich history I believe gives us answers to those questions and teaches us important lessons that are indispensable in struggles that lay ahead. Primarily lessons for the potential of working class struggle from below.
Promises of the Unidad Popular and the dominance of the Right:
Salvador Allende’s rise to presidency took place at a time when the Chilean working class began to grow much more confident and class-consciousness was rising. Allende assumed the presidency in November of 1970 through the coalition of leftist parties called Popular Unity. The UP was composed of six parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party. Both parties had a mass base in the industrial working class of Chile that had been forged in the early parts of the century with the upheaval of the Nitrate workers. Both political parties had highly become focused on popular front strategies since the 1930’s, even electing as president in 1938 member of the Radical Party, Aguirre Cerda, effectively putting the Popular Front in power for the first time. The popular front strategy was nothing new. This tactic of class collaboration was born out of the necessity for Stalin in the 1930’s to seek allies against a war with Hitler. In practice, this meant that socialists were to be uncritical of reformists, the middle class and bourgeois parties and seek to work together. So by the time Allende was elected president in 1970 it was his sixth appearance as a candidate for a broad coalition like the UP and his third time as president.
It is important to understand the period before Allende’s presidency because it helps explain what were the expectations and visions of the organized left that became his supporter. Popular Unity was different from other Popular Fronts strategy due to three key elements, the failure of the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei, to live up to its promises of reform and the crises of his government, which set in motion the second element: an increasingly combative working class movement. The Frei government had promised agrarian reform in the countryside to ease rural tensions. However, the land owning oligarchy was not going to hear it, a class that Frei’s government did not dare confront. This caused many peasants who had voted for Frei into open revolt. Frei’s government also promised industrial growth in the cities that attracted thousands of unemployed rural workers into working class areas and cities, who at once in the city began to demand free housing and basic services like clean water and food. What did all this mean concretely?: for one the strikes in this period increased and so did the workers involved: from 230.725 in 1969 to 316.280 a year later. Factory occupations also rose from five in 1968 to 24 in 1969; they then jumped to 339 occupations in 1971. It also led to the third central element that led to the rise of Allende, which was the reorganization of the left during the crises of Frei’s government. The Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR), which was a group who formed in 1965 and with a deep admiration towards Che Guevara, began to play a key role in the student movement for educational reform. In addition, sections of Frei’s party began to split forming the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, all of whom joined UP, with a vision that Allende will conduct the agrarian reform that Frei did not pass. Allende rise to presidency rode the waves of working class and peasant struggles, which will be reflected in its program.
The program of the UP tried to unite conflicting class interests, for which its survival in the electoral arena depended on. If you take a look at UP’s platform and their “Forty Measures” they promised honest government or “Popular Government”, an end to corruption and the abuse of power, more extensive and cheaper social benefits. The UP’s electoral program promised a number of strategic economic measures, including the nationalization of Chile’s U.S. owned copper mines, private banks and insurance companies. Allende proposed to establish a “social property sector” whose goal was to protect important industrial monopolies and certain parts of the service sector, which were important for social and economic development. Allende’s economic policy, according to socialist Mike Gonzalez in his article Chile: the Workers United: “was an orthodox Keynesian plan for reactivating the economy. It contained no challenge to the dominance of private capital; on the contrary, it gave the industrial bourgeoisie a range of guarantees and provided land- owners with generous compensation”. An example of this was the Agrarian Reform Act that Frei did not dare pass; unlike Frei, however, Allende promised landowners possession of the most productive acres and the best farm machinery, thus preventing a confrontation with the landowning class.
This is what Peter Winn author of Weavers of Revolution has to say about UP’s electoral program:
The UP’s program reflected its political strategy an alliance of the middle and lower classes, blue and white-collar workers, intellectuals and peasants. It contained something for almost everybody and particular assurances to the non-Marxist middle class that a Popular Unity victory would benefit them and hurt only "monopolists" and "imperialists". (Winn 65).
Further on, I will argue that this strategy was untenable and consequently led Allende to be more alienated to the interests of the working class.
Within Allende’s Socialist Party there existed a strong current that believed socialism had to be achieved through a revolution and if you read the party’s literature and paper Chile Hoy, that was put forward. However, Salvador Allende, who I believe represented the conservative wing of the Socialist Party, had a fundamentally different understanding of Chile’s road towards socialism:
In the transition to socialism, the legal norms will respond to the necessity of the peoples will to build a new society...On the realism of the Congress, it depends, to a great extent that the capitalist legality transitions to the socialist legality, according to the socio-economic transformations that we are implanting, without a violent fracture, which we responsibly want to avoid. (Textos Escogidos 119, emphasis added.)
This was Salvador Allende’s May 22 1971 message to a congress made up of the Chilean right wing and parties of the ruling class, titled The Road to Socialism. Allende’s strategy was to enact reforms that was possible to carry out under existing legislation and could win approval of the congress. Consequently, allowing the right to determine the pace of change. In fact, the congress believed having him in power would actually help restrain and control working class self-activity, which was growing.
On the contrary to some bosses’ fears, we see that Allende does not want to confront the Chilean bourgeoisie. Even before he was able to assume the presidency as the worlds first ever “Marxist elected president” Allende had to agree to terms that would keep the existing political establishment together, make sure that the legal system would not be touched, and most importantly that the armed forces would remain free to “guarantee democracy”. This behind the scenes agreement with the ruling class i.e. bosses, bankers, owners of the press etc, is known as the “Statute of Guarantees”. What is interesting about the passing of this agreement is that it was never discussed and voted on with rank-file members of the UP. On another level, this agreement proved that Allende had a fundamentally different vision of socialism. For Allende socialism meant turning the existing state apparatus with its laws, courts and armed forces into a pro-worker state. However, what Allende failed to understand is that the ruling class does not take this lying down. I will try to demonstrate in later events that developed in Chile that proved this reformist view wrong.
Cracks in the Coalition – Advanzar o Consolidar:
The first year of Allende’s presidency was relatively peaceful. Nonetheless, there were some stirrings in the countryside in where land seizures began to rise; partially due to UP’s commitment to agrarian reform and the rise of confidence in peasants. Overall, in 1970 the Chilean working class experienced a rise in wages, which was soon to be cut short. We can say that this was the calm before the storm. The ruling class at this moment was looking for the correct moment to launch its first challenge, and the moment was November 1971 with leader of the Cuban Revolution--Fidel Castro visiting Chile. The march, which is known as the “March of the Empty Pots”, was organized by the right wing parties, in which hundreds of middle class women came out with their saucepans (and house cleaners) in a symbol of the shortages (and class status). Although this might seem like a joke, it was actually a warning sign by the Chilean ruling class of battles to come and a concrete effort to begin mobilizing the middle class. So in this light Allende began his second year in office, and it was here where a debate within the UP began to form.
The debate in the UP and its conclusion further highlight its political character. The dispute focused around the questions: should the UP support the workers in their struggle to defend their living standards? Moreover, if the workers decided to fight back what political strategy should it be carried out with? These debates, took place in two UP conferences at La Arrayan and Lo Curro in February and June 1972, and were centered on the label advance or consolidate. The right wing of the Popular Unity argued to stop the process of reforms and to seek wider electoral support before advancing, while the left wing argued for the quickening pace of the reforms and the continuing enforcement of the working class, which had begun to prove it can struggle forward. However, the left wing’s arguments were not substantial enough to lead to a decisive break with the Popular Unity’s framework. Nor did it lead to question the relationship between the state and the ruling class, nor the control and direction of the economy and the role of the working class in that process. In the end, the left of the UP, which consisted of elements of the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU), the leftwing of the Socialist Party, and the Christian Left were poorly organized to amount a serious challenge in the political direction of the UP. So it was at the Lo Curro conference where the rightwing secured a majority. In this context, the boom of 1971 had receded and the Chilean ruling class was reassured that Allende and Popular Unity were more interested in compromise. Chile under Allende was about to experience some of the harshest class battles the world has seen, but yet the organized left and more importantly the mass socialist and communist parties in the UP were only to be witnesses at the brave creativity of the Chilean working class to confront the bourgeoisie’s offensive.
The Rise of Los Cordones and the betrayal of the UP:
The independent organization of the Chilean working class and poor peasants was a process in which peoples expectations were raised and their living standards attacked while the right wing of the UP sat back and watched and even at times attacked them. It was also a process of confusion. One of the UP’s famous slogans was “popular power”. For UP officials this meant unconditional support for their government, while for workers this actually meant create socialism right here right now. The first of these and one of the most important organizations to appear in the political scene in Chile was the Cordon Cerrillos-Maipu, a cordon meaning industrial belts, which were workers councils setup across Chile in response to the attacks on the working class. The town Cerrillos is an industrial suburb of Chile’s capital and had the largest concentration of industries in Chile with over 45.000 workers and 250 factories. Maipu is a farming area that borders Cerrillos. The forming of this cordon like others arose due to concrete problems. In Maipu 44 peasant leaders were arrested for taking over a farm that was soon to be expropriated. The Judge in this case ruled against the peasants and used government policy to back himself. This led to large demonstrations against the judge and an increase in land seizures as well. Meanwhile, Cerrillos was going through several waves of strikes and factory occupations, in particular in a factory owned by textile monopolists Yarur Inc. This factory, which was not due to be expropriated under the governments list, was taken over by the workers in an attempt to push the government’s policy further to the left and in a concrete effort to raise their living standards. In an inspiring meeting with the Yarur workers and union officials, the workers decided to “socialize” the textile plant. This is an account of one of Allende’s representatives Jorge Varas who was present at the meeting:
I have never in my life seen anything like this... When the union officerd told them that the company didn't want to receive them and had denied all their petitions, the people stopped them and began to cry 'Socialization! Socialization!' It was incredible. It was revolution! Two-thousand workers standing and shouting: 'We want Socialization' And the women calling out: 'No more exploitation!' They were in a state of euphoria. (Winn 174, original emphasis)
What is interesting about what occurred afterwards was that the Yarur workers demanded that Jorge Varas speak in behalf of Allende, this is what he had to say (note on his language):
"Comrades! You have decided that this enterprise should pass to the social property area. My duty is to demand this of the government." There was a round of applause; then an old-timer banged his fist on the table and cried: 'And right now, comrades! We are going on strike and we won't go back with those octopuses inside!' Jorge Varas decided that he had no choice except to follow their lead. "Well, comrades if you resolve to go on strike immediately, we have to see what is the best way to do it..." 'By seizing the industry!" one old-timer shouted out from below. "No comrade! We are not discussing a factory seizure. Yes, we will take the industry, but from outside. You have to guard the strategic spots of the enterprise...while we propose this to the president of the Republic. And I know that he will have to accept your position." (Winn 175, original emphasis).
This was a primary example of how workers were ready to go on the offensive against an increasingly paranoid ruling class, however, Allende and the UP and their revolution from above, acted as a brake in this process because they sought to work jointly with the legal system.
Because of these joint struggles, Cerrillos and Maipu both joined forces with an aim of denouncing the vacillations of the so-called “Peoples Government” and demanding it take action in behalf of the workers. The Cordon Cerrillos put forward a political program, which was far in advance than anything the organized left was arguing for:
1. Support President Allende’s government in so far as it interprets the struggles and mobilizations of the workers.
Clearly, this strategy was fundamentally different from the UP’s: a revolutionary alliance between the working class and other oppressed groups, and not with the middle class, under the program of: workers’ control. It was also a testament to the revolutionary consciousness of the Chilean working class. Despite this, the program of the cordon contained two key weaknesses, one was president Allende and the second was the problem of what to do with the bourgeois state. The problem with supporting Allende is that it hid the real political situation, which the working class found themselves in. The working class was directly challenging the control of the ruling class on the shop floor, this in turn was setting the stage for the bourgeoisie to strike back. Allende was not interested in protecting the concrete gains the working class militants had achieved. While the workers were struggling with how to go forward, Allende called their acts “crass irresponsibility”. This was so because “the government already represented the interests of the working class”, so they had no reason to struggle. Instead, during this time the UP was trying to convince workers of the participatory role of the armed forces in Chile’s Road to Socialism. Once again, the temperature of the class struggle was about to rise, and so was the power of the cordones with the Transportation Bosses’ lockout that began on October 11 1972.
Bosses on the Offensive and the response of the cordones:
The bosses in Chile had several strategies to counter the revolutionary process in Chile. What occurred on September 11 was the last brutal option. Before that, the ruling class relied on its economic position as owners of the means of productions and its role in the flow of capital to bring the country to its knees. The impact of the transportation bosses’ lockout was to be devastating. The absence of road transport, which Chile heavily relies on, would have stopped the transportation of spare parts, raw materials and most importantly the distribution of food for the working class. The strategy of the bosses was to use their economic leverage to bring the country to the brink of chaos and blame the policies of Allende. Their goal: was for Allende to resign or to win effective control of congress in the upcoming congressional elections of March 73 in order to impeach Allende. Once again, the Chilean working class rose to the occasion. All across Chile workers began to form comandos. These were community-based councils that sought to continue the distribution of food and to continue to run hospitals, which had been abandoned by doctors who supported the lockout. In factories across Chile where bosses tried to stop production in support of the lockout, workers took over the factory in order to keep supplies moving and industries running. New cordones sprang up in every major industrial town of Santiago with the simple task of seizing control of the factories; protect truck drivers who were still working from fascist violence, and to maintain production. The class character of the October Bosses’ strike made it possible for the Chilean working class to organize itself in opposition.
Allende’s response to the lockout was to immediately please the bourgeoisie. After failed negotiations with the transportation bosses Allende reshuffled his cabinet, adding three heads of the armed forces and declared a “State of Emergency” using the army to “restore order” and to return factories taken over by workers to the bosses, for workers this was not a moment for negotiations. These are the words from a young woman worker in Fabrilana after hearing Allende’s response:
I think comrade Allende has been very soft; he says it’s because he wants to avoid violence, but I think we should respond with more force, scare them to death. They’re trying to take away what we’ve won. (Gonzalez 58)
Without a doubt if it were not for the heroic efforts of the workers, Chile would have collapsed. Not only did workers defeat the ruling class offensive but they did this in spite of the vacillations of the leadership in the left. In the process of taking over production, workers experienced a glimpse of what it means to run society. This was the time when Chilean-working class was at its most active and most militant and yet the UP and Allende acted as an obstacle to the political development of the working class movement. Yet no organization in the left argued for an independent break from the UP. Instead, the leftwing of the Socialist Party who were playing an important in the cordones, continued to provide Allende with a leftwing cover to his continuing rightward shift, by not breaking from him.
The congressional elections of March 1973 that the ruling class had prepared so much for had strengthen the UP who received 44% of the votes. The increase vote for the UP was clearly a demand of action by the masses. The goal of the ruling class of undermining UP’s electoral support with the bosses’ lockout failed miserably. Now, the ruling class realized that in order to do away with Allende it would have to be through forcible means. At the same time, the elections of March were made top priorities in all main leftist parties and Chile’s national trade union (CUT), which worked closely with the cordones. The channeling of working class militancy into and election campaign led to the cordones becoming demobilized and losing its momentum after the October bosses’ strike in where the immediate goal was to occupy factories and resist and it now became large demonstrations for Allende and the UP with banners declaring “Workers Firmly behind its Government”. Peter Winn rightly captures this shift at the worker run Yarur factory:
Ex-Yarur was no longer in the vanguard of the revolution from below, but rather a bastion of worker support for Allende's more cautious reform from above. It was a shift symbolized by Salvador Allende's decision to celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration at the Yarur mill, where he thanked the cheering workers for their support and appealed to them to channel "the commitment demonstrated during the October strike" into the election campaign. (241)
The second setback for the working class movement came with the El Teniente Copper Miner’s Strike that lasted from April 1973 until June, approximately two months before the coup. The workers went on strike here because Allende failed to deliver a promise to raise wages for them. This strike is important for several reasons. El Teniente at the time was the world’s largest copper mine, secondly miners in Chile have historically played a leading role in the labor movement, but as of yet had not been active in revolutionary process of Chile. Thirdly, the strike represented a direct challenge to Allende’s role as negotiator between the price of labor and capital. Nonetheless, the weakness of the left was the order of the day. The CP denounced the miners as a “labor aristocracy”, while the UP called the leader of the miners strike a “Nazi”. Other sections of the left were less harsh; the Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR) characterized the struggle of the miners as pure “economism”. The reality is that an increase in wages for the miners would have a come out of the pockets of the bourgeoisie, as the price of copper in the world market was declining. The miners strike also brought to light a key weakness of the cordones in Chile. The traditional best-organized sectors of the Chilean working class were absent from the cordones national network. Two months before the coup, the miners strike was defeated but there was still patches of resistance in the working class movement particularly in Entre Lagos where workers occupied a sawmill factory, and Constitucion a coastal town which was under direct control of the masses. However, by this time the working class movement had reached a point of no return.
On June 29, Colonel Robert Souper declared a coup and rolled his tanks into the streets of Santiago. The workers responded by taking over factories, reorganizing the distribution of goods and arming themselves against the threat of the bourgeoisie. Souper’s attempted coup was very similar to the bosses’ strike of October 1972. However, there were some distinct factors: by this time, the Chilean workers had experienced several months of self-organization and secondly, the military factor was now posed as the central question: in whose interest did the state and its armed forces with its guns, tanks and helicopters represent? The ingredients for a social revolution were here: the means of production and distribution and workers defense and social services were in the hands of the cordones and the comandos. At the same time the ruling class was deeply divided, some considered Souper’s attempted coup to be to premature. Chile’s economy was paralyzed with the ruling class ceasing to invest and with bosses’ threatening to strike again. After the failure of Souper’s coup, Allende declared his second “State of Emergency” and passed the Arms Control Law whose purpose were not to disrupt those preparing to overthrow him but as a way of attacking and disarming the cordones and the working class. It was his last way of showing sections of the ruling class that he was determined to control and restrain working class militancy. The army was sent into various comandos and to major cordones like Cordon Cerrillo to occupy the factories. At the same time, Allende promoted General Augusto Pinochet to Commander in Chief, exactly 19 days before the coup. To Unidad Popular the self-activity of the working class was the main enemy.
The role of the Revolutionary Party and the State:
Clearly, workers in Chile were ready to struggle against the bourgeoisies order. The cordones and comandos in Chile legitimately represented the embryo of a socialist society. Yet to the very end, every organization in the Chilean left directed its forces, energy and political outlook towards the Popular Unity. What was missing was a national political leadership of revolutionary workers, independent of Allende, whose vision was the arm conquest of power by the cordones, comandos and workers. Organized into a truly revolutionary party could have provided clear leadership and an alternative strategy from the debates in the UP and could have called out Allende for what he really was. Without this the working class became demoralized and it was in this moment that with the sense of “we struggled but got nothing” that the ruling class decided to launch its decisive blow.
The need for the organization of a party that is rooted in the working class and which can struggle hand in hand with workers cannot be overstated. Workers are not blank slates. If they are not won to the need for a fundamental transformation of society, they will continue to accept the old ideas that justify the existing society. It is also true that there is unevenness in class-consciousness in the working class, some being more conservative than others are. However, the role of a party would be to organize the most militant sections of the working class into a single organization that could then strategize on the next steps and assess political developments. In Chile, this was sorely missing. So instead of a clear left-wing case for the need of the cordones to defend the cause of the striking miners, you had the left turn their backs on them. And instead of a concise left wing case for why the workers should not use their energies for the reelection of the UP and instead focus on retaining the power on the shop floor, workers began to demobilize for UP’s congressional campaign. The various leftist parties did not provide the working class to learn and generalize from there struggles but this does not arise out of nowhere, it requires the conscious intervention of those truly seeking to build a new society.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution wrote in State and Revolution:
Every great revolution raises practically, palpably, and on a mass scale of action, namely, the question of the relation between special bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population”. (State-Rev- 11)
This was true in 1973 where you had dual power between the cordones and the military. What was also true is that the nature of the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the working class was not taken up by anybody. The State apparatus with all its courts, armed forces, and police exist to hold the current system together, as Chilean workers realized the hard way. The state cannot be replaced by socialist politicians but needs to be smashed and in its place has to be workers councils.
Reform or Revolution?
The ultimate lesson to draw from the rich history of Chile’s revolutionary process is that during revolutionary situations reformism can prove deadly. It is not that Salvador Allende envisioned a great “Chilean Road to Socialism” or had more pragmatic goal of workers emancipation but he had a different agenda and a fundamentally different understanding of how to build a socialist society. What Allende tried to do is impossible: a strategy of cross class alliance and socialism through legal reforms. Rosa Luxemburg the German socialist, argued over a century ago against this in her pamphlet: Reform or Revolution:
He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same game goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for the surface modifications of the old order... not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism, not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself... (157, original emphasis)
What is required is the organization of the working class from below and a revolutionary workers party to overthrow capitalism, and in its place a truly democratic society where workers control and human need is the order of the day. This I believe was possible in Chile, and it would be a tragedy if we did not learn from it.
On September 11 of 1973, a dramatic revolutionary situation was destroyed and crushed. As tanks roared passed the city streets of Santiago bombs rained down on the presidential palace La Moneda, where the president Salvador Allende now lay dead. This was the tragic scene of a coup conducted by General Agustin Pinochet and the Chilean ruling class with assistance by the C.I.A. In the aftermath of the coup, 3.000 leftists, Allende supports, trade unionists and revolutionary workers were killed. Not only were they killed some were tortured and made examples of for future generations. Victor Jara the famous folk musician--The Bob Dylan of Chile--was beaten, burned in the hands and then forced to play his guitar before being gun down in the Chilean National Stadium where thousands of others were brutally murdered. It has become a ritual on every September 11 for Chileans to protest the Pinochet dictatorship and to fight for the state to recognize the real numbers of those killed by it. What is important for us is not to mourn those killed, but to learn. The best tribute we can pay to thousands of radicals who lost their lives is to draw the lessons from the mistakes they paid for with their lives. It is for this reason why I will not focus on the role of the C.I.A. and U.S. imperialism but instead on the mistakes made by the Chilean left in order to learn from it.
Today I believe that the lessons of the Chilean Road to Socialism have never been more relevant for us to come to terms with. There has been a reawakening of the Latin American working class, from the factory takeovers of Argentinean workers in 2001, the heroic Venezuelan workers defense of Chavez during the attempted coup in 2002, to the uprising in Oaxaca Mexico, there has been a sharpening in class struggle. If we look closer at these struggles against the ruthless free market, we find the movement dealing with key questions: Is there a need for the explicit building of a revolutionary organization? Can the existing state be used for the purpose of the movement? Is the working class capable of leading a revolution? Can we reform capitalism? The Chilean revolutionary process and its rich history I believe gives us answers to those questions and teaches us important lessons that are indispensable in struggles that lay ahead. Primarily lessons for the potential of working class struggle from below.
Promises of the Unidad Popular and the dominance of the Right:
Salvador Allende’s rise to presidency took place at a time when the Chilean working class began to grow much more confident and class-consciousness was rising. Allende assumed the presidency in November of 1970 through the coalition of leftist parties called Popular Unity. The UP was composed of six parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party. Both parties had a mass base in the industrial working class of Chile that had been forged in the early parts of the century with the upheaval of the Nitrate workers. Both political parties had highly become focused on popular front strategies since the 1930’s, even electing as president in 1938 member of the Radical Party, Aguirre Cerda, effectively putting the Popular Front in power for the first time. The popular front strategy was nothing new. This tactic of class collaboration was born out of the necessity for Stalin in the 1930’s to seek allies against a war with Hitler. In practice, this meant that socialists were to be uncritical of reformists, the middle class and bourgeois parties and seek to work together. So by the time Allende was elected president in 1970 it was his sixth appearance as a candidate for a broad coalition like the UP and his third time as president.
It is important to understand the period before Allende’s presidency because it helps explain what were the expectations and visions of the organized left that became his supporter. Popular Unity was different from other Popular Fronts strategy due to three key elements, the failure of the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei, to live up to its promises of reform and the crises of his government, which set in motion the second element: an increasingly combative working class movement. The Frei government had promised agrarian reform in the countryside to ease rural tensions. However, the land owning oligarchy was not going to hear it, a class that Frei’s government did not dare confront. This caused many peasants who had voted for Frei into open revolt. Frei’s government also promised industrial growth in the cities that attracted thousands of unemployed rural workers into working class areas and cities, who at once in the city began to demand free housing and basic services like clean water and food. What did all this mean concretely?: for one the strikes in this period increased and so did the workers involved: from 230.725 in 1969 to 316.280 a year later. Factory occupations also rose from five in 1968 to 24 in 1969; they then jumped to 339 occupations in 1971. It also led to the third central element that led to the rise of Allende, which was the reorganization of the left during the crises of Frei’s government. The Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR), which was a group who formed in 1965 and with a deep admiration towards Che Guevara, began to play a key role in the student movement for educational reform. In addition, sections of Frei’s party began to split forming the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, all of whom joined UP, with a vision that Allende will conduct the agrarian reform that Frei did not pass. Allende rise to presidency rode the waves of working class and peasant struggles, which will be reflected in its program.
The program of the UP tried to unite conflicting class interests, for which its survival in the electoral arena depended on. If you take a look at UP’s platform and their “Forty Measures” they promised honest government or “Popular Government”, an end to corruption and the abuse of power, more extensive and cheaper social benefits. The UP’s electoral program promised a number of strategic economic measures, including the nationalization of Chile’s U.S. owned copper mines, private banks and insurance companies. Allende proposed to establish a “social property sector” whose goal was to protect important industrial monopolies and certain parts of the service sector, which were important for social and economic development. Allende’s economic policy, according to socialist Mike Gonzalez in his article Chile: the Workers United: “was an orthodox Keynesian plan for reactivating the economy. It contained no challenge to the dominance of private capital; on the contrary, it gave the industrial bourgeoisie a range of guarantees and provided land- owners with generous compensation”. An example of this was the Agrarian Reform Act that Frei did not dare pass; unlike Frei, however, Allende promised landowners possession of the most productive acres and the best farm machinery, thus preventing a confrontation with the landowning class.
This is what Peter Winn author of Weavers of Revolution has to say about UP’s electoral program:
The UP’s program reflected its political strategy an alliance of the middle and lower classes, blue and white-collar workers, intellectuals and peasants. It contained something for almost everybody and particular assurances to the non-Marxist middle class that a Popular Unity victory would benefit them and hurt only "monopolists" and "imperialists". (Winn 65).
Further on, I will argue that this strategy was untenable and consequently led Allende to be more alienated to the interests of the working class.
Within Allende’s Socialist Party there existed a strong current that believed socialism had to be achieved through a revolution and if you read the party’s literature and paper Chile Hoy, that was put forward. However, Salvador Allende, who I believe represented the conservative wing of the Socialist Party, had a fundamentally different understanding of Chile’s road towards socialism:
In the transition to socialism, the legal norms will respond to the necessity of the peoples will to build a new society...On the realism of the Congress, it depends, to a great extent that the capitalist legality transitions to the socialist legality, according to the socio-economic transformations that we are implanting, without a violent fracture, which we responsibly want to avoid. (Textos Escogidos 119, emphasis added.)
This was Salvador Allende’s May 22 1971 message to a congress made up of the Chilean right wing and parties of the ruling class, titled The Road to Socialism. Allende’s strategy was to enact reforms that was possible to carry out under existing legislation and could win approval of the congress. Consequently, allowing the right to determine the pace of change. In fact, the congress believed having him in power would actually help restrain and control working class self-activity, which was growing.
On the contrary to some bosses’ fears, we see that Allende does not want to confront the Chilean bourgeoisie. Even before he was able to assume the presidency as the worlds first ever “Marxist elected president” Allende had to agree to terms that would keep the existing political establishment together, make sure that the legal system would not be touched, and most importantly that the armed forces would remain free to “guarantee democracy”. This behind the scenes agreement with the ruling class i.e. bosses, bankers, owners of the press etc, is known as the “Statute of Guarantees”. What is interesting about the passing of this agreement is that it was never discussed and voted on with rank-file members of the UP. On another level, this agreement proved that Allende had a fundamentally different vision of socialism. For Allende socialism meant turning the existing state apparatus with its laws, courts and armed forces into a pro-worker state. However, what Allende failed to understand is that the ruling class does not take this lying down. I will try to demonstrate in later events that developed in Chile that proved this reformist view wrong.
Cracks in the Coalition – Advanzar o Consolidar:
The first year of Allende’s presidency was relatively peaceful. Nonetheless, there were some stirrings in the countryside in where land seizures began to rise; partially due to UP’s commitment to agrarian reform and the rise of confidence in peasants. Overall, in 1970 the Chilean working class experienced a rise in wages, which was soon to be cut short. We can say that this was the calm before the storm. The ruling class at this moment was looking for the correct moment to launch its first challenge, and the moment was November 1971 with leader of the Cuban Revolution--Fidel Castro visiting Chile. The march, which is known as the “March of the Empty Pots”, was organized by the right wing parties, in which hundreds of middle class women came out with their saucepans (and house cleaners) in a symbol of the shortages (and class status). Although this might seem like a joke, it was actually a warning sign by the Chilean ruling class of battles to come and a concrete effort to begin mobilizing the middle class. So in this light Allende began his second year in office, and it was here where a debate within the UP began to form.
The debate in the UP and its conclusion further highlight its political character. The dispute focused around the questions: should the UP support the workers in their struggle to defend their living standards? Moreover, if the workers decided to fight back what political strategy should it be carried out with? These debates, took place in two UP conferences at La Arrayan and Lo Curro in February and June 1972, and were centered on the label advance or consolidate. The right wing of the Popular Unity argued to stop the process of reforms and to seek wider electoral support before advancing, while the left wing argued for the quickening pace of the reforms and the continuing enforcement of the working class, which had begun to prove it can struggle forward. However, the left wing’s arguments were not substantial enough to lead to a decisive break with the Popular Unity’s framework. Nor did it lead to question the relationship between the state and the ruling class, nor the control and direction of the economy and the role of the working class in that process. In the end, the left of the UP, which consisted of elements of the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU), the leftwing of the Socialist Party, and the Christian Left were poorly organized to amount a serious challenge in the political direction of the UP. So it was at the Lo Curro conference where the rightwing secured a majority. In this context, the boom of 1971 had receded and the Chilean ruling class was reassured that Allende and Popular Unity were more interested in compromise. Chile under Allende was about to experience some of the harshest class battles the world has seen, but yet the organized left and more importantly the mass socialist and communist parties in the UP were only to be witnesses at the brave creativity of the Chilean working class to confront the bourgeoisie’s offensive.
The Rise of Los Cordones and the betrayal of the UP:
The independent organization of the Chilean working class and poor peasants was a process in which peoples expectations were raised and their living standards attacked while the right wing of the UP sat back and watched and even at times attacked them. It was also a process of confusion. One of the UP’s famous slogans was “popular power”. For UP officials this meant unconditional support for their government, while for workers this actually meant create socialism right here right now. The first of these and one of the most important organizations to appear in the political scene in Chile was the Cordon Cerrillos-Maipu, a cordon meaning industrial belts, which were workers councils setup across Chile in response to the attacks on the working class. The town Cerrillos is an industrial suburb of Chile’s capital and had the largest concentration of industries in Chile with over 45.000 workers and 250 factories. Maipu is a farming area that borders Cerrillos. The forming of this cordon like others arose due to concrete problems. In Maipu 44 peasant leaders were arrested for taking over a farm that was soon to be expropriated. The Judge in this case ruled against the peasants and used government policy to back himself. This led to large demonstrations against the judge and an increase in land seizures as well. Meanwhile, Cerrillos was going through several waves of strikes and factory occupations, in particular in a factory owned by textile monopolists Yarur Inc. This factory, which was not due to be expropriated under the governments list, was taken over by the workers in an attempt to push the government’s policy further to the left and in a concrete effort to raise their living standards. In an inspiring meeting with the Yarur workers and union officials, the workers decided to “socialize” the textile plant. This is an account of one of Allende’s representatives Jorge Varas who was present at the meeting:
I have never in my life seen anything like this... When the union officerd told them that the company didn't want to receive them and had denied all their petitions, the people stopped them and began to cry 'Socialization! Socialization!' It was incredible. It was revolution! Two-thousand workers standing and shouting: 'We want Socialization' And the women calling out: 'No more exploitation!' They were in a state of euphoria. (Winn 174, original emphasis)
What is interesting about what occurred afterwards was that the Yarur workers demanded that Jorge Varas speak in behalf of Allende, this is what he had to say (note on his language):
"Comrades! You have decided that this enterprise should pass to the social property area. My duty is to demand this of the government." There was a round of applause; then an old-timer banged his fist on the table and cried: 'And right now, comrades! We are going on strike and we won't go back with those octopuses inside!' Jorge Varas decided that he had no choice except to follow their lead. "Well, comrades if you resolve to go on strike immediately, we have to see what is the best way to do it..." 'By seizing the industry!" one old-timer shouted out from below. "No comrade! We are not discussing a factory seizure. Yes, we will take the industry, but from outside. You have to guard the strategic spots of the enterprise...while we propose this to the president of the Republic. And I know that he will have to accept your position." (Winn 175, original emphasis).
This was a primary example of how workers were ready to go on the offensive against an increasingly paranoid ruling class, however, Allende and the UP and their revolution from above, acted as a brake in this process because they sought to work jointly with the legal system.
Because of these joint struggles, Cerrillos and Maipu both joined forces with an aim of denouncing the vacillations of the so-called “Peoples Government” and demanding it take action in behalf of the workers. The Cordon Cerrillos put forward a political program, which was far in advance than anything the organized left was arguing for:
1. Support President Allende’s government in so far as it interprets the struggles and mobilizations of the workers.
2. Expropriate all monopoly firms and those with more than 14 million escudos capital, as well as all industries which are in any way strategic, all those which belong to foreign capital, and all those which boycott production or do not fulfill their commitments to their workers.
3. Workers’ control over production in all industries, farms, mines and so on, through delegates’ councils, delegates being recallable by the base...
4. Set up the Popular Assembly to replace the bourgeois parliament. (Roxbourough 170).Clearly, this strategy was fundamentally different from the UP’s: a revolutionary alliance between the working class and other oppressed groups, and not with the middle class, under the program of: workers’ control. It was also a testament to the revolutionary consciousness of the Chilean working class. Despite this, the program of the cordon contained two key weaknesses, one was president Allende and the second was the problem of what to do with the bourgeois state. The problem with supporting Allende is that it hid the real political situation, which the working class found themselves in. The working class was directly challenging the control of the ruling class on the shop floor, this in turn was setting the stage for the bourgeoisie to strike back. Allende was not interested in protecting the concrete gains the working class militants had achieved. While the workers were struggling with how to go forward, Allende called their acts “crass irresponsibility”. This was so because “the government already represented the interests of the working class”, so they had no reason to struggle. Instead, during this time the UP was trying to convince workers of the participatory role of the armed forces in Chile’s Road to Socialism. Once again, the temperature of the class struggle was about to rise, and so was the power of the cordones with the Transportation Bosses’ lockout that began on October 11 1972.
Bosses on the Offensive and the response of the cordones:
The bosses in Chile had several strategies to counter the revolutionary process in Chile. What occurred on September 11 was the last brutal option. Before that, the ruling class relied on its economic position as owners of the means of productions and its role in the flow of capital to bring the country to its knees. The impact of the transportation bosses’ lockout was to be devastating. The absence of road transport, which Chile heavily relies on, would have stopped the transportation of spare parts, raw materials and most importantly the distribution of food for the working class. The strategy of the bosses was to use their economic leverage to bring the country to the brink of chaos and blame the policies of Allende. Their goal: was for Allende to resign or to win effective control of congress in the upcoming congressional elections of March 73 in order to impeach Allende. Once again, the Chilean working class rose to the occasion. All across Chile workers began to form comandos. These were community-based councils that sought to continue the distribution of food and to continue to run hospitals, which had been abandoned by doctors who supported the lockout. In factories across Chile where bosses tried to stop production in support of the lockout, workers took over the factory in order to keep supplies moving and industries running. New cordones sprang up in every major industrial town of Santiago with the simple task of seizing control of the factories; protect truck drivers who were still working from fascist violence, and to maintain production. The class character of the October Bosses’ strike made it possible for the Chilean working class to organize itself in opposition.
Allende’s response to the lockout was to immediately please the bourgeoisie. After failed negotiations with the transportation bosses Allende reshuffled his cabinet, adding three heads of the armed forces and declared a “State of Emergency” using the army to “restore order” and to return factories taken over by workers to the bosses, for workers this was not a moment for negotiations. These are the words from a young woman worker in Fabrilana after hearing Allende’s response:
I think comrade Allende has been very soft; he says it’s because he wants to avoid violence, but I think we should respond with more force, scare them to death. They’re trying to take away what we’ve won. (Gonzalez 58)
Without a doubt if it were not for the heroic efforts of the workers, Chile would have collapsed. Not only did workers defeat the ruling class offensive but they did this in spite of the vacillations of the leadership in the left. In the process of taking over production, workers experienced a glimpse of what it means to run society. This was the time when Chilean-working class was at its most active and most militant and yet the UP and Allende acted as an obstacle to the political development of the working class movement. Yet no organization in the left argued for an independent break from the UP. Instead, the leftwing of the Socialist Party who were playing an important in the cordones, continued to provide Allende with a leftwing cover to his continuing rightward shift, by not breaking from him.
The congressional elections of March 1973 that the ruling class had prepared so much for had strengthen the UP who received 44% of the votes. The increase vote for the UP was clearly a demand of action by the masses. The goal of the ruling class of undermining UP’s electoral support with the bosses’ lockout failed miserably. Now, the ruling class realized that in order to do away with Allende it would have to be through forcible means. At the same time, the elections of March were made top priorities in all main leftist parties and Chile’s national trade union (CUT), which worked closely with the cordones. The channeling of working class militancy into and election campaign led to the cordones becoming demobilized and losing its momentum after the October bosses’ strike in where the immediate goal was to occupy factories and resist and it now became large demonstrations for Allende and the UP with banners declaring “Workers Firmly behind its Government”. Peter Winn rightly captures this shift at the worker run Yarur factory:
Ex-Yarur was no longer in the vanguard of the revolution from below, but rather a bastion of worker support for Allende's more cautious reform from above. It was a shift symbolized by Salvador Allende's decision to celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration at the Yarur mill, where he thanked the cheering workers for their support and appealed to them to channel "the commitment demonstrated during the October strike" into the election campaign. (241)
The second setback for the working class movement came with the El Teniente Copper Miner’s Strike that lasted from April 1973 until June, approximately two months before the coup. The workers went on strike here because Allende failed to deliver a promise to raise wages for them. This strike is important for several reasons. El Teniente at the time was the world’s largest copper mine, secondly miners in Chile have historically played a leading role in the labor movement, but as of yet had not been active in revolutionary process of Chile. Thirdly, the strike represented a direct challenge to Allende’s role as negotiator between the price of labor and capital. Nonetheless, the weakness of the left was the order of the day. The CP denounced the miners as a “labor aristocracy”, while the UP called the leader of the miners strike a “Nazi”. Other sections of the left were less harsh; the Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR) characterized the struggle of the miners as pure “economism”. The reality is that an increase in wages for the miners would have a come out of the pockets of the bourgeoisie, as the price of copper in the world market was declining. The miners strike also brought to light a key weakness of the cordones in Chile. The traditional best-organized sectors of the Chilean working class were absent from the cordones national network. Two months before the coup, the miners strike was defeated but there was still patches of resistance in the working class movement particularly in Entre Lagos where workers occupied a sawmill factory, and Constitucion a coastal town which was under direct control of the masses. However, by this time the working class movement had reached a point of no return.
On June 29, Colonel Robert Souper declared a coup and rolled his tanks into the streets of Santiago. The workers responded by taking over factories, reorganizing the distribution of goods and arming themselves against the threat of the bourgeoisie. Souper’s attempted coup was very similar to the bosses’ strike of October 1972. However, there were some distinct factors: by this time, the Chilean workers had experienced several months of self-organization and secondly, the military factor was now posed as the central question: in whose interest did the state and its armed forces with its guns, tanks and helicopters represent? The ingredients for a social revolution were here: the means of production and distribution and workers defense and social services were in the hands of the cordones and the comandos. At the same time the ruling class was deeply divided, some considered Souper’s attempted coup to be to premature. Chile’s economy was paralyzed with the ruling class ceasing to invest and with bosses’ threatening to strike again. After the failure of Souper’s coup, Allende declared his second “State of Emergency” and passed the Arms Control Law whose purpose were not to disrupt those preparing to overthrow him but as a way of attacking and disarming the cordones and the working class. It was his last way of showing sections of the ruling class that he was determined to control and restrain working class militancy. The army was sent into various comandos and to major cordones like Cordon Cerrillo to occupy the factories. At the same time, Allende promoted General Augusto Pinochet to Commander in Chief, exactly 19 days before the coup. To Unidad Popular the self-activity of the working class was the main enemy.
The role of the Revolutionary Party and the State:
Clearly, workers in Chile were ready to struggle against the bourgeoisies order. The cordones and comandos in Chile legitimately represented the embryo of a socialist society. Yet to the very end, every organization in the Chilean left directed its forces, energy and political outlook towards the Popular Unity. What was missing was a national political leadership of revolutionary workers, independent of Allende, whose vision was the arm conquest of power by the cordones, comandos and workers. Organized into a truly revolutionary party could have provided clear leadership and an alternative strategy from the debates in the UP and could have called out Allende for what he really was. Without this the working class became demoralized and it was in this moment that with the sense of “we struggled but got nothing” that the ruling class decided to launch its decisive blow.
The need for the organization of a party that is rooted in the working class and which can struggle hand in hand with workers cannot be overstated. Workers are not blank slates. If they are not won to the need for a fundamental transformation of society, they will continue to accept the old ideas that justify the existing society. It is also true that there is unevenness in class-consciousness in the working class, some being more conservative than others are. However, the role of a party would be to organize the most militant sections of the working class into a single organization that could then strategize on the next steps and assess political developments. In Chile, this was sorely missing. So instead of a clear left-wing case for the need of the cordones to defend the cause of the striking miners, you had the left turn their backs on them. And instead of a concise left wing case for why the workers should not use their energies for the reelection of the UP and instead focus on retaining the power on the shop floor, workers began to demobilize for UP’s congressional campaign. The various leftist parties did not provide the working class to learn and generalize from there struggles but this does not arise out of nowhere, it requires the conscious intervention of those truly seeking to build a new society.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution wrote in State and Revolution:
Every great revolution raises practically, palpably, and on a mass scale of action, namely, the question of the relation between special bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population”. (State-Rev- 11)
This was true in 1973 where you had dual power between the cordones and the military. What was also true is that the nature of the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the working class was not taken up by anybody. The State apparatus with all its courts, armed forces, and police exist to hold the current system together, as Chilean workers realized the hard way. The state cannot be replaced by socialist politicians but needs to be smashed and in its place has to be workers councils.
Reform or Revolution?
The ultimate lesson to draw from the rich history of Chile’s revolutionary process is that during revolutionary situations reformism can prove deadly. It is not that Salvador Allende envisioned a great “Chilean Road to Socialism” or had more pragmatic goal of workers emancipation but he had a different agenda and a fundamentally different understanding of how to build a socialist society. What Allende tried to do is impossible: a strategy of cross class alliance and socialism through legal reforms. Rosa Luxemburg the German socialist, argued over a century ago against this in her pamphlet: Reform or Revolution:
He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same game goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for the surface modifications of the old order... not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism, not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself... (157, original emphasis)
What is required is the organization of the working class from below and a revolutionary workers party to overthrow capitalism, and in its place a truly democratic society where workers control and human need is the order of the day. This I believe was possible in Chile, and it would be a tragedy if we did not learn from it.
Monday, April 7, 2008
The Struggle at Smithfield and Beyond- An Essay on today's Labor Movement
In 1906, U.S. author Uptown Sinclair exposed to the world the horrors immigrant workers faced in the meatpacking plants of Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. The public outcry following Sinclair’s expose led to inspection of the industry and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was meant to protect the integrity of U.S. meatpacking in the eyes of millions. However, it was the 1930’s surge of industrial unionism and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the sharp class battles during that period that meatpacking workers actually experienced a significant rise in living standards and the right to join or form a union.
Today’s labor movement is a different story. The U.S. labor movement has been in a full-scale retreat since the late 1970’s. Union membership is at an all time low: just 12.5 percent of public wage and salary workers belong to one (Smith x). This has to do with several factors, the growing bureaucratization of U.S. unions, the unwillingness of labor leaders to adapt to the structural changes in the world economy, and the union leaders overall strategy of business partnership.
To argue what it will take to rebuild the labor movement in this country is a task well beyond the scope of this essay. However, by focusing on a struggle-taking place at the largest pork processing plant in the world, Smithfield Foods Tar Heel plant, I want to show what is at stake and what are the challenges facing the entire U.S. labor movement. The struggle for unionization and workers’ solidarity at the Tar Heel plant has been occurring for over a decade. It is important to understand what is taking place here because it highlights several important factors that the labor movement can learn from. First, Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is located in the south (North Carolina) where historically, the labor movement has failed to organize workers. Secondly, the racial composition of workers at the Tar Heel plant are white, Black and Latinos. This has historically made it harder for workers to organize since employers have used racism as a key way to pit workers against each other. Thirdly, many of the Latino workers are also undocumented, which makes the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights key to this struggle. Lastly, the meatpacking industry has never been more central to the U.S. economy, they are “responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains” all across the United States (Schlosser 149). The battle that is occurring in Smithfield, i.e. the struggle of white, Black and immigrant workers to form a union and, resist “no match” immigration firings will be crucial to rebuilding a strong labor movement.
Since the 1960’s the meatpacking industry has experienced a massive expansion and growth, while simultaneously there has been a decline of unions and workers wages, this is no coincidence. (Horowitz 245). Traditionally, being a meatpacker was considered a well paying blue-collar job, which provided a stable income and a union. In fact, meatpackers after World War II exceeded the national average for workers in manufacturing (Schlosser 153). However, the meatpacking industry was about to experience a massive structural adjustment starting from the shop floor. In 1961, Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) opened up its first slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, in what was to be known as the “IBP revolution.” This is important for several key reasons. First, the plant was situated in a location outside the traditional union bastions, like New York, Chicago or Minnesota. The bosses understood that in order to compete with other industry giants, their plant needed to remain union free. Secondly, IBP eliminated the need for “skilled” workers in the process of meat production. This is how Eric Schlosser, in his muckraking work Fast Food Nation, describes the plant:
The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again…The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. (156)
Using cheap labor on an assembly line to turn sides of beef into ready-to-sell cuts, the company simultaneously de-skilled meatpacking, ran the unions out, and made skilled union butchers who worked in grocery stores obsolete. The “IBP revolution” was going to have a huge impact to the rest of the industry. In fact, it set the standards for the next decades. An example of the impact of the “IBP revolution” was the labor struggles in 1979 between Monfort executives and Greeley workers. Monfort wanted to follow the path of IBP by slashing wages and applying tougher policy on labor unions. Greeley workers who were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) understood what was underway, and decided to strike. Monfort began to hire scabs and hire thugs to beat up and intimidate striking workers, while president Ken Monfort decide to purchase a new slaughterhouse in Nebraska, from Swift & Company (Schlosser 157). The outcome of this struggle was disastrous for workers. After Greeley workers decided to work without a contract, Monfort closed the plant and fired all workers and in his new plant began to hire undocumented workers. This move allowed him to pay low wages, have access to large numbers of workers, and to prevent unions from organizing the workers. Today the basic pay is $9.25 an hour, if this adjusted by inflation, today’s wages is more than a third lower than when the plant opened forty years ago (Schlosser 160).
These attacks on unions however, did not go down without a fight. The Hormel meatpackers’ strike, which lasted for fourteen months, fought against bosses attempt to slash wages and to create the now fashionable two-tier wage system that offers new hires much lower wages than current workers. When the 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the UFCW voted to strike, the national union was not happy about it. In fact, the national leaders did all they could do to undermine the strike and workers’ solidarity by calling the P-9 strikes a “plague” and arguing that Local P-9 “sought a better deal for Austin alone” (Smith 250). So much for an injury to one being an injury to all. The conflict at Hormel revealed the rank-and-file anger among packinghouse workers at the assault on their living standards. It also revealed the catastrophic role that the national leadership of UFCW played. This was also true for the whole labor movement in the 1980’s and onward. Instead of union leaders representing the mass anger that existed below, they discouraged working class militancy and workers’ solidarity across industry lines. The question that was at stake then and desperately more so today, is how do we combat the employers’ offensive and the overall shift of power from labor to capital. In the end, the national union took over Local P-9 and negotiated a new contract with the scabs that stole the jobs of the strikers, ending the strike in a blistering defeat.
The decline of unions and assault on workers allowed for the meatpacking industry to expand in huge proportions. Therefore, it was by 1983, the number of workers under master agreements in the industry had fallen to thirty-thousand, effectively leaving each slaughterhouse to fight for themselves (Horowitz 275). The effects of the decline in unionism in meatpacking were the increase in the pace of work and consequently a higher rate of injury. This is how Roger Horowitz in his excellent work “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” details the decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking:
Towns that lured packinghouses in hope of prosperity have found that the low wage levels have failed to provide a spur to the local economy; instead the poorly paid workers bring crime and increased demands on local services…The decline of industrial unionism reflected incessant pressure by capital for lower labor costs and more control over the work process. Companies that emerged victorious from the competitive scramble were those that most successfully increased the rate of exploitation of today’s makers of meat (279).
The increase of the rate of exploitation, the creation of “middle America” ghettos, the decline of job safety, the increasing number of debt in working class families, and decline of wages: all form part of the employer’s offensive and shift of class forces in the U.S. The quarter-century old retreat has left a trail of declining living and working standards for union and non-union workers alike. Unions as institutions, with some exceptions, have failed their members and proved unable to recruit new ones in sufficient numbers to slow down a deteriorating balance of class forces in American society that has created a capitalist class of super rich individuals whose wealth has never been greater in history (Moody 2). The result is a generation of workers that only know defeats. However, the systematic attack on workers living standards provides the recipe for acts of rebellions and resistance, which the labor movement sorely needs to organize.
The struggle at Smithfield is part of the acts of rebellion from below that will be crucial to increasing the confidence of other meatpacking workers and rebuilding the labor movement through clashes with bosses. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize Smithfield workers since 1994. The battle has featured two attempts, in 1994 and 1997, for workers to vote for whether or not they want to be represented by a union. However, workers have often testified that the company continually harasses and interrogates workers who show signs of being pro-union (Colson 8). In the 1997 campaign, management beat up, maced, handcuffed and arrested union activist and supporters in an effort to send a message to all of Smithfield workers. (Human Rights Watch 85). Smithfield executives fear the organization of their workers into a union, after all Smithfield generated over $172 million in profits in 2006 alone (Colson 8). These profits are coming straight from the backs of workers, who work for low wages in horrible conditions, brutal long hours, few benefits, and face anti-union harassment. The Tar Heel plant primarily runs off the labor of immigrant workers and African Americans, and small number of whites. New York Times Reporter Charlie LeDuff writes in his article: “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race” how bosses use racism as a way to divide workers:
Whites, Black, American Indians and Mexicans they all have their separate stations…the few whites on the pay role tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors, others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, it leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs in the factory.
This is one of the challenges workers face—how to build a multi-racial struggle that’s build on a class basis. In order to win in Smithfield, workers will need to organize across racial barriers and understand that what they all have in common are the horrible working conditions that benefit the bosses.
Another challenge facing Tar Heel workers has been the assault on undocumented workers. In November 2006, 1,000 workers walked out of the Tar Heel plant in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of 75 workers whose social security number did not match the federal government’s data. The strike settlement was able to rehire the 75 workers and secure no penalties for striking. A 2003 study by the Center for Economic Development explains the role that these “no-match” letters have been having, “many workers identified in the letters have quit their jobs out of concern the immigration authorities might raid their workplace…evidence indicates that many employers have used the letters to undermine workers’ right to organize” (Harkin 10). The Smithfield wildcat strike is a model for how workers can respond to “no-match” letters. The aim of the ruling class in this country is to create a guest-worker program that will create a two-tier system of workers in this country that directly undermines worker’s solidarity. As a result, it will be easier to squeeze workers wages and it would effectively prevent immigrant workers from seeking roots into this country. This is why it is important for the labor movement and union leaders to fight against politicians so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Historically, workers of different races or nationalities have advanced together, or they have sunk together. That is why all workers and their unions should not only welcome immigrants into the labor movement, but they should support a real reform that legalizes millions of undocumented workers, without forcing them to accept the second-class category of “guest worker.”
The battle at the Tar Heel plant will prove to be challenging for workers. However, its success depends on the ability of the UFCW and Smithfield workers to take up the issues that are at the heart of this struggle, i.e. racism on the shop floor, immigrant’s rights and the ruthlessness of the meatpacking industries drive for profit. All of these issues need to be confronted on an industrial wide basis, workers at Tyson, which is the world’s largest meat producer, should know what their brothers and sisters are facing in North Carolina. The 1,100 workers at the six Swift and Co. meatpacking plants that were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year should not be left to fight their struggles alone. Workers’ solidarity across the meatpacking industry will be key to fighting their greedy bosses and Smithfield is just one piece of that struggle.
Works Cited
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Human Rights Watch. New York City: Human Rights Report, 2005.
Colson, Nicole. "Smithfield Food's Rotten Record." Socialist Worker 16 Dec. 2006, 613 ed.: 8-9.
Harkin, Shaun, and Nicole Colson. "Walkout At Tar Heel." International Socialist Review 1 (January-February 2007): 9-11.
Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and Whote, Unite and Fight!" a Social Histroy of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 1997.
Leduff, Charlie. "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race." New York Times 16 June 2000. < res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63" res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63">.
Moody, Kim. U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: the Failure of Reform From Below and the Promise of Revival From Below. New York City: Verso, 2007.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark side of the All-American Meal. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: History of Working Class Radicalism in the U.S. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Today’s labor movement is a different story. The U.S. labor movement has been in a full-scale retreat since the late 1970’s. Union membership is at an all time low: just 12.5 percent of public wage and salary workers belong to one (Smith x). This has to do with several factors, the growing bureaucratization of U.S. unions, the unwillingness of labor leaders to adapt to the structural changes in the world economy, and the union leaders overall strategy of business partnership.
To argue what it will take to rebuild the labor movement in this country is a task well beyond the scope of this essay. However, by focusing on a struggle-taking place at the largest pork processing plant in the world, Smithfield Foods Tar Heel plant, I want to show what is at stake and what are the challenges facing the entire U.S. labor movement. The struggle for unionization and workers’ solidarity at the Tar Heel plant has been occurring for over a decade. It is important to understand what is taking place here because it highlights several important factors that the labor movement can learn from. First, Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is located in the south (North Carolina) where historically, the labor movement has failed to organize workers. Secondly, the racial composition of workers at the Tar Heel plant are white, Black and Latinos. This has historically made it harder for workers to organize since employers have used racism as a key way to pit workers against each other. Thirdly, many of the Latino workers are also undocumented, which makes the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights key to this struggle. Lastly, the meatpacking industry has never been more central to the U.S. economy, they are “responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains” all across the United States (Schlosser 149). The battle that is occurring in Smithfield, i.e. the struggle of white, Black and immigrant workers to form a union and, resist “no match” immigration firings will be crucial to rebuilding a strong labor movement.
Since the 1960’s the meatpacking industry has experienced a massive expansion and growth, while simultaneously there has been a decline of unions and workers wages, this is no coincidence. (Horowitz 245). Traditionally, being a meatpacker was considered a well paying blue-collar job, which provided a stable income and a union. In fact, meatpackers after World War II exceeded the national average for workers in manufacturing (Schlosser 153). However, the meatpacking industry was about to experience a massive structural adjustment starting from the shop floor. In 1961, Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) opened up its first slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, in what was to be known as the “IBP revolution.” This is important for several key reasons. First, the plant was situated in a location outside the traditional union bastions, like New York, Chicago or Minnesota. The bosses understood that in order to compete with other industry giants, their plant needed to remain union free. Secondly, IBP eliminated the need for “skilled” workers in the process of meat production. This is how Eric Schlosser, in his muckraking work Fast Food Nation, describes the plant:
The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again…The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. (156)
Using cheap labor on an assembly line to turn sides of beef into ready-to-sell cuts, the company simultaneously de-skilled meatpacking, ran the unions out, and made skilled union butchers who worked in grocery stores obsolete. The “IBP revolution” was going to have a huge impact to the rest of the industry. In fact, it set the standards for the next decades. An example of the impact of the “IBP revolution” was the labor struggles in 1979 between Monfort executives and Greeley workers. Monfort wanted to follow the path of IBP by slashing wages and applying tougher policy on labor unions. Greeley workers who were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) understood what was underway, and decided to strike. Monfort began to hire scabs and hire thugs to beat up and intimidate striking workers, while president Ken Monfort decide to purchase a new slaughterhouse in Nebraska, from Swift & Company (Schlosser 157). The outcome of this struggle was disastrous for workers. After Greeley workers decided to work without a contract, Monfort closed the plant and fired all workers and in his new plant began to hire undocumented workers. This move allowed him to pay low wages, have access to large numbers of workers, and to prevent unions from organizing the workers. Today the basic pay is $9.25 an hour, if this adjusted by inflation, today’s wages is more than a third lower than when the plant opened forty years ago (Schlosser 160).
These attacks on unions however, did not go down without a fight. The Hormel meatpackers’ strike, which lasted for fourteen months, fought against bosses attempt to slash wages and to create the now fashionable two-tier wage system that offers new hires much lower wages than current workers. When the 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the UFCW voted to strike, the national union was not happy about it. In fact, the national leaders did all they could do to undermine the strike and workers’ solidarity by calling the P-9 strikes a “plague” and arguing that Local P-9 “sought a better deal for Austin alone” (Smith 250). So much for an injury to one being an injury to all. The conflict at Hormel revealed the rank-and-file anger among packinghouse workers at the assault on their living standards. It also revealed the catastrophic role that the national leadership of UFCW played. This was also true for the whole labor movement in the 1980’s and onward. Instead of union leaders representing the mass anger that existed below, they discouraged working class militancy and workers’ solidarity across industry lines. The question that was at stake then and desperately more so today, is how do we combat the employers’ offensive and the overall shift of power from labor to capital. In the end, the national union took over Local P-9 and negotiated a new contract with the scabs that stole the jobs of the strikers, ending the strike in a blistering defeat.
The decline of unions and assault on workers allowed for the meatpacking industry to expand in huge proportions. Therefore, it was by 1983, the number of workers under master agreements in the industry had fallen to thirty-thousand, effectively leaving each slaughterhouse to fight for themselves (Horowitz 275). The effects of the decline in unionism in meatpacking were the increase in the pace of work and consequently a higher rate of injury. This is how Roger Horowitz in his excellent work “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” details the decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking:
Towns that lured packinghouses in hope of prosperity have found that the low wage levels have failed to provide a spur to the local economy; instead the poorly paid workers bring crime and increased demands on local services…The decline of industrial unionism reflected incessant pressure by capital for lower labor costs and more control over the work process. Companies that emerged victorious from the competitive scramble were those that most successfully increased the rate of exploitation of today’s makers of meat (279).
The increase of the rate of exploitation, the creation of “middle America” ghettos, the decline of job safety, the increasing number of debt in working class families, and decline of wages: all form part of the employer’s offensive and shift of class forces in the U.S. The quarter-century old retreat has left a trail of declining living and working standards for union and non-union workers alike. Unions as institutions, with some exceptions, have failed their members and proved unable to recruit new ones in sufficient numbers to slow down a deteriorating balance of class forces in American society that has created a capitalist class of super rich individuals whose wealth has never been greater in history (Moody 2). The result is a generation of workers that only know defeats. However, the systematic attack on workers living standards provides the recipe for acts of rebellions and resistance, which the labor movement sorely needs to organize.
The struggle at Smithfield is part of the acts of rebellion from below that will be crucial to increasing the confidence of other meatpacking workers and rebuilding the labor movement through clashes with bosses. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize Smithfield workers since 1994. The battle has featured two attempts, in 1994 and 1997, for workers to vote for whether or not they want to be represented by a union. However, workers have often testified that the company continually harasses and interrogates workers who show signs of being pro-union (Colson 8). In the 1997 campaign, management beat up, maced, handcuffed and arrested union activist and supporters in an effort to send a message to all of Smithfield workers. (Human Rights Watch 85). Smithfield executives fear the organization of their workers into a union, after all Smithfield generated over $172 million in profits in 2006 alone (Colson 8). These profits are coming straight from the backs of workers, who work for low wages in horrible conditions, brutal long hours, few benefits, and face anti-union harassment. The Tar Heel plant primarily runs off the labor of immigrant workers and African Americans, and small number of whites. New York Times Reporter Charlie LeDuff writes in his article: “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race” how bosses use racism as a way to divide workers:
Whites, Black, American Indians and Mexicans they all have their separate stations…the few whites on the pay role tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors, others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, it leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs in the factory.
This is one of the challenges workers face—how to build a multi-racial struggle that’s build on a class basis. In order to win in Smithfield, workers will need to organize across racial barriers and understand that what they all have in common are the horrible working conditions that benefit the bosses.
Another challenge facing Tar Heel workers has been the assault on undocumented workers. In November 2006, 1,000 workers walked out of the Tar Heel plant in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of 75 workers whose social security number did not match the federal government’s data. The strike settlement was able to rehire the 75 workers and secure no penalties for striking. A 2003 study by the Center for Economic Development explains the role that these “no-match” letters have been having, “many workers identified in the letters have quit their jobs out of concern the immigration authorities might raid their workplace…evidence indicates that many employers have used the letters to undermine workers’ right to organize” (Harkin 10). The Smithfield wildcat strike is a model for how workers can respond to “no-match” letters. The aim of the ruling class in this country is to create a guest-worker program that will create a two-tier system of workers in this country that directly undermines worker’s solidarity. As a result, it will be easier to squeeze workers wages and it would effectively prevent immigrant workers from seeking roots into this country. This is why it is important for the labor movement and union leaders to fight against politicians so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Historically, workers of different races or nationalities have advanced together, or they have sunk together. That is why all workers and their unions should not only welcome immigrants into the labor movement, but they should support a real reform that legalizes millions of undocumented workers, without forcing them to accept the second-class category of “guest worker.”
The battle at the Tar Heel plant will prove to be challenging for workers. However, its success depends on the ability of the UFCW and Smithfield workers to take up the issues that are at the heart of this struggle, i.e. racism on the shop floor, immigrant’s rights and the ruthlessness of the meatpacking industries drive for profit. All of these issues need to be confronted on an industrial wide basis, workers at Tyson, which is the world’s largest meat producer, should know what their brothers and sisters are facing in North Carolina. The 1,100 workers at the six Swift and Co. meatpacking plants that were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year should not be left to fight their struggles alone. Workers’ solidarity across the meatpacking industry will be key to fighting their greedy bosses and Smithfield is just one piece of that struggle.
Works Cited
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Human Rights Watch. New York City: Human Rights Report, 2005.
Colson, Nicole. "Smithfield Food's Rotten Record." Socialist Worker 16 Dec. 2006, 613 ed.: 8-9.
Harkin, Shaun, and Nicole Colson. "Walkout At Tar Heel." International Socialist Review 1 (January-February 2007): 9-11.
Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and Whote, Unite and Fight!" a Social Histroy of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 1997.
Leduff, Charlie. "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race." New York Times 16 June 2000. < res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63" res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63">.
Moody, Kim. U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: the Failure of Reform From Below and the Promise of Revival From Below. New York City: Verso, 2007.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark side of the All-American Meal. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: History of Working Class Radicalism in the U.S. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
On the Picket Line: Fresh Direct
The online grocery store Fresh Direct has joined countless other companies using the racist backlash against immigrants to thwart attempts of workers to organize.
Fresh Direct, a company that made $240 million in profits in 2006, has been battling both the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters Local 805 since 2006.
With a scheduled union ratification vote December 22-23, Fresh Direct told workers at their plant in Long Island City, Queens, that federal officials planned to check their immigration status and demanded that workers bring their documentation to work.
This led to undocumented workers walking off the job out of fear of being reported to immigration authorities. More than 250 workers didn't show up to work the next day, creating a state of fear and panic in a plant of 900 workers.
Javier Guzman, a former worker in the plant, who is now an organizer for UFCW Local 348-S, told me that “workers inside the plant are scared; management has told workers that it is the union's fault that the firings occurred.”
Some plant workers have drawn the conclusion that the union is to blame. This was evident during a community rally on December 20 in front of the plant. Dozens of workers watched the rally wearing “Vote No” pins, and jeered at the mention of the union.
Conditions inside the plant are staggeringly bad. Warehouse employees at the company often work 13-hour shifts in 30-degree temperatures for $7.50-9.75 per hour, while most unionized warehouse workers in New York City earn $10-20 an hour. Guzman also reported how management has been able to pit workers against each other by their race--putting Black supervisors to look after a section of the plant with Latino workers, while white supervisors oversee a section of the plant with Black workers.
In the end, with 500 plant workers participating in the election, 426 voted against unionization, with 73 in favor. The pro-union votes were split between Teamsters Local 805 and UFCW Local 348-S.
The UFCW has been trying to organize the plant since November 2006. José Merced, Local 348-S organizer, said that the struggle at Fresh Direct has just begun. “There can only be fair elections once Fresh Direct stops its anti-immigrant tactic of dividing workers and intimidating pro-union workers” he said.
Fresh Direct, a company that made $240 million in profits in 2006, has been battling both the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters Local 805 since 2006.
With a scheduled union ratification vote December 22-23, Fresh Direct told workers at their plant in Long Island City, Queens, that federal officials planned to check their immigration status and demanded that workers bring their documentation to work.
This led to undocumented workers walking off the job out of fear of being reported to immigration authorities. More than 250 workers didn't show up to work the next day, creating a state of fear and panic in a plant of 900 workers.
Javier Guzman, a former worker in the plant, who is now an organizer for UFCW Local 348-S, told me that “workers inside the plant are scared; management has told workers that it is the union's fault that the firings occurred.”
Some plant workers have drawn the conclusion that the union is to blame. This was evident during a community rally on December 20 in front of the plant. Dozens of workers watched the rally wearing “Vote No” pins, and jeered at the mention of the union.
Conditions inside the plant are staggeringly bad. Warehouse employees at the company often work 13-hour shifts in 30-degree temperatures for $7.50-9.75 per hour, while most unionized warehouse workers in New York City earn $10-20 an hour. Guzman also reported how management has been able to pit workers against each other by their race--putting Black supervisors to look after a section of the plant with Latino workers, while white supervisors oversee a section of the plant with Black workers.
In the end, with 500 plant workers participating in the election, 426 voted against unionization, with 73 in favor. The pro-union votes were split between Teamsters Local 805 and UFCW Local 348-S.
The UFCW has been trying to organize the plant since November 2006. José Merced, Local 348-S organizer, said that the struggle at Fresh Direct has just begun. “There can only be fair elections once Fresh Direct stops its anti-immigrant tactic of dividing workers and intimidating pro-union workers” he said.
Showing day laborers have the power to fight
An organizer on workers taking a stand for their rights
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to ALVARO LOPEZ about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.
CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to ALVARO LOPEZ about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.
CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.
ICE is “trying to scare the community"
June 8, 2007
THIRTEEN GUATEMALAN immigrants are the victims this time in yet another Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in New York City.
On May 20, about a dozen ICE agents rushed into a Brooklyn apartment, allegedly looking for an “Oscar.” Nobody with that name was found, but agents demanded that everyone in the apartment present valid identification. Of the 15 people in the apartment, all but Obispo Lopez and his 16-year-old son Nehemias were detained.
As Lopez told the El Diario newspaper, “They asked us for our papers, and I showed them my identification from the Guatemalan consulate, and the others did as well, but they took them anyway. They didn’t even let them take anything or get dressed.”
Lopez, a construction worker, says the agents took away two of his sons, Evijoel and Avimail, and his son-in law, Alvaro Juarez. As of now, there is no word where the men are being held, but the family has received a phone call saying that they are in good condition.
The day after the raid in the largely immigrant neighborhood of Bensonhurst, people were concerned for the fate of the detainees, and for their own safety. ICE officials say the raids are designed to detain “criminals,” or those who have ignored final deportation notices. But the May 20 raid isn’t an isolated one.
“This is the third time there’s been a raid in this neighborhood,” Benny Hernandez, who owns a small deli across the street from the apartment where the Guatemalan immigrants were detained, said in an interview. “The raid before this, they left children behind and deported one of the parents.
“They’re attempting to scare the community...People who just want to work will be terrified to do that.”
Others in the community know firsthand what it is like to have their lives disrupted. A mother of two said she remembered vividly a raid four months ago, in which the husband of a close friend was detained. Once again, ICE agents were looking for someone who either didn’t exist or no longer lived in the apartment. But five people in total were detained and deported back to Ecuador.
“Her husband is in Ecuador now, and they don’t know what to do,” the woman said. “I’m undocumented too, and I think it’s unjust to separate families. I live very close by, and I’m worried about my children. I don’t have any family here, so what happens if they take me? Who will take care of my children?”
Stories like these will only multiply as federal immigration authorities attempt to reach their goal of deporting 75,000 immigrants by the end of this year.
“The government has to be responsible for its actions,” says Maribel Lopez, an immigrant mother of two who also lives near the site of the Brooklyn raid. “I’ve seen people die of hunger in my native country. People come here to seek a better life and to see their children succeed, but this [proposed immigration legislation under consideration in the Senate] is unjust and doesn’t allow for us to settle.”
Currently, Obispo Lopez and Brooklyn Pastor Erick Salgado are working with the ACLU in New York to get legal services for the workers detained in Brooklyn and their families back in Guatemala. We need to continue building a grassroots response to the ICE raids, and demand an end to the deportations and a just immigration policy.
Luisa Gallego contributed to this report
THIRTEEN GUATEMALAN immigrants are the victims this time in yet another Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in New York City.
On May 20, about a dozen ICE agents rushed into a Brooklyn apartment, allegedly looking for an “Oscar.” Nobody with that name was found, but agents demanded that everyone in the apartment present valid identification. Of the 15 people in the apartment, all but Obispo Lopez and his 16-year-old son Nehemias were detained.
As Lopez told the El Diario newspaper, “They asked us for our papers, and I showed them my identification from the Guatemalan consulate, and the others did as well, but they took them anyway. They didn’t even let them take anything or get dressed.”
Lopez, a construction worker, says the agents took away two of his sons, Evijoel and Avimail, and his son-in law, Alvaro Juarez. As of now, there is no word where the men are being held, but the family has received a phone call saying that they are in good condition.
The day after the raid in the largely immigrant neighborhood of Bensonhurst, people were concerned for the fate of the detainees, and for their own safety. ICE officials say the raids are designed to detain “criminals,” or those who have ignored final deportation notices. But the May 20 raid isn’t an isolated one.
“This is the third time there’s been a raid in this neighborhood,” Benny Hernandez, who owns a small deli across the street from the apartment where the Guatemalan immigrants were detained, said in an interview. “The raid before this, they left children behind and deported one of the parents.
“They’re attempting to scare the community...People who just want to work will be terrified to do that.”
Others in the community know firsthand what it is like to have their lives disrupted. A mother of two said she remembered vividly a raid four months ago, in which the husband of a close friend was detained. Once again, ICE agents were looking for someone who either didn’t exist or no longer lived in the apartment. But five people in total were detained and deported back to Ecuador.
“Her husband is in Ecuador now, and they don’t know what to do,” the woman said. “I’m undocumented too, and I think it’s unjust to separate families. I live very close by, and I’m worried about my children. I don’t have any family here, so what happens if they take me? Who will take care of my children?”
Stories like these will only multiply as federal immigration authorities attempt to reach their goal of deporting 75,000 immigrants by the end of this year.
“The government has to be responsible for its actions,” says Maribel Lopez, an immigrant mother of two who also lives near the site of the Brooklyn raid. “I’ve seen people die of hunger in my native country. People come here to seek a better life and to see their children succeed, but this [proposed immigration legislation under consideration in the Senate] is unjust and doesn’t allow for us to settle.”
Currently, Obispo Lopez and Brooklyn Pastor Erick Salgado are working with the ACLU in New York to get legal services for the workers detained in Brooklyn and their families back in Guatemala. We need to continue building a grassroots response to the ICE raids, and demand an end to the deportations and a just immigration policy.
Luisa Gallego contributed to this report
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