by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The group that
assembled at the Queer-rights organization Canvass for a Cause’s Hillcrest
headquarters September 1 came to hear author and activist Sharon Smith talk
about her new book, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism
in the United States. But before Smith
spoke, the room was galvanized by another speaker, a Chicago teacher and labor
activist identified only as Becca, who spoke via Skype about one of the
best-kept secrets in the U.S. today: the Chicago Teachers’ Association (CTU)
has done extensive community organizing for a potential September 10 strike.
Though Sharon
Smith’s talk was officially sponsored by the Occupy San Diego Labor Solidarity
Committee, it had the appearance of an International Socialist Organization
(ISO) event. Not only were many local ISO members there, the group had canceled
their own regularly scheduled meeting two days earlier and urged its members to
attend Smith’s talk instead. What’s more, Smith regularly publishes in the
ISO’s press, her book was put out by their publishing company (Haymarket
Books), and her talk largely matched the ISO’s ideology, particularly its
rejection of any electoral work within the Democratic Party.
Indeed, many
people there — including Smith herself — saw the CTU’s struggle as confirmation
of their rejection of the Democratic Party as a potential vehicle for social
change. They noted that Becca described the union’s principal enemy as Rahm
Emanuel, Chicago’s recently elected Democratic mayor and previously chief of
staff for President Barack Obama, who along with the Obama administration and
officials from both major parties is pushing an education “reform” agenda
including relentless student testing; a “back to basics” curriculum that
eliminates art, music and culture as “frills”; encouraging privatization of education
through non-union charter schools; and demonization of teachers’ unions as the
principal obstacles to “reform.”
“I’m proud to be
part of a union seeking to educate the whole child,” Becca said. “This is a
fight for schoolchildren and also a fight for union rights. We’ve seen
concession after concession, and I’m proud to be part of a union that has
chosen to make a stand. We’re fighting for a better school day, smaller class
sizes, art and music education, and more social workers and nurses in schools.
My school only has a nurse on duty twice a week — and we have 18,000 students,
many of them with diabetes.” The CTU’s other key demand, Becca said, is
“treating teachers like professionals.”
Becca said the
fight-back against the privatization “reform” agenda began two years ago, when
an insurgent slate, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, won the union’s own
elections and took over its leadership. “We were building a rank-and-file
union, not just a service union and a crusty bureaucracy,” she explained. “We
had teacher activist trainings where teachers could learn to become organizers.
We produced a document called The Schools Chicago Students Deserve, which articulates a vision of what sort of schools we
want. Too often we say what we’re against but not what we’re for. We’ve built
relationships between teachers in different schools, and also worked hard on
getting community and parent involvement.”
Rahm Emanuel got
on the teachers’ enemies list by not only continuing but extending the
school-privatization agenda of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley. In
particular, he pushed through the closure of 17 schools, most of them in
communities of color. The union decided to mobilize against the closure and,
while they weren’t able to stop it, “we gained a lot because parents and
community members saw us as fighting for the schools,” Becca explained. “The
union has also hosted and participated in town-hall meetings and sponsored
‘Teacher in the Pulpit’ programs where teachers volunteered to outreach to
churches, synagogues and mosques.”
According to
Becca, this community outreach campaign has helped the union blunt the “nasty,
anti-teacher” attack ads Mayor Emanuel has put out. “Parents have told us, ‘The
city thinks I’m stupid enough to listen to this and believe it,’” Becca said.
She also said that teachers have benefited from “a great deal of student
activism” on their behalf — and in some cases have suffered for it.
“Social Justice
Academy is a school in a mostly Mexican neighborhood that was founded by
teachers and parents going on a hunger strike,” Becca said. “They fired the
principal during the summer, the students rebelled and they fired teachers for
helping the students protest. Students are taking active roles [in the current
struggle]. They are having discussions on just what types of education we
need.”
There’s been
little corporate media coverage of the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s threatened
strike, and what there has been has made it seem like a normal, everyday wage
dispute. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago schools made what they called their “last, best” offer
last May — a 2 percent salary increase every year for four years, but abolition
of pay raises for “seniority and credentials.” The CTU has denounced the offer
as “insulting” and said the school system is reneging on 4 percent increases it
previously agreed to and is refusing to pay teachers for the 10 extra days it
required them to work the past school year.
But Becca says
it’s about much more than wage increases; it’s a clash between two very
different visions of education, one focused on rote learning and teaching to
standardized tests, and one based on teaching students to think and act for
themselves. Though she doesn’t think the Chicago school system could fire the
striking teachers en masse the way
President Reagan did with the air traffic controllers in 1981 — “There are
26,000 union members and they can’t fire us all,” she said — she is worried
about “the scab operation and what it will look like.” She’s also aware that
the long-term vision of Mayor Emanuel and the others running Chicago’s schools
is of an increasingly privatized operation in which 100 more schools will be
closed and replaced by 200 non-union charter schools.
Sharon Smith: It’s All
About Class Struggle
Sharon Smith’s
presentation began with a ringing affirmation of the continued relevance of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, starting with a quote from the Communist
Manifesto that “the history of all existing
society is a history of class struggle.” She added that “for the better part of
the last 35 years, many people relegated Marx’s theory to the dustbin of
history because class-based social movements seemed to be breaking out
everywhere but here.” What’s changed in the last 18 months — first in the
response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s bid to bust the state’s public
employee unions, then in the Occupy movement and now in the CTU’s struggle — is
the beginning of what Smith calls a “new phase” in the class struggle in which
America’s working people are rediscovering their tradition of militant
resistance.
“The Chicago
struggle is significant because it marks the first time in decades that a union
is standing strong and defiant, with leaders that feel accountable to their
members and committed to winning the best contract for their members,” Smith
said. “No one under 35 to 40 years old has any living memory of class struggle
in the U.S., but class struggle is what built the union movement and won the
eight-hour day and the 40-hour week. You younger workers don’t realize that
this is a major advance.”
Smith also
attacked the notion, pushed by “most commentators” in the corporate media, that
the present is an era of “labor peace” and that the U.S. is a middle-class
consumer society. “In fact,” she explained, “we are a nation today of indebted
workers only a paycheck or two away from poverty. The image of the
‘middle-class consumer’ is a stereotype planted by TV programs, newspapers and
schools. The consumption patterns of the ‘middle class’ are taken as a given. We’re
inundated with the message that we are a ‘middle-class society’ and that if
you’re not part of the ‘middle class,’ it’s your fault.”
Another
stereotype of the U.S. Smith challenged is the belief that “the fact that half
of the adult population stays home on election day is a sign that the U.S. is
an apathetic society.” What it really means, she said, is that people sense
that “democracy has been reduced to pulling a lever once every four years for
one of two ruling-class parties. Most Americans are part of the working class”
— which Smith defines broadly, as Marx did, as “the class that does not own the
means of production and are forced to sell their labor to survive. There is a middle class in this society,” she acknowledged,
“but it is much smaller than claimed. There is never a period in which class struggle is stagnant. One
side is always winning, one side is always losing, and the only time the working class wins is when it’s involved in
mass struggle.”
One purpose of
Smith’s talk — and her book — was to educate her audience that there was a long
and powerful history of mass working-class struggle in the U.S. until the late
1940’s, when in a purge that has become known as “McCarthyism” (even though it
started before the rise of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and continued well
after he was disgraced), “thousands of radical union members and rank-and-file
members of the Communist Party, U.S.A. were driven from their jobs and sent to
prison. The U.S. working class possesses a tradition that at certain points has
led the world in militancy.”
Among the high
points she cited were the struggle for the eight-hour day, the proclamation of
May Day as the international workers’ holiday, and the origin of International
Women’s Day in the ladies’ garment workers’ strike of 1909. She also mentioned
the mass resistance to U.S. involvement in World War I — which continued even
after the government made it illegal — and the sit-down strikes of the 1930’s,
in which industrial workers reached across racial lines and occupied factories
to force their employers to recognize their unions and negotiate.
According to
Smith, the sit-down strikes “built the industrial unions and brought together
thousands of Black and white workers against a common enemy at a time when
lynchings were commonplace and Jim Crow [racial segregation] was the law of the
land. Thousands of white workers came over to the fight against racism.” Smith
said the workers in the sit-down struggles took on sexism, too. “Far from
taking a back seat in the struggle, women built unions in their own right and
took a leading role in the sit-down strikes,” she said. “The Flint Women’s
Auxiliary Brigades armed themselves with baseball bats and beat back the
National Guard on some occasions.”
Smith also said
that the workers of the 1930’s “broke with the Democratic Party and broke with
Franklin Roosevelt’s pose as a friend of the workers when he was saving
capitalism. The 1935 United Auto Workers’ (UAW) convention voted overwhelmingly
against endorsing Roosevelt, and in favor
of forming a nationwide farmer-labor party. At any given time thousands of
workers belonged to a radical
workers’ party.” Smith said that at its height the Communist Party, U.S.A. had
88,000 members, nine percent of whom were Black. She went further back in
history to mention the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union
in the first two decades of the 20th century which “welcomed women,
Blacks, immigrants and unskilled workers” at a time when the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) was open only to white males working in skilled
trades, and the Socialist Party, which “got over 1 million votes for its
candidate for President, Eugene V. Debs, in 1912.”
The bottom-line
message of Smith’s talk was, “Radicals built much of the strength of the U.S.
union movement.” And despite the major purge of radicals from both American
labor and American life in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Smith said, the
radical spirit still broke forth in the wildcat strikes of the late 1960’s and
early 1970’s and groups like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM)
organized by African-American workers to challenge, as Smith put it, “not only
the companies but the racism within the UAW.” In addition to building much of
the American labor movement, Smith said, U.S. Leftists also created the Black
power movement, the women’s movement and a Queer rights movement “that has only
now begun to reap successes from decades of struggle.”
Smith also
acknowledged the role of immigrants — particularly ones who’d been radicalized
in their countries of origin and brought those traditions here — in building
the U.S. union movement. She said the socialist and anarchist traditions in
this country were largely started by German immigrants, and hailed the May Day
immigrant rights’ demonstrations in 2006 — the first mass May Day events in the
U.S. in decades — as rekindling that tradition of radicals from other countries
bringing their politics here and lighting a fire under U.S.-born activists.
Ironically, the immigrant roots of much of American radicalism turned out to be
a two-edged sword, as they made it easier for capitalist propagandists to
denounce Left politics in general as “un-American.” One of the principal
instruments of the McCarthyist purge of Leftists from American life was even
called the “House Un-American Activities Committee.”
After recounting
this history, Smith again returned to her theme of the futility of seeking
fundamental change through the Democratic Party. “The problem of class and
social inequality is not going to be solved by re-electing President Obama or
getting a Democratic majority in Congress,” Smith said. “Increasing the
inequality of wealth and income has been a long-term bipartisan project that
began under Jimmy Carter. The last three and one-half decades has been a
continuous process in which the rich set out to make themselves richer, and the
working class and poor people poorer.”
As part of that
campaign, the U.S. ruling class began a long-term effort to rid themselves of
labor unions altogether, according to Smith. “By the 1980’s, U.S. corporations
were spending half a billion dollars on union-busting firms,” she said. “That
is how today we have achieved a level of inequality not seen since the 19th
century robber barons, and they are determined to finish off unions altogether.
The Great Recession has just accelerated the deliberate immiseration of the
working class and the poor to enrich those who are already obscenely wealthy.
The so-called ‘debt crisis’ was artificially manufactured on Wall Street. We
know all the budget problems could be solved just by raising taxes on the 1
percent, but they will not turn to this solution until they’re forced to do
so.”
So what is to be
done? Smith’s recommendation is to keep building radical movements and confronting
the system — and to reject the plaint of so-called “realists” that the only
thing we can do is work through the Democratic Party to achieve a slightly more
“liberal” form of capitalism. “What seems impossible today can be taken for
granted tomorrow,” she said. “Who thought that the whole country would be swept
up in Occupy’s rhetoric of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, or that the
Occupiers would beat back the police in New York’s Zuccoti Park without
violence? I’ve lived in Chicago and I wouldn’t have predicted the CTU. In fact,
because the U.S. has only two major political parties and they’re both
pro-corporate and don’t even pay lip service to working-class interests, this
country is even more unpredictable than others.”
Smith summed up
by returning to her Marxist roots: “The essence of Marxism is to understand
that exploitation ultimately breeds resistance. The ruling class can use
repression and all kinds of tactics to fight back, but they cannot do more than
delay the day of reckoning.”
