By Simon Gallagher – La Marx USA
Tens of thousands of dockworkers are launching a strike on the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, joining Boeing workers in a rising wave of strikes rocking the country. Tens of thousands of dockworkers from Maine to Houston in Texas went on strike Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. ET in their first strike across the East Coast since 1977. Workers are fighting back against low and stagnant wages, demanding a 70% wage increase over six years. Long live the struggle of the port workers!!
At the same time, they are fighting for better working conditions, including less demanding hours and greater safety.
From La Marx USA we say: Long live the struggle of the port workers!! The dockworkers are joining Boeing’s 33,000 workers, located primarily in the area around Seattle, Washington, on the West Coast, in a strike that has lasted more than two weeks. Other major strikes that have emerged in recent weeks, including that of 5,000 Textron Aviation machinists in Kansas and 525 Eaton aerospace workers in Michigan.
On September 30, warehouse workers from the Teamsters union began a strike at the Smart & Final supermarket chain in California, and also on that day port workers at the Port of Montreal in Canada began a 72-hour strike. This whole wave of strikes sweeping the U.S. is part of a broader global movement of the working class against U.S. and global capitalism, and part of the process of union and political revolution that the country is experiencing, which is radiating throughout the world.
The “Dockers” strike shocks the world
The strike of the “dockers”, as dockworkers are known in the United States, resumes the tradition of struggle of English and German dockworkers who staged large strikes in 2023. East Coast docks occupy a key place in U.S. and global supply chains, including half of the 10 largest ports in North America. The cost of a strike is estimated to be between $1 billion and $5 billion per day, and a prolonged strike could impact supply chains until 2025.
East Coast dockworkers are demonstrating their immense social power, and their strike will be taken as a call to workers across the country and even the world to press for their own demands. Tens of thousands of railroad workers are currently fighting against new sell-out contracts put forward by the union bureaucracy, including a deal at BNSF that paves the way for eliminating driver positions. In the auto industry, UPS, the postal service, and other sectors, workers are fighting back against massive job cuts driven by both automation and bureaucracy sales.
Tens of thousands of educators across the United States, including Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, and other major districts, is a strike movement that also impacts a conflict against the entire political establishment spearheaded by the two candidacies running in the upcoming U.S. elections. U.S. citizens such as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and the Republicans. Both candidacies defend the interests of the 1% of the rich and heads of global corporations. The Biden administration and the entire political system is being challenged as the strike begins to affect their profits.
The strike is being carried out by the bureaucracy of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), whose president Harold Daggett threatened to strike for months and broke off negotiations. However, pressure from the rank and file, such as in the unexpected rebellion of Boeing workers, who rejected the agreement by an overwhelming 95 percent, not only forced a strike there, but seriously jeopardized similar maneuvers by bureaucrats elsewhere.
Having been forced to call a strike, the corrupt ILA bureaucracy, with more than a century of ties to the Democratic Party and even organized crime, will seek to end it at the first opportunity. The dockers must not place an ounce of trust in the union bureaucracy of ILA! Workers’ democracy is essential to confront the manoeuvres of the ILA bureaucracy or any attempt to shut down the strike before all the demands of the rank and file workers have been met! Long live the longshore workers’ strike in the United States that shocks the world! Assembly and union democracy to guarantee their victory!
The great changes that the United States
is experiencing
This strike is an important political, social and cultural event as it can encourage millions of workers to take up these tools of strike and solidarity. The current strike is the expression of the great economic, political and social changes that have shaken the United States for more than 15 years, more precisely since 2006 when the strategy of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) carried out by the George Bush administration was defeated. The defeat of the PNAC opened a revolutionary stage in the United States and the world characterized by a strong crisis of the capitalist economy, an enormous crisis in the ruling classes, in the Pentagon, and in the bourgeois democratic regime and its traditional political parties.
The political crisis of the Bush administration combined with the disaster caused by the sub-prime bubble, and the sharp peak of the world crisis of capitalism exploded, which caused the bankruptcy of Global Corporations and Wall Street between 2008 and 2009. The bankruptcy was so serious that imperialism had to take measures of historic magnitude: Bailouts were carried out to rescue the bankers and owners of the Global Corporations. The Bush administration began with the first bailouts that were later implemented by the Obama administration and the governments of all the imperialist countries of the world, announced with great pomp at the G20 Summit in London in 2009.
But the initial expectation that the Bailouts would stop the crisis soon vanished: all over the world, house auctions skyrocketed, millions of jobs were lost, poverty, misery, and inequality advanced, which aroused indignation throughout the world and revolutionary waves began to explode globally. After the withdrawal of NATO armies that began in 2010, the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East, a process that was part of a global revolutionary wave that included general strikes in Greece, in the United States the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement broke out with its epicenter in the youth that exploded throughout the country occupying squares in states, counties, and cities in the form of protest.
But the Fourth American Revolution incorporated a new battalion when the Black Live Matters movement broke out after the death of Trayvon Martin, after which the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement broke out, which quickly expanded throughout the country and achieved mass mobilizations, taking up the tradition of struggle of the Black Panthers: Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King. Within this movement, different tendencies and ideologies emerged, both reformist and more radicalized and revolutionary. The enormous and powerful national and international mobilization that led to the rise of BLM did not mean the end of racial attacks against African Americans.
BLM incorporated a new element: armed self-defense and self-organization to confront repression by police and state forces. This same movement forced the removal of Confederate flags and symbols, and the tearing down of statues of Confederates, racists, and colonialists, which spread throughout the world. At the same time, the women’s struggle broke out: The “#Me Too” movement in the United States as part of the development of a worldwide revolutionary process of women such as the Kurdish women of Rojava, the women of Argentina with the “Ni Una Menos” of 2015, the movements for legal abortion in Ireland, for abolitionism in Spain, etc. The movement aimed to support the denunciation of women for receiving abuse and harassment, regardless of the year in which they have occurred.
The Emergence of the Working Class: The Phenomenon of “New Syndicalism”
The outbreak of the dockers’ strike is also an expression of another movement: that of “New Syndicalism”. Since 2021, the United States began to experience the rebirth of the phenomenon of unionization, and the emergence of thousands of new and young union leaders. The 2nd global revolutionary wave of 2019 already had as a distinctive feature the emergence of the phenomenon of the “Yellow Vests” in France, and the return of the working class to the center of the world revolutionary upsurge. The country had not experienced such a mobilization since 1970-1971 when there was a trade union wave, although more circumscribed to blue-collar workers, industrial workers, and mostly organized in unions.
This “New Unionism” of the United States began in 2021 and had some of its most important milestones: the strikes against the bosses of the multinational food company Kellogg’s in October 2021, which lasted for more than two months in its four plants. So did the triumph of Amazon workers in Staten Island, Amazon’s only fulfillment center in New York, which triggered a wave of new union activists across the country, pitting the multibillion-dollar industry of anti-union law firms against each other. Now two large international unions such as Teamsters, of truckers, and United Auto Workers, both with a presence in the United States and Canada, have approved mass organizing campaigns.
Fed up with the company’s failure to raise their wages, workers at a Starbucks store in Buffalo decided to use the tactics contained in the handbook of the historic, radical, now marginal Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union. Thus, at the end of 2021, the Starbucks Workers United union was born and the company’s first store was unionized. The photo of that victory is already historic: very young people, especially women, jumping for joy with the posters of their union, but this photo is also representative of what this “new unionism” is driven by a new generation that takes up the flags of Black Lives Matter and feminism, a whole panorama shows that from the years 2021, and 2022 saw a resurgence of trade unionism.
This change in trend or this new trade union movement has been classified as “New Syndicalism” due to a triple factor: it affects companies in which unions had not been formed before; the unions that are being built are new, without affiliation to the previous ones although influenced by them, and this new union movement is totally interconnected with the anti-capitalist movement, for Occupy, anti-racist for Black Lives Matter, pro-LGTBI and feminist for the #Me Too movement.
The Joe Biden Administration and the Democratic Party want to pose as “progressive” and “pro-union”, but this mask and deception collapsed when on December 1, 2021, Biden signed a reactionary legislative project by which unions and railroad companies are forced to accept a contract imposed by the imperialist government. and the railway employers’ associations. In this way, the Biden Administration showed its anti-worker policy and sought to restrict the right to strike of railway workers that would have effectively provoked a general strike in the country. Biden signed the legislative project showing that it is a capitalist-imperialist government that in the face of the threat of a general strike of the workers defends the profits of the corporations and employers, giving a message to the transport workers and all the workers of the country.
This whole process results in the politicization of thousands of young people, and activists who organize these new unions and movements while advancing in their consciousness which has caused Marxism to become attractive again, and fringes of activism begin to look for a revolutionary Marxist alternative. To prevent all this comrade of leaders that emerges from joining Marxist or revolutionary currents, the Democratic Party has given itself a policy of “recruitment” and containment that ranges from the “pro-union” discourse of President Biden, to the formation of “left wings” of the imperialist Democratic Party such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the DSA (Democratic Socialist of America) or Jacobin Magazine. These sectors make strenuous efforts to organize all this new activism that is emerging and win them over to reformism, social democracy or a policy of class collaboration with capitalist sectors, a policy that also has the collaboration of the Communist Party of the United States.
The Fourth American Revolution of the 21st century has thus opened a battle for the consciousness of global activism. To the extent that sectors of U.S. imperialism itself understand the magnitude of the phenomenon, they have adopted a policy to prevent the emergence of a revolutionary Marxist political current. I count on the invaluable help of the old activists of previous broken generations, and the leaders of the small Stalinist left groups, former guerrillas, ex-Trotskyists, who have adopted the social democratic strategy, and have united in the Progressive International founded on May 11, 2020, and under the leadership of Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis, leader of Syriza in Greece.
These currents united in IP have launched a whole series of theories and false consciousnesses to divert and confuse activism such as the “Decoupling Theory”, the “Critical Race Theory”, “Bourgeois Feminism”, the “Decolonial Theory”, the “Plurinational State Theory” and a whole series of charlatanism and precarious theories without any serious scientific content. who seek to hide the relationship of the world crisis of capitalism with national oppressions, of race, gender, origin, sex, and seek to prevent the approach of these thousands of activists to Marxism. Can the PI fool this whole new generation of thousands of ultra-politicized activists who find words like “Socialism” or “Marxism” attractive into the dead end of reformism? Or will these generations break through to revolutionary Marxism? This is the central battle that is ongoing.
Despite reformist efforts to divert and channel this process, more than 80 million Americans refused to support the imperialist Democratic and Republican parties in the 2020 presidential elections, a number that grew to 126,079,794 million Americans who refused to vote for Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. These figures show the crisis of American bourgeois democracy, which is no “democracy” at all, and the crisis of the old imperialist Democratic and Republican parties, responsible for the hunger, poverty and cruel inequality suffered by millions in the United States. The U.S. and the world.
Long live the “Dockers” strike!!
The dockers’ strike must succeed. From Marx International we support these strikes and all the progressive anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist phenomena that the masses of the United States and the world provide with their struggle. We make a global call to support this fight. At the same time, we fight to attract those leaders and activists who emerge in the movements incubated in the Fourth American Revolution of the 21st Century to Marxism, in the task of the International Regroupment of Revolutionaries to end capitalism once and for all, and impose Global Socialism.
Notes
(1) The 1st American Revolution was the National Independence achieved in 1783, while the 2nd was the triumph of the Union in the Civil War of 1865. The 3rd American revolution was the Civil Rights Movement that defeated the regime of racial segregation and was combined with the mobilizations that together with the struggle of the Vietnamese people caused the imperialist defeat in Vietnam. The triumph of the Fourth American Revolution opened up the world revolutionary situation we are experiencing, which began to trigger new movements that have completely changed the political, economic and social reality of the United States. We will begin by analyzing all the movements that emerged in the development of the Fourth American Revolution of the 21st Century.
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