Israel and the War Against the Working Class of the World

Drawing by Kathe Kollwitz

By Steven Halpern

Recently, demonstrations erupted around the world protesting the criminal bombing by the Israeli government on the Palestinian people. While the Israeli government argues that they are defending the security of the citizens of that nation, the reality tells us a completely different story. 

When we look at this history, we see that the overall purpose of those wars was to seize more and more land where the Palestinian people live. When we look at the maps of where Palestinians lived before 1948, and where they live today, we see clear evidence to support this argument. In 1948, Palestinians lived in over 90% percent of the land that now is the nation of Israel and the occupied territories. Today, Palestinians are second class citizens in Israel and are restricted to tiny settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

However, when we look at the reality of the world, we see similar events unfolding. In a demonstration in Chicago, one supporter of the Palestinians argued that the Black community of Chicago is also an occupied territory. James Baldwin once argued that while the armed forces of this country occupied Vietnam, there was also an occupation of the Back community here. In fact, while the government waged war against Vietnam, they also sent the National Guard into Black communities where they murdered scores of residents.

A recent report on the news program Democracy Now played a tape recording of President Biden in his younger years. Biden argued that if Israel didn’t exist, this country would have had to “invent” a nation just like it. This argument makes it clear that the U.S. government support of Israel isn’t about making concessions to the Israeli lobby.

The facts are that the nation of Israel is located in the middle of the region that supplies oil to the entire world. Without a continuous flow of oil, I don’t believe there is a single corporation in the world that would be able to profit. Understanding this reality, we can see why about half of all U.S. aid to the world goes to the nation of Israel. Without that aid, it is questionable if the Israeli government would be able to sustain their economy that is centered on the military.

From what I understand, the per capita income of Israeli citizens is about $40,000, while the per capita income of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is about $3,000. In the United States, there is a progressive demand for a $15 per hour minimum wage. However, today the majority of the world’s population lives on $10 per day or less. Here, we see how governments of the world use extremely repressive measures to maintain the poverty of the world.   

So, when we look at this overall reality, we need to ask the question: What are the forces that drive governments around the world to pursue policies that can only be called brutally repressive? The answer to that question begins with an explanation of the reality of the political economic system known as capitalism. We can begin to see how capitalism works by looking at the routine and flagrant discrimination in the United States.

Discrimination and the drive to maximize profits

Capitalism is a political economic system that allows a tiny minority of the population to live in opulence, while hundreds of millions in the world do not have enough food to eat. So, we can ask the question: Why would the majority of the population accept this apparent insanity?

Part of the answer to this question has to do with the fact that people who have power work diligently to keep working people divided. We are divided with respect to race, sex, nationality, employment, and immigration status. Seeing all these divisions, we can speculate that if we all believed that our primary obstacle is the corporate drive to maximize profits, out struggles would be much easier.

So, while the government claims that this is a nation with “liberty and justice for all,” the history tells another story. This is a history of Native American genocide, chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, discrimination against women, mass incarceration, as well as vicious repression of immigrants.

In the city of Philadelphia, there are relatively affluent neighborhoods in the downtown area. Then, there are extremely less affluent areas consisting of African American and Latino neighborhoods in the north and west of the city. This overall reality has made Philadelphia the poorest of the large cities in this country. Yet, just outside the city, there is the township of Gladwyne, that is among the most affluent in the nation.    

The government invented rationalizations to justify these criminal policies, as well as this gross disparity in the standard of living. However, all those policies had one fundamental goal. They were all about creating an atmosphere where huge corporations were able to gouge out super-profits.

The demonstrations that erupted last summer around the world protesting murders by the police made a clear point. There is mass sentiment opposed to ruthless repression by the police. However, when we look at the repression in this country, we also see the bombing of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli armed forces. 

We also see the mass murder by the police in the nation of Brazil. Several years ago, in Nigeria, the military conducted a raid into the encampment where the musician Fela Kuti lived. In that raid the military murdered Kuti’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Fela Kuti’s alleged crime was that he wrote a song where he labelled the military forces in Nigeria “zombies.” 

So, we see how the extremely low wages of the world are maintained by governments that routinely use brutal methods in an attempt to stifle decent. However, we also see how at a certain point people rise up and demand fundamental change. This happened when an international movement mobilized to force the former apartheid government of South Africa to step aside. 

 How and why will things change?

Around the world, people are asking the question: What will it take to create a movement that will allow for the liberation of the Palestinian people?

I believe that part of the answer to that question is to recognize that the overwhelming majority of the world’s population consists of the working class, as well as farmers. We all would like to have lifetime rights to a decent place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, health care, and education. However, in order to move to a place where we all demand these things, I believe we need to recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all.

Young people are beginning to see that we need to become active in opposition to both Israeli genocide and police brutality. Ultimately, we need a political party that advances the interests of workers throughout the world. The recent mass demonstrations indicate that there is considerable sentiment for this kind of political party.

So, while the Democratic and Republican Parties argue for war, poverty, destruction of the environment, mass incarceration, and the drive to maximize corporate profits, we can have a completely different message.

We are the working class of the world. We live in every nation of the world. When the Israeli government bombs Palestinians in their homeland, they are bombing our sisters and brothers. When capitalist governments deport millions of immigrants, they are deporting our sisters and brothers. When the U.S. government sends millions into the concentration camps of this country, those are our sisters and brothers. Our lives are more important than their profits. When we have political party that has this perspective, then there will be a real potential to create an environment where the seemingly impossible becomes a reality.

The Struggle for Black Liberation and the Labor Movement

 

The other evening, I viewed a film about the organization Dodge Revolutionary Workers Movement or DRUM. This organization existed from 1967 to 1971 in Detroit, Michigan, centered in a Chrysler factory where about 70% of the workers were Black. 

At that time, the United Auto Workers Union had not been addressing many of the grievances of the Black workers who experienced routine discrimination. DRUM responded to this by organizing a wildcat strike of 3,000 workers that was not sanctioned by the union. 

In this film members of DRUM spoke about how the mayor of Detroit worked with the police department to physically assault DRUM supporters. They also testified to how the national union officials commandeered the union headquarters to prevent DRUM members from wining a union election.

These DRUM members understood that the strategy of the company was to keep the Black and white workers divided. DRUM responded to that strategy by attempting to organize all workers against the horrendous conditions they faced. During those years, there was forced overtime where workers toiled at a furious pace twelve hours per day, oftentimes seven days per week.

I was a member of the United Auto Workers Union from 1983 to 1997. I then worked for seven years at an automotive shop that was non-union. In those years, I spoke to older workers who told me about the many strikes in the auto industry in the 1960s. However, when I worked in auto during those years, there were no strikes.

This past summer demonstrations erupted around the world protesting racist murders by the police. These protests made it clear that there are growing numbers of people who are willing to struggle to end all forms of racial discrimination. Understanding this reality, I believe it is useful to look at the history of the labor movement to see the lessons we can derive from our past.

 1877 to 1934 most labor battles were defeated

The first unions in this country were organized on the basis of craft. Today, the construction trades continue to be organized on crafts like electricians, carpenters, sheet metal workers, and iron workers. A problem with this method of organizing is that it doesn’t recognize the reality of capitalism. Today, industries are organized to mass produce commodities. Most of the workers in factories are relatively unskilled.

Eugene Debs was one of the union organizers who began to understand this problem and helped form the American Railway Union. This union organized skilled and unskilled workers. A basic problem of this union was that the delegates voted, by a margin of one vote, to exclude Black workers.

Then, the ARU went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman forced workers to do extremely dangerous and potentially fatal jobs. Wages at Pullman were insufficient to feed the families of workers.

The strike against Pullman won national support in spite of the fact that the federal government called out the National Guard to support the company. Ultimately the strike was defeated because the national rail unions refused to support it. Eugene Debs served time in jail for his leadership of this strike. Debs would later acknowledge that the main reason why the strike lost was because the union refused to accept Black workers. 

Things begin to change

Then, in the 1930s, the depression hit this country and the world. Capitalists responded to their declining profits by throwing about one third of the labor force out of work. By the year 1934, the working class in this country began to understand that only a unified class struggle could begin to alleviate their condition.

Three victorious strikes erupted of the teamsters in Minneapolis, the auto workers in Toledo, and the longshore workers on the West Coast. After sixty years of defeats of the labor movement, these strikes won significant concessions. 

John L. Lewis was the President of the Mine Workers Union at this time. He began to see how workers were becoming determined to wage tenacious battles to advance their interests. He responded to this sentiment by working to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations or the CIO. The CIO would go on to organize all the workers, skilled and unskilled, in a given industry. The United Auto Workers Union joined the CIO, and went on strikes against General Motors in 1937 and Ford in 1941.

In his book Labor’s Giant Step, Art Preis documented how there might have been many more union victories during this period. However, the union officials at that time made a consistent effort to compromise the militancy of the workers and support the politics of President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Eventually, even John L. Lewis would take the miners out of the CIO and join the AFL.

During the 1940s there were numerous instances of racist gangs who murdered scores of Black people. The police routinely took the side of these racist gangs. At that time, the CIO organized many Black workers into unions. There were members of the CIO who argued that the union needed to mobilize to defend Black people from these racist gangs. 

The union officials rejected this proposal fearing that this might be a violation of the law. The facts were that when union members went on strike, the government routinely supported the corporate drive to break those strikes. The union needed to stand up to the company, as well as their supporters in the government in order to win union recognition.  

The civil rights and Black power movements 

The Civil Rights movement mobilized nationwide support for overturning the racist Jim Crow laws that effectively denied Black people citizenship rights in this country. However, as we have seen, doing away with Jim Crow did not do away with institutionalized racist discrimination. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, many of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement abandoned the struggle to mobilize grass roots opposition to discrimination. These former leaders became active in support of Democratic Party politics.  

However, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, hundreds of cities throughout the country erupted in rebellion protesting routine police brutality. This was also the time when the Dodge Revolutionary Workers Movement organized protesting discrimination on the job.

We might think about the fact that during these years of the mid and late 1960s, the United States was in the midst of an economic upturn. We also might think about how those hundreds of rebellions were essentially isolated to the Black community. 

During these same years, students throughout this country and the world began to mobilize protesting the war against Vietnam. While the U.S. government argued that this was a war for “democracy”, people in this country began to understand that the masses of the Vietnamese people opposed the rule of a puppet regime imposed by the United States government. 

Young people became enraged at the fact that thousands of soldiers in this country lost their lives in a war that made absolutely no sense for working people. However, the anti-war movement rarely managed to generalize that struggle with the movement demanding the liberation of Black people in this country.

These movements also parked women to protest the routine discrimination against half of the human race. Those protests forced the government to legalize abortion and give women the right to decide if and when they would become mothers. This movement also forced all kinds of employers to accept women into jobs they rarely, if ever, had before. However, all these movements failed to come together, advancing the interests of the working class of the world..   

1970 - 2020

Then, from the years 1970 to 2020, new kinds of developments evolved in this country. Corporations closed down factories and eliminated millions of jobs. I experienced the elimination of several jobs where I worked.

As a result, the United States changed from a manufacturing based economy, to a service orientated economy. Many of the new jobs were housed in office buildings and consisted of banking, insurance, advertising, sales, health care, and education.

During the 1930s workers developed a consciousness where they began to understand that the road to economic advancement was tied to effective union strikes against corporations. One of the limitations of the union movement is that the goal was and is to advance the interests of only union members. 

However, unions represent only one part of the working class. Unions rarely mobilized their membership to protest or combat the routine discrimination that Blacks, women, Latinos, and immigrants face. 

Because of this problem, unions were helpless to do anything about the closing of factories throughout this country. Their strategy was to advocate for a campaign of “Buy American.” 

One obvious problem with this campaign is that workers are primarily workers and not consumers. Our strength lies in the fact that we can unite in struggle with workers all over the world. As a result, the Buy American campaign only succeeded is advancing a perspective that separated workers in this country from our sisters and brothers all over the world. 

However, during these same years, tens of millions of people in this country moved into suburban homes or into homes in the affluent areas of the cities. Most people in this country drove cars, and had the resources to send their children to college. In fact, many people believed that the ticket to a better life depended on receiving a college diploma.

However, while about twenty percent of the population in this country experienced improved living standards, the majority either experienced effectively stagnant of deteriorating wages.   

During these years, corporations spent about $200 billion in advertising every year. This money wasn’t just about selling commodities. The idea was that workers are not workers but consumers. 

A worker has an antagonistic relationship with the employer. During an eight-hour day, the employer requires workers to do as we are told for literally every minute we are at work. Workers receive more or less in our paycheck. Employers receive the wealth that workers produce. As a result, tens of millions of people in this country do not have enough food to eat, while a few thousand people have billions of dollars in assets.   

Seeing this reality, we might think about the fact that Oprah Winfrey has been one of the best things that happened to advertising in this country. Winfrey doesn’t just sell commodities. She sells a lifestyle arguing that a disposable income will give people a chance for fulfilling lives.

We might contrast the Oprah Winfrey show, to the friendship between Nina Simone (Young Gifted and Black) and Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). Nina Simone had this to say about their friendship: “we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, revolution—real girls’ talk” We can rest assure that these are not the topics to be discussed on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

2020

However, around the year 2020, young people began to see that things were beginning to change. The cost for that college degree became astronomical. The cost of housing, health care, and transportation became more and more difficult to purchase. Astronomical insurance costs added to this problem.

Then, came the pandemic. Employers threw tens of millions of workers out of their jobs. Although the government knew of the possibility of a pandemic, this same government scrambled just to get face masks and respirators. President Trump even contacted COVID-19 because he ignored medical advice and attended what became a super-spreader event. As a result, the United States became the epicenter of the pandemic.

This reality put a spotlight on the reality young people faced. They began to see that getting that college degree would not necessarily insure a lucrative lifestyle. To the contrary, they began to feel insecure about the possibilities for their future.

So, when the world viewed the video of Officer Derrick Chauvin murdering George Floyd, there was an explosion of outrage. Millions of people demonstrated around the world protesting the routine racist murders by the police in this country. When the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators, the outrage only increased and many more joined the protests.

In the past, few police officers had ever been convicted of murder. Those who were convicted usually received light sentences. However, because of the massive protests, government officials favored the conviction of Chauvin for murder. Unlike the convicted police murderers of the past, Chauvin will, no doubt, receive a long sentence for his horrendous crime. 

So, when we look at this history, I believe there are a few conclusions we can draw. In the 1960s the numerous rebellions against police brutality did not spark a national uprising. Those were the years of a relative economic upturn. However, in the 1930s and in 2020 there were downturns in the economy. In those years we saw the beginnings of a change in consciousness where there was a broad openness for the struggle against discrimination. In fact, both white and Black workers came together mobilizing for basic change.

However, we also saw how the union organizing drive at Amazon did not win union recognition. I believe we need to take that temporary setback in the context of about fifty years of relative quiescence in the labor movement.

Today there is more interest in Marxist politics than there has been in a long time. Most of those who are looking at the writings of Marx and Lenin are young people searching for a new vision for their future.

For me, there is only one road that can advance the cause of both human dignity and a future where humanity will work in harmony with the environment. This is to advance the cause of a labor party that strives to install a government where the needs of workers become the priority. That kind of government would make the drive for corporate profit appear as an unfortunate nightmare humanity managed to put in the past.

We are the Workers of the World

 

Art by Kathe Kollwitz

We are the ones who produce everything we need.

I’m talking about food, clothing,

transportation, communication,

health care, education, and even music.

We are the garment workers of Bangladesh.

We’re the Chinese workers who make cell phones.

We’re the Korean autoworkers.

We’re the Vietnamese workers who make running shoes.

We’re the Mexican farmworkers.

In fact, we’re the farm workers of every nation.

We’re also the construction workers of every nation.

We transport goods and people all over the world.

We go deep into the ground,

mining coal in dirty and dangerous conditions,

so some of the people of the world

can have light and live in comfort. 

Yes, this is who we are,

and we have a long history.

A history made up of struggles, 

so we might be treated with the dignity we deserve.

Spartacus led a rebellion of slaves

against the Roman Empire.

Toussaint L’Overture led a slave revolution

against the Spanish, British, and French.

The native people from all over the world

fought against those who invaded their homeland,

and continue to struggle,

so they might live in with dignity in their native land. 

The thirteen colonies freed themselves 

from British colonization.

Then, the Union Army freed the 

United States from a government of slave owners.

Governments demanded that we murder each other,

so the affluent would continue to dominate the world.

Then, workers organized in unions, 

and waged strikes against those who profit from our labor.

Black workers organized,

so they might have citizenship rights, 

in the nation claiming to have 

liberty and justice for all. 

Women struggled for decades 

just so they might have the right to vote.

They also joined in the struggle to prevent 

their children from becoming slaves in factories.

The people of Cuba had a revolution.

They now have a government 

that makes human needs the priority.

Today, Cubans have the right to education and health care. 

But the owners of corporations

are indifferent to all of this.

They have one and only one priority.

This is their drive to maximize profits on investments.

So corporations and investment companies

spent massive amounts of money

to build factories in nations

where workers are paid two dollars per day.

They may have eliminated hundreds of millions of jobs,

while politicians talk about creating jobs.

The new jobs usually have lower wages 

and fewer benefits than the jobs that left the country.

Workers living in nations 

where they exist on the knife edge of survival, 

risk life and limb for a chance 

to work in a nation where they can make a living.

These workers have the worst jobs that few people want.

They have no protection and can be deported at any time.

Corporations depend on these workers,

while they build walls to keep them out.

Then, there is that idea that every worker

thinks about at one or another time in our lives.

This is the idea that things might be better.

Yes, we have the capability to make this a better world.

We produce enormous amounts of wealth

that can be used to eliminate poverty,

end all wars, and work in harmony with the environment.

Yes, we have the potential to stop the destruction of this planet.

We can use sophisticated technology

to make work easier and more rewarding.

Yes, we can expose the myth 

that this is impossible.

There are those who argue that the idea 

of a workers government is dead.

Yet, half of the world’s population lives on two dollars per day.

They say this is the best we can do.

They tend to forget that the history of the world

has been made up of one continuous struggle 

to make life better for the people who live on the planet.

That struggle is continuing.

So, for all those who have their doubts, 

I have these words.

We are the workers of the world

and we will be heard.