From Chile to Lebanon: Working class offensive sweeps the globe
The past week has seen a new stage in the eruption of the global class struggle, with mass protests bringing two seemingly disparate countries to a halt over what are undeniably similar grievances that are rooted in the historic and systemic crisis of the global capitalist system.
In Chile, the announcement by the right-wing government of President Sebastián Piñera of a 4 percent rise in mass transit fares ignited an uncontrollable wave of mass protests that have created a crisis of capitalist rule. The government’s response, reflecting the fears of the Chilean bourgeoisie, has been to impose a state of emergency and curfew, deploying 20,000 troops in the streets of Santiago and thousands more across the country. According to official figures, 18 people have been killed since the protests began, hundreds wounded and at least 5,000 arrested. The criminal methods of the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship have been resurrected, with reports of disappearances, torture of prisoners and sexual assaults against women detained in the protests.
This naked repression has only succeeded in swelling the protests. According to figures from the Chilean Interior Ministry, 424,000 people participated in 68 separate marches and demonstrations across the country Wednesday. Undoubtedly, the real figure is far higher. A general strike continued into its second day on Thursday, with hundreds of thousands more taking to the streets.
Anti-government protesters shout slogans in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2019. Thousands of people are gathering in downtown Beirut as Lebanon is expected to witness the largest protests on the fourth day of anti-government demonstrations. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Meanwhile, Lebanon has also been rocked by mass protests over the past week, bringing an estimated one quarter of the country’s 6 million people into the streets. The immediate trigger was the government’s attempt to impose yet another gouging austerity measure aimed at making the country’s working class pay for its deep economic crisis—a $6-a-month tax on WhatsApp messages. As in Chile, attempts to use the army to break up protests have only inflamed popular anger.
Both Piñera in Chile and his Lebanese counterparts, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun, attempted to allay the popular upheavals with statements of contrition and offers of minimal economic relief measures. In both countries, the masses in the streets dismissed these cynical gestures as too little, too late, and are demanding the downfall of the regimes.
In both countries, the driving force behind the mass protests is the ceaseless and malignant growth of social inequality. The richest 1 percent monopolize 58 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 50 percent own less than 1 percent, in Lebanon, long-considered the region’s “free enterprise” haven for capitalist investment. In Chile, recently touted by Piñera as a regional “oasis” for finance capital, the richest 1 percent gobble up 33 percent of national income, according to World Bank data from 2017.
The New York Times, a principal voice of the US ruling elite, has taken note of the eruption of mass protests in Chile, Lebanon and other countries, commenting in a front-page article that “experts discern a pattern: a louder-than-usual howl against elites in countries where democracy is a source of disappointment, corruption is seen as brazen, and a tiny political class lives large while the younger generation struggles to get by.”
Strangely missing from this review of what the article’s headline describes as “popular fury across the globe” is what is happening in the United States itself. It quotes one of the “experts”, Vali Nasr, who recently left his post as dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as commenting: “In countries where elections are decisive, like the United States and Britain, skepticism about the old political order has produced populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant results at the polls. In other countries, where people don’t have a voice, you have massive protests erupting.”
Are the Times editors genuinely oblivious to what is happening in the US, or are they just whistling past the graveyard? They publish this as 48,000 autoworkers have been on strike against General Motors for 40 days and 32,000 teachers and school workers in Chicago are entering the second week of a walkout that has shut down the country’s third-largest school district. The number of workers in the US on strike last year—over half a million—was the highest in more than three decades.
All the conditions that the Times describes in other countries—profound social inequality, corruption and a political system that is utterly indifferent to the interests of masses of working people—find stark expression in the US, the center of world capitalism, where the top 1 percent hoards roughly 40 percent of total wealth, and a social explosion is also on the agenda.
Thursday’s Times also carried an editorial titled “Chile Learns the Price of Economic Inequality”. Noting that Chile’s “protesters’ rage is born of the frustrations of everyday life,” it goes on to state: “Chileans live in a society of extraordinary economic disparities ... Santiago’s prosperity is undeniable. Viewed from the top of the tallest building in South America, which stands in the middle of a financial district called ‘Sanhattan,’ neighborhoods with luxury apartments, private hospitals and private schools stretch as far as the eye can see.
“But Santiago’s poverty also is striking: crumbling public hospitals, overcrowded schools, shantytowns that sit on the outskirts of the metropolis.
“And farther from Santiago are cities untouched by the recent boom.”
Substitute United States for Chile, and Manhattan for “Sanhattan” and little of this depiction of a country dominated by social inequality would need to be changed.
The Gini coefficient, the most commonly used statistical measure of income inequality, places the United States, at 41.5 barely less unequal than Chile, at 47.7.
The Times editorial attributes Chile’s crisis to the government’s “unsustainably narrow conception of its obligations to its citizens,” which it in turn blames upon the Pinochet dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1973 to 1990, for dictating policies based upon “free-market competition”. What it neglects to mention is that these policies were drafted by the so-called “Chicago Boys”, bourgeois economists trained by the University of Chicago’s “free market” godfather, Milton Friedman.
The same essential policies have been introduced by successive US governments—Democratic and Republican alike—depriving millions of essential social services ranging from health care to food stamps and retirement income, while leaving 40 million people living below the absurdly low official poverty rate of $25,000 for a family of four.
A striking feature of the protests in both Chile and Lebanon are the statements by demonstrators in both countries that the latest austerity measures are merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that they are fighting against an unequal social order that has been built up over the past 30 years. In Chile, these three decades began with the end of the military dictatorship, and in Lebanon, with the end of the civil war.
This also is an expression of a global shift. The social relations created over the past 30 years, began with the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. They have been based upon the suppression of the class struggle, the uninterrupted growth of social inequality and financial parasitism and the vast transfer of wealth from masses of working people the world over to a tiny wealthy elite. Today, this social order is rapidly unraveling under the weight of a resurgence of struggle by the international working class.
Objective events are exposing the complete political bankruptcy of the pseudo-left organizations and so-called “left” academics who wrote off the working class and the struggle for socialism. Nothing in their perspective, based on nationalism and identity politics, foresaw the emerging global eruption of class struggle.
These events, however, were substantially anticipated by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International in both their theoretical analysis and practice.
In its 1988 perspectives document “The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” the ICFI explained why the class struggle would inevitably assume a global character, based upon the “massive development of transnational corporations and the resulting global integration of capitalist production have produced an unprecedented uniformity in the conditions confronting the workers of the world.”
The document stated: “It has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an international character. Even the most elemental struggles of the working class pose the necessity of coordinating its actions on an international scale.”
This now becomes the most urgent and concrete political question. The current mass social protests and strikes are the initial expression of a growing revolutionary struggle of the international working class to put an end to capitalism and reorganize the world economy to meet social needs, not private profit.
“The UAW officials can’t be trusted, they’re greedy just like the company”
GM workers denounce UAW moves to end strike on management’s terms
The United Auto Workers is rushing to end the 40-day strike by General Motors today and impose a deeply unpopular contract that will fundamentally transform conditions for workers throughout the global auto industry and beyond.
The UAW is acting as if the strike is already over. Workers in Arlington, Texas reported that the UAW began dismantling equipment on the picket lines Thursday before voting concludes on Friday. Workers in Flint, Michigan were told to get ready to return to work as early as the weekend, since GM had already scheduled production.
“They’re already taking down generators and other equipment,” an Arlington worker told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter. “They’re calling it quits before the vote is even over.” He said that there was widespread opposition to the sellout deal but that the UAW was exploiting the economic distress workers were in due to the poverty level strike pay doled out by the UAW itself.
Ft. Wayne, Indiana workers voting Wednesday
None of the vote totals reported by the UAW can be taken as good coin. The entire voting process has been heavily manipulated, including the order of votes at locals, to push the contract through. There is no rank-and-file oversight of the balloting process, which is entirely controlled by an organization that has a vested interest in declaring a “yes” vote on Friday afternoon.
At the time of this writing, a running tally by Automotive News based on reports from UAW locals has 57 percent of production workers voting “yes” and 43 percent voting “no.” However, less than 50 percent of the votes are in. Results are not available for several major assembly plants, including Arlington, Texas (5,078 workers); Ft. Wayne, Indiana (4,231); Fairfax, Kansas (2,198); and Delta Township, Michigan (2,350).
Workers resoundingly defeated the contract at two factories in Rochester and Lockport, New York with 80 percent and higher “no” votes. Both plants are run by General Motors Components Holding (GMCH), a GM subsidiary that operates four factories previously owned by Delphi Corporation.
The contract was also defeated at the Spring Hill, Tennessee assembly plant, despite the best efforts of the local leadership to suppress opposition, including calling the police on workers campaigning to defeat the sellout. Workers at the Bowling Green, Kentucky plant, which makes the Corvette Stingray sports car, also defeated the contract. The UAW, however, claims that the contract was defeated by narrow margins, 51-49 percent in Tennessee and 55-45 percent in Kentucky.
On the other hand, the UAW claimed last night that workers at Wentzville Assembly in Missouri voted by 65 percent in favor. It earlier reported that workers at the Flint Assembly Plant, one of the largest locals, voted “yes” by 60-40 percent, although the actual breakdown of the votes was not presented. The UAW also claimed workers at the neighboring Flint engine and metal centers ratified it by a 2-to-1 margin.
The UAW bureaucracy in Flint has long been dominated by corrupt elements, including former Local 651 officials Norwood Jewell and Mike Grimes, who have been convicted in the illegal bribe-taking and kickback scandal engulfing the UAW.
Workers said they had no doubt that UAW officials were capable of vote-rigging and fraud. “I was a monitor of an election,” a retired GM worker told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “and they do stuff the ballots.”
More than 30 percent of the workforce at the Flint Assembly Plant are temps. Virtually none of them will qualify for the bogus “pathway” to full-time employment because they are categorized as “part-time” temps, even though they work 40-50 hours a week.
Given the hostility to the contract, Flint workers expressed shock and disbelief with the large “yes” vote reported by the UAW.
“At our meeting, there were a lot of people against the contract, not just the temps but the more senior people too,” a young temp told the Autoworker Newsletter. “The union said it passed, but they have not released the actual numbers from the vote.”
She added, “The way I figure, I would have made $4,500, the same as the signing bonus, if we were working instead of striking. So, why did we sacrifice to settle for this? This is a contract that GM wants. Corporate greed is at an all-time high.
“The UAW threw the bonus at us because they know people are in need, and it’s going to be Christmas soon. People voted under pressure. A lot are saying the UAW officials can’t be trusted, they’re greedy too, just like the company. They’ve been caught embezzling money.”
The UAW concocted a story about threats against the UAW International to delay to the very end at the Lordstown plant, where they expected to face an overwhelmingly rejection of the contract that sanctioned the closure of the plant.
A Lordstown worker told the newsletter, “The members have stood strong and have been ready to fight back. But the corruption of the International UAW was shown in the rollout meeting at UAW Local 1112 today. They did not have answers to the workers’ questions. We’ve been following the UAW International officials around, and they are giving one story to one local and another one to other locals.”
From beginning to end, this entire process has been illegitimate. The UAW is bought-and-paid-for by the auto bosses. It has been run by criminals under investigation or arrest for taking bribes from the company to force through concessions contracts. Workers know even if they vote against the contract, the UAW would not bring back anything better.
Even as it works to shut down the GM strike, the UAW announced yesterday that it had reached an agreement to end the Mack-Volvo strike, and it is preparing to sell out the Detroit Diesel workers.
Whatever the UAW declares at its press conference today to announce final totals for the vote, the basic issue facing autoworkers is the same. Workers cannot defend their interests unless they build rank-and-file factory committees that fight for what workers need, not what the corporations and their stooges in the UAW say is affordable.
These committees must fight for the expansion of the strike to Ford and Fiat Chrysler. At the same time, US autoworkers must unite with Canadian and Mexican workers and demand the reinstatement of the nine GM Silao workers fired for resisting demands to increase output during the US strike.
Walkout enters eighth day
Striking Chicago teachers confront Democratic Party machine and union’s effort to isolate their struggle
The strike by 32,000 Chicago Public Schools teachers and support staff entered its eighth day on Friday. The central demands in the strike are for smaller class sizes, increased staffing and higher pay for school workers, some of whom make as little as $30,000 a year in the country’s third largest school district.
Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who earlier in the week called on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 to end the strike while continuing contract talks, once again attacked the unions for the slow pace of negotiations.
Chief Education Officer Latanya McDade told the Chicago Tribuneon Thursday, “This cannot go into next week.” When asked, she said she did not intend her statement as an ultimatum.
Striking teachers in Chicago
In 2012, when the powerful strike by more than 30,000 CPS educators reached seven days and threatened to disrupt the reelection campaign of Barack Obama, whose “Race to the Top” education program marked an escalation of the assault on public education, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, threatened an injunction against the teachers. The CTU, with the current president Jesse Sharkey serving as vice president, shut down the strike on Emanuel’s terms, paving the way for the closure of 49 schools in 2013, the layoff of thousands of teachers and the expansion of charter schools.
The conditions against which teachers and staff are striking today were imposed by the Democratic Party, with the aid of the CTU. Now, the CTU and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), are once again seeking to derail a strike by channeling it behind the election campaigns of Democratic politicians. On Tuesday, AFT President Randi Weingarten appeared on a picket line with Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. Weingarten touted the AFT sellout of this year’s Los Angeles teachers’ strike as a “victory” and model for the Chicago teachers.
On Wednesday, tens of thousands of striking teachers, support staff, parents and students protested in downtown Chicago during Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2020 budget address, in which she doubled down on her insistence that there is “no money” to meet the teachers’ demands.
Lightfoot, a corporate attorney and Emanuel’s point person for managing the fallout from the police murder of Laquan McDonald and its official cover-up, is continuing the austerity policy of the Emanuel administration. From the start of the strike Lightfoot has taken a hard line, winning praise from both the Republican-aligned Chicago Tribune and the pro-Democratic Chicago Sun Times .
Unveiling her 2020 budget, designed to wipe out an $838 million deficit, Lightfoot told the press that the public school system and teachers could not “look to the city to bail them out.”
The CTU’s current contract costs $2.6 billion annually. Lightfoot’s offer to the CTU would reportedly add $500 million per year in a five-year deal. Official estimates put the cost of the teachers’ demands for staffing guarantees and smaller class sizes in a three-year contract at $2.4 billion.
Lightfoot’s proposed budget includes $1.9 billion in debt payments, money sent directly to Wall Street. This tribute to the banks and hedge funds would by itself largely cover the cost of the teachers’ very modest demands.
Teachers and staff picketing William Goudy Elementary on the far north side early Thursday morning spoke about Lightfoot’s claim that “there is no money.” A staff worker said, “That’s her chance to fill up her pocket. She says no money, no money. It’s the City of Chicago. It has a lot of money. We need everything, we need a raise, we need good benefits.”
A teacher added, “This is terrible. I hope it gets resolved quickly, because it’s getting long. There’s definitely more money, just not for education.”
Another CPS worker spoke about the kinds of services they are fighting for. She said, “When I went to the hospital yesterday, I was talking to people. They asked ‘Why are you striking?’ I said, ‘Does your child have a library at your school? No, that’s why. Do you have a sick child at school who needs a nurse in the school?’ Even us as adults need a nurse here.”
When a WSWS reporter raised the issue of widening the strike and discussed the GM strike in the US and the mass protests and strikes in Chile, Ecuador, Jordan, Lebanon and Catalonia, the worker contrasted these struggles to the strategy of the CTU, saying, “In Europe, don’t they do this? When one strikes, they all strike together.”
On Thursday, the CTU made a show of putting the concerns of special education professionals at the center of the day’s negotiations. The conditions for special education teachers and students in CPS are abysmal. The district has flouted state laws governing staffing for special education classrooms so brazenly that in 2018 the state took the special education program out of the hands of CPS. In addition to breaking staffing laws, CPS was also found to have routinely denied or delayed services for special ed students, including speech and occupational therapy.
In the evening bargaining update, CTU chief of staff Jennifer Johnson announced, “We’ve made good progress. Today was a good day. Special education teachers and staff were brought in to be updated on bargaining.”
The SEIU bargaining team criticized CPS for not being present for negotiations with support staff since they walked out with the teachers on October 17.
On Thursday evening at CTU headquarters, the CTU, Illinois Federation of Teachers and SEIU held a “civil disobedience” training session with about 500 teachers and staff. Channeling teacher determination into isolated acts of symbolic protest is precisely the function of the CTU and its parent union the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which have deliberately isolated, weakened and defeated the series of teachers’ strikes over the last two years, helping to impose the austerity demands of both big business parties.
It is critical that teachers and staff pursue an independent strategy to expand the strike. Teachers enjoy broad support in the working class in Chicago and beyond. To carry forward the struggle, teachers must break through the isolation imposed by the CTU and turn to all sections of the working class, including area educators, autoworkers, service and logistics workers. The defense of public education is essential to the entire working class, and the exploitative conditions facing teachers are common to all workers.
Teachers and support workers must form rank-and-file strike committees at every school to take the conduct of the strike out of the hands of the CTU and SEIU and adopt a strategy to win the strike. The immediate task is to turn the strike by teachers into a broader counteroffensive of the entire working class against social inequality and the corporate elite.
The fight for the right to high-quality public education requires a new political strategy, independent of and opposed to both big business parties. The defense of education cannot be achieved simply within the boundaries of Chicago. It requires a direct assault across the country and internationally on the entrenched wealth of the corporate and financial elite. The fight for decent schools must be made part of a broad social and political movement of the working class against austerity, social inequality and the capitalist system that produces these conditions.
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