Mexico: Metalworkers, universities join strike wave as 90,000 Walmart workers threaten to walk out
Dozens of maquiladora plants that agreed to the “20-32”—a 20 percent raise and a bonus of 32,000 pesos (US$1,700)—demanded by workers in Matamoros, Mexico, are escalating their reprisals against the historic wave of strikes that began in the city on January 12. This has included thousands of firings.
Rosalinda, a worker at Kearfott who has made public appeals for support from the international working class through the World Socialist Web Site, reported that she was fired this weekend along with 30 of the most militant workers. “We are still organizing to help those on strike and to keep battling those union leaders that have supported the companies, allowing them to step on the agreement,” she said, referring to a no-reprisal clause.
“Since the salary increased significantly, they don’t want to pay that. Moreover, they have ended the 40-hour week to continue with 48 hours for all fellow workers,” she added.
An Inteva worker told the WSWS that, after agreeing to the “20-32,” the company carried out a series of layoffs as maquiladoras “attempt to fire everyone, pay full severance, and force those who want to continue working to agree to 176 weekly pesos and not the [post-raise] 211 pesos. Some will change their business name to bring down salaries again. Of course, they’ll do this with the help of the trade union.”
The largest business umbrella organization in Mexico, the Business Coordinating Council (CCE) threatened up to 50,000 layoffs in Matamoros in response to “the invitations to carry out work stoppages in other cities.” Meanwhile, the maquiladora owners’ association, Index, which includes companies that produce 68 percent of Mexican exports, continue to appeal for the intervention of the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO) of the ruling Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA) party and the union bureaucracy to stop the greater independent initiative by and militancy of rank-and-file workers across the country.
In the same state of Tamaulipas, about 200 metalworkers struck at a yard in the town of Altamira owned by the Spain-headquartered Dragados Offshore. Amid demands of up to 100 percent wage increases, this was followed Tuesday by a strike of 2,000 workers of the same company in a yard in the state of Veracruz about 20 miles south and, on Wednesday, by a blockade of the gates in Altamira, turning it into a total strike among the 2,900 workers.
The trade union, which belongs to the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), has feigned support for the actions while working to negotiate down the demands.
Today, after rejecting a 1 percent raise proposal and demanding 12 percent instead, workers at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM) plan to join a wave of strikes across public universities that began 28 days ago with demands for a 20 percent raise at the Autonomous Metropolitan University. Workers there were inspired by the Matamoros rebellion. The Universities of Oaxaca, Coahuila and Chapingo are also on strike.
Hundreds of elementary and high-school teachers have also been on strike since January in the southern states of Oaxaca and Michoacán demanding unpaid allowances. For several weeks, they blocked crucial railways that severely affected trade through the largest Mexican seaport at Lázaro Cárdenas. About 1,000 striking teachers demonstrated in front of the Public Education Secretariat in Mexico City on Wednesday.
On Monday about 400 workers at three plants in Matamoros—Sigosa steelworks, Seyco Joits and Sistemas Estructurales y de Construcción— struck demanding the “20-32.” The associated local union, led by Javier Zuñiga García, has claimed to support the wildcat strikes while arguing that workers in these plants already make more than others in the city.
After partial stoppages since January 29, the 700 Coca-Cola workers in Matamoros at one of the largest bottling plants in Latin America have been on a full-fledged strike for two weeks in defiance of court rulings branding their action “illegal.”
Since Tuesday, about 500 workers at the Spring Window Fashions maquiladora in Ciudad Victoria, 200 miles southwest of Matamoros, have been striking, demanding to leave the trade union since it rejected their demands for a 16 percent raise. Claiming to be “independent” but belonging to the same right-wing CTM, the Industrial Maquiladora Union led by María Dolores Zúñiga convinced workers to transfer to her union.
Zúñiga canceled a planned strike earlier this month among 6,000 workers, agreeing to a 16 percent raise compared to the 30 percent demanded by workers. In response, one of these companies, Kemet, announced this week that it would eliminate two of its four shifts and fire 700 workers, with Zúñiga discarding any fight and simply advocating workers demand full severance pay.
After workers at Walmart in Matamoros and many other cities were planning to join the wave of wildcat strikes to demand the “20-32,” the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), affiliated with the right-wing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), quickly mobilized to enroll workers and take over negotiations to prevent the wildcat strikes. Instead, the CROC issued a strike announcement for March 20 involving about 90,000 of the 200,000 workers at Mexico’s biggest retailer. A Walmart spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday after speaking to the union that “the dialogue was positive.”
In Matamoros, 15 auto parts suppliers are still on strike. The Mexican Association of the Auto Industry (AMIA) noted to El Financiero on Monday that 80 percent of parts produced in the city go to the US and Canada, seriously crippling production at major plants there, and that within Mexico the strike has shut down production at three assembly plants and seven others have been affected.
The president of the Mexican Association of Cars Distributors (AMDA) summed up to the financial daily that companies in Matamoros have two options: appeal for police intervention or leave the city. “There is a sentiment of a lack of rule of law given how this situation was triggered and there is fear that the same could happen in other border cities like Ciudad Juárez,” he added.
On Tuesday, the president of the Mexican Confederation of Industrial Chambers (CONCAMIN), Francisco Cervantes Díaz, said they are working closely with the AMLO administration and MORENA senator and union leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, to address the wave of “illegal” strikes. “The problem could extend to the Bajío region and the south of the country,” he warned.
Facing the growing challenge from below and the deepening of the crisis of global capitalism, the Mexican ruling class and its US imperialist bosses will act with increasing ruthlessness. As López Obrador accelerates the creation of a new National Guard for domestic military operations, the Central Bank and Goldman Sachs dramatically cut down their 2019 growth forecasts for Mexico this week—with the latter warning of “idiosyncratic factors like strikes.”
Meanwhile, the trade-union bureaucracy is working everywhere to co-opt, isolate and shut down each rank-and-file struggle, while strengthening its corrupt and corporatist collaboration with management and the state.
On the other hand, workers across North America and globally are going on the offensive after decades of a one-sided war by major corporations against their living standards. This year has seen 71,000 teachers from several states participate in a wave of strikes, while almost 2,000 workers at the Wabtec locomotive plant in Pennsylvania initiated Tuesday the first major strike in the manufacturing sector in three years, according to the Huffington Post. Resistance is also growing against General Motors’ plant closures in the US and Canada and mass layoffs by the largest automakers partly being used extort concessions out of the 140,000 US autoworkers facing contract negotiations later this year.
MEXIFORNIA: The Globalist Democrat
Party’s Vision of America
*
Migrant enclaves already are at the top
of the U.S. lists for bad places to live - 10 of the 50 worst places
in America to live according to this list are in
California, and all of them are famous for their illegal
populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
California—not Mississippi, New
Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States.
According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts
for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash
government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians
is poor. Kerry
Jackson
California’s de facto
status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a
permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance
in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long
been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political
price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers
remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove
California to its golden years. Kerry Jackson
As Breitbart
News reported, if chain migration
is not ended — as President Donald Trump has demanded — the U.S. electorate
will forever be changed, with between seven to eight million new foreign-born
individuals being eligible to vote because of chain migration, and overall, an
additional 15 million new foreign-born voters.
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas
identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of
immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new
immigration-detention facilities in favor of the
old “catch and release” policy for
illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than
compromise on mass amnesty.
No Justice for Taxpaying Americans
By Howie Carr
But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get.
By Howie Carr
But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get.
Illegal
aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted
public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety
for all citizens. Arthur
Schaper
The Federation for American
Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government
services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and
criminal justice system costs. STEVEN
BALDWIN
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan
Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of
all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in
2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that
in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were
illegal aliens.
STARING IN THE FACE of
AMERICA’S UNRAVELING and the ROAD TO REVOLUTION
“It will more likely come on the heels of
economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” -- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
"The
kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in
off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where
the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more
lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE
THORNTON
There can be no resolution to any social problem confronting the
population in the United States and internationally outside of a frontal
assault on the wealth of the financial elite.
The political system is controlled by this
social layer, which uses a portion of its economic plunder to bribe politicians
and government officials, whether Democratic or Republican.
AMNESTY
WOULD DOUBLE U.S. POPULATION, POVERTY, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2010/03/heritage-foundation-amnesty-would-add.html
"Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled Illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER
"Additionally, under current
legal immigration laws, if given amnesty, the illegal alien population would be
allowed to bring an unlimited number of their foreign relatives to the U.S.
This population could boost already high legal immigration levels to an
unprecedented high. An amnesty for illegal aliens would also likely triple the
number of border-crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border." JOHN BINDER
The amnesty plan is a boon to Silicon Valley billionaires, big business elites,
and outsourcing firms, as they would be able to readily import more lower-paid
Indian and Chinese foreign workers to take American jobs that would have
otherwise gone to American citizens.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED
AMERICAN CITIES IN CRISIS
LOS ANGELES,
MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST CITY and MEXICAN MURDER CAPITAL OF AMERICA
"It was instead, downtown Los
Angeles, Calif., although the scene
was recreated in numerous other cities around the country with substantial
Mexican populations. Hordes of Mexican expatriates, many here illegally,
were protesting the very U.S. immigration laws they were violating
with impunity. They found it offensive and a violation of
their rights that the U.S. dared to have immigration laws to begin with."
Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General
We are practicing "La Reconquista" in
California."
Aztlan's goal, known as La reconquista, is to cede and take over the entirety of the southern and western states by any means necessary and impose a Communist militant dictatorship. President Bush's blanket amnesty program goes a long way to helping the extremists achieve their aim.
ICE ‘Raging Bull’ Operation Leads to Arrest
of 267 MS-13 Gang Members in Los Angeles
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
JUDICIAL WATCH
Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion
a Year
In 1960,
according to a USC demographic study, fewer than 10% of the people in the
Los Angeles County area were Latino. By 2008, according to federal
census estimates, almost half were Latino. Roughly the same was true in
the city of Los Angeles.
"It extends to each
issue the Democrats embrace. Every city that has come under Democrat control is
proof positive that instead of raising the standard of living for the
occupants, the city falls to crime, gangs, and drugs. In fact, "America
is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democrat
Party mayors for decades." EILEEN F TOPLANSKY
HERITAGE
FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY
WOULD DOUBLE U.S. POPULATION, POVERTY, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2010/03/heritage-foundation-amnesty-would-add.html
"Additionally, under current legal immigration laws, if given amnesty, the illegal alien population would be allowed to bring an unlimited number of their foreign relatives to the U.S. This population could boost already high legal immigration levels to an unprecedented high. An amnesty for illegal aliens would also likely triple the number of border-crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border." JOHN BINDER
The amnesty plan is a boon to Silicon Valley billionaires, big business elites,
and outsourcing firms, as they would be able to readily import more lower-paid
Indian and Chinese foreign workers to take American jobs that would have
otherwise gone to American citizens.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED
AMERICAN CITIES IN CRISIS
LOS ANGELES,
MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST CITY and MEXICAN MURDER CAPITAL OF AMERICA
*
"It was instead, downtown Los
Angeles, Calif., although the scene
was recreated in numerous other cities around the country with substantial
Mexican populations. Hordes of Mexican expatriates, many here illegally,
were protesting the very U.S. immigration laws they were violating
with impunity. They found it offensive and a violation of
their rights that the U.S. dared to have immigration laws to begin with."
*
Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General We are practicing "La Reconquista" in California."
*
Aztlan's goal, known as La reconquista, is to cede and take over the entirety of the southern and western states by any means necessary and impose a Communist militant dictatorship. President Bush's blanket amnesty program goes a long way to helping the extremists achieve their aim.
*
ICE ‘Raging Bull’ Operation Leads to Arrest
of 267 MS-13 Gang Members in Los Angeles
*
The
Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22
billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare,
education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
*
JUDICIAL WATCH
Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion
a Year
*
In 1960,
according to a USC demographic study, fewer than 10% of the people in the
Los Angeles County area were Latino. By 2008, according to federal
census estimates, almost half were Latino. Roughly the same was true in
the city of Los Angeles.
*
"It extends to each
issue the Democrats embrace. Every city that has come under Democrat control is
proof positive that instead of raising the standard of living for the
occupants, the city falls to crime, gangs, and drugs. In fact, "America
is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democrat
Party mayors for decades." EILEEN F TOPLANSKY
KILLING
AMERICA!
THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THE WASTELAND OF AMERICAN CITIES THEY CONTROL AND SURRENDER
TO LA RAZA
*
A study by Tom Wong of the
University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of
DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals
about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal
aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal
aliens. JOHN BINDER
*
*
“The Democrats had
abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial
group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited
migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
WHY THEY COME:
THE GLOBALIST LA RAZA SUPREMACIST DEMOCRAT PARTY’S
VISION OF AMERICA: 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS!
CALIFORNIA and the RISE OF THE LA RAZA MEXICAN
FASCIST WELFARE STATE
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/they-invading-horde-waving-their.html
Accounting
for these differences reveals that California's
real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national
average of 12.7 percent.
"The
public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and
the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state,
draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering
our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens."
NARCOMEX PRESIDENTS SUCK IN STAGGERING BRIBES FROM LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS
"While
other witnesses at Mr. Guzmán’s trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn
have testified about huge payoffs from traffickers to the Mexican police and
public officials, the testimony about Mr. Peña Nieto was the most egregious
allegation yet. If true, it suggests that corruption by drug cartels had
reached into the highest level of Mexico’s political establishment."
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/01/el-chapo-trial-formermexican-president.html
The former president of
Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, took a $100 million bribe from Joaquín Guzmán
Loera, the infamous crime lord known as El Chapo, according to a witness at Mr.
Guzman’s trial. ALAN FEUER
*
“Mexican drug cartels
are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant
Islamists have the
goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels
are now
accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually
every community
across this country.” JUDICIAL
WATCH
VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY? Then keep voting Democrat!
Former Democrat: The Truth is Democrats Won’t Build Wall
Because They’re Under Influence of Mexican Mafia
PELOSI’S OPEN BORDERS: Cheap
Mexican heroin!
HIGHLY GRAPHIC VIDEO!
LA RAZA DRUG CARTELS CUT OUT
HEART OF LIVING MAN.
THE
LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS HAUL BACK OVER AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS NEARLY $60 BILLION
DOLLARS YEARLY. THEY OWN THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM!
MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION and LOOTING OF AMERICA by INVITATION OF THE GLOBALIST LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY for WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
*
*
"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that
Obrador has previously proposed ranting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.
“America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the
Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."
*
"The man likely to be the
next president of Mexico just called for mass migration to the US" RICK
MORAN
*
“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” RICK MORAN
“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” RICK MORAN
AMERICA'S BILLIONAIRE CLASS WILL FINISH OFF MIDDLE AMERICAN AND STILL DEMAND BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AND MORE TAX CUTS!
OBOMB’S BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY!
JOE BIDEN DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS!
THE SECRET LIFE OF A BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html
CRONY CAPITALISM
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES (THERE'S A REASON WHY GEORGE SOROS RUNS OBAMA'S BID FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE).
Socialism and the case for expropriation
“Socialism is back in fashion,” declares the cover story of this week’s Economist, the British weekly newspaper founded 176 years ago. Despite proclamations of the “end of history” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newspaper roots the “remarkable” growth of popular support for socialism in decades of growing social inequality.
“Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies,” the magazine writes, adding, “inequality in the West has indeed soared over the past 40 years.” The growth of socialist sentiment is accompanied by a global strike movement by the working class, in which the number of people who went on strike in the US last year grew 20-fold compared to 2017.
The same week as the Economist published its warning about growing popular support for socialism, a series of events have made clear the vast and entrenched power of the most predatory sections of the financial oligarchy in the United States, which is intent on intensifying an ongoing and massive upward redistribution of wealth.
About-face by the Fed
Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reiterated the decision by the Fed to stop raising interest rates following a mild market sell-off.
While at the beginning of this year the Fed had planned three interest rate increases, now it envisions none. In fact, “the next policy adjustment is increasingly likely to be a rate cut,” Lindsey Piegza, the chief economist for Stifel Fixed Income, told CNN.
As a result, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared over 1,500 points. At the current pace, it is set to smash through record highs set late last year, within a matter of weeks. Jeff Bezos is $20 billion richer, and Bill Gates is $11 billion richer.
In other words, the Federal Reserve was compelled to scrap plans it was working on for years to build up ammunition to respond to the next financial crisis, after a drop of just ten percent in the stock market.
A green light for monopoly
Within hours of Powell’s testimony, a federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department’s challenge to the merger of AT&T and Time Warner in one of the largest corporate consolidations in US history. The Justice Department, for its part, said it would not challenge the ruling, effectively clearing the way for the merger.
The deal creates a massive vertical monopoly, with the company that controls one third of all mobile phone traffic, and one sixth of broadband internet, also now controlling HBO, Warner Bros. and CNN.
In addition to fueling a wave of anticompetitive behavior, including actions newly legalized with the ending of net neutrality, the new ruling can be expected to jack up consumer prices on not just internet and phone service, but on digital content distribution, with the profits passed on to billionaire investors.
Soaring share buybacks
Share buybacks are already on track to eclipse the record $1 trillion in buyback activity set last year. CNN reported that buybacks by corporate clients of Bank of America Merrill Lynch are up by a staggering 91 percent this year, putting the United States “on pace for another record year,” as corporations divert ever-greater sums away from productive investment and into pumping up their own stock prices.
All these factors have created what economist Gabriel Zucman called a return “to Gilded Age levels” of inequality. Commenting on a research paper he published earlier this year, Zucman recently wrote, “What the data show is that wealth concentration in the United States has returned to the level of 1920. Forty percent of total household wealth belongs to the top 1 percent. About 20 percent belongs to the top 0.1 percent, which is about the same as the bottom 90 percent’s wealth share.”
It is the reality of capitalism that is fueling the growth of the class struggle and a resurgence of interest in socialism. The ruling class is terrified of the implications and is preparing its response.
Already, this backlash has taken the form of the Trump administration’s declaration of a war on socialism, with the fascistic president’s proclamation that “The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere.” Trump is speaking not for himself, but for the most predatory layers of the capitalist system, which see in growing popular support for socialism the specter of social revolution, which it will attempt to crush with all the forces of the state.
On the other hand, various figures and organizations in and around the Democratic Party are attempting to propagate the fiction that measures can be implemented to address social inequality without a frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling class and the capitalist system itself. It is, moreover, to be achieved through the Democratic Party, a right-wing capitalist party that has been instrumental in overseeing the massive redistribution of wealth to the rich.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for a 70 percent marginal tax rate for incomes above $10 million. Like everything the congresswoman proposes, the demand is “aspirational,” meaning whatever would be implemented by the party that totally gutted financial regulation in the 1990s would be a massively watered-down version of the original proposal.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, is calling for “a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion.” This wealth tax would raise annually some $275 billion, or approximately one percent of the nearly $30 trillion the US government, by one estimate, committed to bailing out the US financial system after 2008.
In its latest issue, Jacobin magazine, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, is dedicated to promoting the election campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders. The magazine spells out “A Plan to Win Socialism in America,” which it describes as little more than profit-sharing, via a “share levy on profitable companies to build up union-controlled funds.”
Jacobin fails to make clear how this “socialism” would be substantially different from the current arrangement at US automakers, whose retiree health-care insurance pools are run as slush funds for the corporatist UAW, and which give workers piddling profit-sharing checks once a year after ruthlessly exploiting them.
What none of these self-styled reformers address is how, in the face of a ruthless and reactionary ruling elite, even these extremely modest proposals are to be carried out. If the Federal Reserve cannot raise rates—in defense of the long-term interests of capitalism—and the courts ride roughshod over existing anti-trust laws, it is not difficult to imagine the furious backlash to even the most limited effort to increase taxes on the rich.
No struggle against capitalism is possible without the full expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the source of their power: the exploitation of human beings through capitalist property relations.
What is necessary are not “aspirational” proposals to raise taxes by a few percentage points—measures that will never be achieved under capitalism—but the expropriation of the ruling class. All large corporations and banks must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. The stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic, and therefore political, life, must be broken.
The social force that will carry out this sweeping transformation of society, the international working class, has already entered into struggle. It must take up the program of socialism, that is, the reorganization of society in the interest not of the top 1 percent, not of their envious hangers-on in the top ten percent, but of the bottom 90 percent of society: the great mass of the working class that creates all wealth.
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