US workers too conservative?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ok, after reading the "white trash" thread, does anyone who is trying to characterize the US working class on this forum have any ideas about the US working class that don't come from TV shows and stand up comics?

First, people often called "White Trash" are sometimes people from the Midwest that was historically the most militant union workers in the US. Southern "white trash" helped create the US "Populist party" that fought for tenant farmers against large landowners and had a strong anti-racist wing. Places like Oklahoma had a strong socialist and communist tradition; one of the most famous and popular US communists was Woody Guthrie - who would be considered "white trash".

So - why are the "red states" not "Red"? One thing is the legacy of racism that has split the southern working class between black and white. This racism is not inherent to white southerners - otherwise why would southern state governments have to put in segregation and jim crow laws? The CIO (powerful industrial US union) and Communist party tried to unionize in the south after WWII, but their connection to the Democratic party became a barrier to this because in order to really unionize the south, they would have had to taken-on and fight the white supremacist establishment - oops, that was the Democratic party that the CP and CIO were also trying to cozy up to.

The situation now? I think that the backwards ideas in the US working class has everything to do with both McCarthyism and the failure of radical groups to rebuild a real grassroots connection to the working class - such as existed before WWII with the early CP and IWW and even the Socialist Party. The New Left wrote off the working class - like some comrades here seem to do - and so the only groups appealing to big sections of workers in the US are religious ones offering a death-cult version of a better life and some kind of social justice through the rapture.

I think rebuilding a fighting and rank-and-file union movement and grassroots radical movements will offer people a much better alternative than hoping that one day god will swipe you up to heaven and punish the greedy rich. The trick is rebuilding that connection - calling people "white trash" or blaming immigrants or hip-hop for social problems are anti-productive to this. The US working class has shown time and time again that under radical conditions, workers have united across racial lines and left the churches to fight for real justice in the here and now. But since the US CP, there has been no organized force to offer something different from the churches or liberal groups and so without such organizations, it should be no surprise that people turn to god.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I guess that was too wordy. Sorry.

[FireFry]

This would go better on the Worker Action board.

[Faux Real]

I think the push towards reaction was due to the increase in living conditions for the average American white after WWII thanks to the war economy and the New Deal.

They had it nicely in the deformed social-democratic welfare system (whites being the primary recipitants) until the Reagan years. With the era of neoliberalism and heavy anti-unionism, domestic workers of all stripes saw the support net they had dissolve, and what we've seen since then is the "blame the other" or "divide and conquer" charade going on. Whites feel their jobs are being taken by immigrants, dislike for African-Americans on account of being portrayed as leeching off of welfare, and that an arab terrorists is on the verge of arriving at their doorstep.

[RedDawn]

Damn right. Thank you both very much for your contributions. It makes me so angry when people blame religion or stupidity, I have to resist strangling those damn liberals...

But it wasn't just in the first half of this century where that kind of militancy existed. Here are some excerpts from my last branch meeting on the Russian Revolution:

In any modern revolution, the same basic conditions exist, in fact, in our own American Revolution, conditions were similar to those of the Russian Revolution:

The commonalities of these two Revolutions flys in the face of capitalist historians, who have tried to hide the history of workers power during the American revolution.

According to Harvard academic Isaac Kramnick:

“Moderate merchant leaders of protest were, in fact, appalled and frightened by [Samuel Adams] tactics. For many well-to-do, Sam Adams and his mob of mechanics and debtors had become a veritable monster. … The mob took on a life of its own and sought its own interests which were threatening to the substantial wealth and power of the ruling elite in the colonies. Paralllel to the conflict with England, then, American were themselves divided in social conflict. All the talk of justice, equity and natural rights directed against the English was easily directed against the domestic tyranny imposed on backwoods farmers and urban artisans by the powerful merchants and large landowners who dominated colonial life.”

What separates the American Revolution from the Russian Revolution is not the objective conditions. Indeed colonial American society was owned by merchants and landowners with ties to the British crown just as Russia was owned by elite who were in the backpocket of the Czar.
The difference of the two revolutions is one of bitter experience. Unfortunately, Sam Adams and his motley crew had not had the experience that Marx and Engels had had of the Paris Commune. Nor had they endured the Russian Revolution of 1905. Lenin and Trotsky were ardent students of the rules of revolution and were able to draw the necessary conclusions



Obviously my analysis was overly-broad. But I was trying to inspire my branch. :D

I went on after the discussion about the Russian Revolution to talk about the 1919 Seattle General Strike:




In the fall of 1919, Seattle longshoremen refused to load arms to ships destined for a Russian White Army anti-Bolshevik general, and attacked strikebreakers who attempted to load the ships

This direct action became known as the Seattle General Strike of 1919
Workers struck for 5 days and organized the collection of wet trash, milk distribution stations, and cafeterias.

Strikers paid 25 cents per meal, and the general public paid 35 cents. Beef stew, spaghetti, bread, and coffee were free.

Firemen remained on duty. World War I Veterans organized an unarmed police force. Arrests by the capitalist police were halved as there was virtually no crime.

Seattle's mayor Ole Hanson said:

"The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact . . . The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere . . . True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community . . . That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt -- no matter how achieved."

[Andres Marcos]

You can be sure that when the economy is in ruin that workers will become radicalized. I agree with comrade in arms the situation of 'blaming another' and scapegoating is the reason for much of the woes in the American nation, and this fits directly into the bourgeoisie's plans to harm the working-class. They of course perpetuates this race war mentality, ever wonder why the hell all the damn media asks ''Is America ready for a black president?''. That infuriates me.