Mike Ermler has been a long-time activist in Detroit and he has decades of experience in labor, anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing. He has been a member of several organizations and networks over the years. New Beginnings interviewed Mike in the summer of 2006, covering a range of topics about workplace and community organizing from the perspective of working class self-organization. (more…)

A blinking sign at the train station reads, “Next Southbound Train to Airport in 23 minutes.” An advertisement inside a bus displays a photo of a smiling white family headed to a Braves game, announcing “We’re Building a Better Way” over the heads of the majority-black patrons riding to work, school, or home. (more…)

In 2002 New York University graduate teaching assistants became the first to win union representation at a private university after a long campaign. The university administration’s decision to recognize the union followed typical attempts by employers to defeat such struggles. (more…)

Labor struggle in the American South has a long and proud tradition. From the historic textile mill strikes of 1934, to streetcar workers in 1949 Atlanta, to sanitation workers in Memphis and St. Petersburg, FL in 1968, working folks have organized to control social relations and conditions of labor in their workplaces, and to regain a semblance of their own humanity in the face of attacks from company bosses, police, and government officials. And this was all initiated with little or no formal union infrastructure or support. Yet Southern labor history is portrayed as backward or underdeveloped in relation to the North, with its long tradition of unions in large industrial cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. Instead we see that Southern folks, blacks and whites alike, have struggled for years against bosses running company towns with an iron fist, against Jim Crow segregation pervading workplaces, neighborhoods and cities, and against all authoritarian forces viewing organized labor struggles as the coming terror. These past battles give context to labor movements of the more recent past and present, showing how far society has come, and how far it still must go. When examining the gains and limitations of black liberation and workers’ self-management from the Civil Rights and Black Power era, the 1977 sanitation workers strike in Atlanta is very telling.

Workplace organizing among sanitation workers, by 1977, had a proud history. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in places like New York City, Cleveland, Atlanta, St. Petersburg, and most famously Memphis in 1968, sanitation workers, as individuals and as organized groups, battled city bosses against slave wages, unsafe working conditions, and for the right to form unions and workplace associations on their own terms. These struggles went hand-in-hand with the black liberation movement, for defeating white supremacy was a challenge met in neighborhoods and in workplaces.

Memphis in 1968 best demonstrated this connection, where wildcat strikes by an all-black workforce against overtly racist city officials became a larger battle for black liberation and community self-management. This struggle eventually saw the involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights establishment figures. When Dr. King was assassinated the day after giving a stirring speech to assembled sanitation workers, victory for striking workers followed shortly as much of American liberal official society sympathized with the strikers against the racist city officials. The city recognized the strikers’ call for union recognition, nationally backed by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and conceded to demands for better pay and improved workplace conditions. This scene repeated itself in St. Petersburg and Cleveland later that year. This also occurred in Atlanta in 1970, where civil rights figures, some of whom were newly elected city officials, supported striking sanitation workers threatened with termination by Atlanta’s white mayor Sam Massell.

Fast-forward seven years to the Atlanta of 1977 and something strange, one may think, happened. The script was flipped. The same black officials who supported sanitation workers against firings by a white mayor decided to replace striking city sanitation employees with scabs. This occurred with the full support of many old guard civil rights leaders and organizations, allied with business and civic groups associated with Atlanta’s white power structure during Jim Crow segregation. What explains the apparent about-face by black officials?

The Atlanta strike of 1977 shows the coming of age of a coalition of black and white city officials, along with civic and business elites, under the leadership of the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Just seven years earlier Jackson publicly sided with sanitation workers against a white mayor seeking to fire them. Jackson and some members of the civil rights establishment, in positions of local government by the mid-1970s, did not hesitate to marshal the forces of official society against the self-activity of black workers. They allied with white business and civic elites, the same people that just a few years earlier openly supported white supremacist segregation, all in the name of smashing the sanitation workers’ strike by any means necessary.

This showed the open class hatred of black and white elites against working people, a prominent feature of communities in Atlanta for generations. This played out most clearly in times of crisis like the infamous race riot of 1906. Prominent blacks apologized to white officials for the “vices” of working folks in their community who, whites claimed, helped create a climate leading to outright racial violence. These black elites pledged to work with whites to police their community. This occurred, even though many of these same black elites had to defend themselves against white supremacist violence. Yet they still had the nerve to scold black working folks who organized community self-defense against the attacks, calling them lazy, violent, and deficient in virtue.[1]

The coalition of black and white elites 71 years later helped foment class antagonisms that ultimately bubbled to the surface. The difference from 1906 was blacks had a seat at the table of Atlanta city government. The demise of the 1977 sanitation strike appeared to be a blow to the black liberation struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, showing that its mainly reformist victories actually signaled a defeat of the broader movement towards anti-racism and self-government. It signaled to working folks, black and white alike, that the promised land Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of while addressing sanitation workers in Memphis, just a day before he was assassinated, appeared open only to business, political, and religious elites.

Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, 1968

To fully understand conditions leading to the 1977 Atlanta strike, one must first examine perhaps the most famous sanitation workers strike in twentieth century U.S. history. Memphis in 1968 was ruled by social and economic segregation, even after the passage of federal civil rights legislation. These laws, won through years of popular protest, were barely worth the price of the paper they were written on in the eyes of most white civic and business leaders in Memphis.

This was evident in the treatment of city sanitation workers. This job, socially open only to black men, paid such menial wages that most workers lived below the poverty line. After numerous attempts to create a union to counter the city bosses and improve social and material workplace conditions, sanitation workers finally struck in February 1968. What ultimately sparked the strike was the death of two men crushed by faulty garbage trucks. With no formal union support through the national AFSCME leadership, who initially told folks to stay on the job, men organized a complete work stoppage, asking for significant improvements in pay, work conditions, and the right to unionize.[2] Led by mayor Henry Loeb, Memphis city government took a firm line against these individuals that would dare challenge the social, economic, and racial divisions prevailing in Memphis. But it would be white supremacists like Loeb and his ilk who would be left rotting on the trash heap of history by the strike’s end in April 1968.

Unionization efforts began a few years earlier, led within the ranks by T.O. Jones. For his efforts, Jones was fired, but he continued working towards unionization as an organizer for AFSCME Local 1733. By the cold winter of 1968, sanitation workers were tired of workplace conditions, faulty equipment, and pay ranging from $1.65 to $1.85 an hour for laborers and $2.10 for truck drivers.[3] The attitude of city officials was demeaning, telling employees that going on strike was unnecessary and illegal. Besides, sanitation workers were lectured, the benevolent white city fathers took care of them anyway. However, a critical mass of sanitation workers, with strong support from the community, had become sick and tired of the city’s plantation mentality that saw them as nothing more than misbehaving children. Striking workers countered by carrying signs proclaiming “I Am a Man.” It was not simply small economic gains and improved workplace conditions motivating Memphis sanitation men to organize collective labor action. Rather it was a call to change the racist social and economic conditions black folks endured in Memphis. These conditions had fundamentally not changed since the time of slavery. The new society was breaking out of the old order where white supremacy had ruled virtually unchecked.

It wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans. This natural disaster just completed for the ruling class what they started decades ago. The process began long before the flood and it will threaten many other American cities if working people do not begin to fight back.

Through the centuries, New Orleans was built up into a thriving social edifice. Workers came from up and down the Mississippi and were exploited on the docks and assembly lines. Nevertheless, their workplaces, their neighborhoods, their relationships, and their homes were the breeding grounds of a rich culture that would define the American ethos. When industry was automated in New Orleans, like in other industrial centers many of the workers who had built up the city were left stranded and shunted aside because they were no longer necessary to produce corporate profits. Many clung to their homes tenaciously and refused to leave as much of their social infrastructure was obliterated.

Hurricane Katrina accelerated this process. Official society decided long ago that it no longer needed large numbers of Black workers in the city, so when the Hurricane hit they seized upon it as an opportunity to cleanse the city of what they saw to be its “surplus population.” That’s why the struggle that Katrina refugees are waging to rebuild their city is emblematic of the kind of struggle that many workers will find ourselves waging in crumbling industrial cities from Newark to Detroit to Gary.

The Rise and Fall of Chocolate City

Although their labor on Southern plantations had produced the wealth necessary to power American capitalism, with a few exceptions Black folks were generally excluded from the industrial expansion that swept America after the Civil War. Exploited for generations as sharecroppers and low-wage laborers, Black workers eventually fought and struggled their way into jobs in major American industries. Many migrated to industrial cities such as Detroit and Chicago. In New Orleans they sought work in factories, oil refineries, and the port which was a crucial international shipping point servicing growing industries up and down the Midwest.

This growing Black working class seized the opportunity presented by official society’s need to staff labor-intensive assembly line production. They mobilized on and off the job to demand equal pay and access to core production jobs. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements represented hundreds of thousands of Black workers who began to assert their desire to control these workplaces that had been built upon their backs and their neighborhoods. In many industrial cities such as New Orleans they shook the racist establishment to the core.

Amidst the possibilities of more urban uprisings and concerns that the international image of American Democracy and the credibility of official society were collapsing, moves were made to quickly co-opt a sector of this movement and to consolidate a new set of elites who could govern an increasingly restless Black population. In majority Black cities such as New Orleans, a new Black middle class political machine of ward bosses, social workers, and administrators of local patronage networks was established. While the old regime of white terror continued to exist just miles outside of the city (and consolidated itself further in suburbs built by white flight), in places like New Orleans, Atlanta, and Detroit, Black mayors and police chiefs eventually came to power.

These were no Uncle Toms. They often spoke a language of Black pride and presented themselves as dripping in cultural authenticity. Their police forces continued to crack the heads of Black youth in the streets and they continued to smash strikes initiated by Black workers. However, unlike the white man of a fading era, they were able to use their body politics to diffuse criticism of the new regime. For some, they were Black Power realized. For others, they were a betrayal of what the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was trying to achieve. People failed to be vigilant about maintaining their autonomous political power within the cross-class alliances of the civil rights and Black Power era.

Katrina represents a fundamental crisis for this middle class establishment. Many have asked why this “Rainbow Coalition” of Black city managers has been unable to stem the tide of social disintegration, educational chaos, poverty, crime, and pollution that has wrecked inner city areas in the past several decades. Why was it that tens of thousands of Black residents of New Orleans were living without the social infrastructure necessary to support a basic dignified life, long before Katrina hit? Is this because Black leaders like mayor Ray Nagin are simply tokens whose hands have been tied by a white power structure that controls them from behind the scenes at the state and federal level? Is it because the working poor are especially out of control and jeopardizing the civilizing mission of the talented tenth? Is it because of drugs, or bad morals, or single mothers, or because a vengeful God is angry?

In the wake of Katrina, all of these suggestions were put forward to explain the situation in New Orleans. All of them fail to explain what happened there and what is happening in our cities across the country. In reality, the Rainbow Coalition of Black mayors and police chiefs came to power in the 1970s just as the ruling class began to destroy the industrial base located in the cities leading to economic collapse.

The reasons for this are complex, but it can be said they have their roots in the failures of the American labor movement in the 20th century. The CIO wave of organizing opened up possibilities for working people to gain economic and political control of society. However, these were compromised and eventually beaten back by a new union bureaucracy that formed a partnership with capital and the state. With working people disarmed, it prepared the way for capital disinvestment.

At the same time the CIO movement promised to overcome the systematic racism that blocked Black workers from unions and smash a white unionism that made peace with Jim Crow. Battles in the south were particularly fierce, but in the north equally so. Through the 1940s to the 1970s, from A. Philip Randolph’s march on Washington to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, civil rights and Black Power took place in the community and at the same time in the workplace. The failure to maintain leverage over the bureaucracy and to successfully destroy barriers to equal treatment people of color working people fatally comprised these movements.

With automation, speedup and eventual disinvestment and de-industrialization a result, a large unemployed population began to emerge in cities. With automation, employers could produce the same amount with only a fraction of the workers, and from the ruling class’s point of view large segments of the Black urban population were no longer needed.

Because the rulers of the city realized that they could not simply remove all their Black former employees (that would lead to massive resistance here and abroad), they instead tried to contain them. Because these folks were no longer needed as workers they would not need to be educated, housed, or properly kept alive like barnyard animals in order to be exploited for maximum profit. As a result, the new Black middle class became the prison wardens and state administrators of a large sector of Black youth and men shunted from dysfunctional schools to prisons to an early death while the city’s social infrastructure began to collapse.

Many unemployed and underemployed youth tried to fight back. From Detroit to Newark, the cry rang out: “The City is the Black Man’s Land.” Young people mobilized in Black Power rebellions and organizations like the Black Panthers. But these were soon crushed by the police or politically degenerated. The Rainbow Coalition de-mobilized any trends in this direction—much like the CIO movement—by diverting the rebellious energy of the 1960s into support for electoral candidates and ward bosses who were supposed to be able to direct patronage, money, and power into the communities.

They did a little bit of this, but mostly they presided over a regime of diminishing returns. New Orleans witnessed a slow undermining of any basis for a city in the first place. Rising unemployment brought rising crime, and some of this was organized into gang activity. Sometimes the ward bosses of the Rainbow Coalition had to collaborate with these elements in order to maintain control, and social life became increasingly difficult. All the while they pulled cheap gimmicks like naming public schools after historically important Black people to raise the kids’ self-esteem. They tried to keep people’s eyes off the fact that the schools themselves would be shut down or gutted, one by one, with the compliance of so-called Black leadership. Today, while the effects of Katrina continue, they have conferences about banning the n-word, attacking hip hop, and want to pass laws to have people pull their pants up.

Operation Ghost Town: The Occupation of New Orleans

Under normal conditions, all that official society would dare to do to the people of New Orleans would be to kill people softly. However, Katrina gave them another option. It presented a major pretext to get rid of large numbers of the Black working class that were no longer needed by the capitalists. People were shipped off to different cities like Atlanta and Houston, prevented from entering the towns around New Orleans by Jim Crow housing laws. The media—nothing but the propaganda arm of official society—began the usual racist rants by portraying the thousands of people who took things from stores to survive as looters. An untold number of dollars were spent on private mercenary forces to guard rich people.

Many journalists have documented the vast degree of “negligence” during and after the storm on the part of the Federal, state, and local governments. Suffice it to say here that certain facts stand out: the levees were well over a foot too short and the federal government failed to alert the local authorities that they had breached in time for them to launch an evacuation. The New Orleans emergency plan failed to account for the thousands of New Orleanians without cars. The facts indicate one of two possible situations. Either the state is failing miserably to keep its citizens safe (the very task it stakes its right to govern upon) or, this “negligence” is at least in part a deliberate carelessness, a way to accelerate the process of disintegration that had begun long before the storm.

It was terrifying yet revealing to watch how quickly the Rainbow Coalition collapsed during the storm. Refugees found themselves face to face with the ugly ghost of the Old South reborn in the white vigilantes in coalition with local police who fired at them as they tried to flee across bridges into the suburbs. After the federal government waited long enough for the city to be destroyed, they sent in National Guardsmen with shoot-to-kill orders and built the kind of massive military occupation usually reserved for the streets of Baghdad or Gaza City. The Rainbow Coalition did a few media stunts: Ray Nagin cried on TV and Kanye West whined that, “George Bush hates Black people.” But the reality of the matter is that the Black middle class was able to do absolutely nothing to stop the wholesale cleansing of New Orleans’ historic Black communities.

Bringing the Middle Class Economy to New Orleans

The occupation did not end when the floodwaters subsided. The military and the police kept many from returning to their city and their homes to rebuild. Public housing that wasn’t even damaged by the flood was boarded up, its residents kept out at gunpoint. This housing had the misfortune to be located on prime real estate next to the tourist districts that were somehow miraculously rebuilt in time for Mardi Gras.

The state government of Louisiana eventually decided to protect and authorize landlords to throw out all the belongings of refugees who could not return, while opportunists and vultures gouged rent prices and maintained an artificial housing shortage.

While pundits across the country attacked Katrina refugees for being lazy leeches on Federal aid, Black workers were actively discouraged and prevented in many ways from returning to work in New Orleans. With housing still scarce in the city, many were told they would lose their FEMA trailers if they got jobs in the city.

George Bush suspended many labor laws including the requirement that workers in the construction trades be documented. On the surface this was presented as an attempt to rebuild the city as rapidly as possible. In fact it was just the opposite. Predatory contractors hired thousands of undocumented Latino migrant workers onto construction sites in the city at drastically low wages. In many cases they were essentially “rent-a-slaves” kept in poor housing and then refused pay when they finished their jobs.

This is not at all a matter of Latinos “stealing” Black folks’ jobs. In reality official society doesn’t give a damn about Latino or Black people and has no intention of having permanent jobs in New Orleans in the first place. That’s why they are employing a transient population they can more easily expel when they are finished rebuilding the few things they actually want rebuilt, namely the port, military bases, universities, white collar businesses, oil pipelines, and casinos. The service sector and highly automated heavy industries that must remain require few permanent long-term workers and therefore official society is only interested in rebuilding a tiny residential city. The number of workers they need in reconstruction work is larger than the number of residences they will actually be constructing so therefore these jobs cannot be given to anyone they would ever consider allowing to stay in the city.

This is also evident in the fact that the school administration fired thousands of public school employees, in a direct assault on one of the few remaining public sector unions, the teachers’ union. The administration is now replacing the teachers with corporate run charter schools with overcrowded classrooms. It appears the government believes that such a separate and unequal education will be good enough for youth to learn how to do the only thing they will be doing in the Big Easy: cleaning semen and stale beer off of French Quarter floors.

If New Orleans really were to be rebuilt into a thriving, human city populated by citizens rather than ghosts there would be more than enough jobs available in rebuilding social infrastructure. This work could provide a good wage not only for every returning New Orleanian refugee but many immigrants as well.

However, the ruling class wants a city of ghosts and a nation of refugees. Oprah chafed when those displaced by Katrina were called “refugees” crying, “but they’re Americans!” Nevertheless, the future the rulers have in mind for New Orleans is a Third World one. Like many Caribbean nations, it will be shackled to the poor man’s game of resource extraction and tourism, a supply city and pleasure island for the national and global elite who live elsewhere.

In reality, this is a future faced by many American cities. Katrina simply accelerated a process of disintegration of social infrastructure that is evident in the bullet ridden, boarded up homes of Detroit and the Supermax prisons that have replaced the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. And this is not simply a future faced by Black folks; in various ways it is hitting white workers across the rust belt as well, with violence and drugs spreading in the shadows of abandoned smokestacks.

Moreover, this process is accelerating with rapid ecological degeneration. Tour boat operators in the Louisiana swamp may callously remark, “that’s what people get for living below sea level, it’s just one more example of human arrogance and Katrina was nature’s way of teaching us a lesson.” The reality is when New Orleans was built it was protected by miles of precious swamp ecosystems which have since been destroyed by oil pipelines, salt water shipping canals, and other infrastructure that was designed to benefit people living elsewhere. This destruction of the Gulf Coast is only accelerating with global warming and rising sea levels. New Orleans, like many cities, is not suffering from a vague “human arrogance” but rather from the very specific arrogance of elite economic planners who simply do not care if their vision of “development” dumps millions of human beings and nature into a toxic cesspool.

Emerging from History’s Floodwaters

So, given this bleak scenario, what is to be done? A provisional answer to this question is offered by the heroic efforts of everyday New Orleanians who have struggled to rebuild their city against the wishes of the landlords, the bosses, the police, and the politicians. While the feds were stalling and then shooting, a rescue operation proceeded as everyday people appropriated boats, water, food, and clothing, taking from stores where necessary. Many helped out their neighbors rescuing children and old folks. Later on, unemployed workers used their skills to begin rebuilding with no support from the state. Community members have forcefully occupied public housing, renovating and reopening their old homes without the state’s approval. Others opened up a medical clinic and began helping folks under the shadow of military helicopters. People are struggling to rebuild houses and neighborhoods that the government would like to leave as permanent piles of rubble.

These efforts are inspiring yet they face major obstacles. The levees in New Orleans are still too small. The flood-management pumping systems are likely to malfunction in any future Katrina-sized storm. Federal and private aid have been delayed by bureaucratic red tape while entire neighborhoods continue to decay. Ultimately the residents of New Orleans have a right to the material resources and infrastructure that the state is denying them. They helped produce the wealth of America and they have a right to seize it and use it to rebuild the kind of city they want to live in. This alone will secure Katrina refugees their right to return to their homes.

But the whole history of American industrial cities from the early 20th century to today indicates that the government will not hand over these resources unless a massive grassroots movement mobilizes to do it with or without them. Given the sheer power of the forces aligned against the displaced citizens of New Orleans, such a movement would have to be national (and international) in order to succeed.

Fortunately, we are not without historical precedents that shine a light on the way forward. Where communities are now facing an outright attack on education, we might learn something from the community-controlled free schools built by Black folks in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. With the ever-present armed attacks and police brutality against New Orleanians after Katrina, we might take heed of the 1950s and 60s examples of the Deacons for Defense or Robert F. Williams of the Monroe, NC, chapter of the NAACP. These were two organizations that took seriously the question of armed self-defense in the face of white supremacist violence from both white vigilantes and the official police force. In addition, we cannot afford to forget that those industries that provide the greatest profits to capitalism are also its weakest points. The 1934 dockworkers’ strike on the West Coast brought major gains for laborers and remind us today of the strategic importance for organizing of the ports and other points of production that do remain in New Orleans’ own backyard. These steps, and many more, are yet to be taken.

Meanwhile, workers elsewhere should not simply act out of charity. Our own future is wrapped up in this struggle, and our solidarity with New Orleans is a test of our ability to conceive a world besides the one in which our children will be shunted from one prison-school to another as we become permanent economic refugees. In the aftermath of the storm, many Black folks saw Katrina as a sign that the existence of our communities in America cannot be taken for granted. But if that’s the case, why have Black workers, and workers of all races, in other cities not initiated solidarity strikes to force the federal government to stop blocking the reconstruction efforts? Why have the unemployed not rushed the streets, asserting that an injury to one city is an injury to all? Ultimately, the American working class must see that unless we act now our own future is reflected in the floodwaters of New Orleans.

“In a world which says that ordinary people can’t do anything, they attempted to do everything.” -Martin Glaberman, Punching Out and Other Writings

Stan Weir was a lifelong laborer and labor activist. During 50 years on the job, he worked as a merchant marine, an autoworker, a teamster, and a longshoreman. Throughout his life he remained dedicated to the causes of working people, and never lost faith in their unique power and ability to bring about a better world through their collective efforts. (more…)

Last year one of the most remarkable protests in American history took place. Up to a million or more people marched in the streets, effectively staging walkouts from work and school. These marches shocked official society and exposed to many the not-so-hidden conflicts underneath the surface of the supposed booming American economy and civil peace.

Organized by immigrant workers, mainly from Mexico and Central America, but also from parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, the walkouts were achieved through tremendous grassroots organizing. They expressed a critical mass of accumulated frustration with increased attacks on immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past few years by the federal and local state governments, employers and a resurgent racist populist movement.

The immediate spark for the May protests was an immigration bill proposed by Congressman Sensenbrenner—the same official who introduced the Patriot Act and voted against aid to Katrina refugees—that was passed in the House of Representatives in late 2006. The bill expanded police powers aimed at immigrants and criminalized any aid or defense of immigrants by citizens or residents. Protestors correctly saw that the bill represented the growth of rightwing racist populist sentiment mirrored at the local level by daily attacks and harassment of immigrants or anyone who may “look like” an immigrant.

This year successive bills have rolled around Congress. The most recent bill—better known as the McCain-Kennedy bill—has been defeated, representing a failure by the political elites to reach a consensus about how to deal with the growing crisis of immigration.

The bill was status quo legislation that would have legalized the underground workforce by creating indentured labor, euphemistically called a “guest worker program.” It would have closed the gates to family reunification—ensuring cheap and temporary labor—and justified this by opening the door to white collar immigrant labor only.

It mandated the militarization of the border with Mexico and would continue a growing number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) raids. Finally, the bill mandated that undocumented immigrants must pay a $5,000 fine, the head of household must leave the country and apply for reentry and then they will be eligible to apply for residency (another several thousand dollar process). This makes residency extremely difficult and in many cases impossible.

The failure of the elites to reach a consensus has reinforced the growing initiative among racist populist forces and local state officials. I.C.E. raids will continue at their increasing pace, deporting tens of thousands each year. At the same time immigrants and solidarity groups have mobilized, arriving on the national stage last year. Yet these efforts have been seriously weakened for the moment due to the domination of national organizing by the middle class Latino and Chicano organizations, who have harnessed it to the Democratic Party. Some big union bosses have joined them, with the SEIU, one of the most powerful unions of immigrant workers, supporting the Congressional bill.

The protests and walkouts last year were not only victorious in bringing the immigrant fight out of the shadows and setting the agenda. The marches exposed the deep economic and political problems gripping American society. The inability of the rulers to solve the “problem” of immigration, and the failure of the middle class Latino and union bureaucrats to achieve their parliamentary victory, prefigures the crisis of official society as a whole to solve the endemic problems unleashed by neo-liberalism. Yet it has also exposed the failure of American working people as a whole to understand how the struggle of immigrants is central to our own fate. The struggle against racism and imperialism is inseparable from the fight to overturn the thirty year offensive against working people by the state and corporate bosses.

Anatomy of a Crisis

Working people face increasingly difficult circumstances in falling wages, slashed social infrastructure and ideologically militant and hostile management. Decent paying jobs have slowly disappeared for three decades. This has hit rural and especially urban areas hard. Many working citizens blame immigrants and workers in other countries for supposedly stealing American jobs or driving down wages. Others say the American ruling class is no longer loyal to working people (where supposedly they once were) and should be brought back into line. Everyone has a sense that the domestic situation is closely related to wider global developments.

Official society tells us that the freedom of American capital is good for American and foreign workers. In reality, the freedom of the ruling class and its capital mobilizes and controls labor through surplus and coercion on a global scale to impoverish American and non-American workers alike. What becomes clear is that working folks domestically and internationally must aspire to solidarity or else everyone loses.

The capitalists along with national elites everywhere have organized production and markets on a global scale. This has been accomplished by smashing working class and farmer political organization abroad. They build factories and export jobs to other countries to exploit working people abroad to drive down wages and benefits here in the U.S. With the help of local ruling classes they kill union organizers and terrorize the population who are organizing against their oppression. When they find easier exploitation the capitalists leave and set up shop somewhere else. They flood other countries with cheap goods, making millions jobless or landless, sending people to look for work in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Examples are endless. American agri-business corn floods Mexico, forcing millions of farmers to lose their livelihood. Many come here to find work. A Dominican teacher is laid off because of Washington-mandated disinvestment in education in her country. That teacher moves to New York and works as a janitor to avoid starving in the street. A textile factory worker in the same country is forced to work at a quarter or less of the wage here and for twice as many hours. The teacher, textile worker or former Mexican farmer may organize against their situation at home but to do so means they will be invaded or terrorized by Washington elites and their local allies. And this story repeats itself in every region of the world today.

This international arrangement is closely tied to our domestic situation. It is imperialism that creates cheap consumer goods, floats vast budget deficits and national debt for Americans alone on working people’s dime in other countries, and imposes access to cheap natural resources. U.S. empire gives the illusion that working people here are living an “exceptional” life. In reality, this arrangement is not only at the expense of workers abroad, but also at the expense of American workers. White supremacy and imperialism enrich the ruling class and prepare the ground for the kind of decades-long cut backs and impoverishment of working class political power that is only now beginning to really dawn on larger numbers of people in this country. The employer and politician attack internationally on working people in other countries has strengthened their hand to attack working people’s political power domestically. In fact, it has moved along a parallel course.

The illusion that an alliance with American rulers will give a special deal to American workers is not only morally wrong, it is an impossibility. For what has been the result of such an unsavory alliance? Unemployment, underemployment, deindustrialization, anti-union laws, massive social disinvestment with slashed budgets for everyday people, big tax breaks for the rulers and a parasitic and bloated manager middle class, raiding of pension funds, incarceration and police terror.

The success of imperialism in smashing workers and farmers’ democratic movements abroad has helped the rulers to structure domestic competition among working people for increasingly scarce, decent-paying jobs and social investment. In the U.S. this is reflected in ethnic competition through an ever shifting hierarchy of ethnicities under white supremacy. For this reason the American ruling class has turned on and off immigration when it suited its purposes. With the immigrant struggle we see a direct challenge to decades of employer and politician offensive. The failure to join, support and extend immigrant struggles to other fronts will mean another decade of victories for them.

Racist collaborators and opportunists claim that the people on the bottom of the working class are to blame for the economic and political crises created by their ruling class masters. By trying to divide working people they hope to lead folks only to more serfdom. The rulers show no loyalty to working people in the U.S. or around the world. They claim they are good citizens, but they are loyal only to their own profits whose interests cross all national boundaries. Why can’t ordinary people’s interests and solidarity cross those same boundaries? History has shown they must.

Repeating History

There have been two camps warning the capitalists and official society about the direction of this situation. Each seeks to solve it by devising new ways to manage white supremacy, imperialism and labor. From the Right we have seen an upsurge in racist populism. From the Left we see, seriously weakened but waiting in the wings, the old coalition of liberals and union bosses. On very different grounds, each camp seeks a closed shop partnership with the rulers. Both of these positions have a long history in the U.S. and have proven to be a disaster.

Racist forces say they want to rally working folks to the “threat” of immigration. They say this is the reason why wages are low and social services are bankrupt, using classic racist images of “crime” and “Third World invasion” in a bid for leadership of what they think is the white worker. Congressmen like Tom Tancredo see a lot of brown and black people in Miami, and say it looks like a “Third World country” and the fate of white America is clear if they don’t do something about it. Less overtly racist politicians and demagogues may not advocate white racist militias like Tancredo as the final solution to cleansing America, but they all interpret the forces unleashed by neo-liberalism, that the ruling class is increasingly unable to control, as the overturning of the racial order.

Their goal is to restore this order. In suburban and rural towns across the country we have seen new immigrants (mainly from Mexico and Central America, but also elsewhere) arrive and move into predominately white, or in some cases black, working class neighborhoods, while working in food processing plants, agriculture, restaurants, small factories, and as day laborers. Immigrants have worked heavily in the construction boom. Working class neighborhoods deteriorate (along with working class jobs) next to gentrification for the Mcmansion new neighborhoods of the middle class—many of whom sponsor the attempted pogroms and who have benefited from the new economy at the expense of all working people.

In response there has been a new upsurge in white racialist sentiment. There is organizing against brown people moving into the neighborhood. We hear complaints about who is using a park, flying the Mexican flag, or the existence of Spanish-language newspapers or music. Some bitterly decry the supposed lack of learning English, an inability to “assimilate,” or an upsurge in crime. All of this shows the racialist roots of the populist upsurge. Why should there be an exception for immigrants of color since all immigrants historically have necessarily created transitional communities between the old country and the new. Further, how ironic the claims of lacking assimilation into American culture by immigrants, as if these racists somehow are the true Americans and do not have a “strange” culture that is in fact in the minority even among white ethnics. But it is this sentiment that allows Italians, Jews, Polish or Irish to complain about Mexicans as somehow a foreign fifth column in the U.S., when Mexicans have been living here a lot longer than them.

Today the white supremacists are on the offensive. They have been mobilizing at the local level and networking nationally to challenge local and state laws, threatening to impeach legislators and judges, and forming rudimentary militias. These street forces are increasingly working in alliance with local police, to harass “immigrant-looking people,” to set up check points to check for driver’s licenses, to break up day laborer sites and raid construction sites. In places like Hazelton, PA, Farmers Branch, TX, and Long Island, NY suburbs we see things like the passing of housing discrimination laws much like those enacted in Louisiana towns against black people fleeing post-Katrina New Orleans. In Morristown, NJ, the mayor shares the speaking platform with Nazis and Klansmen. In Los Angeles an immigrant solidarity picnic is attacked by police gangs, beating men, women and children, cheered on by this white racialist movement. Meanwhile, at the federal level I.C.E. raids in workplaces continue to pick up pace with the aim of assisting employers in breaking up union activity among immigrant workers.

This is nothing new in American history. Africans who were enslaved, indigenous nations who were ethnically cleansed into ghettos, and successive waves of immigrants have struggled against attempts by the state and capitalists to squeeze super-profits for an expanding capitalism out of their labor by keeping them a subordinate caste. In response to this the state has mobilized, enforcing a reign of police terror when necessary or implementing legislation to defuse immigrant working class resistance to maintain this caste. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, laws were passed to close the door to the “immigrant threat”, excluding or criminalizing at various times Chinese folks, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and Haitians, as just a few examples. But European ethnic workers—even the immigrant Irish in the 19th century—have also falsely linked their interests to the rulers as true “citizens” or “freemen.” They formed patronage networks that were supported by the rulers to systematically bar non-Europeans from unions, job positions and social welfare from the state.

Seeking out patronage is not unique to whites at all, but white supremacy supports white patronage more than others. The rulers need white supremacy to try and control the majority of white workers. In some other countries, stratification within the class is across skill; but in multi-racial America such stratification along skill is enforced along a hierarchy of race. One can only see class through the prism of race; they are part of a single social process. This is exactly why the current immigrant struggle is central to working people’s struggle today to go back on the offensive against the employers and the politicians.

At the moment the racist populist movement is dominated by a bourgeois strategy, subordinated to the parliamentary right-wing. So was the Klan. This movement could expand into more directly “assisting” the “good” sections of the state and elites in carrying out terror. Yet fascist potentials also exist. American racists historically have had no need for fascism to keep the racial caste system in place. However, if traditional methods fail, we may see something quite different emerge.

Among the liberals and the union bureaucracy we see a contending effort to put forward to the rulers a new strategy for overcoming the crisis. Their attempts—with the last Congressional bill—have been fatally hampered not only because they have formed a coalition with some big business interests who have an interest in maintaining cheap wages and a super-exploited caste of workers. It is also because the social base for their project no longer exists. The old base of the “social democratic” coalitions linked to the liberal labor and state bureaucracies—among labor and communities of color—has long since been destroyed. It was destroyed because the union bureaucracy, joined in the 1970s by the middle class, attacked the self-organization of everyday people.

In seeking a “partnership” between labor and capital, between oppressed communities and the ruling class, this establishment not only attempted to coerce working people’s loyalty to imperialism where necessary. It also sought to maintain a closed shop in terms of immigration. The SEIU, National Council of La Raza, LULAC, the United Farm Workers (UFW), and MALDEF all formed a coalition with a section of the politicians and the employers to deliver this. This was not done as some sort of strategy to fend off the backlash against immigrants of color. It was in their class interests to do so.

A quick look at the history of the UFW shows the pattern. Over the decades-long struggle of industrial farmworkers, criminalization, indentured labor and business unionism went hand in hand. Famed UFW organizer César Chávez supported the forceful exclusion of undocumented laborers in order to solidify UFW control over the farmworkers’ movement and place itself at the head of the negotiating table with employers; all to the detriment of autonomous organizing in the fields. He went so far as to organize a march against illegal immigration in 1969 (where, ironically, he was joined by Walter Mondale and Ralph Abernathy among others). “Operation Wetback”, which targeted over 1 million Mexicans living in the U.S. for deportation, the Bracero program, and the use of the UFW to keep out farmworkers in partnership with the state—as somehow a defense of its own members against strikebreakers—demonstrates the closed shop loyalty that prepared the ground for the new employer and state offensive of the last three decades. Rather than build solidarity among workers in the U.S., the coalition between liberals and labor bureaucrats has often represented its final defeat.

New Forces and Old Challenges

There is no doubt that some momentum has been lost since last year. No doubt the failure of the massive marches to lead to federal intervention against harassment by local forces has demoralized many. It can only be hoped that it has also cured many of any illusions about relying on the politicians and their fellow travelers. This must be measured against the challenges collective organizing in the workplace and community faces under conditions of federal and local state terror as well as racist vigilante attacks. Many union chiefs opposed the immigration bill, but they put forward no competing program. Many speeches have been made, but we have seen no threatened solidarity strikes.

Grassroots organizing and solidarity are at a crossroads. Facing a breakup of the cross-class alliance, disillusionment, and the stepped up attacks on immigrants, many are continuing to fight back. There have been important developments of local union militancy and new workplace strategies. There are multi-shop and neighborhood orientations which strengthen the possibilities for victory among relatively isolated workplaces like small grocers and restaurants where many immigrants work. The growth in workers’ centers across the country has encouraged solidarity, and we have seen the beginnings of a boycott against anti-Latino businesses.

Support for these measures is essential, but it must be remembered that much of this work has been defensive in nature. It is necessary to build a movement that takes the offensive, not only protecting what few gains are still ours, but pushing these struggles onto new ground. Alliances and united fronts are key to build solidarity, but no principled democratic movement should be subordinated to any one alliance. Direct action will be a necessary component, such as a revival of the sanctuary movement or other forms of militant defense of undocumented immigrants and resistance against detention and deportation. The state has no place invading our communities and kidnapping our family members and friends, and only our direct intervention against such practices will bring about their end. Where immigrants face attacks and intimidation by the Minutemen or other racist squads and goons, in self-defense those forces must be physically confronted and beat back.

Ultimately, the only way to overcome this political and economic crisis caused by official society, a crisis of epic proportions, is not by pledging allegiance to the rulers and bosses so that we can get “our piece” of the American pie. Moving forward will require a total rejection of the forces that see fit to destroy autonomous working class movements both domestically and internationally. Yet we still have contradictions that must be overcome. Without a new working class movement to fight white supremacy and imperialism, the chant “¡Si se puede!” from last year’s protests will become a mere echo of a movement defeated.

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Two major events happened in the last two years whose meaning many hope are interconnected in some fashion. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, celebrated their 100th anniversary. This was an opportunity to make a festival of the ideals of workers self-management. Also, the New Unity Partnership (NUP), a faction within the trade union bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, separated from the national labor federation. Many have seen NUP as an important step forward in reviving the labor movement. Now joined by the Teamsters, this coalition has the new name of Change to Win. (more…)

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