class struggle

By Staff - Industrial Worker, December 23, 2022

The Industrial Workers of the World stands with U.S. rank-and-file railroad workers as owners and politicians collude to strip them of their most basic rights. The right to withhold our labor is inviolable and cannot be prohibited. Further, we believe that an injury to one is an injury to all. We are disgusted by the hypocrisy of so-called leaders in the U.S. government, who enjoy the luxury of virtually unlimited paid sick leave while legislating against any paid sick leave at all for railroad workers, and we are unsurprised when even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party ultimately aligns with their class over the workers. IWW members throughout the country are prepared to support railroad workers in every way possible as they lead this fight.

We hold that the failure to reach an agreement is undeniably the fault of the owners, who have enriched themselves and their shareholders at immediate cost to the workers generating the profits. One study of financial reports and internal communications for all the major rail carriers shows their unbridled avarice and total disregard for their workforce. They are well aware that wages have been stagnant for years. This was by design. They know that workers have fled the industry due to its destruction of workers’ quality of life and the carrot-and-stick system that prevents their use of promised benefits. They know that injuries on the job have reached record highs in recent years due to understaffing and impossible demands placed on workers.

The agreement being imposed by Congress is unacceptable. Wage increases to compensate for the lack thereof in years past, as well as skyrocketing inflation and cost of living more recently, are inadequate. Workers have univocally demanded more predictable scheduling and safer working conditions. Paid sick leave was a compromise many workers may have been willing to accept. It is the owners and their lackeys in government who refuse to compromise. It is despicable.

We in the IWW encourage workers from all industries to stand together with railroad workers. United we are strong. Together we can win.

For more information on Railroad Workers United, please contact RWU General Secretary Jason Doering, via email or at 202-480-0587.

For anyone who faces detainment for exercising their right to strike, or who knows someone who does, the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee conducts public pressure campaigns and facilitates empowerment through solidarity. They can be contacted at IWOC@iww.org.

Additional statements of solidarity from members and local branches of the IWW throughout the U.S. are being prepared and issued even as mainstream media declares the “crisis averted.” For workers, the crisis only deepens. These conditions can be changed only when we stand together as one. Workers of the world: unite!

By That Green Union Guy (with suggestions from Baltimore Red)- IWW Environmental Union Caucus, December 6, 2022

I gave the following speech at a rally on the UC Berkeley Campus (a video of the rally follows)

Fellow Workers, Comrades, and Friends:

I am a union mariner of over a quarter century (I am a member of the IBU, an ILWU affiliate, and the IWW); I grew up in a railroad family, and I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1994.

I am here today to deliver a message on behalf of Railroad Workers United (of which I am a solidarity member):

The Class One freight railroad bosses:

• Have been reaping record profits for 25 years, and yet...
• they are moving less freight than at any time since 2006;
• they are swimming in money, while industry is contracting when it should be expanding due to its efficiency, and its potential as a major climate solution;
• meanwhile, during that time, 30% of workforce has been lost in the last 4-5 years;
• in spite of the potential for rail as a climate solution, the freight bosses are hostile to expansion of passenger trains;
• in fact, the greed of the capitalist railroad bosses has grown so egregious, that the Class Ones have possessed off every major shipping group with their BS, thus even turning much of the capitalist class against them;

The "deal" brokered by Biden and rammed down the throats of the working class by the Republicans and Democrats alike won't solve the problem.

This is not only naked class war, it's a recipe for the complete implosion and meltdown of the nation's rail system.

By Tom Wetzel - Ideas and Action, December 6, 2022

As the burning of fossil fuels continues to pump up the size of the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere, the global warming crisis becomes ever more acute. In its “Code Red for Humanity” warning in 2021, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said: “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth…”

But we’re losing the climate battle thus far. In Climate Change as Class War, Marxist geographer Matthew Huber argues that the climate movement is losing because it is rooted in the “professional class.” He argues that this class lacks the power to defeat the powerful capitalist interests that drag their heals against the kind of drastic cutting back of fossil-fuel burning that is needed. For Huber, the climate movement needs to be rooted in the working class to have sufficient power to enact radical structural reforms needed to effectively fight global warming. 

Huber analyses the existing climate movement as consisting of three layers. First, there are the “science communicators” like James Hansen who try to do popular education about climate change science. A second group are “policy technocrats” with expertise in law or policy studies and work in think tanks, the university world, or non-profits. Their orientation is to craft “smart” policy solutions. A third group are the “anti-system radicals” whose exposure to the science of environmental devastation “leads to a kind of political radicalization.” Huber views these groups as part of the “professional class” and tries to use his theory of this class to explain the politics of the climate movement. Huber pinpoints two features of the climate movement that he sees as sources of weakness: (1) The emphasis on high levels of personal consumption as a factor in global warming, thus leading to a “politics of less” — especially a feature of “degrowth” politics; and (2) an emphasis on science education. “Making climate politics purely about science evades the question of power. It allows us to attribute…inaction on climate change as simply due to misinformation rather than a lack of power.”

Huber appeals to the theory of the “Professional-Managerial Class” (proposed by Barbara and John Ehrenreich) to try to explain the origin of these features of the “professional class” climate movement. Here he points to the centrality of credentials which mediates the access of the “professional class” to the labor market. This includes “the existence of a specialized body of knowledge, accessible only by lengthy training,” degree and licensing programs, professional associations, which he regards as “forms of class organization.” This tends to encourage acceptance of meritocratic ideology which favors decision-making power for managers and professionals. This emphasis on the importance of knowledge and the role of professionals tends to favor the science education emphasis of the climate movement, as Huber sees it.

In the Ehrenreichs’ theory of the PMC their class position is based on their control over cultural and social reproduction. This is how teachers and writers are included in the class. Among both Marxists and libertarian socialists, however, class has historically been seen as an institutional group-to-group power relation in social production, as in Marx’s concept of capital as a social power relation. Looking at it from this point of view, I think the PMC theory tends to paper over a distinction between two different class groups. First, there is a group I call the bureaucratic control class. This group’s class position is based on their relative monopoly of decision-making power, via bureaucratic hierarchies that exist to control labor and run corporations and government agencies day-to-day. This includes not only salaried managers but high-end professionals who work closely with management to control labor and defend corporate interests, such as corporate lawyers, HR experts, and industrial engineers who design jobs and work organization. This class power relation is the basis of the clear antagonism between this layer and the working class. 

It’s noteworthy that school teachers, newspaper reporters, script writers, and nurses all form unions and occasionally go on strike. These lower level professional employees are not usually part of the management apparatus, and don’t manage other workers. As such, they have a structural position like the core working class of manual workers, not the bureaucratic control class. The people in this lower professional layer often have college degrees, and sometimes do show elitism towards the core manual working class. They also tend to have more autonomy in their work. However, the “skilled trades” in the early 20th century often showed elitism towards less skilled manual workers and often had relative autonomy in their work. But we generally regard skilled blue collar workers (such as tool and die makers) as part of the working class. 

Lower level professional employees may be tempted to middle class meritocratic ideology. As such they will be in a conflicted position, as they also share the subordination of the working class position. This is why Erik Olin Wright’s phrase “contradictory class location” is appropriate for this group — a point that Huber concedes.