Il Partito Comunista 418

There is no shortage of political groupings anticipating a progression of world capitalism into an imminent world war. The problem, as always, isn’t interpreting what’s happening, but what to do about it.

Usually big umbrella activist groups are formed to front for political organizations. Because of their “big tent” structure, these groupings are unable to sum up their problems of, often, decades of similar anti-war activity. They exist primarily to identify and draw in isolated activists while the mother organization prepares them as its own cannon fodder.

The Marxist thesis states: it isn’t possible, first of all, for consciousness of the historical road to appear, in advance, within a single human brain. This is for two reasons: firstly, consciousness follows, rather than precedes, being, that is, the material conditions which surround the subject of consciousness itself; secondly, all forms of social consciousness – with a given delay allowing them time to get generally established – emerge out of circumstances which are analogous and parallel to the economic relations in which masses of individuals find themselves, thereby forming a social class. Historically the latter are then led to “act together” long before they can “think together”. The theory of this relationship between class conditions, and class action and its future point of arrival, isn’t required of persons, in the sense it isn’t required of a particular author or leader; nor is it asked of “the class as whole”, in the sense of a fleeting lump sum of individuals in existence at a certain time or place; and much less can it be deduced from an extremely bourgeois “consultation” of the class. (The False Resource Of Activism, ICP General Meeting n. 6, Milan, September 7, 1952)

The activist group puts the cart of consciousness before the horse. It sees in these small isolated groups the first attempts at revolutions, leading, acting, as in the failure of the anarchist’s propaganda of the deed. Anti-war work requires international centralism, otherwise all efforts become centrifugal, laden as they are by the weight of local demands and imagined local group specificities.

The Party must be able to control every aspect of its life, carry out each of its organizational roles in such a way that nothing strikes it as unexpected, incomprehensible or mysterious. Passing off as positions of the Left that terrorism is a “gleam of light” for the proletariat; that the folksy political traditions of extremist factions, with their lumpen-intellectual student base, represent a “revolutionary camp”; that the idea of “workers committees” is fanciful and that working within them is “activism” or “economism”, and then immediately to state exactly the opposite, not because anything has actually changed but due to impatience and disappointment that no immediate gains have been made; that such oscillations represent the “tactics” of the Left only disorientates militants, sows discord in the Party, erodes the organization, and compromises decades of hard-earned, consistent work. (The Party Does not Arise from “Circles”, 1980)

The small activist circle is the practical equivalent of the united front seeking to include wide swathes of individuals, not into a cohesive and thought-out party, but into an action for action’s sake scheme. The activist circle aims to draw in numbers to make up for its political incoherence.

From the Fourth Congress, which took place at the end of 1922, the Left stood by its pessimistic prediction and its vigorous struggle to denounce dangerous tactics (united front between communist and socialist parties, the slogan of “workers’ government”) and organizational errors (attempts to increase the size of the parties not simply through an influx of those proletarians who had abandoned the other parties with a social democratic programme of action and structure, but by means of fusions that accepted entire parties and portions of parties after negotiations with their leadership, and also by admitting to the Comintern, as national sections, parties claiming to be “sympathizers”, which was clearly an error in its drift towards federalism). Taking the initiative on a third issue, it was from this time that the Left denounced, and ever more vigorously in the years that followed, the growth of the opportunist danger: this third issue was the international’s method of internal working, whereby the centre, represented by the Moscow executive, resorted not only to the use of “ideological terror” in its dealings with the parties, or the parts of them that had made political errors, but above all to organizational pressure; which amounted to an erroneous application, and eventually a total falsification, of the correct principles of centralization and absolute discipline with no exceptions. (Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and the Structure of the World Communist Party, According to the Positions that for more than Half a Century Form the Historical Heritage of the Communist Left (“Theses of Naples”), July 1965)

ICP leaflet in Italy for Unione Sindacale di Base (USB)

September 2022

World capitalism is entering a new recession. This is happening without most of the capitalistically mature – so-called Western – countries having recovered their pre-2008 crisis production levels.

These countries are sinking into the crisis of overproduction that began in 1973-74, which they have been able to survive, for half a century now, thanks to an increasing attack on the achievements of the labor movement, State and private indebtedness, and the full development of capitalism in the so-called “developing” countries, which, with their low labor costs and their rates of growth of young capitalisms, have held back the fall in the profit rate.

But the inexorable economic laws of capitalism – which only Marxism has been able to understand and explain – are also driving those capitalisms, no longer youthful, into the crisis of overproduction, a historical fact of which the recent bursting of the real estate speculative bubble in China was a symptom.

World capitalism is marching toward its inevitable economic ruin, increasingly plunging all of humanity further into barbarism every day.

The worst and most peculiar product of the capitalist economic crisis is imperialist war. Points of friction between world and regional imperialisms, and between their vassal capitalist states, are increasing in number and getting hotter: the Middle East, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indo-Pakistani border, South Asia, Taiwan…

Inevitably, war breaks out, and capitalism as a whole is the real culprit, despite the fact that every bourgeois regime tries to pin the blame on its adversary.

Russian imperialism must react to the capitalist economic crisis that grips it internally. US imperalism – no less decadent and worn down by the crisis – works to curb its decline as a dominant power by provoking conflicts that harm its adversaries: the emerging Chinese imperialism, as well as the old imperialisms of Europe, hiding behind the cloak of a unity that in capitalism is impossible and false.

The imperialist powers all operate on the basis of the same economic drive, as do the smaller capitalist states, which are, however, only clay pots inside iron pots.

Of Ukraine’s independence and the living conditions of its people, like those of the people of the Donbass, the bourgeois regimes on either side of the conflict don’t give a damn. The imperialist war is only a matter of the economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie: democracy, resistance, independence and anti-fascism are just lies waved on both sides of the front to fool workers into going to the front to kill and die for the interests of their exploiters.

Because, finally, the deepest historical reality of imperialist war, maturing again before our eyes, is the class struggle: war is a product of the crisis of capitalism and at the same time the only means capitalism has of surviving, at the cost of a blood sacrifice, against the working class and against communism.

The real “aggressed” in the imperialist war is not this or that capitalist state, or a front of states, but the international proletariat, the workers of the whole world, sent to be massacred to make this inhuman and reactionary mode of production survive.

But the workers, if framed in their class-based union and led by their revolutionary party, have the strength to stop the new world slaughter to which the bourgeoisie is pushing them in order to save itself.

The imperialist war for the world bourgeoisie is a matter of life and death: it must break out and be as devastating as possible, because only by destroying factories, infrastructure, cities and commodities of all kinds, including the commodity of labor-power, can capitalism restart a new cycle of accumulation. The economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s of the past century was made possible by the 50 million victims of World War II, which was also – like today’s war – imperialist on both fronts.

The watchword of the revolutionary Communist Party in the face of imperialist war is – as it was in Russia in October 1917 – revolutionary defeatism: to support and organize the refusal of the proletarian-soldiers to fight, to call for and foment fraternization with the workers of the opposite front, to call for and work for the military defeat of one’s own country.

The only way to stop the imperialist war is for the workers in one national sector of the front of a war, which will once again be world-wide, to set an example by beginning to turn their guns, not against their class brothers in different uniforms with whom they are forced to fight by their respective bourgeois governments, but against their own military command and government. For such an example will infect the whole front, all soldiers, all national armies. This was attempted in World War I, after the example set by Russian soldiers.

To do this requires an international, communist, working class party.

But it is also necessary for workers to be trained to and organized to fight for their immediate, essential needs: for wage increases, for reduction of working hours, for wages for unemployed workers.

Because these needs, and the struggle for them, unite workers above all false divisions between companies, categories, ethnicity, gender and finally nations, they are already defeatist towards the goals and interests of the bourgeoisie: more profits, more exploitation, sacrifice of workers for the sake of the company and national capitalism, war.

That is why the first step of proletarian and revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war is to organize the struggle for the economic, essential, needs of the workers: the first step to stop the imperialist war is to refuse to pay its costs.

To this end a genuinely class-based union is needed, still absent in Italy as in all countries of the world, the result – like the weakness of the revolutionary party – of the long historical course inaugurated by the Stalinist counterrevolution, which destroyed and distorted the organization and principles of communism, condemning proletarians all over the world to the torment of another century of putrid capitalism.

In Italy, the grassroots unions have for years represented an attempt to build a class union, but divisions resulting from the opportunism of their leaderships only help the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) maintain control of the workers, which helps prevent their mobilization.

In the past year, important united actions have finally been taken: the general strike on October 11th last year and the anti-war strike on May 20th.

Faced with the serious rise in inflation eroding wages, the militants and workers of all the rank-and-file unions must fight for the organization of a united struggle – including class-based oppositions inside the CGIL – which has at its center the demand for strong wage increases.

In many countries of the world, of young as well as old capitalism – from Pakistan to the United Kingdom, from Latin America to the United States – strong strikes for wage increases are already under way.

No energy should be wasted instead in the senile and lying bourgeois electoral theater! A strike movement of hundreds of thousands of workers is able to win wage increases that will concretely improve their lives while millions of votes achieve nothing. Tens of thousands of workers framed in the revolutionary International Communist Party in the major countries of the world, at the head of a class union movement, is what will be needed to take political power away from the ruling class and give it to the working class.

Today, a united class union front to organize the struggle for wage increases next fall is the first concrete step to build a real class union and oppose the imperialist war!

Whether it was done for ideological reasons or out of pure cynicism is neither here nor there. The British ruling class knows that a deep recession is virtually unavoidable and used a “fiscal event” to shift as much wealth as possible from the working classes to the ultra-rich before a complete economic collapse happens. “Fiscal event”, the Tory government called it, because a “budget” is always accompanied by impact analysis by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). And if the OBR had run the figures through its computers, it would have totally undermined the government’s rhetoric that the measures would promote the “economic growth” needed to pay for the massive tax cuts, reduce the national debt and pay for investment in infrastructure and the health service.

Politically, the replacement of Prime Minister Boris Johnson by Liz Truss and her new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng allowed the bourgeoisie to present this as a “change of direction” even though the Tory Party has been in power for 12 years.

The bourgeoisie knows the truth

Independent forecasts, such as the one published a day after the “fiscal event” by the Institute of Fiscal Studies indicate that only those on an annual income above £155,000 will benefit overall from the tax cuts – and that’s just the richest 1% of the UK population.

The financial markets delivered an immediate verdict on the claim that the “fiscal event” would deliver growth: the FTSE tanked, the pound sterling lost 3% of its value in a single day, hitting its lowest level against the dollar since 1985, around $1.03. There were suggestions that friends of the government, who had been tipped off on the coming announcement, had “shorted” the pound – in other words, sold sterling in the knowledge that they would be able to buy it back at a lower price shortly afterwards. Consequently the pound recovered slightly on Monday, October 26.

Perhaps more tellingly from a long-term perspective, the yield on UK 10-year gilts (government bonds) soared to more than 4%, an increase of well in excess of 300% over the past 12 months. The yield on gilts tends to rise sharply in inverse relation to the country’s economic prospects (and this in turn increases the interest paid on the national debt) as investors lose confidence in its ability to repay the national debt. Some financial capitalists very openly brag about the money they are making. Multimillionaire (and Tory party donor) Crispin Odey said that his bets against Britain’s government bonds were “the gifts that keep on giving”.

The Financial Times ran with the headlines, “Pound tumbles below $1.09 after UK’s £45bn tax cut package” and “UK bonds in historic sell-off after Britain takes tax cut ‘gamble’”. The FT is the newspaper of the bourgeoisie, so it is duty-bound to report the truth. A complete contrast to the UK yellow press, which, below the usual royalist tittle-tattle ridiculously announced, “Tories make radical tax cuts to get Britain booming” (Daily Express) and “Things are looking BRIGHTER! Chancellor to pledge a ‘new era for Britain’ in mini-Budget with biggest tax giveaway in 30 years to spark growth surge” (Daily Mail).

So what’s actually going on?

The main content of the budget is a massive £45 bn tax-cutting package, which, together with other recently announced measures, will add about £400 bn to extra Government borrowing. The top rate of tax, for those paid more that £150,000 per annum, will be reduced from 45p to 40p in the pound. This will be worth more than £55,000 a year to someone on an annual income of £1 million.

To rub salt in the wound, the government also announced the removal of a cap on bankers’ bonuses, in an effort to attract back bankers who have moved abroad in the wake of Brexit. (In reality it is easy to get around the cap, which limits bonuses to twice the annual salary, by simply increasing the annual salary. But the change sent a clear signal to the super-rich.)

The financial services sector got another bonus: the threshold for stamp duties (taxation) on home purchases will rise from £125,000 to £250,000. With the base interest rate raised to 2.25% (and set to rise further, perhaps as high as 6%) mortgage interest will rise significantly, so the reduction in stamp duty will eventually mean a lot more money to be pumped back into the banks via mortgage repayments. (We say eventually, because a short-term effect of the uncertainty is that banks and building societies started withdrawing some mortgage products altogether.)

The theory behind all this is “trickle-down” economics, the fiction that if you give loads of money to the rich, it will eventually reach the poor. Nobody in the ruling class, not even the keenest advocates of this theory, actually believes it. But it provides ideological cover that is trumpeted in the yellow press.

Even the broadcast media have trouble reporting the claim that the budget will deliver growth of 2.5% per annum in a serious and objective manner. Framed by the Houses of Parliament, two BBC commentators became barely audible as the Abba song, ‘’Money, Money, Money, it’s a Rich Man’s world”, boomed out from a protester’s portable speaker. Cut back to the newsroom, where the newsreader acknowledged there had been quite a lot of background noise “although it was not without relevance”.

Other measures are that the proposed rise in National Insurance contributions will be scrapped, and the basic rate of income tax will be reduced from 20% to 19%. These measures might see a few pounds drifting the way of those on low incomes, but they will be more than swallowed up by food and fuel inflation and the increased price of all imported goods.

For people on the very lowest income, the reduction on tax brings no gain whatsoever, as they are below the tax threshold. What’s more, the benefit rules are being further tightened to make it harder for part-time workers on Universal Credit. This benefit will be withdrawn from people working less than 15 hours a week. Claimants will also need to prove they are job hunting, or else be forced, kicking and screaming, into badly paid, or unsuitable, jobs; this is notably the case in the care sector where there is a massive shortage of workers, mainly due to the paltry wages, tough working conditions and the lack of immigrant workers from the EU following Brexit.

Many such jobs are now in the shadowy sector of the “gig economy” where a worker is categorized as ‘self-employed’, freeing their de facto employers from costs such as sick pay. (In the absence of any effective political opposition, the predicament of such workers gets scant attention, limited, for example, to the portrayal of delivery workers in Ken Loach’s most recent film, Sorry we Missed You).

To try and assuage the working classes and petty bourgeoisie, a part of the massive borrowing the Government has agreed to (variously estimated at between £60 and £ 100 bn) will be spent on subsidizing energy costs. However, this will not be financed, as many had hoped, by a windfall tax on the energy companies (who are making money hand-over-fist on sky-high fuel prices). Instead, the subsidy is another addition to national debt, to be paid out of taxation by present and future generations of workers.

Preparing for the class war

Finally, and highly incongruous to find in a budget speech, the transfer of tens of billions to the financial aristocracy was accompanied by a declaration of war on the working class, who are expected to pay the price with the biggest fall in real wages on record.

Chancellor Kwarteng ranted: “At such a critical time for our economy, it is simply unacceptable that strike action is disrupting so many lives. Other European countries have Minimum Service Levels to stop militant trade unions closing down transport networks during strikes. So we will do the same.

“And we will go further. We will legislate to require unions to put pay offers to a member vote, to ensure strikes can only be called once negotiations have genuinely broken down.”

This comes against a background of working-class militancy on a scale unseen since the strike wave of the late seventies and eighties. Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), Aslef, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association and Unite will strike on Saturday October 1, with further action planned on October 5 and 8. This is significant, as all railway workers including train drivers and office staff will all strike in unison.

Members of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) will strike on 28 September. Criminal law barristers are on an indefinite strike. There is industrial action in the container ports.

Discontent is rife in the National Health Service, too. The Health Secretary announced, on the day before the “fiscal event”, that general practitioner doctors, who already have to meet 72 targets, will now face a 73rd: they must undertake to treat any patient within two weeks, regardless of the urgency of the case. A GP writing in The Guardian reported on the serious shortage of healthcare workers, largely due to the lack of funds: “The NHS faces its worst workforce crisis in history, with 132,000 posts currently vacant, including more than 10,000 doctors and 47,000 nurses. Recent figures from the Health Foundation show a shortage of about 4,200 full-time equivalent GPs.”

On October 3, at the start of the Conservative Party’s annual conference, Kwasi Kwarteng suddenly announced that the headline-grabbing proposal to reduce the top rate of tax was being (temporarily) withdrawn. This was a tactical retreat following opposition from within the Party. Many in the ruling elite felt it was a step too far, too soon, and this had unnerved the financial markets. But this does not mean it is off the agenda, and the tactical retreat provides cover for all the other anti-working class measures.

Be in no doubt, this assault on living standards sticks in the craw not only of active trade unionists and militant workers, and those resisting this law, but broad swathes of the working class. This could well provide a rallying point in the struggle for higher wages to address the steeply rising cost of living. It will also raise class consciousness.

However, the ruling class has an answer to this. The Labour Party is now a “government in waiting”. Waiting for what? To force further austerity on the working class to pay for the crisis, of course.

And this is precisely why the ruling class believes it can get away with the current all-out assault on the proletariat.

Communists regard it as a truism that in order to get elected in a bourgeois democracy, a party must demonstrate to the ruling class that it can be trusted in government. According to The Economist (and reported in The Guardian), the Labour Treasury team “has had about 250 meetings with CEOs of major companies, who are now so eager to talk to the opposition that tickets sold out in July for a business meeting with the shadow cabinet, months ahead.”

The Labour Party is investing money from subscriptions paid by members (who are mostly drawn from the lower middle and working classes) and trade unions (whose membership is working class) to butter up the millionaire elite. There are, of course, some decent, class-conscious individuals in the Labour Party. But they are being sidelined and silenced as the leadership instructs members not to support strikes at all and certainly not to join picket lines. All in an effort to make a Labour government palatable to the bourgeoisie.

The decision of the Labour Party leadership to sing the national anthem, “God Save the King” at its conference, rather than the traditional lukewarm rendition of “The Red Flag” was of more than symbolic significance!

To those involved in the future resistance to the anti-working-class measures in the ”fiscal event”, we say:

• DON’T STRUGGLE ALONE IN YOUR INDIVIDUAL SECTOR
• UNITE WITH OTHER SECTORS IN STRUGGLE
• THE CORPORATIVE INTERESTS OF TRADE UNION STRUCTURES MUST TAKE SECOND PLACE TO THE DEFENSE OF THE WORKING CLASS AS A WHOLE
• THE STATE REPRESENTS THE EMPLOYERS AND THE CAPITALIST CLASS
• ‘YOUR OWN’ NATIONAL CAPITALISM, AS REPRESENTED IN YOUR NATIONAL STATE, IS YOUR MAIN ENEMY
• THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE ’LEFT’ ARE PART OF THAT ENEMY

The bourgeoisie loudly proclaims its victory: a national rail strike has been averted. Overnight talks between representatives of the unions and the carriers, with officials of the federal government acting as mediators, leading right up to the publicly announced strike deadline, have resulted in a last-minute deal. Depending on whether this tentative agreement is ratified by the rank-and-file, a strike may still occur, but the emergency round of negotiations has at least postponed it.

The latest events are the culmination of years of collective bargaining which has stalled on several occasions over various issues including wages, healthcare, and scheduling. Most recently, the government intervened by appointing a Presidential Emergency Board. After hearing both the unions and the carriers make cases for their own proposals, the board released its recommendations. Indicative of their bias in favor of the carriers was the latter’s unqualified support from day one, while the unions hesitated to even put them to a vote; where they did so, based on the scant publicly available information, the rank-and-file overwhelmingly rejected the recommendations.

Further intervention by the state was necessary to resolve the crisis. President Biden met and spoke with both sides to ensure that the conflict remained within the bounds of order, preventing any extension or intensification of the struggle, while one of his highly-touted “pro-labor” appointees, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, himself a former union official, acted as the mediator in the overnight talks.

With the expiration of the thirty-day cooling period following the release of the board’s proposals, which would have allowed the unions to strike, only hours away, the carriers agreed to concede a few minor changes to the board’s proposals, such as employee healthcare contribution caps and the right to request in advance (but not necessarily be granted) one additional day off per year.

The current government is a quintessential example of the “collaborationist” strategy of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Its “progressive” mask serves the propagandistic and ideological function of making the state appear as a neutral mediator between labor and capital, or even as the benevolent, protective father of the working class, while also perpetuating the illusion that capital can be peacefully and legally made to actually improve the living and working conditions of the working class. In reality, however, as we can see in the terms of the tentative agreement, capital need not make any serious concessions even under the pressure of a “left-wing” regime, so workers see few substantial changes in their everyday lives.

Although the “pro-labor” government does indeed support unions, which return the favor by calling upon their membership to support said political leaders at the ballot box rather than striking, its support is conditional on the unions’ “good behavior”. Conservative, collaborationist unions receive favorable treatment, while militancy continues to be repressed and independence is sabotaged at every opportunity. Moreover, the benefits offered by the state mostly accrue to opportunists in the upper echelons of the union bureaucracy, who may, for example, be offered a lucrative, cushy job in the federal government in exchange for cooperation.

Existing unions have largely embraced the role of the parasitic middleman between labor and capital, extracting dues from members and bribes from the company; at the same time, they blackmail the state with the fact that, as the representatives of the workers, they’re the only ones capable of containing class struggles and thereby ensuring social peace – a threat that’s especially persuasive in the face of the potential outbreak of war between great powers.

The degeneration of the unions is a sign of the present weakness of the working class, which the corrupt seek to perpetuate. However, at the same time, the machinations of opportunists in the unions as well as political leaders in the government are signs that they are haunted by the potential resurgence of the labor movement, following a militant, independent class line. A revived working class could easily stop the fragile schemes of internal and external enemies.

Arrayed on all sides are forces – corporations, union officials, and the government – trying to stop a mass strike on the railroads at all costs. Let’s examine some of their arguments:

Conditions aren’t that bad

There are issues with wages, healthcare, and more as well, but let’s just take a look at scheduling for now. Railroad workers are on call 24/7. While a typical worker in the United States gets two days off per week plus two weeks vacation per year, adding up to 118 days, railroad workers usually get 30 days off per year. They are so overworked that, despite extensive applications of science and technology, as well as the regulations put in place to prevent accidents which are very costly to the companies, train derailments due to operator fatigue are remarkably common. In addition, there have been multiple instances of “Positive Train Control”, a system that automates some aspects of train operation and which has been used by employers to justify cutting the transportation workforce, “working” as intended and still derailing trains.

If the job really is that bad, why don’t you just quit and find a new job?

The challenges of changing jobs hardly need to be mentioned here. But quitting also means giving up on the struggle, implicitly acknowledging defeat. It means leaving your coworkers behind in a situation that you couldn’t stand. In any case, the job needs to be done by someone, so your future replacement would suffer just as you did. Lastly, quitting means forfeiting the retirement that is arguably the number one reason long-time workers (i.e., those employed over ten years) remain in the industry. Individual action cannot address a social problem; collective action is necessary.

What of the dangers of escalation, retaliation

A valid concern. Certainly, more organization, more preparation, and leadership that is more ready to take the struggle to the very end, even to a revolutionary conclusion, would be good. However, if a critical mass of workers decides to strike, we must not refuse to take action in solidarity with them, let alone sabotage their movement as some false friends of labor do. Neither should we prioritize the survival of union institutions over the purpose of their existence: to facilitate the struggles of the working class.

The public would oppose a strike

Perhaps, but not necessarily. Public support for unions is at a high-point compared to previous decades. Further, there are measures the unions can take to win support for the strike from broader sections of the working class. For instance, they can advance universal demands that would meet the needs of the entire working class, such as wage raises for all categories of workers, not just railroad workers, or a law for more rigorous limitation of the working day. The collective actions of a particular industry underscore the need for generalized industrial action across all sectors of the economy.

Striking will damage the national economy

What’s the point of a strike if not to damage the economy? That’s workers using their only leverage: namely, the obvious truth that if nobody worked, then society would collapse in a matter of days. Unless failing to meet the workers’ demands would result in even greater harm, why would their opponents even listen to them?

Profits belong to capital, not labor

According to the Presidential Emergency Board’s report, the carriers insist that profits are due to investment and risk, not labor; hence, workers do not deserve raises simply because profits have increased. Even if we leave aside the fact that the capital invested and put at risk by the companies is nothing more than the accumulated product of past labor appropriated by the owners of the means of production, the claim is patently nonsensical. If labor isn’t responsible for making profits for the company, then why don’t they fire their entire workforce and save all the unnecessary expenditures on the wage bill? By striking, the workers would practically be doing their employers a favor; so why oppose the strike?

* * *

The steering committee of Railroad Workers United, a rank-and-file organization promoting combativeness and association of workers within and between the rail unions, adopted the following resolutions on the potential national rail strike. We reproduce it here:

Whereas, the major freight rail carriers continue to refuse to bargain in good faith, leaving national negotiations with the unions at a standstill; and

Whereas, these same carriers – represented by the National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC) – have been making record profits for years, including all through the pandemic; and

Whereas, Precision Scheduled Railroading, firings and furloughs; increased discipline and harassment; massive job cuts, short-staffing, and chronic fatigue; together with unpaid claims and wholesale abrogation of the union contract has left railroad workers frustrated, angry, and ready to fight back; and

Whereas, countless workers in an array of industries nationwide are fighting back, organizing, striking, and winning; and

Whereas, current conditions appear to be ripe for railroad workers to mount a successful national strike, including but not limited to:

• A general labor shortage where the rail carriers are unable to recruit and retain employees in the various crafts, including train and engine service.
• Supply chains in crisis, as goods in transit are hampered at every turn.
• Public opinion that has sided with striking workers throughout 2021.
• The record profits generated by the carriers, together with their alienation of shippers, passengers and communities, which suggest that railroad strikers would enjoy vast public support.
• Rail unions of late that have been largely standing together.
• The fact that the carriers have attacked ALL rail workers, solidifying workers from all crafts, unions, and carriers.
• The existence of a sitting President who claims to be “the most pro-labor President you have ever had”.

Whereas, such favorable conditions for rail workers outlined above have not existed for decades – if ever – and will not continue indefinitely;

Therefore, Be it Resolved that RWU urges all railroad workers to consider the strike option, and to prepare for such a strike; and

Be it further Resolved that RWU urge the rail unions to educate their respective memberships on:

• the Railway Labor Act (RLA) under which our actions are governed;
• the history of rail strikes;
• the benefits and risks of taking such action with webinars, printed materials, presentations at local union meetings, and other means of communication; and

Be it further Resolved that RWU urge the rail unions to poll their respective members for a strike vote so as to ascertain the willingness of the respective memberships to take such action; and

Be it Further Resolved that RWU urge the rail unions to undertake informational picketing, “practice” strikes, and other high-profile activities to mobilize the membership, put the carriers on notice that we mean business; to educate the public as to our cause; and to mobilize our allies; and

Be it Finally Resolved, that the rail craft unions put aside their petty differences and take this opportunity to consummate a single bargaining coalition of all rail labor in order to achieve the greatest possible solidarity, unity, and power.