Views in brief

SW and the fight for a better world

IT'S HARD to express the importance of the work that SocialistWorker.org is doing. I hope many people in your country read some of your articles every week, so they understand what is taking place as a result of the free market, at Walmart and McDonald's ("A tale of two paychecks"), with General Motors' notorious recall ("Still waiting for answers from GM") and so on. And I hope this number is increasing, because inequality is really increasing.

The article about General Motors' refusal to declare a recall when it knew the truth about its cars was one of the most horrible things I have read about in my life.

Meanwhile, the people who tell their stories in the articles about Walmart and other low-wage employers explain that they can't afford to pay their rent. And besides that, Walmart's strategy of changing working hours makes it impossible for workers to study and go to school! That's a "Walmartial" strategy indeed.

It's horrible to imagine what goes on in the minds of the executives who invent these tricks to keep workers down at the bottom. The people must have a third choice besides the bad and the worse.

Let me tell you one more thing: I talk about the stories you report in your articles whenever I have an opportunity. Thank you for your work! I think it is a very good work. I just won't say "congratulations," because we still have to fight for the most minimum rights, incredible as that may seem, in the U.S.
Tancredo Braga, Porto Alegre, Brazil

The Democratic stranglehold

BEFORE WE can address the challenge that "Breaking out of the two party (ballot) box" poses, we have to engage in a series of necessary, clarifying distinctions. The first distinction is between those on the left who are socialists and those leftists who haven't yet come to that level of understanding. To those brothers and sisters who haven't yet figured it out: Get there soon.

Next, there is a species of socialist who believes that we must first fight inside the Democratic Party. To them I would say, you are living a pipe dream, we'll meet on the picket line.

Mainly I have in mind those of us who have figured out that the Democratic Party is the ice jam in the middle of the river, and beyond that ice jam lies class politics.

Breaking through that ice jam can take many strategies: the pick, the ice breaker and the detonation. The "pick" can consist of education about the nature of the Democratic Party, pointing out its pernicious role as the graveyard of mass movements, from Vietnam to Madison. Showing that always and everywhere, the Democratic Party plays the role safety valve--dispersing the steam of independent struggle.

The "ice breaker" can be the honest candidate who insists that he or she is a true progressive independent. First, we would have to trust, but verify.

Bernie Sanders claims that he is an "independent," but caucuses with our class enemy, the Democratic Party. Admittedly, his rhetoric is pitched in a more left key than most Democrats, but when crunch time comes, he is in harmony with the chorus of the Harry Reids and the Charles Schumers. Backing such people does not make a chip in ice jam: it adds to it.

Given the best of independent candidates--those who support every cause on the immediate agenda, those who are consistently willing to step outside the Democratic Party--we can find allies that will help in dislodging the ice and moving us foreword.

But none of these alternatives can substitute for those detonations that blow out big chunks of ice and open up new possibilities. The Kshama Sawant campaign, and her victory, were exactly that kind of small explosion. Her victory has given us one of our own--in the broadest sense--to point to. Her victory places socialism on the map of American politics like few events in the last decade.

In Chicago, we have a chance to make a second break in the ice. We can support and elect an open, avowed, uncompromising socialist, Jorge Mujica as 25th ward alderman. It is an opportunity for the entire socialist left to go beyond chipping, beyond dislodging, and move forward to blowing a major hole through the ice of class collaboration.
Guy Miller, Chicago

The out-of-touch Clintons

IN RESPONSE to "Hard times for the Clintons?": Thank you for this gem of an article. As you noted, it illustrates the extent to which those running for political office enjoy lives very different from those of the masses.

It's too bad that the U.S. has never had a party that was truly a worker's party; it's too bad that most members of the poor and working classes are kept in the dark about what such a party would mean, what it would look like.

As Ms. Clinton makes a bid for the Democratic nomination, I hope that you continue writing such articles. Even if she manages to get elected as president, your articles may prove to be the spark that helps the lower classes (now the majority of Americans) see exactly how little they have in common with their elected elites. The rhetoric of the elite is polished, but it is not reality.
Bob, from the Internet

Next in the Fight for 15

I THINK we have to focus on the concrete situation facing working people in the U.S. The Seattle City Council passed a measure that opens the way for establishing $15 an hour as the minimum wage in the city. That is a tremendous victory. It is a tsunami that will roll across the country--San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and other urban areas.

The protest of fast-food workers made it possible, and Socialist Alternative (SA) and the City Council campaign of Kshama Sawant provided the necessary leadership in mobilizing public opinion and pushing the labor officialdom and liberals like Ed Murray to embrace and act on that sentiment. 15 Now stayed in the streets when 15 for Seattle--the group led by labor officials--wanted to simply conduct negotiations in Mayor Ed Murray's commission.

That is the hallmark of socialist strategy--mobilizing working people and supporters even while conducting talks in the commission. That was the approach of SA and Councilperson Sawant.

The key now is to take 15 Now across the country, and where possible, probe for openings to use union power to organize fast-food and other retail workers into union locals. The two demands of the fast-food worker strikes have been "$15 now" and the right to organize unions at the workplace. "$15 now" is a demand for economic justice, pursuing the right to organize a union is a demand for economic democracy on a basic level.

Using the power of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to unionize fast-food and other retail workers creates an agency to make sure any minimum-wage legislation is really implemented. The Washington State Supreme Court will soon hear a lawsuit to extend the $15 minimum wage won in Sea-Tac to the airport workers. Where possible, SEIU and UFCW should be pushed to hold public meetings on this lawsuit, to pack the courtroom when the Supreme Court hears the case.

Any vision of fundamental change begins with the seizure of openings to mobilize and organize working people. The demand for "$15 now" and the right organize a union allows partisans of root and branch change to do this.
Derrick Morrison, New Orleans

The hologram of democracy

IN RESPONSE to "Breaking out of the two-party (ballot) box": I hope that we can eventually get a more socially oriented, non-business-agenda individual to run for office. But, then again, "the business of America is business," as Calvin Coolidge once said.

I was thinking about American "democracy" the other day and realized that my purported right to vote is pretty useless when (a) someone else chooses the candidates and (b) I'm allowed only to choose between said two candidates. It reminds me of democracy, Egyptian-style: Here's your (in this case) one candidate--vote or don't.

We really live under the charade--or, as Joe Bageant once wrote, the hologram--of democracy. It's a genuinely fake, rather than genuinely real, type of political system.

Good job explaining why factors that allow socialists to get elected at local levels may not be present to boost a socialist to power at the level of the U.S. presidency. Until these doors open, though, we just perpetuate the holographic myth every time that we refer politically to the U.S. as a "democracy." Perhaps we'd have better luck getting socialists elected if we dropped the farce and said, "End the U.S. oligarchy! Restore democracy."

Just a thought.
Carol, Fargo, N.D.