March 4th strike and day of action.

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Saturday March 06, 2010 15:54 by john throne - labors militant voice loughfinn at aol dot com

March 4th - How to take it forward.

Taking the movement forward in continued mass direct action confrontation with the capitalist offensive. Defending it against the pressures of its right wing to make it subservient to the union leadership and the Democratic Party. Helping it stand against the pressures of ultra leftism which would cut it off from the support and involvement of the hundreds of thousands and millions it needs to win.

March 4th was a great success. We have to celebrate this and allow our success to nurture us and to give us new energy and enthusiasm for the coming battles. Please see the videos on yesterday's blog for the great movement we were all part of. Thanks especially to all the school students who gave leadership on the ground and made this day the success it was.

But while doing this we also have to be realistic. This is not the end of it. Capitalism wants these cuts to try and save its bankrupt system and while the heroic movement of youth on March 4th will give them pause they will be coming back again. Unless they are forced to these people are not going to take the money out of their own pockets to pay for the crisis their looting of their own capitalist system caused.

We published on this blog yesterday the need for a strategy that continues to take our movement forward into conscious mass direct action confrontation with the capitalist offensive. That also would protect our movement from being damaged by its own right wing which wants to pull it into a subservient relationship with the Democrats and the union bureaucracy. And that also would protect it from ultra left pressures which wants it to adopt policies which would at this stage cut it off from mobilizing the hundreds of thousands and millions it needs to win. The actions of the anarchist forces and their refusal to consider how their actions negatively affect the bringing into the movement the hundreds of thousands and millions of new forces we need, is an example of this.

We need to keep this approach in mind and continue to fight for it. It will be a continual struggle. The extremely positive side is that the movement and those active in it are maturing through this process of struggle.

While we take our movement forward we need to think in an imaginative way of the forces we are up against. Wall Street, the financial institutions and their bought and paid for politicians in the Republicans and Democrats have looted this country over the years and left it bankrupt. At the same time they have financed the military industrial complex and wars and occupations abroad to defend their power and wealth and resources and to make hundreds of billions producing destructive scrap iron in the shape of weaponry. At home they have their state apparatus, the military and cops and so called legal system which they use ruthlessly, and even in their own terms illegally, if their wealth and power is challenged. And they have their mass media to lie about any and all subjects including the movement we are building. These forces combine to make up the ruling class, the capitalist class in this country.

These people are criminals, they are ruthless, they are utterly unprincipled and inhumane people of the most degenerate type. And they are running this country and dominating its politics and military policies. These are the forces we are up against. We have to be conscious who we are fighting, we must not underestimate them. This is a serious enemy that we are challenging.

But there is no reason to be pessimistic. We have what they do not have. We have the potential to mobilize the tens and hundreds of millions that can out number their forces and defeat them. This is our power. The potential power of the gigantic 200 million strong US working class. But to realize this power and to organize it into a cohesive fighting force we need to have a clear strategy.

This starts with program. We have to explain our program for a better life for all working people and this to be financed by making the rich pay and in the process taking the financial institutions and resources out of their hands and putting these under public ownership and democratic working class control and management and on this basis organize society along democratic socialist lines in the interests of the majority not as in now in the interests of the profit addicted tiny minority of the capitalists and their flunkeys. We have to take this alternative to the working class majority in language which is their language and we have to distill it down into clear demands that we can unite and fight for.

At the same time we have to develop the March 4th committees that provided the leadership last Thursday into a nation wide network of working class based action committees drawing in school students, college and university students, workers from the work places and unions, parents and community activists and on this rank and file body build the movement which we can build the fighting majority that can defeat the capitalist offensive. Such a network can relate to the official union movement by linking with and integrating with the rank and file of this movement while at the same time maintaining its independent fighting program and its mass direct action methods.

As we do so we have to always be prepared for the viciousness of the capitalists and their state machine. But also always remember that our alternative is more powerful if we can mobilize it, our alternative is the tens of millions of working class people united, organized and on the march.

But to look again at the viciousness of the capitalists and how the youth who are leading this movement must be prepared and also how the older sections of the working class and movement must protect the youth.

In today's New York Times, Saturday March 6th, there is an article entitled "cops versus Kids." It is about developments in New York Schools. The New York City police system, representing the New York City elite, that is the capitalist class, have what are know as safety officers in the schools. They work for the NYPD and have the power to detain, search, handcuff and arrest students. Look at some of the things they have been doing.

The article in the New York Times runs a story about two sixth grade kids who drew a line on each others desk with an erasable marker. The teacher told them to erase them and they went to get tissues to do so. The so called safety officer got involved and in no time a NYPD officer arrived and handcuffed the two kids. The young girl asked for her mother and began to cry. The cops refused and took the two kids to the local precinct station house in handcuffs. These heros, the city's "finest" were determined to keep the city safe from sixth graders with erasable markers.

This is not an isolated incident. Just last month a 12 year old girl was arrested for doodling on her desk, she was paraded out, also in handcuffs, and in tears to the local precinct station house. This young woman is taking a law suit against the the cops. In it there is reference to a case in 2008 when a so called safety officer kicked in a door in a bathroom stall. The student in the stall who had done nothing wrong was hit in the head and injured. The so called safety officer is alleged to have said in court:"That is life. It will stop bleeding." In the same year a five year old became unruly at a school event. The so called safety officer grabbed him and shipped him off to a hospital psychiatric ward. Capitalism sees no price too high to keep its city safe from unruly five year olds and to train its future labor force to take orders.

These experiences are extremely traumatic for the children involved. But in a more general sense they make clear the thinking of the capitalists who run this country and who run New York City. The criminals who run Wall Street and the financial institutions loot the country. With the exception of somebody like Madoff who robbed his own class they are not cuffed and ran off to the nearest precinct station house to Wall Street. No they are still inside, and not only that they are pocketing even bigger bonuses from the money they were given by their corrupt politicians from working peoples' taxes. They are free to loot even more. There are no mass arrests on Wall Street of these criminals. But the little kid doodling on their desk, he or she can be carted off in handcuffs and put in the precinct station house or sent to a psychiatric ward. What a system this sick capitalist system, what a class, this sick degenerate capitalist class.

We must not underestimate who class we are fighting. They have large forces. They are vicious and immoral in the extreme. When we go up against them we must do so with hundreds and thousands and millions. This does not mean we do not act until we have such forces. But what it does mean is that our program, strategy and tactics must be determined by what is necessary to unite and mobilize such forces. We have to be as serious in our approach as they are in theirs.

Sean.