War and the Economic Crisis

Here is the talk that two members of Democracy Insurgent gave recently. It explains the economic crisis that is happening today from a working class perspective, as well as the connections to the war in the Middle East.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:

Capitalism in crisis, from Iraq to the US

This is our latest flyer.
All those of you readers who are in Seatown, we'd love to see you there!

SAVE THE DATE: OCT 28th, 7pm, University of Washington HUB 209 A
email us if you need directions!

Repression of Migrant workers unionizing in South Korea

Wol-san Liem, an organizer of the Migrant Trade Union in South Korea sent us an email this morning. In the spirit of international workers solidarity in South Korea, migrant and Korean workers alike have been marching on the streets. Check out the coverage here and here.

While immigrants here in the US have been marching against criminalization, migrant workers too in South Korea have been protesting the crackdown on labor struggles by the police force. And the state lashes back, with its repressive tactics, kidnapping the leaders of the MTU to make a statement against their activities. This is a letter and petition from the organization:

STOP REPRESSION AGAINST MTU and MIGRANT WORKERS

Demands:

1. Stop the repression against MTU and release President Torna Limbu and Vice President Abdus Sabur immediately!

2. In the name of the right to freedom of association of all workers, recognize MTU’s legal union status!

3. Stop the crackdown against legalize all undocumented migrant workers!

Sign the Petition at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/StopMigrantRepression/

Repression against MTU Leadership Continues!

The South Korean government has attacked MTU (Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union) once again. On May 2, only one day after workers around the world celebrated May Day, MTU's newly elected president and vice president were forcibly arrested by immigration officers, the president in front of the union office and the vice president at his home. We are deeply enraged by this act of repression against MTU and migrant workers' organizing in South Korea!

Description of the Incident

At roughly 8:20pm on the night of May 2, President Torna Limbu and MTU's vice general secretary were walking out of the MTU office when they were suddenly confronted by 10 to 15 immigration officers who were waiting hidden around the corner. The officers surrounded the president and without presenting a detention order violently forced him into a van waiting nearby. When the vice general secretary attempted to protest he was physically restrained by officers who shouted at him not to interfere with public affairs.

Soon after, at around 9:00pm the same night, union officers become unable to contact MTU Vice President Abdus Sabur. When a union officer and a Korean supporter went to check on him, they found his house empty. A neighbor informed them that immigration officers had been their shortly before. At 12:30am it was confirmed that the vice president had also been arrested and that both men were being transported to Cheongju Detention Center 2.5 hours south of Seoul.

The arrests of both MTU leaders were clearly pre-planned. Immigration officers had followed the president since the previous day when he participated in May Day activities. The vice president recognized a person who had sat nearby him at a fundraiser the week before among the officers who arrested him. That President Torna heard the officers in the van carrying him communicating consistently with those stationed near Vice President Sabur’s house and in other areas in Seoul also shows clearly that the arrests were coordinate with one another.

Long-term Attack on MTU

This outrageous act of repression comes only several months after the targeted crackdown against MTU leadership on November 27 of last year in which the former president, vice president and general secretary were all arrested. In the wake of that attack MTU, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and supporters from the labor movement and civil society carried out a 99-day sit-in protest calling for an end to the oppression against migrants and migrant organizing and at the same time rebuilt MTU. On April 6, MTU elected a new leadership, with President Torna at the forefront, and moved forward determined to fight the crackdown against undocumented migrant workers and win migrant workers' labor and human rights.

The new conservative government of Lee Myeong-bak, however, has only strengthened the policy of repression against migrant workers. A mass crackdown against undocumented migrant workers has again begun and Lee Myeong-bak has stated that he will not tolerate undocumented migrant workers' unionizing.

Supreme Court Case

Lee Myeongbak’s statement is a direct reflection of the attitude the South Korean government has taken towards MTU since its founding in 2005. At that time the Ministry of Labor rejected MTU’s official union status, claiming that undocumented migrant workers do not have the right to freedom of association and union activities. MTU carried out a legal battle against this decision and eventually won in the Seoul High Court on 1 February 2007. However this verdict was appealed to the Supreme Court, where a decision is expected to be reached by the middle to end of this year. The Ministry of Labor bases its appeal on the claims that the right of undocumented migrant workers to freedom of association is not protected in the South Korean Constitution or stated clearly in international law. However, we know that workers are workers, entitled to the same labor rights, no matter what country they reside in under what visa status. This was clearly shown in the High Court decision, which ruled that undocumented migrant workers are the subjects of equal labor rights under South Korean law and in rulings of the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association (UGT [2001], AFL-CTM [2002]) and the Inter-America Court of Human Rights (17 Sept. 2003), which show that international law protects the union rights of undocumented migrant workers.

Stop the Repression!

The arrests of President Torna, Vice President Sabur and previous union leadership, and the South Korean government’s refusal to recognize MTU’s legal union status are clearly an attempt to break MTU's opposition to oppressive policies towards migrant workers. This repression is not only against MTU, but against migrant workers’ organizing in general and, indeed, the entire labor movement.

We therefore make the following demands:

1. Stop the repression against MTU and release President Torna Limbu and Vice President Abdus Sabur immediately!

2. In the name of the right to freedom of association of all workers, recognize MTU’s legal union status!

3. Stop the crackdown against legalize all undocumented migrant workers!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/StopMigrantRepression/

May1st Reflections (Part 1)

Across the country hundreds of thousands of working people and students took part in what is arguably the most important movement inside the United States. Even though the protest was much smaller than the previous two years, many layers of the most oppressed in American society came out. In this scene, the LGBTQ community, undocumented workers, the First Nation, Palestine solidarity activists, and anti-war groups found a space where one could really see attempts at connecting the many devastating effects of U.S. Empire and vice verse, the movements across the world and in the Untied States which are trying to shatter American Empire and break the back of capitalism.

In Seattle, March First Solidarity and I went to a small protest at Seattle Central Community College. There about 100 students. The protest signs and chants were telling. “The Workers and Students, United, will Never be Defeated” was one popular chant which burst through when the student contingent saw the 500 strong ILWU march. Workers also put down their tools while the student march zipped through downtown Seattle. It was easy to see how the self activity of one layer of society—the students—was having an effect on another layer, the working class. On one corner a worker was standing by his friends and collecting flyers and leaflets from as many students as we he could. Perhaps he will go home at night and read them, getting a dose of fresh air and new perspectives which the New York Times, CNN, or the Seattle local media fail to give time and time again.

Other popular signs in the protests were demanding recruiters to get off college campuses, others showed student support for workers, while some pointed to the continuing US war on Iraq with signs saying “Iraq for Iraqis.” The diversity of signs are a reminder of how many students see immigrant rights, the anti-war movement, the labor movement, and much more as part of one social process at times.

March First Solidarity, Jomo and I also went to the larger immigrant rights and labor protest which took place at 4pm. There were probably about 5,000 to 10,000 people at the protest in our estimate. In the upcoming days we will post some pictures from this protest. For today I posted up some poster signs from the student really at Seattle CCC.

From what I read one of the key reasons for the smaller size of the protests is due to increased raids by INS. According to one website they have increased by 60% since 2005, not to mention the increased militarization of the border. The crisis in the housing market has also been a critical reason for the smaller size. Many undocumented workers are in housing construction and with the growing collapse of the housing industry, their pocket books, let alone their confidence has probably been hit.

There are other reasons as well, some which organizers (as students and workers) inside the labor and immigrant rights movement have to take up. This week Jomo and I will try to post reflections on May 1^st and have some hard conversations on what next if the movement is going to grow. Hopefully folks can post their thoughts and feedbacks in the upcoming week.

Talk to yall soon!

Suraj

PS Here are some pics...

Facing Reality by Grace C. Lee, Pierre Chaulieu, and J.R. Johnson

Few folks are aware of Grace Lee Boggs’ works while she was in a small organization called Correspondence. Although Correspondence was never a large organization, it had an extremely productive existence as a center, which produced some of the most exciting ideas about its own time and what libertarian-socialism/ anarchism might look like in the future.

One key text Correspondence produced was Facing Reality. Correspondence was inspired by the events of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. This revolution was critical for them because they saw the working class come to power not by the means of seizing state power, but by directly taking over factories. This gave them a breath of fresh air on what alternative visions of socialism might look like. It verified their belief that the socialism practiced in Russia was not socialism, but actually a new form of capitalism—one that was led by the state—state capitalism.

This might seem to be arcane Russian and Hungarian history considering the fall of Russian communism happened almost two decades ago. But the continuing debates about Venezuela and Cuba should make these old questions relevant for our times. The leadership of these countries claim that they are headed towards socialism. Chavez even proclaimed a 21^st century model of socialism a while back. But is socialism only measured by the increases in wages, or more healthcare clinics? Granted these are important markers and no society in the future can do without healthcare for all, quality education, or guaranteed housing and food etc.

This is where Facing Reality’s insights are so critical. We cannot separate those gains from the fact that working people must control the healthcare clinics, their workplaces, their own community patrols, to name a few of the powers that normal people like you and I are capable of administering without professional politicians, managers, or NGO-types. This might seem like a pie in the sky idea, but just look at who is fighting the liberation struggles today: normal people, sometimes with no high school diplomas, let alone college degrees. Looking at the liberation struggles in the Philippines, S. Korea, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq should be a powerful reminder that only we can build the new society.

I am posting a video of Grace Lee this week. She has continued to grow and this video is a reflection of that. Everyone has their "own" Grace Lee Boggs. I don't think Jomo or I have any secrets that our "Grace Lee Boggs" is the one who wrote "State Capitalism and World Revolution," "The American Worker," and "Facing Reality" to name a few of the key works she co-authored with CLR and/or Raya. However this does not mean we are ignorant of how she has changed in the past forty years.

In this interview, Grace does lay out some of the key problems facing society: war, the prison industrial complex and global warming. She says one of the ways we can solve this is by building community gardens. I do think these gardens can play a role in bringing communities together and teaching young people valuable lessons about the environment and the care it takes to grow food. As Grace mentioned, it also teaches people that the world does not operate on a "press the button" demand system. That there is an organic process to life and we should learn to respect it. However, I believe there are certain limitations to only working in community gardens. I wonder what Grace would think of the danger of community gardens becoming sub-cultures? How do community gardens challenge police brutality, institutionalized racism, poverty etc etc? How would community gardens relate to anti-racist organizations, to labor struggle organizations etc etc.?

Grace shows an uncomfortable relationship with political work. She describes old political movements being about worker's control over production and management and about capturing state power. I definitely agree that if politics is about capturing state power, the history of this has shown no gain or profit for working people. Instead, the best parts of the workers' struggles have resulted in gains such as the eight hour day, better wages, right to unionize etc. But I do disagree with her about the lack of possibilities for workers' power at the site of production. Just because plants might be sent overseas does not mean that workers cannot organize overseas or that there are no plants left in the United States. Nor is international solidarity out the picture. I am not trying to pick a fight with Grace. I got mad respect for her, but I gotta disagree with her on the perspective on workers' power.

I do like what she says about leadership in the end. We cannot look for great leaders who will come out of nowhere to save us. There are millions of everyday leaders. We are all capable of being leaders. We should not elevate Grace, Malcolm, Yuri, or anyone else to such a status where their human abilities and historical legacies are beyond our own capabilities. We should remember that all "great leaders" in the past were young like us, were willing to take a chance, were willing to take imaginative leaps, take risks, and more….

peace,
Suraj

Chinese American anarchist tradition

I have been reading some of the writings of a Chinese American anarchists who were active in San Francisco in the 1920s. One of the leaders of the group, the Equality Society (平 社 ）was a Chinese worker called Ray Jones， 刘钟时。So far, the group is best known for the correspondences between Jones and Ba Jin, a well-known Chinese anarchist who just recently passed away. Their writings to one another show the kind of dedication that both parties felt toward disseminating anarchist ideas, mainly in the form of a monthly journal, called Equality, or 平等. Ba Jin was also actively translating a lot of anarchist literature, by Berkman, Kropotkin and the like. He was sending a lot of these to Ray Jones with the purpose of disseminating it to Chinese workers, not just in the US but also in Cuba. In his archives, Ray Jones receives letters from workers at the sugar plantations in Cuba, who are trying to organize resistance against the plantation supervisors for their miserly treatment. Also in Ray Jones archives, I found flyers that the Equality Society was distributing at that time, advocating for Chinese workers to resist both the KMT and the CCP, both of which are statist formations that will squash workers under capitalism, albeit different forms. They also tried to organize solidarity strikes in SF Chinatown for the longshore workers union in San Francisco in 1934, as well as the Chinese workers in the garment factories in 1937. They maintained a strong class perspective during the anti-Japanese war resistance. The flyers that they put out on in commemoration of May 1st Labor Day in 1938 (?) was a commentary on the anti-war resistance in China. They warned Chinese workers that the bourgeois parties were going to make use of the war resistance effort to create legitimacy for themselves, and that workers should see through that and fight not only Japanese militarism, but also their own Chinese ruling classes along the way. They showed an earnest sense of internationalism when they published essays by Japanese socialists who were facing repression during the WW2 period, making clear that there was a strong anti-war resistance movement in Japan that was brutally squashed. They quote Shifu, the figurehead of Chinese anarchism, that one's loyalty should not be to any one country, but to the whole of humanity. This is in the tradition of strong anti-nationalism within anarchism.

This research on the Chinese Am anarchist scene in the early part of the 20th century is on-going. The One Big Union Monthly, the publication of the Industrial Workers of the World back in the 1910s, has an article called The Chinese and the IWW, which documents how Chinese workers organized during that period. I'm excited to get a copy o this article soon. It seems though that there is some literature floating around about Chinese workers organizing during that period, such as Chris Friday's Organizing Asian American labor : the Pacific Coast canned-salmon industry, 1870-1942 and Jean Pfaelzer's Driven out : the forgotten war against Chinese Americans

More later,
Jomo

What's happening in Pakistan?

This is a guest post by our friend, A, from NYC:

On Saturday Musharraf in Pakistan carried out an internal coup. Perhaps over 4000
people have been rounded up, many disappeared. The majority of the victims have been the liberal opposition to the regime. This is the most serious blow to US imperialism since Lebanon.

The rhetoric of US imperialism is once again exposed for all to see. The coup had to be green lighted by Bush and that seems confirmed by the fact that there is no threat to military aid. The corrupt and hated Bhutto was flown in from her mansions in Dubai and London recently by the US it seems in order to broker an alliance with Musharraf and give a democratic coloring to the regime in order to save it from the rising opposition. What is unclear is what the alliance between Bhutto and Musharraf that the US was
forcing a few weeks ago meant if the dictator was just gonna suspend the constitution.

It could be that the internal political dynamics were getting out of control between Bhutto and Musharraf for the US to manage in this way and had to go with the straight coup. It could also be that Musharraf did act somewhat alone and that at some point the administration will support the ouster of Musharraf by the military and Bhutto will come to power. On the other hand, it seems that they might have to get Musharraf back on track and get him in the same room with Bhutto for a power sharing agreement. Bhutto is attempting to play "leader" of the opposition, writing an op-ed in the NY Times, essentially appealed to US imperialism to support her. To what extent she is on her own on this, who the hell knows. It could reflect indecision and discussion among foreign policy agents about how to move forward in filling up this crack in the regime of Pakistan. Bhutto or Musharraf or both?

What has to be clear is that the seeming showdown developing between Bhutto and Musharraf is nothing more than a struggle over who is gonna stand with the army in the control of the state and profit by it. The desperate struggles and issues facing Pakistani working people are completely ignored. If they were moving and getting beat and imprisoned by the thugs of the ruling class, you better believe there wouldn't be any outcry about it from the liberals in the US or Europe.

The middle class opposition is another matter and shouldn't be directly mixed up with Bhutto. What is striking is that the liberal opposition forced this confrontation and have
attempted to sustain it through calling mass protests. Political corruption and downwardly mobile economic pressures have pushed the progressive sectors of the middle class—lawyers, journalists, NGO staffers, academics and students to the brink.

What is equally striking and important is the lack of mass character of these protests. Ordinary Pakistanis are completely absent. It shows that these liberals have no mass base and the Islamists, although a small minority, have more of a base than them. It shouldn't be a surprise. The liberal opposition is incapable of speaking to the root grievances of Pakistani working people. The downward pressures on working people with the selling off of core industries, like steel, opening up others to more foreign investment and the resulting drop in wages and union power, is a mass looting opportunity for capitalists and the ruling class alike, and an ongoing disaster for working people. The fight for just basic social infrastructure goes on as the regime and whoever controls it just skims off the top for their pockets. History continues to show that capitalism is the enemy of democracy.

In the absence of leftwing alternatives to fill the vacuum we have definitely seen the revival of liberalism as an ideology of modernization and political opposition beginning in Eastern Europe and places like China and South Korea and moving around the world to places like Iran and elsewhere. The color "revolutions" in places like Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Burma or recent years show this trend. These a more complicated phenomena than simply being dusted up by US imperialism and Europe, although the case can be made in Lebanon where it was the ruling class, with French and American aid and direction, carried out the "protests". There were complicated class tensions in these movements where, in some cases, the liberal "leadership", didn't always have control of the situation.

Working people had their own interests that have not been resolved by these new elites coming to power. This liberal current is supported by an "international" of liberal money and institutions (the university establishment, NGOs, foundations and the US State Department) emanating from the West, through
Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, East Asia and beyond. This liberal trend reflects the interests of a new capitalist elite who are eager to get their hands on state and public assests and exploit more vigorously the national working class. But even where it operates as a genuine insurgent, but naïve ideology, for example among progressive sectors of students, teachers, lawyers and journalists, it fails to understand that any sector of US imperialism and Europe is not a friend.

But in practice, just as in the past in former colonial countries, it is crashing and burning. Could we be seeing the tail end of the liberal phase and the possibilities of something new. Liberalism needs imperialism as its support because it can't become the expression of the vast majority of people. It can't solve the problems of corruption and declining social life in Pakistan for the majority, because this is not in the interests of imperialism or capitalism itself and liberalism has never been anything but the ideology of imperialism and capitalism. This trend has already been played out in Latin America the last 8 years or so, with the collapse of neo-liberal ideology that dominated through the 1990s. Mass democratic movements have opened up possibilities in Latin America and maybe and hopefully soon in Mexico.

The other striking thing is the reaction in the US by official society. The Bush administration had to stay on script, but the Congress doesn't have to. Republicans just rip the whole "democracy" rhetoric off and say what they really feel--dictatorship is the best for the interests of the US ruling classes. Democrats have no answer at all because they secretly support the former position, but can't say so because of their historic base that doesn't even exist anymore, except among part of the middle class. Meanwhile, scan the opinion pages of the major bourgeois, elite papers and you find very little to nothing. Their own supposedly professed principles are being crushed right in front of them and they can't say anything. Despite all the rhetorical fighting among the US establishment over these matters the last 2 years, they in fact, more or less, all have the same policy.
And they couldn't otherwise.

It is always wakes you up when crises like this come up, reminding me once again how serious blows against US imperialism are tied to US domestic crises. The national struggle in Vietnam didn't only win because of superior organization, but also because the US at the time was going through major crises in its own domestic life. Today we
know that such upheavals are right under the surface, but haven't fully emerged and begun to take shape. This means that upheavals in places like Pakistan, a client state of the US, are unlikely to succeed in developing into something bigger and better, because US military might assures the stability of indigenous oligarchy.

It fits into a larger pattern of what I began to realize when I came of age with the Intifada and 9-11 and realized there was this whole other world out there and I wasn't alone and had a history. While things get worse, the establishment, whether it’s the politicians, the media, teachers, intellectuals or bosses, have no answers. Becoming a political person wasn't just about doing activism and reading about my history for the first time. It was about having the revelation that these people were totally bankrupt. In many ways that was a struggle out of the dead end of liberalism and that it had no answers for what's been going on.

Our peoples' crises abroad are mirrored by our own here in the US among the majority working people who have been taking the hits of a one-sided class and racist war for 30 years, and among the youth in the high schools, campuses and the workplaces. I was born into a world of being brainwashed at school, working more for less, and then learning now at college, dominated by liberalism, that these people are also brainwashing or tell us why we can't do anything about it. We got to get it together.