On this day in 1525, Nicholas Storch died, at the height of the revolution he helped to inspire: The German Peasants’ War, an uprising by laborers against the feudal system.
Storch was a radical. A weaver, he became a preacher of anarchist Christian views. He spread his ideas of the equality of all human beings and a communal sharing of goods and work. Unlike other members of the Zwickau Prophets, Storch was not a pacifist. He felt only direct confrontation and an uprising of the workers against the ruling class would result in bringing about the better world of his vision.
Storch’s teachings took hold among the laborers in his native Saxony. The war itself began with a series of uprisings in different Herrschafts. At the time, every Herrschaft (county) was ruled either by a king, a prince, or a princely count. Each held complete authority over the people under his jurisdiction. One of the first rebellions occurred because of unreasonable demands from the local ruling family:
During the 1524 harvest in Stühlingen, the Countess of Lupfen ordered serfs to collect snail shells for use as thread spools. This was the final straw in a series of difficult harvests, and within days, 1,200 peasants had gathered, created a list of grievances, elected officers, and raised a banner…within a few weeks, most of southwestern Germany was in open revolt.
Conditions were ripe for revolution. German coins had been devalued by the importation of silver and gold from Latin America. Prices rose, but rulers refused to lower their lease costs or allow the guilds to raise wages. Taxes on serfs and villagers were increased as well, because the rulers did not want to absorb the cost of a new imperial tax for the Holy Roman Emperor. The peasant class was forced to bear the brunt of these economic disasters in addition to ridiculous demands from their feudal lords.
As news spread of each local uprising against the serf status, more followed. Workers were fighting against well-funded and highly trained military forces: each ruling prince was required to keep a standing army and provide weapons for his soldiers.
The farmers and craftsmen could not afford horses, armor, or weapons. So they used pitchforks, scythes, wooden staffs, torches, and rocks. The ruling class expected these rock-throwing rebels to last a few days at best. Instead, the uprising turned into a war that lasted two years.
The serfs had two advantages. One was their solidarity, and the other was their ability to work hard physically to prepare for battles. They were able to build excellent trenches and field fortifications quickly. They linked their wagons together into a makeshift fort, and surrounded it with ground defenses. The princes’ armies had to split their forces to attack all sides.
Bands of disconnected peasants became, with the help of Storch, Thomas Müntzer, and other advisors, an effective army. Each band elected its own officers. Everyone had input in strategies and decisions, but captains made the final decisions. At the peak of the Peasants’ War, over 300,000 serfs and villagers were fighting across the German feudal states.
By the time Nicholas Storch died, it is likely that he and Thomas Müntzer had worked on drafts of The Twelve Articles, a list of demands that the peasant army presented to their rulers. When we read this list today, the concessions sound modest. The workers and villagers wanted to choose their own pastors, to fish and to hunt small game in the woods, to collect firewood to heat their homes in the winter. They wanted fair rents and taxes, and a return of their right to common grazing land—which they previously held, but were taken away by feudal rulers. And they wanted a voice in how they were governed.
But the rulers were stunned that their serfs, who they regarded as possessions, would make any demands at all. It was as if, one prince wrote, the farm animals demanded a new barn or the crops complained that they didn’t have enough water. The fighting continued.
By May of 1525, the Peasants’ Army was celebrating major victories across the war region. They had captured and gained control of several cities. Some Catholic bishops, along with the Elector of the Palatinate and a few of the princely counts, approached the peasant army and offered concessions. They also promised to meet the army’s Twelve Articles. Then the Peasant Army made a critical error: it took these rulers at their word.
Leaving a small standing army, thousands of peasants were sent home to attend to their fields and crops. A battalion of fighters and a band of councilors convened at Frankenhausen to draft a new constitution for the empire, allowing votes for the peasants. At this point, Martin Luther urged the feudal princes to destroy the “murdering and robbing band of the peasants.” Nicholas Storch’s comrade Thomas Müntzer was captured, tortured, and executed while working on the constitution. He was 28 years old at the time of his death. Saxony fell back under the rule of the Saxon princes. Defeats followed in Alsace, Württemberg, and Würzburg.
Over 100,000 rebels died in their attempt to gain a better life. Their fellow revolutionaries were punished across the German States with even more crippling taxes and were forced to pay war reparations. But, according to Karl Marx, who wrote extensively about the war, the peasant forces did manage to damage the existing feudal system. The Catholic Church lost control of much of its wealth and position in Germany. Many feudal rulers were bankrupted by their war costs and had to become, in their turn, the servants and courtiers of the most powerful princes. These overlords, Marx wrote:
…gained not only relatively, through the weakening of their opponents, the clergy, the nobility and the cities, but also absolutely through the prizes of war which they collected. The church estates were secularised in their favour; part of the nobility, fully or partly ruined, was obliged gradually to place itself in their vassalage; the indemnities of the cities and peasantry swelled their treasuries, which, with the abolition of so many city privileges, had now obtained a much more extended field for financial operations.
There would not be another uprising of the working class to match the Peasants’ War until the French Revolution, 264 years later.
Kellogg and the politics of sustainable certification
Last week the online business journal MiBiz posted a story that was headlined, “Kellogg Co. takes leadership stance in support of sustainable palm oil.”
The article states that the Battle Creek-based cereal company has committed to being part of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The RSPO was an industry-founded entity with a mission that states:
“To advance the production, procurement and use of sustainable oil palm products through:
- The development, implementation and verification of credible global standards and,
- The engagement of stakeholders along the supply chain.”
The MiBiz article affirms the RSPO mission statement by citing both a Kellogg’s spokesperson and a representative of the World Wildlife Fund who says, “By supporting sustainable production in this way, Kellogg is demonstrating just the sort of responsible action that we want others to take. As the first in the U.S. food industry to take this step, they’re setting an example for others to follow.”
It all sounds pretty fabulous, right? Well, it seems that there is information that would question the so-called sustainable practices of the RSPO that Kellogg’s has decided to sign onto.
First, it is important to think about how much accountability there is with such an entity, especially since it is a self-police organization. There is no governmental or citizen-based mechanism for accountability.
Second, the RSPO is made up of entities from the banking industry, Consumer Goods Manufacturers, Palm Oil growers, Palm Oil Processors & traders, Retailers, Environmental Groups and other NGOs. The list from their website is a pretty mixed bag of entities such as ConAgra, Heinz, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Nestle, and PepsiCo from the corporate world and the World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam in the NGO world. An important question for anyone to ask at this point is what is the track record of some of these multinational corporations on matters of ecological sustainability? If you do any research into many of these companies you will quickly discover that that have an awful record when it comes to sustainability.
Third, there is plenty of evidence that despite the claims made by the RSPO, the practices of palm oil production is quite unsustainable. In a 2008 article from Green Peace there is the claim that palm oil production has contributed significantly to deforestation in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. The same article states that the RSPO is just another form of Greenwashing by a coalition of corporations in order to convince the public that what they are doing is good for the environment.
Another indication that the RSPO is not ultimately committed to ecological integrity is their rejection of greenhouse gas emissions standards. According to Friends of the Earth, “Clearing forests to expand oil palm plantations is increasing carbon dioxide emissions. It’s also having a devastating impact on forest communities by trashing the very resources they rely on for food and shelter.”
Author Heather Rogers (Green Gone Wrong) also has a critical take on the RSPO practices in a chapter on the ecological and social consequences of bio-fuels and palm oil. Rogers, who spent a great deal of time in Borneo doing research says that companies that are members of the RSPO have not only displaced local communities in order to plant palm tree plantations they have also cut down old growth forests in the process.
The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has similar concerns, but states: “The RSPO can be an important tool, both for communities and for our work against the US Agribusiness giants. But the RSPO’s success and credibility depends on the work of organizations like SawitWatch, the Forest People’s Program, and other local NGOs who work to ensure that the RSPO is a real multi-stakeholder initiative, and works actively to ensure that community-level conflict is solved before oil palm companies are certified “sustainable.”
Clearly there are serious concerns about the effectiveness and lack of accountability with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil process and its member companies. Unfortunately, this was not something that MiBiz was willing to explore in reporting that Kellogg’s had taken a “leadership” position on this issue.
Yesterday, Wayne State University Professor Danielle L. McGuire spoke to an audience at the downtown campus of GVSU. The topic of her talk was based on her recently released book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape & Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.
She began her presentation the same way the book begins by telling the story of Recy Taylor, a 24 year-old Black woman who while walking home was stopped by a carload of White men. The men forced her into their car and then raped her. The White men told her that if she said anything they would kill her. She told everyone she knew.
The NAACP got wind of the incident and sent their best investigator, Rosa Parks, to Alabama to interview Recy. What Rosa Parks discovered and what Professor McGuire found out was that a decade before the Montgomery Bus Boycott the Black community was already organized and resisting White Supremacy. The difference was Black people were not fighting for an end to racial segregation they were fighting against the sexual violence of White men against Black women.
McGuire said, “The modern Civil Rights movement was born out of the overwhelming incidents of sexual assaults by White men in the South.” It was the courage of Black women that gave birth to the tactics and strategies that challenged White Male Supremacy that would later be used for voting rights and other campaigns, according to McGuire.
Professor McGuire then went on to talk about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She said that the popular version of the story is that Rosa Parks started the boycott because she refused to move to the back of the bus. However, McGuire said that another Black woman, Gertrude Perkins, was really the person who gave birth to the campaign. Perkins was a 25-year old black women who was abducted by White police officers, who then raped her. After the rape she told a local Black minister, who sent the story to a syndicated columnist and radio talk show host who reported on the assault the next morning. The local police would not investigate, even though they had a history of sexist and racist history.
Black people in Montgomery organized around this assault. One action was to hang a banner that read, “The Rapist was White.” It happened to be that the church where the banner was hung was the same church that Dr. King would later be pastor of. A local committee was also formed in response to the rape and this group was so effective in their organizing that they got a Grand Jury hearing and the local Black ministers together for the very first time.
Not long afterwards there was another incident of a rape of a Black woman by a local grocer. Again, the police would not investigate, so a boycott campaign against the store was begun, yet another tactic that was used by the Civil Rights movement.
In addition, there were organized campaigns against the bus system, even boycotts, because of the ongoing sexual harassment on the buses in Montgomery. The bulk of the riders were Black women who worked as maids in White homes and could only use bus transportation to get to work.
So when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, it was no surprise that thousands participate, especially women who had been fighting racism and sexism on the buses for over a decade. “These women during the boycott walked to work and walked to protest the sexism and racism that women had experienced,” said McGuire.
Professor McGuire also told the story of Daisy Bates, in Little Rock, Arkansas who is known for her work in school desegregation. However, Bates got involved in Civil Rights work because her mother had been raped by White men. In fact, the newspaper she edited (Arkansas State Press), would often denounce the sexism and sexual assaults by White men.
McGuire went on to say that so many of these southern Civil Rights struggles were born of women’s experience with sexual assault. McGuire also said it is important to put this history into proper context, by going back to slavery, where White slave owners often sexually assaulted Black women in slavery. This is where sexual assault by White men against Black women became normalized.
During Reconstruction White Supremacists used Sexualized violence as a tool against freed slaves. It was during this time that the White Supremacists used the myth of Black male sexual predators as a way to demonize Black men and maintain power. McGuire said there is an old saying that grew out of the Jim Crow era which said, “The closer a Black man got to the Voting box, the more he looked like a rapist.”
Professor McGuire also mentions the 1967 Supreme Court decision, which overturns the ban on inter-racial marriage. This decision was a watershed moment that not only led to greater equality and freedom in relationships but it also was a slap in the face to White Supremacists.
McGuire shared several other stories and cases that are in her book, but towards the end of the talk she emphasized the point that if we are going to fully understand the sexual and gender aspects of the Civil Rights movement, we have to come to terms with the sexual and gendered violence that activists had to endure. It was this very sexualized and gendered violence, which gave birth to the modern Civil Rights movement that McGuire said should radically alter how we approach that history.
GRIID 2011 Spring Classes
GRIID would like to announce that we are offering two more classes that begin in April.
Confronting White Privilege is the first class, which is one that we offered last fall. This class is designed to investigate institutional racism in the US and how it is being manifested today. We will be using a book by Tim Wise entitled, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.
Included in this 6-week class will be a look at the racial dynamics that exist in the Greater Grand Rapids area and what is or isn’t being done to promote racial justice. The Confronting White Privilege class will meet on Mondays from 7 – 9pm, beginning April 11.
The second class that GRIID is offering is a completely new class entitled US Policy in the Middle East and Revolutionary Movements. This class is designed to investigate US policy in the Middle East since WWII and the current revolutionary movements in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
The class will be using Mark Zepezauer’s book Boomerang!: : How Our Covert Wars Have Created Enemies Across the Middle East and Brought Terror to America to explore these historical dynamics and numerous online resources to investigate the current uprisings. This second class will meet on Wednesdays from 7- 9pm, beginning April 13.
Both classes will meet at the Steepletown Neighborhood Center, located at 671 Davis NW in Grand Rapids. Both classes cost $20, which does not include the cost of the book.
If you would like to sign up for either class or receive additional information contact Jeff Smith at jsmith@griid.org or Mike Saunders at outobol@gmail.com. There are also downloadable flyers online at https://griid.org/griid-classes/.
More protests planned for Lansing this week
As the Michigan Legislature and Governor Snyder continue to attack the public sector and organized labor the level of resistance keeps growing.
This week there will be crucial legislative decisions being made in the State House. On Tuesday, March 15 at 10:30am House Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on HB 4287. This bill prohibits the use of project labor agreements in any projects using state funds or tax breaks. This is another attack on out building trades!
Then on Wednesday, March 16 the House Education Committee will take up HB 4306, a bill that forces local school boards to privatize services. In response to these draconian pieces of legislation there are protests planned for both Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.
On Tuesday, March 15, the Michigan League for Human Services and AARP are holding a rally at the State Capitol from 11am – 1pm. The focus of this rally is to “let lawmakers know it is not OK to cut services and shift taxes from businesses to vulnerable families with children and seniors.”
On Wednesday, March 16, the Michigan AFL-CIO and other affiliate unions are holding a rally at the Lansing Capitol that will begin at noon. According to the AFL – CIO, they are gathering to “Protest the anti-worker legislation (over 40 pieces) such as Emergency Manager bills, ban on Project Labor Agreements, and cuts to education.”
Lastly, it should be noted that there is now an organized campaign to Recall Michigan Governor Rick Snyder. The effort to collect the 900,000 necessary signatures to recall Snyder cannot begin until July 1. The campaign is being done by a group with the website Fire Rick Snyder, which doesn’t provide any information on who is behind the campaign.
Governor Snyder Launches His Union-Busting Agenda
Remember last month, when newly minted Governor Rick Snyder said Michigan was not Wisconsin? He was responding to questions on whether he intended to support Wisconsin-style union-busting legislation here. “We are two very different states,” Snyder commented. “I believe we should go through the collective bargaining process in terms of our discussion as we ask for concessions,” he added, referring to his stated opinion that state employees were overpaid.
A lot of people settled back and bought that comment hook, line, and sinker. No attacks on unions here.
It’s March now. And a new bill, slipped into consideration and passed by the State Senate (and already pre-approved in a House version), says otherwise. Governor Snyder has already announced he will sign the final version.
In the Senate, the vote on the bill was deadlocked before Snyder’s Lieutenant Governor, Brian Calley, cast his vote to break the tie. Protestors lining the visitors’ gallery called out “shame on you!” after several days of protests on the Capitol steps.
The bill is a redo of the state’s emergency financial management bill and allows, like the original legislation, for the state to take over a school system, a city government, or other entity that is failing financially.
But the new beefed-up version lets the state then suspend or terminate any and all union contracts as a part of the takeover. All the governor has to do is target a particular public institution with unionized members as being “in financial emergency” and the union’s contracts can be eradicated and replaced with whatever terms the manager sees fit to provide.
Remember democracy? Kiss it goodbye. This new law would also allow the “emergency manager” assigned by the state to fire elected officials…seize and sell city or school assets…eliminate or privatize city or school services and programs. With no input from or vote by citizens. Its constitutionality has already been called into question.
The state can even use this bill to erase and redraw city boundaries or completely eliminate a school system if the manager wants to do so.
“This is a takeover by the right wing and it’s an assault on democracy like I’ve never seen,” stated Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO.
President of the Michigan Education Association Iris Salter said, during a protest against the new legislation, that the bill was “a way to say to labor ‘You don’t count.’ It’s a way to say to employees, ‘Get back.’ I believe it’s just like being in the slave days.”
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, called the bill “a corporate coup d’etat.” She pointed out that since the “manager” could be a contracted management firm, Michigan could soon be facing “the privatization of whole towns by fiat.”
Another issue, raised by Representative John Conyers, is that the first unions to be busted will be in towns and school systems where there are high numbers of minority residents. They have been hit the hardest in the state’s years-long financial downturn, and tax bases in these communities are plummeting.
And this is just the beginning of planned legislation to weaken unions and conduct class warfare in Michigan under Governor Snyder’s approving eye. Up next: a bill to repeal Michigan’s wage law and one that will terminate binding arbitration for police and firefighters.
PWA event will focus on threats to Women’s Rights
The Progressive Women’s Alliance (PWA) is hosting an event this Wednesday that will address the legislative threats to women’s rights. Their recent media release states:
“In one of the most blatant efforts to erode women’s right to choose, the House voted 240-185 on Feb. 18, 2011 to defund Planned Parenthood. While abortions remain legal, it is no secret that anti-choice legislators are working to chip away at access to the procedure.
This bill and this vote are the most recent attempt to take away women’s rights, and will, at the same time, hinder access for thousands of women across the nation who turn to Planned Parenthood to receive basic reproductive healthcare and family planning services. The passage of H.R.3 has the potential to limit STD testing, cervical cancer screenings and the availability of condoms for thousands who rely on the organization for these services. Many are calling this move not just an attack on choice, but also an attack on women’s healthcare.”
The PWA event is both a fundraiser and an opportunity for people to hear Sarah Scranton, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan.
Wednesday, March 16
5-5:30 pm social time
5:30-6:30 pm program and dialogue
Cost: Open to the public. Tickets are $15; $5 for students with valid ID
Women’s City Club, lower level, 254 East Fulton in Grand Rapids
Gut Check in Madison: Is Labor Ready to Fight for its Life?
(This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.)
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his right Republican allies in the Wisconsin legislature might be a bunch of plutocratic, Koch-funded thugs but you’ve got to hand it to them – they’ve got guts. So what if the strategic departure of fourteen Democratic state senators from Wisconsin was followed by an historic popular and labor uprising in and around the Madison Capital Rotunda, bringing hundreds of thousands of union members and supporters from one day to the next to protest Walker’s move to “reverse half-a-century’s middle-class progress in the state by erasing collective bargaining rights for public employees” (the New York Times editors today [Friday, March 11]) in the disingenuous name of “budget repair”? So what if it is obvious to any serious observer that Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans’ effort to undermine public unions – a longstanding goal of the Republican Party and many of its big business backers (e.g. Koch Industries) – has nothing to do with fixing a state budget crisis that Walker has trumped up and fed with tax breaks for the wealthy and corporate Few? And so what if numerous recent public opinion polls (USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) show that the preponderant majority of Americans support collective bargaining rights for public (and private sector) workers? So what if most of the nation’s citizens reject Walker’s war (and that of other governors and legislators) on public sector workers – a war that amounts to the largest assault on organized labor’s economic and political power in recent American history?
“This is Our Moment”
Walker couldn’t care less. He’s a fiercely dedicated right-capitalist ideologue carried away with the sense of his mission to inflict lasting and historic damage on organized labor and the Democrats. One of many hard-right Republicans elected with Tea Party support at the state level in November of 2010, Walker has made little effort to hide his militantly regressive, pro-business agenda in early 2011. He quickly hung a sign on the doorknob of his office that read “Wisconsin is open for business.” He rejected $810 million in federal money that Wisconsin was getting to build a high-speed train line between Madison and Milwaukee. He turned the state’s Department of Commerce into a “public-private hybrid” in which workers had to re-apply for their jobs. He joined with other Republicans to grant $117 million in tax breaks to businesses and others – this even as he planned major cuts in social spending and an assault on the supposedly exorbitant pension and medical benefit levels enjoyed by public workers in the state.1
Labor suspicions that the Tea Party backers the billionaire right wing Koch brothers were a major force behind the proposed Wisconsin legislation were validated when the liberal, New York-based blogger Ian Murphy placed a call to Walker in which Murphy posed as David Koch. Murphy (as Koch) and Walker spoke for 20 minutes — a conversation in which the governor described several potential ways to pressure Democrats to return to the Statehouse and revealed that he and his allies had considered secretly planting people in pro-union protest crowds to stir up trouble. Walker likened his stand to that taken by President Ronald Reagan when Reagan fired the nation’s air-traffic controllers during a labor dispute in 1981. “That was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and led to the fall of the Soviets,” Walker claimed. Walker said he expected the anti-union movement to spread across the country and that he had spoken with the governors of Ohio and Nevada. The blogger pretending to be Koch agreed, telling Walker, “You’re the first domino.” Walker responded affirmatively, saying “Yep, this is our moment.” When Walker said he was willing to negotiate with Democratic senators, Murphy told him to “bring a baseball bat.” Walker laughed and responded that he had “a slugger with my name on it.” At the end of the call, the blogger posing as Koch said, “I’ll tell you what Scott, once you crush these bastards, I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time.” Walker replied that “that would be outstanding,” adding that the standoff is “all about getting our freedoms back” The prank caller said “Absolutely. And you know, we have a little bit of vested interest as well.”2
Revealing a personal relationship with at least one of the Koch brothers, Walker’s conversation with the prankster Ian Murphy was consistent with earlier comments from the brash new Tea Party governor. Six days into the protests, Walker told Fox News that he was “not fazed” and predicted that Wisconsin would trail-blaze “conservative” policy for other states by weakening unions, much like it did with so-called welfare reform (the abolition of poor families’ entitlement to public family cash assistance) and the advance of school privatization vouchers in the 1990s. As the Times reported six days in, “Mr. Walker, 43, the son of a Baptist preacher, is an Eagle Scout….His political heroes: Tommy Thompson, this state’s former governor, and Ronald Reagan….’He didn’t flinch,’ Mr. Walker said of Reagan. ‘Obviously, I take a lot of inspiration from that.’”3
And now the arch-authoritarian, super-plutocratic, Reagan-inspired union-buster in Madison has made his latest bold move. It was just a matter of time until he and his Republican allies broke out their labor-smashing collective bargaining measure from their larger “budget repair” bill as a separate piece of legislation, permitting them to assault union rights without the presence of the 14 Democratic state senators. So what if doing so exposes the fact that union-busting was the real goal in and of itself, independent of Walker’s claim that the killing of public sector workers’ bargaining rights was necessary to fix the budget? A messianic labor-smasher’s got to what a messianic labor smasher’s got to do: the historical mission inherited from Ronald Reagan and Tommy Thompson cannot be deterred!
On the evening of Thursday, March 10, 2011, the Wisconsin legislature passed a stand-alone bill that cut out bargaining rights for most government employees in the state. Hundreds of protestors crashed into the Capitol chanting “shame” and “General Strike.” More than two weeks ago, the Madison-based 97-union South Central Labor Federation (representing 45,000 public and private sector union members in southern and central Wisconsin)passed a resolution in support of exploring the possibility of launching a General Strike if and when “Walker signs his ‘budget repair bill.’” The federation appointed a coordinating committee is to contact European unions with experience conducting general strikes.4 A recent on-the-ground report from the left labor journalist Lee Sustar gives the following account from the Capitol last night from Mike Imbrogno, an executive board member of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 171 at the University of Wisconsin: “People keep asking, ‘When are we going on strike?’ There is the broad mix of workers here who have been out for the last three weeks: boilermakers, AFSCME members, teachers, firefighters, graduate employees of the UW Teaching Assistants’ Association, lots of building trades people” – many more than ready for some serious direct action. 5
The Cautious Electoral Road v.Direct Action
Walker’s got guts. What about labor? The governor and his cronies have just rammed through legislation (possibly in illegal fashion) that promises to cripple public sector unions financially while destroying their bargaining power. As the left labor analyst Lee Sustar notes on Socialistworker.org, it’s “Do or Die” time for organized labor in Wisconsin, the upper Midwest, and, by extension, the rest of the nation. Once (during the mid-1950s) as high as 35 percent, American union density (the percentage of employed workers enrolled in unions) is down to 11.9 percent and half of the nation’s union members are in the public sector (private sector union density is 6 percent). The corporate and financial elites and its many tools in the political class (in a country where politics continues all too commonly to be little more than “the shadow vast on society by big business”) wants that number to fall by at least half in the next decade. Will union leadership step up to the plate and meet the challenge to defend both working people and its own relevance and position, in accord with majority progressive opinion?
There are reasons to wonder. In December of 2008, a group of militant trade unionists and workers struck a strong populist chord that reverberated across the nation when they staged a successful six-day workplace occupation to secure vacation and severance pay at Chicago’s Republic Door and Windows plant last December. Despite “vast publicity and the stunning victory produced by the workers,” U.S. labor leaders made no move to replicate the occupation tactic in other settings where it would have been well applied, choosing as usual a “cautious, Beltway-focused approach” that “sh[ies] away from visible local mobilizations” and “prefers to concentrate instead on high-level lobbying in Washington” (Roger Bybee). 6
In April of 2009, United Steelworkers of America president Leo Gerard gave a revealingly myopic response when New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse asked him why American workers seemed less willing than their European counterparts to engage in workplace occupations and mass demonstrations. By Greenhouse’s account, Gerard “said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs — for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs” in the United States.7 “I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world,” Mr. Gerard told Greenhouse. “He said,” Greenhouse reported, “large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators.” 8 The labor bureaucrat Gerard’s self-serving explanation for U.S. labor quiescence was shamefully seconded by liberal Stanford historian David Kennedy. Kennedy “saw another reason that today’s young workers and young people were protesting less than in decades past.” He told Greenhouse that “this generation [has]… found more effective ways to change the world. It’s signed up for political campaigns, and it’s not waiting for things to get so desperate that they feel forced to take to the streets.”9
Really? The impressive potency of American trade unionism’s “smarter” and “more effective” preference for “expert lobbying” over direct action was certainly seen with the corporate-managed democracy’s rapid dismissal of labor’s cherished EFCA. That already-“dead” bill – on which presidential candidate Barack Obama ran (along with his disingenuous promise to revise NAFTA) before union rallies (even as his chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee assured conservative Canadian officials that Obama’s “NAFTA-bashing” was just harmless “campaign rhetoric” spit out for clueless proletarians) – would have been more effectively advanced with a wave of workplace occupations and marches. That’s how workers won the National Labor Relations Act (once a powerful vehicle for union representation and collective bargaining) during the 1930s. As progressive labor journalist Roger Bybee noted, “the turmoil created by labor activism” during the Depression decade “forced [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt to argue the need for labor rights and the creation of a social safety to head off even more explosive confrontations between workers and authorities.”[10] I was reminded by Gerard and Kennedy’s arguments of the late radical historian Alan Dawley’s evocative notion that the U.S. “ballot box” is “the coffin of class consciousness.”11
“Do or Die in Wisconsin”
Nearly two year later, the situation in Madison and other state capitols has become “so desperate” that public sector unions have “fe[lt] forced to take to the streets” to fight hard right, Tea Party-approved governors and legislators elected r) governors elected in the wake of the great progressive de-mobilization/demoralization enforced by the corporate Democrats and the moribund “progressive movement.” It has been inspiring to witness their people-moving institutional capacity in defensive reaction again the maximalist anti-labor of the worst, most reactionary policymakers in the country. Unlike the Obama-obsessed Tea Partiers, the union and pro-labor crowds in and around the Capitol Rotunda have seemed uninterested in the question of who sits atop the national media-politics extravaganza. They have been focused, laser-like on the real and relevant policy issues at hand and above all on basic labor, human, and civil rights and social justice within and beyond the workplace. With tens of thousands of them circling the Capitol and thousands occupying the structure itself, they seem to have been channeling the wisdom of the late great radical American historian Howard Zinn in 2009: “There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens. It is becoming clearer and clearer to many, after the first year of Obama’s presidency, that it is going to require independent action from below to achieve real change.”
Great but now the question looms: will“unions will push back with the kind of job actions that launched the biggest labor mobilization in decades” or will they — to quote the radical labor journalist Lee Sustar –– “allow Walker to drive a legislative steamroller over half a century of public-sector unionism in Wisconsin”? Will unions “stand up to the challenge of the greatest attack they’ve faced since President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 198”? Will they move with fire in their bellies in accord with growing rank and file sentiment for significant mass job actions and possibly even a general strike or will they follow the soft advice of six-figure-income liberal, coordinator- class elites like Leo Gerard and David Kennedy by licking their wounds and putting their faith in hopeful future policy corrections through America’s supposedly great political democracy, so pathetically subordinated as it is the combined and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire? Will they move history forward with pro-active gutsiness, showing their capacity to make history from the bottom up and not simply react to the extreme provocations of particularly noxious elites? Reporting from Madison, Sustar notes a telling conflict there between the militant direction many working people want to take and the standard cautious and electoralist-parliamentarian approach favored by labor bureaucrats, who are trying to sound militant by pressing for a voter campaign to recall Scott Walker as they work to dampen the call for decisive, mass, and reasonably rapid direct action from the bottom up:
‘Asked if he supported the call for a general strike, Joe Conway, president of Madison Local 311 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said, “I’m in total agreement. We should start walking out tomorrow and the next day, and see how long they can last.”’
‘…Whether or not the anger of the union rank and file will push union officials into action is unclear. “Right now, what I am seeing from the labor leadership is a lack of response,” said J. Eric Cobb, executive director of the Building Trades Council of South Central Wisconsin. Top union leaders have been in a reactive mode, rather than leading, he said.’
‘…In recent days, union leaders have shifted their focus further away from mobilizations, and toward the recall of eight Republicans in the state Senate, as well as the campaign for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. A mass labor rally scheduled for March 12 was intended to give a boost to that effort.’
“…Labor has already shown it has the power to stop Walker’s union-busting. But do union leaders have the will to use it? Following the Senate passage of the union-busting bill, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) called on members to go to work as usual on Thursday.’
‘Certainly, the recall effort is a useful pressure tactic. But in practice, union leaders have counterposed the electoral strategy to further job actions that can put pressure on Walker and his business backers.’12
Not for the first time in American labor history, rank and file workers are faced with the need to pressure not only employers and the capitalist state but also the labor bosses, who are threatened at one and the same time by the actions and power of elites and the needs and militancy of the working class. Let’s hope that labor “leadership” can embrace their existential identity of interests with rank and file militants in this case. Walker and his class warrior comrades across the gubernatorial mansions and state legislative halls of this country seek nothing more than the complete crippling of organized labor. They’re showing a lot of guts in their mad, top-down campaign. Now it’s time for labor “leaders” to show the same from the bottom up, or get out of the way for those with the courage and chutzpah the situation requires. Sure Walker will call a state of emergency and call out the National Guard but let us not forget that (to quote a placard I saw in Madison three Saturdays ago) “union blood runs thicker than tea.”
NOTES
1 Monica Davey, “For Wisconsin Governor, Battle Was Long Coming,” New York Times, February 19, 2011.
2 Ryan J. Foley, “On Prank Call, Governor Discusses Strategy,” Associated Press, February 22, 2011.
3 Ryan J. Foley, “Wisconsin Governor Says State Could Lead Nation in Weakening Unions as Protests Enter Day 6,” Associated Press (February 20, 2011) at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/sns-ap-us-wisconsin-budget-unions,0,3070407.story; Monica Davey, “For Wisconsin Governor, Battle Was Long Coming,” New York Times, February 19, 2011.
4 Steve Verburg, “Labor Group Calls for General Strike if Budget Bill is Approved,” Wisconsin State Journal, February 23, 2011 at http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_64c8d7a8-3e8c-11e0-9911-001cc4c002e0.htm
5 Lee Sustar, “Do or Die in Wisconsin,” www.socialistworker.org, March 10, 2011.
6 Roger Bybee, “Is U.S. Labor Prepared to Fight?” Z Magazine (June 2009): 35-36.
7 Steven Greenhouse, “In America, Labor Has a Long Fuse,” New York Times, April 5, 2009.
8 Greenhouse, “Labor Has a Long Fuse.”
9 Greenhouse, “Labor Has a Long Fuse.”
10 Bybee, “Is U.S. Labor Prepared?”38
11 Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
New Hate Speech Watch blog started in Grand Rapids
In the past we have posted a few stories that have looked at the hate speech on the comments section of MLive articles.
One of our writers did an initial story that looked at an example of hate speech comments and what the Grand Rapids Press policy is on this matter. A second story was done that looked at how the Press responded to the first article, when a GRIID writer was able to speak to the online editor to get her feedback on the hate speech and their policy. Hate speech on MLive was an issue that was also raised by the director of the Hispanic Center at Michigan Civil Rights Commission forum on Bullying on March 1st.
However, despite the growing concerns about hate speech on MLive there doesn’t appear to be a let up with this type of speech. Many people have commented on this blog that they are disgusted and frustrated with the kind of things that people are allowed to say on the MLive forum.
One person who has been disturbed by these comments has decided to do something about it. Katherine Marty, a local performance artist, just started a blog called MLive’s Greatest Hits. The blog is pretty straight forward, with almost daily postings of MLive comments, followed by comments from the blogger.
When GRIID asked Katherine what made her decide to start this blog she said, “everyone I know talks about how mean-spirited and bigoted the comments on MLive are. I’d been flagging a lot of comments for removal, at least one every day. And I wasn’t seeking out hate speech; I was just reading news items that interested me. After a while I decided it was better to highlight vicious rhetoric and bring it into the open than to write little notes to the site moderators and hope the bigots just went away.”
We would agree that hate speech will not go away until it is exposed and GRIID salutes Katherine’s efforts to shine a light on hate speech in West Michigan.
The Beehive Design Collective- a non-profit, volunteer driven, political arts organization, is headed this way to share their innovative graphic-campaign in two events:
Tues. March 15, 11a.m.- 3 p.m.
GRAPHICS FOR THE COMMONS
Collaborative Graphic Design for Movement Building
A hands-on, collaborative image making workshop with the Bees at Red Hydrant Press 314 Straight St. SW Door M. Limited to 50 participants.
Tues. March 15, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
DISMANTLING MONOCULTURE
Tales of Ants & Economies in the Americas
The Bees present their larger than life banners at Kendall College Student Commons, 17 Fountain St. NW. On street parking or pay for parking at Ionia/Pearl ramp.
According to the The Beehive Collective: A high-energy “picture-lecture,” “Dismantling Monoculture” is an anthology of three educational, visual narratives that illuminate the connections between colonization, militarization, and industrial development in the Americas. To create the graphics, the Beehive interviewed hundreds of community members about the effects of globalization on their lives. The Bees craft these stories into visual metaphors, weave them together in a patchwork “quilt,” and lead audiences through a larger-than-life banner version of the graphic.
The experiences experience prompts discussion and understanding of contemporary struggles in this era of tremendous change. . Los Angeles high 
school student Megan Jackson remarks, “I still remember your presentation quite vividly. You made the subject much easier to understand for all of us visual learners. You do a remarkable job at keeping the attention of the audience while teaching about a potentially hard to understand subject.”
The Beehive Collective is currently booking a nation-wide tour to raise funds for the printing and distribution of the finale graphic in the trilogy, “Mesoamerica Resisté!”
Watch a brief video about The Beehive Design Collective:
For more information and photos of The Beehive Collective’s work, visit www.beehivecollective.org.
Sponsored by Our Kitchen Table, Red Hydrant Press, The Bloom Collective
and Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 