on

Quito, Ecuador (July 26, 2018)

This presentation was delivered by Comrade John Palameda at the 22nd International Seminar as a delegate representing the American Party of Labor.

A year has passed since the national secretary of the American Party of Labor, my

comrade, and friend Alfonso Casal spoke to you about the rise of neo-fascism in the United

States. In that year, and particularly in the last few months, the blows against immigrants,

women, black americans, and the working class at large have come quickly. There has been

international outcry over the inhumane separation and detainment of immigrant families in

concentration camps, where prisoners are forced to recite a pledge of allegiance, suffer in tents in

110 degrees, endure rampant lice infestations, and are denied things like baths and proper

nutrition. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the United States, from Chicago and Los

Angeles, to small local towns, took to the streets on June 30th in the “Families Belong Together”

marches, to protest the indefinite detention of immigrant families and demand the Abolishment

of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, the gestapo of the United States. But we

know that racial and ethnic minorities are only one target of fascists like Trump and Thomas

Horman, the head of ICE, who recently defended his actions with the familiar “just following

orders.” Organized labor has also come under fire from the most powerful institutions in the

American Government, and it is on this topic that I want to talk with you today: the legacy of

Karl Marx 200 years after his birth in the reinvigoration of the US labor movement in the face of

state repression and growing fascism. For it was Karl Marx who repeatedly wrote of the special

promise in the US labor movement in his writings, and it is the labor movement in 2018 that

desperately needs Marx’s insight to grow into a true workers movement.

On Thursday, June 28th, the Supreme Court dealt one of the most significant blows to

public sector unions and unionization in general since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 which

required 80 days notice for strikes, forbid federal workers to strike, and required all labor

leadership to renounce Communism. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that non-union

workers benefiting from a union-negotiated contract no longer have to pay what’s called a “fair

share” for the contract. The fascists, true to their nature, has gone from painting working class

people with a cellphone as “welfare queens” to demanding a free union-negotiated contract. The

decision benefits their fascist project in several ways, though, namely that it empowers

corporations, disproportionately effects women, black workers, and immigrants who work in

greater numbers in the public sector, and empowers self-interest over collective power. Betsy

DeVos, secretary of education and ardent supporter of the privatization of education, has already

sent emails to members of teaching unions encouraging them to leave their union in light of the

ruling, claiming the emails are only to “educate teachers on the decision.” In my teacher’s union,

we have faced severe financial crisis, and are in danger of losing our accreditation if enough

members decide to drop their union dues now that they have the option of receiving the benefits

of our contract for free.

Many in the labor movement and in my union have fallen into despair, particularly given

the other national circumstance highlighted a minute ago, but this decision, and the fervor with

which capitalists are attacking the last bastion of union labor in the United States only denotes

the aftershocks of the teacher’s strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. In

remarkable moments of worker solidarity and class consciousness, red-clad crowds of tens and

even hundreds of thousands descended on state capitols and earned in many cases their demands,

and in others, as in Oklahoma, a reignited union movement founded on elevated class

consciousness and anti-boss sentiments. Graduate students across the country, recently at

Harvard and New School in New York, have also begun unionizing at a steady pace, and the

Teamster’s Union recently flexed their collective muscles at United Parcel Service management

by authorizing a strike. Organizations of working people have not been this publicly reckoned,

endorsed, and discussed since the union-busting and hyper imperialist presidency of Ronald

Reagan.

And these movements revealed something even more hopeful still: there is growing

tension within the labor movement, which has long been firmly anti-communist and supportive

of the liberal democrats, between labor leadership who fight only for incremental wage increases

and support establishment politics and union members who have grown increasingly frustrated

with the fundamental nature of work in the US economy. The opportunistic social democrats in

the growing Democratic Socialists of America, Bernie Sanders, and the usual trotskyists, have

latched onto this liberal desire to reduce growing class consciousness in the labor movement to

moderate campaigns for higher wages or better benefits. But these large teacher strikes in

Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma, and the growing labor movement, tells us as

participators, Communists, and students of Marx, that the proletariat in the United States

increasingly reckons how alienated it is from its labor, and how better compensation can not

erase the simple fact that students would still have work full time to pay a fraction of the cost of

higher education, that often eclipses 120,000 dollars to complete, that working mothers would

still have to work multiple jobs to buy school books, medical care, and food for their children,

that teachers will still have to work 100 hour weeks in and outside the classroom to survive.

That, fundamentally, our labor is not a reflection of our self, but as Marx wrote in the

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, “the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs

to another; it is the loss of his self.”

The experience of the American worker has in many ways confirmed Marx’s analysis of

work in capitalist society, and this is why there is a growing number of workers who are

frustrated with the opportunists and their solutions. American workers are in 2018 80% more

productive than they were in 1979, but median income adjusted for inflation has gone down

considerably. Had income kept pace with the economy, the average american worker would be

earning over $40,000 more a year than they do. When I teach Das Kapital and Marx’s writing on

Alienation, or lead a discussion on Marx’s legacy 200 years on as we did this year on my

campus, for many students it flips a switch—for so long in the United States we have been told

to work harder to attain a high standard of living, or that we should be paid a little more for the

hard work that we do—and here, finally, is a theory that confirms our experience as workers, that

the more you work, the farther away your concept of self becomes, and the more subservient you

become to the capitalist class, as Marx wrote again in 1844: “the wretchedness of the worker is

in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production.”

It is for this reason, this growing discontentment with establishment union leadership and

a growing understanding of the fundamental injustice of work in capitalist society, that the

American Party of Labor and other Marxist-Leninists within the labor movement have made

workplace democracy their slogan. It is not enough to settle for the safe and opportunistic

slogans of union leaders, social democrats, and trotskyists, workers in the United States have

demonstrated with collective action on the streets and in their locals a desire for something more;

for not only higher wages but a greater say in how their work life is structured and carried out.

We do this because we are unwilling to forget Marx 200 years on to be more agreeable to the

liberals like the social democrats, and because, fundamentally, workers in the United States are

thirsty for an analysis of their struggles in the belly of the capitalist beast that gives an honest

prognosis and clear solutions.

So we say, while Trump, DeVos, and their corporate vultures seek to pick the bones of

the last major unions in the US, and continue their campaign to develop fascism in the US, that

there is something stirring in organized labor that has not been seen since the years of Haymarket

and the Pullman strikes. Workers and students increasingly turn to the labor movement to face

the austerity, privatization, low wages, and increasing rent that plague them. At this critical

juncture in American politics between developing left forces and the open fascist brutality of the

American government, Marx emerges as a seminal figure. Not as a foreign figure from a

different century as the right wing and the liberal academics tell us, but as a scholar who

predicted, analyzed, a proffered a solution for the challenges we face in our lives in the United

States. From Brussels in 1848, to Petrograd in 1917, to Berlin in 1945, to Tirana in 1946, to

Havana in 1959, to the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles on-going throughout Latin

America, North Africa, the Middle East, and North America, to the resurgent labor movement in

the United States, it is clear:

Marx Lived, Marx Lives, Marx will live.

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