Revolutionaries: Where We Are At and Where We Should Go

A podcast produced by Kasama  2 years ago, titled Crusty Left Rehabilitation is a guide on how revolutionaries can be relevant in today's modern age, overall the message is something I agree with. Iris, who I must assume is apart of the Kasama Project outlines 5 things we should all take into consideration to fight the Revolutionary Left's political isolation. Kasama recieves my respect for trying to start a dialogue among revolutionaries to re-evaluate Communism for the 21st Century. The points Iris addresses are:

1. We must take issues what people are talking about and put a revolutionary slant to it and not dismiss what any issue what someone is talking about

Examples of this would include environmental change, animal rights, foreclosures etc. The ruling class also support the same issues we talk about but we do not take a radical stand on them, we need to talk about this issues and yank them to the Left. We must not just demand these things but make the issue that capitalism simply does not work.

2. Speak plain, understandable language

Communist jargon has not changed for the past 146 years. Words like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, petty-bourgeois, revisionist, cadre etc. these words will become unknown to people who are not inside the Communist movement; the concept "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" might also trigger misconceptions in many people. We must stretch out to people and form terminology based on a different mindset, that is based on one that is "we come to you" as opposed to "you come to us"; Communism must take on a missionary form.

3. Do not worry so much about recruitment

Communists should feel more concerned about forming relationships with people and creative in forming our message. We should definitely focus on the new technology of the age, we should focus on blogs, podcasts, Facebook, twitter etc. the newspaper is a dying form of media. Nevertheless there is a need to put something into people's hands, whether it be articles, newsletters, flyers, CDs, pamphlets etc..

4. Use new spectacles and pranks to break daily monotony

Going beyond traditional media like Graffiti, public art and pranks, public theater, etc. bring attention, it is something the "establishment" does not engage in. Pranks can take on a political nature and are things that do not happen everyday, and it does bring attention. Take for example Anonymous on its protest of the Church of Scientology. The APL made its own "soviet guy" meme, there are different ways. Going out and having fun resonates with people. It destroys the pre-conceived notions that Communists are stiff-necks and stern faced.

5. Revolutionary Culture

There is indeed a stress in many groups on a focus a theory and not a focus on producing revolutionary poetry, music, art etc. many of the revolutionary artists that have come out, have come out independently and not out of organizations, during the 1930s the Communist Party influenced artists, authors and Hollywood actors, we must direct our groups into creating revolutionary forms of entertainment that speak to people.

The Red Republic Strikes Back!

After so much delay The Red Republic is back online, some things have made it difficult to post but rest assured all is well. This will still be a place to promote Marxism-Leninism, International and National News, Labor and Communist History, opinion and some translations of articles from the ICMLPO and will be a supporter of the APL. While I am no longer a member of the American Party of Labor I do support its line, and while not perfect(no party is) it is the only Anti-Revisionist Marxist-Leninist Party in the United States.

This Goes on Everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan!

I would say that most people in our company didn't consider the Vietnamese human.
—Dennis Bunning

Danger On the Job

From Labor Notes

Behind the Headlines: The Workplace Kills 14 Per Day—One by One
Tom O’Connor
| June 14, 2010

It’s been a very bad couple of months for worker safety: Seven dead in Anacortes, Washington, following the explosion of the Tesoro refinery. Six dead in Middletown, Connecticut, in the Kleen Energy power plant explosion. Twenty-nine dead in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine disaster. And 11 dead in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig collapse (a fact almost completely overlooked in media coverage of the spill’s environmental consequences).

But behind the headlines on the latest disaster is a far quieter but equally disturbing story of daily carnage. In the same week as the human-created disaster in the Massey mine in West Virginia, local media outlets around the country carried dozens of stories with headlines like “Man Killed in Trench Collapse” or “Fall from Roof Fatal.”

The toll of these routine incidents—14 deaths a day from injuries alone—is obscured because most occur one death at a time.

Month after month, year after year, workers die in trench collapses and falls from roofs. OSHA cites the employer, slaps it with a modest fine (a median penalty of only $3,675 per death in 2007), and points out that simple methods exist to prevent such tragic loss of life. Yet some employers continue to ignore the hazards and workers continue to lose their lives due to this criminal neglect.

Like the high-profile workplace disasters, the vast majority of deaths on the job are entirely preventable. The problem is not a technical one of chemical concentrations, safe machinery, and ventilation, but a political one—simply put, our national system for enforcing health and safety regulations in the workplace is broken.

We know how to prevent trenches from collapsing—by using trench boxes to shore them up. We know how to prevent falls from roofs from becoming fatal—by properly using safety harnesses. We know how to prevent coal mine explosions by minimizing the build-up of coal dust and monitoring methane concentrations. But employers routinely refuse to use these established precautions, and OSHA does not force them to.

WHY NO ENFORCEMENT

First, it’s a problem of resources: OSHA’s budget for enforcement is pitifully inadequate, a situation that has worsened since deregulation began in the Reagan era. In the late 1970s, OSHA had one inspector per 30,000 covered workers; today it’s one per 60,000.

Second, obstacles to any new workplace safety rules, put in place by deregulation ideologues in Congress, have effectively brought the OSHA regulatory process to a complete standstill. As the Center for Progressive Reform puts it, “In the nearly 40 years since its enactment, the OSHA Act has been exposed as a virtually useless tool for establishing occupational health and safety standards.” In the last 13 years, OSHA has issued exactly one new health standard establishing the maximum safe exposure to a chemical, and that under the duress of a court order.

Third, OSHA’s promise that all workers have the right to speak up about unsafe or unhealthy conditions without retaliation has proven to be a cruel joke to those who have risked their jobs by calling OSHA. The agency’s whistleblower protection program is so ineffective that worker advocates cannot in good conscience advise a non-union worker to file an OSHA complaint if he or she wants to keep the job.

The Massey mine explosion demonstrated clearly that the combination of de-unionization, lack of enforcement of safety regulations, minimal penalties for violations, and lack of whistleblower protections is lethal. As several current and former Massey workers noted, the mine was a time bomb waiting to explode, but in a non-union mine, it was keep your mouth shut or lose your job.

HOW TO FIX IT

The solutions to this sorry state of affairs are not complex:

1) Congress should amend the OSH Act and the Mine Safety and Health (MSH) Act to protect whistleblowers and to require serious monetary and criminal penalties for egregious violators whose willful neglect of safety results in workers’ deaths.

Under current law, even the most egregious case of employer neglect can result in no more than a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum six months in jail. Civil penalties also lag far behind those for violations of other federal law.

New OSHA chief David Michaels noted in a recent Congressional hearing that when a Delaware refinery worker was killed in a sulfuric acid explosion, OSHA assessed a fine of $175,000, while the same incident resulted in EPA fines of $10 million for violations of the Clean Water Act.

2) Congress should dramatically increase the budget for OSHA enforcement.

3) OSHA should fundamentally rework its system for regulating hazards. It should issue a broad “Health and Safety Program Standard” and cite employers under the “General Duty Clause” for unsafe conditions.

These measures would require employers to develop worksite-specific health and safety programs and allow OSHA to enforce the employer’s duty to provide a safe workplace—without having to navigate the endless bureaucratic obstacles to issuing safety or health standards on a one-by-one basis.

4) Congress should close the loophole in the MSH Act that allows companies like Massey to avoid paying fines by contesting most MSHA citations, effectively shutting down the penalty system. Massey contested 3,601 citations in 2009, creating a logjam that prevents MSHA from collecting on assessed penalties.

5) Congress should enact labor law reform so that workers who want to join a union and speak up about unsafe conditions are able to do so.

FIST-POUNDING

But these changes won’t come about because Congress simply decides to do so. Despite much fist-pounding by senators at recent hearings on the mine disaster, they will likely soon forget about worker safety and move on to the next crisis.

A bill introduced in 2009 would go a long way toward strengthening OSHA’s ability to protect workers. The Protecting America’s Workers Act would increase maximum civil and criminal penalties, expand protections for whistleblowers, and extend OSHA protections to public employees, many of whom are now excluded.

Unfortunately, a timid Democratic-controlled Senate Labor Committee appears unwilling to move the bill without Republican support. (Can someone explain to me why it’s not a good idea to force Republicans to cast a vote against worker safety after the recent disasters?)

So perhaps we can expect little from Congress—unless the labor movement and its allies turn up the heat on our representatives. Now—in the wake of a slew of highly publicized and preventable disasters—is the time to demand action, before more workers die.




Tom O’Connor is executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, the umbrella organization of 20 state and local COSH groups.
 

 

The Tea Party Movement, the Obama Regime and the Growing Fascist Danger in the USA

From the Revolutionary Organization of Labor 

The Tea Party Movement, the Obama Regime and the Growing Fascist Danger in the USA

“What is the source of the influence of fascism over the masses? Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice, and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions.”

–Georgi Dimitroff (Political Report of General Secretary to the
Seventh Congress of the Communist International, August 1935)

Introduction: The USA in Crisis


For the past eighteen months, the world capitalist economy has been in crisis. Within the USA, this crisis has had several distinctive features.

The most striking fact of life in the USA in this period has been the naked give-away by the federal government of at least a few trillion dollars to the criminal Wall Street gang of finance capitalists, the dominant section of the U.S. ruling class, whose frenzied greed was most responsible for the current crisis. Most of this rescue money was provided to Wall Street in two multi-billion dollar bailouts. Both bailouts had the blessings of both the Republican and the Democratic Party. The first was provided under the Bush Regime and the second under the Obama Regime.

At the same time, the U.S. working class as a whole has experienced massive layoffs – eight million new unemployed and more millions chronically underemployed. As in the past, the monopoly capitalists today use the vast “army of the unemployed” as a club with which to beat down the workers still lucky enough to have jobs, to lower their wages, speed up their work, etc.

The oppressed nationality workers are the hardest hit. The Afro-American workers are still the last hired and first fired, and the epidemic of Black youth unemployment is a major source of the devastation being visited upon the Afro-American communities throughout the USA. As the situation of the rest of the working class is becoming increasingly desperate, the ability of the U.S. monopoly capitalist ruling class to mobilize significant numbers to support open attacks on Latino and other immigrant workers is also increasing. And this can only result in the weakening of the position of the working class vis-à-vis capital in each part and as a whole.

On top of all this, many working class families, as well as middle class families, are losing their homes in the epidemic of home foreclosures. And with the drastic reduction in home values and the stock market shocks, manipulation and decline that have accompanied this crisis, many more working class and middle class people have seen their main sources of old age security disappear. This is forcing more elderly workers to remain in jobs and further aggravating youth unemployment and the already parasitic youth culture. Finally, there is an epidemic of small business failures, aggravated by the unwillingness of the big banks that received the Bush and Obama billion dollar bailouts to grant loans to the hard pressed middle class business people. For the U.S. middle class, spoiled by decades of U.S. imperialist hegemony in the capitalist world economy, this calamitous state of affairs has traumatized them.

The Rise of the Tea Party Movement

In this setting, over the past year, a reactionary, right wing, mainly white middle class movement has emerged on the U.S. political scene. The Tea Party Movement has arisen in fits and starts, in one guise or another, under the leadership of one Republican Party politician or right wing media talk show personality and then another. Sometimes

Al Jazeera English on the NPA

Mexican Capitalist Police Attack Miners on Strike