Workers’ Liberty: 12/4/24: Trump’s USA: “There’s Going to be a lot of Conflict”

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Howie Hawkins, a long-standing socialist, a member of Solidarity USA, and Green candidate for President in 2020, talked with Sara Lee, Ben Tausz, and Martin Thomas on a visit to London.

The vote for Trump went up a couple of million; but the Democratic vote, from Biden to Harris, went down seven. I think those seven millions are working-class people who don’t like Trump but feel the Democrats are doing nothing for them, so they just stayed home.

Trump scapegoats. He punches down at immigrants, people of color, uppity women, gay people, trans people. Working-class people felt hurt, and without a positive program from the Democrats everything is moving to the right. The Republicans were a conservative party from the 1930s through, really, to Trump. Now they are a neo-fascist party.

Trump is lazy and incompetent, and in 2016 he didn’t expect to win, so he didn’t get much done. Now the right wing is organized. So, we’re in much deeper trouble. Trump can break the law and the Supreme Court says it’s all right. We’re back before the American Revolution when King George was the law, and we had no recourse. Trump can do what he wants and say it was an “official act”. People are trying to figure out how to resist. I heard of 140,000 people on a call organized by the Working Families Party, which is a faction of the Democratic Party.

There will be single-issue movements around issues like immigrants, the right to abortion, and so on. I don’t know whether the public-sector unions will resist the huge job cuts planned among federal employees, or the organized private sector are going to want to stick their necks on that.

But the left needs to build a membership party, go into the labor movement, turn the unions from business unions into social-movement unions, and start independent political action. That’s the historic task of the workers’ movement that America is a century behind on.

The problem now with political culture is that it’s top down. It’s funded by foundations and the funders tend to be oriented to the Democratic Party on the side.

Syracuse

It varies from locality to locality, of course. The USA is a huge country. In Syracuse, where I live, we have the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). What do they do? Tenants’ campaigning, but it’s mainly activists providing advice, legal letters to landlords, and so on, to individual tenants in trouble, rather than getting tenants themselves organised. The DSA is based at Syracuse University and in the suburbs and trying to organise people in the inner city, where I live, and really there’s no connection. Most people have never heard of DSA. There’s a Syracuse Peace Council, pacifist, based in the university neighbourhood, kind of countercultural, almost all white in a city where the majority are Black. And then there’s the Party for Socialism and Liberation, but it is totally on campus, and it’s a neo-Stalinist sect with money from Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire. They come to demonstrations in the community and then all stand by themselves with their signs; they don’t interact with us.

Our Central Labour Council is conservative. SEIU has a lot of people organised in hospitals and university services. But members appointed by leaders to union committees feel they never get to speak as to what they’re supposed to do, and they get disgusted and they quit the committees.

In Chicago, Detroit, New York, San Francisco and the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, there’s more activity. But there you have left groups very competitive for getting credit for anything that happens; and most of the movements end up going with the Democratic Party.

In the Teamsters the Reform caucus, which was Teamsters for a Democratic Union, compromised too much in getting behind Sean O’Brien. O’Brien was a Hoffa guy who fell out with Hoffa over negotiations in 2018. He’s not a guy who believes in the rank and file strategy. So, he went to the Republican convention and basically gave permission to union members and working-class people to vote for the Republicans. Formally he stayed neutral because, he says, there was a poll internally showing that 60% of Teamsters supported Trump.

Sean O’Brien’s speech at the Republican convention praising people like Josh Hawley as pro-worker disgusted me. O’Brien may thinks his tactic is working, because Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor is a Republican who supports the Protect Our Right to Organise Act, a modest labour reform act. More important is going to be who they replace the current National Labour Relations Board with. And both Jeff Bezos and Musk have sued the National Labour Relations Board for being unconstitutional.

If they win, it might be a blessing in disguise because then we would also get rid of the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments which prevent unions in the US from doing solidarity strikes and sympathy strikes. But it depends on the response.

With mass deportations, the question is, if he does call out the military to bring people in and put them in concentration camps, are they going to obey those orders? Local law enforcement could split, too, with some of them saying they’ve got to work with these immigrant communities and enable them to come with local public safety issues. There’s going to be a lot of conflict.

Popular opinion is much more diverse and anti-Trump than appears from Trump’s electoral base. A lot of these states that voted for Trump also voted in referendums for abortion rights and for things like raising the minimum wage.

Skills

Posted on

December 14, 2024

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