By Steve Hynd
Well done, James Hoffa, for being unrepentant.
Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday.
Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress "sons of bitches" and said union workers are ready to "go to war" with the tea party next year and "take out" Republicans at the ballot box.
Hoffa said he'd say the exact same words all over again.
"I would because I believe it," he said. "They've declared war on us. We didn't declare war on them, they declared war on us. We're fighting back. The question is, who started the war?"
Who started the war? Who ate all the pie?
We're in a class war and so we should use the language of that war - the language of Dorothy Day and Joe Hill and Mother Jones. It's not as if the Right has ever been shy about plain talking there are countless examples of them calling the Left "thugs", "traitors" and every other epithet they could think to sling. There are plenty of examples of them using rhetoric that gets far closer to Hoffa's in advocating actual violence too. Chris Hedges is entirely correct, the Left needs to take the gloves off.
Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
Where Hoffa went wrong was in saying:
"Well, I think all of us want to see [Obama] do more with regards to protecting collective bargaining," Hoffa told TPM. "But certainly at this point, when we're looking at Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, then certainly he's the person that we have to work with and to fight for worker's rights in this country."
You don't win the class war by voting for rich elitists.
The rich as a class and their poorer shills are the problem. They have engineered our current economic dire straits as the direct consequence of their unfettered seeking for more riches and their sociopathic inability to empathise for the effects of that seeking on the rest of us. They have engineered a political system where our only real choices are between all-out asset strippers - the Republicans - and those who pretend to have our interests at heart while doing the bidding of the rich who run corporations which have bought and paid for lawmakers. That means everyone is stuck in this cycle until the vast majority who must scrape to make ends meet each month stop voting for them.
I'd like to think that the unions will actually represent the interests of the working class, but what we saw in Wisconsin this winter bodes ill for that.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't the unions that organized those protests, and of course the guy who said he'd be on the picket line with workers never showed up (so i'm not sure why anyone should believe him this time). In fact, it was the union leadership that basically said, "Let's channel all this media attention and serious class effort into recall elections in which we'll try to elect some Democrats."
Not only did it not really work, but it's not like those Democrats would really represent the workers in any case.
So if Hoffa's big plan is to work with the DLC nominees, then he's just as big a part of fucking us all as Obama is.
Indeed, Lex. Hedges, in the piece I linked above, writes:
ReplyDelete"Liberals bow before a Democratic Party that ignores them and does the bidding of corporations. The reflexive deference to the Democrats by the liberal class is the result of cowardice and fear. It is also the result of an infantile understanding of the mechanisms of power. The divide is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.
Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated partners of the capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple bartering tools. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour day and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism. The Democratic Party and the press have become corporate servants. The loss of radicals within the labor movement, the Democratic Party, the arts, the church and the universities has obliterated one of the most important counterweights to the corporate state. And the purging of those radicals has left us unable to make sense of what is happening to us."
It's not swearing and cussing that we need, necessarily, but we do need some old-style radical straight talking.
Regards, Steve
I long for the days when a Democratic president would stake his reputation on his willingness to stand up against the corporate looters, as FDR did: "I welcome their hatred."
ReplyDeleteDon't like the Repubs? Don't like Obama? Vote Roemer! Seriously, not kidding. Do it.
ReplyDelete