---------- Forwarded Message ---------- From: neil, 74742,1651 TO: DATE: 9/4/00 6:23 PM RE: labor day 2000 The more things change--The more they remain the same Another bosses election circus is upon us. The corporate mass media says it is funded by "campaign contributions." Nice trick!. But bribery is still bribery. Funding the election circus nationally will cost $3 billion this time around. Where did the rich get the $3 billion? Yes. It represents a fraction of the wealth legally stolen by the the capitalists from the workers through the 'democratic system' of waged slavery. The AFL-CIO now prefers the bosses Democratic Party to the bosses Republican Party. They paint up the Demopublicans as 'friends of labor' , 'labors allies' , etc. They preach class collaboration as opposed to the class struggle. This has gone on since the age of Sam Gompers AFofL. The bosses love it too. Their power is not seriously challenged in the terrain of atomized workers in a voting booth punching papers. The exploiters are laughing all the way to their banks and stock exchanges. Apologists say the AFL unions under Sweeney/Trumka are "changing" and will now fight the corporate offensive against labor. This is laughable. The AFL today follows the same pro-capitalist logic as Gompers and Co. From the lips of Gompers , Meany or Sweeney, workers are told to vote for the bosses liberal political stooges. Socialists challenge this labor treason. Even in 1908, in the days of Eugene Debs, bonafide socialists told the truth. "For years the workers have been voting for those whom they believed to be "friends," who made solemn promises before election day only to forget them the day after the polls closed. There is no assurance that that old bunco game will not be continued. At best the "friends" may be friends in one instance and enemies in the next. It has been quite the fashion in Congress and state legislatures to pass a labor bill through one branch and pigeon-hole it in the other. The Senate passes a bill to be chloroformed in a House committee and the House railroads a bill to be killed in the Senate and then politicians of both branches go home and show that they were "friends" and voted for a labor bill or two, but the other fellows were the "enemies." Nor do the "friends" enlighten their constituents as to why they support most of the corporation measures introduced." (socialist Max Hayes , The Socialist (Perpetual) Campaign Book, 1908--quoted from American Socialism, 1900-1960, edited by H. Wayne Morgan, 1964, Spectrum Books, Pg 38). Today the Democrats and Republicans have only refined these political con-games to more cunningly fool the workers. That great champion of the working class, Eugene Debs exposed Gompers and the AFL for hog-tieing workers to Demopublican capitalist politics. Would not these exposes apply to Sweeney/Trumka and the AFL unions today? "First , President Gompers believes that the interests of labor and capital are identical or mutual. We do not. He believes these interests can be harmonized and justice done to both. We do not. We believe that labor is entitled to ALL it produces and that labor must organize politically as well as economically to abolish the existing order, put itself in posession of the means of production, employ itself and take to itself all it produces. Second, Mr. Gompers does not believe in independent political action. We do. Mr. Gompers and his lieutenants have been trying for many years to procure legislation in favor of labor. They have failed miserably, utterly, and we may say, contemptibly, and they always will......... Fourth,..........It is scarcely less than idiocy for labor leaders to expect these tools of capitalism (the Democratic and Republican parties) to legislate in the interests of labor. It would be as reasonable to expect a cow to bray or a mule to bark. A capitalist congress can no more change its nature than a leopard can change its spots..... We are not with Mr. Gompers in his fight on William H. Taft or any other particular capitalist politician. We are against the whole bunch , whether labelled Republicans or Democrats , for they stand for essentially the same system and that system is the private ownership of the means of life and the slavery of the working class......" (ibid, Pg. 40) Todays capitalist offensive against the working class cries out for the workers to get organized for class struggles, to build from below NEW class organizations , industrial and political. Leave the voting booths empty. Let us challenge the rule of the corporations and the rich with our collective strength in numbers as producers of all of societies wealth & spreading the communist program with the goal of workers rule, planned production for human needs, instead of capitalist production for parasites profits and more tightly fastened chains of wage slavery. Los Angeles Workers' Voice, Box 57483, Los Angeles, CA 90057 Internationalists Web: http://www.ibrp.org Sept. 2, 2000
