Thursday, December 3, 2020
Illinois nursing home workers strike in second week as pandemic surges: Build rank-and-file-committees to save lives
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/nhil-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Jessica Goldstein, Kristina Betinis
8 hours ago
Wednesday concluded the tenth day of a statewide strike by nearly 700 Chicago-area nursing home workers at 11 of 13 facilities operated by Illinois-based Infinity Healthcare Management. On the same day, Illinois Department of Public Health reported a record 238 COVID-19 deaths, far surpassing the May record of 191 deaths. In the communities where the strikes are ongoing, solidarity with the striking workers is on display as cars honk in support of the strike as they pass the picket lines.
Certified nursing assistants (CNAs), laundry workers, dietary assistants, housekeepers and other critical workers are on strike for hazard pay, higher wages, adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) and increased staff to meet patient needs during the pandemic.
Infinity’s City View Multicare Center in Cicero is reported to have the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the state this week. The company’s Niles Nursing & Rehabilitation Center has seen the largest number of deaths from the virus.
Nursing home workers are fighting to save their lives and the lives of their patients as the coronavirus continues its rampant spread through long-term care facilities in the state. As of November 27, the Illinois Department of Public Health has reported 45,882 reported cases at long-term care facilities and 6,047 deaths, nearly half of the total deaths from the virus in the state since the beginning of the pandemic.
Workers are rightly angered that Infinity Healthcare received $12.7 million in Federal CARES Act bailout funds while it claims to have no money to meet their demands. Infinity management is offering only a $15.15 starting wage for new CNAs, a $0.25 per hour raise for those making above that, and a yearly raise of only $0.10 per hour, according to Shaba Andrich, the Service Employee International Union’s vice president for nursing homes.
The contract terms proposed by SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana threaten poverty for the striking nursing home workers. Workers are currently paid about $13 per hour and are demanding raises of $2 per hour, bringing CNAs up to a starting pay of $15.50. Pay for non-CNA workers would rise to $14.50 outside of Chicago and $15 at facilities located in Chicago. These “raises” are barely above or at Chicago’s minimum wage, which is set to rise to $15 in 2021.
The deeply exploitative conditions in nursing facilities are a direct result of profit seeking in health care. Infinity, run by Moishe Gubin and Michael Blisko, manages health care facilities in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. In recent years, the Chicago Tribune investigated widespread narcotics use, patient injury and deaths in Infinity-managed facilities in Chicago and referred to its “complex ownership and management structures.” Gubin also operates a separate company, Strawberry Fields Real Estate Investment Trust, whose subsidiaries own the real estate in which Infinity operates.
In April, Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed executive orders shielding nursing homes from civil liability related to the pandemic. This has had the result of loosening restrictions and worsening conditions in the industry, protecting the most negligent operators from suit under the guise of COVID-19. Senate Republicans took up Cuomo’s order in their effort to produce federal legislation to protect business interests.
Under these conditions, SEIU’s cozy relationship with the Democratic Party stands ever more thoroughly exposed. The World Socialist Web Site warned at the beginning of the strike that the SEIU will do everything in its power to the sabotage workers’ struggles while posturing as fighting in the workers’ best interest against the corporations.
SEIU has a well-worn pattern of negotiating with management behind closed doors to push through sellout contracts, as in the strike of 4,000 service workers at University of Illinois at Chicago in early October.
SEIU has also promised nursing home workers that they will receive strike pay, according to its website. But striking nursing home workers should be wary of this promise. The strike pay which was promised to UIC service workers came with many caveats. Workers commented on the Facebook page #StrikeForOurLivesUIC after the strike with complaints that they had been denied the paltry sums from the bogus “hardship fund,” which, according to its website, provided “eligible workers” up to “a maximum of $250 per week and $550 in total or until all funds have been disbursed.” Workers could not even apply for these benefits until September 28, more than a week after the strike had begun.
After UIC services workers were forced back on the job, they complained SEIU was keeping them in the dark about the negotiated raises, retro pay and possible hazard pay as late as the second week of November. At the same time, workers reported not being allowed to stay home from work, or work from home under conditions of a surge of COVID-19 cases in Illinois and a statewide stay-at-home advisory.
The SEIU accepts the domination of the health care industry by private profit and will do nothing to make conditions safer or guarantee workers’ wages above poverty level.
SEIU Healthcare IL-IN posted a quote from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker to its Facebook page yesterday: “There are hundreds of SEIU nursing home workers on strike who are asking for the same type of reasonable working conditions that a large number of long-term care facilities around Illinois have already agreed to in their own contracts.”
Pritzker, who is personally worth $3.4 billion, declared the demands put forth by the SEIU “reasonable” after shielding deeply corrupt and exploitative corporations like Infinity from legal liability.
The “reasonable” conditions are the poverty wages, unsafe conditions and understaffed nursing homes that workers at over 100 other long-term care facilities in Illinois risk their lives to work in. Many of these contracts were also negotiated by the SEIU, including those pushed through in May of this year after the union blocked a strike of nearly 10,000 nursing home workers at 64 facilities across the state.
SEIU is also isolating the Infinity nursing home workers from the other workers it has betrayed across the state and the country who are facing the same conditions that they fought against as a result of the union’s sellout negotiations. Just days ago, over 800 nurses walked out on strike in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Health care workers have entered into struggle in Germany, Australia, Brazil, Zimbabwe and other countries around the world who are forced to work in deadly conditions for the profit interests of the global ruling elite.
Nursing home workers should elect independent rank-and-file safety committees to raise their own demands based on what they and their patients need, not what profit-seeking business people deem “reasonable”. This requires workers to break with the politics of the SEIU and the Democratic Party.
Nursing home workers can take the lead established by auto workers and teachers in forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the SEIU, in order to wage a fight for decent pay, safe and humane working conditions, and the resources necessary to provide dignified care to the elderly and those with long-term care needs.
The SEP and WSWS will do everything possible to assist Infinity workers in the organization of rank-and-file committees and formation of connections with other sections of workers—in health care, auto manufacturing, public education, logistics and elsewhere—to launch a common struggle for workers’ rights. We urge nursing home workers to contact us today.
Nurses union in Upstate New York ends strikes as COVID-19 hospitalizations surpass 100,000 for first time
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/newy-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Jerry White
8 hours ago
Strikes by thousands of nurses in Upstate New York against inadequate safety measures and low wages were ended yesterday by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). Also on Wednesday, US hospitalizations surpassed 100,000 for the first time, and health officials expect the winter months to bring even higher numbers.
Nearly 2,000 nurses at the Albany Medical Center in the state capital launched a 24-hour strike and are now being locked out by hospital management. Another 200 nurses at the Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital in Westchester County, an early hotspot of the virus just north of New York City, conducted a two-day strike.
In both cases, nurses demanded adequate staffing levels, more supplies of reliable personal protective equipment and improved wages, benefits and working conditions. The union, however, ended both strikes without achieving any of the nurses’ demands.
This is not due to any lack of militancy or popular support. On the contrary, the strikes generated widespread sympathy. The nurses who went on strike at two New York state hospitals Tuesday gave voice to the anger of millions of health care workers across the country and internationally who are battling unsafe working conditions in hospitals that are once again being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.
Strikes by US health care workers are part of a wave of struggles spanning almost every continent. Hundreds of health care workers in Chile took to the streets last Saturday to demand an improvement in working conditions and salaries as COVID-19 cases continued to surge across the Latin American country.
Messages on social media expressed solidarity and the striving of health care workers to unify in a joint struggle. “Nurses have to fight for the patients and themselves, because at the end of the day the hospital or institution does not care for the patients or the nurses,” one nurse commented.
Another said, “Keep up the great work and stay united. This is key not only for us as nurses, but more importantly for our patients. We are the eyes and ears for every single patient. … the world is watching and you’re standing up for every nurse, patient across this world. Let’s go.”
“Nurses in every state should have gone on strike at the beginning when it was obvious the toll this would have taken on the entire health care spectrum,” another nurse said.
The New York state strikes are part of the growing resistance of health care workers worldwide. On Wednesday, nurses at Keck Hospital of USC (University of Southern California) held a protest to denounce management’s efforts to prevent healthcare workers with symptoms of COVID-19 from staying home. Seven hundred workers in the Chicago area are in the second week of their strike to demand improved wages and PPE at 11 nursing homes owned by Infinity Healthcare Management. Other potential nurses strikes are brewing in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to alerts on the website of the strikebreaking firm US Nursing Corporation.
After joining NYSNA in 2018, nurses at Albany Medical Center have not been able to get a contract after 18 months of negotiations. Management’s last offer, rejected by nurses, would do nothing to address chronic staffing shortages and only provide a 1.25 percent annual pay increase, plus a system of merit pay.
Albany Med President and CEO Dennis McKenna have arrogantly claimed that only a “vocal minority” of nurses wanted to strike and have hypocritically declared that “a strike in the middle of a pandemic for baseless reasons is totally irresponsible.”
Management at Montefiore New Rochelle has been just as intransigent. Although the Montefiore Health System (MHS), one of the nation's largest, has received at least $38 million in government bailout money, it has rejected nurses’ demands, and like Albany Med, hired strikebreakers to replace striking nurses.
The NYSNA, which was given seats on the COVID-19 task forces set up by Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, has isolated these struggles, forcing nurses to take on powerful corporate interests and the state’s Democratic Party political establishment on their own.
Before the pandemic, in April 2019, the union called off an impending strike by 10,000 nurses of three health systems in New York City—Mount Sinai, Montefiore and New York-Presbyterian—and agreed to a deal with three percent wage increases and the same vague promises to hire more nurses, which are routinely ignored by management.
Rather than conducting a real fight to mobilize health care workers, including the 42,000 members of NYSNA and far broader sections of the working class to win the nurses’ demands, NYNSA President Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, who works closely with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has claimed that safe staffing levels can be won through appealing to Governor Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats in the state legislature, as well as the courts.
But Biden, Cuomo and the Democrats, no less than Trump and the Republicans, are beholden to the giant health care monopolies. In late March, both parties handed over $175 billion to the largest health care systems, as part of the bipartisan CARES Act.
The state’s Health Department recently released its “safe staffing” study, which found that hiring enough nurses to significantly lower nurse-to-patient ratios at hospitals and nursing homes was not economically feasible. As Politico reported, “The Cuomo administration report, which was released Aug. 14, determined the state would need to hire 70,000 more nurses and other caregivers at an annual cost of $3.7 to $4.7 billion to reach the ratios nurses were looking for—a cost the state deemed prohibitive in a defeat for the nurses.” A series of lawsuits by NYNSA against two hospitals and the state over staffing levels were also thrown out of court.
New York State is home to 118 billionaires, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, with a combined net worth of more than $600 billion. The higher end of the state’s cost estimate is only six percent of the $77.3 billion increase in New York billionaires’ combined wealth during the first three months of the pandemic. Nationwide, while 280,000 people have died, including nearly 1,700 frontline health care workers, the billionaire investors who control the health care industry have made out like bandits during the pandemic, getting $150 billion richer.
A recent report in Newsweek noted, “Healthcare billionaires have seen their wealth soar since the coronavirus swept the globe. Billionaires in the healthcare space bumped up their wealth by 36.3 percent between April 7 and July 31, from a total of $402.3 billion to $548 billion, according to a new report by wealth managers UBS and professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“The near-$150 billion premium came as demands for key vaccines, medical equipment and treatments increased, with health services across the world left reeling due to ballooning case numbers.”
The fight to protect health care workers and to attain the resources necessary to battle the pandemic requires building new organizations of struggle, which are independent of the unions, which are tied to the corporate-controlled parties and accept without question the whole system of for-profit medicine. In every hospital, nursing home and health care facility, workers need to form rank-and-file committees to enforce health and safety and mobilize broader sections of the working class in a common fight for the reallocation of resources to fight the pandemic, train and hire hundreds of thousands of nurses and to provide free and high quality health care for all.
At the same time, nonessential production must be shut down, with full compensation to all affected workers and small business owners, in order to prevent any unnecessary infections and deaths before vaccines are available to everybody and the virus can be contained and finally eradicated. To fight for this, the working class has to wage a political struggle against both corporate-controlled parties based on a socialist program, including the transformation of the giant hospital and health care chains and the pharmaceutical and medical device corporations into public utilities as part of a system of socialized medicine.
Bipartisan $908 billion “emergency relief framework” receives support from Democratic congressional leadership
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/stim-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Jacob Crosse
9 hours ago
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a joint press conference on Wednesday released a statement signaling their support for a bipartisan $908 billion “emergency relief framework” proposal that was first revealed by Republican and Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus on Monday. The caucus includes Democratic senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Mark Warner (Virginia), and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), and Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Angus King (Maine), and Mitt Romney (Utah).
The proposed four-month “emergency relief package” is another gift to big business and Wall Street and is less than half of the $2.2 trillion package the Democrats had passed before the November election and roughly $800 million less than the $1.7 trillion deal previously offered by the White House. Most important for the ruling class is the bill’s “temporary” liability shield for businesses and other organizations against COVID-19–related lawsuits brought against them by workers or customers who fell ill due to inadequate safety measures.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell however has already poured cold water on the proposal, instead sticking to the $550 billion package he has been pushing for and that has already been agreed upon by President Donald Trump.
“In the spirit of compromise we believe the bipartisan framework introduced by Senators yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations,” Schumer and Pelosi said in their joint statement Wednesday, signaling their support for the bill.
The announcement of the proposal came Tuesday during testimony by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin before the Senate Banking Committee. Both Powell and Mnuchin expressed support for the proposal, with Powell stating that it “sounds like you’re hitting a lot of the areas that could definitely benefit from the help.” Mnuchin stated he looked “...forward to reviewing with you the overall package. I do think that more fiscal response is needed.”
Five months after both political parties allowed enhanced unemployment benefits and housing protections within the misnamed $2.2 trillion CARES Act to expire, leading to food lines, evictions, and death, and less than four weeks until some 12 million lose federal pandemic benefits, the latest murmurs of a possible agreement that leaves out much-needed aid for millions of workers, while protecting businesses from COVID-19–related lawsuits, epitomizes the bipartisan disdain the ruling class has for the lives and safety of workers and their families.
As with the CARES Act in March, the preliminary details reveal a windfall for the financial oligarchy while a pittance is made available for the majority of the population. The framework does not include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks and reduces the enhanced $600 unemployment benefit, which expired at the end of July, to a miserly $300 week.
Left unmentioned in the proposal is the fate of two key emergency economic relief programs—the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides benefits to so-called “gig” workers and the self-employed, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides benefits to those who have already exhausted their state benefits. Combined, the two programs account for nearly 13 million of the over 20 million people currently receiving some unemployment compensation, and both expire on December 26, the day after Christmas.
The legislation also does not include any renter or mortgage protections, leaving some 30 million people in the US facing eviction in the next two months. The eviction of millions of people and their families with the virus spreading out of control will lead to hundreds of thousands of infections and tens of thousands of additional deaths, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield already predicting that the US COVID-19 death toll could reach 450,000 by February. Redfield warned that this winter could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation”
Hailing the $908 billion figure as a “good middle ground” that “hits the major elements,” Democratic Illinois Senator Dick Durbin lent his support to the bill while offering mild criticism of the immunity from liability protections included in the bill, before adding that he didn’t want the liability issue to hold up the bill: “I want to make sure that we pass this COVID-19 bill, as the group has brought together, or something like it, for $908 billion, we shouldn’t be delayed or diverted from this effort over a debate for immunity for liability. It’s an important issue but 38 states have already enacted laws related to COVID-19 liability, the others can certainly do it if they wish.”
Of the proposed $908 billion, the bulk of the money in the proposal, $288 billion, is earmarked to the Small Business Administration, primarily to refill the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
The PPP was created as part of the CARES Act and was sold as a method for paying businesses through forgivable loans in order to keep workers employed through the pandemic. Instead, it has served primarily as a slush fund for big business and a money-printing service for the large banks that service the loans, with previous disclosures revealing millions handed out to major sports teams, multimillionaires and religious institutions, while millions of workers were still laid off. For small businesses that attempted to obtain a loan, the shifting guidelines and paperwork proved a hurdle too high for many, unlike major corporations with dedicated teams of lawyers and accountants who were able to navigate the government bureaucracy.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed through a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit against the Treasury Department, that of the more than 5 million loans that have been processed so far under the PPP, more than half of the $522 billion allocated went to just 5 percent of the recipients. The top 1 percent of loans accounted for more than a quarter of all the loan value, approximately 28 percent.
The data showed that roughly 600 large companies received the maximum loan amount allowed under the program, $10 million. Some of the companies that received $10 million loans were the parent companies of major restaurant chains such as Uno Pizzeria & Grill, Boston Market and Legal Sea Foods.
Following the nearly $300 billion earmarked for the PPP, the next largest item in the framework is the estimated $180 billion for additional unemployment insurance. Under the current proposal, which is unsettled, the unemployment eligibility window would be increased by 13 weeks, allowing workers to claim through March 31, although it is unclear if they would be able to backdate claims.
The third highest figure—an estimated $160 billion—is reserved for state, local and tribal governments, which have seen their tax revenues evaporate due to pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. The funding is more than $270 billion less than the $436 billion Pelosi had previously demanded in the $2.2 trillion package.
Another notable figure in the bill is the $45 billion set aside for transportation. The pandemic has decimated public transit, leaving several major cities to consider, or already implement, drastic cuts, including the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is threatening to lay off 9,300 workers.
The Chicago Transit Authority is also facing a $375 million budget shortfall in 2021, while Denver’s Regional Transportation District passed a budget in mid-November that included $140 million in spending cuts and the elimination of 400 jobs through layoffs and attrition, along with wage reductions and furloughs.
However, according to Senator Warner’s office, of the $45 billion earmarked for transportation, only $15 billion is for mass transit, with $1 billion for Amtrak and $8 billion for the bus industry, leaving $21 billion for the airlines, which already received $25 billion through the CARES Act and still went ahead with furloughing more than 40,000 aviation industry workers.
100 years since US socialist journalist John Reed’s death
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/reed-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Author of Ten Days That Shook the World
Sandy English, James Macdonald
10 hours ago
Mid-October marked the 100th anniversary of the untimely death of American revolutionary socialist journalist John Reed. The author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a magnificent firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, Reed died in Moscow of typhus on October 17, 1920, five days shy of his 33rd birthday.
About Ten Days That Shook the World, V.I. Lenin, the co-leader of the 1917 October Revolution, commented in an introduction written in 1919, “Unreservedly do I recommend it [Reed’s book] to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages.” The book has had a special place in the hearts and minds of class-conscious workers ever since its appearance. It can still be recommended “unreservedly.”
Many people may be familiar with the name of John “Jack” Reed from the 1981 movie Reds, in which Warren Beatty portrayed the intrepid and principled journalist and for which Beatty won the Academy Award for best director.
What the film cannot convey, among other things, however, is the vital, muscular and poetic quality that made Reed’s writing so influential in his time and to later generations. Reds only hints at the full complexity of the man who, more than any American writer of his generation, followed the demands of his political conscience to their revolutionary conclusions.
John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon on October 22, 1887 into an upper-middle-class family. His mother’s father, Henry Dodge Green, was a wealthy Portland industrialist and his house a center of Portland’s genteel social gatherings.
Reed came of age during the era of the full-blown development of American capitalism. In the 30 years following the Civil War, the US emerged as a modern industrial power. The decades saw the enrichment of the infamous Robber Barons, and the US launched its first imperialist war in 1898, seizing the Philippines and Cuba from Spain.
The urban population swelled in this period, also a time of large-scale immigration, and the working class emerged as a powerful force, expressing—in a series of bitter strike struggles—its determination to fight the omnivorous ruling class.
Reed’s father, C.J. Reed, was a crusader against political corruption in Oregon, helping to take on the logging interests in his capacity as a U.S. Marshal. Not having gone to college himself, C.J. was determined that Jack should attend Harvard, interceding for his son when he failed his entrance exam. Jack passed the second time. Working on and contributing to several Harvard publications, Reed honed his journalistic and editing skills. He also wrote and published a good deal of poetry and became a member of the newly formed Harvard Socialist Club.
Establishing himself in Greenwich Village in 1911, Reed was at the center of the neighborhood’s bohemian culture. The Village was home to such figures as poet Hart Crane, “scandalous” novelist Henry Miller (who, not long before his death, describes Reed’s milieu in Reds) and dramatist Eugene O’Neill.
It was here, as a working writer and an editor at The American Magazine (founded in 1906), that Reed grappled with the challenge of earning a living under conditions where serious art does not pay the rent. For Reed, “serious art” still meant his poetry, which does not make much of an impression after more than a century, and also supplementing his income from The American by selling short stories, which, in some cases genially give a flavor of life at that time.
As Reed came to know Manhattan, however, its palaces and its squalor, he came to realize that something was fundamentally wrong with American society. In a later essay written in the months before his journey to Russia that would result in his witnessing the October Revolution, titled “Almost Thirty,” he would recall the political awakening of his early twenties:
On the whole, ideas alone didn’t mean much to me. I had to see. In my rambles about the city I couldn’t help but observe the ugliness of poverty and all its train of evil, the cruel inequality between rich people who had too many motor cars and poor people who didn’t have enough to eat. It didn’t come to me from books that the workers produced all the wealth of the world, which went to those who did not earn it.
Hearing of a new arts and features magazine with a decidedly socialist orientation, called The Masses (founded in 1911), Reed quickly introduced himself to its editor Max Eastman, who would later translate many of Leon Trotsky’s works into English, and climbed on board as both an editor and contributor.
Though the new magazine could not pay him, Reed would find his work for this important publication his most fulfilling. The Masses was to publish the first stories of Sherwood Anderson in 1916, later to be collected in the groundbreaking Winesburg, Ohio. It published works by figures such as Jack London, the novelist Floyd Dell, and the poets Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell. Painters John Sloan, George Bellows and Pablo Picasso contributed illustrations.
By 1913, Reed would prove a more than receptive audience member when—in a Greenwich Village apartment—he met William “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the left-wing syndicalist movement. Reed listened as Haywood described the developing situation in nearby Paterson, New Jersey, where silk workers were on strike and being beaten and jailed by police. Reed, perhaps for the first time, reacted to a major story not only as a journalist but as a partisan, determined to publicize the strike and help the workers.
Soon after arriving in Paterson, a naturally defiant Reed goaded a belligerent police officer into arresting him. In the county jail, overcrowded with immigrant strikers, he befriended the workers—“gentle, alert, brave men, ennobled by something greater than themselves”—and drew out their stories. That “something greater,” the class struggle, can be seen at work in the article Reed wrote for The Masses (“War in Paterson”), which opens:
There’s war in Paterson, New Jersey. But it’s a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side—the mill owners. Their servants, the police, club unresisting men and women and ride down law-abiding crowds on horseback. Their paid mercenaries, armed detectives shoot and kill innocent people. Their newspapers ... publish incendiary and crime-inciting appeals to mob violence against the strike leaders ... They control absolutely the police, the press, the courts.
So moved was Reed by the condition of the silk workers that he organized a dramatic pageant, held at Madison Square Garden, in which the actual workers demonstrated their onerous work and their treatment as strikers at the hands of the police.
Reed’s best known work is Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), but he did produce other outstanding works of reportage, one of which is his account of his experiences riding with Pancho Villa’s army in the Mexican Revolution, titled Insurgent Mexico (1914). The compelling work immerses the reader in the harsh, violent life of La Tropa, Villa’s army, and its camp followers.
As was the case in Paterson, Reed not only sympathized politically with the peasant revolutionaries but came quickly to admire them and want their respect, which he was proud to earn. At one point in Insurgent Mexico, he writes of an initiation into La Tropa over a bottle of sotol:
“Drink it,” yelled the chorus as the Tropa crowded up to see. I drank it. A howl of laughter and applause went up. Fernando leaned over and gripped my hand. “Good for you, companero!” he bellowed, rolling with mirth ... Captain Fernando leaned over and patted my arm. “Now you are with the men (los hombres.) When we win the Revolucion it will be a government by the men,—not by the rich. We are riding over the lands of the men. They used to belong to the rich, but now they belong to me and to the compaƱeros.”
The material Reed sent back to the US, published in The Metropolitan magazine, established him as America’s foremost war correspondent. The writing was at once impressionistic and clear-eyed, imagistic and frank.
Certainly, no more stark instance of brutal oppression could have presented itself to Reed or the world than the Ludlow Massacre of April, 1914, the culminating atrocity of the protracted southern Colorado coal miners’ strike of the winter of 1913-14. Reading of the massacre, Reed immediately left for Las Animas County.
There he made a detailed search of the scene of the massacre, in which National Guard militiamen rented by John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company killed an estimated 26 miners, their wives and children, some shot with machine guns and some deliberately burned to death in tents the miners had been living in during the strike.
Reed wrote a lengthy, scathing article for The Metropolitan, “The Colorado War,” in July 1914, which detailed the murderous violence of the Rockefeller interests. “I got into Trinidad [Colorado, 15 miles from Ludlow] about ten days after the massacre at Ludlow,” Reed wrote. Later in the article, he explained:
I went to Ludlow next day to see the Federal troops come in and the militia leave. The tent colony, or where the tent colony had been, was a great square of ghastly ruins. Stoves, pots and pans still half full of food that had been cooking that terrible morning, baby-carriages, piles of half-burned clothes, children’s toys all riddled with bullets, the scorched mouths of the tent cellars, and the children’s toys that we found at the bottom of the “death hole”—this was all that remained of the entire worldly possessions of 1,200 poor people. At the railroad station about fifty militiamen waited for the train—boys with the stupid, vicious faces of saloon-corner loafers. Only a few were in uniform, for many of them were mine-guards hastily mustered in. As the regulars left their train one militiaman said loudly, in the hearing of the militia officers: “I hope these red-necks kill a regular so they will go in and wipe out the whole bunch. We certainly done a good job on that tent colony.”
In August of that year, the world was struck by the greatest upheaval to that point in modern times. The First World War broke out in Europe. Reed sailed to Italy as a correspondent for The Metropolitan. He went to France, where he attempted twice to reach the front but was arrested and turned back both times. He then went to London, where he wrote a long article on England in wartime, showing that patriotism was limited to the upper classes. The Metropolitan rejected the article.
In “The Traders War,” written from London and published in The Masses in September, Reed outlined the history of the imperialist commercial rivalries between Britain, France and Germany and stated that the war was nothing more than a continuation of these conflicts. (In a noteworthy scene in Reds, Reed [Beatty], asked at a meeting of the Liberal Club in Portland, Oregon what he thinks “this war is about,” gets to his feet and replies with one word, “Profits.”)
Reed returned to France and in December made his way to Germany via Switzerland. In Berlin, he was able to conduct an interview with the revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht, who alone in the German Reichstag had refused to vote to fund the war. When Reed asked him about “the chances of World Revolution,” “‘To my mind’ [Liebknecht] responded serenely, ‘nothing else can come out of this war.’”
Reed and other American correspondents were able, after long delays, to secure permission to visit the German front in Northern France. Along the way they were feted by German officers and saw the horrors of trench warfare. He wrote articles on these experiences for The Metropolitan and returned to the US in January 1915.
Reed only stayed home a few months. By March, since he was unable to get permission to visit France again, The Metropolitan asked him to report on the war in Eastern Europe. With the artist Boardman Robinson, he visited Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia.
Almost half the articles he wrote, although Reed could not know this at the time, were about the final days of the tsarist empire with its drunkenness, abuse, and corruption organized into armies. In one article, “An Optimistic Pilgrimage” that still moves the reader 105 years later, Reed passes through a Jewish village near Rovno in what is now Ukraine, and observes the filth and poverty of the Jews and their oppression by the Russians. One of his guides, a Russian army officer, complains that all Jews are traitors to Russia.
The scenes from Serbia are shocking. The first country to be invaded by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in response to the assassination of its Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, Serbia was in the middle of a typhus epidemic. Reed visited one hospital for those stricken with disease:
We entered a barrack, along whose walls cots lay touching each other, and with the feeble light of two lanterns we could see the patients writhing in their dirty blankets, five and six crowded into two beds. Some sat up, apathetically eating; others lay like the dead; still others gave short, grunting moans, or shouted suddenly in the grip of delirium.
When Reed returned from Europe in late 1915, the official political atmosphere in the US had shifted to the right: a pro-war “preparedness” campaign was underway and middle-class public opinion had become anti-German. He moved back to Greenwich Village with the woman he would marry, also from Oregon, journalist Louise Bryant. It was at this time he befriended Eugene O’Neill. Reed, O’Neill, Bryant and some of their circle wrote and performed plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1916.
The Metropolitan refused to return him to Europe because of his antiwar views. But in the spring of 1917, two more world-shaking events occurred. In March, the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was overthrown, and in April the United States entered the world war.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1917, Reed wrote antiwar articles for The Masses. By August, he had decided he had to see the revolution in Russia for himself. Reed arrived in Petrograd on September 13, just after the attempted coup against the bourgeois Provisional Government by tsarist General Lavr Kornilov. The coup melted away largely because of the Bolsheviks’ mobilization of workers and soldiers.
Through connections in New York, including Bolsheviks such as V. Volodarsky, Reed became acquainted with that party’s leaders, who were now preparing the overthrow of the Provisional Government and its replacement by a government of Soviets.
He hastened from place to place in Petrograd, saving leaflets and proclamations and documenting the positions of each party. He interviewed leaders of the frightened capitalist parties, and he saw Lenin and Trotsky give speeches to thousands of workers. Reed himself spoke to countless other Bolshevik leaders, workers, soldiers and sailors, as they applied themselves to the historical task of establishing a government of the working class. He was a witness to the Bolshevik seizure of power and was present at the famous storming of the Winter Palace, as well as the struggle afterwards by the new Soviet government against counterrevolution.
For the remainder of the year Reed remained in the new Soviet Russia. He worked for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and was briefly appointed consul to the US. In early 1918, he had his first long discussions with Lenin and Trotsky. He left for home soon after, but was detained in Finland until April by the nationalist government.
On his return to New York, he was met on the dock by government agents who seized his papers and summoned him to court the next day. Reed was indicted under the Espionage Act for a 1917 article, published in The Masses, “Knit a strait-jacket for your soldier boy,” which describes what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Reed took up the task of defending the revolution to an American audience in such articles as “Soviets in Action” and “The Structure of the Soviet State” published in T he Liberator (the successor to The Masses ), in the autumn of 1918.
It was at this time that be took up a fight for the ideas of Bolshevism in the left wing of the American Socialist Party, along with Louis Fraina and other supporters of the Russian Revolution in the journal The Revolutionary Age. His papers from Russia were returned to him, and he worked feverishly on his description of the events he had lived through in October-November 1917. Eastman later reported that Reed wrote the book in a remarkably short period of time, sequestered in a room in Greenwich Village, seeing no one and coming out only for meals.
In March 1919, the product of this effort, Ten Days That Shook the World, was published. It was the peak of Reed’s development as a journalist. He combined his own observations and conversations with the scrupulous publication of the documents of the revolution itself he had collected.
Here is how Reed describes the Bolshevik headquarters, the Smolny Institute, a former upper-class girls school in tsarist times (only eight months previously!) on the day of the insurrection, November 7:
The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom. Automobiles and motorcycles came and went; an enormous elephant-colored armored automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer gate the Red Guards had built themselves a bonfire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the light of which the sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and down. … A crowd came pouring down the staircase, workers in black blouses and round black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers in rough dirt-colored coats and grey fur shapkas [hats] pinched flat.
On this occasion Reed encounters the Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev. Kamenev reads out to him, translating from Russian into French, effectively the first proclamation, just passed in session, of the new Soviet government: “The new Workers’ and Peasants’ Government will propose immediately a just and democratic peace to all the belligerent countries … The Soviet is convinced that the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in conducting the cause of Socialism to a real and lasting victory.”
And Reed’s description of Lenin stands out:
Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader—a leader purely by virtue of intellect: colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analyzing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.
(An insightful description, aside from the characterization of Lenin as “colorless” and “humorless,” which was anything but the case!)
Ten Days That Shook the World is one of the artistic achievements not only of the Russian Revolution, but of American and world literature. The fact that it inspired another great work, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s, October (1928), gives it a unique place in human culture.
Reed discovered the drama of the revolution in its own action, in the rapid and intense response of classes to one other in the pursuit of their social goals, expressed not only by force of arms, but by the most profound political thought. He was able to translate this into narrative and description.
Ten Days That Shook the World was the first time the revolution spoke in its full eloquence to the world. Lenin in his famous preface to the book, noted above, commented: “With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the World. … It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed’s book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.”
In the summer of 1919, Reed helped to launch the Communist Labor Party (one of the forerunners of the Communist Party, founded in May 1921), as it split from the opportunist Socialist Party. In October he left again for Soviet Russia and participated as an American delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International, held from July 19 to August 7, 1920. Following that, Reed attended the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan, an assembly of 1,900 delegates from across Asia and Europe organized by the Communist International, which opened September 1.
French leftist Alfred Rosmer, in Moscow Under Lenin, has a well-known description of Reed speaking at the Congress in Baku, a city famous for its petroleum industry. Rosmer noted that Reed, who had learned a few words of Russian, “was a great success. He shouted a question to his audience: ‘Don’t you know how Baku is pronounced in American? It’s pronounced oil!’ The solemn faces were suddenly shaken with laughter.”
Reed returned to Moscow on September 15, fell sick with typhus and died on October 17. It is said that he might have survived if the American government had not had an embargo on medications to Soviet Russia.
Rosmer explained in his book that when he and others returned from Moscow, “a sad piece of news greeted us. John Reed, who had returned in advance of us, was in hospital, ill with typhus. No effort was spared to save him, but it was all in vain and a few days later he died. His body was displayed in the great hall of the House of Trade Unions. On the day of the funeral, winter had already arrived and snow was falling. We were overwhelmed.”
Rosmer continued, “A burial place was found for him in the Kremlin wall, in the section reserved for heroes who had fallen in the revolutionary battle. The words of farewell were spoken by [Nikolai] Bukharin, for the central committee of the Communist Party, by [Alexandra] Kollontai, and by his comrades from the Executive Committee. Louise Bryant, who had arrived only to see him die, was there, completely shattered by grief. The whole scene was indescribably sad.”
Reed’s reputation after his death has been closely tied to the fate of the Russian Revolution. The Stalinist regime that usurped the Soviet state in the next decade could not abide the truth about the revolution, and Trotsky’s role in October 1917, as Reed had depicted it. Stalin is mentioned only in passing because he played virtually no role in the seizure of power. The work was banned, at Stalin’s insistence, in the Soviet Union for decades.
Equally, anticommunist commentators in Europe and America have sought to make Ten Days That Shook the World into a mere literary accomplishment. Some have alleged, falsely, that after disagreements over Communist tactics in 1920, Reed became disillusioned with Marxism.
Despite the Stalinist and anticommunist treatment of Reed and his work, for millions of workers and young people Ten Days That Shook the World remains an indispensable introduction to the most momentous event in world history. In a time when the question of socialist revolution has been placed before millions and millions, a new generation must discover his work.
Ten Days That Shook the World is currently on sale at Mehring Books for $14.40.
Professor Wolff On The Economics And Vulgarity Of Corporate Welfare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE5bcBzm4YA&ab_channel=act.tv
UAW keeping workers at Ohio Ventra parts plant on the job without contract during pandemic
Zac Thorton
10 hours ago
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/flex-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
[To learn more about forming a rank-and-file safety committee at your plant, contact autoworkers@wsws.org.]
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has kept auto parts workers at a plant in northern Ohio on the job for five months without a contract during the pandemic. Autoworkers at the Sandusky, Ohio plant operated by Flex-N-Gate subsidiary Ventra overwhelmingly voted down a sellout deal two months ago, brought forward by the union, which contained cuts to starting wages and extended the period for new hires to reach full pay. Since the rejection, the union has kept workers completely in the dark about the status of negotiations.
Ventra, which produces headlamps for Ford, employs 2,200 workers at its 1.2 million square foot Ohio facility. Contract negotiations with the company are being led by UAW Region 2B Director Wayne Blanchard, along with UAW Local 1216 officials.
Even without a contract, the UAW is keeping workers on the job in the midst of a major COVID-19 outbreak inside the plant. Dozens of autoworkers have been confirmed infected, most within the past few weeks. Meanwhile, workers have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, by a 98 to 2 margin.
Expressing the thinking of the Local 1264 leadership, former bargaining committee member Clifford Loomis told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, “Our bargaining team is still meeting the company, working towards a new tentative agreement. We have our ability to strike should things go that far, and our strike authorization passed with tremendous force.” When asked by this WSWS reporter how “far” things are supposed to go before a strike is called, given the spread of coronavirus, Loomis responded, “I don’t believe COVID-19 has any part in our negotiations.”
In fact, since the reopening of the auto industry in May, the UAW has worked with management to keep workers on the job and prevent a repeat of the wildcat strike wave which shut down the industry in March. At many key plants, the union has only recently been releasing any figures on the spread of the disease. However, a leak from Fiat Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant demonstrated that the union has been given detailed statistics on infections and deaths from the beginning by management.
Determined to take matters into their own hands, autoworkers at plants throughout the country are forming rank-and-file safety committees to break through the UAW information blackout and coordinate a joint struggle in defense of workers’ lives, including a shutdown of all nonessential industry, with pay guaranteed by the billions in profits which the Detroit automakers made in the third quarter. This includes not only assembly workers at major plants like Fiat Chrysler’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant but parts workers at Faurecia’s Gladstone and Saline plants.
The blackout on negotiations has prompted a number of workers to reach out to local media to denounce the union. Many more have taken to social media to do the same.
In comments to the Sandusky Register, one worker said, “We’re not hearing anything from anyone. A lot of us are asking ‘Where is [Local 1216 President] Brett Whyde?’” Whyde, the report states, has been silent “for months.”
While staying silent on negotiations, on November 20 Whyde issued a finger-waving letter to workers decrying quality issues at the plant. “We currently have 17 [quality rejects] for the month of November ... we had 17 QR’s in total for the entire month of October with a goal of single digits,” Whyde stated in language which may as well have been ghost-written by management. “The other big offender for everyone’s knowledge is that we have ... accumulated over $140,000 in scrap on Monday alone, which more than doubled our target.”
After chewing out workers for their poor performance, Whyde noted casually that the plant had seen 11 infections over the previous week, with 46 workers in quarantine. In a letter the following Wednesday he admitted to seven infections and 56 workers in quarantine.
The November 20 letter, which was posted on the union’s Facebook page, prompted an outpouring of anger from workers. One worker wrote:
“WHAT’S GOING ON WITH THE CONTRACT? THAT’S WHAT WE WANNA KNOW! Are we getting our little $300 ($500 taxed) ‘bonus’? Are you all even meeting with them? Or just hanging out up there? Meanwhile your plant and members who voted for you guys are getting sh---ed on daily by management! This is just unbelievable!”
On November 22 the union’s Facebook published the November 20 letter from UAW President Rory Gamble announcing the suspension of “all local union meetings and events” until April 15, 2021. While workers are being forced to risk their lives in the factories, the UAW is taking measures to safeguard the health of the bureaucracy and shield it from the criticisms of its membership.
The response from workers has been scathing. “Still can’t have membership meetings, still can’t have a new contract, still can’t have a raise, still can’t get management to quit signing off on bad parts,” wrote one worker. “We can, however, have meetings in the plant on the floor where we are encouraged to stand close together so we can better hear management tell us we suck.”
The mounting anger from workers forced Whyde to issue a second letter on November 25. In it, he refused to take any responsibility for keeping workers in the dark or for continuing to allow contract negotiations or lack thereof to carry on indefinitely. Instead, he presented the union as completely subservient to the company, writing, “In regards to Collective Bargaining your bargaining team is and has been ready and able to participate when the Company provides their availability.”
Whyde also shot down any suggestion of a strike, claiming that any strike “has to be authorized by Detroit for legality reasons.” This is the same bogus excuse given to Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) workers in Detroit by UAW Local 1700 President Louie Pahl, who said workers “have to be given permission” from “the International and the IEB.” In the course of the same podcast where he made these statements, Pahl threatened workers not to read the World Socialist Web Site .
As every autoworker knows, UAW President Rory Gamble and the coterie of gangsters in Solidarity House will never call a strike. Instead, they are doing everything possible to keep production going at full capacity to fuel massive profits for the automakers.
The workers at Ventra and all autoworkers must draw the necessary conclusions. The struggle to defend their livelihoods and their lives must not rest in the hands of the corrupt UAW. Instead, workers must form rank-and-file safety committees to appeal to autoworkers, teachers and other workers across the country for support and to organize a struggle to shut down the auto plants. To learn more about forming a rank-and-file safety committee at your plant, contact the World Socialist Web Site at autoworkers@wsws.org.
AskProfWolff: Capitalism's "Economic Growth" Fetish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8qW2K344Yk&ab_channel=DemocracyAtWork
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