United States

Yesterday a communique reached the Campus Antiwar Network national discussion e-mail list announcing the occupation of the New School University's cafeteria by students both from the New School, as well as from other universities in the surrounding area from New York and New Jersey. The students have occupied the cafeteria, claiming it as an autonomous students center.

Workers from the Revolutionary Front of Occupied Factories (FRETECO) in Venezuela and Members of the Executive Committee of CC.OO. branch in Navantia-Ferrol (Spain) send messages of solidarity and support to the courageous workers of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, USA. In English and Spanish/En español y inglés.

Beginning Friday, around 300 workers at the Republic Window & Door factory in Chicago have occupied the plant demanding severance and back-pay owed by the company. For the first time since the birth of the CIO union federation in the 1930s, US workers are occupying their workplace. As the bosses push to place the burden of the failing economy on workers' shoulders, the class struggle is back on the agenda in the US.

An overwhelming 95 percent of black voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama in the recent elections in the United States. The scenes on the streets in Chicago and around the country were full of jubilation, as many working people, both Black and white, fervently believe that change is now on the horizon. But does Obama's victory really mean the end of racism in America?

In the United States anger continues to boil over about the nearly one trillion dollar bailout of the banking industry . It's no surprise, then, that there is a growing ear for populism of the far-right. Many working people are very confused about where the system "went wrong" and are looking for someone to "fix it." Third party figures of the right, such as Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin and Ron Paul, claim to have the solutions.

The U.S. has elected a new president, Barack Hussein Obama. Along with the dramatic turn in the economic situation, this marks a definite turning point in the history of the country and of the world. Big illusions have been created that Obama will provide "change". What American workers have voted for is an end to policies that benefit the rich, but Obama does not represent real change. In the coming years workers will learn from real life experience that what is required is a genuine voice of the US working class, and that can only be a mass party of labor.

As the crisis of world and American capitalism continues to unfold, continued attacks on the living standards of the working class will eventually lead to militant strikes and protest movements. Labor activists and young workers will rediscover the traditions of the past. In this process they will break with the Democrats and move towards building their own party.

Millions of US families are being threatened with eviction from their homes, some because they cannot pay their mortgages and others because their landlords cannot pay theirs. Now a County Sheriff in Illinois, has refused to carry out any more evictions.

It was not the immediate crisis on Wall Street that has “caused” the public outrage against the Big Business bail out. This was only the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” This has simply brought to the surface deep-seated discontent that had been brewing for years.

Last weeks' rallies in New York against the proposed bail-out of failed banks revealed a very angry mood. Comrades of the Workers' International League were on the rallies and they provide here an interesting insight into the real mood that is developing among US workers as capitalism plummets into crisis.

The much ballyhooed movie There Will Be Blood is supposedly based upon Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, but it surely miscasts Sinclair’s focus and technique. The movie limits itself to a study of a manic, ruthless oil prospector, more a personality study, but the novel is a much wider socialist attack on corporate power and labor suppression, top-to-bottom government corruption, and corporate control of war, universities, and Hollywood . The social and economic concerns read just like the present even though it is set in the World War I and 1920s era, mostly in the early California oil fields. 

After years of Bush’s open-ended war on working people at home and abroad, many on the “left” in the United States and beyond are desperate for an alternative. For many, that alternative is Barack Obama. Obama, has been careful to portray himself as a “sensible progressive”. However, far from being a “progressive” alternative, Obama is at his core a typical representative of the bosses’ political parties.

Up to the present, the working class in the United States has not yet built its own political party, unlike in most major industrial countries and even in many less industrialized countries. So what are the prospects that the US workers will eventually build such a party?

Elections can reveal a lot about a country, and the fast-approaching U.S. presidential election is proving to be no exception. Above all, the current election shows just how much working Americans need their own political representation. This fact is expressed and cynically taken advantage of by Barack Obama’s campaign slogan: “Change We Can Believe In.” Even the “old guard” represented by John McCain has had to raise the idea of change in his campaign rhetoric.

Millions have hoped against hope that Barack Obama represents real change. But these sincere hopes were dealt another blow with the selection of Senator Joseph Biden from Delaware as Obama’s vice presidential running mate. Biden has had a long career in politics, and is often portrayed as a “liberal.” However, a brief look at his policies only goes to show the sorry state that bourgeois liberalism finds itself in!