PHOTO/WEAP
OAKLAND, CA—On Friday, June 28, community members including Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) joined workers from public workers unions including SEIU 1021, Our Walmart and Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) on the steps on Oakland City Hall to deliver a powerful message that the city must “reinvest” in the people of Oakland rather than pay on corporate debt that has reached well over $500 million to businesses like Goldman Sachs. The group then marched into downtown Oakland’s city bank, chanting “Wall Street banks, you owe us!”
The struggles of Oakland public workers mark a new quality. SEIU Local 1021 reports they have not engaged in a strike since 1946. This BART strike is an Oakland strike, and not simply a union strike. After many years of being tied at the hip with the capitalist system, labor unions are working in coalition with other impacted members of the community to take a concrete stance against Wall Street, corporations and disrespect of humanity. While the city looks at cutting jobs, reducing benefits and rolling back valuable city services, it refuses to address privatization and the robbing of public coffers.
The startling reality is that corporate debt in the United States far outweighs public or individual debt, yet it is the public and individuals who are forced to cover corporate costs. The workers of SEIU Local 1021, and the members of the Oakland community who support them, represent a changing tide in the social and political environment of the United States, an environment rooted in the economic revolution that has taken place in the American workforce. The fundamental shift towards robotics and automation, along with the expansion of globalization, has made the worker less than disposable. The social contract that maintains their quality of life is no longer valid.
Benito Mussolini defined fascism as the “perfect merger of corporations and state.” US struggles around the corporate take-over of education and health care, austerity measures of the Sequester, and the constant attack on public ownership, all represent the undermining of democracy in the forms of Emergency Managers, Citizens United and rolling back the Voting Rights Act. In essence, this moment and the many struggles we face as they intersect, represent the need for class-consciousness, a class program and a class-based strategy to resolving the challenges we currently face.
We live in a world of abundance. The distribution of basic needs like food, water, shelter, housing, democracy could be met with a different system of collective ownership. Technology, in the hands of the capitalists, can never be used in balance with the sustainability of the planet or the humanity that inhabits it. Siloism and individuality have been used to divide movements, keeping the people from creative and collective solutions that can address many of our issues on more holistic basis. This moment represents a significant point in time, to present class-based solutions to the struggles before us.
