UAW President Shawn Fain addressed the DNC in Chicago with a ringing endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. He proclaimed this pair as solidly on the side of the working class: “Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class.”
This is not true. Harris is not one of us. She is not “a fighter for the working class,” and neither is her running mate Walz.
Political grandstanding on the picket lines
Fain said that Harris and Walz “have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class.” What is the basis for this proclamation? Maybe because Joe Biden—who they kicked to the curb—showed up for a photo op at a UAW picket line last September?
When workers from other industries join a UAW picket line, they bring solidarity from other sections of the class and look to bring more coworkers with them the next time they visit. Students show up on the line bringing drinks and snacks, and ask striking workers to provide speakers to return with them to campus and help them build broader support for the struggle.
But capitalist politicians who come to picket lines only bring legions of journalists and photographers. They have no coworkers to bring around.
What they do have is the power of the government and a media platform to spread their voices far and wide.
Did they bring any of that power to bear on behalf of the workers during the UAW strike last year?
Did they denounce the auto barons for waging a half-century war on autoworkers’ wages, conditions, and retirement benefits?
Did they, perhaps, use their platform to call for solidarity mobilizations from the rest of the labor movement to beef up the picket lines?
Did they threaten the Big Three auto companies with the National Guard to help the UAW shut down the production and shipping of struck work?
Did they call for the nationalization of these companies, to be operated under workers’ control?
They did no such thing.
With ‘friends’ like these …
In the hands of a workers’ government, state power would be a decisive weapon to bring to bear on the class struggle. But today, state power is held by capitalism’s servants and hangers-on, not by workers’ representatives, and is always used by so-called “friends of labor” to pressure and weaken union workers in their fights against the capitalists over the division of surplus value.
The anti-working class record of the Democratic Party is fully apparent to anyone who takes an honest look at its history.
Take the Taft-Hartley “slave-labor” law, passed in response to the huge strike wave at the end of World War II. This involved 180,000 autoworkers, more than half a million steelworkers, 200,000 electrical workers, 150,000 packing-house workers, and hundreds of thousands involved in smaller strikes. Among other draconian restrictions, Taft-Hartley bans unions from using our most militant and effective tactics, including political strikes, solidarity strikes, and mass picketing. Far from repealing it, the Democrats have only tightened its grip since it was passed 77 years ago.
They had 50 years to enshrine the right to abortion into law, and their failure to do so led to the overthrow of that basic right by the Supreme Court.
Even the National Labor Relations Act, which past generations of workers saw as guaranteeing the right to organize, has been used by successive Democratic and Republican administrations to bog down organizing campaigns in bureaucratic mazes and piles of red tape.
That bipartisan agreement to combat the mass mobilization of workers to defend their living standards was demonstrated fully in December 2022 when the Biden-Harris regime won instant Congressional ratification of a measure to ban rail workers from using union power to shut down rail traffic in a strike. No debate and no input from the workers involved.
And let’s not forget that it was Governor Walz—to the delight of then-President Trump—who called out the Minnesota National Guard to suppress the biggest mass working-class mobilization in US history, the 2020 George Floyd uprising.
Fain has spoken out against Israel’s slaughter of defenseless Palestinians in Gaza, demanding a ceasefire. UAW Local 4811 in California, with Fain’s support, even called a political strike against the University of California Regents demanding the end of UC financing of Israeli imperialism. The Biden-Harris regime could bring that slaughter to a halt instantly by cutting off their supply of weaponry and ammunition to Netanyahu. But they won’t do it—because Harris supports that genocidal war.
How is any of that standing “shoulder-to-shoulder with the working class”?
Mood of frustration and sense of betrayal
The rise of Trumpism should sound a warning to leaders of the labor movement. The deterioration of working-class living standards during capitalism’s steady decline has produced a radicalized generation that no longer believes the lies of the capitalists and their Democratic Party supporters. A March 2023 poll showed that 20% of today’s youth already consider communism to be the ideal economic system.
Trump is a capitalist demagogue, not a communist, but he has cynically tapped into the mood of frustration and sense of betrayal felt by the older generation of workers to build up his personal following. Performative chants of “Trump is a scab!” at the DNC are not enough to overcome the growing disgust with liberal promises that the system can work for us.
As Duke Law School professor Jedediah Britton-Purdya observed in a September 12, 2024 New York Times op-ed:
People feel powerless, ripped off by monopolies in everything from phone service to concert tickets. They can’t get ahead in an economy where real wages have fallen behind the investments that wealthier people hold, which have skyrocketed in value. They see great fortunes made from addictive drugs and addictive platforms, and the pirates of high finance bailed out when bankruptcy looms. We are right to believe we deserve better.
When almost 70% of the country feels betrayed by the economy, the party that speaks to this frustration has a built-in advantage. Compared to Mr. Trump’s Republicans, the Democrats remain the party of protecting the system and making it work—the small-c conservative party of the liberal but comfortable coasts and other economic hubs. Many corporate leaders and Wall Street titans have rallied to her, partly because some genuinely fear Mr. Trump’s authoritarian instincts and anti-constitutional tactics, but also because they see her as the candidate of stability, the leader of a party that will not rock the boat.
The capitalist Democratic Party cannot halt this political sea change. Continuing to tie the unions to this sinking ship will only discredit such leaders. They will be swept aside by the emergence of a 1930s-style radicalized labor movement in the not-so-distant future. Watch this space!
