Why do wins and gains for the wage slaves turn into losses? To understand this one only has to look back to the old International Workers of the World (IWW) and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and countries like Ukraine and the Arab Spring. The old IWW used the soapbox approach on street corners to arouse exploited workers to a spectacular and sudden fight for free speech, higher wages. And for ten years they had wins, but then failed to hold their membership.
Just like the IWW, OWS also had wins in getting the 99 percent fired up over wages, Wall Street greed and they had cell phones all over the U.S. to motivate people, but again OWS failed to hold the people together. Even countries like Ukraine who fought a hell of a fight and changed its government, and now it is in trouble as it careens toward a civil war. The Arab Spring, which again changed its government, but now are in trouble. Why is it these groups didn’t plan or ever think about what they will do when or if they win, like putting together an organization or government that will work?
What I have seen during the years is there are three types of people. There are the revolutionary unionists soap boxers, which are needed to fire up the people. At the same time there needs to programs to educate and organize, and if this is applied correctly, this would enable the people to achieve its revolutionary goals. If not this will give fodder to the third group who always wants to destroy what the other two have accomplished.
Lynnwood, Washington, maybe ahead of everyone else in the country as it has hired a full-time organizer. Carlo Voli, a former corporate marine equipment salesman, is now possibly the only "community supported activist" in the country. His work is paid for by a network of 26 donors, who give money each month like the community supported agriculture groups do across the country. One of his best known activism was the blockade against Royal Dutch Shell by kayaks in the Port of Seattle. It is Voli’s job to come up with and organize new approaches to protesting and problem solving. This maybe the future of organizing. Voli has a vested interest in keeping members engaged.
This is what the Bernie Sanders revolution must start thinking about. What we do and how we do what we want and need when we win. How will we keep the fire in the bellies of our wage slaves and proletarians? If we don’t, we can win the battle, but lose the war. Just like history has shown us. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the people that there were good things that needed to be done and then he said, “Now make me do it.”
So Bernie Sanders must keep his foot soldiers in place to make him do what we want. If not, it will be all in vain. Just another case of ‘what could have been.’
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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