The rot of capital continues to advance and deepen, manifesting primarily as increases in the cost of living.

The US is no exception, despite being the number one world power militarily, politically, and economically. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), between September 2021 and September 2022, the price of apparel has risen 5.5%, medical care services 6.5%, and housing 6.6%. Over the same period, food has gone up 11.2% and energy 19.8%. Average hourly wages have only increased 5% over those twelve months, which is a de facto wage cut.

Unemployment has stabilized around 4% since the massive spike at the beginning of the pandemic. As of September, the exact number was 3.5%, or 5.8 million unemployed persons in the labor force, i.e. actively looking for a job throughout the month preceding the BLS survey. However the real magnitude of the shortage of jobs for workers is even greater, albeit hidden. Another 5.8 million are not in the labor force who currently want a job. 1.6 million are marginally attached to the labor force – for example, workers who have become discouraged from seeking a job. Finally, there are 3.8 million part-time workers who would prefer full-time employment.

Similar conditions prevail in other countries, both advanced and peripheral: Germany, France, Ukraine, Iran, etc.

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In the US, small, organic movements are observable which could serve as a basis for a well-organized national labor movement.

Workers at Amazon – one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world – have engaged in a number of walkouts across the country connected to independent grassroots organizing drives. Germany has also been the site of struggles by Amazon employees with very similar demands. We have examined this in closer detail in another article in this issue.

A victorious strike at the food distribution giant Sysco gave workers a new contract with significant wage increases, including a raise of $5 per hour in the first year. The strikers utilized aggressive picketing tactics to their advantage. At one point, a crowd of over 400 workers surrounded a Sysco facility to prevent the 100 strikebreakers inside from leaving. Police intervened and arrested up to 20 strikers, charging them with disorderly conduct and assault and battery.

Such a response to working-class militancy is only natural and should be expected given the class nature of the State, which exists to protect the private property of an insignificant minority of exploiters. Workers should organize struggles against the legal persecution of strikers and prepare to defend themselves against imprisonment and police violence.

A great ferment is still underway among the railroad workers of the United States, as the issues surrounding the national contracts between the carriers and the rail unions remain unresolved. The BMWE, which represents rail maintenance workers, and now the BRS, which represents signalmen, recently voted down the tentative agreement (TA) negotiated in an emergency session with the mediation of the federal government to avert a national rail strike.

Regardless of whether the other crafts support the TA or not, it is crucial that they act in solidarity with their siblings in maintenance and signals by joining any possible future strike for a better contract. Allowing the carriers to perpetuate and deepen divisions between railroaders along craft lines will weaken all the crafts and the working class in general. Their greatest strength against the employers is to be found in cross-craft unity, proven by action.

West Coast port workers are still laboring without a contract as negotiations between the ILWU and the port operators drag on. While the union leadership hesitates to use the strike weapon, much of the rank-and-file membership across the country – facing declining wages and working conditions and having worked for years without an agreement – is ready for action. For instance, around 800 workers and ILA members at the Port of Mobile in Alabama rejected multiple company offers this October, effectively opting for a strike, which was subsequently averted by the union and operator.

In the event of a breakdown in bargaining and a strike on the West Coast, the ILWU should coordinate with the ILA, whose members are also seeking to defend their jobs and wages against the same class of employers, to ensure that shippers cannot simply reroute ships to Gulf Coast and East Coast ports.

At the same time, large national strikes already broke out and are currently taking place in France and Iran, while smaller struggles are taking place in many more countries (such as Myanmar, where the government jails trade unionists, and Ukraine, where there is a wartime ban on strikes and companies have a legally-authorized right to suspend contracts and lay off employees without pay). Workers in the US should pay close attention to these events and express solidarity through their organizations whenever possible.

All these workers are unconsciously pursuing the same immediate interests by identical means – aiming for higher wages and better working conditions through direct action, i.e. strikes and demonstrations. Their opponents are all of the same class – the bourgeoisie – and in many cases, workers with no connection to each other struggle with the very same multinational corporation (e.g., Amazon). The employers, in contrast, are fully conscious of their common identity and interests, and they organize themselves and act accordingly, with unity against the working class.

Consequently, the international proletariat is increasingly made to pay for the same global economic meltdown. Every worker is enslaved to the same capitalist system, forced to sell their labor and enrich a tiny class of idlers for their own survival in times of normalcy, and confronted with severe wage cuts or unemployment, on the verge of starvation and homelessness, when that very same system predictably breaks down every few years.

Workers, who in the U.S. and other countries are showing a tendency to return to economic struggle, must unite their struggles by overcoming the divisions imposed by the capitalist economic structure, its political regime and the collaborationist trade unionism subservient to this regime. Workers must unite in action by overcoming the divisions between plant, company, category, territory, union membership, and finally of nation. The International Communist Party has among its fundamental tasks to intervene in the labor movement by fighting for this purpose against the bourgeois or opportunist leaderships propping up the divisions of the working class. It is in the struggle, in its development, that workers will return to the methods and principles of the class struggle and make these their own notions. This, all the more to the extent that the strengthening of the economic class struggle movement will foster the development of the Party, in which alone lies the complete knowledge of the necessities and historical course of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletarian class from capitalism. As the 1848 Manifesto states, "...communists...have the advantage over the remaining mass of the proletariat, of understanding the conditions, the course and the general results of the proletarian movement”.

The methods of regime unionism are not adequate to deal with these crisis conditions, nor were they ever.

A significant part of the organized working class was already deeply dissatisfied with grievance procedures, mediation, and arbitration, but now such schemes are being exposed as utterly bankrupt. Collective bargaining agreements are sometimes useful, but have clear limits, especially when the purchasing power of wages is constantly being annihilated by inflation. Employers regularly violate contracts with impunity and unions lose all independence and initiative by refusing to break contracts themselves. Even when, in periods of economic growth of capitalism, such methods have improved the living and working conditions of a part of the working class, this has only come at the expense of: (a) the division of workers into groups with better conditions and groups with worse conditions; (b) the chaining of workers with better conditions to the company and the State; and (c) the abandonment of the methods and principles of class struggle.

Workers have been emptying the unions in the US for decades; by now, only 6% of private sector employees are unionized. This disintegration is a testament to the failure of collaborationism.

The solution is not to reject the union, but to transform it into a proper fighting instrument of the working class. Here and there, combative unions, rank-and-file caucuses, and workplace committees exist that could serve as nodes in a national network and become part of the skeleton of a real, militant labor movement. Once a critical mass of the working class is driven to rebel against their degraded conditions, they will aggregate around this framework and strengthen it, forming a true class union.

With the foundational economic organization of the working class in place, they can extract from the bourgeoisie whatever concessions are still possible under capitalism and ultimately implement a permanent solution to poverty and unemployment by abolishing the wages system.