THE US working class is now definitively on the march after six days of action in the town of Ferguson culminated in calls for a ‘Communist Revolution’ and for the National Guard to turn their guns on the bosses!
On Black Friday, a real unity was established between the hundreds of thousands of Walmart workers battling for ‘fair wages, and decent jobs’, the workers protesting at the murder in Ferguson, Missouri of Michael Brown, and the tens of millions of US youth who have been inspired by the defiant resistance in Ferguson.
Large numbers of these youth are already involved in the battle for a minimum wage of $15 a hour in the fast food industry.
All over the USA on Friday (Black Friday) there were strikes and mass pickets of Walmart stores by protesting workers joined by supporters of the Ferguson resistance. In Ferguson, one group of resisters occupied the twin supermarkets with a die-in, while another paraded outside the Ferguson police department chanting, ‘Who do we want? Darren Wilson! How do we want him? Dead!’
Meanwhile, the ‘Let Us Breathe’ collective has been collecting gas masks and taking them to Ferguson for distribution to the protesters.
Nationally, police reported hundreds of arrests in cities from Los Angeles to New York and also that there were plans for big rolling protest actions all across the country.
Dozens of people in Seattle blocked streets, and police said protesters chained doors shut at the nearby Pacific Place shopping centre. In San Francisco, a march by hundreds turned on the police, leaving two officers injured.
Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McFadden, was among the crowd that gathered outside the city’s police headquarters. She expressed the mood of the masses when she shouted: ‘They’re wrong. Everybody wants me to be calm – do you know how those bullets hit my son?’
The Ferguson struggle is now the struggle of the whole of the US working class, which is already in the battle for decent wages and jobs, in the situation of mass poverty that has flourished in the wake of the 2008 banking crash.
The Walmart workers are amongst the most exploited in the country. Last Friday, there were pickets and strikes at 1600 stores in 49 states to spell it out to shoppers that the people serving them often can’t afford to feed themselves.
‘I have to depend on the government mostly,’ said Fatmata Jabbie, a 21-year-old single mother of two who earns $8.40 an hour working at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia. She makes ends meet with food stamps, subsidised housing, and Medicaid.
‘Walmart should pay us $15 an hour and let us work full-time hours,’ she says. ‘That would change our lives. That would change our whole path. I wouldn’t be dependent on government too much. I could buy clothes for my kids to wear.’
Walmart employs 1.4 million people, or 10 per cent of all retail workers, and pulls in $16 billion in annual profits. Its largest stockholders – Christy, Jim, Alice, and S. Robson Walton – are the nation’s wealthiest family, collectively worth $145 billion.
Yet the company is notorious for paying poverty wages and using part-time schedules to avoid offering workers benefits. Last year, a report commissioned by Congressional Democrats found that each Walmart store costs taxpayers between 900,000 and $1.75 million per year because so many employees are forced to turn to government aid.
In fact, Walmart is the success story of American capitalism!
The US trade unions must be made to spearhead this struggle of the working class and the oppressed in the USA. They must be made to break from the Democratic party and found a Labour Party that fights for the working class and socialism.
At the same time, a section of the Fourth International must be built to lead the struggle for the American socialist revolution to put an end to the oppression and super-exploitation carried out by US imperialism at home and abroad!
