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On January 25th 2011, US President Barack Obama “… called for unity with Republicans, while delivering his speech on the State of the Union […] setting the foundations for the second part of his mandate and the race for his re-election in 2012”. He stressed the need for enterprises tax cutbacks, a lesser role for the govern
ment and the need for collaboration of both Republican and Democratic parties in Congress, accordingly to Montréal Métro newspaper, on January 26th.In Montréal, the message is clear and generally well accepted especially by colored people who still savour the presidential election of an Afro-American citizen to this responsibility; paving the way for Hispanic people, women and non-White people in general.
(Illustration Internet: workers' revolt at Haymarket, USA).
The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), through the voice of its President, Richard Trumka, said in relation with Obama’s proposal for collaboration between Republicans and Democrats, “… we will join the President as partners to help build bipartisan support for a sustained and strategic investment in America’s future”.
He added: “We believe the President is heading in the right direction – but as he outlined tonight, the yardstick must be the health of the middle class and the American economy”. (NOW BLOG, 2011-01-27). Let’s recall that unemployment is currently in the two digits in USA. However, US workers are not urged to action by their union leaders.
“… Where and by whom has it ever been proved that the parliamentary form of struggle is the principle form of struggle of the proletariat (working class, Ed.)? Does not the history of the revolutionary movement show that the parliamentary struggle is only a school for, and an auxiliary in, organizing the extra-parliamentary struggle of the proletariat, that under capitalism the fundamental problems of the working-class movement are solved by force, by the direct struggle of the proletarian masses, their general strike, their uprising? […] Who suggested that the method of the political general strike be substituted for the parliamentary struggle? Where and when have the supporters of the political general strike sought to substitute extra-parliamentary forms of struggle for parliamentary forms?” (Joseph Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975, p. 15).
These matters are going to be discussed at the 16th Congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 80 million members. In fact, US workers should remember their own traditions and history; those years, the years of the Congress of Industrial Organizations were moments of great struggles for a better living, peace and progress in general. Let’s recall the struggles for civil liberties. The US working class can find, within its own history "handbook", what revolutionary methods mean.
As for the International Trade Union Congress, it will take place in Athens (Greece), April 6th-10th, 2011. There will be a delegation from USA and Canada. They will dwell upon common fields of interests with hundreds of more than 120 countries; for instance exchange of information and the need for international solidarity, especially between US and Canadian workers.
Should we not recall that at the beginning of the communist movement, North-American revolutionaries were members of the same American co
mmunist parties; then the Communist party of Canada was created in 1921?As the leader of the first socialist Revolution -that took place in Russia-, Vladimir Lenin, pointed out: “The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British (the real Tea Party, Ed.) in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century."
(Photo: Winnipeg General Strike in Canada, in 1919).
"In some respects, if we only take into consideration the ‘destruction’ of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” (V.I. Lenin, Letter to American Workers, Progress Publisher, Moscow, vol. 28, 1965, pp. 62-75).
danieleugpaquet@yahoo.ca
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