By
Finian Cunningham
The U.S.
empire, like the USSR, is imploding out of
its own corruption, says Harriet Fraad in an
interview with Finian Cunningham.
December 05, 202:
Information Clearing House
-- "SCF"
--Over the past year, the massive
upheaval in the United States from workers going on
industrial strike and walking off jobs signifies an
increasing awareness of class politics. In the
following interview, Harriet Fraad says that
American workers are overcoming decades of
suppression from anti-communist propaganda as well
as a betrayal by the two main political parties.
Workers are becoming aware of their rights and
their conditions of exploitation under the corporate
capitalist system. They are angry and restless for
an alternative economic system. For the first time
in a long time the words “capitalism” and
“socialism” are now entering conscious public
discussions. Workers, says Fraad, are well aware of
their betrayal by the Democratic Party which has
sold out their class cause for the benefit of the
party’s leadership from corporate sponsorship.
More than ever, she contends, the working
majority of the United States needs the
representation and leadership of a new political
party that galvanizes their needs and rights under a
socialist program.
Historically, Fraad points out, the United States
always had a strong movement of working-class
politics and socialist parties, for example at the
end of the 19th century and during the early 20th
century. Unfortunately, much of that tradition was
destroyed by the pro-capitalist establishment using
Red Scare tactics during the Cold War, including the
Democratic Party, the corporate media and official
trade union bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, the recent acute exploitation of
workers during the pandemic period and the grotesque
growth in wealth inequality are forcing American
workers to question the entire system and to realize
their collective political power as a working-class
constituency that comprises the vast majority of the
330 million U.S. population.
However, as Harriet Fraad warns, the potential
for progressive change in the United States could
still be hijacked and destroyed by the rise of
right-wing populism under demagogues like Donald
Trump. The Republican rightwing and the ineffectual
Democratic Party under President Joe Biden are
creating the base for fascism which may vanquish the
potential for progressive socialism. Thus, America
is coming to face an ominous crossroads, in her
view, which boils down to this: will the United
States embrace socialism or will it descend into
fascism?
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Dr Harriet Fraad lives in New York City. She has
been a practicing psychotherapist and hypnotherapist
for nearly four decades. She is also a political
activist, a founding member of the women’s
liberation movement in the United States during the
late 1960s and co-founder of the journal
Rethinking Marxism. Fraad is co-author of
several books, including Class Struggle on the
Home Front and Imagine Living in a
Socialist USA. She broadcasts a weekly
commentary
Capitalism Hits Home covering current labor and
economic issues as part of the
Democracy at Work channel. Fraad is particularly
critical of how the Democratic Party in the United
States has elevated so-called “identity politics”
over the more central issue of class politics, the
fight for workers’ rights and the advancement of
socialism. That subject of how the CIA and the
Democratic Party played the U.S. population into the
trivial pursuit of identity politics will be
returned to in a future interview for Strategic
Culture Foundation.
Question: Despite a lack of
mainstream media coverage, nevertheless there is an
unmistakable impression that the United States is
undergoing widespread labor strikes and resignations
over the past year. Can you give us some figures on
this development in worker protests? How significant
are these demonstrations in the historical
perspective of the American economy, industrial
relations and society?
Harriet Fraad: There are over
100,000 people currently on strike in the U.S. At
least four million have dropped out of the labor
force. There have been over 1,000 separate
industrial actions during the past year. These are
low estimates. With the exception of Mike Elk’s
Payday
Report, strikes and labor actions are routinely
under-reported by our corporate media. As reported
elsewhere, billions of dollars in profits were made
by U.S. corporations during the pandemic and the
recession that accompanied it. Billionaire wealth
surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the
same period that saw massive impoverishment of
workers and their families; U.S. billionaires are
now worth a combined $5 trillion. Meanwhile, wages
were not raised.
Question: Do the mass labor
strikes across the United States signal an increase
in workers becoming more aware of issues of class
politics and an increase in militancy to demand
their rights as workers?
Harriet Fraad: The class
awareness of U.S. workers is, at least up to now,
not a conscious class awareness. It is not informed
by a socialist media presence, any socialist daily
newspapers, television stations, or socialist
internet. Historically, class awareness was
effectively crushed by a national anti-communist
crusade with the public trials of hundreds of people
suspected of belonging to the Communist Party or
what they considered its fellow travelers in the
Socialist Party and the left. The confederation of
trade unions, the AFL-CIO, expelled the activist
left and its communist and socialist organizers.
They were the militants that kept the unions vital.
Without them, the union movement lost its wider
purpose of worker power. In the 1950s, 35 percent of
U.S. workers were organized in unions. Now there is
barely 10 percent in unions.
However, class consciousness was re-introduced
with the Occupy Movement of 2011. There, the idea of
the 1 percent super-wealthy and the 99 percent of
the rest of society took root in popular perception.
It is significant that former President Barack
Obama, a supposed “progressive” Democrat, crushed
Occupy sites across the nation in 2012. Having said
that, class consciousness across the U.S. is just
beginning to be revived.
Question: Can it be discerned
that America’s workers and their families – who
represent a majority of the 330 million population –
are becoming: a) more critical of capitalism as an
economic system; and b) more receptive to and
supportive of an alternative socialist politics?
Harriet Fraad: For the first
time since the 1950s, capitalism can be named as a
system rather than the implicitly assumed only
system for organizing an economy. U.S. grotesque
inequality is exposed and becoming increasingly
conscious among workers, especially for the young
whose future is dire. Young Americans are mired in
student debt, deprived of jobs with a future, and
may even lose their planet due to capitalism.
Question: Traditionally, in the
two-party U.S. political system the Democrats are
viewed as being pro-labor and pro-union, but it
seems that over recent decades the Democrats have
become indistinguishable from the Republican Party
as being loyal and pliable servants of Big Business.
Can you explain this trend with historical
reference?
Harriet Fraad: The big sell-out
of the Democratic Party to corporate interests was
launched by Bill Clinton in 1993. He had been
elected with union energy and union financial
support. Yet, he was most instrumental in making the
Democratic Party a party serving corporate
capitalist interests and taking corporate money.
When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), he allowed jobs in the United
States to be outsourced to Mexico and he gave his
blessing to the exodus of millions of U.S. jobs to
nations with low wages, terrible working conditions
and weak or no ecological protections.
Clinton initiated the Democratic Party’s new
corporate strategy of verbally celebrating racial,
gender and sexual equality and justice while
advancing corporate interests and abandoning the
poor and the white working-class. In just one
instance, he killed cash assistance for needy
families and ripped a huge hole in the American
social welfare safety net. He threw millions of poor
black and white women and children into bad jobs and
terrible poverty while claiming “progressive”
treatment for all.
Question: Does this historical
background partly explain the phenomenal rise of
Donald Trump as a “populist hero”?
Harriet Fraad: Yes. The
neglected white working-class gave up on the
Democrats that sold them out and they were ripe for
Trump’s empty promise to “Make America Great Again”.
They were outraged by their perception that the
gains made by people of color and women were what
took their jobs away. That was a misperception
distorted and presented to them by Trump. People of
color and women still earn less than white men. It
was not people of color and women but rather
corporate profiteering that took their better-paid
manufacturing jobs to nations like Mexico, China and
India with terrible job conditions. It was corporate
capitalists like Trump and their servants like
Clinton who took their jobs. Trump exploits white
working-class rage. In the absence of a powerful
present socialist analysis, Trump alone speaks to
their outrage. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, had a
chance to win as the presidential candidate of the
Democratic Party. Sanders was defeated. He was
outvoted by traditional African-Americans who chose
Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s defeat
was aided and abetted by the Democratic Party
leadership.
Question: If the modern
Democratic Party is a hindrance to the cause of
workers, shouldn’t workers then seek to establish a
new third party that actually fights for their class
interests?
U.S. workers are now beginning to reclaim class
consciousness.
America direly needs a unified socialist voice
that connects the various movements like Black Lives
Matter, Climate Extinction, the Feminist Movement,
MeToo# and Timesup#, Labor rights, transsexual
rights, socialist and communist parties and the
movement to transform capitalist business and all
other forms of organizations into cooperatives. They
need a movement and a party that is against all
arbitrary divisions between people. The movement and
party should be an umbrella organization. The handle
and stem represent class justice. The spokes and
their multicolored fabric are all of the movements
that are needed to create class, race, gender, and
sexual justice for all.
Question: The corporate news
media and academia suggest that somehow socialism is
antithetical to ordinary Americans. Is a mass
movement for socialism possible in the United
States? What would that take for it to mobilize and
achieve governance?
Harriet Fraad: A mass socialist
movement is certainly possible in the United States.
In fact, there has been a long history of socialism
in America from cooperative communal movements to
official socialist and communist parties.
The Socialist Party was a powerful force in the
U.S. from the turn of the century until the First
World War. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s
presidential candidate won a million votes even
though he ran from prison in 1920. Socialism and
communism are not antithetical to Americans.
However, when they actually threatened capitalism as
mass movements they were severely repressed by the
federal government in the service of corporate
capitalism.
Question: The social discontent
and political disorientation in the United States
seems to have reached unstable levels. If a viable
democratic socialist direction is not harnessed by
the people, do you fear that a reactionary
alternative is a real danger? That is, for fascist
politics to fully emerge from the incipient forms we
see already in an increasingly rightwing Republican
Party?
Harriet Fraad: The U.S. empire,
like the USSR, is imploding out of its own
corruption. America is polarized. There is far
greater acceptance of a socialist alternative to
capitalism as well as the danger of a well-financed
turn towards fascism. On the socialist side, labor,
a mass base, is awakening to the outrage of
super-exploitation by the 1 percent. People are
politically active on the left as they have not been
since the 1960 and 1970s. A majority of young people
prefer socialism to capitalism. However, the U.S.
left does not have a centrally organized national
organization around which to unite. If it did, it
could mobilize the majority of Americans.
The Trumpian right in the Republican Party has no
positive program except for gun rights and police
and military support. Instead, they rage at
Democrats, progressives, people of color, immigrants
and abortion rights. They have a strong presence in
our capitalist media. They are well-funded and have
a populist and visible leader.
Germany became fascist because when its
capitalism failed and wild inflation wiped out the
livelihoods of the mass of workers, although Germany
had a powerful Communist Party at the time, the
German corporate wealth supported fascism as an
alternative to socialism.
The spontaneous labor uprisings in the U.S. are
promising. But we do not know how it will turn out
in the United States.
Finian Cunningham
has written extensively on international
affairs, with articles published in several
languages. He is a Master’s graduate in
Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of
Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a
musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news
media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
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