More Letters to Red Flag

MTA Operators’ Expiration Date here ♦ Pushing on Walls here ♦ One International Working Class here ♦

23 years of service: MTA Operators’ Expiration Date

Business in general doesn’t like workers. After the 1980s, there has been across the US a negative change against labor.

Depending on how long you have been in the company, you would easily notice the gradual negative changes and attacks on the worker.

The Los Angeles government transit agency MTA (which runs on taxes) is just a name front. We are the instruments they use to generate profits for their businesses by taking their workers to work and people to shop in their stores. Even though we as drivers provide such a vital service to the economy, we are not treated or rewarded as we should be.

If the company hired you when you are in your 20’s or 30s, they know you will meet your 23 years of service before age 65.   It’s not about how old you will be when you retire. It is that your body, after 23 years of wear-and-tear, becomes a liability to them. For the company, 23 years of service is your body’s expiration date as a driver. They use us and then they throw us away.

Do you think that the hostile work environment is just coincidence? No, MTA management wants to keep you under pressure. It messes with you because they need you to leave as soon as you reach 23 years of service. Even before is better if they force you to quit or get fired. That way they get to keep your pension! That’s the system for you!

The reality is that there are a lot of drivers that are not able or will not be able to retire because of the medical issue. They will be forced to work beyond the “promised” 23 years of service.

To get some of these operators to retire, management provides some medical incentives (bribes) according to the age when retired. If you retire before the age of 55, you have no company-paid medical insurance. At 55 they pay 50%; at 58, 75%, and at 62, 100%.

The part that management does not get, or care to, is that driving for the public is a daunting task. If they provide a better working environment for the driver and incentives for the public, the result would be less traffic and less wear and tear on drivers’ lives and health. But MTA and the capitalist system aren’t in business for the workers’ or publics’ health!

—MTA retired bus operator, Los Angeles (USA)

Pushing on Walls and Changing in the Process

“If I push a chair, it moves…because of the real outside pressure I apply. … but to end here would be mechanical materialism,” said a comrade in a recent report on dialectical materialism.

“The main reason the chair moves is because of its organic composition and not so much because of the pressure I apply to it. Dialectical materialism considers both the internal and external when looking at change, but the internal is primary. If you applied the same amount of pressure to a wall or a tree, they wouldn’t move a bit.”

Physics shows that if I exert force on a chair or wall, that object also exerts an equal and opposite force on me. The resultant motion (or not) also depends on the internal composition of the person(s) pushing on the object. If they are seated on a bulldozer, for example, they can move or even destroy the wall. Many in Gaza and India know this firsthand.

Here’s why this matters. Over a hundred people here in Pasadena have been protesting weekly. They are pushing Rep. Judy Chu to sign a Gaza ceasefire resolution. It’s like pushing a wall.

“Yes, we are pushing on a wall with a hand, and it’s not moving,” commented an activist. “But this analogy fails because hands never change. Here the ‘hand’ is changing, and people are getting radicalized.”

He continued: “When we tried to get Chu to move towards a ceasefire, she didn’t, and that is the unmovable wall of the American institutions. But we (the organizers) were changed by the course of events. Through rain, or storm, or cold, we have been protesting every week, and have found a genuine community.

“To complete the analogy, we need to actually see what has changed among the people. There’s more awareness. There’s cross-age organizing. Often students are very radical and older workers are not on the scene. But now we have people from Pasadena City College and Caltech organizing with people from churches and mosques. People come with their families. I think that would be the materialist analysis of what has happened so far in the consciousness of the people who are challenging this genocide.

“But fundamentally no relationships have been changed. Right now we’re voicing dissent, and we still have a way to go in building power amongst ‘the people.’”

The “wall” (Chu) is immovably committed to the Democratic Party and their imperialist project. Focusing on that could lead to cynicism and passivity.

But, looking at the “hand” (protesters), we do see change. There are conversations about whether the movement should be nationalist or internationalist reformist or revolutionary. What’s the long-term goal? How would the movement have to change to destroy the class relationships of imperialism?

Many have read our answers in Red Flag. Some ask for the new issue. Some say, “we’re communists, too.”  We are developing relationships at the weekly gatherings and beyond.

Opposing forces are two sides of a dialectical contradiction. Our communist practice focuses on resolving our side’s internal contradictions. That’s how we’ll create a force capable of destroying the capitalist “wall” and building the communist world we need.

—Comrade in Pasadena (USA)

We Are One International Working Class

“I don’t even want to call myself a Jew anymore,” said a terribly upset friend who was born in Israel.

“You were born into a Jewish family, but you were also born into the working class,” I responded. “Mainly you are a worker and should think of yourself that way.”

“That’s what my parents always said,” she remembered.

Each of us has a personal identity with many aspects. But we are all workers, or allies of the working class. More and more of us identify mainly as communists.

Being a worker (even a communist worker) doesn’t make other aspects of our identity disappear. It means they are secondary, though often we struggle to remember that.

Where we grew up, what languages we speak, where we live, our life experiences, all help to shape our personal identities. We may see ourselves as culturally Jewish or Muslim, Christian or Hindu, even if we don’t practice the religion.

We may identify with others who share a skill set (surfers, poets, electricians, nurses). Or a passion (fans of Mihlali, Taylor Swift, Shah Rukh Khan, Lionel Messi, Manchester United). Most of us don’t let such things divide us from the rest of the working class.

Other things are harder. We know that “race,” gender, and nationality are socially constructed. That means they are boxes that capitalist society invented to sort us into, on purpose to divide us. They are part of the material reality of the wage system.

So we can’t just say to someone, “You’re not Black (or Palestinian or gay or a woman), you’re a worker.”  We experience capitalist oppression and exploitation differently, based on what boxes we’ve been put in. We can’t defeat the divisive ideology of “identity politics” by denying this reality.

What we can and must say is that the only way to end the oppression we each experience is to unite as the working class and destroy capitalism. To mobilize for communism and uproot the wage system.

To struggle, as a united working class, against all the “isms” that divide us. To identify ourselves first, and mainly, as workers. As my friend’s Israeli parents told her, fifty years ago.

—A Comrade

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