“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

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In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

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In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

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And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

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