Former D.C. Union Boss: Our Goal Is to 'Overthrow the Capitalist System and Build Communism

Anyone who's watched Glenn Beck's show, or his 2010 speech at CPAC, will tell you that the main difference between a progressive and a communist is their attitude toward social change. Progressives believe that society can be guided to evolve into their preferred system; communists believe that a violent revolution is necessary to uproot the existing social order. And if nothing else, the increasingly tense exchanges between members of the Occupy movement (revolution) and supporters of the Obama administration (evolution) show that this distinction is far more than purely academic. Moreover, the open communists are coming out of the woodwork more and more.

Exhibit A:  Comments by a former major D.C. Union boss, Mike Golash, made in a video shot by young conservative activists and released this weekend. Golash, who used to run D.C.'s chapter 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, and who is responsible for organizing workers on the D.C. metro, had some shockingly honest things to say on-camera:

The Daily Caller brings these highlights of Golash's speech, which was part of an Occupy gathering:

“Progressive labor is a revolutionary communist organization,” Golash said during an Occupy DC “People’s Assembly” on August 19.

“Its objective,” he added, “is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system and build communism.”

Golash said he and his comrades are “trying to learn something from the historical revolutions of the past: the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, the revolutions in Cuba and Eastern Europe.”[...]

“The capitalists — they have their organizations: the FBI, the CIA, the secret police, the military, the army, etc., etc. They have organizations to maintain their power. It’s foolish to think that without a disciplined organization made up not of a few people but of millions and millions of people, [we] can bring down capitalism."

Golash's comments are unlikely to surprise observers who believe that Occupy is a nest of communism. However, his support for the concept is notable, insofar as his influence on the D.C. Metro Transit system arguably provides a good case study for how his preferred, communistic system would work.

And how would it work? Not well at all, according to the Virginia-based blog Bacon's Rebellion:

Go to the ATW website and you’ll see that the union is interested in a lot more than simply improving the wages and working conditions of its members. States Golosh on the president’s page:

Workers’ real leverage against the bosses lies in their ability to shut down production and call their coworkers into the streets. The threat of economic hardship to the bosses and social instability in society causes a real fear in the bosses’ heart. Direct action by workers is the motor that drives us forward to a better standard of living and a more just society, not election results.

If that doesn’t give you pause about selling your SUV and riding the Metro to work, check out the August/September edition of the ATU newsletter. One article writes about New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the most inflammatory of terms: “It is no coincidence that it is primarily poor black residents that live in the hardest hit areas; slavery and racist laws made sure that the most vulnerable areas of the city are poor black areas.” (Sounds like CNN!) The union also describes the employment of immigrant “guest workers” as “a new kind of slavery.”[...]

Who would you rather trust to get Northern Virginians to their jobs every day — Northern Virginians driving their own cars, or members of a left-wing union led by a communist president? Roads don’t go on strike. Transit unions do.

It gets worse. Back in March, we at TheBlaze cited a Washington Times story demonstrating that the Metro Transit System has been plagued by racial and sexual bias, as well as a ludicrous degree of nepotism:

Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.[...]

White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black. Until at least 1999, that office tracked complaints via a handwritten ledger on a series of taped-together sheets of paper, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The system “made determining statistics impossible,” said a civil rights employee from the time.[...]

For example, Ms. Townsend said, by 2004, many trains were operating without radios in defiance of federal rules. Other drivers confirmed that was common knowledge. So she authored a study and included a recommendation that Metro start substituting cellphones.

This is the communism Mr. Golash apparently wants. The question is: Will he find an audience for it?