Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archive for an online copy of his important Lessons of the Minneapolis Strikes.
Book Review
Teamster Rebellion, Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) the American working class has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses (and jobs not coming back), paying for bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay we pay), mountains of consumer debt, and student loan debt as a lure for the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. In short, it is not secret that the working class has faced, is facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of its material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those very 1930s and struggle, struggle as a class against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. And that is where the late labor leader (and, for a time, revolutionary socialist) Farrell Dobb’s little book on his (and his comrades) experiences in organizing the truckers of Minneapolis, Teamster’s Rebellion, can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in Dobbs’ 1934 Minneapolis but after re-reading this little organizing gem there was something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.
I write this little review with a special purpose, a purpose driven by the rise of the Occupy movement, in mind. Although the Occupy movement is right now as I write going through some growing pains there are some disturbing trends that I have witnessed since its inception. The main trend for my purposes here includes a rather standoffish attitude toward the working-class, especially the organized working-class, as central to the struggle for a more equitable society rather than as just another numbered victim of American imperialism’s relentless assault on, well, if not the ninety-nine percent then some large percentage of the population. And that is where the lessons of the 1934 Teamster’s strikes comes in as a helpful antidote to that notion. As well as very helpful guide to what Occupy already does fairly well-organize auxiliary aspects of the class struggle like kitchens, libraries, speakers’ bureaus and the like.
A few highlights will illustrate my point. Minneapolis was a notorious anti-labor commercial town (flour, copper, farm goods, etc.) for generations leading up to the 1930s. It had a well-organized, ruthless, and, when necessary, armed business-centered Citizen’s Alliance that mostly kept out the unions for generations. Therefore a central demand, yes a front and center in your face demand, of the working-class there was for independent union recognition by the bosses (they recognized only their own “company” unions, or better, dealt with each individual worker separately). That was the first order of business for those militants, including the leading revolutionary militants (mainly Trotskyists in this situation but others as well). Along with that desire was the idea that those allies (inside workers who loaded the trucks, etc.) of the truckers should also be organized in one industry-wide union rather than the old craft union idea of separate unions for each category of worker (in short, to break the old “divide and conquer” strategy of the bosses and comfort zone of the labor skates).
Now this scenario may not immediately strike any current Occupy sympathizer as particularly germane for today’s struggles but that view would be short-sighted. For what Minneapolis (and the other main class battles of the 1930s in places like San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit) demonstrates is the social power of the working class to hit the economic royalists (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” And that is why it is profoundly mistaken to assume that the working class is only along for the ride like everybody else in Occupy. The various recent West Coast port actions is a somewhat skewed way (the longshoremen refused to cross the community picket lines rather than directly shut the ports themselves but the effect was the same-ports shutdown for a period) demonstrate that same proposition.
Beyond that central premise that is bed-rock to understand this book is filled with all kinds of information that is also important to know for any major show-down struggle with the bosses. Such class-war actions have to be carefully planned using every resource available (not just some happenstance thing put together at a whim, or less). So reading about the soup kitchens, the hospital, the make-shift garages (to transport roving pickets, a necessity in the many-sited trucking industry), provisions for entertainment, and a labor daily newspaper to counteract the bourgeois biases of the press sounded awfully familiar to me, and should to you. Some parts Occupy has got right, got right right from the start.
What, disturbingly, has not been right or has been some what blurred today is a clear understanding of the relationship between the bosses and their state (the cops, National Guard, mayors, governors, courts, prisons, etc.) and we the risen people. The militants (beyond the hard “reds”) in Minneapolis probably had some illusions in those institutions starting out, although probably less than those today, a few generations removed from those hard class battles. They soon “learned” about the cops in their three-stage (three separate strike actions from February to August 1934) fight. Learned about cops mostly at the wrong end of a night-stick (or tear-gas grenade) in the famous “Battle of Deputies’ Run”. About the courts and their rough, very rough “justice.” About the militia and who it serves. About the lying bourgeois newspapers and their scare tactics. About who were, and were not, the so-called “friends of labor” from Roosevelt on down. And even about the treachery of the labor skates, particularly the head of the very Teamster Union they were trying to join, Daniel Tobin.
What they also learned though, and we can learn as well, is that through combining together in solidarity in large numbers, through being politically clear-headed, through keeping independent of the main political parties, and most of all having the determination to fight for what you want you can win sometimes in this wicked old world. Read this little book and see if you agree.
No comments:
Post a Comment