What happened to this split in the labor bureaucracy?
by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice (CV #36, Sept. 2005).
The Million Worker March organization held a national conference in Detroit, May 14-15. Originally conceived as a founding conference for an ongoing organization, it was later changed to a "reportback" -- that is, to simply reporting on what MWM has been doing in different areas. MWM's national leaders opposed having any definite structure for MWM, and held that the organization should simply follow whatever they decided. And at the conference they gave time and effort to supporting the most reformist-minded activists, who were grouped around Workers World Party.
MWM originated last year from some discontented union leaders of ILWU (longshoremen) from Local #10 (San Francisco). They called for a demonstration in Washington, D.C. last October 19 to emphasize the interests of working people that were not being addressed by the politicians during last fall's election. Some MWM statements denounced the Democrats bitterly and in ways that would certainly not appear in AFL-CIO statements. But their idea was to spark action and garner support from the leaders of other major unions. Instead, the AFL-CIO top leaders refused to support the demo and in fact tried to quash it. This created a certain rift among the bureaucrats.
But the MWM leaders still placed their hopes in revitalizing the union bureaucracy. They wanted MWM to push it into action. We in CVO pointed out that "the MWM organizers posed the question of class independence, but dream of one day marching together with the traitorous AFL-CIO leadership." We pointed out that this split among the union bureaucrats was only partial and probably temporary, but we called for utilizing even small rifts, if they provided any opportunity to work with rank-and-file workers and activists attracted by the desire for class independence. We supported any positive step by MWM while continually pushing for a real stand of class independence, and we discussed the problems of orientation in MWM openly.
CVO comrades in Detroit have been active in MWM-Detroit and in the struggle over the Detroit financial crisis, which MWM-Detroit is also dealing with. In our work we have sought to encourage every tendency to struggle by the workers against the demands for wage cuts and concessions. We have exposed both the capitalists and the leaders of Detroit city government (both mayor and city council), who are Democratic Party politicians. And we have denounced the treachery of the union bureaucrats who are opposed to a serious struggle and instead look to concessions and deals with this or that politician. But this didn't meet with the approval of the majority of MWM-Detroit. They make left-sounding appeals, but they refuse to tell the workers what the bureaucrats are doing. They also favor this or that liberal politician and close their eyes to those politicians' plans to impose cutbacks on the workers. They have not seen MWM as a way to encourage the building of a new and independent movement among the local workers, but as a way to spark action from the reformist groups of the past. This orientation has sapped the strength of MWM-D, which has declined further since the conference in May. And the conference revealed that something similar has happened to the national MWM.
At the Detroit conference the politics predominated of trying to push the liberals and union bureaucrats into action. The present leadership of MWM is a loose coalition of the Local 10 ILWU leaders and WWP, which dominates a number of MWM's local branches. WWP even wanted to get the conference to endorse its plan for a National Conference to Reclaim Our Cities, where liberal politicians who have been demanding cutbacks from the workers, such as members of the Detroit city council, can present themselves as heroes of popular struggle.
Supporters of CVO in Detroit attended the conference and worked to promote independent working class politics. Comrades there, some of whom have been active in MWM-D since last fall, distributed a special issue of Detroit Workers' Voice devoted to analyzing the direction MWM is heading (reprinted in this issue of Communist Voice starting on page 12). The comrades set up a literature table surrounded by militant posters carried in recent demonstrations. They spoke in conference sessions and tried to get the conference to consider the real obstacles in the path of workers' struggle and the ways to overcome them. These points by our comrades spoke to some unease among some delegates as to the path being taken by MWM, but no other delegates openly supported them. However, WWP did have to back down on its plan to get the conference to endorse the National Conference to Reclaim Our Cities.
The Detroit conference showed that MWM has come to an impasse. But this is not the end to rifts among the labor bureaucracy. There are already some new rifts developing, the most dramatic being the recent split off from the AFL-CIO of the SEIU, the Teamsters, and other unions of the Change to Win coalition. It's not clear whether these unions will do anything that different from the AFL-CIO. But this split reflects a certain discontent that is developing among the base of the reformist-led unions. Activists need to look for and encourage any striving for struggle that appears in the unions without, however, having any illusion in the reformist bureaucracy that dominates both sides of the split. The pro-capitalist union bureaucrats aren't going to do the work of the class struggle for us. Even when they take part in a mass upsurge, they do so to keep it within limits.
Subheads:
- Opening speeches- -welcome to reformism
- The looming question: who to unite with?
- Controversy erupts
- General left politics and a debate over the Democrats?
- Saturday night speakout and Sunday morning summation
- Appendix: "Our Demands" from MWM