by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice (Communist Voice #36, Sept. 2005).
- A nostalgic call for militant tactics
- A stagnant bureaucracy
- Conciliating the bureaucrats leads to disaster
- (What the Trotskyist leadership of the 1934 Teamster strike capitulated to the bureaucrats and refused to tell the workers the truth about them)
- Fight the bureaucrats!
Some activists in Detroit's Million Worker March group are interested in rebuilding an activist labor movement. To this end some of them organized a study of the pamphlet How To Win Strikes: Lessons from the 1934 Minneapolis Truckers Strike written by Harry DeBoer in 1987. (http://www.marxist.com/how-to-win-strikes.htm) Their study session met in late January and lasted for a few hours. Six MWM members attended and discussed what orientation to take toward rebuilding the workers movement and how to carry out a successful strike. Much of the discussion focused on the history of the strike movement in Detroit, especially the newspaper strike of the mid-90s and the teachers strike of 1999. There were also some reflections on struggles of the 1930s such as the hunger march against Ford.
Reading about struggles of the past can be helpful in inspiring activists and giving them some ideas for methods to use today. But differences between situations also need to be kept in mind. ,,, For example, in the 30s the mass upsurge was preceded by patient organizing work in the factories carried out by communists for 10 or 15 years previously. The communists had built up circles of militants who trusted their leadership. Thus a core of activists existed who were ready to take advantage of the economic crisis, when it began, to launch large-scale organizing campaigns.
Many organizing drives of the 30s were hugely successful, and communist activists often played an important part in them. But then as now the union bureaucrats worked to keep mass actions of the workers within very limited bounds. ... and when they had a chance later on they purged the reds out of the unions. To prevent this, the red activists should have taken preventive measures and worked to differentiate their own trend from that of the bureaucrats. But the leaders of the '34 Teamsters strike failed to do this, and the result was eventual loss of their influence and the return of the union to total bureaucrat control. This is the history of the Minneapolis Teamsters obscured by DeBoer's pamphlet, which simply promotes the '34 strike as a great victory. ...
DeBoer himself was active in the '34 Minneapolis truckers strike. But his pamphlet wasn't written until more than 50 years later. Appalled by the decline in the workers movement, DeBoer was moved to write a pamphlet trying to sum up some experiences of the Minneapolis strike and make these lessons available to a new generation of worker activists.
Some of the lessons DeBoer gives are basic to working class tactics. ... The '34 truckers strike is rich in positive lessons for strike organizers, many of which are not mentioned by DeBoer. ,,,
These tactics show the imagination and initiative of the strike leaders as well as the rank-and-file workers during this strike. The same characteristics were present among the rank and file in the Detroit newspaper strike [of 1995-1997], where workers and local activists supporting them tried to maintain strike initiative by blocking trucks, fighting off police attacks, etc. But in that strike the local labor bureaucrats sabotaged the workers' initiative by capitulating to injunctions against mass picketing. The bureaucrats brought in national AFL-CIO leaders like Richard Trumka to harangue the strikers and tell them to rely on Democratic Party politicians like Bill Clinton to save the day. They launched a "corporate campaign" and tried to win the strike by convincing newspaper stockholders that the strike was bad for profits. (The capitalists agreed, but their solution then was to step up efforts to break the strike. ) ...
DeBoer goes into various details of strike organizing, but the main thing he counsels is militance. Be active, and don't hang back from confrontation. But wouldn't that lead to injunctions against the union and to arrests of picketers? No problem, DeBoer says; bail out the picketers and bring them back to the picket lines. And paper the walls with injunctions.
This preaching of militance sounds good. ... But DeBoer never bothers discussing the conditions needed for the success of these tactics or even the conditions under which they are desirable. He just preaches militancy, assuming that if workers wanted to, they could easily reproduce the movement of the 30s. And he just brushes over the role of the union bureaucrats of today as he covers over the reactionary role played by union bureaucrats in the 30s. ...
DeBoer says that unions became complacent in the 1950s-70s, and this allowed the capitalists to become more aggressive in driving down living standards. There's some truth to this. After the anti-red purges of the 1940s the reactionary bureaucrats were able to harden their positions in the unions. But this should not lead to thinking that the AFL and CIO unions, from top to bottom, were centers of militance in the 1930s-40s and before. Then as now the labor movement was marked by a struggle between trends, and the militant actions of the 30s were driven forward by this struggle. The union hacks of the present day have not simply "forgotten" what built the industrial unions in the 30s; their forebears were shocked by the militant actions then and tried to tone them down. But the difference is that then (in the 30s) there were also large, consciously militant trends supported by the mass of industrial workers, and the hacks had to accommodate themselves to these trends to some extent. Today the militant trends are small or nonexistent, due in large part to the bureaucrats' decades-long campaign against them. ...
DeBoer addresses this problem in a cursory way. To workers whose union leaders won't adopt militant tactics, he advises "vote them out." Sure, that's great when you can do it. But DeBoer's offhand remark is like shrugging off the problem of anti-labor laws by saying "Don't worry; if such laws are used, just vote the politicians out." DeBoer doesn't even mention that the top reformist bureaucrats often put militant locals under receivership, in which the workers have no right to elect their officers.
"Vote them out" is DeBoer's frivolous reply to the problem of today's stagnant union bureaucracy. But when speaking of the 30s DeBoer doesn't even mention the problem. He acts like the '34 strike was a glorious achievement of "the union", from top to bottom. But in fact Teamsters international president Daniel Tobin tried to sabotage the Minneapolis strike by launching a red scare campaign against the strike leaders. And after the strike, when the red Teamsters in Minneapolis were working to consolidate their victory and extend its gains to other sections of workers, Tobin and his fellow AFL leaders launched a gangster campaign to drive the Minneapolis reds out of the labor movement. Far from extolling the strike's victory, the bureaucrats worked to destroy the strike's ongoing influence.
There are important lessons in this history for militants of today, lessons every bit as important as DeBoer's advice about using militant tactics in strikes. But DeBoer hides these lessons, which is in line with the way the Minneapolis Teamsters leaders dealt with them in the 30s. The Trotskyist leadership of Local 574, the truckers' local in Minneapolis, capitulated to the bureaucrat leaders of the Teamsters international, relied on them and refused to tell the workers the truth about them. This helped lead eventually to militance being stamped out of the Teamsters union as Tobin purged the Trotskyists from the union in 1941. Having gone along with and supported the bureaucrats for years, the Trotskyists were in a weak position to oppose this purge. They had not made their differences with the bureaucrats into a mass issue, an issue of discussion among the mass of rank-and-file activists.
... despite the reds' organizing victories for AFL unions, the AFL bureaucrats were dead set on crushing their militance. Shortly after the July '34 strike victory Tobin issued an ultimatum to Local 574 demanding that it repudiate its semi-industrial-union type of organization and instead split itself into eight craft unions. He also demanded that the leaders of the victorious truckers strikes be expelled from the Teamsters local. When the local refused to submit, he expelled Local 574 from the Teamsters in early 1935. Tobin then set up a scab union, Local 500, in Minneapolis and tried to raid Local 574. Tobin's local minions visited the trucking capitalists who had signed contracts with Local 574 and tried to persuade them to break those contracts and instead sign new deals with Local 500. But very few of the capitalists agreed. Local 574 maintained the support of the rank-and-file truckers in Minneapolis, and the capitalists were reluctant to ignite another class war.
At this point, in 1936, Tobin got help from the AFL as a whole. ... When methods of persuasion did not work, hundreds of goon-squad thugs were brought in from Chicago to beat up Local 574 leaders and activists wherever they appeared. The reds stood up to the goon squads, and fighting raged all over Minneapolis for three weeks. But finally the local leaders agreed to a truce with Tobin and the AFL. ...
None of this history is mentioned by DeBoer, ....
This is where the Trotskyist leaders of Local 574 fell down. They were effective in carrying out militant tactics against the capitalists in the '34 strikes. They were helpful in extending the Minneapolis strike wave to the entire northern Midwest. They even stood up to the physical attacks against them organized by Green, and beat back Tobin's attempt to set up a rival Teamsters local. But they did not carry on thoroughgoing work against the bureaucrats. After accepting a condition of halfway receivership of their local, they maintained a truce with Tobin, generally refraining from public criticism of the Teamster leadership. They didn't carry out much agitation against the bureaucrats, and they were happy to seek posts among the bureaucrats. Their cozy relationship with Tobin lasted until at least 1939, when Tobin took the Trotskyists' most prominent organizer, Farrell Dobbs, onto his paid staff and made him the lead organizer for truckers throughout the Midwest. Dobbs later resigned to devote himself full-time to working for the Trotskyist party, and at that point Tobin felt secure enough to launch another attack on the leftists. In 1941 Tobin successfully purged the Trotskyists out of the Minneapolis Teamsters leadership.
Note that just opposing Tobin wouldn't necessarily have guaranteed victory for the reds. They might still have eventually lost their union positions and been subject to Smith Act trials. But having organized opposition to Tobin would have made it difficult for him to eliminate any independent organization that was built up. ...
Thus DeBoer's pamphlet neglects the problem of how to deal with the bureaucrats. His heroes, the Trotskyist leaders of Local 574, combined left-sounding declarations about general politics with capitulation to reformism in their immediate politics. They postured on national and international politics while largely remaining silent on the nature of Tobin and the Teamster union bureaucracy. Along with other militants, DeBoer was no doubt angered by the bureaucrats' anti-leftist purges, but he doesn't mention them in his pamphlet ...
To learn the lessons of the class battles of the 30s it's not enough to just be nostalgic about the militant battles of that period. We need to be critical of those like DeBoer who try to paper over the differences between trends in the labor movement, the militant rank-and-file trend and the reformist trend that dominates the present union leadership.
Full text at http://www.communistvoice.org/36cDeBoer.html.