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Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
By Staughton Lynd
To Begin With
The greatest honor I have ever received is to be asked to speak to you
on the occasion of the IWW's 100th birthday.
But I am not standing here alone. Beside me are departed friends. John
Sargent was the first president of Local 1010, United Steelworkers of
America, the 18,000-member local union at Inland Steel just east of
Chicago. John said that he and his fellow workers achieved far more
through direct action before they had a collective bargaining agreement
than they did after they had a contract. You can read his words in the
book Rank and File . Ed Mann and John Barbero, after years as rank and
filers, became president and vice president of Local 1462, United
Steelworkers of America, at Youngstown Sheet & Tube in Youngstown, and
toward the end of his life Ed joined the IWW. Ed and John were
ex-Marines who opposed both the Korean and Vietnam wars; they fought
racism both in the mill and in the city of Youngstown, where in the
1950s swimming pools were still segregated; they believed, as do I, that
there will be no answer to the problem of plant shutdowns until working
people take the means of production into their own hands; and in January
1980, in response to U.S. Steel's decision to close all its Youngstown
facilities, Ed led us down the hill from the local union hall to the
U.S. Steel administration building, where the forces of good broke down
the door and for one glorious afternoon occupied the company
headquarters. Ed's daughter changed her baby's diapers on the pool table
in the executive game room. Stan Weir and Marty Glaberman, very much
alone, moved our thinking forward about informal work groups as the
heart of working-class self-organization, about unions with leaders who
stay on the shop floor, about alternatives to the hierarchical vanguard
party, about overcoming racism and about international solidarity.
These men were in their own generation successors to the Haymarket
martyrs and Joe Hill. They represented the inheritance that you and I
seek to carry on.
*How I First Learned About the IWW*
It all began for me when I was about fourteen years old.
Some of you may know the name of Seymour Martin Lipset. He became a
rather conservative political sociologist. In the early 1940s, however,
he was a graduate student of my father's and a socialist, who wrote his
dissertation on the Canadian Commonwealth Federation.
Marty Lipset decided that my political education would not be complete
until I had visited the New York City headquarters of the Socialist
Party. The office was on the East Side and so we caught the shuttle at
Times Square. I have no memory of the Socialist Party headquarters but a
story Marty told me on the shuttle changed my life.
It seems that one day during the Spanish Civil War there was a long line
of persons waiting for lunch. Far back in the line was a well known
anarchist. A colleague importuned him: "Comrade, come to the front of
the line and get your lunch. Your time is too valuable to be wasted this
way. Your work is too important for you to stand at the back of the
line. Think of the Revolution!" Moving not one inch, the anarchist
leader replied: "This is the Revolution."
I think I asked myself, Is there any one in the United States who thinks
that way? A few years later, in my parents' living room, I picked up C.
Wright Mills' book about the leaders of the new Congress of Industrial
Organizations, The New Men of Power . Mills argued that these men were
bureaucrats at the head of hierarchical organizations. And at the very
beginning of the book, in contrast to all that was to follow, Mills
quoted a description of the Wobblies who went to Everett, Washington on
a vessel named the Verona in November 1916 to take part in a free
speech fight. As the boat approached the dock in Everett, "Sheriff McRae
called out to them: Who is your leader? Immediate and unmistakable was
the answer from every I.W.W.: 'We are all leaders'."
So, I thought to myself, perhaps the Wobblies were the equivalent in the
United States of the Spanish anarchists. But here a difficulty held me
up for twenty years. If, as the Wobblies seemed to say, the answer to
the problems of the old AF of L was industrial unionism, why was it that
the new industrial unions of the CIO acted so much like the craft unions
of the old AF of L?
*Industrial Unionism and the Right to Strike *
The Preamble to the IWW Constitution, as of course you know, stated and
still states:
The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of
workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same
industry . . . .
Clearly these words, when they were written, referred to a workplace at
the turn of the last century where each group of craftspersons belonged
to a different union. Each such union had its own collective bargaining
agreement, complete with a termination date different from that of every
other union at the work site. The Wobblies called this typical
arrangement "the American Separation of Labor."
The Preamble suggested a solution:
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working
class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all
its workers in any one industry, or all industries if necessary,
cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department
thereof, thus making an injury to one the injury of all.
The answer, in short, appeared to be the reorganization of labor in
industrial rather than craft unions.
It seemed to Wobblies and like-minded rank-and-file workers that if only
labor were to organize industrially, the "separation of labor" -- as the
IWW characterized the old AF of L -- could be overcome. All kinds of
workers in a given workplace would belong to the same union and could
take direct action together, as they chose. Hence in the early 1930s
Wobblies and former Wobblies threw themselves into the organization of
local industrial unions.
A cruel disappointment awaited them. When John L. Lewis, Philip Murray,
and other men of power in the new CIO negotiated the first contracts for
auto workers and steelworkers, these contracts, even if only a few pages
long, typically contained a no-strike clause. *All* workers in a given
workplace were now prohibited from striking as particular crafts had
been before. This remains the situation today.
Nothing in labor law required a no-strike clause. Indeed, the drafters
of the original National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) went out of
their way to ensure that the law would not be used to curtail the right
to strike. Not only does federal labor law affirm the right "to engage
in . . . concerted activities for the purpose of . . . mutual aid or
protection"; even as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, Section
502 of what is now called the Labor Management Relations Act declares:
Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require an individual
employee to render labor or service without his consent, nor shall
anything in this Act be construed to make the quitting of his labor
by an individual employee an illegal act; nor shall any court issue
any process to compel the performance by an individual employee of
such labor or service, without his consent; nor shall the quitting
of work by an employee or employees in good faith because of
abnormally dangerous conditions for work at the place of employment
of such employee or employees be deemed a strike under this chapter[;]
and for good measure, the drafters added in Section 13 of the NLRA, now
section 163 of the LMRA: "Nothing in this Act, except as specifically
provided for herein, shall be construed so as either to interfere with
or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike . . . ."
In the face of this obvious concern on the part of the legislative
drafters to protect the right to strike, the leaders of the emergent CIO
gave that right away. To be sure, the courts helped, holding before
World War II that workers who strike over economic issues can be
replaced, and holding after World War II that a contract which provides
for arbitration of grievances implicitly forbids strikes. But the courts
are not responsible for the no-strike clause in the typical CIO
contract. Trade union leaders are responsible.
Charles Morris' new book, The Blue Eagle at Work , argues that the
original intent of federal labor law was that employers should be
legally required to bargain, not only with unions that win NLRB
elections, but also with so-called "minority" or "members-only" unions:
unions that do not yet have majority support in a particular bargaining
unit. We can all agree with Professor Morris that the best way to build
a union is not by circulating authorization cards, but by winning small
victories on the shop floor and engaging the company "in interim
negotiations regarding workplace problems as they arise." But Morris'
ultimate objective, like that of most labor historians and almost all
union organizers, is still a union that negotiates a legally-enforcible
collective bargaining agreement, including a management prerogatives
clause that lets the boss close the plant and a no-strike clause that
prevents the workers from doing anything about it In my view, and I
believe in yours, nothing essential will change -- not if Sweeney is
replaced by Stern or Wilhelm, not if the SEIU breaks away from the
AFL-CIO, not if the percentage of dues money devoted to organizing is
multiplied many times -- so long as working people are contractually
prohibited from taking direct action whenever and however they may choose.
*Glaberman, Sargent, Mann, Barbero and Weir*
All this began to become clear to me only in the late 1960s, when a
friend put in my hands a little booklet by Marty Glaberman entitled
"Punching Out." Therein Marty argues that in a workplace where there is
a union and a collective bargaining contract, and the contract (as it
almost always does) contains a no-strike clause, the shop steward
becomes a cop for the boss. The worker is forbidden to help his buddy in
time of need. An injury to one is no longer an injury to all.
As I say these words of Marty Glaberman's, almost forty years later, in
my imagination he and the other departed comrades form up around me. We
cannot see them but we can hear their words. John Sargent: "Without a
contract we secured for ourselves agreement on working conditions and
wages that we do not have today. . . . [A]s a result of the enthusiasm
of the people in the mill you had a series of strikes, wildcats,
shut-downs, slow-downs, anything working people could think of to secure
for themselves what they decided they had to have." Ed Mann: "I think
we've got too much contract. You hate to be the guy who talks about the
good old days, but I think the IWW had a darn good idea when they said:
'Well, we'll settle these things as they arise'." Stan Weir: "[T]he new
CIO leaders fought all attempts to build new industrial unions on a
horizontal rather than the old vertical model. . . . There can be unions
run by regular working people on the job. There have to be."
*Rumbles In Olympus*
Here we should pause to take note of recent rumbles -- in both senses of
the word -- on Mount Olympus. What is about to happen in the mainstream
organized labor movement, and what do we think about it?
This is a challenging question. Our energies are consumed by very small,
very local organizing projects. It is natural to look sidewise at the
organized labor movement, with its membership in the hundreds of
thousands, its impressive national headquarters buildings, its
apparently endless income from the dues check-off, its perpetual
projects for turning the corner in organizing this year or next year,
and to wonder, Are we wasting our time?
Moreover, there is not and should not be an impenetrable wall between
what we try to do and traditional trade unionism at the local level. My
rule of thumb is that national unions and national union reform
movements almost always do more harm than good, but that local unions
are a different story. Workers need local unions. They will go on
creating them whatever you and I may think, and for good reason. The
critical decision for workers elected to local union office is whether
they will use that position merely as a stepping stone to regional and
national election campaigns, striving to rise vertically within the
hierarchy of a particular union, or whether they will reach out
horizontally to other workers and local union officers in other
workplaces and other unions, so as to form class wide entities --
parallel central labor bodies, or sometimes, even official central labor
bodies -- within particular localities.
Such bodies have special historical importance. The "soviets" in the
Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were improvised central labor
bodies. Both the Knights of Labor and the IWW created such entities,
especially during the first period of organizing in a given community
when no single union was yet self-sufficient. My wife and I encountered
a body of exactly this kind in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, and the
Workers' Solidarity Club of Youngstown was an effort in the same
direction. The "workers' centers" that seem to spring up naturally in
communities of immigrant workers are another variant. What all these
efforts have in common is that workers from different places of work sit
in the same circle, and in the most natural way imaginable tend to
transcend the parochialism of any particular union and to form a class
point of view.
Because many Wobblies will in this way become "dual carders," and often
vigorously take part in the affairs of local unions, the line between
our work and the activity of traditional, centralized, national trade
unions needs to be drawn all the more clearly. From my point of view, it
is a case of Robert Frost's two roads diverging within a wood: on the
one hand, to mix metaphors, toward endless rearranging of the deck
chairs on a sinking Titanic ; on the other hand, toward the beginnings
of another world.
As you know I am an historian. And what drives me almost to tears is the
spectacle of generation after generation of radicals seeking to change
the world by cozying up to popular union leaders. Communists did it in
the 1930s, as Len DeCaux became the CIO's public relations man and Lee
Pressman its general counsel; and Earl Browder, in an incident related
by historian Nelson Lichtenstein, ordered Party members helping to lead
the occupation of a General Motors plant near Detroit to give up their
agitation lest they offend the CIO leadership. Trotskyists and
ex-Trotskyists in the second half of the last century repeated this
mistaken strategy of the Communist Party in the 1930s with less excuse,
providing intellectual services for the campaigns of Walter Reuther,
Arnold Miller, Ed Sadlowski, and Ron Carey. And Left intellectuals
almost without exception hailed the elevation of John Sweeney to the
presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995. Professors formed an organization of
sycophantic academics, and encouraged their students to become
organizers under the direction of national union staffers. In a parody
of Mississippi "freedom summer," "union summers" used the energy of
young people but denied them any voice in decisions.
In all these variations on a theme, students and intellectuals sought to
make themselves useful to the labor movement by way of a relationship to
national unions, rather than by seeking a helpful relationship with
rank-and-file workers and members of local unions. In contrast, students
at Harvard and elsewhere organized their own sit-ins to assist low-wage
workers at the schools where they studied, and then it was John Sweeney
who showed up to offer support to efforts that, to the best of my
knowledge, young people themselves controlled. I want to say a few more
words about two exemplars of the paradigm I criticize: almost a century
ago, John L. Lewis; and today, the not so dynamic duo, John Sweeney and
Andrew Stern. Lewis is an historical conundrum. In the 1920s and early
1930s, he established dictatorial control over the United Mine Workers
union and smashed individuals who sought to challenge him from below,
like John Brophy and Powers Hapgood, and dissenting organizations like
the Progressive Miners here in Illinois.
However, to read his biographers from Saul Alinsky to Melvyn Dubofsky,
like Paul on the road to Damascus the miners' leader experienced
conversion in 1932-1933. He seized on section 7(a) of the National
Industrial Recovery Act and sent his organizers throughout the coal
fields with the message, "The President wants you to join the union."
Then, confronting the standpat leadership of the AF of L, Lewis and
other visionary leaders like Sidney Hillman led their members out of the
AF of L to form, first the Committee for Industrial Organization, and
then, after definitively seceding, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations. James Pope of Rutgers University Law School has been into
the sources and tells a different story. It was not Lewis, but
rank-and-file miners in western Pennsylvania, who before the passage of
the NIRA in spring 1933 began to form new local unions of the UMW. Lewis
and his staff opposed them. Moreover, when in the summer and fall of
1933 the miners went on strike for union recognition, Lewis and his
colleague Philip Murray repeatedly sought to settle strikes over the
head of the workers on the picket lines although the goal of these
massive direct actions had not been achieved.
Yes, Lewis wanted more members, just as the leaders of the five
rebelling unions today wish to increase union "density." But what
characterizes the national union leaders of the past and of the present
is an absolute unwillingness to let rank-and-file workers decide for
themselves when to undertake the sacrifice that direct action requires.
Consider John Sweeney. Close observers should have known in the fall of
1995 that Sweeney was hardly the democrat some supposed him to be.
Andrea Carney, who is with us today, was at the time a hospital worker
and member of Local 399, SEIU in Los Angeles. She tells in The New Rank
and File how the Central American custodians whom the SEIU celebrated
in its "Justice for Janitors" campaign, joined Local 399 and then
decided that they would like to have a voice in running it. They
connected with Anglo workers like Ms. Carney to form a Multiracial
Alliance that contested all offices on the local union executive board.
In June 1995 they voted the entire board out of office. In September
1995, as one of his last acts before moving on to the AFL-CIO, Brother
Sweeney removed all the newly-elected officers and put the local in
trusteeship.
This action did not deter the draftsmen of the open letter to Sweeney I
mentioned earlier. Appearing at the end of 1995 in publications like In
These Times and the New York Review of Books , the letter stated that
Sweeney's elevation was "the most heartening development in our nation's
political life since the heyday of the civil rights movement." The
letter continued:
[T]e wave of hope that and energy that has begun to surge through
the AFL-CIO offers a way out of our stalemate and defeatism. The
commitment demonstrated by newly elected president John J. Sweeney
and his energetic associates promises to once again make the house
of labor a social movement around which we can rally.
The letter concluded: "We extend our support and cooperation to this new
leadership and pledge our solidarity with those in the AFL-CIO dedicated
to the cause of union democracy and the remobilization of a dynamic new
labor movement." Signers included Stanley Aronowitz, Derrick Bell,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Foner, Todd Gitlin, David Montgomery, and
Cornel West.
Closely following Sweeney's accession to the AFL-CIO presidency were his
betrayals of strikes by Staley workers in Decatur, Illinois, and
newspaper workers in Detroit. In Decatur, workers organized a
spectacular "in plant" campaign of working to rule, and after Staley
locked them out, there were the makings of a parallel central labor body
and a local general strike including automobile and rubber workers.
Striker and hunger striker Dan Lane spoke to the convention that elected
Sweeney, and Sweeney personally promised Lane support if he would give
up his hunger strike. But Sweeney did nothing to further the campaign to
cause major consumers of Staley product to boycott the company. Meantime
the Staley local had been persuaded to affiliate with the national
Paperworkers' union, which proceeded to organize acceptance of a
concessionary contract.
In Detroit - as Larry who is here could describe in more detail -
strikers begged the new AFL-CIO leadership to convene a national
solidarity rally in their support. Sweeney said No. On the occasion of
Clinton's second inauguration in January 1997, leaders of the striking
unions -- including Ron Carey -- decided to call off the strike without
consulting the men and women who had been walking the picket lines for a
year and a half. Only then did the Sweeney leadership call on workers
from all over the country to join in a, now meaningless, gathering in
Detroit.
What should the several dozen signers of the open letter to Sweeney have
learned from these events? SEIU president Andrew Stern apparently
believes that the lesson is that the union movement should be more
centralized. What kind of labor movement would there be if he had his
way? Local 399 had a membership of 25,000 spread all over metropolitan
Los Angeles. The SEIU local where I live includes the states of Ohio,
Kentucky, and West Virginia. This is topdown unionism run amok. The
lesson for us is that, however humbly, in first steps however small, we
need to be building a movement that is qualitatively different.
*The Zapatistas and the Bolivians: To Lead by Obeying*
And so of course we come in the end to the question, Yes, but how do we
do that? Another world may be possible, but how do we get there? The
Preamble says: "By organizing industrially we are forming the structure
of the new society within the shell of the old." But if capitalist
factories and mainstream trade unions are not prototypes of the new
society, where is it being built? What can we do so that others and we
ourselves do not just think and say that "another world is possible,"
but actually begin to experience it, to live it, to taste it, here and
now, within the shell of the old?
In recent years I have glimpsed for the first time a possible answer:
what Quakers call "way opening." It begins with the Zapatistas, and has
been further developed by the folks in the streets of Bolivia. Suppose
the creation of a new society by the bourgeoisie is expressed in the
equation, Rising Class plus New Institutions Within The Shell Of The Old
= State Power. All these years I have been struggling with how workers
could create new institutions within the shell of capitalism. What the
Zapatistas have suggested, echoing an old Wobbly theme, is that the
equation does not need to include the term "State Power." Perhaps we can
change capitalism fundamentally without taking state power. Perhaps we
can change capitalism from below.
All of us sense that something qualitatively different happened in
Chiapas on January 1, 1994, something organically connected to the
anti-globalization protests that began five years later. What exactly
was that something? My wife Alice and I were in San Cristóbal a few
years ago and had the opportunity to talk to a woman named Teresa Ortiz.
She had lived in the area a long time and since then has published a
book of oral histories of Chiapan women.
Ms. Ortiz told us that there were three sources of Zapatismo. The first
was the craving for land, the heritage of Emiliano Zapata and the
revolution that he led at the time of World War I. This longing for
economic independence expressed itself in the formation of communal
landholdings, or ejidos , and the massive migration of impoverished
campesinos into the Lacandón jungle.
A second source of Zapatismo, we were told, was liberation theology.
Bishop Samuel Ruiz was the key figure. He sponsored what came to be
called tomar conciencia . It means "taking conscience," just as we
speak of "taking thought." The process of taking conscience involved the
creation of complex combinations of Mayan and Christian religiosity, as
in the church Alice and I visited where there was no altar, where a
thick bed of pine needles was strewn on the floor and little family
groups sat in little circles with lighted candles, and where there was a
saint to whom one could turn if the other saints did not do what they
were asked. Taking conscience also resulted in countless grassroots
functionaries with titles like "predeacon," "deacon," "catechist," or
"delegate of the Word": the shop stewards of the people's Church who
have been indispensable everywhere in Latin America.
The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to
Teresa Ortiz, was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo : "to lead
by obeying." She explained what it meant at the village level. Imagine
all of us here as a village. We feel the need for, to use her examples,
a teacher and a storekeeper. But these two persons can be freed for
those communal tasks only if we, as a community, undertake to cultivate
their milpas , their corn fields. In the most literal sense their
ability to take leadership roles depends on our willingness to provide
their livelihoods.
When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional
gatherings, they are likely to be instructed delegates. Thus, during the
initial negotiations in 1994, the Zapatista delegates insisted that the
process be suspended for several weeks while they took what had been
tentatively agreed to back to the villages, who rejected it. The heart
of the process remains the gathered villagers, the local asemblea .
Only upon reading a good deal of the Zapatista literature did an
additional level of meaning become clear to me.
At the time of the initial uprising, the Zapatistas seem to have
entertained a traditional Marxist strategy of seizing national power by
military means. The "First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle," issued
on January 2, 1994, gave the Zapatista military forces the order:
"Advance to the capital of the country, overcoming the federal army . .
. ."1
But, in the words of Harvard historian John Womack: "In military terms
the EZLN offensive was a wonderful success on the first day, a pitiful
calamity on the second."2 Within a very short time, three things
apparently happened: 1) the public opinion of Mexican civil society came
down on the side of the Indians of Chiapas and demanded negotiation; 2)
President Salinas declared a ceasefire, and sent an emissary to
negotiate in the cathedral of San Cristóbal; 3) Subcomandante Marcos
carried out a clandestine coup within the failed revolution, agreed to
negotiations, and began to promulgate a dramatically new strategy.3
Beginning early in 1994, Marcos says explicitly, over and over and over
again: We don't see ourselves as a vanguard and we don't want to take
state power. Thus, at the first massive encuentro , the National
Democratic Convention in the Lacandón jungle in August 1994, Marcos said
that the Zapatistas had made "a decision not to impose our point of
view"; that they rejected "the doubtful honor of being the historical
vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us"; and finally:
Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want,
nor are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy,
the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all
the routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.4
Marcos then took the Mexican flag and gave it to the delegates, in
effect telling them: "It's your flag. Use it to make a democratic
Mexico. We Zapatistas hope we have created some space within which you
can act." 5
What? A Left group that doesn't want state power? There must be some
mistake. But no, he means it. And because it is a perspective so
different from that traditional in Marxism, because it represents a
fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions,
I want to quote several more examples.6
In the "Fourth Declaration from the Lacandón Jungle," on January 1,
1996, it is stated that the Zapatista Front of National Liberation will
be a "political force that does not aspire to take power[,] . . . that
can organize citizens' demands and proposals so that he who commands,
commands in obedience to the popular will[,] . . . that does not
struggle to take political power but for the democracy where those who
command, command by obeying."
In September 1996, in an address to Mexican civil society, Marcos says
that in responding to the earthquake of 1985 Mexican civil society
proved to itself
that you can participate without aspiring to public office, that you
can organize politically without being in a political party, that
you can keep an eye on the government and pressure it to "lead by
obeying," *that you can have an effect and remain yourself . . . .*7
Likewise in August 1997, in "Discussion Documents for the Founding
Congress of the Zapatista Front of National Liberation," the Zapatistas
declare that they represent "a new form of doing politics, without
aspiring to take power and without vanguardist positions." We "will not
struggle to take power," they continue. The Zapatista Front of National
Liberation "does not aspire to take power." Rather, "we are a political
force that does not seek to take power, that does not pretend to be the
vanguard of a specific class, or of society as a whole."8
Especially memorable is a communication from the Zapatista National
Liberation Army (EZLN) dated October 2, 1998 and addressed to "the
Generation of Dignity of 1968," that is, to former students who had
survived the massacre in Mexico City prior to the 1968 Olympics. Here
Marcos speaks of "the politics of below," of the "Mexico of those who
weren't then, are not now, and will never be leaders." This, he says, is the
Mexico of those who don't build ladders to climb above others, but
who look beside them to find another and make him or her their
compañero or compañera , brother, sister, mate, buddy, friend,
colleague, or whatever word is used to describe that long,
treacherous, collective path that is the struggle of: everything for
everyone.9
Finally, at the zocalo in March 2001, after this Coxey's Army of the
poor had marched from Chiapas to Mexico City, Marcos once more declared:
"We are not those who aspire to take power and then impose the way and
the word. We will not be."10
For the last four years the Zapatistas and Marcos have been quiet,
presumably building the new society day by day in those villages of
Chiapas where they have majority support. If one wishes further insight
as to how the politics of below might unfold, the place to look may be
Bolivia. It's too soon to say a great deal. The most substantial
analysis I have encountered describes the movement in the language of
"leading by obeying":
without seizing power directly, popular movements . . . suddenly
exercised substantial, ongoing control from below of state
authorities . . . .
and:
the . . . insurrectionists did not attempt to seize the state
administration, and instead set up alternative institutions of
self-government in city streets and neighborhoods . . . and in the
insurgent highlands . . . . Protesters, who took over the downtown
center, intentionally refrained from marching on the national
palace. This was to avoid bloodshed, but also a recognition that
substantial power was already in their hands. International
Solidarity.11
There remains, finally, the most difficult problem of all. "An injury to
one is an injury to all" means that we must act in solidarity with
working people everywhere, so that, in the words of the Preamble, "the
workers of the world organize as a class."
This means that we cannot join with steel industry executives in seeking
to keep foreign steel out of the country: we need a solution to
worldwide over-capacity that protects steelworkers everywhere. We
cannot, like the so-called reform candidate for president of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters a few years ago, advocate even
more effort to keep Mexican truck drivers from crossing the Rio Grande.
We should emulate the Teamsters local in Chicago where a resolution
against the Iraq war passed overwhelmingly after Vietnam vets took the
mike to share their experience, and the local went on to host the
founding national meeting of Labor Against The War.
I believe the IWW has a special contribution to make. Wobblies were
alone or almost alone among labor organizations a hundred years ago to
welcome as members African Americans, unskilled foreign-born workers,
and women. Joe Hill not only was born in Sweden and apparently took part
in the Mexican Revolution, but, according to Franklin Rosemont, may have
had a special fondness for Chinese cooking. This culture of
internationalism can sustain and inspire us as we seek concrete ways to
express it in the 21st century. I have concluded that no imaginable
labor movement or people's movement in this country will ever be
sufficiently strong that it, alone, can confront and transform United
States capitalism and imperialism.
I am not the only person who has reached this conclusion, but most who
do so then say to themselves, I believe, "OK, then I need to cease
pretending to be a revolutionary and support reform instead."
I suggest that what we need is an alternative revolutionary strategy.
That strategy, it seems to me, can only be an alliance between whatever
movement can be brought into being in the United States and the vast,
tumultuous resistance of the developing world.
Note that I say "alliance," as between students and workers, or any
other equal partners. I am not talking about kneejerk, uncritical
support for the most recent Third World autocrat to capture our
imaginations.
We in Youngstown have taken some very small first steps in this
direction that I would like to share. In the late 1980s skilled workers
from Youngstown, Aliquippa, and Pittsburgh made a trip to Nicaragua. Ned
Mann, Ed Mann's son, is a sheet metal worker. He helped steelworkers at
Nicaragua's only steel mill, at Tipitapa north of Managua, to build a
vent in the roof over a particularly smoky furnace. Meantime the late
Bob Schindler, a lineman for Ohio Edison, worked with a crew of
Nicaraguans doing similar work. He spoke no Spanish, they spoke no
English. They got on fine. Bob was horrified at the tools available to
his colleagues and, when he got back to the States, collected a good
deal of Ohio Edison's inventory and sent it South. The next year, he
went back to Nicaragua, and travelled to the northern village where
Benjamin Linder was killed while trying to develop a small
hydro-electric project. Bob did what he could to complete Linder's dream.
About a dozen of us from Youngstown have also gone to a labor school
south of Mexico City related to the Frente Autentico del Trabajo, the
network of unions independent of the Mexican government.
These are tiny first steps, I know. But they are in the right direction.
Why not take learning Spanish more seriously and, whenever we can,
encourage fellow workers to join us in spending time with our Latin
American counterparts?
And on down that same road, why not, some day, joint strike demands from
workers for General Motors in Puebla, Mexico; in Detroit; and in St.
Catherine's, Ontario?
Instead of the TDU candidate for president of the Teamsters criticizing
Jimmy Hoffa for doing too little to keep Mexican truck drivers out of
the United States, why not a conference of truck drivers north and south
of the Rio Grande to draw up a single set of demands?
Why not, instead of the United Steelworkers joining with US steel
companies to lobby for increased quotas on steel imports, a task force
of steelworkers from all countries to draw up a common program about how
to deal with capitalist over-production, how to make sure that each
major developing country controls its own steelmaking capacity, and how
to protect the livelihoods of all steelworkers, wherever they may live?
Perhaps I can end, as I began, with a story. About a dozen years ago my
wife and I were in the Golan Heights, a part of Syria occupied by Israel
in 1967. There are a few Arab villages left in the Golan Heights, and at
one of them our group was invited to a barbecue in an apple orchard.
There was a very formidable white lightning, called arak. It developed
that each group was called on to sing for the other. I was nominated for
our group. I decided to sing "Joe Hill" but I felt that, before doing
so, I needed to make it clear that Joe Hill was not a typical parochial
American. As I laboriously began to do so, our host, who had had more to
drink than I, held up his hand. "You don't have to explain. We
understand. Joe Hill was a Spartacist. Joe Hill was in Chile and in
Mexico. But today," he finished, "Joe Hill is a Palestinian."
Joe Hill is a Palestinian. He is also an Israeli refusenik. He is
imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, where his Koran along with the
rest of his belongings is subject to constant shakedowns and disrespect.
He works for Walmart and also in South African diamond mines. He took
part in the worldwide dock strike a few years ago and sees in that kind
of international solidarity the hope of the future. Recently he has
spent a lot of time in occupied factories in Argentina, where he
shuttles back and forth between the workers in the plants and the
neighborhoods that support them. In New York City, Joe Hill has taken
note of the fact that a business like a grocery store (in working-class
neighborhoods) or restaurants (in midtown Manhattan) are vulnerable to
consumer boycotts, and if the pickets present themselves as a community
group there is no violation of labor law. In Pennsylvania, he has the
cell next to Mumia Abu Jamal at S.C.I. Greene in Waynesburg. In Ohio, he
hangs out with the "Lucasville Five": the five men framed and condemned
to death because they were leaders in a 1993 prison uprising. He was in
Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa, and Cancun, and will be at the next
demonstration against globalization wherever it takes place. In Bolivia
he wears a black hat and is in the streets, protesting the privatization
of water and natural gas, calling for the nationalization of these
resources, and for government from below by a people's assembly. As the
song says, "Where workingmen are out on strike, it's there you'll find
Joe Hill."
Let's do our best to be there beside him.
*Footnotes are for purposes of fact checking and need not necessarily be
included in a published article. Most of the documents quoted appear in
more than one source. *
1 Our word is our weapon: selected writings [of] subcomandante Marcos
, ed. Juane Ponce de León (Seven Stories Press: New York, 2001), p. 14.
2 John Womack, Jr., Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New
York: The New Press, 1999), p. 43.
3 Id . , p. 44.
4 Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante
Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation , trans. by Frank
Bardacke and others (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 248.
5 Id . , pp. 249-51.
6 Rebellion in Chiapas , pp. 302-02.
7 "Civil Society That So Perturbs," Sept. 19, 1996, Our word is our
weapon , p. 121 (emphasis added).
8 Rebellion in Chiapas , pp. 333, 335-36.
9 Our word is our weapon , pp. 144-45.
10 Id . , p. 159.
11 Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, "Revolutionary Horizons:
Indigenous and National-Popular Struggles in Bolivia", New Left Review
(forthcoming), pp. 7, 35.
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