Teamsters show ‘with proper leadership, workers can overcome’
https://themilitant.com/2020/12/19/teamsters-show-with-proper-leadership-workers-can-overcome/
December 28, 2020
In May 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters rout cops, special deputies from
bosses’ Citizens Alliance that were sent to break their strike.
Class-conscious leaders organized workers defense to win.
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
In May 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters rout cops, special deputies from
bosses’ Citizens Alliance that were sent to break their strike.
Class-conscious leaders organized workers defense to win.
Teamster Bureaucracy, by Farrell Dobbs, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of
the Month for December. It is the last in a four-volume series on how a
class-struggle union was forged in Minneapolis and across the Midwest
trucking industry in the 1930s. Dobbs, a central leader of these
battles, was national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party from 1953
to 1972. The book also tells how Teamsters and SWP leaders were
railroaded to prison for helping lead labor opposition to the U.S.
rulers’ drive to enter World War II. The excerpt is from the Afterword.
Copyright © 2018 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY FARRELL DOBBS
The relevant elements of the class-struggle program needed by the trade
unions should be introduced realistically on a transitional basis. In
that way the unfolding labor radicalization can be guided from its
present stage toward higher forms of development along the following lines:
Proposals for immediate action should center on problems involving the
workers’ urgent material needs and the defense of their democratic
rights. It is also important that the fight around those issues be
attuned to the existing levels of consciousness in the union membership.
Then, as significant forces are set into motion through that approach,
several things take place. Rank-and-file militancy rises. Increasingly
sharp clashes with the bosses result, during which the workers begin to
shed class-collaborationist illusions and acquire class-struggle
concepts. Lessons thus learned during industrial conflicts can prepare
the union ranks for an advance toward action on a political plane. In
short, a foundation is laid from which to initiate transformation of the
trade unions themselves into instruments capable of developing
far-reaching revolutionary perspectives.
As the transitional process from where they are to where they should be
continues, the workers’ attention can be focused on broad questions
which go far beyond day-to-day issues on the job. They will learn in
that way to generalize their thinking in class terms, and the
development of a conscious anticapitalist outlook will follow.
If, during the course of their experiences in struggle, the labor
militants are helped to analyze the causes of the social and economic
ills facing them; if they are aided in perceiving the essence of an
outlived capitalism — they will learn that the existing problems are not
incidental and episodic at all, but the consequence of a deep structural
crisis of the system. They will then see why governmental control must
be taken away from the capitalists by labor and its allies.
Basic to such a rise in the workers’ class consciousness is
understanding that a fundamental change must take place in the role of
the trade unions, which constitute the existing form of mass
organization among the workers in this country. These broad instruments
of struggle must be turned away from reliance upon so-called friends
among the capitalist politicians. They must break off the self-defeating
collaboration with the bosses’ government, that has been imposed by
bureaucratic misleaders. The unions must be transformed into mechanisms
for independent and militant action by the workers all along the line.
Restrictions on the right to strike must be vigorously opposed and
freedom to exercise that right firmly asserted. Internal union democracy
must be established so that all questions can be decided on the basis of
majority rule. Then, and only then, will organized labor manage to bring
its full weight to bear in confrontations with the employers at the
industrial level.
Whenever conflicts of significant magnitude erupt within industry today,
the government intervenes on the employers’ side; and this interference
is bound to intensify as capitalist decay gets worse. From this it
follows that trade union action alone will prove less and less capable
of resolving the workers’ problems, even on a limited basis.
Objectively, industrial conflicts will assume more and more a political
character, and even the most powerfully organized workers will be faced
with an increasingly urgent need to act on the new and higher plane of
politics.
Therefore, efforts to build an effective left wing in the trade unions
will run into insurmountable obstacles unless the workers move toward
resolving the problem of political action. A vigorous campaign must be
conducted to break the labor movement from subordination to capitalist
politics and to launch an independent labor political organization. This
campaign will have to focus initially on educational propaganda for a
change in labor’s political course, but it should not be conducted in an
abstract, routine manner. Ample opportunity will be found to concretize
the propaganda by drawing the lessons of setbacks caused by the misuse
of labor’s inherent political strength. …
In the process of creating their own mass party, based upon and
controlled by the trade unions, the organized workers can draw
unorganized, unemployed, and undocumented sections of their class into a
broad political alliance. Labor will then be in a position to act both
in a more unified manner and through advanced forms of struggle.
The workers will learn to generalize their needs, as a class, and to
address their demands on a political basis to the capitalists, as a class. …
As Leon Trotsky insisted in discussions during the 1930s, the American
workers must learn to act politically and to think socially if they are
to attain the class consciousness and solidarity needed to defeat the
exploiters. …
At every juncture in the unfolding social conflicts, the workers and
their allies need guidance from a revolutionary socialist party. That is
the reason for the existence of the Socialist Workers Party. Its
scientific analysis of the class struggle provides in fullest measure
the political consciousness and program that the anticapitalist movement
must have. Therefore, it is uniquely qualified to shape the basic
proposals, broad strategy, and tactical steps required for the most
effective mass action. …
As the Teamster story demonstrates, the principal lesson for labor
militants to derive from the Minneapolis experience is not that, under
an adverse relationship of forces, the workers can be overcome; but
that, with proper leadership, they can overcome.
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Teamsters show ‘with proper leadership, workers can overcome’
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for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics,
Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s
done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule
is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.” ― Carl
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