Organized Labor’s Antiwar Forces, What
Now?
by Charles Walker
On April 10, an estimated 15,000 New York
workers and others gathered at a pro-war rally at Manhattan’s former World
Trade Center site. The Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New
York organized the gathering. “With dozens of union banners on the barricades
around the trade center site and a succession of union leaders addressing the
crowd, the event resembled a Labor Day gathering…Plumbers, painters,
carpenters, ironworkers, elevator operators, journeyman apprentices,
pipefitters, truck drivers and others mingled” (New York Times, April
11). New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, and one-time Republican
presidential candidate Robert Dole were among the invited speakers.
To date, organized labor’s antiwar activists
have not been able to draw as many trade union officials and rank-and-file
members—under trade union banners—to any one antiwar demonstration. No doubt
many more trade unionists, including union officers, have joined the antiwar
throngs in the past several months, but relatively few of them marched as trade
unionists under their union banners.
Perhaps, if the antiwar forces had gathered
their organized strength sooner, more unionists and officials would have been
visible, as trade unionists, at the antiwar protests. But those forces, U.S.
Labor Against the War in particular [which was not formed until Jan. 11, 2003],
came together in response to the rhythms of the government’s quick war moves,
which left little time for doing much more than organizing the existing antiwar
sentiment in organized labor’s ranks.
While ad hoc formations of a united front
character are very often absolutely necessary, they’re no substitute for an
ongoing movement within organized labor based on social justice and a
commitment to external trade union militancy and internal trade union
democracy. Without such a movement to tap into, that is, a movement that has
rightly earned a reputation among workers as a fighting force that has made a
difference in at least some workers’ lives, ad hoc formations are fated to
start mostly from ground zero, a strategic liability.
Antiwar forces in the labor movement had it much
better when there were ongoing organized militant and democratic forces within
the unions. The days when the Socialist Party, the IWW, and the Trade Union
Educational League were relatively large and influential forces in this country
come to mind. Though not as influential by the time of World War II, the
influence of such formations lived on in other social and radical currents even
then and counted for something, as evidenced by wartime strikes to redress
sorely felt inequities. But the postwar, anti-Communist witch hunt led by the
U.S. ruling class and its twin parties of reaction, Republicans and
Democrats—and supported by an increasingly bureaucratized union
officialdom—which swept through organized labor in the late 1940s and in the
’50s, all but snuffed out the highly developed class-conscious influence that
had existed in organized labor.
The occupation of Iraq will continue to mandate
opposition by labor’s antiwar forces to this empire building by the ruling
circles of this nation. The need to popularize the demand “U.S. troops out of
Iraq now!” couldn’t be more urgent. The ongoing domestic war on U.S. labor,
unionized or not, which has imposed one defeat after another on workers,
nevertheless could aid the building of a greater antiwar movement by U.S.
workers. Both efforts, the enlargement of workers’ participation in the antiwar
movement and the struggle to defend the living standards of workers, will
remain seriously underdeveloped without the presence of a class-struggle wing,
such as existed before the political witch hunt of the McCarthy era.
The elements of a class-struggle current do
exist today, but those elements have failed to mount their own united front, an
organized labor body with the critical mass to convince other workers that
class struggle is worthwhile because it can prevail. Even a few thousand
organized class militants have the potential to form an effective phalanx
capable of maneuvers calculated to make maximum use of their relatively small
numbers and draw the attention of workers in need.
If bringing such a workers’ united front into
being were easy, it would have been done already. The difficulty of the job is
indicated by the fact that it isn’t even being attempted, nor is there any sign
that it’s thought of as a practical task at this time. But if the past is any guide
to the future, then more attention should be paid to the history of the U.S.
working class. Especially, its turnaround and upsurge during the 1930s.
It’s very true that the Depression Era upsurge
was basically driven by deep deprivation, and the expectation of more to come,
so there wasn’t all that much to lose by militantly taking on the bosses. But
the decisions about how to take on the bosses and when to do battle were often
based on the experiences of labor radicals, who had fought in many class battles
going back to the turn of the century. Moreover, the radicals of the Depression
years were organized, though not in the same organizations. Perhaps the CIO and
the rise of industrial unionism would have been just as successful without the
leavening of organized radicals, but to act or not to act on that supposition
without overwhelming evidence is too risky for today’s radicals and militants,
and the rest of the working class, as well.
For radicals and militants to organize a united
front within the larger labor movement doesn’t mean that all problems have to
be solved or all differences reconciled in advance of getting together. The
construction of such a combination dedicated to relieving as much as possible
the outrageous burden that this society places on workers—a burden that shapes
so much of our daily lives—and the posing of solutions that build on today’s
consciousness would be suitable enough for a start. And a start is what is
needed.
But there’s a major obstacle to the building of
a viable, useful united front of radicals and militants in the labor movement.
That obstacle is the notion that the Democratic Party, even despite the lowest
of expectations for that party, should be supported, no matter how critically.
That notion more than any other, advanced by the labor officialdom at the top
and the bottom, as well as by many otherwise clear-thinking labor activists,
has taken organized labor down a blind alley.
That’s not to say that the Democratic Party
hasn’t given something back for the decades of support it has received from
organized labor and even many of labor’s class-conscious activists. If they
gave nothing of value, or nothing that could be sold to workers as being of
some value, the Democrats wouldn’t have any appeal. Thousands of local
contracts for maintaining roads and bridges or covering schools and city halls
are just an example of the ties that bind unions to the established two
corporate parties, usually the Democrats. When the West Coast dockworkers were
under attack last year their union leaders called on the Democratic Party to
defend them, and many Democrat politicians gave soapbox speeches in the
dockworkers’ defense. But that support was for show, as it invariably is when
the die is cast; and the longshore union’s tops showed it, when they urged
ratification of a contract that’s sure to weaken their future place at the
bargaining table.
The commitment of the labor officialdom (and the
labor militants that attempt to influence them) to the Democratic Party is not
shared by a growing number of citizens. Many no longer buy the notion that the
Democratic Party is a lesser evil, and therefore they refuse to vote at all. At
the same time, the Democratic Party has lost a part of the white workers to the
Republican Party. Whatever usefulness the Democratic Party still has for some
unions or their members is far outweighed by the weakening, dependent state of
organized labor that has resulted from its, critical or not, backing of the
Democratic Party.
U.S. union workers are between a rock and hard
place: A bureaucratic union officialdom that holds them in a
class-collaborationist vise when it can; and the Democratic Party that tightens
that vise as circumstances allow or demand. That vise has kept workers’
opposition to the war on Iraq limited. That is to say, decades of enforced
dependency on the labor bureaucracy and the bureaucracy’s dependency on the
Democratic Party has seemingly left this generation of workers without the
virtually instinctive opposition to capitalist war possessed by many workers of
previous generations. “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” was once a
common saying among workers.
In the abstract there was nothing inevitable
about the New York workers rallying to support the war on Iraq, even though,
perhaps, they had fellow workers, friends, or relatives in Iraq. But in the
concrete their showing up at the rally was as inevitable as anything can be. We
say that for the simple reason that class collaboration cannot be preached and
practiced as much as it is in today’s labor movement on domestic issues, small
and large, without it shaping workers’ views on “foreign” issues.
Class collaboration is a challenge, then, for
labor’s antiwar partisans, as it is for all partisans of labor, unionized or
not. The first step for building a mass labor opposition to capitalist wars,
today’s and tomorrow’s, begins with the organized effort to remove by the roots
class collaboration from labor’s ranks.