Rebel Rank & File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970’s

Rebel Worker Vol.31 No.1(212)
Jan.-Feb.2012
Book Review

Rebel Rank & File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970’s
Edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner & Cal Winslow. Published by Verso.

Recent months have seen the dramatic emergence of the “Occupy” movement, particularly amongst a core of mainly students, middle class and unemployed elements associated with the fallacious populist notion of the “ordinary” 99% versus the rich 1% globally. That such a simplistic notion is so widespread amongst this milieu certainly reflects the down turn in the class struggle in recent decades in many western countries and the disarray or absence of grass roots movements committed to direct action amongst workers in many industries in these countries.

Its epicenter has been in New York with the “Anti-Wall Street” protest which occupied Zuccotti Park, until driven out by the police.

It has oscillated between spectacular protests such as rallies, marches and camps in parks and public spaces, and tail ending various work place struggles characteristic of leftist sects with their normally unsuccessful “party recruitment” agendas and activoids via community pickets such as in the case of Baiada Poultry factory workers in Melbourne. This activity also gets the union hierarchy off the hook in regard to defying repressive industrial legislation such as Gillard’s Fair Work Laws in Australia and avoids the officials mobilising grass roots union members to take solidarity action. In the recent case of Baiada, company workers have spontaneously taken solidarity action in Adelaide by refusing to unload chickens. The workers have gone on, to win the dispute. In the US, Occupy has been involved in the community sphere in regard to resistance to mortgage foreclosures.

Don’t Occupy! – Organise on the Job for Direct Action!

A more strategic approach than spectacular antics and aimless activism involving just responding to employer attacks and union officials sell outs, which tackles the roots of the problem – lack of workers’ self organisation and low morale and creates the basis for workers’ direct action to turn the tide against the employer offensive is support for the long range strategic organising on the job. It can also create the transitional steps in the shape of a bloc of grass roots controlled unions toward the creating a mass syndicalist union confederation. Its task would be conducting coordinated direct action and the long term task of establishing workers control of industry and community control of communities and the elimination of wage labour relations which is integral to capitalism.

The book under review is particularly relevant in the light it throws on the problems of grass roots organising in the difficult conditions of the USA dominated by Business Unionism of the AFL-CIO-CIA, union busting corporation managements and very restrictive industrial legislation. It provides a discussion of the political economy of the upsurge in the class struggle associated with the emergence of various rank and file movements in the 1970s in the USA. It looks at the long post WWII economic boom in the USA and rising wages and improving conditions of workers during this period and in the mid 70’s a crisis of profitability. It led to an employer offensive which these movements were largely unable to counter effectively, despite achieving some gains for workers in various ways.

In “Understanding the Rank-and-File Rebellion in the Long 1970’s” by Kim Moody, the author does a good job looking at the origins of the bureaucratization of the CIO, particularly in the context of WWII and the formation of the WLB (War Labour Board) comprising corporate, government and union representatives which centralized contract bargaining and grievances procedures at the national level away from local unions and workplaces. The McCarthy era/Cold War further supercharged this process with the purging of leftwing militants from unions and workplaces. The author makes the good point that the rank and file upsurge was unable to develop a grass roots controlled unionism in place of the business unionism of the AFL-CIO, due to a lack of cooperation/mutual aid between different rank and file movements and the development of a common identity. Preserving the isolation and lack of inter union solidarity which is such a salient feature of business unionism.

CIA “Social Movement Engineering” & The New Left

The contributors to the volume, also see the emergence of these rank and file movements in the context of the various social movements which erupted in USA during the 60’s and 70’s, such as the civil rights, anti-war movement, various identity politics movements, the New Left, etc. The authors seem oblivious to the role of such agencies of US and international capitalism as the CIA and various corporate sponsored foundations in engineering some of these social movements such as the so-called women’s movement, the LSD drug sub culture and “identity politics” generally via corporate foundation sponsorship of educational institution courses and research on these lines.(1) This phenomena together with such state repression as the FBI’s “COINTELPO” programs played an important role in the disruption and disintegration of New Leftist groups and the student radical milieu which during these years played an important role in assisting the workers’ militant upsurge. The S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) which was the largest and most dynamic of these new left formations and very active in assisting the workers movement. It’s revived version today, is a shadow of its 60’s, 70’s ancestor. Hopelessly absorbed in navel gazing, political correctness displays and divisive identity politics and alienating militant workers.

The volume goes on to look at the development of rank and file movements in the US labour movement in the 20th Century. Then proceeds to provide a survey of different key rank and file movements in various unions and industries.

One of the most important and relatively successful movements focused upon is Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970’s” by Dan La Botz. The essay looks at the origins of TDU in the party building plans of the Trotskyist group “International Socialists” I.S. In the early 1970s, its members who became Teamsters and were involved in the establishment of a network of regional grass roots newspapers for Teamsters: ”The Seattle Semi”, “The Grapevine” in Los Angeles, and “The Horse’s Mouth” in Pittsburgh, etc, Certainly, this is the kind of long range serious crucial work involving the publishing of grass roots industrial papers, the following up contacts and their networking amongst long shore militants which will assist grass roots self activity and direct action, rather than the “vanguardist” interventions by “Occupy” in the USA such as the picketing of ports on the West Coast by activoids on 13th December 2011. The I.S. initiated groupings linked up with other opposition groups in the Teamsters and became an important force for pushing for industrial action to improve conditions and wages. The author is insufficiently critical of how the TDU has moved away from a force for rank and file militant activity and grass roots control of the union into an administration caucus.

The T.D.U. played a critical role in the successful campaign to become Teamster President of Ron Carey who took office from 1992. He had been an independent candidate and a career union bureaucrat. Subsequently, the T.D.U. was supportive of the constitutional changes made by Carey to centralise power in the hands of the President and was uncritical of his nationalist rhetoric and outlawed discussion and articles advocating direct action in its paper “Convoy Express”.(2)

The author has little to say about this degeneration of the T.D.U. Carey later became embroiled in a scandal involving rorting of union finances, lost his position and was expelled from the union as of July 1998.

Two interesting contributions in the volume about the auto industry are “Rank-and-File Opposition in the UAW During the Long 1979’s" by A.C.Jones and "American Petrograd: Detroit and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers" by Kieran Taylor.

Both contributions focus on two rank and file movements which emerged in the UAW – the more militant League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the United National Caucus. The contributors in discussing the more militant L.R.B.W. which played a key role in wave of wildcat strikes in Detroit auto plants in the late 1960’s, see its emergence in the context of black identity politics and vanguardism informed by Marxist-Leninist politics, which informed many key activists and the grass roots. The authors show that this orientation of many of its militants also contributed to its downfall due to alienating many white workers and older black workers in the context of a management and union hierarchy counter attack.

Another less militant rank and file movement, but more long lived and organizing on the national level which is focused upon was the United National Caucus. It was based particularly amongst skilled, “white” workers.

In regard to “rebel unions” which formed in the 1970’s, the volume focuses on the UFW in “The United Farm Workers from the Ground Up” by Frank Bardacke. This essay which is the most interesting in the volume, focuses on how Cesar Chavez and his family suppressed grass roots opposition and militancy in the union and transformed it into a combination family business and farm workers advocacy group. The author does a good job exploding the myth of the lack of militancy amongst farm workers via a discussion of how their militant action is very much connected to harvest time, when the workers have high levels of industrial leverage. It rapidly diminishes after this period. The author then proceeds to review farm worker campaigns in the 1965-70 and how a union structure was established particularly via consumer boycotts. These boycotts in which Cesar Chavez, together with the support of religious and student groups played an important role, helped achieve important victories. However, due to the highly centralised nature of the union organization, characterised by a bureaucracy dominated by the Chavez family, severe infighting broke out in the union. It resulted in the defeat of grass roots activists and the entrenching of Chavez family and middle class radical staffer control. With the transformation of the UFW into a combination of lobby group and family business.

In conclusion, the volume provides an uneven discussion of the rank and file upsurge of the 1970’s in the USA. It certainly fails to look deeply enough concerning the nature of the social movements and youth culture of the 1960’s and 70’s which played such an important role in the militant upsurge and its decline and the hidden hand of the CIA and corporate agencies in key aspects. The contribution about the Teamsters is insufficiently critical of T.D.U.’s move away from a catalyst for rank and file militant activity and control of the union into more of an opposition party. Entangled in the vices of business unionism. Other contributions such as in regard to the UFW, provide a much critical analysis, but don’t entail consideration of a clear grass roots controlled alternative unionism committed to direct action on the job and how to achieve it.

Mark McGuire

NOTES:

(1) See “Gloria Steinem: the CIA & the Women’s Movement” on the Internet; “Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD & the Sixties Revolution” by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain; and “Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and Cultural Cold War” by Frances Stonor Saunders regarding CIA “social/cultural engineering”.

(2) See “Reforming” The Teamsters by Jon Bekken, in Libertarian Labor Review No.15 Summer 1993;