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[Resolution of the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the National Committee submitted to the February-March 1982 plenum]
We should not look for a panacea or some all-serving solution to our many trade union problems. What we need is an overview of the state of the union movement, a better understanding of the present stage of working class radicalization, and an up-to-date explanation of the political and social pressures bearing down upon all strata of the class. We must adjust our tactics in the unions according to the changing political scene and the developing consciousness of the workers.
As we prepare for the 1982 general election we can look to the union movement for opportunities to introduce our candidates and our ideas to union activists, and for ways to help these activists solve the problems they face. For our union fractions this means the promotion of rank-and-file caucuses working to win the unions over to a prolabor party position, and to the running of independent labor candidates. This should be tested in all our union work, taking into account the special circumstances of each union development and the particular political opportunities that arise.
Broad discussion in the unions has begun at all levels, prompted by the present round of contract negotiations which directly affect 4.5 million workers. The takeback demands of the employers, backed by the power of the federal government, constitute a double-barreled threat: idle factories and illegal strikes. If union negotiators refuse wage cuts, they are told the alternative is more layoffs. If union members vote to strike, they are warned that their action may be illegal.
The deepening economic depression is driving millions more workers into the ranks of the unemployed, thus further weakening the bargaining power of the unions. Bipartisan support of Reagan’s aid-to-big-business economic policies holds little hope for working people under the two-party system. These circumstances present a dim future for employed workers, bleaker for the unemployed.
Most union members are seeking some way to fight back. They are asking what can be done. A new awareness of the uncertainty and instability of the economic system develops as the crisis deepens. More workers are radicalizing, questioning old values, and trying to understand the cause of the social and economic breakdown.
A wide variety of answers are offered. Proposals for action (and inaction) are debated. These debates (generally one-sided) are conducted in union papers, in liberal journals, and in radical publications. They also break out (usually unscheduled) in union meetings, and they go on almost constantly in the workplace. They are essentially political, involving ideas representative of the main currents of political thought in the working class movement. Right-wing Social Democrats and left-leaning varieties of social democracy are most vocal in the unions, utilizing the union apparatus and official union papers. Stalinism is represented by a few union officials, and in some so-called rank-and-file publications.
As representatives of revolutionary socialism we in the SWP have different answers for the present problems of working men and women than social democracy and Stalinism offer. It is our responsibility to participate in the political life of the union movement, and to present our program there in open debate with our opponents. We should try to create the best possible circumstances for this, that is, an organizational structure suited to the needs of ourselves and our potential allies. Rank-and-file caucuses working to win union endorsement of the labor party idea and for the running of independent labor candidates can serve these needs.
This proposal seeks to link our work in the unions with the activities and goals of the most politically aware workers, those who are ready to consider radical solutions to their problems. It directs our members to these radicalizing workers and to the most useful and acceptable organizational form through which to unite with them.
The rank-and-file caucus as an organizational form for transforming and democratizing bureaucratic unions has been abused by self-serving union politicians, by the Stalinists, and by ultraleft sects. But the only successful and promising struggles in the past decade have been conducted through such caucus formations, as (most notably) Miners For Democracy against the Boyle machine in the UMWA, Steelworkers Fightback, and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Without tested leaders and despite false political direction MFD ousted the gangster-like Boyle machine in the mine workers union. With similar limitations TDU continues to fight the gangster-ridden leadership of the Teamster union.
One of the most common features of union politics is the formation of opposition caucuses to contest union elections or to oppose an entrenched union leadership that allows only token elections and signs only sweetheart contracts. Under these conditions the rank-and-file caucus sometimes calls itself a “discussion club” or “study class,” or some other innocuous sounding name. Whatever the name, we should pay attention to these rank-and-file caucus formations when they attract active union members. We should become members of them whenever they do. Participation does not require our full agreement with their program. This is one of the most likely places to find the workers we want to know.
Our purpose in the unions ought to be to make friends and explain our politics. That is why we attend union meetings, and why we should attend rank-and-file caucus meetings and argue that now is the time to begin talking about winning support in the union for the idea of running union members for public office on a labor party ticket. To many this is a new idea, something that must be discussed and explained and tested.
Many workers (a few million certainly) readily agree that what we need is a labor party. But few have thought much about how a labor party will be formed, or what they can do about helping its formation.
In many congressional districts the overwhelming majority of voters are workers and their families. Often a high percentage are union members, sometimes belonging to a single union as in the mine fields.
Recent experience with the present Congress has made it possible to convince these workers that whatever their present plans for struggle on the economic front (the possibility of strike action is rarely excluded) to retain past wage gains and fringe benefits in their union contracts, they must also defend themselves against attacks in the political arena. The Democrats and Republicans have demonstrated, at all levels of government, that there is no difference between them on economic policy, especially when it comes to takebacks of worker benefits. These politicians in both capitalist parties have also demonstrated that they think alike and act alike when it comes to tax breaks for the rich, and giveaways to the military machine.
Such matters are no longer abstract questions for workers who face wage cuts and unemployment and are told that the government is broke. They want to know why the government is broke, and if it is where all the money comes from to build up expensive arsenals and keep a gang of high-priced admirals and generals in high style all around the world. And if the government can find money for this purpose, why is there no money for a public works program to hire the millions of unemployed at union wages on useful jobs in order to rebuild the stagnant economy and improve the quality of life in this country?
This is no imaginary discussion. These are the questions that crop up in daily conversations on the job, at unemployment centers, and in union meetings.
The common putdown is that people who do grubby work and who all their lives have depended on a paycheck and punched a time clock cannot do anything about government or about the national economy. Workers are not expected to understand such problems, and if they did there is nothing they can do about them. An increasing large number of workers do not accept such “wisdom” anymore. They are beginning to think they had better try to do something for themselves. These changes in consciousness create conditions favorable to the formation of rank-and-file caucuses or lead workers to gravitate to existing caucuses. The more advanced workers accept the proposition that the working class, in order to improve its own living conditions, must intervene in government and improve the social structure. They understand that a militant union member, “one of our own,” elected to Congress from a working class district will be a good beginning, however modest.
Our task is to explain how, in this way, a labor party can develop, and that this party can quickly become the majority party in this country.
Discussions involving this kind of explanation are what we usually mean when we talk about raising our labor party slogan in a propaganda way. But in union caucuses and at union meetings where this idea will be discussed we should agitate for the formation of campaign committees for independent labor candidates in congressional districts. Where we succeed in helping to organize such committees (based on local unions and their allies) and run congressional candidates against the Democrats and Republicans, our labor party slogan then becomes an action slogan.
We should, of course, enter the 1982 general election campaign with our own SWP campaign in as many states as possible. Our central slogan will be the labor party as in all our previous campaigns since 1976, but this time without the preconceived notion that it is exclusively a propaganda slogan because this is a “propaganda period.”
The labor party slogan lends itself to the developing consciousness of the working class, and if properly used it also serves to advance consciousness. We can expect that in certain local circumstances this year it can be tested in action.
The sharp rightward turn in U.S. politics occurred because of shifts in consciousness within the class structure of society. Large segments of the working class became convinced (partly because of the false promises of successive Democratic administrations, but mainly because of the steady decline in real wages and the gradual deterioration in the quality of life under capitalism) that the two-party system of government offers no real choice to them. Consequently, massive numbers of workers refuse to vote. (About half of all eligible voters stayed away from the polls in the last general election.) Others cast a protest against the Democrats by voting for Reagan in 1980.
The consequences of government attacks on working class living standards, on traditional civil liberties and recently won civil rights (combined with the sharp downturn in the economy, unexpected by the Reagan administration and by most bourgeois analysts) are far reaching. A new political imbalance has developed. This forces us to review our propaganda approach to the politically awakening workers, and to actively participate in the problems and politics of the union movement.
Millions of workers have suffered bitter experiences since 1980. Minorities, women, the poverty stricken, the sick and elderly have suffered most. The lessons of these experiences have not been understood yet by established leaders in the unions, women’s movement, and Black organizations, but among the victims there are some who are beginning to think in terms of class action and social change.
They have many questions.
Even though this questioning does not yet go much beyond the traditional methods and goals of unions, it is an easy transition to the more fundamental questions about the changing structure of capitalist economy, how imperialism emerges as the most advanced (and degenerate) stage of capitalism, why the employing class seeks to organize commodity production worldwide in accordance with the dictates of the world market, what causes depressions and why the present crisis has hit all industrialized capitalist nations and affects all others, and what the working class can do to change all this.
These are all reasons why the present economic and political conjuncture in this country requires a bold policy by the SWP in the unions. We alone can explain how the working class, organized internationally, can and must change the world.
The central debate in the unions occurs among the radical workers and other politicized elements, as always. The aim is to win support from the mass of workers who are mostly apolitical. In this struggle for leadership those who come to the fore and win followers always pick up the main line of argument of the major working class political tendencies: social democracy, Stalinism, and revolutionary socialism.
When we see the programs and aims of the Social Democrats and Stalinists spelled out in their publications it is easy to recognize that there is nothing essentially new in word or deed. But in practice the deed is far more devious and deceptive than can be imagined. Both the Social Democrats and Stalinists win supporters and adherents in the union movement because they appear to champion the cause of the working class, and propose solutions to the problems of working class victims of capitalist society that seem eminently reasonable and practical to many of those victims.
Our political responsibility is to contest these misleaders in the working class movement and to prove in action that our class struggle program is the only way out of the present economic and social crisis.
We must spell out our Transitional Program as it applies in the present situation in the union movement and demonstrate in action how to apply it. This is necessary not only for the advancement of class consciousness among the radicalizing workers we meet daily, but also for our own political health and growth.
It is easy to slip into the habit of speculating about what can be or what should be, and fail to pay attention to what is. In this way we run the danger of losing sight of the transitional character of our demands for the unions, especially our labor party slogan. We should avoid any tendency to think and speak of the labor-party-still-to-come as if it must be the equivalent of a revolutionary socialist party. We of course advocate that it should adopt our revolutionary Transitional Program, at the same time that we avoid giving the impression that we will not support any kind of labor party with less than a fully revolutionary program. If we want to build bridges toward the more advanced union members we must understand how they see the labor party discussion in the ranks of the union movement today. The question for those workers who are seriously thinking about politics in the election this year is how can we elect one of our own union members to Congress, how can we get a voice in government?
This is the question we should try to answer.
We must constantly test our programmatic concepts in action, in class actions against the employers and the capitalist government, and in struggles against our political opponents in the working class movement. Otherwise we run the danger of shriveling into a self-isolated sect.
A tasks and perspectives report, approved by the executive committee of the Chicago-Gary District on January 12 of this year, is symptomatic of this danger. It directs comrades in union work as follows: “Only the emergence of a class struggle left wing, of fighting battalions of revolutionary workers prepared to fight by any means necessary for a new society, can begin to create the framework for an effective struggle against the capitalists” (emphasis in original).
This ultimatistic formulation omits the struggles through which the left wing in the unions will emerge. It is a prescription for abstention in union activity at present, the further codification of a do-nothing policy.
The rationalization for this policy was set forth last year by Comrade Kim Kleinman, head of our rail fraction in Chicago (YSA Discussion Bulletin, Vol. XXV, No. 3, November 1981). In a tasks and perspectives report for the Chicago SWP/YSA rail fraction he explains in some detail why our fractions cannot do much in the unions.
He mentions union losses in last year’s Chrysler and Conrail contracts, then he says:
Can we in the short term prevent these defeats? Sadly not [because we are too weak and small].
There is no tactic we can propose that will turn this around. What is needed is not tactics but an entirely different strategy. We need to challenge the bureaucracy’s political line and lay out an alternative: solidarity to PATCO, El Salvador, and the victims of Reagan’s cuts, and independent political action, a labor party, a Solidarity Day party instead of the Democrats and Republicans.
This litany may sound familiar and convincing enough among ourselves. Comrade Kleinman learned it from other party documents and reports.
But how does this sound to workers in the shop?
Insofar as this kind of preachment is meaningful to any worker today, there is surely as much meaning in almost any SLP tract, including anything written seventy-five years ago by DeLeon.
It is not true that we have nothing to say about what tactics should be employed in the union movement today, in each and every situation in which we find ourselves.
It is not true that we are incapable of making a difference in union struggles wherever we can become actively involved.
If we don’t think we can make a difference, that we count for something, and that what we are doing will influence others (“in the short term,” right now), then what are we trying to do? Why do we want to build our party? And why are we helping to build the YSA?
We believe that we have a historic responsibility for the course of events in the class struggle. Even in situations where we are not directly involved, where we have no members, we should think and write and speak as if we can make a difference in the outcome. We try our best in every way possible to prevent defeats, to win some victories in union struggles.
We know, of course, that we don’t have much direct influence in the union movement today, but one of our goals is to win influence by convincing others that we know what should be done.
That is propaganda.
Shifts in political consciousness among working people, accompanied by a rising mood of rank-and-file militancy in some basic industrial unions (the UAW is a dramatic and unexpected example), require that we agitate for our appropriate transitional demands:
* We are for a shorter workweek, and no overtime.
* We believe that there ought to be a massive public works program, financed by the federal government. And we will explain that the public works program will perform useful work (without supervision or participation by “private industry“) and create jobs for the unemployed at union wages.
* We believe that the war budget ought to be eliminated entirely. The billions of dollars wasted on this should be put to good use to improve the living conditions of all people, not for mass murder.
Our Transitional Program contains demands similar to those often supported by Social Democrats and Stalinists in the unions. Even the demand for disarmament wins qualified support from some of our political opponents, partly because it is popular with a very broad layer of the working class.
But there is one big difference: we think it is all possible and that working men and women can begin independent political organization right now, and the sooner the better.
We believe that unions in every congressional district should get together and run working men and women for Congress on an independent labor ticket (or a labor party ticket) for basic working class economic and political demands.
If we begin organizing now in the unions for this purpose we will attract the attention of many serious-minded workers, and in this way at the very least we will bring our SWP campaigns and candidates to the attention of many who would not otherwise hear about us.
Our optimum expectation of this turn to active participation in the political life of the union movement is that it can mark the beginning of a broad class struggle left wing which will take shape organizationally and programmatically in the struggle for a labor party.
Submitted: February 15,1982
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