What path toward an independent workers movement? (re Million Workers March)

Detroit Workers' Voice, May 13, 2005

What path toward an independent workers movement?

Build the rank-and-file struggle
or illusions in the liberal Democrats?

On October 17 last year, 10,000 workers and activists in Washington, DC rallied
to the call of the Million Worker March. This call did not merely attack Bush
and his neo-con cabal. It raised to some extent the issue of building the
workers movement separate from the capitalist politicians. Led by dissident
union leaders, the MWM departed from the standpoint of the main AFL-CIO leaders
of subordinating everything to the presidential campaign of the pro-war and
pro-business Democrat, John Kerry. The AFL-CIO leadership sought to strangle the
MWM, but the demo was held anyway.

We in the Communist Voice Organization (CVO) attended the demo of last October.
We knew that the break of the MWM leaders with the main AFL-CIO officialdom was
only partial and temporary, and we wrote about this in our leaflets. But we also
saw that the MWM had aroused interest in a section of workers who were looking
to find a way to struggle. Since the October demo, we have taken part in the
Detroit committee of the MWM (the MWM-Detroit), the speakout in Detroit on
February 5, and various activities promoted by the MWM-Detroit. We have kept
workers around us informed of the stands and activities of the MWM.
But the MWM-Detroit has increasingly oriented its work towards allying with
liberal Detroit politicians in the Democratic Party and with the trade union
bureaucrats. It has ignored the lesson of the attempt of the AFL-CIO and
pro-Democratic Party activists to strangle the MWM, and has instead sought to
patch the rift between the MWM and the liberal circles. MWM-Detroit policy has
become similar to that of the Workers World Party, which seeks to organize
national movements hand-in-hand with big-name liberals and the labor
officialdom. The national MWM leadership is apparently adopting the same policy.

And the present conference is likely to orient the MWM towards building the
National Conference of Cities, which would mean tying the workers movement to
the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Such stands have increasingly sucked the life out of the MWM-Detroit. And it
seems to have led the national MWM to an impasse. The question of orientation is
the major question facing the present MWM conference.

The war on city workers and the poor in Detroit

We think that an independent workers' movement can only be built in the
course of actual struggles. Such a trend must attract new activists. Where will
they come from? From a new wave of struggle.

The city budget crisis in Detroit posed the issue of a struggle arising
against cutbacks and concessions for the local MWM committee. The city
government under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been unleashing a new wave of misery
against the working masses. He has already begun massive layoffs of city workers
and is demanding major wage and benefit concessions. And the mainly working
class and poor residents of Detroit will see already-pathetic city services
further decimated. The other pro-establishment forces are implicated in all this
too, from the City Council, which is developing alternative concessions plans,
to the main local union leaders who look to City Council, not the workers
struggle, to save the day.

Only one thing can counter this onslaught. There needs to be determined
mass action by city workers and other sections of the masses. Such a fight must
raise the banner of "No Concessions". Instead of workers being made to sacrifice
again, the rich must be made to pay for the crisis.

When the Detroit MWM committee took up work on the city budget crisis, this
was an important step. But what stand has the majority of the MWM-Detroit
adopted?

Alliance with Democratic politicians and union bureaucrats

The majority of the MWM-Detroit has supported an alliance with the liberal
politicians and the union bureaucrats. No, the committee flyers don't say "Let's
have an alliance with the liberals", etc. and may even include a general phrase
against the Republicans and Democrats. But some members explicitly support an
alliance with the liberals. And in fact that's what the present policy amounts
to.

The public stand of the MWM-Detroit has failed to expose the stand of
certain liberals on the Detroit City Council who are posturing loudly against
Mayor Kilpatrick's cutbacks, while quietly advocating their own brand of layoffs
and wage cuts. Their promises to protect workers are touted by many local trade
union leaders and have influence among the workers. Faith in the City Council
opposition diverts the workers from preparing their own ranks for struggle. This
is why it is an essential issue to deal with. The failure of the MWM-Detroit to
publicly expose the City Council opposition has gone hand-in-hand with a
reluctance to clarify for the rank and file city workers the true nature of
their local union leaders. Yet, these local union officials, with rare
exception, are not preparing the workers to resist these attacks.

The main view in the MWM-Detroit is that the rank-and-file workers will be
mobilized in large numbers if only events are endorsed or called by the union
officials or City Councilpersons. But the numbers haven't come. And the price of
alliance has been silence about the treachery of the liberals and union
officials. So who's benefiting from this alliance? The city workers and poor of
Detroit? Activists who want an alternative to the liberals? No. It's the
liberals themselves who get to parade around as heroes while plotting against
the workers.

Democratic Mayor and City Council vs. the workers

Detroit is a prime example of how the Democrats, not just the Republicans,
are enemies of the workers. The city is totally run by the Democrats, and has
been so for decades. But while the political establishment of Detroit is solidly
Democratic, candidates for city offices technically run as non-partisan.

When liberal white Democratic officials ran the city, the oppression
against the masses was so bad they rose up in the famous 1967 rebellion. Black
Democratic mayors and city councilpeople replaced them. This cooled down the
struggle, but these new Democratic officials served the same corporate masters
as their predecessors. From "radical" Democrats like Coleman Young to
Clinton-style Democrats like Dennis Archer, they have all shoved concessions
down the throats of city workers, made sweetheart deals with the corporations,
ruined city services, continued police terror, etc.

The present mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is continuing this pro-capitalist
tradition. He has made it clear that city workers and public services will be
in his cross-hairs. This year alone, 700 city workers have been laid off. And
Kilpatrick wants thousands more. He also wants 10% pay cuts from workers and
concessions on benefits.

How is this different than what Bush does? Bush says there's no money for
vital social programs because he wants corporate tax breaks for the rich and
needs hundreds of billions of dollars for wars to defend the US world business
empire. Kilpatrick says there's no money for public services but ignores that
hundreds of millions of local city tax dollars a year are handed over to the
banks who grow rich financing Detroit's debt. He doesn't call attention to the
countless billions made by the Big 3 auto companies off the sweat of Detroit
area workers. He forgets to mention the corporate tax breaks for GM's Poletown
plant, the $70 million tax breaks to Compuware, or the city funds that will help
pay for pizza-baron Mike Ilitch's baseball stadium. And while Bush touts
privatization of everything from the military to social security, Kilpatrick has
been privatizing city services with a vengeance. Kilpatrick complains about
Bush's program starving the cities. But he carries out the same class program of
the rich against the poor.

With total control of Detroit city government, local Democrats are
nonetheless sticking it to the masses. If the liberal Democrats of Detroit are
taking up the neo-liberal economics of Bush, this only shows that any promotion
of the Democrats is against the workers' interests.

But the Detroit political establishment is not just the mayor and his
bureaucrats. It also includes the City Council. Four of the eight Detroit City
Council members promote themselves as opponents of Kilpatrick and his budget
plans. And they are widely promoted by certain members of the Detroit MWM
committee who call these politicians the "Fab Four". While not all members go
that far, the dominant position is to refrain from public criticism of these
politicians, who are presented as defenders of the city workers and Detroit
residents. So let's look at where the Fab Four actually stand of the budget
crisis.

*Sharon McPhail: She told the conservative and racist Detroit News that she
could cut 6,000 city worker jobs in one year if she was elected mayor. That's
even more than Kilpatrick has been calling for!! Indeed, it's a third of the
city workforce.

*JoAnn Watson: She has called for a "10% salary cut among all City of
Detroit employees" in a January posting on her web site. She also calls for a
hiring freeze, which would eliminate jobs through attrition.

*Barbara Rose-Collins: She supports wage cuts for city workers in an
article that appeared in the local paper Metro Times (p.12, March 9-15 issue).
She also recently missed a vote where she could have helped defeat a raise in
water rates charged by the city because she was partying in Las Vegas.

*Maryann Mahaffey: She hasn't said much of anything except that Kilpatrick
has kept the City Council in the dark about the real budget numbers. But when
Detroit's auditor general recently made a presentation to City Council with a
budget analysis that demanded massive concessions from the workers and chided
Kilpatrick for not slashing the budget enough, even the pro-Fab Four paper, the
Michigan Citizen (May1-7) reports that Mahaffey praised the auditor general's
presentation as "a real analysis". From the paper's coverage of the response of
JoAnn Watson and other Council members, it's clear that none of the Fab Four
raised any serious objections.

Sugarcoating concessions as "equality of sacrifice"

To add some sugarcoating to their stand, the Fab Four talk about "equality
of sacrifice." This is a time-worn policy used by businesses, capitalist
politicians and union bureaucrats to get the workers to swallow concessions. For
instance, some of the Fab Four say if workers take concessions, the banks should
also accept a minor reduction in the interest payments they receive for
financing the city debt. And, like Kilpatrick himself, they call for high city
officials also taking a 10% salary cut. But it's a fraud to equate a minor
imposition on the banks, who will continue to make hundreds of millions of
dollars a year, and officials who will continue to live high on the hog, with
the sacrifices of the workers who barely get by and have been sacrificing year
after year via layoffs and wages freezes. "Equality of sacrifice" means nothing
more than making the workers bear the brunt of the budget crisis.

The MWM-Detroit too has called for the banks to make concessions. But it
has not exposed the effort to impose concessions in the name of "equality of
sacrifice."

Cheerleading for pro-concessions politicians

While overall the MWM-Detroit has failed to publicly condemn any of the
pro-concessions stands of Kilpatrick's opponents on City Council, some members
have been outright cheerleaders for these liberals. Among the most enthusiastic
supporters of the Fab Four are supporters of the Workers World Party, a
pseudo-socialist group that comes out of the Trotskyist tradition. One of the
Detroit MWM leaders, Cheryl LaBash, writing in the Workers World newspaper, has
written several recent articles hailing JoAnn Watson and other allegedly
"progressive" City Council members. LaBash specifically praised Councilwoman
Watson's call "for the banks and bondholders to accept the same 10% reduction
that's proposed for city workers." (published 3/30/05 on WWP web site) Thus, she
hails Watson's stand for worker concessions under the phony banner of "equality
of sacri-fice." Inside the MWM, LaBash has time and again opposed criticism of
the Fab Four or the union bureaucrats.

Another MWM member and longtime WWP backer said that national MWM leader
Clarence Thomas wanted Watson to speak before the national MWM conference. When
this was opposed by a CVO supporter, who said it was outrageous to ask a
supporter of wage concessions to speak at the MWM conference, LaBash and others
led the MWM-Detroit meeting to pass a resolution permitting Watson to be a
speaker at the conference. Meanwhile, the March 24 issue of the Detroit News
carried a letter to the editor from LaBash defending Councilwoman Sharon McPhail
from charges of being an anti-white racist, while failing to say a word about
McPhail favoring massive job cuts for city workers.

Such stands aren't restricted simply to the WWP. Another local MWM member
constantly hails the Fab Four both in articles to local newspapers (where he
sometimes writes under the pen name "John Henry") and on local MWM e-mail lists.
In the April 24-30 edition (p.6) of the Michigan Citizen newspaper, John Henry
gushes that "the Fab Four represents the most progressive political alliance in
recent memory."

Such support for the liberal politicians, and accommodation of this by others,
has meant that the MWM-Detroit has no public stand against the treachery of the
City Council opposition. True, in one flyer there is mention that some unnamed
elected political leaders have to be replaced. But who and why no one is
supposed to know.

Stand of the local union bureaucrats and MWM-Detroit's response

Likewise, there's a phrase in the MWM flyer on the budget crisis saying
most union leaders aren't helping the workers. But again, which ones? Does that
include the leaders of the city unions? Indeed, the only reason any phrase got
in critical of the politicians and union leaders was as a sop to the few MWMers
who fought for exposing city council and the union leaders.

Yet, the truth is the vast majority of the city workers union leaders are
not preparing the workers for a serious struggle against concessions. Nearly all
of them avoided demonstrations on April 12 and16 held by a coalition opposing
budget cuts. The union bureaucrats aren't focused on how to mo-bilize the
workers, but on the empty promises of the City Council liberals. For example, on
February 21 hundreds of angry city bus drivers went to a City Council hearing to
denounce Kilpatrick's budget cuts. Henry Gaffney, president of the bus drivers
ATWU local, took the floor. Did he use the opportunity to call for mass actions?
Did he attack the pro-concessions stand of the Fab Four? No. He had a friendly
exchange with Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, allowing her to posture as a friend of
the workers. He even blamed the budget cutbacks in part on discounts for
handicapped riders! The most "militant" thing Gaffney did was promise to punish
Council members who supported budget cuts at the polls in November. Of course by
then, in the absence of struggle, the workers will have already been ravaged by
the cutbacks.

Meanwhile, there's strong evidence that the union leaders are taking up the
"equality of sacrifice" baloney. The latest example is a quote from Leamon
Wilson, president of AFSCME Local 312 in the May 8-14 Michigan Citizen (p.A3).
Wilson states "before we can give up concessions, the mayor has to give up the
books." So Wilson says concessions are OK if only the mayor provides budget
figures that show they are needed.

The problems with the MWM-Detroit's stand on the labor bureaucrats echo the
problems that exist in the national MWM leadership. The national MWM leaders
somewhat differentiated themselves from the mainstream union officials with
biting comments against the two big capitalist parties and criticism of AFL-CIO
president John Sweeney. But at the same time, the MWM leaders lavished praise on
any union leader who gave mere verbal support to the October 17 rally in
Washington, DC., ignoring that these same union leaders were ardently
supporting pro-war and pro-business Democratic candidate John Kerry. Thus, for
instance, they promoted the SEIU president Andy Stern, though Stern was turning
the SEIU into a cam-paign machine for Kerry. They were not oriented toward
rallying the rank-and-file workers in these unions, but toward the rotten
national leaderships of the SEIU, AFSCME, the APWU, etc. They created the
illusion that a powerful new workers movement would arise through an alliance
with these timid union officials. Support for pro-Democratic union leaders was
bound to undermine a consistent stand against the Democrats. And the MWM-Detroit's
alliance with the liberals proves this.

The National Conference of Cities

A new debacle brewing from the stand of alliance with the liberal
politicians is support for the National Conference of Cities (NCOC). The NCOC is
an alliance of groups with some liberal politicians from the Detroit City
Council calling for more federal funds for the cities. According to the NCOC's
Detroit Call, donations to the NCOC go to the offices of City Council president
Maryann Mahaffey. So in addition to Mahaffey being an NCOC endorser, she appears
to be the leader of this effort. Moreover, the NCOC emphasizes the liberal
leadership in its literature. Its call for endorsements says "Add your name to
those of Detroit City Council president Maryann Mahaffey, City Council member
JoAnn Watson, and many other local and national leaders to build this effort."

The NCOC Call says Bush should stop feeding the war machine and fund the
cities. That sounds like a good idea. Who could object to opposing the Pentagon
and more funds for social programs? And wouldn't it be great if struggles
against concessions were linked to struggles against war? But the Call doesn't
declare "no concessions" or talk about struggles against concessions and
cutbacks like that faced by Detroit city workers and residents. So the Call
doesn't help struggle. But it might help politicians present meekly lobbying the
Bush administration for a few crumbs, and voting for Democrats who promise to
beg for the crumbs on our behalf, as the path for relief.

Thus, the picture painted by the call of the NCOC is that the whole problem
would be solved if only we could get rid of Bush. It says nothing about the big
city Democratic mayors who also represent the rich and starve the masses. It's
not enough to talk about funds for the cities, when the funds that do go to the
cities are in the hands of crooks like Mayor Kilpatrick who will use the funds
for privatization, corporate welfare and high-living for city officials. Indeed,
it's hard to see how Kilpatrick himself could object to a call that blames
everything merely on Bush.

As well, the NCOC Call only denounces the war machine on the grounds of its
cost. It doesn't argue that the occupation of Iraq was in itself unjust, or
denounce the US world empire for its brutality and exploitation of our class
sisters and brothers around the world. It only says that the war machine drains
resources from the cities.

No doubt many people, when they come to question the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, say that it's not worth the sacrifice in money and lives. But
underneath this, they also have, or are beginning to have, an objection to the
purpose of the war. If the anti-war movement is to have any vitality, it has to
be based on opposing wars for oil and empire, and not only on worrying that war
is a strain on the budget. It has to help people move from upset over the
hardships of war to also opposing the goals of the Pentagon's wars. After all,
if there were billion dollar bailouts for the cities, would this make the wars
any more acceptable?

Indeed, confining things to the financial cost of the war makes it easier for
the Call to avoid any mention of the pro-imperialist policies of the Democratic
Party and the pro-war votes of the Congressional Democrats. After all, these
politicians, while voting to strengthen the war machine, claim to also want more
money for the cities. Thus, the narrow outlook of the Call would hamstring, not
build, the anti-war struggle. It ends up blurring the difference between that
anti-war activists and the pro-imperialist Democratic politicians.

Clearly, the NCOC isn't designed to rattle the capitalist establishment. Instead
it proposes to unite activists with the liberal wing of the establishment.

The NCOC claims it will build a national movement. And if the local
workers' struggles could merge into a powerful national movement that would be
great. But how is a strong national workers' movement going to arise? In
alliance with the Democratic budget-cutters and liberal advocates of worker
concessions? No way. It can only develop by encouraging an actual struggle of
the workers and poor against every attempt to impose concessions and cutbacks.
A militant struggle by, for example, Detroit city workers would encourage
workers elsewhere to stand up and fight. A conference to unite activists with
politicians who are demanding concessions to the workers will be an obstacle to
a national workers' movement.

Unfortunately, various MWM members are jumping into this alliance. National MWM
Co-chair Clarence Thomas endorses the NCOC. Detroit MWM member David Sole,
president of UAW Local 2234, signed his name to the solicitation for
endorsements of the NCOC that hypes the liberal Detroit City Council
politicians. And the MWM-Detroit recently voted to endorse the NCOC, too.

Building the independent workers movement

Thus, the MWM faces a serious issue of where it is going. This is the main
problem facing this conference, and it will determine the role of the MWM in the
future. Our group, the Communist Voice Organization, believes that the only path
forward is building an independent workers' movement. If this is really to be a
workers' movement, it must be independent of the bourgeois politicians and the
stifling AFL-CIO bureaucracy; it must have the guts to tell the workers the
truth about the politicians and the labor bureaucrats from the start. The MWM
demo of last October seemed a start in this direction, but since then the MWM
seems to have been backsliding.

In our work with the MWM-Detroit, we have encouraged MWM members to work among
the rank and file rather than rely on the union bureaucrats. We have
consistently called for discussion in the MWM-Detroit of what orientation will
advance the workers' struggles. We have attended demonstration promoted by the
MWM-Detroit and informed workers, in our own agitation on the Detroit city
workers' struggle about the MWM-Detroit. And we have carried out our own
agitation at workplaces, demonstrations and elsewhere on the city crisis, the
Iraq war, and other issues.

We believe that workers and activists of different beliefs and trends can
unite in various struggles and broader types of organization. But nothing
durable can be built on verbal allegiance to class independence while in
practice something else is going on. Unity will arise among activists who are
taking up the tasks necessary to revive the workers' movement. What follows are
some of the crucial tasks.

Go to the workers and poor directly. Many activists think that alliances
with the union officialdom and getting them to endorse their cause is the key to
organizing the workers. Not so. There is a gulf between the policy of the union
officials and the interests of the rank and file. The union bureaucrats are
verbally in favor of some worthwhile reforms, but they aren't interested in a
militant workers' movement fighting for them. Look, for example, at how Andy
Stern and the SEIU leadership "supported" the October 17 MWM march in words, but
had the rank and file campaigning for Kerry in deeds. And there's also the issue
that there is not even weak organization among the vast majority of workers and
poor.

Thus activists must reach workers by going directly to the plant gates, by
developing contacts inside the workplaces, by distributing literature in the
working-class communities, etc. At union-called meetings or pickets, appeal to
the rank and file. The key thing isn't contact with the union officials. It's
contact with the workers and developing ties with those interested in a real
struggle.

Expose the Democrats and the AFL-CIO officialdom. Efforts to reach the
workers and poor must call attention to the sabotage of the workers' movement by
the Democrats and the union officials. The Democrats and the AFL-CIO officialdom
don't want a militant workers movement. The union officials, when they do not
simply accept concessions, sap the fighting capacity of the rank and file. Just
look at how they sabotaged the 1995 Detroit newspaper workers strike by obeying
court orders to dismantle militant mass pickets that were putting the heat on
newspaper management. There's no sense talking about class independence or a
militant workers movement without exposing the forces that are undermining this.

Various activists raise the issue of a workers' political party. No doubt
the workers need their own political stand and party. But faith in the Democrats
or those with similar politics is harmful. The workers need their own party, but
it must be a party that places militant class action in the fore. Some MWMers
support the Labor Party. But the Labor Party, for all its talk of independence
from the Democrats, still says "it would be naive to expect that labor and its
allies can afford to completely abandon its relationship with the Democratic
Party." (See Labor Party web site article "After the Elections: What Next?" by
Labor Party National Organizer Mark Dudzic). And the Labor Party relies on a
section of the bankrupt union bureaucracy.

Encourage independent forms of organization. In order for the militant
sentiments of workers to have force, they need organization which can provide an
alternative to their present official forms. They need rank and file networks of
various kinds in the workplaces, within the unions and in the workers'
communities. There is no simple formula for this. What's important is to find
forms that provide active participation by the workers and tap into their desire
for class action. For example, in some circumstances, it may be possible to set
up networks of workers that carry on activity inside a workplace. Or there
may be cases where ways can be found to link up workers who reject the
sellout policies of the union leaders during a strike or other struggle.
Independent organization in no way means being "anti-union". Actually it is
organization independent of today's suffocating labor bureaucracies that allows
the workers struggle to develop. And this lays the basis for real fighting
unions in the future.

Rely on mass action. The workers' cause has never really advanced without
relying on militant mass action. Protests, strikes and rebellions that defy the
capitalist establishment are what will change the status quo. But the AFL-CIO
leadership uses the union apparatus as a campaign headquarters for two-faced
politicians. And it's no better when MWM leaders promote liberal politicians.
Activists should lend their support to mass actions of the workers. They should
encourage the workers to resist efforts of union officials or liberal community
or movement leaders to tone down their ac-tions to what's acceptable to the
powers-that-be.

The task of organizing the workers independently is not likely to
immediately result in sweeping victories. Under present conditions of lull in
the class struggle, independent worker organization will be relatively small.
But protracted work in this direction can push forward the sporadic struggles
that break out today. And work to build class independence is the only thing
that can lay the groundwork for the major class battles of the future.[]