London Education Workers' Group: we can challenge union divisions
At the 12th September rally in support of the striking Tower Hamlets College teachers leaflets were distributed by the recently formed London Education Workers Group. The leaflet called for solidarity with the striking workers. In particular, and in contrast to the sterile bombast of the union speakers at the rally, the leaflet emphasised the need to go beyond union divisions "The most important thing is to continue spreading the struggle, to continue getting support and solidarity from other colleges facing cuts and anyone else next in the firing line. Part of this means going beyond the boundaries set by membership of different unions and professions. Having meetings open to all staff regardless of union affiliation increases our strength as workers and keeps actions under our control. We must seek out each other's support, even if that means not waiting for the unions to make those links for us and doing it ourselves." We wholeheartedly agree with this approach! In the period to come it is vitally important that the working class is able to wrest control of its struggles from the unions.
It's clear that the LEWG is a product of the search for forms of organisation which have a tendency to go beyond the unions. It says in the leaflet "The London Education Workers Group was established so that education workers throughout London can come together to oppose the coming assault on education. We reject the division of workers into separate unions and recognise that politicians, political parties, and union bureaucrats have nothing to offer us. Instead, direct action must be our weapon. Power comes from the grass roots and we, as education workers, must democratically and collectively controlled our own organizations". The leaflet also looks beyond purely immediate concern towards longer term, more political goals: "In the long term, it is only through opposition to both capitalism and the state that we can solve, once all for all, the problems that face us as education workers". We support this initiative and helped to distribute the leaflet at the rally and at a meeting held in another college where delegates from the THC strike had been invited to speak.
Contact LondonEWG@googlemail.com
Graham 30/09/09
Comments
On Your Post: London Ed. Workers: We Can Challenge Union Divis
October 9, 2009
Friday
Dear Comrades:
I have read the article posted here.
What I continually fail to see is, the difference between your view in this matter, and the flexibility of Trotskyists in this matter.
Some months ago, I completed reading a book published by the American Trotskyist party, the Spartacists League, who, by the way, have a sister organization in the UK, your country, who publish a paper there, Workers Hammer. I suspect if you wanted to get ahold of this book I read, you could write them and they would be in touch with the American publisher. The book is entitled, "James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928," and the publisher is the American publisher of the Spartacists, Prometheus Research Library, and the Spartacist Publishing Company.
Cannon was one of the long-time cadres of American left-wing political radicalism. He was born in February of 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, which is about as "heartland" as "heartland" can get in my country, the U.S.A. (This old town is now part of Kansas City.) Cannon's father had been an Irish Republican and a Populist first, but had come over to the Socialist movement with the long-time American left-wing radical and socialist spokesman, Eugene V. Debs in 1897. At the age of 18, Cannon in 1908 joined the Socialist Party. In 1911, he quit the Socialist Party to join the Industrial Workers of the World which, as you undoubtedly know, was heavily politically influenced by the politics of anarcho-syndicalism. I should add something here. In the book, "The American Socialist Party, 1900-1912," by -- damn it, I'm forgetting the author's name!!!, but I think it was a Stalinist -- there's a point made that the Socialist Party right-wing was pressuring and pushing out the left-wingers in the party, and that this was pretty much accomplished with the forcing out of the party leadership of "Big Bill" Haywood, the old Western Federation of Miners militant labor activist, and co-founder in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World, and himself on the leading executive committee of the Socialist Party till he was pushed out of the party leadership by the right-wing in 1912. While I do not know this for sure, I suspect the reason Cannon left the party in 1911 was, he was part of the left-wing in the party, and like other militant left-wing workers, he saw the handwriting on the wall, and probably exited the party before Haywood was finally forced out of his leadership position in the party. The right-wing of the party were classical social-democratic reformist opportunists kissing up to the American imperialist bourgeois ruling class and the two-party system of U.S. capitalist imperialism.
In any case, Cannon worked as an agitator and organizer for the IWW from 1912 to 1914, traveling the country, and from 1914 to 1919 he was active in the local Kansas City chapter.
What impelled him back into political action (the IWW were anti-political or anti-party, as I think you know) was, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Cannon re-joined the Socialist Party in order to ally with its pro-Bolshevik left-wing in April of 1919. He helped start a communist newspaper in Kansas City, Kansas, the "Workers' World," in April 1919. In June of 1919, he was a Kansas City delegate to a national caucus of the Socialist Party Left-wing held in New York City. (By the way, the 1980s-era Hollywood movie, "Reds," produced, directed, and starred in by Warren Beatty, depicting the life of the great early American communist journalist and radical writer, John Reed, is pretty good in terms of the accuracy of the factual details on the founding of the early American communist movement, which at its founding had two rival parties emerge. One was led by the American Marxist theoretician, a guy named Louis Fraina, who later left the movement but in the 1930s authored a book under the name, Louis Corey, entitled, "The Decline of American Capitalism".) At an August 1919 convention in Chicago, the left wing split from the Socialist Party, and two communist parties were formed. John Reed was very influential in one of them, and that was the one in which Cannon was active. That party's name was, the Communist Labor Party. Even though Cannon did not attend that convention, he and his entire Kansas City left wing joined Reed's Communist Labor Party, rather than the rival Communist Party of America. Cannon was elected Communist Labor Party secretary for Missouri and organizer for the Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri district. (I'm taking this information pretty much verbatim from the introductory piece on Cannon in the Spartacist Publishing Company-Prometheus Research Library book whose title I mentioned, and the piece is entitled, "About James P. Cannon".)
The two communist parties eventually merged and founded the Workers Party of America. The party retained this name till 1929. Cannon was the chairman of this party from its founding convention in December of 1921 through its third convention in December 1923. He was a member of its Central Executive Committee, essentially its Central Committee, from 1920 to 1928, and of its Executive Council, basically its Political Committee or Political Bureau, from 1922 to 1928. He was assistant executive secretary of the party from December 1923 until August 1925; and he was throughout this period a prominent public party spokesman, as well as the party's education director. He was the Workers Party candidate for governor of the state of New York here in the U.S. in the fall of 1924.
In 1925, Cannon was instrumental in founding the International Labor Defense, a united-front defense organization. He was secretary and chief administrator of the Interntaional Labor Defense from its founding until his 1928 expulsion from the Workers Party. He spoke frequently on behalf of the International Labor Defense, and the International Labor Defense organized mass agitation against the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, among its other campaigns.
Cannon first went to Moscow to serve as the American delegate to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in June 1922. He spent seven months there, first as a member of the Presidium of the ECCI from June through November and then as a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. He made four other trips to Moscow later in the decade. In 1925 he was a delegate to the Fifth Plenum of the ECCI. In 1926 he attended the Sixth ECCI Plenum. In 1927 he was a delegate to the Eighth ECCI Plenum. And finally, he was a delegate to the Sixth World Congress, July-August 1928. The Spartacists were quite right in saying this at this point: "It was at the Sixth Congress that Cannon was won to Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition. In October 1928 he was expelled from the Workers Party for Trotskyism, along with Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. At the time of his expulsion Cannon was the party's candidate for Congress in New York's Second District."
The Spartacists continue: "For the next 25 years Cannon was the principal leader of American Trotskyism, retiring as National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1953. At the time of his death in August 1974 Cannon was still the National Chairman of the SWP; however the party had abandoned the Trotskyist program more than ten years earlier..."
I took the trouble to write this informational stuff down because Cannon was no "lightweight." He was a long-time primary leader of early American communism, as well as the primary leader of American Trotskyism. The book of his speeches and writings published by the Spartacists from the 1920s provides some sense of his approach to trade union tactics. Cannon, by the way, had a considerable base of support in the Workers Party in the 1920s (or it seems clear from the reading of his speeches published by the Spartacists he did) among the blue-collar proletarian element of the party. This, I think, is pretty important here in assessing the issue of trade union and workers' organizational tactics.
This brings me back to my original point.
The issue really in any militant labor action is, flexibility. I view Cannon as a veteran, authoritative guy in the revolutionary movement, and as one whose views I respect and admire. The guy was active in militant labor activism in the IWW from 1911 through 1919. He was a founding American Communist and active in the American communist movement from its founding in 1919 through his expulsion in 1928, at which time he had been won to Trotskyism. He was quite "in touch" in the Workers Party with all the proletarian elements, among whom he had enormous influence.
Therefore, this issue of flexibility is the key issue.
And I think the ICC sets up a kind of formalistic roadblock or formalistic Chinese Wall, if you will, between "union"-based labor activism per se, and "non-union"-based labor activism, per se. That is my primary "bone of contention" with the ICC comrades, as well as other left communist comrades. I think the early American Communist movement had its errors on both sides in the 1920s. Cannon, in fact, or so it is my impression from reading the book of his 1920s writings and speeches published by the Spartacists, partook of and participated in not only the successes, but the failures and mistakes, of that movement, and that includes, in my view, on this issue of flexibility. I think he gradually got the point that the old "boring-from-within" the AFL tactic of Foster could no more be some kind of "hardened" and "rigidified" tactic exalted to the position of a principle than, on the other side, rejecting unions altogether can be. But it is my impression the comrades of the ICC and IBRP and other left communist comrades make the mistake on the other side of the rejection of unions altogether.
The point is not to adopt one or the other side in this issue of flexibility, but to be able and willing to tactically adapt to the nature of the mass labor movement at the grass roots of society and in turn provide it revolutionary and communist leadership as and when it arises. And sometimes that movement will arise within the formal union structure, sometimes that movement will arise outside the formal union structure, and sometimes the movement will arise out of a combination of the two situations.
Here in the U.S., I think that will particularly be the case in the coming period, because the unions' pro-capitalist misleadership have so driven the unions into the camp of capital that when the coming explosion of class war does, indeed, happen in a big way, I expect some of that explosion is indeed going to occur outside the formal union structures, and that the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy of the unions will, indeed, at that moment in historical time, seek to coopt into the unions for, naturally, the pro-capitalist and pro-capitalist boss-purposes of the bureaucracy of the unions that mass movement on the ground. The purpose of revolutionaries should be to work to not allow this to occur at that moment in time.
I think the ICC's tactic of calling for the generalization beyond confines of one locality, one workplace, of labor struggles is a good tactic. But I don't think it is alone sufficient. I think there have to be such things as daily labor strike newspapers, daily labor strike rank-and-file assemblies, daily elected workers' rank-and-file committees, to keep the labor strike in the hands of labor and out of the hands of bureaucrats, workers' defense guards that can quickly move from plant to plant, worksite to worksite, bringing out on strike other workers, and there has to be the tactic of plant occupations, worksite occupations, combined with the tactic of mass labor picket lines that no scab (strikebreaker) dares cross. There is going to also have to be -- whether the ICC and IBRP and other left communists like calling it anti-fascist or not -- on the ground committees of workers' defense which simply necessarily will have to engage in defense of the workers' strike action against not only the private militias and private security guards and the cops, but against armed fascists hired by the bosses to crush the strike. This will particularly here in the U.S. be a question here in the Southern states when Southern labor explodes in the U.S., because the Ku Klux Klan American fascists are the key element historically used by the bosses in this country to keep labor divided along skin color lines. The Klan here are the oldest American fascist organization. So whether or not you formalistically call that "anti-fascism" or not, there's going to have to be committees of workers' self-defense to defend the workers' on strike against the class enemies of the workers.
I am very concerned the ICC sometimes gets so hung up in issues of words and terminology that it forgets the substantive issues of program and what communists are about. That is why I continually raise this issue of flexibility.
Anyway, just wanted to write that.
I enjoyed the piece the comrades wrote and, generally speaking, was impressed by its content.
Comradely,
Allan Greene
Email: tompaine1917@yahoo.com
PS: I have a medical problem which, at some point, might result in loss of my hearing in one ear, or possibly even both, and, more significantly, might eventually result in some considerable pain on one of my ears at least. It so far has not done so, happily. But if it does start resulting in serious pain, I may not be able to pursue political dialogue to the degree I've so far pursued it with the comrades. So far, however, that is not yet an issue. I have been informed by personnel at a medical clinic there's not much they can do for this problem, and I suspect it's simply a result of decades of stress coming from fighting for decades for communism, socialism, equality, and resultant build-up in inner ears of the issue.
Class nature of the unions
Allan -- thanks for your comment. I think you still don't get our position on the unions. You say that, "the unions' pro-capitalist misleadership have... driven the unions into the camp of capital", and that the role of revolutionaries is to "...provide revolutionary and communist leadership as and when it arises".
For the ICC, the trade unions have been integrated into the capitalist state. They were lost to the working class after WW1 and have become weapons for the bourgeoisie ever since, a veritable prison for the working class. They are not 'neutral' organs that can be captured and driven back towards the working class by an 'anti-capitalist' leadership. Leftists who defend the tactic of encouraging militant workers to remain within the prison of the unions are thus doing a great service for the ruling class! See chapter 4 of our pamphlet on the unions, "Leftists and the trade unions", here:
http://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/unions_chapter_04.htm
So what is the role of revolutionaries? We see it as encouraging -- in a militant way, not from the 'sidelines' -- the natural tendencies militant workers have to search for solidarity and to overcome the divisions imposed by the unions, to promote forms of struggle that are much more effective and feared by the bosses.
The revolutionary position is thus not to keep workers locked up inside the union prison but to help them break out of it!
I have a dream ...
When i read your article and your comments, i have a dream :
may the ICC section in France could be as open as you are, and to look for roots in the real worker's movement !
What i understant of what i read here is nothing else than some anarchosyndicalist here in France are trying to do, the same that ICC France accuse to being "syndicalists".
Thanks !
An anarchosyndicalist from France