The other evening, I viewed a film about the organization Dodge Revolutionary Workers Movement or DRUM. This organization existed from 1967 to 1971 in Detroit, Michigan, centered in a Chrysler factory where about 70% of the workers were Black.
At that time, the United Auto Workers Union had not been addressing many of the grievances of the Black workers who experienced routine discrimination. DRUM responded to this by organizing a wildcat strike of 3,000 workers that was not sanctioned by the union.
In this film members of DRUM spoke about how the mayor of Detroit worked with the police department to physically assault DRUM supporters. They also testified to how the national union officials commandeered the union headquarters to prevent DRUM members from wining a union election.
These DRUM members understood that the strategy of the company was to keep the Black and white workers divided. DRUM responded to that strategy by attempting to organize all workers against the horrendous conditions they faced. During those years, there was forced overtime where workers toiled at a furious pace twelve hours per day, oftentimes seven days per week.
I was a member of the United Auto Workers Union from 1983 to 1997. I then worked for seven years at an automotive shop that was non-union. In those years, I spoke to older workers who told me about the many strikes in the auto industry in the 1960s. However, when I worked in auto during those years, there were no strikes.
This past summer demonstrations erupted around the world protesting racist murders by the police. These protests made it clear that there are growing numbers of people who are willing to struggle to end all forms of racial discrimination. Understanding this reality, I believe it is useful to look at the history of the labor movement to see the lessons we can derive from our past.
1877 to 1934 most labor battles were defeated
The first unions in this country were organized on the basis of craft. Today, the construction trades continue to be organized on crafts like electricians, carpenters, sheet metal workers, and iron workers. A problem with this method of organizing is that it doesn’t recognize the reality of capitalism. Today, industries are organized to mass produce commodities. Most of the workers in factories are relatively unskilled.
Eugene Debs was one of the union organizers who began to understand this problem and helped form the American Railway Union. This union organized skilled and unskilled workers. A basic problem of this union was that the delegates voted, by a margin of one vote, to exclude Black workers.
Then, the ARU went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman forced workers to do extremely dangerous and potentially fatal jobs. Wages at Pullman were insufficient to feed the families of workers.
The strike against Pullman won national support in spite of the fact that the federal government called out the National Guard to support the company. Ultimately the strike was defeated because the national rail unions refused to support it. Eugene Debs served time in jail for his leadership of this strike. Debs would later acknowledge that the main reason why the strike lost was because the union refused to accept Black workers.
Things begin to change
Then, in the 1930s, the depression hit this country and the world. Capitalists responded to their declining profits by throwing about one third of the labor force out of work. By the year 1934, the working class in this country began to understand that only a unified class struggle could begin to alleviate their condition.
Three victorious strikes erupted of the teamsters in Minneapolis, the auto workers in Toledo, and the longshore workers on the West Coast. After sixty years of defeats of the labor movement, these strikes won significant concessions.
John L. Lewis was the President of the Mine Workers Union at this time. He began to see how workers were becoming determined to wage tenacious battles to advance their interests. He responded to this sentiment by working to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations or the CIO. The CIO would go on to organize all the workers, skilled and unskilled, in a given industry. The United Auto Workers Union joined the CIO, and went on strikes against General Motors in 1937 and Ford in 1941.
In his book Labor’s Giant Step, Art Preis documented how there might have been many more union victories during this period. However, the union officials at that time made a consistent effort to compromise the militancy of the workers and support the politics of President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Eventually, even John L. Lewis would take the miners out of the CIO and join the AFL.
During the 1940s there were numerous instances of racist gangs who murdered scores of Black people. The police routinely took the side of these racist gangs. At that time, the CIO organized many Black workers into unions. There were members of the CIO who argued that the union needed to mobilize to defend Black people from these racist gangs.
The union officials rejected this proposal fearing that this might be a violation of the law. The facts were that when union members went on strike, the government routinely supported the corporate drive to break those strikes. The union needed to stand up to the company, as well as their supporters in the government in order to win union recognition.
The civil rights and Black power movements
The Civil Rights movement mobilized nationwide support for overturning the racist Jim Crow laws that effectively denied Black people citizenship rights in this country. However, as we have seen, doing away with Jim Crow did not do away with institutionalized racist discrimination. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, many of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement abandoned the struggle to mobilize grass roots opposition to discrimination. These former leaders became active in support of Democratic Party politics.
However, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, hundreds of cities throughout the country erupted in rebellion protesting routine police brutality. This was also the time when the Dodge Revolutionary Workers Movement organized protesting discrimination on the job.
We might think about the fact that during these years of the mid and late 1960s, the United States was in the midst of an economic upturn. We also might think about how those hundreds of rebellions were essentially isolated to the Black community.
During these same years, students throughout this country and the world began to mobilize protesting the war against Vietnam. While the U.S. government argued that this was a war for “democracy”, people in this country began to understand that the masses of the Vietnamese people opposed the rule of a puppet regime imposed by the United States government.
Young people became enraged at the fact that thousands of soldiers in this country lost their lives in a war that made absolutely no sense for working people. However, the anti-war movement rarely managed to generalize that struggle with the movement demanding the liberation of Black people in this country.
These movements also parked women to protest the routine discrimination against half of the human race. Those protests forced the government to legalize abortion and give women the right to decide if and when they would become mothers. This movement also forced all kinds of employers to accept women into jobs they rarely, if ever, had before. However, all these movements failed to come together, advancing the interests of the working class of the world..
1970 - 2020
Then, from the years 1970 to 2020, new kinds of developments evolved in this country. Corporations closed down factories and eliminated millions of jobs. I experienced the elimination of several jobs where I worked.
As a result, the United States changed from a manufacturing based economy, to a service orientated economy. Many of the new jobs were housed in office buildings and consisted of banking, insurance, advertising, sales, health care, and education.
During the 1930s workers developed a consciousness where they began to understand that the road to economic advancement was tied to effective union strikes against corporations. One of the limitations of the union movement is that the goal was and is to advance the interests of only union members.
However, unions represent only one part of the working class. Unions rarely mobilized their membership to protest or combat the routine discrimination that Blacks, women, Latinos, and immigrants face.
Because of this problem, unions were helpless to do anything about the closing of factories throughout this country. Their strategy was to advocate for a campaign of “Buy American.”
One obvious problem with this campaign is that workers are primarily workers and not consumers. Our strength lies in the fact that we can unite in struggle with workers all over the world. As a result, the Buy American campaign only succeeded is advancing a perspective that separated workers in this country from our sisters and brothers all over the world.
However, during these same years, tens of millions of people in this country moved into suburban homes or into homes in the affluent areas of the cities. Most people in this country drove cars, and had the resources to send their children to college. In fact, many people believed that the ticket to a better life depended on receiving a college diploma.
However, while about twenty percent of the population in this country experienced improved living standards, the majority either experienced effectively stagnant of deteriorating wages.
During these years, corporations spent about $200 billion in advertising every year. This money wasn’t just about selling commodities. The idea was that workers are not workers but consumers.
A worker has an antagonistic relationship with the employer. During an eight-hour day, the employer requires workers to do as we are told for literally every minute we are at work. Workers receive more or less in our paycheck. Employers receive the wealth that workers produce. As a result, tens of millions of people in this country do not have enough food to eat, while a few thousand people have billions of dollars in assets.
Seeing this reality, we might think about the fact that Oprah Winfrey has been one of the best things that happened to advertising in this country. Winfrey doesn’t just sell commodities. She sells a lifestyle arguing that a disposable income will give people a chance for fulfilling lives.
We might contrast the Oprah Winfrey show, to the friendship between Nina Simone (Young Gifted and Black) and Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). Nina Simone had this to say about their friendship: “we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, revolution—real girls’ talk” We can rest assure that these are not the topics to be discussed on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
2020
However, around the year 2020, young people began to see that things were beginning to change. The cost for that college degree became astronomical. The cost of housing, health care, and transportation became more and more difficult to purchase. Astronomical insurance costs added to this problem.
Then, came the pandemic. Employers threw tens of millions of workers out of their jobs. Although the government knew of the possibility of a pandemic, this same government scrambled just to get face masks and respirators. President Trump even contacted COVID-19 because he ignored medical advice and attended what became a super-spreader event. As a result, the United States became the epicenter of the pandemic.
This reality put a spotlight on the reality young people faced. They began to see that getting that college degree would not necessarily insure a lucrative lifestyle. To the contrary, they began to feel insecure about the possibilities for their future.
So, when the world viewed the video of Officer Derrick Chauvin murdering George Floyd, there was an explosion of outrage. Millions of people demonstrated around the world protesting the routine racist murders by the police in this country. When the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators, the outrage only increased and many more joined the protests.
In the past, few police officers had ever been convicted of murder. Those who were convicted usually received light sentences. However, because of the massive protests, government officials favored the conviction of Chauvin for murder. Unlike the convicted police murderers of the past, Chauvin will, no doubt, receive a long sentence for his horrendous crime.
So, when we look at this history, I believe there are a few conclusions we can draw. In the 1960s the numerous rebellions against police brutality did not spark a national uprising. Those were the years of a relative economic upturn. However, in the 1930s and in 2020 there were downturns in the economy. In those years we saw the beginnings of a change in consciousness where there was a broad openness for the struggle against discrimination. In fact, both white and Black workers came together mobilizing for basic change.
However, we also saw how the union organizing drive at Amazon did not win union recognition. I believe we need to take that temporary setback in the context of about fifty years of relative quiescence in the labor movement.
Today there is more interest in Marxist politics than there has been in a long time. Most of those who are looking at the writings of Marx and Lenin are young people searching for a new vision for their future.
For me, there is only one road that can advance the cause of both human dignity and a future where humanity will work in harmony with the environment. This is to advance the cause of a labor party that strives to install a government where the needs of workers become the priority. That kind of government would make the drive for corporate profit appear as an unfortunate nightmare humanity managed to put in the past.
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