From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The "Socialist Alternative" Website- A History of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
A History of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI)

Below is a general account of the development of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) over the last 24 years. It is based on a speech made by Peter Taaffe at a European School of the CWI in July 1997. Valuable comments were also made during the discussion by a number of comrades, some with a long history within the CWI. In particular, Arne Johansson from Sweden, Angela Bankert from Germany, François Bliki from Belgium and many others all made important additional points on the history of the CWI. As far as is possible in a short account, their comments have been incorporated into the text. This is by no means a full account of the work of the CWI over almost two and a half decades. A proper history is eagerly awaited. It is hoped a comrade will be able to undertake this task in the near future.


Foundation - 1974

The CWI was founded at a meeting of 46 comrades from 12 countries in April 1974. This was not the beginning of international work by supporters of the British Militant (now Socialist Party), who were the main initiators for the founding of the CWI. Many efforts were undertaken in the previous ten years to extend the influence of the ideas of the British Militant internationally. Even without a single international contact, Militant always proceeded from an international standpoint. An international is, first of all, ideas, a program and a perspective. The general ideas are the linchpin of any organization. From this alone flows the type of organization that is required. Therefore, the history of the CWI, as with the British Militant, is a history of the ideas of this body, in contrast to the ideas advanced by other rival Marxist organizations.

The need for an international organization flows from the very development of capitalism itself. The great historical merit of capitalism is that it developed the productive forces, of which the working class is the most important, and bound individual nations together through the world market. Internationalism, as Marx pointed out, flowed from the very situation created by capitalism, i.e. the creation of the world market and the world working class. This idea is even more important today in the period of globalization. The linking together of companies, continents and different national economies on a world scale has been taken to an extent never even imagined by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.


First International

The first attempt to set up an international was, of course, undertaken by Marx and Engels with the founding of the First International. Marx attempted to bring together in one international organization the most advanced sections of the working class: French radicals, British trade unionists, and even the Russian anarchists. Great work was undertaken by the First International, culminating in the heroic Paris Commune. Engels pointed out that the International was "intellectually" responsible for the Commune although it had not "lifted a finger" to create it.

This first great attempt of the working class to establish their own state made the bourgeois tremble. They drowned the Commune in blood and conducted a witch-hunt against those who they held responsible, above all the leaders and adherents to the First International. But the defeat of the Paris Commune also coincided with an upturn in capitalism and a serious crisis within the First International especially because of the role of the anarchists, led by Bakunin. Marx and Engels led a successful struggle against the ideas of anarchism but, alongside the disruptive activities of the anarchists, the upswing of world capitalism created reformist illusions in those like the British trade union leaders, which led to splits and divisions within the First International. Marx and Engels then drew the conclusion that the First International had done its job, had established the idea of internationalism and of an International in the consciousness of the working class. But they also concluded that, having exhausted this historical mission, it should be wound up after moving its offices to New York.

Second and Third Internationals

The period that followed saw the creation of mass parties of the working class. These parties were mostly influenced by the ideas of Marx and Engels. This process culminated in the foundation of the Second International in 1889. This organization developed in a generally progressive phase of capitalism. Tens of thousands of working-class people were mobilized by these parties, attracted to the ideas of socialism and given a basic class education. But because of the objective conditions - the steady progress of capitalism in developing the productive forces - this led the leaders of the parties who adhered to the Second International to collaborate with the capitalists, seeking compromises, which became a way of life. In effect, a stratum rose above the working class, with catastrophic consequences, once capitalism's progressive phase had exhausted itself. This was clearly shown in the onset of the First World War. The overwhelming majority of the leaders of the parties of the Second International supported their own bourgeois in the bloody slaughter of the war.

The adherents to genuine internationalism were reduced to a handful. Some who may feel that the genuine internationalists today have been enormously weakened by the collapse of Stalinism and the ideological offensive of the bourgeoisie, should ponder the situation of Lenin, Trotsky, Connolly, MacLean, Liebknecht, Luxemburg and other genuine Marxists, in the First World War. At the Zimmerwald conference, which gathered together those who were opposed to the First World War, the old joke went that the delegates could have fitted into two stagecoaches! Yet two years later the Russian revolution exploded, and within nine months of this, the Bolsheviks were in power and the first genuine workers' state had been established. This set in train the ten days that shook the world.

Out of the Russian revolution came the creation, in 1919, of the Third International. If anyone has any doubts of the effects of the Russian revolution, read John Dos Pasos's USA. He gives many headlines from the US press about the Russian revolution. Not just the yellow press, whose editors dipped their pens in mad-dog saliva, but also the so-called "responsible and informed" journals of capitalism, like the New York Times, which carried headlines such as, "Lenin Assassinates Trotsky", or "Trotsky Kills Lenin". Even more lurid was the edition that claimed, "Trotsky Kills Lenin in Drunken Brawl". The Hungarian workers attempted to follow their Russian brothers and sisters, as did the German and Italian workers. In fact, the whole of the European working class was striving in this direction. It is not possible to go into detail on the causes of the Third International's degeneration. Trotsky traces this out in detail. The main causes were the isolation of the Russian revolution and the development of privileged strata that usurped political power. The defeat of the German revolution and the later betrayal of the German working class with the coming to power of Hitler consolidated the political counter-revolution carried out by the Stalinist elite.

Fourth International

The political collapse of the Third International led Trotsky to pose the need for a new Fourth International. But the founding conference did not take place until 1938. This was no accident. This step was based upon the perspective developed by Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement of a new world war. As a consequence, Trotsky envisaged a mighty revolutionary wave that would sweep across western Europe. He was absolutely right in this, as the revolutionary events of 1944-47 demonstrated. This began with the Italian revolution of 1943-44 and was followed by the revolutionary events in France and other convulsions throughout Europe. But Trotsky could not have anticipated that Stalinism would come out of the war strengthened and that imperialism would be greatly weakened. As part of this process the Communist parties, which had participated and often led the struggle against Hitler, Mussolini and fascism, increased their mass support. Social democracy was also strengthened. The very power which had been vested in these organizations by an aroused working class allowed their leaders to save capitalism at this crucial historical juncture. Capitalist counter-revolution was carried through, not in an outright military or fascist form, but mainly by "democratic" means. Social democracy and Stalinism, and the mass parties which based themselves on these ideas, saved capitalism in Western Europe in this period and, in effect, laid the political preconditions for the beginning of the upswing of world capitalism in the post-1945 situation.

After Trotsky

As with all Trotskyists, we trace our roots back to Trotsky himself. We in Britain, however, came from the Workers International League (WIL), set up in 1937, and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), formed in 1944. We believe that the analysis of this party and its leaders, like Ted Grant, Jock Haston and others, was more accurate than the perspectives of others. They anticipated the development of deformed workers' states in Eastern Europe and China, in particular. The leadership of the "Fourth International", Ernest Mandel, Michael Raptis (Pablo), Pierre Frank and others, believed that this phenomenon - the creation of deformed workers' states - was an impossibility. Faced with reality, however, they did a somersault. Then they went to the other extreme and Tito, in Yugoslavia, became an "unconscious Trotskyist" as did Mao Zedong.

Of course, the leaders of the RCP made mistakes. There is no such a thing as an infallible leadership. Ted Grant, for instance, originally characterised the regimes in Eastern Europe, such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, as "state capitalist". But he checked himself, re-examined the works of the great teachers, such as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, and came out with a correct evaluation of the situation of these states. Tony Cliff, on the other hand, maintained, and still maintains, the doctrine of state capitalism.

The leaders of the RCP also made the mistake, in our opinion, of entering the Labour Party in 1949-50. The majority, led by Grant and Haston, correctly argued that the conditions were not there for successful entry into the Labour Party. The Labour government of 1945 was actually carrying out reforms, the creation of the welfare state, etc, and there were the beginnings of the world economic upswing. It would have been more correct to remain as an independent party with the majority of the efforts of the Trotskyists, at that stage, directed towards industry. But the capitulation of Jock Haston led to the disintegration of the majority and, in effect, the capitulation of Ted Grant to the wrong policy of Gerry Healy for entry into the Labour Party. However, because of the beginning of the post war boom, even a powerful Marxist organization would have been undermined. The objective situation in this period and for the foreseeable future, was favorable both for reformism and Stalinism.


USFI Congress 1965

My generation entered the scene at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. I joined our organization in 1960. We had a base amongst workers in Liverpool and there was also a base amongst a very promising layer of students who joined our organization at Sussex University. We were, at this stage, part of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI). We had been forced into a very unprincipled fusion with Mandel's organization in Britain, the Internationalist Group, later the International Marxist Group (IMG), in mid-1964. The old, rather self-mocking, slogan of the Trotskyists at that time was, "unhappy with fusions, happy with splits". And sure enough within six months - towards the end of 1964 - because the amalgamation had taken place on an unprincipled basis, there was a split. In order to clarify the situation of a split organization with two distinct groupings, Ted Grant and myself attended the Congress of the USFI in 1965. Our arguments for continuing to be recognized as the only official British section of USFI were rejected. This decision was in the tradition, unfortunately, of the leaders of this organization who preferred pliant followers able to carry out their line, rather than genuine collaborators, even with serious political differences. Our tradition has always been to try and argue out differences politically. The tone for the USFI was set by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States. James Cannon was an able workers' leader but possessed certain Zinovievist, that is maneuverist, traits. An honest approach towards the different sections of the USFI was foreign to this leadership.

The Congress of the USFI took place in the Taunus Mountains, in Germany, in November/December 1965. We submitted alternative documents and amendments to those of the leadership. We had differences on the character of modern capitalism and economic perspectives. We maintained, I believe correctly, that Mandel's ideas were neo-Keynesian in content. We also differed with them on perspectives for the Common Market, as the European Union was called at that stage. The USFI leadership clearly thought that European capitalism was at the point of "take-off", that capitalism would be able to unify Europe. We also differed with them on the analysis of the colonial and semi-colonial world. We were in support of the national liberation struggle, even under bourgeois leadership, but without in any way giving a shadow of political support to the leadership of these movements. The US SWP, which was then part of the USFI leadership, believed that Castro was more or less carrying out the tasks of genuine Trotskyism at that stage. There was no need, according to this organization, for a political revolution in Cuba, i.e. the creation of soviets, the election of officials, the right of recall, etc. On the other hand, in the course of the conference deliberations we managed to extract from the leadership a difference between Mandel, on the one side, and the US SWP, on the other, in relation to China and Mao Zedong. When we questioned Mandel about a formula in their document about the need for an "anti-bureaucratic movement" in China, he admitted that the US SWP believed that a political revolution was necessary but that Mandel, Maitan and Frank believed that it was not. In general, however, despite the fact that our documents were the only real opposition at the congress, our ideas were not addressed and hardly referred to.

Refuting our arguments, Mandel & Co. recognized two sympathizing groups of the USFI in Britain, ourselves and the IMG. This was completely unprecedented in the history of the Trotskyist movement. While there are examples of an official section and sympathetic groups being accepted, there was no precedent for an official section to be de-recognized or put on a par with a "sympathizing" group. In our book this was a form of expulsion, moreover, one undertaken in an underhand and dishonest fashion. We decided that the time had arrived when we must turn our backs on this organization and the squabbling sects who described themselves as "Trotskyist".


Out of the USFI

We tried to follow the advice of Marx and Engels to their followers in Germany in the 1870s. Writing to Babel, one of the leaders of what later became the mass Social Democratic Party of Germany, Engels commented, in 1873: "It is easy to pay too much attention to one's rival and to get into the habit of always thinking about him first. But both the General Association of German Workers and the Social Democratic Workers Party together still only form a very small minority of the German working class. Our view, which we have found confirmed by long practice, is that the correct tactics and propaganda is not to draw away a few individuals and members here and there from one's opponent, but to work on the great mass which still remains apathetic. The primitive force of a single individual who we ourselves attracted from the crude mass is more than ten Lassallian renegades, who always bring the seeds of their false tendencies into the party with them." (The Lassallians were the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle who founded the General Association of German Workers in 1863.)

Marx commented earlier, in 1868: "The sects see the justification for its existence and its 'point of honor' - not in what it has in common [emphasized by Marx] with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it."

We decided to face up in Britain, Germany, Ireland, Sweden and elsewhere to the task of reaching those workers, particularly young workers, who had an interest in left politics and could be won to a Marxist and Trotskyist position. There were many very good comrades in the small Trotskyist groups, many who were raw revolutionary material, but the opportunities of transforming them into rounded-out Marxists were squandered by the mistakes of the leadership of these groups.


Guerillaism and the USFI

We had fundamental differences with the USFI's approach on the role of students in the revolution, and particularly on guerrillaism. Their position on guerrillaism resulted in the destruction of many potentially fine revolutionary fighters. It is not a question of ex post facto criticisms but, at the time when the USFI was engaged in sectarian adventures in Latin America and elsewhere, we polemicized against them. In January 1972, for instance, when it was revealed that there was a split between the mainly European sections of the USFI and the followers of the US SWP, we utilized the opportunity in internal material to explain our position to our comrades and to theoretically inoculate them against the ideas of Mandel and others.
The main proponent of guerrillaism, at least publicly, was Livio Maitan. We will give just a few quotes from a document, written in 1972, of our criticisms of his position:

"Of lesser importance but still necessary is the arming of ourselves against the ideas of the different sects. The Bulletin has already carried criticisms of different tendencies in this country. This short piece is to familiarize the comrades with the present evolution of the United Secretariat [USFI], the organization we were expelled from in 1965. Internal documents of [the USFI] have come into our possession that reveal a split between the mainly European sections of the USFI and the followers of the American SWP. The issue around which both tendencies have polarised is that of guerrilla war (but it doesn't stop there) and the attitude their organization has taken towards it. This is of particular interest to our tendency as it was one of the questions which we attempted to raise at their 1965 World Conference and which was dealt with at length in our document of the Colonial Revolution presented to that Congress and rejected without discussion. (See our document on the Colonial Revolution and the Report of the Congress):

"Maitan gives a number of quotes from the great Marxist teachers. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky are transformed in Maitan's hands from the masters of scientific socialism into guerrilla romantics who anticipated Guevara, Debray and their ilk as proponents of the idea of peasant based guerrilla operations. Thus, in a reply to earlier SWP criticism, Maitan has torn out of context extracts from Engels, Marx and Lenin in order to demonstrate the validity of guerrilla war! He quotes, for example, from Engels's Introduction to Marx's Class Struggle in France, which refers to insurrection as an "art". Engels was dealing with the problems of a proletarian uprising in the cities! Where the great teachers of Marxism have supported guerrilla warfare, it has only been as an auxiliary to the movement of the working class in the cities. Maitan's attempt to utilize articles by Lenin on guerrilla war in 1906 are a complete distortion. He makes Lenin appear more as a theoretician of the Social Revolutionaries, in looking towards guerrilla war and the peasant movement as the most important factor in the situation at that time, than of the Bolsheviks. In reality, the Bolshevik Party had fought a relentless theoretical battle against precisely these ideas, insisting on the prime role of the industrial proletariat, while giving every support to the peasant movements in the countryside and attempting to bring it under the influence of the proletariat.

"Trotsky elaborated this idea in his work on the Permanent Revolution and elaborated in numerous articles on the incapacity of the peasantry, because of its social position, its lack of cohesiveness, etc, to plan any independent role in the Revolution; either it supports the proletariat, as in the Russian Revolution, or the bourgeoisie.

"Lenin did support guerrilla war in 1906, as an auxiliary when he considered the Revolution was on the upswing. Later, when it was obvious that an ebb had set in, Lenin opposed the continuation of guerrilla war, as he did the faction of Boycottists amongst the Bolsheviks who opposed any participation in the Tsarist Duma and the possibility of even limited legal work. He would have condemned as a slander those who, because of these articles, would have accused him of propounding the theory of guerrilla war as outlined by Maitan.

"The position is even worse in the case of Trotsky: "On the question more specifically of rural guerrilla warfare, Trotsky grasped the importance of armed peasant detachments in the Second Chinese Revolution." (USFI International Information Bulletin, January 1968, page 13). The impression is given that Trotsky greeted the peasant guerrilla war in China enthusiastically and uncritically. In reality, as the following extracts from Trotsky will show, he warned that because of the predominantly peasant social basis of the Chinese "Red" Army, it could come into collision with the proletariat if it defeated Chiang Kai-shek and entered the cities:

"It is one thing when the Communist Party, firmly resting upon the flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead the peasant war. It is an altogether different thing when a few thousand or even tens of thousands of revolutionists assume the leadership of the peasant war and are in reality Communists or take the name without having serious support from the proletariat. This is precisely the situation in China. This acts to augment in the extreme, the danger of conflicts between the workers and the armed peasants... Isn't it possible that things may turn out so that all this capital will be directed at a certain moment against the workers?... The peasantry, even when armed, is incapable of conducting an independent policy." (Peasant War in China, September 1932)

"As we know, the "Red" Army did shoot down those workers who rose in support of it in the cities. Because of the impasse of Chinese society, the Chinese Stalinists were able to use the peasant army to maneuver between the classes and construct a state in the image of Moscow. (See Colonial Revolution document)

"And as if it were written for today, Trotsky answered the "guerrillaist" arguments... when he remarked in passing: "The Russian Narodniks ("Populists") used to accuse the Russian Marxists of "ignoring" the peasantry, of not carrying out work in the villages, etc. To this the Marxists replied: "We will arouse and organize the advanced workers and through the workers we shall arouse the peasants." Such in general, is the only conceivable road for the proletarian party."

"Not once are these fundamental principles of Marxism posed, i.e. of the social role of the working class, organized in large scale industry, being the only class capable of developing the necessary cohesion and consciousness to carry through the tasks of socialist revolution.

"On the contrary, having bent to the mood of the rural guerrillaism reflected within their own ranks, it is only one step removed from hailing the latest outbreak of urban guerrilla war as a step forward: "We also envisaged the possibility of essentially urban guerrilla warfare and armed struggle." (USFI International Information Bulletin, page 17)

"One of the ideas fought for almost from the conception of the Marxist movement against the anarchists and terrorists has been that of mass action by the proletariat as the main lever for the social revolution. No self-sacrificing individual or small group armed with bomb and pistol, is able to bring about the downfall of the capitalist system. On the contrary, individual terror can bring down a wave of repression on the whole labor movement, as has been the case in a whole series of countries, of Latin America and of Quebec recently...

"Hansen, on behalf of the SWP in replying to the arguments of Maitan and Mandel, gives a crushing indictment of the present open "guerrillaist" orientation of the majority in his own international organization. Many correct points are made against the majority with which we would... agree.

"But Hansen's criticisms are at the same time leveled at the positions which he and the SWP held only yesterday and which they have not completely abandoned.

"Many of the ideas and even the formulations relating to the role of guerrilla war and by implication the peasantry are borrowed from our documents presented at the 1965 World Congress.

"If the SWP now claim that they have consistently held this position they would have to explain why they opposed our document presented to the World Congress where a clear Marxist perspective is given in relation to developments in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Ours was the only position which started out from the fundamental ideas of Marxism, the primacy of the working class and the need for the Marxist cadres to root themselves amongst the proletariat.

"In fact the pro-Castro and hence pro-guerrillaist orientation is one of the themes of Hansen's document. He quotes with approval the earlier reunification document in 1963 which founded the present United Secretariat: "Guerrilla warfare under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the end of the Second World War. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries."

"There is no attempt, as we have done in our material, to first of all lay down the main strategy of Marxist tendencies in these countries of first concentrating the small forces available amongst the industrial workers while, of course, giving every assistance to armed action by the peasants and attempting to tie in these movements together with that of the organized workers. The "experiences" referred to are those of Cuba, Algeria, etc, i.e. of the methods of rural guerrilla warfare...

"Perhaps the most pertinent point in all the documents is that made by Hansen against Maitan: "One of the items in the evolution of comrade Maitan's thinking might have been the internal developments in the Italian section of the Fourth International at that time when, if I am informed correctly, the bulk of the youth were lost to a Maoist current"! (USFI International Information Bulletin, page 22)

"This statement alone is a complete vindication of the criticisms we made at the time of the 1965 Congress and in our document on The Sino-Soviet Dispute and the Colonial Revolution [written by Ted Grant]. We warned them: "No concessions can be made to the degenerate nationalism of all wings of Stalinism... Those comrades who dream of an 'easier' approach are deluding themselves. Nor is it possible to imagine an opportunist approach on "current", "modern" lines will succeed, while the revolutionary approach is left for the bedroom. "Why should any cadres in the Russian wing, or the Chinese wing, approach the Fourth International unless it has something to offer? What have we to offer at this stage except the theories of the masters, reinforced and enriched by the experience of the last decades?" (Colonial Revolution, pages 25-26)

"The pro-Chinese position of the whole of the USFI not only failed to win over sections of the CPs becoming critical of Moscow but on the contrary resulted in the going over of a section of the Italian USFI youth to Maoism! They preferred the real Maoists!"

This position of the USFI did untold damage in Latin America. It is no exaggeration to say that thousands, tens of thousands, of young people and workers in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and elsewhere who were initially attracted to Trotskyism, were led into the blind alley of guerrillaism by the leaders of the USFI. They had a similar position of uncritical support for the Provisional IRA in Ireland. Needless to say, their position as political attorneys for different guerrillaist leaders did not result in any substantial gains for their organization. On the contrary, as we see above, it led at a certain stage to the recruitment of potential supporters for Trotskyism to go over to these guerrillaist movements. The USFI destroyed many potentially important revolutionary fighters.


Towards New Layers and the Labour Party

We considered that our main task in the period of the 1970s and also later, was to turn decisively towards the proletariat, especially to the new layers. In Britain, as we have detailed in our book, The Rise of Militant, we concentrated our work in the Labour Party and, particularly, in the youth wing of the Labour Party. We had to skillfully adapt to this milieu but we never hid our ideas. Indeed, it became a standing joke amongst our opponents that a Militant supporter would immediately be recognized by the allegedly exaggerated hand movements but, above all, if they mentioned that they stood on the basis of the ideas of "Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky". This did not stop our "Marxist" opponents, who were usually located outside of the organized labor movement, from criticizing us for "opportunism". While we gave critical support to the left, particularly the Benn movement in the 1980s, we always defended our own independent position.

Could the same be said for those "revolutionary purists" who did not sully their hands within the mass organizations of the working class? The followers of Mandel, in a number of countries, opportunistically cuddled up to different left reformists and in the process watered down their program. No such criticism could be made of the supporters of Militant (now the Socialist Party) in Britain. We built a solid base amongst the youth, particularly in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS). Ninety per cent of our efforts were concentrated in this field. It was not just the youth comrades, but the older comrades who participated and played a role in educating the new layer of youth who were moving towards Marxism. We won a majority in the LPYS in 1970, as we have explained elsewhere, later taking all the positions on the National Committee. This probably went a bit far but the LPYS NC members were actually elected at regional conferences. Experience had shown that unless the Marxists won the NC position in a region, the Labour Party bureaucracy would hamper, undermine and frustrate the attempts of the youth movement in that area to engage in any genuine mass work. In the future, however, where we are engaged in mass work, in general it would not be appropriate for us, even where we have an overwhelming majority, to take all the positions in the movement.

We were tolerated in the Labour Party at this stage. One of the reasons for this was the genuine rank-and-file democracy that existed in the party. Also we were energetic, most of the comrades were youth, had very good ideas, etc. A wing of the bureaucracy undoubtedly believed that the youthful supporters of Militant would, as previous generations had done, move to the right as they got older. However, these "Trotskyists" did grow up but, to the horror of the right wing, they continued to defend their ideas and some of them even became MPs. They were not the kind of MPs that the right and the bureaucracy had anticipated. The 1980s was a very successful period for the Marxists in Britain, as we have explained in The Rise of Militant. At one stage our membership rose to 8,000. Three MPs - all known Trotskyists - were elected and made a marvelous contribution to the struggles of the British working class.

Of course, the ruling class hated us and put enormous pressure on the Labour bureaucracy to weaken us and drive us out of the party. As is well known, a series of expulsions ensued in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, this did not prevent us from reaching out to workers who were engaged in struggle. Alongside of the Liverpool battle, we gained invaluable experience in leading the mass movement around the poll tax. We defeated this measure and, in the process, brought down Thatcher.


Painstaking Work

The development of the British section has always run alongside the growth of the CWI. But it would be a mistake to see the CWI as a mere adjunct of the work that we did in Britain. The CWI has a separate identity. It was impossible to replicate exactly the experience of the British Marxists in every country even in Western Europe. Painstaking discussions ensued with comrades in different countries in elaborating different and varying strategies and tactics to enhance the profile, numbers and effectiveness of the supporters and members of the CWI. As explained above, even when we were restricted to the small island of Britain, we always had an international outlook. We never took a purely British position but always proceeded from an international analysis, only then examining how the situation in Britain fitted in with this. We were always on the lookout for international contacts. Many of the international contacts that we made appeared to be purely "accidental". But these "accidents" were related to the changes in the objective situation that was affecting the working class and their organizations.

Ireland

A dramatic growth in our international contacts was itself related, in the early part of the 1970s, to the big changes that were underway in the mass, traditional organizations of the working class. But the first extension of our influence came in Ireland. We recruited a young student in Britain who then went back to Northern Ireland on the eve of the explosive Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s. He, in turn, made contact with a new generation of youth, both Catholic and Protestant, around the Northern Ireland Labour Party in the city of Derry. I was invited to visit the North of Ireland in 1969. I arrived just a week before the explosive, almost revolutionary, events in Derry of August 1969. I was able to make contact and discuss with a number of young socialists at that time: John Throne, Bernadette Devlin (now McAlliskey), Cathy Harkin, Gerry Lynch and many others. We built a very important position, at that stage, amongst both Catholic and Protestant youth through the Derry Young Socialists. Later on, through our work at Sussex University, we recruited Peter Hadden who went back to Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, and has played a decisive role in our section in the North and throughout Ireland in this period. Following these discussions I traveled south and met a group of youth who were members of the Southern Ireland Labour Party in Dublin. Unfortunately, most of them who proclaimed to be Marxists were absolutely unfitted for the task of building a powerful Marxist organization. Nevertheless our work in the North of Ireland did, later on, lead to the establishment of an important presence in the South. This, in turn, led to the recruitment of what is now the leadership of the Irish section, comrades such as Dermot Connolly and Joe Higgins, who is now a Socialist Party TD.

IUSY

At this stage, we did not just work through the different youth organizations in Europe but also in the international organization of the social democratic youth, the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY). We came up against a youthful but extremely hardened group of careerists who had been groomed as future leaders of the mass social democratic parties. Their main aim was to occupy the plush offices and limousines of ministers in future social democratic governments. We represented a mortal threat to them. Compared to the Labour bureaucracy in Britain, these creatures were a much more vicious breed. Nevertheless, our young comrades attended every meeting, no matter how daunting or boring the task in confronting these young careerists, in the hope of turning up useful potential socialist and revolutionary fighters.
This paid off in 1972 when two of our comrades, Peter Doyle and Andy Bevan, were sent to the conference of the Social Democratic Youth in Sweden. There they met Arne Johansson and Anders Hjelm who were immediately recognized as kindred spirits of the British young socialists. Arne comments:

"The visit of the two representatives of the British Militant came just at the right time. There was a radicalization amongst the social democratic youth in Sweden, with growing opposition towards the bureaucracy. At this stage we were part of a left faction within the Social Democratic Youth. We were well known, so much so that a social democratic bureaucrat even pointed out the British young socialists to us and said that our ideas were similar to theirs and that we should "discuss with them". This we did on the evening of the congress and found that we had a lot in common.

"We were concentrated in the city of Umeå in the north of Sweden, in a loose left/Marxist discussion group. Without a doubt, unless we would have met Militant at this time, this organization would have completely disintegrated. We were not politically homogenous. Nor was it preordained that we would automatically join Militant or what became the CWI. In fact, the representatives of the USFI, in the form of Pierre Frank, made determined efforts to win us. He traveled to Umeå to address a meeting of our student group. I asked him if he knew of the British Militant. His riposte was short and brutal: "They are completely impotent."

"Roger Silverman, on behalf of the British Militant visited Sweden, engaged in very thorough discussions with us and helped to consolidate us on the political positions of the British comrades. We took steps to organize a serious Marxist force but one that was very, very small at that stage. On the other hand, the Swedish Social Democratic Youth was a large organization and the bureaucracy had learned from the experience of Britain. They, therefore, very quickly moved to expel us from the SSU but this did not mean we were completely debarred from the party - you could be expelled from the SSU while still retaining membership of the social democracy. Nevertheless, the "loose left" in Umeå and elsewhere disintegrated, although we won some very good comrades to our organization.

"Undoubtedly, the 1970s was a difficult time for the Swedish Marxists and only by digging in and establishing firm roots, along with serious international contact, was it possible for us to survive this period. In effect, we could not pursue effective entry work as most of our forces were outside the SSU and, subsequently, outside the Social Democratic Party. In the creation of our organization, we had to combat not just the ideas of reformism but the false ideas of the Mandelites in Sweden. Their attitude was that the revolutionary students were the new vanguard of the working class and they adopted an extremely sectarian attitude to anyone who did not agree with them. Only by correctly analyzing the situation were we able to survive and to make serious progress in the course of the 1980s."


Germany

We had a similar, although different, situation in Germany. I had met a German comrade at the LPYS conference in 1971. He was soon recruited to our organization and, in turn, attracted a layer of youth who traveled into our ranks. But if in Sweden we had arrived just in time, as Arne commented, this was not perhaps the case in Germany. Angela Bankert comments: "The CWI came a bit late to Germany. The radicalization of the youth was well under way. This was reflected in the youth wing of the social democracy, the Jusos. Unfortunately, it was not genuine Marxism, in the form of our ideas and organization, which successfully intervened in this situation, but Stalinist-influenced organizations."

In a different historical context of sharp crisis, of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation, this position in Germany could have been fateful, as had been the case in the past in other countries. For instance, in Spain in the 1930s, the "Trotskyists" refused Trotsky's advice to enter the Spanish young socialists. But the Stalinists were not so "pure". They entered and won virtually the whole of the socialist youth which not only strengthened the Spanish Communist Party but resulted in the lost opportunity for Trotskyism to establish a mass base. The consequence was the isolation of the Trotskyists and the defeat of the Spanish revolution. Angela comments: "We intervened, with our very small forces at the beginning, just when this radical wave was beginning to recede. Nevertheless, there was a very keen audience for our ideas. At regional conferences of the Jusos and the party, with sometimes 300 people present, we could usually sell about 150 papers."


Belgium

The Belgian section of the CWI was founded in 1974 again by "accident". Roger Silverman was on his way back to Britain and missed the boat from Belgium to Britain and was, therefore, compelled to stay overnight. He therefore looked up a contact from an LPYS conference and from this original introduction, a group of youth active within the Belgian social democracy came towards us and were eventually won over politically to our ideas.

François Bliki, who has participated in the Belgian section of the CWI almost since its inception, comments:

"If we would have been in touch with the CWI prior to the 1970s, it is no exaggeration to say that we would now be the largest section in the whole of the CWI, perhaps exceeding the numbers in the British section. There was tremendous turmoil within the workers' movement in the early 1970s. This was reflected in the social democracy with the shift towards the left, particularly by the youth. The biggest Trotskyist current at that stage was around Ernest Mandel's organization, which refused to involve itself in this struggle within the social democracy. We were very young and inexperienced but, nevertheless, we had a big impact right from the beginning. In 1986 we organized a mass movement of 26,000 students in 25 different towns in Belgium. It was organized under the name of our organization because the Belgian Young Socialists would not let us use their name. We made significant gains through the work we conducted within the social democracy.

"From an historical point of view, this work was entirely justified. But of course, conditions change. The split with the Grant group in 1992 was also felt in Belgium. This resulted in 32 comrades remaining with the majority and 30 with the minority. This minority merely repeated ideas from the past that were quite adequate for their time but had become completely outmoded by the change in the situation. Whereas they have stagnated, we have undergone a big growth. Now we have over 100 and they have 20, largely older, comrades with a stagnant membership.

"In 1995, there was a split from the Mandel group with the best of the comrades coming towards and joining our organization. At that stage, the SI [the Belgian group linked to the British SWP] had 34 members. They actually approached the ex-Mandel group, led by a comrade who is now with us, but there was no question of him joining this organization rather than us. Then in 1997, at a national meeting with 21 present, the London-based leadership of the SWP tried to impose their international "party line" [although not implemented in Britain], which meant that the members of the Belgian SI would have to enter and submerge themselves into the social democracy. This is against the background where the conditions for work within the social democracy no longer exist for a serious Marxist tendency. We approached them and had discussions with the 13 who voted against [it was a majority] and, subsequently, the majority of these comrades joined us. It was the comrades who left the Mandel group earlier, and who had been approached by the SI to join them, who now went and participated in persuading the Belgian SI to join our organization."


April 1974 - CWI and Greece

By 1974 it was clear that the conditions were ripe to take the initiative in forming a properly structured international organization. Big movements took place throughout Europe. The CWI was founded at a conference in London on 20/21 April 1974. Four days later, on 25 April, the Portuguese revolution exploded and we immediately intervened. Similar upheavals were to take place in Greece and Cyprus soon afterwards, and the Franco dictatorship was on its last legs in Spain.

The history of our International is one of ideas, of an attempt to work out the most effective strategy and tactics for the building of the forces of Marxism. With a small organization it is always a question of concentrating all, or most, of your forces at the "point of attack". At that stage - the early 1970s - for us, that was clearly within the mass organizations that still retained the overwhelming support of the proletariat. In one case, Greece, we predicted the need to work in mass organizations even before they had been formally created. Almost as soon as the military junta had been overthrown in Greece in July 1974, our organization outlined the perspective for the development of a mass socialist party. We argued that this inevitably arose from the situation following the overthrow of the junta, that would open the floodgates for the mass participation in politics that would inevitably take a new form to that which existed prior to the military coup in 1967. The new generation, in particular, was looking for a revolutionary road but was repelled by the parties that still clung to Stalinism. We identified the figure who would probably lead such a party - Andreas Papandreou. He had evolved from the leader of the "left" in the liberal bourgeois party, the Center Union, prior to the seizure of power by the colonels into a radicalized socialistic opponent of the junta. And very quickly after he returned from exile, in September 1974, Papandreou took steps to organize a socialist party, PASOK, which rapidly attracted big layers of the youth and working class who were looking for a revolutionary alternative. Our ability to intervene in Greece arose from another "accidental" encounter with a Greek comrade in Britain. I happened to be speaking at an LPYS meeting in the west of London soon after the junta had seized power and a Greek comrade, a playwright who spoke little English, immediately identified us as 'Trotskyist'. This comrade participated in the fringes of our organization over a period of years. When he returned to Greece in 1973, and tried to re-enter Britain he was excluded by the authorities. This rather repressive measure against him turned out to be very fortuitous for us. He was there when the junta was overthrown and immediately made contact with a group of Trotskyists who had played a heroic role in the struggle against the dictatorship. He urged us to visit Greece, which we did shortly afterwards. At the end of 1974, I was able to win this group and another group to the CWI. The first group was led by Nicos Redoundos. Nicos still plays a vital role in Xekinima, our Greek organization. Also, as we have explained elsewhere, we won a very important group of young socialists in Cyprus. Comrades Doros and Andros remain in our organization and still play an important role. From the original group who joined us, Andros is now active in the leadership of the Greek organization. We were able to carry through the fusion of the two groups in Greece, which, for a period, worked quite effectively. Unfortunately, this unity did not last but, nevertheless, our organization rose, at one stage, to a membership of 750. Moreover, it played quite a decisive role in the developments of the left in PASOK over a very important historical period. Now PASOK, alongside many of the other traditional parties of Western Europe, is in the process of abandoning its class base and, therefore, the task in Greece is to work as an independent organization.


Portuguese Revolution

The CWI, right from its inception, was extremely energetic in intervening in any serious workers' movement. For instance, as soon as the Portuguese revolution broke out, both Bob Labi and Roger Silverman were on the streets of Lisbon distributing material hailing the revolution and outlining the perspective of what we considered was the likely development of events. For us it was not just a question of correct ideas but of ideas linked to action and intervention. A similar and very successful approach was adopted in relation to Spain. We have outlined in our book how we intervened in the Spanish situation. What is not generally realized is that there were many attempts to establish contact with Marxists and revolutionaries but they were not successful until we came across serious forces in 1974. Lynn Walsh, at a later stage, was also sent to see whether the CWI could make headway in Portugal. We then looked on any international contact, as we do today, as gold dust to be carefully nurtured and developed with the hope that this would lead on to much greater possibilities later on.

We called our international organization the Committee for a Workers' International for very good reasons. There were a number of "Internationals", all of whom maintained that they were "The" International. We did not want to go down this road. We, therefore, called ourselves a "Committee", for a future mass International. We used the word "Workers" because we wished to emphasize the central role of the proletariat, in contradistinction to others who based themselves on the peasantry, guerrillaist ideas or the students, as the "detonators" of the revolution.


Sri Lanka and India

And it was not just in Europe, where our main base was, that we began to have success. We had a very important Sri Lankan contact in London who was in touch was a big left opposition that was developing within the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). This was the largest Trotskyist party in the world, with a great revolutionary tradition, but whose leadership had moved in an opportunist direction by joining the popular fronts with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) after 1964. Through this Sri Lankan comrade, we made contact with this organization led by Siritunga Jarysuriya (Siri), Vasudeva Nanayaika (Vasu), and Vickremabahu Karunaratne (Bahu). Accordingly, Ted Grant made a visit to Sri Lanka in 1976, which led to closer political relations with these comrades. He also made a visit to India to a much looser group of 'Marxists' who had come into contact with us. I subsequently visited Sri Lanka in 1977 and the tendency led by Siri, Vasu and Bahu were won to the CWI, bringing with them a significant group of workers numbering hundreds. In effect, all the best trade union leaders who were in the LSSP came over to this trend, which constituted itself, after they were formally expelled from the LSSP, as the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP).

I also made a visit to India with Bahu after I visited Sri Lanka in April 1977. The discussions that we had with a group of "Marxists", based in Bangalore, proved to be completely abortive. This grouping of pseudo-intellectuals were welded into their armchairs, contemplating their navels even more than Buddha himself. We immediately turned our backs on them but, fortunately, made contacts with members of the former-Maoist mass Communist Party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - the CPI(M). From the contacts we made in these discussions with very good, active workers in the unions and the CPI(M), we established the first basis of our Indian organization. Roger Silverman subsequently made many visits to India and at one stage lived for quite a long period of time in the sub-continent.


First International School

After two years of the CWI's existence we organized, in 1976, an International school in the city of Ulm in West Germany. We made spectacular efforts in Britain to get as many comrades as possible to this school. We bought an old battered bus to travel to the school. This ancient vehicle trundled to the European continent, much to the astonishment of the population of the different countries that it visited. Upon our return to Britain we promptly sold the bus. The gathering in Ulm was partly a school and partly a conference of the cadres that we had managed to assemble around the banner of the CWI. Apart from the countries mentioned earlier, there were many others in which we had loose contacts or groups that were moving towards the CWI. One such group was in Cyprus, of comrades who played a key role at the time of the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. They played a quite heroic part in taking up arms against the Turkish invaders through the youth wing of the socialist party, EDEK.

Expelled From Social Democracy

While in Britain we had great latitude for work within the Labour Party throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, this was not at all the case with comrades in other countries. The social democratic bureaucracies in the countries of Western Europe had learnt from the experience of Britain. Very quickly in Sweden and Spain, our comrades, almost as soon as they formed distinct and significant groupings, were faced in the mid-1970s with a witch-hunt and expulsions. This did not prevent them from playing an important part in the struggles of the workers and the youth in their own countries. In Britain, we had successfully launched a school students' strike in 1985 against the establishment of slave labor through the YTS scheme, with 250,000 students coming out on strike. Basing itself upon the experience in Britain, the Spanish section of the CWI organized a massive movement among school students involving strikes of millions of youth. They also did great work during the Gulf War at the beginning of the 1990s. Our German section and other sections did extremely useful work at this stage as well.

Emissaries Abroad

But we did not just send emissaries for the ideas of the CWI to Europe alone. We also made a determined intervention in Latin America. In the early 1980s we sent comrades such as Paulina Ramirez and her brother, Matteus, and Tony Saunois to Chile. This involved great danger for these comrades as the Pinochet dictatorship was still in place. Great work was undertaken in Chile where the basis of the organization we have today was founded. We also sent a comrade from the Spanish section to work in Argentina, which was not as successful.

Also comrades from Britain, such as Clare Doyle and Dave Campbell, intervened in the former USSR in the extremely difficult conditions of the late 1980s and early 1990s to establish the basis of the organization that we have there. Other comrades, like Steve Jolly, Robyn Hoyl and Paul True were sent to Australia, where again great work was undertaken. This is now bearing fruit with the very successful growth of our Australian organization.

Our general policy had always been to work, where this was possible, in the mass organizations. After the initial assembling of the cadres, the task was then to develop viable sections of the CWI. But related to this was also the best method to develop the initial cadres and, alongside of this, the leadership of the different national organizations of the CWI. Leadership is something that is not easily acquired. It is an art that has to be learnt and inevitably involves mistakes, particularly from a young leadership. There is nothing wrong with this - in fact it is inevitable - particularly on tactical questions, but the important thing is to learn from mistakes.


International Campaigning

A vital component part of the development of the CWI was the successful organization of international campaigns. On the issue of Spain, for instance, before we acquired the initial cadres, we conducted a campaign of solidarity with the Spanish workers in general but, in particular, with the underground socialist unions and party, the UGT and PSOE. At that stage, this party stood well to the left of the Labour Party in Britain and of social democracy in general. These campaigns were important not only because they allowed us to intervene in Spain but also brought towards us important figures from the trade unions in Britain. In our discussions with comrades from Lutte Ouvrière, who were present at the 1997 European School, we made the point that although we have worked, and very successfully, in the trade unions this is not the only way of winning workers. It is possible to win some very good workers, some of them leading shop stewards, on issues which are not immediately related to work in a particular factory or in industry in general. For instance, we won Bill Mullins, who was then one of the leading conveners in a factory of 12,000 car workers in Birmingham, not on a trade union issue but through the campaign of solidarity with the Spanish workers. After he was won to our organization, we pursued very successful work in his factory on trade union issues. He subsequently played a key role not just in Birmingham and the West Midlands, but nationally in our trade union work and is presently our national industrial organizer.

Defending Our Comrades

In the 1980s also, with the growing importance of the different national sections of the CWI, we were involved in vital defense campaigns of comrades who had been arrested for their activity. In Israel/Palestine, comrade Mahmoud Masarwa was arrested and tortured, Femi Aborisade and other comrades in Nigeria were arrested, South African comrades were arrested and some of them imprisoned. We also were involved in the leadership of the general strike in Sri Lanka in 1980, which resulted in the victimization of thousands of workers. We organized an effective solidarity campaign with these workers on an international scale.

Nigeria

All this work brought towards us some very important contacts. Some of them were won in the most peculiar and unlikely conditions. For instance, the present powerful position that we enjoy in Nigeria was made possible to some extent by our participation in a "Black Book Fair" in London. A Nigerian lecturer visiting London accidentally came across a number of our books and documents. He was very impressed with the ideas contained in them and took them back to Nigeria. This had a big effect on a group of Nigerian activists who considered themselves Marxists, some of whom were still under the influence of Stalinism but who had heard about Trotsky, and they approached us for discussions. Through this we won the position that we have in Nigeria at the present time.

South Africa

Similarly, in South Africa, a group of activists, some of them lawyers and intellectuals who participated in the first formation of independent black unions in 1973, came across our documents. This had a powerful effect on them and some of them gave up their jobs and flew to London, into exile, in order to have discussions with us. This, in turn, led to a very successful phase of intervention in the underground struggle in South Africa where our organization was considered as a "tendency" of the African National Congress. Some of the material produced in their journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi, had a powerful effect on the outlook of the militants who were fighting in the factories and in the struggle against the apartheid regime. This was subsequently confirmed in the early 1990s when the apartheid regime began to disintegrate. This also led to the South African comrades intervening in Zimbabwe which led to the foundation of our Zimbabwean section.

New Initiatives

Our Pakistan section, which is now undertaking some of the most serious work of any section of the CWI amongst the workers and peasants, was established through Pakistani exiles who we came into contact with in London.

In the USA the visits of Sean O'Torain and the work of Alan Jones, who comes originally from Greece, resulted in the setting up of the US organization.


Exhausting the Possibilities

Work in the mass organizations, it was clear, was virtually exhausted by the end of the 1980s. More and more, the work of our different national sections was taking place outside of these organizations. But, as happens very often in history, we did not draw all the necessary conclusions as early as we should have done. I have taken this point up in my book, The Rise of Militant, where I advance the idea that successful, independent work under our own banner could have been possible in Britain as early as 1985-86. The persecution of the Marxists and the further shift towards the right within the Labour Party had completely changed the situation. The process had begun whereby the British Labour Party more and more separated itself from its working class base. We organized mass meetings attended by 50,000 workers protesting against the expulsions of our comrades. But unfortunately, we did not offer a clear organizational as well as political alternative, at this stage. We asked people to join Militant, which we still described merely as a newspaper. We were not a party. The main thrust of our propaganda was against expulsions. The call to join a newspaper, rather than a party, was intangible in the consciousness of those who attended our meetings. Contrast our experience since we changed our name to Socialist Party in Britain to the situation which obtained then. Two hundred and twenty workers agreed to join the Socialist Party in Britain in the course of the 1997 general election. The fact that we are now called a party has had a decisive effect on our own ranks in making them conscious of the tasks which are posed but also in reaching out and winning workers who are looking for a party such as ours.

1992 - Open Work

As comrades know, in 1992 there was a split in Militant and the CWI. There is no time to go into all the issues involved in this split - we have done this elsewhere. But what is clear is that the small minority that split from our ranks were utterly incapable of facing up to the new period and the new tasks which were posed by developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The decision to conduct more independent work laid the basis for the successes of our organizations in the course of the 1990s. The initiative of setting up Youth against Racism in Europe (YRE) led to great success, which we have detailed in The Rise of Militant.

But alongside of the establishment of independent national sections we have, since 1994, launched the CWI as an open International. It would not have been possible to do this successfully in the previous period. The baggage we carried from our work within the mass organizations inevitably led to us concealing the true extent of our international organization. The truth is that virtually everybody knew about the existence of the CWI, which was often listed by the different labor bureaucracies in the "evidence" they amassed to carry through our expulsions. The bureaucracy knew about it, our opponents on the left, particularly the Stalinists, spoke openly about this. It was the working class, unfortunately, that did not have a full knowledge of the existence of the CWI. Now, as a more independent organization, we have corrected this.

We have moved to establish more independent work and an independent international organization at perhaps just the right historical moment. A huge vacuum now exists in the workers' movement. Just look at the Malmö meeting of the so-called Second International in 1997. This was a gathering of social democratic leaders and bankers who very often were one and the same thing. Significantly, the opposition to this meeting, in the streets around the conference, was organized by our Swedish section. There is no mass Stalinist International today, merely fragments of Stalinism - some of them quite important - scattered throughout the world. Unfortunately, the comrades of the USFI, at their Congress in 1995, in effect abandoned the idea of building, in this period, mass revolutionary Trotskyist parties or a mass revolutionary Trotskyist International. We believe also they have begun to abandon the idea of the party as a revolutionary, democratic centralist organization. It is quite obvious that you cannot have a rigid centralism in any organization today. Maybe we will have to alter the terminology, perhaps we cannot use the phrase itself because of its connections now with Stalinism. But though we have to carefully examine terminology and change it where necessary, nevertheless the idea of a unified International, of revolutionary unity, is an idea we must defend, as we must also defend and develop the idea of the need to create parties to ensure the victory of the working class.

On another level, the dockers' strike in Britain shows the need for international action of the working class like never before in history. The 1995 Danish bus workers' struggle, as with their Indian counterparts in Bangalore, also demonstrated the need for the working class to link up on the trade union level internationally. At the same time there is a greater need today, as I mentioned earlier, in the era of globalization, to not only adopt a general internationalist stance but also to create mass political organizations which are linked together through a real mass International.


Reassembling Revolutionary Forces

The question is how to build such a mass International. We have a vital role to play in this process. We have in the past, as I described, sent comrades to different countries and continents throughout the world to establish the first forces of genuine Marxists. If necessary we will continue to do this. But a new mass International will not develop in a linear fashion. The process will involve fusions, splits and the reassembling of genuine revolutionary forces on an international and national plane.

We have been very successful in this regard. From the beginning we managed to absorb into our ranks organizations that did not agree with everything that the CWI stood for. In Cyprus, for instance, the group mentioned earlier that eventually joined us, after quite lengthy discussions, was somewhat heterogeneous. Many of those who remained with the CWI and who played a key role in building a very important section in Cyprus were, from the outset, committed to the general perspectives and program of the CWI. But there were others who could be described as occupying a left centrist position, vacillating between the ideas of the CWI and centrist ideas. Some of them dropped by the wayside as the group became more serious, while others evolved into genuine revolutionaries with a rounded-out outlook. Similar developments took place in Sri Lanka. While the NSSP affiliated to the CWI, the leaders of this organization, particularly Bahu, never fully agreed with the analysis that we had made of Stalinism, of developments in the former colonial and semi-colonial world and the national question, etc. While successful collaboration ensued for a period, the differences never disappeared and were a factor in the split of the NSSP from the CWI in 1989 (although a very important minority led by Siri stayed with the CWI).

A more recent example of a very successful fusion was in France. Comrade Renaud from Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), the French section of the CWI, comments:

"We came to the CWI from the USFI. We had come into political opposition to the leadership of the organization in France, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR). From 1987 they had been pursuing a policy of "automation". They interpreted this to mean that every initiative undertaken by themselves was deemed "sectarian". Leading comrades of the LCR would even argue that to sell the paper was sectarian. The line was that we should try to intervene in "new kinds" of organizational forms, new formations, for example, the developments on the environment and amongst the ecologists.

"There were, of course, some correct points in what they said. We have never hesitated to aid any group of workers in the labor movement, particularly those evolving towards the left, environmentalists involved in serious struggle, etc. But the problem with the USFI's position was that they never tried to put forward their own political line, but tended to adapt their program, in an opportunist fashion, to the leaders of these "new formations". For example, when a left group within the Socialist Party [PS] launched a school students' union the USFI deliberately played down their own role and forswore any attempt to win this group over. At every demonstration, they lent them [the PS] megaphones, etc, because this group, according to the USFI, should be the "leaders' of the school students' union. In reality, the Mandelite youth organization was bigger than this group. This role of merely "helping" the leaders of the traditional left organizations and not politically challenging them we opposed.

"In the beginning it was not clear in our heads but we wanted to build the forces of Trotskyism in an open, fighting organization. We wanted to build and recruit to our party with our program. Our clash with the Mandelites on this issue is what shaped our tendency inside their organization. We had already begun to bring a newspaper out whilst still within the LCR. We won a majority of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire [JCR - the LCR's youth organization] in 1989. But you will see there have been many changes in our political line as we have sought to clarify our position. In the French Mandelite organization there are several tendencies, which are really factions. In fact, the LCR is not a party but a federation of factions.

"They expelled us in October 1992 when we were quite well organized with a group of 50-60 young people around us. When we were expelled we were approached by many groups. I think comrades would be astonished at the number of Trotskyist groups throughout the world, many of them very strange to say the least. We know, we met them all. We had heard of the Militant, and at first thought it was a kind of left, social democratic, "workerist" tendency within the social democratic and labor movement. But then we went through the experience of the Brussels demonstration after a comrade had seen a poster in Ireland.

"After the demo we approached the CWI with a view to launching the YRE in France. We originally thought that we would have to join the CWI as a condition for us setting up the YRE. But we were pleasantly surprised that this was not the case and that we were given permission to form the YRE. We thought that this was a very good start, which then led to political discussions and eventually a large level of agreement which resulted in us joining the CWI."

David Cameron was also one of the founders of GR in France and, at the time he made the following comments, was a member of our International Secretariat. He has now returned to France to help build our French organization. David adds:

"The USFI and Mandel had completely failed to understand the changes in the world situation. We had definitely drawn the conclusion that this organization was impossible to reform after their congress in 1991. So, as Renaud has commented, we started looking around for other organizations. We did not confine ourselves to that but also began to develop our own ideas in opposition to the LCR. This led us to contact with many organizations, more than we wanted to!

"A comrade from the JCR who is no longer with us - he ended up badly, going back to the LCR - went on holiday to Ireland in the summer of 1992 and bought a copy of Irish Militant in a newsagents. This is how we came to learn about the October 1992, anti-racist YRE demonstration. In fact, we had been arguing for years within the LCR and USFI for them to take such an initiative. Following the Brussels demonstration we had many discussions with the CWI.

"What did these discussions actually amount to? We first of all had to get rid of any misconceptions that we were dealing with "left reformists". When you approach an organization, you have to ascertain the nature of that organization. Are these people Marxists? Are they reformists? Are they sectarian? Are they Stalinists? The second point is how do these people analyze what is going on in the world? What are their perspectives? And, of course, vitally, are they competent in building viable organizations both on a national and international scale? Through discussions we became convinced that both the Militant and the CWI met the criteria that we had set ourselves.

"There are many lessons in relation to how we joined the CWI which will be useful in similar experiences in the future. I don't think that fusion with other groups is the main way of building the International. I think we will build out of the new layers coming into action but, also, the question of working with other groups and fusion can be posed as well.

"In France, at the moment, there is a certain flux on the left. In my opinion there is the beginning of a break-up of the three largest Trotskyist groups - which were set up in the 1960s - with the emergence of an opposition in Lutte Ouvrière, for example. And at the same time, there is the emergence now of defined political currents, even with their own newspapers, within the PCF [French Communist Party]. There is, therefore, the possibility of fusions and regroupments posing further questions for our intervention in the mass organizations. I think similar questions will be posed elsewhere. Renaud said at the end of his contribution that when we joined the CWI we weren't perfect - we're still not perfect. I think we have learnt a lot from the International and I also hope that we have contributed to the International.

"Just a word on work within the traditional organizations in the past. The French section is one of the few in the International which has never actually done entry work. We came into the International after the CWI had exhausted the tactic of work within the mass traditional organizations. I wonder if we had come in ten or fifteen years before, what we would we have done in France? Let's put the question another way. Could the LCR with 1,500 members, in 1968, and 3-4,000, in the mid-1970s, have been more effective in working within one of the two major mass organizations of the French working class? Hundreds of workers joined the French Communist Party in the decade after 1968 and tens of thousands joined the Socialist Party. Now, if the LCR had decided to employ the tactic of the CWI (given the size of the LCR) to enter the PCF - difficult but not impossible - or go into the PS - easier but not so profitable - is it not possible they would have made a much bigger impact? It seems to me that when an organization of this size - and from that point of view size is important - could have maintained an independent organization and yet, at the same time, worked within either wing of the mass organizations, that could have been the most effective method."


Lessons From the Past - For the Future

The main forces for our organization will come from new layers of the proletariat who have only just begun to move into action or have not yet entered the political arena. The task of winning these layers may appear to be immediately more arduous than the "easier" task of trying to group together different "revolutionary" organizations. There are, of course, some very good comrades in different organizations with a different tradition to our own. It would be a mistake not to seek principled revolutionary unity with genuine forces. However, we have to turn our back on the sectarian fragments who will never be capable of building genuine mass Marxist forces.

The early 1990s were not the easiest of times for us or for revolutionary Marxists in general. But we managed to keep alive the revolutionary thread. We have analyzed, we believe in a correct, rounded-out fashion, the objective situation that confronted us and the working class, and are prepared for a new, more favorable position for our organization. While we are not completely out of the woods yet, the most difficult period is perhaps behind us. This does not mean that we will not have more problems but, at the same time, there will be great opportunities for the development of our organizations and the CWI if we work correctly. The achievements in the future will far surpass what we have done in the past. We must raise the level of all comrades, from the leadership to the newest comrades. Every member has a vital role to play in the development of the revolutionary movement. Each comrade, as Trotsky commented, carries a particle of history on their shoulders. We stand in the best revolutionary traditions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and the achievements of the revolutionary movement of the last four or five decades. One worker today can win 10, 50, 100 tomorrow and prepare the ground for the development of new mass workers' parties and a new mass workers' International.

We must learn the lessons of the past. There have been enough defeats of the proletariat. Because we have not yet attained mass influence, there are bound to be setbacks and defeats. But there are going to be victories as well. And in defeats and in victories, this new generation will learn the lessons of the past and build an organization, which, this time, will carry the working class to victory.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The "History Is A Weapon" Website- On The 75th Anniversary Of The Great GM Auto Sit-Down Strikes-Genora (Johnson) Dollinger Remembers the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Genora (Johnson) Dollinger Remembers the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike
... as told to Susan Rosenthal


Contents

Preface
Introduction
Conditions Before the Strike
Preparing for Battle
Sit Down!
Women Come Forward
The Women's Emergency Brigade
Breaking the Stalemate
A Blow Against Racism
The Sweet Fruit of Victory
Fighting Racism
Organizing the Unemployed
Personally Speaking
Class Struggle During the War
The Employers Strike Back
Back to the Future


Preface

There are times in history when the forces of capital and labor are so evenly matched in combat that the actions of a few brave individuals can tip the balance in favor of their class. Genora (Johnson) Dollinger was one of those courageous and clear-sighted people. Her greatness lay in her determination to press forward to win a decisive victory for labor and her deep conviction that such a victory could only be won by the workers themselves.

The struggle to organize the growing American automobile industry began with a strike at a Studebaker plant in 1913. In 1930, workers at Fisher Body in Flint struck and closed their plant for a week. Early in 1933, auto workers struck Briggs Manufacturing Co., the Hudson Motor Car Co. and the Motor Products Co. In 1934 auto workers won a bloody strike at Toledo's Auto-Lite plant and signed up thousands of new members. But there was still no national union of auto workers, only individual, federally-chartered locals affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Growing impatience with the craft-dominated AFL spurred the formation of the national, industry-based United Automobile Workers of America (UAW) in 1936.

On November 17, 1936, the first auto industry sit-down in U.S. history began at Bendix products in South Bend, Indiana. Workers occupied their plant for a week to win recognition of the UAW. But the spark that led to the unionization of the giant General Motors Corporation, and eventually of the entire auto industry, was ignited on December 30, 1936, when auto workers in Flint Michigan sat down and occupied their plants.

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger was called "the Joan of Arc of Labor" for her role in the Flint sit-down strikes. At the age of 23 she organized the Women's Auxiliary of the UAW and led its military wing, the Women's Emergency Brigade. Brigade members armed themselves with clubs to defend sit-downers from GM's plant police, hired Pinkerton strike-breakers, and the Flint city police who also served the corporation.

Genora was also instrumental in overcoming the opposition of those who initially rejected her husband's strategy for capturing Chevrolet Plant 4. The union's successful occupation of Plant 4 marked a decisive turning point in the history of American labor. The largest corporation in the world was forced to sign a contract with an industrial union representing all its workers. The victory of GM workers led to a wave of industrial organizing that revolutionized relations between capital and labor in the United States.

I interviewed Genora in February 1995. Despite her advanced age and very poor health, Genora's passion for the cause of labor was undiminished. My hope is that her story will inspire the militants of today and tomorrow to push forward to win the final victory for labor.

Susan Rosenthal
National Writers Union
U.A.W. Local 1981



Introduction
Genora (Johnson) Dollinger (April 20, 1913 - October 11, 1995)
Genora Johnson was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but the family residence was in Flint. She became a socialist at age 16, and in 1931 she joined the newly organized Flint chapter of the Socialist Party.

Her militant actions during the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37 were the subject of two award winning documentaries: The Great Sit-Down Strike, made by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Academy Award-nominated documentary, With Babies and Banners: The Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade. However, I believe Genora's contribution to the strike has not been fully acknowledged for a number of reasons, including the fact that she never wrote her own account of the strike.

After the Flint strike, Genora was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also helped organize the first union for unemployed workers, that was affiliated with the UAW, and served as its secretary. During the war she dodged the blacklist by moving to Detroit, where she took a job at Briggs Manufacturing and was elected Chief Steward of UAW, Local 212.

After the war, Genora served on a committee to investigate the brutal beatings of two prominent members of her Local. However, she became the third victim when two thugs beat her with a lead pipe while she was asleep in her bed. Six years later, the Senator Kefauver Investigating Committee confirmed that the beatings of five Briggs workers and the shooting of Walter and Victor Reuther were instigated by well known Detroit corporate officials in collusion with the Mafia.

Genora ran as a candidate of the Socialist Workers' Party for U.S. Senator from Michigan in 1948. From 1960-66, she was the Development Director of the Michigan Civil Liberties Union. She was one of the first presidents of Women for Peace, an anti-Vietnam war organization. During her term, she enlisted most of the union leaders of Detroit and Michigan into public opposition to the war.

In 1977, Genora was invited by the officers of the UAW and GM to attend the 40th anniversary banquet celebration of the sit-down strikes and the winning of union recognition. Refusing to attend the banquet, Genora flew to Detroit to hold a press conference denouncing the union leaders for their participation in the "love fest," which she called an example of "Tuxedo Unionism."

At age 81, Genora was still active, organizing the Labor Party Advocates in California. In October, 1994, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Michigan Women's Historical Center in Lansing. On her induction, Victor and Sophie Reuther wrote,

"Genora is of the great tradition of Mother Jones who in an earlier generation was to the mine workers what Genora became to the auto workers. A living legend in her own time!"

Sol Dollinger



Conditions Before the Strike



"We hire Chevrolet workers from the neck down."

Arnold Lenz,
Chevrolet-Flint Plant Manager, 1936.

Conditions in Flint before the strike were very, very depressing for working people. We had a large influx of workers come into the city from the deep South. They came north to find jobs, because there was no work back home. They came with their furniture strapped on old jalopies and they'd move into the cheapest housing that they could find. Usually these were just little one or two-room structures with no inside plumbing and no inside heating arrangements. They just had kerosene heaters to heat their wash water, their bath water, and their homes. You could smell kerosene all over their clothing. They were very poor.

One woman came from a small section of Flint around Fenton Road, where many of these poor southerners settled. She would walk the picket line in the snow in tennis shoes with no gloves. She was a wonderful person. She was there every day, and we'd have to make sure she got warmed up in the union headquarters before she went out on the picket line again.

Before the strike, the women didn't have the opportunity to participate in any activities. The small neighborhood churches were the only places they had to go to. They knew some of their neighbors and they would go to some of these little churches, but that's all. The men frequented the beer gardens and talked to other men about shop problems or whatever. They got to be shop buddies.

When you worked in the factory in those days, no one cared what your name was. You became "Whitey" if you happened to be blonde. Or you might be "Blacky" if you had black hair. If you asked, "Well, who is he?" you'd get, "I don't know, he works in department so-and-so, Plant 4, on the line half way down." It was just "Blacky" or "Shorty" or some nickname. They were wage slaves with a complete loss of identity and rights inside the plant.

At first, when these workers were approached to join the union, they were afraid they might lose this job that was so very valuable to them. At that time, men working in the auto plants were getting around forty-five cents an hour. The younger girls that worked in the A.C. Sparkplug division of General Motors, were being paid twelve-and-a-half cents an hour to make minor car instruments. That was the only plant that employed women.

I'll tell you about the conditions of these young women. After the strike, a Senate investigating committee found that in one department of A.C. alone, the girls had all been forced to go to the county hospital and be treated for venereal disease traced to one foreman. Those were the conditions that young women had to accept in order to support their families. Sometimes they earned just enough to provide food for the family and they couldn't lose their jobs because nobody else in the family had a job.

Flint was a General Motors town- lock, stock and barrel! If you drove past one of the huge GM plants in Flint, you could see workers sitting on the front lawns along the side of the plant just waiting for a foreman to come to the door and call them in. And maybe they'd work them for an hour or maybe for a day, and that was it. But workers were so desperate that they would come and sit every day on that lawn in the hopes of being called in and possibly getting a permanent job. That's how poor these General Motors workers really were, at least the ones in hopes of getting a job at GM.

I had a most wonderful father-in-law, a very fine union man who had a little college education in South Dakota, then moved to Flint to work in the auto factories where the big money was supposed to be. Big money then was nothing when you stop to think of it today. But compared to jobs in the rest of the country and considering there was a national depression, it was big money. And if you were a tool and die maker, you made a little more. But the tool-and-die men were not in favor of organizing the plain, ordinary industrial workers. They wanted their skilled unions kept separate. And, of course, they wanted their wages to be kept higher.

Conditions were terrible inside the plants, which were notorious for their speed-up systems. They had men with stop watches timing the workers to see if they could squeeze one or two more operations in. You saw Charlie Chaplin in the movie, Modern Times? Well, this is exactly what happened. They did everything but tie a broom to their tail. It was so oppressive that there were several cases of men just cracking up completely and taking a wrench and striking their foreman. When that happened, the worker was sentenced to what was then called an insane asylum in Pontiac, Michigan.

The speed-up was the biggest issue. The men just couldn't take it. They would come home at night, and they couldn't hold their forks in their swollen fingers. They would just lie down on the floor. Many of them wound up in beer gardens to try to forget their problems and their aches and pains.

They had many medical problems, too, because you couldn't go to the rest room whenever you felt like you had to. When "Mother Nature" called, that was just too bad. You had to wait for the foreman to summon a relief man to come and take your place on the assembly line. Sometimes that took awhile. In one plant a worker brought a chamber pot and put it on top of the assembly line. All the workers got a big bang out of that, but he was fired. He lost his job just for that kind of protest.

They used to say, "Once you pass the gates of General Motors, forget about the United States Constitution." Workers had no rights when they entered that plant. If a foreman didn't like the way you parted your hair- or whatever he didn't like about you- you may have looked at him the wrong way, or said something that rubbed him the wrong way- he could fire you. No recourse, no nothing. And practically all foremen expected workers to bring them turkeys on Thanksgiving and gifts for Christmas and repair their motor cars and even paint their houses. The workers were kept intimidated because if they didn't comply with what the foreman told them to do, they would lose their jobs and their families would starve. You can see what a feeling of slavery and domination workers felt inside the GM plants.

Not only that, but when workers started talking about organizing, management hired lip-readers to watch the men talk to each other, even when they were right close to each other, so they could tell if they were talking union. One of our friends who was a member of the Socialist Party wore the first UAW button into the Chevrolet plant. He was fired immediately. He didn't even get to his job. They spotted the button and that was it. If you went into a beer garden or other place like that and began to talk about unions, very often you didn't get home without getting an awful beating by GM-hired thugs.

That was the condition inside the plants. Combined with the bad conditions on the outside: poor living conditions, lack of proper food, lack of proper medical attention and everything else, the auto workers came to the conclusion that there was no way they could ever escape any of this injustice without joining a union. But they didn't all decide at one time.




Preparing for Battle
"General Motors Corp. spent $994,000 for labor spies between January and June, 1936. GM also had more tear gas and other riot control equipment in its possession than the combined supply available to all cities nationwide."

The UAW Local 659 Searchlight,
February 3, 1995.

A considerable amount of preparatory work was done before the strike. That preparatory work was done by radical parties. We had several very active organizations in Flint and Detroit: the Communist Party, the Proletarian Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party and the International Workers of the World (IWW). And, with the exception of the Communist Party, we all had our headquarters in the Pengelly Building, a very old building that became the major strike headquarters of the whole United Automobile Workers Union of Flint. Even as the strike was going on, we still had our rooms on the second floor, while the main activities in the auditorium were on the third floor.

Two years before the strike broke out, the Socialist Party in Flint organized the League for Industrial Democracy, (LID). We held meetings in garages and in basements, secret meetings, so the people wouldn't get caught and beaten up.

As we got bigger, the Socialist Party started sending us their speakers from New York. Many of them were from the Brookwood Labor College. We put out leaflets and sold tickets for these meetings, which were held in the basement of the biggest Methodist church and in the Masonic Temple.

We held lectures in socialism mainly, plus labor history and current events, focusing on what was happening politically. Those were very popular meetings. We would get three and four hundred people at some of our meetings.

This was all before the strike, in preparation for when the struggle actually broke out, when the workers couldn't take any more and rebelled. A core of socialists understood that this would eventually happen. I was busy organizing the LID and the Socialist Party during this time before the strike. I was well known in Flint.

Our Socialist Party was the next biggest organization to the Communist Party. The Socialist Party held on-going classes in labor history, public speaking, and parliamentary procedure. These classes were very important and produced many capable people.

One of the Reuther brothers, Roy, was a member of the Socialist Party. Roy had organized several workers' education projects and was sent into Flint to organize the UAW early in 1936.

Our newspaper, The Socialist Call, was distributed widely as an aid to our recruitment of GM workers into the Socialist Party. We laid a solid groundwork so that some of the first people who took the initial brave actions in the shop were Socialist Party workers.

The Communist Party met at the north end of Flint because that's where most of the immigrants from Russia, Poland and Hungary lived. They were mainly Buick workers. They had a lot of social activities, dances, and political meetings. They also had an insurance organization, the International Workers Order. Robert Travis, the top UAW organizer in Flint, was in the Communist Party, and he selected Roy Reuther to work as his second-in-command during the strike.

But, in my opinion, the main leaders of that strike, the ones who were able to organize, to speak in public meetings and so on, came out of the Socialist Party.

Workers were receptive to the idea of a union, but so much fear came along with it. When we started signing people up to be in the union, General Motors organized a huge rival organization called the Flint Alliance that cost nothing to join, but you signed a card so that they had a record of you. A great deal of anti-union propaganda was disseminated into the homes of workers through the Flint Alliance. The workers knew conditions were horrible, but they were in fear of losing their jobs if they refused to join the Alliance. They also saw what happened to some of their buddies who would go to a union meeting and get beaten up and come to work the next day with black eyes or a busted head.

So workers didn't all rush to join the union. In fact, if General Motors had known the real number of union members at the time those plants went down, a successful strike wouldn't have been possible. We had to keep the actual membership figures as secret as we could.

As I said, a fermentation was taking place for a couple of years before the first sit-down. No question about it. Many revolutionaries, so-called, talk about "spontaneous combustion of the workers." I can't see that at all, because it took time for the organizers in various plants of this whole General Motors empire to talk to the workers and to bring them to classes-to make some contact-create a bond. You had to trust your fellow worker if you were going to be an active union member because we had an awful lot of spies in there, a lot of people who would get special favor for squealing on somebody else.

I should add that the one big daily newspaper, the Flint Journal, was controlled completely by General Motors. They wrote things like, "You don't bite the hand that feeds you," and "These people coming in are all imports from Soviet Russia, and they want communism." So everybody was labeled a Communist who joined the union. The radio stations (we didn't have television then) and every avenue of information was controlled by GM.

The only thing the union had at first was mimeographed sheets. Finally, we were able to put out a weekly, the Flint Auto Worker, with reports of what the union was doing and what we were working for- what kind of a society we wanted. We handed these out at the plant gates after work. And the distributors often got beaten up by the company's paid agents. They had Pinkerton men in there, two or three different spy agencies, plus the people that they would pull out of their own ranks, General Motors protection police. It was a dangerous period- no question about it.

And we had our sound car, an ordinary car fitted with loudspeakers on top with large batteries. During the strike we would send it around to the various plants that were still operating- A.C. Sparkplug and Buick. As the workers were going in, we would taunt them with the conditions that they had to face, and we'd give them a little pep talk, "As an individual you are only one, but the union gives us strength." Many of the workers in those plants came down and walked the picket lines in sympathy, but there was not enough preparation done in those plants and not enough leadership, for them to take the chance to shut their plants down.




Sit Down!
"They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn.
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn,
That the union makes us strong."

Verse from the song, "Solidarity Forever", written by Ralph Chaplin.

The first sit-down was on December 30 in the small Fisher Body Plant 2 over a particularly big grievance that had occurred. The workers were at the point where they had just had enough, and under a militant leadership, they sat down. When the UAW leaders in the big Fisher Body Plant 1 heard about the sit-down in Fisher 2, they sat down, also. That took real guts, and it took political leadership. The leaders of the political parties knew what they had to do because they'd studied labor history and the ruthlessness of the corporations.

Picket lines were established and also a big kitchen in the south end of Flint, across from the large Fisher 1 plant. Every day, gallons and gallons of food were prepared, and anybody who was on the picket lines would get a ticket with notification that they had served on the line so they'd be able to get a good hot meal.

The strike kitchen was primarily organized by the Communist Party women. They brought a restaurant man from Detroit to help organize this huge kitchen. They were the ones who made all of those good meals.

We also had what we called scavengers, groups of people who would go to the local farmers and ask for donations of food for the strikers. Many people in these small towns surrounding Flint were factory workers who would also raise potatoes, cabbages, tomatoes, corn or whatever. So great quantities of food were sent down to be made into dishes for the strikers. People were very generous.

John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers helped us financially so that if there was somebody in serious difficulty we could help them out a little bit. Later on, the garment workers sent money. But with thousands of workers, you couldn't help everybody, so many families were taken care of by committees forming in plants, whether they were on strike or not. Committees in Buick, Chevrolet, and Fisher Body took care of some of the urgent cases so nobody starved or got into really major medical difficulties.

After the first sit-down started, I went down to see what I could do to help. I was either on the picket lines or up at the Pengelly Building all the time, but some of the strike leaders didn't know who I was and didn't know that I had been teaching classes in unionism and so on. So they said, "Go to the kitchen. We need a lot of help out there." They didn't know what else to tell a woman to do. I said, "You've got a lot of little, skinny men around here who can't stand to be out on the cold picket lines for very long. They can peel potatoes as well as women can." I turned down the idea of kitchen duty.

Instead, I organized a children's picket line. I got Bristol board and paints, and I was painting signs for this children's picket line. One of my socialist comrades came up and said, "Hey, Genora, what are you doing here?" I said, "I'm doing your job". Since he was a professional sign painter, I turned the sign-painting project over to him and that was the beginning of the sign-painting department.

We could only do the children's picket line once because it was too dangerous, but we got an awful lot of favorable publicity from it, much of it international. The picture of my two-year-old son, Jarvis, holding a picket sign saying, "My daddy strikes for us little tykes," went all over the nation, and people sent me articles from French newspapers and from Germany and from other European countries. I thought it was remarkable that the news traveled so far.




Women Come Forward



"The women of Flint have made their fame and are known throughout the world for their heroic stand during the great General Motors strike..."

Robert C. Travis, Strike Organizer, 1937

I should tell you how the Women's Auxiliary was formed. The last days of December 1936 were when the sit-downs began. Following that came New Year's Eve. Among working class families, everybody celebrates New Year's Eve. I was amazed at the number of wives that came down to the picket line and threatened their husbands, "If you don't cut out this foolishness and get out of that plant right now, you'll be a divorced man!" They threatened divorce loudly and openly, yelling and shouting at their husbands. I knew I couldn't go and grab each one of them to talk to them privately. So I could only watch as some of the men climbed out of the plant window up on the second floor, down the ladder to go home with their wives. These were good union members, but they were hooted and hollered at by their comrades in the plant who were holding the fort in the sit-down. This was a very dangerous turn of events because I knew how few men were inside holding that plant, and it worried many of us.

The next day, we decided to organize the women. We thought that if women can be that effective in breaking a strike, they could be just as effective in helping to win it. So we organized the Women's Auxiliary and we laid out what we were going to do.

Now remember, the UAW was still in the process of getting organized. It didn't have elected officers or by-laws or any of the rest of it. So we were free to organize our Women's Auxiliary, to elect our president, vice-president, recording secretary and heads of committees, all on our own.

We couldn't have women sitting down in the plants because the newspapers were antagonizing the wives at home by saying that women were sleeping over in the plant. In fact, GM sent anonymous messages to the wives of some of the strikers alleging that there were prostitutes in those embattled plants. But we knew we could get women on the picket lines.

So we organized a child-care center at the union headquarters, so children would have some place to go when their mothers marched on the picket line. Wilma McCartney, who had nine children and was going to have her tenth, took charge of that. At first, the women were scared to death to come down to the union, and some may have been against the union for taking away their pay check so they couldn't feed their children who were hungry or crying for milk. Then this wonderful woman, this mother of nine children who was pregnant with another, would talk to them about how it would benefit them for their husbands to participate actively. And if they won the strike, it would make all the difference in the world in their living conditions. We recruited a lot of women just through the child-care center.

We also set up a first aid station with a registered nurse in a white uniform and red union arm-band. She was a member of the Women's Auxiliary. The women in the Auxiliary also made house calls to make sure every family had enough to eat, and they gave advice on how to deal with creditors.

But that wasn't enough as far as I was concerned. Women had more to offer than just these services. So we set up public speaking classes for women. Most of the women had never even been to a union meeting. In those days, many of the men would go to union meetings and say to the women, "It's none of your damn business. Don't you mix into our affairs." So the women didn't express any of their ideas about what could be done to better their conditions.

One of our Socialist Party women, Tekla Roy, took over the public speaking classes and was very popular. She was a very tall woman with a low and resonant voice. She seemed like a person who could handle any man or any opposition. She also taught labor history: what had happened in America in the early days when child labor was eliminated, and how the women garment workers in New York were the first to organize unions in the United States. Women came out of those classes thinking, "Well, women did play a role in the unions. We have got a right to say something." We trained them in how to get up in union meetings and what appeals to make. We gave them an outline of a speech and they practiced in the classes.

Some of the men were very opposed to having their wives at the union headquarters and a few of them never gave up their sexist attitudes. But most of the men encouraged their wives. They thought we were doing a wonderful job, making things better for them at home because their wives understood why their husbands had to be on the picket line all day long and do a lot of extra things for the union. They could talk and work together as companions. And the children were learning from their parents' discussions about the strike.

A few men still opposed women becoming active or walking the picket lines. I was often called a "dyke." Some men said that women who came down to the picket line were prostitutes or loose women looking for men. But as more married men with families became active in the strike, they kept those elements quiet. We eventually won respect and were praised highly by the leaders of the strike after victory was declared.

Organizing the women in the strike was the most wonderful experience of my whole life. I was not as tall as Tekla but I had experience organizing. I was interested in building the Socialist Party and in building a socialist society, so I had a great deal of influence with these women.




The Women's Emergency Brigade



"Greetings and congratulations to the new officers and to the members of the Women's Auxiliary and the Women's Emergency Brigade. The automobile workers of Flint and America owe you a debt of gratitude for the part you played in the winning of The Big Strike and in building our International Union. You are truly crusaders in this new American Labor Movement, and your fighting spirit an inspiration to all workers!"

Roy Reuther, Strike Organizer, 1937

The company decided they had to break the strike. On January 11, they attacked the smaller Fisher Body Plant 2. I happened to be on the picket line that day, and I was amazed to see what was happening. The plant guards prevented the men from getting any food for about 24 hours. It was very cold, and they turned off the heat in the building. The men inside were very angry.

Then the company police and the city police started shooting. At first they were shooting tear gas inside the plant, but that was too difficult, so they decided to tear-gas and shoot this huge mass of picketers that had formed in front of the plant. The police were using rifles, buckshot, fire-bombs, and tear-gas canisters. It was a shock to a lot of people. We had thought that General Motors would try to freeze us out or do something in the plants, but never open fire on us right in the middle of the city.

The union picketers took their own cars and barricaded off a section so that the police couldn't get us from both ends. Then, over the radio came the equivalent of saying that there was a revolution starting in Flint. With all the propaganda saying, "The communists are coming into the city to take over the union," people gathered in vast numbers on both sides of this battle. When the police misfired, tear-gas and bullets went over our heads into the crowds which had came out to watch. It was very frightening. People would run away and dart into restaurants up the street.

The battle continued for quite some time. Workers overturned police cars to make barricades. They ran to pick up the fire bombs thrown at them and hurl them back at the police. It was very, very cold. The men in the plant were using fire hoses against the police, and when the water ran down, it would quickly ice over.

I saw one of our Socialist Party members, Fred Stevens, jump over a gutter where there was icy water flowing down. A little stream of blood spurted down his leg into the water. I couldn't get my wits together for a moment.

The men wanted to get me out of the way. You know that old "protect the women and children" business. If there are any women or children around, usher them right out, protect them. I told them, "Get away from me. I've got as many weapons as you have." I was the only woman who stayed.

The battle went on for hours. Throughout the whole time, the sound car was giving instructions and trying to bolster the courage of the men inside the plant as well as the picketers on the outside. Victor Reuther spoke for a while and then other men substituted for him, giving him relief. But there were only the voices of men. At one point, Victor came over and told us that the batteries in the sound car were running down.

Lights went on in my head. I thought, "I've never used a loudspeaker to address a large crowd of people, but I've got to tell them that there are women down here." So I asked him, "Victor, can I take the loudspeaker?" He said, "We've got nothing to lose."

The first thing I did was attack the police. I called to them, "Cowards! Cowards! Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children." Then everything became quiet. There was silence on both sides of the line. I thought, "The women can break this up." So I appealed to the women in the crowd, "Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts."

In the dusk, I could barely see one woman struggling to come forward. A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat and started walking down to the battle zone. As soon as that happened there were other women and men who followed. The police wouldn't shoot people in the back as they were coming down, so that was the end of the battle. When those spectators came into the center of the battle and the police retreated, there was a big roar of victory. That battle became known as the Battle of Bulls Run because we made the cops run.

By this time, General Motors was going crazy and got Governor Frank Murphy involved. The next day, the National Guard was sent in because it was a very explosive situation. At first, eleven hundred troops were sent, followed by more than two thousand later. By the end of the strike, almost four thousand National Guardsmen were stationed in Flint.

I decided that women could do more than just the duties of the Women's Auxiliary. We could form an Emergency Brigade, and every time there was a threatened battle, we could mobilize. We might make a difference.

We didn't know that nothing like that had ever been organized before, at least not in this country. We didn't know we were making history. We didn't have time to think about it. The day after the Battle of Bulls Run, just from the people we notified the night before, fifty women joined up right away.

When we held our big Auxiliary meeting, I got up and asked who would like to join the Women's Emergency Brigade. I said, "It can't be somebody who's weak of heart. You can't go hysterical if your sister beside you drops down in a pool of blood." Oh, I made it a bloody sounding thing! After all, sixteen workers and eleven police had been injured in that battle. Anyone who wanted to join had to stand up, announce publicly that they wanted to join, walk over and sign their names in front of everybody. It wasn't a secret organization and we didn't pressure anyone to join. We made it very difficult.

One old woman in her early seventies stood up. I said, "This is going to be too difficult for you." She said, "You can't keep me out. My sons work in that factory. My husband worked in that factory before he died and I have grandsons in there." She went on and gave a speech. She got applause, then she walked over and signed her name. Then a young girl, I think she was sixteen or seventeen, stood up and said, "My father works in that factory. My brothers work in that factory. I've got a right to join, too." She walked over and signed, and all the women applauded. We recruited about 400 women for the Brigade out of about 1,000 women in the Women's Auxiliary.

I organized the Emergency Brigade on a military basis. I knew a captain gave orders, so I was the captain. Then I picked five lieutenants. We organized groups under each lieutenant. We'd give out an assignment and that lieutenant would find a car, round up her people, and off they'd go to wherever they were needed. Three of my five lieutenants were factory girls. One of them was an A.C. worker who was nineteen years old.

Ruth Pitts was from Fisher Body and "Teeter" Walker was from Redmans, a supplier plant for GM cars. Those two lieutenants wore jodhpurs, pants that come out on the side like a military or riding habit. They wore big boots that laced up to the knees, short Eisenhower-type jackets, red berets and arm bands. The workers in Fisher Body 1 made blackjacks for them. They laced them up with car leather on the outside and wristlets to go around the arm. They looked pretty jaunty and they meant business. Those two were always on the front lines.

We decided that we would use red berets as our insignia. They were very cheap at the time, something like fifty cents for a good felt beret. The Women's Auxiliary sewed red arm bands with a white E.B. on them for Emergency Brigade. I have one still. We carried heavy wooden clubs with handles carved to fit a woman's grip. Whenever you saw one of those women, you knew that she was ready for action at any time, morning, night, or anytime.

News about the Women's Emergency Brigade made the front page of the New York Times and other papers across the nation. In France when they heard about women organizing and doing it seriously, not just carrying mops and brooms as the newspapers liked to put it, but carrying clubs, they called me the "Joan of Arc" of organized labor-of women warriors. They thought it was very dramatic.

After we sat down in Flint, which was the heart of the General Motors production empire, fifteen GM plants across the country went on strike. And the news went out about the role women could play. Women in Detroit organized and wore green berets and arm bands; Lansing, blue; Pontiac, orange. These were all cities right around Flint and Detroit, the heart of the empire.

The emergency brigade responded whenever any emergency arose. Saginaw was just a few miles from Flint and that was where the union was having the hardest time. After workers won the Chevrolet strike of 1935, General Motors moved its Chevrolet Parts and Service plants to Saginaw and established a vigilante organization called the Loyalty League to prevent any unionization of those plants.

The union organized a car of men to go from Flint to Saginaw to hold a meeting and help in any way that we could. The meeting went off all right and the local men escaped from the meeting hall, but when our organizers were driving back, vigilantes in big, black Buick cars followed them down the highway into Flint and ran them into a telephone pole. They sent our people to the hospital.

That was a challenge for us after we had gone up there and encouraged them to meet and given them such visions of success. The union organizer was out in the hall as one of our meetings was ending, asking for volunteers to send a second car up to Saginaw right away before despair set in. Two Socialist Party men and three women volunteered to go. They were Mary Donovan Hapgood, who was a writer at the time, and Fania Fish, who later became Fania Reuther, and me. I got the two women to volunteer to go. The UAW organizers were amazed that we were taking such a chance. I noticed that they weren't too quick to volunteer to get their butts up there.

We drove up to Saginaw and met in the basement of a building that had big, high windows. The hall was packed with men and women who spoke about their determination to build the union. We got up and spoke, and we got them to sing, "Solidarity." That pepped the whole meeting up.

Toward the end of the meeting, we noticed that there were eyes looking at us through those basement windows. We knew we were surrounded by Loyalty League vigilantes, so we gave emergency instructions: "As you're leaving the building, be sure you leave in twos and threes, and be prepared." A group of people were organized to protect the union hall, to get us to our car, and to escort us to the highway.

We were driving a new Pontiac, and we felt safe because we knew that it had a lot of power. As we drove out to the main highway, one of the little cars that was ahead of us was cut off by a big, black, Buick sedan that got in front of us. We turned the corner and another one got in back of us. We were boxed in. It was a fearsome thing, expecting to wind up dead or maybe injured for life by being rammed into a telephone pole.

Fortunately for us, our Saginaw brothers were determined to protect us. Two little out-of-date cars pulled up behind us, turned sideways into the road, smashed into the oncoming vehicles, and completely blocked the road.

The driver of our car, seeing his chance, stepped on the gas, shot out around the other car, and sped straight ahead at ninety miles an hour. He opened the car up as fast as it would go. We were frozen. Driving ninety miles an hour then was like speeding through heaven and hell, and it scared the wits out of us. Now it means nothing, but in those days cars didn't go that fast.

Finally when we saw the lights of A.C. Sparkplug on the left side of the highway, Mary Donovan Hapgood, who was sent in from New York to write about the strike, started to sing a union song, "When a scab dies, he goes to hell." We all joined in and our voices were shaking.

We got back safely and a UAW local was established up in Saginaw. They had enough people join the union to become a force that could protect itself. This is the kind of thing that the women stepped in and helped build.

In Flint everybody in the city was dependent on the auto workers. If the workers didn't have money to buy groceries, clothes, or food, everybody suffered. So the strike affected everyone and everybody wanted to join the union. The milk drivers wanted to join but we didn't have any union of milk drivers. We didn't have any union of store clerks or retail clerks. So they all came down to the main headquarters where our amalgamated local took in all of them. They all became members of Local 156 of the UAW- CIO.

People were joining the union all over the city, whether they worked in an auto plant or wherever they were working. We would get calls all the time like, "J.C. Penney girls want to sit down. They want to strike." So we would send the Emergency Brigade women down there in case there was any trouble. Then we had the Women's Auxiliary members go down after we saw that it was going to be all right and talk to those workers about labor history and about what we were trying to achieve.

Those were the roles women played. There were also many altercations on the picket lines, where sometimes women would come out and help. We didn't always carry the clubs because they were heavy, clumsy things to walk around with on a cold picket line. But we all carried a hard-milled bar of soap in one pocket and a sock in the other. That way, we couldn't be charged with carrying a weapon. But if somebody was creating trouble on the picket line, we'd slip that bar of soap into the sock and swing that sock very fast and sharp. It was as good as a blackjack.

I've had wonderful experiences in working with people, and I have found that sometimes the people who talk the loudest and act the bravest are the ones you can expect the least from. Sometimes, when there was a fight on the picket line you'd see a big, healthy man dive under a car! Yet you'd see other small men or you'd see women take a stand.




Breaking the Stalemate



"General Motors will not be obligated by contract to a principle that the corporation does not approve even though that principle is now a federal law."

GM corporate press release, February 8, 1937.

Across the nation, fifteen plants of General Motors were on strike, but we were making no progress. GM and the union had begun negotiations a few days after the Battle of Bulls Run but GM was stalling and bargaining in bad faith. The company tried to start a back-to-work movement with their anti-union Flint Alliance, and they tried to use the courts to stop the picketing and evacuate the plants. This was the same strategy that they had used against the Toledo auto strike in 1934.

It became quite difficult for some people to keep going. Every day the union was getting out bulletins and organizing the picket lines, trying to encourage people, to inspire them. We knew that something drastic had to be done and soon.

Everyone knew that if we could take Chevrolet Plant 4, we could win the strike. Plant 4 was the single largest unit in the whole GM complex. It produced engines for all Chevrolet automobiles across the country and for export, too. If we could stop production there, we'd hit General Motors right in the pocket-book. But no one knew how to do this because Plant 4 was very heavily guarded.

This next part has never been written up in history. My husband, Kermit Johnson, worked in Plant 4 and was the leader of the strike committee for Chevrolet. One night he came home from work with a greasy little piece of paper in his hand. He said, "You know, I've figured out how we can take Plant 4. Plant 8 is located here. Plant 6 is there." He pointed to the paper. Those plants were all around Plant 4. "If we pull a strike," he said, "We'll have workers from all these other plants march into Plant 4. The problem is that General Motors has recruited professional Pinkertons, plant protection and organized vigilantes. It will be one big slaughter unless we distract them from that area and give ourselves time to barricade the plant."

Plant 4 employed 4,000 workers, 2,000 on each shift. And if you've ever been inside one of those plants, you'll know the doorways are as big as the side of a house. They're huge, long structures. It would take some time to barricade the doors and to weld the openings shut to prevent an attack by the police. So they needed to create a distraction to buy time.

When Kermit took his plan to the Socialist Party to get support, Walter Reuther and his group in Detroit were opposed to it. They were afraid that we hadn't had enough experience to carry through a plan like that. So our Socialist Party was split and the plan was voted down. But that was only after Walter Reuther came in and talked against it. Walter had a little more experience in Detroit and he'd been over in Russia, so some of the Socialist Party members deferred to him. What did we know in a little backwater town like Flint? Reuther came in and hammered against it, real hard, and they voted it down.

After that, I didn't know what to do. I went home and wrote a two-page, single-spaced letter appealing to Norman Thomas to help us. Norman Thomas was a great speaker for socialism and a wonderful writer, but he didn't know anything about the day-to-day problems that went on in the Socialist Party. He sent the letter to Frank Trager, the Socialist Party Labor Secretary.

Trager came to Flint on January 21 and I got all of the militants that I could get to talk to him to convince him that we should adopt Kermit's plan. Trager saw the workers trudging up to the big auditorium on the third floor where they were being shown movies like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, with everybody laughing. Other workers would come up and say, "What the hell is this? What are our orders for today? Where are our plans? What are we going to do?" Trager talked to these people as they trudged up and down that big stairway.



When we had our meeting, Trager decided that Kermit had a valid plan and there was a valid reason why we should carry it out. Walter Reuther was still opposed but he had to defer to the Labor Secretary. But he told Kermit that if the strike was lost it would be his fault. The vote was taken again and this time, it carried.

Kermit and Roy Reuther were assigned to take the plan into the general strike committee to be approved and developed there. The rest is written up in history.

We've tried so hard to trace that letter I wrote to Norman Thomas, but after the strike Frank Trager went to work for the United States government, I've forgotten in what capacity. I think he may have mislaid it or destroyed it. I was always very sorry about that because if it hadn't been for that letter I don't know which route the strike would have taken. I do know we wouldn't have had that dramatic, decisive victory in the General Motors strike.

Kermit's plan was adopted by the strike committee. We knew there were some informers in the union meetings so a "secret" meeting was held with people who were going to shut Plant 9 and a couple of the suspected informers. That's how we let the company think that Plant 9 was going to be struck. We wanted GM to put all its guards on Plant 9 and leave Plant 4 free to be taken.

Kermit's plan was scheduled to be put into action on February 1 during the afternoon shift change. I had the Brigade out there, marching up and down in front of Plant 9. When the police saw the Brigade, they came and formed a line.

At one point, the police pulled their revolvers and threatened the union men on the outside because they knew the plant police were taking care of the men inside. There was a newsreel truck that happened to be there at the time, and I told the women, "Raise your clubs." They got a picture of the women with their clubs raised in back of the police and the police with their guns pulled at the union men. I think General Motors got hold of those pictures some way. I never knew what happened to them.

When Plant 9 started shutting off some of the machines, the police began to tear-gas and beat the men. Then we heard a glass break, and we saw the head of Tom Klasey look out. Blood was streaming down his face and he was yelling, "They're gassing us in here! For God's sake, they're gassing us!" That's all we had to hear. We used our clubs to smash the windows out so the men inside could get some air. Those men took an awful beating and by the time the ambulances came to carry them out, General Motors thought that they had squashed that one.

But I knew what was happening at Plant 4 half a mile down the street, so I dismissed the Brigade and sent them back to headquarters. Then my five lieutenants and I sauntered down to Plant 4 gate to see what the hell was going on. We didn't make it obvious in any way.

When we got there we saw some big fights. Union men were throwing out the scabs and some of the foremen, and they said, "Hold that gate. Hold it, don't let the police come through here!" We strung ourselves across that gate, and it was only a matter of a telephone call before the police were sent down. They wanted to push us aside. We said, "Over our dead bodies." We talked to them - remember in Flint the policemen had uncles or fathers or brothers who were factory workers, too. We asked them, "What would you think if your wife was out here with us and you were in that damn plant? What would you think? Wouldn't you expect your wife to defend you and fight for better conditions for you?" They would start to tell us, "Well, you know, if we didn't have General Motors, what would we do in Flint? This is what feeds the people of Flint." We got them to procrastinate in these discussions just long enough.

Just as it was beginning to look risky for us, we saw the Emergency Brigade marching towards us, singing "Solidarity Forever" and "Hold the Fort." When they arrived, I climbed into the sound car that came from the other direction and instructed the women to lock arms and set up an oval picket line to prevent the police from entering the plant until it could be secured.

The successful occupation of Plant 4, which joined the occupations at Fisher 1 and 2, broke the resistance of General Motors and negotiations began in Detroit. We still maintained the picket lines and the security of the plants. The areas that weren't controlled by the union were controlled by the National Guard.

The National Guard kept everyone away from the Chevrolet embankment. If you came down Chevrolet Avenue and you looked up at the buildings there, you'd see guardsmen with their machine guns pointed right down the street.

The Brigade went to help the women from the kitchen get food into Plant 4 the first night, but we couldn't get by those guards. I started talking to one of these young boys and his finger was actually trembling on that trigger. We didn't fool around with them because they were all excited. They thought this was a big adventure - what the hell, shooting a couple of people. It was war. But the governor declared that the strikers were to be fed.

However, General Motors had turned off the heat in Plant 4 and they had no cushions. Fisher Body plants have cushions and materials for seating and so they were much easier to hold. Not only that, the huge motorized picket lines at Fisher Body 1 meant we were strong enough so that the picketers and sit-downers could get out if they wanted to and go across to the union restaurant to contact people. They could even have their families come into the plant for a little while and get them back out again through the big front windows, because they were guarded by the union.

At Chevrolet you couldn't get out. GM used all kinds of tactics to break that sit-down. They sent in notes that some members of the strikers' families were very sick. One man was told his father was dying, and so he left. They had doctors come in saying that some little cough was very dangerous-a contagious disease. But Kermit was a very strong leader and he managed to keep the men together.

This time it was General Motors that was stymied. On February 11 they signed a peace agreement recognizing the UAW as representative for the auto workers. And on March 12 the first labor contract was signed.




A Blow Against Racism
"An injury to one is an injury to all"

Black workers did not generally participate in organizing the union. They used to say at our Socialist Party headquarters, "It's bad enough being Black without being Red, too." You had to understand that they had nobody, not even any White union people, that would fight for them if they were fired. Racial prejudice was so pervasive. Many workers had come up recently from the deep south thinking that Blacks should get off the sidewalk when they passed by. We couldn't eat in the same restaurants. Blacks just wouldn't be served in any restaurant in Flint.

Out of 12,000 workers employed by Chevrolet, only 400 were Black. Fisher 1, Fisher 2, Chevrolet, all ten plants of Chevrolet, hired only White men on production. Black men were allowed to work only in the foundry of Buick and as sanitation workers, cleaning up the men's toilets in the other plants. Black men had no hope of ever getting a raise or getting a job promotion.

The only Black sit-downer in the Flint strikes was Roscoe Van Zandt in Plant 4. At first, the southern white workers didn't know what to make of it. All they could say to him was, "What the hell are you doing here? You haven't got any job to protect". When the food came in, he took his share and went around the corner because Blacks and Whites never ate together. This embarrassed the rest of the sit-downers.

The first night, when it came time to sleep, there was only one clear table and one blanket. Who was going to have the blanket and sleep up off the cold cement plant floor? The strikers voted that because Roscoe Van Zandt was an older man, he should have the blanket and sleep on the table. Then they began to talk to him. Before that, Black and White workers never got to know each other because it was a period of intense discrimination. Being a socialist, Kermit helped those workers get a good, anti-racist education in those 14 days before the strike was settled.

When it came time for the victory parade, the strikers voted for Roscoe Van Zandt to carry the flag out of the plant.

After the strike was over, there were some honorary meetings for Roscoe Van Zandt in the Black community, and I was a featured speaker. That was a different experience. You say a few sentences and then you have to wait for "Amen, Amen, you said it sister!" At first when I was interrupted, I didn't know what to make of it. Believe me, before that speech was over I knew how to say something and pause to let them express their feelings. These were the older generation that felt we had won a victory for them, even though they couldn't actively participate.

Conditions for Black workers improved greatly after the strike. Oh, yes! They were now in the union, of course, and they could begin to afford to own their own homes, buying them at so much a month. They took great pride in what had been accomplished by the strikers. Their sympathies were with us all of the time.




The Sweet Fruit of Victory



"Faintly, in the distance a mass of men was moving. A wisp of song caught all of us waiting there and it grew as the strikers marched forward. That song of victory drew everyone together as the Fisher 1 men marched through downtown and across to Chevrolet Avenue where they descended the hill and met the triumphant shouts of the Fisher 2 and Plant 4 men."

Shirley Olmsted Foster, "Open Letter from Sit-downer's Widow", The U.A.W. Searchlight, February 3, 1995.

Following the strike, the auto worker became a different human being. The women that had participated actively became a different type of woman, a different type from any we had ever known anywhere in the labor movement and certainly not in the city of Flint. They carried themselves with a different walk, their heads were high, and they had confidence in themselves. They were not only mentally different, but physically different. If you saw one of those women in the beginning and then saw her just a short period after going through this experience, learning and feeling that she had things she could fit together in her life, it would be an entirely different woman.

Not only that, but relationships within the family became much stronger. The kids understood why their parents were leaving them so often and why they had to go through a period of deprivation. It was not easy on them. The teachers in the schools were not in favor of the strike, and they showed it in many ways. Of course, in that period of great upheaval, the union couldn't do anything about what the teachers were saying in the schools. You couldn't take care of all the problems that cropped up at the time. But after their parents had this great victory, the children knew that their dads had won. It was mainly dads because it was mainly men in the plants, but their mothers had helped. Among the working class, it was a lot better.

Conditions also changed inside the plants. The foremen were tip-toeing around, being very careful. Every time something came up that couldn't be settled, or the workers got a tough foreman who told them, "Go to hell," they'd shut down the line. The men were so cocky, they'd say to the foremen, "You don't like it?" They'd push the button and shut down the line. It was very pleasurable to think that these men were not afraid of the boss anymore. They got a raise in their wages, and they weren't always followed to the can where somebody would step in to check how many cigarette butts were in the toilet. They became human beings to a degree even though they were still under the jurisdiction of a big corporation which controlled their lives. There was still the speed-up and other problems like that.

But in the family itself, which interested me most, it used to be that when a young man or a young woman got to the age where they were to graduate from high school the whole family celebrated because that was the glorious end of their education.

As conditions and wages improved in the plants, workers were able to have a more settled home life and raise families. The children did better in school, and they got to the point where they could go to college. After a few years of saving, the parents had the money to send them to colleges and universities. That's the period, in the 40s and 50s, when the college system began to proliferate across the country because of workers being able to send their kids. There was so much pride in the family: "My son is studying to become a doctor or a lawyer." Or "My daughter is studying to become a librarian." They had hopes that were outside the factory. And so the whole family was changed.

I think that was the biggest change of all. For the first time the children became very proud of their fathers and their mothers. They had gone through this big struggle to make it better for everybody, to put enough food on the table, to have enough clothes, and to have pride in school and the possibility of going on to colleges and universities.

There is something else that has to be emphasized: the fringe benefits that workers got from winning the strike, hospitalization and medical care, and in some contracts, dental and eye care. I have neighbors across the street who are Black retired auto workers and they get all that. All of these fringe benefits were something the workers never dreamed they could have when they first got recognition. Little by little, the strength of the union was able to get these benefits, and as a result, many other employers had to give them. Unionists set the standard.

The victory of GM workers set off a wave of union organization across the country. This wave grew to encompass the entire auto industry, including Chrysler and Ford. Then steel workers organized, then rubber workers, glass workers, and finally even professional, commercial, and service workers. They gained confidence after our victory because if we could force the largest industrial giant in the whole world to its knees, then they could win, too. This was the realization of John L. Lewis' dream, the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). By the way, the CIO was formed in 1935 as the Committee for Industrial Organization, but after the GM strike, after Plant 4 was taken, its name changed to the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The initials CIO stood for power. You'd see posters in homes and posters on cars proudly proclaiming, "I am the CIO." Those letters became almost like "I am the deity down from heaven." Those three letters, CIO, had great significance. I've never known of anything else as powerful, even government agencies that were set up to help people. The government's Works Progress Administration (WPA) program helped a lot of poor people, and those letters were well known. But the CIO was an especially magical set of letters.

What else changed? Workers felt that they had the right to run for political office if they wanted to and they did. Many of the later legislative people in the state of Michigan and other political posts were either strikers themselves, if they were young enough, or the sons of former strikers. The whole nature of the city changed.

The rich, of course, never forgave and never forgot. They blacklisted those that they could get away with blacklisting, and it was especially easy when it was a woman like me, a political organizer who was right at the center of things. And I was right in the middle of it, there's no question about that. After the strike was over, everybody in Flint knew who I was.




Fighting Racism
For White workers from the recent south, racism was something that was very strong. They had nasty attitudes like "You wouldn't want to get too close to them. Your daughter might marry one." You heard it all the time. We socialists kept on educating and writing articles in the union paper and doing everything that we could to argue against racism. Certainly, all the socialist auto workers had the right understanding. The success of the union eased things for Blacks but racism was still there. That was the hardest struggle of all.

The only viable anti-racist organization in Flint at the time was the The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and that was not a militant organization nationally-ever. But we formed a NAACP chapter in Flint that became very militant.

We threw out the president, the one they called "the downtown man" because he would go and report everything downtown. We threw him out and elected Edgar Holt, a Black Buick worker who was a graduate of Wilberforce University, to be president. He was a good orator with a wonderful personality-a very inspiring man.

When the city council voted down the Fair Employment Practices Commission, we organized a mock funeral with a casket in a hearse. A black minister in his robe marched with casket bearers wearing white gloves. This funeral procession wound through the city of Flint to stop at the bridge of the Flint River. We took the casket out, proclaimed "The burial of FEPC", and tossed the casket over the bridge into the river. Then the minister gave a long sermon using a loudspeaker.

It was something for people downtown shopping and going through the city to see a demonstration like that. When you throw a casket over the bridge into the river, people stop to see what is happening.

I became very active as a leader of the NAACP following the strike. We always dramatized the actions we organized so we'd get a lot of publicity. Otherwise, it was the policy of a company town like Flint to keep everything quiet. There was no news coverage of working class people's lives, of what they were doing or thinking, and so you had to be dramatic to get attention.




Organizing the Unemployed



The people on the bottom of the economic ladder who had become so completely demoralized, the people who felt they had no hopes, no help, no one who gave a damn about them-you could see that person stand up straight. "We can fight, too. We've got fight in us."

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger

After the strike, the unemployed workers were also having great difficulties. We petitioned the International Union to give us the right to organize a WPA and Unemployed Local 12, UAW - CIO, under the International's name and their protection. They didn't give us any money. I guess they didn't know what we were going to do and if they couldn't control it all the way down, they didn't want to fund it. We did organize a very militant union.

Many WPA projects were street repairs. They used to call it "digging holes" and ridicule the workers. These projects kept men and their families barely eating, just barely eating, because the wages were so little.

I was the secretary of Local 12 because at that time a woman wasn't supposed to be president, even though she may have all the ideas. We used the big name and the big, bright lights of the UAW - CIO, and because of the success of the strike, we got an awful lot of WPA workers to join our union. The main organizers were the men who were digging in the streets and the women who worked on the canning projects. We had regular meetings and we had all kinds of projects. We had library projects.

There wasn't office space in the main building for the library project I was working on at the time, so we were put in the building that housed the water department facilities of the city.

The city officials were very worried about what we were doing. One day we picked up the local paper to read that a leading communist of Flint was in a position to poison the city's water supply. It was a big story about me! Once again we were facing that big Red scare.

Fortunately I knew the head of the WPA. She was a feminist from Britain from the Labor Party. She knew who I was and she knew my record, so she immediately got the whole project transferred to another building. The other officials in the WPA wanted me off the job and out of their hair. They wanted to fire me. But she held firm and transferred the whole project.

Local 12 brought in the unemployed people that had almost lost hope. The politicians were taking away milk from the children, instead of giving them more milk which they should have been doing. And they wouldn't give any surplus food to the hungry people. Homes were being repossessed and they were taking the women and children and putting them into one big shelter with the men in another. They were actually splitting up families. They would set furniture out in the street, but we had crews that would set the furniture back in and try to protect it. That became a lot of hard labor without any results so we started organizing big demonstrations. We would burn an effigy of the relief manager, the head of the welfare department, and we'd give out statements.

We finally decided to let the whole city of Flint know what was happening. We had a demonstration and announced that we would hold a "Death Watch." If they were going to do these things to the poor people in Flint, then let everybody see it.

Across from the welfare building there was a big park with a lot of beautiful trees. This park also happened to be across from one end of Buick Motor Car Company, which was rehiring workers to go into automobile production after the 1937 recession.

We put big signs up on each corner of the park inviting the public to come out to see poor people with hungry, starving children-to watch people die. We had whole families down there in great big army tents that we had procured. And we tapped into the street wires so that they had electricity at night in their tents.

Mothers were down there washing out diapers in tubs and hanging them up on ropes we strung between the trees. They built fires in large oil drums to keep warm and to heat water. They would cook their meals out there and heat their water to wash clothes and bathe their babies. They were really living out in public.

People came down to see what was happening. Great big signs on each corner of the park said, "This is the Death Watch" and "If you want to see people in the city of Flint die, here they are." That shook up a lot of people. You'd see cars driving around slowly to view what was happening. This was very bad publicity for the city. It hit the state capital and finally it hit Washington. Washington opened up surplus food to the people in Flint who were on the relief rolls. And they stopped separating families when they repossessed their homes.

The police did threaten us. But many union people came to hang around the periphery of the park. We also had union men in the park putting up clothes-lines and doing whatever they could to help. On top of that, in the Buick plant we had a lot of UAW members that had just gone back to work. They knew the power of the union. The windows of this plant came down fairly low so the men could look right out into the park. Pat Murray, the chief steward in there, issued a statement: "If any cops come up anywhere within the district, we're going to come out with our pipes and our hammers and our wrenches, and we'll take care of them." We settled the grievance before that happened.

It was an exciting period. It took a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of militancy, but it achieved results. The people on the bottom of the economic ladder who had become so completely demoralized, the people who felt they had no hopes, no help, no one who gave a damn about them-you could see that person stand up straight. "We can fight, too. We've got fight in us."

Unemployed people were inspired by factory workers who had won a union, and they came down to the union meetings which became quite exciting, quite dramatic. They would get up and speak for the first time. Unemployed people found their voice and their strength. It was a wonderful experience, not only for the people that helped, but for the people who were doing it- for everybody.

It is the hardest thing in the world to organize the unemployed. They need strong backing. The strongest backing comes from the established unions, especially those who've had success in a strike. They feel that they have power. Once you see that in a worker or a number of workers, it's something you don't forget. They've been changed from people who have been kept down constantly to people who feel they have strength. They have knowledge and the ability to make changes. Before that, they'd only see the overpowering bureaucracy of the union and the overpowering bureaucracy of the government over their heads constantly with police and badges all around them. But when they have a great victory in a labor struggle, then they begin to feel that they are just as powerful and strong as their opponents.

That's the way that socialism will come in this country-when workers realize that they do have the numbers and the strength and the talents and the abilities. All of the creative things that workers come up with in a strike are usually original, because it pertains to the situation you are in right at that moment. You'll have people offering one suggestion after another, and they will discuss it together. The organizing process is very inspirational.




Personally Speaking
"It's not that I was born a heroine. It was a question of growing up in a company town where people were going without food and children were going without health services. These families were in dire need. That wasn't the concern of General Motors. They just wanted to get their production out. If you were living in a company town, you would feel that, and you would do the same thing."

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger, 1994

During the strike, I had tuberculosis in my right lung and I had to have treatments to collapse that lung. I was fortunate that the doctor who treated me was a socialist, or else I would have had great difficulty finding a doctor in Flint to treat me during the strike. It was a very serious problem, but when you live through a period of revolt like that, then you understand a person saying, "I'll give my life for this cause if I can make it easier on other people," and mean it-really mean it. So I didn't stop to be sick. I was willing to go through anything for the strike.

After the strike, the labor movement raised enough money for me to go east on a speaking tour. I spoke before a number of unions and I spoke before their big May Day celebration.

Then I came home and collapsed with tuberculosis. The unions and two lawyers in Detroit and New York raised enough money to send me to a sanitarium for six months. By that time it was impossible to save my lung. The loss of that lung has caused me much difficulty over my life. But I never regretted it because I had so many wonderful experiences.

The strike was one of the best experiences of my life, but also the most painful. After the strike my younger son, Jarvis, was killed in a car accident. The older one, Dennis, died a few years later of multiple sclerosis. Kermit and I separated.

That part is painful. I think that's why I never wanted to talk much about that time, and I never wanted to write about it.

You get enriching experiences in life, even if you struggle for something and you lose. It's the people that you get to know-that you work with. It's the real strength and nourishment that you get from somebody working beside you that you can call brother or sister. So, if my life has been shortened, it also has been highly enriched.




Class Struggle During the War
I was blacklisted so completely I don't think I could have gotten a job anywhere in Flint. When General Motors blacklists you, the blacklist extends to other auto factories and other corporations. All of the automobile plants including Chrysler and Ford cooperated on that. If you're well known, the blacklist is really effective. The unemployed union got a lot of publicity from the "Death Watch," so I was well known from that, in addition to the strike.

I had to get out of Flint if I wanted to get a job. It was 1941 and they were hiring for the war effort. I had just married Sol and we both moved to Detroit.

During that time housing was so scarce, you had to take practically anything. We found a very small, depressing apartment that had black paint all over the floors and the wood-work. My husband, Sol, and his buddies in the movement stripped all the paint off, re-painted it and made it livable. At least we had a place to live.

We didn't have sit-down strikes during the war. We would have had a great deal of difficulty doing that. Many of the workers that came into the shops during the war were new, so we had to educate them to unionism. Secondly, there was so much patriotism that people would have endorsed any kind of military action to stop strikes in those plants.

During the war, the government had a national "cost plus" agreement with business which guaranteed them a fixed rate of profit in addition to their production costs. That was how the government got the corporations to convert their auto plants to war production. So you weren't hitting a corporation in the pocketbook during a strike but the United States government. In spite of that, we did shut plants down just by walking out and going home.

And there were lots of grievances! When they opened up the plants to war production, they left the same old foremen and management forces in there. You had the same old speed-up artists and the ones who would harangue you.

First, I went to work at Budd Wheel Corporation in a plant that was producing shells for the war. In the beginning the men were really cruel. They resented women coming into the plants. Their attitude was, since women weren't the bread winners, "What the hell are they doing in those plants, anyway?" It didn't matter even if the woman's husband had been drafted and removed from the family. They didn't want any women in there. So they left all the toughest jobs in these plants to women. No matter how small you were, or how delicate you were, or how old you were, or anything else, these men took all the good jobs and left all the rough ones for the women. They would even side with the bosses when they razzed us and made sordid remarks to us.

I couldn't open my mouth until I got seniority after ninety days. I got seniority, but then they found out who I was, and I was fired, summarily, just like that. I had carried my name, Genora Johnson, to Detroit and the blacklist had caught up with me. I thought if I used my new married name, Genora Dollinger, I would have a chance. I came home and I said, "Sol, I'm going to start using your name now. I've worn mine out."

I decided to apply for a job at Briggs Corporation. It used to be a plant that produced auto bodies for Chrysler. During the war it had the largest press room in the world. They were producing complete B-27 airplanes. It was a huge plant.

The plant had a good union leadership and I think that's what I was looking for-a little protection. Local 212 had a reputation for being very, very militant. They were called the "dead-end kids" of the UAW. They had sent flying squads up to Flint to help us win our sit-down strike.

I practically had to beg the employment manager to give me a job in the plant instead of in the office at a higher salary. He said I didn't belong in a factory because I had good grammar and I wasn't a "shop girl." But I told him that I had gone through a WPA course and learned how to run lathes and milling machines and grinders, and I knew how to use vernier calipers and all the necessary tools. When you completed that course you could go into practically any department of an automobile plant and know how to handle the job. I had all the qualifications to be hired in the plant, and I told him with a straight face that I had come out for the war effort, so he hired me.

Briggs Manufacturing Company had several plants in Detroit and they put me in the plant on Vernor Avenue. I was on the drill press and I'm telling you, those were the longest days of my life. All the workers were exhausted from the speed-up. We had a militant union, but so many people thought that if you struck during the war, you were striking against our boys on the front lines. Patriotism was running high.

The hiring manager had mentioned that he had a large inspection department in the main plant on Mack Avenue. That plant employed 7,000 workers. I left the Vernor plant one day and walked into his office. I said, "You promised me that you were going to transfer me to the inspection department." So he transferred me.

The inspection department was divided into "cribs" or sections. Chicken-wire walls divided the cribs from each other, keeping the Navy parts separate from the Army parts, because they were working on two different airplanes. Workers could see over into the Navy crib, and they could see over into the Army crib, but no one was supposed to ever go from one crib to another. The whole department was restricted. But the union covered all the grievances from both cribs, and the stewards and I had to go back and forth. We could always see if the foremen were doing something in one crib when we were over in the other crib. It was an interesting arrangement, all right.

The workers were primarily women with maybe a hundred or two hundred men who were injured veterans returned from the war. The women were treated in a disgraceful fashion by the foremen. They talked dirty to them, saying things like "Get the rag out of your ass" and "It's time to stop your screaming and your bleeding." Dirty, sick, awful stuff. They were resentful of women coming into the plants. They seemed to especially enjoy tormenting women fresh out of their homes or school classrooms.

The union was trying to organize the women there. They had an old man come up from an adjoining local, and he would take up a grievance here and there and pat the women on the back. But he didn't solve anything, really, because the foremen didn't change their ways and the male union rep was blind to the harassment.

For ninety days, women kept coming around saying, "We're going to have a meeting. We're going over to the Local hall, won't you come?" And I'd say, "No, I can't. No, I can't." I couldn't talk to anybody because I had to work ninety days to get seniority. Finally, I had about three or four days left. The women in our department were organizing a meeting to go over and talk to the people at the main union hall. They were taking their list of grievances to tell them that they weren't being resolved. So I went over and sat in the back of the hall.

Instead of having a committee man address this department meeting, they had Emil Mazey come in to give his last farewell speech. Emil was the organizer and president of Briggs Local 212, and he had been drafted because of his militancy. He wouldn't go along with the UAW's no-strike pledge during the war, so he was drafted by the United States government. (He later became the secretary-treasurer of the International Union).

When I saw Emil come in, I didn't know what the hell to do. I didn't want to get up and be noticed by walking out, so I just held my head down during his speech and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. When they said they needed somebody to be their chief steward, which is the same as a committee man or committee woman in the General Motors plants, he recognized me. He told these women that I'd been working with for almost three months, "I don't know what you're coming over here and asking me for help for. You've got one of the original organizers of the union right there in your ranks." All the women looked back at me.

I was embarrassed and angry, because I knew I was going to get fired because of the blacklist. After the meeting, when Emil came down to greet me, I said, "Thanks, pal. You know what you did? You just blasted me out of being a member of your union." The women were all around me. Emil called over the man who was succeeding him as president, a young militant by the name of Jess Ferazza. He introduced me and said, "Jess, if that woman is fired, you pull every Briggs plant in the city of Detroit, all 18,000 workers, and you keep them down until she's put back in again."

A couple of days after the meeting, I was fired. Eighteen thousand workers walked out in Detroit and I got my job back immediately. I was elected chief steward of Department 15 and I organized it very well.

There were 500 workers in my department, mainly Hungarian, Italian, and Polish. There were all kinds of things they didn't have experience with and there were many problems that had never been resolved.

The workers had only half-an-hour to rush up to the cafeteria, eat their lunches, and get back down again, so they brought their lunches instead. They cleared off a few long tables so they could sit around them and eat. Every day I ate lunch with a different group and discussed unionism and solidarity.

One day, one of the women left crying and I chewed the foreman out. The foreman denied having anything to do with it. I didn't believe the foreman, naturally. But what had happened was that another women found out that she had an illegitimate child and said something nasty to her. So we had a big discussion on that and on a number of other similar topics, day after day.

We had three gay couples in there, too. One of them didn't like me. Her partner was very friendly, very warm. But this woman was not cooperative at all with things that I was trying to do to build the union. One day she said something about me being interested in her partner. So I took her outside the gates of the department and I said, "Look, I want to tell you something. I don't want you to think that there's anything between your partner and me. I've got a husband, and I'm not personally interested in your friend. I understand what the relationship is and I want you on my side." And she was on my side from that time on. She was a good one.

In the early days, you know, no one talked about those things. There was so much prejudice. But we got those women to the point where they accepted an awful lot of things that even the men with all their experience wouldn't accept.

And we organized all kinds of militant actions. There were more walk-outs at Briggs than anywhere else in the city of Detroit. Even though the UAW had agreed not to strike during the war, we kept organizing walk-outs because the company never stopped trying to smash Local 212. But every time we struck, somebody usually got fired.

At one point, there was a major grievance in the plant in some other department. The union stewards decided that we had to strike over this grievance. But one steward after another said, "Don't look at me. I led the last one, and I nearly got fired." So finally they turned to me. "You haven't led a strike out of here for the whole building." I said, "No, I haven't. But I've got it pretty well organized by now." And so they said, "It's up to Department 15 to lead this one."

First I told everybody, "Don't clock out-to make sure you get your pay. It shows that you were consciously leaving the department on strike at that time." That was how the company was able to identify the strike leaders: they were the first to clock out. But I didn't know what the hell I was going to manufacture in my department to get all the workers out without recriminations.

Finally, I came up with a plan. Eddie, the Army foreman, had a nasty mouth on him. I went into the superintendent's office and I started charging Eddie with all kinds of contract violations. The superintendent said, "Wait just a minute, Genora. We'll get Eddie in here." "All right, you get him in here." Then I said, "Look, you and Frasier (the Navy foreman) both said this and you said this." I charged them with a lot of grievances that didn't really exist although they could have. The foremen were amazed and they were angry. I said, "You want me to prove it? You know where I got my information? Call the general foreman in." I got them all in that office, off the work floor, all the foremen, Navy crib, Army crib, and Marine crib. I was yelling and hollering as hard as I could- like you had to do with those kind of foremen, charging them with all kinds of things.

Then the Army foreman looked out the window and said, "My God, the department is all gone!" They had walked off. I turned to the superintendent, and I said, "You didn't believe me, did you. You see what you've done? What they've done?" Then I walked out. My line stewards had lead the women out without touching the time-clock. They had all gone, so I walked out, too. We won that strike and none of my stewards were fired, but there were casualties in other departments.

From my viewpoint now, I know that if they had organized women like that in every plant, we would have had a much stronger union. But that wasn't the policy of the men in the unions then. They didn't think too much about women. Most of them were resentful of "women working in factories and taking jobs away from men."

But I was able to prove to all the rest of the men in the plant, some of whom had built the union from the beginning, what women could do and how much they could learn and how fast they could develop in a short time. I had a great deal of satisfaction out of that experience.

I was fired three times. The last time I went back, it was rough. If I went to the toilet, they had somebody follow me and very obviously watch the clock. Everything I did was watched. Every time a grievance was brought up or there was a discussion with one of the employees, the foreman would come up a little too close. I'd say, "Get the hell out of here. This is a private grievance and you have no business until we call you in on it." In my department, the workers wouldn't let the foremen come anywhere near anything that I was saying or doing, but I couldn't stop it when I was out of my department.

During this time the Local needed an educational director because our director was drafted. The executive board voted that I take over the job. But some of our people in the Socialist Workers' Party didn't think it would be a wise thing because of my reputation as a socialist. They thought it would be better if I didn't take it. But the union kept insisting. I heard that another very good educator from Ford Local was being released, so I asked the union if they would release me from their request if I could get him to come over to Briggs Local. They agreed and so I took over the public speaking classes instead.

Many of the committee men were very effective in the shop on grievances and in speaking to people one on one. But when a union meeting came up, they just didn't know how to stand up and make a persuasive speech. A number of these committee men from different Briggs plants came to my classes regularly. We had a very effective method of encouraging them. We recorded what they said one time and played it back when they got much better.

When the contract came up for consideration, lo and behold, these committee men stood up and spoke in the meetings. They did a beautiful job persuading the workers to turn down this contract, because it didn't meet any of the union demands. One meeting after another, the contract was turned down, primarily because of these popular committee men who had never before taken a position on the floor. That was another reason why management didn't like me very much.

Then came the end of the war. All of the people on war production were laid off because the plants were going back into regular industrial production.




The Employers Strike Back
In 1945, when the plant closed down for re-tooling after the war, I was asked to help the UAW run its first candidate for the mayor of the city of Detroit, Richard Frankenstein. I worked one or two days when one night when I was sleeping in bed, I was beaten with a lead pipe.

Two men broke in through the back door of our apartment from the alley and put a flashlight in my face. I went up on my elbow to see who it was. That's when I got beaten pretty badly.

At that time, my husband, Sol, was organizing the Socialist Workers' Party chapter in Flint. He used to come home to Detroit every weekend at the same time. But this particular week, he called and said, "I can't make it on Saturday. Is it all right if I come home for Sunday and Monday instead?" So it was not the usual time he was home. Normally, I would have been alone on that night, but he was sleeping on the other side of the bed when I was attacked. If he hadn't put his arm over my head, I think I would have been injured permanently-beyond help. He tried to climb over me, and they clubbed him on the legs so bad that when he tried to stand up against them, he collapsed. The two thugs immediately rushed out into the back alley and sped away.

I was badly injured and had to stay in the hospital for several weeks. I had a brain concussion and was paralyzed on my right side. I had a broken collarbone and nerve damage to my face, and I was in a cast for six weeks.

There had previously been three other beatings in the local. The first beating was of a popular member of the Briggs Local, Roy Snowden, who was captain of the flying squad, a fighting military group, the most militant flying squad in the whole UAW. Roy was a most courageous union man and afraid of nothing. The assailants ambushed him in his rooming house. As Roy went to put his key in the door, he couldn't get it in. He bent over to find out why. They had deliberately broken off another piece of metal in there. When he was bent over, they came up and gave him a severe beating.

The next time they got another militant man of the squadron by the name of Art Vega. He had also been in an awful lot of scraps to build the union. Art Vega and his wife were out walking when thugs rushed out and started beating him. His wife took off her high-heeled shoe and hit one of them in the back of the head. She started screaming and they ran away. But it was a real, genuine threat.

Then Roy Snowden was beaten a second time when he was walking up the street with Frank Silver, president of the motor products Local. Somebody he knew beckoned to him from the sideline and he went over. His companion got a little ahead of him, and when Roy went to catch up, thugs dashed out from the back of an apartment building and gave him another severe beating.

We decided to form an investigating committee to find out where these beatings were coming from because we did not want them to spread further in the Local. In the meeting only a couple of people volunteered because it was a real intimidation for the rest of the membership to think that the great captain of the flying squad, this physically and mentally powerful man, had been beaten up twice. So I volunteered. Dumb-bell me!

We began investigating and interrogating people, holding meetings and going over the information we had collected. We learned that Briggs had given out an important scrap contract to a man by the name of Carl Renda. Carl Renda was the son-in-law of Santo Perrone, the head of the Mafia in the city of Detroit. Briggs had given the Mafia this highly lucrative scrap contract in exchange for attacking the militants in the union.

When our committee went to the International Union, they just pooh-poohed it. "These guys get into beer garden fights. They break up the place, and they can be stepping out with somebody else, and some husband can come in..." and so on. They gave us a lot of silly talk. When I asked Walter Reuther to set up a reward that would deter any further action, he said, "Come on, Genora. Let's not get dramatic." That was before I was attacked.

I told Walter that if he didn't put up a reward at the Local level, the violence would come up to the International. Then he could be facing it. By the way, my warning is published in an issue of the American Socialist magazine. Sadly, my prediction came true. They shot both Reuther brothers. Walter Reuther was shot and Victor Reuther was shot and lost his eye. Then the International Union became very, very interested. They put up a very big reward and brought in a man from Washington, who used to be on the LaFolette investigating committee. This man, Ralph Winstead, was a real detective. He followed every lead, every rumor. He was paid twenty-four hours a day for doing this.



We had to investigate some very suspicious characters, and the detective had to inform his wife every hour where he was. Later on the police found his body in Lake Ste. Claire. We think it was foul play and so did the International Union. But there was nothing we could do about it.




Back to the Future



"Nothing is ever handed to the working people on a silver platter. Improved living conditions and greater freedom are won through organized struggles. This is how the common people in America got the right to vote, the right to send their children to public schools, and the right to form their own independent organizations."

UAW, Local 212, Educational Committee March 18, 1945.

I think our duty today is to educate all of those who do not understand that they got their present benefits and their present standard of living from organized labor. We have to tell the story of people who suffered and died for the cause of labor. We have to teach people the history of the labor movement, and we have to tell the story that women played, so that women can be encouraged to play more of a role today.

We have won some wonderful economic advantages for working people in this country. But they are slowly being legislated away from us. Now, we've got to fight on the political level. We have to organize politically with the same intensity that we had when we began to organize the unions.

Today, most unions have a bureaucratic leadership that does little for working people and keeps them in a state of apathy. As soon as Walter Reuther found the back door to the White House so he could go in and talk to the President, he was more concerned about what the big politicals and the corporation owners said than his own members-his own members!

Right after the strike, they did away with the stewards collecting union dues on the job. Walter Reuther wanted to have money coming in regularly through an automatic dues check-off system. It was supposed to be more efficient and guarantee that in case of a strike the International Union had the funds available to help in any part of the country. But as soon as they got the regular dues coming in, you know what the bureaucrats did? They were secure, so they made all the decisions and that made the union less democratic.

We fought against this change because we thought it was better to keep the union leadership accountable to the members. Under the old system workers had some power over their leaders. They could say, "I want this done and I want that done and here's my dues." So the leadership had to deliver if they wanted the dues to come in regularly.

At the beginning of the strike, Walter Reuther said no labor leader should get paid more than the highest paid worker in the industry. But he soon forgot those words. He started living a very comfortable life, and he spent a lot of the union's money without talking to the members about it. He built a very beautiful camp at Black Lake with some of that money.

That camp is supposed to be an educational facility, but they don't want radicals in there giving workers the real solution to the problems of people in general and working class people especially. That is socialism, social ownership of the means of production. That is the way to stop the ruling class from dominating humanity, and for working people to achieve their liberation.

-END-