Thursday, January 16, 2014
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From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The 1934 Minneapolis Strike
..This year marks the 80th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.
*******
This year is the 80th Anniversary of the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes that paved the way to the later over-the road trucker unionization that was to make the Teamsters Union one of the strongest unions (if at the same time one of the most corrupt but that is a story for another time). Here is a 1934 article by Socialist Workers Party(SWP) (then Communist League Of America)leader James P. Cannon who was also a key leader behind the scenes (and not so behind the scenes when the law came looking to arrest him and Max Schachtman) about the lessons to be learned by labor militants from that great series of strike actions. I also recommend "Teamster Rebellion" and "Teamster Power" by local Teamsters leader and later SWP leader Farrell Dobbs. Those books trace the rank and file struggle and the later over-the road fight that he was instrumental in leading.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
The implications of these strikes cannot all be pursued here. Farrell Dobbs’ own account is set out in his book, Teamster Rebellion, New York, 1972, and the comments of James P. Cannon in Notebook of an Agitator, 2nd edition, New York, 1973, pp.75-94, The Communist League of America 1932-34, New York, 1985, pp.328-340 and the chapter on The Great Minneapolis Strikes in The History of American Trotskyism, 2nd edition, New York, 1972, pp.139-168. A cursory treatment is to be found in Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army, Westport, 1977, pp.77-82. Carl Cowl offers his own reminiscences in Ceri Jones’ Minneapolis 1934: An Upsurge in Confidence in Socialist Worker (9 October 1982), and Jake Cooper and Harry DeBoer in Minneapolis 1934, in the American Socialist Action, July 1984).
Every effort was made by the leaders to give these natural abilities an opportunity to come to the surface. No stone was left unturned in the attempt to do this, Something more than numbers is required on the picket line. The men must feel that their efforts are well spent, that they are a part of a smoothly functioning machine, that they can successfully hold every position they win. To stimulate and justify this confidence the leaders must perfect a thorough organization and all preparations must be carefully checked to the most minute detail. That was done in Minneapolis.
A large garage about 400 feet wide and a block long was selected to serve as the headquarters for the Minneapolis strike. A large sign was painted across the front of the building announcing that this was the strike headquarters. Supplementary field headquarters were set up at points where it would prove necessary to concentrate a sizeable force for mass picketing. At the main headquarters a stage was erected and a loud-speaker system installed to be used in the dispatching of pickets and in addressing meetings.
A commissary department requiring a personnel of 35 was set up and maintained throughout the strike. A special service and repair department was provided and a crew of 12 mechanics well equipped with tools were busily engaged in keeping the cars and trucks of the pickets in good running order. Special arrangements were made to secure gasoline and to obtain a tire repair service.
A first-aid station was established at the headquarters through the volunteer service of two doctors and two trained nurses. This department rendered an invaluable service because of the speed and efficiency with which injuries were treated and it is notable to record that in no case did an infection develop.
Within the headquarters offices, a crew of men with special instructions remained constantly at the five telephones which were the nerve center of the strike. A corps of women assistants under the direction of the financial officer received applications for membership which poured in by the hundreds and issued permits for the pickets to obtain gasoline and mechanical service. A special committee was set up to hear complaints and requests for special permits to operate trucks. The instructions to this committee were very strict. These special groups served excellently as a buffer to take the burden of routine matters off the shoulders of the leaders and to leave them free to direct the principal strategy of the strike.
Before the start of the strike a complete analysis of the picketing requirements had been made and, with a corps of stenographers and mimeograph operators, the leaders had prepared a complete set of written orders and instructions to the pickets. As a result of this careful preparation, the entire picket line was established and functioning effectively within an hour after the beginning of the strike.
The principal strategy of the picketing was to establish stationary picket posts at the city limits on all highways, at all gasoline bulk plants and direct service filling stations, at the wholesale market, in the loop retail district, and at the truck freight terminals.
These stationary pickets were supplemented by ‘cruising squads’ which were assigned to definite districts throughout the town and by other cruising squads which were assigned to cover certain areas where trucking activities would most likely be attempted.
The pickets were transported to and from the stationary posts by truck and the cruising squads were provided with fast automobiles. A reserve force with adequate transportation facilities was kept in the headquarters at all times. Each group of pickets and each cruising squad was commanded by a picket captain, who had been given written instructions as to responsibilities. Each truck driver was also given special written instructions to be followed.
Wherever mass picketing was required a field commander was appointed and given special credentials with instructions to establish a field headquarters to maintain contact with General Headquarters. This was accomplished by stationing a contact officer at a suitable telephone location and providing him with assistants. In this manner GHQ could phone orders to the contact officer who would in turn send them to the field commander by one of the assistants. Reports from the field commander to GHQ were also sent by this medium. To supplement this a special squad of motorcycle riders were kept at GHQ to perform special liaison duties.
A number of special cruising squads manned by hand-picked men and captained by qualified leaders were kept under the constant control of GHQ. The captains of these squads were given credentials which superseded all other authority in the field. These squads were used to be sent into a tense situation for the purpose of reorganizing the forces and leading the fight. They did their work well and more than justified the continuation of this system.
It is well to note that in spite of the large number of cars, trucks, and motorcycles required for this method of picketing, there was an excess of vehicles volunteered for service by the strikers.
It was naturally necessary to maintain a guard at the doors of the headquarters. But in spite of all precautions, stoolpigeons will slip through. Once within the building these miserable wretches can do much damage if left unhindered. They operate principally by attempting to disrupt the ranks through the encouragement of drinking and through attempts to create disorder and discussion.
Special squads of reliable men were kept on duty constantly watching for these people and they did their work very effectively. There is another and more dangerous type of stool-pigeon, who comes well armed with credentials and attempts to insinuate himself into a position entailing some responsibility. It was found that by carefully selecting key men who are absolutely trustworthy and by using great secrecy in issuing orders that it is comparatively early to discover these people through their great ambition to disrupt.
To summarize the general results of this organizational method, we find that we have a group of strikers who are given food regularly, and medical care for their physical comfort. We find that they have reliable mechanical equipment to do their job. And we find that they soon come to realize that their leaders know at all times where they are and what they are up against. They wade in fearlessly because they know that if they need help it will come, if they need new captains, they will come, and they feel confident that if they win any advantage their leaders will be able to hold it for them.
These Minneapolis workers then are merely representative American workers, who have risen to a new height because of the careful efforts made to uncover and develop their every resource. The Minneapolis workers call upon the workers of America to demand such cooperation and guidance from all labor leaders.
At the Minneapolis City Market
Through our connections in the market houses it was learned that on Saturday morning there was to be a concerted effort to make deliveries. The strike committee held a conference and it was decided that we would relieve some of our forces from positions where there was not so much activity and hold them in reserve. It developed that although we had a little skirmish on that day, a serious threat was not made for any wholesale delivery.
The market situation was watched closely and, after waiting for Sunday and Monday to pass, we learned through unquestionable sources, that the big offensive was to be made Tuesday about eleven o’clock. This information was received about midnight Monday. Immediate action became compulsory. ‘Concentrate the Pickets’, was the slogan. ‘Cruising squads’ of pickets were dispatched, motorcycle riders roared out, street car motormen and conductors on the owl cars carried the word to our pickets at outlying points, telephones and other messengers were utilized for the mobilization of every available picket.
Soon the outlying positions were deserted except for a skeleton picket line. The pickets came pouring in to strike headquarters, thousands of the tired but eager fighters, anxious to defend their rights with their lives if necessary. Tons of food had been prepared and was waiting for these fighters; but it seemed that it was hardly touched, so anxious were these workers for the job to be done.
No raised voices; no milling; quietly questioning each other: ‘Where do we go? When do we start?’ The word goes from the dispatcher to the microphone announcer in the big strike headquarters: ‘Start moving!’ Then trucks lined up. Noiselessly they were pushed into place. Next order: ‘Fill the trucks!’ Like one man these eager fighters filled the trucks to capacity.
In code the drivers only were given the destination. ‘Move out!’ Motors roared and in an instant three hundred pickets were on their way to a destination, unknown then, that was to make new history for the American workers.
Adjacent to the market and on one of the border streets, Labor Headquarters is located. Into this hall holding about two thousand men our pickets were concentrated. A skeleton patrol was sent to patrol the market streets and to report any move to start delivery. Word quickly comes back: hundreds of special deputies, special police and harness bulls armed with clubs and guns, squad cars of police with sawn-off shot guns and vomiting gas. Quietly the pickets patrolled the streets, curiosity seekers hurling curses at the hired strikebreakers. A truck starts to move, our pickets jump to the running boards and demand that the scab driver stop. A hired slugger raises his club and slashes at a picket. Down the picket drops as if dead. The fight is on. Phone rings at the concentration hall: ‘Send the reserves!’ Orderly, but almost as if by magic, the hall is emptied. The pickets are deployed by their leaders to surround the police and sluggers. The police raise their riot guns but the workers ignore and rush through them. ‘Chase out the hired sluggers’, is their battle cry. The cowardly sluggers take to their heels and run. The police and strikers use their clubs freely. Many casualties on both sides. The workers have captured the market!
Step by step in this l0-day strike the workers learnt that ‘law and order’, ‘constitutional rights’, ‘liberty and justice’, ‘right to organize’ were hollow phrases used by the bosses to keep them in ignorance and subjection. No sooner did they learn than they swiftly translated these lessons into militant action, not individual action but organized action. The whole record of the strike is a record of the transformation of workers to whom the idea of unionism was new, into resolute experienced fighters, who have successfully fought their class enemy, the bosses, and know the value of organization and militant leadership.
In the first days of the strike a holiday spirit prevailed. There were no serious clashes with police nor any determined effort on the part of the bosses to move trucks. The sentiment of the men was for peaceful picketing and Law and Order. Many had illusions about the impartiality of the cops and the press.
But on Friday the bosses began their offensive. Cops began to arrest pickets by the dozens. A few trucks under heavy police guard pierced the picket lines. The yellow press began to denounce the strikers, who were trying to get decent living conditions for themselves and their families, as lawless elements. Abuse was heaped upon them by all the agencies of the Citizens Alliance. The workers began to realize the seriousness of the struggle and settled down in real earnestness to the task confronting them.
Meanwhile the police chief, at the behest of the bosses, began to round up the ex-crooks, murderers, and all the scum of the city, including gentlemen from the social register, and made them special deputies, to preserve ‘Law and Order’.
The first real fight occurred Saturday morning in the market, when 500 pickets battled with their bare fists, trying to prevent 600 cops and deputies armed with clubs and blackjacks from moving two trucks. The cops succeeded in getting the trucks through, but only after bitter fighting in which the unarmed strikers gave a good account of themselves, sending many cops to the hospital.
Sunday was comparatively quiet. The men were thinking hard and learning fast.
Early Monday morning hundreds of pickets assembled at the market armed with clubs, rubber hose, and other improvised weapons. They were no longer a mass of strikers, they were soldiers obeying orders from their captains. Police attempted to disperse the pickets and the fight was on. The strikers rushed the cops, who went down like nine-pins. After considerable fighting the cops drew their guns and threatened to fire. The workers showed their defiance. But the cops had had enough and asked the pickets to drop their clubs, saying that they would drop theirs. The strikers were not fooled by this and stood their ground. No trucks moved that day.
At dawn Tuesday, hundreds of cops and special deputies began to pour into the market until there were over a thousand. They were concentrated at strategic points. Later the strikers began to arrive by truckfuls. Thousands of sympathetic onlookers lined the streets. The strikers moved with military precision, maneuvering skillfully for vantage points. Their plan was to catch the cops from the rear and divide their forces. Many reserves were stationed in the Central Labor Headquarters nearby.
As the morning wore on, there were numerous skirmishes that heralded the battle to come. Just about noon the fight started, when a deputized female attempted to club a woman picket. The plucky woman seized a club from a picket at her side and stretched her flat. With a roar that was heard for blocks, the strikers swept away the specials and cops. The specials made no effort to stem the tide but turned and fled, tossing away their clubs and badges as they ran. Many were cornered in stalls and blind alleys and laid out three deep. Clubs swung everywhere as the fighting pickets surged irresistibly through the rows of stalls smashing down all opposition. Several truckloads of deputies attempting to escape were surrounded and transferred to the mounting casualty list. In desperation the regular cops drove their cars into the ranks of the strikers in a vain effort to stop them. Ambulances worked overtime taking away the specials.
Within half an hour the strikers had complete control of the market. The cops and deputies were completely licked. More than 50 special cops were injured, two of whom died subsequently. A few pickets were hurt. No further efforts were made to move the trucks. The bosses agreed to recognize the union.
Still another was so badly beaten in the Tribune riot that all old operation lesion opened up, and there is danger of internal hemorrhages. Still another was beaten across the arm with a billy. She is still carrying her arm in a sling.
Another interesting angle to this situation was brought out when sympathizers began to offer their services. One young woman, a graduate of the University who had specialized in sociology came down to offer her services. She felt that the power of the women had not even been felt in this class struggle. A young couple, friends of the other girl, offered their services. Using these three as an advisory council, the officers of the auxiliary started to raise money.
A committee, composed of Mrs. Grant Dunne as president of the auxiliary and Mrs. Farrell Dobbs, as secretary, these three friends, and two other women not connected with the union, met at four o’clock one afternoon. The next night at midnight the auxiliary had in its Commissary Relief Fund, $416.70. The necessity of feeding the families of the men on strike until they would again be able to draw wages was brought home to us very forcibly during the last few days.
The newspapers of Minneapolis, being the instrument of the Citizen’s Alliance, were muzzled to such an extent that no news in favor of the strikers was ever published. To attempt to counteract this state of affairs, the women organized a mass demonstration. We marched from the Auditorium on Grant and 14th Streets straight down Nicollet Avenue. Led first by four women carrying our banner, followed by about 500 women, many of them sympathizers, we broke every traffic rule in Minneapolis. Crowds gathered along the sidewalk and followed the procession to the court house.
We marched straight to the mayor’s office. A committee entered to present our demands upon the mayor or his emissary – Mr. Guise. The gentlemen were not in. in fact Mayor Bainbridge was in his usual position – home in bed ill. Mr. Guise would be in by 2 p.m. It was then about 12:30. The committee decided to wait.
The women, quiet and orderly during the whole proceedings, suddenly were infuriated by something. Inquiry disclosed that the chief of police had thought it smart to parade a batch of his special deputies down the same corridor the women were waiting in. Only quick thinking on the part of the committee saved those deputies from being very badly hurt.
The mayor’s secretary arrived in surprisingly short time. The committee waited upon him. They got just what they expected – nothing. The demands were the immediate removal of Chief Johannes, the removal of all special deputies, and no further interference with pickets. The committee then left. The crowd was addressed by Frieda Charles, and dispersed in an orderly fashion.
In closing let me emphasize again. Let your women work in this class struggle. Their place is right along side of the men, shoulder to the wheel, fighting for their birthright. The Women’s Auxiliary of General Drivers’ Union No.574 has set an example which we hope will be followed by the working class women throughout the nation.
The entire labor movement has been aroused. Every union in the city has been strengthened. The recruiting of workers into the organizations is going forward all along the line. The forces of reaction have been dealt a powerful blow. Tens of thousands of workers stand up today, proud to have been a part of the smashing drive.
The Minneapolis Branch of the Communist League bears considerable responsibility for this achievement. It is well known that its members have been active in the trade unions for a long period of years. It has not pressed forward for place or prestige alone. The League members have at all times acted in accord with the real interests of the union. The program adopted has been submitted to the rank and file from time to time. Proposals, suggestions, criticisms have been welcomed. The League has given its best to the union and to the strike. It is willing to accept its part of the blame for any mistakes that may have been made. We think they were very few. Such errors can and will be made good.
Just as the League accepts responsibility for mistakes that it may make, it insists upon a calm and careful appraisal of its work in the union and the strike. In short we ask the workers to judge us for the work done and for policies and programs proposed.
The real work of Communist militants in the trade unions consists in putting forward correct proposals, fighting for their acceptance; then, by diligent and patient effort, rallying the advanced workers to carry these proposals into action.
That the League membership played an active part in the strike is shown not only by the fact that our comrades were in leading positions in the strike committee. It is also shown in the part played on the picket line where every man and woman available from our ranks was placed. In the work of organizing for the strike our comrades took a leading part. This alone was the work of months. At the headquarters, both before and during the strike, our members found their places in the kitchen, in the office, in the picket line, at various tasks too numerous to mention.
That the unions and other workers’ organizations came forward with material and moral support was due, in no small measure, to the efforts of our comrades. Handicapped by the stigma attached to Communism by the false and reactionary policy of the ‘Official’ Communist Party (the Stalinists), we have relied upon the judgment of the thinking militants in the trade unions to learn to know and to support a true Communist trade union policy. The Communist League has never asked that the advanced workers in the unions accept our political opinions in order that we may find a place in the work of the movement. We have never demanded any special privilege. We have taken our places there in order to render whatever services we had the ability to render.
A new period has opened up in the class struggle in America. The workers’ organizations must be prepared for new and greater tasks. The capitalists are more ruthless and stubborn than ever. They are better organized and financed, they have centralized their already powerful chambers of commerce. The unions must also find better forms of organization, change completely the old outlook, and put forward a new and militant leadership. This is becoming more and more apparent to the workers.
The League long ago recognized this truth, and with its numerically small forces, has moved deliberately but confidently toward the great task of reconstruction. This work, necessary for the very life of the workers’ movement, is not the easy and simple task that many workers imagine it to be. It requires the devotion and sacrifice of all workers who see and understand that fighting unions are the need of the hour.
The Minneapolis Branch of the Communist League asks those workers who believe as we do, or who have the desire to learn more about our views, to join the League. To become part of the International Communist movement. To help in the vast work of building a new revolutionary party in America. A Communist Party worthy of the name, a party of workers that will be also a section of the Fourth International.
In the produce market area it was common practice for drivers and helpers to start work at 2 or 3 a.m. and continue work until 6 p.m. They were low paid and sometimes had to work seven days without any extra pay. If complaints were made they were fired.
The workers in trucking, and most other industries, were not unionized before 1934 and had to accept whatever conditions employers imposed. Many strikes were called between 1922 and 1934, and all suffered defeat. Minneapolis was known all over the country as the worst scab town.
In the early 1920s the bosses started the open-shop drive. They formed the Citizen’s Alliance whose only aim was to keep Minneapolis non-union. The bosses were successful in carrying out this program up to 1934. In fact, they were confident that no one could ever lead a drive to unionize the city.
V.R. Dunne, Miles Dunne, Grant Dunne, Harry DeBoer, George Frosig (who was vice-president of Local 574), and myself worked in the same coal yard. We held meetings in the early part of 1933 to discuss and plan a program for organizing the coal industry. If that test case was successful we would proceed with the rest of the trucking industry.
We all recognized that the trucking industry was the most powerful and also the most difficult in dealing with strikebreakers because scabs have to operate on the street. We had great strength in numbers and understood the task of organizing. We therefore picked the coal industry as the starting point. This industry was strategic because of Minnesota’s sub-zero winters.
We were convinced the employer would never recognize the union without a bloody battle. Consequently we made all possible preparations and were extra careful to proceed legally – appearing before the Central Labor Union, the executive board of the drivers union, and the Teamsters’ Joint Council. The response from these bodies was to throw a wet blanket over our proposal.
Some made statements like, ‘The drivers know where we are, why don’t they come and join us?’ This attitude was discouraging but we still went on with our plans, confident of victory if we prepared properly.
Workers’ committees from various companies drew up a contract of demands. And when we presented this contract to the employers, they, as we had expected, refused to meet with us. We then called an open meeting of all workers to present the results of our efforts. When the leaders of the AFL found out about this meeting and the possibility of a strike – a rumor had been spreading throughout the industry – they ganged up on us in mass, preventing us from taking any action. About 500 to 600 coal drivers present at this meeting tore up their union books and littered the union headquarters with the pieces.
The only action taken was a motion to hold a special meeting Sunday at 2 p.m., predicated on the fact that no business agent then would come out on Sunday and interfere with us. This proved to be strategically correct. Between Friday and Sunday all our forces were in motion to bring out all the coal workers to this meeting. The meeting was packed and a motion passed to strike on Monday morning at 5 am and to set up a strike committee.
We appealed to the Teamsters’ International Union for a strike sanction and strike benefits. We received the command to continue negotiations. Knowing that the International would never endorse a strike, we still – for the sake of the ranks – sent another appeal explaining the employer’s attitude in refusing to meet with the union committee. The answer again was: proceed to negotiate.
This procedure caused a delay of action For at least a month. But it was well worth the time in order to prepare the workers for the coming strike. It became plain that a big battle was unavoidable. The issue would be recognition of the union. The outcome of this battle could not be predicted.
All the preparations for the strike began to be made. Regular charts were made up of the main highways and streets for picketing. Instructions for the picketing captains were drawn up. Registration of all available vehicles for service on the picket line, installation of a loud-speaking system in the strike headquarters everything was done according to plan.
Early one morning in May 1934 the strike started. The workers responded practically 100 per cent. The employers were caught by surprise at the response of the workers. The methods used by them were nothing new – the use of police and deputizing of every reactionary man equipping them with weapons to beat and arrest the pickets. During the first days dozens of strikers had been arrested and beaten up in a most brutal manner. Sixteen women had been beaten unconscious after being lured into an alley where an attempt was being made to deliver newspapers.
We organized rehearsals, padded our caps with cardboard and proceeded to hit one another on the top of the head. If it hurt the first time some more padding was applied until the blows became painless.
The daily newspapers carried screaming articles warning the public not to appear in the market area on such and such a day as violence was prevalent and some innocent bystander might get hurt.
Two days after the women were beaten up an attempt was made to open the market with scabs. The morning when this happened all radio stations had their speaking equipment on the roof of buildings to broadcast the intended movement of trucks. Instead they had to broadcast the Battle of Deputy Run.
The story of Deputy Run is known all over the country, in fact all over the world. It meant that 1500 deputies and 500 uniformed police, under the pressure of the strikers’ superior force, had to run for their lives. One deputy, a prominent open-shop employer, fell dead on the battlefield. Another died a few days later. Many others went hospitals.
Governor Floyd B Olsen then intervened, demanding a 48-hour truce, and during this time no trucks were to move. Both sides accepted this truce proposal. During these 48 hours we were in continual negotiations; union representatives in one room and employers in another, and the governor as a go-between.
After many hours of negotiations, a contract with recognition of the union and a small increase in wages was presented. The big question at issue at that time was our right to represent truck drivers, helpers, and inside workers working for each employer. This issue was scuttled, and finally a paragraph, very ambiguous in wording, was accepted with the guarantee of the governor that it meant the right of the union to deal for all the mentioned classifications. On this basis the strike ended after ii days.
The whole working class in the city was jubilant over the great victory. But in the first meeting called to negotiate a definite contract, the employers refused to recognize our union as the bargaining agent for the inside workers. The strike was again set in motion.
Now the employers really set to work. They placed full-page ads in all the city dailies. A vicious red-baiting campaign was carried out by the newspapers, picturing the leaders as ‘Trotskyist-Communists’ intending to make a revolution in Minneapolis instead of building the union. It became necessary to meet all these slanders by issuing a daily paper to present the position of the union.
Two government mediators were attempting to settle the dispute on any terms. They finally gave us a proposal providing for recognition on the ‘inside workers’. The union accepted but the employers turned down this agreement. The governor then declared martial law.
Early one morning the military surrounded the strike headquarters with machine guns and took it over. Bill Brown, Ray Dunne, Miles Dunne were thrown into a stockade. Attempts were made during that day to call in second-ranked leaders and settle the strike. They refused to meet until the headquarters and the leaders were released.
Finally, after eight weeks of hardship and suffering a settlement was agreed on which provided for all the important issues that the union had been battling for.
In brief, these are some of the highlights of events during the strikes of 1934.
*******
This year is the 80th Anniversary of the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes that paved the way to the later over-the road trucker unionization that was to make the Teamsters Union one of the strongest unions (if at the same time one of the most corrupt but that is a story for another time). Here is a 1934 article by Socialist Workers Party(SWP) (then Communist League Of America)leader James P. Cannon who was also a key leader behind the scenes (and not so behind the scenes when the law came looking to arrest him and Max Schachtman) about the lessons to be learned by labor militants from that great series of strike actions. I also recommend "Teamster Rebellion" and "Teamster Power" by local Teamsters leader and later SWP leader Farrell Dobbs. Those books trace the rank and file struggle and the later over-the road fight that he was instrumental in leading.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
 | The 1934 Minneapolis Strike
From Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.1, Spring 1989. Used by permision.
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The Minneapolis strikes of 1934 have always occupied a special place in the historical understanding of the Trotskyist movement, as they were the first clearly documented demonstration of the ability of a small Trotskyist organisation to make the breakthrough into the broader labour movement, and to lead one of its sections to victory. Along with the Toledo Auto-Lite struggle and the San Francisco General Strike, they formed part of the revival of the industrial militancy of the working class of the United States from the depths of the slump. They have always been regarded as a model by Trotskyist organisations throughout the world.
We reproduce a series of extracts taken from the American Militant of 2 June 1934 (vol.vii, no.22 – whole no.226), and a speech made in 1952 by Carl Skoglund, The Story of Minneapolis, which first appeared publicly in the March 1984 issue of Socialist Action, the paper of one of the groups supporting the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in the USA.The implications of these strikes cannot all be pursued here. Farrell Dobbs’ own account is set out in his book, Teamster Rebellion, New York, 1972, and the comments of James P. Cannon in Notebook of an Agitator, 2nd edition, New York, 1973, pp.75-94, The Communist League of America 1932-34, New York, 1985, pp.328-340 and the chapter on The Great Minneapolis Strikes in The History of American Trotskyism, 2nd edition, New York, 1972, pp.139-168. A cursory treatment is to be found in Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army, Westport, 1977, pp.77-82. Carl Cowl offers his own reminiscences in Ceri Jones’ Minneapolis 1934: An Upsurge in Confidence in Socialist Worker (9 October 1982), and Jake Cooper and Harry DeBoer in Minneapolis 1934, in the American Socialist Action, July 1984).
Editors RH
How the Strike was organized
Minneapolis, 28 May – The courage and determination so effectively displayed by the striking Minneapolis truck drivers and helpers has proven conclusively that the American working class is very well equipped to fight their exploiters. It only remains for a proper leadership to come to the front in the entire labor movement and guide these dynamic forces to victory,
The striking truck drivers and helpers were suffering from economic adversity but their condition was no different from that of other workers in the United States. These men were simply a representative cross-section of the American working class. The abilities which they brought into play are lying dormant in every group of American workers.Every effort was made by the leaders to give these natural abilities an opportunity to come to the surface. No stone was left unturned in the attempt to do this, Something more than numbers is required on the picket line. The men must feel that their efforts are well spent, that they are a part of a smoothly functioning machine, that they can successfully hold every position they win. To stimulate and justify this confidence the leaders must perfect a thorough organization and all preparations must be carefully checked to the most minute detail. That was done in Minneapolis.
A large garage about 400 feet wide and a block long was selected to serve as the headquarters for the Minneapolis strike. A large sign was painted across the front of the building announcing that this was the strike headquarters. Supplementary field headquarters were set up at points where it would prove necessary to concentrate a sizeable force for mass picketing. At the main headquarters a stage was erected and a loud-speaker system installed to be used in the dispatching of pickets and in addressing meetings.
A commissary department requiring a personnel of 35 was set up and maintained throughout the strike. A special service and repair department was provided and a crew of 12 mechanics well equipped with tools were busily engaged in keeping the cars and trucks of the pickets in good running order. Special arrangements were made to secure gasoline and to obtain a tire repair service.
A first-aid station was established at the headquarters through the volunteer service of two doctors and two trained nurses. This department rendered an invaluable service because of the speed and efficiency with which injuries were treated and it is notable to record that in no case did an infection develop.
Within the headquarters offices, a crew of men with special instructions remained constantly at the five telephones which were the nerve center of the strike. A corps of women assistants under the direction of the financial officer received applications for membership which poured in by the hundreds and issued permits for the pickets to obtain gasoline and mechanical service. A special committee was set up to hear complaints and requests for special permits to operate trucks. The instructions to this committee were very strict. These special groups served excellently as a buffer to take the burden of routine matters off the shoulders of the leaders and to leave them free to direct the principal strategy of the strike.
Before the start of the strike a complete analysis of the picketing requirements had been made and, with a corps of stenographers and mimeograph operators, the leaders had prepared a complete set of written orders and instructions to the pickets. As a result of this careful preparation, the entire picket line was established and functioning effectively within an hour after the beginning of the strike.
The principal strategy of the picketing was to establish stationary picket posts at the city limits on all highways, at all gasoline bulk plants and direct service filling stations, at the wholesale market, in the loop retail district, and at the truck freight terminals.
These stationary pickets were supplemented by ‘cruising squads’ which were assigned to definite districts throughout the town and by other cruising squads which were assigned to cover certain areas where trucking activities would most likely be attempted.
The pickets were transported to and from the stationary posts by truck and the cruising squads were provided with fast automobiles. A reserve force with adequate transportation facilities was kept in the headquarters at all times. Each group of pickets and each cruising squad was commanded by a picket captain, who had been given written instructions as to responsibilities. Each truck driver was also given special written instructions to be followed.
Wherever mass picketing was required a field commander was appointed and given special credentials with instructions to establish a field headquarters to maintain contact with General Headquarters. This was accomplished by stationing a contact officer at a suitable telephone location and providing him with assistants. In this manner GHQ could phone orders to the contact officer who would in turn send them to the field commander by one of the assistants. Reports from the field commander to GHQ were also sent by this medium. To supplement this a special squad of motorcycle riders were kept at GHQ to perform special liaison duties.
A number of special cruising squads manned by hand-picked men and captained by qualified leaders were kept under the constant control of GHQ. The captains of these squads were given credentials which superseded all other authority in the field. These squads were used to be sent into a tense situation for the purpose of reorganizing the forces and leading the fight. They did their work well and more than justified the continuation of this system.
It is well to note that in spite of the large number of cars, trucks, and motorcycles required for this method of picketing, there was an excess of vehicles volunteered for service by the strikers.
It was naturally necessary to maintain a guard at the doors of the headquarters. But in spite of all precautions, stoolpigeons will slip through. Once within the building these miserable wretches can do much damage if left unhindered. They operate principally by attempting to disrupt the ranks through the encouragement of drinking and through attempts to create disorder and discussion.
Special squads of reliable men were kept on duty constantly watching for these people and they did their work very effectively. There is another and more dangerous type of stool-pigeon, who comes well armed with credentials and attempts to insinuate himself into a position entailing some responsibility. It was found that by carefully selecting key men who are absolutely trustworthy and by using great secrecy in issuing orders that it is comparatively early to discover these people through their great ambition to disrupt.
To summarize the general results of this organizational method, we find that we have a group of strikers who are given food regularly, and medical care for their physical comfort. We find that they have reliable mechanical equipment to do their job. And we find that they soon come to realize that their leaders know at all times where they are and what they are up against. They wade in fearlessly because they know that if they need help it will come, if they need new captains, they will come, and they feel confident that if they win any advantage their leaders will be able to hold it for them.
These Minneapolis workers then are merely representative American workers, who have risen to a new height because of the careful efforts made to uncover and develop their every resource. The Minneapolis workers call upon the workers of America to demand such cooperation and guidance from all labor leaders.
A Striker
At the Minneapolis City Market
‘The Battle of Deputy Run’
From the inception of the organization work in connection with the General Drivers strike, it was correctly estimated that our strategic position was the so-called central market place. This takes in an area of approximately six square blocks. It is bounded on the one whole side by the railroad tracks, which are the team tracks where practically all of the market produce is unloaded.
In concentrating on the market, we were guided by the fact that the food situation, especially at this time of the year, was the real point to attack. At the start of the strike this strategy was not so apparent. But on the second and third days, it became plainly visible that the perishable food supply was running low and that the market bosses were going to attempt some drastic action to move their perishable foods.Through our connections in the market houses it was learned that on Saturday morning there was to be a concerted effort to make deliveries. The strike committee held a conference and it was decided that we would relieve some of our forces from positions where there was not so much activity and hold them in reserve. It developed that although we had a little skirmish on that day, a serious threat was not made for any wholesale delivery.
The market situation was watched closely and, after waiting for Sunday and Monday to pass, we learned through unquestionable sources, that the big offensive was to be made Tuesday about eleven o’clock. This information was received about midnight Monday. Immediate action became compulsory. ‘Concentrate the Pickets’, was the slogan. ‘Cruising squads’ of pickets were dispatched, motorcycle riders roared out, street car motormen and conductors on the owl cars carried the word to our pickets at outlying points, telephones and other messengers were utilized for the mobilization of every available picket.
Soon the outlying positions were deserted except for a skeleton picket line. The pickets came pouring in to strike headquarters, thousands of the tired but eager fighters, anxious to defend their rights with their lives if necessary. Tons of food had been prepared and was waiting for these fighters; but it seemed that it was hardly touched, so anxious were these workers for the job to be done.
No raised voices; no milling; quietly questioning each other: ‘Where do we go? When do we start?’ The word goes from the dispatcher to the microphone announcer in the big strike headquarters: ‘Start moving!’ Then trucks lined up. Noiselessly they were pushed into place. Next order: ‘Fill the trucks!’ Like one man these eager fighters filled the trucks to capacity.
In code the drivers only were given the destination. ‘Move out!’ Motors roared and in an instant three hundred pickets were on their way to a destination, unknown then, that was to make new history for the American workers.
Adjacent to the market and on one of the border streets, Labor Headquarters is located. Into this hall holding about two thousand men our pickets were concentrated. A skeleton patrol was sent to patrol the market streets and to report any move to start delivery. Word quickly comes back: hundreds of special deputies, special police and harness bulls armed with clubs and guns, squad cars of police with sawn-off shot guns and vomiting gas. Quietly the pickets patrolled the streets, curiosity seekers hurling curses at the hired strikebreakers. A truck starts to move, our pickets jump to the running boards and demand that the scab driver stop. A hired slugger raises his club and slashes at a picket. Down the picket drops as if dead. The fight is on. Phone rings at the concentration hall: ‘Send the reserves!’ Orderly, but almost as if by magic, the hall is emptied. The pickets are deployed by their leaders to surround the police and sluggers. The police raise their riot guns but the workers ignore and rush through them. ‘Chase out the hired sluggers’, is their battle cry. The cowardly sluggers take to their heels and run. The police and strikers use their clubs freely. Many casualties on both sides. The workers have captured the market!
A Striker
A Lesson in ‘Law and Order’
Minneapolis, 28 May – The magnificent struggles of the truck drivers, particularly the battle in the market Tuesday morning, 22 May, the ‘Battle of Deputies Run’, will be permanently engraved in the minds of the Minneapolis working class.
This fight in which the strikers routed over 1500 police and special deputies is full of meaning for the future. Coming as it did after a week of lesser fights, it shows the capacity of the workers, once aroused, for determined struggle. It reveals their resourcefulness, courage and intelligence.Step by step in this l0-day strike the workers learnt that ‘law and order’, ‘constitutional rights’, ‘liberty and justice’, ‘right to organize’ were hollow phrases used by the bosses to keep them in ignorance and subjection. No sooner did they learn than they swiftly translated these lessons into militant action, not individual action but organized action. The whole record of the strike is a record of the transformation of workers to whom the idea of unionism was new, into resolute experienced fighters, who have successfully fought their class enemy, the bosses, and know the value of organization and militant leadership.
In the first days of the strike a holiday spirit prevailed. There were no serious clashes with police nor any determined effort on the part of the bosses to move trucks. The sentiment of the men was for peaceful picketing and Law and Order. Many had illusions about the impartiality of the cops and the press.
But on Friday the bosses began their offensive. Cops began to arrest pickets by the dozens. A few trucks under heavy police guard pierced the picket lines. The yellow press began to denounce the strikers, who were trying to get decent living conditions for themselves and their families, as lawless elements. Abuse was heaped upon them by all the agencies of the Citizens Alliance. The workers began to realize the seriousness of the struggle and settled down in real earnestness to the task confronting them.
Meanwhile the police chief, at the behest of the bosses, began to round up the ex-crooks, murderers, and all the scum of the city, including gentlemen from the social register, and made them special deputies, to preserve ‘Law and Order’.
The first real fight occurred Saturday morning in the market, when 500 pickets battled with their bare fists, trying to prevent 600 cops and deputies armed with clubs and blackjacks from moving two trucks. The cops succeeded in getting the trucks through, but only after bitter fighting in which the unarmed strikers gave a good account of themselves, sending many cops to the hospital.
Sunday was comparatively quiet. The men were thinking hard and learning fast.
Early Monday morning hundreds of pickets assembled at the market armed with clubs, rubber hose, and other improvised weapons. They were no longer a mass of strikers, they were soldiers obeying orders from their captains. Police attempted to disperse the pickets and the fight was on. The strikers rushed the cops, who went down like nine-pins. After considerable fighting the cops drew their guns and threatened to fire. The workers showed their defiance. But the cops had had enough and asked the pickets to drop their clubs, saying that they would drop theirs. The strikers were not fooled by this and stood their ground. No trucks moved that day.
At dawn Tuesday, hundreds of cops and special deputies began to pour into the market until there were over a thousand. They were concentrated at strategic points. Later the strikers began to arrive by truckfuls. Thousands of sympathetic onlookers lined the streets. The strikers moved with military precision, maneuvering skillfully for vantage points. Their plan was to catch the cops from the rear and divide their forces. Many reserves were stationed in the Central Labor Headquarters nearby.
As the morning wore on, there were numerous skirmishes that heralded the battle to come. Just about noon the fight started, when a deputized female attempted to club a woman picket. The plucky woman seized a club from a picket at her side and stretched her flat. With a roar that was heard for blocks, the strikers swept away the specials and cops. The specials made no effort to stem the tide but turned and fled, tossing away their clubs and badges as they ran. Many were cornered in stalls and blind alleys and laid out three deep. Clubs swung everywhere as the fighting pickets surged irresistibly through the rows of stalls smashing down all opposition. Several truckloads of deputies attempting to escape were surrounded and transferred to the mounting casualty list. In desperation the regular cops drove their cars into the ranks of the strikers in a vain effort to stop them. Ambulances worked overtime taking away the specials.
Within half an hour the strikers had complete control of the market. The cops and deputies were completely licked. More than 50 special cops were injured, two of whom died subsequently. A few pickets were hurt. No further efforts were made to move the trucks. The bosses agreed to recognize the union.
William Kitt
Women Active on firing line
When the General Drivers’ Union made a strong appeal to the wives of their members to aid in every way possible, they met with a response they had not dreamed of. Women came to Strike Headquarters, ready and willing to do any kind of work assigned them. Girls trained in office work took over the routine work. Others gave their heart and soul to the feeding of hungry droves of men.
Women pickets took up the cause on the line of battle. Three of our women were seriously injured in riots with police. One’s life was despaired of for several days. Another was taken to the hospital with a very seriously fractured ankle. She is at present confined to her bed, and will be there for some time to come.Still another was so badly beaten in the Tribune riot that all old operation lesion opened up, and there is danger of internal hemorrhages. Still another was beaten across the arm with a billy. She is still carrying her arm in a sling.
Another interesting angle to this situation was brought out when sympathizers began to offer their services. One young woman, a graduate of the University who had specialized in sociology came down to offer her services. She felt that the power of the women had not even been felt in this class struggle. A young couple, friends of the other girl, offered their services. Using these three as an advisory council, the officers of the auxiliary started to raise money.
A committee, composed of Mrs. Grant Dunne as president of the auxiliary and Mrs. Farrell Dobbs, as secretary, these three friends, and two other women not connected with the union, met at four o’clock one afternoon. The next night at midnight the auxiliary had in its Commissary Relief Fund, $416.70. The necessity of feeding the families of the men on strike until they would again be able to draw wages was brought home to us very forcibly during the last few days.
The newspapers of Minneapolis, being the instrument of the Citizen’s Alliance, were muzzled to such an extent that no news in favor of the strikers was ever published. To attempt to counteract this state of affairs, the women organized a mass demonstration. We marched from the Auditorium on Grant and 14th Streets straight down Nicollet Avenue. Led first by four women carrying our banner, followed by about 500 women, many of them sympathizers, we broke every traffic rule in Minneapolis. Crowds gathered along the sidewalk and followed the procession to the court house.
We marched straight to the mayor’s office. A committee entered to present our demands upon the mayor or his emissary – Mr. Guise. The gentlemen were not in. in fact Mayor Bainbridge was in his usual position – home in bed ill. Mr. Guise would be in by 2 p.m. It was then about 12:30. The committee decided to wait.
The women, quiet and orderly during the whole proceedings, suddenly were infuriated by something. Inquiry disclosed that the chief of police had thought it smart to parade a batch of his special deputies down the same corridor the women were waiting in. Only quick thinking on the part of the committee saved those deputies from being very badly hurt.
The mayor’s secretary arrived in surprisingly short time. The committee waited upon him. They got just what they expected – nothing. The demands were the immediate removal of Chief Johannes, the removal of all special deputies, and no further interference with pickets. The committee then left. The crowd was addressed by Frieda Charles, and dispersed in an orderly fashion.
In closing let me emphasize again. Let your women work in this class struggle. Their place is right along side of the men, shoulder to the wheel, fighting for their birthright. The Women’s Auxiliary of General Drivers’ Union No.574 has set an example which we hope will be followed by the working class women throughout the nation.
Auxiliary Member
Role of the League in Strike
Minneapolis – Serious and militant workers confronted with the necessity of advancing their demands for a better standard of living, have the problems of organization, program and leadership before them from the very first. In the Minneapolis drivers’ strike thousands of workers came to the union for very definite reasons. First: the union is a mass organization. Second: it had to its credit the achievement of the Coal Yard Workers’ strike. Third: its leadership had been tested.
The Communist League has always followed the policy in the trade unions of working with all progressive forces to be found in the organizations. Its trade union policy has been proved in action. Today there stands, confronting the bosses, a mighty union which organized the picket line that fought off and routed the police and the armed bands of the Citizens Alliance.The entire labor movement has been aroused. Every union in the city has been strengthened. The recruiting of workers into the organizations is going forward all along the line. The forces of reaction have been dealt a powerful blow. Tens of thousands of workers stand up today, proud to have been a part of the smashing drive.
The Minneapolis Branch of the Communist League bears considerable responsibility for this achievement. It is well known that its members have been active in the trade unions for a long period of years. It has not pressed forward for place or prestige alone. The League members have at all times acted in accord with the real interests of the union. The program adopted has been submitted to the rank and file from time to time. Proposals, suggestions, criticisms have been welcomed. The League has given its best to the union and to the strike. It is willing to accept its part of the blame for any mistakes that may have been made. We think they were very few. Such errors can and will be made good.
Just as the League accepts responsibility for mistakes that it may make, it insists upon a calm and careful appraisal of its work in the union and the strike. In short we ask the workers to judge us for the work done and for policies and programs proposed.
The real work of Communist militants in the trade unions consists in putting forward correct proposals, fighting for their acceptance; then, by diligent and patient effort, rallying the advanced workers to carry these proposals into action.
That the League membership played an active part in the strike is shown not only by the fact that our comrades were in leading positions in the strike committee. It is also shown in the part played on the picket line where every man and woman available from our ranks was placed. In the work of organizing for the strike our comrades took a leading part. This alone was the work of months. At the headquarters, both before and during the strike, our members found their places in the kitchen, in the office, in the picket line, at various tasks too numerous to mention.
That the unions and other workers’ organizations came forward with material and moral support was due, in no small measure, to the efforts of our comrades. Handicapped by the stigma attached to Communism by the false and reactionary policy of the ‘Official’ Communist Party (the Stalinists), we have relied upon the judgment of the thinking militants in the trade unions to learn to know and to support a true Communist trade union policy. The Communist League has never asked that the advanced workers in the unions accept our political opinions in order that we may find a place in the work of the movement. We have never demanded any special privilege. We have taken our places there in order to render whatever services we had the ability to render.
A new period has opened up in the class struggle in America. The workers’ organizations must be prepared for new and greater tasks. The capitalists are more ruthless and stubborn than ever. They are better organized and financed, they have centralized their already powerful chambers of commerce. The unions must also find better forms of organization, change completely the old outlook, and put forward a new and militant leadership. This is becoming more and more apparent to the workers.
The League long ago recognized this truth, and with its numerically small forces, has moved deliberately but confidently toward the great task of reconstruction. This work, necessary for the very life of the workers’ movement, is not the easy and simple task that many workers imagine it to be. It requires the devotion and sacrifice of all workers who see and understand that fighting unions are the need of the hour.
The Minneapolis Branch of the Communist League asks those workers who believe as we do, or who have the desire to learn more about our views, to join the League. To become part of the International Communist movement. To help in the vast work of building a new revolutionary party in America. A Communist Party worthy of the name, a party of workers that will be also a section of the Fourth International.
Striker
The Story of Minneapolis
Today I want to talk about the famous Minneapolis strikes of 1934.
The drivers and all the workers employed in the truck transportation industry at that time enjoyed miserable conditions which existed throughout the history of Minneapolis prior to 1934. When the economic crash came the misery was intensified.In the produce market area it was common practice for drivers and helpers to start work at 2 or 3 a.m. and continue work until 6 p.m. They were low paid and sometimes had to work seven days without any extra pay. If complaints were made they were fired.
The workers in trucking, and most other industries, were not unionized before 1934 and had to accept whatever conditions employers imposed. Many strikes were called between 1922 and 1934, and all suffered defeat. Minneapolis was known all over the country as the worst scab town.
In the early 1920s the bosses started the open-shop drive. They formed the Citizen’s Alliance whose only aim was to keep Minneapolis non-union. The bosses were successful in carrying out this program up to 1934. In fact, they were confident that no one could ever lead a drive to unionize the city.
V.R. Dunne, Miles Dunne, Grant Dunne, Harry DeBoer, George Frosig (who was vice-president of Local 574), and myself worked in the same coal yard. We held meetings in the early part of 1933 to discuss and plan a program for organizing the coal industry. If that test case was successful we would proceed with the rest of the trucking industry.
We all recognized that the trucking industry was the most powerful and also the most difficult in dealing with strikebreakers because scabs have to operate on the street. We had great strength in numbers and understood the task of organizing. We therefore picked the coal industry as the starting point. This industry was strategic because of Minnesota’s sub-zero winters.
We were convinced the employer would never recognize the union without a bloody battle. Consequently we made all possible preparations and were extra careful to proceed legally – appearing before the Central Labor Union, the executive board of the drivers union, and the Teamsters’ Joint Council. The response from these bodies was to throw a wet blanket over our proposal.
Some made statements like, ‘The drivers know where we are, why don’t they come and join us?’ This attitude was discouraging but we still went on with our plans, confident of victory if we prepared properly.
Workers’ committees from various companies drew up a contract of demands. And when we presented this contract to the employers, they, as we had expected, refused to meet with us. We then called an open meeting of all workers to present the results of our efforts. When the leaders of the AFL found out about this meeting and the possibility of a strike – a rumor had been spreading throughout the industry – they ganged up on us in mass, preventing us from taking any action. About 500 to 600 coal drivers present at this meeting tore up their union books and littered the union headquarters with the pieces.
The only action taken was a motion to hold a special meeting Sunday at 2 p.m., predicated on the fact that no business agent then would come out on Sunday and interfere with us. This proved to be strategically correct. Between Friday and Sunday all our forces were in motion to bring out all the coal workers to this meeting. The meeting was packed and a motion passed to strike on Monday morning at 5 am and to set up a strike committee.
Success
After a three-day strike we were victorious. No one could get a pound of coal without a doctor’s prescription. The success of this strike caused a sensation among the drivers and workers.
A mass meeting was organized in a big theatre for the purpose of inaugurating a real campaign to unionize other trucking industries. The meeting was well advertised and a capacity crowd filled the place. Organizational preparations were carried out for about two months. The famous committee of one hundred was made up of representatives from all sections who became involved in the strike. This committee had full authority to decide on all questions. Contracts of demands were presented to the employers. There was one answer received – a flat no.We appealed to the Teamsters’ International Union for a strike sanction and strike benefits. We received the command to continue negotiations. Knowing that the International would never endorse a strike, we still – for the sake of the ranks – sent another appeal explaining the employer’s attitude in refusing to meet with the union committee. The answer again was: proceed to negotiate.
This procedure caused a delay of action For at least a month. But it was well worth the time in order to prepare the workers for the coming strike. It became plain that a big battle was unavoidable. The issue would be recognition of the union. The outcome of this battle could not be predicted.
All the preparations for the strike began to be made. Regular charts were made up of the main highways and streets for picketing. Instructions for the picketing captains were drawn up. Registration of all available vehicles for service on the picket line, installation of a loud-speaking system in the strike headquarters everything was done according to plan.
Early one morning in May 1934 the strike started. The workers responded practically 100 per cent. The employers were caught by surprise at the response of the workers. The methods used by them were nothing new – the use of police and deputizing of every reactionary man equipping them with weapons to beat and arrest the pickets. During the first days dozens of strikers had been arrested and beaten up in a most brutal manner. Sixteen women had been beaten unconscious after being lured into an alley where an attempt was being made to deliver newspapers.
We organized rehearsals, padded our caps with cardboard and proceeded to hit one another on the top of the head. If it hurt the first time some more padding was applied until the blows became painless.
The daily newspapers carried screaming articles warning the public not to appear in the market area on such and such a day as violence was prevalent and some innocent bystander might get hurt.
Two days after the women were beaten up an attempt was made to open the market with scabs. The morning when this happened all radio stations had their speaking equipment on the roof of buildings to broadcast the intended movement of trucks. Instead they had to broadcast the Battle of Deputy Run.
The story of Deputy Run is known all over the country, in fact all over the world. It meant that 1500 deputies and 500 uniformed police, under the pressure of the strikers’ superior force, had to run for their lives. One deputy, a prominent open-shop employer, fell dead on the battlefield. Another died a few days later. Many others went hospitals.
Governor Floyd B Olsen then intervened, demanding a 48-hour truce, and during this time no trucks were to move. Both sides accepted this truce proposal. During these 48 hours we were in continual negotiations; union representatives in one room and employers in another, and the governor as a go-between.
After many hours of negotiations, a contract with recognition of the union and a small increase in wages was presented. The big question at issue at that time was our right to represent truck drivers, helpers, and inside workers working for each employer. This issue was scuttled, and finally a paragraph, very ambiguous in wording, was accepted with the guarantee of the governor that it meant the right of the union to deal for all the mentioned classifications. On this basis the strike ended after ii days.
The whole working class in the city was jubilant over the great victory. But in the first meeting called to negotiate a definite contract, the employers refused to recognize our union as the bargaining agent for the inside workers. The strike was again set in motion.
Now the employers really set to work. They placed full-page ads in all the city dailies. A vicious red-baiting campaign was carried out by the newspapers, picturing the leaders as ‘Trotskyist-Communists’ intending to make a revolution in Minneapolis instead of building the union. It became necessary to meet all these slanders by issuing a daily paper to present the position of the union.
Shotguns
The strike hit with solid ranks. All transportation stopped and the city again looked like a Sunday. This time the employers proceeded to arm the police with rifles and sawn-off shotguns loaded with slugs. Many dummy deliveries were made under very heavy police protection, such as medical supplies to a hospital or groceries to an old peoples’ home. The aim was to get the pickets involved in trying to stop them and use this as an excuse for shooting the pickets. But deliveries could be made to these institutions without interference.
The strike went on for weeks without much action. One morning a report came in that an attempted delivery was planned in the wholesale grocery area and that the police, with shotguns, were there to protect the drivers. Pickets were dispatched and when they attempted to stop the delivery the police opened fire and shot down 52 pickets, killing two. This day has become known as Bloody Friday. At the funeral of Henry Ness, one of the pickets killed on Bloody Friday, an estimated 50 000 people marched four abreast and tied up all city traffic for hours.Two government mediators were attempting to settle the dispute on any terms. They finally gave us a proposal providing for recognition on the ‘inside workers’. The union accepted but the employers turned down this agreement. The governor then declared martial law.
Early one morning the military surrounded the strike headquarters with machine guns and took it over. Bill Brown, Ray Dunne, Miles Dunne were thrown into a stockade. Attempts were made during that day to call in second-ranked leaders and settle the strike. They refused to meet until the headquarters and the leaders were released.
Finally, after eight weeks of hardship and suffering a settlement was agreed on which provided for all the important issues that the union had been battling for.
In brief, these are some of the highlights of events during the strikes of 1934.
Carl Skoglund
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin
Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006 archives). I made some special points here last year about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in January 2006 archives). This year it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.
A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary
The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972
The now slightly receding figure of the 20th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.
Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.
To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.
I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.
The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21st century. Read on.
***The
Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator –
The
Club Tijuana
Los Angeles private investigator Michael Philip Marlin hated to go south of the border, south down into sunny fetid Mexico, faux Mexico really. Tijuana. The American idea of Mexico mainly with the cheap tourista duds, fanfare and dust. He hated the squalor, worst that his home town Ocean City cold-water flats that he knew well from growing up right in the middle of them, he found just over the border after the immigration station told him he was in “habla Espanol” country. He hated the bracero looks, stares, eternal stares, piercing right through you, from the sun-blackened Mexican fellahin, and the blank stares, the hungry stares from his children.
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler
Those
who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City
(located just south of Los Angeles then now incorporated into the county)
private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way
everybody when he became famous after the Galton case out on the coast) and his
contemporaries in the private detection business like Freddy Vance, Charles
Nicolas (okay, okay Clara too), Sam Archer, Miles Spade, Johnny Spain, know
that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late
1950s and early 1960s. Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories to the
journalist who uncovered the relationship , Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a friend
of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who in turn related them to me over
several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I
have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full
responsibility for what follows.
*************Los Angeles private investigator Michael Philip Marlin hated to go south of the border, south down into sunny fetid Mexico, faux Mexico really. Tijuana. The American idea of Mexico mainly with the cheap tourista duds, fanfare and dust. He hated the squalor, worst that his home town Ocean City cold-water flats that he knew well from growing up right in the middle of them, he found just over the border after the immigration station told him he was in “habla Espanol” country. He hated the bracero looks, stares, eternal stares, piercing right through you, from the sun-blackened Mexican fellahin, and the blank stares, the hungry stares from his children.
He
hated too once he entered dusty, disheveled, loud honky-tonk (gringo
honky-tonk) Tijuana with a bar every other building, cheap bracero merchandise
in the others, and a whore, young, old or bent in front of them all, leaving
the two or three streets that made up tourista Tijuana. And most of all he
hated what could and could not be sold, cheaply, cheaply like the value of
human life there. That too came too close to home where his younger sister had
turned to the streets looking for thrills after some flash boy gangster turned
her head with cocaine and turned her too to walk the streets when he was done
with her. Leaving her to waste away in some sullen hole before she went to an
early grave. Anything perverse or
illegal could be had for a price, and not much, un-bonded whiskey, seven kinds
of dope, women willing to do anything, other women, six guys at once, animals, ditto
for guys if it came to it and that was your preference as it was for the
distinctly- dressed panama suit and hat fairies who came streaming down on
weekends, somebody’s sister, hell, somebody’s brother, guns, all the guns you
would ever need enough to outfit Pancho Villa’s army if it came to it.
Yes,
Marlin hated going south of the border, the smell, the dust, the piss,
everything but just then, 1940 just then, he was in need of cash. In need of
cash badly since business had been off what with rumors of war and the economy
in the tank and he had room- rent coming due fast (his landlord had padlocked
his office down at the low-rent seen-better days Sadler Building which he
shared with the other just barely making it legal and illegal operations
tenants and that room- rent loomed large). He had taken the Addington case the
minute he had received it via Detective James Foote his friend on the Los Angeles
police force who threw business, non-police business, business where discretion
was the watchword, his way.
What
was desired by that Mrs. Addington, Mrs. Adele Addington, heiress to the typewriter
fortune and thus capable of having her desires carried out unlike some forlorn
housewife from Westminster looking for her man, was for a missing husband to be
found. Found Marlin for a woman who had
the means and wherewithal to find that errant soul just what the doctor ordered
to get his finances well. The fleer once Marlin got a line on him, one James
Addington, late of New York City Riverside high-end digs via that searching
wife, had made the tour of the West Coast cities and as Marlin found out to his
dismay had headed south of the border to indulge in whatever he had the price
for, mainly primo dope and loose women.
Yes,
James had slipped down the class ladder a few rungs after he got the taste for
cocaine, got the taste for loose women who hovered around the cantina cocaine
pits, and so his life turned to the meccas for such tastes and Marlin had to go
south and find out where he was, and whether he was coming home to his waiting
wife. Naturally Marlin had to stop at the Club Tijuana (don’t get confused the
place was owned by Americans and catered to Americans, no fellaheen need apply)
the central place where those trying to make dope connections, or anything else
sporting could be found. And Marlin found James, James and his woman, his all
Spanish sparking eyes, ruby lips and swaying hips woman, Rosita. After some
verbal sparring James told Marlin (without the fiery Rosita present) that he
would return to the up and up in New York once he got rid of his “jones.”
Marlowe thought that would be never giving the ragged look of this downtrodden James.
He reported that news to Mrs. Addington and, go figure on women, she not only bought
the excuse but sent money via Marlin to cover James’ expenses.
Marlin
figured that would be that, case closed except that a few weeks later Mrs.
Addington showed up Los Angeles to be nearby when James was ready. Marlin was
sent to deliver that message. James no
nearer to recovery than previously was peeved at the fact Marlin presented to
him about his wife. Rosita was furious. Marlin sensed that no good could come
from these quarters after his announcement. And he was right because a few days
later, a couple of days after he got back from Tijuana, Mrs. Addington was
found in her rented suite murdered, cut up by somebody skilled at knife work.
Needless to say despite all the pat alibis down in Tijuana this appeared to be
a hit ordered by James (probably pushed on by Rosita), and was probably done by
a Mex bracero bad boy who went by the name (translated from Spanish) of Mack the Knife.
Once
Marlin had his proof he would go up against James, who expected to inherit a
big wad of dough for his habits (and to keep Rosita in style). When Marlin had
his proof (somebody in Mrs. Addington’s apartment building had seen a bad Mex
looking like Mack the Knife in the hallway) he went in for the collar. One
afternoon he entered the Club Tijuana where James and Rosita were sitting at a
back table in the dark. As Marlowe approached a knife whizzed by him, he turned
and shot Mack the Knife point blank. James seeing that was ready to face the
music but Rosita took a shot, two shots actually, at Marlin hitting him in the
left arm. He responded by throwing a couple of slugs into her heart. Dead. As
for James, James recently took the big step-off up at Q for the murder of his
ever-loving wife. Marlin thought when he heard the news that damn that was
another reason to hate Tijuana, hate it bad.
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The strike at the Renault Plant, April-May 1947
... in times of class upsurge like after World War II in Europe (and for a shorter period in the U.S.) even small smart propaganda groups (in the Marxist organizational sense) can make great gains if they have the right programmatic calls and can agitate effectively.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
The axis which Trotsky proposed to the militants of the Fourth International was simple: it was to transform the imperialist war into civil war and the general settlement of labour with capital, which is indispensible for the reconstruction of modern society.
This perspective has been confirmed in an extraordinary way. After years of terrible defeats, the world revolution raised its head in 1943 and the following years in an unequal but combined way. The end of the war was to witness revolutionary situations created in most of the countries of Europe, in the bourgeois states which had been thrown into dislocation when the Nazi regime collapsed.
In the most varied ways the masses broke through to the scene where their destinies were to be decided. They began to set up their own organisations. In France, Germany and Italy the embryo of workers’ councils arose. Nothing could enable these movements to be blocked and the bourgeois states to be reconstructed, but that lofty agreement which was sealed at Teheran, and later at Yalta and at Potsdam, between the imperialist powers anal the Kremlin bureaucracy. The Red Army was to try to maintain order in Eastern Europe, while the Communist parties had the task of ensuring that the bourgeois states were reconstructed in the West. In France and Italy the Communist parties took their places in governments of national unity. Accordingly, the French Communist Party organised the disarming of the patriotic militias; it acted on the instructions of Maurice Thorez, who came back from Moscow to say: “We must have one single army, one single state and one single police force.” The CRS were to be created by amalgamating the FTP, the FFI and what was left of the Vichy police, the GMR. The priority task became “the reconstruction of the national economy”, in other words, the reconstruction of the profits of the capitalist trusts. Following the very special logic of the Stalinists, strikes were proclaimed to be “the weapon of the trusts”.
Charles Tillon, the Communist Party member who was Minister of Armaments, who had already made himself notorious by organising the massacre of many thousands of Algerians at Setif on 8 May 1945, spoke as follows at a National Conference on Arms Production, on 1 February 1945:
Nothing but the complete, entire commitment of the Stalinist ‘Communist’ Party, with its ‘worker-ministers’ on the one hand, and its control over the CGT on the other, could make this policy effective, could make the masses accept these sacrifices.
The journal of the CGT, Le Peuple, gave significant indications on 1 March 1947:
This was the situation which the ‘Communist’ ministers undertook to make the workers accept. The CGT, for its part, combined some platonic expressions of regret with prohibiting strike movements in practice. Front Ouvrier, the trade union journal produced by the Trotskyists of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, made this appreciation of the situation:
A series of strike movements in 1945 bore witness to the will which was maturing within the working class to break the grip of the strait-jacket of national unity. In January 1946 the machine operators in the printing industry in Paris went on strike, against the advice of the CGT leadership. L’Humanité came out with blank pages; the strikers refused to print a speech by Ambroise Croizat, a ‘Communist’ minister and leader of the CGT.
The movements in telecommunications during summer 1946 were on a much larger scale. They were significant for more than one reason. Maurice Thorez, who was De Gaulle’s Minister of State, had worked out the conditions of service for state employees. This withheld from postal workers certain concessions which were enjoyed by other state employees. The demand that the workers in telecommunications be upgraded was to be the axis of the struggle of the postal workers against the government of national unity. Pressure was rising; resolutions from union branches were pouring into the offices of the leaders of the postal workers’ federation. The leaders of the federation mounted on 11 July 1946 an operation of the same kind as has later come to be called ‘a day of action’, in order to break up the mobilisation of the postal workers. At Bordeaux the workers disobeyed the instructions of their union; they stopped work. This stirred the bureaucrats, who decided to call a ten-hours strike for 30 July. But then Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Lille came out for an indefinite strike. By 31 July the whole country was involved. The CGT leadership decisively opposed the movement:
The leadership of the postal federation resolutely refused to yield to the pressure of the postal workers. It refused to allow the union leaders to be elected by ballot. This was no accident: the leadership had at all costs to hold on to its control of the union, in order to enable the anti-working class policy of the government to be effective, the government in which ‘Communist’ ministers were sitting. This posed urgently the need for the vanguard to be organised on the basis of a clear political programme, which included an understanding that the leaders of the French Communist Party and the CGT, like those of the SFIO and of the Force Ouvriere tendency, had “definitely gone over to the side of the bourgeois order”.
The weakness of the Trotskyists and their inability to lay down a line to construct the revolutionary party in the course of intervention in the class struggle did not permit this vanguard to be organised. The militants of the national strike committee found themselves in a blind alley. About 15,000 militants refused to submit to the Stalinist policy and were to leave the CGT and, on 8 December 1946, founded the Committee for Trade Union Action, which was to transform itself in July 1947 into the Syndicalist Federation of Telecommunications Workers and go back into the CGT and FO after the split.
The Trotskyist militants explained the needs of their class in a campaign for a general rise in wages and a sliding scale. Front Ouvrier advanced the ‘general slogan’: “Ten Francs an Hour Now!” The struggle was closely linked to the struggle for the five-day week of 40 hours, thereby opposing the development of piece-work and the prolongation of the working day which the employers and the government were imposing.
In February 1947 the workers stated a demand for 10 francs an hour in Department 6 of the Renault complex – where the militants of the Union Communiste, the ancestor of Lutte Ouvrière, were working – and in Department 18. The management rejected the demands. The leaders of the CGT, faithful to the principle ‘Production First’, opposed the ten francs. In its place they proposed a production bonus! They continued to be the warmest supporters of increasing the profits of the capitalists.
But on Tuesday 28 April the strikers marched through the factory and called on those at work to stop the machines. Four thousand workers met at 12.30 in the Place Nationale. The strike leaders spoke one after another in favour of “Stop the Machines! General Strike through all Renault! These are the only means to use to get the 10 Francs!”
The workers brushed aside the partitions and the divisions which the employers and the unions raised, and organised themselves at the base, beginning to weave a net of struggle between them.
The report, which we owe to a young worker in the Renault plant, sets out the political significance of the strike very clearly. The workers were in revolt for the 10 francs, against the “political grip on the union”, meaning the subjection of the union to the policies of the bourgeoisie which the Stalinist party had undertaken to force the workers to accept. In other words, the workers, some more consciously and others less, were going into battle to break the links which the workers’ organisations had woven with the bourgeoisie and its state. This lay at the bottom of the affair, which had crystallised in the ‘economic’ demand for the rise of 10 francs an hour. The activity which the vanguard had carried on in Departments 6 and 18 had correctly enabled this will be to expressed, organised and conscious.
Nonetheless, on 29 April, the CGT leadership tried a first manoeuvre in the face of the extent and the spread of the movement which had begun in the Collas sector. It called for a one-hour strike, for the following demands: an all-round hourly increase in the production bonus of three francs, payment of bonuses lost and time lost at the going rate, revision of ‘speeds’ and the organisation of a parity commission to revise speeds. But this manoeuvre failed. By the evening of 29 April there were 29,000 workers on strike. While the plant manager Lefaucheux and the Minister of Labour alike were refusing to meet the strike committee, L’Humanité was warning the workers against ‘the swindlers who are collecting strike support funds without the authority of the CGT’.
Faced with the treachery of the Stalinist leadership, the strike committee decided to address every worker in engineering in the Paris region. The leaflet of the Central Strike Committee of the Renault plants, which was addressed to engineering workers of the whole Paris region (and which the printworkers produced without taking any pay for their work) raised all the political problems, the fundamental problems, with which the whole working class was faced:
`In order to carry on this struggle which was of concern to every worker, the strike committee immediately appealed to all the Renault plants. Despite the opposition by the official trade union leadership, the workers, whether members of unions or not, and irrespective of whatever trade union or political organisation to which they belong, unanimously support our demands.
Even though the Renault workers received the sympathy of the engineering workers in Paris, even though a certain number of movements actually took place, the general strike of the engineering workers in the Paris region was not to take place.
However, it must be said, at the time the Parti Communiste Internationaliste was under the leadership of the rightist, opportunist current. The entire politics of this current diverted it from the movement of the masses. One of the leaders of this current had made ironic remarks at a meeting of the Central Committee, when the workers at Unic had stopped work some time earlier, about “the unique strike at Unic”.
In March 1947 Parisot wrote an article in which he argued that strike struggles on a large scale were impossible. The whole leadership of the PCI at that time was oriented towards a policy aimed at the apparatuses, or, at best, a kind of privileged militant. Their concern was to have a dialogue with the militants of the French Communist Party in order to influence Stalinist policy and “turn it leftwards”. This is what Parisot, who was editor of La Verité, wrote in that journal on 3 May 1947:
The CGT got control of the strike and then negotiated with the Minister of Labour, Daniel Mayer. Between 6 and 8 May, a consensus was reached. On 9 May the CGT called for work to be resumed, in a leaflet which, by itself, serves to demonstrate the unequalled virtuosity and experience with which the Stalinists practice the art of treachery.
The CGT leaflet started with a headline in large type: “We have won our three francs”. It went on:
This was the basis on which the strike committee declared for continuing the strike until the management agreed to pay “for the time lost”. On 12 May, at the time of the general move back to work, departments 6, 18 and 43 were occupied by the strikers. The leaders of the CGT were infuriated. On 13 May they handed out a leaflet which declared: “All together, we shall defeat those who divide us.”
They stated that the strikers in 6 and 18 were no more than 250 unbalanced people, and the leaflet went on, in large type:
Between 28 April and 15 May there were 27 meetings between the CGT leaders and the Renault management, four of these meetings in the presence of the Minister of Labour. Work generally re-started on 16 May.
The Renault strike compelled the leaders of the French Communist Party to leave the ‘tripartite’ government. Its political consequences were of the highest importance. When the Renault workers expressed the general aspirations of the entire French working class, they were beginning to strain the structure of the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance which had been agreed at Yalta and Potsdam. Despite the treachery of the leaderships, the workers had not been defeated. To be sure, they had had to withdraw, but at the same time they began to advance the political means which would enable them to confront and defeat the bourgeois state.
There was one condition for this struggle to succeed; it was that there should exist at least in the principal engineering factories in the Paris region organised groups of workers of the vanguard, brought together on the basis of precise political objectives and consciously preparing the conditions for victorious struggles.
Certain sections of the PCI, under the leadership of the trade union commission, had already undertaken this work. But the leadership of the PCI did not make it the axis of their orientation. It was disarming the militants by adopting a policy of ‘pressure’ on the apparatuses – and particularly on the Stalinist apparatus.
The strength of the Renault strike movement lay in the strike committees and in the organisation of the movement by delegates elected and mandated by the rank and file. As Trotsky explained:
But this is still not enough. If the working class needs such organisms in order to rally its forces as a class, the organisms must necessarily include the traditional organisations, and these are controlled by bourgeois apparatuses.
Pierre Bois gives us a striking illustration of the stupidity of the ultra-left theses on Red Trade Unions and of the blind alley into which they led; this is in La Voix des Travailleurs de Renault (The Renault Workers’ Voice):
The Democratic Renault Union went on endlessly about its own perspectives. In the union elections following the strike, the level of abstentions rose sharply, especially in the departments which had been most active in the strike. The SDR decided that what mattered were votes – for itself. Accordingly, in the table of results in La Voix des Travailleurs it simply replaced the column of abstentions, spoiled ballots, etc, with a column headed SDR. But dreams and self-mystification do not replace reality. The Stalinists stepped up their campaign against ‘the provocateurs and splitters’ and the SDR disappeared ingloriously from the scene.
The revolutionaries took the Renault strike as an unequivocal warning: they must seriously apply themselves to the task of constructing the revolutionary party, without trying to evade the obstacles.
They needed to put an end to a kind of abstract propaganda, which served only to conceal a policy of subordination to the apparatuses, to Stalinism. On the contrary, their task was to work out the line and the political means to intervene in the class struggle, which were based on the movement of the masses and on helping them to open up their way forward. That would be the way in which the revolutionary organisation would construct itself in the movement of the class, and the revolutionary party would construct itself.
The Fourth Congress placed so much insistence on this problem because the outgoing leadership of the PCI had precisely not carried on either before, during or after the Renault strike the systematic campaign to rouse the French proletariat for 10 francs an hour, on the axis of the general strike, and thereby counterposed slogans which helped the independent mobilisation of the working class in opposition to the ‘production first’ slogans of the Stalinists. The resolution criticised the activity of the outgoing leadership and explained:
But instead of this development, the months and years which followed were to see a new aggravation of the difficulties of the PCI and of the Fourth International, which ended in 1951-53 in the Fourth International bursting apart. Nonetheless, these difficulties and crises in the struggle to construct the revolutionary party cannot be overcome from only one side.
In the battle which developed in Renault, but which was expressed in many other workplaces, a Trotskyist nucleus, linked to the workers’ movement and working to unify their movement as it freed itself from the clutches of the apparatuses, was formed at the heart of the struggles of the proletariat. There can be no doubt that this was enormously important in the resistance of the majority of the PCI, and in particular of its trade union commission, to Pabloite revisionism.
When Pablo identified the movement of the masses with that of the Stalinist bureaucracy, when he demanded that the Trotskyist militants integrate themselves into the Stalinist apparatus to make it “evolve to the left”, the worker militants of the PCI could rely on living experience, their own and that of their class. No! The Stalinist bureaucracy was not the “delegated representative” of the proletariat. On the contrary, the proletariat in its entire movement was beating against the Stalinist straitjacket and trying to organise itself round a new axis. To help it and guide it in this movement – this was the task of a Trotskyist organisation, a task which required complete political independence from the bureaucracy. There is no doubt that this is the most important conclusion to be drawn from the Renault strike of 1947.
Denis Collin
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
9: The strike at the Renault Plant, April-May 1947
Translated from La Verité, No 589, December 1979
Trotsky wrote, in the Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International in May 1940, about the world war which was then beginning: “The shifts in the battle-lines at the front, the destruction of national capitals, the occupation of territories, the downfall of individual states, represent from this standpoint only tragic episodes on the road to the reconstruction of modern society.”The axis which Trotsky proposed to the militants of the Fourth International was simple: it was to transform the imperialist war into civil war and the general settlement of labour with capital, which is indispensible for the reconstruction of modern society.
This perspective has been confirmed in an extraordinary way. After years of terrible defeats, the world revolution raised its head in 1943 and the following years in an unequal but combined way. The end of the war was to witness revolutionary situations created in most of the countries of Europe, in the bourgeois states which had been thrown into dislocation when the Nazi regime collapsed.
In the most varied ways the masses broke through to the scene where their destinies were to be decided. They began to set up their own organisations. In France, Germany and Italy the embryo of workers’ councils arose. Nothing could enable these movements to be blocked and the bourgeois states to be reconstructed, but that lofty agreement which was sealed at Teheran, and later at Yalta and at Potsdam, between the imperialist powers anal the Kremlin bureaucracy. The Red Army was to try to maintain order in Eastern Europe, while the Communist parties had the task of ensuring that the bourgeois states were reconstructed in the West. In France and Italy the Communist parties took their places in governments of national unity. Accordingly, the French Communist Party organised the disarming of the patriotic militias; it acted on the instructions of Maurice Thorez, who came back from Moscow to say: “We must have one single army, one single state and one single police force.” The CRS were to be created by amalgamating the FTP, the FFI and what was left of the Vichy police, the GMR. The priority task became “the reconstruction of the national economy”, in other words, the reconstruction of the profits of the capitalist trusts. Following the very special logic of the Stalinists, strikes were proclaimed to be “the weapon of the trusts”.
Charles Tillon, the Communist Party member who was Minister of Armaments, who had already made himself notorious by organising the massacre of many thousands of Algerians at Setif on 8 May 1945, spoke as follows at a National Conference on Arms Production, on 1 February 1945:
The duty of the government is to prevent inflation at all costs, with all that this means in increased difficulties and poverty for everyone. The government has, therefore, to adopt measures, some of which will not be popular. But it is our duty to restore the financial and economic situation to health. Otherwise we shall endanger the future of France for years to come. If we can overcome the present crisis quickly, we shall have got round an awkward corner, and shall be in a position to ensure that conditions are better for everyone.Anyone would think that they were reading a speech by the leading economist of France! Amid the ruins of Europe, this policy struck the working class like the lash of a whip; rationing and a wage freeze were the inevitable conditions for the capitalist economy to toe reestablished.
Nothing but the complete, entire commitment of the Stalinist ‘Communist’ Party, with its ‘worker-ministers’ on the one hand, and its control over the CGT on the other, could make this policy effective, could make the masses accept these sacrifices.
The journal of the CGT, Le Peuple, gave significant indications on 1 March 1947:
The share of wages in the real National Income would fall from 40 per cent in 1938 to 38.5 per cent in 1947, after having touched 41.2 per cent in 1946, if the demands of the CGT were not accepted.A commission on earnings had proposed that “abnormally low” earnings be raised: Le Peuple remarked: “Raising abnormally low earnings would raise the workers’ share by only 0.35 per cent.”
This was the situation which the ‘Communist’ ministers undertook to make the workers accept. The CGT, for its part, combined some platonic expressions of regret with prohibiting strike movements in practice. Front Ouvrier, the trade union journal produced by the Trotskyists of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, made this appreciation of the situation:
Behind the platonic expressions of regret there is acceptance (while the bourgeoisie was every day getting a greater share of the national income) of the brutalising strait-jacket of the 48-hour week and of piece work, which could not fail to earn super-profits for the employers. The life of slaves was imposed on workers who wanted to get the minimum needed to keep them alive! Fifty years of struggle were negated in conditions such that the employers’ position was considerably strengthened. As for the comrades in the ranks, who had undertaken to struggle for a general improvement of wages to meet the cost of the minimum for a decent life – let them look after themselves! This shook the confederation from top to bottom. But what did that matter, in the eyes of those who had long since sacrificed the independence of the trade union movement to the needs of the political parties sitting in a government of the defence of capitalist interests?At the time, when Nazi domination and the regime of Petain in France collapsed, the policy of national unity was a powerful restraint to curb any independent activity by the working class. The French Communist Party enjoyed the prestige of the October Revolution and of the victories of the Red Army, in addition to what its members had won in the Resistance. It threw everything it had into the struggle against the movement of the working class. But “the laws of history are more powerful than the bureaucratic apparatuses”, as our programme says.
A series of strike movements in 1945 bore witness to the will which was maturing within the working class to break the grip of the strait-jacket of national unity. In January 1946 the machine operators in the printing industry in Paris went on strike, against the advice of the CGT leadership. L’Humanité came out with blank pages; the strikers refused to print a speech by Ambroise Croizat, a ‘Communist’ minister and leader of the CGT.
The movements in telecommunications during summer 1946 were on a much larger scale. They were significant for more than one reason. Maurice Thorez, who was De Gaulle’s Minister of State, had worked out the conditions of service for state employees. This withheld from postal workers certain concessions which were enjoyed by other state employees. The demand that the workers in telecommunications be upgraded was to be the axis of the struggle of the postal workers against the government of national unity. Pressure was rising; resolutions from union branches were pouring into the offices of the leaders of the postal workers’ federation. The leaders of the federation mounted on 11 July 1946 an operation of the same kind as has later come to be called ‘a day of action’, in order to break up the mobilisation of the postal workers. At Bordeaux the workers disobeyed the instructions of their union; they stopped work. This stirred the bureaucrats, who decided to call a ten-hours strike for 30 July. But then Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Lille came out for an indefinite strike. By 31 July the whole country was involved. The CGT leadership decisively opposed the movement:
`The indefinite strike is a mistake: one cannot go on strike whenever one pleases. The strike is holding up discussions and preventing agreements from being reached, because it may antagonise public sympathy. (Circular No.53 of the Federal Bureau, reprinted in La Federation Postale)The postal workers replied by forming a national strike committee on 2 August. The questions which their demands raised were taking; on a general political content. The workers were confronted by the fact that their union had been taken over by an apparatus acting in the service of the capitalist state. They were obliged to organise independently and to try to solve their problems by themselves. Quite naturally they followed the classical roads of revolutionary mobilisation by workers. They elected workers’ deputies responsible to the mass. However, at no time did the postal workers try to construct a ‘substitute union’. The method which enabled them to fight to take back control of their trade union and to impose their own control in opposition to that of the apparatus was their independent organisation in strike committees. The Congress of the National Strike Committee, which met in Montrouge on 16 and 17 August, announced that the leaders of the postal federation had been dismissed. It adopted a resolution which:
... resolved to inform the CGT that the organised postal workers were prepared to accept impartial inspection of everything that had to be done to renew their federal organisms, and to organise a special congress under the supervision of the CGT.
Content
Front Ouvrier (Workers’ Front) emphasised the political content of the struggle in the following terms:The postal workers’ strike has expressed as clearly as possible what the struggle for their immediate demands requires. It marks the highest point of the first stage of the class struggle, the stage in which the workers rid themselves of the leaden cloak of class collaboration. Already the engineers in certain enterprises have brought into existence the embryos of these strike committees which flourished among the postal workers in the course of their struggles about wages ... But the postal workers did not stop with strike committees. They replaced the inadequate union leadership at the departmental and the national level by the democratic election of departmental strike committees and a national strike committee. (Front Ouvrier, 12 August 1946)The Trotskyists were not in any way confused. The strike committee is not an ‘anti-trade union’ organ. It is the means by which the workers organise themselves and bring about the united front of their organisations and struggle to break with the bourgeoisie. This experience demonstrates, moreoever, that the renewal of the unions cannot be the result of long, patient efforts of ‘parliamentary opposition’ in the union structures. On the contrary, the renewal of the unions and the renovation of their composition and their leading bodies can come only as one element in the struggle against the bourgeoisie as a class, a struggle which demands that the workers be mobilised independently, that they shall break the opposition of their apparatuses and shall themselves realise the united front from the base to the top.
The leadership of the postal federation resolutely refused to yield to the pressure of the postal workers. It refused to allow the union leaders to be elected by ballot. This was no accident: the leadership had at all costs to hold on to its control of the union, in order to enable the anti-working class policy of the government to be effective, the government in which ‘Communist’ ministers were sitting. This posed urgently the need for the vanguard to be organised on the basis of a clear political programme, which included an understanding that the leaders of the French Communist Party and the CGT, like those of the SFIO and of the Force Ouvriere tendency, had “definitely gone over to the side of the bourgeois order”.
The weakness of the Trotskyists and their inability to lay down a line to construct the revolutionary party in the course of intervention in the class struggle did not permit this vanguard to be organised. The militants of the national strike committee found themselves in a blind alley. About 15,000 militants refused to submit to the Stalinist policy and were to leave the CGT and, on 8 December 1946, founded the Committee for Trade Union Action, which was to transform itself in July 1947 into the Syndicalist Federation of Telecommunications Workers and go back into the CGT and FO after the split.
The Trotskyist militants explained the needs of their class in a campaign for a general rise in wages and a sliding scale. Front Ouvrier advanced the ‘general slogan’: “Ten Francs an Hour Now!” The struggle was closely linked to the struggle for the five-day week of 40 hours, thereby opposing the development of piece-work and the prolongation of the working day which the employers and the government were imposing.
In February 1947 the workers stated a demand for 10 francs an hour in Department 6 of the Renault complex – where the militants of the Union Communiste, the ancestor of Lutte Ouvrière, were working – and in Department 18. The management rejected the demands. The leaders of the CGT, faithful to the principle ‘Production First’, opposed the ten francs. In its place they proposed a production bonus! They continued to be the warmest supporters of increasing the profits of the capitalists.
Origin
The bulletin, The Voice of the Renault Workers, traced back the origin of the movement:On the island [where the factory stands] it was a question of bonuses that brought the lads out. The maintenance men came out to demand a wage based on output.
The maintenance men came out to demand a re-adjustment of their bonus and their classification onto the same level as that of the production workers. This was not the only strike. It was the turners who stopped work first, on Thursday 27 February, following the descent upon them of time-and-motion people ... The other workers in the sector solidly arose with them and with the general demand for a rise of 10 francs an hour ...>
In Department 5 (tempering, Collas sector), there was a stoppage from Thursday morning to Monday afternoon. After several fruitless delegations, these comrades got a rise of two francs. In the Collas sector the workers cut off the power, in order to provoke the calling of a meeting in works time to decide what to do, but the delegates sabotaged the movement by starting the power again ...The whole class movement, which was to explode a few days later, was expressing itself in this multitude of partial movements. The workers were testing the resistance of the enemy; they were running into the sabotage of the trade union representatives; they were sometimes able to force the management to retreat and thus to get points of support for going forward. On 17 April the workers in Department 6 decided unanimously by the votes of all present, except eight, “to regard strike action as the means by which to win our demand for the 10 francs. To this end, they have mandated comrades to carry out the activities necessary. These comrades have been to see the management who, through the voice of Mr Bohin, has rejected our legitimate demands, on the pretext that the government did not authorise any pay increases.” (From the leaflet issued by Department 6)
But on Tuesday 28 April the strikers marched through the factory and called on those at work to stop the machines. Four thousand workers met at 12.30 in the Place Nationale. The strike leaders spoke one after another in favour of “Stop the Machines! General Strike through all Renault! These are the only means to use to get the 10 Francs!”
A young worker tells
At 9.30 I saw a procession of people with placards that read “We Want Bread!” and “We Want Our 10 Francs!” I saw the procession from close by, and a chap said quietly to me: “You know your mates have been out in Departments 6 and 18 since Friday for the 10 francs on the basic wage. I think this demand is right; there has to be many of us; come in with us.”; And away he went.
I did not yet know the chaps in my workshop very well, and they were still not decided. They met in little groups. After a minute the CGT delegate came along and, when he saw that this indecision went deep, he said: “This is not serious; get back to work.” I went up to him and said, “But there is something up; tell me what it is about. I'm only new here.” He said: “It’s nothing; it’s a bunch of chaps who have got a bit excited, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
The blokes went back to work. The movement consisted of me. But, for all that, I had had a shock. At midday I tried to get more information. I discussed with the strikers and learned that many of them had struck because they had had enough of the political grip on the union.
When we started again at two o’clock, I set my machine running and did 10 minutes’ work, and then I stopped. The foreman said: “What's come over you?” I told him: “I'm striking”. He looked at me as if I was mad and came over to my machine to mark on my sheet the time I had stopped work.
I went to find the four young blokes and said to them: “Look, there are these mates of ours who have revolted because there is politics in the union.” I told them the whole story. At the end of half an hour I got them to support me and said: “There are only five of us; that’s not good enough; we’ve got to spread like a patch of oil.” By four o'clock we had between 80 and 100 who had stopped work.
Meanwhile, I had been to another sector to have a talk with the members of the strike committee. When I got back, my four mates had gone back to work. I managed to get them to stop, but at the time it was quite something.
Then we went to the big body-presses, with a very strong chap who did everything I told him and evidently commanded respect. We had to go and see each man individually to explain to them. By the end of the afternoon we had been able to get about 120.
On the Monday I made contact with the strike committee, and they told me that three people must be elected, one of whom would be on the central committee, and I decided to get this committee to meet workshop by workshop.At six o’clock in the evening the CGT leaders spoke to 1500 workers, who booed them several times. The leaders were trying to break the movement by playing on the theme: “Do not follow the militant elements; we are going to get you a rise.’ But by the evening, over a third of the plant was on strike.
The workers brushed aside the partitions and the divisions which the employers and the unions raised, and organised themselves at the base, beginning to weave a net of struggle between them.
The report, which we owe to a young worker in the Renault plant, sets out the political significance of the strike very clearly. The workers were in revolt for the 10 francs, against the “political grip on the union”, meaning the subjection of the union to the policies of the bourgeoisie which the Stalinist party had undertaken to force the workers to accept. In other words, the workers, some more consciously and others less, were going into battle to break the links which the workers’ organisations had woven with the bourgeoisie and its state. This lay at the bottom of the affair, which had crystallised in the ‘economic’ demand for the rise of 10 francs an hour. The activity which the vanguard had carried on in Departments 6 and 18 had correctly enabled this will be to expressed, organised and conscious.
Nonetheless, on 29 April, the CGT leadership tried a first manoeuvre in the face of the extent and the spread of the movement which had begun in the Collas sector. It called for a one-hour strike, for the following demands: an all-round hourly increase in the production bonus of three francs, payment of bonuses lost and time lost at the going rate, revision of ‘speeds’ and the organisation of a parity commission to revise speeds. But this manoeuvre failed. By the evening of 29 April there were 29,000 workers on strike. While the plant manager Lefaucheux and the Minister of Labour alike were refusing to meet the strike committee, L’Humanité was warning the workers against ‘the swindlers who are collecting strike support funds without the authority of the CGT’.
Faced with the treachery of the Stalinist leadership, the strike committee decided to address every worker in engineering in the Paris region. The leaflet of the Central Strike Committee of the Renault plants, which was addressed to engineering workers of the whole Paris region (and which the printworkers produced without taking any pay for their work) raised all the political problems, the fundamental problems, with which the whole working class was faced:
`In order to carry on this struggle which was of concern to every worker, the strike committee immediately appealed to all the Renault plants. Despite the opposition by the official trade union leadership, the workers, whether members of unions or not, and irrespective of whatever trade union or political organisation to which they belong, unanimously support our demands.
We are mandated to present these demands to the employers’ leadership. In the person of Mr Lefaucheux, this leadership has refused to meet us and has treated the workers’ delegation with the utmost contempt. Mr Lefaucheux makes light of the workers’ most elementary right to elect their own representatives. He wants to impose upon us the same people as in the past, who have supported his anti-working class activities, and with whom he hopes to arrange to deceive us once again, but in vain.In other words, the struggle against the policy of class collaboration required that the workers be able to elect their own representatives. Such is the significance of the strike committees, the only purpose of which is not to meet the requirements of abstract democracy but to be the only possible way to break the counterrevolutionary resistance of the apparatuses, if we may take up the formulation which Trotsky used in his article Committees of Action – not Popular Front (in Whither France).
Demand
The strike committee leaflet explained the general significance of the demand for the ten francs an hour, and ended as follows:Up to now our work has been obstructed by those who claim to be our leaders, but who not only do not defend us but go so far as to oppose our struggle, either because they are accomplices of the employers or because they lack confidence in themselves, and have taken the disastrous position of waiting to see what happens.
Our task is, ourselves, to defend our demands. We have had to overcome the same difficulties as you know. But our example proves to you that these difficulties can be overcome. The workers in our factory have elected, directly from among themselves, in the course of their struggle, the delegates whom they have mandated to achieve these demands. The working class is rich in people who will show what they are in action and who, even if they lack experience at the beginning, can quickly learn to correct themselves in action when they have general support.The Stalinist apparatus was defending the policy of subjecting the working class to the interests of capital, of the government and of bourgeois power. The real problem was that of the policy and activity of the revolutionary militants, especially of those who claimed to be for the Fourth International, who were drawing support from the mass movement and opening before it a road of opposition to the Stalinist apparatus.
Even though the Renault workers received the sympathy of the engineering workers in Paris, even though a certain number of movements actually took place, the general strike of the engineering workers in the Paris region was not to take place.
However, it must be said, at the time the Parti Communiste Internationaliste was under the leadership of the rightist, opportunist current. The entire politics of this current diverted it from the movement of the masses. One of the leaders of this current had made ironic remarks at a meeting of the Central Committee, when the workers at Unic had stopped work some time earlier, about “the unique strike at Unic”.
In March 1947 Parisot wrote an article in which he argued that strike struggles on a large scale were impossible. The whole leadership of the PCI at that time was oriented towards a policy aimed at the apparatuses, or, at best, a kind of privileged militant. Their concern was to have a dialogue with the militants of the French Communist Party in order to influence Stalinist policy and “turn it leftwards”. This is what Parisot, who was editor of La Verité, wrote in that journal on 3 May 1947:
Those whom the French Communist Party treats as ‘provocateurs’ have already obliged it to repudiate the government’s policy, this capitalist policy, so that the French Communist Party is going to have to demonstrate how far it is with the masses. The Renault strike must be the signal for a total break with the policy of class collaboration. The break-up of the governmental coalition must be welcomed by putting the entire working class press, all the members of the workers’ parties and every means of propaganda behind the aim of generalising the workers’ struggles, for a genuine living minimum income guaranteed by the sliding scale of wages, pay, pensions and retirement pay.
The French Communist Party has its back to the wall. The workers who have put it there must march boldly forward and pose the real, the only, "governmental problem" by way of the generalisation of the struggle for the 10 Francs: this means forming, in the struggle of the masses, a government which will be exclusively at the service of the working classes, a workers’ and peasants’ government.>
Apparatus
What could be more clear? It was to the apparatus, which was resisting the Renault strike with all its strength, which had had the militants of the Renault strike beaten up during the May Day demonstration, that the leadership of the PCI of that time was addressing itself, to “generalise the workers’ struggles, etc., etc.”, when in reality everything depended on the initiative of the revolutionary militants, especially the Trotskyists, to encourage the initiative of the masses.The CGT got control of the strike and then negotiated with the Minister of Labour, Daniel Mayer. Between 6 and 8 May, a consensus was reached. On 9 May the CGT called for work to be resumed, in a leaflet which, by itself, serves to demonstrate the unequalled virtuosity and experience with which the Stalinists practice the art of treachery.
The CGT leaflet started with a headline in large type: “We have won our three francs”. It went on:
What were we asking for?
The 10 francs rise, please note, had simply disappeared. Now it was a question only of the three francs production bonus!
- Payment for lost bonus at the basic rate.
- Payment for hours lost at the average rate for the preceding fortnight.
- Revision of times which do not allow 120 per cent to be earned.
- A Parity Commission to revise timings.
- Increase in the production bonus of three francs an hour all round.
What have we obtained? In the first days of the strike we convinced the management to reach formal undertakings on the first four demands. It remained for us to settle the essential question of the bonus. Yesterday, after insisting tenaciously, we were at last to meet Mr Lacoste and Mr Daniel Mayer, the Ministers of Industrial Production and of Labour. After a long, lively discussion, we have wrung from them the promise of a production bonus of 2.80 francs an hour (my emphasis – DC). We expressed all the objections to a proposal which did not entirely satisfy the workers. On the other hand, we demanded that the increase in the production bonus be dated back to 25 February, the date when we presented our demand. On this question we ran into a categorical refusal on the part of the two ministers, who were speaking for President Ramadier.
We continued to try to get the bonus back-dated and raised the matter with the management who conceded our proposal after discussion. Despite this agreement, which we and the management reached, the Minister of Labour, Mr Daniel Mayer, categorically refused to agree to back-date it, adding “whatever happens”. Once more, it is quite clear who is responsible. We then returned to the three francs demand and succeeded in making the Minister of Labour change his position and agree to the three francs for everyone.
he question remained to be settled of the payment for 1 May. During our delegation to the management, we obtained the assurance that everyone would be paid for 1 May.
`Workers in Regic Renault! On these proposals, the trade union section calls upon you to declare your opinion this afternoon in a vote by secret ballot. It appeals to you to endorse this first victory by a massive vote to re-start work (emphasis in original).
In this way you will declare your agreement with the trade union section about the results that have been obtained, and will proclaim that you are ready to pursue the struggle by the side of all the Paris engineering workers to win agreement for the production bonus of the order of ten francs an hour.There is certainly nothing new under the sun. It was not in Manufrance or Paris Libéré that the Stalinists learned how to pass off as victories the rotten deals that they fixed up with the employers and the government against the workers. When Daniel Mayer said, “I shall not give way, whatever happens”, the Stalinists replied warmly in this leaflet, “Nothing is going to happen”. It is very surprising to observe how little the formulae of betrayal have changed in 32 years. ‘Euro-Communist’ or not, the Stalinist party undertakes to demonstrate that it is the principal bulwark of the bourgeois social order.
Retreat
The treachery of the leaders came into conflict with the workers at Renault. The leaders got the workers back to work at Unic (where a branch of the PCI intervened). The Renault workers were forced to retreat. The return to work was voted by 12,075 against 6,866. However, in the departments where the strike had begun, and in some others, the workers refused to return to work. These, moreover, were the departments which were once again to be in the vanguard at the time of the referendum organised in August 1953.This was the basis on which the strike committee declared for continuing the strike until the management agreed to pay “for the time lost”. On 12 May, at the time of the general move back to work, departments 6, 18 and 43 were occupied by the strikers. The leaders of the CGT were infuriated. On 13 May they handed out a leaflet which declared: “All together, we shall defeat those who divide us.”
They stated that the strikers in 6 and 18 were no more than 250 unbalanced people, and the leaflet went on, in large type:
This is enough! We want to be free to work! The management, which has to run the plant, must accept its responsibilities. The Minister of Labour, Daniel Mayer, also must accept his. If he had conceded back-dating the three francs to 25 February, we would not be in this position now. It is up to them to take the measures necessary to enable the plant to work ...
How are we to explain the presence of a group of organised provocateurs, who are today unmasked? Who has been able to cover with his authority the employment of such individuals? In whose interest is it to paralyse further the operation of Regie Renault?
Everything must be brought out into the open! We will defeat manoeuvres no matter where they come from. The workers in Regie Renault are not responsible for the results of those manoeuvres and should not have to bear their consequences.
This is the reason why a delegation from the trade union section met the management yesterday and obtained payment for the time lost due to lack of work. We shall remain united in pursuing the struggle with the general body of the engineers in Paris to improve our living conditions and defend the nationalised industries ...
Agreement
On 15 May agreement was reached between the ministry and the CGT about the conditions for resumption of work: there was to be a bonus on re-starting of 1,600 francs and a repayable advance of 900 francs, and the hours needed to get production going would be paid as overtime. The management proposed to pay to the trade union delegates and to others who had supported the trade union leadership for the time of work which they had lost: in other words the prominent Stalinists got a tip for services rendered. The other part of the agreement consisted in the CGT undertaking to get the results of the referendum of 9 May upheld, particularly in connection with the sacking of ‘agitators’ as well, furthermore, undertaking not to oppose the requirement to repay the 900 francs, which it agreed to regard as an advance.Between 28 April and 15 May there were 27 meetings between the CGT leaders and the Renault management, four of these meetings in the presence of the Minister of Labour. Work generally re-started on 16 May.
The Renault strike compelled the leaders of the French Communist Party to leave the ‘tripartite’ government. Its political consequences were of the highest importance. When the Renault workers expressed the general aspirations of the entire French working class, they were beginning to strain the structure of the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance which had been agreed at Yalta and Potsdam. Despite the treachery of the leaderships, the workers had not been defeated. To be sure, they had had to withdraw, but at the same time they began to advance the political means which would enable them to confront and defeat the bourgeois state.
There was one condition for this struggle to succeed; it was that there should exist at least in the principal engineering factories in the Paris region organised groups of workers of the vanguard, brought together on the basis of precise political objectives and consciously preparing the conditions for victorious struggles.
Certain sections of the PCI, under the leadership of the trade union commission, had already undertaken this work. But the leadership of the PCI did not make it the axis of their orientation. It was disarming the militants by adopting a policy of ‘pressure’ on the apparatuses – and particularly on the Stalinist apparatus.
The strength of the Renault strike movement lay in the strike committees and in the organisation of the movement by delegates elected and mandated by the rank and file. As Trotsky explained:
The principal significance of the factory committees (strike committees) is to become ‘general staffs’ for the layers of workers whom the trade union is generally unable to reach. Where all the workers are organised in the union, the committee will formally coincide with the structure of the union, but it will renew its composition and widen its functions.But the Transitional Programme did not restrict itself to describing the importance of the strike committees or factory committees. The chapter on ‘factory committees’ ends as follows: “It is necessary to begin a campaign in favour of factory committees in time, in order not to be caught unawares.”
But this is still not enough. If the working class needs such organisms in order to rally its forces as a class, the organisms must necessarily include the traditional organisations, and these are controlled by bourgeois apparatuses.
Pierre Bois gives us a striking illustration of the stupidity of the ultra-left theses on Red Trade Unions and of the blind alley into which they led; this is in La Voix des Travailleurs de Renault (The Renault Workers’ Voice):
The old union ended badly, because the workers were content to pay their dues and did not take the defence of their own interests into their own hands. They did not struggle and were unable, either, to control the trade union leaders. These leaders, not controlled by or subjected to the will of the workers, ended by elevating themselves above the workers and betraying them.
Nonetheless, our strike shows that the active intervention of the most advanced workers can defeat the bureaucratic apparatus. This is why the Democratic Renault Union wants to bring together all the most active workers – and we shall then have another kind of union than the CGT.Fundamentally, then, if the workers were betrayed, they had only themselves to blame; they were not ‘active’ enough. Here the Union Communiste was sinking into the purest pre-war revolutionary syndicalism, which could not conceive of the union except as the active minority – that is, fundamentally as a substitute for the revolutionary party which does not exist. But, however much syndicalism before World War I was able in the face of the opportunism and parliamentarism of the Socialist Party to play a rô1e in gathering together a revolutionary vanguard, to the same extent the policy of the Union Communiste in 1947 amounted to preventing the advanced workers from understanding the policies of Stalinism, and, therefore, raised an obstacle to the construction of the revolutionary party.
The Democratic Renault Union went on endlessly about its own perspectives. In the union elections following the strike, the level of abstentions rose sharply, especially in the departments which had been most active in the strike. The SDR decided that what mattered were votes – for itself. Accordingly, in the table of results in La Voix des Travailleurs it simply replaced the column of abstentions, spoiled ballots, etc, with a column headed SDR. But dreams and self-mystification do not replace reality. The Stalinists stepped up their campaign against ‘the provocateurs and splitters’ and the SDR disappeared ingloriously from the scene.
The revolutionaries took the Renault strike as an unequivocal warning: they must seriously apply themselves to the task of constructing the revolutionary party, without trying to evade the obstacles.
They needed to put an end to a kind of abstract propaganda, which served only to conceal a policy of subordination to the apparatuses, to Stalinism. On the contrary, their task was to work out the line and the political means to intervene in the class struggle, which were based on the movement of the masses and on helping them to open up their way forward. That would be the way in which the revolutionary organisation would construct itself in the movement of the class, and the revolutionary party would construct itself.
Critical
The Renault strike was at the centre of the work of the Fourth Congress of the PCI, which was to be held on 9-11 December 1947. The resolution adopted by the Congress drew the balance of all the movements which followed the Renault strike and, in particular, the strike in the Paris transport system; it characterised the new stage in the political situation as marked by the change in relations between the working class and the Stalinist leadership. It made a critical balance of the orientation of the old leadership of the PCI, and placed the question of the development of the party on the order of the day:Coming after a succession of experiences in the course of the last six months, especially the Renault strike and the strike of the railwaymen, the Stalinist manoeuvres which prevented the outbreak of the general strike in support of the Paris transport workers have more or less brought home in a practical way to a wide layer of advanced workers that the Stalinist party is in fact an obstacle to the workers’ struggle and that its leadership has interests foreign to those of the proletariat. For a certain part of the cadres of the Stalinist Party themselves the problem now arises of going over the heads of their leaders in order to continue to lead the workers’ struggles ...
When our party fixes its objectives, points out how they can be achieved, popularises its experiences and denounces the Stalinist manoeuvres, it will, through the initiatives of its militants, help each of the elements of the vanguard which is seeking its way forward; it will ensure that their aspirations are brought together; it will give them a common programme; it will be able to lead the masses and will encourage the outbreak and the organisation of the struggles to come. The highly political character of the coming struggles, which are inevitable even in the absence of any revolutionary party recognised by the masses, gives the intervention of the party an extraordinarily great importance for the outcome of these struggles, and this depends especially on the capacity of the party to help the masses, to create a new leadership for the struggles.
Resolution
In other words, the question which was raised before the PCI was this: how was it going to be able to help the political apparatus of the struggle to be built in the course of the struggle itself? The resolution of the Fourth Congress took up the significance of the slogan of the general strike and laid down: “The general strike is the central slogan of the new stage.”The Fourth Congress placed so much insistence on this problem because the outgoing leadership of the PCI had precisely not carried on either before, during or after the Renault strike the systematic campaign to rouse the French proletariat for 10 francs an hour, on the axis of the general strike, and thereby counterposed slogans which helped the independent mobilisation of the working class in opposition to the ‘production first’ slogans of the Stalinists. The resolution criticised the activity of the outgoing leadership and explained:
It [the leadership] did not match up to the interests of the proletarian revolution.
It did not carry on a systematic campaign for the general strike during a period of months.
It refused to issue this slogan, and did so three days late in the Renault strike and 10 days late in the rail strike [after work had been re-started].
It opposed the slogan at the beginning of the Paris transport strike and raised it only when it believed that there was a 90 per cent possibility that the Stalinists would issue the slogan.
It developed a concept of the economic general strike, the success of which would open up a new stage of political strikes.
It systematically refused to link the question of the general strike to that of the workers’ and peasants’ government.This criticism of the rightist leadership of the PCI opened up a political orientation which aimed at giving a solution to the problems which had come out into the light of day in the Renault strike. To begin with, it took up the content of the agitation of the party:
The activity of the party itself is of extreme importance, because political problems underlie the general strike. It was the absence of political demands and realistic aims that diverted the immediate activity of elements among the most combative and most decisive, at the time of the Paris transport strike, from calling for it.
There could be no question of a general strike just for the 1,000 francs. But the demands themselves, contained in the slogans – the actual figure for the minimum living standard guaranteed by the sliding scale – could not be separated from the central political slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government. The workers knew that victory for these demands meant bringing down the Ramadier government. To drop the slogan of the workers’ and peasants’ government was to close off the perspective of the general strike and to make useless all agitation for it.But while the correct orientation is indispensable, the political means to advance it have still to be worked out. The Fourth Congress brought out the significance of the ‘committees of struggle’ which the party should encourage and on the relation between committees of struggle and strike committees:
The committees of struggle, at the beginning of the new period of struggle, have been real organisms by which the vanguard can prepare for struggle, over the heads of the bureaucratic organisms; as organisms of the united front, they can only exist in activity or in its immediate preparation. They cannot replace either strike committees or trade union organisms by becoming permanent. The party will work to create such organisms, without ever forgetting that in the future other forms of regroupment to prepare for the general strike may very well be created by workers.
The party should popularise the experiences of the strike committees in confronting the Stalinist and reformist fakery. It should also spread the idea that there should be links between these committees.What was worked out in this Congress – though still inadequately – was the possibility of constructing no longer a mere propaganda grouping and especially not an organisation to exert pressure on the apparatuses, but a real revolutionary organisation, which could forge deep-going links with the masses in the political struggle. The Renault strike, with the help of the Trotskyist militants, marked the appearance of new political relations between the masses and the apparatuses, which provided precisely the objective basis for such an organisation to develop.
But instead of this development, the months and years which followed were to see a new aggravation of the difficulties of the PCI and of the Fourth International, which ended in 1951-53 in the Fourth International bursting apart. Nonetheless, these difficulties and crises in the struggle to construct the revolutionary party cannot be overcome from only one side.
In the battle which developed in Renault, but which was expressed in many other workplaces, a Trotskyist nucleus, linked to the workers’ movement and working to unify their movement as it freed itself from the clutches of the apparatuses, was formed at the heart of the struggles of the proletariat. There can be no doubt that this was enormously important in the resistance of the majority of the PCI, and in particular of its trade union commission, to Pabloite revisionism.
When Pablo identified the movement of the masses with that of the Stalinist bureaucracy, when he demanded that the Trotskyist militants integrate themselves into the Stalinist apparatus to make it “evolve to the left”, the worker militants of the PCI could rely on living experience, their own and that of their class. No! The Stalinist bureaucracy was not the “delegated representative” of the proletariat. On the contrary, the proletariat in its entire movement was beating against the Stalinist straitjacket and trying to organise itself round a new axis. To help it and guide it in this movement – this was the task of a Trotskyist organisation, a task which required complete political independence from the bureaucracy. There is no doubt that this is the most important conclusion to be drawn from the Renault strike of 1947.
Denis Collin
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