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Title: Remarks on Solidarity Unionism
Author: Staughton Lynd
Date: June 29, 2005
Language: en
Topics: solidarity, trade unions, Industrial Workers of the World, speech
Source: Retrieved on 2nd September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/staughton-lynd%E2%80%99s-remarks-solidarity-unionism

Staughton Lynd

Remarks on Solidarity Unionism

To Begin With

The greatest honor I have ever received is to be asked to speak to you

on the occasion of the IWW’s 100^(th) birthday.

But I am not standing here alone. Beside me are departed friends. John

Sargent was the first president of Local 1010, United Steelworkers of

America, the 18,000-member local union at Inland Steel just east of

Chicago. John said that he and his fellow workers achieved far more

through direct action before they had a collective bargaining agreement

than they did after they had a contract. You can read his words in the

book Rank and File. Ed Mann and John Barbero, after years as rank and

filers, became president and vice president of Local 1462, United

Steelworkers of America, at Youngstown Sheet & Tube in Youngstown, and

toward the end of his life Ed joined the IWW. Ed and John were

ex-Marines who opposed both the Korean and Vietnam wars; they fought

racism both in the mill and in the city of Youngstown, where in the

1950s swimming pools were still segregated; they believed, as do I, that

there will be no answer to the problem of plant shutdowns until working

people take the means of production into their own hands; and in January

1980, in response to U.S. Steel’s decision to close all its Youngstown

facilities, Ed led us down the hill from the local union hall to the

U.S. Steel administration building, where the forces of good broke down

the door and for one glorious afternoon occupied the company

headquarters. Ed’s daughter changed her baby’s diapers on the pool table

in the executive game room. Stan Weir and Marty Glaberman, very much

alone, moved our thinking forward about informal work groups as the

heart of working-class self-organization, about unions with leaders who

stay on the shop floor, about alternatives to the hierarchical vanguard

party, about overcoming racism and about international solidarity.

These men were in their own generation successors to the Haymarket

martyrs and Joe Hill. They represented the inheritance that you and I

seek to carry on.

How I First Learned About the IWW

It all began for me when I was about fourteen years old.

Some of you may know the name of Seymour Martin Lipset. He became a

rather conservative political sociologist. In the early 1940s, however,

he was a graduate student of my father’s and a socialist, who wrote his

dissertation on the Canadian Commonwealth Federation.

Marty Lipset decided that my political education would not be complete

until I had visited the New York City headquarters of the Socialist

Party. The office was on the East Side and so we caught the shuttle at

Times Square. I have no memory of the Socialist Party headquarters but a

story Marty told me on the shuttle changed my life.

It seems that one day during the Spanish Civil War there was a long line

of persons waiting for lunch. Far back in the line was a well known

anarchist. A colleague importuned him: “Comrade, come to the front of

the line and get your lunch. Your time is too valuable to be wasted this

way. Your work is too important for you to stand at the back of the

line. Think of the Revolution!” Moving not one inch, the anarchist

leader replied: “This is the Revolution.”

I think I asked myself, Is there any one in the United States who thinks

that way? A few years later, in my parents’ living room, I picked up C.

Wright Mills’ book about the leaders of the new Congress of Industrial

Organizations, The New Men of Power. Mills argued that these men were

bureaucrats at the head of hierarchical organizations. And at the very

beginning of the book, in contrast to all that was to follow, Mills

quoted a description of the Wobblies who went to Everett, Washington on

a vessel named the Verona in November 1916 to take part in a free speech

fight. As the boat approached the dock in Everett, “Sheriff McRae called

out to them: Who is your leader? Immediate and unmistakable was the

answer from every I.W.W.: ‘We are all leaders’.”

So, I thought to myself, perhaps the Wobblies were the equivalent in the

United States of the Spanish anarchists. But here a difficulty held me

up for twenty years. If, as the Wobblies seemed to say, the answer to

the problems of the old AF of L was industrial unionism, why was it that

the new industrial unions of the CIO acted so much like the craft unions

of the old AF of L?

Industrial Unionism and the Right to Strike

The Preamble to the IWW Constitution, as of course you know, stated and

still states:

The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of

workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry

....

Clearly these words, when they were written, referred to a workplace at

the turn of the last century where each group of craftspersons belonged

to a different union. Each such union had its own collective bargaining

agreement, complete with a termination date different from that of every

other union at the work site. The Wobblies called this typical

arrangement “the American Separation of Labor.”

The Preamble suggested a solution:

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class

upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its workers

in any one industry, or all industries if necessary, cease work whenever

a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an

injury to one the injury of all.

The answer, in short, appeared to be the reorganization of labor in

industrial rather than craft unions.

It seemed to Wobblies and like-minded rank-and-file workers that if only

labor were to organize industrially, the “separation of labor” — as the

IWW characterized the old AF of L — could be overcome. All kinds of

workers in a given workplace would belong to the same union and could

take direct action together, as they chose. Hence in the early 1930s

Wobblies and former Wobblies threw themselves into the organization of

local industrial unions.

A cruel disappointment awaited them. When John L. Lewis, Philip Murray,

and other men of power in the new CIO negotiated the first contracts for

auto workers and steelworkers, these contracts, even if only a few pages

long, typically contained a no-strike clause. All workers in a given

workplace were now prohibited from striking as particular crafts had

been before. This remains the situation today.

Nothing in labor law required a no-strike clause. Indeed, the drafters

of the original National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) went out of

their way to ensure that the law would not be used to curtail the right

to strike. Not only does federal labor law affirm the right “to engage

in ... concerted activities for the purpose of ... mutual aid or

protection”; even as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, Section

502 of what is now called the Labor Management Relations Act declares:

Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require an individual employee

to render labor or service without his consent, nor shall anything in

this Act be construed to make the quitting of his labor by an individual

employee an illegal act; nor shall any court issue any process to compel

the performance by an individual employee of such labor or service,

without his consent; nor shall the quitting of work by an employee or

employees in good faith because of abnormally dangerous conditions for

work at the place of employment of such employee or employees be deemed

a strike under this chapter[;] and for good measure, the drafters added

in Section 13 of the NLRA, now section 163 of the LMRA: “Nothing in this

Act, except as specifically provided for herein, shall be construed so

as either to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right

to strike ....”

In the face of this obvious concern on the part of the legislative

drafters to protect the right to strike, the leaders of the emergent CIO

gave that right away. To be sure, the courts helped, holding before

World War II that workers who strike over economic issues can be

replaced, and holding after World War II that a contract which provides

for arbitration of grievances implicitly forbids strikes. But the courts

are not responsible for the no-strike clause in the typical CIO

contract. Trade union leaders are responsible.

Charles Morris’ new book, The Blue Eagle at Work, argues that the

original intent of federal labor law was that employers should be

legally required to bargain, not only with unions that win NLRB

elections, but also with so-called “minority” or “members-only” unions:

unions that do not yet have majority support in a particular bargaining

unit. We can all agree with Professor Morris that the best way to build

a union is not by circulating authorization cards, but by winning small

victories on the shop floor and engaging the company “in interim

negotiations regarding workplace problems as they arise.” But Morris’

ultimate objective, like that of most labor historians and almost all

union organizers, is still a union that negotiates a legally-enforcible

collective bargaining agreement, including a management prerogatives

clause that lets the boss close the plant and a no-strike clause that

prevents the workers from doing anything about it In my view, and I

believe in yours, nothing essential will change — not if Sweeney is

replaced by Stern or Wilhelm, not if the SEIU breaks away from the

AFL-CIO, not if the percentage of dues money devoted to organizing is

multiplied many times — so long as working people are contractually

prohibited from taking direct action whenever and however they may

choose.

Glaberman, Sargent, Mann, Barbero and Weir

All this began to become clear to me only in the late 1960s, when a

friend put in my hands a little booklet by Marty Glaberman entitled

“Punching Out.” Therein Marty argues that in a workplace where there is

a union and a collective bargaining contract, and the contract (as it

almost always does) contains a no-strike clause, the shop steward

becomes a cop for the boss. The worker is forbidden to help his buddy in

time of need. An injury to one is no longer an injury to all.

As I say these words of Marty Glaberman’s, almost forty years later, in

my imagination he and the other departed comrades form up around me. We

cannot see them but we can hear their words. John Sargent: “Without a

contract we secured for ourselves agreement on working conditions and

wages that we do not have today.... [A]s a result of the enthusiasm of

the people in the mill you had a series of strikes, wildcats,

shut-downs, slow-downs, anything working people could think of to secure

for themselves what they decided they had to have.” Ed Mann: “I think

we’ve got too much contract. You hate to be the guy who talks about the

good old days, but I think the IWW had a darn good idea when they said:

‘Well, we’ll settle these things as they arise’.” Stan Weir: “[T]he new

CIO leaders fought all attempts to build new industrial unions on a

horizontal rather than the old vertical model.... There can be unions

run by regular working people on the job. There have to be.”

Rumbles In Olympus

Here we should pause to take note of recent rumbles — in both senses of

the word — on Mount Olympus. What is about to happen in the mainstream

organized labor movement, and what do we think about it?

This is a challenging question. Our energies are consumed by very small,

very local organizing projects. It is natural to look sidewise at the

organized labor movement, with its membership in the hundreds of

thousands, its impressive national headquarters buildings, its

apparently endless income from the dues check-off, its perpetual

projects for turning the corner in organizing this year or next year,

and to wonder, Are we wasting our time?

Moreover, there is not and should not be an impenetrable wall between

what we try to do and traditional trade unionism at the local level. My

rule of thumb is that national unions and national union reform

movements almost always do more harm than good, but that local unions

are a different story. Workers need local unions. They will go on

creating them whatever you and I may think, and for good reason. The

critical decision for workers elected to local union office is whether

they will use that position merely as a stepping stone to regional and

national election campaigns, striving to rise vertically within the

hierarchy of a particular union, or whether they will reach out

horizontally to other workers and local union officers in other

workplaces and other unions, so as to form class wide entities —

parallel central labor bodies, or sometimes, even official central labor

bodies — within particular localities.

Such bodies have special historical importance. The “soviets” in the

Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were improvised central labor

bodies. Both the Knights of Labor and the IWW created such entities,

especially during the first period of organizing in a given community

when no single union was yet self-sufficient. My wife and I encountered

a body of exactly this kind in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, and the

Workers’ Solidarity Club of Youngstown was an effort in the same

direction. The “workers’ centers” that seem to spring up naturally in

communities of immigrant workers are another variant. What all these

efforts have in common is that workers from different places of work sit

in the same circle, and in the most natural way imaginable tend to

transcend the parochialism of any particular union and to form a class

point of view.

Because many Wobblies will in this way become “dual carders,” and often

vigorously take part in the affairs of local unions, the line between

our work and the activity of traditional, centralized, national trade

unions needs to be drawn all the more clearly. From my point of view, it

is a case of Robert Frost’s two roads diverging within a wood: on the

one hand, to mix metaphors, toward endless rearranging of the deck

chairs on a sinking Titanic; on the other hand, toward the beginnings of

another world.

As you know I am an historian. And what drives me almost to tears is the

spectacle of generation after generation of radicals seeking to change

the world by cozying up to popular union leaders. Communists did it in

the 1930s, as Len DeCaux became the CIO’s public relations man and Lee

Pressman its general counsel; and Earl Browder, in an incident related

by historian Nelson Lichtenstein, ordered Party members helping to lead

the occupation of a General Motors plant near Detroit to give up their

agitation lest they offend the CIO leadership. Trotskyists and

ex-Trotskyists in the second half of the last century repeated this

mistaken strategy of the Communist Party in the 1930s with less excuse,

providing intellectual services for the campaigns of Walter Reuther,

Arnold Miller, Ed Sadlowski, and Ron Carey. And Left intellectuals

almost without exception hailed the elevation of John Sweeney to the

presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995. Professors formed an organization of

sycophantic academics, and encouraged their students to become

organizers under the direction of national union staffers. In a parody

of Mississippi “freedom summer,” “union summers” used the energy of

young people but denied them any voice in decisions.

In all these variations on a theme, students and intellectuals sought to

make themselves useful to the labor movement by way of a relationship to

national unions, rather than by seeking a helpful relationship with

rank-and-file workers and members of local unions. In contrast, students

at Harvard and elsewhere organized their own sit-ins to assist low-wage

workers at the schools where they studied, and then it was John Sweeney

who showed up to offer support to efforts that, to the best of my

knowledge, young people themselves controlled. I want to say a few more

words about two exemplars of the paradigm I criticize: almost a century

ago, John L. Lewis; and today, the not so dynamic duo, John Sweeney and

Andrew Stern. Lewis is an historical conundrum. In the 1920s and early

1930s, he established dictatorial control over the United Mine Workers

union and smashed individuals who sought to challenge him from below,

like John Brophy and Powers Hapgood, and dissenting organizations like

the Progressive Miners here in Illinois.

However, to read his biographers from Saul Alinsky to Melvyn Dubofsky,

like Paul on the road to Damascus the miners’ leader experienced

conversion in 1932–1933. He seized on section 7(a) of the National

Industrial Recovery Act and sent his organizers throughout the coal

fields with the message, “The President wants you to join the union.”

Then, confronting the standpat leadership of the AF of L, Lewis and

other visionary leaders like Sidney Hillman led their members out of the

AF of L to form, first the Committee for Industrial Organization, and

then, after definitively seceding, the Congress of Industrial

Organizations. James Pope of Rutgers University Law School has been into

the sources and tells a different story. It was not Lewis, but

rank-and-file miners in western Pennsylvania, who before the passage of

the NIRA in spring 1933 began to form new local unions of the UMW. Lewis

and his staff opposed them. Moreover, when in the summer and fall of

1933 the miners went on strike for union recognition, Lewis and his

colleague Philip Murray repeatedly sought to settle strikes over the

head of the workers on the picket lines although the goal of these

massive direct actions had not been achieved.

Yes, Lewis wanted more members, just as the leaders of the five

rebelling unions today wish to increase union “density.” But what

characterizes the national union leaders of the past and of the present

is an absolute unwillingness to let rank-and-file workers decide for

themselves when to undertake the sacrifice that direct action requires.

Consider John Sweeney. Close observers should have known in the fall of

1995 that Sweeney was hardly the democrat some supposed him to be.

Andrea Carney, who is with us today, was at the time a hospital worker

and member of Local 399, SEIU in Los Angeles. She tells in The New Rank

and File how the Central American custodians whom the SEIU celebrated in

its “Justice for Janitors” campaign, joined Local 399 and then decided

that they would like to have a voice in running it. They connected with

Anglo workers like Ms. Carney to form a Multiracial Alliance that

contested all offices on the local union executive board. In June 1995

they voted the entire board out of office. In September 1995, as one of

his last acts before moving on to the AFL-CIO, Brother Sweeney removed

all the newly-elected officers and put the local in trusteeship.

This action did not deter the draftsmen of the open letter to Sweeney I

mentioned earlier. Appearing at the end of 1995 in publications like In

These Times and the New York Review of Books, the letter stated that

Sweeney’s elevation was “the most heartening development in our nation’s

political life since the heyday of the civil rights movement.” The

letter continued:

[T]e wave of hope that and energy that has begun to surge through the

AFL-CIO offers a way out of our stalemate and defeatism. The commitment

demonstrated by newly elected president John J. Sweeney and his

energetic associates promises to once again make the house of labor a

social movement around which we can rally.

The letter concluded: “We extend our support and cooperation to this new

leadership and pledge our solidarity with those in the AFL-CIO dedicated

to the cause of union democracy and the remobilization of a dynamic new

labor movement.” Signers included Stanley Aronowitz, Derrick Bell,

Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Foner, Todd Gitlin, David Montgomery, and

Cornel West.

Closely following Sweeney’s accession to the AFL-CIO presidency were his

betrayals of strikes by Staley workers in Decatur, Illinois, and

newspaper workers in Detroit. In Decatur, workers organized a

spectacular “in plant” campaign of working to rule, and after Staley

locked them out, there were the makings of a parallel central labor body

and a local general strike including automobile and rubber workers.

Striker and hunger striker Dan Lane spoke to the convention that elected

Sweeney, and Sweeney personally promised Lane support if he would give

up his hunger strike. But Sweeney did nothing to further the campaign to

cause major consumers of Staley product to boycott the company. Meantime

the Staley local had been persuaded to affiliate with the national

Paperworkers’ union, which proceeded to organize acceptance of a

concessionary contract.

In Detroit – as Larry who is here could describe in more detail —

strikers begged the new AFL-CIO leadership to convene a national

solidarity rally in their support. Sweeney said No. On the occasion of

Clinton’s second inauguration in January 1997, leaders of the striking

unions — including Ron Carey — decided to call off the strike without

consulting the men and women who had been walking the picket lines for a

year and a half. Only then did the Sweeney leadership call on workers

from all over the country to join in a, now meaningless, gathering in

Detroit.

What should the several dozen signers of the open letter to Sweeney have

learned from these events? SEIU president Andrew Stern apparently

believes that the lesson is that the union movement should be more

centralized. What kind of labor movement would there be if he had his

way? Local 399 had a membership of 25,000 spread all over metropolitan

Los Angeles. The SEIU local where I live includes the states of Ohio,

Kentucky, and West Virginia. This is topdown unionism run amok. The

lesson for us is that, however humbly, in first steps however small, we

need to be building a movement that is qualitatively different.

The Zapatistas and the Bolivians: To Lead by Obeying

And so of course we come in the end to the question, Yes, but how do we

do that? Another world may be possible, but how do we get there? The

Preamble says: “By organizing industrially we are forming the structure

of the new society within the shell of the old.” But if capitalist

factories and mainstream trade unions are not prototypes of the new

society, where is it being built? What can we do so that others and we

ourselves do not just think and say that “another world is possible,”

but actually begin to experience it, to live it, to taste it, here and

now, within the shell of the old?

In recent years I have glimpsed for the first time a possible answer:

what Quakers call “way opening.” It begins with the Zapatistas, and has

been further developed by the folks in the streets of Bolivia. Suppose

the creation of a new society by the bourgeoisie is expressed in the

equation, Rising Class plus New Institutions Within The Shell Of The Old

= State Power. All these years I have been struggling with how workers

could create new institutions within the shell of capitalism. What the

Zapatistas have suggested, echoing an old Wobbly theme, is that the

equation does not need to include the term “State Power.” Perhaps we can

change capitalism fundamentally without taking state power. Perhaps we

can change capitalism from below.

All of us sense that something qualitatively different happened in

Chiapas on January 1, 1994, something organically connected to the

anti-globalization protests that began five years later. What exactly

was that something? My wife Alice and I were in San Cristóbal a few

years ago and had the opportunity to talk to a woman named Teresa Ortiz.

She had lived in the area a long time and since then has published a

book of oral histories of Chiapan women.

Ms. Ortiz told us that there were three sources of Zapatismo. The first

was the craving for land, the heritage of Emiliano Zapata and the

revolution that he led at the time of World War I. This longing for

economic independence expressed itself in the formation of communal

landholdings, or ejidos, and the massive migration of impoverished

campesinos into the Lacandón jungle.

A second source of Zapatismo, we were told, was liberation theology.

Bishop Samuel Ruiz was the key figure. He sponsored what came to be

called tomar conciencia. It means “taking conscience,” just as we speak

of “taking thought.” The process of taking conscience involved the

creation of complex combinations of Mayan and Christian religiosity, as

in the church Alice and I visited where there was no altar, where a

thick bed of pine needles was strewn on the floor and little family

groups sat in little circles with lighted candles, and where there was a

saint to whom one could turn if the other saints did not do what they

were asked. Taking conscience also resulted in countless grassroots

functionaries with titles like “predeacon,” “deacon,” “catechist,” or

“delegate of the Word”: the shop stewards of the people’s Church who

have been indispensable everywhere in Latin America.

The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to

Teresa Ortiz, was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo: “to lead by

obeying.” She explained what it meant at the village level. Imagine all

of us here as a village. We feel the need for, to use her examples, a

teacher and a storekeeper. But these two persons can be freed for those

communal tasks only if we, as a community, undertake to cultivate their

milpas, their corn fields. In the most literal sense their ability to

take leadership roles depends on our willingness to provide their

livelihoods.

When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional

gatherings, they are likely to be instructed delegates. Thus, during the

initial negotiations in 1994, the Zapatista delegates insisted that the

process be suspended for several weeks while they took what had been

tentatively agreed to back to the villages, who rejected it. The heart

of the process remains the gathered villagers, the local asemblea.

Only upon reading a good deal of the Zapatista literature did an

additional level of meaning become clear to me.

At the time of the initial uprising, the Zapatistas seem to have

entertained a traditional Marxist strategy of seizing national power by

military means. The “First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle,” issued

on January 2, 1994, gave the Zapatista military forces the order:

“Advance to the capital of the country, overcoming the federal army

....”[1]

But, in the words of Harvard historian John Womack: “In military terms

the EZLN offensive was a wonderful success on the first day, a pitiful

calamity on the second.”[2] Within a very short time, three things

apparently happened: 1) the public opinion of Mexican civil society came

down on the side of the Indians of Chiapas and demanded negotiation; 2)

President Salinas declared a ceasefire, and sent an emissary to

negotiate in the cathedral of San Cristóbal; 3) Subcomandante Marcos

carried out a clandestine coup within the failed revolution, agreed to

negotiations, and began to promulgate a dramatically new strategy.[3]

Beginning early in 1994, Marcos says explicitly, over and over and over

again: We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard and we don’t want to take

state power. Thus, at the first massive encuentro, the National

Democratic Convention in the Lacandón jungle in August 1994, Marcos said

that the Zapatistas had made “a decision not to impose our point of

view”; that they rejected “the doubtful honor of being the historical

vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us”; and finally:

Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor

are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the

place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the

routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.[4]

Marcos then took the Mexican flag and gave it to the delegates, in

effect telling them: “It’s your flag. Use it to make a democratic

Mexico. We Zapatistas hope we have created some space within which you

can act.” [5]

What? A Left group that doesn’t want state power? There must be some

mistake. But no, he means it. And because it is a perspective so

different from that traditional in Marxism, because it represents a

fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions,

I want to quote several more examples.[6]

In the “Fourth Declaration from the Lacandón Jungle,” on January 1,

1996, it is stated that the Zapatista Front of National Liberation will

be a “political force that does not aspire to take power[,] ... that can

organize citizens’ demands and proposals so that he who commands,

commands in obedience to the popular will[,] ... that does not struggle

to take political power but for the democracy where those who command,

command by obeying.”

In September 1996, in an address to Mexican civil society, Marcos says

that in responding to the earthquake of 1985 Mexican civil society

proved to itself

that you can participate without aspiring to public office, that you can

organize politically without being in a political party, that you can

keep an eye on the government and pressure it to “lead by obeying,” that

you can have an effect and remain yourself ....[7]

Likewise in August 1997, in “Discussion Documents for the Founding

Congress of the Zapatista Front of National Liberation,” the Zapatistas

declare that they represent “a new form of doing politics, without

aspiring to take power and without vanguardist positions.” We “will not

struggle to take power,” they continue. The Zapatista Front of National

Liberation “does not aspire to take power.” Rather, “we are a political

force that does not seek to take power, that does not pretend to be the

vanguard of a specific class, or of society as a whole.”[8]

Especially memorable is a communication from the Zapatista National

Liberation Army (EZLN) dated October 2, 1998 and addressed to “the

Generation of Dignity of 1968,” that is, to former students who had

survived the massacre in Mexico City prior to the 1968 Olympics. Here

Marcos speaks of “the politics of below,” of the “Mexico of those who

weren’t then, are not now, and will never be leaders.” This, he says, is

the

Mexico of those who don’t build ladders to climb above others, but who

look beside them to find another and make him or her their compañero or

compañera, brother, sister, mate, buddy, friend, colleague, or whatever

word is used to describe that long, treacherous, collective path that is

the struggle of: everything for everyone.[9]

Finally, at the zocalo in March 2001, after this Coxey’s Army of the

poor had marched from Chiapas to Mexico City, Marcos once more declared:

“We are not those who aspire to take power and then impose the way and

the word. We will not be.”[10]

For the last four years the Zapatistas and Marcos have been quiet,

presumably building the new society day by day in those villages of

Chiapas where they have majority support. If one wishes further insight

as to how the politics of below might unfold, the place to look may be

Bolivia. It’s too soon to say a great deal. The most substantial

analysis I have encountered describes the movement in the language of

“leading by obeying”:

without seizing power directly, popular movements ... suddenly exercised

substantial, ongoing control from below of state authorities ....

and:

the ... insurrectionists did not attempt to seize the state

administration, and instead set up alternative institutions of

self-government in city streets and neighborhoods ... and in the

insurgent highlands .... Protesters, who took over the downtown center,

intentionally refrained from marching on the national palace. This was

to avoid bloodshed, but also a recognition that substantial power was

already in their hands. International Solidarity.[11]

There remains, finally, the most difficult problem of all. “An injury to

one is an injury to all” means that we must act in solidarity with

working people everywhere, so that, in the words of the Preamble, “the

workers of the world organize as a class.”

This means that we cannot join with steel industry executives in seeking

to keep foreign steel out of the country: we need a solution to

worldwide over-capacity that protects steelworkers everywhere. We

cannot, like the so-called reform candidate for president of the

International Brotherhood of Teamsters a few years ago, advocate even

more effort to keep Mexican truck drivers from crossing the Rio Grande.

We should emulate the Teamsters local in Chicago where a resolution

against the Iraq war passed overwhelmingly after Vietnam vets took the

mike to share their experience, and the local went on to host the

founding national meeting of Labor Against The War.

I believe the IWW has a special contribution to make. Wobblies were

alone or almost alone among labor organizations a hundred years ago to

welcome as members African Americans, unskilled foreign-born workers,

and women. Joe Hill not only was born in Sweden and apparently took part

in the Mexican Revolution, but, according to Franklin Rosemont, may have

had a special fondness for Chinese cooking. This culture of

internationalism can sustain and inspire us as we seek concrete ways to

express it in the 21^(st) century. I have concluded that no imaginable

labor movement or people’s movement in this country will ever be

sufficiently strong that it, alone, can confront and transform United

States capitalism and imperialism.

I am not the only person who has reached this conclusion, but most who

do so then say to themselves, I believe, “OK, then I need to cease

pretending to be a revolutionary and support reform instead.”

I suggest that what we need is an alternative revolutionary strategy.

That strategy, it seems to me, can only be an alliance between whatever

movement can be brought into being in the United States and the vast,

tumultuous resistance of the developing world.

Note that I say “alliance,” as between students and workers, or any

other equal partners. I am not talking about kneejerk, uncritical

support for the most recent Third World autocrat to capture our

imaginations.

We in Youngstown have taken some very small first steps in this

direction that I would like to share. In the late 1980s skilled workers

from Youngstown, Aliquippa, and Pittsburgh made a trip to Nicaragua. Ned

Mann, Ed Mann’s son, is a sheet metal worker. He helped steelworkers at

Nicaragua’s only steel mill, at Tipitapa north of Managua, to build a

vent in the roof over a particularly smoky furnace. Meantime the late

Bob Schindler, a lineman for Ohio Edison, worked with a crew of

Nicaraguans doing similar work. He spoke no Spanish, they spoke no

English. They got on fine. Bob was horrified at the tools available to

his colleagues and, when he got back to the States, collected a good

deal of Ohio Edison’s inventory and sent it South. The next year, he

went back to Nicaragua, and travelled to the northern village where

Benjamin Linder was killed while trying to develop a small

hydro-electric project. Bob did what he could to complete Linder’s

dream.

About a dozen of us from Youngstown have also gone to a labor school

south of Mexico City related to the Frente Autentico del Trabajo, the

network of unions independent of the Mexican government.

These are tiny first steps, I know. But they are in the right direction.

Why not take learning Spanish more seriously and, whenever we can,

encourage fellow workers to join us in spending time with our Latin

American counterparts?

And on down that same road, why not, some day, joint strike demands from

workers for General Motors in Puebla, Mexico; in Detroit; and in St.

Catherine’s, Ontario?

Instead of the TDU candidate for president of the Teamsters criticizing

Jimmy Hoffa for doing too little to keep Mexican truck drivers out of

the United States, why not a conference of truck drivers north and south

of the Rio Grande to draw up a single set of demands?

Why not, instead of the United Steelworkers joining with US steel

companies to lobby for increased quotas on steel imports, a task force

of steelworkers from all countries to draw up a common program about how

to deal with capitalist over-production, how to make sure that each

major developing country controls its own steelmaking capacity, and how

to protect the livelihoods of all steelworkers, wherever they may live?

Perhaps I can end, as I began, with a story. About a dozen years ago my

wife and I were in the Golan Heights, a part of Syria occupied by Israel

in 1967. There are a few Arab villages left in the Golan Heights, and at

one of them our group was invited to a barbecue in an apple orchard.

There was a very formidable white lightning, called arak. It developed

that each group was called on to sing for the other. I was nominated for

our group. I decided to sing “Joe Hill” but I felt that, before doing

so, I needed to make it clear that Joe Hill was not a typical parochial

American. As I laboriously began to do so, our host, who had had more to

drink than I, held up his hand. “You don’t have to explain. We

understand. Joe Hill was a Spartacist. Joe Hill was in Chile and in

Mexico. But today,” he finished, “Joe Hill is a Palestinian.”

Joe Hill is a Palestinian. He is also an Israeli refusenik. He is

imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, where his Koran along with the

rest of his belongings is subject to constant shakedowns and disrespect.

He works for Walmart and also in South African diamond mines. He took

part in the worldwide dock strike a few years ago and sees in that kind

of international solidarity the hope of the future. Recently he has

spent a lot of time in occupied factories in Argentina, where he

shuttles back and forth between the workers in the plants and the

neighborhoods that support them. In New York City, Joe Hill has taken

note of the fact that a business like a grocery store (in working-class

neighborhoods) or restaurants (in midtown Manhattan) are vulnerable to

consumer boycotts, and if the pickets present themselves as a community

group there is no violation of labor law. In Pennsylvania, he has the

cell next to Mumia Abu Jamal at S.C.I. Greene in Waynesburg. In Ohio, he

hangs out with the “Lucasville Five”: the five men framed and condemned

to death because they were leaders in a 1993 prison uprising. He was in

Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa, and Cancun, and will be at the next

demonstration against globalization wherever it takes place. In Bolivia

he wears a black hat and is in the streets, protesting the privatization

of water and natural gas, calling for the nationalization of these

resources, and for government from below by a people’s assembly. As the

song says, “Where workingmen are out on strike, it’s there you’ll find

Joe Hill.”

Let’s do our best to be there beside him.

[1] Our word is our weapon: selected writings [of] subcomandante Marcos

, ed. Juane Ponce de León (Seven Stories Press: New York, 2001), p. 14.

[2] John Womack, Jr., Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New

York: The New Press, 1999), p. 43.

[3] Id. , p. 44.

[4] Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante

Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation , trans. by Frank

Bardacke and others (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 248.

[5] Id. , pp. 249–51.

[6] Rebellion in Chiapas , pp. 302–02.

[7] “Civil Society That So Perturbs,” Sept. 19, 1996, Our word is our

weapon, p. 121 (emphasis added).

[8] Rebellion in Chiapas , pp. 333, 335–36.

[9] Our word is our weapon , pp. 144–45.

[10] Id. , p. 159.

[11] Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, “Revolutionary Horizons:

Indigenous and National-Popular Struggles in Bolivia,” New Left Review

(forthcoming), pp. 7, 35.