Detroit Workers' Voice, May 13, 2005

What path toward an independent workers movement?

Build the rank-and-file struggle

or illusions in the liberal Democrats?



On October 17 last year, 10,000 workers and activists in Washington, DC rallied

to the call of the Million Worker March. This call did not merely attack Bush

and his neo-con cabal. It raised to some extent the issue of building the

workers movement separate from the capitalist politicians. Led by dissident

union leaders, the MWM departed from the standpoint of the main AFL-CIO leaders

of subordinating everything to the presidential campaign of the pro-war and

pro-business Democrat, John Kerry. The AFL-CIO leadership sought to strangle the

MWM, but the demo was held anyway.

We in the Communist Voice Organization (CVO) attended the demo of last October.

We knew that the break of the MWM leaders with the main AFL-CIO officialdom was

only partial and temporary, and we wrote about this in our leaflets. But we also

saw that the MWM had aroused interest in a section of workers who were looking

to find a way to struggle. Since the October demo, we have taken part in the

Detroit committee of the MWM (the MWM-Detroit), the speakout in Detroit on

February 5, and various activities promoted by the MWM-Detroit. We have kept

workers around us informed of the stands and activities of the MWM.

But the MWM-Detroit has increasingly oriented its work towards allying with

liberal Detroit politicians in the Democratic Party and with the trade union

bureaucrats. It has ignored the lesson of the attempt of the AFL-CIO and

pro-Democratic Party activists to strangle the MWM, and has instead sought to

patch the rift between the MWM and the liberal circles. MWM-Detroit policy has

become similar to that of the Workers World Party, which seeks to organize

national movements hand-in-hand with big-name liberals and the labor

officialdom. The national MWM leadership is apparently adopting the same policy.

And the present conference is likely to orient the MWM towards building the

National Conference of Cities, which would mean tying the workers movement to

the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Such stands have increasingly sucked the life out of the MWM-Detroit. And it

seems to have led the national MWM to an impasse. The question of orientation is

the major question facing the present MWM conference.

The war on city workers and the poor in Detroit

We think that an independent workers' movement can only be built in the

course of actual struggles. Such a trend must attract new activists. Where will

they come from? From a new wave of struggle.

The city budget crisis in Detroit posed the issue of a struggle arising

against cutbacks and concessions for the local MWM committee. The city

government under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been unleashing a new wave of misery

against the working masses. He has already begun massive layoffs of city workers

and is demanding major wage and benefit concessions. And the mainly working

class and poor residents of Detroit will see already-pathetic city services

further decimated. The other pro-establishment forces are implicated in all this

too, from the City Council, which is developing alternative concessions plans,

to the main local union leaders who look to City Council, not the workers

struggle, to save the day.

Only one thing can counter this onslaught. There needs to be determined

mass action by city workers and other sections of the masses. Such a fight must

raise the banner of "No Concessions". Instead of workers being made to sacrifice

again, the rich must be made to pay for the crisis.

When the Detroit MWM committee took up work on the city budget crisis, this

was an important step. But what stand has the majority of the MWM-Detroit

adopted?



Alliance with Democratic politicians and union bureaucrats

The majority of the MWM-Detroit has supported an alliance with the liberal

politicians and the union bureaucrats. No, the committee flyers don't say "Let's

have an alliance with the liberals", etc. and may even include a general phrase

against the Republicans and Democrats. But some members explicitly support an

alliance with the liberals. And in fact that's what the present policy amounts

to.



The public stand of the MWM-Detroit has failed to expose the stand of

certain liberals on the Detroit City Council who are posturing loudly against

Mayor Kilpatrick's cutbacks, while quietly advocating their own brand of layoffs

and wage cuts. Their promises to protect workers are touted by many local trade

union leaders and have influence among the workers. Faith in the City Council

opposition diverts the workers from preparing their own ranks for struggle. This

is why it is an essential issue to deal with. The failure of the MWM-Detroit to

publicly expose the City Council opposition has gone hand-in-hand with a

reluctance to clarify for the rank and file city workers the true nature of

their local union leaders. Yet, these local union officials, with rare

exception, are not preparing the workers to resist these attacks.

The main view in the MWM-Detroit is that the rank-and-file workers will be

mobilized in large numbers if only events are endorsed or called by the union

officials or City Councilpersons. But the numbers haven't come. And the price of

alliance has been silence about the treachery of the liberals and union

officials. So who's benefiting from this alliance? The city workers and poor of

Detroit? Activists who want an alternative to the liberals? No. It's the

liberals themselves who get to parade around as heroes while plotting against

the workers.

Democratic Mayor and City Council vs. the workers



Detroit is a prime example of how the Democrats, not just the Republicans,

are enemies of the workers. The city is totally run by the Democrats, and has

been so for decades. But while the political establishment of Detroit is solidly

Democratic, candidates for city offices technically run as non-partisan.

When liberal white Democratic officials ran the city, the oppression

against the masses was so bad they rose up in the famous 1967 rebellion. Black

Democratic mayors and city councilpeople replaced them. This cooled down the

struggle, but these new Democratic officials served the same corporate masters

as their predecessors. From "radical" Democrats like Coleman Young to

Clinton-style Democrats like Dennis Archer, they have all shoved concessions

down the throats of city workers, made sweetheart deals with the corporations,

ruined city services, continued police terror, etc.

The present mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is continuing this pro-capitalist

tradition. He has made it clear that city workers and public services will be

in his cross-hairs. This year alone, 700 city workers have been laid off. And

Kilpatrick wants thousands more. He also wants 10% pay cuts from workers and

concessions on benefits.

How is this different than what Bush does? Bush says there's no money for

vital social programs because he wants corporate tax breaks for the rich and

needs hundreds of billions of dollars for wars to defend the US world business

empire. Kilpatrick says there's no money for public services but ignores that

hundreds of millions of local city tax dollars a year are handed over to the

banks who grow rich financing Detroit's debt. He doesn't call attention to the

countless billions made by the Big 3 auto companies off the sweat of Detroit

area workers. He forgets to mention the corporate tax breaks for GM's Poletown

plant, the $70 million tax breaks to Compuware, or the city funds that will help

pay for pizza-baron Mike Ilitch's baseball stadium. And while Bush touts

privatization of everything from the military to social security, Kilpatrick has

been privatizing city services with a vengeance. Kilpatrick complains about

Bush's program starving the cities. But he carries out the same class program of

the rich against the poor.

With total control of Detroit city government, local Democrats are

nonetheless sticking it to the masses. If the liberal Democrats of Detroit are

taking up the neo-liberal economics of Bush, this only shows that any promotion

of the Democrats is against the workers' interests.

But the Detroit political establishment is not just the mayor and his

bureaucrats. It also includes the City Council. Four of the eight Detroit City

Council members promote themselves as opponents of Kilpatrick and his budget

plans. And they are widely promoted by certain members of the Detroit MWM

committee who call these politicians the "Fab Four". While not all members go

that far, the dominant position is to refrain from public criticism of these

politicians, who are presented as defenders of the city workers and Detroit

residents. So let's look at where the Fab Four actually stand of the budget

crisis.

*Sharon McPhail: She told the conservative and racist Detroit News that she

could cut 6,000 city worker jobs in one year if she was elected mayor. That's

even more than Kilpatrick has been calling for!! Indeed, it's a third of the

city workforce.

*JoAnn Watson: She has called for a "10% salary cut among all City of

Detroit employees" in a January posting on her web site. She also calls for a

hiring freeze, which would eliminate jobs through attrition.

*Barbara Rose-Collins: She supports wage cuts for city workers in an

article that appeared in the local paper Metro Times (p.12, March 9-15 issue).

She also recently missed a vote where she could have helped defeat a raise in

water rates charged by the city because she was partying in Las Vegas.

*Maryann Mahaffey: She hasn't said much of anything except that Kilpatrick

has kept the City Council in the dark about the real budget numbers. But when

Detroit's auditor general recently made a presentation to City Council with a

budget analysis that demanded massive concessions from the workers and chided

Kilpatrick for not slashing the budget enough, even the pro-Fab Four paper, the

Michigan Citizen (May1-7) reports that Mahaffey praised the auditor general's

presentation as "a real analysis". From the paper's coverage of the response of

JoAnn Watson and other Council members, it's clear that none of the Fab Four

raised any serious objections.

Sugarcoating concessions as "equality of sacrifice"

To add some sugarcoating to their stand, the Fab Four talk about "equality

of sacrifice." This is a time-worn policy used by businesses, capitalist

politicians and union bureaucrats to get the workers to swallow concessions. For

instance, some of the Fab Four say if workers take concessions, the banks should

also accept a minor reduction in the interest payments they receive for

financing the city debt. And, like Kilpatrick himself, they call for high city

officials also taking a 10% salary cut. But it's a fraud to equate a minor

imposition on the banks, who will continue to make hundreds of millions of

dollars a year, and officials who will continue to live high on the hog, with

the sacrifices of the workers who barely get by and have been sacrificing year

after year via layoffs and wages freezes. "Equality of sacrifice" means nothing

more than making the workers bear the brunt of the budget crisis.

The MWM-Detroit too has called for the banks to make concessions. But it

has not exposed the effort to impose concessions in the name of "equality of

sacrifice."

Cheerleading for pro-concessions politicians

While overall the MWM-Detroit has failed to publicly condemn any of the

pro-concessions stands of Kilpatrick's opponents on City Council, some members

have been outright cheerleaders for these liberals. Among the most enthusiastic

supporters of the Fab Four are supporters of the Workers World Party, a

pseudo-socialist group that comes out of the Trotskyist tradition. One of the

Detroit MWM leaders, Cheryl LaBash, writing in the Workers World newspaper, has

written several recent articles hailing JoAnn Watson and other allegedly

"progressive" City Council members. LaBash specifically praised Councilwoman

Watson's call "for the banks and bondholders to accept the same 10% reduction

that's proposed for city workers." (published 3/30/05 on WWP web site) Thus, she

hails Watson's stand for worker concessions under the phony banner of "equality

of sacri-fice." Inside the MWM, LaBash has time and again opposed criticism of

the Fab Four or the union bureaucrats.

Another MWM member and longtime WWP backer said that national MWM leader

Clarence Thomas wanted Watson to speak before the national MWM conference. When

this was opposed by a CVO supporter, who said it was outrageous to ask a

supporter of wage concessions to speak at the MWM conference, LaBash and others

led the MWM-Detroit meeting to pass a resolution permitting Watson to be a

speaker at the conference. Meanwhile, the March 24 issue of the Detroit News

carried a letter to the editor from LaBash defending Councilwoman Sharon McPhail

from charges of being an anti-white racist, while failing to say a word about

McPhail favoring massive job cuts for city workers.



Such stands aren't restricted simply to the WWP. Another local MWM member

constantly hails the Fab Four both in articles to local newspapers (where he

sometimes writes under the pen name "John Henry") and on local MWM e-mail lists.

In the April 24-30 edition (p.6) of the Michigan Citizen newspaper, John Henry

gushes that "the Fab Four represents the most progressive political alliance in

recent memory."



Such support for the liberal politicians, and accommodation of this by others,

has meant that the MWM-Detroit has no public stand against the treachery of the

City Council opposition. True, in one flyer there is mention that some unnamed

elected political leaders have to be replaced. But who and why no one is

supposed to know.

Stand of the local union bureaucrats and MWM-Detroit's response

Likewise, there's a phrase in the MWM flyer on the budget crisis saying

most union leaders aren't helping the workers. But again, which ones? Does that

include the leaders of the city unions? Indeed, the only reason any phrase got

in critical of the politicians and union leaders was as a sop to the few MWMers

who fought for exposing city council and the union leaders.

Yet, the truth is the vast majority of the city workers union leaders are

not preparing the workers for a serious struggle against concessions. Nearly all

of them avoided demonstrations on April 12 and16 held by a coalition opposing

budget cuts. The union bureaucrats aren't focused on how to mo-bilize the

workers, but on the empty promises of the City Council liberals. For example, on

February 21 hundreds of angry city bus drivers went to a City Council hearing to

denounce Kilpatrick's budget cuts. Henry Gaffney, president of the bus drivers

ATWU local, took the floor. Did he use the opportunity to call for mass actions?

Did he attack the pro-concessions stand of the Fab Four? No. He had a friendly

exchange with Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, allowing her to posture as a friend of

the workers. He even blamed the budget cutbacks in part on discounts for

handicapped riders! The most "militant" thing Gaffney did was promise to punish

Council members who supported budget cuts at the polls in November. Of course by

then, in the absence of struggle, the workers will have already been ravaged by

the cutbacks.

Meanwhile, there's strong evidence that the union leaders are taking up the

"equality of sacrifice" baloney. The latest example is a quote from Leamon

Wilson, president of AFSCME Local 312 in the May 8-14 Michigan Citizen (p.A3).

Wilson states "before we can give up concessions, the mayor has to give up the

books." So Wilson says concessions are OK if only the mayor provides budget

figures that show they are needed.

The problems with the MWM-Detroit's stand on the labor bureaucrats echo the

problems that exist in the national MWM leadership. The national MWM leaders

somewhat differentiated themselves from the mainstream union officials with

biting comments against the two big capitalist parties and criticism of AFL-CIO

president John Sweeney. But at the same time, the MWM leaders lavished praise on

any union leader who gave mere verbal support to the October 17 rally in

Washington, DC., ignoring that these same union leaders were ardently

supporting pro-war and pro-business Democratic candidate John Kerry. Thus, for

instance, they promoted the SEIU president Andy Stern, though Stern was turning

the SEIU into a cam-paign machine for Kerry. They were not oriented toward

rallying the rank-and-file workers in these unions, but toward the rotten

national leaderships of the SEIU, AFSCME, the APWU, etc. They created the

illusion that a powerful new workers movement would arise through an alliance

with these timid union officials. Support for pro-Democratic union leaders was

bound to undermine a consistent stand against the Democrats. And the MWM-Detroit's

alliance with the liberals proves this.

The National Conference of Cities

A new debacle brewing from the stand of alliance with the liberal

politicians is support for the National Conference of Cities (NCOC). The NCOC is

an alliance of groups with some liberal politicians from the Detroit City

Council calling for more federal funds for the cities. According to the NCOC's

Detroit Call, donations to the NCOC go to the offices of City Council president

Maryann Mahaffey. So in addition to Mahaffey being an NCOC endorser, she appears

to be the leader of this effort. Moreover, the NCOC emphasizes the liberal

leadership in its literature. Its call for endorsements says "Add your name to

those of Detroit City Council president Maryann Mahaffey, City Council member

JoAnn Watson, and many other local and national leaders to build this effort."

The NCOC Call says Bush should stop feeding the war machine and fund the

cities. That sounds like a good idea. Who could object to opposing the Pentagon

and more funds for social programs? And wouldn't it be great if struggles

against concessions were linked to struggles against war? But the Call doesn't

declare "no concessions" or talk about struggles against concessions and

cutbacks like that faced by Detroit city workers and residents. So the Call

doesn't help struggle. But it might help politicians present meekly lobbying the

Bush administration for a few crumbs, and voting for Democrats who promise to

beg for the crumbs on our behalf, as the path for relief.

Thus, the picture painted by the call of the NCOC is that the whole problem

would be solved if only we could get rid of Bush. It says nothing about the big

city Democratic mayors who also represent the rich and starve the masses. It's

not enough to talk about funds for the cities, when the funds that do go to the

cities are in the hands of crooks like Mayor Kilpatrick who will use the funds

for privatization, corporate welfare and high-living for city officials. Indeed,

it's hard to see how Kilpatrick himself could object to a call that blames

everything merely on Bush.

As well, the NCOC Call only denounces the war machine on the grounds of its

cost. It doesn't argue that the occupation of Iraq was in itself unjust, or

denounce the US world empire for its brutality and exploitation of our class

sisters and brothers around the world. It only says that the war machine drains

resources from the cities.

No doubt many people, when they come to question the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan, say that it's not worth the sacrifice in money and lives. But

underneath this, they also have, or are beginning to have, an objection to the

purpose of the war. If the anti-war movement is to have any vitality, it has to

be based on opposing wars for oil and empire, and not only on worrying that war

is a strain on the budget. It has to help people move from upset over the

hardships of war to also opposing the goals of the Pentagon's wars. After all,

if there were billion dollar bailouts for the cities, would this make the wars

any more acceptable?

Indeed, confining things to the financial cost of the war makes it easier for

the Call to avoid any mention of the pro-imperialist policies of the Democratic

Party and the pro-war votes of the Congressional Democrats. After all, these

politicians, while voting to strengthen the war machine, claim to also want more

money for the cities. Thus, the narrow outlook of the Call would hamstring, not

build, the anti-war struggle. It ends up blurring the difference between that

anti-war activists and the pro-imperialist Democratic politicians.

Clearly, the NCOC isn't designed to rattle the capitalist establishment. Instead

it proposes to unite activists with the liberal wing of the establishment.

The NCOC claims it will build a national movement. And if the local

workers' struggles could merge into a powerful national movement that would be

great. But how is a strong national workers' movement going to arise? In

alliance with the Democratic budget-cutters and liberal advocates of worker

concessions? No way. It can only develop by encouraging an actual struggle of

the workers and poor against every attempt to impose concessions and cutbacks.

A militant struggle by, for example, Detroit city workers would encourage

workers elsewhere to stand up and fight. A conference to unite activists with

politicians who are demanding concessions to the workers will be an obstacle to

a national workers' movement.

Unfortunately, various MWM members are jumping into this alliance. National MWM

Co-chair Clarence Thomas endorses the NCOC. Detroit MWM member David Sole,

president of UAW Local 2234, signed his name to the solicitation for

endorsements of the NCOC that hypes the liberal Detroit City Council

politicians. And the MWM-Detroit recently voted to endorse the NCOC, too.

Building the independent workers movement

Thus, the MWM faces a serious issue of where it is going. This is the main

problem facing this conference, and it will determine the role of the MWM in the

future. Our group, the Communist Voice Organization, believes that the only path

forward is building an independent workers' movement. If this is really to be a

workers' movement, it must be independent of the bourgeois politicians and the

stifling AFL-CIO bureaucracy; it must have the guts to tell the workers the

truth about the politicians and the labor bureaucrats from the start. The MWM

demo of last October seemed a start in this direction, but since then the MWM

seems to have been backsliding.

In our work with the MWM-Detroit, we have encouraged MWM members to work among

the rank and file rather than rely on the union bureaucrats. We have

consistently called for discussion in the MWM-Detroit of what orientation will

advance the workers' struggles. We have attended demonstration promoted by the

MWM-Detroit and informed workers, in our own agitation on the Detroit city

workers' struggle about the MWM-Detroit. And we have carried out our own

agitation at workplaces, demonstrations and elsewhere on the city crisis, the

Iraq war, and other issues.

We believe that workers and activists of different beliefs and trends can

unite in various struggles and broader types of organization. But nothing

durable can be built on verbal allegiance to class independence while in

practice something else is going on. Unity will arise among activists who are

taking up the tasks necessary to revive the workers' movement. What follows are

some of the crucial tasks.

Go to the workers and poor directly. Many activists think that alliances

with the union officialdom and getting them to endorse their cause is the key to

organizing the workers. Not so. There is a gulf between the policy of the union

officials and the interests of the rank and file. The union bureaucrats are

verbally in favor of some worthwhile reforms, but they aren't interested in a

militant workers' movement fighting for them. Look, for example, at how Andy

Stern and the SEIU leadership "supported" the October 17 MWM march in words, but

had the rank and file campaigning for Kerry in deeds. And there's also the issue

that there is not even weak organization among the vast majority of workers and

poor.

Thus activists must reach workers by going directly to the plant gates, by

developing contacts inside the workplaces, by distributing literature in the

working-class communities, etc. At union-called meetings or pickets, appeal to

the rank and file. The key thing isn't contact with the union officials. It's

contact with the workers and developing ties with those interested in a real

struggle.

Expose the Democrats and the AFL-CIO officialdom. Efforts to reach the

workers and poor must call attention to the sabotage of the workers' movement by

the Democrats and the union officials. The Democrats and the AFL-CIO officialdom

don't want a militant workers movement. The union officials, when they do not

simply accept concessions, sap the fighting capacity of the rank and file. Just

look at how they sabotaged the 1995 Detroit newspaper workers strike by obeying

court orders to dismantle militant mass pickets that were putting the heat on

newspaper management. There's no sense talking about class independence or a

militant workers movement without exposing the forces that are undermining this.

Various activists raise the issue of a workers' political party. No doubt

the workers need their own political stand and party. But faith in the Democrats

or those with similar politics is harmful. The workers need their own party, but

it must be a party that places militant class action in the fore. Some MWMers

support the Labor Party. But the Labor Party, for all its talk of independence

from the Democrats, still says "it would be naive to expect that labor and its

allies can afford to completely abandon its relationship with the Democratic

Party." (See Labor Party web site article "After the Elections: What Next?" by

Labor Party National Organizer Mark Dudzic). And the Labor Party relies on a

section of the bankrupt union bureaucracy.

Encourage independent forms of organization. In order for the militant

sentiments of workers to have force, they need organization which can provide an

alternative to their present official forms. They need rank and file networks of

various kinds in the workplaces, within the unions and in the workers'

communities. There is no simple formula for this. What's important is to find

forms that provide active participation by the workers and tap into their desire

for class action. For example, in some circumstances, it may be possible to set

up networks of workers that carry on activity inside a workplace. Or there

may be cases where ways can be found to link up workers who reject the

sellout policies of the union leaders during a strike or other struggle.

Independent organization in no way means being "anti-union". Actually it is

organization independent of today's suffocating labor bureaucracies that allows

the workers struggle to develop. And this lays the basis for real fighting

unions in the future.

Rely on mass action. The workers' cause has never really advanced without

relying on militant mass action. Protests, strikes and rebellions that defy the

capitalist establishment are what will change the status quo. But the AFL-CIO

leadership uses the union apparatus as a campaign headquarters for two-faced

politicians. And it's no better when MWM leaders promote liberal politicians.

Activists should lend their support to mass actions of the workers. They should

encourage the workers to resist efforts of union officials or liberal community

or movement leaders to tone down their ac-tions to what's acceptable to the

powers-that-be.

The task of organizing the workers independently is not likely to

immediately result in sweeping victories. Under present conditions of lull in

the class struggle, independent worker organization will be relatively small.

But protracted work in this direction can push forward the sporadic struggles

that break out today. And work to build class independence is the only thing

that can lay the groundwork for the major class battles of the future.[]