Vol. 1, No. 2. September, 1969
Newspaper of the American Communist Workers Movement, Marxist-Leninist
PO 5221, Cleve. O. 631-5784
The proletariat is the greatest class in the history of mankind. It is the most powerful revolutionary class ideologically, politically and in strength. It can and must unite the overwhelming majority of people around itself so as to isolate the handful of enemies to the maximum and attack them.
WATER WORKERS WIN FIGHT FOR UNION SURVIVAL
Editorials
WORKING CONDITIONS OF THE WORKING CLASS
Communists Fired from Republic
[Cartoon.]
On Friday, August 29, the Cleveland water department workers and other city workers of Local 100 (AFSCME) won their two week long strike against the water department and the Cleveland city government. This struggle flared up over one central problem, Local 100's fight for survival in the face of repeated attempts by the city government to bust it up. Local 100 is a part of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, a new union of governmental employees which has been involved in several militant struggles recently, for instance, the Memphis sanitation workers strike.
The issue the workers went out over was the firing of Clarence King, a militant chief steward, by the water department administration. Clarence King has always stood up for the rights of the men. As one water worker said to a Workers' Advocate reporter, "We used to have a different kind of steward. If you came to him with a grievance, he would listen to it and that would be it. King is different. Any grievance you have he'll say 'Well let's go right into the office and settle this,' and he always backs you up!" Not only does King back up the men who are already in the union, he also personally organized many of the people into Local 100, bringing it up to its present strength. He is a tough, courageous working-class fighter.
The city fired King because it is trying to cut the costs of operation. This means making fewer men do more work, cutting into wages and buying inferior equipment. Also, it is well known among many city workers that the city government is corrupt. One worker told us how a heavy air compressor was bought for them to use instead of a lighter one (which would do the job just as well) because somebody who had a heavy air compressor on his hands happened to know somebody in the right place in city government. The heavy air compressor is harder for the men to use. To cut costs means to be able to push the men around and force them to accept whatever bureaucratic rules and regulations the city administration hands down.
The strike was ended by an agreement that King would accept 30 days suspension (beginning before the strike) which was a victory because the city at first wanted to fire King and later tried to suspend him for 90 days and transfer him to another station in the city. The courageous workers of Local 100, and their militant chief steward Clarence King will never accept this kind of bullying from the city government. Their dedication and militance throughout the two weeks of this strike proved that they will only fight harder when the city administration tries to oppress them more. Their example should be followed by workers everywhere in Cleveland and across America.
Learning Through Struggle
Through their struggles against city government, the workers of Local 100 have learned several important lessons that other workers should take note of.
1. They have seen that in unity there is strength. The working people are many and the oppressors are few. When we keep our minds on the main problem and our common goal, we build unity in our ranks that our oppressor can never break.
2. Black workers, who made up the main body of militant pickets, will definitely lead powerful struggles that will benefit all workers regardless of color.
3. It doesn't matter who is elected into this government. Stokes or Locher, liberal or conservative, black or white, they all serve the interests of the big corporation owners, not the people.
4. Workers' organizations must be built on the principle of democratic centralism. That is, every decision must be made on the basis of completely democratic discussion so that it comes from a correct summation of all the peoples' experiences in struggle. Once a decision is made, however, everyone must help put it into practice. This builds a strong, democratic organization which can best serve the needs of the working people in struggle.
5. Most important of all, the working and oppressed people must have independent organizations to defend themselves from the big corporation owners and their flunkies in the government. If we have no organizations, or if our organizations are weak or controlled by corrupt leaders, we can never fight back and defend our rights. If the city had won in its attempt to fire King, it would have set a pattern for dealing with other city workers, many of whom are unorganized.
Many 'Right To Organize' Struggles
The water workers' strike was the latest of several local workers' struggles aimed at winning the right to organize and maintain militant workers' defense organizations. In fact, the lesson of the water workers' strike has been learned repeatedly by American workers in over a hundred years of struggle -- that without militant defense organizations, the workers won't have a chance.
Taking this lesson to heart, workers in several industries in Cleveland have run strikes over the right to organize and maintain militant organization. On Feb. 7-8 of this year 3,850 workers of Local 122, United Auto Workers went on strike over the firing of a union steward at Twinsburg Stamping Plant of Chrysler Corp. On Feb. 21 of this year 250 workers of UAW Local U5l walked out of Baker Electric Co. over a racial dispute that ended in the suspension of two union stewards. At Addressograph-Multigraph Corp. one worker was suspended for violating a company rule and. 55 were suspended for staging a sit-down strike on his behalf. A total of 2,100 workers went out on a wildcat strike as a result. Even middle-class, white-collar workers are joining the struggle. On March 31, 1969, nurses at St. Vincent Charity Hospital went on strike for union recognition.
The big corporation owners and their flunkies in the government want to take away the workers' right to militant, independent organization. First, because unorganized workers are easier to push around and force into accepting low wages and bad working conditions. Second, when workers have independent organizations they become a potential independent political force. This is what the big business owners fear most because their economic power, their ability to exploit and oppress the laboring people, depends upon their control of political power (the government, the courts and the police). When the working and oppressed people organize to smash the corrupt government controlled by the corporation owners and replace it with a democratic government run by the people, they will also take control of the giant industries and run them democratically. Then the big corporation owners will no longer be able to exploit and oppress the laboring people of America, and this country will be run to serve the interests of the vast majority, not a tiny minority.
ACWM Supports These Struggles
The American Communist Workers Movement joined the strike of the workers of Local 100, We saw that, as always, the workers were right and the employer was wrong. We call on every worker to do what he can to aid the struggles of other working people. We do this because we see that the main problem for the working class, the middle class (white collar and small business) people and the racial and national minorities in America is exploitation and oppression by the owners of the big business empire in American, By organizing to win such battles, like the courageous workers of Local 100, we can build a movement to put an end to the power of the corporation owners forever!
HAIL THE VICTORY OF THE COURAGEOUS WORKERS OF LOCAL 100!
FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE!
WORKING AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF AMERICA, UNITE!
[Cartoon.]
In the articles in this issue you will see the oppression and daily struggles of the working people against their main enemy - the handful of monopoly capitalist parasites who own the huge corporations and use their wealth control the U.S. government and to rob and dominate the people.
The American Communist Worker' Movement stands for putting an end to this form of oppression by overthrowing the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and its flunkey government and placing state power and the means of production in the hands of the working class and its allies, the racial and national minorities, progressive sections of the middle class and the small farmers, so that they can be run to serve the people.
We see the only way of achieving this is through mass democratic struggles by the people everywhere directed against the monopoly capitalist class and led by the working class. By mass democratic struggles we mean people coming together for mass action to solve their problems,relying on their own initiative, not on a few elitists behind closed doors. We mean people democratically bringing up their own true experiences, not abstract "expert" ideas, summing up those experiences and coming to a common understanding on what to do.
The American Communist Workers Movement lives and works among the working people. Our job is to join and lead mass democratic struggles by helping to sum up experience, drawing conclusions from it and calling on the people to take action on these conclusions. We will always take a position or a line on the problems and struggles of the people and argue for that line. If the peoples' experience, especially the experience of the working class, shows our line to be correct, together we will act on it. If our line can be proven wrong, we will change it. This is our method of work.
Finally, in the course of these struggles we must build the new American Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist, the party of the proletariat. This party will be composed mainly of industrial workers and will be the highest instrument for summing up the experiences of the people and organising for action to overthrow the monopoly capitalists. In the words of the great leader Chairman Mao Tse-tung: "If there is to be revolution there must be a revolutionary party." The American Communist Workers Movement is striving to lay the foundations for this party.
In our first issue The Workers' Advocate made some mistakes which since then have been criticized by advanced workers and members of the American Communist Workers Movement and the American Revolutionary Youth and are now being corrected.
First of all, the paper came out as the paper of the ARY although it was clearly a Communist paper. American Revolutionary Youth members are youth who are pro-Communist but are just beginning to serve the working people in practice and to apply Mao Tse-tung's thought to the problems of the working people. Thus they are not yet members of the American Communist Workers Movement but are under its direct leadership and discipline. Putting out the paper in ARY's name made it seem that ARY was in the leadership of the working class movement The leadership of the working class movement can only come from communist revolutionaries and eventually from a new American Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist, to replace the old "Communist" Party which has ceased to live among, organize and lead the working class. In order to correct this mistake and show the clear leadership of communist revolutionaries, The Workers' Advocate will now be produced by the American Communist Workers Movement, Marxist-Leninist, although ARY members and anyone who isn't anticommunist can help write, produce, and sell it.
Secondly, the purpose of the paper wasn't made clear in the first issue, nor were the guidelines that it is to follow. The purpose of The Workers' Advocate is to:
1) report on the struggles of working and all oppressed peoples
2) rally the most advanced, militant workers around the American Communist Workers Movement and together strengthen the people, led by the workers, and raise the struggles to higher levels
3) spread understanding of revolution and communism based on the real experiences of the people not the ideas of some expert.
The guidelines The Workers' Advocate will follow are:
1) to make a lively, accurate report on struggles and issues at all levels
2) to strive to carry out the line of relying on the masses of people in everything. According to Chairman Mao Tse-tung, this means: "take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action."
We hope more workers will come forward to write articles, draw cartoons, sell and distribute the paper. We especially encourage reports on struggles and working conditions in the plants and on conditions in the neighborhoods and schools. With your help the struggles of the working people will advance to a new level and the bosses will be terrified!
(By a former worker at Westinghouse's Cleveland plant)
My name is not important. But what happened personally to me and happened by Big Business is. They're so powerful that if the small people don't start standing up in united groups there will no longer be freedom as we know freedom.
Westinghouse being one of the largest companies in the world, one would think fairness would be an every day thing. But please take my word for it, they're not very fair at all.
I had been working there for some time. I had had a steady job in my classification, then one day for no reason, this pathetic foreman put me on a job out of my classification. I immediately contacted the head union steward for advice. He told me in numerous ways to work or quit. So I let it go. The machine I was working on was out of date when the depression of the early 30's came. It should have been replaced many, many years ago.
I told the foreman that the machine was dangerous and he almost went into convulsions. So stupid me let it go again. About a week later I was working on the same machine and received the burns which I now bear, ugly scars on the first two fingers of my hand.
When I first received the burns I went to what is supposedly called the Nurse who in actuality is nothing more than a police guard. And not a very bright one at that. The guard who attended me told me the burns were not bad, and that I would not need medical attention from a doctor. He dressed it and said it would be okay, but as you may guessed it was not all right. In about three days my hand was swelled to twice the normal size and hurtin to an extent which made me want to cry. But being strong natured I went back to the guard who then sent me to see a doctor, who almost blew his stack when he saw it. He asked me why I wasn't in earlier and I of course explained. He said that if I had been in a couple of days earlier he could have put a skin graft on and that my fingers would not be scarred.
So the doctor told me to take off a couple of days to let the hands try and heal, so I did. I had expected to receive my pay for being off the couple of days that I was, but good Westinghouse said oh no, you must be off 7 days then we'11 pay you fifty dollars a week, which will take a- bout a month to receive the first check.
So I then started looking for new employment which I have found, This is not all that has happened to me at this place but at least you know about this part.
(More about present conditions at Westinghouse next issue.)
[Cartoon.]
In our talks with people many times we hear the statement that: the capitalist takes a risk when he invests his money; therefore he is entitled to his profits.
The capitalist invests money for which he gets profit. What do workers contribute, their sweat? A look at the recent past will show what we workers put in to production:
-- 75 miners killed in cave-in in W. Virginia.
-- 2 workers recently killed in Republic Steel,
-- 3 workers killed putting up a WIXY radio tower on the 4th of July.
-- 1 worker killed in Youngstown.
-- 1 worker killed in Napoleon, Ohio.
This is just a small sample. Every 8 minutes a fatal industrial accident takes place in the U.S. But not all are fatal, many are maimed and crippled.
The capitalist risks his money. The workers risk their lives and limbs. Who do you think runs the greatest risks?
THE WORKERS' ADVOCATE WELCOMES REPORTS BY WORKERS ON CONDITIONS AND STRUGGLES ON THE JOB.
Poem -- By An Unknown Proletarian
We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed.
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers' dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!
There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you.
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth
Good God! We have paid it in.
We have fed you all for a thousand years --
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth
Good God! We have bought it fair.
The Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist), Toronto branch, successfully completed a revolutionary discussion on THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE on Friday, July 25th 1969. The meeting was attended by about fifty communist workers, students and their supporters. Comrade Robert A. Cruise and Comrade Richard McClachi, two members of the Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist), addressed the meeting. The Workers' Advocate believes that Comrade McClachi's remarks have great meaning in the US at present.
Comrade Cruise introduced Comrade McClachi as "a real historian of the real labor history, a communist worker, a worker who has fought all his life for the working class and has faithfully served its interests. For the last twenty years, this comrade of ours has had a rich experience of fighting labor aristocrats, company goons and other mortal enemies of the working class. His speech tonight is not based on self-cultivation by reading books, but on the actual experience at the picket lines."
Comrade McClachi remarked:
Tonight's topic is an extremely important one. The workers' right to organize is their safeguard from merciless exploitation and a guarantee that the workers will fight US monopoly capital and the comprador Canadian bourgeoisie until their total collapse.
The history of the working class of North America, as the history of the working class all over the world, is a history of bloody struggles against their exploiters and oppressors. Not only had the worker to fight imperialists and their lackeys but also the numerous favor-takers who have reared their ugly heads over the decades and still hold power within the unions today.
Our external enemy is plainly visible: it is the imperialists, the bourgeois lackeys who own the means of production and transportation. The internal enemy is a little harder to detect. Over the years he has worn many masks and appears in many different corners. We dare to speak irreverently of some of the big daddys of the labor movement! We dare to challenge the past!
As early as 1895, the American Federation of Labor had hatched a plot against the working class. Through Sam Gompers and Matthew Wall, and Andrew Zilk, they neatly carved up little pieces of proletarian flesh and tucked them away in nice little tidy jurisdictions and sat there to preside over this betrayal. As early as 1895 also, the worker by his constitution was prohibited from participating in party politics. Negroes and other "undesirables" were denied union membership. Consequently, the masses of workers were subordinated to the skilled crafts, and few were organized. Sam Gompers and Matthew Wall used to take great delight in slandering the working class. They believed that strikes were unholy things. They held the mass industrial worker inn complete contempt. They said in effect that the workers had no right to organize themselves. The workers had no right to improve their standard of living. The workers had no right to look for any other future than the one they were condemned to.
As a result of these policies, craft autonomy was established. In the place of class consciousness we had craft consciousness. And out of all this came one of the worst enemies of the worker, union scabs. When a strike is declared, a particular draft strike, members of other crafts are told piously by their leaders that they must cross the picket line and go to work. If they do not go, they are fired. The union will not take up their cause.
Let us view the union scabs in a proper perspective, A classic example of a conversation on a picket line involving picketers fighting union scabs is contained in the anthology of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World):
Hello John, Hello Jim, Howdy Jack. You see this is a carriage factory and it's only the Association of Brimstone and Emery Polishers that are striking. The Brotherhood of Oil-rag Wipers, the Fraternal Society of White lead Daubers, the undivided sons of varnish spreaders, the benevolent compilation of work gluers, the iron-benders sick and death benefit union, the Oakdale lodge of coal shovers, the Martha Washington lodge of hash wielders, the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Oilers, the Engineers protective lodge, the stationary firemen, the portable firemen, the F.O.Q.L., and the A.S.S.E.S., these societies have nothing to do with the Amalgamated Association of Brimstone.
This very clearly illustrates the division that was planted amongst the workers as a result of craft unionism.
Union scabbing was a legitimate offspring of organizing on a craft basis. Railway operating employees have a long history of union scabbing. In the cab of a diesel engine, you will find a brakeman, a fireman, and an engineer. It is conceivable that five unions could be represented in that same cab. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, the Order of Railway Conductors, the Switchmen's Union of America, the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen (Four of them are now united in the United Transportation Union. -- Ed.) If one goes on strike, the others will work, if possible. During the Clark cannery strike in Toronto six years ago, about 500 workers went on strike for union recognition and a first contract. Railway union men hauled in the goods, scabs produced finished goods, and Railwaymen hauled them out. Women lay down on the tracks to prevent these trains from running in and out. During the Royal York strike of about 1,200 employees, union engineers heated the hotel, union bands played in the ballroom, and some Express and Truck Driver unions refused to cross the picket line, but they conveniently parked on the other side of the street to let scabs cart the goods across the road and into the strike-bound hotel. This is the division in labor that is so detrimental to the cause of the working people. This deplorable state can be and will be eliminated only by mass-democratic anti-imperialist political organizing.
LET THE LABOR FAKERS STAND EIPOSED AND LET THEM REALIZE THAT THE DAY IS FAST APPROACHING WHEN THEY WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO TELL A WORKER TO CROSS ANOTHER WORKER'S PICKET LINE.
The treachery of the labor fakers has not been confined to the crafts alone. The industrial worker has been the victim of an equally rotten conspiracy over the years, which has served the interests of monopoly capital. Let us now examine the Big Daddy of them all, the bushy-haired and bushy-browed John L. Lewis. Here is a man who demanded that crafts surrender their jurisdiction, here is a man who called for organizing amongst the masses of workers who were unorganized. Here is a man whose rhetoric and deeds are legendary in the annals of North American labor struggles. Let us take a good look at him.
In 1935 at the AFL convention, he crossed the floor and proceeded to wump the hell out of Morris Hutchison, the craft master of the Carpenters and Joiners, supposedly in disgust with his do-nothing policies. He left the AFL with his miners and founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It was through the CIO that mass organizing took place. It is safe to say that every union whose name starts with the word "United" was founded, one way or another, by the CIO. The backbone of the CIO was the miners. For it was the miners' money, their dues and their early fights which made it possible for the CIO to get off the ground at all. John Lewis and Phil Murray, the first head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, recognized the value of communist zeal and determination and of the 200 organizers who first went into the field to organize the masses of the workers, sixty of these organizers were members of the Communist Party.
It was the communists who led the historic Flint strike, and the first agreement negotiated in the auto industry was signed by John Lewis and Windham Mortimer. Mortimer was a militant communist. Militant communists also played key roles in organizing the 'dock-wallopers', the Longshoremen, International Longshoremen's Association, the United Textile Workers. It was the communists in the mills of the South who organized and fought. In timber it was Harold Pritchard, a Canadian Communist, who went into the bush and the lumber camps and the mills and established the International Woodworkers of America. In rubber, transport, packing, canning, hard-rock mining, farm equipment, metal, glass, militant communists played key roles. This same John Lewis, onetime president of the United Mine Workers of America, and Phil Murray, the first president of the United Steelworkers of America, were the first and most ardent advocates of constitutions prohibiting communists from membership or from holding office within their unions.
Many of the very men who gave their lives and fought this fight that lasted for five years, found themselves excluded from the very unions they had founded. Men of the calibre of Mark Zaladny were excluded from membership. Zaladny who dared to speak in 1955, who dared to fight, who dared to challenge the trade union movement in Britain to adopt as its own the Communist Manifesto. Mark Zaladny departed from his homeland as an undesirable alien because of his proletarian struggles, was imprisoned in Canada, deported from Canada, to the United States. He died on a picket line with a police bullet through his head in Los Angeles, fighting for bread-workers.
All these gigantic struggles were waged against seemingly insurmountable odds. These were the days of the in-plant armed company thugs. If you dared to mention the "union" in a plant, you were isolated and had the hell beaten out of you with rubber hoses. People died of these beatings.
This was the period when thousands of militiamen patrolled the pitheads, plant gates, shop, woods, but nothing stopped the days when there was no buffer between monopoly capital and the proletariat, nice buffer zones of labor laws, rules and regulations designed to serve the interests of the monopoly capital and to frustrate the workers. These were the days when the worker stood eyeball to eyeball with his enemy. The worker fought and he won.
In the coal-fields of the South West is a little town of Ludlow, Colorado. Erected in that town today is a monument, and enscrolled on that monument is the name of "John D. Rockefeller, murderer," a coal baron of the early twenties. When the miners organized, the first act on the part of Rockefeller was to shut off the heat in company houses. The miners would not give in and all of them were evicted. They set up a tent near where their homes once had been. In the middle v of the night hundreds of Pinkerton agents and goons came and set fire to the tents and shot down those who tried to escape the flames. A Wobbly organizer was dragged from his hotel room by five men in the middle of the night and hanged on a lonely railway trestle. A note was pinned to his clothes as a warning to others who might attempt to follow his example.
Bill Davis, Cape Breton Island, walking in a demonstration protesting the takeover by the militia of the power-houses and the mines in Cape Breton. Walking with his hands in his pockets beside his son. He died from a bullet in his head. Jim McLaughlin, a great proletarian fighter and a great communist who went about his task of organizing the miners in Cape Breton Island, who led the miners in their historic march when they were fed up with company stores and company houses. The miners looted the company stores and burnt them to the ground. There has not been one McLaughlin since.
Esteban, Saskatchewan, which so many of us remember, where the miners struck and paraded through town, and while passing the town hall they were opened fire upon by machine guns by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three died, dozens were wounded.
When 78,000 steel workers dared to strike against giants like the Bethlehem, the companies' arsenal included: 1,000 thousand revolvers, 450 rifles, 440 shotguns, 8 machineguns, 190 gas guns, 2700 grenades, 24 gas machine guns, and 30,000 rounds of ammunition. To take on 78,000 who dared to strike.
How were these battles won? They were won by mass action. In spite of all these odds, the CIO was born. It was born because masses of workers dared to fight. Monopoly found itself frustrated. It was defeated on the dip-heads of the mines, at the plant gates, in the mills and in the woods.
So the monopoly turned their sights toward the legislatures of North America and began, through politics and lobbies, to weave a web of laws which would form a buffer zone between monopoly capital and direct confrontation with the workers. The labor bureaucrats and the fakers of the day did not oppose these laws. They had got rid of the communists and other militants, and they were content to see these laws come into effect. It provided them with little offices. Every time a labor law was enacted, another office sprang up at the International Union headquarters.
With organizing relatively at a standstill, the labor bureaucrats and their hacks began to turn their eyes with envy at the other bureaucrats' little empires. They began to consider how nice, it would be if this or that particular group of workers, represented by one union, could be represented by one union of a different name. The communists who remained in the labor movement as rank and file members continued over the years to battle the policies of the bureaucrats who signed agreements the workers knew nothing about. What could the bureaucrats do about these communists? They got rid of them in many union, but there were two union they could not touch. These were the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. The only way the bureaucrats could devise to get rid of them was to expel the two unions from the House of Labor. When the United Electrical Workers were expelled, the labor bureaucrats set out to establish an opposite union. They picked up a name, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers and put "International" in front of it; thus another union was born. The task of the IUE was to raid the UE, to defeat it and take its membership away from it. Raiding is a process by which one union attempts to transplant another as a bargaining agent. Perhaps the best example of a raid is the Steelworkers campaign against the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter in Sudbury, Ontario. Raiding started there around 1949. They finally managed to gain the allegiance of the workers in 1958. During that time they waged four separate raids against Mine-Mill.
While all this raiding was going on, various laws continued to creep into the statute books. During this period also two infamous words were adopted by the labor fakers and the labor hacks. The words are "compromise" and "accomodation," We must compromise our position to get a settlement, we must accomodate one another, Who was compromised? It was the workers, Who was accommodated? The monopoly capital.
Two-thirds of the workers in this country are unorganised. This is so due to the antilabor attitude of the union bureaucrats. They carry with them the Labor Relation Acts and the union constitution. The union constitution which provides for the exclusion of the communists. The constitutions put it very nicely: communists, fascists, or members of other goon organizations. They go to a particular plant and tell a worker that he has the right to organize. They tell lies to the workers. It is an outright lie to say that the workers have the right to organize themselves into a union. The workers could organize themselves by consent, but if the company decides that they want to prevent the union from coming in the union will be prevented from coming in by law. There is a law on the statute books that says that a company has to sign a contract. The union bureaucrats also tell workers that if they lose their jobs the union will get them their jobs through legal procedures. The law says that you can join a union, that you cannot be fired from your job for joining a union, but this is also a lie. The fact of the matter is that once a company decides to reject the findings of the labor boards, it can completely ignore these findings; in this situation the only recourse a worker has is through civil courts. (While U.S. companies cannot entirely escape the National Labor Relations Board, workers are frequently fired for organizing and the NLRB is so cumbersome and bureaucratic that it drags out and cripples mass struggle, without which workers can't win anything. -- Ed.)
...the proletariat is the greatest revolutionary force the world has ever known, and it is the proletariat who forms the vanguard of the revolutionary struggles against U.S. imperialism and comprador Canadian bourgeoisie. It is the party of the proletariat, armed with Marmsm-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, which will overthrow the tiny minority of the comprador bourgeoisie in Canada and inaugurate the People's Republic of Canada.
VICTORY TO THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE IN CANADA!
VICTORY TO THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE IN QUEBEC!
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
[Four cartoons.]
[Photo: 150 STRIKING CITY WORKERS PICKET City Hall Aug. 28.]
Recently two members of the American Communist Workers Movement were fired from Republic Steel for trying to organize a progressive union movement to deal with the problems in the plant. They were fired shortly after they came out openly as communists and began distributing copies of The Workers' Advocate, which contained an article calling for action to solve the main problem at Republic -- low wages and weird hours caused by the swing shift.
The parasite owners of Republic Steel and their white shirt flunkies are clearly to blame for not allowing freedom of speech and political discussion in the plant. These are the same superpatriots who so loudly support democracy as long as it goes their way. They fired one com- rad for "being absent too often" (which was a lie) and the other for falsifying his application! (which was true, he didn't put down that he had been arrested for throwing rocks at a scab truck on a strike picket line).
The two communists criticized themselves for a careless mistake and for adventurism. One had put his own phone number in the newspaper article and the other had openly told everyone in his department (even before he got into the union) that he was a communist. They pledged to carry on the struggle against the monopoly corporations but to be more careful with security in the future and to rely more fully on the initiative of the workers themselves.
Inside Republic Steel we found many progressive workers. The vast majority of the workers there fully realize that the union is weak because it depends on a few "expert" lawyers and white shirts in the international office and on the "good will" of the company. Instead it should rely on mass struggle by the workers themselves, and on the workers experience in struggling against Republic on the shop level.
A few days after the firings the two communists and some members of American Revolutionary Youth returned to the plant and handed out copies of The Workers' Advocate. One of the communists went inside and talked to workers in his department and gave out papers until Bar Mill flunkie Wetzel saw him and the workers told him the company cops were coming. He split out Gate 9, was followed and threatened with arrest by Wetzel and a company cop and then dragged bodily out of the parking lot. After refusing to cooperate, he was released, not without flunkey Schrift threatening to punch him in the mouth.
All this came out at the workers discharge hearing. The local union leaders supported him as he showed that the company only began to investigate his record when they heard about the newspaper. It was clear that the company was deathly afraid of having a communist revolutionary in its plant taking a clear stand on the need for action to solve the main problems of the workers.' After the hearing, however, he decided not to pursue the grievance up to arbitration because the union was too weak, to win and it would cost the union $1200.
Reactions to The Workers' Advocate from Republic workers have generally confirmed our line on what the central problem is and that the workers have to get together in a mass democratic way to solve it. Safety, too has come up as a major problem as two workers have died in plant accidents in the last couple of months.
So two communists were fired but the problems remain at Republic Steel and more communists and more anti-monopoly workers will come up and will defeat the bosses and solve them. It will not be long before the workers take the union into their own hands, and begin dealing telling blows to the owners of Republic. But the last of these problems will not be solved until the working class leads the other classes in overthrowing the parasite class of monopoly capitalists and putting the government and the mass production industries in the hands of the people.
[Cartoon.]
[Graphic.]
Produced by donated labor.
Materials paid for by workers' wages.
Reports coming out of occupied Czechoslovakia indicate that the there is a great deal of worker. unrest directed against the Soviet invaders and their own nation's sold-out leadership. Workers in the coal mines, foundries and machine shops are refusing to pay union dues, and are repudiating their "Communist" Party membership cards. More and more workers are leaving the "Communist" factory cells and are not attending meetings. Industrial workers are refusing to toil for their exploiters, and are engaging in tacit slow-down strikes.
Says the New York "Times": "Premier Oldrich Cernik and other spokesmen of the regime have already warned that the drop in productivity has reached alarming proportions." "The Soviet-led invasion... (has) demonstrably sapped working morale, increased absenteeism,' loosened plant discipline and voided the prestige of the trade unions. Each one of Czechoslovakia's 60 or so unions carries the word "revolutionary" in its official title, but they are as revolutionary as the bureaucrats who run the economy."
The Soviet rulers share the alarm of the "Times", and have been sending Soviet soldiers disguised as "volunteer" helpers to farming co-operatives and to factories in Slovakia. Thus, the Soviet social-imperialists (i.e., socialists in words but imperialists in deeds) are trying to create puppets with the help of guns. This is exactly what Hitler did in the past in his aggression against Czechoslovakia and U.S. imperialism is doing today in its aggressions against Vietnam.
The revisionist Soviet ruling clique, while in fact trying to carve out its own "sphere of influence" in CzechoSlovakia, pretends that it is interfering there in order to defend "socialist gains." This claptrap emanates from the very gang of bandits that long ago betrayed the working and other oppressed people of the Soviet Union. But the brave people of Czechoslovakia are constantly pointing out that the actions of the Soviet invaders are fascist in nature, similar to those of the Nazi troops in the Sudetenland in 1938. Today the Czechoslovak people are resisting armed occupation by a foreign power just as heroically as they did those decades ago. As Premier Chou En-lai of the People's Republic of China stated: "The armed aggression by Soviet revisionism is the root cause of this calamity. This is likewise a very good lesson for the people of the Soviet Union, the other East European countries and the rest of the world."
Reprinted from PEKING REVEW