Vol. 73/No. 1      January 12, 2009

The book, published by Pathfinder Press, tells the story of the 1934 strikes in Minneapolis through which workers organized into the Teamsters union and helped pave the way for the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a fighting social movement.

The meeting drew a variety of people interested in learning about the lessons of working-class struggles contained in the book. Among the 20 who participated were a group from the Somali Peace and Development Organization. They had been involved in a fight for the freedom of two leaders of their group arrested on false charges of “aiding terrorism” and eventually released after four months of protests. Two of them are reading the book with great interest.

The meeting was chaired by Catharina Tirsén, editor of the Swedish-language translation of Teamster Rebellion. She stressed the timeliness of the new book as a tool for workers in the coming struggles at a time of deepening worldwide recession.

Tony Hunt, from the Communist League leadership in the United Kingdom, described the impact Teamster Rebellion had on him as a young worker involved in a strike in London. “A communist worker gave me a copy, which helped me understand a lot of what was happening in the fight I was involved in,” Hunt said, adding that others will have the same experience when they read the book.

Daniel Nordström, from the Young Socialists and the Communist League in Sweden, pointed to how the Teamsters battles in the 1930s forged a fighting union movement.

Tirsén noted the example of Carl Skoglund, one of the leaders of the Communist League in the United States—forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party—who helped lead these struggles. Skoglund, originally from Bengtsfors, Sweden, was an immigrant without legal papers who faced the threat of deportation by U.S. authorities.

Debbie Delange, a volunteer in the Printing Project in Manchester, England, told about the efforts of dozens of volunteers to produce the book in time for the European Social Forum, held in Malmö, Sweden, in September. Communist workers and Young Socialists from Sweden, Britain, Belgium, and the United States who participated in that event drew upon lessons from the book in discussions at the forum and explained a communist perspective.

A week later the book became a center of political discussions at the Pathfinder stand at the international book fair in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Also speaking on the December 6 panel was Paul Mailhot, from the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. He gave the audience a picture of the suddenness and severity of the economic downturn in the United States.

Mailhot stressed that having Teamster Rebellion in four languages now—English, Farsi, Spanish, and Swedish—means workers speaking different languages who find themselves in struggles of their own can study and absorb the class-struggle lessons of the Teamster battles and gain an understanding of the type of revolutionary leadership that was decisive in that fight.

Teamster Rebellion is the first of a four-volume series on the Teamster battles by Farrell Dobbs. The titles are available from Pathfinder Press.  
 
 
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