Vol. 73/No. 11      March 23, 2009

The meeting also presented Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters, in a newly expanded Spanish-language edition. Two other speakers took up themes in that book: Yankiet Echevarría, international relations secretary of Cuba’s Federation of University Students, and Róger Calero, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and SWP candidate for U.S. president in 2008. The event was chaired by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press. A news report on this meeting appeared in the March 9 Militant.

The translations are by the Militant.
 

As workers, we identify with the account that compañero Farrell Dobbs offers us in his books.

Who was Farrell Dobbs? This union and party leader is a worker who, while in his 20s, became one of the main leaders to emerge from the 1934 strikes. That year he joined the Communist League of America, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party.

He shouldered different responsibilities. In 1944, he and other compañeros of Local 574 and the SWP were jailed for a year in a federal prison for opposing the imperialist aims of the United States during World War II.

Teamster Rebellion shows us the harsh conditions suffered by workers, many of whom were of Scandinavian—Swedish or Norwegian—origin, in the early 1930s. Farrell himself was of Irish descent.

Over time Farrell became a citizen of the world, a proletarian internationalist who saw the present as part of history. He became one of the great mass organizers of the working class in the United States, as shown in the fact that 250,000 over-the-road truck drivers were organized, joining a worthy union.

One example of his qualities as an organizer and the confidence he had in the most humble men to lead the struggle, was Ray Rainbolt, a Sioux Indian, who was elected to command the [union] defense guard, which had 600 members.

Compañeros and compañeras who are here today:

We want to thank the editorial staff of the Militant for the information we receive regularly, which allows us to be informed about important events in North America and the rest of the world, based on a position of realism and the defense of the proletariat.

We are very grateful for the articles this weekly publishes regularly about the five Cuban heroes who remain unjustly incarcerated in U.S. prisons, contributing in this way to breaking the wall of silence surrounding that gross injustice. Such attitudes of solidarity in the very heart of the empire are examples to be emulated in order to counter the media disinformation by the great imperialist power.

We recently received an issue of the Militant with an article by Ben Joyce titled “The 1930s Teamsters Rebellion” with the following caption: “Members of Teamsters Local 574 during May 1934 strike in Minneapolis defend themselves against attack by cops and bosses’ hired thugs. ‘There was a war in Minneapolis … a conflict of poverty against wealth, of labor against capital.’”

Speaking about the great crisis of the 1930s, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz noted the following in one of his reflections:

“The character of the recession changed drastically when a series of bankruptcies in the Midwest and the South of the United States undermined confidence in the banks.”

Our own José Martí, referring to workers in the United States, wrote in 1886:

“Working people are standing up… . Things are not well when an upright and intelligent man who has worked all his life does not have bread, or a single saved peso, or the right to walk peacefully under the sun… .

“Things are not well when some live in leisure to the frustration of the miner, the docker, the train engineer.”

Those statements, by two of the most brilliant Cuban figures and patriots of all time, reflect their constant concern over the economic and social contradictions, the battles waged by the poorest in our neighbor to the north, as well as the ties of unity with the most deprived and needy sectors.

Having these books—in the midst of so many pages that are written to promote consumerism, banalities, and glitter—provides a magnificent and much-needed contrast and encouragement, today in the 21st century, to continue the struggle for the exploited of the world.

The powerful media in the wealthy world have no interest in how workers live. They are interested in them to the extent that they produce surplus value.

The lessons of these struggles offer a reference point in a genuine epic—the contradictions between the love of those who produce the wealth and the barons who are insatiable in their vengeance and thirst for blood.

One example, in this great book that we are discussing, is described on page 170, chapter 10, titled “Bloody Friday”:

Forty-seven men lay on cots, their bodies riddled with bullet wounds.

Sixty-seven people were wounded.

“You thought you would shoot Local 574 into oblivion. But you only succeeded in making 574 a battlecry.”

Rebelión Teamster is not a “manual” or a handbook, as Jack Barnes said. It is the record of a concrete experience in the class struggle.

We can add that it is enjoyable reading that reflects the contradictions of a system condemned to disappear.
 

I have two reasons for this acknowledgment:

First, because with this invitation Pathfinder distinguishes itself from those hegemonic forces—including, of course, the information monopolies—that have proclaimed the death of an organization that for more than 60 years has remained faithful to the working class, and that they seek to exclude and isolate at a time when it is rising with renewed strength in the international arena in defense of the class struggle, because its thinking and its call to action are considered a threat to the interests of this savage and voracious capitalism.

Secondly, for giving us the privilege of reading this first edition in Spanish of the Teamster books.

I confess that, personally, I arrived here having overcome—at least I think so—an internal debate over how I should comment on these books. I didn’t know whether there were certain rules or protocols, which I confess I’m not aware of. But in the end I decided to go by my instincts and a basic idea: to awaken an interest in reading a firsthand account that cannot be considered past history because its most striking feature is its ability to convey a well-developed and valuable understanding for today’s union movement. A practical experience of working-class struggle.

The “rebellion” that the book by Dobbs describes is the strike by workers who, exploited and deprived of their rights at a time of depression, were able to overcome the timid union bureaucracy that was paralyzing them, organize themselves, prepare for a strike, launch the strike when the doors on negotiations were shut, and then resist, defend themselves, and defeat the bosses and opportunist politicians.

They did this with a collective leadership that was uncorrupted and that won the cooperation of other sectors through the genuine practice of working-class solidarity.

The causes and conditions that led Teamsters Local 574 to struggle to defend their union, fight for their rights, and consolidate workers power, and the challenges and obstacles they had to overcome to win their victory, are similar to those that exist today in the United States and the majority of capitalist countries.

This crisis, whose effects have already devastated thousands of laid-off workers and impoverished families during the wave of neoliberalism, is a result of the same economic model and the vices associated with it: speculation, individualism, and greed.

The first lesson this rebellion of 1934 offers us is that a period of crisis is also a time of opportunity for transformation and change, an opportunity to strengthen the historic agent of this change and advance the class struggle.

The author, Farrell Dobbs, addresses this reality in all its richness and diversity, identifying the agents and social forces that play a role and the actions carried out by each of them.

Seventy-five years ago, as these events show, in the labor movement there was also a bureaucracy, a conciliatory way of thinking, and opportunist leaders tied directly or indirectly to those who had political and economic power. These manipulators tried with their “good speeches” to convince people of the need for “dialogue,” and were averse to class confrontation.

But the workers did not let themselves be demobilized. They united, proving the correctness of Marxist philosophy as written in the second thesis [by Karl Marx] on Feuerbach: “Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice.”

Attacks on revolutionary Marxism, on the rights of the working class, on its class consciousness and class struggle, are designed to try to convince the exploited that the capitalist order is the only thing possible.

But regardless of the changes that have occurred in class structure and relations, and in capital’s methods of domination, the reality we are experiencing today is still capitalism, based on exploitation, domination, and alienation.

Class struggle is manifesting itself in the 21st century, and forcefully so. It is not a belief in the minds of a group of crazy people or dogmatists clinging to the ideas of a senile Marxism. Class struggle is the result of an irreconcilable antagonism between capital and labor, between workers and the popular sectors, on one side, and an increasingly totalitarian oligarchy, on the other.

This book, compañeros, with its narrative power and honesty, subtly rouses our consciousness, taking us from the combative enthusiasm of the masses to the suffering and outrage of “Bloody Friday”—the violent face of the Empire.

The reader can picture and feel the pain of those bodies shot in the back, and how this pain, grief, and outrage overpower their fear and renew their strength to rescue the wounded, carry out solidarity, keep fighting, and in the end, feel the satisfaction that brings consciousness and heart together in the moment of victory, the first victory, which serves as a basis and encouragement for the subsequent achievement of workers power.

This is Teamster Rebellion, this is Teamster Power: the reaffirmation that the path of action is the only valid antidote to challenge and overcome the tyrannical power of capital.

Its lesson for our own times is the necessity and urgency of taking up revolutionary action.

I would like to reiterate my gratitude to Pathfinder, a publishing house that—like the Organizer of those days, the strikers’ newspaper—broke through the barriers of silence and manipulation by the power of the media, to proclaim the truth of revolutionary thought.  
 
 
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