The labor bureaucrats argue among themselves more these days as well, accusing each other of responsibility for their fallen estate. And since they accomplish so little, they live in mounting fear and hatred of the ranks, who might at any time elect someone else to replace them in office.

That is why, among other things, trade union officials have begun to approach workers such as yourselves, whom they peg as activists and radicals, to try to draw you into union structures they dominate. They need you more right now. They are looking for activists who have authority in the ranks. They count on militants being frustrated and thus initially seeing any change as perhaps a step forward. And they count on the petty-bourgeois radical left in the labor movement doing their bidding for a very small fee, and hopefully bringing some militant-minded workers along with them.²

The officialdom's overtures are a diversion from what class-conscious workers need to be doing, and from what we have substantial political space to accomplish in the unions today. We need to be working together in whatever ways possible with others in the ranks. That is where the power and the determination will come to make real changes in the labor movement as struggles pick up--changes that go well beyond the plans of the more left-talking officials.  
 

Think about the people you admire and seek to emulate: take, for instance, Farrell Dobbs, the greatest communist class-struggle leader of the labor movement in the United States; or Malcolm X; or Nelson Mandela. The true leaders of the oppressed and exploited have never addressed themselves to the bourgeoisie, to the oppressors, to complain about what they are doing to us. Leaders talk to fellow workers, fellow fighters about where we are messing up; what we have to do; what we have to prepare for. Leaders explain how we have to increase our discipline, change our view of ourselves, and much more in order to accomplish our ends.

The bourgeoisie puts on a pretense of being the class that bears intelligence, culture, politeness, civility. But in volatile times such as these, their pretense turns to ashes in their mouths. They are in fact only the parasitic bearers of surplus value--of a part of the fruits of the working day they steal from the labor of our class! And we begin to understand that the most important idea that revolutionists such as Farrell Dobbs, such as Malcolm, can teach us is not about them--not about the exploiters--but about what we can accomplish together, and about what weaknesses we need to overcome in order to do so. As Malcolm once put it, that is why his goal in building a revolutionary organization was not to awaken Afro-Americans to their exploitation but "to their humanity, to their own worth."

Those of us who grew up in the postwar period are acquainted with what has been known as the Democratic Party "labor-liberal coalition." It grouped together--under the political awning of the Democratic Party--the AFL-CIO officialdom, the leaderships of the NAACP and other major civil rights groups, and executive officers of public and private welfare agencies. Today, that coalition is scarcely a shadow of its former self. Nor does it have the appearance of any substantial weight in bourgeois politics. For the Communist Party and the rest of the petty-bourgeois left in the working-class movement in the United States, this is cause for great sorrow and lamentation. But for communist workers, it is grounds for celebration.

The so-called labor-liberal-civil rights coalition was never a fighting alliance of workers and youth. It was never an alliance of the ranks of the massive battles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s and then advanced Black rights in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a coalition of apparatuses and officialdoms who derived their authority from the concessions those working-class struggles had wrested. It was a coalition of those who sat on top of the unions and civil rights organizations and prevented them from effectively defending or extending those gains. It was a coalition that blocked all advances toward political activity independent of the party structures that serve the exploiters and oppressors. As such, it was very useful to the capitalist parties and politicians for many decades.

This so-called coalition was built on the lie that if working people in struggle would support this or that wing of the exploiters, staying within their two-party system, then a way could be found to make progress and improve conditions of life for workers and farmers. So long as the postwar capitalist expansion gave the rulers a margin for concessions, that class-collaborationist illusion could be portrayed by the labor officialdom as having some basis in reality. Given capitalism's current deflationary conditions, however, the bureaucracy finds it harder and harder to produce on that lie. But with the help of parts of the left, growing sections of the officialdom will work overtime to try to give that coalition an appearance of renewal.  
 
 
1. At the same time, growing sections of the labor officialdom are collaborating with employers to maintain a relatively stable even if smaller dues base among better-off and higher seniority workers. In January 1999, for example, the top officialdom of the United Auto Workers joined with General Motors management in seeking to sell UAW members at two plants in Ohio and Michigan on a deal that would cut the workforce by 60 percent. According to the New York Times, UAW officials "said in interviews today that so many of their workers were ready to retire that the unions were willing to accept sharp cuts in employment. In exchange, the new factories would provide long-term job security for the workers who retired." No individual or current in the U.S. labor officialdom has the perspective of a fight to win jobs for all by cutting the workweek with no cut in pay and promoting a federally funded program of public works to build housing, schools, hospitals, roads, and other goods and services needed by working people.

2. The union tops seek to draw not only militant workers behind their bandwagon, but radicalizing student youth as well. In 1996 the AFL-CIO recruited some 1,200 students to a "Union Summer" to train them in "community and labor organizing," i.e., first and foremost, helping to get out the vote for the Democrats in the November 1996 elections.

3. This resolution drafted by Karl Marx is included in Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay by Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder, 1990), p. 35.  
 
 
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