As this process continues today, more workers become interested in learning from examples of the past when labor’s battalions were successful in scoring victories that altered the class relationship of forces in favor of working people. Under this kind of pressure, glimpses of such examples sometimes make it into the pages of official union publications, even though partially, without the whole story being told. This is the case, for example, with “The Minnesota Strike of 1934,” published in Teamster magazine and reprinted in this issue.

It is well worth reading the entire story as told by one of the leading participants, Farrell Dobbs, author of the four-volume Teamsters series published by Pathfinder.

The first volume, Teamster Rebellion, tells the story of the 1934 Teamsters organizing drive in Minneapolis. Dobbs, who emerged from the ranks as part of the class-struggle leadership of the strikes, describes how a fighting industrial union movement was built in Minnesota, helping to pave the way for the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In subsequent volumes, Dobbs outlines the 11-state Teamster over-the-road organizing drive in the 1930s, of which he was an architect. He also explains how many of labor’s gains during that period were set back because of the class-collaborationist course of the top union officialdom.

As Dobbs, who became SWP national secretary in 1953, put it in the “Afterword” to this series, published in the last volume, Teamster Bureaucracy, the accomplishments of the rank-and-file militants who made Minneapolis a union town in the mid-1930s “were made possible through the interplay of two basic factors. One of these was the skillful and considerate leadership of the workers by revolutionary socialists. The other was our championing of trade union democracy. Full membership participation was encouraged in the organization’s internal affairs. Freedom to express all points of view was upheld, as was the workers’ right to set policy by majority vote.”

This situation, however, was unique to Minnesota, as the relationship of forces in the workers movement at the time was not as favorable to revolutionary socialists in other parts of the country.

“The misleaders were able to prevent the labor upsurge from going beyond the unionization of the unorganized mass production workers into the CIO, although much more was possible at the height of its energies,” Dobbs wrote. “They managed to tie the new industrial union movement to the Democratic Party, beginning with the 1936 elections, thereby keeping the workers mired in capitalist politics. By mid-1937, class-collaborationist norms were reestablished to a large extent in setting trade union policy. Reliance on help from the Roosevelt administration was substituted for use of the union’s full power, and a staggering setback resulted for the CIO with the defeat of the Little Steel strike” in 1937.

Since then, these misleaders have increasingly tied the labor movement to a course of subservience to the ruling class. That is why today the unions continue to be weakened—while at the same time a vanguard of militant workers and farmers has emerged, leading the resistance to the bosses’ offensive.

“As that contradictory situation unfolds,” Dobbs notes in his “Afterword” to the Teamsters series, “large numbers of workers can be brought, in stages, toward adoption of a class-struggle program required to defend their interests—if the left-wing forces in their midst proceed with the necessary patience and astuteness.”

This is one of the many invaluable lessons for today that working people will find in these books by Farrell Dobbs.  
 
 
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