The Militant - September 14, 2015 -- Why labor should oppose the imperialist war drive

Vol. 79/No. 32 September 14, 2015

(Books of the Month column)
Why labor should oppose the imperialist war drive

Teamster Bureaucracy, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in September, tells the story of how the leadership of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544 organized to oppose Washington’s entry into World War II. It recounts the infamous 1941 federal sedition trial that culminated in the imprisonment of 18 leaders of Local 544 and of the Socialist Workers Party, including the book’s author, Farrell Dobbs, for carrying out this campaign. The excerpt below is from the opening chapter, “Let the People Vote on War.” Copyright © 1977 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FARRELL DOBBS
General Drivers Local 544, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, set out to organize trade union opposition to Roosevelt’s preparations for use of the workers as imperialist cannon fodder. Local 544, an affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, AFL, was led by Trotskyist militants. They were revolutionary socialists, whose training and experience enabled them to grasp the real meaning of the scheme being cooked up in Washington.

The leaders of Local 544 were also seasoned campaigners, well versed in the organization of mass actions. Thus it was apparent to them that the first task was to alert the union ranks to the dangers arising from the new course taken by the White House and to explain why the workers’ vital interests were threatened. Only in that way could the necessary forces be drawn together to launch a broad protest movement.

Fortunately, there was an excellent vehicle at hand to undertake that beginning. The Minneapolis Teamsters had a weekly paper, the Northwest Organizer. …

[I]n July 1937, the Japanese military invaded North China. Shortly thereafter two United States soldiers stationed in the war zone were wounded, and the capitalist propagandists seized upon the incident to build up anti-Japanese sentiment here in this country. At that point the Teamster paper set out to counter the jingoistic line, opening with an editorial which asserted:

“The reason the United States has its garrisons in China and its warships in the Far Pacific is to protect American capitalism in the Orient. The American worker has nothing whatever at stake, the American bosses have millions of dollars of investments that must be protected. The American worker has nothing to gain and everything to lose by a war fought to protect American capitalism. … In the present crisis in the Far East, the interests of the American workers lie with the interests of the downtrodden people of China.

“For an understanding of the whole problem of Imperialism and its relation to the American trade union movement, the Northwest Organizer recommends to its readers a series of articles on this subject beginning in the next issue.”

Five articles written by Tex Norris, a revolutionary socialist educator, were then published. His main points, which were illustrated by historical examples, may be summarized as follows:

Imperialists are capitalists with investments in foreign countries. By 1937 United States business interests were making increasingly large investments in every possible quarter of the world. Those who benefited from this development were trying to keep the facts hidden from the workers, who always came out losers in such a situation, and it was the duty of the labor movement to explain what was happening.

Profits made by gouging U.S. labor, Norris continued, were being used in the form of capital to exploit foreign workers at starvation wages, even lower than those paid here. In order to maximize such exploitation, the imperialists, acting just as they did at home, sought to use the governments of the particular foreign countries to break strikes by native workers and, wherever possible, to crush their trade unions. The accomplishment of those aims helped, moreover, to hold down wage rates in this country, thus enabling the imperialists to reap superprofits at the expense of both U.S. and foreign labor.

In an effort to cope with this problem, some within the trade unions were promoting “Buy American” campaigns, hoping thereby to protect jobs and wages in this country. But such notions were misleading, he pointed out. In the long run, no nation could sell more to foreign nations than it bought from them. Efforts to build walls around nations were, therefore, bound to result in restricted production and a reduced standard of living. Instead of pursuing that false course, the answer to the difficulty lay in cooperation between U.S. and foreign workers in a common struggle to win better conditions for all. …

Imperialism, he added, was a natural development in any advanced capitalist nation. Just as U.S. business operated outside its home base, so did British, French, Italian, Japanese. The competition between those different imperialist interests within a contracted world market was growing keener daily, and that was leading to the most terrible of all the consequences of imperialism — war.

Protection of U.S. business interests in that sharpening conflict, Norris emphasized, had become the main concern of the Roosevelt administration. Its State Department had consuls searching for foreign investment opportunities. Prospective investors were being shown where diplomatic and military protection could be offered. Acquisition of military bases was going on in regions where capitalist investments abroad were concentrated, and Washington was preparing to pull millions of workers into the armed forces for war against its rivals.

If workers in the U.S. were to resist this mad course, he concluded, they needed to fight against capitalism itself, of which imperialism was a deadly offspring. That, in turn, called for the clasping of workers’ hands in other countries in a grip of international labor solidarity.

While presenting the foregoing explanation of imperialism, the Northwest Organizer added editorially: “The army is not our army, but belongs to the rulers of America and is for THEIR use — to protect THEIR investments and interests in foreign lands, and in case of domestic crises, to protect the same interests at home against the workers.”