Vol. 80/No. 11 March 21, 2016
(feature article)
‘Teamster Politics’ draws interest at Havana book fair
Book ‘shows how workers, with leadership they deserve, can transform their unions into instruments of struggle’
AND OSBORNE HART
Política Teamster, published by Pathfinder Press, is the third of a four-volume series by Dobbs offering a firsthand account of the historic labor battles and organizing drives led by Local 574 of the Teamsters union in the Midwest in the 1930s.
The book was presented by Heriberto González, who works with the Americas department of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and Martín Koppel, editor of the Spanish-language translation of the book. Among union leaders in the audience were Aníbal Melo, head of the North America department of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) — the country’s union federation — and members of the transportation workers union.
The program followed a presentation of Pathfinder’s Spanish-language edition of 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US: Washington’s Political Police and the American Working Class. That title was presented by long-time Cuban leader Ramón Sánchez-Parodi and Pathfinder President Mary-Alice Waters. (An article on this meeting appeared in the March 7 Militant.) Many in the audience attended both events.
Lessons of Teamsters battles
The Teamster books, Koppel said, “show how workers, if they have the leadership they deserve, can begin to transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary working-class struggle.” He described the course, presented in Teamster Politics, that the Minneapolis Teamsters leadership carried out “toward unifying the working class and its allies to overcome divisions fostered by the employers.”
Those efforts included organizing the unemployed as a Federal Workers Section of the union; deploying a sizable Union Defense Guard that stopped a fascist group’s recruitment operations in Minneapolis; mobilizing labor opposition to Washington’s imperialist war aims in World War II; and promoting a course of political action independent of all capitalist parties, including the need for workers to organize a labor party based on the unions.
Today, as a smoldering world economic depression unfolds, capitalism is pushing more and more workers to fight, Koppel said, and the course of struggle explained in Teamster Politics is an example working people can study and draw on.
González said the account in Política Teamster “offers a class approach and is little known” in Cuba and other countries. The publication of the book in Spanish “is a valuable and timely contribution to making known this struggle by workers in the United States.” He pointed to the role of Dobbs and other leaders of the Communist League, precursor of the Socialist Workers Party, in the leadership of the Minneapolis truckers union.
He underscored how the Teamster militants confronted attacks by both the national union bureaucracy and the U.S. government. This included an FBI frame-up of its central leaders under the newly adopted Smith “Gag” Act on charges of conspiring to “advise and teach” the revolutionary overturning of the US government.
González said this panel was part of many years of collaboration between the Havana-based regional office of the WFTU and the Socialist Workers Party. In 2009 leaders of the WFTU and Cuba’s National Sugar Workers Union spoke at the launching of the Spanish translation of the first two volumes of Dobbs’ series, Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power.
In the discussion period, an audience member asked the speakers to comment on the argument frequently heard in the capitalist world that the working class and the unions are becoming superfluous because workers are “being replaced” by robots.
González and Koppel replied that capitalist bosses cannot eliminate the working class. The exploitation of workers who must sell their labor power to survive is the bosses’ source of surplus value. Together with the earth’s natural resources, it is the source of their profits. Under capitalism, Koppel said, bosses use technological advances to squeeze more labor out of fewer workers, increasing safety hazards, and these are among the conditions that push workers to fight and organize.
Speaking from the audience, Isabel Monal, a revolutionary fighter since the 1950s and today editor of the Cuban magazine Marx Ahora (Marx now), pointed to what Marx and Engels wrote about the role of the ruling class in the capitalist economy. With the disaster that capitalism is producing worldwide today, she said, one would have to ask, “Which class is really superfluous, the working class or the bourgeoisie?”
Sales of Política Teamster and other Pathfinder titles throughout the Feb. 11-21 book fair indicated noticeably greater interest in the U.S. class struggle than in previous years. In addition to the many who purchased Teamster Politics, eight people bought sets of all three volumes available in Spanish.
“To really understand what happened, I think I need to read all three,” said David Martínez, a Honduran youth studying in Cuba, who attended the book launch. “Then I’m going to send them to trade unionists I know in Honduras.” Martínez was glad to hear that the final volume in the Teamster series is scheduled to be published in Spanish next year.
Two days before the book presentation, the CTC invited three communist workers from the United States and Canada — part of the team introducing Pathfinder books at the book fair — to meet workers and union leaders at Autochapt, a shop that repairs and rebuilds cars, small trucks and buses. Nearly two years ago the former state enterprise was reorganized as a cooperative.
The visitors learned how the 156 workers at Autochapt are part of efforts by Cuban working people to confront today’s economic challenges and improve working and living conditions. The CTC also hosted a visit to another cooperative in Havana that makes construction materials. Cooperative members at both shops are members of the construction workers union.
A presentation of Política Teamster at a Havana depot for long-distance truck drivers is scheduled for early May. The event, organized by the CTC, is planned to coincide with the participation of U.S. delegations in activities to celebrate May 1, International Workers Day.
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