Vol. 80/No. 18      May 9, 2016

 
(in review)

‘Teamster Politics’: lessons of 1930s battles for
fighters today

 

Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs. 345 pages. Pathfinder Press, second edition 2015.

As the 2016 U.S. elections unfold, the effects of capitalism’s crisis of production and trade are pressing working people to look for new political perspectives, and for ways to defend their jobs, wages and working conditions, and political and social rights.

I recommend reading Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs, a longtime central leader of the Socialist Workers Party. A new, expanded edition was published last year, including 20 pages of photos that draw readers into the book.

Through the living experience of workers’ battles during the 1930s, it shows how we face a dictatorship of capital — not just the bosses, but their cops, courts, administrative apparatus and political parties. This won’t end until the working class takes political power out of the hands of the boss class once and for all. To fight to win, we need to organize not only in trade unions, but on the broadest political level.

This is the third volume of a four-part series. Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power describe the series of organizing drives and strikes by Minneapolis truck drivers in 1934 that forged a powerful fighting union there, and how the Minneapolis Teamsters, guided by a class-struggle leadership, built on those victories to strengthen the labor movement throughout the Midwest over the following years.

In Teamster Politics, Dobbs looks at the broader political framework in which these battles took place — part of the upsurge that forged the industrial unions and the CIO. President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, when the capitalist depression had made workers’ conditions “so intolerable that rebellious moods were rapidly spreading,” Dobbs writes. “Fears of a revolutionary uprising gripped the capitalists so they allowed the incoming president wide latitude in acting to stem the threat to their rule.”

This is how the measures called the New Deal came about. Dobbs explains how, with the help of trade union bureaucrats and other misleaders, Roosevelt and the propertied rulers he spoke for used these measures to try to contain the labor upsurge and prevent it from challenging their political rule. But depression conditions, with ups and downs, dragged on until the U.S. rulers’ entry into the second world imperialist war.

To stifle the labor upsurge and opposition to the rulers’ war moves, “the FBI openly began to assume the role of political police,” says Dobbs, restricting civil liberties and targeting the unions.

The final book in the series, Teamster Bureaucracy, describes how the rank-and-file Teamsters leadership organized to oppose World War II, racism, and government efforts — backed by the international officialdom of the AFL, the CIO and the Teamsters — to gag class-struggle-minded workers.

A participant’s account

Dobbs was a participant in this history. He was a young coal yard worker when he joined the 1934 Minneapolis organizing drive and became a leader of the strike battles. He was later the central organizer of an 11-state union organizing drive that drew tens of thousands of over-the-road truckers into the Teamsters.

Dobbs joined and became a leader of the revolutionary party that was at the heart of these union battles, the Socialist Workers Party. He left the Teamsters organizing staff in 1940 to become the party’s labor secretary, served as SWP national secretary from 1953 to 1972, and was the party’s presidential candidate four times.

In the class battles unfolding on each page we learn just as the workers themselves learned in the process about the true character of all institutions in capitalist society.

The book is divided into four sections. The first, titled “The Politics of the Trade-Union Movement,” describes how a class-struggle leadership built the union while confronted with the narrow, self-serving perspectives of the Teamsters bureaucrats and their devotion to Roosevelt and other supposed friends of labor.

The second section, “Political Conflict in Minnesota,” takes up in depth why workers need to organize politically independent of capitalist parties such as the Democrats and Republicans.

Need for union-based labor party

Dobbs explains why in 1938 the Socialist Workers Party decided to call for a labor party based on the unions. The party knew the working class might make a direct leap to revolutionary politics, as happened in Russia in 1917, where the Bolshevik Party, led by V.I. Lenin, led the toilers to power. The explosion of the labor movement in the 1930s, drawing millions of men and women into the unions and political activity, showed that potential.

“The CIO movement had arisen with unanticipated rapidity and power; and the revolutionary party had not been able to recruit CIO militants at the rate and on the scale needed to gain effective leadership influence among the mass of industrial workers,” Dobbs writes. “The time had come to support the development of a more elementary form of independent working-class political action, namely formation of a labor party based on the trade unions.” This remains a pressing question for the working class today.

The book features concrete examples of how the fight for independent working-class political action unfolded in Minnesota, where a reformist Farmer-Labor Party existed, independent of the Democrats and Republicans.

In the third section, titled “Ruling-Class Offensive,” Dobbs takes up how the bosses and their government used everything from lawsuits smearing the unions for “corruption” to anti-labor legislation to try to tame the labor movement as the Roosevelt administration geared up for war.

One particularly interesting chapter describes how workers pushed back a threat from a fascist outfit known as the Silver Shirts, which in August 1938 talked of an armed raid on the Teamster headquarters. “Local 544, acting with its customary decisiveness, answered the threat by organizing a union defense guard,” Dobbs says.

In the final section, called “Plight of the Jobless,” Dobbs explains the alliance forged by the union with unemployed workers who were part of the government Works Progress Administration make-work projects, many of whom joined the Federal Workers Section affiliated to Local 544.

As part of the labor movement, they fought for increased unemployment compensation and forced local and state officials to back down on humiliating means testing for jobless workers to get relief. Minneapolis was one of the strongest centers in a nationwide strike by WPA workers in 1939.

Readers will appreciate learning of the role of women fighters who fought unflinchingly alongside men on picket lines in this battle. Some were arrested, faced frame-up trials and jail time.

Through the battles described in Teamster Politics, many participants became transformed into different men and women. Dobbs introduces some of the individuals, and tells how they became capable of acting and leading others in solidarity in ways neither they nor the bosses had thought possible.

This marked the beginnings of a politically conscious, class-struggle union leadership in Minnesota and the region. But similar developments did not happen nationwide.

As Dobbs describes vividly, one of the chief reasons was the counterrevolutionary betrayals and thuggery of the Stalinized Communist Party, which was substantially larger than the SWP.

Challenges working class faces today

Because of the bosses’ moves to wrap the unions in red tape and legal restrictions, and the class-collaborationist outlook of the trade union bureaucrats and their subordination of the working class to the bosses’ political parties, especially the Democrats, the power of the labor movement has been eroded in the decades since. Today just 7 percent of industrial workers are in unions.

But new winds are blowing — from the movement for $15 an hour and unionization, to fights against two-tier wages and union busting, to mobilizations against police brutality and abuse.

Dobbs explains that the Teamsters’ experiences showed that “unionism and politics can’t be separated.”

As I read this I can name farmworkers, longshore workers, retail workers, shellfish gatherers, and paperworkers who I know are thinking about this question based on their own experiences with the brutality of capitalism and the necessity for a union. They are looking for a way forward.

Dobbs says, “Power generated at the trade-union level can be shattered by government blows. Workers must enter the political arena as an independent class force, with their own party.” Teamster Politics is a powerful tool for the new generations learning this lesson today.

Mary Martin is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of Washington state.
 
 
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