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Workers Vanguard No. 1129 |
9 March 2018 |
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“World Socialist Web Site”: Anti-Union, Not Socialist West Virginia teachers and school staff: beware! In the middle of the crucial statewide strike, supporters of the “World Socialist Web Site” (WSWS) distributed a “Teacher Newsletter” dated March 1 that counseled strikers to form “rank-and-file committees to take conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the AFT-VW [sic] and the WVEA.” It grotesquely claimed that “the basic purpose of these organizations” is “to suppress the uprising of teachers and get them back to work.” This agitation could only undermine a strike that was organized and carried out by the unions.
Opposition to the unions is nothing new for these political bandits who also go by the name Socialist Equality Party (previously the Workers League). Over two decades ago, WSWS honcho David North declared in a speech that “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992). Shortly after the brief United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against General Motors in 2007, the WSWS announced that they “would advise workers, should the UAW come to their plant, to vote to keep it out” and declared that “joining the UAW would not advance workers’ interests one iota.”
The WSWS puts an equal sign between the trade unions—the basic defense organizations of the working class—and their pro-capitalist misleaders. Unlike the fake socialists of WSWS, the Spartacist League supports the unions in every battle against the bosses. At the same time, we denounce the union bureaucrats for their reliance on the Democratic Party and other forms of class collaboration, which have deeply eroded labor’s power. Our purpose is to facilitate struggle that will strengthen the unions. By contrast, the sinister WSWS finds common cause with Don Blankenship and his fellow capitalists who want to destroy unions.
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