Northites' Scab Line on UAW

What kind of organization, writing about the recent United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against General Motors, “would advise workers, should the UAW come to their plant, to vote to keep it out” and state that “joining the UAW would not advance workers’ interests one iota”? Our readers could be excused for thinking that such an appeal would come from the professional union-busters of the National Right to Work Committee. No, these were the words of the “Socialist Equality Party” (SEP) in an October 12 posting on their World Socialist Web Site. And they were in direct response to the fundamental point we made in “Victory to the UAW Strike!” (WV No. 899, 28 September) that “organizing the unorganized is crucial to the very survival of the UAW.” The SEP (formerly Workers League, WL) are political bandits who like to pass themselves off as Trotskyists. And when it comes to labor struggle, this outfit is nothing but scab “socialists.”

More than a decade ago, SEP (then WL) 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). The Northites soon showed what this line meant in practice when they openly apologized for scabs who crossed UAW picket lines in the long and bitter Caterpillar strike in the mid ’90s. Today they oppose union organizing in non-union auto plants, offering the rationale that the sellout contract pushed by the UAW tops following the short-lived GM strike marked “the open transformation of the UAW into a business.” Throw in some rhetoric about “globalization,” and this all adds up to a “radical” veneer for siding with the bosses, who spend billions each year on thugs and spies, lawsuits and advertising campaigns to keep unions out.

To pass off their anti-union line, the Northites willfully conflate the trade unions—the basic defense organizations of the working class—with their misleaders, aptly characterized more than a century ago by the Marxist Daniel De Leon as “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.” The union tops must be thrown out and replaced by a new, class-struggle labor leadership. This surely is not where the SEP is coming from. In the early 1970s, when struggles against the Vietnam War and for black rights had shaken the U.S., the Workers League called on the reactionary AFL-CIO chief George Meany to “build a Labor Party” and offered a program for such a party that said not a word about the war or about the fight against racial oppression!

A primary preoccupation of the union tops at the time was to work in league with the State Department in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The Northites joined right in, tailing every CIA-sponsored force arrayed against the Soviet degenerated workers state and East European deformed workers states, from the Afghan mujahedin to Polish Solidarność. As we noted in “Workers League vs. the Unions” (WV No. 580, 16 July 1993), David North’s speech writing off the unions came right after U.S.-backed Boris Yeltsin formally dissolved the USSR in December 1991. North seized on this to announce the death of the Soviet workers state. Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky had aptly compared the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule to a giant labor organization that must be defended against the capitalist enemy despite its misleaders. North grotesquely inverted Trotsky’s analogy to write off the organized labor movement along with the Soviet Union.

We exposed the SEP’s union-busting line at a talk at New York City’s Tamiment Library on October 12 by Bryan Palmer, author of a recent biography of American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon. Following comments from longtime WL/SEP leader Fred Mazelis, a Spartacist League speaker pointed out:

“The SEP, which supported every imperialist-inspired force in destroying the gains of the 1917 Revolution, now come out against trade unions entirely and tell workers not to vote for the UAW should the organizing drive come to their factory. There is a word for that and it begins with ‘s’ and it ends with ‘b’.”