Remarks by Staughton Lynd for the Left Forum, March 15, 2008
In
Youngstown, more than twenty-five years ago, several of us began to
meet once a month at the local union hall for Utility Workers Local 118.
The local had just been through a strike during which the central
labor body provided very little help. I was asked to teach a class and
told attenders that I wished to devote it to the question, What has gone
wrong with the trade unions? Why are we all broken-hearted lovers?
The
only evening I remember clearly was a discussion of a new encyclical by
the Pope entitled, “On Human Labor.” The Pope said that there were two
kinds of work: for money, and for the glory of God. All one long
evening the late Bob Schindler, a lineman for Ohio Edison, maintained
that when he went up on the pole he did so for the glory of God. It
turned out that when Bob and his crew were called out in an ice storm
the company expected them to repair the line but to report the need to
turn the power back on to headquarters. Rather than leave an elderly
woman to suffer through another freezing night Bob’s crew would fully
restore electric service, much as unemployed workers did in the 1930s.
At
the end of the class we did not want to stop meeting. We adopted the
name Workers Solidarity Club of Youngstown. For the next twenty years
there was a place where workers in need of help could go on the second
Wednesday of every month. During at least two long and bitter strikes
the support of the Club ensured the survival of the local unions
involved. At the end of every meeting we formed a circle and sang the
first and last verses of “Solidarity Forever.”
Over the years
several members of the Workers Solidarity Club used their annual
vacations to visit revolutionary Nicaragua. There Bob (who didn’t know a
word of Spanish) worked as part of an electric maintenance crew in
Managua. A young man named Benjamin Linder had been killed in northern
Nicaragua working on electrification for villages there. Bob Schindler
went back the next year to help to finish the electrification project.
Ned Mann, one of Ed Mann’s sons, helped to construct a vent over a
particularly smoky furnace at Nicaragua’s only steel mill.
Others
from the Club attended a workers’ school south of Mexico City supported
by the Frente Auténtico de Trabajo, the network of Mexican independent
unions. African American participants experienced another world that,
while not free of racial prejudice, was far more hospitable than the
United States. So what is solidarity? Most obviously, we find it in the
conduct of certain radical martyrs. When the so-called Haymarket
Anarchists were being rounded up after the Chicago bombing of May 1886,
Albert Parsons made it out of town and took up residence, in disguise,
near Milwaukee. His comrades were put on trial for their lives.
Parsons returned to Chicago, walked into the courtroom, and was tried,
convicted, and hanged with the others.
In Mexico, the painter
Frida Kahlo spent her adult life in great physical pain after a
near-fatal streetcar accident that crushed her spine and pelvis, leaving
her unable to bear children.
She finally had her first Mexican
solo show in 1953 and went to the opening on a stretcher. She would
lose a leg to gangrene. In June 1954 she had herself pushed in a
wheelchair to join a protest againstn the action of the United States in
overthrowing the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemala.
A few days later she died.
So this is one kind of solidarity.
The Left did not invent it. As is stated in the Gospel according to
St. John, ch. 15, v. 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his friends.”
There is another kind of
solidarity: the day-to-day practice of poor and oppressed persons who
turn to each other in the belief that “an injury to one is an injury to
all.” The anthropologist James C. Scott calls that kind of solidarity
the “weapon of the weak.” He describes it well.
On the one
hand, Scott rejects the concept of “hegemony” if that is understood to
mean that what the peasant or worker ordinarily dares to express is all
that the subordinate thinks or feels. At those rare historical moments
when the weak openly confront their masters, it is not so much that “a
new consciousness, a new anger, a new ideology” has come into being, but
rather that what was there all along is fully displayed.
On
the other hand, however, Scott insists that the cries of “bread” and
“land” so often at the core of peasant resistance arise from “the basic
material needs of the peasant household.” More generally, [t]o require
of lower-class resistance that it somehow be “principled” or “selfless”
is not only utopian and a slander on the moral status of fundamental
material needs; it is, more fundamentally, a misconstruction of the
basis of class struggle. . . . “Bread-and-butter” issues are the
essence of lower-class politics and resistance.
Crucially, for
Scott forms of resistance that are individual and unobtrusive are not
only what a Marxist might expect from petty commodity producers and
rural laborers, but have certain advantages. Unlike hierarchical formal
organizations, there is no center, no leadership, no identifiable
structure that can be co-opted or neutralized. What is lacking in terms
of centralization may be compensated for by flexibility and
persistence. These forms of resistance will win no set-piece battles,
but they are admirably adapted to long-run campaigns of attrition.
Moreover,
while the forms of resistance Scott studies may be individual, “this is
not to say that they are uncoordinated. . . . [A] concept of
coordination derived from formal and bureaucratic settings is of little
assistance in understanding actions in small communities with dense
informal networks and rich, historically deep, cultures of resistance to
outside claims.”
Scott studies peasants. Where do we find in
the activity of industrial workers a comparable practice of the idea
that an injury to one is an injury to all?
The most striking form
of solidarity I have encountered during thirty years in Youngstown as a
lawyer for rank-and-file workers, and as a labor historian, is the
conduct of some workers during layoffs.
Labor historians are in
general agreement that the signature accomplishment of CIO industrial
unionism is the seniority system. The need for institutionalized
seniority must have seemed obvious in the 1930s. In Youngstown, it was
still the practice then for workers to assemble at the mill gate in the
morning and to be individually called to work by the foreman much as in a
longshore “shape-up.” Quid pro quos for steady work including giving
the foreman free meals at the worker’s home, or worse.
But during
layoffs, the mechanical application of seniority puts the most
recently-hired workers on the street with nothing while older workers
not only keep their full-time jobs but may continue to work overtime.
Precisely in shops where the spirit of solidarity is strongest workers
may simply refuse to follow collectively bargained seniority language
and instead divide work equally among all members of the “family at
work,” regardless of date of hire.
It happened among Illinois
coal miners during the 1920s, among countless industrial workers in the
early 1930s, and continues sporadically today. In the Youngstown Legal
Services office where I worked in the 1980s, when President Reagan cut
our budget by 20 per cent the lawyers all reduced their work week by one
day (while leaving untouched the weekly salary of non-lawyers who were
underpaid to begin with). Alice and I experienced the same thing with
an independent union of visiting nurses that we helped to organize.
Perhaps the clearest description of the process that I know is in the
following account by Mia Giunta, an organizer for the United Electrical
Workers, about a plant called F-Dyne Electric in Bridgeport,
Connecticut.
There were layoffs in 1978, 1979, right after the contract was signed.
Under
the contract, the layoffs went according to seniority. We felt
terrible, thinking of some of the workers who would be put out on the
street. There was a Portuguese woman named Albertina who had little
children. She was crying but she said, “It’s OK. It’s all right.” The
other women said, “That’s unfair.”
The workers took up a
collection for her. I felt very guilty, and tried to talk to Albertina
to make sure that she and the kids would be all right. We just didn’t
want to see her go.
When the next bunch of layoffs came along,
somebody suggested, “We’ll all work a few hours less each week. That
way everybody can stay. Everybody will have health insurance.” And . .
. that became the tradition in that factory.
The contract was
never amended. Every time there was a layoff, we would sign a side
agreement that everyone would agree to cut back.
So what should
solidarity mean for us, practically and politically, right now? I
suspect that I would agree with most of the programmatic demands any of
us on the Left might wish to propose. Where we may differ is whether
the trade union movement of the United States, in any of its present
incarnations, can be expected to do very much about solidarity.
Take
the issue of immigration. Labor historians like to dump on Samuel
Gompers for supporting the exclusion of Chinese laborers in the late
19th century. But the best of modern unionists do exactly the same
thing. All of us admire the Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez. But Chavez
would call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and ask it to
apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Similarly,
Tom Leedham, the presidential candidate of the longest-lived and most
attractive rank-and-file movement in the United States, Teamsters for a
Democratic Union, criticized his opponent James Hoffa, Jr. for not doing
enough to keep Mexican truck drivers out of the country.
What I
think it comes down to is this: Unionism in the United States has been
built on short-term, material, individual self-interest. You cannot
create that kind of movement and expect it to produce members who will
take risks on behalf of workers who speak a different language, may be a
different color, likely as not profess a different religion, and
compete for the same jobs. You cannot paste the solidarity vision of
One Big Union on a classically Social Democratic union structure.
We
also face some urgent internal housekeeping. Somehow we must re-create
a movement in which blacks and whites are, as we used to sing,
together. Despite much awkwardness and insensitivity, SNCC created a
movement in the first half of the 1960s in which leadership was firmly
in the hands of African Americans, but in which whites such as Jane
Stembridge, Bob Zellner, Howard Zinn, Betty Garman, Casey Hayden, Jack
Minnis, and myself, were able to play a part. We are not going to
change this society in fundamental ways until we once again create a
movement that can include all oppressed aand radicalized persons.
The difficulty goes beyond race. In the late 1960s we forgot what it
means for comrades to create a movement together. I have a clear and
distinct memory of a member of the SDS national leadership, at a public
meeting in Chicago, calling for “icing” and “offing” — that is, killing
— political opponents. Finally, I want to call on all persons on
the Left to repudiate a false patriotism. There is a belief that the
United States is a city on the hill, with a mission to the rest of the
world. Some folks consider that the American psyche is so firmly
committed to this idea that we dare not challenge it and must work
within that metaphor.
I disagree. I think we in the United
States belong, not on a hill, but on our knees, seeking forgiveness for
what we did to African American slaves and Native Americans, and what we
continue to do to other indigenous peoples — Iraqis and Colombians,
for example — right now.
Solidarity stands opposed to
every form of narrow collective self-interest and to all varieties of
parochialism. As I was growing up here in New York the Communist Party
was promoting a synthetic homage to the so-called tradition of
Jefferson, who never freed his slaves, and Jackson, who sent the
Cherokee Indians on the Trail of Tears. We have not wholly freed
ourselves from this bogus ideology.
However, there is another
tradition in the United States, articulated by a series of working-class
intellectuals, that says, My country is the world.
Tom Paine began it, writing in The Rights of Man in the 1790s, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
William
Lloyd Garrison placed on the masthead of his newspaper The Liberator,
when it first appeared in 1831 and thereafter, “Our country is the
world, our countrymen are mankind.”
Frederick Douglass, fugitive
slave, shipbuilding craftsman, and abolitionist editor, travelled to
Great Britain in 1847 and for the first time experienced the possibility
of a world with far less racism than the United States. On his return
to this country he said: “I have no love for America as such; I have no
patriotism; I have no country.”
I mentioned Albert Parsons.
Before he was sentenced to death, he spoke to the jury and the court
room for parts of two days. Hoarse and exhausted, but “opening his arms
wide,” he declared: “The world is my country, all mankind my
countrymen.”
And finally we come back, as we cannot come back too
often, to Debs. The speech that earned him his years in federal prison
and brought on his premature death was given in Canton, Ohio. Debs
said there: “When I say I am opposed to war I mean ruling class war,
for the ruling class is the only class that makes war . . . . I would
be shot for treason before I would enter such a war . . . . I have no
country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the
world.”
The day after tomorrow will be March 17, St. Patrick’s
Day. In Mexico they celebrate the “San Patricios,” the St. Patricks.
When the United States launched its imperialist war on Mexico in 1846,
many newly-arrived and impoverished immigrants from Ireland were
recruited. Approximately six hundred of them deserted and fought with
the Mexican army. In a battle on the outskirts of Mexico City, 35 died,
85 were captured, and another 85 retreated with the remnants of the
Mexican army. Those who had deserted before the war were branded with a
capital “D” on the cheek. The rest were hanged. Today, every first
Sunday of the month in Mexico City the St. Patrick Battalion Pipe Band
plays in the soldiers’ honor. The battalion’s name is written in gold
letters in the chamber of the Mexican House of Representatives.
For
the sake of friends from the FBI who may be among us, let me make it
clear that I do not encourage members of the United States military to
open fire on their fellow soldiers.
But in this time of
imperialist arrogance and incipient fascism, the bravery and political
clarity of the St. Patricks serve to remind us of what may be required
of us by the idea of solidarity.
