David North, “Socialist” Apoologist for Scabbing
Four years ago, the organization known as the Workers League, led by one David North, decided to write off the trade unions, saying “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992; see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). Now, in the context of the defeated 17-month-long Caterpillar strike and the four-month battle by Liverpool dockers against union-busting, North & Co. have taken this formulation out of the realm of theory and shown it for what it really is: an open prescription for strikebreaking.
Early last month, as dock workers unions from North America to Australia announced their refusal to handle ships loaded in Liverpool by scabs, North’s followers in the British International Communist Party (ICP) wrote a scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), calling this basic declaration of solidarity a “fraud.” Yet some two weeks later, American trade unionists of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) turned back a scab Atlantic Container Lines ship from three U.S. ports by honoring picket lines put up by dock workers who had flown in from Liverpool, giving a huge boost to their strike.
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North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
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North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
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As a cover for their anti-internationalist, anti-working-class line, the Northites point to the ILA’s “history of working with the U.S. State Department and CIA backed operations abroad.” This is pretty cheeky coming from these political bandits, who took up the cause of every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet movement from the Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin reactionaries. North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
The link between the Northites’ current anti-labor line and their historic anti-Sovietism was captured in a recent appeal by ICP National Secretary David Hyland to the deeply reformist Militant Labour group for a “mass socialist party,” Openly calling to “destroy the influence and control of the old unions,” Hyland offers as proof that any “trade union perspective” is bankrupt… “the example of Solidarność in Poland” (IWE, 11 September 1995). Solidarność, in fact, was a counterrevolutionary political movement masquerading as a “union” on behalf of its CIA and Vatican bankrollers, which was cheered by the Northites as it organized Polish workers behind a program of capitalist restoration.
Never ones to differentiate the trade unions from the pro-capitalist bureaucracy that keeps them chained to the exploiters and their state, North & Co. have now become lawyers for scabbing. Reporting on the Caterpillar UAW strike, which was betrayed outright by the UAW bureaucracy, their American newspaper writes, “UAW officials have attempted to absolve themselves of blame for whar has happened by diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines” (International Workers Bulletin, 18 December 1995). Putting quotation marks around “scab” is no slip. In fact, the article justifies scabbing, claiming that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union. Most simply recognized the futility of the policies being pursued by the UAW, which had, after all, abandoned the previous strike.” Now that corporations are shelling out billions every year to hire union-busting law firms and private police, are the Northites offering themselves as PR agents for the growing army of strikebreakers?
The “hot-cargoing” of scab shipping by dockers internationally is an example of the kind of genuine solidarity in action which can fortify the unions against the worldwide capitalist offensive. Our perspective is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. This requires a hard political struggle to drive out the sellout bureaucracy — the “labor lieutenants” of the bosses — that is undermining and destroying the unions. That fight must also be waged against scab “socialists” like the Northites, who spit on the best traditions of working-class struggle as they stand on the side of the capitalist union-busters.
