"Socialist" Apologist for Scabbing (1996)

Workers Vanguard No. 637, 19 January 1996

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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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.

WL Scabs on Defense of W. Virginia Miner (1994)

Workers Vanguard No. 607, 30 September 1994

Workers League Scabs on Defense of West Virginia Miner

With United Mine Workers (UMWA) member Jerry Dale Lowe now sentenced to nearly eleven years in federal prison, on an anti-union frame-up, it is urgent for all supporters of labor to redouble their efforts in fighting for his freedom. That includes raising the large sums of money needed to carry out a legal appeal to overturn his conviction. As part of our efforts to defend Jerry Dale Lowe and seven other Logan County, West Virginia strikers, Workers Vanguard has warned miners and other supporters of his cause to beware that “a dubious outfit called the Workers League has tried to stop money from going to Lowe’s defense fund” (WV No. 603, 8 July).

Now this “Workers” League — which publishes its newspaper without a printers’ union label — has confirmed its scabby role in the case of Jerry Dale Lowe. A smear piece in the WL’s International Workers Bulletin (18 July) accuses us of being “accomplices” of the UMWA bureaucracy, because we call on our readers to send contributions to the place Jerry Dale Lowe wants them to go, the UMWA Region II Defense Fund. This, according to the Workers League, is “How the Spartacist League Aids the Frame-up of a Miner”!

The Workers League has written several articles on the outrageous frame-up of Jerry Dale Lowe. So why are they going out of their way to stop contributions being sent to his legal defense? An article in their 9 May Bulletin says that any money sent to the union defense fund would be used “for the purpose of further isolating the Logan County miners and ensuring their conviction.” Yet that is where Lowe himself has asked that donations for his defense be sent. The Workers League offers no alternative for how to raise money for his defense and dismisses any attempt to mobilize the union to free this victimized striker.

Why? The Bulletin (4 July) writes that Lowe’s case demonstrates the “transformation of the UMWA and the entire AFL-CIO into agencies of big business and the capitalist state.” Union members who have seen their wages slashed, their working conditions destroyed, their jobs decimated and their strikes sold out, are increasingly and painfully aware that their union “leaders” operate as the labor lieutenants of the bosses in enforcing the capitalist status quo. But the Workers League openly declares that it does not defend the UMWA or any other union against the bosses and their government — because it equates the unions with the bosses and government. The WL tells workers to “break with this apparatus and build new organizations of struggle.” But far from promoting class struggle, these appeals for workers to junk their unions neatly dovetail with those of the union-busting bosses.

The Spartacist League defends the unions as elementary defense organizations of the workers, while fighting to get rid of the pro-capitalist misleaders. Every strike brings home the fact that a new, class-struggle leadership is needed for labor to get off its knees and fight. But you can’t win any labor battles by scabbing on defense of the unions.

The Workers League willfully ref uses to distinguish between the unions and the sellout bureaucrats. So they attack us as “accomplices” of the bureaucracy and claim that we “promoted the lie that the UMWA bureaucracy was defending Lowe.” Let’s see who’s lying. When Lowe and seven other miners were indicted last year, we denounced UMWA president Trumka for his statement that violence “has no place in the coal fields” and his pledge to aid the frame-up by giving “whatever support and assistance we can give in that investigation.” At the same time we demanded:

“The Mine Workers union must mobilize its strength to defend these victimized union men. But that will take a sharp fight inside the UMWA against the leadership that has sold out union conditions, sold out union militants and presided over the decimation of a union that was once proud to be the shock troops of American labor.”
— WV No. 589, 3 December 1993

Who does fit the description of “accomplices” to the UMWA bureaucracy? When Arnold Miller and his “Miners for Democracy” invited the capitalist government’s Labor Department to “clean out” the UMWA in the early ‘70s, a betrayal which led to decisively weakening the union, nobody cheered louder than the Workers League. The WL’s Bulletin (11 December 1972) called or “all miners to vote for the Miners for Democracy slate,” hailing it as “a real alternative to the Boyle leadership” (see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). In contrast, Workers Vanguard (No. 17, March 1973) headlined: “Labor Department Wins Mine Workers’ Election.” A few years later, miners were burning effigies of Miller in the 1978 coal strike, as the WL’s “real alternative” knuckled under to strikebreaking Taft-Hartley injunctions and tried to shove giveback contracts down the miners’ throats.

And when it comes to financial shenanigans, why should anyone believe the Workers League? In 1991 the WL’s phony “International Labor Defense Committee” launched a “Vorkuta Miners Relief Fund,” supposedly to raise money for medical supplies for workers in northern Russian coal fields. (Curiously, the “Vorkuta miners” had well-documented links to the CIA through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy and the AFL-CIO, which had itself just set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners.) In April 1992, the WL’s affiliate in Australia declared that “more than $40,000 worth” of supplies had been sent to Vorkuta. Yet one month later, the WL’s paper admitted that they never delivered anything to the miners. The supplies ended up instead with a doctor in the Ukraine… or so their story goes (see “Workers League’s ‘Vorkuta’ Fund,” WV No. 563, 13 November 1992). The WL has given no public accounting of donations to its “relief fund.”

Whether tailing the pro-capitalist union misleaders or undermining defense of unions in the face of capitalist assault, the political bandits of the Workers League are always up to something dirty. The WL’s undermining of Jerry Dale Lowe’s defense is one more treacherous example. And the next time these fake-socialists pop up, ask them where is the union label on their IWB rag.

Bulletin's Hormel Lies (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 403 (9 May 1986)

Bulletin’s Hormel Lies

We told it straight. “Hormel Strike Knifed,” declared our headline, adding “All Labor Will Pay for This Treacherous Defeat!” (WV No. 400, 28 March). For seven long months on the picket lines-against a union-busting company, backstabbing International union tops, a liberal Democratic governor and the National Guard-the Hormel meat-packers hung tough. But finally, in the face of this unholy alliance, the leaders of Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota decisively turned away from union action. Instead of a class-struggle program to clear the scabs out of the plant and win the strikers' jobs back, they called for a nationwide consumer boycott and announced they would sue the United Food and Commercial Workers. (UFCW) in the capitalist courts. “And so after a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed,” we wrote.

We knew we would hear soon from the fake-left and others, whose program of tailing after the labor bureaucracy prevents them from saying what is. Sure enough, on April 1, the Bulletin, newspaper of David North’s Workers League (WL), ran a full-page polemic titled, “'Workers Vanguard Buries the Hormel Strike.” The article, by Bulletin editor Martin McLaughlin, labels the Spartacist League “dyed-in-the-wool defeatists” and claims:

“For all the rhetorical denunciations of the betrayals of the UFCW International, the resolution and the entire analysis of Spartacist AGREE with the position of the UFCW that the strike is over and it is time for a post-mortem.”

It’s not surprising the Bulletin resorts to this lying amalgam, a smear tactic from Stalin’s arsenal, equating the SL’s call for class-struggle unionism with the UFCW International’s scabherding. The entire resolution he refers to, by Spartacist supporter Stan Gow in the West Coast dock union (ILWU), is a bitter attack on the labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement for having “deliberately isolated and stabbed in the back” the Hormel strike.

The professional con artists of the Workers League don’t have to bow to the Stalinists when it comes to cynical lies: having signed up as press agents for local president Jim Guyette and his adviser Ray Rogers of Corporate Campaign, Inc., the WL simply declares that P-9’s “decision to defy the International” was an “enormous advance” and a “great step forward for the entire labor movement.” So-presto! – the workforce of more than 1,000 scabs who have been working in the Austin plant for more than two months now is simply disappeared! What is this act of “defiance” North's WL praises so highly? They’re not talking about a plant seizure, mind you, or militant mass picketing (as opposed to symbolic “civil disobedience”) to drive out the Guard, stop the scabs, shutthe plant down and keep it shut until the strike wins. Guyette and Rogers accept the government's claim that such class-struggle tactics would be “violent” and therefore unacceptable. No, what they are referring to is taking the UFCW International union to court. The Bulletin article explicitly states that “the P-9 lawsuit is perfectly justifiable as a defensive measure....”

In 1979, when a WL agent, Alan Gelfand, was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, North & Co. sued the SWP in federal court. Thus the Northites were calling on the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization! And as part of this provocation, the WL called on the court to pry into the SWP's minutes, finances-in short, every aspect of its functioning. Gerry Healy, North's British boss until recently (when Healy was blown out of the water in a scandal involving Libyan gold, fingering Iraqi Communists and allegations of sexual importunities with young women), would have leftist opponents beaten up by his goons, then sue them when they complained about it in print.

The Workers League has always had great faith in bourgeois justice. Remember their notorious support for the 1971 NYC police “strike,” moreover at a time when the racist cops were flexing their bonapartist muscles for more leeway to go after the Black Panthers! Until recently virtually the entire British left shared with the Healyites the idea that cops were incipient “comrades.” But the British miners strike, when the cops beat heads and tear-gassed strikers for 12 solid months, taught the British workers a lesson in the nature of the state and discredited the cop-loving Healyites in the eyes of militants.

For Marxists it is axiomatic that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. The behavior of the , cops, courts and National Guard during the Hormel strike has dramatically proved this again. What P-9er expects to get justice in the courtroom of Judge Bruce Stoner, whose injunctions have made real picketing illegal? Experience from the United Mine Workers to the NYC hospital union has shown over and over that when the government intervenes in the internal affairs of labor, the workers always end up paying. Rather than being a weapon for the Hormel strikers against the company and the treacherous UFCW bureaucrats, this suit will only help the bosses hamstring and control the union movement.

The Bulletin article promises to be the first of a series on “The Politics of the Spartacist League.” An introduction describes the SL as “imbedded . . . deeply into the sewers of middle-class radicalism,” and other uncomplimentary phrases. (This is a comedown, of sorts - last year the WL was labeling us “racist” and even “fascist.”) To back up such charges, it claims that the SL last year “hailed” the NYC “subway vigilante,” Bernhard Goetz, and “denounced” black revolt in South Africa, supposedly saying that armed struggle against apartheid was “hopeless.” Anyone who has read Workers Vanguard or is familiar with the politics of the Spartacist League knows that these are patent lies. We have refuted them, exhaustively, in our article “Smash Fascist Smear of SL” (WV No. 379, 17 May 1985). But North, McLaughlin et al. have fed well at the Healyite trough, and figure that they can dish out any amount of hogwash and get away with it.

The Bulletin lies about what we say on the Hormel strike; they lie about the SL's position on South Africa and the black question in the U.S. Aren't they afraid of getting caught out? The purpose of such obvious falsehoods is not to win over any independent worker or radical who comes in contact with the Spartacists. (In fact, anyone who does admit having talked to the SL is immediately given an ultimatum – break off all contact with “the Sparts,” or else.) Rather, these deliberate lies are a political straitjacket, to imprison their own members, morally and programmatically. Either you accept and defend them – all of them – or you're out of the Workers League. And once you've prostituted yourself peddling this crap, you’ve signed away your right to differ on anything: you are a proven liar.

There is one industry in the country where the WL is active and their work can be compared with that of Spartacist supporters: New York City transit. Recall that the Bulletin declared Bernhard Goetz a racist would-be killer on the sole grounds that he was a white man who shot some black youths; whether or not Goetz faced or feared a mugging was irrelevant to them, because in their legalist view only the “authorities” should have guns. The Goetz case was ambiguous, and we s aid so at the time. But recently a clear-cut case of self-defense has arisen, of black subway token clerk James Grimes, who shot robbers threatening his life in a hold-up attempt. Spartacist supporters together with token clerks and other transit workers have taken up Grimes’s case, seeking to mobilize broad union support. But the WL has done nothing to defend Grimes against management discipline and attempts by the D.A. to railroad him to jail on gun possession charges or worse. The Bulletin has not mentioned this case once. This group which hailed the 1971 NYC cop “strike” won’t defend a black man with a gun.

The WL's brand of “colorblind,” legalistic unionism shares the fundamental values of the racist pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which is why the Bulletin kept calling on every sworn enemy of P-9, from the AFL-CIO, and UFCW tops on down, to aid the Hormel strike. The Spartacist League, in contrast, put forward a program to mobilize the ranks of labor in militant class struggle. It is not “defeatism” to recognize a defeat when it is staring you in the face. No doubt many Hormel workers will find this hard to take. But revolutionary politics is not a popularity contest: it's a matter of providing leadership. According to the Bulletin, things are getting better and better – all you have to do is believe. But Hormel workers aren’t Peter Pans, and David North sure as hell isn’t Tinkerbell.

As Trotskyists we prefer to face the facts, in order to forge a party that can lead a winning fight. As Stan Gow's motion in the ILWU said of the Hormel strike, “All American workers are going to pay for this treacherous defeat. Next time there had better be a massive show of force by the labor movement to smash the union-busters.”

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper? (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 395 (17 January 1986)

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper?

Workers Vanguard reporters and salesmen at the January 4 union rally in solidarity with the Chicago Tribune strike found the militant Trib workers to be quite interested in socialist literature. We also noticed that supporters of the recently Healyite Workers League were skulking about, curiously unaggressive in pushing their raison d’etre, the twice-weekly Bulletin.

Meanwhile, a WV salesman was approached by several strikers who, misinformed, protested that he was distributing a publication printed by non-union labor. The WV salesman immediately showed the union “bug” prominently displayed in our masthead and, reassured, each of the striking workers bought a copy of the paper. We concluded that this misunderstanding arose because some fake-left outfit was, grotesquely, handing out literature without a union label at the rally – an intolerable insult to the strikers whose struggle is one for the survival of unionism in the printing industry. Recalling the WL’s furtive behavior at this rally, we checked out the Bulletin and, sure enough, found no union bug. Is the Bulletin a scab newspaper?