From: revo (inquiries@revolutionuk.demon.co.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 30 2001 - 05:53:17 EST
sorry to clog the list but these arguments from MIM (dont know anything
about them, jsut read these arguments) really need to be addressed by the
movement. WE are having the same debates here in Britain with some
Anarchists around No Sweat and now antiwar organising. So here goes:
>
> A call to labor organizers and youth considering
> being labor organizers: common arguments for
> building war-mongering, national chauvinist unions
> defeated It's time to quit any of the old war-mongering
> unions supporting this war. Most Amerikan unions
> today do not have a track record of opposing
> chauvinist wars and have supported them for a long
> time.
>
So why is it time to leave now? Workers will begin to see through the
government's war drive as the shock and horror of S11 becomes supplemented
by the horror of a war on civilians in AFghanistan, and the huge attacks on
welfare and job cuts at home. And by this argument militants and
revolutionaries would have left the unions where the struggles will be
taking place, coming to a head, and at their most potential to be truly
powerful. We would have no voice. This is self-defeating.
The AFL-CIO supported the most bloody, anti-working class counterrevolution
in central america and further afield. It supported the Vietnam War effort.
So what's new? Trade unions organisations support capitalism, especially
their (very well paid) leaderships and bureaucracies - they also organise
millions of workers in key economic power points for the class struggle -
they are as Engels' said, schools for socialism in that respect. Our
solidarity with the union movement is based on this, it isn't based on the
politics of the leaderships which has always been pro-capitalist - and
pro-imperialist - in the imperialist countries. We should struggle against
those politics in the unions: building democratic rank-and-file movements is
the key to this. The war could be crucial to radicalising a sectoin of the
workers as it drags on and the cuts go through at home - if we are outside
of the unions we won't be able to take part in this process and be the
catalysts for it.
>
> In fact, it could be the very success of Amerikan
> unions that provides the material basis for
> Amerikan nationalism and believing Amerikan
> workers are so much superior to other countries'
> workers. In the united $tates, it may be true "that
> things have to get worse before they get better"
> when it comes to economic conditions for the
> people who have become a war-mongering middle-
> class.
>
great we'll never win any mass forces. How can we win if we tell workers
they actually have to lose their struggles, strikes etc and suffer a decline
in their living standards as the best thing for the rest of the world?! A
movement winning those economic day-to-day struggles is one that is strong,
confident, and which has the potential to widen its struggle and extend its
goals - that is the best atmosphere for revolutionaries to argue
internationalism within, not a union branch, organisation or movement that
is going through defeats!
> 3. "My union newsletter reaches thousands of workers."
> As independent organizers, you could work with MIM
> or even other organizations to spread a newspaper
> without watering down your views. MIM Notes
> promises to give big coverage to any labor
> organizers who quit their jobs on account of the
> war or national chauvinism or racism. Write to us
> here. To get your statement put on the web page immediately,
> write to mim3@mim.org. You can contact the same people without building
> a union that supports imperialism.
>
There is no way a political organisation can replace the union movement and
its real, daily, conection to thw working class.
> 4. "I have influence with the workers by being
> there."
>
> The success of your work is what makes these
> workers love this country and stay with its rulers
> no matter what. If you truly have influence with
> the "workers," when you quit, that influence will
> carry over to independent organizing. If it does
> not, you never had any independent influence to
> begin with. You were simply a cog (perhaps
> unwitting) in the machine, reflecting the needs of
> the imperialists and labor aristocracy that truly
> own your union.
>
We need to stay in the unions but not drop our politics - we need to fight
to build stop the war committees in them and make this movement as big as
possible to obstruct the war machine at home. We have to also raise at the
same time, as revolutionaries, the demand for the defeat of US and British
imperialism in the region. This is the best road foward for humanity, and
to build an alternative to fundamentalism we will have to show that their is
a progressive, secular pro woman alternative to imperialism that is as
radical as hamas, the taliban etc. This is the only way to win the most
radical fighters of the Middle East and Asia, those who have lived in the
refugee camps, in the urban slums, in a Shin Bet jail for years by the time
they are 20.
Stay in the unions, and stick with your political arguments. it's hard,
you'll get loads of stick from people to begin with, but people are already
beginning to see through the media lies. That is the only way foward.
In solidarity, Revolution Britain
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