One issue
that we disagree on is the use of the phrase "united front" in the
context of building an alliance with other groups in the union. While we
wholeheartedly agree that different groups should be able to collaborate on
issues they have in common and work together in joint campaigns, calling this
kind of activity a "united front" opens the door to theoretical
confusion. The "united front" was a very specific tactic developed in
the early years of the Communist International and later the Trotskyist
movement that called on the mass parties of the working class, particularly the
Communist Party and the Social Democrats, to bring together their forces in a
joint struggle against fascism and reaction. The slogan had particular
resonance in the struggle against fascism in Germany and France in the 1930's.
Raising this slogan today when mass parties of the working class no longer
exist or have become so corrupted - as for example the British Labour Party -
that they can hardly be considered working class parties anymore, does not help
in educating the masses about the need for independent political action by the
working class. It is even worse when the "united front" slogan is
applied in the context of statements signed jointly by several tiny political
groups. It sows illusions that such groups have the capacity to become mass working-class
organizations. Hal Draper dealt with this particular form of wishful thinking
many years ago in his excellent essay, Anatomy
of the Micro-Sect.
Given that caveat, the statement
by Ross and Zeltzer deserves a wide audience. They point out the significance
of the fact that one of the candidates in the UAW election, Will Lehman, has
made a powerful impression by calling out the UAW bureaucracy and raising the
question of socialism in his campaign. At the same time Ross and Zeltzer point
out the schizophrenic position of the Socialist Equality Party which is behind
the Lehman campaign. While running a candidate for a leadership position in the
UAW, the Socialist Equality Party has very recently called for the destruction
of the UAW and urged workers to vote against the union in the recent union
organizing drive of Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama.
When Peter Ross tried to raise
the question of the contradictory position of the SEP in relation to their
campaign in the UAW in a comment on the World Socialist Web Site, he was
censored by the editors of that online publication. We are adding Ross's
unpublished comment on the WSWS in an appendix.
Alex
Steiner
UAW at a Crossroads
Peter Ross and Steve Zeltzer
(United Front Committee for a Labor Party)
October 20, 2022
Last Monday, the United Auto Workers began mailing out ballots for
the election of the union’s International Executive Board, its highest
governing body. This is the first election in the history of the UAW in which
every member will be able to vote directly for the leadership of their union.
This historic election comes two months after the UAW held its
once-in-four-years Constitutional Convention—the first convention in which
rank-and-file members were able to put themselves up for election to the union
leadership.
These and other changes to UAW rules were put in place by a 2-1
vote in a union-wide referendum, which was part of a consent agreement with the
federal government, after 17 executives were federally indicted for
embezzlement and racketeering. The corruption scandal, which began in 2017, has
rocked the union leadership, many of whom are implicated in taking company
bribes and stealing dues money from the membership. The federal government has
also installed a monitor, who in July issued a report on the leadership’s lack
of transparency and violation of the terms of the consent agreement.
The imposition of more democratic processes by the federal
government has opened up some new possibilities for militant workers, but no
confidence should be placed in the capitalist state to democratize the union.
The new rules leave the bureaucratic apparatus untouched. It retains its
function as a proxy of management, whose role it is to negotiate and enforce
concessionary contracts in the workers’ name. The interventions of the
capitalist state are not aimed at truly democratizing the union, but at providing
its bureaucratic apparatus with a veneer of democracy, in order to preserve its
legitimacy in the eyes of workers and stabilize it as an instrument of labor
management. That the American government felt the need to intervene in union
affairs is itself a damning indictment of the rot at the heart of the UAW and
exposes the character of the bureaucracy as a junior partner of the
capitalists. The union belongs to the workers! The rank-and-file must demand:
feds and bureaucrats alike, out of the UAW!
The Movement for Union Democracy
Only a movement from below can truly bring democracy back to our
union. Recent reform efforts have been led by Unite All Workers for
Democracy (UAWD), a grassroots movement of UAW members from around the
country, which commanded substantial influence at this year’s convention. The
Administration Caucus, which has ruled the UAW for decades, usually sets the
agenda for the conventions in a choreographed series of speeches and
Administration Caucus-sponsored resolutions. But at this year’s convention,
they were unable to prevent resolutions drafted by the rank-and-file and passed
by union locals from reaching the floor for discussion.
UAWD-sponsored resolutions included one to start strike pay from
day one instead of day eight, and increase strike pay from $275 to at least
$400 per week. The International Executive Board (IEB) voted for the pay
increase just prior to the convention, in an effort to take the initiative from
UAWD, but convention delegates went a step further, passing the resolution to
begin strike pay from day one and increasing strike pay to $500 per week, at
the initiative of a striking Case tractor factory worker.
A UAWD-drafted resolution calling for the UAW to amend its constitution
to require it to oppose contracts with tiered pay and benefits also made it to
the floor and was the subject of extensive debate but was ultimately defeated.
The two-tier system has been backed by the Administration Caucus as supposedly
the only way to save autoworkers’ jobs in the face of company cost-cutting and
outsourcing. It is both a betrayal of the newer members and a weapon against
the demands of the more senior members, and it is a wedge which the management
and bureaucracy use to divide the union membership.
On the final day of the convention, the Administration Caucus
attempted to reassert its authority by forcing a revote on the increase in
strike pay. Many of the delegates had already returned home by this point, and
the Administration Caucus, working behind the scenes to pressure delegates, was
able to rescind the increase in pay. These are the actions of a bureaucracy
that is so used to ruling, it doesn’t know how to respond to rank-and-file
opposition, and clumsily exposes itself in its efforts to retain control.
Another telling episode from the convention was the refusal of the
Administration Caucus-dominated International Executive Board to invite a
contingent of GM workers from Silao, Mexico—who recently founded the independent
union SINTTIA—to attend the convention. Instead, they invited the so-called
Solidarity Center—an international operation of the AFL-CIO—which receives $75
million per year in corporate and federal money from the National Endowment for
Democracy. The AFL-CIO has a long history of collaborating with the CIA and
American government in suppressing workers’ struggles, propping up corporatist
trade unions against independent unions, and overthrowing governments around
the world, including in Brazil, Guatemala, Guyana, and the Dominican Republic.
They worked to sabotage a peasant movement in El Salvador, supported the
apartheid regime in South Africa, and participated in backing right-wing unions
in Chile prior to the 1973 coup, which resulted in the deaths of tens of
thousands (see also, the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International
Operations). While the multinational corporations have spread production all
over the globe, the AFL-CIO prevents workers from mounting an effective
response by organizing internationally. In the age of globalization, the only
way to rebuild the labor movement is on an international basis, and this means
a rebellion against the AFL-CIO.
The Radical Roots of the UAW
There is a long history of militant working-class struggle in the
UAW. Following a long decline of the craft unions organized in the American
Federation of Labor (AFL)—long-controlled by their own ossified
bureaucracies—the onset of the Great Depression and a wave of militant
struggles opened a new era in the American Labor Movement. In 1934, a wave of
powerful general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo, led by
socialists and left-wing workers, showed that the organized working class could
defeat the employers.
This eruption of class struggle gave a powerful impetus to the
development of the Labor Movement. The following year, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) was founded, originally as a committee within
the AFL, and then, after it was forced out, as an independent organization of
industrial unionists. The UAW, also founded in 1935, was divided from its
inception between a group aligned with the radical-led CIO and a group aligned
with the conservative, class-collaborationist AFL. Due to the efforts of
militant workers and socialists, the UAW followed the CIO out of the AFL, and
went on to grow rapidly. The 44-day Flint Sit-down Strike of 1937 forced
General Motors to recognize the UAW, and within the next few years, it also won
recognition from Chrysler and Ford.
The power of auto workers during the period of the UAW’s founding
came from taking direct action on the shop floor to stop production. This
approach was successful in protecting the health and safety of workers and also
in stopping the firing of union militants and rank-and-file leaders. There was
also significant support at this time for the formation of a Labor Party,
independent of both the Democrats and Republicans.
The nature of the UAW gradually changed in the following years, as
the union became established and took on a dual role as both the negotiator and
enforcer of labor contracts. In March 1939, a group of ten UAW locals led by
Trotskyists came together to support the formation of a Labor Party and to keep
power in the hands of the rank and file. This was opposed by a conservative
faction led by Walter Reuther and a faction led by the Communist Party, but the
Trotskyists' Union Building Program was adopted, along with a resolution
calling for the formation of a Labor Party in the United States. However, the
leadership of the CIO remained subordinate to the Democratic Party.
In the World War II era, the UAW’s Executive Board signed a
no-strike pledge to assist the American war effort. This was backed by the
Communist Party. After the war, communists and class struggle militants were
systematically purged from the trade unions. The AFL and CIO merged into a
single anti-communist and pro-imperialist alliance, and the labor movement went
into sharp decline. The Administration Caucus began its life during this period
as an anti-communist grouping founded by then-UAW president Walter Reuther, who
remained president until his death in 1970. The Reuther leadership vehemently
opposed the militant tactics that had built the UAW, and they eventually signed
contracts that ended this power on the job, while solidifying their own
leadership.
The UAW bureaucracy became little more than an adjunct of the
Democratic Party. At a UAW convention in San Diego in 1995, then-President Bill
Clinton, who had been invited to speak, told union leaders that he would
support NAFTA whether they liked it or not. After this speech, the craven UAW
officials gave him a standing ovation despite his open declaration that he
would push deindustrialization via this corporate trade program. The UAW and
AFL-CIO tops have been right behind not only Clinton but also Trump, who passed
the USMCA, a trade agreement replacing NAFTA that is aimed at further
consolidating the North American trading bloc in preparation for conflict with
China.
Today, Flint, Michigan—the site of one of the great victories of
American labor—is a decaying city in the deindustrialized area around Detroit,
known to most Americans as the town whose residents were poisoned by their
water supply. Flint is emblematic of the decay of American capitalism and the
defeats of the Labor Movement. Yet after a lifetime of rule by the
Administration Caucus, which has overseen one concessionary contract after
another and helped run the Labor Movement into the ground, rank-and-file workers
have shown that there is still a spark of life in the UAW.
Almost a century ago, American Trotskyist James P. Cannon
described the Flint Sit-down strike in these terms: “The revolt, which no
bureaucracy could contain, was spearheaded by new people—the young mass
production workers, the new young militants whom nobody had ever heard of…” The
strike was propelled by the “bitter and irreconcilable grievances of the
workers: their protest against mistreatment, speedup, insecurity; the revolt of
the pariahs against their pariah status.”
Today, after decades of attacks on living and working conditions,
there is a new generation of workers who are being driven into struggle against
the capitalists and the union bureaucracies. A wave of strikes, unionization
drives, and renewed working-class militancy has shown that workers will not
continue to accept endless wage cuts, sellout contracts, and attacks on their
livelihoods. It is up to this new generation of workers to return the UAW to
its radical roots, sweep away the bureaucracy, and turn the union back into a
weapon to defend the rights of working people.
Reformism and Sectarianism: Two dead-ends for the working class
The Administration Caucus has clearly been taken aback by the
level of support and organization among the rank-and-file for the upstart
reform movement. But now that they know the strength of this movement, they
will make every effort to crush and disperse it.
Three weeks after the convention, UAW Region 1 “CAP Coordinator”
Brian Negovan flagrantly violated the “Official Rules for the 2022
International Officer Election” by attempting to prohibit campaign leaflets
from being passed out outside a meeting of a retiree’s chapter. UAW
Presidential candidate Will Lehman’s campaign has reported a similar act of
intimidation by Local 598 District Committeeman Sean Meachem, who confronted
Lehman and a team of volunteers who were leafleting outside a GM plant, took photographs
of them, and called GM security to remove them from the premises.
Lehman—the only avowed socialist in the campaign—has rightly
highlighted the Administration Caucus’s use of intimidation tactics, something
that UAWD has failed to do. He has won a hearing in the UAW for raising issues
no other campaign will broach: above all, the need to entirely dismantle the
bureaucratic machine and replace it with democratic institutions controlled by
workers themselves. He was the only candidate, in the election’s one
presidential debate, to speak to the real conditions workers face, to attack
not only the current bureaucrats but the bureaucratic apparatus itself, and to
call for organizing workers on an international basis.
Lehman’s campaign—conducted by the Socialist Equality Party, which
publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)—has centered on “abolishing the
bureaucracy” and calls on union members to form so-called “rank-and-file
committees” as an alternative. But the SEP’s committees are not broad-based
organizations aiming to draw in the widest possible layers of militant workers
and educate them in the class struggle. Rather, the SEP insists that the
committees must be in full political agreement with itself on all issues.
Hence, these committees are typically founded by and subordinate to the party,
and generally consist of only a few members.
Workers want and need organizations they control, which give them
a voice and allow them to become active agents in fighting for their own lives
and livelihoods. The role of a Marxist is to aid the workers in their struggles
for political independence and to fight for a revolutionary political
perspective. This requires that Marxists immerse themselves in the movement,
not section themselves off into isolated committees, which are doomed to
sterility and irrelevance. It requires a willingness to build United Fronts,
capable of drawing into struggle as many workers as possible, including those
who have not yet come to revolutionary conclusions. Marxists must fight
intransigently for a revolutionary program, but they do not demand that workers
adopt all their positions as a precondition for uniting around common,
transitional demands.
The “Trotskyists” in the SEP would do well to recall the 1938 discussion between Trotsky and
Cannon on whether the Socialist Workers Party should support the movement in
the CIO for the formation of a Labor Party. Trotsky called for the SWP to join
these efforts as a necessary tactic for organizing the mass trade union
movement politically, while maintaining an independent existence and
revolutionary program for the SWP. Trotsky concludes, “To say that we will
fight against opportunism, as of course we will fight today and tomorrow,
especially if the working-class party had been organized, by blocking a
progressive step which can produce opportunism, is a very reactionary policy,
and sectarianism is often reactionary because it opposes the necessary action of
the working class…”
Indeed, the SEP has long since gone over to an outright
reactionary position, attacking the trade unions in general, and calling for
workers to leave them for their own committees. For the purposes of this
campaign, they now claim that they seek to abolish the bureaucracy, not the
union itself, since the latter would make their campaign an obvious absurdity.
This is pure sophistry, as a brief look at their past positions makes clear. In a WSWS article, “The middle-class ‘left’ and the UAW-GM
contract”, published October 12, 2007, the authors write: “The Socialist
Equality Party would advise workers, should the UAW come to their plant, to
vote to keep it out. Joining the UAW would not advance workers’ interests one
iota.” Elsewhere, WSWS refuse to differentiate between the union and its
bureaucracy, calling the UAW an “agency of corporate management” and stating
that their task is to “destroy, not bolster, the ‘persuasive power’ of the UAW
and to build a powerful political alternative.” Last year, WSWS called for a
“No” vote for the unionization of an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.
Again and again, the website calls for the replacement of the trade unions by
rank-and-file committees, i.e., the abolition of the former, even to the point
of opposing the organization of unorganized plants—a direct attack on the union and the working class.
Such backward positions not only discredit the SEP—they give priceless
ammunition to the bureaucracy, which can and will be used against other revolutionaries
in the UAW.
Rather than criticizing the SEP on this basis, the left-wing media
outside WSWS has instituted an unprincipled black-out of Lehman’s campaign.
In contrast to the SEP, UAWD took the initiative in mobilizing
pro-reform elements across the UAW during both the ‘one-member-one-vote’
campaign and the convention. Their platform calls for abolishing the multi-tier
system, opposes corruption and the existing labor-management partnership, and
has put forward the old slogan ‘30 Hours Work for 40 Hours Pay’ in answer to
the mass-layoffs brought about by automation and cost-cutting. However, UAWD
fails to even address the issues that Lehman’s campaign has raised and limits
its aims to superficial reforms rather than building the organizations the rank
and file will need to confront the Administration Caucus. Their presidential
candidate, Shawn Fain, attacks individual bureaucrats but scoffs at the idea
that the bureaucracy itself must be dismantled. Fain often hails the
anti-communist Reuther as representing the supposed good old days of the UAW.
While the UAWD platform calls, in vague terms, for “international solidarity”
and makes a meek call for a “re-examination” of the UAW’s relationship with the
Democrats, they have not pressed these issues in the IEB campaign and have
provided little in the way of a concrete program. They have run on the whole,
an insipid, pro forma campaign, completely lacking in militancy. It is little
wonder that they have proved unable to mobilize mass support in the union after
the convention.
Perhaps most glaringly, neither UAWD nor the SEP has publicized
the ongoing strike of 700 Case tractor factory workers in Racine, Wisconsin, or
attempted to use their campaigns to mobilize workers across the UAW to defend
the strike.
Neither of these camps is capable of bringing real change to the
UAW. What is needed is a true oppositional caucus, committed to building a mass
movement in the UAW that will sweep the bureaucracy out of the union and
replace it with new institutions of worker democracy. Until such a caucus
exists, revolutionaries should work both in UAWD and outside of it, building
United Fronts with the reform forces around certain demands, while openly
criticizing reformism and fighting for a revolutionary perspective.
An oppositional caucus can only exist if it is absolutely
independent of the Democrats, which led the bureaucratization of the unions,
and have spent decades, together with their “Republican colleagues,”
dismantling all that is left of the old Labor Movement. The first political
task for a renewed Labor Movement will be to carry out a struggle against the
Democrat-aligned bureaucracies and pose a political alternative: a mass
democratic Labor Party in the United States.
The critical fight is to organize the large number of auto plants
in the South, the Midwest, and Mexico. This has been an abject failure by the
business-unionist officialdom of the UAW. We need to win these organizing
fights by supporting a mass movement of workers in these communities that backs
up organizing with direct action. This is how the UAW was built.
The Fight in the UAW in a New Era of Class Struggle
Workers all over the United States are suffering from the same
conditions as UAW workers. They are dealing with the same sell-out bureaucrats
and the same bosses who want to make profits on their backs. More layoffs and
speedups are in store. We have to unite as a class to shut down industry
because that is the only way we will win our demands. Negotiations do not
result in any victories without militant struggles. When workers see the power
they have through mass mobilizations, there is no stopping that power.
Workers must reclaim the ability to take direct action on the job
to protect health and safety and prevent contract violations. The NLRB will not
help us. The Biden Administration has underfunded and
understaffed this agency while the federal government has provided $210 million
for so-called “democracy” and "labor rights" union work in Mexico
(supplied to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs through the USMCA trade
agreement).
The auto companies aim to further gut the auto industry as they
transition to the production of less labor-intensive electric vehicles. Auto
workers and other UAW members should take up UAWD’s call for equal pay for a
shorter work week, so that no one need lose their job, and workers can benefit
from the enormous technological advances their labor has made possible.
The union movement must take as its starting point the
international unity of the working class against the capitalist class and its
political parties. In the UAW, this means building direct international links
with other workers at GM, Ford, Caterpillar, and all other auto, truck, farm
machinery and parts companies around the world, and taking direct action
internationally with our fellow workers when they need it. We cannot allow the
bosses to pit workers here against those in other countries or pit our members
against each other with two-tier wages and substandard contracts. We need real
union solidarity in action.
With no one in Washington representing their interests, many
working-class people, including some in the UAW, have turned to the faux
populism of the Republican Party, which is now moving toward fascism and
dictatorship. The issues of growing racist attacks and the rise of fascism were
not debated or even brought up at the UAW 2022 Convention by any grouping, but
these issues are critical not only to UAW members and their families but the
entire working class. In the past, the UAW supported the struggles against
racism and the right to vote in the South, yet the present bureaucracy refuses
to support a mobilization against the danger of a fascist coup. Instead, they
rely on the Democrats. UAWD should link up with the Vermont AFL-CIO, which is
fighting to build a democratic Labor Movement and organize the working class
against the threat of another coup by the fascists in the Republican Party. We
also need to defend Black, Brown, and Asian members, who face increasing racist
attacks in the plants and in our communities.
There is also a growing threat of a catastrophic war between the
US and China and Russia. The UAW, as one of the largest unions in the AFL-CIO,
has long supported US imperialism around the world. We must end the trillions
of dollars that are spent for the war machine while our cities and communities
are falling apart and working people don’t have affordable housing, healthcare,
or a good public education system. Both the Democrats and Republicans are
bipartisan when it comes to more wars and privatization. We need to organize a
national fight against wars abroad and privatization of public education,
public services, and public lands. The enemies of UAW members are not Mexican
or Chinese auto workers and the people of these countries, but the billionaires
and capitalist class that are exploiting people throughout the world and use
xenophobia, racism, and nationalism to pit worker against worker.
In this time of social collapse, we must rebuild our unions and
take the first steps toward a Labor Party, founded and controlled by working
people. Only such a party, capable of organizing the entire working class, can
successfully oppose the giant transnational corporations and open a new era in
the struggle for socialism.
Appendix:
Censored comment by Peter Ross on the World Socialist Web Site
I
applaud Lehman for bringing socialist ideas before the UAW membership for the
first time in many years.
He
consistently attacked the bureaucracy and counterposed to it the power of the
rank-and-file. He also raised the important question of international
organizing several times. Fain’s answers, in contrast, were vague and
uninspiring. The idea that the union can be democratized while leaving all the
old institutions intact is absurd.
But Lehman
should have provided concrete proposals on HOW to abolish the bureaucracy and
what it would be replaced with, i.e. both immediate and long-term organizing
goals for the rank-and-file committees, how they would elect an international
leadership and measures for democratizing the union, to include the ability to
immediately recall officials, pay limited to that of a skilled worker, open and
direct elections, more regular conventions and mass meetings, creation of a
union-wide forum to facilitate discussion, etc. Without these sorts of demands,
the call to abolish the bureaucracy is vacuous. Also needed is a plan of action
to organize the unorganized auto plants concentrated in the southern US and
eastern Mexico.
If the SEP
were serious about building rank-and-file committees, it would pursue United
Front tactics aimed at drawing in as many militant members as possible. In
practice, the SEP views the committees as proxies for the party, which has the
effect of isolating them from wider union politics.
Lehman was
able to participate in this debate not due to major organizing victories in the
rank-and-file, but because of new rules brought about by the intervention of the
federal government into the union. His candidacy would not have been possible
without the victory of one-member-one-vote, in which UAWD played a key role.
Where was the SEP in this struggle? Criticizing the bureaucracy is one thing,
but without serious organizing efforts, these are only words.
If Greenhouse
misquoted Lehman, that is indeed an egregious mistake, but union liquidationism
is exactly what the SEP has preached for many years. Does Lehman know the
history of his party? In an article by Jerry White and Barry Grey, “The
middle-class ‘left’ and the UAW-GM contract”, published October 12, 2007, the
authors write “The Socialist Equality Party would advise workers, should the
UAW come to their plant, to vote to keep it out. Joining the UAW would not
advance workers’ interests one iota.” Elsewhere, the WSWS calls the UAW an
“agency of corporate management” and says its task is to “destroy, not bolster,
the ‘persuasive power’ of the UAW and to build a powerful political
alternative.” Last year, WSWS called for a “No” vote for the unionization of an
Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Again and again, the website calls for
the replacement of the trade unions by rank-and-file committees, i.e., the
abolition of the former.
The SEP has
now opportunistically altered its line for the purpose of this campaign, since
to run a candidate for UAW IEB president while calling for the replacement of
the UAW would have been an obvious absurdity. Now the WSWS says it doesn’t want
to abolish the trade unions — only their bureaucracies. Its demands remain just
vague enough that it can claim this is what it meant all along.
As Trotsky
pointed out, opportunism is the flip side of sectarianism. The SEP has leapt on
an opportunity to be heard and has had no trouble adapting its line to whatever
was most convenient to the campaign, without really moving away from its
sectarian and abstentionist politics.
Letter from Peter Ross
to members of the SEP and the Will Lehman campaign:
I
am a graduate student worker and member of UAW 2865, and a former provisional
member of the Socialist Equality Party.
I attempted to post the below comment on September 26 to
the WSWS article “The UAW presidential debate: A rank-and-file socialist
confronts the apparatus,” by Joseph Kishore.
(https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/26/pers-s26.html)
I attempted to post the comment three times, and I don’t believe this was a
mistake or technical issue. It’s incredibly hypocritical that an organization
that protests internet censorship so forcefully would censor a critical
comment, and it shows an incredible backwardness and lack of understanding of
socialist methods. Will Lehman and members of the LA branch, do you really
stand by this action?
I would add a few things to my original comment. I don’t
think I sufficiently emphasized that Lehman made many powerful points. He was,
as Kishore’s article notes, the only candidate to speak to the real conditions
workers face and the only candidate attacking not only the current bureaucrats
but the bureaucratic apparatus itself. He also, importantly, called attention
to the undemocratic methods of the bureaucracy, including their attempts to
intimidate and silence his campaign.
But I repeat: For years, the SEP has based its politics
on the claim that unions can’t be reformed, yet now it runs a candidate for UAW
president and say it wants to abolish the bureaucracy, not the union. To
say the abolition of the bureaucracy wouldn’t be a reform of the union is pure
sophistry. The party has in the past opposed the organization of unorganized
plants. Obviously, this was a direct attack on the union, not its bureaucracy.
I am still astounded that SEP members seem not to have noticed this glaring
contradiction.
If the party had truly reversed itself and was now
seriously engaged in fighting for rank-and-file power in the UAW, I would be
compelled to support your campaign. But the SEP remains committed to sectarian
politics - it refuses to build united fronts and it continues to
reject and attack the Transitional Program.
