Originally published September 25, 2023
The growing rebellion among auto workers in the United States against the efforts of the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy to betray its contract battle against the Big Three is having a radicalizing effect among workers in the United States. international scale. In Mexico, auto assembly and parts factory workers joined their class brothers and sisters north of the border and made numerous demands to expand the fight across North America against UAW sabotage in the United States and Unifor in Canada.
While the issues of wage increases and other demands related to auto contracts are extremely important, what is emerging in direct discussions among workers is a desire to join forces to fight for their common class interests. Inequality, the transition to electric vehicles, war and other broader social issues are increasingly in the spotlight.
The question on the minds of many workers is how truly “independent worker organizations” can be created to take power away from the union bureaucracy and assert their will. This is ultimately a political and revolutionary challenge that raises the question of which social class controls society’s wealth: a small capitalist oligarchy or the working class.
Alarmed by these discussions and by the growing movement of base committees under the influence of World Socialist Website and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), pseudo-leftist middle-class organizations working to strengthen the control of the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party over workers.
The pseudo-left steps in to subordinate workers to the AFL-CIO and Biden
These forces are also intervening aggressively with auto workers in Mexico, who have repeatedly demonstrated solidarity with U.S. and Canadian workers in recent years. The interventions of Newspaper of La Izquierda (which publishes the Left-wing newspaper in Brazil) have systematically sought to subordinate workers to the Mexican partners of the AFL-CIO trade union confederation, to which the UAW belongs.
During the 2019 nationwide General Motors strike in the United States, workers at GM’s Silao assembly plant, who had formed a grassroots activist group to oppose the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) corrupt, came into contact with American strikers and refused to work compulsory overtime, which led to dismissals and the creation of blacklists of combative workers.
Oh Left voice/LID recently published an article by one of these workers describing how the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which receives about 94 percent of its budget from the U.S. State Department, stepped in with funding and a group of lawyers to break up the base group and impose such a system. -so-called “independent” union, SINTTIA, made up of workers “handpicked by the committee’s advisors”.
Oh Left voice/LID recognized that SINTTIA “is supported by national and international trade union organizations, such as: FESIAAAN, Unifor or AFL-CIO, the latter two representing the interests of imperialism in their respective countries (United States and Canada)”. Furthermore, they write that by sponsoring Mexican unions, the AFL-CIO seeks to “guarantee labor peace in the country’s transnational corporation branches…to defend imperialist capital.”
After admitting that SINTTIA is a supporter of American and Canadian imperialism, the Morenists still call it an “independent union” and tell workers to support it and its ties to imperialist bureaucrats. For example, during the vote at the GM Silao plant, they wrote: “we support workers who want to express their opposition to the CTM and ask them to vote critically for SINTTIA.”
Then the Left voice/LID reported on May 1 last year that SINTTIA carried the banners of the AFL-CIO and Unifor. The publication quickly commented: “Statements of solidarity from the AFL-CIO and Unifor must be translated into concrete actions” in support of SINTTIA.
More generally, the Left voice/LID insists on the support of “all trade union organizations which claim their independence” and on the creation of new organizations. Meanwhile, in an article from Working notes Last year, longtime Solidarity Center and AFL-CIO employee Jeffery Hermanson listed all the new “independent” unions that the Solidarity Center and Unifor had launched, including SINTTIA, its Casa associate. Obrera to create similar unions, SNITIS in Matamoros and several others supported by LID. Hermanson then called for “an industrial and national approach focused on key employers and sectors in regional industrial clusters along the northern border or in Guanajuato’s automotive supply chains.” [onde Silao está localizado]Morelos and Puebla.
The installation of new pro-capitalist unions as traps to enslave Mexican workers and prevent the true unification of rank-and-file workers across North America is a key link in the war plans of American and Canadian imperialism. Given that these new unions are discredited as tools of management, the Morenistes play a crucial role in helping them maintain control over workers.
Concretely, opposing political apologists and direct agents of imperialism is one of the first steps towards class independence.
What does true independence mean for the working class?
The last article written by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, before he was killed by a Stalinist agent in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1940, addressed precisely this question (“Unions in the era of imperialist decadence”, remained unfinished). The main characteristic of unions in the current stage of capitalism, he writes, is their integration into the capitalist state. As an example, he cites the CTM in Mexico, which had already acquired a “semi-totalitarian” character by being fully integrated – even at an early stage – into the bourgeois nationalist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas.
After analyzing the case of Mexico, he added: “In reality, the task of the bourgeoisie is to liquidate the unions as organizations of class struggle and to replace them with the bureaucracy, as organizations of domination workers by the bourgeois state. »
Today the Left voice/LID supports union bureaucrats completely integrated into the imperialist state, as demonstrated by the UAW’s close collaboration with the Biden administration to betray the strike, while at the same time supporting overseas apparatuses that represent imperialism American and Canadian. These new unions in Mexico are integrated almost immediately into the current Morena party of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has aligned his government with the war policy of American and Canadian imperialism against China. Moreover, the entire legal structure of the new Mexican labor reform, ordered by Washington and Ottawa, gives veto power to the Ministry of Labor to recognize the registration of new unions and supervise their elections.
Trotsky, who would have despised the pseudo-leftists complicit in today’s imperialism, presented as his main demand the “total and unconditional independence of unions from the capitalist state“. [Grifo no original]. He explained:
Democratic unions, in the old sense of the term – organizations in which different tendencies fought within the same mass organization, more or less freely – can no longer exist. Just as it is not possible to return to the bourgeois democratic state, it is also not possible to return to the old workers’ democracy. The destiny of one reflects that of the other. In reality, the class independence of the unions in their relations with the bourgeois state can, under current conditions, be guaranteed only by an absolutely revolutionary leadership, that is to say the leadership of the Fourth International. Naturally, this orientation can and must be rational and guarantee the unions the maximum democracy imaginable in current concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International, the independence of the unions is impossible.
The International Committee of the Fourth International is the only party which has defended the political independence of workers throughout the post-war period and which has opposed the countless betrayals of the trade union bureaucracies, the lessons of which must be carefully studied by all class-conscious workers. Since then, the ICFI has further developed the Marxist vision of unions to “present concrete conditions”, while working intensively within them to free workers from the grip of bureaucracies.
As David North explains in The last year of Trotsky:
The trend toward “joint growth” of unions, the state, and capitalist corporations continued throughout the post-World War II period. Furthermore, the process of global economic integration and transnational production deprived unions of a national framework within which they could lobby for limited social reforms. No space remained for unions to resort, even moderately, to class struggle methods to achieve minimal gains. The unions, instead of extracting concessions from companies, have been transformed into auxiliaries of the State and companies, which serve to extract concessions from workers.
The process of corporatist degeneration over a period of eighty years prevents, except in the most exceptional circumstances, the resurrection of old unions. The alternative strategic path, mentioned by Trotsky in 1938 in Transition Program, is the policy that is consistent with current conditions; that is to say “to create in all possible cases independent combative organizations which correspond more precisely to the tasks of the struggle of the masses against bourgeois society and not to hesitate, if necessary, even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus.” unions”.
This path, which involves revolutionary opposition to the union apparatus, its pseudo-left apologists and the capitalist structure they defend, is the only possible one for the construction of truly independent workers’ organizations and guides the work of Workers’ International. Basis of the Alliance of Committees (IWA-RFC).
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