I will comment on this. I was for about 6 months also in the Kansas City, MO Branch when Mark was there. The soliloquy of events *started* with the 1975 Steel Workers Fight Back campaign. That was the real beginning of the SWP's turn. While it did "start" at Chicago's South Works (Mark, I believe it was actually smaller than your plant) and the huge and super large U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana (plant was a damn near 5 miles long!) it was a national campaign even outside of what we call "Basic Steel", that is the iron ore into finished steel. At that time they were still hot rolling steel in downtown Pittsburgh (Jones & Laughlin). The Fight Back campaign was indeed quite national. There were Fight back groups of rank and filers in *most* but not all Basic Steel sectors of the industry and as many in non-Basic Steel (the Steelworkers Union had organized many manufacturing jobs such as canneries and even some large chain coffee shops in NYC!).
Mark probably got from my my off the cuff analysis of the SWP's "campaign party" nonsense that developed out of the stupendous anti-war work the SWP did in the 1960s and early 1970s where the entire party was turned into an anti-Vietnam war machine. This is when the national campaign party nonsense started to develop where the success, for example, of the Lower East Side branch of the SWP in NY during the campaign for "bi-linguel/bi-cultural" school board campaign was successful and the SWP became literally the headquarters for the 2 communities in question, Puerto Rican and Chinese, against the right-wing United Federation of Teachers. From this the SWP "analysis" dictated a "turn toward the communities" which in 100% of the practice mean simply moving one's headquarters into the communities of the oppressed but ignoring actual struggles going there. Unlike, for example, the CPUSA which allowed their branches to also engage in local struggles, the SWP ignored them if it was part of the "National Campaign". The SWP suffered unknowingly from this idiotic strategy. The same applied to union struggles that Mark also touched on. In NYC there are union locals with over 30,000 members. One such was the very radical Hospital Workers Local 1199. During the 60s and 70s this lone NYC local (the national union was an old "red union" called the Retail, Wholesale, and Distributive Workers of America or the RWDWA. In otherwords a small warehouse and retail union that existed only the NE of the U.S.) it actually mobilized 10s of thousands of it's own members to march for civil rights and against the war. The union was dominated by Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican and immigrant works. The SWP did have a fraction inside it but when the turn to garment workers was announced, it dissolved the fraction to go into it because it was part of the "national campaign". Many of us questioned and opposed this but were shutdown. We didn't oppose an orientation toward garment workers but we didn't believe that dissolving the ONE fraction we actually recruited out of and had massive rank and file involvement was correct. And that was true increasingly into the 1980s as well. Very sad. David Walters -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29180): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29180 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104608543/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
