Hi Hari,
This will be long but the easy question first. The RWDWA (the actual name "R
etail, Wholesale and Department Store Union" ). It was very much a "catch all"
union in dozens of different service and industrial sectors. It was what often
is term in U.S. labor union lingo an "Amalgamated" type of union. It was
probably the only union to launch a strike, in 1944, that the U.S. government
intervened in order to win the strike for the workers, the '44 Montgomery Ward
strike. Strange stuff, and even after FDR threatened to nationalize the company
and even seizing the stores with troops, the union still never got recognized
by the company.
Let's say, in a country, there is a struggle involving, say, tenants are a huge
housing project someplace. That would be local struggle. It could have national
implications, of course, but the actual struggle is my those tenants only who
fact a unique situation. Would a revolutionary party then assume that that
struggle could be duplicated on a national level? That the entire
party/league/group should be mobilized about this one local action and start
"organizing tenants"? Probably not.
The SWP saw an opportunity around a branch in a very oppressed neighborhood in
New York's Lower East Side (LES). The party moved its local headquarters there
(or opened up a new one, I don't remember) and with an amazing result where the
community of mostly Puerto Ricans, Chinese and elderly Jewish folks bonded with
the branch. We even had a few leaflets in Yiddish! We went up against the
powerful right wing teachers union (40,000 members) that ran the union as a
Jewish job trust. This was not uncommon in NYC and the surrounding area for
certain ethnic groups to dominate particular industries. This was true to a
significant degree into the 70s. Prior to this, in the 1960s there was a move
to establish community boards of education as a demand by Black and Puerto
Rican parents to control their community. The UFT, the union, went on strike in
1969 against this. There is MUCH written on this strike left groups and it
divided to some degree many socialist and Marxist organizations whether to
support the union or the community. Most supported the community and saw this
was a racist strike and called for it be smashed (though not getting rid of the
union). The action against the UFT was lead by the few thousand Black and
Puerto Rican teachers, many in socialist groups themselves. The SWP sided with
every Maoist group (very siginficant back then) and the various Puerto Rican
socialist groups (extremely influential at that time that eventually became the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party).
To make a VERY log story short, the community control folks *basically* won and
so there was no dozens of local boards of education. The UFT shifted tactics,
obviously, and sought control over all the elected school boards in NYC. The
*central* demands in the actions around an election campaign was the "Por Los
Niños" ("For the Children") slate supported by the SWP and included an SWP
member was for the demand I noted in my previous comment "For
Bilingual/Bicultural Education". Pretty simple and straight forward. That would
of required hiring a lot of Spanish speaking (and Chinese) teachers, something
anathema to the UFT leadership, lead by a man name Albert Shanker (if you ever
saw the Woody Alan movie "Sleeper" he is referenced as how the "nuclear war
started, when a man by the name of Albert Shanker got a hold of a nuclear
weapon...").
I believe the SWPer Katherine Sojourner, even got elected in this election. The
key thing is that the SWP was doing a real local community struggle and do so
successfully. The conclusion the SWP leadership came to however, was totally
without merit. It viewed, in light of the fact that the SWP monotonically
organizing around the "national campaign party" meant that EVERY branch, by
this time probably over 50 branches, had to move into the local community
dominated by oppressed nationalities. And all like 1500 SWPers did just that.
But as their were no "national" or even local campaigns lead by local community
activists of the type we saw in the LES it was a totally mechanical move by the
SWP which resulted in absolutely nothing for the party OR the communities they
moved into.
So Hari, this what is meant by "local" vs "national". If there was a struggle
by workers in a local industry [think of the Local 1199 union with 30,000
workers in NYC] but couldn't organize a "national fraction" [Local 1199 at that
time was basically a big union in NYC and a very small one in other cities in
the NE of the US] the SWP would ignore that strike, though they would write
about the strike anyone they may of recruited out of that union, they would
then shortly ask them to quit their jobs and get into an industry where the SWP
had a.... national... fraction. It was beyond idiotic.
David
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