LETTER FROM LENA SOLOW

I’m a new mom to a two month old and it has been hard this winter to watch protests and canvasses from afar. I am feeling an intense isolation from organizing alongside an intense sense of solidarity with other mothers. Reading the essays from Rebekkah Dilts and LuLing Osofsky in Issue 4 was a real balm as I’ve thought about how to incorporate being a parent into my organizing and not see it as a barrier to work around.

LETTER FROM NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

I commend the editors of Long-Haul for publishing the article by Matt Ray and Matthew Wranovics, “The Worst Among the Bad: Auto Workers and Class Power in Fremont, California (Pt 1).”  It is an excellent probe into the sources and character of shop-floor radicalism prevalent at General Motors’ once brand-new assembly plant in the East Bay. It demonstrates the importance of an ideologically committed strata to the larger mobilization of a heterogenous working class newly recruited to a suburban workplace that management had sited there precisely to forestall such militancy.

On the evening of September 14, 1970, I was among the dozen or so young people from the Berkeley branch of the International Socialists who drove down to Fremont to join the picket lines scheduled for midnight as the United Auto Workers began their first company-wide strike in a quarter century at what was then the nation’s largest – and arguably – most powerful company. We brought with us hand-lettered signs, some of which proclaimed “GM: Mark of Exploitation,” or “Workers Power.”

When we got to the union hall around 10pm there were already some workers milling around, perhaps from the day shift. They quickly took our signs, which were far more provocative than those provided by the union. I remember one of the official signs, “UAW Demands Equity,” which then struck me as abstract and punchless. It still does.

We were outside when we noticed workers running down the company road that led from the plant and into the union hall. This was around 10:30 or 11:00pm and it was clear that these workers themselves wanted to stop the assembly line and not wait for the official midnight inauguration of the strike. Along the way we could hear and see that they broke the windows at the GM entrance station, but we were unaware that night of the other damage reported by Ray and Wranovics in their article. A couple of days later, the Oakland Tribune quoted the West Coast UAW Regional Director Paul Schrade, who denounced “Berkeley radicals” for causing all the damage. This was amusing but also telling. Schrade was by far the most progressive of all the top UAW leaders. He identified with the New Left, had been a strong supporter of Cesar Chavez-led farmworker struggle, and was an early leader, at least among Democrats and unionists, of opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was wounded in June 1968 because he was standing next to Robert Kennedy when the senator was assassinated at a Los Angeles hotel.

However, none of the above should be taken in agreement with the perspective of the late Martin Glaberman, whose work is invoked by the Editorial Collective in their “Yet It Moves” opening statement. Glaberman was a life-long militant and Marxist writer whose celebration of working-class “self-activity” offered readers, then and now, much inspiration and insight. But his resolute condemnation of the union movement – indeed any effort to institutionalize worker aspirations that fell short of the revolution – was a recipe for passivity and an abdication of any effort to reform or revitalize the actually existing union movement. Consciousness is episodic: it is never static or embedded but rises and falls among workers as well as other strata of the population. Unions crystalize a certain level of working-class understanding of the world, and they maintain a staff and funds designed to propagate that perspective. They are often lousy at the task or even retrograde, but when they are effective such institutions advance and enhance a level of working-class self-awareness that does in fact have an impact within both the political arena and on the “shop-floor.” We need more of them.