By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
> ...Ralph Schoenman, a fellow long in the sectarian trenches who somehow
> became the MWM's communications chair, hogged the mic, affecting the
> cadences of a Southern minister as he made introductions, among them his
> "best friend" Dick Gregory....
R.S. who I've seen speak at rallies, has to be the most boring, formulaic Trotskyist sectarian around. Even if Tariq Ali has some kind words about him in, "Street Fightin' Years, " when he accompanied Perry Anderson to Bolivia after Regis Debray was arrested.
Dick Gregory who has been friendly w/ the far right "populist" Liberty Lobby/Spotlight/American Free Press set.
>...ANSWER's Larry Holmes said afterward, "We hit a homerun."
>...Who ultimately defined the march? (The March on Washington of 8/63, M.P.) The masses who answered the call, and the organizers marshaled by Bayard Rustin, working under the aegis of the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who made sure they not only heard it but also had a way to make their answer felt in the flesh: 2,000 organizing manuals disbursed to 2,000 local leaders, 200 core volunteers, 2,000 buses, 21 chartered trains, 80,000 cheese-sandwich bag lunches packed by volunteers at Riverside Church, 400 march marshals, a seven-minute limit on speeches and a hook man to enforce it. Rustin had set a goal of 100,000 marchers. Two hours before the scheduled rally, police estimated the crowd at twice that. Buses from the North had been rolling through the Baltimore tunnel at a rate of 100 an hour. The final demonstrator count may have been 300,000, maybe more.
>...It may seem unfair to juxtapose the Million Worker March, as the October 17 demonstration was called, and one of the iconic events of modern American history, but the event's organizers invited the comparison; they even had a King, MLK III, on the Lincoln steps. The name, on the other hand, they borrowed from the Nation of Islam's 1995 Million Man March, a clash of symbols, given the Nation's views on racial separatism; and of politics, given the MMM's emphasis on personal responsibility and entrepreneurship, and the MWM's on the collective action of workers, union and nonunion, against structures that depend on racism, exploitation and war. The name was unfortunate for another reason, rousing expectations that the event didn't, couldn't, live up to, either in numbers (by generous calculations, there were 3,000 to 5,000 people) or in action (there was no march, which came as a rude surprise to workers I rode on the bus with from New York, who learned they were in for a day-long speechfest only upon disembarking in DC)...
>...In the days before and after the demonstration, AFL HQ on 16th Street was a ghost place, virtually everyone from secretaries to executive vice presidents having gone to "battleground states" to work the phone banks, leaflet communities, get out the vote. In places like Wisconsin, the 5,000-member Teamsters Local 200, with a rank and file TDU leadership, committed all its mobilization efforts in the run-up weeks to the election. Steelworkers in biker leathers were going door-to-door with an enthusiasm longtime labor political operatives say they have never seen.
From Philadelphia, the head of the Central Labor Council, which opposed war in Iraq before it began, told Gene Bruskin, co-convener of US Labor Against the War, that they couldn't spare a single body for the Million Worker March if it were held before the election; everyone was working flat-out, particularly on the weekends. Thomas found it insulting to suggest that unions couldn't do two things at one time, but realistically even doing one thing is hard for most of them, such is the state of underdevelopment. And Bruskin says he heard the same from other member groups, which, he believed, would have participated enthusiastically at another time.
Along with all those bodies focused on elections flow dollars, millions of them. Donna DeWitt, president of the South Carolina State AFL-CIO, the only state fed to endorse and organize for the MWM, said she understood the importance of the resource question for the federation ("they're broke!") but, like all the union people I spoke with, resented the memo. (And especially resented Schneiderman gesturing disapprovingly at her MWM T-shirt at an earlier federation gathering, and snapping, "We have to talk.") "If the AFL had supported and mobilized for the march-even tacitly, even by just encouraging affiliates to do what they could and giving a little money," DeWitt continued, "it would have been a lot bigger. As it is, they gave all affiliates an excuse not to participate." And, she added, gave organizations like USLAW and the Labor Party, which depend on unions and state and local labor bodies for their funding, a reason to be fearful about endorsing. Neither did endorse, though Bruskin did personally, as did individual Labor Party members, like DeWitt and Brenda Stokely, a march organizer who is also president of AFSCME District Council 1707 in New York.
It might be countered that march planners allowed the AFL its excuse; a post-election demo would have deprived them of it. Even if this stirred no more official support (and no one would want so much support that it translated into control), it would have made opposition more awkward, placing class concerns at the center of the table, prodding labor officials who might want to relax if Kerry wins and capitalizing on the public assertions of those like SEIU's Andy Stern that no matter who is president, labor will need to fight. In a switch from previous periods, labor strategists began talking seriously in October about organized pressure on a putative President-elect Kerry. Back in October 1992, when Jesse Jackson called for national civil rights and labor leaders to meet two weeks after the election to figure out how to put some concentrated heat on Bill Clinton, none of labor's representatives could make it.
As the rally on October 17 actually played out, there was no compelling sign that it would have made any difference whether the event occurred before or after the election. Who was its immediate target? It's hard to say. Speakers thundered against Bush but also against the Democrats. Some urged the crowd to vote for change and get their friends to do the same; others said not to worry about the election. None that I heard made a tactical United Front-style argument for voting for Kerry, followed by a clear program of resistance and pressure from the left on the issues. None I heard advocated for Nader or Cobb or anyone. A few floated dreams of a real labor party, of a general strike, requisite sky-castle of sectarian newspaper floggers and hangers-on. There were a couple of Kerry signs, multiple anti-Bush insignia, a few digs at union bureaucrats. The best speeches stuck to the heart of the matter: the war on workers, the war on the world.
Afterward, rally organizers said the election wasn't the issue; the demands transcend it. Certainly, but then what was the strategic value of the timing? When most of the organized working class is highly interested in an election outcome and the rest of the working class is made no stronger by disenfranchisement in a system where the rich do vote, being fuzzy about that election, on the cusp of the election, indicates a disconnect from the base. Demonstrations do need some kind of message discipline and critical mass if they are to be political interventions at a moment in time. Like politicians, workers can count.
Clearly, it was the AFL's resistance that demonstration organizers had to defuse, disarm, defy. Perhaps as important, though-because the day the AFL is a rank-and-file organization, the revolution will already have happened-is what one union electrician at the march called "activistism", the tendency of some left activists, because they spend so much time talking to each other, to convince themselves of a reality at an angle to actual fact. There is a perdurable romance about the rank and file's willingness, consciousness to move, often detectable by pronouncements beginning, "Working people know" In the summer there was talk among march organizers about rethinking the event if the numbers weren't building, if the money wasn't coming in sufficiently. It was never pursued further, mostly because nobody wanted to be seen as throwing cold water on the project. In the weeks before the march some activists involved with the planning, particularly those connected with International ANSWER, continued to insist that there would be 100,000 demonstrators, even when the buses so far on order would hold only 2,000. This is classic sectarian fantasism: look at the list of endorsers, who in this case were legion, some real, some not, and extrapolate. American Postal Workers Union, representing 330,000 workers; National Education Association, representing 3.5 million workers, and so on like that. That those organizations have no history of mobilizing workers, even for their own causes, is ignored.
Who defined the march? The activists, but perhaps just for now. Ralph Schoenman, a fellow long in the sectarian trenches who somehow became the MWM's communications chair, hogged the mic, affecting the cadences of a Southern minister as he made introductions, among them his "best friend" Dick Gregory. Even as the day lengthened and the crowd thinned, there seemed to be no adjustment of the program. A representative of twenty-six trade unionists who had come all the way from Japan for the march was kept waiting until the very end, when most of the audience had already headed off to meet their buses. ANSWER's Larry Holmes said afterward, "We hit a homerun." Because the event was broadcast over CSPAN, Clarence Thomas could justifiably say, "We may not have had a million people but we reached a million households." But he didn't talk about homeruns; like some of the workers from New York waiting for the bus home, he admitted disappointment.
The most hopeful note is that the people who did come were not by and large professional activists. From their jackets and T-shirts, flags and caps, they seemed mostly to be workers or organized immigrants. At least half the crowd was black. Two buses had come from South Carolina (compared with one from Chicago), and the day after, Ken Riley, president of International Longshore Association Local 1441 out of Charleston, said workers who had attended or watched it on TV thanked him for affording them an opportunity rare in their home state. (The local had hired two additional buses based on expressed interest, but in the end, Riley said, a lot of the younger longshoremen decided to take advantage of the older-timers' absence to get work on the docks.) As Ron Washington of Black Telephone Workers for Justice out of New Jersey said later, the overall success of the event will be determined by whether it begins to construct a skeletal framework on which people can build, uniting workers who are now fragmented and isolated, articulating the interests of the broad working class through specific fights but also helping those struggling to gain power or even just develop a strong left opposition in their unions. The nature of leadership does, after all, influence the nature of engagement.
There's no rule of politics that says national mobilizations must come only after strong local networks have been built and are active, but it helps. The 1963 March on Washington followed at least eight years of vigorous local militancy. But there's no saying it can't work the other way around, especially if the most serious people behind this effort forge good regional leadership, good coalitions, good communication and define a clear aim and enemy. For the past seven years the AFL has been trying to fan interest in the idea of the right to organize as the spark for a new civil rights movement. But as tough, progressive black trade unionists, many of whom participated in the MWM, regularly say, the old civil rights movement is yet unfinished. And there's no way you're going to get a person who can't find a job, can't feed the kids, has no health care or is about to be sent to jail or Iraq to believe that the most important thing in life is the right to form a union. Now, if the union cut a public presence caring for that job, those kids, that health care, that jail sentence and that war, maybe...
Joann Wypijewski is a writer living in New York. She contributed an essay on Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition to CounterPunch's new book, Dime's Worth of Difference. She can be reached at: She can be reached at: jwp at thenation.com
-- Michael Pugliese, overposted, over and out