>Fortunately, there is always a way to find out who is closer to the
>truth - through practice. Chuck0, who prefers action to talk, should
>appreciate this. That's why he and his comrades could easily test
>out his proposition that one of the "small victories" (!) the
>antiwar movement could win would be to "organize, for example, union
>members to strike at ports on both coasts." It would probably not
>involve much expenditure of time and effort on their part - likely
>only a very brief round of leafletting the docks to gauge whether
>the workers' mood is such that they're ready to shut down maritime
>commerce and confront the state in an illegal political strike.
It is not necessary for workers to engage in an illegal political strike to raise the costs of business as usual for the US power elite, exerting indirect and occasionally even direct pressures on the war machine. If US workers asserted their own economic interests more militantly, even if they didn't link their struggle with the Iraq War in any way, that in itself would be good for those who oppose the Iraq War.
Observe the radical decline of industrial conflicts since the 1970s: "Table 1. Work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, 1947-2004" (at <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm>). The peaks within the tables were 1952 (470 stoppages) and 1974 (424 stoppages). The lowest number of stoppages recorded in the table, 14, was registered in 2003. Last year, the number of stoppages was still only 17. Existing unions alone will never be able to raise the level of class struggle from below. Currently unorganized workers have to discover such tools of industrial struggles as sit-downs and work-to-rule on their own and use them. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>