Lecture 1: Overview and the Coal-Yard Strikes

Introduction by the chair

Chair: The summer school is very proud to finish up its series of studying this summer with Farrell Dobbs, who's the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in this country. Farrell was a leader in the 1934 Minneapolis truck driver strikes, and in 1941 left a top position with the Teamsters Union in order to become National Labor Secretary for the Socialist Workers Party. In that same year, 1941, he and 17 other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and of the Minneapolis strikes were the first to be convicted under the Smith Act and spent time in prison as a result of this conviction. With DeBerry as a candidate for president, it's interesting to note, Farrell has been the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party four times, beginning in 1948, and has had many experiences in election campaign work, work that we're involved in at this time. So we're very proud now to present the first of four lectures on the Minneapolis strikes and the role of the revolutionary party, and present Farrell Dobbs.

Why class-struggle history matters to young people

Farrell Dobbs: Comrade Chairman, comrades. In preparing these talks on the Minneapolis strikes, I have undertaken to fashion a presentation primarily in a way that I hope will be most helpful to the young comrades who comprise this audience, recognizing on the one side the importance of class-struggle history to the young people of today and on the other side the extremely limited opportunity you have in contemporary times to get a real feel of the revolutionary potential of the working class from the labor movement as it exists today.

In fact, each new generation coming into the world faces an experience that is somewhat like the situation when you walk into a theater in the middle of a play. As young people attain maturity, they walk into the middle of a human drama that has been going on for thousands of years. Like the latecomer to the theater, you must first try to orient yourself on the basis of the scene as it is unfolding at the moment. It takes time to find clues to preceding events and to begin an assessment of what the future holds in store. In fact, it becomes a huge task to grasp the class-struggle essence of social history and to begin to arrive at the long view of the human story. From their earliest consciousness of social life about them, young people of each succeeding generation in our society are falsely indoctrinated by the capitalist educational and propaganda media.

Capitalist society is presented as the ultimate in social organization, so perfect an institution that there can be no meaningful change except for the worse. The brutal class rule of monopoly capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog social mores, is depicted as the ultimate of democracy in what is presented as a so-called classless society. American labor is pictured as a docile reform movement that is wedded to capitalism for all time. Such references as the prevailing capitalist media do make to this country's class-struggle history give the connotation that those struggles involve nothing more than a mob of uneducated workers who were misled by un-American agitators having conspiratorial aims. It is inferred that any legitimate grievances the workers had, that the alleged rabble-rousers tried to seize upon, were handsomely corrected by the fair-minded capitalists once they were called to their attention; that the rabble, as they called it, was justifiably put in its place through police repression; that labor agitators were public enemies to be dealt with summarily, as in the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs here in Chicago; and that all red-blooded Americans cheered the capitalists and the cops and the hangmen. That's the picture they try to create of the real class struggles that unfold in this country.

Confronted with such falsifications of labor history, young people have little to rely on at the outset in their search for the truth. They must perforce begin by trying to assess the revolutionary potential of the working class in terms of the organized labor movement as they see it today. Unfortunately, young people don't get much from the contemporary image of the union movement to help them in that direction. It has been 18 years since the last major demonstration of the power of the working class in the great strike wave of 1945-46. Eighteen years. That's the whole conscious lifespan of young people today, in which there has been no chance to get a feel in life of the revolutionary power inherent in the working class.

Instead, you see a union movement that is dominated by a capitalist-minded bureaucracy, a gang of so-called leaders at the head of the working class who support every vicious reactionary foreign policy move of the imperialist ruling class in this country, who back the Washington tyrants in their attempt to strangle the liberating Cuban revolution, who support the outrage against humanity that is being committed in Vietnam today by this same imperialist gang in Washington, who support every action of the imperialists across the world that cuts across the needs and the interests of working people in other countries. A gang of bureaucratic misleaders who are permitting the white supremacists to split the working class by lending themselves, if you please, to generating white prejudice against Negroes in the working class, instead of mobilizing labor in solidarity with the Negro people in their freedom struggle to advance the cause of the working class as a whole. A gang of union bureaucrats that paralyze the union power at the point of production. They abandon workers who are losing out in the rat race for jobs under automation. They turn their backs on the youth coming onto the labor market who can't find a job for love nor money, and base themselves on an ever-narrowing strata of privileged or semi-privileged workers who are able to survive. They side with the bosses against the militants in the unions and in the plants every time the chips are down. And they live like lords on very handsome salaries and they strut about as labor statesmen, selling out the interests of the working class day in and day out.

They keep labor tied to capitalist political rule, destroying thereby the capacity of the unions to really serve the interests of the workers, because the power to offset, to checkmate, struggles made by the workers at the point of production remains in the hands of the capitalist ruling class. They strip the unions of any capacity to influence national affairs, and they cause a stagnation of the union movement through adaptation to the capitalist status quo in every way, shape and form.

There are a series of adverse consequences to this bureaucratic misleadership that you witness in the unions today. Doubts are created in the minds of young people who have no way to know what the class is really capable of, as to whether or not there are any real revolutionary capacities in the working class. Illusions are fed that middle-class intellectuals must step forward and take over the vanguard revolutionary role that is the rightful historic task of the workers. Diverse patterns of opportunist adaptation to capitalist reform concepts become impregnated upon potential revolutionary militants. In other cases, impatient militants try to substitute sectarian adventures for the lack of motion of the mass, and get in the way of building the vanguard party, get in the way of forging the struggle movement, get in the way of advancing the basic processes of struggle. Tendencies are steadily fed to proclaim Marxism obsolete, at least in the United States.

In these circumstances it's not easy for people to perceive objective class truth, and it is precisely here that the revolutionary vanguard party of the working class plays a decisive role, as the bridge in historic consciousness to restore an understanding of the revolutionary role of the working class in times such as these, to show how a vanguard party can lead in an upsurge of struggle on the part of the working class, how to apply working-class principles in action, and how to perceive what is necessary and what is possible by way of advancing the class struggle at a given conjuncture. In the talks that I'm going to give on the Minneapolis strikes, I will undertake to discuss these basic factors in the concrete terms of those struggles, to examine the actual role of the revolutionary vanguard party in those mass actions, to study the character of the vanguard party as the highest organized form of class consciousness through which class leadership must be forged.

Labor before the upsurge of the 1930s

Turning back then to earlier times, let us observe first that the 1934 events, which will constitute the central struggle that we are going to discuss, were a study in polar opposites of union policy. On the one side, then as now, there was a bureaucratic usurpation of workers' democracy in the union movement, such as it was: bureaucrats who distrusted and feared the workers, who sought to regiment the rank and file on a dictatorial basis and tried to subvert the union power to their own bureaucratic special interests and, in the last analysis, to the alien class interests of the bosses themselves. On the other side appeared a class-struggle policy geared to the objective reality of the time, based on the concept of the workers' right to act in their own class interests, which is the fundamental thing that distinguishes workers' democracy from so-called capitalist democracy.

Before we take up that struggle, however, I think it will be useful to take a brief look at the objective situation that preceded the explosion of labor radicalization in the '30s. For a good many years prior to the development of those struggles there had been a relative passivity and a seeming apathy among the workers, just as is the case today. If anything, the situation was even worse, because the working class was atomized organizationally. They had no real organizational cohesion to any significant degree, even at the union level. In 1933, the American Federation of Labor (we're talking now about a period before the CIO even came into being) had only some two million members. That was the lowest figure of the membership of the central organization of labor, the AFL, since 1916, 17 years before. And it represented a decline to about half of the some four million workers that were in the AFL at the zenith of the strike wave that followed immediately after World War I.

The AFL of that day was headed by an ingrown, reactionary, craft-union-minded bureaucracy. They were class collaborationists to the extreme in their relations with the bosses, and they were dictatorial to the nth degree in their relations with the rank and file of the unions. They looked upon the unorganized masses as rabble. In one of his editorials at the time in the Teamsters magazine, Daniel J. Tobin, the then president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whom we're going to meet tonight and in the next three days in a whole series of ways under a whole combination of circumstances, that then president of the Teamsters Union referred to the unorganized workers (and he didn't mean only those that he wouldn't let come into the Teamsters union of Minneapolis, he meant the workers throughout basic industry). He called them rabble. That was his mentality, and it was typical of the mentality of the heads of the craft unions.

In these circumstances, the pundits of those times, as you hear said today, claimed that the working class was impotent. It was incapable of asserting itself in meaningful struggle. But then came a revolt of these seemingly docile workers. It began in several quarters. Minneapolis was one, San Francisco was another, Toledo was a third. It started a process of struggle that had its culmination in the sweep and drive of the CIO a few years later. The workers were goaded to action by the problem of deep unemployment under depression conditions. The bosses were slashing pay right and left, and with a boss's market par excellence from the point of view of the employment relationship, there was total tyranny on the job. These circumstances impelled the class toward action. A second factor that helped to trigger the explosion was the demagogic act of Roosevelt, at the inception of the New Deal after he came to office in the spring of 1933, in enacting the National Industrial Recovery Act, which recognized the right of the workers to organize. It gave a wedge.

Now, another thing to note, and I'm still talking about the alleged passivity and apathy of workers, is that when the workers did move in those days, they brought up their grievances from way back. It would appear then that they hadn't been quite as passive in their desires as it would seem. I recall a comparable situation. I was in Montgomery, Alabama, at the time of the King trial during the boycott there in 1956. A woman took the stand testifying to the discrimination against Negroes in the transportation system there, and she was being questioned by the defense attorney. This was the spring of 1956. The attorney asked her if she had ever had a bad experience on the transportation system. She began her answer by saying, "Yes, sir, in 1919." She just rolled the clock and the calendar back, and she was ready to just pour forth years and years and years of pent-up wrath and determination to do something about it. The judge cut her off, but nevertheless it told the story. In that sense, you see, apathy is a relative thing; the changes that are taking place in the thinking of a class, of a mass, are not always immediately apparent.

Now, from yet another point of view, in labor struggles you have this historic condition: so long as workers feel that they have a chance to hold their own and maybe hope in time, bit by bit, drip by drip and dab by dab, to get a reform or two, they will not tend to radicalize. They will not tend to move forward in their mass into struggle. But the minute they begin to lose ground, something gets taken away from them, their present and their future becomes more and more precarious, then tinder begins to pile up, leading toward a potential radicalization. And any one of a whole series of particular sparks can light that tinder. Once ignited, under these conditions, the class-struggle fires tend to spread quite rapidly. Just compare here again the Negro struggle today. Look at the accelerated sweep and momentum with which the Negro struggle has widened and deepened in just the last few years. You get there a preview, in contemporary terms of the Negro struggle, of the way mass action becomes contagious within any given mass formation and between mass formations once struggle is in the air.

Why Minneapolis

Now, one of the sparks was the Minneapolis strikes of 1934. It took place parallel with the battle of the longshoremen in San Francisco and the auto workers in Toledo, Ohio. We're going to discuss now the Minneapolis struggle, and in doing so try to go into some detail about the forces in motion, the strategy and tactics that were inherent to the struggle, the nature of the class forces counterposed one against the other, and how you take an idea and at the proper time set it alive and set a mass on fire.

The Minneapolis development was exceptional in a number of ways, in addition to this particular vanguard role in the national struggles of that day. It's important to recognize that Minneapolis is an economic byway when you think in terms of the industrial complex of the country. Certainly then there wasn't any semblance whatever of any basic industry in the area, or even any important decentralized component of a basic industry. In short, it was not in the main theater of class war in terms of masses and in terms of the concentration of those sections of the working class, the industrial workers in basic industry, who had the greatest potential power. Another unusual factor was the peculiar political background in Minnesota. There existed what was known as the Farmer-Labor Party, which in a sense cohabited with the Democrats in national politics and yet acted on its own in a number of respects, as we shall see, in state politics. This had lent a certain favorable political aura to the potential struggle atmosphere in the town.

In another sense, the action there was unusual because in the manner in which it unfolded, it turned out that the strikes played a big national role: first by giving a demonstration of what can be accomplished when there is a successful fusion of class spontaneity among the workers and class consciousness on the part of the revolutionary vanguard. It set an example of workers' power in action, going up against the class enemy and all its instrumentalities of repression on a no-holds-barred basis, and helped thereby to stimulate and promote later militancy in the CIO. Without the presence of the cadres of our party who were there on the ground, the Trotskyists, in Minneapolis at that time, the labor movement would have remained in the rear guard of the radicalization of the '30s. It would not have been in the vanguard.

I gave you a thumbnail description of the nature of the general craft union leadership. We'll come to it in more detail later with respect to the Teamsters unions there. But let me just give you a bit of a picture of the other side of the coin. The employers were tightly organized in a setup known as the Citizens Alliance. It was a formation dominated by the biggest, most powerful, wealthiest, most influential bosses around town, and it rode herd over every little fly-by-night boss in the community when it came to labor relations. Through the structure and functioning of the Citizens Alliance, the bosses had succeeded in breaking every major strike in that town since World War I. They had kept Minneapolis an open-shop town and they had kept employment strictly on the basis of open-shop conditions. Everything for the boss and damn little for the worker. It took a class war to beat this all-dominant boss gang, and that's why, if there hadn't been a conscious revolutionary leadership in that potential for struggle, Minneapolis would have remained in the rear guard and would not have played the role it did in the vanguard of the labor upsurge of the '30s.

The initial party cadre

So let's look a little deeper into that now from the point of view of the key role played throughout the struggles that were to come in Minneapolis by the initial party cadre. By that I mean those comrades who were already in the party, already with revolutionary consciousness, as distinguished from others that were to come in later during the struggle. They had a rich political and trade union background. The key figures in the initial party cadre in the Minneapolis situation stem back to the days of the IWW and the Debs movement. They had been among the founding members of the Communist Party. They had been supporters of Trotsky in the showdown fight with Stalin that led to the split in the Communist International in 1928. They were educated, they were seasoned, they were experienced politically, and they had had quite a good bit of trade union experience, ranging all the way from participation in the free speech fights of the IWW to playing key roles as rank-and-file leaders in such actions as the '22 strike of the railway shopmen. They had been red-baited out of the AFL during the period of reaction in the latter part of the '20s, but now these were new times, there were better prospects, and they were about to turn their hand to it and see what they could accomplish.

The central leaders of the initial cadre in Minneapolis were Comrades Ray Dunne and Carl Skoglund. Not the least of the things that should be observed about the role they played was the tremendous capacity that they showed to work as a team, as a leadership team, all the way through that battle. If you were to talk with them, you can talk with Ray, you can't talk with Carl anymore, he passed on some years ago, they would agree, or would have agreed, that perhaps Skogie made just a little larger contribution on the strategic side, Ray made a little larger contribution on the tactical side. That doesn't mean that Ray Dunne didn't know a whole lot about strategy and it doesn't mean that Carl Skoglund didn't know a whole lot about tactics, but each just had a little extra shade of strength in these directions.

But part of the bigness, part of what it takes to make a revolutionary leadership, and a revolutionary leadership has always got to be a team, you can't build a vanguard party and you can't lead a showdown fight where you're fighting for keeps if you're going to have a leadership that's composed of strutting, posturing individual stars who are more concerned about showing what a big wheeler-dealer they are than of selflessly giving everything that's in them to the best of their ability to help along the battle as a whole. This was not the least of the examples. If teamwork developed in the whole initial revolutionary cadre and absorbed and integrated on a team basis young revolutionists that were to come right out of the ranks of the strikers into the party during that struggle, it was before everything else because of this magnificent example that was set by these two central leaders of the local cadre in working as a team.

Now, in thinking out the broad strategy and the main lines of tactics of the situation, they were thinking in terms of organizing Minneapolis as a start, radiating outward to organize the workers in the whole area. In short, they wanted to get the class-struggle battle on the road as best they could as a beginning there and go forward and do everything they could to carry it as far and as wide and as deep as possible. They saw the truck drivers as the key to the Minneapolis labor movement because of the peculiar strategic features of the truck driving industry, particularly in a community of that kind. I don't think I have to go into details. You see enough trucks around to know that there's very little that goes on in the economic structure that trucks aren't involved in to one extent or another, and therefore a strong truck drivers' union plays a key role in many respects in organizing, building, extending and knitting the power of the working class.

The Teamsters structure and finding a point of entry

But what kind of a truck drivers' union did they have to begin with? The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen and Helpers was the name of the union. Horses in the greater part of the trucking there were becoming about as rare as a one-armed cornetist with the itch. Stablemen were even somewhat passé. But yet, this was the name. It was not just simply a matter of a name that was appropriate at a far earlier time hanging on because nobody had gotten around to changing it. The name also typified the mentality of the officialdom of the local unions as well as the whole top hierarchy, including Tobin himself. It was a completely craft setup, but even more, it was a polyglot of craft subdivisions of crafts. It wasn't bad enough just to narrow the organizational structure down to truck drivers. They had a separate local union set up for drivers that picked up the garbage. Another one for drivers that hauled freight. Another one for drivers that delivered newspapers. Another one for drivers that went out with a little cart, they used to call him the jewel tea man, who went out and sold coffee, tea, spices, bread, and the Farmer's Almanac in the neighborhoods. Whatever the particular commodity was at the back end of the truck, their tendency was to set up a specific craft local for that sphere. The result was that it kept the workers broken up into little groups, so that there could never be, even in those small unions, any collection of workers within a given local that could make any serious trouble for the business agent and the rest of the bureaucrats that dominated the union.

Then, to cap the climax, they knit these together in what's called a Teamsters Joint Council, in which the officials that sat on top of each of these subdivisions of crafts that I've described to you came together as a council, and they had constitutional powers and authorities that contravened, to all practical intents and purposes, the autonomous rights of these little locals of the subdivisions of the craft. They were class collaborationists to the core. Their idea of how to organize was to go out and get a boss here and a boss there that could see the logic of signing a contract with the union if the union would then carry on a propaganda campaign that the organized labor movement of the town as a whole should patronize that boss because he's union. And then they ignored every other unorganized worker. All they wanted was just enough workers so that they could pay the hall rent at the Central Labor Union headquarters where they acted, and so that the union business agent, who had the key post, could get his weekly salary, which he strove with considerable success to make quite handsome. Not the kind of figures they pay today, different times, different criteria, but relative to what the workers were getting, the business agent was paid quite handsomely.

That, as I have described to you, was a bureaucrat-ridden structure. That wasn't a very promising thing, but it was an instrument with which to begin. If you look deeper at it, there was a possibility, as events were to demonstrate, that this class-collaborationist organizational structure could be used to start a class battle that was going to transform that town, and transform the union in the process of the battle. The main problem was to find a point of entry.

Now here we come to a feature of bureaucracies, operated then, operates now. A bureaucracy tries to be monolithic, but it does not necessarily follow that a bureaucracy can become or can remain wholly monolithic. It depends on the ebb and flow of the objective processes that militate toward or against struggle potential in the ranks of the working class. In broad terms, you can say that a bureaucracy is divisible into upper and lower echelons. The farther a bureaucrat is away from the rank-and-file worker at the point of production, the more class collaborationist, the more reactionary, the more dictatorial he will be. But the closer the bureaucrat is to daily contact with the workers at the point of production, the more he is subject to pressures that make it difficult for him to be quite such a collaborator with the boss, quite such a dictator over the workers. The upper echelon will dominate the lower, or the lower will shake up a little the upper echelon, depending on whether or not class-struggle pressures are being generated in the ranks of the organization at a given conjuncture.

When struggle moods are developing, when potential for class battle is in the air, one of the important things to do is to begin to look for a place to rupture the bureaucratic monoliths, find a place to drive in a wedge. That was the problem that confronted the party cadre in Minneapolis on the eve of the 1934 battles. The key was found within the executive board of Local 574. Local 574 had what was known as a general drivers' charter, which meant it was a catchall. If some particular body of workers, for one reason or another, wanted to join the union, the bureaucrats wanted to take them in, they would take them in to 574. They might let them remain there a while, or they might put them in another union. You know, they might create another little craft out of it. It was a kind of a catch basin for workers that accidentally wandered into the union in one way or another, and the bureaucrats liked the color of their money and let them pay dues.

The executive board of Local 574 was made up of men who worked for transfer companies, as they were called, that haul freight, or one was an outfit that moved furniture. Another was representative of a group of workers that were the delivery men for one newspaper that the drivers were organizing, and so on. The two leading figures were Bill Brown, who was the president of the union, a man that had come out of the industry. He was working full-time, not on the organization staff of Local 574, but on the general organizing staff of the Central Labor Union, the composite body of all the AFL unions in the town. The second was a fellow by the name of Cliff Hall, who was a milk wagon driver. There was a milk wagon drivers' union, but he was on loan to 574 as the business agent because he'd been pretty well trained in the mores of business agenting in Teamsters terms of those times, and he was a good watchdog to have in the local. Hall was everything that is wrong about what a union leader ought to be. He was the opposite of everything that it takes for a leader to serve the interests of workers. It's no accident that he got the nickname Beelzebub from the truck drivers, who told quite a bit about what he was.

Brown was a man who had a capacity for militancy within him. He had a certain degree of limited social understanding. He had guts, which is a commodity without which no leader in any mass organization is worth a continental damn, and he had a capacity to be flexible. He got caught in the vortex of the events just at a time when he could have gone one way or the other. He could have gone the road of the gravy train or he could, as he proved, go the road he went. It depended on what happened in the larger frame of things at that particular moment in his life. But as it turned out, struggle was in the air, the potential for the organization of the drivers was present. Brown was this kind of a person, and the Trotskyists were pounding on the door of Teamsters Local 574 with quite a significant body of men they wanted to bring into the union.

There was one other figure, the counterpart of Brown, a man by the name of Frozig [?], who worked on a truck in the transfer industry, who was the one man among those that had been given some kind of a little two-bit pie card by the business agent, a little privilege here, a little privilege there. So they sit on the executive board, and then they would vote with the business agent. Frozig [?] was the exception to this. He quickly proved capable of following Brown as against Hall. The executive board is seven plus the business agent, and it became very quickly a polarization of Brown, backed by Frozig [?], on one side and Hall, backed by the five other members of the executive board, on the other.

The coal yards: an unofficial organizing drive

All right, here's the crack in the door. Now the problem is to get a crowbar, get it properly inserted, and bust the hasp or knock the door off the hinges or somehow or other get the thing open. The workers in the coal yards provided the crowbar with which the door of Local 574 was pried open. To begin with, a number of the party comrades of the cadre that existed on the eve of the struggle had gotten jobs in the coal yards, among them Ray Dunne and Carl Skoglund. In these coal yards they found some young new potential leaders at hand that were very susceptible to the education that the comrades began to give them about what this whole fight is about and what's got to be done in order to get around Beelzebub, get into that union, get Brown to help us, get Frozig [?] to help us, and let's get this battle going.

In addition to that, the workers in the coal yards were chafing under harsh and worsening conditions. I don't know if you ever spent a day operating the business end of a number 10 scoop or lugging coal in 100-pound batches in a canvas sack on a steel frame, sometimes climbing three or four flights of stairs to dump it in somebody's coal box up there. But these are some of the things that these coal yard workers did. And they got long hours and they got no work unless there was work at hand, unless there was a load of coal to be loaded, a carload of coal to be unloaded in the yard, a load to be thrown on a truck, or a batch to be carried in one of these canvas sacks upstairs. The rest of the time they just hung around all hours in the coal yard, and the boss says, I don't need you, so they sat around. Or if he needed them he would hire them and give them a starvation wage for whatever limited period of time in a given workday it took to do the job he had for them. That's the way they got prosperity in this best-of-all capitalist world.

They were unorganized, and the union bureaucrats didn't want it. Remember, it's still five to two up there in the Local 574 executive board. So it became necessary to start the initial organization drive outside the official union movement. Now, I told you, the coal yard workers had to hang around the yard just to while away their time in between this little job or that little job the boss gave them. Well, they used to play blackjack, poker. If they had a particularly good day, they might even get out a pair of dice and roll them a while for entertainment. It leaves a lot of room and a lot of time for conversation, and there was quite a subject to talk about. Now, the workers, when they weren't employed, had to be in the yard, or when they were employed, the boss put up a little shack for them with a potbellied stove in it. This is wintertime, and it gets cold in Minnesota, as cold as it is here in Chicago. Perhaps the best description of the shacks is that the workers called them doghouses. So the doghouses became the instrumentality through which an unofficial organization drive got started.

The bosses every once in a while have their get-togethers, compare notes, how you get along, gouging the workers, what do you mean stealing my customer? You know how bosses are, you know, all sweetness and light. Our comrades, in thinking out the strategy of the thing, thought, well, why don't we try to play a little on the gullibility of the bosses here? So they accomplished the organization of a general get-together of potential union members not only with the blessing in advance of the boss, but the boss paid the hall rent and bought the beer. It just went to the ball. Look, you have your smokers. Don't you think it makes for better relationships if the men get together once in a while and compare experiences? And since you're pretty well off, don't you think it would be a nice gesture if you bought a little beer for the boys, and so on? So between the conversations in the doghouses and things like the smokers, they began to get a formation among these workers who wanted to organize that Local 574 did not want. And they began to press a few modest demands, not much.

This is another one of the artistries of strategy and tactics in any kind of an action, any kind of a struggle. One should never be overcautious, but at the same time it's better to shoot for just a little bit less than you could have accomplished and make it, or do a little better, than it is to overreach yourself, get a little too fast in your timing, get a little bit too ambitious and try to lop off too big a chunk at once and get a setback. The important thing always, when you're trying to mobilize and lead a body into action, is to develop a momentum that shows steady gain, steady progress, steady growth in the force, steady development of the possibility for expanding the sphere of action, but always heading in the right direction. I say you shouldn't be overcautious, but it's not decisive in the last analysis how fast or how slow you move, provided you've got the motion going in the right direction. This is what they accomplished, and it served to gather together the forces and develop the necessary struggle momentum to crash into Local 574.

An interlude: the charge of company unionism

But just shortly before that was accomplished, there was an interlude that is worth commenting about. In some other places in the country, one of the places being New York, there were a few petty-bourgeois impressionists who listened to the reports that were made at party meetings about the work of the comrades in the Minneapolis coal yards, and they got deeply suspicious. You can't trust these trade union opportunists. The next thing you know, a charge is advanced that the comrades are practicing company union policies in the Minneapolis coal yards. Now, that wasn't just a phenomenon of that moment. It had happened before, it's happened since. One in every so many you run across is that type today: people that haven't had any real experience in the class struggle, or for some reason or other, although they're very adept at reading the books about the class struggle and learning what it says so well that they can oftentimes recite it at length, seem to have untoward difficulty in understanding how you take those words, those concepts, and translate them into life. A type, I think, if you haven't met them you'll meet them in your time in the movement. A type, you might say, a little long on lung power and a little short on brain power. Well, anyway, in this kind of a setting, with a struggle to come that wasn't exactly a pink tea, there was this interlude where the charge is raised of company unions.

I think it's worth mentioning from another point of view. It's very, very important, where mass actions are taking place, not to be too hasty to make too sweeping and too categoric a judgment about what is going on in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour tactics of that struggle, because there are many aspects to it. And oftentimes things move very fast. As a matter of fact, that's again something that is different from the situation today. Today sometimes a person can make pretensions about having a deep-going knowledge of exactly what ought to be done in a struggle situation and can appear to be quite an authoritative thinker, because at the given moment there is no basis to test the differences of opinion in life. So it becomes a matter of arguing, voting, arguing, voting, arguing, voting. But when struggle is in the air, it doesn't take very long. In this case, it was to take only just a few weeks to demonstrate they didn't know what they were talking about. Oftentimes in struggle, you can make a decision at seven o'clock in the morning and by 7:45 or eight o'clock the answer's in, who was right and who was wrong, and you take it from there. That's another reason why it's very important, particularly when struggle is in the air, to not pop off too much unless you've got a reasonable notion what you're talking about.

The coal-yard strike of February 1934

Anyway, following this interlude, with the momentum that had been developed, the coal yard workers, led by the Trotskyists, headed by the crack provided in the union through Brown and Frozig [?], fought their way into Local 574. A campaign that had started back in the spring of the year 1933 came to this point of culmination in a very fortunate way from the point of view of the importance of the calendar in the coal industry. The coal industry, as it existed then, was principally and primarily one of hauling coal to heat people's homes. There wasn't much business in the summertime. It was very important that if a battle was going to be joined, it had to be joined while the weather is cold and the boss had a lot of orders and wanted to get his coal delivered. They broke in and by February 1934, and February is a cold month in Minneapolis, they got into a strike. And here was the first new characteristic. Whereas there had been a little piecemeal attempt here and there, in this instance, the minute the strike began, it was against all coal yards in the town. Just one clean sweep of the coal yards was the aim. The overwhelming majority of the coal yard workers responded to the strike. As a matter of fact, as many coal yard workers came in to 574 the morning the strike started as had been in the night before when the strike was voted.

The workers had been bitten before, I should tell you. It'll help to give you a feel of it: time and again in these setups, they would carry on a fake organization drive. The idea being to get a few workers to come down and join, pay a $5 initiation fee and a couple of months' dues. These guys kept two sets of books: one in which they kept their regular members that they let Tobin's order come in and look at, and they paid per capita tax on; and they had a second set of books in which they took in these initiation fees and dues from the workers when they conducted this organization drive from time to time, and that they put in their pocket. They never did and they never intended to do anything for these workers. It was because of some experiences of this kind that as many workers came into the union the morning the strike got underway as came in in order to bust through and bolt the strike into process, because of the way they had been bitten.

Now, the strike was short and it was sharp. There were two basic reasons for that. One, it was an extremely militant strike. The coal yard workers went out.

[Tape break]

No coal yard is going to be open, no truck is going to haul a load of coal, and not a single basket of coal is going to be carried up, no matter how many flights of stairs on anybody's shoulder, until the bosses settle with the union. In no time at all the pickets ran up against the cops. Now, it didn't become a clash of the kind we're going to [inaudible]. The workers walked around and gave their orders as though they're supposed to be obeyed, and the workers didn't pay any attention. You could say, in a limited sense, it was a form of civil disobedience that hadn't quite yet got to the area of self-defense, as was going to happen in just a few weeks in another and larger situation.

A few loads of coal were delivered, but the whole battle was waged by the militant pickets in such a way that it became crystal clear that the bosses and their minions and the police were going to have to club down a whole lot of coal yard workers before they were going to break the strike and get back to normal delivery. Meantime, the temperature is down between 30 and 35 below zero, and orders are pouring into the coal company offices, and they're getting very nervous. The upshot of it was, between these two factors, that the bosses agreed to settle. They gave what amounted to a qualified recognition of the union, and that was tied in with the format at the time, a collective bargaining election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board to determine whether or not the union would represent the workers.

Now, it wasn't much of a gain from the point of view of the material conditions of workers in the settlement, but it was a strike with limited aims. The aim was to establish the union in this area and get set to take the battle onto a new and higher and broader stage during the summer, and then we would return the following fall when it got cold and we would mop up the loose ends in the coal yards. That was the intention. It was only a partial victory, but a very important victory in the sense that it was a victory in what was the first major strike, magnitudes being relative, that had not been defeated since the year of the blue snow in the city of Minneapolis.

And yet you should have seen the settlement meeting. All the bureaucrats of all the unions around town had been about as nervous as you can get while this battle was going on. Who knows what's going to come to the union movement if this kind of stuff starts? And so the question came of voting on the settlement. They had Farmer-Labor aldermen from the city council, they had the secretary of the Minnesota Federation of Labor, they had the organizer of the Central Labor Union, they had a judge that was called a friend of labor, they had a personal representative of Bill Green who happened to be in town, and they paraded one after another before this body of workers extolling the virtues of this contract and this magnificent victory. You'd have thought it was virtually the Second Coming of Christ, the way they painted the thing to the workers. And the strike was settled.

Now the bosses had their own ideas, and they weren't unanticipated by the real strike leadership either. The boss's idea was, all right, we gotta get this coal moved, it's cold, we can't break this strike quick, but the season will be running out in another month, we'll chop off the red hots and we'll have this whole thing housebroken and back to normal before we get into serious business the next fall. The coal yard workers were no more than going back into the yards, and even before the election was held to prove that the workers wanted the union to represent them, which it proved, the bosses began to take reprisals by firing those who had been the more outstanding organizers and militants. I mean organizers in the voluntary sense of workers on the job helping to organize other workers, and those who had played one or another militant role in the strike itself. But this act on the part of the bosses boomeranged, in part because there were a lot of militants in the coal yards that really meant business, and in part because it was a life or death question for them. If they didn't go forward and help deepen the momentum of the whole union drive and expand the whole struggle, they didn't have a prayer of getting back into a coal yard again, and where were you going to get a job in those times?

The result was that as the bosses began to fire the coal yard militants after the strike settlement, Local 574 began to get an increasing body of volunteer full-time union organizers. At the same time something else had happened. When all the yards were organized already at that level, the tight craft structure of the kind I sought to describe to you had been cracked open, in that everybody who did anything in any way, shape or form who wasn't a boss (the criterion was, if you got any authority over hiring and firing, you got no business in the union, but anybody who didn't have the authority to hire or fire or worked anywhere around the setup, he's in) all wanted in. So in a limited sense, but in a very significant sense, we had cracked open already in the coal strike the tight craft structure, and that had laid the basis for the development of the general descriptive concept of how we were going to organize the whole trucking industry and all its environs, and, as they say in Paris, its purlieus too: the generalized phrase of drivers and inside workers. This became the formula around which the whole campaign was conducted.

A volunteer organizing committee and union democracy

Also, the victorious coal strike, as you would anticipate, had set a very important tone of confidence among the workers, opening the way to a general organizing drive. Having seen this transpire, the unorganized workers throughout the whole trucking industry of the city were ready for action, because they too were being goaded by the same intolerable conditions that had driven the coal yard workers into action. They had seen demonstrated before their eyes a proven means to advance their wages, to better their conditions and begin to redress some of the grievances that they'd had in their craws for a long time. The consequence was that all over town the workers in and around the trucking industry began to respond in strength to the general organization drive. And the stage was now set for a major class action to be carried out through the formal structure of what had been a typical class-collaborationist craft union, and that under revolutionary leadership.

Now, at this point I might observe, as will be demonstrated by what is to follow, that in appropriate circumstances it is not necessary to hold formal office in order to lead. It is possible in appropriate circumstances to move in where there is a leadership default and seek, as was undertaken in using the wedge of Brown and Frozig [?] in 574, to exploit cracks in the official apparatus. How it comes out is going to be determined not by the form of things as they have existed in a union at a given juncture under a given set of precedent historic circumstances. How it comes out is going to be determined by the dynamics of the class struggle.

In this respect, the cadres that had been forged in the organizing drive in the coal yards, blooded for battle in the short, sharp and sweet coal strike of February 1934, and made full-time volunteer organizers by virtue of the fact the bosses began firing them as soon as they went back into the yards after the strike, a cadre had been forged among some of the best militants in the trucking industry that were going to become a decisive force in the fights that were to follow. They were to serve as the vital core of the union as we headed into the first of the general strikes of the truck drivers that was to follow in May. And as we went into that strike and on into the second general strike in July and August of the same year, this basic cadre of union militants (I'm not talking about party militants, I'm talking about union militants) were being reinforced by their counterparts that were coming into the union and onto the picket lines and into battle from all sections of the trucking industry.

In the meantime, another change is taking place. After the coal strike a volunteer organizing committee was formed. It was made up of a democratically selected body of militants from among the coal yard workers, but the selection was made in a meeting where the business agent wasn't present and his permission wasn't asked, plus Brown and Frozig [?]. Now, this volunteer organizing committee, as you will see in our discussion tomorrow night, was soon to become the actual leadership of the union. The official executive board of the union was going to be pushed into a minor role, and the antagonisms of the bureaucrats in 574, in the Teamsters Joint Council, in the whole AFL movement of the city, were to be counteracted through the development of union democracy in the organization drive and strike struggles that were coming. It was through an initial stage in the introduction of union democracy that one major impetus was given to the organization drive. As we go along I'm going to return in one or another context to this question of workers' democracy as it is manifested in terms of union democracy in these struggles that follow, but I want to note just this one factor at this juncture.

The workers knew what they wanted in material terms. The workers had a rich practical knowledge of the industry and they had an equally thorough knowledge of all the boss tricks. The device that gave a great impetus to the whole organizing drive, on top of the example of the victorious coal battle, was the work of the volunteer organizing committee in calling a whole series of meetings of workers coming into the union. They'd be asked to come down, we want to talk to you about joining the union. Or we would go out to the garages, to the freight docks, everywhere. We would talk simultaneously about joining the union, and we'd get them together, and we'd talk about what ought to be in the demands we give the bosses. The workers themselves made the decisions, and with a little generalized guidance from the leadership, arrived at a reasonable degree of uniformity for minimum demands to be made on wages, hours and conditions that they were going to fight for. And this is what the union meant to them. All the leadership had to do was just add a few key clauses such as union recognition, guarantees against discrimination, and so on.

With that process well underway, the demands were submitted to the bosses, and the bosses very quickly and very emphatically made it crystal clear that they had no intention of dealing with the union in any way, shape or form. Now it was up to the leaders, the unofficial but actual leadership of the voluntary organizing committee, to steer the workers in a fight for these union demands. And tomorrow night we'll take up the battle that follows.

Questions and discussion

Chair: Now for a question period. So if anyone has any questions they'd like to ask Farrell about this portion of the strikes that he spoke on, or some of the material to come, why, the floor is now open for such questions.

Question: I can see the reason why this strike was not too long. It had to be a universal strike, but I'm thinking right now of the UAW strike, where they just [inaudible] one of the three auto producers [?]. I was just interested if you could tell [inaudible] that's the wisest policy, whether it would be better [inaudible].

Dobbs: Well, you'd have to look at that question from the dual point of view of strategy and tactics. The difference between what we were doing then and what Reuther is doing now is that the strategic aim was to facilitate the mobilization of the workers and leading them into battle for demands which the workers themselves set down. Strategically today, Reuther's notion, his whole policy, his whole concept, is to prevent in every possible way direct struggle by the workers at the point of production, and in those situations where he is forced into giving some kind of lip service to doing battle against the bosses, he begins by the opposite of the policy I described of letting the workers shape the demands. He maneuvers around to frustrate and defeat the workers' demands. The outstanding example is the consistent refusal of the Reuther leadership in the UAW to make a battle for the 30-for-40 demand, the 30-hour week at 40 hours' pay, which would be fundamental to improving the job situation in auto, to try at all possible hazards to prevent a strike, and if a strike takes place to settle it just as quickly as he can. See, there's that difference in the strategy.

Now, when you come to the tactics, it does not necessarily follow that it is at all times and in all circumstances the best tactic to strike them all. As a matter of fact, on Friday night, when we talk about the battle in 1941, where the objective situation is beginning to change, I will indicate how we resorted to selective strikes and were very careful how we picked and chose the place that a strike would be initiated, because we were up against a qualitatively different situation. So if you want to take the question of a limited strike as against a broader strike, if you take it strategically, the tendency to limit strikes is a facet of the tendency to try to prevent class struggle, so far as possible. But in tactical terms, you don't say categorically in advance that at all times and in any and all circumstances you would strike every boss at once. That's a question that has to be determined by a series of factors in a given situation at a given moment.

Question: This is a two-part question. In the coal yards, were there any Negro workers there? If so, how was the situation handled? Secondly, what was the attitude of the Communist Party [?] for those coal yards?

Dobbs: On the first question, there were no Negroes in the coal yards. As a matter of fact, there is now not a very large Negro community in Minneapolis, and in relative terms it was much smaller then. There were scarcely any Negroes employed in the trucking industry. The only area where there was even a small Negro representation was in the taxi industry. That would be commensurate with the whole situation in which the Negro worker, the last to get a job, gets the worst, and so on. For those reasons, in that actual setting, very few Negroes were involved. Insofar as there were Negroes present, they were an integral part of the union from the outset. I won't say that there wasn't a good deal of anti-Negro prejudice among the white workers. There was. But at the same time, in the struggle atmosphere and with a conscious leadership, there was absolute equality for Negroes.

Now, on the second question, if you'll permit me, I intend to talk about the role of the Communist Party tomorrow night and take you through a general strike before we talk about the role of the CP, because that's where it really begins to be driven home. Then I'll take it up again later when we come to the fight in 1941. I'll return to the question of the Communist Party in two different contexts. I think it would be better to do it that way, because I think it will have more meaning if it is taken up in terms of some larger, more deeply significant events that will be taking place. Are there other questions?

Question: The fact that there weren't too many Negroes involved in this fight is because there weren't too many located there in Minnesota [inaudible]. I didn't hear the last half.

Dobbs: Well, the union did not discourage them from joining. The situation was this: there was a very small proportion of Negroes relatively in the town, a small Negro community. As I said, very few Negroes employed anywhere in the trucking industry outside of a few in the taxi industry. Wherever there were Negroes employed in any area that the union organized, they were taken into the union with equal rights with everybody else. There was no discrimination against them, and as I remarked, it would not be true to say there wasn't prejudice against Negroes on the part of the white workers, for all the historic reasons that are well understood, but there was actual solidarity, at least as far as that struggle was concerned. Insofar as there were any Negroes present, they were few. They had full union rights, and there was equality in struggle as well during the battle.

Question: I heard that recently there are only, well, 3% of the population of the [Twin?] cities who were Negroes [?]. [Inaudible.]

Dobbs: Can you speak a little louder? I can scarcely hear you.

Question: Presently, in the Twin Cities, I've heard the figure of three percent being the percentage of Negroes in the cities. [Inaudible.] ... an analogy between the situation there and the discrimination that might arise there, to the situation arising, say, where you are about to [inaudible].

Speaker from the floor: I just wanted to make a comment on that, because it seems to me that in the context of this whole discussion, this particular point is important to recognize [inaudible]. I have learned too much about the statistics in Minnesota and northern Michigan and on to further west [inaudible]. However, I do know that in this same period, in traveling through this region, it was not uncommon to go for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles and not see a single Negro. I remember going into Iron River [?], Michigan, once, and staying there for two days. There was only one other Negro person in the whole town. Of course he was accepted just as any other citizen of this region, and he had a good job. But I think it's important for us to remember, because this might pop up, the Negro question being so much on the agenda as it is today, that there was an absence of Negro people in that part of the whole population.

Another factor equally as important to remember is the fact that even among the few Negroes that you found in this region in this period, they were a little more advanced, a little further developed in their thinking [inaudible]. Coal yard work as such was not a desirable work even among the Negroes in the Depression period. There was no pressure for these kinds of jobs. There was no rushing to get into a union or anything else, as far as that's concerned, in this particular region. Those Negroes who were the oldest [?] and the rooted families in the region were in the main Negroes who had taken root in this area as a result of the Underground Railroad system, escaping from slavery, and therefore had made themselves pretty substantial. I think the unemployment figures in this region among them were much better than in other parts of the country. The deeper question as such did not present itself in this form for these struggles that Comrade Dobbs is talking about at this time. I'm not saying that there may not have been some prejudice. However, I don't think that it was the same. The nature of it, because of the competition, even in an undersold working class [?], for jobs, was entirely different.

Dobbs: That's a very good point that Comrade Jim makes. I would just add that really it's a point that should be noted as an additional category in the other points I brought up in my talk about the exceptional nature of the Minneapolis situation. You remember I pointed out that there was no basic industry there, and that was one of the reasons why it was an accident, for the reasons I sought to describe, that such a titanic battle would take place there. That's an important thing to observe, that yes, in part, as a matter of fact in substantial part, insofar as there were Negroes in that part of the country it was more a matter of people that came in the time of the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War. Whereas the main migration of Negroes from the South elsewhere in the country that brought substantial forces of Negroes into the class struggles that developed in the '30s was a migration into basic industry. If I recall, one of the major waves was in the period of the First World War. I was going to say you would be aware of that factor in the Second World War, I keep forgetting how old I'm getting, you wouldn't be so much aware of that either, that's 20 years ago too, isn't it? But just as had been the case in the First World War, there was another big wave of migration. As a matter of fact, I think the latter was the period in which the more profound of the Negro migrations to the West Coast in considerable magnitude began to take place, whereas the migrations during the First World War and in the period of the development of mass production in the succeeding years was more in the North and East, in the packing and auto industries of that kind. So in that sense, what Comrade Jim says is correct, that for historic reasons, in this exceptional circumstance, there was not a Negro community present that would have constituted a factor of sufficient magnitude to represent a specific historic category of the struggle forces involved in the battle.

How the Trotskyists came to know Bill Brown

Question: [Inaudible] ... known Brown for some time?

Dobbs: As I pointed out, the older, more experienced comrades at the time, like the Dunne brothers and Skoglund, for example, and there were others, had been in the movement and a bit earlier had been red-baited out of the AFL. Now, back in the Red Scare of the early '20s, around the events that are known in history as the Palmer Raids, Palmer being the Attorney General of that time, a somewhat less sweeping but roughly analogous version of the contemporary witch hunt was initiated, and prevailed during the '20s. Since backlash is a popular term today, I'll say in the backlash of the Russian Revolution there was this witch hunt development in the '20s. Radicals got driven out of the unions, put on blacklists, and oftentimes it became hard for them to get a job. As a matter of fact, as somebody observed, I think it was you, Jim, shoveling coal is not exactly the kind of job you go out to look for, and that's not the least of the reasons that people like Skoglund and Dunne were in coal yards, because they'd been blacklisted out of other places because they were radicals.

So they were known in the movement and by various figures in the movement, and among others they had developed some limited acquaintance with Brown, who was a relatively young man, in his 30s, but had some years of background experience in the Teamsters union and in one and another post in the union movement. So they knew one another, they knew a little about him, and they had perceived that this was the type of a man that, although they had seen him only as part of the apparatus, was a cut above the average stripe of the faker that sat on top of the unions. So they began to probe more deeply to just see how big a cut he was above them, and it proved to be quite a bit. They developed discussions with him and evaluated the whole situation. As I say, he had a little above-average consciousness for a trade unionist. He was just a pure-and-simple trade unionist, no political [inaudible]. But he had a little vision. He had a little capacity to look out beyond his navel in contemplating what's in the best interest of the union movement. And as I say, he had guts.

It was through really three basic factors. One, that Brown was something above the average. As I said, he could have gone one way or the other, depending on what happened in life at that juncture. It's a very important thing, by the way, as long as we're talking about Brown, instead of talking specifically about him for a moment, let's just take him as the prototype. It's a very important thing to keep in mind about individuals in politics, particularly when you're dealing with the motion of social forces. You remember the saying of Napoleon that every soldier has a marshal's baton in his knapsack, which was his way of indicating that under the storm and stress and tides of the great French Revolution of 1789 and the period that followed, people who didn't dream they had those capacities would get a chance to demonstrate that maybe they're a great military figure. That's putting it one way, not turning it around. Plekhanov, in dealing with the role of the individual in history, calls attention to the fact that if it hadn't been for the French Revolution, Napoleon might just as well have wound up a corporal in the French artillery. Now, it's a very important thing to understand that one or another thing happens to an individual according to what is happening in the larger forces, in the tides of human society and the class struggle that goes on around you.

Take some people, who can live to be 60 years old in any kind of circumstances and never get as much life as another person would in 16 years in the same circumstances. But just subtract from that and just take two people that you would say have got about the same given potential of realizing richness in life, given an opportunity. One person can live out a whole life and not too much happen. And another person can live more life in five or six years. And the difference is not, in this instance, in the people. The difference is in what is going on. Put it another way: young people today have the problem of trying to grasp the revolutionary essence of the working class out of books. If you would have had an opportunity to participate in what I'm going to try to describe to you tomorrow night, you wouldn't have to open the cover of a single book to convince yourself of the revolutionary caliber of the working class. You still have to open the books, but you'd open the books not to convince yourself the working class is revolutionary, but to help learn how to be an even better revolutionary fighter.

There's another comparison in the situation with the individual. Brown is one example. I'm going to give you two others, neither of whom was the man Brown was but who served a certain key role at a certain key juncture in some struggles that are to follow later on. I think maybe as we go into these it'll help to broaden this factor a little. Just by way of reading matter, if you haven't done so recently you could do well to go back and read those two pamphlets about the materialist conception of history and the role of the individual in history. In the light of what we've talked about tonight and are going to talk about, it maybe has some fresh meaning to you.

As long as I've got the floor and the chairman hasn't stopped me, I'll just add that even when you read a book, when you're reading books about particularly such profound questions as the class struggle and the titanic motion of great social forces that are trying to advance human society, don't feel because you read it once, that's that book and that's the end of it. Depending, of course, on the quality of the book. You can read a book when you're 20 years old and go through five or six years of life and experience and open that book again, and you'll wonder if you ever read it, because something has happened to you in your life that gives much more meaning to what you read. You understand much more. You understand much more deeply than you did before. Are there any further questions?

Question: You mentioned about certain people who are able to translate their ideas into actual [inaudible]. I wonder if you would point out how these things [inaudible] ... you couldn't just go with a bunch of wild ideas and expect to succeed.

Dobbs: That's a very cogent point. Whether directly or indirectly, but really at least by a combination of the two, where a conscious political force is giving or attempting to give leadership to a body of workers, there has to be a clear link between the political consciousness, the class-struggle consciousness, of the people attempting to give leadership and knowledge of the industry. You can't walk into any industry, any body of workers, you can't walk into any kind of a mass organization and pretend you've got all the answers and you're going to give leadership, and it's going to be the best of leadership, and get people to listen to you and believe you unless you know something about the situation. I see by the morning paper the National Farmers Organization has got what they call a withholding action going on, doing a little picketing. You couldn't walk up to even the most responsive people there and pretend that you're going to give them all the answers about what to do next in that fight until you first prove that you can tell a hog from a goat, and the northeast from the southwest quarter on a section of land, and which end of a cow you milk, and a few other things. You've got certain minimum proofs that you have to give. Or, well, in any other sphere of struggle, that holds true. There has to be a linkage between the political class consciousness necessary to lead a struggle against the boss class and a knowledge of the environmental conditions in which the given body of workers live and work and struggle, before you've got the full component to get the complete fusion of spontaneity and consciousness in struggle.

Chair: [Inaudible] tonight's lecture in a series, the second [?] lecture in a series of four.