Mobe leaders discuss united front approach

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Socialist Action Forums:

SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1988 3 Duarte regime [in El Salvador] has dominated almost every one of the mobilizations—and that's certainly going to be true this year.

KPFA: In the past, you've organized some large rallies at the Civic Center, which give us an indication of the breadth of this kind of coalition. Let's talk about how broad a coalition this is.

Finamore: This coalition is broad because the issues we selected enjoy majority support in the American public. We consciously selected those issues, though many more issues are covered with various contingents and banners and speakers, which go beyond what just our San Francisco Speakers: Alan Benjamin, Editor, Socia ist Action, recently returned from Nicara gua. Other speakers to be announced.

Friday, May 13, 8 p.m. 3435 Army St., Rm. 308 four slogans can address. We realize that.

The breadth of our coalition is maintained by political choices we make in maintaining our slogans and by our conscious selection of leadership, which we place in the hands of the broad church, labor, and community forces. That makes us unique.

Our leadership is not just a list of prominent individuals who endorse what radicals conceive. It's actually those broad leaders who conceive, develop, and help plan—in conjunction with the radicals and others-the program of the coalition.

KPFA: Could you address the issue of coalition politics and why it's so important to compromise. How do you decide when to compromise without diluting the purity of an issue? And on what basis do you make these decisions?

Finamore: That's an important point. Any radical knows that we can find a hundred reasons why we disagree with a labor official, a religious person, or a prominent community figure. But the real trick for anyone interested in social change is to find a basis of agreement upon which the broadest number of people can act together against this government's policy.

And within the context of that unity, you take those steps that you consider principled, that enable the coalition to go forward. I think we've done that by preserving intact a coalition that has four very powerful demands—which are very timely.

Seymour Kramer: I'd like to stress a special feature of the upcoming march and the Mobilization. As a trade-union member and one who's been active in the peace movement for more than 25 years, I'm aware of the real difference between this mobilization against war and the fight against the Vietnam War.

The labor movement has taken the lead in trying to put together this kind of a broad coalition and to speak to not only trade-union questions but also to questions of peace, questions of funding for AIDS, questions of discrimination, questions of South Africa. I think that's very important.

There still are debates within the tradeunion movement nationally, with significant leaders of the AFL-CIO refusing to go along with this new orientation. But in the Bay Area, labor councils and leading members of the largest unions in our area have fully supported the Mobilization.

And I think that's what gives it not only its breadth, but its continuity, so that we don't have to reconstitute a Mobilization every six months to face this or that emergency.

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state contractors and had received the quality of work that

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