John Anderson 1907-1989

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14 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1989 Socialist veteran John Anderson, 82, died in Detroit on Feb. 17 after a long bout with heart disease. He was active in working-class struggles throughout his life.

Anderson was raised in Wisconsin under the extremely strict Calvinist discipline of his father, who was a lumberjack. As a young man living through the Depression years, he rebelled and joined the revolutionary anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies.

He became a marvelous soap-boxer who could speak extemporaneously on any issue of concern to the working class. This is where he got his political experience.

In 1933, Anderson, then working as a Detroit sheetmetal worker, was involved in the Briggs Manufacturing Company strike. Later he participated in the great sit-down strikes in Detroit and Flint which formed the United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

He joined the Socialist Party (SP) during this time. When the Trotskyists in the leftwing of the SP were expelled, Anderson joined with them to form the Socialist Workers Party. He left the SWP in 1953 because of political differences.

Anderson spent his whole life in the tradeunion and socialist movements as an activist and writer. He wrote extensively about the rise and decline of the UAW, including an unpublished biography of prominent UAW leader Walter Reuther. In the mid-1950s witchhunt period, it was Reuther who had Anderson bureaucratically removed as president of the large Fleetwood UAW local.

During the Vietnam War, Anderson led organizing efforts that succeeded in making Dearborn, Mich., the first American city to pass a referendum demanding: U.S. Out of Vietnam.

He has written a pamphlet, "The First 50 Years of the UAW," and he wrote a regular labor column for the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization—of which he was a member at the time of his death.

Anderson was married for 53 years. His wife, Dominica (or Minnie, as she is known) was raised in an Italian anarchist family. In her youth, she was a member of the Detroitbased Proletarian Party. Other surviving members of the family are a daughter Maria and grandsons Steven and Walter Williams.

John Anderson is a courageous figure in the memory of older workers. He waged a militant fight for socialism in the working class of America for over 50 years. His life is an honorable example for the next generation.

Milt was undemocratically expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1983, when the present leadership purged the Trotskyists from the organization. Later that year, he was a founder of Socialist Action. Despite his illness, he took an active part in national gatherings of Socialist Action and played an important role in building our Los Angeles branch.

Milt Alvin remained true to the cause of socialism even when he knew that he would not see the revolution in his own lifetime.

And yet he must have felt that—insofar as he helped to sustain and educate the next generation of revolutionary fighters—he carried part of the fate of humanity on his shoulders.

example we have inherited.

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the top planners operate in ignorance, misled by a selfserving lower bureaucracy concerned only with the bonuses it gets for meeting the plan. The result is the goods of poor quality and the shortages characteristic of the system.

This bureaucracy does not have the creativity of thought that is more than ever needed in an economy of the Soviet Union's present size and complexity. The problem is aggravated by the difficulties the Soviet Union is having in