[EASTERN at the same had already moved to…]

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EASTERN at the same had already moved to stage.

"In the wake of the 1981-82 recession," the SWP's new resolution states, "labor's retreat under the blows of the employers' offensive that began at the end of the 1970s turned into an all-out rout of the unions. The union officialdom's capitulation to the bosses turned into workers running away from a fight.

"The membership went along with this, and often voted for not only cuts in wages, concessions on job safety, and speedup, but also multi-tiered wage scales and various outsourcing (subcontracting) and temporaryworker schemes that qualitatively deepened divisions in the work force and among union members. Despite these heavy blows dealt to labor and the working class by the employers' offensive, and the resultant further weakening of the unions, the capitalists:

"1) have not broken workers' resistance; and "2) have not improved their competitive plant, became a national example for labor because of how the rank and file and its leaders fought.

They reached out for support nationwide and internationally. They stood up to the international leadership of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), who ultimately stabbed the strike in the back. The main lessons of the fight included how important it was for labor to stand united against union-busting and the need to move beyond the bankrupt policy of the labor officialdom. The latter's policy leads to defeat. Militant strike action with the aim of stopping production is being seen by more and more workers as essential to winning.

But it is an overstatement to call 1980-85 a rout of the labor movement. The weakness of the unions is a result of 40 years of class collaboration. Year after year since the 1940s the officialdom of the unions have given back union power to the bosses. They have accepted anti-labor laws without a fight. The increasing use of class-collaborationist bor to do more pass resolutions of support.

In 1983 airline unions at Continental were forced on strike. The lack of unity by the unions there and from the labor movement allowed chief executive officer Frank Lorenzo to destroy the unions at Continental. Nevertheless the workers walked the picket line more than a year, some longer. They struck as their Eastern brothers and sisters are doing six years later.

Bus drivers at Greyhound in 1983 also went on national strike. In a hard-fought battle that won a certain measure of labor support, the union finally accepted a major concession contract. But the workers fought, and the union was saved for future battles. That defensive strike prepared union members for the current strike.

Soon after the Greyhound strike, copper miners in southern Arizona struck PhelpsDodge, then the second largest copper producer (now the largest). The mostly Chicano and Native American workforce stopped production for a few days with militant pickets. But the lack of national solidarity led to the strike's defeat.

AP Parts workers organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Toledo, Ohio, went on strike against a union-buster in 1984. They were unable to win either. But they refused to accept their situation without a fight. They also sought solidarity from other workers.

In 1985 pilots at United Airlines struck against the two-tier wage system set up there. The lack of solidarity from the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and other workers made it impossible to win that battle completely. Out of that fight the pilots decided the best way to "win" was to buy the company under an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). In 1990 the other two unions, the IAM and the flight attendants, agreed and a concessionary buy-out plan has been accepted by the United Airlines Board of Directors.

Other strikes also occurred before Hormel, and since. Most ended in defeat. After the among the SWP leadership as a result.

Insisting that the radicalization of the working class would become evident in the immediate period ahead became the leadership's stock in trade. After each new event in the class struggle, "if" was said to be just about around the corner.

Unrealistic norms of membership were insisted upon, such as that every member would sell at a plant gate every week, even though there was not the response that would justify such a projection. Or the new norm that no one will be accepted into membership in the SWP without going through a six-months probationary period during which they must get into industry— which had obvious implications for SWP members who were not in industry. Many members simply quit as a result.

The SWP discovered that there had been a "rout" of the labor movement after the fact. The "rout" became a new way to say that times have been tough, but finally now we have turned the corner-"it" may not have been quite here before but now "it" is upon uS.

Any questioning of this view was cited as "proof" that the party members involved were getting tired or "giving up on the working class." This reinforced the SWP's shift away from the party's tried and true organizational principles, and led to further substitution of the use of organizational means to deal with political questions.

Such restrictions of party democracy are said to be justified because we are in or about to be in a period of class combat that necessitates total centralism. (Even when we do enter such a period such practices are wrong.) But holding onto a wrong assessment of political reality leads to a frantic need to suppress anyone who raises any hint that perhaps the emperor's new clothes are really no clothes at all.

Part and parcel of this denial of reality has been an abandonment by the SWP of the correct political orientation toward work in the unions and in other arenas of the class struggle that were projected in the party resolutions of 1975-79. Next month's article will take up this question. •

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= ART and REVOLUTION Section of Los Angeles mural painted by Mike Alewitz LANE NO PREE ASHRA T Kathleen O'Nan/Socialist Action This government is waging a war on working people. And some of the people who are on the front lines of the war—the Eastern strikers and the Greyhound strikers— are here today. The war that's being waged by the government is on behalf of the employers against working people. And in attempts to divide working people from each other in order to weaken us, it divides us by male and female, by Black, White, Hispanic, or Korean.

It tries to divide skilled craft workers from unskilled laborers. It tries to divide gays from straights. It tries to divide in any way that it can. But one of the most fundamental ways that it tries to divide workers from each other is between those who have jobs and those who are unemployed.

And so they create a stigma attached to some people. A lot of them they call illegal aliens, and they try to make them appear as something less than human-that they shouldn't have the same rights as other workers, that they shouldn't get the same pay as other workers, that they shouldn't be treated with the same respect as other workers. And I think what we all have to do is to make sure that we don't fall into that trap.

When people are killed crossing a border into this country or die locked in a van somewhere, it isn't happening to those people, it's happening to us. When people are paid slave wages, it isn't happening to them, it's happening to us.

When people are called by numbers like they are in garment shops in New York