BY FARRELL DOBBS
The following excerpt is from Teamster Bureaucracy, the final book in a series by Farrell Dobbs, who was a leader of the Teamsters struggles in Minnesota in the 1930s and later national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. This selection is from the section of the book titled "Trade Union Campaign Against War." The book is copyright by Pathfinder Press, and reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

Imperialist rivals were encroaching upon territories abroad which this country's ruling class, with its global interests, had staked out for exploitation. Among those competing governmental gangs, two loomed as the most formidable opponents of their Wall Street counterparts. One operated from within Hitlerite Germany; the other had its base in Japan, where a militarist regime held power. Both had their eyes on the superprofits United States banking combines and monopoly corporations were raking in from foreign holdings; Germany and Japan were out to grab a larger piece of the action.

It was in this rivalry between imperialist cutthroats that Roosevelt was dedicating himself to the protection of "American interests." But that wasn't what he talked about during the 1936 elections.

Instead, he campaigned on the basis of his phony image, built up during his first term, as a champion of the exploited masses. Then, after being returned to office, he began to apply his real line in foreign policy. Budgetary provisions were made for increased military spending, using the argument that such action would expand industrial hiring and reduce the jobless rolls. At the same time Washington employed every available propaganda device in an effort to justify the handling of foreign affairs in a manner that led toward war.

At that point General Drivers Local 544, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, set out to organize trade union opposition to Roosevelt's preparations for use of the workers as imperialist cannon fodder. Local 544, an affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, AFL, was led by Trotskyist militants. They were revolutionary socialists, whose training and experience enabled them to grasp the real meaning of the scheme being cooked up in Washington....

Union paper speaks against war drive
Fortunately, there was an excellent vehicle at hand to undertake that beginning. The Minneapolis Teamsters had a weekly paper, the Northwest Organizer, published initially by the General Drivers Union. In 1936 it had been made the official organ of the Teamsters Joint Council, a body composed of representatives from all IBT locals in the city. Its editor was Miles Dunne, one of Local 544's central leaders....

The educational phase of the campaign was opened through an editorial in the April 22, 1937, issue of the paper. It was pegged to the upcoming celebration of May Day, the international working-class holiday which had come into being in direct relationship to class battles during the latter part of the nineteenth century....

"May Day will continue to express the interlocking nature of economics and politics," the editorial said in part. "But although puny politicians may try to turn the occasion into a common election rally, the workers will be turning their attention to much broader and sounder implications, namely independent working-class action. Proper economic subjects such as hours, wages, jobs, relief and organization, will be amplified by consideration of political relations such as civil liberties, war and the other struggles ahead. . . .

"Wars and rumors of war are . . . necessary implements of great capitalist competitors. Not one of them can remain peaceable but each must strive until his power is broken, to gain world-wide supremacy by ruthless terror and destruction. Here, too, petty politics are of no avail. Why? Because government, `the executive committee of the ruling class,' must not only conduct war for its master, but must prepare the way by subduing all opposition and assuring `unity at all costs' at home. May Day therefore calls for renewed defense of workers' rights."

Some weeks later, in July 1937, the Japanese military invaded North China. Shortly thereafter two United States soldiers stationed in the war zone were wounded, and the capitalist propagandists seized upon the incident to build up anti-Japanese sentiment here in this country. At that point the Teamster paper set out to counter the jingoistic line, opening with an editorial which asserted:

"The reason the United States has its garrisons in China and its warships in the Far Pacific is to protect American capitalism in the Orient. The American worker has nothing whatever at stake, the American bosses have millions of dollars of investments that must be protected. The American worker has nothing to gain and everything to lose by a war fought to protect American capitalism. . . . In the present crisis in the Far East, the interests of the American workers lie with the interests of the downtrodden people of China...."

Imperialism and war
Five articles written by Tex Norris, a revolutionary socialist educator, were then published. His main points, which were illustrated by historical examples, may be summarized as follows:

Imperialists are capitalists with investments in foreign countries. By 1937 United States business interests were making increasingly large investments in every possible quarter of the world. Those who benefited from this development were trying to keep the facts hidden from the workers, who always came out losers in such a situation, and it was the duty of the labor movement to explain what was happening.

Profits made by gouging U.S. labor, Norris continued, were being used in the form of capital to exploit foreign workers at starvation wages, even lower than those paid here. In order to maximize such exploitation, the imperialists, acting just as they did at home, sought to use the governments of the particular foreign countries to break strikes by native workers and, wherever possible, to crush their trade unions. The accomplishment of those aims helped, moreover, to hold down wage rates in this country, thus enabling the imperialists to reap superprofits at the expense of both U.S. and foreign labor.

In an effort to cope with this problem, some within the trade unions were promoting "Buy American" campaigns, hoping thereby to protect jobs and wages in this country...

Imperialism, he added, was a natural development in any advanced capitalist nation. Just as U.S. business operated outside its home base, so did British, French, Italian, Japanese. The competition between those different imperialist interests within a contracted world market was growing keener daily, and that was leading to the most terrible of all the consequences of imperialism - war. Protection of U.S. business interests in that sharpening conflict, Norris emphasized, had become the main concern of the Roosevelt administration.... Acquisition of military bases was going on in regions where capitalist investments abroad were concentrated, and Washington was preparing to pull millions of workers into the armed forces for war against its rivals.

If workers in the U.S. were to resist this mad course, he concluded, they needed to fight against capitalism itself, of which imperialism was a deadly offspring. That, in turn, called for the clasping of workers' hands in other countries in a grip of international labor solidarity.  
 
 
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