As part of celebrating Black History Month, the Militant is reprinting the excerpt below, taken from "A new stage of revolutionary working-class politics," a 1979 report published in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes. In this section, Barnes discusses the organizing drive and strike in 1979 by United Steelworkers Local 8888 at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. Copyright © 1994 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY JACK BARNES  
The Newport News battle tells us a lot about the effects of the civil rights movement, the role of the Black struggle. It's a big mistake to look at what happened in the South over the past twenty years in too narrow a framework. It's not just that some important civil rights were won, narrowly construed.

There were elements of a social revolution in the South; Jim Crow was smashed. The South today is more desegregated than many of the big northern industrial states; studies have shown that.

This was a big victory for our entire class, Black and white. It means that there has been a sort of leveling-out process in some of the conditions of the class struggle throughout the country. The South is more like the rest of the country than ever before. The big difference today is not the Jim Crow system and all the social, political, and economic features that flowed from that. That was the big difference from the defeat of Reconstruction through the 1960s.  
 
South still less organized than North
The big difference today is that the southern working class is still much less unionized than in the North. That is one of the legacies of Jim Crow, and the class-collaborationist policies of the labor bureaucracy. But, as Newport News showed, the battles that demolished Jim Crow have created much more favorable conditions for solving this important remaining difference as well. It's a big challenge confronting American labor--and the entire union movement will be fighting from a position of weakness until it is met.

A great deal was changed in the South by the civil rights movement. The consciousness of the working class was dramatically changed. Not only Black, but also white workers became more capable of moving in a class-conscious direction; their attitudes were profoundly altered. They became more capable of seeing their common class interests with Black workers--which is absolutely necessary to move forward. There was a rise in the self-confidence of the Black workers.

The composition of the workforce changed, as more and more Blacks fought their way into industry. There has also been a rise in the number of women workers, like everywhere else. Finally, there is a lot more industry in the South today. In addition to the textile and other traditional southern industry, there are more auto plants, steel mills, electrical assembly plants, rubber factories, and so on.

The origins of the [Local] 8888 organizing drive directly reflected these important changes in the South. The vanguard was made up overwhelmingly of Black workers inside the yard. They sensed what these changes meant. They sized up how they could take advantage of these changes to put together a new struggle, in a new way, and with broader forces--white and Black workers, men and women. They took the initiative to draw the USWA [United Steelworkers of America] into the fight.  
 
Working-class solidarity
The Newport News workers also learned something about the importance of solidarity. Although the support they got from unionists around the country fell far short of the potential had the USWA officialdom energetically pursued it, the workers nonetheless got a taste of what solidarity can mean.

They also got a taste of what the bureaucracy will never mean by solidarity. They never mean solidarity inside the labor movement or with the oppressed. The bureaucrats' solidarity is with the capitalist government. They try to teach the workers to look to the government, to look to the National Labor Relations Board, to look to some mediator, to look to the courts. That's what USWA president Lloyd McBride and the entire USWA officialdom tried to drum into the heads of the 8888 workers.

But from their own experiences with the cops, the capitalist politicians, the courts, and the NLRB, the Newport News workers began learning something about where they must really look for allies, and why. The process is just beginning. It's still being thought through. It's not all totally understood. There are still hopes that the courts or the Carter administration will come through with some real assistance.

But the question is posed right out in the open. This, too, presents the bureaucracy with difficulties. George Meany personally sent letters to AFL-CIO affiliates telling them to hold no Newport News solidarity activities without an explicit go-ahead from the USWA officialdom. The deliberate intent of this was to put the kibosh on solidarity, including in cities where union support meetings were already in the planning stages.

McBride gave his infamous press conference where he said there had been a "tactical blunder," an unfortunate misunderstanding. Some people, McBride said, were incorrectly portraying the Newport News strike as part of a crusade to organize the South.

"I don't look on this as a crusade," McBride insisted. "We are not interested in broadening the dispute beyond our efforts to get a contract." But without a contract to organize the South, it will be much more difficult to get a contract. That's another lesson the Newport News workers are learning. They have everything to gain, and nothing to lose, from projecting their fight as a struggle for workers throughout the South and throughout the country.  
 
 
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