Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 12:17:09 +0200
Subject: M-G: Santos docks dispute and its implications


Check out Marxism-News (marxism-news-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu) and/or
LabourNet (http://www.labournet.org.uk) for the latest on this dock dispute.

Dock workers have occupied ships in the Sao Paulo Steel Company COSIPA's
terminal in the port of Santos in Brazil, following a very sharp four day
strike  including a general stoppage throughout Brazil on 4 April.

The issue, as in Liverpool, concerns the attempts of the employers to smash
unionized portworkers and replace them with casualized contract labour.

Local militia and army representatives have refused to intervene, on the
grounds that it would be illegal on the basis of the docks agreement
reached with the government five years ago.

To end the occupation and break the union it will be necessary to call in
Federal troops and this can only be done legally on the orders of the
president -- so the dispute has taken on a national and political aspect
right from the start.

What's more, thanks to the portworkers' website and the experience
accumulated within international dockers' organizations during the eighteen
month Liverpool dispute, the Santos conflict has already become known
internationally. The International Transport Federation has declared its
solidarity and is preparing further action on the model of Liverpool
solidarity.

This is just the latest in a series of disputes in which workers are
beginning to develop an international framework of information and
solidarity in response to bosses attempts to smash their organizations and
destroy their conditions of work. In this way they are beginning to
confront and challenge the bosses immediate advantages of international
organization and media control, even if there's still a long way to go.

At the very least this response makes it much more difficult for the bosses
to isolate the workers and reduce them to disorganized individuals in these
confrontations.

The impact of even these first faltering steps of internationally organized
and clearly publicized counterattack -- strong enough to stop the local
police and military from just marching in (also a reflection of the general
balance of power in the country of course) -- indicates the enormous latent
social power of the working-class movement and the incredible relative
weakness of the bourgeoisie despite its superficially overwhelming strength
and control in terms of troops and media control.

It shouldn't be too difficult to imagine the effect of actions springing
>from explicitly revolutionary consciousness coupled with a large-scale,
efficient and class-based worldwide solidarity effort.

I think we'll be seeing the first such actions in the very near future,
probably this year, and definitely before the end of the century. And they
won't just come singly -- once they start there'll soon be a flood as the
demands for social justice and the pent-up anger of so many decades begin
pouring through the first cracks in the defence ramparts with which the
imperialists have been trying for so long to keep out the incoming tide.
Their biggest helpers in manning the ramparts, the Stalinists and the
Social-Democrats, provided the best help by fooling workers into not seeing
themselves as part of the rising flood. But with the capitulation of the
Stalinist bureaucracy to imperialism at the end of the 1980s, and the
resulting stampede to the right of the Social-Democrats, there is nothing
to stop the workers from understanding their own role in keeping
imperialism in a position to exploit them. The Stalinists and the
Social-Democrats as leaders of the working class had real social power, and
they used it to benefit the imperialist bourgeoisie. As upstart bourgeois
politicians and would-be capitalists themselves, their social power
(completely dependent on their links with the working class) shrivels, and
the bourgeoisie stands politically isolated against its class enemy.

I might add that in the Santos struggle and the others like it around the
world -- that is to say in the real struggles of the working class -- the
potential leaderships of a future worldwide revolutionary party are
*already* in the process of being tested. And the things being tested are
class perspective, proposals for action and programmatic relevance. For the
leaderships, of course, their own internal development is being tested --
their historical origins, their ability to learn from past successes and
past mistakes, and their ability to put the demands of the struggle (both
short and long-term) before organizational convenience and inertia.

Cheers,

Hugh

PS For the latest on the Santos dispute in Portuguese check out the Santos
portworkers' website at:

http://www.portodesantos.com/sindicatos




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