From: "Trotskyist Screamer" <trotskyist-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: M-G: Forwarded [SEP Violence at the March on Detroit (fwd)] Date: Thu, 26 Jun 1997 01:46:28 PDT ------- Forwarded Message During the march on Detroit t'other day, David North's Socialist Equality Party (formerly the Workers' League) was involved in some fairly scurrilous activity. For those who know the history of this groupuscule, this is hardly a surprise. Regardless, comrades and friends should be made aware of their most recent attack on the most basic precepts of socialist democracy. The following is from someone there at the time, a member of the Marxist Workers' Group. Fraternally, Chris Faatz *********************************************************************** *********************************************************************** The Socialist Equality Party(SEP), better known as the Workers League, has been trying to start up an organization in the Lansing area, specifically at the MSU campus, for years, with only recent (limited) success, establishing at MSU recently a branch of their youth movement the Students for Social Equality. Earlier this year, the Marxist Workers Group was founded in the Lansing area by a tiny cell of comrades who representing the surviving core of the Lansing Area Marxist Study and Action Group. The MWG has been the only one of the four or so "revolutionary" and socialist organizations operating in the Lansing area to have made a strong committment to strike support work around the UAW strike at Melling Drop Forge. Our collective in its earlier MSAG form sent two members out to walk the picket lines on the *very first night* of the strike. The core of the MSAG that stuck with it in this fight and became the MWG was involved in a nasty political fight within the Lansing chapter of the Anti-Racist Action Network(ARA-Net) around the refusal of some members of that group to do picket line work because "white workers are counter-revolutionary" and the refusal of ARA to condemn this and take a strong stand as a collective in support of the workers--we were kicked out of ARA for that stand. We have made regular trips out onto the picket lines throughout the strike, walking the line and participating alongside the workers in militant actions which have brought them in conflict with the cops(the pigs dispersed the workers from the plant gate with tear gas recently, the gas spilling into some homes in the working-class neighborhood around the drop forge.) We have also been the only group to have taken a stand on the picket lines against the powerful UAW bureaucracy that has been knifing the workers struggle by dangerously under-staffing the picket lines(in a city of tens of thousands of auto workers!), also calling in our leaflets for the formation of elected rank-and-file strike committees to take over the strike from the bureaucratic mis-leadership. These leaflets have been accepted warmly and there are indications that our proposal might have sparked some interest amongst at least some of the workers. What has the SEP been doing? Well, apparently they prefer to loudly denounce the bureaucrats from the safe confines of college campuses. Because we have fought side by side with the workers as they have attempted to do whatever they could with the tiny numbers that their "leaders" call out onto the lines at a time to stop scabs from coming in and out and shut down scab producton, picking up whatever weapons are available to them (shattered glass for the parking lots, eggs and the sticks from their picket signs for the windows, simply sitting in front of scab trucks as they attempt to enter the parking lot, etc., etc., etc.) we are derided for "throwing eggs" and "just helping Sweeney and Trumpka..." We briefly noted in our article on the Melling strike in our little newsletter PRAXIS that we have not seen them out on the picket lines and even though we gave them exact directions, etc. they have shown no interest. Apparently this was the breaking point--a new, healthy and worker-oriented revolutionary collective had been formed in an area that they had decided to mark off as their turf, it was formed by comrades they had tried very hard to recruit, and it had come out politically against it. Our collective marched in the union-organized March on Detroit in support of the locked-out workers there, marching with Workers Voice (WoVo) and a couple of independants under a WoVo banner reading "NO MORE DEFEATS! NO MORE SURRENDERS! RANK AND FILE CONTROL OF THE UNIONS!" Around Hart Plaza, where the march ended, two of our comrades went over to an SEP lit table with the thought of buying a couple of cheap Trotsky pamphlets from them. Without me so much as opening my mouth, frequent SEP candidate for public office and prominent member Jerry White turned to me and started on a long tirade against the Melling article from PRAXIS..."Hey, Burgis, that was some fucking shit you wrote in that goddamn PRAXIS newspaper...," etc. An MWG comrade of mine briefly responded with a simple "Fuck you, when's the last time you were even on the picket lines?" White responded with "I'm not even going to talk to you!" The MWG comrade put up his hand in a quick "fuck you, I'm not talking to you either" gesture, and walked away in digust. An SEP robot trailed after us, saying "you taunted Jerry White! You don't know what could happen to you!...." Rolling his eyes, the MWG member turned around to go over and argue with them more. As they were arguing, the SEPer physically attacked the MWG comrade, smashing him down on to the pavement--fortunately, the comrade was mildly cut and shaken instead of being in the hospital with a concussion. The motivation was clear--comrades who they had tried to recruit started up their own group and took a stand against them politically in any area in which they have desperately trying to establish a presence. We are an extremely young group, and they were trying to intimidate us to get us out of the way. Fortunately, a Spartacist who was selling WORKERS VANGUARD nearby snapped a photograph of the incident from behind and another of the MWG comrade with a trickle of blood running down his leg. They will send those pictures to our PO Box in East Lansing and they will definitely appear along with an article on the incident in PRAXIS, as well as most likely WORKERS VANGUARD and WORKERS VOICE. We will send relevant materials to any other left group that asks for them. Our response is clear--we are going to publicly expose them to the extent that they are going to have to answer a lot of embarassing questions from their members, sympathizers and contacts about violence within the workers movement. With Bolshevik-Leninist Greetings, Ben Burgis MWG e-mail: burgisbe-AT-student.lansing.cc.mi.us PRAXIS PO Box 1544 East Lansing, MI 48823 ------- End of Forwarded Message --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com --------------------------------------------------------- --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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