Date: 15 Aug 97 20:38:38 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: UPS Strike


dear friends,

You know , marxists/militants  go to the strikers picket lines 
and show solidarity with the strikers just demands 
and key issue of grueling speedups, incresing package
weight limits and mass part-timing the workers (61% of the 186,000
 workers on strike against  UPS are part time ) and try to get
other workers from other indusries to join in as many more millions now
 are getting smacked with  similar part timing schemes of capital
 &under even more onerous conditions in other industries.

Written and verbal Agitation should show partisanship to workers 
just cause&  call for  spreading the struggle to other packaging outfits 
and even other industries, including those even indirectly connected
to the shipping industry. business. This is the key way to both 
vastly slow shipments, hit the bosses where it hurts the most,
and show the scabs that won't get away with the class treachery
 so easily..

Workers also would be on higher combative ground  firmer  turf under them 
by electing their own strike committes rather than probably near  fatal
 reliance on those posturers representing bourgeois business unionism 
 of the AFL CIO, in this case the Teamsters and this is something that 
should be stressed.

Also in this period of cpitalist 'downsizing'  'restructurings' . and
globalizations
of competing capitals and the inner crisis ofthe ysstem . Workers should 
understand that any gains won by  their immense and valourous sacrifice now
 would probably be fleeting unless they forge new political anti-capitalist
opposition 
groups in force that would call for and organize  "out of bounds'  mass actions 
 as soon as  the UPS and other bosses with their Demopublican  state 
 running interference for the rich began the ineitable takebacks  and flouting 
of any' legal' agreement which is arbitrated by the bosses trusted flunkey,
the democratic state machine .

The issue is not simply positing economist laundry lists of demands in the
 typical left reformist  way with the usual attempted warmed over   bogarting
of the struggle with simplistic and savioristic  "crisis of Leadership '
mantras.
The workers already  have their own economic demands, we should  
suggest better advanced industrial tactics to win them and the imporatnce
of taking up POLITICAL work in organizing against the ruling class and
its party-state as well as exposing the role of the unions in collaboration
with the companies as industrial police over the workers.

We need the materialist/marxist analysis of --institutionalized 
class  fealty between the unions, the state and the bosses/Corps
togegher .
Yes, expose the labor fakers but go further than a mere idealist 
posturing about a savioristic 'Crisis of Leadership " problem. 

That way the workers might come out both a tad better in the immediate 
demands sense whilst building new  groups/higher political seriousnes
 that also speak to  both the present and future needs of the workers 
 combat to defend their interests  agaisnt  capital--with a SPECIFIC class 
programme of theory and action.
Such a result is possible and could  be the pivot in the class for key 
left advances in workers conscousness , mood to struggle and 
 widened combativity. 

That would be a great victory  the ruling class may not take
back so easily, try as they certainly will to do so..

Neil






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