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What is most striking in these emotionally charged scenes is that the struggle transcends a simple plant election. The people who are politically in motion are people who work on the line every day, people who drive their own cars, people who own homes, people who have families, people who may even own the proverbial color television set. These same people are very obviously and very enthusiastically supporting an anti-capitalist revolutionary organization. Workers viewing such footage can identify with the kind of people participating and with the kind of action being taken. They can see that being a radical does not require becoming an incredible, gun-slinging hero who defies the police with every breath. A union election is one of the lowest levels of mass action, but it is mass action nonetheless, and not elite action, just as the strike and the boycott are mass actions in which the people serve themselves rather than relying upon a group of elite warriors.
Our objectives: 1. Workers' control of their places of work -- the factories,
mines, fields, offices, transportation services and communication facilities -- so
that the exploitation of labor will cease and no person or corporation will get
rich off the labor of another person, but all people will work far the collective
benefit of humanity.
-Black Workers Congress manifesto, 1971
The Forman idea of revolutionary theory and practice, "Formanism," reflected a precise, if restricted, sense of organization and an amalgam of popularized theoretical tendencies of the 1960s. The major organizational form was the umbrella group operating with a popular front strategy. The organizations had plans for becoming mass-membership groups; but more important than gaining members were the immediate goals of organizing conferences, workshops, and lectures and producing documents. This procedure would attract outside funding and prepare the ground for political education classes. The end product of this program was supposed to be the creation of Frantz Fanon Institutes. In effect, Formanism substituted ideological struggle for struggle over material conditions. The focus had to remain ideological because people were recruited into study groups and organizing commissions rather than action groups prepared to deal with immediate issues. Reduced to study groups and organizing commissions, politics was effectively separated from the problems of work and daily life. The education itself was anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, but ideas were not presented in the context of a serious class analysis of the roles blacks play in America or of the state of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Unlike the economically grounded and disciplined organizational approach of Marxism-Leninism, the approach of Fanon-Formanism was exemplified by loosely structured groups stressing psychological interpretations of social reality and the accumulation of technical skills. Formanism was less a program for moving toward power than a defensive tactic for dealing with oppression.
A typical example of a runaway plant was the Briggs Manufacturing Corporation. Once an independent giant in the auto parts industry whose owner also owned the Detroit baseball team and ran the ball park as a kind of civic duty, Briggs was purchased by Chrysler in 1953. Nineteen years later, Briggs workers learned that their factory was to be moved to Tennessee within a year. The workers were told that they were guaranteed a job if they moved to Tennessee, too, but their wages would be $2.40 an hour instead of the Detroit rate of $4.30. The stunned workers also learned that Tennessee had a "right-to-work" law which hampered union activity and that the state was granting Chrysler an interest-free loan of $6.5 million. The Detroit workers discovered that they would lose their pensions, group insurance benefits, job security, workman's compensation claims, and numerous other "fringe" benefits. The affected workers were not the "new" workers written about in scholarly journals, but people whose average age was 45 and who had an average of 20 years' seniority. Many of them came from white ethnic groups. One hundred and fifty of these workers organized to fight the company. The insurgents could get no action from the union, so they turned to radical labor attorneys John Taylor and Ron Glotta, who promptly took legal action to protect the workers' financial interests.
What distinguished the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was that we were able to engage masses of black workers at a time when people didn't know how to approach or mobilize them. We learned to speak plainly in a language workers understood, but we did not talk down to them. We understood you had to speak with passion. You had to feel that passion. You had to have the courage to expose yourself as a person with revolutionary ideas and be willing to face the consequences.
from Michael Hamlin