An interview with Dan La Botz about RadioActive Radicals: A Novel of Labor and the LEFT.

An interview with Dan La Botz about RadioActive Radicals: A Novel of Labor and the LEFT.

are pleased to be joined by Dan Labots at Bread and Roses 2 and Dan is the author of many books and writings and you can actually go to his website at dan da n l a b- b o tz writing w r i t i n g-s.com and you'll see many of his articles and books there more than we have time to list he's very prolific writer and he's the author of a recent book major book calledactive metals by Dan Labots and it's self-described as a novel of labor and left. Dan, why why did you write this book? >> Well, I think that our generation, I think you and I are in the, you know, about the same age. And our generation that grew up came of age in the 1960s and '7s, I think had a very remarkable experience, especially socially. That is, we lived through the civil rights movement and the beginning of black power.

We lived through the women's movement. We lived through the Chuco and Puerto Rican movements that began respectively in California and in New York and New Jersey and in Chicago for the Puerto Ricans too. And so all of those movements were movements about liberation and freedom and about being able to change the country. And we grew up in that period when there was so much hope and such great aspirations and in which many wonderful things were accomplished though obviously a job still not finished. So I think I wrote the book so that people could have a picture of us.

Sometimes people give a little cliche for our generation, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And there was plenty of that. But it doesn't capture the radical social dimensions and the complexity of our personal experiences, all the road trips, all the hitchhiking, all of the uh all of the stuff that went on. So I wanted to give people a way to look at this wonderful generation of which we were a part. >> And I I think this is important for a new generation of of political radicals, people who want to organize, people who believe that by coming together and and doing collective organizing that they can change the world.

And I think your book actually captures a lot of the culture as well as the actual history of a sector of the left that formed as you say really influenced by a massive anti-war movement huge social movements particularly the black liberation movement of the period and gave rise to many many thousands of people around the world including the United States who were determined to totally transform this country and uh to deal with imperialism. to deal with racial oppression to create a world in which working-class people would actually democratically as possible run society. A big big vision. Big vision. >> Absolutely. That was the vision.

>> And I I I think it's important for us people now to grasp why people had these huge aspirations that those kind of fundamental changes were possible. Not done by, you know, a handful of people who are going to liberate you from above, but by building a movement of socialism from below. And I think your book captures that. I mean, for this period really from maybe 64 up to what would we say? >> Well, it goes it goes right up to the murder of George Floyd and to the huge Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place right after.

So, yes, about then. >> Yeah. So, in fact, the Black Lives Matter, >> these two young people >> who by the end of follows two young people who by the end of the book are two older people. >> Yeah. So, it's fiction, but it's historical fiction.

And there's a lot of important history in here as well as a lot of personal stuff. There's there's lots of discussion of sex and love and relationships, but also it gives a picture that I I think is almost unparalleled elsewhere of a sector of the left that um began on the on the mass campuses of the period and this was a new period where you know millions of people were actually going to college. You actually started out with your transformation I think with you were what early on you joined students for a democratic society and you were a supporter of the free speech movement in in Berkeley. Tell us about that and why that or something else was important. >> So I I I organized this book around two biographies.

It's partially autobiographical about me and I start in the book I more or less start in California which is where I was in high school and and went to college and so on and about a a friend of mine who's and in the book my character is called Durk and the other character is called Wes for Wesley and and he he is starts out in Iowa but goes to Chicago. Both of us go into SDS at different moments. SDS was of course an enormous movement. 1 million people passed through students for a democratic society and it was everywhere and it and it raised the some of the ideas we were talking about the role of democracy ending wars the role of democracy and so on and so so for myself for the candidate the candidate for the character rather who is me that character is called Durk and Durk joins SDS as a graduate student on a campus at the University of California in La Hoya where he is studying and so he joins SDS there and becomes active in SDS and active in the anti-war movement. So and we see you know within that early period I mean your transformation um into a lifelong political radical and writer and thinker and organizer and activist and then there's another fellow as you mentioned you call him Wes I I knew him and I worked with him but I will say his name was Steve people I frankly loved um I mean this was a very emotional book because it captures my generation as well and historically within within your book you talk about the rise of this sector of the left that wasn't really the new left. It was it was a Marxist left that believed in the centrality of mass workingass selfactivity.

I first ran across that you talk about Clear Lake the SDS convention in 1966 at Clear Lake, Iowa that I was at and there was a fellow there who showed up with a new pamphlet Kim Moody called towards the working class and that was actually a fairly new idea within this this broad new left to introduce that. Would you say more about the the formation of this this tendency that saw itself Yes. beginning on campus, beginning with serious study and and understanding of Marxism, a rejection of of the kind of totalitarian colonism that was represented by the Soviet Union and many other countries and for that matter also the this kind of social democratic vision that took hold in much of Europe and certain degree I think within the New Deal, the Roosevelt New Deal in the United States. But talk about the formation of this. How how it is that hundreds of people went from coming, grad students, maybe professors, college students to seeing the necessity of in key sectors of the working class and seeing that as a and why did you see that as important? Well, I think that in the novel I try to show that we became socialists first and we became socialists on the campus and we became socialists through groups like the young people's socialist league and then the independent socialists which was an actual organization though in the book it's it's really the name I give to the international socialists and these were tendencies that came out a wing of the Troskyist movement that was led by first by Max Shackman and then by Hal Draper And it was a wing of the Troskas movement that said that it rejected support for the the Soviet Union rejected support said the Soviet Union is no longer it had a revolution but it's no longer a worker state.

And so in this book we see people going to meetings of SDS reading talking about these ideas and the one of the big ideas was that uh the working class was the only group that had the necessity and the power to change capitalism. Its conditions of life forced it to fight back against the capitalist class, the bosses that for whom they worked and and its enormous size. The majority of countries like the United States, the vast majority of people were earning wages to make a living and also its compact location at the center of industrial production that is people who worked in big heavy industries. We believed at that time in auto, steel, telephone, trucking, mining. Those were the sectors of society that had the power, had the interest to fight back and had the power to bring the whole system to a stop.

That is if they began to stop working. If they began to fight back against the bosses, they could change society. So that idea percolated through our left and I show it in the book through individual stories and and it and as pe in other words, as people are searching for liberation for black people against the war, women and so on, they begin to say what can liberate us? What is a theory of liberation? And that's socialism.

But socialism says we need the working class. And so then there's a big decision before us which for many of us not all of us. My friend Mel Packer who was went through similar experiences wrote me recently and said I gave a talk on this recently that was online and he said you forgot not all of us went to the university. He said I I was a worker in the industry who was attracted to these ideas. That's true.

But for those of us who were campus activists, whether in the black movement, the Latino movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, we had to make a choice if we were going to turn to the working class. Now, in other countries, it's not weird to stand in Europe. It was not weird in that period in Europe to stand outside of a factory and hand out a socialist newspaper and get in discussions with people. Here in the United States, that would make you the most incredible oddball. When people left work, they jumped in their cars and they raced out of the parking lot.

It would be dangerous to try to sell them a paper as we learned. >> I tried. I tried. Okay, go on. >> Anyone could do it.

But the thing is, so what made more sense we felt was we actually had to become part of the working class. We had to get jobs in industry uh and so on. So a bunch of us started to go to places. Now, some of us had the some of us had already been in the teachers unions or been or been involved in some other white collar union. In my own experience, I became a social worker briefly in in Chicago before I found an industrial I moved from California to Chicago to look for an industrial job. took me a while to find the job and I worked as a social worker and I had a interesting experience in the Illinois Union of Social Service Employees which was an incredibly democratic union allied with welfare rights organization great union meetings full of all kinds of leftists in that period of every remark I think there were people from the communist party the socialist workers party uh the internationalist progressive labor party everybody was there at the union meetings and the black workers and uh white workers and so on and and that union so that gave us a union experience but we were looking for a job in industry and then one day a friend came over to my house and he stood next to me.

He threw a newspaper down on the kitchen table and he said look we live in a poverty area here it's in on this map and so therefore we can go to this truck driving school for free and we're looking for industrial jobs. So we went to the truck driving school >> and and it was mainly black workers who were there and it was a great experience actually. It was a lot of fun. Uh and and I came out of it able to drive a truck with a category of license to drive a truck and I was and then I went out to look for a job. Ideally in that period we wanted jobs in heavy industry and we wanted jobs in the biggest employers.

Now, at that time, I would like to have gotten a job with Consolidated Freightways or Roadway or Yellow Freight, which in that era were huge national trucking companies, and some of their local facilities had hundreds and hundreds of workers. So, that would have been where I would like to be. But, as it turned out, the only job I could find at that moment was in what was called a local cartage company. I went to work for a company called Fland and Cartage. And it was a small company.

I don't know if it had maybe 50 employees, truck drivers, and dock workers. and a few dispatchers and a clerk or two and and it was and it was a very backward conservative place, very tight-knit. So, so that was the experience. That's what we were doing. Other people went out and found jobs in auto plants, found jobs in the steel mill in Chicago when we looked for jobs. One of our members who was a researcher type, he had worked as a a labor researcher actually for Caesar Chavez and then moved to Chicago for our project and went to work for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. and he he became our kind of our employment agency.

He would say to us, "Here's jobs you can find. Go to these places." And if we if we needed a recommendation, his was the name and number we gave. >> And they they didn't have to look at whether or not you had a graduate degree when you were applying for tried to get rid of all of our >> You could have a college degree, which you certainly didn't want to have anything else. And and some people got rid of the college degrees. They just applied as a high school graduate.

Most pe most workers at that time were high school graduates. So there were already maybe 10% of the working class already had college degrees in the 1970s. The place I went to work, the worker with the oldest seniority on the list had hired in in 1935 and I hired in about 1972. So that's a full workingass life, you know. >> And they they when I hired in they had been all white workers and the first couple of black workers were just hired under a federal consent decree and these were racist white workers in Chicago.

Dan, give us a a brief sense of the formation of a major rank and file group which still exists for perhaps in in a somewhat different form and certainly different conditions today. Teamsters for Democratic Union and I believe that members of your group the the is played a big role in connecting indigenous workers that is people like Mel Packer and and others out there who were dissident and fighters within within their union you know working people from workingclass backgrounds without you know having the college degrees and having come into their politics while on campus or or some such. How was it possible and what were the conditions that made it possible to to create a significant that still exists today? >> Yeah, team I in the book I call the teamsters for democratic union I call it teamsters for democracy and I give more or less a picture of of how it was created and of I give a picture of my role in it and of my friend Steve Kindred's role who I descri I name him Wes in the book and both of us were involved in this >> and Steve was an incredible organizer. He was >> he was an incredible organizer and and a wonderful person.

I miss him. He died more than 10 years ago. And I begin the book with myself at his deathbed. So what we did is so here here we are a bunch of college kids. We get we get into industry and we want to meet the people there.

We did not have the idea that we knew everything and could organize everything. We never were arrogant about that. We never wanted to control everything. In fact, we realized as soon as we got into the trucking industry, we we had we had experience as speakers and writers and organizers, but we didn't know a damn thing about the trucking industry. Uh we didn't know anything about the unions that we were in and their history.

We knew little about workers conditions in their workplaces. We began to experience and see it around us what was going on. So we recognized that that we leftwing organizers, activists entering the labor movement had to enter into a partnership with the the the workers who were already there. The workers who were already there and they had a lot of experience. Now there were different categories you could say in some parts.

Jimmy Hawa who was the great romantic charismatic leader of the union in this period of the 1960s when we first go in he is uh he he's he wants to centralize the union. He he created a tremendous thing. He took over the ideas of the troskiest labor organizer Frell Dobs at whose need he had learned to organize. Hoffa had learned to organize and he takes over Frell Dobs's ideas of using power in one city to organize other cities. At that time it was very there were no there were no national freight lines.

So you could block freight by blocking one city and and and so uh Hawa take over those ideas and he's building a new thing called the national eventually at the end of it called the >> national master >> national master freight agreement that covered about 500,000 workers half a million workers in the United States and so when we went in there many people were mad at Hawa because he centralized the union and all power was in his hands he he dominated the union so you had little groups of anti-Hawa groups you also had other people who were pro- ha and who as the as ha went to prison he was put in prison for jury tampering and because he was being pursued by the feds because of corruption in the union and they didn't get him on the corruption but they he tried to to buy a juror so they threw him in jail for that and so when he was in jail there were people who then he left the union in the hands of a gopher named Frank Fitz Simmons and nobody thought Frank Fitz Simmons would ever amount to anything and and and he was a different animal than than Hafa. I mean, frankly, I I worshiped Hafa back, you know, back in the day when I first joined the the Teamsters myself. Not because I was trying to change the world. I just needed a job. But okay, I'm going Yeah.

>> So, Hawa Hawa had two faces when he was in prison. And just as he came out of prison, he he he did two things. One, he said he started writing, giving talks, writing things. He wrote a little book saying that people had to go back to class struggle. They had to fight against the bosses.

He took up these ideas that came from his Troskiest mentor Frell Dobs. And he was saying as he came out of prison in the late60s and early 70s, we have to go and we have to fight the bosses. Well, that attracted some people. But he was also had another side of him. He was going to the mafia people and saying, I know what you guys are doing.

I know where all the bodies are buried and I will tell the feds if you don't let me come back and take back the union. Well, that got him killed. But so there were two different attitudes towards Hoff. Some people who fought him because he was too dictatorial and some people that admired him because he had a militant past. So when we went into the union, but there were lots of other people everywhere who had a problem at work because the something had happened in the US economy.

The US had dominated the world economy from the end of World War II up until about 19, we could say ' 67 or '68 when an economic crisis began and pressure started to come down on the employers. They needed to make more money which meant they needed workers to work faster and harder. And so that came in as a push push for productivity in the teamsters and when that happened people started to fight back. So you had in many places people who were pissed off the rules were being changed. They were being pushed harder.

The bosses were being awful. And their union officials didn't want to fight. The union officials did not want to fight. They wouldn't lead fights. And sometimes they would join with the bosses to suppress workers who were organizing and resisting.

>> And this wasn't just in the teamsters. I mean, this was happening in the UAW, the auto workers, and other unions as well. Yeah. >> Everywhere. And in all the big ones, we had a small hand in it.

Not not as we in the teamsters we became the organizers of the leading opposition for decades but in other unions we played a role. We were involved in the United National Caucus I think it was called in the UAW. We were involved with people who come out of Edowski's campaign to create a new leadership in the steel workers union. So in the telephone workers we had been involved in an important strike in New York though we never really got a a stronghold there. Uh we never had more than a tiny foothold.

But >> that was a mil that was a militant local. It was I mean politically backward I suppose in many ways but it was a militant local. Yeah. >> So everywhere we were so in the Teamsters Union we would meet these people and then we would talk with them. We and we would say you know let's let's try to organize something here to fight back.

And when we did that and we began to build up little groups in the cities where we had we had some people who had not moved most of us moved to the big industrial cities of the Midwest, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit. And the idea those were the the big four for us. We went to those cities. We sent people to those cities. But we had some people who stayed behind who had been on the West Coast in and going to school or something in Seattle, in the Bay Area, in Los Angeles.

And we had some few people on the east coast in New York or New Jersey. >> In New York City. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So we had a few people doing those things in the Teamsters Union.

But uh but when we got started in these Midwest places, we had kind of a formula. We get together a group that might be 5 10 20 people who wanted to organize in their local and then we would say to them, we think these are the ideas that we need to organize around like you know fighting the bosses, union democracy, solidarity. elected union stewards. You know, a lot of places did not have elected union stewards. They were appointed. A steward is the person in the workplace who represents and fights for you.

But if you don't get to elect them, the if the bureaucrats picked one, the guy might be worthless. I say the guy because where I worked in trucking, there were almost all guys. There were some women in the teamsters freight area, but not many, a handful. So, so that was the method. You form a group, you agree on these ideas, and then we'd publish a newspaper of some sort.

So, we had newspapers in every city where we were active with lots of different names, and those newspapers were local union activist newspapers that we wrote with the people with whom we worked. I would often say to somebody, they would we would have a meeting, and they'd say, "Man, you can't believe what happened at work today." Well, let's write that down. This is an example of what the bosses are doing, not just in your workplace, but elsewhere. So then you have a conversation and try to encourage the working-class person to write. Lots of workers don't have the confidence, the experience say but we you say why don't you dictate to me I'll write what do you think of this?

No you forgot something. Oh no write it down. So so you try to have a working relationship to have people write articles develop these ideas and people do that everywhere that we were active in the country in 19 I'm I just want to say I understand the importance of this and that approach. You weren't going in as missionaries in or an arrogant way because you actually actually had a vision of creating helping the working class create a layer of people who were skilled, who could speak for themselves, who had the skills, who could develop the the activity of of their of their co-workers. Yours was not just a socialism.

It was a vision of a socialism from below. and and and you didn't mention it, but I mean there was an important pamphlet that came out years before by Hal Draper >> by Stan Weir. >> Yeah. >> Stan Weir's >> it was I mean it was the kind of the opening of thoughts for many of us of the concept of socialism from below. >> Yeah. So so in a a union the national master freight agreement was up for negotiation.

So it's enormous contract half a million workers and uh one of the people in our group who often provided the best ideas to the group and gave us a good strategy was was Ken Path and Ken and others came up with the notion that we should intervene in this national master freight agreement and that we should attempt to get workers to organize to demand a better contract. >> That was that was TDC, right? Teamsters for dem uh yeah >> decent team for a decent contract, right? Right. Easy3.

>> And so and so we we we would take and we had a little pamphlet when you know how we used to in the old days before >> in the old days before we had the internet. We had little three-fold brochure. So we we had a three-fold brochure about this getting a better contract and getting a decent contract. And we started handing them out to people in the cities where we were located. But we also would put bundles of them either just bundled up in an envelope that said for the union steward or said for your for the local union officers.

And we would put these bundles of brochures into trailers that were leaving to be taken somewhere else in the country. So we distributed I don't know how many more than 100,000 of these pamphlets throughout the country in various ways handing them out throwing them in trailers and so we began to get a response. So, so then what what happened was we called a meeting in Chicago to have a a meeting of various people from various cities who were involved in this project. They had not met before. And when we did that, I was at this meeting and I remembered it was we were concerned that team that Teamster officials who in parts of the country had had in killed a couple people who are union oppositionists had beaten up others.

We were afraid they might show up. So we had we had organized this in a hotel and we had 50 people who were not teamsters who we brought in with baseball bats and so on different places in the hotel to prepare to defend ourselves if we got attacked. And then we were we were sitting in a circle the people who were involved in this project and in walked a couple guys in suits and we didn't know that we knew wore suits. We'd come off the campus. We were dressed like I am in blue jeans and some shirt, you know, and these guys come in wearing suits and they're carrying matching metal like aluminum briefcases and I I don't and they come in and they sit down and they introduce themselves.

One guy says, "I'm Pete Camarada and I'm from Detroit." So Pete Camarada was a Hawa supporter had been a ha delegate to a previous convention. >> Yeah. There was actually an organization called Action for Hafa. >> Yeah. Yeah.

So he he shows up and we're all at first thinking this guy's going to take a gun out of that briefcase, but he shows up and he says, "I' I'd like to jo, you know, we'd like to join this movement in Detroit." Well, he was a person who had a a sort of I would call him a quietly charismatic person. >> It was just that he was like the world's nicest guy. I mean, he was very softspoken, very sweet. He was he had been married, divorced, and went back to live in the fraternity hall of the fraternity he had belonged to as a student. And yet he was working in these in the trucking barns.

And he was the guy who if he said we have to walk out, everybody walked out. And I mean hundreds or thousands of people walked out of on strike. >> And and he had a network. It wasn't just his workplace, right? >> Yeah.

Of course. He had a network and and with other local unions, uh local not only local 299, but local I think it's 337. Uh and so we had he he had suddenly we he had joined us and suddenly our group meant something. It put us on the map in a big way. I mean, I I was part of a tiny group in Chicago.

We could get we could get 10 or 20 people at most to go demonstrate or something. When we called a demonstration, he had a one or two thousand people demonstrating marching around the union hall in Detroit. And uh and and all of these demonstrations and we called press conferences. I spoke as I was the spokesperson for a national press conference about this in 75 or six. >> And were you speaking as a teamster or a member of a socialist group?

No, of course I'm speaking as a teamster. We were organized a Teamster movement. Uh, and so we, let me say a word about that in a second, but I just want to finish this part to say we put enough pressure on Frankfurt Simmons and on the Teamsters Union that they called the first ever national strike on the National Master Freight Agreement. And it led to wildcat in various cities, but been in Detroit in particular, but other cities. and our members and friends in TDU, our members of the IS and our friends in TDU played leading roles in those wildcats and freight and at UPS. So >> I give give just one example.

Actually, I don't think you describe it in the book, but it was important to me. There was your your buddy Steve who was a good organizer. He was working in Carhole and he played a role in a major strike in Carhaul where I think he had hundreds of of these carhaul trucks all going down the highway at like you know 10 miles an hour or something and it had like a really major impact. >> Yeah. Steve was was a leader of that car hole strike and and it's one of the things I feel bad about.

Whenever I would see Steve he would say I'm I'm going to write up that story. And Steve found it hard to get the discipline later in his life to sit down and write up that story. In the book, I I make that character Wes the leader of another strike or two and there were strikes that I was actually involved in. But in any case that you mentioned the question of did I speak as a socialist. So let me say a word about this because I think it's important.

When we were in the Teamsters Union, our conception was that we're going to build an organization that ought to be led by Teamsters. when we had the first meeting to elect the first steering committee for this newly found organization teamsters for a democratic union I believe was held in Cleveland and at that meeting uh many of our members were nominated to be on the committee but we'd already decided that the leadership committee would only have which would be like 16 people or something would only have three or four of our members and so I for example was nominated I'm not particular shouldn't have been a teamster leader but I can speak well and and so on And and so I got nominated and I declined and so did many o of our members decline. And we had a few people on that committee and we had a policy that we had one person in our teamster movement and in our teamster leadership meetings who represented the point of view of the IS and he would speak and that person was Mel Packer >> and that was also possible because he was he was actually coming out of that work same working-class millu. Right. >> Right. and he had been working as a teamster for a long time and he and he was a a real leader locally and uh I mean the person who was playing the real leadership role at the highest level I would say Mel played an important role but was but the person who you know was a strategist was often Ken Path and Ken Path didn't never spoke as a member of the international socialist he was a quiet silent member and he we we tried to not make the is a central issue I don't think people talked about the is role in the teamsters for maybe a decade or something. >> This is very important.

I mean you there were lots of these other groups that left small leftist organizations or maybe not so small leftist organizations were creating but they were creating them as front groups and they were they were creating them as ways to then first of all yes engage in struggle but also to recruit to their own particular small well in US terms small organizations. you had a very different vision. I believe >> I was going to say that I had women friends for example involved in the women's movement who were organizing around the women's issues of the time which were the right to abortion always so that women can control their own bodies and and the right to equal pay for equal work and so on and these people organizing around these issues and the SWP came into that millure in different places and would organize and they would create a leadership committee always making sure that they had the votes that they had more of their members there so they could control it from the top and we we had rejected that uh that approach and I think it was a a bad approach. It's important to say this is a workers organization. I don't know, you know, they I guess and the one other thing I wanted to say when we when we were working with people, if I'm working with someone for a while and they got to know me, they felt they could trust me and I could trust them and I would say to them, you know, uh I work on this Teamster stuff with you, but I want you to know I'm a socialist and I belong to a socialist group and we're involved in this too and a couple of the other people who work with I didn't mention their names necessarily, but there's a few of us in here and I wanted you to know that I'm a socialist and when you did that, it inoculated the Nobody could come and say, "Did you know Labbatz is a is a communist?" They always say a communist, of course. And they usually say, "You know, he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] communist." Somehow that always happened.

This is a different period than today because anti-communism was a really serious and burning issue and it was also the basis in many unions. If if you were identified as a member of a communist organization, you you were subject to being expelled from the union. Well, I think to be expelled from the union, you had to be member of the Communist Party itself. But others were probably driven out because they were of similar kinds of politics. In my experience, one time I was handing out uh our socialist newspaper, but we I didn't usually do that in the Teamsters Union.

We had people who were doing that who didn't work in the Teamsters Union, handing out the socialist paper at Teamster Places to protect our uh being outed in the union in a bad way or prematurely or something. And I but I was handing out this newspaper in a parking lot. Somebody had driven me there and and I was handing this out in the parking lot in Chicago and the other person with a car had, you know, gone a little ways down and was handing out the paper and a guy, two guys come up to me and one of them looks at me and said, "You're a communist and you guys killed my father in Korea and you killed my uncle in in Vietnam." And so the anti-communism was both very visceral and had a very real material basis. That is Communist states and communist organizations were at war uh with the United States and had killed Americans. And so yes, the anti-communism was not just like I don't like your ideas is I hate you because of what's happened to members of my family.

So in that case, I showed those two guys how fast I could run. I caught up with the guy with the car and fled because I would have gotten the [ __ ] kicked out of me. So, so that was one another approach we had as socialists in the union is whenever there was going to be a teamster meeting that was going to take place, we would call a side meeting like a national meeting. I mean, we would call a side meeting so that if at that national meeting there were going to be hundreds of teamsters there or just the teamster leadership committee of 16 people or something for the three or four people we thought were close to us or maybe maybe it was five or 10 people, we would have a side meeting where we would talk to them. and we'd say, "We want you to know we're in the International Socialist. This is who we are, what we do.

This is our newspaper." Uh, and try to win them to our to join our group at some point. We wanted them first to know that who we were. But if we could, some of them we wanted to recruit and we did recruit um some teamsters in Detroit and other cities. How successful. Now, this is a small organization, the international socialists.

You've got a actually I think there was an excellent paper written very popularly workers power and you're actually recruiting jig workingclass activists um that you'd worked with in in rank and file movements and reform movements but they're coming into a culture of where they're surrounded with people who were trained on campus in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement who like to have long arguments and write position papers and have lots of meetings. How did this work for for for people who didn't come out of that kind of out of a section of the intelligencia? >> Yeah. At at the moment at the moment we started to recruit workers, we immediately realized what a problem it was. And so we would tell our people don't start some discussion on some abstract problem of socialism or tell us about the latest you know you've been reading Antonio Grochi or Gay or Glucatch or something. don't let let's come into this meeting and and so we tried to get people to get rid of those personal level discussions but we also so attempted to change the agenda of the meetings.

So we would have our meeting begin with a discussion of what's happening in the teamsters union or the auto workers union or the steel workers union. Uh and we had members in those union when I was in Chicago we had members involved in all of those unions one way or another. some working in we had both working auto workers and teamsters and good friends in the in the steel workers union and we had some steel workers is members in in northern Indiana in Gary and so on. So we we tried to make the the union meeting more hospitable. We're coming in. You're going to come in here and they're going to be talking about your union about other people you know about their kinds of issues and that helped.

On the same time we did not want to totally depoliticize our group. So we would also probably having done that and so people feel more welcome at the beginning we might to say now we're going to talk about union activists and what's happening in South Africa where the union movement there called Kosatu their coalition or confederation of South African trade unions is leading big strikes fighting not only the bosses but fighting against a racist Nazi government and so so we would try to uh to make the but but nonetheless what you point out is is very true. Let me add some other dimensions to this. The people that we're recruiting, they have families. Most of our members did not have children.

I was the exception. Uh when I moved to Chicago, I moved there with a companion. We had two children. So that was that was the I was the exception. Nobody else had kids in that branch.

But the people we're working with in the workplaces, they're all married. They have kids. Mostly they're older than us. We're going in around 25 to 30 years old and there are people in their say 40s. So they already have children.

Most a lot of them go to church. Not all of them. In fact, some ministers joined TDU in this Midwest and the South who played a because of their experience as speakers and organizers of their church played a good role in TDU. But in any case, they've got families. They go to church.

They belong to social clubs. Sometimes those are ethnic clubs. Sometimes they're sort of conservative local community organizations, you know. And so if we recruit them, we can't we can't completely unplug them from their world or and and so they'd come to us and say, you know, uh my wife is getting mad at me cuz I'm I'm spending coming to your meetings on the weekend. She thinks we have to go shopping on Sunday and and we have kids to take care of and we have a family event.

One of my kids has a birthday. So all of those kind of normal family life things were things that our members had no experience with and and we weren't used to really making allowance for them. One other thing I would I would mention is that our organization these are we're working with guys who are in their 40s and our organization is about half women who are in their late 20s or early 30s and so there some of their wives did not appreciate these young women coming around to talk to their husbands with probably came with one you know with some guy but so so there's also the whole naturally the whole romantic sexual element of these things and so it was not easy to and and we were Where it worked best I would say was Detroit. And in Detroit we recruited a small cluster of people, four or five or six people who came in to get and they could come to this meeting and hang out with people they already knew from the teamsters union at an is meeting. That was the best because they could feel at home there. whereas you point out in the other branches here they are with these people whose experience and background in training was in the campus movements or in social movements the anti-war movement or uh the women's movement or whatever.

So >> yeah, this is this is a problem that I don't think has been resolved today. I mean there's a sort of a rebirth of a of socialism among a generation of of people who are mostly in their 20s or early 30s. I mean, it's something that's organizationally a lot of it's been captured by Democratic Socialists of America, but yet, you know, the strength of that movement, the people that that fill it, they they come off the campuses, you know, they've got their PhDs or their grad students, and yeah, they're they helped organize a a grad students union. Yeah, we have but they're but they're probably reading Hegel to have a better understanding of of capital and and and at the same time they want to build a working a mass workingass movement which includes people who actually have families and children you know and who maybe they work at a job at UPS where you know they're working 50 60 hours a week and they're exhausted >> utterly exhausted. >> Yeah.

How do you these are unresolved problems for building a >> but but I had a meeting the other day at my house I was asked to give a talk to people from what's called the bread and roses caucus the democratic socialists of America and there were mostly were members of that caucus maybe one or two other DSA members I think there were seven people we had a we had a talk and I had to admire these people they're getting jobs as teachers they're getting jobs as working in the healthc care as nurses some of them are already working a couple of them were working for TDU now as staff members for TDU and so these are people who are making a commitment to the working class in different ways and and so I admire that I think that's good I'm glad that they're attempting to do it and I agree with you that some of the problems we previously had unresolved that is we have in in I'm a member of the TSA chapter in New York City it always has about 10 the national membership so that means it has about 11,000 members and it does have five people I believe are in the teachers union or in maybe that's not right. Excuse me. It has 500 people in labor unions and yet that is not very that work is not somehow really integrated into DSA. DSA is not integrated into that work except maybe there's there's a caucus in the teachers union a good caucus called more the movement of is it called radical educators. Yeah, >> more the more caucus and there's uh there's people who are involved in the nurses union the new NISNA the New York State nurses association and so you know those are good and important things and and one of the things is the change today that where people are not trying to get jobs in heavy industry industrial workplaces are you know I worked briefly before I was a truck driver I worked as a steel worker and I worked at Gary Works Gary Works is an enormous an enormous steel mill in Gary Indiana that during World War II it had 40,000 workers.

When I went to work there in 1970 or something, it had uh 10,000 workers, but that was still a huge workplace. >> And then of course when the Japanese and German competition in steel came in, the US steel mills had to change their technique. They had to go to things like continuous processing, which was a much more efficient, rapid way of making steel. and the and they they went to creating mini mills. The industry created mini mills. So we no longer have those same huge industrial workplaces with the same economic and social weight.

>> Yeah. This and this has happened not just in steel but in I mean it's happened in auto when I you know as a teamster driver. I I worked for you yellow freight and roadway and you know I think like 10 out of the 11 companies that I worked for all went bankrupt you know and the teamsters union which what you said in in master freight already had like what 500,000 members I mean there there really isn't a master freight agreement anymore. No, what happened was that Ralph Nater, usually a good guy, made a mistake and started advocating deregulation of the trucking and airlines industries as well. >> Yeah.

>> And Ted Kennedy took up that that initiative and they passed these laws to deregulate the trucking industry which meant that new non-UN companies came in to compete and the whole the whole system collapsed because trucking had been based on government regulation and on teamster organization. But they they needed both without government regulation uh which had kept out people keep kept people from forming new companies and kept them from uh creating new rates and so on routes. I want to can I change the subject for a moment? >> Yeah, please do. And actually we should wind this up in about 5 minutes.

>> Okay. Okay. So, let me just mention I wanted to talk in this book about the labor bureaucracy and and one way to talk about that was to take up the case of perhaps the most admired labor bureaucrat in America whose name was Cesar Chavez. And so, Cesar Chavez uh who was the leader of the farm workers who did a remarkable job in organizing the farm workers in California for a few years. It was a very short-lived success but he did have success.

He organized workers, got contracts, did it and these were Mexican-American workers. He was opposed to organizing Mexicans who crossed the border. He would he called them illegals and wanted them out of the fields. And and so I created I took my character who's called Durk in the book and I had him go to work for Caesar Chavez for a year. I never worked for Caesar Chavez.

I worked with the United Farm Workers as a volunteer in various ways at different times. >> But you wrote a book about Caesar Chavez, too, >> right? I wrote a biography of Caesar Chavez. So I knew everything about him. And I also had I mentioned earlier a good friend who had worked for him as his researcher.

So and so I knew that he he never wanted local unions because if there were local unions they might compete with they might get leaders that competed with him. You know he didn't want anybody making other decisions or challenging him. And so Caesar Chavez while a great organizer at first played a very conservative role in cons controlling the union. And as of course after my book was published which I did not know at the time we learned uh that many women affirmed that he had sexually abused or even raped them. Uh so so the union bureaucracy we had I think a very good understanding.

We said some leftists said we want to organize left unions against right unions. We said no it's not about left and right. It's about top and bottom. We want to organize the bottom against the top. Most of these union officials, you know, even the best of them when we first went in there, when we first started thinking about this, Walter Ruther in the late 60s, Walter Ruther, a social democrat, supported farm workers, supported other causes, his union did good things, but they did not fight for workers on the shop floor.

And the workers, Dan, in the time we have, I know you characterize the union bureau, maybe that should be defined, as a cast with its own social interest, with its own material interests, >> right? And and and why is that important? Why is that important? >> I think it's important because if you're going into a union, especially young people going into a union say, "I'm for the union." Well, I'm for the union, too, but I'm for the union run by the members and these the people who get who become union officers. Not all of them.

Not all of them by any means. But when we talk about the big national unions and the people on top of those unions, they no longer work in a workplace with other workers who from their who do make automobiles. They don't do that anymore. uh they don't work with people who drive trucks. In the Teamsters Union, they they have a different wage or salary. In the Teamsters Union, we had officials when I was a truck driver making $14,000 a year who were making $500,000 a year from the union.

This is a complete robbery. This was corruption. And those were don't share our experiences. They're out of the control of the members. Very often they had what were called golden parachutes.

When they retired, this golden parachute would see them into their old age of enormous pensions, different than ours, of course, as workers. >> And they didn't want to lose their positions and go back to the workplace. >> No, certainly not. Most of them, in fact, not most of them, but many retiring union officials would get jobs either working as arbitrators for the government or some of them knew about the trucking industry. So, they'd go open a trucking company, a non-union company, and compete with their former union members.

So, it's called business unionism. They had a couple different meetings. One is run first is protect the business that you work for. So the steel workers should protect the steel industry. They go and testify in Congress.

>> We're partners. >> We're partners. Exactly. So you're protecting the secondly run the union like a business corporate organization hierarchy and so on. And third maybe go into business for yourself.

So business unionism uh was that what that cast did. And we thought it was not good for workers. And I'm glad you brought that up. That's a very important part I think of the is tradition. >> That's an important thing which uh you know young mostly young socialists today have to understand who actually want to transform the labor movement as the as the essential vehicle for for building workingclass power.

And I don't think it's fully I think it's not really understood by a lot of people. They just see well let's go in and help build stronger unions. And that's that's great, but you don't understand the necessity of organized rank and file organization and developing the self-activity of the members as opposed to just becoming popular enough to get elected to union office. >> Yeah. And to then become, unless there's tremendous pressure, become a member of that social cast.

So, well, I appreciate you taking the time. We didn't talk much about sex and drugs and alcohol and but I'm glad we talked about the union stuff, which is the principle. This is principally the first part is a of half of the half of the book is about the left in the 1960s and 70s and the second half is about that part of the left that went into the teamsters union and the role of TDU and the and the ability to elect a a genuine union reformer though a conservative guy like Ron Kerry to become the head of the Teamsters Union. So So the book is about all that. It's about all that stuff.

We you know it's always fun to talk about sex but we won't do that today. >> Okay. with on another time Dan but let me just follow up with one last question and it's a big question there was a rank and file upsurge um which I don't know one of you remember uh coming out of I think it was the the ISL the old coming out of the workers party the the old socialism from below movement Stan we was noticing that there was a new labor revolt in in the mid early to mid60s and there was a great deal of working-class self-confidence and militancy and combativity at this time low unemployment you know in relative terms about three times as the size it is now. Our project it seems of building the kind of mass rank and file movement was was dependent on that kind of activity and confidence and that begins to tenatively >> this very small group of talented and dedicated organizers to make help work with working-class people to make important changes and and why why did that that those opportunities change and how does that relate to today. Huge question. >> We already talked a little bit about deregulation.

That is deregulation became more militant. The employers demanded give backs. They reorganized industry. They created we talked about mini mills. That kind of thing of creating smaller workplaces.

Um many industrial plants went off to the Caribbean or Mexico and later to China to South Korea to Japan. Those became the countries doing industrial manufacturing. The United States still does an enormous amount of industrial manufacturing but with a much smaller workforce. Uh and I think that that really changes things. There's other things that change too.

Workers were able to understand and control their workplace better. Uh Harry Braverman has written about this. Andre Gors has written about this. Both of them very brilliantly in different ways about workers no longer understanding and able to control everything in their workplace. Industrial workers.

I don't know today. uh it seems to me that might even be more difficult as as things are in the hands of uh uh computer technicians and AI perhaps now and so on. So I think you're right. You point out that the material conditions of the existence of an American working class have changed. Um and it's not yet clear where we are or what's coming next. And so I think we have to watch carefully and see is it possible to look for those you know the working class is still the largest class if we say working people and if we take a view of people who have to work for wages that's an enormous class in America it has tremendous power and I think we have to look for those the changes we see that maybe create militancy fights for democracy and opportunities for organizers on the left.

Dan, I want to thank you very much for dealing with a part of your book. I mean, it's quite a book. I think it's something like 750 pages. Um, it is available, by the way, by the way, on Audible for what is it like less than $3. Um, you can you can buy the book.

Um, which I encourage you to do. Um, and also there a second because it disappeared into your background. >> There you see that. Okay. >> No, it disappears.

Something's happened with the way your screen works. Ah, there it went. >> There it is. Okay. Um, but if you go to uh Dan's website, again that's Dan D- an Labbots L- Ab-O TZ Writings, Writ Tings.com, um, you'll see links to uh, a huge trove of of articles, YouTube videos, books, etc.

>> Hey, thanks a lot, Trevor. Great to talk with you about this. I appreciate it. Right. I I think I mean I think you've actually captured an important experience of a generation of people who were idealistic and maybe we had illusions of what we could accomplish.

But I think it's important for a new generation of working-class militants to to understand that history just as we needed to understand what was happening in the 50s, the 40s and the 50s and the early 60s. Books like uh Standing Fast and Going Away and and others. >> Absolutely. Going away. One of my favorites.

>> Take it easy. >> Thank you, Dan. Solidarity.