Lessons From the Million Man March

The Lessons of the Million Worker March
by Jeff Mackler

Virtually no one expected that one million workers would attend the Million Worker March (MWM), which took place in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17. But Clarence Thomas, an official of the initiating International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 and co-chair of the mobilization, announced at a press conference shortly before the event that 100,000 participants were in the MWM Organizing Committee’s sights. Others associated with the effort projected an even higher number.

However, the gap between the massive numbers originally projected to attend the march and the actual turnout is glaring. The estimates this writer received from a dozen or so activists attending the march from cities across the country all put the figure at 5000 or less.

March organizers initially announced a figure of 10,000 to 15,000 but now appear to have reached agreement that 5000 would be closer to the mark. The impressive list of trade-union endorsers included major national unions, statewide AFL-CIO labor federations and local central labor councils, a host of important union locals, district councils and labor-associated groups, as well as the two major national antiwar organizations—International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice. But the endorser list was not matched by anything resembling a concerted effort to mobilize workers to attend. No union brought out more than a handful of its membership, and the small number of union workers who did attend came largely on their own. Several major endorsing national unions reversed gears and actively opposed participation.

The ANSWER coalition, correctly emphasizing the MWM’s inclusion of an antiwar demand to "Bring the Troops Home Now" from Iraq, did strive to build the action. But it is doubtful that its pre-march announcement that 100 buses had been chartered on the East Coast ever materialized.

Socialist Action was among several socialist and many progressive organizations that supported the effort. We devoted almost three pages of our October 2004 issue to promoting participation and to explaining the importance of the demands of the march.

We emphasized an aspect of the effort that was quite new for the labor movement—a call for an independent mobilization of workers and their allies among the oppressed to challenge the bipartisan parties of capitalism’s twin parties.

But we also pointed to the great discrepancy between the official endorsements and the lack of any concrete action by any of the supporting labor groups to mobilize the ranks.

We noted as well the glaring contradiction between the formal independent working-class nature of the MWM and its incisive attacks on the policies of the Democrats and Republicans, on the one hand, and the overt support to the Democratic presidential candidacy of John Kerry by virtually every endorsing union, on the other.

In the end, the political promise of the march was not to be realized. March organizers at a San Francisco report-back meeting a week later offered some partial explanations for the very modest turnout:

• The AFL-CIO leadership mobilized to oppose the march, they asserted. Top AFL-CIO leaders, including Secretary-Treasurer John Sweeney and President Richard Trumka, met with Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy in Hyannisport to discuss the march and oppose union participation.

James Spinoza, the ILWU president, whose Executive Council voted to oppose the march after the ILWU Longshore division had endorsed it, was also present at this meeting. Spinoza is reported to have agreed that the march was ill-timed in that it conflicted with labor’s efforts to mobilize for the election of Democrat John Kerry. Everywhere there was an endorsement, said MWM leaders, there was pressure to rescind and/or refrain from participation.

• The American Postal Workers Union (APWU), whose president, William Burrows, initially pledged to mobilize the union’s 1350 chapters in 50 states and who had assigned a key staffperson to build the march, also reversed gears. Top APWU members indicated that "the screws were being turned" to thwart support to the march.

• Key speakers like Noam Chomsky withdrew without explanation, as did the well-known rapper Mos Def.

• The 2.7 million-member National Education Association, whose 12,000-delegate national convention had endorsed the march, reversed its position at a post-convention meeting of its Executive Council. NEA’s top leader, Reginald Weaver, instructed a MWM organizer to refrain from including mention of the NEA at a planned MWM press conference. While 50,000 NEA teachers were slated to be in Washington, D.C., on the Oct. 17 march weekend in a major NEA lobbying effort, few, if any, attended the march.

While the above explanations confirm that there was indeed a concerted effort to undermine the MWM on the part of the AFL-CIO’s top labor misleaders—not to mention on the part of labor fakers across the country, who today dominate the severely weakened trade-union movement—this in itself is far from a satisfactory explanation for the march’s near washout, especially when compared to the original projections. MWM organizers mistakenly based their expectations on the assumption that they could organize a massive independent labor mobilization against the policies of the twin parties of capitalism at a time when not a single union in the country had engaged the boss class in struggle and emerged with a clear victory.

A mobilization of the scope and political trajectory contemplated by the MWM leadership can only be an outgrowth of the powerful struggles of U.S. workers. And this can only be contemplated when working people feel compelled to challenge America’s capitalist rulers at the level of the factory—locally, regionally and nationally—and in the political arena.

Such struggles will inevitably unfold as workers have no choice but to respond with their full power to the hammer blows hurled against them. Their struggles will of necessity be organically connected to a fight to replace the corrupt and class-collaborationist labor bureaucrats with class-struggle fighters who emerge in the big battles to come.

Their struggles will also be connected to the emergence of a militant leadership who sees labor’s future success bound up with the organization of the great bulk of U.S. workers and the oppressed, who today are left outside the unions and virtually defenseless against the ruling-class offensive.

The MWM effort demonstrated labor’s weakness, not strength. The march’s very claim to independence was undermined when prominent speakers—like the Rev. E. Randall Osburn of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and 1960s antiwar and civil-rights activist and performer Dick Gregory—ignored the MWM’s strictures against using the speakers’ podium to support any candidate. Both, in their own rhetorical style, denounced George Bush and indirectly, but clearly, called for a vote to John Kerry.

This should have been anticipated. No endorsing union and few of the expected speakers of prominence had adopted any contrary position. All favored a vote for Kerry. When it became clear to the bureaucracy that the MWM was not to become a pro-Kerry event, they ran for the hills, with some, like the NEA, screaming that they were defrauded from the outset.

Socialist Action was mistaken in projecting the march as a new and important development in the U.S. labor movement. We wanted the march to succeed and momentarily substituted our best intentions and hopes for a necessary analysis of the actual forces behind the march and the forces in motion in the broader labor movement.

In the end, the actual organizing forces proved to be a small layer of honest militants who were largely divorced from labor’s rank-and-file or who hoped that the portrayal of the march, through its significant endorsements, as being indicative of a new emerging force in labor, would suffice to ensure a significant turnout.

A real break with capitalist politics cannot be accomplished with mirrors or gimmicks. It will not be far into the future when U.S. capitalism’s deepening economic crisis awakens working people to the reality that their conscious and collective energies are required to reverse the offensive launched against them.

These inevitable battles are not yet on the horizon, but also not far ahead. When they come, a real Million Worker March, and more, will be on the agenda. It will be a march that is a product of the gut feelings of workers who have tasted victory and who are looking for solutions that challenge the system itself.

The MWM was designed to storm the heavens without the prerequisite forces in motion to do so. It was a good idea whose time is not yet upon us.