Long-time New Directions leaders, including Recording Sec’y Noel Acevedo and RTO VP Tim Schermerhorn, have been on the outs with Toussaint since early last year. As Concerned New Directions Members, they finally put out a publication, the Rank and File Advocate (RaFA) in October which criticized the Toussaint regime’s undemocratic functioning – only nine months after Revolutionary Transit Worker did so.
This followed several months of factional fighting between Toussaint’s burgeoning machine, on the one hand, and many of those now around the Rank and File Advocate. Toussaint packed New Directions meetings with union staffers and other supporters, and passed votes raising meeting quorums and forbidding any actions, statements, publications or web-sites in ND’s name without a vote at an ND meeting. He has laid the ground-work for witch-hunts and wholesale expulsions. Given his penchant for bringing his political opponents in Local 100 up on charges, these developments are ominous. No witch-hunts!
In effect, this liquidated ND as of January 24, ’01. New Directions technically still exists, and Toussaint promises another issue of ND’s newsletter, Hell on Wheels (HoW). HoW has not appeared since January 2001, and Toussaint & Co. have held for even longer that caucuses are unnecessary since ND’s 2000 election victory. This means, of course, that only one caucus, the Toussaint machine, can exist. As Toussaint just about owns the TWU Local 100 Express and all the rights to ND/HoW, we’re not holding our breath for the next HoW.
Rank and File Advocate issue No. 1 has a sort of statement of principles, “Back to Basics.” It represents an attempt to resurrect the failed strategy of “rank-and-file” caucuses which got ND into liquidation in the first place. The statement says, among other things, “Local 100’s history has many important lessons for us. One of them is, without democracy and accountability, militancy degenerates into do-nothing bureaucracy ... lack of democracy will ultimately work against militant action.”
The call for militancy and democracy is OK, but abstract. A glance through RaFA Nos. 1 and 2 shows a whole lot of pleas for democracy and damn little militancy. In reality, ND acted as though union democracy were a necessary stage before workers are able to fight the bosses. One important lesson of Local 100’s history is that, with rare exceptions, ND since its inception has postponed militancy until the attainment of “democracy,” that is, their own electoral victory.
ND was a union reform caucus, founded by people who often considered themselves socialists, even revolutionaries. But they did not try to show through struggles to defend past gains or win new ones that socialist revolution is necessary. Rather, they organized on a lowest common denominator program, emphasizing union democracy. In order to gather the largest number of disparate elements and keep them together, they agreed to disagree on many fundamental issues. They were especially zealous to win over bureaucrats disillusioned with or pessimistic about Sonny Hall and his machine. As such elements joined, ND had ever less claim to being “rank-and-file” in composition. It became a caucus of out-bureaucrats.
To this end, they watered down a program which was diluted to begin with. The most prominent example was the plank on political action. At first, it called for a break with the Democrats and Republicans and the formation of a third party which would “better represent working people.” Not even a Labor Party! In order to win Democratic Party activists like (now Stations V-P) Lawson from the old guard, this proved too radical. By the mid-nineties, this plank said that workers should not depend only on the Democrats and Republicans – just mostly? Is it so shocking that the regime elected on the ND slate has thrown Local 100 so ferociously into the Democratic Party/electoralism?
While tamping down their own weak radicalism, the organizers of ND went out of their way to exclude avowed revolutionaries from their publicly announced meetings. Since at least 1991, ND has excluded Eric Josephson (currently a Vice-Chair of TWU Local 100 Track), an open supporter of the League for the Revolutionary Party which sponsors RTW; and members of the Committee for a Fighting TWU, supported by the Spartacist League, on the rare occasions when the latter came out of hibernation.
This fact surfaced in recent factional exchanges. John Simino (long-time CM officer and ND’er, now speaking for Toussaint’s purge) challenged RaFA supporters’ right even to publish a paper. Steve Downs, ND co-founder and long-time EB Member from RTO, responded, “Once the ND caucus was formed, it was not open to all members of the Local, as you pretend. It’s [sic] meetings were open only to members of the Local who supported ND’s platform. That is why Eric J., for example, was not allowed to participate in our meetings, he did not support ND or its platform.”
This is hypocritical of Downs. Josephson was not a member, but a political opponent of ND, as Downs states. He attended publically-announced meetings of ND at times of mass struggle in the Local in order, through open, critical discussion, to show participants who wanted to fight how best to do so. While Downs and the majority of ND were excluding Josephson for “not support[ing] ND or its platform,” they welcomed old-guardists to their meetings. They required no agreement on platform from the old-guard elements as a condition for attending. In fact, they changed their program to agree with the old guard to make the latter comfortable inside. Now elements of the latter, plus some old ND’ers, all led by ex-“Marxist-Leninist” Toussaint have effectively driven those now with RaFA from ND, using weapons handed them by Downs and his co-thinkers.
RTW defends the right of the “Concerned New Directions Members” to publish RaFA or any other organ, to organize, to speak, etc. We oppose the witch-hunt against them in the Local. We have already come to the defense of Naomi Allen (Vice-Chair, CM, and ND co-founder). We wish to join with any fellow workers against Toussaint’s bureaucratic attacks and his capitulations to the MTA.
The RaFA criticizes Toussaint for not organizing membership fightbacks to defend our Health Benefits, such as working by the rules. A work-to-rule can be a legitimate part of a fightback strategy. But many members already know that a serious fightback requires at least a strike mobilization and probably a strike itself. This argument is one of a number of urgent questions that we should have discussed and voted on at the Dec. 1 “General Membership Assembly.” The RTW “Supplement” distributed at and before the December 1 meeting advocated this – one reason that the Local goon squad threw an RTW distributor out, along with RaFA distributors and other dissidents.
At the meeting, RaFA, to be honest with the members, should have openly explained that to fight health benefit cuts or trade-offs, we’ll have to strike. Given the MTA offensive against us, there is no alternative. Toussaint recognized that stark reality: because he feared a strike, he capitulated. If we want to avoid surrender, we have to fight for a real Local mobilization. Advocate supporters instead distributed an issue at the December 1 meeting which gently questioned the wisdom of the planned HBT/RBC deal, without saying what to do about it, let alone call for a democratic, decision-making meeting. Frankly, given the past record of the Advocate leaders, RTW was not surprised. They have been dodging the strike question since at least 1984. And, even now, when the crisis shows it can’t be dodged anymore, they find a way.
Real working class leaders risk immediate unpopularity. They lead by putting forward ideas and strategies that they believe are necessary and try to convince others. But, instead, the New Directions leaders who now publish the Advocate have a record of putting forward only proposals they think that many transit workers will already accept. (We also believe that they mis-estimate the level of understanding by the members.) They hide their lack of leadership by stressing rank and file democracy – let the members decide. When there was an actual meeting, however, they fought for no such thing.
Now, even as Toussaint & Co. plan further bureaucratic attacks against them, they say have no “desire to oppose the Toussaint leadership.” They don’t have much choice – he’s attacking the hell out of them, as well as the past gains of the whole membership.
RTW is for the utmost union democracy. We are for the rank-and-file democratically throwing out the bureaucratic union leaders who front for the bosses. We are for replacing them with a leadership which consistently and democratically mobilizes the ranks to defend past gains and win new ones.
RTW says openly that a consistent defense against the bosses’ attacks ultimately requires socialist revolution. But we participate in any struggle, no matter how small, for any gain, no matter how partial or temporary, alongside any co-workers who favor them, regardless of disagreements. We don’t hide the disagreements: we argue them out with our fellow workers in the course of common struggle.
This is the fight to build the revolutionary party. “Socialists” who only talk about the “rank-and-file” build neither mass rank-and-file action nor socialism: the long, sad history of ND and HoW proves as much. Supporters of RaFA and others who want to build both should look to RTW and the League for the Revolutionary Party.