A Nazi woman-leader declared at a Congress that children’s homes and nurseries should disappear as soon as possible. According to her, “the abolition of children’s homes would promote ‘family life,’ for the woman would be occupied only with rearing children, attending to the needs and well-being of her husband and would not take part in any public activity.”  

Such are the blessings which fascism has in store for the German woman. In addition to worsening her economic position, fascism is heaping disgrace upon the women, pushing them back into the position from which they have emancipated themselves through long and hard struggles some decades ago.

Elimination from all public offices and leaving for her only the 3Ks (Kinder, Kirche, Kueche), the children, church, and the kitchen, the double enslavement of the women, by the capitalist state and male superiority, are the gifts which Hitler brought the woman in his Third Reich.

Those words are from an article my Oma wrote in 1934 for Working Woman, a monthly publication of the Communist Party, for the March 8 celebration of International Women’s Day. A friend found it while helping in a search for family immigration records of old – I had never seen this but the words brought back the person who meant so much to me while growing up. Her article was important then, for the true nature of what Nazism represented was not yet fully appreciated so soon after Hitler came to power. And it is important today, because too few remember how central suppression of women was to the fascist project. The nature of women’s oppression and resistance she describes speaks to a continuum visible in current movements to resist the particular burdens on women posed by capitalism in its neo-liberal phase as well as against the use of strident and overt appeals to patriarchal domination of women by right-wing authoritarians.  

A review of that 1934 issue gives a sense of what that struggle for women’s liberation looked like when the Depression was still a reality. The combination of desperation for any kind of job, speed-up, dangerous work conditions and low pay was acute in the textile industry – one of the few centers for women’s jobs in industrial towns in New England and in the South. The result: spontaneous and organized protests. The violent suppression of a 1929 strike in Gastonia, North Carolina was a recent memory as was the death at the hands of armed vigilantes of worker/organizer and song writer Ella Mae Wiggins (her story has been memorialized by several novels, including Grace Lumpkin’s To Make my Daily Bread, which was excerpted in that issue of Working Woman).   Worker discontent was to boil over a few months later in a national strike as 400,000 workers – mostly women – walked off the job in one of the largest national work stoppages in the U.S. to that point. This was one of the precipitating events of 1934 that was to culminate in mass unionism and the creation of the CIO. Unfortunately, though, the textile workers suffered a defeat that they were unable to overcome – the defeat in the South due to state-sanctioned and permitted extra-legal violence was to prove the Achilles heel for labor going forward. The violence of lynching – nominally done to “protect” women – fed into the culture that led to violence against the largely white women workers who sought to organize.

There was also an article about the miners strikes and the role of women in them. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s mining suffered from overproduction and layoffs. The United Mine Workers was divided and split while engaged in bloody strikes as sheriffs’ deputies patrolled mining towns as if an occupying army. A photo of Albino Cumerlato, a miner’s wife active in the Women’s Auxiliary who was killed during a strike in Southern Illinois, speaks to the war-zone atmosphere each time miners organized to assert their rights. And because those strikes pitted entire communities against surrounding authorities, miners’ women’s committees played a far more central role than in urban industry with a mainly male workforce. The article describes how women would rotate among themselves shared work in caring for children and cooking in the strike camps so that they could also rotate participation on picket lines and in meetings. The immediate battles described all ended in miner defeats (including the one in Harlan Country, Kentucky during which Florence Reece, a wife and daughter of coal miners, wrote Which Side are You On?) – but unlike textile workers, the years ahead would see a revival of union strength as the United Miners Workers (no longer at war with itself) regained lost ground and played a key role in the birth of the CIO.

As women were central to the life of mining communities, so women functioned as leaders in building community in struggle amongst the unemployed. Highlighted therefore in that issue was the demand of Unemployed Councils for passage of a bill for unemployment insurance, which had been a central demand of Communists and Socialists (but strongly opposed by old-line leaders of the AFL) since the Stock Market crash of 1929. Working Woman’s account focused on the black women from the South who took part in a conference in DC as part of that campaign to push a Congress that refused to budge.   The legislation failed to pass but the agitation continued and contributed to the passage in 1935 of legislation that provided for the unemployed (through the Social Security Act and Federal Emergency Relief).   The gains, even if not as far-reaching as initially proposed, made an enormous difference in people’s lives.

The articles about women in the unemployed movement and in the miners’ struggles emerged out of the reality that women were the primary care givers in most families. But International Woman’s Day was about the whole person – and so there was also an article about birth control and the effort to make it legal, alongside the demand for free medical care for women in labor. The need for women to decide how many and whether to have children was part and parcel to the demand for women to be treated with dignity and respect while giving birth, and to be able to do so safely and thus avoid all too common maternal deaths. The class arrogance of many doctors when treating working-class women was harshly criticized.

Yet there was another dimension of women’s rights highlighted– their full participation in the overall struggle for justice and socialism. The life and legacy of Louise Mitchell, one of the leaders of the Paris Commune in 1871, was commemorated as representative of the meaning of International Women’s Day past, as were the women who joined with her to fight alongside men on the barricades in its defense. Bringing that legacy to the then present, the women who joined men in the Socialist-led armed resistance in Austria to the imposition of a clerical fascism were honored. The victory of a form of clerical fascism closely aligned to Mussolini’s Italy (imposition of German fascism was still four years away) was one of the many global defeats of working people in the early 1930s and contributed to the mix of fear, anger and hope of the time.   The dangers of war and of the need for peace – peace which the victory of German fascism put in jeopardy in a manner clear to many from the moment the Nazis came to power – was also written about in that issue. The articles reflected the anti-New Deal bias of Communists (and many Socialists) in the early years of FDR’s administration, but they also spoke to and reflected the radical upsurge and a broadening understanding of what could be possible that was to help propel the United States to the left in a decade when much of the rest of the world fell to reaction.

Taken as a whole what we see in the above was the legacy of International Socialist Women’s Congress which first called for the celebration of International Women’s Day rooted in the demand of equality – defined as respect for the rights of women as workers, and as full participants in the life of society; as the right of a woman to control her own body within and outside the family and the right to raise children with food on the table in a world without war; as the right for full participation in the struggle for freedom, for equality, for socialism. The language used and how these were understood were couched differently from today — many in the socialist and labor movements only gave lip service in their support while others did not hide their acceptance of women’s subordination – but the underlying struggle for equality in society and within the socialist movement never ceased. And, for its part, right-wing power never ceased to denounce socialism for the possibility it offered for equality.  

Which gets us back to my Oma’s article. She and my Opa had come to the U.S. in the mid-1920s; a coal miner, he was blacklisted in Germany after the union suffered a bitter defeat in one of the struggles between capital and labor in a Weimar Republic that was always on the edge of civil war. He next worked the mines in Western Pennsylvania (and was blacklisted after another lost strike). They moved to New York where my Oma worked as a house cleaner – a common occupation for working-class German immigrants in those years. They had, however, every intention of returning to Germany where my mother had stayed, being raised by her grandparents. But then Hitler came to power, my Oma’s father and brothers were arrested. Thus, instead of their going home, my mother came here early in 1934. The article quoted must have been written shortly thereafter when the impossibility of a return became manifest – neither were to go back to Germany until we went as a family in 1958.  

My Oma had become a Communist as a young person following the horrors of World War I and in the conditions of poverty and deprivation which hit mining communities especially hard in the years that immediately followed. In the course of that – or perhaps inherent to that – she also became a strong advocate for women’s rights. One of the substantial achievements of the Weimar Republic under Social Democratic influence was the dissemination of sex education in public schools and legalization of some forms of birth control. In that atmosphere, a campaign emerged to pass legislation to end the prohibition on abortion, which became a core element in the German Communist Party’s work among women, especially in the urban slums where too many faced the desperate choice of another hungry mouth to feed or a dangerous back alley procedure.   One of the central planks of the Nazis during the years before they came to power was an assault on “bourgeois feminism,” an attack on Social Democratic educational reform and fear mongering about “godless Communism” and the “dangers” of free love and the abolition of the family that, it was claimed, Marxists were to impose on all women. Once they took power the fascists acted swiftly to roll back women’s rights, force them out of the workforce and ban birth control. As Margaret Atwood imagines for a possibly dystopian future in A Handmaid’s Tale, women in Nazi Germany were consigned to breed men for the war machine.  

Something of my Oma’s bitterness at what transpired comes through in what she wrote – I can still hear her voice through all these years telling me as a child that Hitler wanted to limit women’s lives to “Kinder, Kirche, Kueche.” All this is not too far from Trump and Pence’s program today; the dual sides of how women are devalued as human beings reflect not just their twisted personalities, they speak to the core of their reactionary politics aimed as suppressing democratic rights for all by putting women in their “place” as sex object or mother.

And in the struggles that she and so many others were going though in the 1920s and ‘30s we see what too many immigrant women face today – fleeing from war and repression, children and parents separated from each other by poverty and violence, exploitation at work all the worse because of a lack of rights, the need for peace with justice so as to have a home rather than live with an ever-present sense of loss. Absent that, women migrants remain the most vulnerable to the dangers around them, yet are relied upon for their strength to hold families together in the face of a hostile society. We should celebrate International Women’s Day in that spirit of resistance and hope that helped transform U.S. society after 1934, that helped defeat fascism a decade later, as we confront the urgent need in our present to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

This piece first ran in the The Washington Socialist

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January 31, 2020

It’s no accident that on the same day the Senate voted not to hear any witnesses in its sham impeachment trial the Trump administration announced it was adding six countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, to its restrictive travel ban.

Get beneath the rhetoric and both actions are about race and racism. As has been the outcome of so many trials and so many immigration policies in U.S. history.

The bottom line consideration in those Republican senators’ minds when they voted today was revealed by a conservative former GOP policy director who still has ties with his old friends. Evan McMullin tweeted the day before the vote:

“Republican leaders in Congress believe – and privately say – that they fear the country is quickly changing in ways that may soon deprive them of power, and that they must use the power they have now to delay it as long as possible, even by harming the Republic if necessary.”

Decoding that doesn’t require re-reading the pages in “To Kill a Mockingbird” about that story’s jury verdict:

“The country is quickly changing” means “the proportion of people of color is growing and white people soon might not be a majority.”

“They must use the power they have now” means “democracy is a nice idea that we’ve said we believe in for decades, but when it comes right down to it maintaining white power in general and our white power in particular is more important.”

“Even by harming the Republic” means “if authoritarian rule and an above-the-law strongman president will do the job, then let’s get it on; all we need is four more years to create the necessary facts on the ground, we’ve helped the Israelis do it and in face of a “demographic threat” in this country it’s now our turn.”

That’s the mind-set underlying the “no witnesses” vote and the upcoming acquittal.

This does not mean every Trump voter or registered Republican is a full-blown hater. It doesn’t mean that over time many in the Trump camp, especially those facing economic hardship, can’t be won over to a different world view. It does mean the robber barons on top of the fossil fuel industry or military-industrial complex or Koch brothers empire see riding this mentality as the necessary route to advancing their class interest in a changing world.

But the Senate vote shows that outright racist authoritarianism is in the driver’s seat in today’s GOP. It’s get in behind the Supreme Leader or be kicked out of the club.

This is how fascism comes to power. People who start out quite a distance from the blatant haters cut deals with them because they share some common aims and think they can stay in control. But it’s a slippery slope and those who don’t jump off the toboggan soon enough find themselves abandoning every principle they once claimed to hold dear (Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Lamar Alexander). They sometimes squirm but keep rationalizing one destructive, sycophantic action after another until lies, self-dealing and great-leader-worship become normalized in the broader society. And millions get numb or “go private” hoping to find some shelter from the storm.

In today’s U.S., the Trumpists can be stopped. But only if the most conscious sector of the opposition is clear-eyed about the danger and absolutely determined to do two things:

First, confront their drive toward a racist authoritarian regime with a passionate resistance rooted in defending the humanity and equality of everyone across the globe;

Second, inspire and bring into unified action the substantial majority of U.S. people who disagree with one another on many things but agree Trump and his enablers are a danger to people and the planet: defeat Trump and the GOP at the ballot box in November, take to the streets to defend that victory in the days after the balloting when he declares the results illegitimate, and then keep on pushing toward a society that works for all.

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From Editor’s Desk: My friend and comrade Glenn Perusek enlisted me in 2016 to co-teach courses in the Building Trade Academy (BTA). The BTA is housed at Michigan State University; it serves the affiliates of the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU). We teach a series of four-day courses on basic organizing skills and planning. One of the issues for all trade unionists is understanding the difference between strategy and tactics. Glenn wrote this fine exposition on the differences between the two and their application to the work of organizing, particularly in the construction trades. Glenn’s essay follows along with audio of the interview I did with Glenn on this topic in September 2019. Peter Olney

The word “strategy” is overused and is often confused with tactics. This is a problem not just for organized labor and progressive movements; it is also endemic in business and many other realms of organized activity. This seems odd, given that the literature on strategy and tactics is thousands of years old. This article draws on some of that classical literature, distinguishing strategy, tactics and longer-run planning, called “grand strategy” in the military-political context and probably best termed “organizational development” in the union context. The article also develops key elements of strategic planning for labor—the mobilization of resources; the calibration of ends to available means; and the concept of the “indirect approach.”

One of the most common mistakes of labor organizers is to confuse strategy and tactics—typically, to elevate a particular tactic to the level of overall strategy. Many organizers in construction see stripping—recruiting skilled, highly capable craftsmen from non-union contractors—as key. Or, in attacking bad behavior of a non-union contractor, an organizer might discover a vulnerability over wage and hour violations. Or, in approaching a non-union contractor, developer or customer, an organizer might have had prior experience setting up an inflatable rat to draw negative public attention.

As tactics, these are perfectly legitimate. The problem arises when one of these particular tactics is seen as a strategy—which should involve myriad particular tactics. Elevating a particular tactic to the level of strategy constrains the field of play. When your toolbox of potential tactics has only one or a small number of alternatives, it makes planning easy—because planning is non-existent. To say “we are organizing” is equated with the limited repertoire.

In getting away from this kind of thinking—which elevates tactics to the level of strategy—it is helpful to recognize that the English words are based on ancient Greek. 2,500 years ago, the stratēgoi were the generals elected by the assembly in Athens. They were accountable to the assembly, but they were charged with overall planning, leadership and coordination of military operations on many fronts. Tactics comes from the Greek taktikē, which has to do with drawing up troops for battle. Herodotus refers to the Athenian board of generals, the stratēgoi (6.109.1), who have a dispute over a great matter of strategy—whether to confront the Persians at Marathon. But once the decision was made and it was finally time to arrange troops for battle, a form of taktikē is the word used (6.111.1).[1]

Taktikē is also the origin of the word tactile: We can say that whenever you are engaging with your opponent, whenever you are touching them, as it were, you are employing a tactic. Strategy, in contrast, the activity of the generals, has to do with planning.

Because so many labor organizers in North America are familiar with American football, that analogy can be helpful. Strategy refers to the game plan: A large number of plays, with variations (depending on choices made by one’s opponent), and a large number of particular techniques—blocking and tackling techniques, for instance, or the proper running of pass routes—go into the plan. But the plan is distinct from particular tactics. The plan, the strategy, needs to weave hundreds or thousands of tactics and micro-techniques together in a coherent whole.

A strategic plan needs to employ multiple tactical elements and be articulated over time. This is a good litmus test—a single tactic (“the Rat”) that does not change through time (“We’re going to set up the rat until the cows come home…”) is not a strategy. Elevating a particular tactic to the level of strategy is analogous to reducing a game plan to a single play. If you are running off tackle on every play, you do not have a strategy.

Tactics, strategy—and grand strategy (or organizational policy/development)

To stay with the football analogy, we distinguish game plan (strategy) from particular plays or techniques, which are up at the level of tactical engagement. Football people commonly retread the idea that they are focused “only on this week,” “only on this game.” They claim to have a one game at a time mentality. Coupled with the idea that each player and coach should focus “only on doing his job,” this is supposed to be a way to focus on the task at hand.

But someone in the organization, of course, needs to be thinking beyond next Sunday’s game. Someone needs to be thinking about the long-term health of the organization—in developing new players, for instance.

If strategy is the plan for a particular campaign, and tactics are the multiple ways of engaging with an opponent—or articulating in practice the strategy—there must also be an overarching organizational plan, a plan that transcends particular campaigns. For a sports team this might be a plan for a whole season or a multi-year program of building up a club. In American football, the head coach and his staff are responsible for game plans. It is typically a General Manager and his staff who are responsible for such things as player acquisition—a matter of organizational development. For a firm, long-term organizational strategy supersedes a campaign around a particular product. (It is the difference between the quarterly bottom line and a five – or ten – year growth plan that involves a whole range of products, and the organizational infrastructure necessary to develop them). For a nation state, grand strategy would involve overarching war aims. Strategy entails applying tactics to win in a campaign or on a front. But grand strategy involves winning the entire war—and creating a post-war world that is most advantageous. For an organization, grand strategy can be termed organizational policy or long-term planning for organizational development.

When considering tactics to employ in a strategic campaign, organizers need to keep in mind the situation after the campaign. The objective, typically, is to sign up a contractor or employer—we need to fight in a way that anticipates the settlement that we look forward to signing.

Sufficient resources and multiple elements

Organizers for union locals are often involved in all elements of planning and deployment of resources. That is, they are involved in tactical engagement (one-on-one discussions with potential recruits or subcontractors; production and distribution of flyers; testimony before a government body, etc.) but they can and should develop strategy for an organizing campaign. Additionally, they can become involved in longer-run planning, including the development of resources that can be built up for use in multiple campaigns.

In the building trades, we employ a 4 x 4 planning tool.[2]  In addition to suggesting that a strategic plan be articulated through time, the 4 x 4 tool identifies four constituencies that a plan should address: 

●          current members;

●          workers you aim to organize;

●          contractors you seek to sign; and

●          “secondaries,” a range of actors who potentially could influence the contractor (general contractors; developers; local politicians, etc.)

Too common, the organizer for a construction local has insufficient resources to engage in powerful organizing. So building up extra resources for organizing is prior to developing a strategic plan for a particular campaign. Thus, for instance, the development of a robust member-organizer program would be part of a long-term plan for organizational development.

Ends and Means

“Strategy depends for success, first and most, on a sound calculation and co-ordination of the ends and the means.”[3]

Here, a major pitfall is to overreach—to attempt more than is feasibly possible given available resources. Liddell Hart, an important twentieth century military strategist, considers the equilibration of ends to available means an essential axiom. Overreaching will lead to physical or psychological exhaustion, which will in turn erode confidence. This is a common mistake committed by dedicated organizers.

In our experience, even when a construction local has a full-time organizer, she/he has few additional resources at his/her disposal. The organizer might face indifference to organizing from the local’s leadership (since, for instance, bringing in new members potentially adds to the governability problems for elected leadership). Members are often indifferent to new organizing; they may see bringing new workers into the membership as cutting a finite pie of unionized work into ever smaller pieces (as opposed to seeing organizing as a matter of growing the union’s market share or density, so that there is more work to perform under unionized wages and conditions).

Prior to any particular organizing campaign, this points to the necessity, as an initial step, of developing an internal organizing committee—a significant minority of the working membership that could assist the full-time organizer. Similarly, the whole membership needs to be educated on the importance of organizing (which necessarily includes signing up new contractors), so that at the very least they are welcoming to workers who are new members in the local. Building up an organizing culture can be seen as vital to the development of resources. This is a task at the level of organizational policy. It transcends any particular organizing campaign.

Liddell Hart contended that strategic thought was characterized by an “indirect approach.” In construction organizing, a direct approach would be a frontal assault on a contractor: for instance, simply going to the contractor and making a demand. An indirect approach would be more subtle. First, in relationship to the contractor himself, it means flipping the narrative: Instead of speaking of our interests as organized labor, we would speak of the contractor’s interests. For instance, skilled construction unions often have the most outstanding (or only) training program in a jurisdiction. When work is plentiful, contractors often come to us—a clear indication that they recognize the value of our apprenticeship programs.

But an indirect approach also means mapping key connections between the contractor and other actors: The contractor’s business is built upon relationships to general contractors, developers, political figures and more. Building up relationships in these (and other) areas is part of the indirect approach in labor organizing. It may be necessary to convince a General Contractor, developer or political body of the value of a skilled workforce. This suggests that considerable background research is a precondition of strategic planning. Just as film study for scouting advanced game planning in football, background research on projects, contractors, governmental bodies and more greatly facilitated strategic planning. A professional approach to planning necessitates thorough research. Is it an accident that Sun Tzu, whose Art of War is the great original text of military strategy, begins with “Estimates,” a process of researching/inventorying one’s own and one’s opponent’s strengths and weaknesses?[4]

In general, an indirect approach in organizing means discovering one or more key relationships for the employer and developing a plan to step in and interrupt these relationships.   

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[1] Herodotus:  The History, ed. and trans. David Grene (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1987). Herodotus is considered the “father of history,” a Greek writer from the fifth century BC.

[2] The Campaign Guide:  Organizing and Contract Enforcement in the Construction Industry, ed. Michael J. Hayes, Thomas Kriger, Richard Resnick, Hope Singer (Washington:  Building Trades, 2014).

[3] Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York:  Praeger, 1967), p. 336.

[4] I recommend the translation by Samuel B. Griffith of Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1963). Sun Tzu was a general and writer during the Zhou Dynasty, in the 6th century BC. While research means digging through internet-based resources, the starting point is probably just systematically recording officers’ and members’ on-the-ground knowledge on contractors and markets.

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With this post The Stansbury Forum will begin, from time to time, to include audio files of interviews with the authors and others. In the following Glenn Perusek in conversation with Stansbury Forum co-editor Peter Olney.

01: Introduction

02: A bit about the Greeks

03: Strategy, Tactics and American football

04: On the local level and grand Strategy

05: The Rat

06: Mind Games

07: You got to know your limitations

08: Ends and Means

09: Practice, fundamentals and teamwork