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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.
The article above first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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