This is a lively and very useful pamphlet taking up important questions of political perspective and strategy facing workers everywhere. Bea Hansen was a young auto worker, a union activist and a socialist in the 1950s. Her talk printed here focuses on the evolution of Walter Reuther, then present of the United Auto Workers, tracing his development from a militant-minded young student and worker into a career-minded, union bureaucrat looking to collaborate with the employers and their government in maintaining the status quo.

Hansen gives a lively introduction to the massive struggles of millions of workers that forged the industrial unions in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and a sharp contrast of Reuther's political course with that of the great revolutionary working class leader Eugene V. Debs. This is an important story that is often hidden or falsified, and full of lessons for today's labor movement. This pamphlet also prints an article by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the union battles in the Mid-Western United States in the 1930s, comparing Reuther's views with those of another top union bureaucrat, George Meany.

On the same topic, I'd also recommend reading Labor's Giant Step: The first 20 years of the CIO, by Art Preis, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, by Leon Trotsky, and the Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working class politics and the trade unions, by Jack Barnes.

Do you want to know what the labor bureaucracy is all about? Read this little book on Walter Reuther, the longtime head of the UAW and spiritual father of today's labor misleaders. Bea Hansen tells the story of how Reuther, who once described himself as a socialist, traded his principles to mount the ladder of the bureaucracy to its top rung.

Hansen contrasts Reuther with another kind of labor leader, Eugene V. Debs, who fought for his socialist principles, tried to build a movement against the U.S. war machine, and supported the rank-and-file struggles of labor. Hansen is an authoritative voice on these issues. Members of her family led the Flint Sit-Down strike when she was a girl and she was a respected socialist fighter in the auto workers union for most of her life. This remarkable pamphlet ends with Hansen's confident prediction-in 1955 at the height of the witch hunt--that young people will pick up the struggle for socialism that Reuther abandoned.

Bea Hansen who wrote this had slaved in GM and I believe ford. Her sister Genora had been one of the heroic leaders in the Flint sit downs. She did not write about Reuther as someone in a book, a newspaper, a liberal or limp water pseduo socialist or any kind of hero, but a sellout, a particular kind of sellout, someone of her generation, someone who started out like her as a worker wanting to fight, who had strayed and been deformed by Stalinist, social democratic., Democratic party, big business humping, selloutism into what he became.

To anyone who knew Bea, her tremendous intelligence, her dead serious organization skills, her smarts with people, her cold blooded decisiveness, you knew her choices, even as a woman in those times, opportunites to sell out and go places, to make some sort of place in bourgois society even without betrayal had been just as open outside the revolutionary workers movement or more so for her than someone like Reuther. Yet she chose the workers movement, the revolutionary communist movement, without restraint as heartily and strongly as she did everything else! She had signed up for the duration and fought every battle to the death! She received a bigger prize than Reuther ever did!

Bea was 10 times smarter than something like Reuther, tied to her class, not by sentiment, but by conviction of who you really need in a fight. She was not some nostalgia monger harping back to the "good old days" when even Reuther was militant, but a fighter who kept on fighting against world War 2, against the cold war, against Reuther, fought even when her sister sold up and gave up, she fought on until she could fight with people like Malcolm X and Che Guevara. Bea stayed to welcome militants like me who came from the antiwar movement and others who came from the women's liberation movement. Bea Hansen was a fighter, a leader and trainer and organizer of fighters.

I remember her warm, hearty, working class like someone from home (the part of my family that included steelworkers, coalminers, and yes moonshiners) , but smart and schooled in struggle and science like the field generals we need to win our freedom. Read this and learn our history and our future. Read this and realize that fighting workers, fighting women, fighting immigrants will produce a thousand Bea Hansens for every lickspittle Reuther the capitalists can buy out!

In rereading this book I was struck by what a wonderful thing it was that these rank and file workers were able to change history by creating, out of their struggle, an example of revolutionary unionism. It was wonderful for them and is wonderful for us, because it shows what we can do today. This book also tells the story of how Farrell Dobbs learned that he could trust in both the fighting capacity of the working class and the leadership capabilities of its vanguard. Through powerful examples Dobbs describes the dog-eat-dog viciousness of capitalism and contrasts it with the desire on the part of young fighters to break through the backstabbing and open up a road to workers' solidarity. This book could change your life.

Dobbs, a leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, which became a citywide general strike, tells its story. The battles with the companies, cops, strike breakers, and their hangers-on are told with masterful effect. It also shows the rising industrial unions as organizations of working-class struggle, taking on the employers and its government. But the real gem at the heart of this tale is how the unfolding struggle transformed ordinary workers, including Dobbs himself, into extraordinary fighters, thinkers, and revolutionary leaders.

To any working person who wants to know how to fight the bosses and win, you have to read this book. The author, Farrell Dobbs, was born into a working-class family in Missouri in 1907, worked his way into a management job, started his own business, and hoped to go to law school and become a judge. But his plans were cut short by the great depression of the 1930s. In 1933, he found himself working in a Minneapolis coal yard and met coworkers who asked him to join an effort to organize the workers into a branch of the Teamsters union. The rest is history. In 1934, Dobbs played a central role as the members of Teamsters Local 574 carried out a series of three dramatic strikes that succeeded in making Minneapolis a union town. To do this, they had to battle the boss-led Citizens Alliance, the police, the top Teamster bureaucrats, as well as a "friend of labor" Governor, who talked out of both sides of his mouth. This book gives a blow-by-blow account of all of this, and is a real handbook for how to conduct a strike effectively. Key to their victory was a union leadership that included members of the Communist League of America, a revolutionary socialist group, which later became the Socialist Workers Party, which Dobbs joined and led on a national level for decades. If you like this book, you'll also want to read the three other books in Dobbs' Teamster series, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics and Teamster Bureaucracy.

Dobbs does not delve in the minutiae of small radical sects. Instead, he places the growth of socialism and the birth of communist movement in the context of a concise, but vivid history of working class life and struggle in the USA and of the influences of the world beyond that. This is a book written to arm fighters against oppression, fighters for workers rights with their history. Dobbs also provides in one chapter a concise history of Marx and Engels struggles to build the First International. The most interesting to me was his story of how he went from being a forman at Western Electric and a small store owner to being one of the great leaders of the labor upsurge of the 1930s and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

Dobbs does not delve in the minutiae of small radical sects. Instead, he places the growth of socialism and the birth of communist movement in the context of a concise, but vivid history of working class life and struggle in the USA and of the influences of the world beyond that. This is a book written to arm fighters against oppression, fighters for workers rights with their history. Dobbs also provides in one chapter a concise history of Marx and Engels struggles to build the First International. The most interesting to me was his story of how he went from being a forman at Western Electric and a small store owner to being one of the great leaders of the labor upsurge of the 1930s and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

This is the fourth in the fascinating series of books on working class struggles in the 1930s, centering on the strikes and organizing by drivers and warehouse workers in the Midwestern states. Farrell Dobbs was a young worker in the Minneapolis coal yards who quickly became a leader of these strikes and organizing campaigns, as well as a member and then leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
The first three volumes (Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics-- don't miss them!) take up the important strikes in Minneapolis in 1934, the subsequent over-the-road organizing campaign throughout the upper Midwest, and the vital and complex political challenges militant workers took on in confronting the employers, their government, cops and finks, and reactionary, class-collaborationist trade union officials.
Teamster Bureaucracy draws some of the broadest lessons for working class fighters from those years of struggle. Facing the intense political pressure of the opening years of WWII, the Stalin-Hitler pact, frame-ups by the FBI, the drive by Teamsters international president Daniel Tobin (aiding and aided by the Roosevelt administration) to crack down on militant local unions -- this book is full or rich experiences we can learn from today. It should be in every workers library!

The major industrial unions rose from almost nothing to massive powerful organizations in the mid to late 1930s. They were social movements in the broadest sense. They led powerful strike mobilizations, galvanizing the hopes of not merely their own members, but other workers, the unemployed, family farmers, and others. By the 1950s, U.S. union structures had become a prop of capitalism, both domestically and internationally, ruled by officialdom as corrupt and disloyal to workers as can be found on any corporate board. How did the fighting unions become their opposite? Farrell Dobbs, a Minneapolis Teamster and leader of the famed 1934 Minneapolis general strike, and later of the Socialist Workers Party, describes how the militancy of his union was confronted, and smashed, in the prelude and opening of World War II. He also explains the lessons to be learned by today?s militant workers.

With a war drive on in the US today, we need the lessons of the battles in this book by the militant teamstesr of the Midwest, especially Minneapolis in 1940 and 1941, fighting against Roosevelt's war drive, and its clamp down on union rights. Dobbs was the general organizer, a man who helped turn the Teamsters into an industrial union,together with other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis teamsters. They built a militant movement that included not just union members, but farmers, the unemployed and many other working people. Dobbs and the militant teamsters and the Socialist Workers party refused to give up with the Teamsters bureaucracy and the Roosevelt administration tried to jail and persecute them and drive them out of the union. This is about that fight. Particularly poignant is Dobb's depiction of his last conversation with Teamster's boss Tobin. Tobin dangled a secure position as an IBT international leader before Dobbs, a working man with young daughters. The path of resistance could and did lead Dobbs to prison. Yet, he explains why he chose to fight and continue to fight the rest of his life, long after Tobin had been forgotten. We need this book to fight the war that is coming!