Back in 1934 Minneapolis was the scene of another bitter struggle, pitching sections of the city’s working class against local bosses and the capitalist state apparatus. ROB WILLIAMS recounts the momentous battles of that time and their lessons for the struggle today.
The tumultuous scenes in Minneapolis, as mass opposition grows to Trump’s anti-immigrant ICE agents, have brought home to US workers and millions across the world that a new period of volatility has opened up.
That this virtual uprising included actions called under the name ‘general strike’, with all its limitations and contradictions, has at least introduced the language of the trade union movement into this mass resistance to Trump’s brutal racist offensive. However, the need to fully put the stamp of the organised working-class on these events, both in Minnesota and across the US, is a fundamental task of socialists and trade unionists, in order to unite workers and young people and undermine the divide-and-rule tactics which the capitalist system has always employed and Trump has taken to extreme limits.
Over 90 years ago, on the very same streets that this furious opposition against ICE erupted, a mighty struggle between workers and bosses took place. Despite some clear differences, there were many features in this class battle that are relevant for the struggles today, not least the essential ingredient of leadership of the workers’ movement and the decisive role that Marxist revolutionaries can play.
US supporters of Leon Trotsky were pivotal in the struggle, immortalised in the book, Teamster Rebellion, written by Farrell Dobbs – a leader of the struggle and a member of the then Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA). While every struggle, strike and dispute is different, and most don’t reach the heights of the Teamsters (truck and transport drivers) in Minneapolis in 1934, Farrell Dobbs’ book is far more than a memoir and a recollection of the strike; it is a textbook for Marxist trade union reps and activists, setting out how to build in the workplaces and the unions, and how to lead workers in struggle.
Volatile events and growing class consciousness
As with the book, The City that Dared to Fight, by Peter Taaffe, former Socialist Party general secretary, and socialist councillor Tony Mulhearn, which told of the great struggle of Liverpool city council in the 1980s, Teamster Rebellion fairly pulses and reverberates with the rollercoaster explosive events of the great Teamster strikes.
One of the main features of the strikes was the intensity of the struggle and its dynamic character, including how the consciousness of a key section of the workers was able to change.
Farrell Dobbs himself played a central role in the struggle as a revolutionary worker. Yet just a year before the strike, he had been a 26-year-old worker, with a variety of jobs behind him, who had never even been a union member. In fact, he readily admitted that he had voted Republican in the 1932 presidential election against the self-styled reforming Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt. Two years later, he was a Marxist militant strike leader, taking on the forces of the capitalist state.
This was arguably one of the most volatile periods in history. Trotsky talked of “sharp turns and sudden changes”. The period between the world wars was two decades of revolution and counter-revolution, conflict and economic crises.
When tracing his trajectory into socialist politics, Dobbs recollected “two events that affected me deeply, one in a faraway country and the other here at home”. The first was the Japanese invasion of the Manchuria region of China in 1931. Photographs of US troops guarding an upper-class district, while a working-class area was destroyed by Japanese artillery, started to raise within Dobbs the class bias of the bosses’ system and the role of the capitalist state, both at home and abroad.
The second incident was closer to home. He was training to be a supervisor at General Electric as the company was looking to make cost savings post the 1929 Wall Street crash and the onset of economic depression. On being called to a conference of superintendents, he was privy to the plans of management to lay off older longstanding workers to “save some pension money”. Farrell personally knew one of the workers and was disgusted.
Economic insecurity and grinding hardship pushed Farrell Dobbs towards the essential role of unions, the need to organise workers collectively and the ideas of socialism. He recounts the dreams that he and his wife and comrade Marvel Scholl had about trying to make a future. They planned to start a small business, go to university to become a judge, in order to “dispense some justice”. But 1930s capitalism crushed these aspirations and forced Dobbs to join the ranks of those looking for work, in a world of mass unemployment that tilted the balance of power in favour of the bosses – who were determined to keep workers down to protect their profits.
Dobbs writes that in 1933, there were 30,000 unemployed workers in Minneapolis. Taken together with their families, he estimated that they comprised about a third of the city’s population of over 400,000. This huge ‘reserve army’ of mass unemployed workers could have potentially undermined the militancy of the Teamsters.
Political evolution
In September 1933, Farell became a truck driver or ‘teamster’, driving coal wagons. It was here that he met Grant Dunne, which was a watershed moment in his political awakening. Grant was one of the three Dunne brothers, alongside Miles and Ray (also known as Vincent R Dunne), who were all members of the Communist League of America, and activists in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union Local 574 branch, together with fellow CLA member Karl Skoglund.
These were seasoned Marxist workers who had been developed and hardened through a whole range of political and industrial events. Ray Dunne had joined the union movement before the first world war, becoming an organiser with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He then campaigned for Eugene V Debs, a pioneer of the US union movement, who ran as a socialist candidate for president five times from 1900-1920.
The Russian revolution had a decisive effect on Dunne, and he joined the newly-formed Communist Party of America in 1920. Along with CLA leader James P Cannon, who had first come across Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin when in Moscow in 1928, Dunne was convinced by the arguments of Leon Trotsky in the struggle against the usurping of the workers’ and peasant revolution by Josef Stalin and the bureaucracy that he headed. Cannon and his adherents were expelled from the Communist Third International that year.
At that stage, Trotsky and his International Left Opposition, expelled or not, regarded themselves as a faction of the Communist parties, fighting to reform the parties and the Communist International. However, he changed his opinion after the catastrophic defeat of the German working class by Hitler and his Nazis. There the mass Communist Party made serious mistakes in not stressing the need for a united front against the Nazis and making it easier for the pro-capitalist Social Democratic Party (SPD) leaders to hinder a demined struggle against fascism. The Third International’s failure to discuss the reasons for Hitler’s 1933 victory, alongside its ridiculous claims that the German Communist Party was getting stronger, convinced Trotsky that it was impossible to revitalise the Third International, and that it was necessary to build new Marxist revolutionary parties, and ultimately a new international.
However, it was essential that the small forces of genuine Marxism looked towards the broad workers’ movement, with an open approach, while putting forward a principled socialist programme.
Actually, at that time in Minneapolis, the CLA was a genuine challenge to the Communist Party in the unions, and especially in the Teamsters. It was a feature of the Teamsters struggle that the Trotskyists had to contend with the sectarianism of the CP, desperate to besmirch the reputation of the CLA.
The CLA only had about 40 members and close allies in Minneapolis in 1933, yet they were able to build a leadership position in the unfolding Teamsters’ struggle and in the union branch. Through the Teamsters struggle, and their role in it, the CLA more than doubled its membership in the city and massively increased its influence amongst the working class.
Farrell Dobbs’s book shows that none of this was by accident. The Trotskyists had an important position in the Teamsters, but their strategy, tactics, approach and orientation were all discussed, hammered out in the party branch and in the party caucus or ‘fraction’ in the IBT Local 574, and then tested out with the workers. Dobbs emphasised the crucial importance of there being a strong connection between union members and the party branch.
The CLA had small forces nationally, with significant middle-class elements, but the leadership recognised what was at stake in Minneapolis and sent leading national members there to assist, including Cannon.
Economic conditions and class struggle
In fighting for their position in the union, they also had to reckon with the bureaucracy of the Teamsters union, on a national and regional level, and also in Local 574 itself. National IBT union President Daniel J Tobin was a dictatorial right-wing union leader, who over decades led anti-communist campaigns in the union. However, the Trotskyists understood that while they had to continuously contend with Tobin’s blockages, and at times downright subterfuge and sabotage, as a union leader he did have a vested interest in building the union and winning disputes.
The Local 574 officials too were drenched in ‘business unionism’ or ‘partnership’ with so-called ‘fair’ employers, something that many present-day union reps and activists will recognise! So too the lack of confidence that it is possible to win gains and concessions from the employer when the economic backdrop is extremely complex and difficult.
There is no simplistic relationship between economic conditions and the combativity of workers. There are a whole number of factors that have an effect. For instance, a sharp downturn in the economy with a sudden rise in redundancies and unemployment can stun workers and lower their confidence to take strike action, although at the same time, lead them to draw radical political conclusions.
On the other hand, as we saw in the strike save of 2022-23, rising prices with steady employment can force workers to strike to defend their living standards at a time when there is a reduced threat of losing their jobs.
However, worsening economic conditions can lead to serious and determined defensive struggles to stop mass job losses and workplace closures, with heightened levels of action such as occupations, raising the need for nationalising threatened industries.
Complex conditions aren’t an argument against fighting, but pose the necessity of a serious strategy and militant action. For the Trotskyists in Local 574, the first stage was to challenge the local leadership, who were prepared to close off the union to broad layers of workers in order to preserve their leadership status.
Building the union
This brought out the differences in union organisation that would be raised during the period of the 1930s industrial militancy. As in Britain in the 19th century, most right-wing US union leaders saw ‘their’ unions as the preserve of skilled workers with ‘trades’, often giving them a conservative character. But in Britain, the ‘new unionism’ of the late 19th and early 20th century saw the building of mass unions, bringing into organisation for the first time millions of semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, including women.
In the 1930s in the USA, the main union federation, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), still saw itself very much in the ‘craft’ tradition despite the rapid growth of new industrial sectors. It was only in the 1930s that mass industrial unions were built largely under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a breakaway from the AFL. US union membership jumped from under three million in 1933 to nearly 8.5 million in 1941. Later the two federations merged in 1955 as the AFL-CIO.
The Trotskyists therefore had to have a strategy to challenge the leaders of IBT Local 574, and build it into a mass industrial union organisation. They didn’t take a dismissive attitude to the Local being in the AFL, as the Teamsters remained in the old federation and had bargaining rights in the industry. Instead they formed a ‘volunteer committee’ of coal yard workers to mobilise these workers to fight to join the union, in which they were successful.
They built on this by starting an organising campaign throughout the coal yards, with open meetings with workers. Essential in this drive was the setting up of a committee, with each yard represented, drawing up a list of demands to take forward to the employers. The method was to involve as many workers as possible, building confidence that it was possible to win, increasing the number of unions reps, and building a bigger union force that could be mobilised to take on the bosses.
It was essential that members felt part of the decision-making of the dispute, with constant communication. And it was vital that members were told the truth, that any setbacks weren’t dressed up, better to put them into perspective so as to arm workers on what was needed.
Having a Marxist core to what was initially a ‘left opposition’ in Local 574, who then became the leadership, was vital in the cohering of the best workers. Given the grim economic backdrop, and faced with right-wing union officials, it was invaluable to have a world socialist viewpoint that could stand up to the pressure of crisis-ridden capitalism that infected the union officials.
The officials’ starting point was ‘what the bosses could afford’, while for Marxist union activist, it is ‘what workers need’. This doesn’t mean that they were dismissive of the economic conditions that existed, but it meant that the task in hand was not to rationalise the position of the bosses, who will always make workers pay for the crisis, but instead build the confidence of the union members to fight for what was needed to keep their families’ heads above water.
By formulating a programme of demands on the most important issues facing the workers – union recognition, pay rises, shorter hours, better terms and conditions etc – they were able to build the union and prepare workers for the need to take action to win. By early 1934, the membership of Local 574 had grown massively to 3,000 from just 75 a year earlier. This would rise still further during the battles of 1934 to about 7,000.
The battle begins
When the employers rejected the union’s demands, a strike was called for February 1934. Again, the CLA looked to build mass picketing, with 600 strikers mobilised for this, closing down virtually all of the 67 coal yards.
The strike saw the first example of what would be brutal actions by the police and strike-breaking squads of the bosses. But time and time again, the strike leaders would respond with bold initiatives, such as mobile pickets, moving around in motor vehicles to stop the scabs.
This first clash with the employers resulted in an offer to the union. The Trotskyists argued against the settlement, acknowledging the potential gains, warning that they hadn’t been concretised. However, the workers did vote to accept.
The leaders of Local 574, threatened by the CLA members, tried to smear them as ‘communists’ or as an IBT leader would later label them ‘Trotsky-Communists’, but ultimately, if anything, it helped bring some of the best activists towards them, including Farrell Dobbs himself, who soon joined the party.
The approach of the CLA was to involve as many workers in the dispute as possible and broaden the struggle against the bosses. The employers were themselves organised in an anti-union front called the Citizens Alliance, numbering over 800 local firms but dominated by the biggest. It even had a full-time staff with spies and agents in local unions. Behind them stood the police and other state forces who would use brutal measures against the strike.
The Trotskyists in Local 574 put their plan of mobilisation into practice. They established an organising committee, to broaden the leadership team beyond the confines of the branch leadership. The Local then elected a strike committee of one hundred to lead the dispute. They called a mass meeting in April and invited the Minnesota state governor Floyd B Olson to speak. Olson was a left-wing populist from the Farmer-Labor Party. This Minnesota-based party came out of the short-lived Labor Party founded in Chicago in 1919. This party for a time dominated Minnesota politics before it was effectively taken over by the Democrats in 1944. Olson, after agreeing to speak, sent a statement to be read out. The tactic was to put pressure on the governor before the main struggle started.
They also looked to widen the movement still further. Key in this was to approach the rest of the union movement in Minneapolis and nearby. Aware of the dangers to the strike by the bosses looking to use the unemployed workers to break the strike, the Trotskyists made links with the them, organised under the Minneapolis Central Council of Workers (MCCW), an umbrella of unions, unemployed formations and political organisations. The CLA had members active in the MCCW. Over 10,000 unemployed had already protested against cuts. They then created a Women’s Auxiliary, to bring into the struggle the wives and families of the striking workers. They reached out to small farmers and market traders to bring them towards the union, and away from the big bosses.
Faced with the pro-bosses propaganda of the media, Local 574 started its own paper, The Organizer, at first weekly but produced on a daily basis during the strikes, with a circulation of 10,000. Dobbs remembers that the paper became self-financing, despite there being no set price, with workers stuffing dollar bills, and sometimes five dollars into collecting tins. Bundles of papers were left at newsstands and bars, and sold and distributed at factory gates and railways yards.
Mass strikes and state brutality
The main periods of the 1934 struggle were in May, when militant action forced the bosses into negotiation, and in July-August after the talks broke down. There were mass strikes of thousands of workers. Dobbs’ estimates about 7,000 at its height, with hundreds of pickets at a time. The union prepared for the brutal attack that they knew would come. They effectively created a field hospital in the union headquarters, with volunteer medics and nurses.
The strikers faced down the vicious cruelty of the bosses and the state. Strike-breaking thugs were used against pickets, yet they were confronted with a heroic but disciplined response from the striking workers. In the May action, there were mass confrontations and running battles with the police and their ‘deputies’ who were trying to protect scabbing operations, leaving many workers and police seriously injured. This reached a new deadly level when the strike resumed in July: 20 July 1934 became known as ‘Bloody Friday’ when armed police opened fire on a picket truck, killing two strikers.
The reaction of the workers and the Local 574 strike leadership was to take the strike to new heights. There had already been mass meetings and demonstrations throughout the struggle, mobilising 10,000 to 25,000. But the funeral of one of the two fallen workers, Henry Ness, was estimated to number over 40,000.
At the height of the strike, the union with its cruising pickets dominated the streets, deciding what could be moved or not – an element of ‘dual power’. This feature can be seen at times in mass struggles, general strikes and revolutions, where the working class gains a certain control, vying with the rule of the ‘normal’ capitalist state. But this state of affairs cannot last indefinitely. Either the workers are able to consolidate their power, and spread the action, or the capitalist state forces will reassert control.
At that stage, the struggle in Minneapolis was largely confined to the city, and was ahead of the mood of workers nationwide. The so-called ‘left’ governor, Olsen, with the ‘progressive’ Democratic president, Roosevelt, behind him, brought in martial law through the National Guard to ‘resolve’ what had become a five-week war of attrition between the union and the bosses. The military arrested Ray and Miles Dunne, and Bill Brown, Local 574 president, and while not a CLA member, a close ally. A mass strike rally on 6August of 40,000 sent a defiant message to the bosses and the authorities.
But massive pressure had been put on Olsen and also Roosevelt. The deal that had been tabled back in May was brought back. This represented a massive victory for the union, with significant pay rises. But, vitally, the union was recognised with bargaining and representation rights across the vast majority of trucking companies.
The CLA militants and their allies won the leadership of Local 574 and the party in Minneapolis was hugely strengthened by the struggle. It was also pivotal in the party attracting the American Workers Party (AWP), which had led a militant struggle of auto workers in Toledo, Ohio in May 1934. The CLA and the AWP entered fusion talks which led to the launching of the Workers Party of the United States at the end of the year.
The present-day fight against Trump and ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US is drawing a new generation into struggle. This comes at a time when the unions are beginning to move into action, as the strikes by New York nurses and workers nationwide at Starbucks show, on the back of a number of key disputes over the last few years. It is the role of socialists to point to the power of the organised working class as the main mass force that can find a way to the future needed by the majority in US society.
For this to happen, as the main lesson of the Teamsters strikes of 1934 reveals, a determined far-sighted Marxist leadership will be needed with deep roots in the working class and the union movement, armed with a socialist programme that is the alternative to crisis-ridden capitalism.