The International Communist Party salutes the workers of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, whom have chosen to strike against the devilish “Big Three”. Like the heroes of an ancient epic, the workers must once again cut down to size this three headed hydra, a perennial foe of the working class. When it was first founded in the 1930s, the UAW hase been famous for its militant sitdown strikes. We remind workers of the events of “The Battle of Running Bulls”, when thousands of UAW workers in Flint, Michigan occupied Cleveland’s Fisher Body plant, repelling the bosses’ scabs for weeks. When the capitalist State sent in its armed forces to dislodge workers, wave after wave was defeated & the police “bulls” were sent running. As the workers in the plant stood unmoved, the strike spread to 17 other GM plants over 44 days. As a result of this generalization of the struggle, the company was forced to capitulate. Then as now, our power lies in acting as a unified class, by taking up concrete action beyond the confines of single workplaces, trades, and employers.

It was through these methods that workers of the industrialized world cleaved from the hands of our class enemy a decent standard of living in the last century; however, after World War 2, opportunist union leadership in collaboration with the bosses and the capitalist State, turned the unions into pathetic HR firms of the companies themselves. The auto worker, who once represented the epitome of the American “middle class”, has today become proletarianized. Everywhere the sterile “American Dream” has given way to the depressing reality of a putrefying capitalist society, while the employers’ totalitarian State manages with its profoundly inhuman technology a disgusting, bizarre, & contorted social reality. This system’s senile, infirm, and morally bankrupt leadership inches ever closer toward tossing the workers of the world into the jingoist blood bath of world war, in a vain attempt to save their rotten order from its inevitable demise at hands of the ever deepening capitalist crisis. In contrast the International Communist Party stands as the only force capable of leading the working class to victory in the battles to come.

All over the world the class is beginning to wake up from a great slumber, casting aside its collaborationist leadership and taking up the weapon of the strike once again. We salute the over 18,300 UAW workers currently on strike. As the strike grows and more workers join its ranks, the more powerful workers become. Already other unions such as the Teamsters local 299 have pledged to stand in solidarity and refuse to cross picket-lines. We call on the workers to demand that UAW leadership mobilize its remaining membership in solidarity, as over 100,000 workers remain on the job working in the same industry where other workers are already striking.

Ultimately, the working class must move beyond the narrow confines of a trade unionism in which only 10% of the US workforce has been able to be organized. The need for a class union which unites all workers in common defense under a “one big union”, beyond individual trades and workplaces, was once the great aspiration of the workers’ movement which recognized the need to centralize their dispersed trade unions in order to win against the concerted attacks of the capitalist class.

Today, we must advance a practical unity of action among the existing unions to realize this goal. We need a united front of all combative and class unionist forces, uniting the masses of already unionized workers in common defense, a necessary step towards a future class union. As an immediate practical step, we call on sympathetic UAW workers to join other class unionists within the Class Struggle Action Network in an ongoing effort of cultivating a class unionist pole within the existing labor movement.

Towards the Class Union!