Workers World, Vol. 12, No. 5, March 26, 1970
Whatever the final results of the negotiations between the postal workers unions and the Nixon Administration now in progress in Washington, one thing can be said with absolute certainty. The tidal wave of mass insurgency that shook the capitalist establishment like a veritable social earthquake cannot be erased by any type of maneuvering between the top hierarchy of the labor leadership, their Congressional cohorts and the Nixon Administration.
Long, long after the specific gains of the hard-pressed postal workers have become dim in the memory of the public and have been eaten away by the ravages of inflation, what will be remembered is the truly monumental character of the struggle that the workers launched. It is the fact of the struggle itself that is of the greatest significance. From the struggle the workers gained for the first time a sense of strength and power which surpasses anything that even their best well-wishers could have anticipated before the strike began.
The strike has several features which are tremendously important, not only for the working class as a whole, but for the vanguard elements of the revolutionary movement as well.
Every significant strike is an embryo revolution. By this Marxists have not meant that every strike, ipso facto, raises the question of state power or raises the possibility of the seizure of state power. What is meant by this is that every great struggle brings into play all the fundamental class forces of capitalist society and reveals in miniature form the close and intimate relationships that exist between the capitalist state and its master, the ruling class, as well as the more concealed relationship of the labor bureaucracy to both the capitalist class and the working class.
Even more illuminating is the revelation of the state in its naked form as organized terror and violence. The state as “the body of armed men,” the classic and imperatively accurate definition of the state given by Engels, has again been confirmed, if indeed it still need by, by the use of the army against the postal workers.
The most strike feature of the postal workers’ struggle was the element of surprise. It caught the ruling class and its minions flat-footed at a time when the Nixon Administration was harassed by a hundred and one domestic and foreign problems of which the postal workers was the last on the agenda. The element of surprise in any class struggle is always an invaluable asset, but in this particular struggle it was exceptionally favorable to the workers because the ruling class was unable to make effective use of all the ponderous governmental machinery at its disposal. The best they could do was to use the army solely as an instrument of fear and intimidation and even this they found to be difficult.
The Nixon Administration was quick to pass the word down that the soldiers would be unarmed. The use of armed soldiers (which would have meant a bloody reckoning with the workers), although contemplated by the Nixon Administration, was abandoned precisely because the government feared that this would enlarge the scale of the struggle and turn it into an unprecedented general struggle of a deeper and more profound character with acute political implications – struggles of the type that took place in France in 1968.
The only capitalist newspaperman to reveal this aspect of the Nixon Administration’s strategy was the syndicated columnist Victor Riesel, who, in a telecast on March 23, specifically mentioned the French experience as an element that entered into the making of the strategy developed by Nixon, Blount, Shultz and Co.
One thing that must have been absolutely clear to Washington was that this struggle was in the nature of a spontaneous uprising and that the leaders who had called the strike were merely responding to an irresistible convulsion, the dimensions of which could be of incalculable proportions. The elemental drive of the masses of workers, the fact that they themselves were doing it, their enthusiasm, their confidence and determination, was so apparent that only those totally blind would fail to see it.
The struggle united both Black and white, young and old, skilled and unskilled in one of the most remarkable displays of unity in many years and this in spite of a variety of different unions and the complete absence, at least for the duration of the strike, of jurisdictional disputes which the boss press so loves to play on.
In the space of a few short days the workers got a lesson in the nature of the top hierarchy of the labor leadership that would have taken years of formal agitation and propaganda to teach. In times of great struggle, Marx said, the workers learn in a few days what it would take many years to learn during other times. The hanging in effigy of Rademacher was the most eloquent testimony to the swift change in the mass psychology of the workers, in their evaluation of the labor bureaucracy. This act alone proves that the struggle alone is the greatest educator and explains why the labor bureaucracy fears a real struggle and tries to avoid struggle as it would the plague.
The attitude of the postal workers toward the top official leadership did not, however, become anarchistic in character. On the contrary, what became evident to all who observed and heard the workers on the picket lines, was that they assumed an attitude of “wait until we get the opportunity to get rid of them.” Rather than identifying the labor bureaucrats with the unions, the workers more than ever, and in some cases for the first time, saw the union as their own instrument and their “leaders” as an imposition upon them.
Coming at a time when the official trade union movement has reached its lowest ebb in prestige, the thoughtful attitude taken by the postal workers in relation to the labor bureaucracy is an exceptionally favorable omen for all of the workers.
The postal workers did not display the naïve belief that they would be able, by themselves and in spite of their top leaders, to make the Nixon Administration capitulate openly and on all their demands. They instinctively knew that in the face of the collusion of Rademacher and his lieutenants and practically the entire hierarchy of the AFL-CIO with the Government, they alone could not win all they wanted to win. But they could and did get “the measure of their strength.”
What is meant by this phrase which is often used, not only in strike struggles, but in other struggles of the working class as well? It means that after examining the objective relationship of forces between the workers and their class enemy, and taking into consideration the available weapons which the workers have at their disposal in combatting the class enemy at a particular moment, and after measuring the totality of all the forces of the workers as against what their enemy can muster at that same particular moment, a decision is made to ratify at the negotiating table what has been won on the picket line.
Of course, many a gain which has been won by hard battles on the picket line has been lost at the negotiation table. And this many yet be the case in the postal workers’ strike, particularly in a situation where there is so much room for treachery. Not only do the leaders of the union have to keep their word to the workers, but the Nixon Administration and the Congress have to abide by the behind-the-scenes promises which they made to the labor bureaucracy in order to enable them to get the workers to go back.
The postal workers’ strike has special significance because it of necessity is directed against the capitalist state – but only in its capacity as an employer. Viewed in this light the strike reveals the enormous disparity between trade union militancy and political class consciousness. No revolutionary Marxist who works for the proletarian revolution can fail to give the closest study to this phenomenon.
In such Western imperialist countries as France, Germany, Italy and to a lesser extent Spain, which have a long tradition of revolutionary class struggle against the bourgeoisie, trade union militancy is to a large extent also merged with political class consciousness. To a large degree this is explained not only by the higher level of the class struggle in these countries, but also by the fact that Marxist parties developed first and then built the unions. It is otherwise in the Anglo-Saxon countries such as Britain and the United States where trade unions grew up first and political parties of the working class developed later.
However, from a broader historical perspective, the disparity between the political class consciousness of the American workers and their West European brothers, particularly in the Latin countries, is due to the highly privileged position occupied by U.S. imperialism which has been able to bribe the upper echelons of the labor aristocracy in this country.
The postal workers’ strike comes at a critical juncture in the historical evolution of U.S. imperialism. The empire of finance capital with its citadel in Washington is crumbling. With each blow delivered by the oppressed peoples of Vietnam, of all Asia, Africa and Latin America, the privileges of the labor aristocracy in America not only are imperiled, but are destined to vanish. The imperialist colossus which has mercilessly levelled towns and villages abroad is now levelling the standard of living here at home as one of the consequences of its adventurist foreign policy.
The inability of the Nixon Administration to grant a meagre, paltry 12 percent increase to a section of Government employees other than by evoking one of the most massive strikes in the country, sounds the death knell of the social system.
It sometimes takes a long, long time for the economic facts of life to reflect themselves in the political consciousness of the masses. The Vietnam war which is now almost 10 years old has wrought havoc with a capitalist economy which was already in decline at the end of the Korean war. Its artificial stimulation by gargantuan military projects such as the ABM and related military installations has merely introduced one more explosive element into an anarchic and chaotic situation.
All the more necessary is it for the vanguard of the revolutionary movement to help accelerate the political consciousness of the working class, the only class destined, by the nature of its class position in society, to overthrow the rotting system of imperialist rule.
Trade union consciousness is one of the oldest and most elementary forms of class consciousness. It can develop and has developed over the centuries more or less spontaneously. It can be a vehicle for either class collaboration or class struggle precisely because it is merely an elementary form of consciousness. Political class consciousness on the other hand requires the knowledge of precise Marxist-Leninist theory, knowledge of the laws that govern the class struggle, the reciprocal relationship between the antagonistic classes in society and the social institutions that are based upon them.
The great merit of the postal workers’ strike is that it was effectuated with a mere elementary trade union consciousness in the environment of a totally bourgeois ideology. Imagine what could be accomplished with such a truly great struggle, with such a massive upsurge of enthusiasm, unity and solidarity if it was accompanied by equally great political class consciousness. And yet this is the indispensable element needed, not only for ultimate victory, but even to safeguard the modest gains that have been won as of now.
All this underlines the need for building a genuine revolutionary workers party, a party based upon the fundamental conceptions of Marx and Lenin.
March 25, 1970
Last updated: 11 May 2026