Charleston Five longshoremen arrested for defending picket lines against cop attack (January 2000).
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South Carolina clay miners appeal for solidarity in fight for their union (October 2001). 
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July 2002 

On June 24, three strikers at the Navistar truck plant in Chatham, Ontario were injured when a professional strikebreaker smashed a van into the picket line. One of the picketers, Don Milner, spent hours in surgery for critical internal injuries. This attack, perpetrated by the bosses and their hired thugs from the notorious London Protection International, was carried out to clear the way for what the capitalist media calls “replacement workers” – scabs – at the Navistar Plant, whose 650 workers are members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 127. It follows an injunction from the bosses’ courts seeking to cripple the effectiveness of picket lines in this hard-fought strike.

Navistar striker Don Milner after he was struck by scabherders’ van that drove into picket line, Chatham, Ontario, June 24. (Photos: Derek Ruttan/London Free Press)

The potentially deadly attack shows the meaning of the anti-labor campaign waged by the Tory (Conservative) Harris government, which has been emboldened by decades of class-collaboration and sellouts from the labor bureaucracy and the reformist NDP. The government onslaught has included officially lifting the supposed ban on using scabs in unionized workplaces – a direct assault on the power of the picket line. 

The courageous Navistar strikers have now shed their blood in defense of the elementary working-class principle: Picket lines mean don’t cross! While the bosses and their reformist hangers-on preach the lie of class peace, Navistar shows yet again that the interests of labor and capital are irreconcilably opposed. They will be at war until the working class defeats and expro-priates the bourgeoisie. The picket line is the battle line in the class war.

As workers express outrage at the bloody strikebreaking attack, CAW president Buzz Hargrove has made noises about shutting down other auto and aerospace plants and bringing out some of the 130,000 CAW members in Ontario. The working class has tremendous potential power, waiting to be unchained. But words won’t win this fight. A  massive, militant mobilization of workers power is required NOW to smash the Navistar bosses’ murderous strikebreaking and win victory for the Chatham strikers, who are resisting an employer offensive that includes the demand for a wage cut of $6 an hour. Yet Hargrove asks for “assistance” in preventing further violence from the Labor Minister of the same Ontario government which has unleashed an onslaught against labor and specifically against the picket line. With its long history of using troops against strikers, and the 1970 occupation of Quebec, the Canadian capitalist state exists to serve the exploiters against the exploited and oppressed. 

Picketers of Canadian Auto Workers Union block bus carrying management scabs at struck Navistar truck manufacturing plant in Chatham, June 24.

The Navistar strike is a clear example of the need for workers internationalism. The plant is an hour’s drive from Detroit. Mobilizing active support from the strikers’ class brothers and sisters in the U.S. (as well as Mexico and Brazil, where the company has operations) is clearly called for. Our opposition to NAFTA is based on international solidarity with Mexican workers. And a mobilization of powerful contingents from Quebec labor would be crucial.

Yet this cuts directly against the craven nationalist appeals which are the stock in trade of the CAW tops, and the rank Ca-nadian chauvinism of the New Democratic Party. CAW head Hargrove is a mainstay of the NDP. The fact that this party is firmly committed to serving the capitalist class was made clear as day by Bob Rae’s vicious attacks on social programs during the NDP years in Ontario.  It was Rae and his NDP that paved the way for Harris’ massive cuts. The social democrats – with their record of opposition to Quebec independence, of serving the capitalist state which imposes brutal racist oppression of Native peoples and immigrants – help divide the working class in the face of the class enemy. 

Navistar’s attack is part of a broader international offensive against the working class. Imperialist war abroad means war “at home” against the workers and all the oppressed. The vicious Bill C-36 (the maple-leaf imperialist version of  the USA Patriot Act) puts basic democratic rights under the gun. In the U.S., homeland security top cop Ridge seeks to intimidate the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, warning that a strike would affect the bosses’ “national security” (read: profits).

The crucial need is for a new, class-struggle leadership, which can only be built in a thorough break from the NDP, in the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party. The Internationalist Group fights to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, to lead the workers to power and defeat the capitalist system on an international scale. 

Defend the picket line! Mobilize workers power now for VICTORY TO THE NAVISTAR STRIKE! 

– Leaflet issued by supporters in Canada of the Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth International, 28 June 2002 (updated 7 July 2002)