Taking a swing at the fight for unions

Scan page 9

the film F.I.S.T., starring Sylvester Stallone, soon The Leicester Square preview of F.I.S.T. has already attracted considerable publicity.

The promoters of this relatively lavish Hollywood production are clearly hoping for a big box-office success.

Socialist Press readers will welcome a film which deals seriously with American trade unionism and the corruption of the union bureaucracy.

However, they will find this in F.I.S.T.

The film is loosely based on the history of James Hoffa, President of the giant Teamsters Union, who was jailed for his criminal activities (later to be freed by another criminal-President Nixon-kidnapped by unknown opponents and to disappear without trace).

'Rocky' star Johnny Kovak (played by 'Rocky' star Sylvester Stallone) represents Hoffa.

The Teamsters Union becomes F.I.S.T. (Federation of Interstate Truckers).

The audience is taken across three decades, from the fight to built F.I.S.T. in the 1930s to the point of Kovak's downfall.

The battle to build the Teamsters, forty years ago, provided an unforgettable page of struggle in the history of the US working class movement.

And the development of a thoroughly corrupt leaderMARK HYDE reviews go on general release.

ship in the Teamsters holds important object lessons for every thinking worker.

But for the makers of F.I:S.T. this is all a closed book.

It may be hard to believe that a film on this subject matter could leave out the working class-but F.I.S.T. manages just that.

The union (according to this film) was built by the actions and manipulations of (implausible) individual figures.

Of course there are 'workers' in the film. It's just that they don't seem to think, speak or show the slightest trace of independence.

Grunts

As substitutes for these attributes they grunt, listen to Kovak and respond with a chant of F.I.S.T.! F.I.S.T.! F.J.S.T.! to his demagogy.

Hollywood has depicted more perception and class consciousness in its portrayals of the 8th Cavalry in Westerns. • The violence, intimidation and scab thuggery of the employers against trade unionism in the 1930s is shown up by the film (in fact the plot of strike scenes seems completely subordinated to the need for liberal helpings of violence obligatory for the box-office ratings). But everything else is pure fantasy.

'F.I.S.T.! rests on a monstrous and slanderous deception-that the Teamsters' Union was built not by the workers but by ... the Mafia.

Kovak is portrayed as incapable of winning the battle to organise the union (despite the apparent readiness of strikers to organise workers' defence guards against scabs and cops) without enlisting the assistance of mobsters.

It is the hoods' Molotov cocktails that win the day as the workers take a backseat.

From then on the plot is simple, and tediously predictable.

Kovak (despite the bill board claim that 'He loved his men ...') can't get the Mafia leader Milano off his back.

The union uses traditional Mafia methods against workers and becomes a field of operations for organised crime.

At last we reach modern times with Rod Steiger as a crusading and fair-minded but the gruesome historting corruption.• Still the dumb workers follow Kovak to his violent end.

The message is simplethe union could not be built without corruption. The rise of the bureaucracy was inseparable from it.

In fact, as Socialist Press has shown in features on the period in. question, the Teamsters Union was wilt on a powerful mobilisa tiơn and radicalisation of the American working class.

Further, central to this development was not the Mafia, but the Trotskyists.

Members of the (thenrevolutionary) Socialist Workers Party such as Vincent R. Dunne and Farrell Dobbs stood at the head of the movement.

It is a well documented history but one which Hollywood can never tellfor it is a milestone not simply in trade unionism, but in the experience of the struggle for Marxism in the American working class.

Perhaps the most ironic line in the film comes, when, during the strike, a Writings on union leader warns the strikers against listening to the Fourth 'Bolsheviks'.

Bolsheviks Kovak asks his sidekick 'Have you seen any Fourth International: Problems and Bolsheviks?' The real story Tasks: would have reen the The first WSL document attempting to Bolsheviks asking Have you seen any Kovaks?' In conclusion, those who cannot believe just how bloated and corrupt the Conference of the WSL, in late 1975. union bureaucracy is learn something from this ialist Press. Price 15p plus 10p p&p. film.

But anyone who wants Aspects of the History of the FI: to know why that bureauBased on a lecture by John Lister to cracy grew up, and the real working class struggle behind ihe Teamsters should give F.I.S.T.' a miss.

'reunification' of 1963.

Published in Trotskyism Today No march 1978. Price 50p plus 15p p&p.

The Poisoned Well:

The document drafted by the Workers of the International.

All available from the WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 Jimmy Hoffa in 1946