• The strike started out with only a part of the workers ‘striking’ with a majority continuing to work. The ICFI, WSWS, SEP called for an ‘all-out’ strike ‘to expand’ the strike to include the remainder. 

• The ICFI, WSWS, SEP, collectively now as ‘the party,’ did not call for a ‘general strike,’ did not advocate for a ‘general strike,’ did not raise the call for a ‘general strike’ among any of the rank-and-file committees within its stead. It did not make an active attempt to widen the struggle by those means or to seek to unite the ‘all-out’ strike, designed to be semantically distinguishable form a ‘general strike,’ with workers striking in different sectors of the economy. 

• The UAW is one of the most profound ‘rabbit holes’ in the history of the labor movement, the sum total of whose history is designed to overwhelm the average worker who does not have the time to analyze the union’s various twists and turns, processes, court cases, elections, leaders, or movements. It is by far an organization whose convoluted history is the very definition of ‘trade unionism.’ The party’s engagement with the UAW is tied up with nearly every single aspect of the UAW’s convoluted history. 

• The party is tied up with the union’s various twists and turns, processes, court cases, elections, leaders, or movements. The staggering, breath-taking, nauseating amount of paperwork generated from the party’s entanglement with the UAW could easily fill 10 to 20 volumes; a serious study of its entanglement could easily usurp a full year’s worth of work. It suffices to say that after Fain Shawn, the leader of the UAW, won a heavily contested election, the party refused to raise a call for a recall or for Fain Shawn’s immediate overthrow. It did not appear that at any point during the course of the party’s ‘all-out strike,’ the party sought to raise a call for a recall or for Fain Shawn’s immediate overthrow as one of the ‘all-out’ strike’s demands. These facts call into question the party’s entanglement with the UAW’s elections. 

• It is often the case that the ICFI, WSWS, SEP cites the ‘betrayal of the unions’ as the primary reason for a strike’s failure. It is convenient. It satisfies the logical prerequisites of Occam’s razor. It provides a simple explanation. It shifts the blame from the leadership of these organizations to the trade unions. It therefore undoubtedly justifies a strike’s betrayal. However, citing the ‘betrayal of the unions’ comes to pass now, as nothing less than an excuse. The quantitative law of diminishing returns, however, significantly degrades the quality of this excuse. It has been trivialized to a negligible infinitesimal in a grand calculus designed to deprive workers of an area for a right to assemble. 

• Moreover, the very idea that the party seeks to reach a conclusion other than the one Leon Trotsky reached in the founding document of the Fourth International is a recommendation to workers to scrutinize the party’s analysis with the greatest skepticism imaginable. In the Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth Internal, Trotsky states quite clearly that the “world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” [1] Leon Trotsky’s point of departure indicates that the way forward for an analysis of a labor struggle is not to be found in the crisis of a trade union’s leaderships but in the historical crisis of the proletariat’s leadership. There is where workers need to be begin their understanding of the party’s ‘all-out’ strike for the UAW.

[1] – [(Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program [New York: Labor Publications, 1981] p.1).]