Now something that we haven’t succeeded very well at, but we tried to get at—it’s been too informal—but we’ve tried to get a number of people to these recent Nazi demonstrations in these cities and we’re operating under the perspective – some of the same people going have been attending the Soldiers of Solidarity rank-and-file thing that was formed at Delphi. These are plants that were going to get closed in all these small and medium-sized cities, and some of these cities are the ones that the Nazis go to and they take a tour and talk around, and with the decline in economy and tensions, we thought to get our faces known by going and joining the solidarity actions with the Soldiers of Solidarity with their struggles against the union bureaucracy at Delphi.

So we want these two kinds of movements to mutually scratch each other’s back. If you’re coming to a thing and you’re from the outside but you’re already a known community or workplace militant from that area it can do a lot towards building solidarity around both issues and the beginnings of the political network or struggle for whatever comes up down the road. So here is how the working class, the attacks at Delphi, and the fascist stuff come together.

NB: You mentioned queer support work in the working class. Was there resistance on the part of people in the factories and in middle class queer activism against the perspective that you folks were bringing?

Ermler: Well, the queer movement wasn’t like it is today. It was very radical then and the left led the center. There wasn’t much resistance, even if many didn’t accept the whole perspective on the gay movement. In the factories people may have said things and people may have been annoyed, but people know they are living under a regime were you can’t afford to be at each other’s throat. Others were sympathetic, but uncomfortable with this sexuality and might have bought tickets to the event but didn’t show up. They weren’t going to overcome that right away.

In the neighborhoods it was a little different. You would run into sympathetic people, but you seemed like an outsider where you could be attacked. People know they don’t have to see you all the time because you’re not part of the factory regiment together. So more backward elements could lash out easier.

NB: You observed the LRBW and the developments among black workers in the auto plants at that time. Also did you follow the demonstration of Arab workers in Detroit against the UAW holding Israeli bonds? Could you tell us a little bit about these?

Ermler: I wasn’t in Detroit when the DRUM came about. I arrived shortly after the major demonstrations of Arab workers happened. My experience of the DRUM and the LRBW was as an observer after I arrived.

By this time these had split into two trends. You had the more intellectual, non-worker leadership, continuing to be political players in the city, but as part of the New America movement which had people like James Weinstein around Socialist Revolution and Michael Lerner. So the people that were responsible for the broader political work of the League and its international events had, by this time, become social democratic. They were always reaching out to other constituencies and searching to find ways to implement change, but by this time underneath their revolutionary rhetoric, they pulled right and united with various social democratic forces. Ken Cockerel got on city council. If he hadn’t died prematurely from a heart attack he would have been mayor of Detroit. So you had that on the one hand.

On the other you had the actual DRUM militants, the worker militants. The number of them that remained full-time political, ended up joining a Stalinist group out of California called the California Communist League. It was led by Nelson Perry which had a significant Black cadre based in the dockworkers who were in the Communist Party USA who split in 1958. They resurfaced after a period of internal study. A lot of these units had been seen as the more black nationalist units of the League and the less class, less Marxist and less internationalist wing. They reemerged as part of the new Black-led Marxist-Leninist thing that put out a call for party building and became the Communist Labor Party. After a stagist period of internal consolidation they resurfaced in the factories and became probably the largest revolutionary left force in Detroit and Flint in terms of numbers. They had a solid working class base and also in welfare rights organizations and community groups.

The impact of the whole DRUM struggle was that a cadre came out of it that went to work elsewhere and had a lot of experience and recruited other forces. Now the 1974-1975 recession hit auto and elsewhere very bad in this region—auto and steel related states. It was ferocious. National unemployment went up to 10%. Around here if you went to the unemployment office there were by 8 a.m. already lines three or four blocks long. You couldn’t find another job anywhere. It got hard and bleak. During that period the impact that DRUM had lost a lot. The recession was another thing that caused it to lose ground, not just the split. Despite the CLP people, the broader thing that DRUM represented was shrunk, hacked out and cut by the system too.

The LRBW was primarily in the Chrysler plants. Chrysler, when I got here, was notorious for having a large black work force and an almost total white supervision with a lot of racist attitudes. The city was also going through the transition where the white workers were disappearing from Detroit, many of whom voted for Wallace, and there was the backlash against the 1967 riot and the 1968 elections. Prior to going into the recession Chrysler had also axed a lot of the key militants. Then the DRUM caught on because of the racist regime in the factories. The auto bosses came out the other end and started to make the change. You started to see more black foremen. By the time you hit the 1980s you could see the continual process. You also saw how they would identify workers who had artistic talents and have them paint black pride murals and give him a full paycheck. You had more black women foremen too. So the regime met the demands of representation.

NB: It seems this story in the microcosm of Chrysler is in many ways the story of Detroit. We want to get back to that a little later. But before that could you reflect on the decline of auto and its effect on Detroit and the people living there?

Ermler: Well, the first thing to say about the decline of auto is to see how the city has been devastated. The decline was a long time coming. While there was still a lot of juice left in the industry, it really picked up pace with the major 1979-1982 recession. This was extremely deep. Also remember the Chrysler bail out. It almost went belly up. Besides the federal bail-out money, the company was restructured. The inner city plants—Chrysler was Detroit-centered—were tied to this.

In the late 1970s you had the Dodge Main closure and the Mack Avenue Stamping closure. You had, a couple of years later, the Pole Town struggle that was in the film Pole Town Lives. The plant wasn’t lost, but the old Clark Street Cadillac plant for GM was closed and the new plant was built. However, the price for keeping it in the city was that it wanted a 20 year tax-free ride from the city or they would move everything out. The new plants that were built, like my plant when it was running at peak, were approaching 4,000 working. But in the 1980s, when it was re-automated, it functioned at about a third of the production workers. Skilled trades didn’t take as big a hit. However, with the whole change in the production process and technology, the production workers were shrinking.

The city is devastated because you didn’t need an education and you could take your pick about where you wanted to work. That whole avenue was closed off to the black community in particular. The shrinking housing tax base and corporate flight led to a deteriorating school system. The black community got hit twice with good paying jobs getting cut and the school system, except with a few magnet schools, couldn’t provide another kind of training. Now you have the poorest large city in the country. By their own statistics this is so. There are whole areas bombed out looking. It’s a very bad situation. I know at one point the infant mortality rate was equal here to that of Honduras. City health went way down.

The effect on the auto workers was that obviously people are being presented with the fact they are supposed to give up their incentives to save their jobs. People were saying to themselves that if they lose this job it puts them in a dilemma and they are gonna have nothing. They couldn’t make a transition to anything else.

The UAW, Chrysler and the government came up with a package that, compared to the rest of the population, was a fairly decent wage and benefit package. But the first step was opened up in acceptance—and this is tied into the decline of the Left—the logic (or illogic) of capitalism. That is, in order to save your job you got to keep making the outfit you work for more profitable. But where does it end? People got caught up with that logic.

Just to illustrate and to flip back to potential racial tensions, a whole bunch of production workers, black and white, felt that if this job disappears what are they going to do. But you had the historical divide in skilled trades within production. Here is an example of this that didn’t happen at the initial concession, but when more concessions were being demanded a few years later. All the workers—production and skilled—overwhelmingly voted this contract down that demanded these cuts. The union came in with its big guns, but it was voted down a second time. They called a special mass meeting and they put it to us that we were going to keep voting this until it was voted “the right way.” You can see what democracy is about for them. This was the first time they called a mass meeting and it wasn’t for the wage struggle but for a retreat.

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