Aronowitz, Baker & Lynd - What Is To Be Done? 28:09

What Is To Be Done?

In this period of intensified class warfare against the working class and the
poor, what will it take to mobilize the people for the mass movement it will
surely take to win? Many have been heartened by the fightback in Wisconsin
and many of the frontline states. But is the predominately electoral strategy
that is currently being followed sufficient to win? What is the role direct action,
strikes, including general strikes, and cross union and community solidarity?
We talk with:

General Baker has been called the most important 21st century American
revolutionary. He was a leader of the Detroit wildcat strikes in the 1960s, a
founder of the legendary League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), & the first American to refuse
induction to fight in Vietnam. The book, "Detroit: I Do Mind Dying" (about the
worker revolts of that era) calls Baker the "soul of the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement (DRUM)." An autoworker for 30 years, he remains a
champion of the unemployed and unorganized workers.

Stanley Aronowitz is a Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, where he studies labor, social movements,
science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies. He is
author or editor of 25 books including: Left Turn: Forging a New Political
Future; How Class Works; The Jobless Future (with William DiFazio); and
False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness.

Staughton Lynd has dedicated his life to activism & social change as a
historian, lawyer, and labor activist. He helped direct the Mississippi
Freedom Schools. In April 1965 he spoke at the first march on Washington
against the Vietnam War and became an early leader of the anti-war
movement. Subsequent to becoming an attorney he spent years focusing
on labor and prison issues. He wrote the definitive history of the 1993 Ohio
prison uprising at Lucasville as well as the ever popular “Labor Law for the
Rank and Filer” and “Rank and File” oral histories of the 1930’s .

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