Learning the lessons and passing them along

THE NEWS that Pete Camarata has passed overwhelmed me with a sense of loss--not just of a friend and comrade, but also of a working class fighter who touched the lives of thousands of people with his courage, humility and humanity.

I first encountered the image of Pete Camarata in the early 1980s on the pages of a broadsheet published by the Brotherhood of Loyal Americans and Strong Teamsters, or BLAST, an anti-communist hit squad created by the far-right Lyndon LaRouche organization and the mob-dominated Teamsters union bureaucracy.

Pete, BLAST breathlessly informed the reader, was an "International Socialist" and a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, derided as "Tear Down our Union" in a phrase that the union old guard apparently thought was clever.

A couple of years earlier, Pete had been severely beaten at the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas, the town into which the union had poured much of its pension money to the delight of various gangsters. Not long afterward, Pete got back in his truck, delivering freight around Detroit and building TDU, the reform group Pete had helped form in the mid-1970s during a stormy period of wildcat strikes and union activism.

By the time I was introduced to Pete personally, I was a bit in awe of him. As a young socialist, I soaked up everything I could learn about the rank-and-file movements of the 1970s, including Pete's prominent role in the national freight wildcat strike of 1976. That action cost Pete both his job and his membership in the Teamsters union--until his coworkers and supporters helped him reverse both decisions.

Then I heard that Pete, who'd left the International Socialists to join Workers Power in the late 1970s, had joined the International Socialist Organization--so I'd be meeting him soon.

INSTEAD OF the fire-breathing agitator I was expecting, I found a gentle man with a wry sense of humor whose authority as a leader in the struggle came from his great empathy for working people. Pete liked to joke that you're going to spend more of your waking hours with your co-workers than your partner, so you'd better find a way to get along--and get organized. "You want to organize a union?" he'd say. "Then start acting like a union."

Pete was always willing to share his experiences with younger comrades in the ISO--never lording it over them, but listening closely and asking questions before giving them friendly, practical advice. As a member of the ISO, he enjoyed the opportunity to explore his political interests and test his ideas. The first meeting he gave at the ISO's annual Socialist Summer School--the forerunner of today's Socialism conference--was on the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollantai's contributions on sexual relations and the class struggle.

Whenever I visited Detroit in the late 1980s, Pete was a generous host and an enthusiastic tour guide. His city was literally falling down around him as it was starved of investment, so Pete made sure to show me the sites of key labor struggles before the wrecking ball got to them--followed by a delicious meal at a favorite Greektown restaurant.

Pete's home was a regular gathering place for union militants and radicals of all stripes who'd been through some of the most dramatic labor struggles since the Second World War. To listen to them was to learn the lessons of a generation of working-class fighters who'd stepped up to the challenge of resisting Corporate America's anti-union onslaught--which continues to this day.

I got to play host to Pete, too, when he came to New York City, a town he loved. When a blizzard hit the night he was to do an ISO meeting on rank-and-file movements, he showed up anyway and spoke to eight or 10 of us.

Later, when Pete's employer finally shut down in 1995--they'd shifted business to a nonunion operation--Pete took the opportunity to travel, and often returned to New York, usually with a carload of colorful characters along for the ride. As always, I took the opportunity to talk union and politics with Pete late into the night. Years later, when we both moved to Chicago, I got the chance to know him as a friend and neighbor.

PETE LOVED life, whatever the many twists and turns it took for him. I'll always remember the delight on his face as he walked the picket line at UPS in 1997, when 200,000 Teamsters stood up against big business and captured the imagination of the country.

For some, it might have been a bittersweet moment. Pete's activism, after all, had helped pave the way for the 1991 election of Ron Carey's reform slate that took over the Teamsters union. Pete himself, however, having lost his job, was quietly working as an organizer for a couple of reform Teamsters locals in Chicago, a town dominated by the union's old guard.

But Pete wasn't put out by the fact that he was no longer in the thick of the Teamsters' fight. For him, the UPS strike was simply a joy to behold. Working people had rediscovered their "no" to the boss--and with that, their dignity. Pete was in his element.

I'm sorry to say that I saw much less of Pete in recent years, as his political focus shifted. The last time I spoke with him, he was happily sitting at a restaurant with his longtime partner, the labor attorney Robin Potter, and his stepson, Jackson Potter.

Jackson had taken the trade unionism he'd learned from Pete into the effort to revitalize the Chicago Teachers Union under the CORE reform slate. It was the kind of moment that labor historians rarely capture: the thread that connects, 35 years later, the young man who led a wildcat strike on the freight docks in Detroit to another young man at the center of a bold teachers' strike that captured headlines across the country.

When Jackson informed me of Pete's illness, I realized that during all that time I spent with Pete, he wasn't about just teaching me about organizing, but how to live. It was a simple but powerful lesson. You fight. Maybe you win. Maybe you don't. And if you lose, you don't walk away in bitterness. You learn the lessons and pass them on, so that you--or someone else facing that same battle--can win the next time.

Pete, thank you so much for what you taught me and so many others. You will be missed, my brother.