Career
As a member of the Workers League, White reported on the 10-week strike by Appalachian coal miners in early 1981 and the Solidarity Day march on September 19, 1981, in Washington, DC where half a million workers protested President Reagan’s firing of 11,000 striking PATCO air traffic controllers and the smashing of their union. He has been active in the party’s interventions in the working class since the 1980s, providing on-the-spot reporting of strikes at Greyhound Bus, Hormel, Eastern Airlines, Pittston Coal, Caterpillar, Verizon, UPS, public schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, West Virginia and Oklahoma, the oil refineries and many others.
White authored a book, published in 1990, entitled Death on the Picket Line: The Story of John McCoy. The book, an investigative report, treats the killing of a militant coal miner, McCoy, as well as the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW) in West Virginia. [6] He has written extensively on the history of the American working class, including the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike and Flint Sit-downs in 1936-37.
White has served as the labor editor of the World Socialist Web Site since its founding in 1998. As a WSWS reporter, White has written extensively on the US auto industry, [7] [8] and has interviewed autoworkers in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. [9] [10] [11] [12]
White is also the Editor of the World Socialist Web Site Autoworkers Newsletter. [13] White announced the creation of the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter in July 2015, as a means to oppose "UAW Nationalism", pension cuts, poverty wages, and unemployment, and to call for the abolishment of the two-tier wage system, and develop international unity among autoworkers. [14] The Autoworkers Newsletter played a substantial role in the "No vote" carried out by Fiat Chrysler workers and Nexteer workers in 2015 against the proposed contract. [15]
The newsletter and the WSWS played a central role in rallying support for GM workers in Silao, Mexico who were fired in 2019 for refusing to work overtime during strike by GM workers in the US and encouraging workers to shut down the auto industry protect autoworkers from the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020. [16] [17] The Autoworker Newsletter supported Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman who ran as a socialist candidate for United Auto Workers president in 2022 and Lehman’s lawsuit opposing the disenfranchisement of UAW members. [18] [19]
In 2023, White interviewed autoworkers and commented extensively on UAW President Shawn Fain’s impotent “stand up strike” and the UAW labor agreements, which have opened the door for massive job cuts in the global auto industry. White denounced Fain’s endorsement of US President Biden, writing a comment titled, “The UAW apparatus backed the war criminal in the White House.” [20]
During his early years in the Workers League, White also served as editor of its youth newspaper, the Young Socialist, and interviewed Gary Tyler in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana in 1985. In 1974, the 16-year-old black youth was arrested and falsely accused of murder in a state conspiracy backed by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. In 2016, Gary was released after serving 42 years in prison, including many on death row, and recently reconnected with several party members who campaigned for his freedom, including White, during an exhibit of his artwork in Detroit.
White was active in the 1993 Citizens Inquiry into the Mack Avenue Fire, which opposed the witch hunt of the parents of seven children killed in a Detroit house fire that occurred after the city and electric company shut off utilities to the impoverished family. [21] [22] White was also active in Detroit's Committee Against Utility Shutoffs (CAUS) and organized hearings on fires in low-income neighborhoods. [23] [24]
In October 2013, White participated in the Socialist Equality Party’s protest against the threatened sale of artwork at the Detroit Institute of Arts and gave introductory report to the Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Attack on the DIA & Pensions on February 15, 2014. [25] [26]
On January 24, 2021, White was invited to speak on the Jimmy Dore Show to discuss the strike by Hunts Point produce workers in New York City. The YouTube personality brought White on without informing him that Dore’s previous guest was a member of the Boogaloo Boys, an armed far-right militia group that actively participated in Trump’s January 6 coup attempt and the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. [27]
White began by saying the Socialist Equality Party opposes Dore’s strategy and “the idea that somehow there can be unity of left and right.” He continued, “There is a historical precedent. The Nazis called themselves ‘revolutionists’ and opponents of the international Jewish capitalist conspiracy. This has nothing to do with left politics. My movement, the Socialist Equality Party, is seeking to build a genuine movement of the working class. We are above all internationalists. The right wing promotes nationalism.” [28]
Election campaigns
In 1996, White ran as the first presidential candidate for the newly-formed Socialist Equality Party (SEP) with vice-presidential candidate Fred Mazelis. [29] [30]
In 2006, White ran for Michigan's 112th Congressional district seat as an SEP candidate. [31] [32]
In 2008, White ran as the SEP presidential candidate with vice-presidential candidate Bill Van Auken. [33] [34] [35] The write-in campaign was accompanied by a redesign of the Socialist Equality Party's website, which would rehost articles written by both candidates for the World Socialist Web Site. [36] [37]
Reporting on a campaign speech by White at the University of Michigan, the student newspaper wrote, “White said he is running to provide a political alternative to Obama and McCain, both of whom support the bailout. ‘Both of them are preparing to issue a joint statement urging the passage of what would be the greatest theft of public assets in the history of the country, to bail out financial speculators at the direct expense of working people,’ he said. ‘We’re running in order to make the case for a socialist alternative. If the resources of the country have to be mobilized to avert a financial catastrophe, then the great financial institutions should be put under the public and democratic ownership of the working people.’” [38]
In 2012, White ran as the SEP presidential candidate with vice-presidential candidate Phyllis Scherrer. The campaign was announced from the Cooper Tire factories in Findlay, Ohio, where workers were locked out for contesting contract negotiations. [39] The White-Scherrer ticket was on the ballot in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and had write-in status for Michigan. White visited Canada, Germany, England and Sri Lanka to campaign for socialism and an international working-class movement. [40]
White's 2012 presidential campaign kept five core components: social equality, international unity in the working class, rejection of austerity, opposition to imperialist militarism and the assault on democratic rights, and opposition to the political subordination of the working class to the Democrats and Republicans. [41] White's campaign indicted the crisis that arose from the 2008 global financial crash as evidence of the failure of capitalism to organize society in a productive manner, and called for the building of an independent socialist movement and called for social rights to housing, retirement, food, and education. [42]
In 2016, White ran as the SEP presidential candidate with vice-presidential candidate Niles Niemuth. [2] In an interview with Russia Today, White explained, “For years social opposition has been channeled back into the Democratic Party, which has presented itself as a “people’s party,” pointing to role of the leaders of the 2003 anti-war protests, the Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign. “There is no national solution for American workers or Greek workers, we’re confronting huge transnational corporations that can only be fought through the international unity of the working class.” [43]
Speaking to the Legal Reader during 2016 campaign, White was asked to explain the difference between the Socialist Equality Party and those groups the SEP refers to as the “pseudo left.” White explained that the Socialist Equality Party traces its roots back to the political struggle by Leon Trotsky for revolutionary internationalism against Stalinist bureaucracy’s nationalist and reactionary program of “socialism in a single country.” After World War II, the orthodox Trotskyists, White said, had to fight and ultimately defeat political tendencies associated with Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which tried to liquidate the Fourth International into the existing Stalinist, Social Democratic, bourgeois nationalist and trade union apparatuses. [44]
“So, we call them ‘pseudo-left’ not as an epithet but to describe those organizations that present themselves as sort of anti-establishment or even in some cases socialist, but whose politics are pro-war and articulate the interests of the top ten percent, that layer of the upper middle class that does have some real concerns over how wealth is being distributed at the top and is really concerned about, you know, getting its own cut of the spoils. But they’re not looking to overthrow capitalism.” [45]
