File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-21.035, message 56


Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 22:36:37 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Marxists in unions



I think Yoshie's position is substantially different from that prevailing in
ordinary organizing situations.   First of all,  I imagine most of her
fellow graduate students would jib at being called "working class" and have
for the most part expectations of becoming,  if not privileged members of
the managerial (petty) bourgeoisie,  at least solidly middle class.    This
places them,  categorically speaking,  outside the traditional rubric of
trade unionism,  most of whose members are looking to improve their lot in a
lifelong situation,  or at least in one not wholly dissimilar to it.
Secondly,  I would expect the leadership of such an enterprise to be unlike
that of, say,  an organizing drive for janitors or laundry workers,  the
latter tending to be what I would call (for lack of a better word)
*lumpenintelligentsia*.     People in graduate school tend to be those from
families whose greater wealth or more highly placed connections place them
in a class quite different from that of the traditional union organizer.
Finally,  the supplementary nature of their demands -- as well as the
relatively benign environment in which those demands are put forth -- render
them incompatible with the more traditional organizing strategies of the
established unions.

This is not to say that AFSCME or SEIU will necessarily abstain from such
struggles.    The union leadership is nothing if not opportunist.
Establishing a toehold -- however tenuous and however shabby or dubious the
cause -- in an exotic environment where unionism is largely absent can prove
tempting; bigger fish may be caught further down the road.    One reason
graduate students at,  for example,  Harvard have found such rough going is
that the rest of the university is already largely unionized.    There is
too little to be gained for the AFSCME leadership for them to become
friendly to their cause,  itself having developed a satisfied and overweight
local bureaucracy that is largely a wholly-owned subsidiary of the
metropolitan Boston Democrat party.    

Good luck,  in any event, Yoshie.

I belong to Local 94 of the Carpenters,  to which my father and his father
before him belonged.   My great grandfather had a hand in starting Local 342
in Pawtucket - Central Falls in 1897.   The building trades in this neck of
the woods have always been more or less inhospitable to the Left,  though my
father recalls the *Daily Worker* being distributed to several thousand
construction workers every week at Quonset Point Naval Air Station in the
late 1930s.    Today,  the pendulum has stabilized; pitching slightly from
the center to the center-right,  depending on the vagaries of the local
Democrat party leadership.   Such is the retrograde nature of our political
culture.     

I wrote in this forum last fall that unions,  *as such*,  were wholly
incompatible with a Marxian revolutionary program,  but were, on the
contrary,  indispensable to strengthening capitalism in its twilight era.
It is not that workers are docile or counter-revolutionary -- though
tempermentally,  urban dwellers seem the least suited for purposive and
determined revolutionary action -- it is just that organizationally,
American trade unionism is a natural agency for reform,  not revolution.
This has always been so,  even during the heyday of Left agitation (authored
and embodied largely by the Communist Party).    Demands for union
recognition or an eight hour day could succeed (with largely defensive
violence if necessary) where more fundamental demands could not.
Principle always took a back seat to the humdrum world of higher wages and
more time off.    The Left was cleaned out of the shops in the 40s/50s with
hardly a whimper from the rank and file who had lately benefited from the
sacrifices of these same stalwarts.

I am struck by how little,  fundamentally,  has changed.    The occasional
"Leftist" or "Socialist" is tolerated,  even, good naturedly,  celebrated on
the lower rungs of the trade union leadership ("Communists" are still
outside the pale).    But the basic union program -- embraced by virtually
all workers,  whether service or manufacturing -- is still,  and will remain
so,  solidly right-wing social democratic.   Workers in Russia or China may
have had nothing to lose but their chains.     Western workers -- whatever
their exogenous situation -- have a good deal more than that to lose,  and
they don't want to lose it.    It may be that the Western urban working
class,  that species that is thoughtlessly celebrated on this list by a
number of modern day Rip Van Winkles,  is congenitally incapable of becoming
a ruling class (Lenin hinted at this in his last days).    In any event,  a
few noisy but ineffectual "revolutionaries" have made no difference in
American trade union life in many decades.    Those whose lives
providentially supply the self-delusion necessary to go on living can
content themselves with "revolutionary" action within the trade unions.
Those who prefer a reality grounded in the here in now will demur to other
types of activity.

Louis Godena      



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005