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 ---
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