Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 22:37:20 -0400 (EDT) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: Re: M-I: Labour Government and the Unions Jon Flanders writes: >We have the same syndrome here in the US with the Democrats. If the >unions were out, the Democratic party would collapse. Clinton's greatest >achievement has been to keep the workers out of the streets and out of >politics for the last 5 years. Despite one anti-working class initiative >after another, there has not been one significant labor mobilization in >the Clinton era. The key to this, again, is in the Democrats keeping the >unions IN, living in hope that the occasional veto of a bad bill will >pull the workers' chestnuts from the fire. Jon, I don't think Clinton or anyone else (save for a few Right-wing Rip van Winkles in the *Wall Street Journal* or *National Review*) worries about "labor in the streets" in America. The big attraction for a practically bankrupt Democrat Party in 1996 was labor *money*, together with the connections certain craft and transportation unions had with organized crime and urban political machines that were needed to get out the votes for Clinton and congressional Democrats. The whole "union summer" demagogy of 1996 was simply a cynical ploy on the part of Sweeney, Trumka, et al to try to regain influence within the Democrat party. It didn't work. The workers themselves stayed away from the polls in droves. There was never any prospect of "labor in the streets", nor will there be, unless it is part of a much, much larger incident of social upheaval in America, such as one springing from a natural calamity, and then only as a tail to more dynamic forces facilitating fundamental and far-reaching changes. The culture of western workers simply forbids them playing a leading role in effecting revolutionary change. Both Jon and Rob Lyon in their own way unconsciously chart labor's degeneration in the modern era. The hapless NDP in Canada could only keep itself solvent by moving sharply to the Right; despite rumors of worker discontent, no left-wing movement of any import proposes to replace it. In the US, two decades of worker retrenchment and give-backs has only thrown up the most pathetic resistance, like the so-called Labor Party Advocates, itself a still-born movement in many ways more right-wing and less respectful of "democracy" than the Democrat Party itself. At its inaugaral convention, the Number One Enemy was not the Democrats or the capitalist system, but a noisy (and ultimately ineffectual) Left wing among its own members. If Jon and Rob are to be believed, and workers themselves are anticipating a party or movement that will fight vigorously for their rights, where is the evidence of this? I must say no such evidence exists, and for good reason. Workers in the West are an irretrievably counter-revolutionary force. If their leaders are drawn to various social democratic reform schemes, the rank and file themselves are pulled inexorably in the opposite direction. That is why union leaders, almost without exception, oppose things like voter initiative, one-man-one-vote in formulating national labor policy, and the like. They hate and fear their own members and, lacking any modicum of popular support, they are wholly dependent upon the leaders of the organized political parties for their very survival. The labor movement in Canada and the US is in an inexorable process of decline and outright degeneration. It can neither be recussitated or destroyed by any political party; it must be refunctioned from within. So, may I humbly suggest that it is not the Democrats who most fear "labor in the streets"? It is, sadly, the institution of labor itself. Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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