File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 17


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



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