Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 15:34:46 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Brown-bagging at the Monthly Review


I have returned to my desk after a brown-bag lunch down at the Monthly
Review, a regular Wednesday event. All the regulars are there, except Paul
Sweezy. There's Hugh Deane of the US-China Friendship Committee, a member
of Bill Hinton's generation. There's Annette Rubenstein whose 85th birthday
was celebrated last year with Paul Sweezy's next door at the Brecht Forum.
She is literary critic and was a member of the Communist Party for many
years, on whose behalf she taught at the Jefferson School in NYC. There's
Lynn Turgeon, a retired economics professor and occasional contributor to
PEN-L. Lynn has always been friendly to me, despite my out-of-control
moments there. There's John Simon who is the head editor of Monthly Review
Books. He came there after a successful career in commercial publishing and
a brief stint at the Pacifica listener-sponsored station in NYC. And, then,
of course, there's Harry Magdoff who enjoys everybody's deep respect and
affection.

Everybody is in an ebullient mood over the Teamsters victory and the
discussion revolves around the meaning of the strike. I take notes since I
am preparing an article on the strike for Sozialismus, a German magazine
that is a sister publication to MR. Sozialismus was started by Theodor
Bergmann, who was active in the Communist Party youth in the 1920s. He
identified with the wing of the party that was closely connected with the
Luxemburg-Liebknecht roots. This wing was driven out after the party was
Stalinized. Lately I have felt a deep affinity for this political current,
especially after doing an in-depth study of German politics in the early
1920s.

Notes on the discussion:

1) Gangsterism:
What was the significance of the Hoffa-Kennedy wars? Somebody speculates
that the Kennedys wanted to replicate the Japanese corporate-gangster
relationship in the US but Hoffa was an obstacle. This leads to a
discussion of gangsterism in the labor movement in general. John Simon
theorizes that gangsters made their entrance into the labor movement as an
expression of newly immigrated groups such as Jews and Italians trying to
gain leverage in American society. Unions were open to them. They hired
themselves out at first as protection against scabs but then stuck around
after they were no longer needed. Somebody mentions that Arnold Rothstein,
the Jewish gangster who fixed the 1919 World Series, made secret donations
to the Freiheit, the Yiddish language Communist daily.

2) Bourgeois coverage of the strike:
There's been a noticeable shift to the left in the coverage of the strike,
especially at the New York Times. Harry suggests that the Times is
extremely sensitive to changing moods in the population and will adapt to
the right or left to keep pace with the change. Proof of this shift is an
item that appeared in today's edition of the Times:

Gloria Harris, 39, said the strikers had felt inspired by a sense that they
were standing up for other working people. 

"This sent a message to other companies that you can't keep pushing people
so hard, and expect to get away with paying them part-time," said Ms.
Harris, a single mother who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the
rough-at-the-edges Chicago neighborhood of Englewood.

Except for those who crossed the picket lines, Ms. Harris said, the strike
brought people together in a way that company picnics and bowling leagues
never could.

"We now feel more like brothers and sisters than co-workers," she said,
noting the diversity of the strikers, who, until the walkout, had often
kept to their own racial or ethnic group. "We all learned something about
color. It comes down to green."

3) The left and the strike:
I mention that the hard work of the Schachtmanite International Socialists
paid off. This was the first evidence of 60s radicals "colonizing" the
trade unions that paid off. Hugh Deane states that it is too bad that Bill
Nuchow died before the UPS strike. Bill was a local teamsters official who
took a pay cut from $100,000 to $40,000 immediately after taking office. I
suppose Bill had been in the CP at some point, but when I met him in the
1980s doing Nicaragua support work, his politics were not that different
from mine. Bill was a strong supporter of the Cuban and Nicaraguan
revolution and would show up at cocktail parties sponsored by my
organization Tecnica, that he helped out financially. As I sat thinking
about Bill Nuchow and the older comrades at the table, I was struck about
how much the revolutionary movement is a cross-generational phenomenon.
When I visited the ANC headquarters in exile in 1990, I noticed how much
empathy there was between ANC'ers in their 80s and in their teens. I myself
had been drive out of the SWP about ten years earlier because--at the age
of 34--I was too old and too petty-bourgeois. I was now beginning to learn
that the SWP was wrong about this. The struggle for socialism is a struggle
for the ages and everybody young and old is needed.

Louis Proyect




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