Labor Day: Which side are you on?

Labor Day in my neck of the woods is the biggest carnival in America. About a million people have gathered in Central Brooklyn for the West Indian Day Parade, known to West Indians as the Labor Day Parade. This year, it's the only one NYC gets because the Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO has canceled the usual flag-waving exercise for the first time in a century (from what I heard). So... it's worth remembering today that "labor", conceived of and enforced as the skilled, pensioned and professionalized workers of the core industries is just one section of the international working class. Our struggle is a freedom struggle, as sloppy and hopeful as that's bound to be. Today is carnival in Brooklyn, May Day is our international workers day. Video by Rebel Diaz.

Comments

[Ralph]

Shows how far removed from working people you are. The Labor Day Parade has been canceled several times before. In 2002 they replaced it with a 9/11 memorial service, in 2004 there was an RNC protest in its place. Same goes with your ridiculous assertion that "the skilled, pensioned and professionalized" are the only workers who are organized. Have you heard of the UFCW, or UNITE-HERE? I find it funny that 'power to the people' Maoists who reject organized workers (just like the ultra lefts Lenin condemned) in the name of going to 'the real workers' always end up in popular fronts, working with 'the middle strata.' In the end, they don't work with any working people at all.

The job of communists is to help organize all workers, not to condemn those already organized for winning more crumbs from the bourgeoisie.

[ShineThePath]

UNITE-HERE!?! Oh christ you can't be serious.

[zerohour]

Don't confuse "unionized" with "organized".

Speaking of UNITE-HERE, the only organizing they do is when a photo-op is needed, and they need workers out there to look militant. Garment workers have a great contract - too bad it doesn't get enforced. But at least they get bennies with the union card, right?

[JB]

Sure, Ralph – that's about what I said... but take it as you will.

ON the other hand, I know more than one field organizer with UNITE/HERE who was fired for straying beyond the usual talking points.

There's nothing wrong with fighting for a pension or healthcare, or even what's called a living wage. But let's not pretend like SEIU hasn't politically embezzled tens of millions of their members dues dollars to support openly neo-liberal candidates like Al Gore or Hillary Clinton.

In the mind of Andy Stern, Unite to Win means: bow down to the DLC, lick their boots and don't forget to smile.

Bottom line is this: in the industries I have worked, service and media – there are no unions that would even let me join.

Even still, I literally just finished some (admittedly) minor assistance to a local (non-union) workers association preparing to strike in my home town and, if you're curious Ralph, here's a link to the piece I wrote especially for our dear ultra-left on the topic of the NYC Transit Strike in 2005.

If you're still in denial that the total, effective collapse of the business unionism that has been the unionism of the last several decades – and confuse observation of this fact with an "ultra-left" attack – then you, my dear union brother – are totally lost without a rudder.

Aside from municipal workers, particularly teachers – unionism in the private sector is a dead letter... for now. And here's the really scary news for those committed to Trade Unionism, on those terms: it's never coming back.

The imperial growth that funded the seemingly overnight growth of the "middle class" union worker is over. It's done. It's not ever coming back.

That doesn't mean workers don't need to fight, or that unions (beyond AFL-style "trade" unionism) won't have a crucial role to play.

It just means that you ain't never gonna get the kind of sweetheart labor deals won in the 50s and 60s, or be able to seriously promise that to the globalized workers of today... beyond those "pensioned, professionalized" workers in the "core industries".

But ever there... jeez, do we even have "core industries" anymore?

Do you know any autoworkers? In this country? Under 50?

[Ralph]

Yeah, I know a few dozen actually. I also know about 150 coal miners, who I work with. Then there are the hundreds of UPSers I used to work with, all teamsters. I also know at least a handful of each iron workers, boilermakers, insulators, mill wrights, carpenters, nurses, janitors, DHL workers, airline attendants, bus drivers, and postal workers. Those are just people I know personally. A little more than 1 in 10 workers in America are still organized, and in some of the most important sectors.

And I never praised the unions. They're led by opportunist labor aristocrats. So what? Should we ignore the millions of workers under them, or fight to expose as oust them, as Lenin suggested 100 years ago?

We can struggle where the working people are, and work to bring other workers into the organized fold, or we can ally with 'the middle strata' to 'impeach Bush.' Communists do the former. People attempting to apply a peasant-based strategy to a country with no peasants apparently do the latter.

To say that unions are over again shows how disconnected you are from working people. Maybe you should spend a little less time studying the armed reformists in Nepal and take a look around yourself here in the states.

Millions of immigrant workers are struggling to organize themselves. Did you forget the political, general strike of 2006? The CIW? How about the recent shipyard strike in Mississippi? The Transit Workers strike in NYC? The UPS national strike? The California political port strikes on May Day of this year? The upsurge among UMWA organizing in the unsafe scab mines that have reopened since the price of coal has shot up?

'Labor Day' is phony and the unions won't bring socialism, but neither of those facts should change our orientation to working people.

[ShineThePath]

No one is saying to ignore the workers, I believe. I think that is a crude point being made, and I am surely one against it. But to point out to UNITE-HERE as an example of a worthy Trade Union to work with, you have to be bonkers. UNITE-HERE runs a racket in NYC profitting of the exploitation of garment workers. That is precisely what they do, sell to the highest bidder, keep themselves alive, and let the workers in Garment factories fend for themselves....they don't even have to be undocumented, go to a factory in NYC, you will find documented workers getting paid minimum wage for 70 hour work weeks with no OT.

What does UNITE-HERE do about it? Nothing.

[question]

ralph – what is the percentage of people in unions, discounting those who are municipal workers or otherwise in the public sector?

5%? Maybe?

[Christopher Day]

Maoists call Trotskyists Trotskyites. Trotskyists think Maoism is all about the peasantry and think its clever to point out to Maoists that we don't have one in the US. Anarchists can't tell Trotskyists and Maoists apart.

I am not an agnostic, but I do think its sufficiently evident that none of us have yet discovered the keys to the kingdom of heaven and might therefore take the time to really familiarize ourselves with the actual thinking of various tendencies rather than "prooftexting" in search of evidence for what we already believe about each other. There are things we all have to learn from each other. If we're going to squabble lets at least do it over substantive differences and not caricatures of each other.

[ShineThePath]

There is at this time 7% of labor organized in Unions.

However I don't think that is a fair question to be asked. There is a reason to the weakness to the Unions, and it is precisely because the current anti-labor laws and legislation have weakened Unions and the labor struggle over the last two decades. Unions, unlike the past, can't organized undocumented labor and are in a position where labor is being more centralized in service industry which is less skilled and there is much turnover because of the free arbitrary decisions allowed by Employers.

[Ralph]

But undocumented workers have and are being organized, see UNITE HERE (which is why they are one group I pointed to), SEIU, the IWW (to a much lesser extent), CIW, etc.

And I don't know where 7% comes from. Thin air maybe? 13% of the workers in the US belong to a union.

Then there are facts such as "Of the 17.7 million foreign-born wage and salary workers in the United States, 1 in 10
are members of unions" & "The number of foreign-born union members rose from 1.4 million in 1996 to 1.8 million in
2003, or by 24 percent. The number of working immigrants with union representation
increased from 1.6 million in 1996 to 2.0 million in 2003, or by 23 percent." http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:1NuNjk_FWcAJ:www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/7_Immigrant_Union_Membership.pdf+13%25+us+workers+unions&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us

As for the Maoist/Trotskyist/Anarchist sludge fest, I am none of the above.

[Ralph]

Oh, and "Black workers are more likely to belong to a union (14.5%) than whites." http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

[zerohour]

Some questions for Ralph: where do you see this union struggle leading to - what is your end goal? Why is unionization a more pressing issue for workers than any other? You criticize allying with the middle strata to impeach Bush, but why not mobilize the working class to do so? What role do you see for middle strata in your larger strategy? Should workers spend more time on "purely economic" issues or on larger political ones?

You were wrong to invoke Lenin in the mechanical way you did, but right to imply he still had a lot of relevance. Go back to What Is To be Done? and see what he says the role of communists should be in regards to popular struggles. Hint: it is not just to organize workers but to do so with revolutionary internationalist politics. Workers are capable of thinking beyond food in their belies and money in the bank. Not to recognize this is the politics of trade unionism not communism.

The problem with trade unions isn't that they're run by bureaucrats. It's that they tie their success to the success of capitalism. Do you see this as a necessity for unions to gain more institutional strength or is it just misguidance of a few reactionaries at the top? This is in the context of the US empire, not an all-encompassing scenario for all time and space.

[legless lizard]

First comment here,
On the sight, politicalfleshfeast, there's a graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows the drastic and steady decline of union membership after communists and socialists were ran out of the ranks of the AFL-CIO. There's also a few good videos contrasting Labor day with May day in Sweden and Turkey.
link

[r. john]

There have been considerable "wellsprings" of revolutionary sentiment in the U.S. In the last century they have most powerfully been:

a) the conditions of immigrant workers -- including especially the Russian-Jewish workers of NYC, influenced by their conditions, their literacy, and their association with the USSR. (Before them Haymarket was an immigrant act of political struggle -- for the eight hour day and a revolutionary society -- rooted among German/Bohemian/etc workers.)

b) The oppression of Black people as a powerful engine of challenging and breaking with this system -- the progression of the civil rights movement to a Black liberation struggle with powerful revolutionary currents gave rise to sweeping sentiments for radical change broadly (including outside the Black nation).

c) The influence of socialist revolutions internationally -- including the Soviet revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural REvolution -- have given rise to great interest toward the most revolutionary ideas (i.e. toward MLM and revolutionary communism). And, in a different way, the rise of anti-colonial struggles (including South African struggles and the 1949 Chinese revolution), have triggered important thoughts about national liberation and revolutionary organization among oppressed nationalities.

d) And finally the intense and outrageous experiences people have had with what imperialism does around the world. Opposition to their wars, from Hiroshima to AbuGhraib, have produced political movements and ideological insights that have been a "wellspring" of revolutionary thought. So has traveling to chiapas, or being in the peacecorp, or experiences this empire as its soldier/vet etc.

What stands out is that these are not trade union struggles. And that many of them deeply touch the proletarian strata in the U.S.

In other words, for many decades (back to world war 2), the sources and engines of revolutionary thinking (among the masses) have not been the economic struggles, the unionization.

Some have been associated with trade union struggle -- but it is usually the wrong way: I.e. the great revolutionary energy of Jewish workers in new york gave rise to explosive struggles in the garment districts (including the obviously justified and important aspect of organizing the masses of workers in economic struggles)... but one tragedy of their generation was that this "energy" was more and more FUNNELED into trade unionism (first in the guise of "revolutionary" trade union work, then less and less revolutionary) until finally, their generation slid from Flint Sitdown to Iwo Jima (and warm participation in the great U.S. grab for world hegemony and the pacifif rim during WW2)

My point is that while economic struggles are justified, and while they often have some value in pulling the least-awakened workers into some kind of political life -- this is not any central or prerequisite arena of struggle.

Since we are quoting Lenin: it is not the best, or most conducive, means of bringing workers into political life (because of the powerful pull of economic struggles toward bourgeois politics -- toward negotiating a place within the system, and toward seeking a survival accomodation at the expense of higher aims.)

This is not just true in general (i.e. it is not just true since Lenin's time) -- but it has been increasingly true (in the world and in the U.S.) that trade unionism and revolutionary movement have moved apart, are more distantly related (if at all). And there are real structureal reasons for that:

In the third world, the reason is the importance of national liberation as a central focus (within which the economic struggles and trade union organizaiton have historically a very limited place, for obvious reasons.... just look at the Vietnam war.)

In the U.S. this dynamic is tied to the complex of extreme stratification and highly mobile capital. And also the de-employment among the most oppressed and potentially radical sections of the proletariat (Clearly issues of police murder are more prominent than "we want a contract.")

To be dialectical, there is anotherside:

Mexican immigrant workers are crusing toward (possibly) a huge and disruptive influence in U.S. life and politics. The dillemmas around their situation are bollucked up for the imperialists. And their conditions are intolerable.

And these workers bring with them an inclination toward a certain kind of organization and struggle -- often lifted straight from Mexican political life and struggle (and from its revisionist/reformist scenes).

These contradictions will produce movement and struggle (including internal struggle over which road to walk).

[submarino]

I appreciate R John's nuanced points about what kinds of struggles give rise (or could give rise) to a revolutionary movement. However, I take issue with the claim that "these are not trade union struggles." Clearly there are many important struggles that are unrelated or only tenuously related to trade unionism. But even some of the struggles R John mentions quite clearly were: the struggles of immigrant workers in New York City in the early 20th century, whose militant industrial unionism inspired and helped establish the CIO; and the Black liberation movement, which in my opinion became more powerful and more threatening to the ruling class as it began to confront class-based injustice and not merely racial segregation. This took place outside trade unionism (the Black Panthers), but also inside: MLK was assassinated in Memphis while supporting a mass strike of black sanitation workers, which was simultaneously a political strike and a "trade union" strike. At the time, he was preparing for a national "Poor People's Campaign" with which parts of the labor movement (such as the hospital workers of 1199 in New York City) were deeply involved, despite the reactionary politics of George Meany and his crew. (For a good video on MLK's linking of the civil rights, trade union, and anti-war struggles, see http://www.nehceu.org/mlk/index.cfm.)

Not to mention the various worker uprisings all over the country associated with the IWW and the CIO in the first four decades of the 20th century. Not until the re-merger of the AFL and the CIO in the midst of McCarthyism did the labor movement lose its way completely, and even during the Cold War there were exceptions to this rule. If the expulsion of communists and other radicals from the American labor movement during the Cold War had the disastrous results we all agree it had, does that mean we should we stay out or fight our way back in?

In my opinion, to stay out completely is to cede this important ground to the do-nothing labor beaurocrats who are still hanging around trying to manage the decline of the auto industry and other dying industries. More to the point, it is to cede this ground to literally no one at all--a complete lack of leadership--since the old guard is quickly getting crushed by corporate America and the vast majority of American workers are either neither unionized nor organized in any other way. Thank goodness there are a whole lot of radicals out there turning some of our unions back into what they should be: not insurance agencies or contract-negotiating services, but engines of class struggle. The fact that many of the people posting on this blog don't know or don't believe this is happening can only be attributed either to head-in-the-sand ignorance or to self-defeating cynicism.

It's true, as some have pointed out here, that the American manufacturing industries and trade union manufacturing therein are dying. The future of organizing in that industry lies in workers centers and international solidarity, which is why UNITE (before the merger with HERE) helped start USAS. (Incidentally, I have very little knowledge of and no interest in defending the UNITE HERE locals that represent or fail to represent garment workers in New York City.) But the future of trade union organizing in this country is in the various service and transportation industries, which, despite the extreme mobility of capital that R John points out in order to argue that all union organizing is now a dead end, can't be moved overseas. Not only can this part of the economy not be moved overseas, it employs millions of workers, including many of the most brutally exploited workers in this country, many of whom are precisely the immigrant workers that R John concedes might soon constitute a major revolutionary force in this country. (Note to R John: they're not all Mexican, and they don't necessarily bring "reformist" concepts from Mexico to their union activity on this side of the border. Some of them bring no such organizing experience at all, and plenty bring experience with guerrilla movements in Central America, including some of the senior leaders of my union.)

What exactly do people think campaigns like Justice for Janitors, Hotel Workers Rising, Justice at Smithfield, and other similar campaigns are about? What kind of union organizing do people think the radicals in the labor movement are doing? We're sure as hell not busy trying to decide whether the wages of auto workers will be cut by half or merely by a third during the next round of contract negotiations.

None of this is an argument that trade union organizing is all we need, or that all the Change to Win unions have the right program. Like the revolutionary project as a whole, this is a work in progress. I just find it very frustrating that so many revolutionary-minded people can't see the incredible folly of writing off trade union organizing entirely in a country whose economy is so thoroughly dependent on millions of low-wage wage-slaves who have come here from all over the world.

[R. John]

Some replies to submarine:

“I appreciate R John's nuanced points about what kinds of struggles give rise (or could give rise) to a revolutionary movement. However, I take issue with the claim that "these are not trade union struggles." Clearly there are many important struggles that are unrelated or only tenuously related to trade unionism.”

Yes. That is one point worth agreeing on. And this history underscores (imho) that the economic struggles of employed workers should not be assumed to be the prerequisite or natural gateway to higher struggle.

“But even some of the struggles R John mentions quite clearly were: the struggles of immigrant workers in New York City in the early 20th century, whose militant industrial unionism inspired and helped establish the CIO; and the Black liberation movement, which in my opinion became more powerful and more threatening to the ruling class as it began to confront class-based injustice and not merely racial segregation.”

This is worth dissecting a bit.

Yes, many of the movements of the oppressed had a connection with economic struggles. And I do think that it is inevitable that political uprisings among the oppressed will include economic struggles as “epi-phenomena.”

The question worth understanding is “what is that relationship between the revolutionary political and the economic?”

Perhaps this is one provocative way to pose this: I think that a great tragedy of the 1920s revolutionary immigrant movement in NYC is that within two decades it had been turned into the “inspiration” of the CIO.

The immigrant cauldron of NYC, with its intense political life and bitter exploitation, could have produced many things – and did! Among them both revolutionary parties and trade unions – but the larger historical trajectory became that the revolutionary impulse was turned into a CIO drive (and revolutionary cadre became the trade union organizers in textile, steel, auto, etc.) and then (as I said earlier) ended up in Marine uniform at Iwo Jima (and later applauded Hiroshima along with the CPUSA itself).

Your history of the Black liberation struggle is a little fuzzy: it always had an economic and trade union component (from the twenties on) – as just the example of the “Sleeping Car Porters” showed (which was both a trade union for black railroad workers, but also a rolling communications network for much broader confrontation with Jim Crow.)

The Black liberation struggle has always been about “class-based injustice and not merely racial segregation.”

What can be more “class based injustice” than slavery itself?

What is more “class-based injustice” that Jim Crow – where the “color line” is a superstructural mechanism for enforcing the serflike immobility of rural labor?

But the idea (which you seem to imply) that the Black liberation struggle became “more powerful and more threatening to the ruling class” when it started to be channeled into trade union struggles… hmmmm.

If you want to make a thesis like that you have to explain and then justify it.

“This took place outside trade unionism (the Black Panthers), but also inside: MLK was assassinated in Memphis while supporting a mass strike of black sanitation workers, which was simultaneously a political strike and a "trade union" strike. At the time, he was preparing for a national "Poor People's Campaign" with which parts of the labor movement (such as the hospital workers of 1199 in New York City) were deeply involved, despite the reactionary politics of George Meany and his crew."

Brief factual sidepoint: The Black Panther Party (under the influence of the CP) flirted with trade unionism – to the extent that they developed a Black Panther caucus at Fremont GM plant. Then they consolidated their “lumpen” line – and essentially ordered all employed workers to leave their party or leave their jobs (in several cities if not everywhere).

But on your main point about Memphis: Look, no one is unaware that there were economic strikes happening around the important political movements of our times. Or that (at times) the economic struggles of certain workers take on a “political complextion” in the context of larger political struggles and upsurges.

(Certainly the Farmworkers of the 60s were both economic and social movement, and were part of the larger upsurge of the times politically – especially for left leaning catholic and pacifist forces.)

But leaving it there is a bit shallow.

Great upsurges of the people can go in various directions, and inevitably currents within them DO go in various directions. Lenin says that in great revolutionary movements the economic struggles can have the positive effect of drawing into life the more backward and less awakened sections of the people. I think there is some truth to that (not just in 1905, but also elsewhere.)

And there are times when some economic struggles have a real “manifesto effect” – become larger banners and symbols that highlight the times and class contradictions and rally support on that basis.

But (BUT!) the issue is whether there is a kind of “ladder” of necessary struggle: where workers have to “first” fight around their “own issues” and themselves, and then (from within the framework of those trade unions) start to consider “politics as a mix of self-interest and solidarity” – and then take up “higher” struggles and consciousness on that basis.

This view, this set of “typical motion” assumptions, is mistaken.

Often (and I’m arguing generally) in countries like the U.S., economic struggles are epiphenomena of system-challenging political movements that are arising from other wellsprings.

In the U.S., the modern trade union struggle did not “give rise” to a revolutionary movement. It was the other way around: the U.S. developed an embryonic revolutionary movement based among Jewish and immigrant workers in new york, and then (tragically) that revolutionary movement got squandered and channeled into creating “modern collective bargaining” and the “modern social compact” (with all the imperialism and patriotism that implies.)

You keep pointing out that the economic and political struggles coexist and intertwine. No one can or would disagree with that. The issue is HOW they have intertwined in the past, and what we could possibly project about the future (without being mechanical).

You are so enamored with the CIO etc. that you are not really differentiating the different kinds of revolt, and the changing texture of the workers struggles – and how the emergence of unionization as THE focus of their attention (with the help of the CPUSA) marked the defacto death of their revolutionary aspirations.

It was a squandering, carried out under the great pressure of ongoing assimilation.

You write: “Not to mention the various worker uprisings all over the country associated with the IWW and the CIO in the first four decades of the 20th century. Not until the re-merger of the AFL and the CIO in the midst of McCarthyism did the labor movement lose its way completely, and even during the Cold War there were exceptions to this rule. If the expulsion of communists and other radicals from the American labor movement during the Cold War had the disastrous results we all agree it had, does that mean we should we stay out or fight our way back in?”

This is an interesting set of assertions.

I have no idea what it means for the “labor movement to lose its way completely.”

But I will say, that the communist movement lost its way long before McCarthyism (late 1940s) – and part of that lost way was the simultaneous decision to take up patriotism as an ideology and trade unionism as a political focus. (And this happened in a decisive way in the early 30s.)

By the time the CP was expelled from the “labor movement” they were long dead as a revolutionary force.

Since then, that “labor movement” has also virtually died. (In a way not dissimilar to the 1920s). And the issue is precisely the value of “fighting our way back in.”

You write: "In my opinion, to stay out completely is to cede this important ground to the do-nothing labor beaurocrats who are still hanging around trying to manage the decline of the auto industry and other dying industries."

First: It is a straw man to imply that anyone argues to “stay out completely.” Why don’t you deal with what people actually say.

Second: The trade union movement in the U.S. was always a rather nasty mix of reactionary politics and occasional struggles for economic betterment. And overall, historically, the nasty reactionary politics have predominated.

You can’t separate the U.S. “labor movement” from asian exclusion, jim crow, keeping women out of construction, anti-immigrant politics, prowar CIA politics in the 1950s, or (more recently) Buy American.

The U.S. "labor movement" has always had three programs: constrict the labor market (keep out foreigners, blackpeople, women), protectionism (buy American), and (in that context) force a raise in pay.

It is a myth that this is fundamentally and essentially a “movement for workers rights” whose reactionary colorations arrive because some alien layer of “bureaucrats” have taken over and perverted its supposedly inherently progressive “class” essence.

Third: The main reason the labor bureaucrats run the unions is because the unions are dying. The unions are not dying mainly because they are run by labor bureaucrats.

The world has changed. Capital mobility is intense and the internationalization of production circuits has taken a quantum leap.
I can forsee economic struggles in the form of elemental rebellion like outbursts from the lowest strata (similar to the “Salt of the Earth” movie, or the miners wildcats in the 70s, or Germinale, or the railroad strike of the 1800s.) And probably as a series of such outbreaks lighting the sky, and emerging as part of a larger social movement of immigrants (who have the particularity of being often, or largely, employed).

That potential outbreak needs to be connected with the revolutionary movement – but not in order to channel it into stable unionism, legalized citizenship, a future system of collective bargaining – but in order to build it as part of a larger movement aimed at the system itself. (“We want out, not we want in!”)

The masses themselves are highly ambivalent on those points, and many different currents will inevitably content.

But the issue is not “whether or not to relate to this” (including “from the inside”) – the issue is “for what?”

You write: “More to the point, it is to cede this ground to literally no one at all--a complete lack of leadership--since the old guard is quickly getting crushed by corporate America and the vast majority of American workers are either neither unionized nor organized in any other way. Thank goodness there are a whole lot of radicals out there turning some of our unions back into what they should be: not insurance agencies or contract-negotiating services, but engines of class struggle. The fact that many of the people posting on this blog don't know or don't believe this is happening can only be attributed either to head-in-the-sand ignorance or to self-defeating cynicism.”

I don’t rule out the possibility that there are lots of phenom that some of us don’t know about. And if so, let’s talk more about them.

But overall, I don’t think things are as you pose them.

Look: if there was a huge upsurge from a section of the oppressed that (initially or partially) took the “form” of economic struggles – then revolutionaries would (correctly so) be eager to “relate to that.” And I anticipate that may be about to happen, and I think we should struggle through how to “relate.”

But people who are trade unionists (or “economists” in communist parlance), argue that trade union struggle is always a prerequisite for higher forms, so that “if it doesn’t exist, it is our responsibility to create it.” And “if it doesn’t exist” then, it is believed, any talk of higher, more conscious, more radical forms of struggle are just premature.

This is because there is a (sometimes unspoken) vision that you have to have a big, bad, militant, rank-and-file trade union movement BEFORE any possibility of a working class revolutionary movement is conceivable.

This “vision” is built of a series of unjustified assumptions. And (as I’m trying to argue) far too often the emergence of a big, sorta-bad, trade union movement can emerge as an alternative – as an opposition to the revolutionary movement.

In the 1930s the CIO was the death of the revolutionary movement, not its crowning achievement.

You say: “It's true, as some have pointed out here, that the American manufacturing industries and trade union manufacturing therein are dying. The future of organizing in that industry lies in workers centers and international solidarity, which is why UNITE (before the merger with HERE) helped start USAS.”

Who says there is a future to trade union organizing in manufacturing?

And who says it is a loss if there isn’t?

You say: “But the future of trade union organizing in this country is in the various service and transportation industries, which, despite the extreme mobility of capital that R John points out in order to argue that all union organizing is now a dead end, can't be moved overseas.”

There is some truth here: there are segments of the economy that can’t be “moved to low wage areas.” (Transport, meat cutting, hotel work, restaurants, etc.) The strategy of the capitalists of those sectors is (not surprisingly) to “move the low wage areas” into the U.S.

So instead of moving the factories to Mexico, they move the Mexican workers to those factories. (Or filippinos or guatamalans, or chinese or whatever...)

And it is true that if there is going to be any economic struggle it is most likely going to be concentrated in those sectors, and in the revolt of the superexploited workers there.

But who wants that to be the “future of trade union organizing”??!

We want that to be part of the germination of a revolutionary challenge to this system. Why should these workers be trained as footsoldiers for some (very very unlikely) demand for new social compact – when they could be conscious leaders of a movement for a new social order.

Deal with this: the New Deal aint happening again.

And more: And if any fat new social compact were to emerge, it would only be on the basis of U.S. victory in its fight for hegemony.

If you want a new stable trade union movement in the U.S., perhaps instead of asking young organizers to go into the factories, you should encourage them to join the army and help win the war in Iraq.

In ways you don’t want to discuss or think about the success of your trade union dreams objectively ride on the success-or-failure of Bush-Cheney strategies for the world.

And that is really not a place neither of us want to be. Deal with it.

You raise an important issue:

“What exactly do people think campaigns like Justice for Janitors, Hotel Workers Rising, Justice at Smithfield, and other similar campaigns are about?”

These are important questions. But this post is already long enough.

[submarino]

R John,

Thank you for elaborating on and complicating my admittedly simplistic points about the intertwined nature of economic and political struggles. If I have argued against straw men, I apologize. But you insist on doing the same, by repeatedly mistaking the worst aspects of the history of the American labor movement for the whole thing:

"You can’t separate the U.S. 'labor movement' from asian exclusion, jim crow, keeping women out of construction, anti-immigrant politics, prowar CIA politics in the 1950s, or (more recently) Buy American.

"The U.S. 'labor movement' has always had three programs: constrict the labor market (keep out foreigners, blackpeople, women), protectionism (buy American), and (in that context) force a raise in pay."

If you are "unaware" of the various "phenomena," both past and present, that don't fit into your unflattering picture of the movement, I don't think a blog post will be sufficient to educate you. But since you point to the farmworkers' movement as a relatively positive example of "social movement" unionism, suffice it to say that many of the most militant and progressive and influential leaders of SEIU and UNITE HERE come directly from the heyday of the UFW, and my union sees itself as carrying on Cesar Chavez's legacy and advancing Dolores Huerta's socialist vision. Other high-level SEIU leaders come from the socialist-led movement of (mostly African-American) hospital workers that gave rise to 1199 as a powerful force in NYC and beyond. I don't think 1199 or the UFW are or were perfect, any more than I think the CIO or IWW were perfect. But it's foolish to throw the baby out with the bath water.

You assert that the revolutionary potential of the early-20th-century workers' movement died when it became part of the CIO, rather than after (or during) WWII when too many of its leaders made an accomodation with imperialist capital and those who didn't were purged. That's a controversial statement that demands a detailed argument. Please provide one, if you can. I would argue that to assume the workers movement simply arose without the leadership of union organizers who were part of the CIO and its predecessor unions (such as the ILGWU in NYC and the UMW in the South) is to succumb to what Lenin called "subservience to spontaneity."

I'm not interested in a new New Deal or in a "stable" trade union movement. A false sense of "stability" is what destroyed the labor movement after WWII, and there was certainly no consensus about the desirability of the broad truce with industry and the Democratic party that produced that stability. There were major controversies between Walter Reuther and George Meany (in which the latter largely prevailed, tragically), not to mention all the folks to the left of Reuther who were kicked out of the movement entirely.

I'm interested in reaching millions of workers who aren't organized (into unions or otherwise) and inspiring and recruiting them to fight the brutal exploitation they face. The goal is not a union contract, the goal is to build a larger and larger organization to engage in open class struggle--the contract is merely a tool to keep the struggle going. (Think of "dual power" or "base areas.") Have I figured out how to turn a strong, militant labor movement into a revolutionary force? No, but as Chris says, none of us has discovered the keys to heaven. I'm open to suggestions.

[DW]

Submarino, to what extent is your affiliation with "your" union a political choice and to what extent is it a job and/or career?

Speaking for myself, I work for a union and am proud to do so. It's a growing union that organizes the unorganized in a basic, mainly immigrant sector and betters the conditions of its members. I think organizing, particularly of the basic masses, is a good in itself in ways even Real John (paraphrasing Lenin) has acknowledged here.

But look, it's a job for me, not a calling. Considering other things I've done (nonprofit staffing, temp work incl. corporate), I think it's a good place for a red to be.

The head of "my" union nauseates me with his emphasis on labor-management partnership. I just read in the mainstream press that "my" union is leaning towards endorsing a particular Democrat for President (hint: not Kucinich or that dude from Alaska). If I thought that that was the sum total of where the surplus value I create was going, I'd have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

Reality bites. I would be a professional revolutionary if the revolution was hiring. As it is, my day job has largely become my political practice.

As a for instance, I'm late for work right now, so I'll cut this short. But I'd like to hear comments on the reality of union staffing as a job option for reds, instead of the more idealist conception that frames the choice as rev work vs. labor organizing.

[LS]

Whatever happened to reds getting rank and file jobs in workplaces where there are unions, and organizing from the rank and file? Why are so many leftists drawn to staff jobs? Great things can be done to organize workers from the rank and file.

As union staff you can do some good stuff but at the end of the day you're required to carry out the line of your boss (the union) rather than your revolutionary politics.

[DW]

Speaking for myself in response to LS:

With 12% union density, and with union jobs being coveted, it's not always so easy to get a rank'n'file job. E.g., as a bookish middle-class origin red who doesn't drive much, I had an easy time passing the written test for a postal job, but flunked the driving test. But my resume *as a red* makes union work (and nonprofit work) easy to get.

As staff *anywhere* "you can do some good stuff but at the end of the day you're required to carry out the line of your boss ...rather than your revolutionary politics."

And there's the rub. I'm happy to say my current employer, in its contradictory way, does a lot to hold the line for a large section of workers against their exploiters. Much more than I can say for many of my previous corporate & nonprofit employers.

[Freddy]

JB wrote -
"That doesn't mean workers don't need to fight, or that unions (beyond AFL-style "trade" unionism) won't have a crucial role to play."

That's good you at least grant workers the "right" to fight, although it can't be through any union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. I guess the left should dump the California Nurses Association-they just affliated with the AFL ya know.

"It just means that you ain't never gonna get the kind of sweetheart labor deals won in the 50s and 60s, or be able to seriously promise that to the globalized workers of today... beyond those "pensioned, professionalized" workers in the "core industries".

Funny, that's what the Heritage Institute says too.

"But ever there... jeez, do we even have "core industries" anymore?"

"Do you know any autoworkers? In this country? Under 50?"

I guess if you don't ever make it out of Brooklyn, then you wouldn't. If you did you could visit the new autoplants thoughout the south that are trying to organize. And the corest of core workers, miners, have been in the news an awful lot. And they don't seem to have a very good deal at all.

[Christopher Day]

While this is fascinating and I'd like to hear a little more from others why they haven't taken jobs in unionized (or unionizing!) industries, I'd really like to get at the theoretical question at the core of this which is: do we, like Marx, privilege the industrial proletariat as the leading sector of the working class and other oppressed sectors. If not, do we privilege some other class(es), class fraction(s) or sector(s) or do we reject the very notion of a privileged revolutionary agent?

The RCP talks more about "the proletariat" than other left groups, but seems to mean the more despised sections of the working class rather than the industrial proletariat as such. Maoism in China, and elsewhere, also preserved a theoretical insistence on the leading role of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry while in practice substituting the party for the miniscule proletariat. Gramsci also maintained a privileged place for the proletriat, but emphasized the neccesity that it sacrifice some of its specificity in order to constitute a new historic bloc including other classes. Laclau and Mouffe reject the whole privileging of the proletriat or any other positionally determined class actor at all, retaining only Gramsci's notioon of hegemnoy without it sneccesarily proletarian core.

It seems to me that the argument for either taking a job in a particular industry or taking a staff job with a union is based either on a belief that this positions one better to build an effective revolutionary movement OR on a resignation to the idea that organizing for revolution doesn't make much sense and the best thing to do is to find ways top fight for the amelioration of some of the worse aspects of capitalism.

Instead of insinuating that each other is either living in a world of revolutionary delusions or is a sell-out reformist union hack with no broader horizons, maybe we should attempt to address the underlying theoretical questions that presumably inform, to one degree or another, the decisions we've made.

Finally, just because the Heritage Foundation says something doesn't mean its wrong. The neo-cons are not wrong in their perception that the maintenance of American global hegemony precludes a return to a return to the class peace bought with relatively high wages and other social guarantees that characterized the US from the end of WWII to the early 70s.

There are fundamental structural features of US imperialism and the world capitalist economy in the early 21st century that can not be overcome simply by organizing the unorganized into SEIU and then fighting the good fight and pretending otherwise fosters illusions and confusions that will disarm those same workers when their efforts do not produce the promised results. Massive balance of trade and payment deficits and the rapid transfer of the manuafacturing sector of much of the world to East Asiacreate conditions of struggle radically different than those that gave rise to the New Deal. The US is an empire in decline that can't afford to buy domestic social peace but can try to compel it through religion, patriotism and repression.

There ARE interesting things happening in some sectors of organized labor and they deserve more careful attention than they typically recieve at this site. But the absence of a conscious and explitly revolutionary minded political movement confines much of that interesting activity within a horizon of restoring a New Deal that is simply not restorable.

[ShineThePath]

Submarino, I think you should really investigate 1199 and their "progressive leadership" (Diego Rivera). I think you are giving a lot of credit to what Rivera says in the public light, which is far from what happens in SEIU 1199. Sure he signed the WCW list, he has been visible on the street, but I'll surely tell you right now his politics and vision...and of course his Union's actual work in organizing workers is absolutely fucked.

I wouldn't spit on any SEIU local if it were on fire.

On UNITE-HERE...I recommend picking up Robert Fitch's book "Solidarity for Sale." Read the part on UNITE-HERE's Gulgag system in NYC.

[submarino]

Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter (and a Trotskyist, heaven forbid!). The leader of 1199NYC is Dennis Rivera. I'd be intersted in hearing more about how his "politics and vision" and "actual work in organizing workers" are "absolutely fucked," as long as you can stick to facts and reasoned arguments rather than rhetorical and personal attacks. But I'll say at the outset that I know more about the "original" leaders of 1199 in the 50's and 60's and their successors in places like Connecticut, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, than I do about Rivera. The locals in those states make up a significant part of the progressive "vanguard" of SEIU and Change to Win. I've met these people, and I can tell you something the press never will: they're socialists.

While Freddy's post is a little meanspirited towards the fine residents of Brooklyn, it is generally true that organized labor in New York City tends to be more ossified and conservative than the best locals of SEIU, UNITE HERE, etc, in other parts of the country precisely because in NYC a much higher percentage of workers are unionized already, and there is therefore much less emphasis on organizing the unorganized. (There are exceptions to this rule, such as UNITE HERE Local 100, which organizes in the mostly non-union food service industry.)

Chris wrote: "It seems to me that the argument for either taking a job in a particular industry or taking a staff job with a union is based either on a belief that this positions one better to build an effective revolutionary movement OR on a resignation to the idea that organizing for revolution doesn't make much sense and the best thing to do is to find ways to fight for the amelioration of some of the worse aspects of capitalism."

I'd say for most people it's a combination of the two. I work very hard every day to keep my eyes on the former, and to answer DW's question: I'd say my decision to work in my union is not a "job" but a "calling." I don't seen how I could do this work otherwise.

Also, to answer LS's question: lots of people still do salt (I did it myself for years, and I still recruit people to do it). In my opinion it's much more important to get a job in an unorganized workplace and help build the union than it is to find yourself a job in one of the very few workplaces left that still have a union. Better to be on the offensive than the defensive.

Chris wrote: "There ARE interesting things happening in some sectors of organized labor and they deserve more careful attention than they typically recieve at this site. But the absence of a conscious and explitly revolutionary minded political movement confines much of that interesting activity within a horizon of restoring a New Deal that is simply not restorable."

I agree with this and with much of what Chris said in his last post, and I'd like to see a deeper discussion of how revolutionary-minded organizers might help develop the exciting, progressive, militant section of the labor movement (which is growing, believe it or not) into a "a conscious and explitly revolutionary minded political movement."

[ShineThePath]

Sorry...Diego Rivera vs. Dennis...I got it confused in my mind.

Well anyway, I don't want to go into lenght about the problems of every single SEIU local, but what makes the Change to Wingfederation a reactionary wing of the Labor movement is the fact they support guest worker programs and the "comprehensive immigration reform" that was pushed by Democrats and a few Republicans. 1199 is open about supporting that legislation, and SEIU as a federation is openly stating they support Guest Worker programs.

I mean, I have been outright told this by (unnamed) people in their political action committees.

By the way...UNITE-HERE supports the very same.