From Dollars & Sense:
Works sucks and it's been getting worse in the U.S. for decades.
So why aren't there more radicals at work?
For the first part in a series about radicals and labor today, we asked a dozen radical workplace organizers—teachers, Teamsters, telephone technicians, union organizers, and more—that question. Read what they had to say.
The activists we talked to blamed the American Dream, persistent racism, and a feeling that struggle and collective won't do any good. They also laid some of the blame on radicals themselves, for failing to connect with working people.
It hasn't always been this way. Before World War II, radicals in the United States had much deeper roots in the working class. Employers, the government, and even union officials purged those Reds after the war.
Read more here.
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2 comments:
Good, but it misses the connection between anti-Sovietism and anti-communism. The purges talked about in the article were part of the same anti-communist offensive as the demonization of the USSR was. In any case, I'm not sure that trying to make a distinction between "good" communists and "bad" communists is going to get us anywhere. Either we have to become something other than communists in order to escape the bad press or we own our history, explain it, and correct the lies and distortions.
I posted this article because it puts in perhaps too simple terms some of the questions we ought to be asking ourselves daily. I do not think that we should be any more surprised by workers' conservatism that by the basic conservatism of any other sector of the US population. That said, we have to be careful not to mistake conservatism for something else and to appreciate the remarkable speed of thought and creativity workers adopt when we do go into radical motion. Age, retirement and mass layoffs, mass industrial closures and the continuing rationalization of work have knocked most of the radicals out who took jobs in industry in the 60s and 70s. Many also took union staff jobs, removing them from the rank and file. That generation had limited success in broadening the left's base in industry, though we should not underestimate their tremendous work in mining, the auto industry, hospitals, education, transport, the post office and government services. The failure of the oldand new labor lefts to more fully unite needs study; some of this may be due to the legacy of McCarthyism and left factionalism, but some of it reflects the wider generation gaps in society, I think. What is of more interest are the strengths and weaknesses of the ever-present, if now much-weakened, indigenous labor left. We have passed the point of "rank and fileism" or workerism on the left, I hope, and we should be able to assess what draws (and repells) workers as workers politically to the left or to some other direction. We should also be able to chart resistance to capitalist rationalization where it is occuring. And we need to think hard about the lag in unemployed organizing. Last, we need to confront the question of what a US left will look like without labor at its center, which is the direction we seem to be rapdly moving in. For the first time in 140 years this seems to be so. That this happens at a moment when so many unions seem officially committed to a liberal political program and may be on the verge of a new organizing drive is a major and paradoxical question for the left to take up.
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