Ethnicguy's post of September 27, "Labor Breaks With The Democrats", touches on some very timely issues within the American labor movement and within the broader spectrum of American progressive politics.
I agree with some of Ethnicguy's conclusions, disagree or would differently nuance some of the other conclusions, but mostly Ethnicguy's post lead me to some further thinking.
I'd like to start with Ethnicguy's 3rd from last paragraph:
".... In any event, absent from this discussion is any truly independent role for labor in politics. A break with the Democrats under these conditions could mean an opportunistic move to the right by segments of the labor movement. And under those conditions, it seems to me, it is important for people on the left to work to hold the line against opportunism in the labor movement. Now is not the time to talk about elections-based third parties (except in states with fusion voting) or to pose too much criticism or aim too much fire at the Obama administration. Rather, now is the time to direct the criticism and attack the right directly from within the labor movement."
Opportunism in the labor movement?
Let's face it -- for most of its history the American labor movement has rested comfortably on a foundation of opportunism. Opportunism is what American labor is about. "Punish your friends and reward your enemies" is the basic operational mantra and only core principle of American labor.
This principle was recently re-stated by an anonymous union president who said, "better to be at the table and receive nothing than not to be at the table at all." It never occurs to such union leaders that organized workers could run the kitchen; such thoughts would interfere with the main goal of rubbing shoulders with American capital's mighty and powerful.
With a few very important historical exceptions, American labor has stood only for its institutional survival and narrow prosperity. It has eschewed any notion of representing the American working class and its strategies have relied proudly on collaborating with capital in the narrow interests of furthering the goals of individual unions, their leaders and members -- regardless of the consequences.
Unfortunately, it is this opportunistic mindset that seems to be governing labor's intensification of its political program. Key will be the same reliance on rewarding friends and punishing enemies. And the results will inevitably include backing a couple Republican candidates by a few unions. This intensification will also result in backing lots of the same candidates as before with unions stepping out to do home visits to the unrepresented 90% of American workers, all aimed at securing labor's invitation to the proverbial table yet again delivering nothing to American workers.
That the above is what is likely to come out of labor's intensified political program is virtually guaranteed by labor's refusal to adopt an independent political agenda. And practically speaking, without an independent agenda it will be very hard for labor to have the kind of electoral impact it wants.
Here the problem is simply that the American political process has lost all credibility for working folk, for obvious reasons.
Obama and lightening up on the criticism
I disagree with Ethnicguy regarding the need to circumscribe criticism of the Democrats and the Obama Administration. Labor and all of us need to keep the critical focus on the Democrats. The way I figure it, Obama's recent tendency to push back against the Republicans is almost exclusively due to the criticisms he has received from the progressive end of the political spectrum.
Theoretically, criticism aimed at the Obama Administration and Democratic policy could help move the Democrats toward some kind of relevancy for working people as November 2012 approaches.
Interestingly, labor is not where a lot of this progressive criticism has come from. This is because labor has no principles, agenda, or anything of substance to say to working people. To my mind, labor needs to ratchet up its criticism of the Democrats -- not with threats of bolting the party or staying home on election day -- but with concrete and substantive analysis. This should include meaningful alternatives and options.
Third Party?
At this point in time, a meaningful third party is pure fantasy. The broad progressive left, including labor, has no analysis or agenda on which to build a third party. A third party dedicated to nothing more than punishing Obama and the Democrats might feel good emotionally but the effect would most likely be to deliver the nation to an extremely authoritarian right wing.
Avoiding Movement Building
American labor is a movement without a mission. Traditional union functions have been abandoned. The abandonment of these functions began when American unions did little more than watch and whine as their guts were carved out through the de-industrialization of the 1980s. Through this period, shop floors were abandoned and strikes -- that primary tool of organized workers -- were as rare as hen's teeth -- in spite of a number of opportunities where an effective strike could have won the day.
The results of this trend within labor has been the loss of any large scale impact on working class economics and the absence of unions in the day-to-day life of working people.
Labor's fixation on the political as the highest priority during the last three decades, and the way in which labor sees its political role, is the obvious consequence of its failure to be a labor movement. The emphasis on the political is not so much due to the potential gains for working people in the political arena as much as something for international union leaders to do in order to justify their otherwise irrelevant existences.
Where I'm going with all of this
The aim of progressives -- and labor progressives in particular -- is to build a movement. "Movement" means collective action, based on solidarity, with certain self-developed goals to be achieved. I see none of this in labor's current political discussion.
Likewise, the broad progressive spectrum in America needs to give up on its demand for the perfect messiah type leader and instead move on its principles through collective action.
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7 comments:
Charles, thanks for this post, I agree with most of it, particularly the "interests" of the Union bureaucrats and taking on the "opportunist" label. The left often throws that word around. But opportunists are those who vacillate, waver, take some tactical advantage, have no principles. Those who take on the President and the democratic Party are the opposite of opportunists
So what I'm getting from this is the answer to the question I posed in my original posting: some part of the left is indeed willing or ready to abandon the movement that elected the first African-American president and defeated the right wing and focus criticism on liberals and labor instead of the right wing. Moreover, this move seems to come with a critique of an undefined "labor bureaucracy" --whatever that is.
I'll counterpose to that a strategy of building a horizontally structured united front from below against the right wing which meets and is centered in the entire labor and civil rights movements, which moves forward from fight to fight precisely because it is able to bring broad masses of people and people's leaders along and which holds to the left's traditional class analysis that there are, essentially, only two classes with diametrically opposing interests. I think that the occupation movements around the US are reaching for this and will get there after they work through their anarchism and find it lacking in substance.
Readers and history will judge which is correct and I'll stay with the latter approach I've described and reject the former approach as practically and theoretically insufficient, at least for now.
This debate goes back more than 125 years in the United States to the early days when Daniel DeLeon fought Henry George in the New York Central Labor Union. I hear DeLeon and the ghost of the Socialist Labor Party--America's original sectarians--cheering from their graves as some part of the left rejects the possibility of building and maintaining a united front against the right.
I have been pondering this question myself in recent weeks - it's good to see it being discussed here. I find myself torn between a popular front idea (encompassing the center and left) and the united front idea (all the left). This question is particularly salient when propositions are made for a popular front but those proposing that suffer from the inability to actually realize others on the lefts being part of that front. Limited resources compound the problem, leaving such proponents out of inspirational upsurges like those in Madison or now in NY.
I guess I really don't want to focus on the Dems but I do want to focus on labor a bit.
Our primary job on the left, to my mind, is to build what right now is a pretty amorphous but possibly growing left movement. I figure our role ought to be to lend our experience, historical vision and understanding of class dialectics towards building this movement.
I share Ethnicguy's senses regarding the right wing. The current right is authoritarian to the point of a modern fascism, and in power shows every possibility of wishing to implement the totalitarian vision many on the extreme right are currently advocating.
Defeating this right wing is not furthered by acting as a "cover" for actions, mis-actions, and inactions of the current regime. Indeed I don't even want to focus on that current regime because they are really only tangential to building the movement such as the above.
Labor is core to building such a left movement. The political agenda labor is playing out however has little to do with building such a movement.
First, presidential and congressional elections as they are constituted now are not going to build a movement, although they are important because this is where the right needs to be defeated.
However, all of labor's, indeed far too much of the broad left puts so much emphasis on these elections, yet these elections are movement dead ends.
Getting back to labor specifically, labor's political program has steadily dominated for going on two decades now. To my mind, this fixation on mainstream political gaming has been transformed labor's role from its traditional economic function into being a sort of little mini-party aimed at feeding into a bigger party instead. Here, to take the other side of the argument, we have Daniel De Leon's "labor lieutenants of capital" who are so bought into feeding into the bigger party that they have no time and are too politically contradicted to develop and maintain a working class agenda.
In the end, labor and the progressive left are not the ones who will make or break the 2012 elections. The reality is that if Obama and the Dems take another drubbing in 2012 it will their own fault, their own equivocating, their dodging of the big issues, and their squandering of massive progressive political capital.
So, I want Obama and the Dems to win in 2012 because more than anything else I don't want the right capturing national totalitarian power.
And I figure the best way to help elect Obama and the Dems is to be unrelenting in our honest criticism and at the same time, to embrace and be supportive when Obama and the Dems actually do something right, and they are capable in theory of doing at least somethings right. This is shoving the argument to the left, and this is what our role on the left ought to be and that includes labor as well.
I think Charles and Ethnicguy by the ends of their posts pretty much agree with each other, although Ethnicguy's whole post is more consistent, or coherent. Still, there is a definite if somewhat submerged debate going on between them. I find myself pretty much in agreement with their concluding paragraphs.
I've been watching (like many of you) videos of the Wall Street and Brooklyn Bridge actions, which I think are very effective--shows what a relative few can accomplish. I hope the labor unions add effectively to the people's actions and do not overwhelm them. It's a good thing to see these very direct protests against global finance capital, right in its own fouled den. I hope such protests keep spreading and grow, drawing more folks.
I want to complain about too quick resort to the term "totalitarian" and "fascist" (except as effective in actual actions). The US is not a totalitarian system, nor is it fascist. I'm in the midst of reading a lot about the rise and coming to power of the Nazi party, and I see no comparison with the US--and I am deeply anti-fascist. One thing that helped bring down the Weimar Republic was the constant carping about its structure and inability to address perceived and real problems, mostly but certainly not only from the authoritarian right. So those terms should be used in reflective and pointed ways, and not overused, which lessens any real effect (with the exception still of the heat of the moment in protest actions) where they can be effective in their moment.
I also think the vague term "progressive" is over- and mis-used at times, but that's another subject.
Thank you for posting this discussion - this issue is one I've found myself preoccupied with recently. It seems different Marxist organizations in this country are increasingly split on this question, and reality seems to beg more nuanced stances. Thanks for presenting those.
Actually Rich, I use the term "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" quite intentionally.
The current right wing is full of authoritarian and totalitarian sentiment. Take for instance Christian Dominionism... It's totalitarian to the core. And this brand of thought has worked its way off the fringes and into some pretty important social institutions such as government and the military, not to mention its ideological hold within thousands of churches and millions people through these churches.
I bring Christian Dominionism up only as one example... There's also the white power militias not to mention large elements within the Tea Party.All of these groups have engaged in identifying "enemies" both internal and external, have suggested various levels of "war" against these enemies (whether they be gays, cultural Marxists, or Islam).
And now, all of the above groupings have good solid roots within the Republican Party.
You mentioned the Wiemer Republic too. I think the comparison between our current state of affairs in the USA and the final three or four years of the Weimer Republic is a good one, for all of the reasons you cited...
This is why I think it is so important to beat the right wing in 2012...
Sorry too for the continued lack of coherence...
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