What did the Anti-War Movement Lead To? Gramsci and Civil Society

[Louis Proyect]

Nathan Newman:
>As to the idea that the 1930s was a "working class mobilization", which came
>first, the organization or the mobilization?   The early 30s had sporadic,
even
>impressive individual political fights, but it's hard to chalk it up as so
>impressive.  Between 1929 and 1934 - five long years of misery and poverty -
>there was surprisingly little mobilization and I would happily  compare
strikes
>and working class fights from 1968-1973 against that early Depression period.
>What began to change after 1934 was the mode of organizing by the Left;
partly
>this was due to the Communist Party moving away from sectarianism towards a
>broader Popular Front, partly to other forces teaming up in the effort to
take
>on the government in venues ranging from the workplace to culture in a
>comprehensive way.

This is historically inaccurate. The big CIO sit-down strikes occurred
before the Popular Front turn. What did happen, and this has some bearing
on the recent UPS success, is that the bosses started hiring again and the
workers had more leverage in waging strikes, beginning in 1934. In any
case, we have been in a qualitatively different period since the end of
WWII. The American Trotskyist movement always assumed that the next
radicalization would be a repeat of the 1930s. SWP guru Farrell Dobbs kept
seeing "heat lightning" in every single strike until the day he died, in
anticipation of a repeat of the Teamsters General Strike in Minneapolis,
where Dobbs became a legend.

Peter Camejo once told me that Dobbs and Jack Barnes were sitting around a
swimming-pool in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, when disco was king. Dobbs
told Barnes, "Jack, I don't know how long I have to live, but promise me
one thing. You will return the party to its working class roots and send
the petty bourgeois into the factories where the action is." Barnes, who
had never had a job of any sort in his life let alone a factory job, nodded
his head in agreement. Then he directed all 2000 party members to go get
jobs as coal miners, steel workers, etc. Those who couldn't "make the turn"
got the boot, like me. So I went to the Sandinistas and the ANC and told
them I would be able to deliver leftist computer programmers wrapped up in
a red ribbon. They patted me on the back and I got busy. Meanwhile, all the
bonehead sectarians who got factory jobs have absolutely nothing to show
for the past 20 years. Why? The working class is quiescent. When will this
change? I don't know, but you won't have to squint to see it. If you do
want to see effective Marxist participation in the unions today, study the
Teamsters for Democratic Union in Dan LaBotz's "Rank and File Rebellion".

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)