JW Mason wrote:
> Re labor and Seattle, it's true that the AFL-CIO isn't the IWW, but it's
> not clear to me exactly what follows from this.
I think this is getting focused wrongly. Of course the AFL-CIO top bureaucracy is obnoxious -- and not just because they're not IWW but because they are not even what they claim to be. But that is not, or shouldn't be, the question here, and whacking away at them as St. Clair/Cockburn tends towards opportunism: it allows one with appearing to be super-radical cheaply. (Apparently, for Jeffrey it was physically fairly expensive.)
What we need is an analysis of the factors or forces which compelled the AFL-CIO to be there at all. It's pointless, I think, to either blame or praise them personally. (To be a traitor to a cause one first has to enlist in it.) Whatever those forces were that compelled them to be there, and however successful they were in preventing a thorough juncture of the labor battalions from the other protesting forces, they obviously did not wholly prevent such a joining-- and the movement (or some embryonic movement) was clearly the gainer from that.
Doug writes: "That they were here at all, and that they've taken as tough a stance as they have is the news. That they've shed their nationalism for at least a rhetorical/gestural internationalism is news too." I agree, that is news. But it is news we need to ponder the meaning of independently of any (in my case negative) judgment of those leaders.
Could it be that they fear a stampede? And want to be at the head of it to guide it down safe paths? That is one hypothesis.
Carrol