> I suspect the process runs something like this. You enter the party with a
> principled desire to change from within. You're soon faced with some choice
> - sell out a constituency or betray a principle in order to cut a deal or
> advance your career. You rationalize the sellout/betrayal by saying it's a
> short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain. Soon you find yourself doing
> that every day. You end up hating yourself or hating your former
> constituency or both. No doubt the same thing happens in organized labor.
Hmm, I know some of y'all are union activists yourselves and probably know this, but my two and a half months as President of the GTFF here at the University of Oregon has been quite the Educational Experience. Currently, we're fighting the UO over our health insurance; our premiums are going way up, so we're mobilizing grads over this. It's definitely an issue which most grad students care deeply about -- health insurance is the only real benefit we have, and has saved more folks from personal bankruptcy than you can shake a stick at.
The kicker is, much of the practical politicking in unions revolves not around fighting The Power, but fighting *internal* battles with people who are supposed to be your friends. It's like, every day as union Prez, I get to live out Adorno's dictum, that the totality is false. You quickly realize that power is a commodity, like everything else in late capitalism, and that you don't run political offices, political offices run you. I see this in our relations with AFT-Oregon, where we've been having running skirmishes with the Old Guard of conservative, entrenched labor bosses (good souls, but totally unable to understand micropolitics), as well as within our own union, where different folks have different priorities (good souls, but totally unable to deal with grad-politics). And yet, and yet... there is occasionally a window of opportunity, moments where the Revolution materializes out of nowhere, when people pull together and realize that solidarity which otherwise remains an empty abstraction.
At the latest AFT-Oregon convention, we elected a good, progressive slate of activists, a real victory for working people. But it wouldn't have happened without years and years of trench fighting, struggle, vicious conflicts, etc. Somehow we global Leftists have to square the magic circle, and think with the power and acuity of an Adorno, while acting with the decisiveness of a Brecht. It's a damnably tough contradiction, the kind which tears hunks of flesh out of you, but also the kind which can detonate political earthquakes. Postmodernism will have its revolutions, just you wait.
-- Dennis