As Doug notes, this "response" to my post doesn't address the point I was trying to make, which is that contra the original CounterPunch piece, more local does not necessarily equal more democratic. What I was arguing--and would still argue--is that there are three terms here, not two: rank and file, national leadership, and local leadership. Not distinguishing the first from the third leads to bad analysis. CP is right that I garbled HOTROC/BTOP. Silly me. If it'd been a published piece and not a post to a mailing list, I'd be embarrassed.
Not that the opinion of a lowly ex-functionary like me matters much, but I like the tone of this piece a lot better than the last one. To talk about "serious" and "heroic" commitments from the international leadership is a little different from comparing them to the Death Star, as Jeff St. Clair did in our exchange here. (Funny his comments didn't make it into the newsletter; space considerations I guess.)
I was at a talk last night by Tom Juravich, who wrote that book on the Steelworkers victory at Ravenswood. He said, "You can point to union struggles like the P-9 meatpackers, that fail because while the rank and file is mobilized, they get no support from the International. And you can also find cases where there's a great campaign on the national level but the workers aren't mobilized, and those lose too. Labor can't win without both." I agree completely with this view, which you might call, oh I don't know, the dialectics of struggle.
What I don't agree with is the conclusion of the original CP piece that the locals are doing all that needs to be done and all that's wanted from the national organizations is to get out of the way. To denounce AFL-CIO staffers as sell-outs and parasites is a good way of letting off steam, and fits well with some people's writing style, but it's not helpful in rebuilding the labor movement. Not there aren't plenty of seatwarmers on 16th St., but there are many smart, committed people seeking the same goals as CounterPunch, and if they aren't succeeding we should look for the structural reasons.
Of course some of those structural problems are located within labor, though we may not agree what they are. For instance, CounterPunch thinks that the labor movement suffers from overcentralization and bureaucracy; I think it suffers from fragmentation and clientelism. There could be an interesting discussion here. A good first step would be for CounterPunch to admit how far this new piece backs off from the overheated claims of the original article.
Josh