What you apparently find so offensive about her actions in this case which you have not cited no less than four times and which is so marginal to what goes on this city that I can't even remember any of the particulars is that she was forthright and direct about the UFT's differences with a particular effort at political mobilization, and that she chose not to participate in it based on those differences. Labor solidarity does not mean surrendering your political judgment, or giving up your strategic perspective; it means providing general support for other unions in their struggles with their employers, whatever the other differences one might have. Labor solidarity meant that the AFL-CIO should have provided full support to PATCO when Reagan went all out to "bust" it, despite the fact that it had endorsed Reagan's election and followed a self-destructive strategic orientation which put them in the hole they found themselves.
Look, it is as clear as the daily rising and setting of the sun in the sky, that the Workers' World Party, through its totally owned and controlled subsidiary, the Interantional Action Center, is making a push to grab exclusive hold of whatever demonstrations and protests will take place as a counter-inaugural, and to use them as a platform to push their politics. It is also the case that a lot of us have a lot of serious problems with their amalgam of Trotskyist and Stalinist politics, starting with their defense of the suppression of the workers revolts in East Germany and Hungary, up through their support for the 1968 invasion of Czechosolvokia and the repression of Solidarnosc, down to their utterly repugnant defense of the murder of Chinese students and workers at Tiananmen Square. We know that the IAC will run a demonstration where Ramsey Clark will be the figure with the _most_ credibility. By your logic, no one -- not you or I, much less the AFT or the AFL-CIO -- is supposed to have the right to say that we want no part of such an effort, and that we will only participate in a broad-based, democratic mobilization with real roots among labor, people of color, feminists, environmentalists, etc., because that would constitute red-baiting. "Red baiting" operates here simply as a bludgeon to try to end open political discussion and criticism, and to try to force surrender to a political agenda which one can not even discuss.
> >Leo Casey wrote:
> >Furthermore, the day when labor solidarity
> >depends
> >upon shutting down open debate over strategies,
> >on
> >muffling criticisms and differences
> When Sandra Feldman refused to appear on a
> speakers' platform with
> "avowed Communists," was she violating this rule?
> Doug
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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