> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> >If Sweeney spends his days fighting for the rights of workers and calls
> >himself a socialist, who are you to claim he is lying about his ultimate
> >goals?
>
> Hey, call up his office. Ask them if Sweeney calls himself a
> socialist. Get back to us with the answer.
I don't have to call his office. He has himself identified himself as a socialist by rather publicly joining the Democratic Socialists of America and has gone futher and lent a verbal endorsement and his picture for their recruiting.
The point is that nothing seems to satify folks. Steinem gets labelled a "CIA feminist" with pretty shaky innuendo and guilt-by-association, while you won't believe that Sweeney, despite an avowed public membership is a socialist group, is actually a member.
You quoted Reagan, but the better quote is Reagan's "facts are stupid things." In this case, it doesn't really matter what the facts are, people can interpret them however they wish to defame or define other people's politics, whatever they themselves do or say.
> >Sweeney is not a leftwing revolutionary,
>
> But he's a socialist. Hmm. Socialism, even if it's not achieved by
> classically revolutionary means (e.g. storming the Winter Palace),
> does involve a social revolution of some kind. What is this nonleft,
> nonrevolutionary socialism anyway?
It is what any socialist does when that social revolution is not happening tomorrow. A lot of folks argue that if you don't act like the revolution is tomorrow every day, you are not a real socialist. But for those interested in building worker and grassroots power in anticipation of periods of greater strategic maneuverability (to use a less loaded and vague word than "social revolution"), there is a pretty large honest debate on socialist tactics.
A quite respectable number of socialists at various points have argued that organizing the unorganized is the top priority of socialists at almost any period, but especially in periods of less political foment at the state level. By that criterion, Sweeney is advancing a socialist agenda more dramatically than almost any person you can name.
And Sweeney is not some kind of business craft unionist, advancing only the interests of the labor aristocracy, but instead has dedicated the last few decades to organizing the poorest workers, often immigrants, from janitors to home health care workers.
I consider those actions neither conservative nor "nonleft"- they seem in the best tradition of socialism in this or any other country. They have advanced both the economic status and organization of workers most in need of it in the United States.
As head of the AFL-CIO, he has expanded resources dedicated to organizing across the board, fired the rightwing foreign policy staff and replaced it with a much more progressive internationalist group of folks, led the political charge against NAFTA and the successful defeat of fast-track legislation, and is now leading the fight against the hegemony of corporations through the WTO.
You can argue with strategy and tactics in all these areas, but in each the general direction of his leadership has been due Left. Combine that with a public membership in a socialist organization and it just seems like perversity (and yes sectarianism) to claim he is not a socialist.
-- Nathan Newman