>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>
>>The black exodus from the Republican to the Democratic Party began, I
>>think, in 1932. The next black exodus, I believe, won't occur until
>>mass movements of working-class people of the magnitude & vitality
>>last seen in the Thirties rise again. It is also important to
>>remember that it was the rise of a new type of labor movement --
>>industrial union organizing -- that prompted this historic exodus.
>>Given this past experience, I think that a new type of labor movement
>>will have to come out of an initiative to organize the unorganized --
>>which should split the AFL-CIO, taking radical unionists along with
>>it -- before the next exodus. I'm afraid this type of initiative is
>>unlikely to originate in the Nader/Green combo as it is constituted
>>now.
>
>Split, divide - why is that the only way you think you can change either the
>Dems or the union movement?
>
>Why are you so sure the left is powerless to takeover those institutions,
>yet will somehow be powerful enough to takeover the whole society?
No, I'm not sure. It's just a prediction based upon history. The history of American unionism has been not a story of linear progress but one of the rise and fall of different movements (as Peter Rachleff argues in the last chapter of _Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement_, Boston: South End Press, 1993). And the point is that the next black exodus will come in the process of a new type of labor movement organizing the unorganized massively (or a social change & movement of _comparable magnitude_), if it comes at all.
Yoshie