At 05:26 PM 6/12/01 -0400, Nathan wrote:
>Why folks on this list are so adamant about the marginal importance of left
>protest after Seattle et al, the mass rallies against police brutality,
>increasing union militancy, and the campus anti-sweatshop mobilizations is
>beyond me.
-Because it takes the form of identity politics whose usual implications are -embracing various forms of weirdness, intellectual mumbo-jumbo, and -celebrity cults with zero appeal to people who have to earn their living -instead of living off their trust funds. I would rather see a "bread and -butter" organizing, unions, and party discipline.
The tens of thousands of union members at Seattle were very much part of "bread-and-butter" organizing. Yes, on LBO folks prefer to talk about the small number of Black Bloc anarchists, but what is most striking about recent political events is how integrated union, civil rights, and environmental organizing has been. The AFL-CIO has built strong alliances with the Sierra Club and other environmentalists on trade issues and when the NAACP was protesting the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida, the unions including John Sweeney were down there in solidarity.
As for identity politics, union upsurges have always been tied to "identity politics"-- with language federations and community organizing a key part of union upsurges throughout American history. The mass union gains in California, such as the 70,000+ home health care workers unionized two years ago in Los Angeles, could never have been organized without a clear sensitivity to integrating "identity politics" into the class politics of union organizing.
>While we are at that, why did not you mention the unioninzation of NYU
>graduate workers which was a *major* union victory against academic
>estabslishment, a bread-and-butter remarkably free of usual symbolic
contents?
I could have and note the spread of grad organizing to Temple, Brown and other private universities, with lots of solidarity from undergrad groups; at Yale, support for grad organizing has been hand-in-hand with other student labor activism on campus.
-- Nathan Newman