David: No need for explanation-- I agree with you. My disagreement was with your contention on Friday that "In short, there obviously needs to be some kind of radical labor - revolutionary labor - alternative to the AFL-CIO." If indeed you are suggesting that this radical alternative is necessarily outside of the AFL-CIO, then my response would be that this is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.
David:
>What *is* obvious is
> that the AFL-CIO is a corrupt bureaucracy, representatives of the
Democratic
> Party within labor rather than vice-versa.
Brian: I agree most of it is corrupt, but I think the Democratic Party influence is sometimes over stated. Some elements of the AFL-CIO support Republicans. And even a few individual unions have supported Greens. Here in Texas the Teamsters supported Bush's candidacy for governor, just as they currently support his arctic oil drilling program.
David, response: Obviously the AFL-CIO, and labor in general, are influenced by more than just the Democratic Party. What I should have said was that the union bureaucracy is for the most part bought and paid for by the business community, i.e., capitalists. Thus, these bureaucrats represent capitalist interests when dealing with rank and file workers, rather than workers' interests in dealing with capitalists. Obviously this is just a general rule and there will be (hopefully increasingly) many exceptions. The book, "Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor" by Paul Buhle, is a good illustration of this. What was true in the 1950s under Kirkland, etc., remains true in many ways today. For me this is not a source for cynicism about labor, but optimism about the possibilities available for organizing and agitating within unions.
David:
> But, it is the hallmark of
> sectarian leftism to state that workers should abandon a large union to
form
> some splinter sect of the little that remains of actual workers
organizations
> with actual workers in them.
Brian: I don't think workers should necessarily do this. Many IWW members are dual carders: they belong to an AFL-CIO union but hold an IWW red card and try to inject some of the old Wobbly spirit into the organization. Technically I'm a dual-carder, too. As messed up as business unions are, I think a mass exodus from them now would be catastrophic.
David: So, then what solution do you think would be most viable for unions in the United States? Surely it is insufficient to simply acknowledge that the business unions are "messed up" while becoming a "dual card holder"....?
Brian: This "boring from within" strategy has been tried time and again with increasingly dismal results. There's even a name for it: Fosterism, after William Z. Foster, an important IWW organizer and Communist Party leader of the past who urged a mass exodus from the IWW to work from within the AFL-CIO structure. <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/redencyclopedia/bios/foster.htm">http://www.geocities.com/redencyclopedia/bios/foster.htm</A> It failed.
David: I was actually thinking more along the lines of the Trotskyist model of entryism is it might apply to trade unions and union organizations, and the so-called "French turn" by French Trotskyists who joined the socialist party. It is true that these methods have failed in the past, but forming sectarian splinter organizations has hardly "worked" either. But, we can't view these tactics independently of the historical and material circumstances which accompany them. Many of us are anticipating a broad crisis in capitalism sometime in the near future. But, we will see.
Brian: The AFL-CIO leadership recently circulated a memo that wondered at the viability of transitioning over to a style of industrial unionism and away from their favored form of trade unionism. Of course, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy would go with it, and it would be a top-down form of industrial unionism. And The Nation recently called for something called "Open Source Unionism" which is essentially the same as what the IWW has fought for in the form of "minority unionism." These are positive developments.
David: Exactly-- I think this represents the beginnings (with a LOT of work still needed obviously) of the very kinds of union developments I would talk about. However, I think it would be incorrect to assume that these developments originate solely within the leadership-- They are quite clearly the leaderships response to their rank and file, for whom they have not held their own in the past few decades. What remains to be seen is whether or not rank and file union activists can continue to push progressively more radical demands, expose their leaders as unshakeably pro-capitalist, and oust them.
Best, David
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