--- John Lacny <jlacny at earthlink.net> wrote:
> US labor's lack of a vision on health care is a good
> deal more complicated
> than you would know from reading this sort of
> vulgar-Marxist analysis that
> tries to find proximate economic causes for every
> failure of the movement.
> Our ideological problems are in fact much deeper and
> a good deal more
> depressing. Some perhaps find it comforting to see
> pure, simple venality
> where a much more daunting enemy can be found, but
> in the end that doesn't
> help us.
While I fully agree with your point about the lack of vision on health care and otherwise, vision alone does not get you very far. The key problem of the US trade unionism is that it never branched out into the civil society arena (cf. Gramsci) - by forming a political party and adjunct civic associations, but remained essentially a wage cartel and a junior partner of business.
This is not just the lack of vision - albeit lack of vision is a big part of it. It is above all structural conditions peculiar to the US, among them:
- universal male suffrage that created exclusions that crossed class lines (i.e. women of all classes were excluded, men of all classes were included); in Europe, by contrast, disfranchisement coincided with class divisions, which made it much easier to "fuse" labor unionism with a broader struggle for political representation;
- machine politics that created local alliances which again crossed class lines as well as political orientation lines; due to these arrangements, labor generally found it favourable to stick with the local business and party bosses and put in the office a politico who could bring federal pork and barrel that was divvied up along the political machine connections; these local labor-business-party boss alliances were a major obstacle in forming nation-wide labor-based institutions; I think fond memories of machine politics is still well embeded in organized labor's mentality, and union bosses do not miss an opportunity to play their junior partner role when the business lets them;
- racial divisions that provided a further obstacle in forming nation-wide labor based institutions; I think that racial divisions alone would not be as detrimental if they were not coupled with machine politics, and gender disfranchisement, but together these three formed a really deadly for labor mix;
- availability of frontier land - contrary to Europe where the migration was mainly from countryside to cities and urban labor had no other alternative but accept wage slavery, the availability of the frontier land was a real alternative to wage slavery; in other word, while the European proletarian knew that factory work was his final stop so if he wanted to better his lot he had fight for a stronger position of labor in general, for the US proletarian there was always the lure of moving on his own piece of land as an alternative to struggle for better labor conditions; that created the obnoxious frontier mentality that poisoned labor solidarity and was yet anoter obstacle to creating a nationa wide labor-based institutions.
In short, the US labor had it much more difficult in this "land of freedom and opportunity" than its European cousin - so the lack of vision was not the only thing against it. Of course, it remains an open question whether a different vision, one that emphasized long term interest of building nation-wide labor institutions as opposed to short term benefits of accepting the role of a junior partner in machine politics, would make any difference.
However, I am pretty sure that - vision or no vision - labor (broadly understood, not just blue collar workers) must branch out to civil society and build a political party, adjunct civic organizations, organic intellectuals, media and research centers to improve its dismally weak position. Unloading its health care intermediary role is a good opportunity to redefine priorities.
Wojtek
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