Yoshie said:
I totally agree with you, except that I'd qualify one critical point: the fact that many labor-leftists find themselves in the "permanent opposition" ghetto, rather than running any major union, is not due to their choice.
I agree. And at a certain moment in labor history a few decades ago, the strategy they went forward with was undoubtedly on point. But their failure to execute calls the plan itself into question. And it's a much less useful plan now. But instead of changing with the times, they are digging into a fetishization of that strategy more and more, with less and less success. I'm drinking buddies with a tdu kid who comes out of usas originally here in vegas, and I love him but think he has a really hard time accepting the realities of real numbers and real workers unless solidarity writes about it first.
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Rank-and-file labor leftists who have been involved in union democracy campaigns and so forth had an idea of a long march through an institution by winning over fellow union members to a campaign of democratizing unions, getting out of the rut of concessionary bargaining, and running their unions on better industrial strategy (e.g., organizing for power, rather than just numbers, as Jane...
See, what you are saying above is precisely what many labor leftists have been saying for a long time....
No, talking about it is different than doing it. Labor notes people always pay lip service to having an organizing focus and an industrial strategy--- but their lack of success, when others are succeeding, indicate that this talk is not followed up by disciplined action. Folks who are successfully running organizing programs don't have time or inclination to write articles for other labor nerds to read, and so the actual nuts and bolts of all these organizing victories is absent from the whole left debate on labor. I don't care what anyone writes in their newsletter, I care how much more power the organized workers or x industry have at the end of the day. As SNCC used to say, "Mr Say ain't the man, Mr Do the man" (gender specifism not endorsed by me). The teamsters under hoffa have made more strides to structural orientation towards industrial organizing than they did under carey--- that's a very sad reality. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061220/3ee4927d/attachment.htm>