[lbo-talk] Re: lbo-talk Digest, Vol 31, Issue 224

[Jim Straub]

No offense intended, Doug!  Perhaps I'm indulging in some strategic
snideness.  But the specific professors I jab at are Fitch--- who believes
home health aides are not 'really' workers (in a way that, presumably,
college profs are); and Yoshie, who's made many offensive claims that are
baldly false about a great seiu local I used to work for which she has lived
down the street from for a decade and never met in any way.  But much as I
might disagree with them both on these issues, Fitch and Yoshie are actually
some of the more engaged and working-class oriented of the many, many, many
left wing academics out there who like to read and debate about workers but
not actually talk to them in real life.  This is what I call 'labor geeks'
or the 'geek left'--- the folks, based in universities and sects, who have
many opinions, manifestos and complaints about a working class they do not
relate to at all.  These people's relationship to actual workers usually
seems to be largely theoretical; even bordering on the realm of fantasy.
But I wouldn't say it's a problem with 'intellectuals'--- I think positions
like Yoshie's on SEIU if anything have a complete lack of intellectual rigor
to them.  I wish there were more people doing intellectually tight, and
relevant, brain-work on the problems of working people.

But health care is a good point, and one of Fitch's plausible seiu critiques
out of many others more hallucinatory.  SEIU is on the record as being for
single payer.  It's true we put very little muscle into making it happen
right now.  I personally wish we'd put more into it--- but I also wish we'd
put our energy into ramping up really well-run organizing campaigns in 100
paces rather than 30.  Believe my sincerity or not, there really is a
resource question involved--- every penny and each person are stretched as
far as possible to organize as many hundreds of thousands of workers as
possible (which at the end of the day is our immediate, and not unimportant,
goal).  In my own modest role in this, I work very long hours and my own
small piece of that puzzle in las vegas.  I actually do not have a spare
hour each day to devote to single-payer organizing.  I wish I did, and if I
did, I guarantee you I would spend it talking to working people in an
organized fashion about building the required power to institutionally force
our government to provide health care for all--- and would not spend it
complaining that SEIU, CWA, the IWW, the Sierra Club or anyone else doesn't
work hard enough on single payer.

I agree with you that there is an annoying tendency in SEIU that wants to
're-invent the wheel' and come up with new, crappy political programs
instead of just marching on to acheive the things we all know we want like
single payer.  But they're not selling out to please the employers in our
industries (like I said, those employers HATE us doing what we do--- the
thing HCA would like most in the world is for SEIU to stop organizing
workers and become instead a single-payer lobby).  They are reacting to a
perceived historic weakness among the forces of good.  At present we can
barely as a people prevent the most egregious and nutty rollbacks of
existing social programs--- I doubt the good guys' ability to at this moment
succeed in passing an expansion of the social contract so big it didn't even
get done during the new deal.  I'd love to be proven wrong, tho, and the
sooner the better.  To win something that big takes more than it polling
well (many building blocks of socialism poll well, which could not be won by
any conceivable political alignment in the real world in the US today).  But
if it is so imminently acheivable, surely evil Andy Stern's truculence
cannot slow down the existing left from winning it without the purple hordes
joining in?

Jim


> On Jul 26, 2006, at 9:56 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
>
> > Any professors want to share wisdom on how this fits the evil seiu
> > scheme to keep people from getting health care by gaming the
> > welfare system?
>
> Hmm, don't recall any professors, aside from maybe Adolph Reed,
> making that point. I guess it's just a bit of authentic proletarian
> disdain for intellekshuels then. SEIU's health care strategy sucks.
> It deliberately avoids - and Stern isn't above a little xenophobia
> here about "Canadian imports" - the only sensible solution, a
> universal single-payer system (which polls very well), in favor of
> some mysterious, complex scheme, probably some bastard offspring of
> the fraudulent Massachusetts plan (which you couldn't poll about
> because it's impossible to explain in less than 20,000 words). It's
> bad policy and bad politics, and you don't have to be some kind of
> pointy-head to think so.
>
> Doug
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <../attachments/20060728/38382925/attachment.htm>