--- Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
> Again you reverse the causal arrow and highlight a
> DECISION by unions, as if
> they had an obvious alternative option. You put
> union decisions as leading
> to employer resistance, rather than the other way
> around. In fact, US
I think this is a good point, but I still think you put too much weight on state repression. If state repression was a key factor, countries like South Africa should have no trade unionism at all due to state represion that is simply unimaginable by Western standards. Yet, South Africa today is the stronghold of unionism and one of the fewremaining places on earth where socialism and Marxism are not dirty words.
By the same token, the Solidarnosc movement in Poland should not have existed after trade unionism was simply eliminated for fifty years by the Stalinist repression and state planners.
That brings us to the issue of collective consciousness. Government repression alone seldom suffice to repress a genuine popular demand for a particular form of self-organization. It may increase the cost of that organization or create martyrs, but never supress it. We know that from numerous struggles for independence, self-management, social justice etc, that persevere despite the state repression (whether or when they win is another story, but they do not disappear.)
So if the severe state repression elsewhere did not eliminate movements for a particular form of self-management or form of political organization, why should we believe that the mild, by international standards, government repression of unions did the trick in the US?
I think the answer to this lies elsewhere. To find that answer, let's start with the observation that the failure to form a universal nation-wide movement is failure on not just the US unions, but a general problem of the US society. Many other institutions, from local governments, to education, to health care, and to transportation is localized and fragmented. So if the unions at at "fault," if this is an appropriate term here, they are in good company as mnay other institutions also failed to raise above this national tendency toward parochialism and compartmentalization ("federalism" is the euphemism for that in the official political discourse here, no?)
It is interesting to note that the US is not unique in this tendency to parochialism and compartmentalized localism. Most other countries, from Japan, China, India, Russia, to Italy, Germany, or even the UK experienced it at some point in their history. All these countries also made a strong effort to overcome that localism in the process of modernization. US is not an exception in that respect. What seems to be different about the US is the superficiality of the unification process.
In most countries that once were but a collection of competing fiefdoms that were later unified, often by force, in the process of modernization (cf. Japan, Germany, UK or Italy), at the end the ideas of national unity and universalism trickled down and became pretty firmly ingrained in collective consciousness. In the US, however, the process of unification, carried mainly on the federal level, failed to “trickle down” to popular consciousness. Localism, parochialism, tribalism, and suspicion of universal institutions, from federal government, to the UN, to the Catholic (i.e. universal) church, and to scientific theories (which are universal by nature) runs deep in the US collective consciousness. Despite the federal effort to unify the country, the US basically remains a loose collection of local yokels and fiefdoms held together mainly by federal programs and funding. This is, of course, not to say that universalism does not exist in the US - it does, but it is overwhelmend by the sea of parochialism
Only a few institutions, notably business corporations managed to transcend this localism and to build a truly national and then international networks (cf. Chandler’s work on the history of the US business). Interestingly, these were not populist institutions that had to vie for popularity, but merit-tested-democracies or meritocracies, institutions based on democratic principles (rule by collective consent) but in which merits (or claims thereof, including money) trumped over popular appeals and the "tyranny of the majority."
So I agree with your point that the choices made by US unions were not "voluntaristic," but rather effects of the broader social forces, especially anti-intellectualism, parochialism, localism and suspicion of “big” universal institutions aka “gutter populism.” Again this is not to say that government repression and business opposition did not matter, but that they were not decisive. Or perhaps that repression would not have the effect it did, had the US collective consciousness not been so parochial and antagonistic to any "big" institution, from the Catholic church, to big government, to welfare state.
As to your claim about the uniqueness of race relations in splitting the labor movement in the US: Have you ever heard of the "Polish plumber" in the heart of the ah-so-universalistic-we-are-all-Europeans-now EU? The gutter populism unleashed by the Bolkestein Directive (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4698524.stm)? Or Turkish "guest workers" in Germany? Or for that matter the specter of "Judeo-Bolshevism" that was haunting Europe for over a century, splitting and undermining labor organizing? Playing ethnic and cultural differences was always the favored weapon of fascist reaction against labor movement, and Europe's ethinic diversity provided a steady supply of scapegoats: Jews, Turks, Poles, Gypsies, Irish, Southern Italians, North Africans - the list is long.
Again, the point here is that the right wing reaction anywhere used similar tactics, but the success of failures of those tactics varied, depending on the "collective consciousness" of the nation, which in turn was shaped by civl society institutions - whichy I belive was the forgotten lesson from Gramsci. The greater the parochialism of the populace, the more successful the minority bashing campaigns.
So to summarize, I take your point that the US unions did not act "voluntaristically" and made a "bad choice" that put them below other US instituions. Au countraire, they have been affected by the same problems as virtually all but a handful of other US instituions, which are ultimately linked to US anti-intellectualism, parochialism and hostility toward "big" institutions. Even if we accept your claim about the pivotal role of government in union repression, that pivotal role would not be possible without the aforementined parochialism and anti-institutinalism deeply ingrained in the US collective psyche. After all, other countries experiences a far more brutal government repression that only strengthened the unions or the movement for self-determination.
PS. Yoshie, thanks a lot for the reference and link to the Bok paper - that was very useful indeed.
Wojtek
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