> Colin Brace wrote:
>
>>http://www.counterpunch.org/allen03112006.html
>>
>>March 11 / 12, 2006
>>
>>Bob Fitch's Hatchet Job
>>Smearing Ron Carey and the TDU
>
> Here's Fitch's response.
>
> ----
>
> Instead of a review of Solidarity for Sale, Joe Allen has expressed what
> amounts to a howl of anger. Instead of arguments refuting my criticisms of
> Teamster President Ron Carey's leadership and Teamsters for a Democratic
> Union's politics he's offered a series of logical fallacies.
[...]
> These stories of failed reform are painful to red. (They were painful to
> have to write.) And the human-all-too human reaction is to denounce them
> as boss talk. But unless we face up to the limits of our past work, the
> U.S. labor movement, with its promise of liberation, could soon disappear.
======================================================
This seems like a pretty effective rejoinder to the Counterpunch article,
but, like so many disillusoned commentaries about reform efforts in unions
or political parties or states, it doesn't address the white elephant in the
centre of the room:
Why do so many hopeful reform movements like the TDU "fail"? How to explain why so many presumably well-intentioned leaders of so many mass organizations in so many different countries over so many generations - many of whom came to power denouncing the "cowardice" and "corruption" of their predecessors - have all succumbed to the Roach Motel syndrome Fitch describes?
The conservative indictment of the left is that it doesn't understand that dashed hopes are predictable because the corruption of power is inherent in human nature or human institutions. I don't buy that.
Nor the view of much of the contemporary left that the failure to advance is due to failures of "leadership". If only we had leaders possessed of more integrity and understanding and "vision" - like us, for instance - things would be different.
Things are more complicated than that, and I'm still not convinced from all of the discussion around Solidarity for Sale that Fitch addresses the more complex historical and structural factors which gave rise to the US labour movement. I don't think he contends, for example, that American unions uniformly established the same kind of institutions and relationships with the employers and mobsters and other outside interests, but does he explain why some did and some didn't? He seems to attribute the faiure of the US labour movement to fulfill its early promise to the corruption of its leaders, but is the record of the US labour movement qualitatively different from those in Europe and elsewhere in terms of promoting reform and raising living standards? I think NN and others began to touch on these issues.
So it may be that what Fitch is leaving out may be more important than what he is saying - even if he can establish that what he is saying in terms of union corruption is accurate, and needs to be fought. Certainly, the indictment of his critics is that he has drawn a one-sided and misleading picture of US labour - one resembling the caricature of it by the right. If this is so, in Fitch's case would be unintentional, but it would flow from the same questionable starting point where much of the left begins its analysis: that all contemporary problems are reducible to deficient leaders in the unions and the mass parties who are seen as somehow at odds with their members, when, in fact, it is conditions which produce leaders who, for the most part, reflect the consciousness and values of their base.