[lbo-talk] A highly critical take on Fitch

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 14 10:45:57 PST 2006


Marvin Gandall wrote: >>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. <<

Carrol Cox wrote: >This emphasis on leadership tends to characterize many followers of Trotsky, as well as those who worry about who the DP will nominate in 2008, but is it really widespread enough to justify your phrase, "much of the left"? I don't think so. <

FWIW, most of the folks in the Teamsters for a Democratic Union come from the "neo-Trotskyist" tradition, highly influenced by Hal Draper's "Socialism from Below." In this view, the emphasis is not on the perfidy of leaders (as in the title of Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed" or the Trotskyist slogan "a Crisis of Leadership") as much as the need for rank-and-file mobilization in order to counteract the tendency of existing structures (trade union organizations, the official political party system, etc.) to corrupt leaders, where corruption may not be financial in nature. (It may be simple careerism.) This also applies to the DP and electoral politics: it's not the politicians who are crucial as much as popular pressure from outside the electoral arena.

In this view, union leaders do not "for the most part, reflect the consciousness and values of their base." It is true that the values and consciousness of the base put _limits_ on the leadership, but so do the restrictions of the legal system, management, and the union organizational structure on the leaders. The leadership has to deal with management all the time, and management puts all sorts of pressure on the leaders, which are different from the pressures on the rank and file. This produces a difference of opinions between the leadership and the ranks (which disagree amongst themselves, naturally).

The problem is that the trade union leadership can use its limited power to try to keep the ranks out of "their" business, to limit union democracy, to run the show in a top-down manner. This demobilizes the rank and file, except for the limited time period around strikes or lock-outs. This causes the gap between the leaders and the ranks to widen. It also hurts the ability of the rank-and-file workers to build common ground among their diverse opinions.

In the end, it weakens the power of the leadership itself, since that power arises from the sense and practice of solidarity by the ranks. If the ranks stop caring about union affairs (because they have no effect on them anyway), then all of the union official's power arises from the legal system and his or her alliance with management (or with other officials). This makes the organization much, much less effective as a labor union.

It should not be forgotten that many union officials are liberals or even socialists when it comes to political opinions. That is, they often have more "progressive" opinions than do the ranks when it comes to issues outside of the union. But at the same time, the structural pressures on them as officials causes them to be conservative when it comes to issues inside the union. -- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles



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