[lbo-talk] A highly critical take on Fitch

[Jim Devine]

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