>Of course, for me the more interesting question, which goes well beyond
>Fitch, is why have all these well-intentioned movements and their leaders
>fallen short?
My own answer would be a two-parter. First, any leadership position is likely to exert a conservatizing influence on its occupant, regardless of intention. You have to balance competing forces within an organization and deal with the real world outside. I've quoted before the observation of a guy who used to work in Manley's finance ministry in Jamaica: listening to a bunch of anti-World Bank radicals fulminate about what should be done, he calmly said, "You have no idea what it's like to have to come up with $100 million in hard currency next week." You could make a long list of the real-world pressures that force people - the ANC, Lula, Roger Toussaint (head of the NYC transit union), etc. - to make compromises that get denounced as "sell-outs" and "betrayals" by far leftists and Trots.
And second, the US unions (like the rest of the US political system) are structured to emphasize this. They're extremely fragmented, and built around delivering a contract to workers in a closed shop. That forces them to be more businesslike and less interested in broad working class politics.
Doug