Nathan asked:
>How is this at all what Fitch was criticizing?
-What I meant was that when you say last week's march was a fruit of -labor's efforts, it sounds like one of the inflated claims Fitch -criticizes. Likewise, what labor was doing in the runup to the march -sounds like the sectarianism he criticizes. -I don't mean to beat up on you, but I think what happened here last -week is something labor should respect as a thing to learn from and -tap into, not take credit for.
You miss the point since I never said that the unions were responsible for THIS EVENT; by definition, mass movements take off in all sorts of directions. But to argue that a decade and a half of work by unions in Los Angeles supporting immigrant rights efforts had little to do with building the alliances that helped make them happen is exactly the kind of refusal to recognize union efforts that I am criticizing.
I extend the same praise to the work of the Catholic church and other forces as well over recent years in creating the context where this kind of mass mobilization would happen. Sectarianism is trying to withhold credit from any of the multiple forces that led to this event.
If you deny credit to the unions for their role, then that is sectarianism, just as it would be sectarian to deny credit to many of the other groups that mobilized.
But anti-union sectarianism that inevitably denies them any credit is exactly what I criticize as being pervasive on this list.
Nathan Newman