On Dec 6, 2010, at 3:46 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote:
> Andy Stern, former president of our largest union and a member of President Obama’s thoroughly anti-working class deficit reduction commission, tells us that he won’t be beholden to labor when he decides which of the odious commission recommendations he will support. He will, instead, act in the national interest.
I just happened to re-read Stuart Hall's classic, "The Great Moving Right Show," written in 1979 during the early days of Thatcherism, yesterday. He writes of the use of "national interest" against the working class:
> The expression of this representative relationship of class-to-party, in the present period, has depended decisively on the extensive set of bargains negotiated between Labour and the trade union representatives of the class. This "indissoluble link" is the practical basis for the claim to be the natural governing party of the crisis. This is the contract it delivers. But, once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within those limits. But this requires that the indissoluble link be used, not to advance but to discipline the class and organizations it represents. This is only possible if the link - class-to-party — is dismantled and if there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: government-to-people. The rhetorics of "national interest", which is the principal ideological form in which a succession of defeats have been imposed on the working class by social democracy in power, are exactly the sites where this contradiction shows through—and is being constantly reworked. But government-to-people dissects the field of struggle differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of struggle—from the strikes of 1966 right through to the present 5 per cent norm—by definition "on the side of the nation" against "sectional interests", "irresponsible trade union power", etc.
Ah, Andy, enemy of the working class.