[lbo-talk] Tracking the decline of the left's historic base

mep maximumep at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 04:31:19 PST 2010



> "mep" says Operation Dixie was too "half-assed." The CIO should have
> focused more on sticking up for the Communists - during the Berlin Airlift,
> while William Z. Foster was announcing that America was "five minutes to
> midnight," on the verge of revolution, and calling on CP cadres to go
> underground to prepare for armed struggle. No - wait! The CIO should have
> sent more of those Communists into Alabama to form interracial unions - in
> 1948, in the name of the pro-Communist CIO. During the Taft-Hartley
> Congress.
>
> Union density would be so high today.
>
>
> SA
>
>
>

No, I'm claiming the the CIO shouldn't have abandoned union organizing in the South for a strategy that involved lobbying Democrats, accommodating themselves to racist Dixiecrats, and pandering to the racism of white workers, all the while purging the union of many of the leftists -- including rank-and-file communists --who had done much of the early spade work organizing workers/sharecroppers in both black and white communities throughout the South - Alabama included. This is the reason why, as I quoted, there were "fewer unionized workers in the South at the end of the 1940s than there had been at the beginning." This hostility of the CIO to grassroots mobilization was the flip-side of Taft-Hartley, a willingness of the bureaucracy to do its part in helping to demobilize labour after the war -- something, ironically, the Communist Party (and many of it's soon to be purged members) helped pave the way for with their own Popular Front orientation towards the Democrats.

But clearly from his response "SA" thinks the red scare purges were, if not a good thing, at least a necessity -- or at least the only constructive thing the CIO could do at the time. And yes, despite his stupid scoffing, a real, early attempt at organizing workers in the South, as opposed to lobbying the Democratic Party, would have likely led to higher union density, or at the very least given a fighting chance to those forces fighting the consolidation of the retrograde system of Democrat/Dixiecrat rule that has made large parts of the US the social and political backwater it is today.

But then all of this is probably a bit over the head of someone who takes Cold-War hysterics about the international spread of World Commanis'm at face value.

-mep



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