This was on counterpunch. However, here I have added links and end notes so readers can look at this discussion for themselves. While the acrimony has been considerable, the debate itself is interesting, and, given the revolts going on in the world and the ones that are going to occur, the rebuilding of the left and the labor movement are important projects. I might add that Doug really got this whole debate going. He has taken a good deal of unfair and mean-spirited abuse as well.
Excerpt:
The recent defeat of the Scott Walker recall in Wisconsin, an election in which Walker soundly defeated the same Democratic challenger who ran against him when he became governor in 2010, has generated much discussion. Why was the Wisconsin Uprising of early 2011, where hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites took to the streets and occupied the Capitol building to protest Walker’s attempt to destroy public employee unions and eliminate social welfare programs, diverted by the Democratic Party and labor leaders into a recall effort? Why was the man chosen by the Democrats to run against Walker a person who had himself been an enemy of labor unions and who distanced himself from organized labor every chance he got during the recall campaign? Why didn’t the unions build on the Uprising to reconstitute the state’s labor movement on a more militant and class conscious basis?
Several people, including radical economist and Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild, took labor leaders to task for not taking advantage of the mass anger and willingness to protest shown by the Uprising. Henwood said,
Suppose instead [of the recall]that the unions had supported a popular campaign—media, door knocking, phone calling—to agitate, educate, and organize on the importance of the labor movement to the maintenance of living standards? If they’d made an argument, broadly and repeatedly, that Walker’s agenda was an attack on the wages and benefits of the majority of the population? That it was designed to remove organized opposition to the power of right-wing money in politics? That would have been more fruitful than this major defeat.[1]
Rothschild said,
Nor were more creative strategies tried. The Teamsters with their 18 wheelers, whose support was so emboldening, could have driven down Interstate 90 and 94 at 45 mph all day long for a week’s time to demonstrate that workers in Wisconsin weren’t going to take this lying down. No coordinated workplace strategies were adopted. Every union in the state could have caught the blue flu, so that workers in one trade after another would call in sick on alternating days. Or unions could have told their members simply to “work to rule”—doing the bare minimum that their contracts required. But none of these options were taken, and the only channel that all of the people’s energy was poured into was the very narrow and murky channel of the Democratic Party. There was a failure of imagination, and a failure of nerve, and a failure of process.[2]
For this, Henwood, Rothschild, and those of us who agree with them, have been subjected to sharp criticism. Gordon Lafer, professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, called Henwood, et. al. “anti-labor leftists” who don’t understand that organizing is slow, difficult, incremental work, that unions have primary responsibility to protect their own members, and that labor must engage in politics.[3] Labor had the choice in Wisconsin of going for the recall or throwing in the towel. Henwood’s and Rothschild’s suggestions are just so much pie in the sky, offered by outside commentators who aren’t serious about organizing and don’t know what they are talking about. It is the slow, painful, incremental organizing that, in the end, radicalizes workers.