On 2012-03-14, at 3:41 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Mar 14, 2012, at 3:34 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
>>> [WS:] This begs the question whether party "identities" are written in
>>> stone or are subject to political pressures from below. My hunch is
>>> that is a mixed bag, or to be more precise, about 1/4 of the former
>>> and 3/4 of the latter. That is to say, while parties have some parts
>>> of their identities that are relatively fixed over time, they are also
>>> in the business of winning elections, which makes them responsive to
>>> pressures from the public (however defined.)
>>
>> No question. You could not understand the evolution of the social democratic and Communist parties or of the German Greens any other way. Let me qualify that. Trotskyists, anarchists, and others to the left of these parties attribute the adaptation to electoral politics of these opposition parties to the "treachery" of their leaders. That's a lot of treachery by many trade union and socialist leaders in many countries over many generations.
>
> But leaders develop their own interests, no? They flatter themselves into thinking they can become junior partners of the real rulers. Their ego puffs up with feeling like an insider. So "treachery" is the wrong word. A better way to think of it might be that they get tempted by access and influence. As some unnamed labor top told Bill Fletcher about Obama, it's better to be inside and not listened to than it is to be outside.
Sure, I witnessed first-hand how easily trade union leaders are easily flattered and seduced into cooperating with employers and the state. But you could say the same of the leaders of the black, women's, and other mass movements who have all supported the Democrats. In cozying up to power, they mostly reflect the political consciousness of their base, which interprets White House invitations and photo ops as an indication that their leaders have influence, and that this influence will yield concessions and reforms.
When leftists like myself would speak out publicly against "productivity pacts", "tripartite state-employer-labour cooperation", and other forms of class collaboration, we could often persuade a thin layer of politically conscious and active trade union members, but were rarely able to gain traction with the majority. Left-wingers who have challenged union officials in open debate about membership ratification of poor tentative agreements have been similarly frustrated. So treachery is the wrong word for reasons you suggest, but also because it implies that the leadership is acting in contradiction to the interests of its members, as the latter define their interests in the current historical period.
If it were indeed the case that the leadership was lagging rather than reflecting the prevailing consciousness of the base, you would expect to see many more successful membership rebellions led by leftists whose charges of "betrayal" would be resonate widely with the rank-and-file. The leaders would be scrambling to catch up by adapting in some measure to this pressure from below. Perhaps we'll see this begin to happen as the state increases the pressure on the unions and working class standards more generally. We've seen some evidence of growing trade union militancy in Wisconsin and Ohio and in the response to the Occupy movement, and even some accommodation to this sentiment by the trade union leadership, but so far the level of militancy is not such that it has put the rank-and-file on a collision course with the bureaucracy.
Finally, as I noted above, it is one thing to identify and charge individual leaders at various times and in various places with betraying their members; quite another, to indict the entire trade union leadership spanning the generations in all of the advanced capitalist countries with effectively being traitors to the working class. This approach looks for the cause of working class conservatism not in historical conditions but in leadership psychology. This can be a comforting thought to revolutionary leftists because it implies that all which is required to unleash worker militancy is to expose their leaders, without having to confront the more intractable problem of objective conditions. Trotsky and his followers, in particular, insisted that the failure of the working class to extend the Bolshevik revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was essentially a "a crisis of leadership", and it led to a sectarian political practice which rendered them and other revolutionary currents irrelevant in an epoch of rising living standards.