Assessing 40 Years of Labor Notes
In the entire course of North American labor history, Labor Notes, now celebrating forty years of existence, is by far the most durable, and one of the most successful, interventions by activists who have come out of an explicitly socialist tradition. [1]
Socialists of various sorts played important roles in the creation of the Knights of Labor and the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Workers of the World a few years later, the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s, and the emergence of public sector unionism in the 1950s and 1960s. But one of three things happened.
They were purged by a repressive state or a hostile union officialdom. Or the socialists merged themselves into or accommodated the politics, legal structures, and leadership of the trade unions they had sought to influence. Or they just got tired and retreated from active political engagement, not unlike the old radical Harvey Swados evoked in his fictional portrait of those who labored in an auto factory in On the Line, published in 1957.
The World War I-era repression of the Wobblies and other union radicals is a well-known story; likewise, the Cold War destruction of Communist union leadership after passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and the CIO’s purge of the Left from within its own ranks. But a socialist — or merely reformist — current within the labor movement can also vanish when its own most dedicated partisans give up the fight or think that the existing trade unions, whatever their flaws, fulfill the hopes and dreams of their youth.
This is what happened to the radicals who for more than a decade were linked to the Brookwood Labor College during the 1920s and 1930s, an institution that had a lot in common with the Labor Notes generation and its many educational and training ventures. Led by the socialist A.J. Muste, and with young radicals like Roy and Walter Reuther in frequent attendance as either students or teachers, Brookwood was something of a cadre school for the nascent CIO.
And that was just the problem: once radicals had played such a large role in building the new industrial unions, leftists of a wide variety of persuasions came to see these new institutions as embodying the aspirations they had once advanced under the socialist banner.
So what accounts for the unique longevity and the growing impact of Labor Notes and the democratic and militant current it has embodied within the larger labor movement? First, the founders of Labor Notes understood the problems confronting them and the larger labor movement better than the union leaders of whom they were so frequently critical and certainly better than the academics, radical or old-school, who spun endless theories of labor’s place in American society. [2]
In the years before 1979, many of those who would later found Labor Notes were members of the Trotskyist group International Socialists, later merged into Solidarity. [3] They published a newspaper called Workers’ Power, designed to move its working-class readers from “union consciousness” — which presumably they already enjoyed — to class consciousness and then a revolutionary understanding of the world.
But it soon became apparent that union consciousness could hardly be taken for granted. A publication was needed that, while critical of contemporary union leadership, saw its main task as educating, connecting, and animating a layer of labor activists whose main task was to build effective rank-and-file unions capable of fighting the boss on a sustained basis. . ."
Comments
Post a Comment