How are you guys explaining the decline of unions? Not just in traditional areas - manufacturing, government - but also the complete lack of unions in a lot of new industries? (I've long since thrown my hands up in confusion over the whole thing, since even quite savage job cuts in state government here haven't done much to boost union membership).
Well, lucky you, I am a labor organizer. The decline of
US unions has little to do with the subjective motivation of labor leaders to be sure. It has, in part, been due to the National labor legislation starting with the 1935 "National Labor Relations Act," which was passed in reaction to 6 General strikes in 1934, including the SF General strike, where for six months, even the police were on strike, the UNIONS (Teamsters, Machinist and longshore workers) ran the city. The NLRA or Wagner Act "allowed" a certain sector of the workforce to organize -- it excluded farm workers and domestic workers, as well as employees of independent contractors. Well, some, liek John L Lewis (NOT a communist) said "Let's do it -- get the unions going and then get tot he unorganized. Use this tactically. He took his industrial unions, raised a treasury and started the CIO.
Well, after WWII, another Red Scare happened and congress passed the Taft-Hartley amendment which outlawed all of the tactics labor used to win in the 1930s. Since 1947, the perentage of workers in unions went down, while in 1970, the actual numbers of unions went down. Unions' hands in the US are tied by labor laws, so that left 70 - 100 million workers untouched by union organizers, legally.
Don't despair, there are unions organizing the growing number of service workers, and there are organizations reaching those who are not organizable unto unions. These organizations lack organizers. That is one of the things do -- train organizers.
So you see Maoism as an adaption (a tweak if you will) of Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese situation?
No, I see "Maosim" as the non-China application of the tactics of the Chinese Revolution.
Why do the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers, Left Front of Something Something etc... keep trying to run a Presidential candidates? It's a waste of time, waste of money and they don't even have complete ballot access. They would be far better served by building local level organizations in the city and state levels, things like alderman positions, assembly even school board.
And while we're on the topic why are there half a dozen tiny left parties in the US? You couldn't fill a phone booth with all of them. Fragmentation is a luxury you can hardly afford.
The 6,000 people that voted for Socialist Workers Presidential candidate, probably some (many?) as a lark, isn't going to help.
FYI: Eugene Debs got a million votes as socialist party candidate when running against Woodrow Wilson in 1916 -- and he got them from JAIL!
(c.f.
Labor's Untold StoryBoyer and Morais, UE Publication.
Forgive me Reds, if I might take a crack at this. I'd be interested if you think my hunches are on or off base. I suspect this, and the continued failure by even minor party standards of Communist political efforts in the US comes from:
1) A lack of organizational and political talent. The fragmentation of "New Left" type groups in the US is not a new development, and there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how to approach China, social issues, or organized labor. The kinds of younger Americans who might be interested in far-left political activity have plenty of other groups to chose from, and the types that could provide legitimate political advice, or organizing, would flock to the Greens, or somewhere else. Cheezy is legitimately the only American over the age of 18 that I have ever met, or even really READ about, that unabashedly calls himself a communist.
2) The failure to preach their message outside of a small demographic group. I believe that the majority of American communist voters tend to be whites with access to a university education, just like members in urban green parties, OWS-types, etc. The *actual poor and underclass* has been in lockstep with Democrats for decades, and nobody, not even the better financed greens, has been able to dislodge them.
3) The failure of a coherent way to articulate what a "communist" administration would do for local issues. What does a Communist school board member do, practically speaking, when his other 5 peers are mainstream capitalist leaders? Does a Communist city council member try to nationalize various commercial zoning areas? It would seem that many in the party figured the only practical way to preach that message is to do it nationally, which they can't do without money, leadership, or organizational talent.
downtown, I am impressed. Thank you, by the way, for responding. I would like to ask how you came up with this analysis.
Your point about the lack of political and organizational talent, and lack of getting into a broader demography, while I take personally, is partly true -- but the reasons are as follows:
From the outset there was a lack of a unifying political and organizational structure.
Marx tried this first in Europre with the International Workingmen's Association (whose first act was to congratulate Lincoln in 1864 on his re-election, and which a portion of Lincoln's reply is exerpted in
Labor's Untold Story) Marx had gotten together the most disparate grouping you could imagine: Bakuninists Anarchists, Blanquist shoot first and organize later revolutionaries, Prudonnist (workers cooperatives) remnants from the chartist movement. As effective a polemicist and organizer as Marx was, he could not get them all together and the First International was disbanded in 1874.
In the US, we have the peculiar problem in that the Labour movement predates the socialist revolutionary movement. Whereas in Europe, the Union movement came as a result of revolutionary organizing. And CPUSA chief (and traitor) Jay Lovestone called this "American Exceptionalism" and tried to tie CP into the white AFL trade unions, while ignoring the growing industrial movement, which was becoming multicutural. Under Earl Browder's leadership (he switched off with William Z. Foster who is featured in that great Chicago labor film
The Killing Floor, see it!) after the Bolshevik Revolution, CP moved into the international spectrum by their support of the USSR, BUT it did not have an domestic program of its own.
Now, along comes a spider.... FDR gets voted in as the Prez and he puts in the New Deal. The country is in crisis and FDR has a plan, so CP flocks to the ranks as well as they flock to the ranks of the emerging CIO and they offer uncritical support of the New Deal and the CIO. Meanwhile, people joined CP in such numbers that they used to rent out Madison Square Garden every saturday nights for party meetings. So, here we have the CP with a domestic program of uncritical support of the bourgeois government, and the international program of uncritical support of the USSR.
Can anyone guess what happens next? Well CP members start getting kicked out of the unions, and then Nazi Germany and the USSR sign the Molotov-Von Ribbetrop pact of non-aggression.
OOPS! CP members started leaving in droves, because while they can stomach support of their own capitalist government, signing a pact with "Hitler," (which, by the way, I would have supported, and many Western European press outlets described as "The Pact that Stopped Hitler!") and that was it -- the entire reason for their being in the Party, as they saw it, was null and void, because if they were in the fight to fight fascism, how could you sign a deal with it.
Stalin knew what he was doing, and it may have saved the USSR from utter destruction, but that is not the debate, here.
When, in 1943 the Communist International disbanded (in order to shut up all the press who were saying that Moscow controlled everything and to remove the last obstacle to getting Churchill and FDR to agree to open a second front in Europe. So, Browder disbanded the Party in the US! Oy, it came back ,but it was not the same
In the meantime, after WWII, when the Congress passed teh Taft-Hartley Amendment to the NLRA, which outlawed Communist leadership i nthe unions, and which John L Lewis of the CIO called "The first savage ugly thrust of Fascism in America."
Well, what was the left to do? CP was decimated by the McCarthy witchhunts and wrote "revolution" right out of its Constitution.
Now, as for the other left parties, they have always been around, but none in the US have been able to launch a successful revolution.... so far.
I think that covers the "inside dope" so to speak, on your first two points, of what is essentially a correct analysis.
RE: #3: The Red Scares shocked people, so the CP said "We are just like you, we have jobs, go to PTA meetings, and pay taxes. It's just that we go to our cell meetings every Saturday night." Well, then, what is so different about that.
Likewise, no two left groups in the US could even agree on a national program.
So, there we are.
The key is for the left to form a united front, and come to a common agreement on practice and political direction. I am not opposed to having many left groups, I say that the more organization, the better. It is the character of these organizations that is the crux.
Lenin said that the urgent task of the movement was agitate and educate the masses to socialist victory, and to not reject any tcatic
on prinicple, including work in the unions, parliament, et c. Lenin also said that where comminists were illegal, the communists had to have an illegal apparatus. In this country, you have the right to assemble -- freedom of association, but Lenin also said that where communists were legal, they needed a combination of legal and illegal tactics.
Running someone for office won't cut it.
ace99, hope that helps. downtown, again, good answer.
