Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 01:37:07 -0400
From: portsideMod@netscape.net
Subject: Re: SDS FILM 'LABOR & THE LEFT'
Re: SDS FILM 'LABOR & THE LEFT'
[continuing discussion -- See portside posting of March 31, which
contained the initial discussion from the H-Net Labor History
Discussion List <H-LABOR@H-NET.MSU.EDU> . Below are some of the
responses which draw on personal experience, review of historical
materials and documents, related to the relationship between the 60s
Left, mainly the "New Left," and the labor movement. - Moderator]
====================
1. Exclusive to portside, from Jim Williams (April 01)
I am not subscribed to the H-Labor list, but would like to add my .02
about labor and the new left.
There is an interesting book "The New Left and Labor in the 1960s" by
Peter B. Levy (1994) University of Illinois Press, Urbana, that has a
lot of good information about SDS and labor. The author never spoke
with me, and consequently, some factual information was omitted.
The UAW gave SDS the money to set up ERAP, the Economic Research and
Action Project. The original purpose of this grant to do education
among students about labor and economic issues. I was approached by
Todd Gitlin to be the director of this effort--but declined since I
was actually trying to graduate from school.
However, I later became director of SDS PEP, the Political Education
Project of SDS, which was funded by a grant from the Industrial Union
Department of the AFL-CIO. PEP was actively distributing anti-
Goldwater materials during this period, and we published a number of
pamphlets ranging from my "Goldwaterism: What it is and how to fight
it", and Robb
Burlage's "Lyndon Johnson with Eyes Open." Steve Max and I worked
with Jacob Clayman who was then director of the IUD.
I left SDS's employ to work for the IUE. AT this time SDS had
discovered the disestablished poor and had no interest in working
with labor.
But, the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) was interested
in working with labor. Peter Brandon (an SDSer) was doing a lot of
student and labor organizing in the Carolinas with Textile Workers
and later with workers at Duke University. SSOC worked closely with
Jim Pierce of the IUD and the National Sharecroppers Fund. SSOC
published a number of pamphlets about labor, sponsored conferences on
students and labor.
In many ways, I see the anti-sweatshop and anti-WTO movements today
as continuations of the work Steve Max, Peter Brandon and myself
attempted during the 1960s. This kind of stuff doesn't fit the
"party line" according to Helen Garvy and The Really Cool People who
now constitute the SDS "canon."
It was good to see that Al Lannon and Marv Rogoff are writing about
Washington Labor for Peace. I was active in this as well. Hardly any
of
the commentaries at that time mentioned it, including a small book by
Phil Foner on Labor and the Vietnam War. (Although the CPUSA was well
aware of our activities. )
Jim Williams
====================
2. From: Melvyn Dubofsky <dubof@mailbox.cc.binghamton.edu> (March 31)
However right Kevin Boyle and Jeff Cowie are in their observations,
and I think that they are on target, I fear that Heather Thompson
draws the wrong conclusions from their suggestions. She seems to
suggest a split in the working class between liberated and rebellious
younger workers and other workers, who I assume were "older," and
right-ward drifting labor leaders. Certainly, there were younger
workers in the 60s and 70s who wore their hair long, consumed drugs,
soft and hard, and became "dead-heads." But not all of them were
politically "progressive" or open-minded on questions of race and
gender. As Kevin Boyle's first book suggests, the UAW leaders rather
than pulling their members to the right along with themselves often
found themselves besieged by rank and filers who thought the leaders
were too far ahead of them. And those famous Lordstown young rebels,
who challenged their stodgy "business unionist" bureaucrats, were, in
many respects and ways, supported by their union leaders who played a
complicated game. Bound by a legal contract that limited what actions
the UAW could take against GM's newly aggressive management, the
leaders more than tolerated the rebellion at Lordstown for it
strengthened their hand in bargaining with GM. The notion that union
leaders are a drag on their more "progressive" rank and file is a
romantic example of what that old red, V. I. Lenin, called "infantile
leftism," illustrated best in Paul Buhle's recent book, TAKING CARE
OF BUSINESS. I remember well the summer of 1988 when I was involved
in negotiations with the Teamsters' Union research and education
department, a time when Michael Dukakis, the AFL-CIO's official
choice in that year's election, was way ahead in all the published
polls. The Teamster officials told me that polls of their own union
members showed a substantial majority in favor of Bush, which was why
the IBT was one of the few unions not to endorse Dukakis.
Increasingly after 1968, did a majority of white union members and
their families come to vote Republican because their leaders were
drifting right and tying themselves more tightly to the Democrats,
1972 excepted. And speaking of 1972, were most white union members,
especially younger ones, sympathetic to McGovern yet misled by big,
bad George Meany? Isn't it conceivable that Meany was led to
neutrality in the 1972 election (even an implicit endorsement of
Nixon) because he feared the impact of McGovern's candidacy on the
coalition between labor and the Democrats? And what of the voting
tendencies of nonunion white workers, young, middle-aged, and old,
since 1968, if not earlier? Last year's election shows that they are
perhaps the strongest anti- Democratic, pro-Republican bloc,
especially if they are Protestant. Our correspondent from the Iron
Range in Minnesota paints for us a different working-class reality
than Heather. Frankly, we are dealing with an extremely bifurcated
working class in which the distance between white workers and
nonwhites seems to widen rather than narrow. And it might be well to
point out that in the 1960s and 70s the working class was
considerably "whiter" than it is today. So, yes, as Kevin and Jeff
suggest, let's stop revisiting and revising the relationship between
the student left and the labor movement and examine more closely
where most workers were, and, even more important, not assume that
long hair, drugs, ear rings, or tattoos signify a rebelliousness that
promises "liberation." Some challenges to "authority" only strengthen
the system, whether you want to call it the world-capitalist system
or simply capitalism. And that complex subject merits a long and
separate discussion of its own.
Melvyn Dubofsky, Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology
Binghamton University, SUNY
====================
3. From: John Holmes <jholmes@OCF.Berkeley.EDU> (March 31)
Jeff Cowie wrote:(on March 29):
> Kevin Boyle's posting struck me as particularly important.
> Decentering Berkeley, Columbia, and Ann Arbor, and examining blue-
> collar communities on their own terms will be the only way to
> understand the sixties "in factories and office buildings, in their
> neighborhoods, in their families, in their churches, at the Moose
> Lodge." Bravo.
>
> Going one step further, I suspect that "the sixties" as we're
> describing them (questioning of authority, upheavals in gender and
> race relations, the war) didn't really happen in those places IN
>the sixties. I would argue that these issues did not hit most blue
> collar communities until the seventies and did so in different and
> unintended ways. The many questions posed by the New Left were
> done so in the midst of a successful economy, but most working
> people struggled to come to terms with those issues in a different,
> and shrinking, world of economic opportunity. The search for lofty
> goals such as participatory democracy, authenticity, legitimacy of
> authority, and racial equality seemed very different under the >
> weight of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.
The problem with the above posting is that it commits an all too
common error about "the sixties": treating the student New Left as
its central phenomenon.
Actually, the central event of "the sixties" was the civil rights
movement in the South in the early sixties, and its essentially
unsuccessful extension to the North in the middle sixties, whose most
important form was the brutally suppressed "ghetto rebellions."
The student New Left was essentially a reaction to this basically
working-class movement, and to the war of course.
The basis for the New Left's dismissal of organized labor was of
course (1) the white backlash among many white workers against their
black fellow workers' movement, and (2) labor support for the Vietnam
war.
It also does need to be pointed out that the tremendous upsurge of
"wildcat" strike activity during Nixon's presidency certainly did
have overtones of New Leftist influence, despite the lack of any
direct connections.
> Interestingly, the seventies (unlike much of the previous decade)
> did see a resurgence of workplace issues (from federal legislation
> to strike activity to commercial pop culture), but when the answers
> came, they were not pleasant.
Nixon's wage controls were intended to put a halt to the explosion of
strike activity during his presidency. They essentially did so,
except for the 1978 coal strike. The interest in working class
"culture" on the movie screen and even the boob tube that was indeed
noticeable in the '70s was, I think, an outgrowth of the flare-up of
what one might call working-class New Leftism under Nixon.
And, of course, said flare-up did indeed attract the interest and
attention of the bulk of those ex-New Leftists who did not succumb to
the apathy mood of the '70s, resulting in all those ex-New Left union
activists -- and labor historians -- noted in other postings.
John Holmes, grad student, UC Berkeley union activist and would-be
labor historian
====================
4. From: John Russo <f0036238@cc.ysu.edu> (March 31)
I too have enjoyed the discussion on "What we did in the Sixties." I
would join both Heather and Jeff in arguing on the side of complexity
and moving away from a preoccupation with the SDS and labor issue per
se.
After talking to autoworkers at Lordstown plant for over 20 years,
the schisms and the lessons of the Sixties are not always obvious for
those who were for or against the war. Two remarks from autoworkers
about their participation in the Lordstown strike of 1972 seem
particularly helpful in looking at the relationship between the war
and labor issues. Briefly, one antiwar person who was drafted and
served in Vietnam said to me: "Why would we be scared of GMAD [know
for their abusive management style]. After all I had 500,000 Vietcong
trying to kill me." Another vet said " What we learned from Vietnam
is that if you don't fight you don't win."
It seems apparent to me that we have only begun to scratch the
surface in reviewing this period. But this is good time to start.
While autoworkers are still passionate and often have painful
memories about their involvement or defiance of the Vietnam war,
enough time has passed to permit discussions among autoworkers and to
have them consider of what was gained and lost.
====================
5. From: Keith Gallagher <Kbgall@aol.com> (March 31)
The posts of Kevin Boyle, Jeff Cowie, Heather Thompson and others
seem to hit the nail on the head. The SDS was peripheral to many
folks activism, including working-class activism, during "the
Sixties"--as before and since. SDS was an outsider, by and large,
though some active in that organization did make an effort to create
solidarity of purpose. Sure SDS wanted to see itself as an
enlightened vanguard, yet the evidence doesn't indicate that. Heather
Thompson's suggestion that we look at many sites, with hard-hats and
otherwise, will reveal plenty of people who wanted to participate in
charting social arrangements-- for better and worse. Many are still
active, and in no need of a self-glorifying video. They continue to
confront many of the same issues that boiled to the surface in the
60s, most of their efforts off-post.
====================
6. From: Gabe Gabrielsky <scottshuster@msn.com> (March 31)
In a previous posting, Mark Lause suggests that there were no
American analogies to the great working class upheavals in France,
Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the industrialized world in
the 1960's. Perhaps not direct one to one analogies, but the era was
full of rank and file insurgencies in the United States, though most
were not consciously political, and certainly not radical, and most
escaped prominent news stories and therefore the notice of the
public, including radical students and other workers.
Rank and file insurgencies in alliance with a restive secondary
leadership displaced the top leaders of half a dozen international
unions in the mid 1960's. Only a few years earlier the conventional
wisdom was that the old line leadership, most of whom had come to
power during the hey day of the CIO were deeply entrenched and
virtually unremovable. Among the most notable of these changes were
in the IUE and the Steelworkers. The modern union democracy movement
has its birth in that era and before in historically corrupt unions
such as the ILA and the San Francisco painters union whose reform
leader, Dow Wilson, was the victim of an assassination. Years before
the advent of the consciously radical League of Revolutionary Black
Workers wildcat strikes ripped through the auto industry in the
period.
What the rank and file movements of the 1960's typically lacked was a
radical vision that looked beyond the replacement of top leaders and
immediate shop floor issues. By the late 1960's, even a crisis
ridden SDS was reexamining its earlier skepticism of the working
class as an agency for change, and by the time of its collapse many
former SDSers entered or had already entered both blue collar and
white collar industries in which labor discord was highly visible.
Indeed, a substantial number of both rank and file militants and
staffers in the labor movement today got their primary political
educations in SDS, though after its collapse they often joined more
explicitly socialist organizations.
Certainly by the late 1960's the cultural revolution and the
generation gap of the period had penetrated industry and long haired
hippies were as prominent in an auto plant as they were anywhere else
in our culture, though for the most part working class hippies were
as alienated from union politics as they were from the rest of
"straight" culture.
Gabe Gabrielsky Shop Steward, HERE Local 54
====================
7. From: NORMAN MARKOWITZ <MARKOWIT@cac-gen3.rutgers.edu> (April 01)
While I have always had great respect for Mel Dubofsky, he seems to
either underplay or wholly miss a great many important points in his
suggestions that conservative worker attitudes shaped trade union and
Democratic party politics over the last thirty years. First of all,
what is unique about U.S. politics, even when compared to many third
world countries, is that the majority of eligible voters don't vote,
and those who don't vote are overwhelmingly low income, although not
necessarily trade union families, since trade union membership in
percentage terms declined from its postwar peaks and the of course
plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Meany leadership wasn't interested in organizing the unorganized.
I don't think that this was necessarily true of union members, even
the "silent majority" [tory] workers who were both demonized and
glorified as representative of the white working class. Even counting
for racist attitudes among white workers, the Meany leadership's
attempt to avoid serious integration of minorities and women in labor
went along with its exclusionary business unionist outlook. The
Teamsters of course had a long history of backing Republicans under
Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, even though Dan Tobin was the AFL's token
Democrat on the Democratic National Committee before Beck assumed
union leadership.
My major point, though, at issue with Mel who sounds here like a
right Hegelian, to remember an old idealist non-Red, and those he
criticizes, who sound more like left Hegelians, critics of
conventional wisdom for the sake of advancing the dialectic, than
infantile leftists, is that neither the conservative leadership of
the AFL-CIO, generally considered the most politically conservative
leadership of any labor movement in any developed country at the
time, and the Democratic party, which, even in the age of Tony Blair,
is still the most conservative mass party representing workers and
the "left side" of establishment politics in the developed world, had
any inclination to reach out and unite their own limited
constituencies with either unorganized workers or low income non-
voters.
That "old red" Lenin, who towers above Sam Gompers and George Meany,
not to mention the politicians the AFl-CIO supports as lesser evils,
made the point long before the Russian socialist revolution that
workers through their unions could only fight for economic gains,
without a struggle by "advanced" class conscious activists to educate
workers about the necessity to empower themselves by struggling for
socialism. Lenin's opponents in the Second International, rejecting
his revolutionary vanguard party thesis, stood for building mass
unions and mass labor based socialist parties and having each
strengthen the other, in enacting and sustaining working class gains,
and eventually, transforming those quantitative gains into a
qualitative transformation, socialism.
If you have de facto business unions, which is what the Meany and
Kirkland leadership of the AFL-CIO represented, a Democratic party
living on the political capital of the New Deal and trying briefly,
to extend in through the Great Society, which it in the Clinton years
abandoned, and no principle, much less socialism, to identify with
except continuing the cold war and increasing consumerism, which only
George McGovern seriously challenged in the Democratic party as a
presidential candidate, the flexibility and the militancy needed to
adjust to changing conditions simply can't be there, however
grassroots struggles may continue to exist and however "pragmatic"
leadership may continue to support right moving Democrats over
Republicans who develop a whole new base of strength in the old
segregationist white South , where Taft-Hartley made unions largely
marginal.
Peoples empowerment, participatory democracy, Black liberation,
women's liberation, naming and fighting the system were the ideas
that shaped the struggles of the 1960s. Historians might compare
them to the ideas which motivated the Democratic party and AFL-CIO
establishments Where labor gained, it was largely by piggy-backing
off the social movements of the time, which opened up the space to
create OSHA, increase social security benefits, expand public
assistance to reduce competition among workers, and civil
rights/affirmative action policies, which reduced the power of
employers to discriminate among workers.
Today, the Sweeney leadership of the AFL-CIO is much better than its
predecessors in both its positions and its active commitments to
organizing and a revived social unionism, while the Democratic party
leadership is, if anything, worse even than the old cold warriors who
sacrificed their liberalism to the next military buildup and
containment war. If we are to contribute to the development of a
"usable past" for labor, understanding post world war two labor
history in terms of political culture, conflict between cold war
establishment leadership and new social forces, and the contradictory
relationships between labor and the Democratic party provide the most
useful framework.
====================
8. From: Heather Thompson <hathomps@email.uncc.edu> (April 01)
Because I agree with many of Mel Dubofsky's points, I fear that he
misunderstands those that I was trying to make. No... one should not
assume that the stylistic or cultural trappings of the 1960s, or
"youth" for that matter, necessarily connote progressive politics in
the work place or anywhere else. But the evidence from my own work
suggesting that Sixties radicalism, and even its revolutionary
movements, were a integral part of many urban American workplaces is
not at all based upon such superficial trappings. To be sure there
were many workers in auto who simply wanted to tune out and get high,
but the record shows that there were also those who were committed to
eliminating racism and sexism from the workplace. In auto that ranged
from various grassroots caucuses such as the National Committee for
Democratic Action (NCFDA) and the United National Caucus (UNC) to
various revolutionary union movements (RUMs). I was simply pointing
out that such groups did exist in the workplaces of the late 1960s
and early 1970s and, therefore, we should not assume that the
"Sixties passed the labor movement by."
On a slightly different note, I am glad that Mel has called our
attention to the situation at Lordstown during the GMAD battles. I
have argued in another piece that the interesting thing about
Lordstown is precisely that the union leadership DID embrace a
militant grassroots struggle of young, rural, even hippie-looking,"
white workers at the very same time that it refused to stand by black
workers in inner city Detroit who were leading a remarkably similar
biracial fight against speed-up, forced overtime, etc. So, what was
the difference? Perhaps the arrival of "sixties politics" to the shop
floor were alot more threatening to union leaders when, in addition
to targeting management's abusive line practices, these radical
workers in Detroit were simultaneously speaking out against racial
discrimination WITHIN the union.
Anyway, yes, the working class is and was divided and bifurcated. But
yes, the sixties still touched it in ways important.
====================
9. From: Gabe Gabrielsky <scottshuster@msn.com> (April 01)
I agree with Professor Dubofsky that union leaders very often are
more "progressive" than the ranks on social issues. One obvious
reason for this is the more cosmopolitan life styles that the
leadership leads. They interact with other union leaders, corporate
managers and politicians at the state and national level and with
labor intellectuals at university labor ed centers. On the other hand
workers, particularly in menial and repetitive jobs, tend to be
organic Luddites. I say this not out of any scientific statistical
analysis, but as a participant observer. Often workers might
articulate an ideology of intense company loyalty, but there is a
cognitive dissonance and they ACT quite differently, if only for the
sake of survival, to fight speed ups, arbitrary work rules, bad
contractual arrangements, etc.
Also, while union democracy issues are hardly a mass movement at any
level of the labor movement, to the extent that ideas for democratic
unionism have any audience, it is more likely among the rank and file
than within the staff, whose positions might quite likely be
threatened by any serious union democracy movement. The US labor
movement has the largest per capita paid staff of any labor movement
in the industrialized world. This is an awfully big target for any
serious reform movement. My experience is that it doesn't take long
at all for full time union official and staffers to completely lose
any appreciation or even understanding of the day to day experiences
of the rank and file. Fortunately this is not a universal phenomenon
as the sensibilities of many (though not all) radical academics would
attest. I experience this almost daily from full time business agents
who certainly understand the mechanics of the work place, but seem to
have lost all empathy with how everyday work life is palpably
experienced by the people whom they are supposed to represent.
Certainly, there is little necessary correspondence between cultural
radicalism and what is traditionally understood as "class
consciousness." Nevertheless, the statistics are quite plentiful
demonstrating the difficulty that most young workers have learning to
be disciplined members of the work force, just as young drivers have
a difficult time learning to drive safely at speeds roughly
approximating the speed limit. In times of affluence, when another
crummy job is just up the street, the lessons of work place
discipline are learned with even greater difficulty.
Gabe Gabrielsky Shop Steward HERE Local 54
====================
10. From: Sjaak van der Velden <s.vdvelden@hetnet.nl> (April 01)
I followed the tremendously interesting discussion at H-Labor. Here
in Europe we had the Revolution of '68 (ten million French workers on
strike and occupying their companies), the autunno caldo in Italy,
die Septemberstreiks in Germany and even here in Holland the strike
wave of 1970. Not being a student of American Labour history I
nevertheless calculated an index on strike activity in the United
States during the late sixties. The results are as follows: 1965-56;
1966-63; 1967-82; 1968-84; 1969-81 and 1970-100 (in this index the
number of strikes, number of strikers and number of working days lost
are related tot the total wage-earning labour-force). Apart from
these bare statistics my perspective on American working-class
history of the sixties and seventies is also formed by booklets like
Berry Millard, Wildcat Dodge Truck june 1974, Detroit...
Of course many of the long-haired, pot-smoking radicalists thought we
were a better kind of human beings and many of us looked down upon
the working class. Still the workers were also on the move.
Most workers didn't have highstanding expectations about socialist
democracy like so many radical students did. But by taking their fate
in their own hands the working class battled its way up to higher
wages and a more pleasant way of life. Power shifted to the
workfloor.
On the downward wave of capitalist crisis, management regained
control and was able to change things for the worse. Now that things
ARE worse the leading ideologists accuse the activists of the sixties
and seventies of this worsening.
But despite all this, the western world nowadays is a better place to
live in than the western world of the fifties. Therefore I think that
no radicalist should feel guilty about what he or she did in the
sixties.
====================
11. From: David Nack <DAVIDNACK@aol.com> (April 01)
I see nothing in Norman Markowitz's comments that negates Professor
Dubofsky's observations. It is a fact today that many union leaders
struggle against opposing currents, particularly in the white working
class. Abortion rights, the NRA, racism, sexism, bigotry, religious
zealotry, ignorance, etc., are very real factors that currently
exist, and hold sway in large pockets of the working class (even
among people of color). As someone who until very recently was
engaged on an almost daily basis for the past quarter century in
trying to break through these attitudinal barriers with rank and file
union members, and has the scars to prove it, I fail to see the
relevance of Norman's use of Hegelian terminology. There are many
union leaders at all levels who would like to be able to take their
members further than they are willing to go in regard to important
social and political issues. Of course there are other labor leaders
who are conservative or even reactionary, but that hardly contradicts
the previous observation. I know Norman fairly well, and he does some
good work at Rutgers, but he simply doesn't travel enough among
labor's rank and file.
David Nack, School For Workers, University of Wisconsin-Extension
====================
12. From: Melvyn Dubofsky <dubof@binghamton.edu> (April 02)
Yes, I misunderstood a part of Heather's comment, which she clarified
in her response. And, yes, I agree with her that the 60s had an
enormous impact on workers, especially younger ones, though perhaps
less so on most official labor leaders. As Gabe Gabrielsky points
out, a real gap, more positional and situational than political and
ideological separate officials and rank and filers. Most union
democracy movements do indeed originate below and appear as threats
to leaders, which is why officials tend to frown on local
insurgencies, and why as our Dutch brother points out, such
insurgencies in the 1960s displaced old-style leaders in a number of
unions. This would probably explain why the UAW reacted differently
toward Lordstown rebels and angry African-American workers in the
Detroit area; the former threatened only GMAD, the latter the "union
bureaucracy" as well. And, by the way, doesn't John Sweeney's role in
the 2000 election and initial response to W's presidency show
persistent tendencies in the AFL-CIO style.
Melvyn Dubofsky, Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology
Binghamton University, SUNY
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 06 2001 - 01:13:10 EDT