A question for Bill Fletcher

Most of the people on this list will try to get down to the Labor Temple to hear Bill Fletcher’s talk at 7 p.m., Wednesday, February 25. I’ll have one question for Brother Fletcher: So, who’s going to do it?

If you’ve been following Fletcher’s work over the years, you know he has a vision of a revitalized labor movement based on militant organizing around broad social justice issues. That this new labor movement must be inclusive, based on a critique of capitalism and be able to engage in class struggle to achieve its goals. His latest book, Solidarity Divided, lays it out again. In addition, the book gives us an insider’s look at some of the palace intrigues that led to the unprincipled split in the AFL-CIO in 2005. It’s worth a read.

But, suppose we agree with Fletcher’s idea of what is to be done. Again, who the hell’s going to do it?

Here we might need to get into a serious discussion of labor history. There’s a strong current in the field that says it all happens more or less spontaneously. That workers reach the end of their collective rope and something just snaps. A few spontaneous uprisings spark more spontaneous uprisings and, before you know it, we have a full-fledged labor movement. Unions organize and flourish and the standard of living of the working class rises, at least for a time. Alternatively, we have the Democrats (Roosevelt/Obama) passing a law that allows unions to organize and it takes off from there.

These views simply aren’t true. They’re based either on bad history or, sad to say, an intentional revision of what really happens.

The last great uprising of labor in the 1930s through the ‘40s was anything but a spontaneous event. The left parties of the day had suffered vicious state repression, beginning under that great democrat Woodrow Wilson. But, with the collapse of world capitalism in 1929, they started to recruit and grow. Moreover, with Stalin’s discovery of a new “Third Period,” the Communist Parties around the world embarked on a strategy of going heavily into the unions and engaging in militant class struggle. The emerging Trotskyist movement and other left parties did the same, with their smaller forces.

Three city-wide general strikes in 1934, in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo, are credited with setting off the organizing wave that became the CIO. While thousands of workers participate, those strikes were anything but spontaneous and legal. They were organized and directed by members and supporters of the Communist Party, Communist League (the Trots) and the American Workers Party, respectively. The militant mass movement that followed was also heavily influenced, if not directed, by members of those organizations. Flint didn’t just happen.

The left parties of the time were able to recruit some of the best and brightest of the generation by offering a vision of a classless society, where all would live in peace, prosperity and freedom from oppression. They organized the working class, not as an end in itself, but as a means to overthrow predatory capitalism. The parties not only gave people inspiration, but they provided training and coordination. Thousands of people subordinated their lives to the Party and threw themselves into organizing the working class, for the “final conflict” that would usher in the next epic of human development.

These parties provided their members, and through them the broader working class, with a winning organizing strategy because the understood capitalism. They understood that organizing unions required not only an economic struggle against the employer but a political struggle against their laws, their political parties and the capitalist state apparatus. Because they were Marxists, they understood the need to organize against court injunctions, the cops and National Guard troops. Only because the understood the relationship of class forces were they able to organize sit-down strikes and militant mass picket lines, to challenge not only capitalist property rights but the authority of the capitalist state as well.

Incompetent or dishonest tellings of our history omit the central role of left-wing parties in organizing the unions. You can see the difficulty that bourgeois historians and pro-capitalist labor leaders would find themselves in if they had to acknowledge the truth. If you want to see what really happened, you need to go to the Marxists themselves. For a raw but honest account, I recommend Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step, if you can find a copy.

Fletcher acknowledges the need for a left “organizational coherence,” and gives a tip-o-the-hat to the left parties of the past. But, that begs the question: Who’s going to do it this time around?

Today the left is a ghost of its former self. And, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many former socialists have given up the vision of a future classless society. Of the 200 or so labor activists on this list, probably less than a dozen are actual members of any left party (Progressive Dane doesn’t count) and probably only a couple of dozen even identify themselves as socialists or Marxists. We have no local “organizational coherence.” And, this is the best and brightest we have to offer.

Thus my question to Brother Fletcher. If we agree on the broad outlines of what we need to do to build a new labor movement in this country—an inclusive movement for social justice, based on a critique of capitalism and able to engage in class struggle—just who do we think is going to do it?

Or, hey. Maybe we should be asking ourselves that question.