A blindspot that crippled
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
“The New Voices campaign of 1995 was one of the most important efforts within organized labor to respond to the crisis afflicting the movement. There are two issues that are regularly ignored in analyses of this effort, specifically, the Left and the issue of the union/community relationship. The following is a modest note on these and a suggestion that there is need for further exploration of these issues.”
The New Voices reform effort was very significant in many ways. There was a deep commitment to building a revitalized trade union movement. But one feature of this was a strange and select view of labor history and its lessons for contemporary labor. A classic example of this was the recognition that unions needed to place more resources into organizing. It was noted how much–in terms of resources–the United Mine Workers had devoted to organizing. While this was true, and while it was also true that the contemporary union movement needed to redirect resources toward organizing, what was ignored was the role of the Left in helping to move the resurgence of organized labor.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations was built through a combination of factors. One of those factors was the role that the Left had played in building the union movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Communists, Trotskyists, Independent socialists, and Muste-ites all played a major role, in part through the dedication of cadre who were deployed to build various movements within the working class. Leaders of the CIO were willing to admit their need for the Left, at least during the 1930s. The Left played a major role in sustaining efforts, e.g., the unemployed movements, providing leadership as well as leadership training.
In the 1990s the much weaker US Left did not exist as such a force. Additionally, the leaders of the New Voice movement placed no attention on playing any role in rebuilding the Left. While, in many cases, leftists were hired as staff and/or tolerated in certain elected positions, there was little effort to acknowledge a role for the Left, let alone to advance a discourse shaped by the Left. Thus, the history of labor’s various efforts at resistance and resurgence almost never mentioned the significance there was to the existence of a Left in the building of a trade union movement.
The second, but related factor that was largely ignored by the New Voices movement was the question of the role of the union/community alliances. Although in the early 1990s there was renewed attention to building ties with community-based organizations and movements, such relationships continued to be dominated by a transactional and tactical approach. Specifically, unions would turn to community-based organizations when they felt that they–unions–were in trouble but there was no sense of building strategic ties between the two sectors. This contrasted with efforts that could be found in the 1930s where there was a more open recognition of the need for such relationships, at least on the part of a segment of the union movements. The ties built between segments of the CIO and the National Negro Congress, for instance, were very significant and played a major role in the successful unionization of Ford Motors. Yet this history has been largely forgotten or, when remembered, ignored.
The New Voices ignored or dismissed these two very important legacies. In doing so they operated with a blindspot that crippled, if not doomed their reform efforts. This does not mean that the other factors were of no or little importance. Rather, these points noted here are more aimed at completing the circle.
These are very important observations that deserve a more extended treatment. One additional observation I would make is that during the 1930s there was no dispute about the fact of a class struggle. People understood there was “them” and “us”. By the time of New Voices, as a result of the expulsions of the left during the McCarthy era, the understanding that workers were engaged in a class struggle was transformed into the idea that there was no such thing as a working class. There are the poor and unemployed, the middle class (taken to mean most union members), the well to do and the truly rich. Ideas abounded about labor-management cooperation and the “Team Concept,” reinforced by jingoism, nativism and racism directed toward the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese in particular. It is difficult to rebuild a movement if you don’t know who the enemy is or who your allies are. The absence of a mass left component of the working class that carried the ideological beacon of class struggle sapped the labor movement of its capacity for understanding the true nature of the struggle in which it is engaged. “Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on. Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.”