Full at
http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2011/01/12/radical-labor-education-part-3-the-decline-of-the-left/
"In the United States, radical labor education had great vitality from the
heyday of the Socialist Party and the IWW before the First World War until the
end of the Second World War. In fact, much of the impetus for labor education
came from the left, and a good deal of what was taught had an explicit or
implicit anti-capitalist bias. This reflected the fact that there were strong
progressive currents within the labor movement throughout this time. Even the
conservative American Federation of Labor, which was usually strongly opposed
to any critical labor education, sometimes supported schools with a radical
focus. Socialists and communists found havens in the left-wing political
parties and the industrial union movement, and their students did the same.
Of course, there were many problems that confronted radical labor education in
addition to AFL antagonism. The independent colleges were perennially short of
funds and were often at odds with the labor unions. The same was true for the
party-based schools. Some of the energy and independence of the labor movement
was coopted by the New Deal. And even in the left-wing unions, there was
conflict between their immediate needs and the more long-term goals of the
educators. But, all in all, radical labor education had achieved much and was
poised to achieve more at the end of the Second World War. Union membership was
at an all-time high, and the rank-and-file were ready for action.
Unfortunately, the postwar period brought the ferocious Cold War assault on the
labor left, the result of which was that the radicals, including the educators,
were defeated by the corporations and the state, with help from the AFL and
liberal opportunists in the CIO like Walter Reuther. This assault has been
well-documented and needs little further comment, except to say that the
withdrawal or expulsion of the CIO's left-led unions foreshadowed the collapse
of an independent labor movement. Not long after the merger of the AFL and the
CIO in 1955, union density began its long decline. Even the economic gains that
labor won as a part of the "deal" it made with capital—in which organized
workers got regular wage increases and a package of fringe benefits in return
for unilateral management control of the capital and union discipline of
rank-and-file dissidents—could not withstand the end of the long period of
postwar prosperity that began in the mid-1970s. By the time Reagan became
president and broke the Air Traffic Controllers Union, the labor movement was,
for all practical purposes, already dead."
To be continued . . .
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