michael perelman wrote: > In an undergraduate class, we read [Selig] Perlman's book, A Theory of the > Labor > Movement. .... Perlman was a > former Marxist, who saw the unions as a bulwark against communism. I > don't know whether he influenced later scholars' ideas that, by giving > workers a voice, unions dampened their revolutionary spirit. I suspect > that his analysis had some influence on Jay Lovestone's CIA-sponsored > project to encourage (capitalist-friendly) trade unionism around the world.
If Perlman was right, Governor "Tin-pot Thatcher" Walker of Wisconsin may be a mole whose goal is to build the base for the revival of communism by getting rid of the bulwark against it. Seriously, I don't know much about Lovestone, but I used to know some Lovestone-like people, i.e., the acolytes of a former ally of Trotsky (Max Schachtman). (At some point in the 1950s, Schachtman decided to favor US imperialism over the USSR's version, converting his principled criticism of the CP's politics into anti-communism.) They saw themselves as being very pro-union and worked hard for their bosses, such as the NYC United Federation of Teachers' Albert Shanker. In their distorted version of Marxism, they followed Trotsky's theory of "substitutionism"[*] in bizarre way, as if it were a prescription instead of a critique: they substituted the AFL-CIO (and the UFT) for the working class as a whole as the "progressive force in history" -- and then substituted George Meany, Al Shanker, and similar union officials for the AFL-CIO in that role. They saw their group -- eventually called the Social Democrats, USA [pronounced "seducer"] -- as a vanguard in this process. Following both their theory (Schachtman) and their paychecks (Shanker, etc.), they promoted narrow-minded anti-communist unionism, most likely in league with the CIA. This process was encouraged by their sectarianism (which they took with them as they moved from the left to the right) and their fervent support for Israel. In other works, if Perlman and Lovestone hadn't existed, it seems that they would have been invented, spawned by some other alliance between flipped-out sectarian leftists and the official labor movement leadership. > Obviously, Perlman was not radical, but he still was sympathetic to the > working class. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, unions no longer serve > such a purpose. Instead, they are treated as a parasitic force that eats > into the profit rate. ... In addition, during the heyday of US hegemony (the so-called Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s), the relatively high and stable wages of the US working class provided a domestic market, helping to compensate for the direct cost to employers. (Nowadays, of course, the US is more like a dependent economy, in which high wages hurt export revenues and encourage capital flight.) -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] Trotsky's theory was a critique of Lenin, who he accused of substituting the Bolshevik Party for the Russian working class, etc. It's like a boiled-down version of Luxemburg's critique, which is similar to that of Kautsky (I am told). _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
