VL is about Work (Left Wing CIO).3

[Terrance]

The goal of a fundamental reversal of power between capital and labor
has largely been absent from the practice of American Unionism since the
1920s. Nowhere is this fact more manifest then in Labors relation to the
formal political process. With  few exceptions, American labor leaders
have rejected independent, working-class political action, choosing
instead an ostensibly nonpartisan approach based on "rewarding friends
and punishing enemies" in the Republican and Democratic Parties. I
practice, however, at least since the presidency of Woodwork Wilson,
organized labor has largely come to rest in the Democratic Party, the
more social democratic of the two parties. And, by the second term of
RFD, organized labor's identification as one of the cornerstones of the
new Democratic coalition was complete. As a quid pro quo for the general
Democratic Party support for organized labor's agenda in the areas of
labor law and social entitlements, the leaders of the CIO increasingly
found it necessary to enforce a political orthodoxy on what was
basically and economic movement. 

For the CIO's Left Wing (as I defined it in a previous post), the New
Deal's active social engineering and intervention in the economy
provided fertile ground for an industrial unionism that seemed to have
the potential to go far beyond pure and simple unionism to a significant
reformation of the power relations between capital and labor. These
militants flocked to the CIO banner during the great organizing drives
of the 1930s because they saw the industrial union movement as the
foundation for this new order.  They had contempt for what they
considered the narrow, exclusive nature of the craft unions of the AFL.
Short of qualified organizers to deal with millions of workers clamoring
for organization under the provisions of the NIRA and the Wagner Act,
John L Lewis the Committee for Industrial Organization welcomed the
skills and the dedication of the Left Wing. From the beginning they
played a significant role in organizing and running the CIO. 




One of the great paradoxes of the American Labor Movement is that it is
and has primarily been, especially since the 1920s, a working class
movement outside of the broad stream of socialist thought. Most
references to Unions as the institutional expression of class struggle
existed mainly in the early rhetoric of the movement, but rarely in its
operating principles. These have always been mainly rooted in the
tradition of "pure and simple" economic unionism. Every really
successful union leader since Samuel Gompers has acted firmly in this
conservative tradition, including the Marxist leaders of the left-wing
unions of the CIO. 

Basically pure and simple, or "business" unionism, as it developed in
the United States, accepted private property and the market as the
fundamental, and largely beneficial, pillars of economic life.
Capitalism, while fundamentally desirable, had to be tempered by more
humane institutions capable of minimizing the negative effects of
unrestrained individualism and extreme concentration of economic power.
The labor movement is one such institution.