The left may learn from past mistakes

[alice wellintown]

The great paradox of the American Labor Movement is that it is and has
primarily been, a working-class movement outside the broad stream of
Socialist thought. In operating principles, rarely a class struggle,
other than in its early rhetoric, the American Labor Movement has been
and continues to be, rooted in traditional conservative economic
unionism. American Labor is Business Unionism; it accepts private
property and the market as fundamental, and largely beneficial pillars
of economic life. Capitalism must be tempered by more humane
institutions. More humane institutions are weakened by their humanity.
Labor has always done its part in Dis-membering Unions, boring from
within, fracturing from without, forging un-equal and exploitative
alliances ...selling out brothers and sisters.





On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Somehow this reminded me of Vineland and Against the Day.
>
>        On the whole, Kagan writes without evident bias, analyzing
>        quite evenhandedly the rifts—which at times she suggests were
>        doomed to be insurmountable—between the revolutionary and
>        reformist camps in the Socialist Party as well as in the
>        International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. If anything,
>        Kagan seems to have more sympathy for the centrist
>        "constructivist" leadership than do many historians who write
>        about labor and radicalism. Her overall point, made without
>        stridency, is that sectarianism, caused mainly by misguided
>        revolutionary hopes, should ultimately bear the burden for the
>        party's demise. Socialists, she seemed to say with some
>        sadness and frustration, have often been their own worst
>        enemies. In places, her tone even implies that she may
>        consider this an ongoing characteristic of the American left.
>        "Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of
>        sectarianism," she wrote; "it is easier, after all, to fight one's
>        fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe." In
>        any case, there is no question that Kagan wrote not a
>        propagandistic celebration of socialism's heyday but a judicious
>        account of its self-destruction—with the hope that the left might
>        learn from past mistakes.
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2254406/pagenum/all/#p2