Things are so bad that we've got to have some way quickly to light the spark that mobilizes for change and I think that feeds a sort of techno fetishism that there are magic bullets out there. And it really is a kind of magic, right? I mean there's no way around this.
It's funny, I was at a grad student's colloquium Tuesday morning where we were talking about sustainability planning and at one point someone said well the fact of the matter is that if we don't do something in fifteen years then, we have to do something within fifteen years if we want to stem ecological collapse and my response to that was well then we're done because we can't do what needs to be done to stem it within fifteen years.
We can try to do what we can do now but the fact of the matter is that the sources of environmental degradation are too deep to be solved in fifteen years. I mean, if you live in a world where the Oakridge bomb plant manager boasts that they consume as much electricity in a day as the city of Los Angeles does in a month or maybe a year, and the big industrial operations like that that you need to be controlled which means you need to control capitalism, you know all of the blue recycling bags and making sure that I insulate my windows and close the refrigerator door just aren't going to stack up against that, right?
So I think that's the problem. That's sad. I think it's, and I'm not a complete Luddite about all of this stuff, I think it's possible to use and in ways that are more inventive than I can imagine to use the new technologies to assist in organizing, but the bottom line is that the foundation of a social movement building is going to be direct personal contact among people-
R.K.: Are there people who have written about that? Are there books that you would recommend? Are there people who are leading in that approach?
A.R.: Well, I mean that's what the trade union movement has always been anchored on, right. So it's not, I don't think it's... I don't think you need to have a PhD in organizing to do it and it's what people do for whatever matters to them anyway, right? If you're in the PTA and you want to see the school go in a certain direction you will talk with other parents and form alliances and try to find common understandings that will make it possible to produce a constituency that can win the vote for the project that you can agree on.
R.K.: Isn't part of the problem too that even among unions, the leadership has become so top-down that they have become loyal to these right wing, neo-liberals, and I vote in Pennsylvania and we had our own sector and the biggest unions were backing a republican.
A.R.: Right. Well I think that's probably building trades mainly but yeah I mean look, I mean that's another problem and for much of the national leadership of the AFL CIO, they've become much more, like all our movements have, much more cue-takers from the democrats than cue-givers to the democrats so in some sense their political function is to explain to members why it is they need to vote for democratic party that's not giving them anything basically.
So no, that's a problem. But it's also the case that there are a lot of cleareyed, progressive trade union leaders both at the level of international unions and especially like at the intermediate ranks, right? Elected leaders and big locals and district councils and stuff who have got good clear understanding of the position that they're in.
I think one of the reasons that many radicals get impatient and dismissive of trade unions start tossing around charges of bureaucracy and invoking a kind of fetishism of the rank file is ironically the product of the radical's frustration that the unions are democratic institutions and they are, and they have to be accountable not only by law but by the law of incumbency. They've got a duty to represent the interests of their members and you can't ju... I mean, I'll often hear lefties say something like why can't you just get the unions to support X. Well it's because they can't do it.
They can't do it on their own. Now I will say that one of the places that we've fallen behind is that much of the labor movement has failed to do the kind of political education among the member activists.
R.K.: In fact, a lot of labor union leaders end up working for the company. They become the agent that forces the workers to get in line even.
A.R.: Right. That's true. That's true up to a point. And I think that's as much a function of the shape that the post-war collective bargaining compact took. It kind of forced the labor movement into that position.
Once, in 1946, in contract negotiations with GM, and I know it sounds like I'm living in the past here, but Walter Reuther calls for the company to open the books so that the union and management could jointly plan production, wages, profit, pricing. That sent waves of horror through the business class and the big defeat really was kind of, not just around Taft-Hartley but I think Taft-Hartley consolidated this in 1947, was forcing the labor movement to accept that all decisions about production and really the organization of the production process where management's exclusive priority and forcing on the union movement is the concession and this is what I mean about when I say that the terms on which we win within the larger fabric of defeat are just as important if not more so than how we got defeated.
R.K.: You know one of the things, we've got to wrap up, but one of the things that I took from your article and from our conversation is that we really need to be thinking a lot bigger and longer
term.
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