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The IWW's opposition to WWI was official and on paper. It had no particular hold on members, some of whom enlisted. (One of them is interviewed on the subject in the documentary "The Wobblies.") Is there any real question that the American Federation of Labor represented the overwhelming mass of organized workers in the US at the time? Or that even those larger AFL unions represented only a small proportion of the American working class? I am curious as to why Baby Aye says that the relative sizes of the unions and the socialist party "is neither here nor there." This might be unimportant for some purposes, but in light of a class movement towards socialism--which is what Dan originally posed--the size of these things certainly matter more than their relationship to each other. That is, a good relationship between tiny unions and tiny parties does not bring us closer to the goal. Indeed, at the time the Second International was beginning, participants in the early socialist movement were the founders of the AFL in the1880s, which started with the adoption of the idea of class struggle. But let's move on to the present.... There are two ways a serious movement will develop in the U.S. The present small unions nor the microscopic nanno-parties of the Left might grow large enough to matter. Or new social conflicts, struggles, the need for organization will create new unions and new parties. Obviously, there will be something of a dialectic between these, but it's become increasingly clear that the future will belong to the new. Basically, the longer organizations function as marginal entities, the more it seeps into their mode of operating, their self-perception of limitations and leadership. We've had this discussion before about socialist groups, and I've argued that, in some ways, learning to function in a microparty for twenty years is usually not good training for anything other than functioning in a microparty. Instead, I've argued that we need to look to new formations that come out of mass concerns...the Greens some years back, for example. Following the reactions of organized labor to the twists and turns of capitalism and capitalist politics since the 1980s, some have done better than others, but none have really caught fire or shown any prospect of being likely to do so. I suspect that things like the immigrants' rights movements are more likely to spark something... Certainly, Dan's account of mass strike movements in France presents us something that is, at this point, beyond the vision of the American working class--whether the unions or the microparties--much less its reach. Much will have to change before this does... ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
