On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Nathan Newman wrote:
> IMF funding is a real tactical division: I very much doubt labor allies in
> South Korea, for example, support cutting off IMF funding. They would
> like support in easing the terms of the IMF in exchange for funds, but
> merely shutting down the pipeline won't help workers there.
>
> Now, the threat to cut off funding might gain the chance to rein in the IMF
> abuses, and that is the tactical dilemma. But if some folks, including the
> AFL-CIO and some of the most pro-labor political leaders in the country,
> think it is a bad strategy, it is a reasonable debate to have without
> resorting to personal vilification of those progressive leaders you
> disagree with.
[text cut]
> I wish there could be honest disagreements on tactics, even principles on the
> Left, without falling immediately into recriminations and denunciations.
Oh come *on*, Nathan. A few e-mails which disagree with you and you're
already claiming persecution. There are all kinds of people on this list,
Leftists, centrists, moderate conservatives, you name it. I harbor no
personal rancor towards you or anyone who I disagree with (and I have
plenty of disagreements, even with my friends), and if William F. Buckley
himself got onto this list and started soldiering on about the sterling
qualities of Reaganomics, I would not indulge in name-calling or acts of
verbal violence; I'd just quote the economic statistics disproving his
case (I can't speak for others, but PEN-L is amazingly dignified
compared to some of the wilder lists I've seen).
The problem with American politics, and indeed most of our institutions,
is that there are very few genuinely "progressive leaders" out there. This
is immediately and painfully obvious to anyone who's traveled in Europe a
bit: IG Metall, the big German metalworkers union, and many of the other
unions are already talking about ecological alternatives to Fordism,
creating an information-age industrial policy, pushing for the 30-hour
workweek and creating a social charter for the European Union. Here in the
US, the AFL-CIO has finally figured out it needs to organize the
unorganized, or simply disappear as an organization; but we're very, very
far away from even *thinking* about the sort of practical forms of
cooperation and economic justice Europeans have been experimenting with
for thirty years.
Why is this? Why is it that the EU countries have socialized health care,
socialized pensions, high minimum wages, powerful unions and a great deal
of social equality and equity? Because they're more democratic, that's
why. People vote in their elections, belong to mass parties where they
have a chance to actually mold policies, and are part of a welfare state
which at least tries to buffer the violence of market competition. Here in
America, on the other hand, politics is money-politics, pure and simple.
Presidents get elected in primaries where image-making and soft money
deals are the rule, not the exception; Congress is staffed by pols elected
by winner-take-all rules; and most trade union leaders are, to this day,
lifetime bureaucrats of one sort or another (things are changing on the
local level, but it's a long struggle).
I think it's pretty obvious the Cold War, with its witchhunts and
McCarthyism, destroyed the best part of the independent Left in the 1950s,
and entrenched a whole generation of deeply corrupt Old Boys in unions
which were once, in the Thirties, raucously leading the charge for social
change. Military Keynesianism subsequently kept the economy going,
and put a fifty-year damper on working-class mobilization; as long as
wages kept rising, folks didn't see a need to protest too much.
Now that damper is slowly fraying, as the Pax Americana unravels under the
pressure of global competition, and as Wall Street subsumes the command
and control functions once vested in the national security state --
e.g. the IMF bailout of South Korea. In days past, this would've been
handled by some Pentagon grant or Cold War development fund, all
legitimated by the usual harping on the vileness of Communism; nowadays
what we have is a straightforward bookkeeping maneuver to keep
the Land of the Morning Sun solvent and capable of paying back at least
part of its hard-currency loans. This is a long way of saying that no
leader or group of leaders is going to save us, or do our organizing work
for us; if Bonior wants to speak to a crowd of Lefties, that's fine, but
speeches are not a substitute for grassroots democracy or genuine Left
parties driven by issues and not a few superstar/charismatic personalities
(what we might call the Kennedy ideology).
OK I've yakked on long enough, I'll shut up now to let other
folks in on this thread.
-- Dennis
