Well, isn't this a fine serving of cow pie? > From: Louis N Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [PEN-L:11937] The call for new Teamsters election and Michael Ansara > I guess everybody has heard about the courts ordering a new election for > the office of Teamster president. Cary got caught up in some > irregularities as described in this morning's NY Times: First we have verbatim, uncritical quotation of accusations against persons in or connected with the labor movement who are not around to answer lifted from the house organ of Capital, the NY Times. > "With heavy restrictions limiting contributions -- a legacy of the effort > to rid the Teamsters of corruption -- the two fund-raisers, Michael Ansara > and Martin Davis, decided to focus on wealthy patrons of public-interest > groups. . . . > [etc.] >>. . . To set their plan in motion, Ansara went to California, where he proposed the idea to Charles Blitz, an acquaintance involved in raising money for various political causes, including a consumer advocacy group, Citizen Action. . . . >> A factual point: Actually Citizen Action is a community organizing group with a strong orientation to working people, not some kind of middle-class 'consumer' group. I believe it was initially funded by the UAW. Now it's in some hot water and deserves better than this post from LP. In the same vein, the G.O.P. in the Senate is trying to subpoena AFL-CIO records and leaders and embroil them in the DNC fund-raising scandals. > Michael Ansara was somebody very well-known in the Boston radical movement > when I was up there in the early 1970s. He was an MIT student and the head > of the "new left" SDS faction which was at war with the "worker-student > alliance" faction led by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. Both factions > were united in opposition to the Socialist Workers Party and the > single-issue antiwar movement we were spearheading. Familiarity intended to connote understanding, the latter a different thing. > Ansara never went off the deep-end like the Weathermen, but he adhered to > SDS orthodoxy about the counter-revolutionary nature of the American > working-class. Sometime in the 1970s, he got involved in consulting and Actually the majority PL faction of SDS was focused on the working class to a fare-thee-well. The same could be said of the Maoist RU. Unfortunately, this did not prevent PL, some years later, from launching a mass goon attack on a meeting of the NYC Central Labor Council. The RU went on to create its own oblivion. By contrast, the SWP wasn't cool enough to have any following in SDS. It was a fine liberal organization whose grip on the proletariat was less, shall we say, than vise-like. > fund-raising activities for the labor movement. I suppose that there is > some kind of continuity between his SDS beliefs and the tendency recently > shown to take shady, if not illegal, short-cuts in the labor movement. In the annals of cheap shots, this last deserves some kind of honorable mention. > Rather than doing the back-breaking and risky work of taking Teamster's > jobs and organizing a grass-roots reform movement, Ansara operates within > the elitist world of other "inside-the-beltway" liberal think-tanks and > foundations. The Schachtmanite IS'ers like Steve Kindred took another Not unlike those who went into academia, or, say, computer programming. But let's be unfair, shall we? Elitism is an elastic term. There is academic elitism, obviously. There is also reverse elitism, something like 'the romance of the uncredentialed' (related to "nostalgie de la boue") which uses superficial aspects of persons and organizations to castigate their political character without need for actual supporting substantive argument. In other words, like the familiar form of elitism, it presumes superiority and abstracts from the question of merit. > route. They oriented to the rank-and-file and prepared the way for the > recent victory. They, unlike Ansara, believed that the working class is a > potentially progressive force. The same Ansara who was working with the Teamsters? Never mind. In other words, they shucked their radical ideology and became good trade unionists, just like generations of CPers and SWPers before them. God bless them all. That IS should be credited with revival of the IBT is debatable. They certainly had to help, like many other lefts within that union. In fact, on the crucial issue of vanguardism in the 1960's and 1970's, the IS was more right than I was, among others, so I have to tip my hat to them. I heard Walter Daum of IS give a speech 26 years ago. I wish I had taken what he said more to heart. I would have gone further in life. I doubt that an ISer would actually put on the airs to which LP says they are entitled. The funny thing is, the day after this post Louis uploads a nice news account of the IBT's preparations for the UPS strike which centered on the work of the leadership and its staff, not on rank-and-file activists. My recommended slogan is: Defend Citizen Action, Mike Ansara, Ron Carey, and the victorious IBT UPS strike leadership from State harrassment and tendentious Internet posts!!!! Coming in September: "How to turn into your opposite." In solidarity, MBS ================================================== Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200 202-775-8810 (voice) 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-0819 (fax) Washington, DC 20036 Opinions here do not necessarily represent the views of anyone associated with the Economic Policy Institute. ===================================================
