Stanley Aronowitz's From the Ashes of the Old
Lichtenstein, Nelson
THE APPEARANCE Of Stanley Aronowitz's new book on the future of American labor comes precisely a quarter-century after he burst into the consciousness of my New Left generation with the...
...The Aronowitzes of 1973 and 1998 are here juxtaposed not to chide the author for changing his views, but as a kind of signpost that measures how thoroughly our understanding of American trade unionism, both past and present, has been transformed...
...Labor's vision must be just as bold, so a renewal of a mythical, 1950s-style "social compact" simply will not do...
...The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices From Women's Liberation...
...To transform the political culture, labor needs its own distinct voice...
...and it also happens to be the scene of labor's most dynamic and successful organizing effort in many decades...
...Verso, 1998...
...Labor needs not just a voice, but a radical message that makes its own interests synonymous with the public good...
...Lyrick Publishing, 1998...
...Routledge, 1998...
...But if we think that the doubling of the working-class standard of living between 1947 and 1973 was a product of such a social compact, we will have learned the wrong lesson...
...The trade unions, he then wrote, had "evolved into a force for integrating the workers into the corporate capitalist system...
...The formation of a labor party used to be the left's favorite solution to this problem, but Aronowitz no longer gives priority to such a strategy, in part because of the general decay into which the whole party system has fallen in our atomized, plebiscitarian political universe...
...This has been his milieu for more than a third of a century...
...But when he offers up Walter Reuther and Albert Shanker as historical models of this sort, eyebrows are going to rise, and not just among aging New Leftists...
...Aronowitz's book is therefore notable because it signals a rapproachment between the "actually existing" trade unions and a generation of academic intellectuals who once were far more alienated...
...Such power gave labor an articulate potency within the halls of power that is sadly missing today, no matter how intelligent or reasonable the voice...
...All that has vanished, so despite the thirteen million who still belong to the AFL-CIO, labor is effectively mute when it comes to setting the national political agenda or playing a part in the cultural buzz now refracted through the television talk shows and op-ed pages...
...BRIAN MORTON, Starting Out in the Evening...
...Shanker and Reuther were "big thinkers," and both started off as union-building radicals, DISSENT / Winter 1999 • 123 but in their latter years they both came to symbolize the triumph of an accommodationist realpolitik over social-movement unionism...
...Indeed, trade unionism itself is the essential lever necessary to unlock whatever leftist potential still resides within the hearts and minds of the working population...
...Once we take off our Marxoid blinders, we can see that in the years between 1957 and 1962 the offices, classrooms, and hospital hallways of New York City proved the birthplace of modern public-employee unionism, in a fashion quite similar to that of depression-era Flint, Akron, and Pittsburgh, whose mills and factories spawned the industrial unionism of that era...
...Thus, to restore union power and density to even the modest levels enjoyed in the early 1970s, the labor movement will need to organize some ten million new workers...
...University of California Press, 1998...
...Lyrick Publishing, 1998...
...DAVID BROMWICH, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the I790s...
...But such growth has not compensated for the marginalization of trade unionism in virtually every other sector of the corporate economy...
...Graywolf Press, 1998...
...To maintain even its current size, three hundred 124 DISSENT / Winter 1999 thousand new workers must be recruited each year...
...That book took its title and much of its spirit from an old bit of communist doggerel: The Cloakmakers Union is a no-good union It's a company union by the bosses .. . The Dubinskys, the Hillquits, the Thomases By the workers are making false promises...
...Moreover, Aronowitz adopts as his own an argument that both former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and many contemporary laborites have mistakenly turned into a sort of left-liberal orthodoxy...
...ERAZIM KOHAK, Zelena Svatozar: Kapitoly z ekologicke etiky (The Green Halo: Bird's Eye View of Ecological Ethics...
...Stanford University Press, 1998...
...JOANNE BARKAN, A Pup in King Arthur's Court...
...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, Carrol Seron, Bonnie Oglensky & Robert Sauté, The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender...
...I share much of the ideological trajectory traveled by Aronowitz, but for all his insights, this book is irritating because he is so unselfconscious about that shift...
...Three Rivers Press, 1998...
...DISSENT / Winter 1999 125...
...ANN SNITOW & Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds...
...Site-specific organizing efforts, no matter how successful, won't reverse this doleful trend, nor will more money for television ads or political lobbying or even for the hiring of hundreds of youthful organizers, useful and inspiring as such activities might be...
...And Aronowitz has only kind words for Albert Shanker, whose increasingly neoconservative leadership of the American Federation of Teachers long proved an obstacle to the kind of union progressivism presided over by the Sweeneyites...
...THE APPEARANCE Of Stanley Aronowitz's new book on the future of American labor comes precisely a quarter-century after he burst into the consciousness of my New Left generation with the publication of False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness...
...Jo-ANN MORT, ed., Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO...
...Aronowitz, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, writes not as the visionary partisan of some radical union future, but as an advocate of (or perhaps as the loyal opposition to) the trade unionism of our day...
...But as Aronowitz points out, white-collar workers are the "invisible glue of administration...
...But his contemporary analysis—both sociological and political— rests upon a potted history that has airbrushed some of the most vexing dilemmas in labor's past...
...Indeed, John Sweeney's radicalism consists in precisely this understanding, which is another reason why intellectuals like Aronowitz can now participate in a fruitful dialogue with the leaders of official labor...
...Although the emergence of John Sweeney and his associates to top leadership positions in the AFL-CIO is the most visible sign of labor's transformation, intellectuals like Stanley Aronowitz actually made the greater political shift...
...In 1973 Aronowitz saw organized labor and collective bargaining as largely counterpoised to an insurgent radicalism embedded within the consciousness of working-class America...
...Aronowitz memorializes a rather sugar-coated Reuther who put UAW power at the service of the insurgent political movements of the 1960s...
...Aronowitz's didacticism becomes more useful when he turns his attention to the fate of white-collar and public-employee unionism in New York City...
...It's been a secret, not because the New York Times failed to report it, but because so many in both the academy and the house of labor never took seriously the organization of those whose relationship to the point of production seemed so attenuated...
...DENNIS WRONG, The Oversocialized Conception of Man and Other Essays, Transaction Publishers, 1999...
...NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, who teaches history at the University of Virginia, is the author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit...
...From the Ashes of the Old combines a didactic history lesson with a set of "what is to be done" propositions about the future...
...I NDEED, the phrase "social compact" is a product not of the 1950s, when it was absent from the laborite vocabulary, but of the 1980s, when liberals invented it as a way of explaining what they had lost without thereby becoming too cozy with the unions...
...GEORGE PACKER, Central Square...
...Metropolitan, 1999...
...Clerical labor has neither power nor aura, he writes, "only a kind of grudging indispensability...
...JOANNE BARKAN, A Tale of Two Sitters...
...The latter are largely sensible and intelligent, focusing upon the ways in which professional, technical, and even managerial employees constitute the union movement's new organizing frontier...
...But contra the author's account, the real Reuther had so linked his fortunes to Lyndon Johnson that he battled the Vietnam doves and Robert Kennedy Democrats during the crucial 1968 electoral season...
...TODD GITLIN, Sacrifice...
...University of Chicago Press, 1998...
...The unions used to have their own neighborhoods, radio stations, newspapers, and local labor parties...
...In 1959, for example, the otherwise stolidly led Steelworkers conducted the largest strike in American history, putting more than seven hundred thousand workers on the street for 116 days, in the face of both a Taft-Hartley injunction and a lingering recession...
...They preach socialism but they practice fascism To save capitalism by the bosses Needless to say, this little poem appears nowhere in From the Ashes of the Old...
...Crown, 1998...
...Prague: Sociological Publishers, 1998...
...At some point in the Reagan era, they accommodated themselves to a well-tempered social democracy that consigned any remaining revolutionary visions to the arcane discourse of the postgraduate seminar...
...This is the idea that labor-management relations were characterized by a "social compact" during the 1950s, which contemporary unionists battle to restore, if and when they can find an appropriate set of corporate partners...
...DENNIS WRONG, The Modern Condition: Essays at Century's End...
...Perhaps, therefore, we should revisit False Promises after all, not so much for its indictment of the trade-union leadership, but as a way of reestablishing a radical, visionary standard by which to judge the corporations, the economy, and the nation, so that we can inspire the millions necessary to transform them...
...But such a social compact never existed, and if you had asked Walter Reuther, not to mention Jimmy Hoffa, if such an accommodation characterized collective bargaining or government policy in the strike-prone 1950s, they would have thought you a management propagandist...
...Pioneer radicals like Jerry Wulf and David Selden generated the kind of creative chaos that impelled New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr., followed a few years later by President John F. Kennedy, to promulgate the collectivebargaining structures that would facilitate the dramatic growth of unions like the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers, whose size now outstrips that of the old heavy-industry unions...
...Aronowitz properly understands that American labor needs leaders who can make a union social agenda synonymous with the national interest...
...But in his new book, Aronowitz turns this proposition on its head...
...In fact and imagination, the unions stand, for the first time in two generations, on the left side of American political culture...
...Despite all their bureaucratization, the unions could actually shut down key sectors of the economy in those mid-century decades...
...Aronowitz calls this achievement one of the best-kept secrets of postwar labor...
...The unions are now virtually the only institution in American life that stand athwart the ideological and social dominance of capital...
...Bill Gates and Steve Jobs offer us a world of techno-utopian empowerment, while Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan insist that the United States must once again become a Christian republic...
...ANSON RABINBACH, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment...
...Aronowitz recognizes that labor's revival requires a dramatic breakthrough into the hearts and minds of millions of unorganized workers, people who now see unions as either irrelevant or hostile to their interests...
...That's the way unions have always grown, in huge organizational and ideological leaps that transform not only the workers but the politics and culture of the entire nation...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
