The labor movement will get its groove back
Berman, Marshall
LABOR MOVEMENTS are remarkable modern institutions. All over the world, they I have fought for what Marx called "the political economy of the working class." They have transformed exploited...
...I2 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...
...These guys actually won the election, yet they are still shaking as if the Big Unit has DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 11 COMMENTS & OPINIONS just struck them out...
...Other people are developing coalitions with environmentalists and trying to give labor a global horizon...
...The AFLCIO's Union Summer project reinvented the occupation of organizer, and thousands of young people are organizing, above all in our ever-growing "human service" industries...
...But, although this progress is real, it isn't guaranteed...
...You have a past and a future and promises to keep and a life to live...
...Why has W. gotten such a free ride to the right...
...When his people hit the ground running, how come nobody hit back...
...Half a century ago, Albert Camus rewrote the myth of Sisyphus, whom he portrayed as "proletarian of the gods...
...These different strokes attract different folks...
...That's the point of those thrilling protests against the World Bank and the World Trade Organization...
...They have transformed exploited workers into active citizens, and Social Darwinist battlegrounds into civilized and decent places whose members can count on public education, public housing, public health...
...It devolved into a bunch of particularist protection agencies for certified members...
...It can't be trusted to pull itself together unless there is a labor movement pushing it hard left...
...People all over the country are fed up with W.'s Gilded-Age deference to capital and his cowboy environmentalism, but the party seems to have no idea of how to reach them...
...The Democratic Party seems even more clueless in 2001 than it was in 2000...
...John Sweeney & Company could seize power because it was clear that workers were politically isolated...
...Maybe it's still in shock...
...In the long years of George Meany's hegemony, the AFL-CIO lost its collective drive and its care for public welfare...
...This hero rolls an enormous stone up a mountain—participates in grueling but satisfying work that leads to social progress—only to see it roll down again...
...Without its civic leadership, America collapsed into the concrete jungle we all know, with thriving sweatshops and penal systems and people sleeping in the streets...
...the labor movement would have to reach out and organize the rest of American society or it would die...
...SO WHERE ARE they now...
...But unlike the GOP, which knows it is the party of the rich, the Democratic Party has a notoriously shaky idea of what it's there for...
...But all of us who have ever lived through mourning and melancholia should be able to say to the labor movement what our best friends have always said to us: Wake up, already...
...MARSHALL BERMAN teaches at the City University of New York and is at work on a book entitled One Hundred Years of Spectacle, Metamorphoses of Times Square...
...Hundreds of millions of people who never give unions a thought stand in their debt...
...A little power—say, control of the Senate—might concentrate their minds...
...Show some pride in who you are...
...Weep for Michael Harrington, Cassandra of this modern tragedy...
...but they are all trying to roll that stone uphill once more...
...Yet the AFL-CIO still seems frozen in its futile embrace of Al Gore, as if it gave everything to this man who barely gave labor the time of day, and now it has nothing left...
...Other people are working with on-line workers, many of whom don't know they are workers at all, even after they have been atomized, downsized, outsourced, and re-engineered into the ground...
...Shock is something that any of us who have ever suffered a hopeless love affair can understand...
...Anybody close to American labor knows this story all too well...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
