[Marxism] People: there's counter, and then there's punching

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 17:12:10 -0500
> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] John Lacny goes apeshit against CounterPunch
> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
>       <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20040228170523.01c8b2f8@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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>
>>This letter from John Lacny is polite, but we can tell he's pretty mad at
>> us.
>
> John means well, but I am afraid that he is adapting to his milieu. One
> can
> assume that being an organizer for 1199 puts him shoulder to shoulder with
> CP'ers--they have a traditional stronghold in the hospital workers union.
> This union epitomizes everything that's good and that's bad about this
> current. On the plus side, they do fight for higher wages more effectively
> than just about any union around. Nurses in NYC can make up to $90,000 per
> year. On the downside, you get a kind of crass opportunism on the
> electoral
> front, even to the extent of endorsing a Republican candidate from time to
> time like Pataki as NYC 1199 head Dennis Rivera did. The funny thing about
> John is that he defends this parliamentary cretinism using the rhetoric of
> the 1960s student left--a thoroughly odd mixture to say the least.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
>

This is "structural-functionally" incorrect, Lou: as John would tell you
in so many words,
the two unions which can be taken to be exemplary of CP-CIO bonding are
Mine-Mill
and the UE, which could both be accused of "dual unionism" w/ respect to the
UMW and IBEW but generally are not -- and in this day and age of aspiring
radical
historians, the UAW is generally taken to be their "dual", the union
responsible for
the CP purges.  As I understand it, this is factually correct: the Reuther
brothers did
the legwork for the dissociation of the CIO from the CP, but this is under
an aspect
provided by an older history no longer generally available (the "tame" CP
of the
Nazi-Soviet pact era).

And as I was speaking of "Westies", those west-coast residents who are
descendants
of people who worked in war industries and "inconsequentially" not very
good at
understanding postwar developments deviating from a norm of "parliamentary
cretinism",
let me say that was indeed the funny thing about John from the standpoint
of the
local establishment -- nobody could figure out why that guy had any
sympathy at all
for those tree-hugging hippies, and I mean nobody but nobody (you don't
even want
to think about that man's relationship to red meat).  But I will say that
1199P represents
Lacny's values, more or less: these are the people who can conform to
Sweeney's Kantian
rhetoric without hating themselves in the morning, and the fundamental
point that we here
are in agreement with such people on is that US labor history is not to be
occluded:
in the order of reality there was McCormick and then harvesting, and to
say otherwise
is to be complicit in NAM hush-hush.

Rubard


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