[PEN-L:11963] Re: The call for new Teamsters election and Michae

["Max B. Sawicky" <Max.B.Sawicky@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well, isn't this a fine serving of cow pie?

> From:          Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 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

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Max B. Sawicky           Economic Policy Institute
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