Journals of Value to Labor Activists & Educators

[Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The labor movement is undergoing important, even potentially profound
changes while confronting daunting challenges.  As we grapple with both
change and challenge and grope toward some as yet uncertain future, the need
for thoughtful, creative, and provocative analysis becomes ever more urgent.
Three journals deserve attention by those who hope to serve as pathfinders
within and with the labor movement.

The September/October issue of  _New Left Review_ (No. 225, thematically
entitled "Confronting Globalization") offers a number of articles that
deserve both consideration and debate.  Linda Weiss leads off with
"Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State," in which she questions
both the newness of globalization and the purported previous power of the
state to control its economic fate.  She argues that governments do have
considerable opportunities to develop 'state capacities' in ways that give
them control over social and economic policy, but only if their policies
directly discipline the accumulation process and sponsor new forms of
productive organization.  Her essay, like those of Doug Henwood and others,
helps to counter the notion that globalization is some inexorable and
inevitable force against which both workers and governments are powerless.

A suitable companion piece is "Towards an International Social-Movement
Unionism" by Kim Moody, taken from his new book.  Moody both describes and
prescribes the emerging labor rebellions based on a new, broader, and more
inclusive social agenda that is not confined by national borders.  He points
to the social movement unionism of the developing South as a model for
unions in the developed North as the appropriate response to an era of
transnational corporations, capital mobility, and neoliberal political and
economic restructuring.  Moody warns that an effective global union
response, however, must be concerned as well with increasing the extent of
union democracy if unions are to play an effective role.

In "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism"
Slavoj Zizek argues that multiculturalism, far from opposing the logic of
global capitalism, is its perfect expression: an inverted and disvowed
racism, through which, as the editors observe, "it can view each separate
and exotic 'Other' only as an authentic, self-enclosed community from the
point of view of its own empty universality. Valuing only safe, marketable
forms of identity, the market smoothly and efficiently destroys culture."

Howard Winant, in "Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial
Politics," tackles the meaning of whiteness and how it has been used to
define and judge all other colors from both right and left, analyzing both
traditional conservative and New Right variants and their liberal and new
abolitionist alternatives.  He observes, "It is the problematic of
_whiteness_ that has emerged as the principal source of anxiety and conflict
in the postwar US.... Whitness -- visible whiteness, resurgent whiteness,
whiteness as a colour, whiteness as _difference_ -- this is what's new, and
newly problematic, in US politics.  Most centrally, the problem of the
meaning of whiteness appears as a direct consequence of the challenge posed
in the 1960s to white supremacy."  He argues that both the liberals and new
abolitionists hold between them part of the key to challenging white
supremacy in the U.S.

****
Two new journals also deserve a look.

_New Labor Forum_, in its premier issue (Fall 1997), describes itself as "a
journal of ideas, analysis and debate."  Volume 1 opens with "the New Urban
Working Class and Organized Labor" by Robin Kelley, which takes up the theme
of a social unionism that reaches beyond the workplace into the community --
beyond wages, hours, and conditions to the entire range of concerns of
working and poor people.  In doing so, this form of unionism must
necessarily make issues of culture, race, gender, and sexual orientation
fundamental to its agenda.  Kelley offers examples from recent labor
struggles of just such unionism, which is cognizant of, but also organizes
across identity politics.

In "Labor, Liberalism and Racial Politics in 1950s Detroit," Thomas Sugrue
examines the roots of blue collar conservatism and "populist" opposition to
social programs in the early failure of both New Deal liberalism and
organized labor's response to white racism.

Three articles discuss labor's involvement in politics.  Editor Mark Levitan
engages in a wide-ranging interview with Gerald Hudson, Executive VP of 1199
and Political Director of the NY State Democratic Party, including an
interesting discussion of Hudson's view of the limitations and potential of
the New Party and Labor Party.  Dan Cantor and Wade Rathke follow with "A
Non-Partisan Party: The New Party Model" and Sean Sweeney concludes with
"The Labor Party's Alternative Politics."  Those interested in various forms
of independent labor political action will find the trio worth their time.

Turning to the theme of globalization, Kate Bronfenbrenner authors
"Organizing in the NAFTA Environment," Elaine Bernard and Sid Shniad give us
"Social Unionism and Restructuring," and William Milberg and Bruce Elmslie
coauthor "Harder Than You Think."  Bronfenbrenner reports original research
which shows how employers have used plant relocation and threats of
relocation to resist worker efforts to organize.  Bernard & Shniad discuss
the impact of restructuring in the telecommunications industry and how
social unionism and labor-community unity offer the best tools for resisting
the downsizing paradigm.  Milberg & Elmslie take up the issues of trade,
labor rights and labor standards and challenge the notion that international
labor standards offer a solution to unfair competition.  They examine the
issue not only from the perspective of unions in the developed countries,
but also from that of workers and unions in developing nations.  Against the
neoliberal move toward downward harmonization of wages and conditions, they
propose an approach that harmonizes the interests of workers, including a
tax on all international capital transactions.

NLF concludes with three book reviews from Kit Costello ("Life Support:
Three Nurses on the Front Lines" by Suzanne Gordon), Leo Casey ("Bayard
Rustin: Troubles I've Seen" by Jervis Anderson), and Steve Early ("Living
Inside Our Hope" by Staughton Lynd).

****

_WorkingUSA_ is a recent offering from M.E. Sharpe edited by Don Stillman.
Its September/October issue includes articles by David Moberg on the UPS
Strike and its lessons, Bob Master ("A New Political Strategy for American
Unions"), Matt Witt & Steve Trossman ("NAFTA, Round Two"), Manning Marable
("Black Leadership and the Labor Movement"), William Wolman & Anne Colamosca
("The Judas Economy" about capital mobility and its impacts), Lillian Rubin
("Family Values and the Invisible Working Class," which takes on the ways in
which the fiction of the US as a society without class distinctions, one of
equal opportunity, helps keep workers from a sustained and organized effort
on their own behalf), " Sam Pizzigati ("America Needs More Than a Raise"),
and Jared Bernstein & John Schmitt ("The Sky Hasn't Fallen: An Evaluation of
the Minimum-Wage Increase").

Stillman includes a section entitled "Periodical Patrol" in which he points
his readers to artricles in other publications that are of potential
interest to his audience.  In this issue, he recommends "An Injury to All,"
Issue Nine of _The Baffler_, edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland.  The
entire issue is devoted to labor.


Taken together, these periodicals offer a rich resource of materials for
labor educators, labor officials, union activists, and any others who are
trying to grapple with how to release the labor movement from the grip of
business/service-bureau unionism to embrace politically independent, global
strategies based on social movement forms of unionism.  They also help the
labor movement take a step back from numbing acritical anti-intellectualism
in which it was steeped throughout the Cold War.  There is dim hope for
labor's future if it does not permit, even encourage, critical thinking that
challenges the assumptions of accepted wisdom.  Let's hope that this
portends a new appreciation of the capacity of workers for intellectual
development and the capacity of intellectuals to identify with the working
class and appreciate the problems that workers and their unions confront.
We might also hope these periodicals indicate there is now an an opening for
expressions of probing, critical analysis and commentary in the pages of
publications that serve the labor movement.

In solidarity,
Michael