PEN-L message, Re: In the Ford plant -tation

In a message dated 9/11/2004 10:05:58 AM Central Standard Time, cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

>The material underpinning for Reutherism is not "only" imperialist booty, as you say. But imperialist booty is an important pillar of it in the total calculus of finance capitalism. . . . One thing we haven't done, as I recall , is to look at the imperialist booty figures for the 40's, 50's and 60's, the Golden era which would be significant directly to Reuther period of leadership.

The U.S. bourgeoisie used the carrot and the stick in whipping the class collaborationists into shape. There was booty and booty beating, as when Coleman Young went before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for being a member of the National Negro Labor Council. Reuther denounced the NNLC, the Detroit NLC, Dave Moore and William Hood of Local 600. Coleman Young was also on Reuther's Black and Red list.<

Comment

I subcribe to a concept of bribery of the working class and the historical bribery of the Anglo American people as a people . . . in relationship to the African American . . . which in my opinion expresses the core and shape of the historical bribery of the American working class. Bribery of the working class in the imperial centers does not mean that the workers are not exploited . . . rather it appears in history as a relationship governed on the basis of oppressor and oppressed peoples.

Also the existence of the labor aristocracy (labor lieutenants of the capitalist class) - Reuther was such, and the existence of a trade union bureaucracy is probably agreed upon by most communists, Marxists and generally progressive thinkers.

Wafter Reuther was an anti-Communists rat and white chauvinist. When his plane crashed and he died we celebrated . . . and issued leaflets and a newspapers screaming . . . "The Red Head Is Dead."

It is difficult for anyone outside the Detroit scene to grasp the depth of Reuther's criminality against the working class and especially the harsh punishment melted out to blacks. His raid on Local 600 is legendary. My dad was a member of Local 600 for 36 years - not a party member . . . and the Reuther machine could not totally crush the communists under ground machine.

I forget the UAW Convention where Reuther stated there was not a Negro in the union - the entire auto industry, qualified to be on the Executive Board of the Union. The is a book that came out in the early 1970s called "The Company and the Union" that details a lot of history of the UAW.

Coleman Young Jr. will remain one of the legendary large city mayors in American history and was flat out a hell of a man. His appearance before the House un-American Activity Committee will live forever and represented a decisive turning point in this committees dirty work. Coleman was a "man's man."

Nothing provokes more passion amongst communists and left-wingers than mentioning Russia/Soviet Union and the trade union question. When such divergent points of view arise on an issue . . . amongst Marxists and communists . . . I tend to believe we are either posing the question incorrectly or are simply to close to it to unravel its distinct features.

The Company and the Union legalized the 54 Hour work week . . . meaning you could not refuse to not work . . . back in 1973 or 1974. The Union to a considerable degree helped to rationalize auto production. I remember my father going to work in the late 1950s and early 1960s and being sent home . . . without pay for bottlenecks in the system that would shut down departments and individual plants. The fight and winning of the Short Work Week placed tremendous pressure on the company to rationalize production or face paying 40 Hours wages . . . minus work related expenses . . . when the workers are sent home due to the company mistakes.

Writing this makes me experience the love hate relationship most workers have towards their union . . . and we have the extra burden of dealing with the ideological white chauvinism . . . and my first wife had to grapple with this and male supremacy (to a degree me) on her back.

Sorry if this sounds fatalistic but I have never like it and will never like it. Local 51 (my local) had an extremely militant tradition and remained anti-Reuther and the Reuther machine for fifty years . . . and to this very day. At our peak we were almost 10,000 strong . . . produced on of the first black Local Union Presidents in the Detroit area . . . Homer Jolly in 1968 and actually had a specifically Trotskyite tradition. Really. Throughout the 1970s there was a large IS (International Socialists) group . . . along with us . . . Communist League and Communist Labor Party at Lynch Road Assembly and individuals members of the CPUSA.

I learn towards a proposition that the trade unions are inherently conservative as economic organizations corresponding to a distinct juncture in the shape and form of capital . . . which is more reason for communists to wage the militant battle for sanity. I believe it is this inherent conservatism expressing the logic of connection with capital that creates a tendency within the unions to drift towards ideological fascism in unity with a section of capital. This is more reason to fight to win the union members to a social consciousness of taking a stand on behalf of themselves as a class.

Unions are revitalized on the basis of extending their field of operations into the unorganized and during transition from one form to another . . . as during the case of the transition from craft . . . to larger skilled . . . to the unskilled industrial form.

The UAW is hit . . . and our working class is the process of receiving its higher education at the hands of capital.

Melvin P.