The following is the first in a series published by the Cross Union Classwide Caucus in 1977. The CUCC was a paper organization fashioned by Fred Newman's IWP during the formation of the Nationwide Unemployed League (NUL)—a joint effort between the IWP, the National Labor Federation and the California Homemakers Association. NATLFED and CHA were front groups of the Provisional Communist Party, which was in turn run by another political guru, Gerald William Doeden (aka Eugenio “Gino” Parente). The article reveals remnants of LaRouche-like ideology (vis-à-vis grand conspiracies involving the Tri Lateral Commission, the union movement, corporate America, former President Jimmy Carter and the Rockefellers)—the seeds from which the IWP's bitter vitriol towards the Democratic Party were apparently sown.

Labor Must Lead: Part I

An Overview

“It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. It will be particularly hard to swallow because it is quite obvious that if big business and big banks are the most visible victims of what ails the Debt Economy, they are also in large measure responsible for it. Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.”

Business Week, October, 1974

In an economy where everyone, save big business, must do with less (not merely with less than big business, which is always the case, but with less than they formerly had), everyone understandably tries harder than ever to get a larger share of the less which is available.

When Jimmy Carter tells the people of this country (as he did in his recent energy program presentation to Congress) that he stands for “competition,” he actually means: (1) limited competition among Big Business interests mediated and controlled by Big Government which is, in turn, controlled by certain elements of Big Business and Banking; (2) viscous competition for shares of the dwindling pie amongst everyone else; and (3) no competition between Big Business and everyone else. The labor movement is more and more struggling to locate itself in the context of this new reality (the “pill”).

The love affair between organized labor and Jimmy Carter was actually not much of a love affair at all; it was more of a Fall Fling, the most recent “coming together” (after the McGovern debacle in “72) of Big Labor and the Democratic Party against the common enemy: the far-right forces of U.S. Big Business.

Carter, who represents amongst other things the interests of the more “liberal” elements of the U.S. Big Business community, espouses policies formulated to a large extent by the Tri Lateral Commission, a private institution combining “enlightened” elements from Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government, funded by Rockefeller money and founded by David Rockefeller, President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1973.

Carter and Mondale were two of the original politician members (Big Government) of the Tri Lateral Commission, and many of Carter's key advisors (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus R. Vance, Paul C. Warnke) formerly sat on Tri Lateral. The Tri Lateral Commission is an international body representing the multinational interests of North America, Europe and Japan. The concern of the Tri Lateral Commission is to develop a new strategic perspective for the U.S.A. (and the capitalist world), one based on the underlying reality articulated so succinctly in the October, 1974 Editorial of Business Week.

When all is said and done, the “palace” economists (both liberal and conservative) have made plain only that nothing is plain at this point in capitalist “development.” International political realities as well as the socio-economic realities of multinational finance capitalism have made official political economy into a complete guessing game. The professional prognosticators of capitalism's economic future are in substantial disagreement with each other, though, of course, all give lip service to the claim that “capitalism will survive” (a position reiterated time and time again at a recent Big Business conference in Nyack, New York).

One need not be much of a pragmatist at all to recognize that this statement is heavily influenced by these professionals' economic location. But, beyond this self-interested public agreement amongst the economists of the capitalist class there is little agreement at all, either on what will happen, when it will happen, or on how Big Business, Big Government and Big Labor should move either to make it happen or stop it from happening.

Despite this chaos, it is recognized that something resembling a long-range perspective foe Big Business and therefore Big Government must be developed. What is developing within this so called “liberal” or “enlightened” faction of the U.S. capitalists, as reflected in the strategic and tactical writings of the Tri Lateral Commission, and as it is now being realized in the White House under Jimmy Carter's presidency, is most accurately characterizeable as post-cold war liberal conservatism.

Carter, who ran his campaign based on a loose center-left coalition (because that represents the electoral base upon which he could be and in indeed was elected, though, we must not forget, barely) has made plain even in his first few months in the White House that his real politik, the position he will no doubt hold between elections, locates him as the leader of a center-right coalition. It is not that he now represents different forces. Rather, election rhetoric could never be taken to indicate one's real politics even when they were clear, no less in times so transitional and chaotic as these.

The little “love affair,” or flirtation, between organized labor and Jimmy Carter is based on Carter's tactical recognition that labor represents a substantial electoral constituency and, moreover, the Tri Lateral recognition that Big Labor represents, from a strategic point of view, a social-political force which must be more thoroughly co-opted than ever before, if a long-range strategy of liberal-conservatism is to be effected. Labor, for its part, has been in the back pocket of Big Business interests in this country for so long now that it is difficult for it to see where to go now that the socio-economic conditions for its benefiting from the capitalists' strategic policy no longer hold.

In other words, the deal being offered Big Business through Big Government to Big Labor is that Big Labor should continue to cooperate despite the fact that the policies being developed are more and more not in the interests of Big Labor—no less working people as a whole. It is, of course, a difficult product to sell as the Business Week editorial so clearly points out, and Tri Lateral and its men and women in the White House are counting heavily on the compromised leadership of Big Labor to “sell the unsellable.”

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) identifies the so-called “historic compromise” as its strategic perspective. U.S. Big Business and Banking interests are in the “historic bind” and are searching for a “historic compromise” of their own to get them out of their historic bind. Unfortunately for them, they (unlike the PCI) have little to compromise. However, Big Labor, which has placed itself since the 1930s in the position of rising or falling with U.S. capitalism's star, is in an almost equally bad position to compromise.

The “historic bind” is a far more accurate characterization of the actual socio-economic position of international capitalism than is the “historic compromise” an accurate characterization of international socialism's position, because the socio-economic factors (roughly, the impossibility of further capitalist expansion by virtue of the elimination of areas of investment of surplus value) determine the binding character of the international economic situation for the capitalists while it is only a sometimes well-intended idealism on the part of the socialists—which suggests there is in the not-so-long run a basis for “historic compromise.” The issue here is not some childish ultra-left matter of never compromising. Compromising is the very essence of all practical politics. But anyone even moderately scientific must appreciate that there are certain objective conditions which must hold for compromise to take place, and, as is pointed out in the Business Week editorial (and as has been pointed out by millions and millions of words to the same effect written by the propagandists of U.S. Big Business), there is no socio-economic basis for compromise.

The condition of the 1930s in this country provided a basis for compromise between Big Business and labor and industrial unionism represented the result of such a compromise. Of course, even that compromise required enormous struggle on the part of the broad masses of industrial workers and the unemployed because Big Business is not characteristically a very compromising social force, even when there is a basis for compromise—indeed, even when it is in their self interest to compromise.

Nonetheless, the “enlightened” or liberal wing of U.S. Big Business interests under Roosevelt's political leadership was “willing” (under duress) and more significantly, socio-economically able to compromise. Similar conditions do not exist today. The international conditions for real capitalist expansion do not hold. The U.S.'s neo-colonial empire is fast shrinking. The international monetary situation which for decades has, amongst other things, propped up the U.S. economy is more unfavorable than ever to U.S. expansion.

In fact, the U.S.'s current international monetary policy is to run a conservative course while encouraging its allies towards a more inflationary course—a defensive posture responded to with understandable annoyance by the U.S.'s allies. The propping up [of] the U.S. economy by the military industry has created—and will continue to create—an increasingly corrosive inflationary spiral. Moreover, there exist today severe political and military limitations on the potential for warfare (a standard technique for heating up the economy)—limitations based on the tactically unviable position of the U.S. internationally.

Without examining these matters in greater detail here, suffice to say that the socio-economic political conditions internationally, do not favor U.S. capitalist expansion. They favor austerity, from the capitalists' point of view. On this there is full agreement among the still-sane politicians and economists of both right and left. Only the most extreme right-wing elements who fanatically hold that capitalism can survive only if it crushes socialism (a view which—though wrong and viciously fanatical—contains a germ of truth that the more liberal elements must constantly hedge), fail to recognize the limitations posed by the current socio-economic and political situation. The concrete tactical response for Big Labor in light of these socio-economic circumstances is fundamentally unclear. The lack of clarity derives from the lack of a long-range strategic perspective for labor.

Labor is, so to speak, faced with the prospect of accepting the long-range strategic perspective (insofar as one can be clearly articulated) of the Tri Lateral Commission, which identifies labor as a minor partner (equal only in name) simply because the objective conditions demand that labor's throat be cut. Alternatively, labor can develop its own strategic perspective.

In point of fact, there are elements within the labor movement who have always recognized the necessity for labor to have its own strategic perspective. Those who have recognized, that in the final analysis, labor must lead or labor will be destroyed. These elements, some of whom hold ranking positions in the trade unions (and who are quietly friendly to the CUCC [Cross Union Classwide Caucus]) have been conspicuously silent during the post-World War II boom—silent to some extent because their “radical” politics left them vulnerable to political purging in the hyper-paranoid world of the trade union movement created by the well-planned anticommunist hysteria following World War II, and equally because the socio-economic conditions which yielded dramatic expansion of the U.S. economy from 1948-1968 seduced a sufficiently large number of trade unionists, members and leaders alike, so that a long-range perspective was not particularly easy to sell.

The labor aristocrats of the U.S. (historically far more wage-conscious than politically-conscious) have understandably never been particularly well known for their capacity to see long-range implications. But times have not merely changed, times have changed sufficiently and conditions have changed dramatically enough so that even the “liberal” capitalists recognize that a conservative strategy must be developed if any strategy is to be developed at all. Not a conservative strategy of the right, but a conservative strategy of the left.

In such a moment as we now find ourselves, these closet progressives in the trade union movement find an objective basis for their politics. Now, of course, it would be ridiculously naive to suppose (and indeed, it would be undesirable) that they will therefore stand up and be counted. No, these closet “radicals” have been a part of the bureaucracy for too long and are typically more inclined to use the current transformation of the socio-economic conditions to advance their own self-interest—trying to “come out on top” in the ongoing bureaucratic struggle—which to a large extent has become the U.S. trade union movement.

Thus, the trade union movement is currently marked by more and more cries for new leadership but not for a new strategy. The trade union movement is, so to speak, a self-perpetuating closed environment aligned very closely with the strategic perspective of certain Big Business interests.

What is demanded, historically (as opposed to bureaucratically) however, is not merely new leadership, but a leadership which has a new strategy, a strategy which recognizes the fundamental reality that labor must lead.

But how can that be effected? How can the closed environment of the trade-union movement be transformed so as to encourage not only new leadership hut new leadership with a new strategy of it own? The failure of Big Labor over these last three decades, three decades in which the U.S. “historic compromise” of the 1930s evolved into the “historic bind” of the 1970s, the failure of Big Labor during this period, must be identified with its increased alienation from the mass of the U.S. work force. The collaboration of Big Labor with Big Business effectively transformed organized labor into a massive constituency removed from its real socio-economic location, namely the working class as a totality. This is no mere abstract leftist rhetoric, as can be seen by spelling out this point in clear operational terms.

The “radical” thrust that has increasingly been turned into a platitude within Big Labor over these past three decades is the organizing of the unorganized. The failure of Big Labor as a whole to substantially increase the percentage of the work force organized into the labor movement and of equal importance the failure of Big Labor to put forth consistent policies and tactics which provided leadership to the totality of the work force, has left Big Labor a well-taken care of constituency with no future in itself.

The transformation of the labor movement from a constituency which cooperates with Big Business and Big Government to a leadership force demands, concretely, bringing back to life the perspective of organizing the unorganized. Again, it is important to point out that the issue here is not mere numbers, though surely the fact that the working masses of this country make up the vast majority of the population is a material and political fact never to be forgotten.

Rather, the question is whether organized labor—which represents not only those elements of the working class that play a particularly critical role in capitalist production, but which represents the most fully developed (though not politically developed) working class organization in the country—will provide leadership or whether they will continue to abstain from leading the broad mass of the working class, allowing the “new” (actually retooled) Democratic politicians who are the instruments of Tri Lateral to sell the impossible nightmare.

This revitalization process which is already underway demands that Big Labor (or at any rate the most progressive elements of it) wake up more and more to the actual conditions (the socio-economic realities) of U.S. society; to recognize that they unlike the other Tri Lateral elements have a way out of the “historic bind.”

This revitalization process, the rebirth of labor, must be operationalized in the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month tactizing of cross union class-wide activity. Central to this rebirth is that this activity not only be between existing or established unions, for that would leave out precisely those elements of the population necessary to organize in carrying out a perspective of organizing the unorganized. However, it is impossible for the unions in any meaningful way to link up with the unorganized mass.

Therefore, the current development of “new unions”—organizations of the unorganized as concretized in such embryonic formations as the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (NYCUWC), California Homemakers Association (CHA), Lake County Coalition for Survival (LCCS), Eastern Farm Workers Association (EFWA), takes on particular significance and must not be seen as a hostile attempt to create dual unionism.

Actually, they are tactical attempts to create associations and organizations of the unrepresented, of the unorganized, of the unrecognized, whose political perspective and material development places demands on the most progressive elements of the trade union movement and provides a basis for interrelationships between those elements within organized labor to provide the necessary support and leadership of a political nature to an organized labor force that has been locked-in (and to some extent sold-out) for decades.

It would be foolhardy for the “new unions” such as the NYCUWC, CHA, LCCS, EFWA, etc., to regard themselves as developing an alternative to organized labor. The socio-economic facts of life make such a position ridiculous. What they in fact represent are embryonic formations of the poorest strata of the labor force which will hopefully serve to provide political leadership not from the outside (as some foolishly characterize it), but from the inside; that is, inside the work force taken as a totality.

For those who regard “new-union” organizing as outside and, for example, caucus organizing as inside, simply make the labor-aristocratic mistake of identifying the working class with those organized in the current trade union movement. It must be our perspective that the trade-union movement exist as a leadership force within the totality of the work force, not [that] the totality of the work force exists in or be identical to the trade union movements.

Hence, the political strategic and tactical perspective of the “new unions” is class-wide in that far from excluding the trade unions, the “new unions” demands that trade unions overcome their exclusiveness and provide leadership. It is, so to speak, the followers demanding leadership from a long abstaining leadership and in doing so themselves providing political leadership.

Those leaders of the trade union movement (and they are becoming more and more visible every day) who recognize the correctness of a cross-union class-wide perspective; that is, the perspective that labor must lead, who see that this is the only materially viable perspective for trade unionists, will quite lawfully emerge in the upcoming years as the new leadership of the trade unions and the labor movement as a whole—a new leadership with a new perspective on who must lead.

The Cross Union Classwide Caucus is that developing organization—embryonic as it currently stands—which tactizes and operationalizes this strategic perspective. It is a formation which must educate the totality of the working class of this country to the objective reality which demands that labor must lead—which forges the day-to-day tactical and operational links between the progressive elements of the trade union movement and the new organizations of the unorganized, the progressive community organizations and the progressive political organizations.

Part Two