francesca polletta, freedom is an endless meeting

preface

(vii): athenian democracy from 461 BC - 322 BC

chapter 1

(2): activists have been drawn to the solidary, innovatory and developmental benefits of participatory democracy

(3): in other words, there are practical/political benefits to participatory democracy

(3): social relationships shape participatory democracy in two ways

1. familiar relationships provide frameworks for group
2. activists' identification of the tactic have shaped it, too [this is part of the silly nonsense that it became 'white', so SNCC abandoned it]

(8-10): three features of participatory democracy

1. people share in decisions -- feel a part of things (solidary)
   
2. more inputs from everywhere (innovatory)
3. trains people as activists (developmental)

(12): another summary--solidary counters inability of groups to offer incentives to participate; innovatory benefits counteract the fact that politics is uncertain; developmental benefits counteract inexperience

(19): table of movements/decision-style, etc. [painful]

(24): battles were not between idealists and pragmatists--rather, they were between different ideologies--and, even, about other things (race, friendship [!], limits of liberalism)

chapter two

(29): AFL's Gompers calls himself 'three-quarters anarchist'

(32): deeply unsatisfying treatment of Labor in the 1930s

(38): mistaking the symptom of Old Left's failure, for its cause--if you were to extend the same kind of careful treatment to what she opposes the New Left to, we might have a book on our hands...

(53): coded insult of communists as 'nondemocratic' and the bureaucracy/liberals as 'democratic' -- what is this hogwash?

chapter three

(56): again, her main point--activists chose participatory democratic practices as much for idealistic reasons as for pragmatic reasons

(57): by April 1960, 50,000 students had sat-in at lunch counters

(60): extraordinary over- and under-representation of whites and blacks, respectively in these Southern counties

(63): Ella Baker emerges out of the SCLC to found the SNCC--democracy is part of what's at stake, in this break

(66): and this' populism' would be at the heart of what inspires SNCC in later years

(73): again, if you hadn't noticed already--there is a developmental rationale to participatory democracy

(74): prefigurative commitment and political change [!?]

(79): meetings as Durkhemian 'collective rituals'

(85): what is this nonsense! 'hurtful', 'friendship', ahhhhhh!

(86): in sum--participatory democracy is eminently practical for social movements, for four reasons

1. participation helps decisionmakers gather information
2. developmental benefits of shaping preferences/skills
3. specifies a range of possibility, heightening sense of belonging in minorities [?]
4. foster conventions of scruitny that endure [?]

chapter four

(89-90): SNCC unraveled because came up against limits of tutelage and friendship as basis [?]

(90): perceived as white by black staffers [!?]

(117): goals became unclear after 1964 Atlantic City Convention -- didn't solve programmatic and racial questions, and this was the reason for the decline

(118): more of this nonsense about black, white, identity--this is not an explanation!

chapter five

(121): SNCC in between top-down and bottom-up, actually.

(124): explanation for SDS failure is, well, "dynamics of friendshp and exclusion"

(127): participatory democracy as a model for social change--not internal organization

(140): more on friendship, and how it constrains groups

(142): newcomers challenging old guard on hypocrisy

(145): 100,000 members

(145-146): reason for decline, also, had to do with fact that there was an upsurge of action, elsewhere [implicit in this, though, has to be a recognition of the limits of this kind of organization -- what could capture the upsurge? labor in the 30s did, to an extent that this doesn't come close to doing]

(147): a missed opportunity, proposing to make it participatory and democratic and national?

(200): badly done p. democracy gives you structurelessness; badly done organizing give you authoritarianism

conclusion

(203): purpose was to recuperate a rationale for doing participatory democracy

(204): again, a caricature of the Old Left that depends on her having ignored it

(205): participatory democracy had explicitly political impulses driving it

(207): again, the limits of friendship -- this is when participatory democracy stopped working!? [oh god save me]

(213): four conflicts that explain the decline of groups (problems of p. democratic groups, then, have been exogenous to the form of organization)

1. conflicting demands of making social change
2. orientation toward goals or process
3. tension between conventionality and innovation
4. behavioral limits on the social relationships on which activists have modeled their interactions [oh god]

(217): obstacles lie in "broader cultural conceptions" (as well as these conflicting demands, etc.). at certain prssure points in the 'associational relationships', these appear. [in other words, we have 'friendship' doing most of the work, with culture as an auxiliary. mighty fine book, this is.]

poulantzas, the problem of the capitalist state

(68): "Here I would advance, with all necessary precautions, the following thesis: the absence of a study of the State derived from the fact that the dominant conception of these Internationals was a deviation, economism, which is generally accompanied by an absence of revolutionary strategy and objectives—even when it takes a ‘leftist’ or Luxemburgist form. In effect, economism considers that other levels of social reality, including the State, are simple epiphenomena reducible to the economic ‘base’."

Has anyone considered the possibility that labor has been doing it all wrong? That rather than going after the Democrats all this time, they should have been going after the Republicans? The argument can be made that organized labor should have used that $400 million to buy off their enemies instead of using it to grease the palms of their nominal friends—friends who, alas, can’t (or won’t) get the job done.

sharon smith, "the 1930s"

(...) By 1932 it was estimated that 75 percent of the population was living in poverty, and fully one-third was unemployed. And in many places, Black unemployment rates were two, three, or even four times those of white workers.

(...) In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted workers the right to organize into unions in Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act, and workers rushed to join unions.

(...) By the 1930s, objective conditions were overripe for mass industrial unionism in the United States. Industrial productivity had risen by less than 10 percent between 1899 and 1914, but between 1920 and 1930 productivity increased by 7 percent each year. By 1926, the Ford Motor Company announced that 43 percent of its jobs required only one day’s training. Most importantly, the working class was no longer segregated along racial lines. The slowdown in immigration after 1914 brought with it a corresponding increase in internal migration. A half-million Southern Blacks moved north during World War I. By 1930, more than 25 percent of Black men were employed in industrial jobs, compared with only 7 percent in 1890. By the mid—1930s, Black workers made up 20 percent of the laborers and 6 percent of the operatives in the steel industry nationally. And one-fifth of the workforce in Chicago’s slaughterhouses was Black. White workers couldn’t hope to win unless they united with Black workers–and that wouldn’t happen unless they organized on the basis of equality.

(...) Moreover, Lewis had supported Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. He was woven of the same cloth as the rest of the AFL leadership. But unlike the others, he recognized that if the AFL didn’t open its doors to the unskilled, another rival union organization would develop and grow from the mass organizing drives which were already taking place. As Lewis’ biographer, Saul Alinsky, concluded, Lewis merely "read the revolutionary handwriting on the walls of American industry," when he pushed to organize an industrial union federation.

(...) When the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formally opened its doors as a section of the AFL in 1935, industrial workers flooded in. And those groups of workers who were already at the forefront of struggle, such as the auto and rubber workers, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO. In 1938, when the AFL finally expelled the CIO and its million members, the CIO changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and emerged as a rival union federation.

(...) As the level of working-class struggle grew, and the economy began to stabilize, big business began to desert Roosevelt. As Mike Davis argues, "It was this mass desertion of business from the administration in 1935 that drove a reluctant Roosevelt temporarily into the arms of Lewis and the CIO insurgents."27 Roosevelt needed the working class vote in order to win the 1936 election, and he shrewdly tailored his campaign to win the hearts and minds of workers. He put on quite a convincing show, declaring at one point during the campaign that if big business hated him, "I welcome their hatred," and if he were given the chance to serve a second term they will have "met their master." It was toward this end that in 1935 Roosevelt made two far-reaching concessions to workers.

(...) He pushed through the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), which finally made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain with unions. And he secured passage of a Social Security program, by which the U.S. government agreed to provide a minimal standard of living for the poorest families in society and for the elderly. These two concessions proved to be the biggest gains workers won from the government during the Depression decade–gains which earned Roosevelt his legendary status as a friend to the working class. But although Roosevelt promised workers that "we have only begun to fight," these were to be the last significant reforms he would grant to working class people.

(...) Although Roosevelt remained popular, many workers–especially those who were most active in building the new industrial unions–began to turn away from the Democratic Party as the Depression decade wore on. Indeed, Democratic politicians were proving in practice that they stood firmly on the side of the bosses, while the compassionate New Deal rhetoric went out the window as soon as the class struggle intensified. In 1935 alone, 20 state militias–most controlled by Democratic governors–were called out against strikers in 73 disputes. A 1937 Gallup poll showed that at least 21 percent of the population supported the formation of a national farmer-labor party as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

(...) [UAW 1935 Congress -- first no support for Roosevelt, then threat from leadership]

(...) Thus, despite the significant shift leftward in working class consciousness by the mid—1930s, the pressure to support Roosevelt was tremendous, even among many socialists. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party fell into step behind the New Deal coalition, its politics virtually indistinguishable from Roosevelt’s by that time. Many long-standing members of the Socialist Party as well succumbed to the pressure to campaign for Roosevelt in 1936.

(...) The Great Depression was the most significant period of class struggle that has ever taken place in the United States. The sheer intensity of the struggle led ever broader sections of the working class to become radicalized and to begin to generalize politically. For a very short period of time as the working class movement advanced–between 1935 and 1937–the level of radicalization was such that on a fairly large scale workers began to realize that if they were to have a chance at winning, they had to confront all the bosses’ attempts to divide and weaken the working-class movement. Workers had to break down racial barriers and build genuine unity and solidarity; they had to prepare themselves to confront the violence of the bosses, which grew in ferocity during this period; they had to fight against anti-communism; and they had to break with the Democrats and the Republicans and form an independent working-class party. Thus, the Depression decade marked the key turning point for the working class movement in the United States: For the first time, the potential existed to build a genuine mass revolutionary workers party. But such a revolutionary alternative would have required a forceful revolutionary leadership inside the working class movement. Instead, there was the Communist Party.

(...) There was one reason in particular why the Communist Party was the organization which played the decisive role in the labor movement of the 1930s: its comparatively large size. Even at the very beginning of the Depression, the Communist Party claimed a membership of 7,500, compared with the Communist League of America’s 131 members in 1931. At the end of 1938, the CP had grown to 82,000, while the membership of the Trotskyists, by then in the Socialist Workers Party, peaked at 2,500. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party continued its process of decline. Subsumed by inner turmoil as its right and left wings continued to do battle, SP membership actually declined in 1935–a pivotal year of growth for the class struggle. [oh but come on! this is not an 'exogenous' factor!!!]

(...) As American CP leader Earl Browder argued in the mid—1930s, "If one is not interested in directives from Moscow, that only means he is not interested in building socialism at all."

(...) But for all the weaknesses of the American Communist Party, its commitment to fighting racism was exemplary. In fact, the CP in the 1930s provides an extraordinary example for socialists on how to go about building a working-class movement that makes fighting racism an integral part of the class struggle. This was true despite the CP’s bizarre "Black Belt" theory. As part of Stalin’s left turn during the Third Period, he argued that the American CP should advocate "self-determination for the Black Belt." This meant calling for a separate Black republic in the Southern states, where a majority of Blacks still lived–even though no demand for such a republic had ever been raised by Blacks themselves. Perhaps for this reason, the Black Belt theory’s call for a Black republic had virtually no influence on the party’s practice, and was rarely even mentioned in its literature.

(...) All literature, whether communist or union, had to be secretly distributed–smuggled inside baskets of laundry by Black women posing as laundresses or at the local barbershop, where communists would drop in for a "trim" and pick up their leaflets. The communists issued their own leaflet in response to the Klan, which read, "KKK! The workers are watching you!" And in 1933, the CP held a demonstration in front of the Birmingham courthouse, which demanded that the KKK and other white supremacists be outlawed, and the right to vote without the racist restrictions that prevented a majority of Blacks from voting throughout the South.

(...) All over the U.S., communist youth circulated petitions against segregation in baseball and other sports, in a campaign which featured white and Black ball players calling for integration in sports. When communists traveled to Washington, D.C. for a demonstration to free the Scottsboro Boys, they stopped off on the way and sat in at restaurants that refused to serve Blacks–a tactic adopted decades later by the civil rights movement.

(...) By 1934 the party claimed 1,000 members in Birmingham, mostly Black. After three members of the Sharecroppers Union were shot and killed by police in 1932, 3,000 people marched in a funeral procession for six miles, following caskets that were draped in banners with the communist hammer and sickle, while 1,000 stood along the route in tribute.

(...) This meant that, after spending the previous seven years denouncing as social fascists not just Roosevelt and the Democrats, but also liberals and reform socialists, the CP was instructed to become virtually indistinguishable from them. And as the 1936 presidential election approached, the Popular Front meant that the CP was instructed to do everything in its power to help ensure Roosevelt’s victory. Communists were to become loyal–if uninvited–members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. [this is distinct, really, from Davis' explanation -- important, then, to think through the argument more carefully]

(...) As late as January 1935, the Daily Worker described Roosevelt as "the leading organizer and inspirer of fascism in this country." But by the end of 1936, the CP formally entered the Democratic Party. While it didn’t formally support Roosevelt in the election (voicing fear that open communist support might hurt his campaign), the CP made it clear that it hoped he would win.

(...) Some left-wing historians–those who wish to downplay the problems of Stalinism, along with those who wish to apologize for reformism–argue that the Popular Front was a major step forward for the CP, because it ended its self-imposed isolation of the Third Period. They point to the fact that the party more than tripled in size during the Popular Front period, from 26,000 members in 1934 to 82,000 members in 1938, as evidence of success. But that line of reasoning ignores the fact that the CP’s membership also tripled in size during the Third Period years between 1930 and 1934, when it grew from 7,500 to 26,000.

(...) The fact remains that from 1928 on, the CP never decided its strategy based upon what was needed to move the labor movement forward. Because it was tied to Stalin’s coattails, the American CP could not aim to build an independent revolutionary movement inside the working class–either during the Third Period or the Popular Front. In shifting from the Third Period to the Popular Front, the Party merely traded one disastrous policy for another, shifting from outlandish sectarianism to the adoption of equally outlandish patriotism.

(...) Because of the Popular Front, the communist shop floor leaders were instructed to help the CIO leadership in delivering the working-class vote to the Democrats. Despite the fact that many of the most militant workers were already willing to break with the Democratic Party in 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history. [if only -- not sure if this claim is tenable, though]

(...) During the course of the Flint sit-down strike, which began on December 30, 1936 and lasted until February 11, 1937, 140,000 out of a total of GM’s 150,000 production workers either sat down or went out on strike. But the strike’s importance was more than just economic. The attention of the entire nation was riveted on the Flint auto workers, as they took matters into their own hands and stood up to the bosses, the CIO leaders, the National Guard, and even Roosevelt–and won.

(...) The Flint victory had an impact nationally, raising working-class confidence still higher. By the end of 1937, nearly a half-million workers all over the U.S. had taken part in a sit-down strike. The number of all strikes more than doubled between 1936 and 1937, from 2,172 to 4,740, involving nearly two million workers overall.

(...) Outwardly, Lewis appeared to defend the communists from conservatives within the CIO. "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets," he told red-baiters. But privately Lewis made it quite clear that he was merely using the communists. He argued, "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" And later, once the union had finally gained a foothold in the steel industry and he no longer needed them, he fired all the communists from the union’s payroll.

(...) But the CP leaders’ newfound aversion to wildcat strikes did not immediately filter down to communists on the shop floor–many of whom continued to lead the wildcats and sitdowns which erupted during the course of 1937. Not only was confidence still rising among the rank and file, but that confidence enabled workers to begin to try and assert some control over the pace of production and other working conditions. [this is critical]

(...) [November Pontiac strike] The Communist Party finally broke the stalemate–by condemning a strike led by its own members, which it had publicly supported only days earlier. After an article appeared in the New York Times blaming the strike on the Communist Party, the CP leadership immediately switched sides, fearing it might alienate its New Deal allies. Earl Browder personally ordered the party’s Pontiac auto workers fraction to end the occupation.

(...) The Pontiac strike effectively marked the end of the CIO strike wave of the 1930s. The dynamic of class struggle is such that, if it does not continue to move forward, it very quickly begins to backslide. The monthly average of strikes fell by more than half between 1937—39, while the CIO added only 400,000 new members–compared with nearly 4 million in its first two years. By late 1937, recession had once again set in. Between August and November of 1937, the industrial production index dropped by 27 percent, once again throwing millions of workers into unemployment. Between November 1937 and January 1938, U.S. car production fell from 295,000 to 155,000. Employment in the auto industry dropped from 517,000 in 1937 to 305,000 in 1938.

(...) Once the 1936 presidential election was out of the way, Roosevelt was free to show his true class loyalties. Moreover, with a new war on the horizon, as Mike Davis argues, "FDR’s overriding desire to win support for an increasingly interventionist foreign policy, pre-empted further reform initiatives or new concessions to labor."93 As Roosevelt began his war buildup, he looked to reestablish his ties with big business. Thus, Roosevelt slashed relief and works programs for the poor and unemployed in 1938 and again in 1939, even though unemployment was rising sharply. And he made a pronounced turn against the labor movement, beginning in 1937.

(...) [thesis:] It was to be expected that Roosevelt would turn his back on workers, and that the CIO leadership would not lead a fight against Roosevelt. But by the time workers learned this bitter lesson, the greatest upsurge in U.S. working-class history was over. And the Communist Party had played a decisive role. The CP had an impact inside the labor movement which reached far beyond its own membership. Not only did the Communist Party have a substantial base among industrial workers, but by 1937, CP members held top leadership posts in 40 percent of CIO unions. There was a decisive missing element in the working-class movement of the 1930s: an organization of revolutionaries that was large enough to influence the course of the struggle. The Communist Party was large enough, but it had long ceased to be a revolutionary organization. So instead of leading workers toward revolution, the CP left thousands of workers without a way forward. Most workers who’d joined the CP during the course of the 1930s left by the end of the decade, undoubtedly confused and demoralized by the experience, with a grossly distorted vision of socialism. In the eyes of the most militant workers, the Communist Party discredited itself when it turned its back on the class struggle at its turning point in 1937. [too easy, one thinks]

stepan-norris and zeitlin, left out (2003)

Chapter One

(1): long 'Red Decade', early 30s to late 40s (bookended by 1933 and 1950, really)

(2): CIO originated in 1935, to 'organize the unorganized'-- broke, after charges of dual unionism, to become officially independent in November 1938

(3): by 1947, its international unions represented 80% of the country's industrial workers!

(4): Communists were best organized political group, within the CIO

(4-5): C Wright Mills as classic 'left' position on CP in unions--dictatorial, undemocratic, slavish to Moscow, etc.

(14-15): Communist Camp--stalwarts were UE, the ILWU, the MM; 'uncertain and shifting' were UAW, ACW, UPWA; anti-communist camp were USWA (especially powerful, of course), TWIA, URW.

(16): degeneration really begins in 1947 and 1948, they're arguing, as they are disoriented by Truman and the Marshall Plan, and their own failed and "uneven" support for Wallace in 1948

(17): in 1949-1950, when the CIO expelled 11 'communist-dominated' internationals, one estimate was that it lost up to a million members! (CIO's total memership in 1948, at its height, was 4.3 million). at their height, in 1946, they represented some 27% of the CIO's membership.

(20): key--the guiding thread of this book, then, is the importance of the 'intraclass struggle within the class struggle' [it is difficult, though, to speak about a 'relative autonomy'--for what is sometimes missing, I think, is the way in which the larger 'class struggle' redounds on this intraclass struggle. and, of course, the willingness to set this in the perspective of the longue duree. but these are only partial criticisms.]

(22-23): absolutely--their denials/ignorance of Stalin's terror, etc. should not obscure the critical democratic achievements of the rank-and-file of Communist trade unionists.

Chapter Two

(24-25): organizing 'The Rouge' in 1941--the last citadel to fall to the CIO

(26-30): key argument--Communists not in power, they're arguing, due to their 'organizational discipline'/monolithic activism, etc., but because of their actual, effective organizing. there is an element of contingency that we can admit, but we have to understand it as socially determined contingency--there are "indelible connections" between the 'insurgent practices' and whether a union was communist, or not.

(32): CIO, remember, is product of two phases of class struggle.

1. 1920s, industrial unionism against AFL craft
2. after early 1930s, in response to labor upsurge

(32-33): key--thus, we can think of 'four insurgent political practices'

1. earlier Red organizing
2. whether the union seceded from the AFL 'from below', or whether it was an officers' revolt
3. whether the union was organized independently, or whether it was done by a CIO organizing committee
4. whether it was formed through amalgamation, or as a unitary organization

(33): earlier phase of organizing was carried by the TUEL (within the AFL, boring holes) and then, in 1929, the TUUL (new industrial unions, outside the AFL), after the demise of the Wobblies

(37): key premise, which needs to be at the heart of our interrogation of their thesis--"objective conditions do not create organizations."

(38): argument--earlier Red organizing makes it more likely that the international is Communist

(40-41, 43): argument--same goes from workers' insurgency (UAW) vs. officers' revolt (SWOC)

(46): argument--same goes for amalgamation (UE) vs. unitary

(48-49): in sum--their theoretical model, quite useful table/diagram

(51-52): in sum--these four insurgent political practices increased the odds of Communist victory. BUT they are careful to warn against voluntarism, because all of this was made possible by the Great Depression. Men are not 'corks on a river', but a river exists nonetheless? [certainly, as phrased here, this theoretical tack is hardly objectionable]

Chapter Three

(54-57): key--Michels' iron law of oligarchy cannot, at all, take into account the intraclass struggles that took place--the fact that democratic unions existed, and that oligarghic unions existed. It is therefore totally ahistorical. [of course, there is a limit to which we want to push the notion of 'contingency', here, but as a rejoinder this is very important. but let's probe, here]

(59): three features of a democratic union

1. democratic constitution
2. institutionalized opposition
3. active membership

(66): constitution as a 'real reflection' of the internal political dynamics--as them, congealed

(69-82): argument--the four insurgent political practices and the likelihood of being democratic--amalgamation and secession from AFL had significant impact (but there all bound up with each other, don't forget, so there are indirect effects)

(85): diffuse vs. narrow ideology--Communism as former, business unionism as latter

(87-89): argument--Communist-leadership and democracy positively correlated (this holds even when you control for insurgent practices, factions, etc.--even though they recognize that this is not favorable, because each is implicated in the other)

(93): in sum--a theoretical model; quite useful, again.

(94): in sum--oligarchy and democracy as "alternative possible paths"; the outcome as contingent, not determined [again, I think this works as a rejoinder, but it would be hard to stand on its own, as an insight. surely there is some need to take a longer perspective (remember that we are looking at variation within the long 'Red decade')]

Chapter Four

(96): contrast between Fordist hierarchy and industrial democracy

(97): turning point for the UAW Local 600 was 1952, when Ford moved to 'de-centralize' (here they track the figures: 58,000 in 1941 voted for CIO (fraction had voted instead for AFL); had about 60,00 dues-paying members in the late 40's; decline begins in 1952.)

(99-102): the coupling of activism and socialism explains Local 600's rich political life, they argue. the 'insurgent practices' gave rise to a 'colossal overproduction' of experienced organizers.

(103-104): key--a contingent, strategic decision to build radical democracy in a diverse workforce--a "double-edged realm of possibility" [the implication being, of course, that the other strategy was also 'open'. but can this satisfy us? we want to give credit where credit is due; but we don't want to abandon explanation.]

(108-109): progressive militance at Rouge

(112): Reuthers' only answer to 'Stalinism' at Rouge, was 'bureaucratic force'

(113): argument--the left-wing units, at Rouge, were the most contentious/democratic

(114-115): argument--it was the Communists who were most tolerant of political opposition in the unions

Chapter Five

(121): Reuther and the 5-year contracts, in 1950--this "class accord" marked the end, as Davis argues. From 'struggle' to negotiation.

(124): Local 600 files a suit against Ford and the long contract.

(125): 'decentralization', then, was just as much a 'political' decision, as an economic one

(127-129): key--here, positioning themselves against 'functionalist' Marxist and pluralist understandings of the labor agreement, which unanimously see it as a harbinger of 'accord.' here, instead, they stress the diversity amongst agreements--and thus, the importance of not acceding to a notion of structural 'predetermination' [i have a question, though, about whether their interlocutors are speaking at cross-purposes--Gramsci is speaking of the 'trade union', whereas Burawoy seems to be speaking about 'collective bargaining'/labor agreement. but ultimately this isn't as important as the issue at hand--again, the spectre of overstatement]

(131): Walt Disney at the HUAC--trying to make a communist out of Mickey Mouse!

(133): key--here we get into dangerous territory; they want to talk about the 'hegemony of capital' as relational, dynamic, etc. of course--and to some extent what they have done is important. but within limits. and the critical thing, also, is to decide where we will place those limits. their framing suggests something much more loose than seems legitimate.

(133-134): three provisions of the contract

1. prerogatives of management--labor or management?
   
2. union's freedom of action--right to resist and ability to impose sanctions
3. methods for handling disputes--what kind of grievance procedure?

(139-141): six indexes for measuring prolabor vs. procapital tendencies

1. management prerogatives--management or labor?
   
2. right to strike
3. contract term--long or short?
   
4. trade-off provision
5. grievance procedure--shop floor, or not?

(141-142): key argument--they find a 'sharp' difference between the Communist-led international unions and the others. this is incompatible with the 'functionalist' argument. [yes. but is not incompatible with a larger claim about structural determination]

(144): we want to control, also, across the four time periods:

1. immediate pre-WWII years of the Great Depression
2. the WWII years
3. immediate postwar offensive of organized labor, coupled with right-wing resurgence in Congress and Taft-Hartley in 1947
4. advent of the Cold War, attacks on Communist-led unions

(147): repression of communists--in January 1948, the CIO board votes to endorse Truman--this marks the beginning of the end for Communists within the CIO, in a sense. by late 1949 they vote to expel unions who follow Communist line. By late 1950, 11 miscreant unions are thrown out. 1954 is the coup de grace, when communist-infiltrated unions can be deprived of rights under the NLRB.

(149): KEY--nonetheless, even taking into account the official CP line during WWII, and all this--communists were more militant. this is remarkable, and very important.

(152-153): key--why is this? because unionists' were, and had to be, accountable to their rank-and-file. so it was the leadership of the CP that shifted, but the rank-and-file couldn't move, with them.

(156): further controls don't remove this 'stark' effect

(158): KEY--functionalist arguments must ignore the mechanisms by which 'structrual determination' happens--this, they're arguing, is to do violence to the notion of 'sociohistorical' causality. [i accept this as a critical intervention, with my earlier reservations noted. very useful.]

Chapter Six

(160-161): what difference does democracy make? perception that autocratic unions are more 'efficient'.

(162-163): important--they are arguing that democracy, actually, is critical to the forging of a coherent 'class identity' (which will, in turn, be critical to union power).

(165): argument--democracy gives you prolabor contracts.

(174, 179-180): argument--UE best, UAW second, and USWA a distant third on prolabor measures and wages, too.

(184): important--trade unionism is not, unlike some arguments, inherently depoliticizing. if it were so, how could you explain the breadth of political consciousness across trade unions?

(187): the Communists were least well-paid of all the organizers

(187-188): key--analysis shows that union democracy makes a real difference in the daily lives of workers. the larger theoretical claim, here, is that political relations within classes (given objective limits and possibilities') are relatively autonomous determinants of the relations between classes. [again, everything rests on the limits--but insofar as we agree to this, i have no real issue with this way of framing things. in the FN, also, they are acknowledging that they have abstracted away from employer's resistance, etc.--all of which would be one way into the question of 'objective conditions' and the State]

Other

(210): argument--communists and democratic unions fought for women's rights, as well

(225): UE was reluctant to fight for blacks' rights, for fear of opening a second front

(227-228): Local 600 and a thoroughgoing commitment to interracial community

(231): the Left-wing was central to interracial solidarity

(234-235): for most of its two decades of existence, CIO was a tremendous force for interracial solidarity (though it was hardly monolithically good, in this regard)

(254-255): CP and the racial question--it is critical to distinguish between what the leaders were saying, and what the activists were doing (the latter were the most consistent and principled in fighting for the rights of black workers)

(256): Operation Dixie, 1946--faded soon after it started, precisely because the CIO leadership was anxious to ban political agitation. it fell in on itself, more-or-less, as a result.

(264-265): overtly anti-Communist phase in CIO history begins from 1946 (this is also the date that Truman begins the government's loyalty program, under pressure from right-wing Congress). After the defeat of Henry Wallace, these escalate (Wallace had held massive interracial meetings in the South)

Conclusion

(266-269): summary of the book's findings

(271): Harry Bridges on 1949 explusion of the UE

(273): key--the 'difference' it could have made, had the Communists cohered [the analytical trouble, though, is when you treat this, as is implied, as simple contingency. Davis' formulation is more attractive, for this reason--you want to be able to explain this. without losing the sense of possibility and contingency, certainly. there is also, here, little discussion of the CP's own follies--very different discussion of their support of Wallace, for example]

(274): after the purges, in 1950 AFL was twice the size of the CIO

(275): without the Reds, 'Jim-crowism' in the CIO

(276-277): CIO's self-immolation left it powerless as industry, then, relocated [but here we have the spectre of the structural--could a powerful CIO have stopped this slide? how do we make sense of 'capital''s dominance, while accepting a partially contingent reading of this conjuncture?]

(278-287): "The Great Purge" of American Working Life

(286): one out of every five working people was put through screening, required to take an oath

(287288): key--argument, here, is that repression did not determine the fate of the CP. it was their incapacity in the face of this repression; their inability come up with a new strategy. specifically, a "corrupted internationalism" from 1945-1956--here focusing on two things: (1) reverse backing of Roosevelt-Wallace to back a third party ticket for Wallace, that destroyed the 'center-left alliance'; (2) going back into the mainstream [after ten pages of documenting repression, this is odd. and more importantly, it is unclear that these were the strategic blunders. entirely inverts Davis' argument, to an extent--but he also dates the fall much earlier. ]

(293): why the CP did an about-face in December 1947 and supported Wallace as a third party candidate, when they knew it would split the CIO? [clearly they have started the narrative of decline far too late--but let's think about this more, viz-a-viz the Davis]

(294): Cominform founded in October 1947--"united fronts from below"

Epilogue

(309-316): the debate over the 'Third Trade Union Federation' -- Foster saying the CP must stay within the trade union movement, and not make the mistake of the late 20's (shift to TUEL, from TUUL). an 'exquisite irony', because there he listened to the Comintern; had he listened to the same advice, he would have pushed for the 3rd Federation. implication, in this book, is that there was support amongst the trade unionists; moreover, that the communists could only have worked within their own trade union (election in Local 600 very close, in 1951) [anyway--all this has the character of guesswork, as they admit. not much use in pursuing this, right now]

---

TUEL: 1922-1929
TUUL: 1929-1935

James Matles
John Lewis
Walter Reuther--comes to be UAW president in 1946; by 1947, he wins a majority of the executive board.

Though militants no longer have any known hideout in Swat, they are still able to strike fairly regularly through suicide bombings. An act of terror happens just when one starts experiencing normal life in Swat. Before the latest bombing, another suicide bomber had struck on Nov 30 last year killing the NWFP Assembly member Shamsher Ali Khan while the MPA was receiving well-wishers at his home on the occasion of Eid. Such occasional attacks cannot be discounted in future as a significant number of Taliban militants managed to escape during last year's military operation. Though many of them were subsequently captured and some were summarily put to death in custody, those still at large would prefer to fight on and attempt revenge against the security forces, the police and ruling politicians.

The Punjab is the only province, which witnessed budget deficit of Rs 25.496 billion, and contributed a lot in the overall fiscal deficit of the country that stays at 2.7 per cent. However, Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan experienced no deficit in the first six months of the current financial year, showing that they went in surplus. Sindh has gone in surplus of Rs4.747 billion, the NWFP Rs13.050 billion and Balochistan Rs14.534 billion.