Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (review)

If it seems odd to read a review of book reviews, bear with me; or, more accurately, bear with author Steve Early, who has organized and written on behalf of the North American labour movement for the past 35 years.

Early is a participatory journalist of the first rank: an individual with deep first-hand knowledge of the workers’ movement, and a thoughtful chronicler of people, ideas, and events. The 38 book review essays that comprise Embedded With Organized Labor represent Early’s continuing search for ways to build a movement that is truly run by and for workers, but that also commands the resources and organizational heft required to credibly challenge capital. Reviewing books about the workers’ movement allows Early to weigh in on vital debates and events, and to pose intriguing questions of his own.

Early is a graceful writer with a generous spirit. He is careful to acknowledge the strengths of people and positions he opposes and to confront in very frank terms the shortcomings of those he supports. He is able to argue passionately for principles (rank-and-file democracy, in particular) without letting readers forget that in messy real-world struggles, success frequently hinges on the support of powerful, well-resourced organizations. For example, when Early reviews an edited collection of rank-and-file activist Martin Glaberman’s writings, Punching Out (2002), as well as an edited collection of activist Stan Weir’s works, Singlejack Solidarity (2004), he hails the books as a “welcome antidote” to the technocratic, top-down style of union reform so in vogue today. Glaberman and Weir (both deceased) advocated anarcho-syndicalist-style workers’ councils during the 1930s through the 1960s, and Early contends the two would have dismissed today’s union reformers as “union centralizers trying to consolidate power in their own hands.” But when Alice Lynd and her husband Staughton Lynd (editor of Punching Out) propose their own similar strategy of decentralized, bottom-up union reform in their The New Rank and File (2000), Early takes quite a different tack. It is one thing to admire historic efforts to combat business unionism. It is quite another thing to suggest practical strategies for today, and Early takes the Lynds to task. He praises their book for reminding readers that union official-dom did not wake up one day progressive and enlightened, and somehow chose John Sweeney to head the afl-cio. As the Lynds show, Sweeney’s election and other promising changes in U.S. labour resulted from decades of difficult grass-roots organizing by radicals and progressives in neighbourhoods and work sites, large and small. But Early argues that the Lynds err badly in proposing a strategy for union reform based almost entirely on building horizontal networks among the union rank and file. This strategy, he says, writes off “all bids for organizational power above the local union (or even steward) level.” Had rank-and-file Teamsters adopted that strategy, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union would never have elected Ron Cary, who delivered the 1.4 million votes that put Sweeney in office. “Where is the roadmap for large-scale movement building?” Early asks.

Early chides leftist critics who insist that union reform movements must “challenge the fundamentals of capitalism.” Valuable political spaces have opened up for debate and rank-and-file activity because of Sweeney’s election and related changes in the top ranks of labour – changes brought about through mass campaigns that did not articulate an anti-capitalist message. But Early also faults an official history of the U.E. for failing to acknowledge the role communists played (and continue to play) in that union and in the larger labour movement. Early recognizes that the root problems facing workers and unions flow from the “multiplying crises of capitalism,” and he cites case after case of labour radicals who, fearing rejection and persecution, buried themselves and their quest for a just social order in the mundane...