An abridged version of this article, minus footnotes, appeared in Mute (UK) in February of this year.

“Capital is the moving contradiction, (in) that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth.”

Marx, Grundrisse1

This quote from the Grundrisse identifying the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, succinctly describes the situation on a world scale today: once again, as in 1914, capital requires, in order to survive as capital, a vast devalorization of all existing values, however great the destruction of human beings and means of production which that entails.

This has in fact been the situation since ca. 1970–73. Global capital has put off the day of reckoning, a full-blown deflation, by a vast pyramiding of debt—fictitious capital—and by a series of “countervailing tendencies” which have supported that debt while contracting social reproduction.

Two World Conjunctures Contrasted

Prior to looking at the specifics of the four decades since 1970–73, let us first sketch the broad shifts which have occurred. The post–World War II Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates anchored on the United States dollar had just collapsed. At that time, world accumulation was clearly divided into the three zones of

1. advanced capitalist (OECD) countries (the United States–Europe–Japan),
2. the “socialist” bloc (the Soviet Union, and Comecon), and
3. the “Third World” of “non-aligned” countries, with China as an outlier.

Both the “socialist” bloc and the Third World were deeply indebted to western banks, and would become more so in the course of the 1970s. The working class in the United States and western Europe was in the midst of its biggest strike wave since the immediate post–World War II period. Third World nationalism of the “Trikont” variety, promoted by countries such as Algeria and Cuba, was still a potent force, and would culminate in the mid-1970s in the United States defeat in Indochina, the independence of Portugal’s colonies in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, and pro-Soviet regimes in Somalia and Ethiopia on the Horn of Africa. The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had reached a new level in the 1976 Soweto riots. A new independence of the Third World was even echoed in the emergence of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) in the oil price surges of 1973 (and later 1979), however linked most OPEC nations were in reality to the United States and US financial markets.2 At the United Nations, a “Group of 77” of Third World countries aggressively attacked Western economic dominance. “Euro-communism” seemed to be on the march in France, Spain and Italy.3 The US-backed Shah of Iran aspired to be a regional power in the Middle East. Few in the West had yet heard of Islamic fundamentalism, either of the Shi’ite or Sunni variety, and few yet took seriously the “Four Tigers” in Asia (South Korea–Taiwan–Hong Kong–Singapore), still in the early phase of their industrial emergence. China, still largely autarchic and still in the last convulsive throes of the “Cultural Revolution” was a “quantité negligeable” in the world economy. France and Germany by the late 1970s were in the first stages of forming a single European currency to stop their whip-lashing by the fluctuations of the dollar. The southern cone of South America (Argentina-Chile-Brazil-Uruguay) was under vicious military dictatorships propped up by the United States.

Forty years later, and thirty-five years into the “neo-liberal” era, we see first of all the (relative) decline of the United States. The European Union, conceived as a counter-weight to American hegemony, is endangered by a meltdown of its single currency and, following that, by outright disintegration. In the United States (if not quite as much in Europe), strikes receded, until quite recently to near-invisibility.4 The Soviet bloc has collapsed, with only Poland and the Czech Republic having, to date, regained a precarious footing. The Third World has fragmented with the full emergence of the “four Tigers,”5 followed by the “flying geese” of aspiring tigers, currently led by “socialist” Vietnam.6 Islamic fundamentalism has swept aside Third World nationalism in much of the Arab world and in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The small populations of the oil-rich Gulf states and Saudi Arabia are in a class by themselves, but their large imported South Asian work force is a potential regional time bomb. One-third of the world’s population, in Africa7 and in parts of Latin America has been trapped in economic stagnation since 1980.

China, in the meantime, fully in synch with neo-liberal global restructuring and, in fact, a key to its success globally, as shall be shown, has become the manufacturing “workshop of the world,” in counter-point to the hollowing out of so many other countries. We will return to the practical implications of this for world revolution after analyzing in detail the “balance sheet” of the world austerity aimed at preserving fictitious values. Most of the past four decades have been a period of defeat and recomposition for the working class; in the following, we will (somewhat artificially) bracket class struggle while distilling the “economic” drift of the period, and conclude with a world strategic outlook.

Capital Hits Up Against Its Historical Limit a Second Time

Capital had inaugurated a comparable, extended period of devalorization once before, on the eve of the First World War, when the mere sharp collapse of paper values, the bankruptcy of weaker capitals, general price deflation and a period of extended unemployment for the working class to push down wages were no longer sufficient to achieve the necessary devalorization, as had been the case through the nineteenth century. Outright physical destruction of labor power—of workers—and of capital plant became part of the process whereby capital destroyed enough “value” to restart production at an adequate rate of profit. Between 1914 and 1945, two world wars, the 1920s period of brief reconstruction,8 the 1930s decade of depression, fascism and Stalinism were all part of the process which laid the foundations for the 1945–1970–73 postwar boom. The world process of devalorization,9 like all shakeouts before it (the decennial crises studied by Marx from 1817 to 1866 and the “long deflation” from 1873 to 1896) moved production and reproduction as a whole to a new “standard of value,” or what Marx refers to in Capital as a “revolution in value.” Each capitalist phase of boom and bust (from “peak to trough” as the jargon goes) constitutes a “manifold” based on such a new standard, an “apples to oranges” transformation in which a unit of socially necessary labor time is incommensurate with that of the preceding phase, or with the following one. The “cluster” of new modes of transportation in the mid-nineteenth century, from canals to railroads to steamships, was one such manifold; the new electronics, chemical and automotive technologies from the 1920s to the 1940s was another, or closer to our own time, the revolution in both communications and in the transport of commodities (maritime and airborne) since the 1970s.

By the late 1960s, the postwar boom had brought world capital to another moment in which the current cost of reproducing labor power could no longer serve as the systemic “numeraire,” the common denominator, for commodity exchange. Capital again, as in 1914 but more diffusely, entered a new period in which physical destruction on a world scale was a necessary part of the movement of devalorization and potential revalorization.

Every capitalist cycle of boom and bust produces fictitious capital as it is peaking: this consists of paper claims on surplus value which correspond to no actual surplus value from the immediate process of production or sources of loot from primitive accumulation. Rampant speculation aside, as occurred in particular in the past two decades (and also in the run-up to the 1973–1975 world downturn, the biggest of the postwar period up to that time,10 ) the initial source of fictitious capital is devalorized fixed capital in the immediate11 sphere of production itself. This devalorization results directly from one of the most vital aspects of capital: regular advances in the productivity of labor.

Capital Appears to Capitalists As Paper Titles to Profit, Interest and Rent

Capital, however, appears to capitalists not, as in the first two volumes of Marx’s book, as “value valorizing itself” but rather as paper titles to wealth, stocks (profit), bonds (interest) and the various claims on rent from land dealt with in volume 3. These are claims on future cash flow whose “value” is not immediately determined by the “price/value” conundrum discussed ad nauseam by readers fixated on the first section of volume 3, but by a capitalization of that cash flow relative to the generally available rate of profit.12 As this mass of hot air grows—fictitious relative to the actual surplus value available to valorize it—it is sustained temporarily by anti-deflationary actions of the central bank and by various “countervailing tendencies.”13 The mass of hot air circulates, like any other capital, until it can no longer be valorized through the classic M-C-M’ movement that defines capital.14 The ensuing bust collapses these titles to wealth, aligning them with the actual underlying available rate of profit, or even below it, in the initial phase of a new expansion. This is the phase we have been in since 2008. But what occurred in 2008 was merely the latest, acute phase, as indicated, of a long process of debt pyramiding concealing (or not, as it were) an extended period of contracted social reproduction on a world scale since the early 1970s, in contrast to the capitalist recovery from depression of 1945–1970–73.

Let us then look more closely at the history by which these fictitious titles to wealth took on the huge dimensions they had acquired by 2007–08, and which, five years into the crash, they still possess today. The contemporary reader can easily recognize such titles in the activities of hedge funds, as well as in derivatives, “securitized finance,” the worldwide “asset inflation” in stock markets and in private and commercial property values, “credit default swaps,” “collateral loan obligations,” the ballooning of the “FIRE” (finance–real estate–insurance) sector, not to mention the increase of US government debt from $10 to $15 trillion in four years, and comparable recent increases in the balance sheets of the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of China. The contracted social reproduction, under the weight of these paper claims, is most immediately visible on the streets of Greece, Italy and Spain, and the current 50 percent rate of unemployment on a world scale for those under the age of 25.

1970: End of the Postwar Boom

Few today remember the United States corporate liquidity crisis of 1969–70,15 or the 35 percent fall of the United States stock market in the same year, following on the “dollar crisis” of March 1968,16 or finally the sharp US recession that followed. But these events can arguably be seen as signaling the end of the post–World War II boom, and, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, the world system has been haunted ever since by the specter of the outright deflation underway today. This credit crunch and ensuing recession was followed by Richard Nixon’s August 1971 suspension of the gold convertibility of the United States dollar, and a series of other measures designed to lift the United States economy into an inflationary super-boom guaranteeing his re-election in 1972.17

The breaking of the link between the dollar, then as now the main world reserve currency, and the gold backing established at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, began the process of levitation of the then-existing fictitious capital bubble into the colossal proportions it has taken on today.

Simultaneous to (and related to) these events in world capital markets was the quadrupling of the world price of oil in 1972–1973.18

In 1973–74 as in 2008, the major capitalist governments reflated in classical Keynesian fashion, producing (in the former case) the “stagflation” of little growth plus much inflation, which by 1979 was running at 15 percent in the United States and higher in the United Kingdom. There were effectively negative interest rates in a period where creditors and all people on fixed incomes were punished and debtors rewarded.19 European countries and Japan were forced to import American inflation with their chronic balance-of-payments surpluses in trade with the United States. This period ended in 1979 with a second “oil crisis” most immediately associated with the Iranian Revolution, together with the coming to power of Thatcher in Britain and a year later of Reagan in the United States, while the United States Federal Reserve Bank under Paul Volcker ran up interest rates to 20 percent to stop a run on the dollar and (in order to do so) to choke off US inflation,20 which was achieved by an even deeper recession (1980–82) than that of the mid-seventies. World capital entered the “neo-liberal” era, and by 1985 Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterand, Gorbachev and Deng were in synch in turning their backs on the “social” dimensions of the state that had theretofore characterized the post-1945 era.

“Neo-Liberalism”

“Neo-liberalism” (in itself a term coined to divert attention from the word “capitalism”) had its origins far back in the postwar era,21 in the thought of the “Austrian” theorists Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and promoted in the Anglo-American world in another variant as “monetarism.” Though most potential readers of this text are all too familiar with the term and its ramifications, rehearsing the latter is still worthwhile to give a sense of neo-liberalism’s global impact, which is not yet exhausted today. While marginal in the first years of the crisis of the 1970s, except in southern South America (Chile, Argentina)22 neo-liberalism dominated the world for 30 years, and its run is not yet over. We might neatly define it as multiple means of destruction of V (variable capital) and C (constant capital)23 aimed a propping up the ever-growing fictitious bubble of hot air with sufficient S (surplus value). The backdrop to its rise was the post-1968 reversal of the trend to income equality in the West24 ; it dominated ideology during a period in which income inequality in the United States, at least, surpassed that of 1929, and the gap between the “rich” and “poor” countries grew far greater than it was in 1973.25 Neo-liberalism involved a war on the social, by which was meant the postwar welfare state and, in other contexts, “communism”; the privatization of state functions,26 usually for short-term looting purposes; the casualization and “flexibilization” of labor,27 often with “just in time” techniques originated in Japan; the serious de-industrialization of both the United States and the United Kingdom28 ; the great reduction of taxes on the wealthy in the name of “trickle down” economics; the vaunting of the “entrepreneurial” small firm (in many cases, self-exploitation of the formerly employed) and the ascendancy of “high tech”29 ; the reduction or outright dismantling of state regulation of banking and stock exchanges as well as of labor conditions, health and safety; the untrammeled outsourcing of production to cheaper labor markets; the dismantling of (some) tariffs and the promotion of regional, supra-national trade agreements at the expense of workers and peasants. In the United States, neo-liberalism was accompanied and promoted by the “culture wars,” in which issues such as abortion, sex education, contraception, religion and rejection of Darwin, eclipsed for many, including those most directly affected, “economic issues” in a general backlash against the 1960s and 1970s.

A critical opening volley in the new period was California’s 1978 Proposition 13, a populist tax revolt capping property taxes on housing, which dropped the national ranking of California public schools from No. 1 to No. 48 over the following 30 years. This was an early manifestation of the “opting out” of wealthy strata into low-tax enclaves with gates visible or invisible, enforced by the new mass industry of private “security.” The same wealthy strata drove ordinary working people from urban areas with worldwide gentrification. “Free market” neo-liberalism internationally was quickly challenged in the Latin American debt crisis of 1982 (Brazil and Mexico first of all), requiring massive intervention and debt restructuring by the United States government, and leading to IMF austerity programs in the dozens of countries weighed down since 1973 by the increased cost of oil imports.30 In 1980 the biggest employers in Brazil were steel and auto plants; by 2000 they were private security companies and McDonalds.31 Neo-liberalism involved the ramping up of Cold War II and increased military expenditure.32 It led to the Plaza Agreement of 1985, in which the United States forced a major revaluation on Japan and Germany (thus devaluing the large dollar holdings they had built up supporting the dollar and Volcker’s high interest rates after 1979). It continued and intensified the incarceration of the (racially-coded) “relative surplus population” in the United States, reaching 7 million people, or 3 percent of the population today.33 It led to the world stock market crash of 1987. Months before, Alan Greenspan had taken over the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB, or Fed) from Volcker, and during and after the crash inaugurated two decades of the “Greenspan put,” the assurance that massive credit infusion from the Fed would create a floor under any financial or stock market downturn. “Free market” “small state” neo-liberalism didn’t mind using the state to bail out its follies, something repeated on a far greater scale after 2007.34 It forced through (in the United States) “welfare reform,” requiring welfare recipients to take menial jobs at minimum wage instead of receiving a welfare check. It pioneered the junk-bond, “leveraged buyout”35 (LBO) era of the Ivan Boeskys and Michael Milkens, in which debt was piled onto corporations for tax purposes, thereby forcing them to asset strip and downsize to their core “cash cows,” after which the LBO artists then resold the company, paid off the debt and took a huge profit a few years later. It promoted the ideology of “shareholder value,” meaning that the short-term stock price trumped all other considerations in the management of firms, and showed the door to “old economy” long-term investment strategies and R&D. It deregulated the savings and loan (S&L) banks in the United States, leading to a real estate credit binge that ended by the late 1980s in $500 billion in losses, picked up by and added to the United States government debt.36 The “junk bond” era ended at the same time (though it was reborn as “private equity,” alive and well today). Between 1990 and 1993, in the “mild” US recession, housing prices fell dramatically and major financial institutions such as Citicorp, holding billions in uncollectible Third World debt,37 tottered, until their debts in turn, like those of the S&L fraud, were nationalized with little fanfare.

Clinton and a “Kinder, Gentler” Neo-Liberalism

By the early 1990s, the previous New Deal “liberalism” associated in the United States with a (very modest) Keynesian welfare state had been won over to the new mantra, and came to power with Bill Clinton in the wake of the 1990–1993 recession. He was followed by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Anthony Giddens in Britain in 1997, after the latter trio had cleansed the Labour Party of its gritty, proletarian trade-union image with their “Third Way” to market meltdown. Clinton was immediately informed by his cabinet, led by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (a former Goldman Sachs banker), of the paramount need to calm the bond markets38 by refraining from any socially-minded deficit spending. Clinton pushed through NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.39 His much-touted and labyrinthine health care reform, like Obama’s reform bill 15 years later, was designed to curb health care costs while still maintaining the prerogatives of the private health insurers and pharmaceutical companies,40 , and was dead on arrival in Congress. Clinton introduced a mild income tax increase, but hardly reversing the tax cuts of the previous 12 years.41 He pushed through “tough on crime” legislation to put one million new cops on the streets, his most direct contribution to expanding employment. On the eve of his 1992 election, as then–governor of Arkansas, he had overseen the execution of a mentally-retarded death row prisoner and later denounced Jesse Jackson to show he was no old-style liberal “soft on crime” or the death penalty. In 1996, on the eve of his re-election, he abolished “welfare as we know it,” pushing workfare and back-to-work initiatives, a cheap electoral ploy saving the government a few billions but consigning millions of single mothers to minimum wage jobs and long commutes, and millions of children to “latch-key” neglect. Starting in 1995, the Silicon Valley “high tech” bubble took off, along with general asset inflation. 1995 was also the year of the “reverse Plaza,” in which the dollar came off the floor against the German mark and the Japanese yen, to peak 10 years later.42 The Federal, state and local revenue from asset inflation produced a Federal surplus by 1996, and “surpluses as far as the eye could see” were projected well into the twenty-first century. The labor market tightened to levels not seen since the early 1960s. The IMF and the World Bank in those years were direct enforcers of US neo-liberal policy, in “structural adjustment” programs in 100 countries.

International Backdrop of Clinton’s Neo-Liberalism

One must, however, see the brief, “fine-tuned” Clinton conjuncture against its international backdrop. First, the Japanese “miracle” had come to an end in the stock market crash of 1989–1990, with the Nikkei index dropping from 38,000 to 10,000 and never recovering, beginning 20-plus years of much slower growth. This was the result of the Plaza Agreement, which had radically revalued the yen. Japanese capital went on a shopping spree, including in the United States but also in Southeast Asia.43 The high yen, however, hit Japanese exports hard, and lack of available outlets pushed funds into real estate speculation and other types of asset inflation, leading to the 1990 crash from which Japan has never fully recovered. Many of the Japanese investments in the United States went bad. The Japanese, in an atmosphere of constant Japan-bashing by American politicians, industry and some unions, were prohibited from making others. This was accompanied by battles over trade and tariffs, and Japan was pressured by the United States to ramp up military spending. All in all, the flow of Japanese capital into the United States was one factor easing credit conditions in 1990s.

The Clinton years also witnessed the bond market crisis of 1994 when the hawkish Fed back-footed bond dealers with several rapid interest rate increases, causing billions in losses.44 That year also saw the second Latin American debt crisis, beginning in Mexico and ricocheting through Latin American financial markets.45 Whereas the Clinton administration had claimed that the NAFTA free-trade agreement would be worth $50 billion in new annual export production in the United States, it was instead required to provide a $50 billion US government bailout for American holders of Mexican debt after the peso plummeted.

The Mexican crisis of 1994–95, however, paled in comparison to the Asian crisis of 1997–98. Whereas months before, the new Asian “tigers” had been touted as the success story of the 1980s and 1990s (including by blindsided American ideologues who imagined these highly statist economies to represent a triumph of the “free market”), what began in July 1997 as a run on the Thai currency snowballed into a panicked flight of short-term capital from precisely those countries who had responded to the neo-liberal siren song and liberalized their exchanges, and spared those countries (China, Malaysia, India) which had resisted it. By early 1998, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand were prostrate and under IMF control. To qualify for IMF and other loans, countries such as South Korea had to agree to massive layoffs of state employees, to scrap controls on foreign acquisitions of key industries, while Western vulture capitalists rushed in to buy them up at bargain-basement prices, a massive global leveraged buyout.46 Clinton ideologue Lawrence Summers, then Undersecretary of the United States Treasury, rushed to Asia to oversee this process, and stopped a Japanese attempt to form an Asian Monetary Fund to staunch the crisis in its tracks. Capital fleeing the collapsing Asian economies returned to the United States, again strengthening capital markets there.

In the eastern bloc, which had collapsed in 1989–1991, the Clinton administration backed draconian austerity. There was no “new Marshall Plan” (nor did the capital exist for one).47 The US backed the “democrat” Yeltsin to the hilt, after (in 1993) he bombed an elected parliament. The United States abetted the takeover of the Russian economy by the oligarchs, who were taking US and IMF money and stashing it abroad. Top US advisers oversaw the privatization of the Russian economy, which quickly culminated in its takeover by criminal elements, many of them former officers of the Soviet KGB.48 This looting of Russian industry and natural resources was momentarily interrupted by the 1998 collapse of the ruble. Throughout these years, more than half the Russian population was forced into poverty. By the late 1990s, living standards in some of the former Soviet Central Asian republics were at 30 percent of their previous levels.49

1998 also saw the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis of fall 1998. LTCM was a top hedge fund, founded and headed by Wall Street stars and having two Nobel Prize winning economists on its board of directors. LTCM as well was wrong-footed by the Russian default and the potential impact of its bankruptcy on world financial markets was estimated at $1.4 trillion. The New York Federal Reserve convened an emergency weekend meeting of the involved Wall Streets banks, who jointly provided a $13 billion bailout for damage control, as a small dress rehearsal for the events of 2007–08 and beyond.50

The Latin American, Asian and Russian financial crises rebounded onto the United States economy itself, which was in the midst of the stock market frenzy of 1995–2000 associated with the high-tech “dot.com” “New Economy.” Capital fleeing from collapsing markets abroad saw a haven in the rising US dollar (following the 1995 “reverse Plaza” agreement) and the ascent of the stock market into the stratosphere, totally out of synch with underlying profits.51 Federal, state and local governments were buoyed by tax revenue based on this fictitious asset inflation, and Clinton left office, just in time, more popular than when he was first elected. In spring 2000, the “New Economy” tanked in the dot.com meltdown. The NASDAQ (the stock exchange for high tech firms) fell from 5,000 to 2,000 and never recovered.

This was the era in which Wal-Mart replaced General Motors as the largest US employer, and the brief “Goldilocks” economy achieved in the United States, while crisis after crisis erupted abroad, is unthinkable without the “China price,” the ever-increasing low-cost exports, primarily from foreign firms operating in China,52 which kept consumer price inflation low during a tight labor market and soaring asset inflation in stocks and real estate.53

Since the 1970s, dozens of Third World economies have been devastated by neo-liberal IMF and World Bank–enforced policies that forced acceptance of cheap imports,54 as in NAFTA’s effect on the Mexican countryside, which also forced millions of rural Mexicans off the land and into migration to the United States, where they worked at minimum-wage (or less) jobs until the 2008 crash. NAFTA is also the little-noted backdrop to the rise of the Mexican drug cartels, who recruited thousands of these impoverished refugees from the countryside into wars that have killed over 50,000 people.

The post-1989–91 developments in the former Soviet bloc, once again, also fed into the brief halcyon days of the “New Economy.” The most important aspect was a whole new dimension of investment for Western capital, with cheap educated labor and attractive urban real estate (Prague, Budapest, Cracow, Riga) to be gentrified.

The people, particularly old people, of Eastern Europe and Russia underwent tremendous austerity and worse.55 There was massive emigration of educated youth to the west, as well as of whole new networks of criminality. Entire industrial regions were shut down or downsized as the oligarchs took the family jewels. There was the expense of the unification of Germany, which was allowed as a tradeoff for its integration into the European Union. The trillions of marks spent on reunification pushed German interest rates up, deepening recession in the rest of Western Europe.56 German capital surged into Eastern Europe as well, and French and German firms relocated to Poland. In Poland, old urban industrial areas outside Warsaw were devastated.57

Dot.com, Housing Bubbles Expand Fictitious Capital

The consequences of the 2000 dot.com crash were localized to some extent, though the “rational allocation of resources by free markets” resulted in the wiping out of $3 trillion in paper value, and 98 percent of all fiber optic cable laid during the euphoria would never be used. Just when George Bush Jr. seized power in fall 2000, everything was starting to turn down. Just as the first Iraq War had diverted attention from the deepening recession under Bush Sr., 9/11 did the same thing for Bush Jr. The United States went into recession from 2000 to 2003. This was the era of Enron58 and World.com, further fallout of the “New Economy.” The “dividend” from the high tech boom was over.

It was at this point that the housing bubble took over from the high tech bubble, promoted by the Fed as a new source of consumer spending. American workers with inadequate wages went deep into debt and began using their homes as collateral for more debt. “Securitized finance”—the packaging of income streams from mortgages and other assets and sold off to the unsuspecting with AAA ratings from obliging agencies—came into its own, culminating in the sub-prime mortgage frenzy, construction and housing sales of the last years of the boom.59 Until 2008 it was the era of the “maxed-out American consumer,” buying goods from Asia (increasingly from China). The resulting export boom in China prompted booms in all raw materials providers (Australia, Latin America, Africa). Millions of Mexicans, fleeing the post-1982 and then post-NAFTA devastation of the Mexican economy, as indicated, worked in US construction and meatpacking at minimum wage during the boom years. As is always the case in US expansions since the 1950s, dollars held abroad began piling up from the chronic US balance of payments deficit.60 The dollar turned down in 2005, going from $1 = €1.50 to $1 = €0.75 by 2008.

This basic triangle of Asian imports to the United States, drawing on raw materials from throughout the world and funded by increased domestic leveraging (as exemplified by the housing boom) in the United States and made possible by foreign lending, began to unravel in 2007.61 It was the final phase of the United States as the “consumer of last resort” supporting the rest of the world economy, in exchange for its ever-increasing foreign indebtedness,62 going back to at least the 1970s. This should not, however, distract attention from the deeper problem of structural crisis, the need for a massive devalorization of the 1914–45 variety (however different in specifics, which the entire history outlined here has attempted to sketch out). The “neo-liberal” era, as stated at the beginning, has amounted to four decades of pulverizing real living standards (V) and real fixed assets (C) on a world scale to shift value to surplus value (S), to prevent the massive “de-leveraging” whose possibility has haunted states since the early 1970s.

The Rise of China

The preceding overview would hardly be complete, to put it mildly, without some consideration of the rise of China.

Some skeptical analysts, stepping back from the euphoria around China’s undisputed emergence, have pointed to the parallels with the similar euphoria around “Japan as No. 1,” “Japan in the passing lane” of the 1980s. There are indeed important parallels: China’s amassing of $1.4 trillion in dollars from trade with the United States recycled into US Treasury bills; the constant skirmishing by US politicians about China’s supposedly overvalued currency; the flooding of the United States market with Chinese goods (as mentioned earlier); a huge buildup of unsold real estate, paralleling Japan’s 1980s real estate asset inflation; the “zombie banks,” carrying countless billions in non-performing loans to the state enterprise sector; China’s serious dependency on imports of food, oil and raw materials; the progressive aging of the population. While not as dramatic as Japan’s 75 percent stock market fall in 1990, the Chinese stock market has been drifting downward for the past four years.

In 1960 East Asia accounted for 5 percent of world GDP; today it accounts for 35 percent. Most of this growth took place in the post-1970–73 crisis period. How does this undeniable shift in world economic dynamism square with the broad analysis presented here, of forty years of crisis and devalorization? Although South Korea and Taiwan, two of the first “tigers,” emerged and still exist under the United States military umbrella, China has long since surpassed the United States as their major trading partner and, as also with Japan, as a target for investment. Forty years ago, most Latin American countries were under the tutelage of the United States; today, they are increasingly looking to China, much as some Third World countries played off east and west during the Cold War. China is feeling the pressure of even lower-cost production in Vietnam and Bangladesh, but its overseas investments63 and “soft loans” are offering some Third World countries, especially in Africa, a certain alternative to the rigors of the IMF and the World Bank.64

In the midst of this, and alongside its “G-2” relationship with the United States, China has established a special relationship with Germany, as a gateway to the EU.65 This meshes with a certain (classical) German geopolitical orientation to Russia and China, as a counterweight to US influence in Europe.66 German engineers and technicians are hired on a large scale by Chinese firms.67 German trade unionists fly to Beijing to advise the Chinese government on a facelift of its repressive, state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions. After its export model of growth hit a wall in 2008, China reflated, looking for a model of domestic consumption to replace it, and the German model of corporatism and a new integration of the working class may well fit the bill. Chinese think tanks study the rise of Germany as an “outlier” in the pre-1914 European balance of power, assuming that China occupies a similar position relative to the current US-dominated world system.68

But the analogy is false. Germany’s rise took place in the ascendant period of capitalism, and even then, it had to be absorbed into a “North Atlantic bourgeoisie” through two world wars. We return to this problematic after sketching out the 2007–08 crisis.

World Market Meltdown

Space obviously does not permit a full account of the crisis here, but we will attempt a general outline. The first salvo was the liquidation, in March 2007, of a major sub-prime lender, New Century. This was followed, in June, by the bankruptcy of two sub-prime funds belonging to the global investment bank and securities trading and brokerage firm, Bear Stearns. In that summer, the total derivatives and counter-party contracts outstanding were estimated at $400 trillion. In March 2008, Bear Stearns in turn had to be saved by J.P. Morgan. The “structured investment vehicles” (SIVs) by which the banks keep debts “off balance sheet” were imploding. As deflation accelerated, the price of oil fell from $147 to $107 a barrel. On September 7, the United States government had to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant quasi-governmental underwriters of mortgage debt. On September 14, the signature “credit event” of the crisis took place with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a 158-year old investment bank. An event of the same order took place in the United Kingdom with the near-collapse of another bank, Northern Rock. Merrill Lynch, still another venerable investment bank, had to be sold to the Bank of America. AIG, the colossal insurance company, which had ventured into the brave new world of derivatives, also had to be rescued. On September 28 and 29, the United States Congress, under intense pressure from government and financial circles, led by then–Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, agreed to a $700 billion bailout of the “toxic” assets of Wall Street. J.P. Morgan agreed to take over Washington Mutual Bank, after $46 billion were written off the latter’s balance sheet. Money markets were virtually frozen. The pension funds, heavily invested in Wall Street, had lost $2 trillion dollars in the previous fifteen months.

These were only the highlights of the eighteen months preceding the election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency at the beginning of November 2008. His government, which took power in January 2009, was highlighted by an economic team made up of former riff-raff from the Clinton era, including the Harvard economist Larry Summers and the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Tim Geithner. Obama brought the Wall Street CEOs to Washington and told them: “I’m the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” He lost no time is showing the role he would play in restoring, in all its integrity, the neo-liberal agenda, by a “light” regulation of the very institutions which had (apparently) caused the crisis, after a reflation of further hundreds of billions of dollars in keeping with the futile Keynesian stratagem of “pushing on a string.”

The events of 2007–2008, to date, were the culmination of the true trajectory of the “neo-liberal” agenda which took shape at the end of the 1970s. And yet, four years later, that agenda remains intact, barely concealed behind the flimsiest of ideological facelifts. The same government and central bank policies, on a colossal scale far beyond the first anti-deflationary actions in the late 1950s, are still in place, with the aim of preventing a deflation of the fictitious bubble generated by the real dynamic of S/(C+V).

China’s Ruling Class Rides the Reformist Tiger

We return to and conclude, then, with a brief analysis of the geopolitical confrontation of the twenty-first century: the United States, and secondarily the West as a whole, with China and the new Asian capitalism, a confrontation which has the same potential to unleash the permanent revolution “crossover” of 1848 and 1917 as theorized by Marx for 1848 and by Parvus-Trotsky for 1905–191769 : a working class revolution in the “mature” (in fact, overripe) capitalist heartland linking up with the emerging working class in the rising “peripheral,” “weak link” power: Germany in 1848, Russia in 1917, China in some (hopefully) not too distant future. The US-China imbroglio in East Asia is one in which we move from “economics” to the political in the critique of political economy.

Rose-tinted analyses of the “rise of Asia,” of the “shift of power from west to east,” overlook a few inconvenient realities. First, perhaps foremost, Japan succeeded in establishing itself as an industrial (and imperialist) power before the first mass devalorization period of 1914–1945, or the “decadent” phase of capitalism on a world scale. Its statist development after 1868 has been the model for all subsequent “tigers,” and now for China.70 While it has been an imperialist power in its own right since its 1895 military defeat of China, it has never since 1945 freed itself from the tutelage of the United States, and with the recent rise of China, still less so. South Korea and Taiwan are the sole former Third World countries to have crossed the threshold to mature industrial capitalism since 1914. They did so first, as Japanese colonies before 1945, bringing a certain industrialization and second, under US auspices since 1945, where agrarian reform, essential to industrial “takeoff,” was permitted and encouraged by the United States as a “showcase” counter-weight to North Korea and to China after the revolution in 1949 (the United States opposed serious agrarian reform virtually everywhere else in the Third World).

However embroiled in the Chinese economy today, neither Taiwan nor South Korea are in a position to escape from US political and military dominance; indeed, South Korea has just (September 2012) finalized a Free Trade Agreement with the United States which will do to Korean agriculture what NAFTA did to Mexico. The case of the “red hereditary monarchy” North Korea, which directly involves South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China, threatening the latter five countries with a reunification which none of them (for different reasons) want, constitutes, along with the unresolved status of Taiwan, two levers with which the United States can keep East Asia off balance. Finally, the depth of nationalism in East Asia, a problem Europe overcame, provisionally, through two world wars, to date precludes any serious regional economic integration that could pose a more unified threat to US dominance.

It is the timing of the crisis in the West in the 1970s with the takeoff of the “tigers” and then, after 1978, of China, which shows the tremendous growth in East Asia as an expression of one single world crisis. The flood of cheap consumer goods from Asia, first from South Korea and Taiwan, and then from China, softened the decline of V (variable capital) in the United States and Europe: wage austerity in the latter was partially compensated by cheapened production in the former.71 The needs of the Chinese state bureaucracy, exhausted by a decade of “Cultural Revolution,” meshed perfectly with the needs of a Western capitalism having exhausted the accumulation pattern, based on relative surplus value, of the postwar boom.

Let us then look more closely at how the dynamic of permanent revolution applies to China today. Is China today a “weak link” in world accumulation, in the way that Germany was in 1848 and Russia was in 1905–1917?

The theory of permanent revolution was first of all, as indicated, the problematic whereby the attempt of the bourgeoisie in an “emerging” country to undertake or complete the bourgeois revolution necessarily sets in motion the attempt of the working class to fight for its own demands, and ultimately for the socialist revolution. The completion of the bourgeois revolution in the full sense of the term is also the solution to the agrarian question, meaning the destruction of pre-capitalist social relationships in the countryside, land to the peasants, and ultimately, in the conditions of the real domination of capital, the radical reduction of the percentage of the population working in agriculture by the emergence of modernized agriculture, as occurred in the United States and Europe after World War II.72 This must be seen as a global problematic, with the world’s rural population having only recently dropped below 50 percent.

It is no secret that China, since 2008, is at crossroads, where its ruling class can no longer rule as before, and to survive must take the leap in the dark of a major reform and restructuring of the economy and with it, of society more generally. The export model, as sketched above, which served it so well for three decades, is broken, in the context of the world crisis. The legitimacy of the regime has depended on steady 8–10 percent annual growth and the jobs and rising incomes such growth provided, whatever the social costs in infernal working hours and conditions, and the environmental destruction, it entailed. The Western powers as well, through their NGOs and the Hong Kong–based labor scene, know quite as well as the regime that the latter must, if not exactly “change everything so everything can remain the same,” embark on a major gamble that can staunch the rising tide of opposition, above all represented by an increasingly militant working class, whose centrality to the social “equation” has now became a banality in mainstream opinion in China itself.73 (The American New Deal of the 1930s, not in programmatic content but as a template, was one example of such a gamble; Russia under Gorbachev was another such gamble, albeit one that failed.) One is reminded of Tocqueville’s remark that the most dangerous moment for an oppressive government is when it attempts to reform itself. Already the recent events in Wukan rank as an important, and apparently successful experiment74 in integrating deep democratic discontent into a reformed status quo.

Along with its unprecedented growth rates over three decades, China has developed a significant “middle class” which has till now been content to accept the “contract” of apolitical quietism in exchange for higher levels of consumption and upward mobility (however much such mobility is linked to a dog-eat-dog level of competition for jobs among the millions of technically trained students emerging from China’s universities every year). This “middle class” is the basis of a growing would-be “civil society” and a space of criticism through the new social media that the regime never before had to confront. Environmental disasters, corruption at every level, the regime’s attempts to finesse such high-level scandals as the fall of Bo Ji Lai or the 2011 wreck of China’s high speed train and subsequent attempts at cover-up, are all objects of the scrutiny and commentary of “netizens” which cannot be simply crushed or ignored, however much the older methods are still in use. As was the case in, for example, Egypt in 2011, this electronically savvy “middle class” can potentially play a role in any coming “regime change,” even if (as in Egypt) it can hardly come to power on its own.

This is where the dynamic of “permanent revolution” comes into play. The Chinese ruling class—apparently the entire new central committee of the CCP consists of billionaires—carefully studied the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The prospect of a Chinese “Solidarnosc” is widely held up as a model in the underground labor milieu (although only Solidarnosc of the early, 1980–81 period, with little consideration of what happened after 1989), and, in ruling circles, as a model to be avoided at all costs. The 1989 events in Tien An Minh more than anything alerted the regime to the fact that it was “riding the tiger.”75

Nevertheless, it confronts a dilemma not unlike the one which the Soviet and East European Stalinists failed to finesse: it wishes to complete the transition to full membership in the capitalist world market, but at the same time its own bureaucratic form of rule is the main obstacle to such a transition. It knows full well that it could be swept away in the torrent just as Gorbachev et al. were. Unlike the post-1985 Soviet Union, however, China for decades after 1978 could offer world capital a decently educated, skilled and very cheap work force, still very much in the process of moving from agriculture to industry and urban life.

A fundamental reason for the CCP’s dilemma is that many aspects of the old system are still in place. Shanghai may long to join, or even supplant, New York and London as a world financial center, but has none of the depth required to be one. The renminbi is nowhere near being able to play the role of an international reserve currency. Capital flows in and out of the country are still regulated, a regulation that served China well during the 1997–98 Asian meltdown, when countries (South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia) which had dispensed with capital controls were devastated while China was untouched. The state still can maintain the “zombie banks,” with huge balance sheets of uncollectible debt, by government fiat. Corruption is endemic and reaches the highest levels. The state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) must be converted to something along Western lines to retain credibility.76

The rise of China has been and will continue to be a useful alibi for Western and above all US capital as it goes into the next phase of the post-2008 crisis. Different eruptions of xenophobia and calls for protectionism from both government and union officials appear with every electoral cycle in the United States. Japan has claimed the Diaoyu Islands, setting off a wave of anti-Japanese riots in China; nine powers lay claims to potential oil discoveries under the South China Sea,77 and Vietnam has given the United States navy the use of Da Nang harbor, built by the United States during the Vietnam war. Even while the United States defense budget is eight times larger than that of the next ten powers combined, the Pentagon denounces every sign of increased Chinese military prowess, such as the recent launching of its first aircraft carrier. The announced American “pivot to Asia” is a further realignment of priorities.

Yet China, with 100,000-plus “incidents” a year of riots, land disputes between peasants and party officials, not to mention the impressive strikes of 2010, is a powder keg. The regime’s legitimacy ever since 1978 has rested on delivering 8–10 percent annual economic growth and the resulting jobs and rising incomes. It may attempt to implement an updated “German” corporatist model of free unions and enterprise committees, combined with increased domestic consumption to substitute for declining exports, but the obstacles and risks are great.

Meanwhile, the depth of the crisis in the West has, after decades of rollback, increasingly the proletariat in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and even the United States doing what “it is compelled to do” (Marx) by crisis conditions.

When this deepening ferment in the West meets a similar ferment in China, the linkups that failed in 1848 and 1917 (the latter being the turning point of history when history didn’t turn, as CLR James put it) may “turn the world upside down” far more than the “bourgeois revolution with red flags” of 1949 ever did.

• 1Grundrisse, 1973 ed., p. 706.
• 2On the recycling of petrodollars into US capital markets, cf. Michael Hudson, Global Fracture (1977).
• 3The Italian Communist Party received its all-time postwar electoral high in the 1976 elections there; the French Communist Party looked like a key partner to Francois Mitterand’s Socialist Party for the 1978 legislative elections; and the Spanish Communist Party played a key role in containing the Spanish working class in the post-Franco transition.
• 4This has been modified somewhat in the past year by the Longview (Washington) longshore struggle, the stalemated Verizon strike of summer 2011, the defeated Caterpillar strike and the recently-concluded (mid-September 2012) Chicago teachers strike. But for the 40-year period in question, 20 percent of American workers were involved in strikes or lockouts each year in the 1970s, and only 0.05 percent in 2009. Cf. my article “The Sky Is Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn: Class Struggle in the United States from 2008 to the Eve of Occupy” on Break Their Haughty Power.
• 5South Korea joined the OECD in 1996; Taiwan was restricted to “observer status,” under pressure from China.
• 6These also include Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
• 7Africa has 13 percent of the world’s population and 3 percent of world GDP.
• 8In key countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany unemployment rates never fell below 8 percent. At the same time, in both the United States and Germany, major firms engaged in capital-intensive rationalization.
• 9Which also included some important technological innovation in the 1920s and even in the 1930s in electronics, chemicals and automobile production.
• 10And subsequently surpassed in depth in 1980–1982 and since 2008.
• 11Note the “Hegelian” overtones of this use of “immediate” by Marx, namely unmediated. The “mediation” of the “results of the immediate process” is the task of volume 2 (circulation) and of volume 3, the division of surplus value into its visible capitalist forms of profit, interest and ground rent.
• 12“Capitalization” refers to the practice of valuing an asset based on the anticipated profit it will generate, with reference to a “floor,” usually (in recent decades) the current rate of interest on a US Treasury bill. If a $10,000 T-bill pays 2 percent, a $10,000 corporate bond paying 4 percent is “capitalized” at e.g., $12,000; a comparable bill paying 1 percent (or 0.1 percent, as is the case at this writing) is worth $9,000, and so on. When one considers this concept applied to a 100-year-old slum tenement, paid off decades ago and depreciated for tax purposes five times since, but still generating $1 million a year in rental income with minimal expenses for upkeep, the capitalized value and the “real” value can diverge far more widely.
• 13These include pushing the total wage below the cost of reproducing labor power; the incorporation of labor power from outside the core wage labor–capital relations, as in massive recruitment of petty producers from the countryside; the running down of fixed capital past its full depreciation period; and the looting of nature, as in environmental destruction, strip mining or depletion of soils through agricultural exploitation. All of these amount to “non-replacement” (non-reproduction) of either C (constant capital) or V (variable capital). See my “Fictitious Capital for Beginners: Imperialism, ‘Anti-Imperialism,’ and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg.”
• 14The movement M-C-M’ is based on the simple M-C-M movement of exchange described in the opening chapters of volume 1 of Capital; M-C-M’ is the money thrown into the valorization process by the individual capitalist, in which M’ returns as M expanded by contact with living, exploited labor power. These triadic movements further form the opening section of volume 2, in which Marx considers circulation from its point of departure of money capital, of production and of the commodity. Finally, in volume 3 we find the breakdown of the M-C-M’ movement in the heart of crisis, showing the “architecture” of the three volumes to be based on a phenomenology moving from the “simple cell” (the commodity) through to full-blown breakdown of accumulation. The truth is in the whole, the oak is the truth of the acorn (Hegel) and the simple commodity form already implies the breakdown of the system.
• 15This was marked by excess corporate debt (a postwar high of the “debt to equity ratio”), which came under intense pressure with the May 1970 collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, and ensuing near-bankruptcies of such major firms as Lockheed and Rolls Royce. See John Brooks, The Go-Go Years (1971).
• 16Trading in the dollar was suspended for several days at that time, as world foreign exchanges became concerned over the outflow of gold from the United States, undermining the whole foundation of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. “It was at this juncture [early 1970s–LG] where the United States state itself…jumped onto the bandwagon by fashioning Eurodollar market-based speculation against the inflating US dollar into de facto US government policy. The rapid upward spiking of Eurodollar loans…is indicative of …real capital investment dearth in the moribund US production-centered economy.” Richard Westra, The Evil Axis of Finance: The U.S.-Japan-China Stranglehold on the Global Future (2012), p. 99.
• 17This severing of the world reserve currency from any relationship to gold opened the way for all the subsequent “new financial products” invented by the global banking system, especially after 1980.
• 18The real basis of this increase is controversial; some explain it by the classical operation of the laws of ground rent (either Ricardian or Marxist); others (cf. S. Artesian in Insurgent Notes No. 3 and No. 4) disagree. Be that as it may, the effect on world financial markets was neutralized by agreements of the major exporters in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to recycle their “petrodollars” back into the Western financial system (Michael Hudson, Global Fracture, 1977), primarily in New York and in US government paper (Treasury Bills), as well as direct investment in the Western economies. The effect on most countries, particularly those in the Third World, was not neutralized, resulting in an exponential increase in their foreign indebtedness through the 1970s and 1980s, and in the subsequent IMF and World Bank enforced austerity programs. Meanwhile, the OPEC countries acquired billions of dollars of state-of-the-art weaponry, primarily from the United States. Hudson’s book describes both the arrangement between the United States government and the main oil producers to recycle “petrodollars” in US capital markets, but also the large-scale acquisition of weaponry and some Western assets by OPEC governments.
• 19The US stock market from 1966 to 1982 produced a net zero rate of return after inflation is taken into account.
• 20The huge interest payments on US government paper and the similarly huge deficits of the Reagan years were made possible by massive loans from Japan (cf. R. Taggart Murphy, The Weight of the Yen, 1996).
• 21The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1948 by these die-hard anti-Keynesians, who were in the wilderness until the 1970s “stagflation” era, as well as military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, gave them their moment. For these “anti-statists,” some states are not as bad as others, a proclivity they had already shown in their 1930s preference for fascism over “communism.”
• 22Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were the laboratories for neo-liberal policies, under extreme military dictatorships. In Chile, the “Chicago boys” had been preparing for their moment since the mid-1950s, in collaboration with a small Catholic university in Santiago. See T. Moulian, Chile actual: anatomía de un mito (1997).
• 23Michael Perelman, The Pathology of the United States Economy Revisited (2002) not only provides extensive material on the decline of infrastructure in the United States economy (pp. 80–91) but also shows how the dominant neo-classical paradigm is blind to the very question of material reproduction: “Keynes must have known that depreciation charges cover the vast majority of all investment… Still, he generally assumed that capital replacement occurs automatically when a capital good reaches a certain age… You might wonder why anyone should care about the distinction between replacement investment and investment in general. In fact, inadequate replacement investment was one of the keys to the decline of the United States economy in during the late 1960s and early 1970s,” p. 114. “[A]ccurate data on the scrapping and upgrading of installed plant and capital do not exist… Over time, more and more capital goods ceased to be very productive, falling into the category of phantom capacity… [In the postwar boom], management gave little indication that it had much of an inclination to maintain a healthy capital stock,” ibid., pp. 134–135.
• 24From 1945 to 1968, the gap between the richest and poorest fifth of the populations of OECD countries steadily declined; after 1968, it reversed itself and became greater than prior to the 1930s depression.
• 25This gap should not obscure the “grey” reality of greatly increased poverty in the “rich” countries and the existence of an important, wealthy “globalized” group in the “poor” countries, as in the cases of China, India, Mexico or Brazil.
• 26With the mantra that “market forces” are always superior to the “state,” these privatizations almost invariably tended to make services more expensive, often followed by bankruptcy and their simple disappearance. Sometimes there was a “public-private” collaboration, as in, one example among thousands, the recent case of a Virginia judge whose juvenile court sentenced thousands of teenagers, usually with the most rapid sham trial for the most trivial offense, to a private prison which charged their families serious money for incarceration, and which paid the judge generous kickbacks. In the United States invasion of Iraq, thousands of private “consultants” in such burgeoning fields as “security” were performing tasks previously done by military personnel.
• 27On the psychological damage wrought by this casualization, cf. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998); though deeply flawed, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) is an arresting presentation of the many forms of enforced solitude in the new organization of labor and society.
• 28Answering skeptics about US de-industrialization, Michael Perelman writes: “the government data are misleading because they overstate the share of manufacturing in the aggregate economy, because they fail to account for the imports used in production… the government merely tallies the final output of the manufacturing sector,” Perelman, op. cit., p. 173. The United Kingdom went from having 25 percent of international trade in 1952 to 2.9 percent in 2012. Cf. Nicholas Comfort,Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost, 1952–2012 (2012). For one excellent case study of de-industrialization and its impact, cf. David Ranney’s study of Chicago, Global Decisions, Local Collisions (2003).
• 29Tom Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (2000), shows (among other things) the ideological origins of this new constellation in the American counter-culture of the 1960s, as part of the “revolutionary” revolt against “bureaucracy.”
• 30“[The] rise in interest rates savaged third world economies with output dropping to such an extent that it would not be until 1996 that third world output as a whole approached the level it had attained in 1979,” Westra, op. cit., p. 88.
• 31Between 1980 and 2002, the third world remitted $4.6 trillion to financial institutions based in the advanced OECD states. “[This] ensured that they would never again be able to attempt full-scale industrialization…and would stay the IMF/WB (World Bank) course since debts forever compound, eliminating possibility of repayment,” Westra, op. cit., p. 100. “Thus, in manufacturing, [TW countries] are rendered little more than cogs in globally dispersed and fragmented value chains,” ibid., p. 104.
• 32Hazy historical memory and America-centric Cold War triumphalism attribute the collapse of the Soviet bloc to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s vast rearmament. In fact, the Soviet bloc had been sinking into stagnation and torpor since the 1970s; Emmanuel Todd, in his 1976 La chute finale: essai sur la decomposition du sphere sovietique, had already pointed out that birth rates in Russia, the empire’s heartland, had turned negative. Gorbachev, for his part, claimed after his fall that it was the Polish workers’ uprising of 1980–81 that convinced him that the system as it existed was finished.
• 33Either in prison or awaiting trial or on parole. Cf. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America (1999).
• 34“Small state” neo-liberalism also had its finest moment in international trade and tariffs with the so-called Doha Round (2001–2011). Where the “Washington Consensus” had been all too happy to force weaker countries to drop their protection of local industry and agriculture, the Doha Round failed (in 2011) because of the refusal of Western countries, led by the United States, to lower tariffs protecting their own domestic industries and agriculture.
• 35The leveraged buyout strategy (LBO) took advantage of an old (1909) corporate tax law which made stock dividends subject to income tax but interest payments on corporate debt tax deductible. Hence the LBO artists were able to shift corporate balance sheets from equity (stock) to debt, claiming a nice tax deduction in the process. Cf. George Anders, Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business (1992) and Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball (1988).
• 36“Because of the vast sums of money that the bailout consumed, the government curtailed spending on health, education and infrastructure,” Perelman, op. cit., p. 148.
• 37According to the World Bank’s Global Financial Development (2012), Third World debt today totals $4 trillion. It has receded from the headlines primarily because, in 90 or 100 national cases, it has been “rationalized” with the principal written off as uncollectible, and the country in thrall to interest-only payments stretching far into the future.
• 38Rubin was a spokesman par excellence for the ascendancy of finance over production in the “New Economy”: Douglas Dowd points out “Corporate profits were more than ten times as high as net interest in 1949; more than five times in 1959; more than two-and-a-half times in 1969; a quarter more in 1979; in 1989 and since corporate profits have been less than net interest,” quoted in Perelman, op. cit., p. 151. “[Christoper Niggle] notes that the ratio of the book value of financial institutions to the GNP of the United States was 78.4 in 1960… By 1984, it had reached 107.4,” ibid., p. 158.
• 39A muckraking account of Clinton’s strong-arm campaign to force through NAFTA is in John MacArthur, The Selling of “Free Trade” (2000). NAFTA more than anything was an abolition of prior Mexican restrictions on capital flows and imports, and quickly threw millions of Mexicans into unemployment.
• 40Health care costs in the United States, then as now, are higher than in any comparable country, and still leave 45 million people uninsured. Estimates of the additional cost of the “take” of private insurers (HMOs, Health Management Organizations) are on the order of 20–30 percent of total cost, which amounts to 14 percent of “GDP.” Obama’s “Affordable Healthcare Act” legally requires the uninsured to purchase private health care costing more than $1,000 per month for a family of four, or face stiff fines. George Bush Jr. had preceded this gift to the HMOs with a $500 billion gift to the pharmaceutical companies in his loudly-touted subsidies to seniors for their medication. Less touted were the cost-plus prices for these drugs established on a “no bid” basis, as well as other legislation and government action forbidding states to buy cheaper drugs in Canada.
• 41The tax rate on the wealthiest income strata in the United States into the late 1970s was 52 percent; today it is 25 percent.
• 42This “see-saw” of the dollar has followed the business cycle going back to the 1950s; it amounts to the tossing of the bubble of hot air back and forth between the United States and its creditors. The dollar crisis began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system; after the end of Bretton Woods in 1971–73, the dollar declined against the yen and European currencies. The US balance of payments has been at zero or in surplus only in a few years coming out of recession. As soon as “recovery” kicks in (1975, 1983, 1994, 2003) it goes negative and dollars resume accumulating abroad. It is one manifestation of the “seignorage” privilege of the world reserve currency; the United States alone prints the currency in which its massive foreign debts are denominated, and as in the 1970s (with Germany and Japan) or with Japan (1985) or potentially today with the Asian central banks, led by China, depreciates those debts representing billions of exports to the United States. As Richard Westra puts it, “[The] main villains of the Asian Crisis were really the United States itself… By the mid-1990s bloating US current account deficits and private sector borrowing requirements desperately needed monies that were flowing into a Japan-centered economic growth pole… Through the G-7, then, the United States sought to correct ‘misalignments’ of major currencies vis a vis the dollar which Treasury Secretary Rubin deemed were not reflective of purportedly strong US economic ‘fundamentals.’ [We] can concur with Michael Burke that no account of the purported US new economic ‘boom’ can do justice to the question in absence of consideration of the Asian Crisis,” op. cit., pp. 132–134.
• 43“Japan’s net foreign assets rose from 10 to 30 percent of GDP between 1990 and 1998… in 1997 and 1998 Japan’s external position of $958 billion and $1.153 trillion respectively is a virtual mirror image of that of the United States, -$1.066 trillion and -$1.537 trillion respectively,” Westra, op. cit., p. 128.
• 44The bond market reflects the process of “capitalization” described earlier. When general interest rates rise, they immediately lower the value of all bonds paying less than the going rate of interest. The 1994 rate rise left bond dealers, who earn their commissions with a constant turnover, with large portfolios of such devalued bonds.
• 45After Brazil’s “lost decade” following the 1982 debt crisis, it suffered a second lost decade in the 1990s. Cf. I. Lesbaupin (coordinator), O Desmonte da Nacao: Balanco do Governo FHC (1999). As elsewhere, neo-liberal policies in Brazil included further upward transfer of wealth in what was already one of the world’s most unequal societies, the fracturing of social security and health care, and large-scale sell-off of public assets at bargain-basement prices. In Mexico, “the 30 years 1982–2012 are a single unity, made possible by the alliance between the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PAN (Partido de la Alianza Nacional). This includes selective and massive repression, the disappearance of people, electoral fraud, the change of generation with the arrival of young people with no future who have adapted to a degraded situation, the reorganization of school curriculum eliminating historical consciousness (even in its bourgeois, constitutionalist, liberal, national forms),” “Letter from Mexico City,” in Insurgent Notes No. 7, October 2012. Following the 1982 debt crisis, the living standards of Mexican workers and peasants fell by 50 percent; following the 1994–95 crisis, they fell by another 50 percent. “The reduction of the wages of Mexican workers was achieved at the same time as the Pinochet regime, with the sole aim of making Mexico into an international maquiladora center,” ibid.
• 46One account among many is Donald Kirk, Korean Crisis: Unraveling of the Miracle in the IMF Era (1999). Under IMF bailout conditions, all candidates for the Korean presidency in December 1997 had to sign off on their commitment to honor the IMF austerity package.
• 47Even a Cold Warrior of impeccable credentials such as Richard Nixon denounced the West’s miserly, vengeful treatment of prostrate Russia after its collapse.
• 48On this, see the article “The Harvard Boys Do Russia.” The author later wrote a book-length treatment of this Ivy League/US government/Wall Street looting condominum: Janine R Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (2001). Another member of the “best and the brightest” was French Mitterand ideologue Jacques Attali, who in 1991 helped found the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), ostensibly to finance the Russian transition, and later resigned under a cloud of scandal.
• 49In the 2006 report The World Economy (2 volumes, 2006), of the very official OECD’s Development Center Studies, we learn (p. 25) that as of 1998, in Eastern Europe and Russia taken as a whole, there had a 25 percent fall since 1973. Unemployment (p. 133) in western Europe in 1994–98 averaged 11 percent, higher than that of the 1930s.
• 50See Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (2000).
• 51Westra, op. cit., p. 81: “[At] bottom, globalization is simply a sexed up term for the United States transubstantiation into a global economy; a global economy where the United States parlays dollar seignorage into a Wall Street-dominated international financial axis through which it then shapes the world’s material goods production on which it is dependent.”
• 52Cf. the essay of M. Hart-Landsberg et al., “China and the Dynamics of Transnational Accumulation,” in M. Hart-Landsberg et al., Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy (2007). “[In] 2004, China and the United States accounted for almost half of the world’s growth… In 2002, China became the largest recipient of FDI in the world… China’s economic growth has been increasingly dependent on the export activity of these transnational corporations,” pp. 116–17.
• 53Cf. Westra, op. cit., p. 85: Wal-Mart was “the number one single US employer with 1.3 million workers…by 2003. Wal-Mart sales that year were $256 billion… it wielded a network of 60,000 suppliers in over 55 countries. It is estimated that Wal-Mart brought low price savings to US consumers from 1985 to 2007 to the tune of $287 billion!”
• 54In The World Economy, op. cit., we learn, p. 25, that as of 1998, in 168 countries totaling one-third of the world’s population, there has been no economic advance since 1980.
• 55From 1985 to 1998, Russia suffered the worst demographic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, during which life expectancy fell one year per year from 65 to 52.
• 56Unemployment, p. 133, in western Europe in 1994–1998 averaged 11 percent, higher than that of the 1930s, and had averaged 8–10 percent through the ’80s and ’90s as a whole.
• 57Cf. David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (2005) for a portrait of some of these cities, which had provided the shock troops for Solidarnosc in 1980–81, after which the aspiring globalized yuppie class reaped the benefits, both in Poland and as expatriates.
• 58Among many books on Enron, the paradigmatic corporate Ponzi scheme of the Goldilocks “New Economy,” cf. B. McLean, P. Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003). Enron perfected the art of concealing debts “off balance sheet” while reporting inflated fictitious profits to boost the company’s stock, which the top executives then secretly sold at their peak, inflicting billions in losses on shareholders, including Enron’s own employees, who received a significant part of their compensation in Enron shares.
• 59Cf. B. McLean, J. Nocera, All the Devils Are Here (2010) for material on the sub-prime phenomenon. The expansion of housing in turn fed expansions in furniture and household appliances; it was estimated as the boom peaked that these sectors in concert accounted for 50 percent of all economic activity in the United States, financed by foreign capital (above all European banks), which in turn was caught in the downdraft when the bust began.
• 60The US Federal debt went from $1 trillion to $4 trillion between 1980 and 2000; the United States, which had been a global creditor since World War I became a net international debtor in 1984; this net indebtedness (dollars held abroad minus US overseas assets) is currently estimated at $5 trillion.
• 61Westra, op. cit., p. 19: “prior to the recent meltdown the United States coveted approximately 70 per cent of all international financial flows to finance its deficit which constitutes over 1.5 percent of total global GDP.”
• 62It should however be pointed out that some of the foreign exporters to the United States were themselves US corporations, thereby blurring the picture somewhat. But more than 50 percent of foreign direct investment in China comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan. The presence of some US corporations did not affect the volatility of the total “dollar overhang,” recycled into the financing of the United States government debt and its ability to further expand domestic credit. As mentioned above, the United States had in the 1970s (with Germany and Japan) and in the 1980s (with Japan) unilaterally devalued those foreign holdings; the possibility of a third devaluation of the $4 trillion held by China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan was a major concern of the latter until the post-2008 revival of the “haven” status of the dollar put that concern on hold. According to Westra, op. cit., p. 72, in the postwar expansion up to the early 1970s, “The ‘selling’ of goods by affiliates of US NF (non-financial) MNC’s (Multi-National Corporations) back to their home companies in the United States accounted for one-third of US imports.” This did not save Japan from the 40 percent revaluation of its imports to the United States following the 1971–73 breakdown of Bretton Woods.
• 63Chinese overseas investments prioritize access to raw materials, as in Canada (Financial Times, October 11, 2012), South Sudanese oil (FT, February 21, 2012) and Australia (FT, June 25, 2012); the Chinese Development Bank lent Venezuela $20 billion in 2010 to secure oil shipments (FT, September 24, 2012). Chinese construction firms build in Africa and Asia, and increasingly look to the EU and US markets (FT, September 14, 2011); the infrastructure company Sinohydro has projects underway in 55 countries in Africa and South America (FT, January 4, 2012) and is moving into Europe (FT, January 21–22, 2012) as for example into UK utilities (FT, July 18, 2011); the agribusiness company Cofco bought the Chateau Viaud vineyard in France (FT February 5–6, 2012); Chinese banks have lent $75 billion to Latin America since 2005 (FT, February 16, 2012); Chinese exporters have tripled their market share in Africa since 2002 (FT, March 27, 2012); China’s trade with Africa was $150 billion in 2011, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese unemployed are setting up as traders there (FT, May 8, 2012); it is increasing investment in eastern Europe (FT, May 18, 2012); the State Administration for Foreign Exchange has $300 billion to invest, with a “determination to diversify its investments, especially away from US government debt and the dollar” (FT, June 12, 2012). Last but not least, Chinese acquisitions of US assets have already totaled $8 billion in 2012 (FT, August 23, 2012) and the Chinese Development Bank has $985 billion in assets and operations in 130 countries (FT, August 24, 2012).
• 64This move into Africa is not without its critics, such as South African president Jacob Zuma, who said in July (FT, July 20, 2012) that “Africa’s past economic experience with Europe dictates a need to be cautious…” after China announced $20 billion in loans to the continent.
• 65See FT, May 15, 2012.
• 66Germany in 1922 had already established the Rapallo treaty with the Soviet Union to break out of the isolation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles; Willy Brandt’s early 1970s “Ostpolitik” moved (more mildly) in the same direction; Gerhard Schroeder, SPD Chancellor from 1999 to 2005, cultivated close ties with Putin to assure a steady flow of natural gas.
• 67FT, June 14, 2012.
• 68FT, April 13–14, 2010.
• 69Marx uses the term “permanent revolution” in the 1850 Address to the Communist League. The term refers to the role of the working class in a country where the national bourgeoisie (Germany in 1848, Russia in 1905 and 1917) is too weak to fight the ancien regime without enlisting the support of the working class, the “Fourth Estate.” Hence the possibility of the working class going beyond the confines of bourgeois demands and making the revolution “permanent.” Trotsky and Parvus deepened the theory in applying it to Russia, well before Trotsky proclaimed himself a Bolshevik in 1917; in my view, it constitutes his most important contribution to Marxism and can be separated from his later Bolshevism, particularly since prior to 1905 he had already uncannily foreseen the authoritarian trajectory of Bolshevism in his prescient and little-read critiques of Lenin in Report of the Siberian Delegation (1903) and Our Tasks (1904).
• 70See my text on Asian capitalist development 1868–1930 on Break Their Haughty Power.
• 71This convergence is most concisely stated in the excellent book of Bruno Astarian, Luttes de classes dans la Chine des reformes, 1978–2009 (2009), especially pp. 147–152.
• 72See my pamphlet Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today. The US population directly engaged in agriculture by the 1960s was 3–4 percent of the active population; western Europe and Japan emptied their countrysides slightly later.
• 73Already in 2003, the United States State Department and the AFL-CIO held a conference in Washington on the future of Chinese labor, naturally attended by various Chinese candidates for a future role of “Lech Walesa,” such as Han Dongfang.
• 74In the village of Wukan, what began in September 2011 as a typical “incident” over a land grab by party official evolved into an armed standoff with 1,000 armed personnel surrounding and blockading the village, in a permanent uproar after one of the delegates of the movement died in police custody. Finally, the CCP authorized a special democratic election of local officials, hoping to gradually wear down the movement and co-opt it as a one-off experiment.
• 75Tien An Minh, further, was anything but a mere “student” uprising, with street fighting and the destruction of tanks throughout the capital, as well as confrontations in other parts of the country. It is well known that the “students”—the children of the party elite—were allowed to leave the square before the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the increasingly working-class crowd that had joined the demonstration.
• 76In early February of this year, a step was taken in this direction with the decision to allow the 1.2 million workers of the Taiwanese giant FoxConn to elect their own union representatives.
• 77These countries include Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and China.

Because something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mister Jones?

Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

I confess that I feel a little like Mr. Jones when I try to comprehend the new worker organizing. Much more has been going on than I had imagined. It deserves attention, understanding and careful assessment. In this article, I hope to begin a sketch of just what “is happening here.” My hope is that it prompts additional articles, especially from participants in the centers, about their experiences.

On January 25 of this year, Michael Paarlberg published an article in The Guardian entitled “US unions’ continued decline masks new forms of worker activism.” Paarlberg is a volunteer at the DC Employment Justice Center. He highlighted two instances of the new activism—one-day “flash” strikes at fast food places in New York City and at Walmart stores around the country. He suggested their special significance was that both actions “were coordinated by groups that are not traditional unions: New York Communities for Change and OUR Walmart.”

New York Communities for Change is the re-constituted ACORN chapter in New York. OUR Walmart is an organization of Walmart “Associates” that “works to ensure that every Associate, regardless of his or her title, age, race or sex, is respected at Walmart.” It was founded in 2011 with the strong support of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).1

Paarlberg went on to talk about networks of grassroots workers’ centers, including the Restaurant Opportunities Center, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the National Domestic Worker Alliance. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In 1992, there were five worker centers; in 2005, there were 139; in 2012, the number was up to 214. Authoritative membership numbers are somewhat hard to come by. An IWJ Worker Center Network Survey conducted in 2011 reported that more than 32 percent of the 26 centers in that network had more than 400 members. Extrapolating from that report would suggest that there are perhaps about 200,000 members all told. In addition, however, many centers provide services and assistance to workers who do not become members.

Perhaps no struggle has come to represent the potential of the new worker organizing more than the recent strike and subsequent union recognition of the Hot and Crusty Workers in New York. Twenty-three immigrant workers, employed in a branch of a chain food company on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, engaged in an eleven-month campaign that included petitioning for NLRB recognition as an independent workers’ association, a successful legal case to secure back pay, a brief workplace occupation when the workers learned that the store was going to be closed, and a two-month long daily picket line. In October 2012, they won—the store would re-open; the association would be recognized for collective bargaining; the first agreement included paid vacation and sick days, wage increases, a formal grievance procedure and a union hiring hall.

It’s evident that the workers involved demonstrated an extraordinary level of determination and sacrifice and that there was a genuine bottom-up character to the workers’ activity. Nonetheless, it is also evident that a key role in the organization of the campaign was played by staff and volunteers from the relatively new Laundry Workers Center.2 That Center was modeled in part on the experience of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, an organization that’s more than ten years old.3

The campaign of the Hot and Crusty Workers is emblematic of an array of other struggles in New York City and elsewhere being conducted by worker centers. In New York, they include a sustained effort to organize car wash employees and workers who work at green markets, such as those at Golden Farm in Brooklyn. Another quite recent victory came in Chicago where workers in an embroidery factory secured union representation (in this case, they chose the United Workers, an SEIU affiliate).

Many, perhaps most, of these worker center–based organizing projects focused on workers in low-wage jobs, are conducted with the active support and, often enough, leadership provided by a variety of community-based organizations—with support from one or more unions. In New York, among the most important of active groups are New York Communities for Change and Make the Road New York, originally an organization focused on immigrant issues. In Chicago, an especially prominent group is the ARISE Coalition. The community groups often have strong connections with some union leaders and with forces in or close to the Democratic Party—such as the Working Families Party in New York State and, indeed, as will be seen below, the possibility of alliances with elected officials or candidates for office is seen as a key organizing resource.

Although organizational models vary quite a bit, it is often the case that the members elect a board which has decision-making authority but that the organizational work is conducted by paid staff. While some centers collect dues, most are reliant on outside funding—from unions, foundations or donations from sympathetic individuals. Most of the groups share either historical connections and/or political affinities with the Alinskyite tradition of organizing—focused on the possibility of achieving short-term goals in the cause of sustaining participation and involvement and, more or less specifically, foregoing any embrace of fundamental social change—thus, “social justice” is perhaps the most frequently cited overarching goal. There is also a very strong religious dimension to the overall similarities and remarkable cohesiveness among organizations in different places. And perhaps most important, much of the activity is taking place in immigrant communities, including those with large numbers of undocumented individuals.

One of the major forces contributing to a common focus and a common set of organizing principles is the Interfaith Worker Justice Center (IWJ)—which supports worker centers across a broad range of industries. The Center, now located in Washington, DC, has embraced five core issues for organizing and advocacy purposes—wage theft, immigration reform, unemployment (or more precisely, jobs), the right to organize, the enforcement of workplace standards (such as minimum wage and paid sick days), and occupational safety and health (OSH). Its Workers’ Center Network provides support and advice to worker center start-ups as well as those already established in several key areas—1) conducting studies of local conditions; 2) building a community coalition; and 3) producing a worker rights manual. Its advocacy efforts are focused on involving individuals who are not directly affected by the issues in support of policy and legislative changes. IWJ also maintains close relationships with the federal Department of Labor.

Where did the Worker Centers come from?

Clearly, the worker centers are grounded in the working lives of many thousands of workers on the margins of what might be considered the mainstream economy. And, as well, they reflect the commitment of many social justice advocates from various traditions (liberation theology, members of Catholic Worker, adherents to various strands of non-violent thought, etc.). The roles and views of those individuals deserve to be looked at. But, first, I’d like to take a detour to examine what might be considered the strategic conceptualization of worker centers.

In 2003, Thomas Kochan, the co-director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Relations, put forward an argument about what would be needed to “restore workers’ voice at work and in American society.” He began with an acknowledgement that a reliance on what might be considered traditional models of labor organizing would not reverse the decline in union representation of workers (a decline has only become worse since). He wrote, “Simply putting new energy and resources into these efforts will not fill the void.” The key elements of his proposal were the following:

• A positive, forward looking, and distinctive vision that speaks to the aspirations of workers and working families across the full spectrum of the labor force and that is presented in highly visible fashion to the public, media professionals, and political leaders;

• A strategy that recruits members outside as well as at their workplaces and that provides a range of services and benefits workers need as they move across jobs and through the different stages of their career and family lives;

• A networked structure capable of maintaining membership and working in coalition with other progressive groups, and;

• Creative use of a variety of sources of power that complement the traditional sources of union power in collective bargaining. These include extensive use of information and modern communications media, exit and mobility as well as voice at work, coalition building, and a focus on state and local level public policy initiatives as test beds for the more fundamental changes needed in national policies.4

Two years later, Janice Fine, a Labor Studies professor at Rutgers University, authored a report on worker centers for the Economic Policy Institute, titled “Organizing communities at the edge of the dream.” She described the common features of the then existing worker centers:

• Rather than being worksite-based, most centers focus their work geographically, working in a particular metropolitan area, city, or neighborhood. Unlike unions, their focus is not organizing for majority representation in individual worksites or for contracts for individual groups of workers.

• Sometimes ethnicity, rather than occupation or industry, is the primary identity through which workers come into relationship with centers. In other cases, ethnicity marches hand in hand with occupation. Discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity is a central analytic lens through which economic and social issues are viewed by the centers. In addition, a growing number of centers are working at the intersection between race, gender, and low-wage work.

• Centers place enormous emphasis on leadership development and democratic decision-making. They focus on putting processes in place to involve workers on an ongoing basis and strive to develop the skills of worker leaders so that they are able to participate meaningfully in guiding the organizations.

• They view education as integral to organizing. Workshops, courses, and training sessions are structured to emphasize the development of critical thinking skills that workers can apply to all aspects of their public lives, including work, education, neighborhood interaction, and health care.

• Centers demonstrate a deep sense of solidarity with workers in other countries and an ongoing programmatic focus on the global impact of labor and trade policies. Many centers maintain ongoing ties with popular organizations in the countries from which workers have migrated, share strategies, publicize each other’s work, and support international partners as they are able.

• As work is the primary focus of life for many newly arrived immigrants, it is also the locus of many of the problems they experience. For this reason, the centers focus on work, but also have a broad orientation and respond to the variety of issues faced by recent immigrants to the United States.

• Centers favor alliances with religious institutions and government agencies and seek to work closely with other worker centers, nonprofit agencies, community organizations, and activist groups by participating in both formal and informal coalitions.

• Most centers view membership as a privilege that is not automatic but must be earned. They require workers to take courses and/or become involved in the organization in order to qualify. Most centers have small but very involved memberships.5

Although I’m sure that this is abstracting from a more complex reality, those principles and characteristics seem to be quite consistent with the actual form and content of the existing worker centers. Let’s take a look at some of the self-descriptions of various worker centers.

Restaurant Opportunities Center

Initially founded to provide support to restaurant workers displaced after September 11, 2001, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) is dedicated to winning improved wages and working conditions for restaurant workers and raising public recognition of restaurant workers’ contributions to the city.

The Workplace Project

The Workplace Project/Centro de Derechos Laborales on Long Island (in New York State)—founded in 1992—is a membership-based organization that unites immigrant workers and their families for better working and living conditions. It was founded on the belief that while providing services might alleviate some of the pain of exploitation, it would do nothing to fix the problems in the long run. Instead, it has chosen to build a grassroots movement and to strengthen the immigrant community through a cycle of education, leadership training, membership building, and organizing for change in the labor context.6

New Labor in New Brunswick, New Jersey

For a different kind of self-description, here’s a performance of The New Labor Hymn by members of New Labor, a group in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Connections with Unions

In her 2005 paper, Fine had recommended greater contact and cooperation between worker centers and unions and reported that the Center for Community Change had initiated conversations with the AFL-CIO about its involvement.

Some eight years later, the contact and cooperation appears to have become quite extensive at both the national and local levels and it includes Change to Win, the other union confederation (SEIU, the Teamsters, UFCW and the United Farm Workers), as well as the AFL-CIO. Currently, the AFL-CIO has formal partnerships with the National Day Worker Organizing Network, Interfaith Worker Justice, the Domestic Workers Alliance and the National Guestworkers Alliance. Of special interest is its support for the Excluded Workers Congress, now called the United Workers Congress (which brings together organizations of farmworkers, restaurant workers, workers in southern right-to-work states, workfare workers, taxi workers employed as independent contractors, formerly incarcerated workers, domestic workers, day laborers and guest workers).7

As mentioned above, the UFCW, a Change to Win union, actively supports OUR Walmart. In addition, the confederation has initiated campaigns for: 1) the fair treatment of farmworkers in California; 2) clean and safe ports on both coasts (that was involved in the recent organization of Los Angeles truckers into the Teamsters); and 3) Warehouse Workers United (which sponsors the Warehouse Workers Resource Center in southern California). It does not appear that any of the former animosity which existed between the two confederations gets in the way of their cooperation on many fronts—although it’s likely that they each have their own priorities. It bears emphasis that while some campaigns do result in unionization, many do not seem to have that goal—as in the case of OUR Walmart—at least immediately.

The Role of Spanish Speaking Labor

In 2010, Will Barnes, a brilliant thinker and committed revolutionary, produced an ambitious survey of what he thought was a mostly dismal state of affairs, entitled “The Working Class, World Composition and Crisis, A General Perspective.”8 He found one possible bright spot in the US:

… Spanish speaking labor is, however, different.

By the early 1990s, Spanish speaking labor was at once a phenomenon of the borderlands economy, the dominant proletarian element in migratory labor in the fields of corporate agriculture, and a component in the retail service sector in the great cities of America.

But what distinguishes Spanish speaking today in the United States, and this may be unique to immigrant labor as it exists in the world today, is its centrality in the productive processes in the United States as a whole: Spanish speaking labor has penetrated every major sector of the United States economy; demographically, it has become the largest minority in American society (between fifteen and twenty percent of the entire population); and, geographically, no longer confined to the Southwest, the San Fernando Valley of central California or the large metropolises, it can be found in large numbers in every corner of the continent: Geographically and demographically, Spanish speakers are now the largest social group, in Arizona, New Mexico, in the southern cities of Texas, in Southern California and close to the largest social group in the entire state as well as in Nevada. By 2006, Spanish speaking labor had become the largest growing minority in South Dakota (having outpaced the growth of the rest of the population of the state by 20:1) and in South Carolina (where a growth ratio of 10:1 existed over the previous six years).

Productively, Spanish speaking workers are overwhelming (better than ninety percent) proletarian. They make up seventy-five percent of all wildfire fighters in the Pacific Northwest; almost exclusively, they do the factory labor of butchering hogs in southwestern Minnesota, and in slaughtering chickens in central Iowa. Spanish speaking workers form the largest, most militant component of the trucking industry in Southern California. They dominate in the less skilled trades in the mass production of resident housing and commercial office construction, not merely in the major cities but in cities with a population of 100,000 or more across the country; and they continue to work in textile and apparel in the South, in the high tech sweat shops of Silicon Valley, and in the service sector as cooks in restaurants and hotels, as janitors everywhere and as domestics in the homes of the well-to-do throughout the country and in the large urban areas of southern Canada.

Spanish speaking labor is still engaged in low paying, but better paid, unorganized but better organized work. The fractured traditions of community constituted in its homelands (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, etc.), its linguistic commonality in the midst of difference (Spanish as opposed to English), its Indian as well as specific “foreign” “national” heritages, and its lowly proletarian status all render this proletariat oppressed and exploited with slim chances for integration into the fictitious community of capital as it exists in America today, and, in self-making under these “conditions,” vastly more capable of self-organization for self-defense and qualitatively more militant than their white and Anglo counterparts.9

In this light, it is perhaps not so surprising that so much of the worker center activity has been occurring within Spanish-speaking communities.10

What to do and what not to do?

Last year, I wrote to an acquaintance who’s an activist in South Africa and asked him about the relationship between the left and the popular movements in that country, including the shackdwellers’ and landless people’s movements—as compared to the situation in this country. He wrote back:

Much of the organised left has often been very much alienated from popular struggles and at times has actively sought to delegitimate them via the mobilisation of slander and so forth, sometimes in complicity with the discourses of state repression. There has also been a tendency to co-opt individuals from popular struggles into the networks of the organised left rather than developing a mutually transformative dialogue. In both cases the essential assumption is that the role of the popular struggles is simply to provide a base for The Left. For these reasons, and others, some of the popular organisations and struggles are deeply suspicious of and refuse to work with some of the key figures and organisations in the organised left.

One of the reasons why the popular organisations are clearly much more attractive to most people than what you have called the organised left is that they are much closer to the lives, experiences and immediate challenges of the oppressed. But this is not a simple question of immediate material interest. It is also about being able to meet people’s needs for validation, support and so on. The organised left may have important ideas about macro issues but they usually struggle to connect them to lived experience leaving them with negligible popular support. But on the other hand the popular struggles are often much more local in their reach and this limits their ability to achieve system change. Clearly a synthesis of the two would be able to take us forward but here anyway the primary barrier to that possibility is the most of the organised left is unwilling to give up its assumption of a right to dominance—both at the level of ideas and organisation.

I wrote back:

Once again, it’s a question of balance—how best to express popular anger and hope in ways that connect them to the possibility of larger social transformation without gutting them of what might be considered their authenticity. Are you familiar with the novels of Barry Unsworth? In what I think that many agree is his greatest work, Sacred Hunger, a novel of sailor/slave revolt and utopian yearning, the young artist, Delblanc, embarks on a campaign to persuade the miserable sailors of the miserable slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, that they could change the miserable world they inhabited:

Anyone at all—the weasel-faced Tapley, swabbing down the decks, a disgruntled Billy Blair coming up from scraping the slaves’ quarters, Morgan in his galley trying to find some new disguise for the rotten beef—might find himself addressed by Delbalnc and asked whether he did not agree that the state of society was artificial and the power of one man over another merely derived from convention. Delblanc’s manner was the same with all, friendly and open. At first, tactics lagging behind conviction, he made no concessions to any imperfections of understanding in his audience. “By nature, we are equal,” he said on one occasion to a vacantly smiling Calley. “Does it not therefore follow that government must always depend on the consent of the governed?” He even spoke to McGann, asking him whether he did not think it true that the character of man originated in external circumstances and could be changed as these were changed.

The men listened, or appeared to listen, out of deference, because he was a gentleman, because he was paying for his passage. Delblanc saw soon enough that he was using the wrong language with them and was beginning to try out a different one until warned by Thurso [the captain] that if he persisted in distracting the crew, he would be confined to his quarters for the rest of the voyage. … One look at the captain’s face was enough to convince Delblanc. It was in his reaction to this threat that he showed the quick grasp of realities that later came to distinguish him. A man can do no good locked up in his cabin. He went more circumspectly thereafter.

I bring Unsworth up because I don’t think that the left has yet developed much of an effective approach to engaging with workers, either when they are or are not engaged in struggles. Indeed, I’d suggest that the organizers who are playing key roles in the worker center movement are doing much better in that regard. Now, it may be that the reason why they are doing better is that the political visions that guide their practice are closer to the hopes and dreams of the workers they organize. Or it may be that they have done a better job of convincing those workers of the wisdom of their political visions. In either case, all too often, what the left has to say when it shows up on the picket line does not go very deep and its impact is all too limited. One reason why is that we often underestimate the time and effort needed to acquire real knowledge of the circumstances that workers are facing and of the all but certainly contradictory views they hold about those circumstances.

In the meantime, I think it would be especially helpful to develop better understandings of what the political perspectives at play really are. By way of example, the Center for Popular Democracy is a new entity that is co-chaired by the co-director of Make the Road New York and the President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU, a UFCW affiliate). It has recently published a report on service worker organizing, titled Workers Rising, that includes a set of proposals regarding matters such as an increase in New York State’s minimum wage, a new minimum wage just for New York City, policies (regarding such things as paid sick leave and stricter enforcement of local labor standards) that it hopes a new Mayor and a new City Council will implement starting next year. It’s quite easy to see all of its limitations but the more important task is to understand what the workers who are intended to benefit from the proposals make of it all. Have they seen the report? Were they able to read it? (There does not appear to be a Spanish-language version available.) Do they understand it? Were they asked about the proposals? How much difference do they think it will make if they’re adopted? What else would they have wanted to propose?

As we listen, perhaps we might discover ways in which the workers articulate their concerns that open up new possibilities. In 1985, Neville Alexander wrote in Azania Worker: “What has to be stressed, however, is the vital political and social importance of creating a new discourse, the urgent need to recognize that language is much more than a passive reflection of a pre-existent, autonomous reality, that, indeed, the language we use, by virtue of the fact that it is the medium through which the historical subject is constructed, helps to construct the reality within which we act and to which we react. While we have to guard against all idealist temptations and test everything we do against the non-discursive practices and possibilities of the working class, we….” must pay “attention to this formative role of language…”

Perhaps then we can find some new things to say.

• 1In a fascinating recent development, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and OUR Walmart have signed a consent decree wherein they commit themselves to not organizing Walmart workers into a union. See “Letter and notice regarding disposition of Walmart picketing charge.”
• 2See Laura Gottesdiener, “A New Face of the Labor Movement,” December 2, 2012, on Common Dreams.
• 3For information about the two centers, see Restaurant Opportunities Center United and Laundry Workers Center.
• 4Cited verbatim. Thomas Kochan, “Restoring Workers’ Voice: A Call for Action,” April 2003; revised August 15, 2003.
• 5Cited verbatim. Janice Fine, “Worker centers: Organizing communities at the edge of the dream,” Economic Policy Institute, December 15, 2005. A book by Fine, with the same title, was published by Cornell University Press in 2006.
• 6Cited mostly verbatim.
• 7See Harmony Goldberg and Randy Jackson, “The Excluded Worker Congress: Reimagining the Right to Organize,” New Labor Forum, volume 20, number 3, pp. 54–59, fall 2011.
• 8Will died, way too early, last year. His death cut short the contributions of a remarkably distinctive voice in the American revolutionary movement. His writings can be found here.
• 9The Working Class, World Composition and Crisis, A General Perspective.”
• 10For the moment, I am not addressing a very important other issue—the existence of divided labor markets and specifically the ways in which urban labor markets are divided between black and Spanish-speaking workers. For two very detailed, and quite excruciating, accounts of how this works in Chicago, see two articles by Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the Spaces of Temporary Labor,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, volume 25, issue 3, September 2001; and “Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis,” same journal, volume 32, issue 2, June 2008.

Insurgent Notes is happy to publish another highly original article by Matthew Quest, this one on the evolution of C.L.R. James’s thoughts about Maoism. The article uses the term “national liberation” in a way we find somewhat at odds with the critiques we have previously published of the term; we however feel that this small disagreement fades into significance set against the overall thrust of the article, with which we are in strong agreement.

C.L.R. James’s perspectives on the Chinese Revolution, like his analysis of the Third World broadly, were distinguished by shifting emphases on race and class. James’s outlook also was a complicated response to a regime many imagined as progressive for a claim to cultivate the popular will, fight bureaucracy, and oppose the empire of capital.

James’s intellectual legacies on Mao Tse Tung’s China were conflicted to the extent that for many years he rejected these propositions in published writings distinguished by a standard of direct democracy and workers self-management. Then in his elder years he began to discard these libertarian socialist principles in his assessment of China’s history and politics, and retreated to a re-evaluation of state capitalism in China. Where previously state capitalism was a reactionary social formation blocking the self-directed liberating activity of Chinese toilers, Mao’s state capitalism later for James, primarily in informal debates, oral history transcripts, and organizational correspondence not part of the public record, became an attempt to complete China’s national liberation struggle.

Before the 1960s, the centrality of the workers councils and general strikes in Chinese insurgencies of 1925–1927 in Shanghai, Canton, and Wuhan frame an unfavorable view of both Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tse Tung as representatives of national liberation. Alert as James was to self-organized forms of freedom among urban settings and industrial labor, the idea that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 was uniquely peasant-based was received as a distortion and mystification of state repression. In such class based perspectives, James was intolerant of any focus on Mao or other aspiring progressive rulers as embodying the independent cultural contributions of peripheral nations to an alternative capitalist modernity. For most of his career, there was no acknowledgement by James that the aspiration to a one-party state or welfare state could be valid in any sector of the world. Their roles in crushing directly democratic expressions of labor’s self-emancipation were decisive for evaluating such regimes. However, during his first American years (1938–1953), James also began to exhibit another simultaneous perspective: the Chinese struggle for national liberation as a whole informed anti-racist struggles by African Americans, and might potentially encourage anti-imperialist perspectives among American workers. Later, James made tentative steps to place China as part of Asia’s and the Third World’s cultural contribution to democratizing world civilization. In the decade between the publication of Modern Politics (1960) and the disbanding of the Facing Reality group (1970), this tension between direct democracy and national liberation in James’s China analysis surfaced as a festering conflict among James’s closest associates.

James viewed Mao Tse Tung’s “One Hundred Flowers Bloom,” (1956–1957), the “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1960) and “Cultural Revolution” campaigns (1966–1971) as failing to truly fight the bureaucracy of Chinese society, where labor’s autonomy was prioritized in his analysis. Mao’s contempt for directly democratic expressions, as opposed to populist ones that were perceived as initiated from within his own position in the bureaucracy, and his contempt for James’s beloved Hungarian Revolution of 1956 were crucial in these assessments.

Nevertheless, intermittently in the 1960s, James began to eschew direct democracy as a primary framework for evaluating national liberation in China. Revising his view found in Facing Reality (1958), James admitted he was mistaken in the past to take the stance that the Chinese Revolution did not yet fully convey its self-governing potential. For a while, James waited for Chinese workers to tear down the state, which in his view, only claimed to be communist, in a direct democratic revolt. But by 1964, James had, in personal recollections among friends, begun to reflect on the Chinese working class as just as self-governing as any other in the world under a nation-state. On that basis, James reconsidered the presumed modernity of the Chinese people, and felt compelled to re-evaluate China’s weight in smashing the colonial order in the world.

Increasingly, James moved away from analyzing China on the basis of wage labor and capital relations as he did in State Capitalism and World Revolution, where China’s state capitalist regime obstructed workers self-management. Instead he began to tentatively imply that state capitalism in China was an incomplete social revolution against empire where a progressive ruling class was still aspiring to completely break those particular shackles. In the epoch of Black Power and Third World Marxism, James rarely wished to draw lines of steel in public between the national bourgeoisie in post-colonial state power and the self-management of the working classes. China came to strongly represent the silences and contours of an awkward intellectual legacy.

James was not known for extensive commentary on the Chinese Revolution, although he did display an early and thorough interest during his first British years (1932–1938). He admitted when he wrote World Revolution (1937), the first anti-Stalinist account of the Communist International in the English language, that despite original rhetorical flourishes and a muted, but already emerging libertarian socialist view which foreshadowed his later break with the Trotskyist movement, he borrowed much from Leon Trotsky’s own writings.1 This collection has writings by Trotsky on China from 1925–1940. Further, he was inspired, as was Trotsky, by both the first draft of Harold Isaacs’s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) (which James was instrumental in getting published by Frederic Warburg2 ), and Andre Malraux’s two novels about the Chinese Revolution, The Conquerors (1928) and Man’s Fate (1933).3 James followed with interest the evolution toward Cold War loyalties of Isaacs and Malraux through their turn toward a more right-wing social democracy, even as he commends them for their historical contributions for helping to chronicle the Chinese Revolution.4

In World Revolution, James, in his chapter “Stalin Ruins the Chinese Revolution,” reproduced the epic terms of debate culminating in the split among the Communist International between Stalin and Trotsky. After offering a brief outline of Chinese political economy, suggesting that pre-capitalist dynamics were confronted with the modernizing and oppressive influences of Japanese and British imperialism, James discussed the politics of the Kuo Min Tang (KMT), the nationalist “people’s party” led by Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek. Following Trotsky’s interpretation of Leninist policy outlined earlier in this book, James argued that the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was mistakenly enacting Stalin’s policies by encouraging the CCP to subordinate itself to the nationalist forces, which included both landlords and warlords. The KMT would be instrumental in smashing strikes and land seizures by workers and peasants in Canton, Wuhan, and Shanghai.5 But let us examine the dynamics of direct democracy and dual power a little closer than James first conveyed them in World Revolution.

In May–June 1925 protests by striking Chinese workers, locked out from a Japanese owned textile factory, amid widespread protest against foreign occupation, prompted the Japanese and British military to fire on a growing number of rebellious crowds. News of the atrocities compelled solidarity protests to erupt across the nation. More deaths at foreign hands would result.

As a revolutionary situation distinguished by dual power developed, the creation of popular councils by workers and students began to increase in several areas, particularly in Shanghai of 1925 where there was a general strike but also in a series of solidarity strikes in Canton, Wuhan, and Hong Kong. Agitation increased in the countryside with the growth of militant peasant associations. The self-organized masses moved to take over the city of Shanghai with the support of local CCP cadres. From late 1926 to early 1927 a series of general strikes were organized in Shanghai closing textile factories, docks, municipal services, public transport and commercial centers, cutting telephone and power lines. Police stations were seized and railway stations were occupied.

Unfortunately, when nationalist forces marched into the city, workers and students were disarmed. Conciliatory gestures were made to the local foreigners and capitalists, and the CCP began looking the other way while, Chiang Kai Shek’s army, business owners, paramilitary groups, and warlords began attacking and killing union members. Similar developments occurred in Wuhan (May 1927) and Canton (December 1927).6 After 1927, laborers and students increasingly came under the administration of the Chinese Communist Party.7 What must not be forgotten insisted James, following Harold Isaacs, was the workers of Shanghai were encouraged by Moscow-affiliated Communist leaders to believe that when Chiang Kai Shek’s army arrived, the Nationalist troops would support their independent labor action and liberate the oppressed. This was supposed to be a new stage of world revolution—in hindsight the arrival of the anti-colonial revolution.8 Yet Stalin, and his advisors in China, like Borodin, believed that a vision of national liberation should be propagated that taught that those who opposed capitalism should subordinate themselves to the national bourgeoisie. The anti-class struggle perspectives of Sun Yat-sen and Chaing Kai Shek were not to be criticized. Stalinists in China criticized what they believed were the excesses of independent labor action that might disturb the KMT leadership.9 James in contrast emphasized a historical lesson.

At this juncture, national liberation was based on millions of toilers seeking a way out of the unbearable circumstances of the interplay of imperialist war, civil war, and colonial war. A small clash about workplace conditions or a local dispute about injustice could become a detonator for colonial freedom. The fear of foreign intervention, though always present, could be overcome. Yet nothing could unite revolutionary China, than seeing the Chinese ruling class, yesterday patriotic devotees of their country, attacking the Chinese working class more than the hated forces of empire. James believed, as with the Spanish Civil War, that a bourgeois-democratic regime in a peripheral economy with an advanced proletariat was unfeasible where popular committees of labor desired to directly govern.10

One of the weaknesses of James’s World Revolution was that while it foreshadows aspects of his libertarian socialist viewpoint to come, it still had vanguard preoccupations with building a proper party and leadership. He had not yet arrived at a critique of Stalinism with an analysis of working class self-activity, which could overcome a government or party bureaucracy that claimed to be progressive. Instead, this earlier James seemed to be criticizing Chinese leaders, Moscow-oriented communists but also nationalists, who appeared to be revolutionary for a time, for not propagating class struggle. James admitted he respected Sun Yat-Sen somewhat, though he did “not, in the Bolshevik manner organize a party based on a single class.”

His reorganized Kuomintang [included] a few big capitalists, the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and workers and peasants. His program promised the nine hour day to one, high tariffs to another, reduction of rents to a third, land from the state for landless peasants and tenant-holders, the right of self-determination for the various nationalities, democracy, all lumped together under one term—Socialism. A determined revolutionary and undoubtedly a great leader, even at the end of his life, he was only able to leave to his party a program that Ramsay MacDonald could have drawn up for him without any difficulty in half-an-hour.11

Ramsay MacDonald was the right-wing social-democratic leader of the British Labour Party who had little trouble collaborating with the bodyguards of capital among the British Tories. In a humorous rhetorical flourish, James equates Sun Yat Sen’s leadership of his party with interclass cooperation that promises both the rich and poor autonomy and economic empowerment.

In a 1937 editorial James penned for the British Trotskyist newspaper Fight, he challenges the image of Chiang Kai Shek in Stalinist literature and popular culture:

A cartoon in the Soviet newspaper “Isvestia” shows a little Japanese officer trying to ride a Chinese coolie and getting an unexpected knock on the nose. From this it…appear[s]…the Chinese coolies are bestirring themselves, that the great liberation war against foreign imperialism has started. [We] read about his oriental serenity, his romantic marriage, his age, height, weight, and calculating brain. How he reads his bible everyday and how he alone, inspired by his English educated wife and the ten commandments, is leading the Chinese proletariat and peasantry to the promised land… Undoubtedly Chiang Kai Shek is a great man. He is recognized as such by the international financiers.12

If Chiang Kai-Shek ultimately allied himself with the American bloc of capitalist power, it would be imprecise to leave the impression he was always friendly to all bankers and industrialists in China for in the aftermath of the April 1927 coup against independent labor, Chiang launched a terror campaign against the wealthy of Shanghai.13

Still this passage by James suggests an intermingling of themes we shall be considering: race, modernity, the opposition to empire, and the struggle for socialism. It would appear that James intended to confront Oriental stereotypes and Western chauvinisms even as he accepted the term “coolie,” a racially derogatory word for Asian labor he would be familiar with from the Caribbean. James was rarely fond of viewing, in his first British and American years, the personalities of national liberation leaders, regardless of their less than stellar disposition toward their own working classes, being elevated uncritically as representatives of peripheral nations’ contribution to world civilization. But he would find a way to allow historical events in China, with muted contours, to function as a type of inspiration in his first American years (1938–1953).

While James does not see anything liberating in the political economy of the Chinese Revolution during his first American years, he does imagine that the Chinese national liberation struggle as a whole, and its many waves, have symbolic value for anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. James’s writings in this regard demonstrate a desire to give a global perspective on African American and working class struggle in the USA.

In 1939, in an essay entitled “Revolution and the Negro,” he saw parallel developments in slave revolts in the Antebellum American South and the Taipeng Rebellion in China.14 James argued a year later in a review of Richard Wright’s Native Son that Bigger Thomas’s rebellion appeared on a global scale as part of a constellation of forces which included the Long March in the China of 1936.15 In a 1944 sketch outlining the international tasks of American labor, American workers are seen as distinct from their trade union hierarchy. James points to the soviets and general strikes of European revolutions as well as the events of 1925–1927 and 1936 in “backward China” as inspiration for possible insurrections of the future.16 Finally in a narrative called “The American People in One World” James asserts: “Every Chinese knows it is impossible to have great class struggles in China without provoking the intervention of American imperialism.” It is not clear from his other writings in this period that all Chinese are preoccupied with such concerns. Nevertheless, James illustrates how class struggle at home can check “American adventure[s],” and argues that while the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s was not aided and thus failed, more contemporary American imperial maneuvers “in Formosa” (now Taiwan), where Chiang Kai Shek retreated when Mao Tse Tung came to power, could be thwarted with direct action at home.17

Analyzing the shifting perceptions of Asians in popular magazines and Hollywood films, James sensed a decline of the “yellow peril” theme as the preoccupation with Japanese loyalty during World War II changed priorities to concerns about Mao Tse Tung and China during the Cold War. James highlighted an increasing amount of interracial relationships and marriages between whites and Asians in the narratives of contemporary film, and suggested that these newly visible tropes are meant to win over Asian loyalty in the Cold War. Thus there was a shift in racial attitudes by the state and in popular culture.18

A multi-cultural outlook was struggling to be born in American popular culture out from under the dominant assumptions of white racism. Yet, this new vista was bogged down by Henry Luce’s “American Century” idea. If the United States did not present itself transparently as the policeman of the world, under the premise of the free market, human rights, and development, instead there was a new identity of benevolent patron of the world through the framework that Christina Klein has called a “Cold War Orientalism.”

James was aware of the imperial maneuvers of Henry Luce’s Time-Life publications, in his reading of Luce’s strategic use of China during the Cold War to shift American foreign policy. Yet he partially misunderstood transformations of the “yellow peril” as it was represented in films of that historical moment. Themes of integration and interracial relationships could suggest a gendered representation: that “Oriental” Asia was feminine and submissive to the “white male” West. It could also be imagined, by anti-racist and feminist movie audiences, taking James’s sensibility a step further, that Asian women had a subtle anti-colonial power over Europe and the United States.19

Nevertheless, James did assert how the state and some aspects of popular culture, in the age of decolonization, were now willing to embrace non-Western peoples, provided they resisted the Soviet Union and were perceived to be anti-communist. This development would quickly characterize changes in the United States under pressure from the African American movement, and foreshadowed aspects of post-civil rights America.

By the end of James’s first American years he had consolidated the direct democratic implications of his evolving state capitalist analysis. James would extend his analysis of state-capitalism outside of the United States and Western Europe, critiquing the limitations of Trotskyist methodology as applied to the Third World in general, and China specifically.20 These perspectives cannot easily be combined with a strain of racial vindication though it has implications for his anti-colonialism.

While hoping for a better regime in the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists looked toward emerging communist states, such as Yugoslavia and China, as regimes yet autonomous of Stalin’s Russia. Where the Trotskyists held that both nation-states were progressive, because they were independent of Moscow and had nationalized property, James explained that the Yugoslavian and Chinese ruling classes simply demonstrated the desire and ability to exploit their own working classes and peasants without interference from Stalin.21 James underlined in another crucial document, The Balance Sheet Completed (1951):

The [Socialist Workers Party] is obsessed with speculation as to Mao’s and Tito’s future intentions. That is the path to ruination, not for Mao and Tito, who don’t have to bother with such foolishness, but for the S.W.P. Mao and Tito can switch from Russian to Western imperialism without batting an eyelash. They are rulers of states and administrators of the proletariat.22

In 1950–1951, fundamental social relations for James, in class struggle and anti-colonial terms, have not changed in either country. Like Yugoslavia, where the party and the state were “subordinating the workers to the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and administrators,” James underscores a similar process taking place in China.

In contrast, from his publication of Facing Reality (1958) to Modern Politics (1960), James showed some friction within his methods for evaluating China. Facing Reality was written in response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union. Hungary was the most recent, and spectacular confirmation of his direct democratic politics. For two months, workers and students rose up creating popular councils, committees, and militias to run production in factories, and take over offices of government, and university campuses.

At first it seemed Moscow would capitulate, however, amidst the speculation Soviet tanks and troops rolled into the country and crushed the militias and councils, returning the country to Moscow’s communist affiliate party.23 Nevertheless, for a brief period, the uprising broke the hold of state capitalism, whether Eastern or Western, and as such, provided a glimpse of the future of a revolutionary upheaval.

“Experience under the bureaucratic leadership of the Party or its Plan, the revolution from the very beginning seized power in the process of production and from there organized the political power. The workers councils did not look to governments to carry out their demands.”24 And it was this historical experience that for James widely characterized “the whole world.”25 James, after the Hungarian events, is patiently waiting for spontaneous labor action to emancipate China from Mao’s hierarchal regime.

It is notable for our purposes that Mao Tse Tung, in his “Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” expressed in the chapter “Can Bad Things Be Turned Into Good Things?” that the Hungarian Uprising was “a bad thing.” Mao explained: “Everybody knows that the Hungarian incident was not a good thing. But it too had a dual character. Because our Hungarian comrades [in state power] took proper action in the course of the incident, what was a bad thing eventually turned into a good one. Hungary is now more consolidated than ever, and all the other countries in the socialist camp have learned a lesson.”26

Mao, as dialectician, sees the contradiction in Hungary as the mistaken desire by working people to directly govern society. James’s inconsistencies on China, especially in observing Mao’s stance on Hungary, are less about evaluating race and colonialism versus class struggles. Instead they reach to the heart of a conflict between his direct democratic perspectives and his Leninism. Before the 1960s the former would win out in his outlook on China. But James did not see a conflict between his direct democratic and his Leninist tendencies. This tension could be particularly obscured in how James used and taught dialectical method.

For Mao, popular uprisings were a warning sign that the state had become bureaucratic and had to be reformed, just as the population had to be brought back under control. From a certain vantage, this could have been seen as favorable by James. Mao was seeking to observe working class dynamics in the world. Mao could be reforming state power, per a construction of Lenin which C.L.R. might identify based on the self-activity of ordinary people.

Mao was popularizing all over the world a type of dialectical analysis that resolved contradictions, which he saw emanating from ordinary people, in the state’s favor. This would soon be a part of presenting his Chinese one-party state in the forefront of a battle against “revisionism” embodied by the Soviet Union and other regimes claiming to be socialist. On a global scale this led activists to look toward hierarchal regimes, instead of the self-organization of labor, to fight capitalism and colonialism.

James later wanted Kwame Nkrumah, who saw his state as non-aligned, to interpret the popular will of Ghana in a similar fashion, if with less repression, and praised Julius Nyerere in Tanzania for doing so. As with Lenin and Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti, James tolerated state repression and constructs it as partially accidental, if the state appeared to desire to reform its bureaucratic outlook and subsequently retrain its eye on the masses’ popular desires. Yet in the appendix to Modern Politics, James observed an instinct toward direct democracy in China, inspired by questions about what really happened in Hungary, which seeks to overthrow Mao’s state. At this juncture, James sides with that perceived spirit.27

Mao’s “Hundred Flowers Bloom” policy was born in the shadow of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, and the Hungarian events. Attempting to partially assess the lesson of the Hungarian uprising, Mao temporarily reversed the policy of censorship, and encouraged open political discussion and criticism of the Party and conditions in China in a series of historic speeches.28

James could have viewed Mao’s approach as an attempt to tend to the popular will like Rousseau. It would seem Mao was importantly not like James’s Rousseau, an aspiring founder of a polity who advised on the terms of a social contract, and then honorably walked away and let someone else govern. Yet Mao could also be read, mistakenly of course for he was the personification of the authoritarian state, as the philosopher who doesn’t govern—for Zhou En Lai was the premier for many years while he was chairman of the party.29 James’s approach to Mao in the late 1950s and early 1960s can best be summed up as recorded in his talk “Perspectives and Proposals”:

The chief thing I remember about Mao Tse Tung is a resolution: one day he said: “let one hundred flowers bloom.” Everybody must have talked. Forty-three days after he put everybody who bloomed in jail. What kind of mentality, what kind of thinking is that?30

The one-party state as an overseer and not a liberator was also to inform a series of articles written by James’s comrade Grace Lee Boggs in their newspaper Correspondence, on China in 1961, in the aftermath of the “Hundred Flowers Bloom” and the “Great Leap Forward” period.31 The Great Leap Forward was a policy whose aim was to increase production in the countryside in order to support China’s industrial growth. Nearly all of China’s peasants were organized into large rural communes and urban based party cadres were encouraged to go to the countryside.32 One might imagine from this Jamesian outlook of Grace Lee Boggs that the Great Leap Forward would be seen as a partial success. If direct democracy grows out of the “modern” workplace, bringing industrial production such as iron smelting to the countryside, however unprofitable, this might inspire rural communities toward popular self-management. Their reading of Karl Marx’s Capital seemed to suggest that a more authoritarian centralized production process, while socialists should not encourage capitalists to take such initiatives, inevitably pushes working people toward mutual aid and self-government—even if toilers rebel against value production itself. But both C.L.R. James and Grace Lee Boggs, at this juncture, were not fond of the Chinese state’s organization of a centralization of economic production.33 China’s state capitalism was extracting surplus value under a coercive labor regime.

Writing in Correspondence about the Great Leap Forward, Grace Lee Boggs argued that “in 1958 the Chinese Communists, determined to squeeze the capital needed for rapid industrialization out of the hides of the peasants, decided to organize the whole rural population into communes. By bringing every aspect of the personal lives and property of the peasantry under party control, the Communists thought it could militarize peasant labor.”34 However, Boggs noted, as a result of peasant resistance, the state had to abandon the process, concluding that “the most effective anti-Communists are those who have had a taste of Communism.35

For James, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through the Hundred Flowers Bloom and Great Leap Forward campaigns, it was the 1925–1927 period in revolutionary China, and the potential for such self-organized forms of freedom by Chinese labor, that set the tone for his analysis of reoccurring conflict inside the country. While acknowledging the Chinese masses largely supported the party and army of Mao Tse Tung at this juncture, despite criticism from below, he insisted the Chinese masses had not in this period “yet come independently upon the stage as the Russian people did in 1905 and then in 1917”—that is, in a victorious direct democratic uprising. However, James claimed, “They will.”36

The idea that Mao’s party bureaucracy, state capitalist plans, and the secret police could control the minds of hundreds of millions of people was mistaken. Chinese history, for C.L.R. James on the eve of the emergence of the Third World, demonstrated an instinct toward popular self-management that would eventually ignite a free society.37

C.L.R. James on China in the 1960s and 1970s

Illustrating changes in his worldview on China, in a letter to Martin Glaberman on December 3, 1962, James stated, “the only place where Marxism has had any success is in Communist China, and there it was an original doctrine, created by Mao Tse Tung on an entirely new basis out of the reach of official Stalinism.”38 Coming out of the blue, this letter was a shocker for Glaberman, who was James’s comrade for almost a quarter-century and maintained with him for many years that state capitalism was an obstruction to workers’ self-emancipation all over the world. This would appear to be a rejection of James’s analysis of China in World Revolution and in his State Capitalism and World Revolution. Political perspectives should evolve over time with new knowledge and awareness. But James’s methodologies were not improving on this question.

James’s fluctuations on China in letters to Glaberman would be frequent over the next decade. On January 7, 1963, James explained that the debate over the Sino-Soviet split was not unlike the dilemma between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky felt that the working classes, never able to hold on to a revolution where they were permanently sovereign, begin to be fooled by the Stalinist one-party state of the Russians. James appeared to see clearly, at this moment, that both Trotsky and Mao in backhanded ways, offered new vanguard party formulations presenting themselves as the new progressive ruling elite to believe in, thereby from another angle encouraging the “great masses of the working classes” to be dominated by the “conception of the two blocs.” Thus the Russian and Chinese regimes are seen by everyday people worldwide as “the opposition to imperialists and capitalists whom they knew for hundreds of years and whose crimes and mistakes had sunk into their bones.” James further explains his position: “[There] is taking place a split between these two forces, Russia and China… It is not a split between counter-revolutionary and opportunist Russia and revolutionary China. It is no more than a split between two branches of the bureaucracy of the bloc.” According to James, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party are not revolutionary at this particular moment. “This is a bureaucracy defending itself… In this Russia vs. China business in which China is masquerading all over the place as the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary wing of what everybody calls ‘the socialist states,’ it is vital, a necessary part of a Marxist movement in the United States to be able to show and to explain what is really taking place.”39

James’s contradictory positions on China crop up within one month of each other. He contends that Mao made a new breakthrough in communist doctrine. On the other, he felt that the only distinction to be made was that Mao represented a not-at-all-new struggle among Cold War “blocs” of aspiring bureaucracies and progressive ruling classes to rule over everyday people. Critical to emphasize here, though, is the fact that James refused to publicly criticize Maoism, even as he insisted his small revolutionary organization must expose the limits of the national bourgeoisie who claim to be progressive, given emerging political trends in the world.

This contradiction in James’s political thought would lead to the disbanding of the Facing Reality group, the final manifestation of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. James’s political economy had begun to change. Instead of state capitalism, where wage labor’s revolt against value production functions in “one world,” James increasingly divided his conception of state capitalism. Still obstructing direct democracy breaking out in modern industrial nations, in the Third World it is now imagined as attempting to break the vestiges of the colonial order but on terms of the late transition from feudalism to capitalism.

C.L.R. James, Martin Glaberman, George Rawick, and William Gorman attempted to write an updated political statement subsequent to Facing Reality, the document previously co-written with Grace Lee and Cornelius Castoriadis.40 The Gathering Forces (1967) was never published for public consumption, though edited sections were published by Paul Buhle, in 1971 in his magazine Radical America. A major reason why it was not published was, indeed, the fact that James’s comrades could not agree with his stance on Mao and China.

In The Gathering Forces, James revised his view of the Russian Revolution on the fiftieth anniversary of the event, casting it primarily as a peasant movement in a backward society, which Stalin crushed. “At the very same time, in the turn from the port cities of Shanghai and Canton to the peasantry in the interior that took place in 1927–28, the Chinese Communist Party made its own turn—but in an opposite direction.” This direction appeared ambiguous, since consensus in the Facing Reality group was unreachable.

Emphasizing the independent self-activity of the masses under Mao’s leadership, James nevertheless accepted the conventional wisdom of the time that the Chinese Revolution contributed something unique to civilization, with a peasant-based revolution that was “successful,” and was thus not crushed by authoritarian means. He embraced the historical erasure on one level of urban working class revolt in such places as Shanghai which he had previously defended for decades as central to a proper analysis of the Chinese Revolution.41 This is part of an overall trajectory that argues for the Chinese Revolution’s contributions to world civilization instead of specifying or suggesting strategies and tactics of socialist revolution (or criticism of them). A survey of “Asian power” informed by China, among other nations, is exemplary of this trend in his thinking. James became enamored with logic eliding distinctions among Asians, where all aspiring modernizing statecraft and economic activity in peripheral nations became the embodiment of progress.42 He even began to put forward ideas akin to Third World Marxism. Arguing for Asia’s special contribution to world politics as ambiguously economic production on its own nation-states’ terms, even valorizing Maoist China’s discovery of atomic capacity; James suggested a tension between the relative autonomy of elites in state power as equivalent to the rise and realization of everyday people’s potential.

Crucially, something more was needed from James at the height of the Cultural Revolution campaign in China. This was a difficult historical moment for James to assess given the tension between his Leninism and his direct democracy. Raising the Paris Commune of 1871 as a banner, and fomenting attacks on intellectuals whose conceptions of art and reason were labeled as old and enemies of the people, Mao’s wing of the state bureaucracy stirred up a movement of Red Guards which in hindsight got out of control. Public humiliation, torture, show trials, and forced prison labor transcended a genuine egalitarian sentiment from below in response to Mao’s populism. Calls for nationalization and attacks on landlords led to attacks on the corner merchant and poor peasant farmer selling vegetables. There was a sense that the class collaboration that distinguished Mao’s rise to power would now be purified by attacks on centrists and liberals not merely the remnants of feudal culture.

Often it was difficult to tell whether the masses were really seizing direct democratic power or whether party leaders were instigating “radical” uprisings against one section of the state bureaucracy to secure the dominance of another layer. Popular committees, instigated by sincere Red Guards, were often blunted into a “three way alliance” with the army and CCP members who had been found after all to have the “correct” line. Mao came into conflict with his own wife Jiang Qing, who had openly declared that people with professional leadership titles should be “smashed in pieces.” Mao responded leadership was necessary, the integrity of which lies in the content of their politics. Zhou En Lai had to quell a popular tendency to fight bureaucracy within the army. There was an evolving policing of urban youth into rural re-education camps among the peasantry under the premise of “consciousness raising.”43 There were in the midst of this national cloud of dust real libertarian labor formations that emerged. Perhaps the most memorable was the Shengwulian (the Federation of the Provincial Proletariat based in Hunan Province). This direct democratic formation broke out from below while the Cultural Revolution was meant to be stage managed from above. Paying tactical deference to Mao in theory, their manifesto “Whither China,” took seriously the appeal to revolutionary France to popularly govern through a great commune. The CCP in response, in an attempt to restore centralism of the one-party state, attacked such developments as “the anarchist” theory of “many centers.” There was a clear attempt in Mao’s Cultural Revolution to suppress or co-opt the spontaneous rebellion of industrial labor and youth. This was difficult to see when even the Hunan-based Shengwulian, accused of “anarchism” by K’ang Sheng (an associate of what later became the Gang of Four), attacked Chou En Lai as “a capitalist roader,” but tried to quote Mao, sometimes ambivalently, against his own state. In response to the specter of popular self-management, all factions of the Chinese one-party state, despite differing statements at times, functioned in unison when their power was threatened.44

Marty Glaberman argued with James to decisively intervene in the debate in the United States and the world on the political meaning of events in China to no avail. Writing a new draft preface to their State Capitalism & World Revolution—which was never published—and centering their previous critique of Mao’s China, Glaberman updated it in light of what he perceived as the emerging dangerous popularity of the Three Worlds Theory. Glaberman wanted the Facing Reality group to oppose publicly placing faith or remaining agnostic in a people of color led state bureaucracy. This is merely the application of James’s most revolutionary instincts on China and the Third World, which he repeatedly advised the Facing Reality group should be publicly known since James began writing letters and offering perspectives to shape the small revolutionary organization after its split with James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs in 1962. It is worth considering the nuances of these final exchanges on China between James and Glaberman.

In an April 16, 1968, letter to Glaberman, James criticized the new draft preface to State Capitalism & World Revolution. Suggesting what Glaberman has to say about labor is now only relevant to “the advanced countries” (James’s italics), he takes issue with a political analysis that he does not “think need[s] to be stated so absolutely.”45 James challenged Glaberman to not emphasize so much that Mao “consciously excluded the proletariat.” Apparently, “to say that directives by Mao himself instructed workers to remain at work and not to think of participating in the revolution is not the same as ‘consciously excluded.’ ” James thought such phrasing was too “militant” and should be edited out. James then quarreled with Glaberman’s characterization of the Chinese Revolution under Mao “as a bourgeois revolution of the most thorough type.” James sensed there was something wrong with underscoring “bourgeois” but says: “I don’t want to argue this with you.”46

What James really objected to was Glaberman’s awareness that “the proletarian socialist revolution was replaced by the bourgeois national revolution [my italics].” James argued instead that their document should now view Maoist China in Leninist terms as approaching “the complete state capitalist revolution.”47 This was not the libertarian socialist or syndicalist interpretation critical of state capitalist regimes they had shared in 1950 as the basis for their global perspectives of social revolution from below. James instead wielded his later incarnation of Lenin, the Third World statesman of a peripheral nation, who would be lucky to administer a state capitalist regime under the control of a progressive ruling class. Peculiarly, James’s Lenin, has on one level, a subtle mandate to smash independent labor action. This is the same Lenin which James places in conversation with Ghana, Tanzania, and Haiti.

For James, Mao was not attempting to destroy what was left of Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist movement, as Glaberman held, but rather to complete it. Klaus Mehnert, in discussing Shengwulian’s marshaling of Lenin’s last writings, where Lenin characterized the Bolshevik state as deformed, also quarreled with K’ang Sheng’s assessment of these purported “anarchists” who strived to quote Lenin (and Mao) against the Chinese one-party state. Sheng believed properly, in contrast to Mehnert, who rightfully wished to defend Shengwulian, that Lenin’s critique of the Russian state in his last writings were not a call for uprising against his own regime.48

Of course the state that Mao and Sheng represented did deserve to be overthrown by the self-emancipating Chinese people. The Shengwulian popular formation should have been defended. We must recall clearly that Sheng not only denounced the Shengwulian movement, but was the leader of the police and military suppression of it.

Maintaining that Mao had created the bureaucratic structure that imperiled its completion, and at the same time thinking that Mao was trying to fight bureaucratic degeneration which he observed in Russia (but which for Mao justified the smashing of the Hungarian Revolt), James believed that what Glaberman proposed was “a very unusual view” in 1968. Glaberman argued that the proletariat resisted the Cultural Revolution, and that the latter was directed against what remained of the nationalist revolution.49 Yet it appeared James’s view was the one that was muddled and untenable in light of Shengwulian. Glaberman’s perspective as a whole actually spoke to the conflicting tendencies present in James’s history and politics.

In another letter, this one dated May 20, 1968, James tells Glaberman, “I accept everything you say about China (except one thing).” Revealing the tensions between them James explained: “The only thing that really startled me in your letter was the statement that if we weren’t going to deal with China it would be better not to have a document at all.” Observing world events, now those of a libertarian socialist quality in the labor and student revolts in France of 1968, James was “convinced that we are in a revolutionary situation (although as Lenin always insisted, that does not necessarily produce the revolution).”50

In the final analysis, despite many twists and turns, we can see that C.L.R. James’s views on Maoist China were consistent with and amplify three contours in his political thought: first, the double meaning he gives to state capitalism; second, the dual legacy of Lenin (both revolutionary socialist who initially advocates “all power to the soviets” and proto–Third World nationalist–progressive–capitalist politician); and third, the rise and fall of directly democratic rebellions of labor, from expressions of popular self-management from below seen as the pinnacle of national liberation and socialist revolution to merely a revolutionary situation which can be negated by a fateful embrace of the state.

Martin Glaberman, in a 1967 editorial in the Facing Reality group’s journal Speak Out, called “Upheaval in China,” and a pamphlet called Mao As Dialectician (1968) marshaled C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics and the meaning of the Hungarian Revolution to illustrate that Mao manipulated the Red Guards and the youth of China generally, dislocating their lives whether in rural areas or universities, to purge the army and party to consolidate his continued rule. He re-affirmed James’s claim in Facing Reality that the decisive direct democratic revolt against China’s one-party state had not truly arrived.51 In June 1989, when James was being buried in Trinidad, the events of Tiananmen Square broke out. Glaberman was hopeful James’s intellectual legacies of direct democracy and national liberation would historically be reconciled in the final showdown for state capitalist China.52 That one party state, authoritarian as ever, shorn of its charisma and populist claims, still stands—now on the authority of being an industrial power that has placed the United States in a dependent relationship through a trade deficit.

Glaberman never succeeded in convincing James to endorse a vision of workers self-management in contrast with Mao’s state capitalist regime as the public platform of their group in later years.53 This was a great historical opportunity missed. Perhaps only James, among the most libertarian socialist figures of the Marxist movement and the Third World, with his tremendous body of critical work on the state and political economy, in a period where attacks on the Eurocentric past of Marxism were increasingly prevalent, could have raised criticism of Maoist China and clarified national liberation, anti-racism, and workers self-management as synonymous. On the lower frequencies, in the archive of primary and neglected sources of James’s intellectual legacies, including the debates, that body of work is ready to be explored and may contribute to such a re-evaluation in the future.

• 1Les Evans and Russell Block, eds., Leon Trotsky on China, introduction by Peng-Shu-Tse (1976).
• 2For evidence of C.L.R. James’s influence with Warburg leading to the original publication see Paul Collin, (Harold Isaacs), “The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: An Essay On The Different Editions of That Work,” Revolutionary History, 2.4, Spring 1990, pp. 1–9; Frederic Warburg, An Occupation for Gentlemen (1959), p. 214; Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (1996).
• 3For two very different collections of essays discussing Malraux see R.W.B. Lewis, ed., Malraux (1964); Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate (1988). Ironically, the latter text (which covers more than Man’s Fate) seems to be colored more by the Cold War than the former produced at its height.
• 4See C.L.R. James (G.F. Eckstein), “New Recruits for Norman Thomas’ Campaign,” The Militant, May 17, 1948; C.L.R. James (G.F. Eckstein), “Malraux, With Aid of ‘Times,’ Slanders Trotskyism,” The Militant, March 1, 1948.
• 5World Revolution, pp. 229–268.
• 6Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (1999), second edition, pp. 332–341.
• 7Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991), p. 288.
• 8Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1961), second revised edition, pp. 156–174.
• 9See Maurice Meisner, “Stalinism in the History of the Chinese Communist Party,” in Aril Dirlik et al., eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (1997). Arif Dirlik et. al. eds. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:Humanities Press, 1997.184–206. Meisner points out that Mao’s famous “Hunan Report” (1927), which valorized the peasantry, was published at the same time that Chiang Kai Shek’s counter-revolution confined the aspiring Communist revolution to the rural areas.
• 10C.L.R. James, World Revolution, pp. 238, 242–243.
• 11Ibid., p. 233. Of course, it was questionable whether the Bolsheviks ever did organize their party based on one single class. Perhaps, if we accept the party at their word, they organized in the interest of the working class. But this should not be confused with the class composition of the party. At many points in this study it is questioned whether the party always acted in the best interests of the working class.
• 12C.L.R. James (Anonymous), “China Fights—For Whom,” Fight, 1.10, September 1937, p. 1. See the collected volume of this publication, Staffan Lindhe, ed., Fight: Facsimile Edition of British Trotskyist Journals of the 1930s (1999).
• 13Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 342.
• 14C.L.R. James, “Revolution and the Negro,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939–1949, Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc, eds. (1994), p. 83.
• 15C.L.R. James, “Native Son and Revolution,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939–1949, p. 91.
• 16C.L.R. James, “In the International Tradition: Tasks Ahead for American Labor,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939–1949, p. 162.
• 17C.L.R. James, “The American People in One World,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939–1949, pp. 174–176.
• 18C.L.R. James (G.F. Eckstein), “Karl Marx and Henry Luce,” Fourth International 9.2, March–April 1948, pp. 40–49; C.L.R. James, Modern Politics (1973), p. 125.
• 19See Gina Marcetti, Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’ (1993), and Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism (2003).
• 20For a more comprehensive state-capitalist analysis of China than what was offered in James’s State Capitalism & World Revolution, see Cajo Brendel’s Theses on the Chinese Revolution (1974).
• 21C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee, State Capitalism & World Revolution (1986), pp. 78–105.
• 22C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Balance Sheet Completed, Raya Dunayevskaya Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan, 1951, p. 8.
• 23While the Hungarian Revolution’s main events were in October–November 1956, studies argue dynamics of these events extend as far as a year later. See Melvin Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution (1957); Andy Anderson, Hungary ’56 (1976); Terry Cox, ed., Hungary 1956—Forty Years On (1997).
• 24Facing Reality, p. 8.
• 25Ibid., p. 20.
• 26Mao Tse Tung, February 27, 1957, “Can Bad Things Be Turned Into Good Things?” in Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung (1977), volume 5, p. 416.
• 27Modern Politics, pp. 162–167.
• 28Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 539–543.
• 29For the purposes of this study of James, the nuances of Rousseau’s concept of the social contract and his methods of cultivating the popular will by a philosopher disinterested in personally rising to state power must be kept in mind. However, we must also recall that while Mao seems to have studied Rousseau, “the citizen of Geneva” who inspired the French Revolution, Rousseau was among the European political thinkers, who had an Orientalist outlook, and saw China as backward and beyond reason and true liberty. See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 134, 293.
• 30C.L.R. James, 1963, “Perspectives and Proposals,” in Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization, Martin Glaberman, ed. (1999), p. 165.
• 31Grace C. Lee, “The Best-Laid Plans in Communist China,” Correspondence, July 1, 1961, p. 3.
• 32Spence, p. 578.
• 33I wish to thank Robert G. Lee, professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at Brown University, for critical discussion leading to this reflection.
• 34“The Best-Laid Plans in Communist China,” Correspondence, p. 3.
• 35Ibid., p. 3. Grace Lee Boggs subsequently transitioned to a politics partially inspired by Maoism and thus has desired to minimize in her autobiographical memoir her previous adherence to a more critical approach to Maoist China that she had from at least 1944–1961. It is not historically accurate to suggest, as Boggs had done in her memoir, that (1) because both Boggs and Mao are of Chinese descent, and aspired to be philosophers, (2) and that there was a greater affinity, enhanced soon after writing this article in Correspondence, when Mao’s works became more widely available in the United States. Instead Boggs felt the need to discard the meaning of direct democracy and Hungary to embrace a more state-centered socialist perspective on a world scale. See Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change (1998), pp. 193–195.
• 36Facing Reality, pp. 79–80.
• 37Ibid., p. 80.
• 38C.L.R. James, Letter to Martin Glaberman, December 3, 1962, “Letters On Organization,” in Marxism for Our Times, pp. 70–71.
• 39C.L.R. James, Letter to Martin Glaberman, pp. 97–98.
• 40Facing Reality (1958) the publication should not be confused with the subsequent organization named Facing Reality. Grace Lee Boggs co-wrote the document but split from C.L.R. James, taking the organization correspondence, and the newspaper with the same name with her in 1962. Her split led to the formation of the Facing Reality group led by James and Martin Glaberman.
• 41C.L.R. James, 1967, The Gathering Forces, George Rawick Papers, Western Manuscripts Archive, University of Missouri, St. Louis, pp. 22–23.
• 42Ibid., pp. 41–42.
• 43Spence, pp. 574–586.
• 44See Klaus Mehnert, ed., Peking and the New Left: At Home and Abroad, Chinese Research Monograph No. 4 (1969). This collection includes “Whither China,” two other Shengwulian documents, and K’ang Sheng’s attack on Shengwulian and the CCP’s assessment of their challenge to authority as “anarchist.”
• 45C.L.R. James, Letter to Martin Glaberman, April 16, 1968, p. 1.
• 46Ibid.
• 47Ibid.
• 48Mehnert, pp. 22–23.
• 49C.L.R. James, Letter to Martin Glaberman, April 16, 1968, p. 2.
• 50C.L.R. James, Letter to Martin Glaberman, May 20, 1968, p. 1.
• 51See Martin Glaberman, “Upheaval in China,” Speak Out, January 1967, p. 3; Martin Glaberman, 1968, Mao As Dialectician (1971).
• 52Martin Glaberman, “C.L.R. James: A Recollection,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, p. 52.
• 53Martin Glaberman, Letter to Paul Buhle, June 18, 1970; Martin Glaberman, “Draft Introduction to State Capitalism & World Revolution” (1967), Martin Glaberman Collection, Walter Reuther Labor Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. This manuscript was prepared for the third edition of State Capitalism & World Revolution, which was published in 1969. This edition’s published “Preface” has no remnants of the discussion of Maoist China to be found in this manuscript.

I recently re-read the chapter on China in CLR James’s World Revolution. It’s titled, “Stalin Ruins the Chinese Revolution.” It was published in 1936–1937. Not surprisingly, at virtually every turn, James invokes Trotsky as the one who was always right but who was not able to outmaneuver Stalin. While the chapter has lots of useful information, it’s not especially sophisticated in its analysis—certainly nothing like the sophistication that James would display a year later in The Black Jacobins. As is well known, James subsequently went well beyond Trotskyism in, among other documents, his Notes on Dialectics, I think that book is a lot about an attempt to precisely identify where Trotsky went wrong.

I believe that, in spite of all the ink spilled that says the opposite, Trotsky may have been closer to Stalin than he was to Lenin. That’s the argument made by Claude Lefort (one of the leading members of Socialisme ou Barbarisme) in a 1948 essay, “The Contradiction of Trotsky.” He criticizes Trotsky for having over and over again pursued a conciliationist approach towards Stalin and failing to uphold what Lefort claims would have been Lenin’s positions if he had still been alive. The full essay is at libcom. Here are a few excerpts:

Trotsky in Words vs Trotsky in Deeds:

A reading of Stalin, or of the earlier The Revolution Betrayed or My Life, would lead one to believe that the attitude of Trotsky and of the Left Opposition, in the great period of 1923–7, was a perfectly rigorous one. It is as if Trotsky, “bearer” of revolutionary consciousness, had been swept aside by the inexorable course of things that were then developing in a reactionary direction. There were a great many who, taking sides against Trotsky and in a way for Stalin, reproached Trotsky only for not having been realistic enough, not having been able to “adapt” the politics of revolutionary Russia to the difficult circumstances of a capitalist world undergoing reconsolidation. They did not dispute that Trotsky had then adopted a clearly revolutionary attitude, but it was precisely this attitude that they denounced as abstract. In any case, it is not usually denied that the Left Opposition had a coherent strategy, whether it was justified at the level of revolutionary morality or whether it was regarded as inopportune. Trotsky himself largely lent support to this view. In his works, he speaks of this period with perfect serenity, repeating that he acted as he had to act in the given objective situation. History, he says in essence, was taking a new course. No one could block the ebbing tide of the revolution. Thus, recalling the events of the decisive year 1927, he writes in My Life:

We went to meet the inevitable debacle, confident, however, that we were paving the way for the triumph of our ideas in a more distant future … It is possible by force of arms to check the development of progressive historical tendencies; it is not possible to block the road of the advance of progressive ideas for ever. That is why, when the struggle is one for great principles, the revolutionary can only follow one rule: Fais ce que tu dois, advienne que pourra. (8)

It would be quite admirable, when one is in the midst of historical action, to retain such lucidity and to be able to stand above day-to-day events, perceiving what is permanent in the heart of what is immediately present. But one must ask whether Trotsky was as lucid when he was acting as he was when he was writing. For it is one thing to judge one’s own past actions, to look back on a relatively closed period in which the most diverse actions seem to take on a single, absolute meaning; it is a quite different thing to act in an equivocal situation with an indeterminate future. In his Stalin Trotsky defines once again the principles of the Left Opposition in its anti-Stalinist struggle:

No Regrets:

Indeed it is striking to see, when one examines the events of this period closely, that the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalin almost never assumed a revolutionary form and always developed around compromise. The problem is not the one that Trotsky poses, namely, whether it was possible or desirable to undertake a struggle for power. The question was to lead the struggle—or to lay the ground for the future—in a revolutionary spirit. The Bolsheviks were in retreat between 1908 and 1911 and postponed until later the struggle for the seizure of power; but, on the theoretical plane, they did not make the slightest concession to their adversaries. At no time did the Bolsheviks ever indulge in a policy of compromise or conciliation with Tsarism. By contrast, it is Trotsky himself who declared in November 1934, referring to his attitude to Eastman when the latter revealed on his own initiative the existence of Lenin’s Testament: “My statement at that time on Eastman cannot be understood except as an integral part of our line, which, at that time, was orientated towards conciliation and appeasement.” (11) In 1929 he was writing from the same point of view and in a much more brutal manner:

Right up to the last minute, I avoided the struggle, for, in the first stage, it had the character of an unprincipled conspiracy directed towards me, personally. It was clear to me that a struggle of this nature, once begun, would inevitably assume an exceptional vigour and, in the conditions of the revolutionary dictatorship, might lead to dangerous consequences. This is not the place to try to find out whether it was correct at the cost of the greatest personal concessions to tend to preserve the foundations of a common work, or whether it was necessary for me to throw myself into an offensive all along the line, despite the absence, for such an offensive, of adequate political bases The fact is that I chose the first solution and that in spite of everything I do not regret it. (12)

On the Eastman Affair:

It is true that the struggle against Trotskyism had not yet come out into the open and, more importantly, that Stalinism was only just emerging as a political entity. Trotsky’s concessions seemed all the more tragic when battle commenced. After the first phase of this battle, after Trotsky had triggered off a struggle in favour of the New Course, after he had been the object of a campaign of systematic attacks from the politbureau, after Stalin had put forward his view of “socialism in one country,” (19) Trotsky published an article in Pravda (January 1925) in which he denies ever having thought of opposing a platform to the Stalinist majority.’(20) This was to state clearly that there was no fundamental divergence between him and this majority. Capitulation appears again in that year 1925, on the occasion of the Eastman affair. In a work entitled Since Lenin Died, the American journalist, a Bolshevik sympathizer, had taken it upon himself, as I have already indicated, to reveal the existence and the content of Lenin’s Testament, which Trotsky, in agreement with the Central Committee, had thought good to conceal not only from the Russian masses, but also from the party militants and from communists throughout the world. Trotsky’s declaration, at this time, would deserve to be quoted in full, so striking is the degree to which it reveals Trotsky’s bad faith and the practice of the “supreme sacrifice” Trotsky accuses Eastman of “despicable lying” and implies that he is an agent of international reaction. “Comrade Lenin,” he writes, “did not leave a testament: the nature of his relations with the Party and the nature of the Party itself excludes the possibility of such a testament.” Referring to Lenin’s letter on the reorganization of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (in which Stalin had the upper hand), Trotsky does not hesitate to declare: “Eastman’s affirmation according to which the C.C. was anxious to conceal, that is to say, not publish, Comrade Lenin’s article on the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection is equally erroneous. The different points of view expressed in the C.C., if it is actually possible to speak of a difference of points of views, in this case, was of absolutely secondary importance.” (21) How could Trotsky speak in this way, when Lenin, on this very point, was making a fundamental attack, and when Trotsky was fully in agreement with him, as he has repeated a hundred times?

On China:

We cannot complete the balance sheet of this politics of conciliation without showing that, even on the theoretical level, Trotsky was confused. I have already shown that he did not regard the struggle against the theory of socialism in one country, when it was “discovered” by Stalin, as a matter of fundamental principle. One must also recognize that Trotsky did not oppose the entry of the Chinese communists into the Kuomintang nor the tactics used by the British communists within the trade-union Anglo-Russian Committee. In each case, he took up the struggle against the Stalinist policy only when it was obviously turning into a “disaster.” (22) I said above that the tactics of the Left Opposition had helped to disarm the revolutionary vanguard in Russia; I should add, in the light of these examples, that it also had a negative effect on the revolutionary vanguard throughout the world. Trotsky said that Stalin appeared to the world one day as a “ready-made dictator”—he forgot to mention his own responsibility in this regard.

Finally, it was in the last stage of the struggle between the Opposition and the Stalinist leadership, as this struggle became more violent, that the capitulations became more radical and more tragic. On two occasions, in October 1926 and in November 1927, the Left Opposition, which then had the support not only of Trotsky but also of Kamenev and Zinoviev, solemnly condemned itself, repudiated its supporters abroad and undertook its own dissolution. Finally, when there was no hope left for it, when Stalin had at his disposal a Congress (the Fifteenth) that obeyed him blindly, the Opposition made a final attempt to return to favour, and drew up a new condemnation of its own activity, namely, the Declaration of the 121. This is a document of the greatest historical importance, because it represents the last public action of the Left Opposition in Russia. The declaration begins by proclaiming that the unity of the Communist Party is the highest principle during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We find the same terms that Trotsky had used in his speech to the Thirteenth Congress quoted above. The party is regarded as a divine factor in historical development, independently of its content and its line. The declaration thus underlines the danger of a war against the USSR and declares that there is nothing more urgent than to re-establish “the combatant unity of the party.” One may find it extraordinary that the Opposition was seeking above all to preserve the facade of party unity, whereas the gravest dissensions were setting it against the leadership of this party. But the 121 had decided to regard their dissensions with the party as insignificant. Of course, on several occasions, they repeated that they were convinced of the correctness of their views and that they would continue to defend them, as the organizational statutes allowed them to do, after they had dissolved their fraction; but at the same time they proclaimed: “There is no programmatic difference between us and the Party.” (23) And they bitterly denied that they had ever believed that the party or its Central Committee had followed a Thermidorian course. Now, not only had the party completely lost its revolutionary and democratic character in 1927, but it had adopted the perspective of socialism in one country, that is, it had in fact renounced the perspective of world revolution.

Lefort subsequently abandoned his enthusiasm for Lenin (although, as has been documented by Matthew Quest in his recent article for Insurgent Notes, CLR did not). Later still in the 1980s, Lefort lost his enthusiasm for revolution and became one of the theoreticians of post-Marxist civil society.

In any case, however, it is well past the date when we should reconsider Trotsky and the nature of his differences with Stalin.

Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory—an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and others—has generally dominated most fields in the humanities and some in the social sciences, while even making forays into the natural sciences. But the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent chronic crisis in capitalism have dealt a fatal theoretical blow to the varied and nearly ineffable assemblage of perspectives that are often grouped under the rubric of “postmodernism.” History had not ended, nor could postmodern theory grapple with the conditions of its continuance. The financial collapse of 2008 demonstrated that language itself, or the “symbolic register” in postmodern parlance, could not by itself contain the entirety of social reality. In fact, the manipulation of the “symbolic realm” in the stock market, in particular in the real estate sector, had resulted in real material consequences that had spun out of the reaches and control of language itself. Moreover, mere symbolic manipulation could not, by itself, remediate such consequences. Further, for those who regarded class analysis as outmoded, or class itself as a mere construct of language, the class character of the social order, underlying layers of mediation and theoretical obscurantism, became starkly visible. Meanwhile, with the election of Barack Obama and his continuation and extension of Bush’s policies, the hollowness of identity politics (the political fallout shelter of postmodernism’s retreat from historical materialism) was on full display.

A review of postmodern theory and its claims is in order to show exactly how and why postmodernism fails in light of the present moment. The various theoretical tendencies, while diverse in many ways, have nonetheless been properly grouped under a single heading. There is much merit in the postmodern label where the various theories are concerned, especially in connection with their demotion of reason, their radical epistemological relativism, their dismissal of or representing as inaccessible social and historical reality, and their undeniable political pessimism.

One must begin by mentioning the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, where the strange bedfellows of high modernism and Marxist theory combined—at least where Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer were concerned—to produce a critique of Enlightenment rationality itself. This critique arguably inaugurated the “postmodern turn” and its attack on the Enlightenment project en toto—on reason, on the universal project of human emancipation, and on such “master narratives” (particularly Marxism) that sought to explain and address the social totality.

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), reason, albeit split into “instrumental reason” and “critical reason,” formerly a necessary tool for any critical methodology, became an instrument of oppression itself. One might say that the postmodern thereafter became married to one or another form of what Max Weber had referred to as the “iron cage of rationality.” The postmodern theorists variously constructed this cage from different materials. For Michel Foucault, it was a cage of knowledge/power; for Francois Lyotard, it was a cage of master narratives; for Jacques Derrida, it was a cage of language. In each case, a faculty, tool or method that had previously been regarded as essential for understanding the social totality and undertaking the struggle for human emancipation was now regarded as means of self-hostage-taking, or as evidence for always already having been taken hostage by the very means once considered essential for theory and practice: reason, knowledge, theory, language, etc.

We can begin with Foucault, whose project must be seen in light of an effort to explain social reality, including historical change, in terms that he hoped would both escape and exceed Marxism, while nevertheless essentially leaving Marx’s analysis of political economy in place. As Mark Poster made clear in Foucault, Marxism & History (1984), Foucault’s work clearly responded to the structuralist currents in French Marxist thinking prevalent in the 1960s, and we can discern subtle references to Marxist thought in his work—for example in Discipline and Punish, where he refers to “panopticism” as the disciplinary prerequisite for coordinating the “accumulation of capital” and “accumulation of men” under industrial capitalism. But Foucault’s major preoccupation was with the nexus of power and knowledge. In effect, in his archaeologies and genealogies of knowledge, Foucault twisted and reversed Bacon’s axiom, “knowledge is power,” into “power produces knowledge.” He conceived of knowledge as the product of decentralized and seemingly disembodied power structures, not necessarily but sometimes connected to the state. Change was based on permutations of power, at times severe ruptures in its operations. (Here Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) should also be considered germinal.) What followed from this position, among other things, was that knowledge and truth were a function of sheer power itself. Going further than Nietzsche, Foucault aimed to show that knowledge was used to impose a form of “panoptic” discipline on the body and in the various spheres throughout the social order.

Foucault’s conception of the knowledge-power nexus owes much to Nietzsche and Heidegger. But it can also be connected to Soviet Marxist thought as well. In his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lukács introduced the idea of a proletarian “standpoint epistemology,” wherein, based on its unique positioning within the social order and its productive capacities, the working class occupied a privileged epistemological perspective for uncovering the verities of social and scientific reality. Only the working class could have the interests and the social positioning necessary to unpack the reified character of commoditized social relations and to find historical truth, objective reality. In effect, Foucault turned Lukacs’s standpoint epistemology on its head and emptied it of its class character. By implication, Foucault suggested that knowledge could not be located outside of the powerful institutional frameworks capable of producing it.

The problems with Foucault’s formulations are quite clear. How, for example, could it explain how knowledge escaped the control of power elites, as for example, in the case of structural breakdowns like the 2008 crisis, wherein neither the state’s own ministers or the economic “experts” either anticipated it or precluded its appearance? If Foucault is right, how could power ever be threatened and overcome, as in numerous instances in the modern world? Further, if power is so decentralized, why does it rely on state power in the cases of war and imperialism? Further, what kind of politics could ever be possible under such an analysis?

In the end, Foucault’s recommendations boiled down to local, boutique politics for petty bourgeois self-fashioning. In The Care of the Self, his final book in the trilogy The History of Sexuality, a subject’s political agency extends only as far as the ability to locate itself within its preferred “discursive fields,” likewise, given the power of discourse, to fashion itself as a particular kind of subject. This faith in and strict adherence to “local” politics can be seen in any number of the academic left’s political engagements.

With the “linguistic turn” of deconstruction, the radical disjuncture from social reality becomes even more pronounced. With deconstruction, for example, such ideas as “truth” and “history” do not exist outside of language, if at all. As Jacques Derrida wrote in Of Grammatology (1967), “there is nothing outside of text.” Derrida’s later defenses of this often-lampooned remark did little to extricate him from its significance. For much of the 1990s, as the “linguistic turn” metastasized throughout the humanities, in my own field of British nineteenth-century studies, it became problematic to speak of the nineteenth-century working class as a real social formation in history. Rather, one did better to refer to the proletariat as a function of language itself. Frederic Jameson’s attempts to overcome the poststructuralist “prison house of language” wound up nearly ensnaring him in this discursive trap, from which he was barely able to escape long enough to locate an object that exceeded the “symbolic register.” Despite the fashion of critiquing logocentrism—the idea that language is a system of domination—it is not unfair to say that under the linguistic turn, nothing could exceed language, except language itself. But even this excess amounted to a “chain of signifiers” that slid away like a sloughed-off snakeskin to hover around its own coiled body. If it pointed to anything, it was only to itself.

It seems almost unnecessary to note that this theoretical perspective is matched by the self-abnegation of its praxis. To be sure, postmodern theory itself arose due to the bad faith that parts of the left had kept with Stalinism. The failure of the Stalinist state prompted Adorno and Horkheimer, under the influence of Weber, to suggest that the fundamental unity between the two major contenders for systemic hegemony in the West—capitalism and socialism—was bureaucratic rationality. The iron cage was not class society per se, but rather instrumental reason—i.e., rational organization. But such a critique could only have posed a problem for a politics that saw revolution primarily in terms of re-organization, i.e., Stalinism and its apologetics (and in some sects of Trotskyism). In fact, this is the root of the problem, stemming back to the Frankfurt School, through Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and into post-structuralism and even deconstruction: an adherence to the belief that Stalinism represented Marxist socialism, and thus that its failure was a failure of socialism-communism. One might argue that a successful left communism, that is, a communism that views revolution as the self-emancipation of the working class from commodity production and class society, could have averted half a century of “fashionable nonsense.” But this too would be to discount historical processes as mere constructs of discourse.

In terms of political activity, social democracy in Europe and Democratic Party adherence in the United States has been the concomitant to what can only be seen as a theoretical pessimism. Changing “discourses” is analogous to the volleying back and forth of political party control that continues under bourgeois democracy. In fact, what we primarily get from political elections in the United States is the rhetorical shape shifting that Foucault saw as the horizon of political possibility. The difference between Bush and Obama, clear even to many Obama supporters, was a change of identity and rhetoric. Similarly, identity and language politics are the only remnants of academic postmodern political engagement. According to Judith Butler, they were sufficient to induce the “uncritical exuberance” of her colleagues among the academic postmodern left upon the first election of Obama, despite the fact that Obama supported Bush and voted for the bailout of Wall Street banks and brokerage firms, the same bailouts that would energize the OWS protests in the wake of economic catastrophe.

The crisis of postmodernist epistemology was in evidence well before 2008, however. It was discernible in the aftermath of the 2000 US Presidential election. Given its adherence to radical epistemological pluralism and relativism, how could the academic left, such as those who had been recently embroiled in the “Science Wars,” argue for an objective recount of ballots in the contest between the two ruling-class candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida? The social constructivists could not come to the aid of their favorite, because they had long argued that all knowledge claims were mere constructs of ideology or language, or that observation could not but be utterly saturated in “theory-ladenness”—that is, that no observation could escape the theoretical prejudices of the observer. Science and its products were social constructs “all the way down.” Likewise, the academic left could not credibly support the Democratic Party’s claim that the ballots should be objectively evaluated for the intentions of the voters. If they had joined in the calls for a recount, they could only have done so by marshaling a Foucauldian-Nietzschean argument that the success of knowledge claims depends on the power associated with them. Thus they would have conceded the argument in advance to the Republicans, who were accusing the Democrats precisely of attempting just such a power play.

Yet, it was finally the economic collapse of 2008, and nothing as strictly “discursive” or “symbolic” as a US Presidential election, that finally marked the theoretical end of postmodernism’s sway over academic thought. Yes, the practical result may be a theoretical and historical vacuum that lasts for some time. In some fields, we may see a decline into positivism as a response to the theoretical licentiousness of the past fifty years. In others, postmodern theory may continue to be bandied about, despite its obvious shortcomings, failures, and patent absurdities. Similarly, the bourgeois economists continue their neo-Keynesian/monetarist parrying, pretending that their paradigms haven’t been utterly discredited by a crisis that they failed to predict and have no nostrums for remediating. Likewise, we may witness a period during which the postmodern mounts pathetic resurgences in effigy, repeating as farce what was first intellectual and political tragedy. That is, we may be in the “late age” of postmodernism, the tail end of this decrepit phase of bourgeois philosophy.

And, like the financial collapse, postmodernism was indeed tragedy. It was tragedy for the massive amounts of “cultural capital” that it wasted; it was tragedy for the defrauding of intellectual integrity that it represented; it was tragedy for the abandonment of reality that it recommended. Further, like the financial fiasco, it was criminal. The postmodernist ringleaders should be indicted as as the ideological counterparts of Wall Street’s thieves, as the “junk bond traders” and “corporate raiders” of culture, as Camille Paglia once referred to them.

Except for these final processions and prosecutions, however, the era of postmodernism—the last gasp of “credible” philosophical idealism—is theoretically, and effectively, over.

Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the Question of Unions in Contemporary Capitalism

This review is conceived as a further contribution to the discussion of contemporary trade unions in Insurgent Notes, as we have attempted in articles, book reviews and letters on Greece, Andy Stern’s SEIU, Wisconsin, the Arab Spring, New York City transit, South Africa, the ILWU’s role in the terrible Longview defeat, and on the fall 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike. The length and detail of the following treatment of Bardacke, in contrast to most earlier IN articles, grew out of his book’s exceptional quality as labor history of a not too distant past, but nonetheless a past mostly contained in the post-World War II boom and the movements of the sixties and seventies from which we are separated as by a chasm by the intervening, relentless decades of “neo-liberalism.” In the three years of IN ’s existence, we have attempted to document the discontinuity from that earlier period, in order to better articulate the recomposition of class terrain on a world scale. Nonetheless, Bardacke tells the story of one movement’s evolution from grassroots obscurity to such (relatively little-known) successes as the Salinas Valley (California) general strike of lettuce pickers in 1979—a veritable mass strike in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense—and from there to the collapsed shell of a union nonetheless administering fourteen non-profits with millions in assets. In today’s world, when the diminished unions in the “advanced” capitalist countries are heavily invested in pension funds, real estate and other areas, even as their memberships plummet, Bardacke’s story of one union’s evolution in that direction is in fact quite contemporary. All quotes in the review are from Bardacke’s book unless otherwise indicated.

From Grassroots Worker Ferment to Non-Profit Portfolio Management: A Case Study

This book is social and labor history of an E.P. Thompson or Peter Linebaugh quality. It’s hard to think of any comparable work detailing in so many dimensions the history of any American workers’ movement since World War II. For an earlier period, Steve Fraser’s study of Sidney Hillman or the Dubovsky–Van Tine study of John L. Lewis come to mind, but they mainly deal with pre-1945 developments and do not have quite the lived, total social history “from below” feel of Bardacke; Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive has some of that, but it is a survey of the United States working class as a whole in the 1970s and not written with the “participant-observer,” Thucydides-like, feel that Bardacke brings to his subject. In Bardacke’s book, as with Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class or Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, one quite simply enters…a world. At a first pass, criticizing it would seem tantamount to criticizing Picasso’s Demoiselles of Avignon or Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue ; the only meaningful criticism would be another work presenting another world.

The book’s own history is worth a mention: Bardacke, a 1960s Berkeley radical, suffering (in 1971) from the New Left burnout that carried off so many in that dismal period, hitched a ride in central California and was dropped off in Watsonville, an agricultural town. He stayed a lifetime, working first for six years in the fields, and then teaching English as a Second Language for decades more. Trampling, in its sprawling 740+ pages, thus comes across as a life’s work in a double sense.

Our main purpose in reviewing the book, however, is not to add to the multiple (and deserved) rave reviews it has received since it appeared in 2011. We wish to use the material it presents, and some gathered elsewhere, to continue an ongoing analysis of the role, real or potential, of trade unions, either of the traditional business or newer “social movement” type (the United farmworkers—hereafter UFW—obviously being one of the latter) in post-1945 American and world capitalism, and particularly in the context of the almost uninterrupted defeats, to which the UFW was hardly immune, which began in the mid-1970s.

Seen in that context, it is difficult to think of a comparably successful (if only temporarily) union movement started from scratch in the United States (or for that matter in any other “advanced capitalist” country) in the postwar period. The UFW fits well into the general working class upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s (it was in fact able to carry out and win militant strikes as late as 1979), but most of the other struggles, from the post-1955 wildcats in auto to the post office, Teamster and New York Telephone wildcats of 1970, were revolts against established unions, not the creation of a new one. The UFW, in turn, in the explosive 1979 lettuce strike in the Salinas Valley, found itself confronted by a militant rank-and-file that threw the leadership’s caution to the winds and won, but even that was more the brief emergence of a pole independent of Cesar Chavez’s micromanaging (not to say authoritarian) style than a revolt against the union per se, not to mention against the (by then) mythical Chavez himself. And, as Bardacke shows, Chavez wrought his revenge in short order, even if it meant destroying the UFW as an organization of farmworkers in the process.

The UFW, it should be noted, also triumphed for a time in a sector—agribusiness—which could not readily move operations overseas, as so many US industries started to do in the 1970s. But despite that difference with auto, steel, textiles and electronics, where relocation and foreign imports helped snuff out the United States worker revolt of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and although agriculture, unlike those industries, is the number one US export sector today, we find, by the end of Bardacke’s story, agribusiness as well undergoing a complete reorganization through bankruptcy, creating ghost companies to void union contracts, and finally succeeding in eliminating highly skilled workers (such as in lettuce picking) in ways similar to those that swept through the rest of the economy in the 1980s and beyond.

The “two souls” of the UFW in Bardacke’s title refers to ever-growing tension between, on one hand, Chavez’s great talent for boycotts and raising outside support, followed by his retreat into the Tehachapi mountains where he attempted to build an “intentional community” with the top UFW leadership and volunteer support staff, and on the other hand the actual organization of farmworkers which over time became almost an afterthought and from which the whole project acquired its original legitimacy.

Cesar Chavez never conceived of the UFW1 as merely a trade union. It had its origins in his lifelong, deep Catholic faith combined with his early training in Alinsky-style community organizing, and was actually a step or two behind the emergence of farmworker militancy in their 1959–1962 strike wave. The UFW as a union cum boycott had its glory days, in a larger 1960s context, between its defeat of the Di Giorgio growers in Delano in 1966—the first big albeit ambiguous victory—and the successful organizing of much of the table grape industry by 1970. After a big downturn and many lost contracts, it had a second surge in the late 1970s, culminating in the 1979 Salinas lettuce strike which Mexican immigrant militants imposed on Chavez and the union leadership. But by 1980 and thereafter, Chavez had turned the Tehachapi headquarters of the union into almost a Gandhi-inspired ashram with the intensive use of the methods—the Game—of the increasingly bizarre and cultish Synanon group, as well as into the administrative center of a burgeoning number of non-profits having their origins in union activity controlling millions of dollars in assets, while union membership plummeted to a few thousands of workers.

This evolution from a popularly based militant mass movement operating on a shoestring, with hundreds of volunteers, including top-quality legal staff, working for years for $5 or $10 a week plus expenses, to the later farmworkers Movement (FWM) controlling non-profits with millions in assets and an actual worker membership a shadow of its earlier dimensions, is actually part of a larger, worldwide phenomenon which is necessarily beyond the scope of Bardacke’s book—he has more than enough on his hands in 740 pages which were edited down from a manuscript twice as long. But this phenomenon is of real importance if we are to look above and beyond an excellent work of social and labor history, a story from the 1950s to the 1970s unrepeatable today for reasons Bardacke himself provides, to lessons for a present and future movement.

In fact, the evolution of the UFW followed a broader movement in American and world trade unionism. According to Marshall Ganz, the former SNCC2 organizer who became part of Chavez’s “kitchen cabinet”3 until he was forced out much later, the UFW by 2009 had declined from its peak of 60–70,000 to 5,000 members. It has fourteen non-profits with $42 million in assets, run by the Chavez family. These assets developed out of the capitalization of funds from 1970s and 1980s labor contracts, direct mail marketing, and an investment portfolio. The related National Farm Work Service Center Inc. has assets of $24.6 million and nine radio stations, and builds affordable housing in four states. The Juan de la Cruz Pension Fund in 2004 held $102.7 million in assets, and makes pension payments to only 2,411 retirees. The RFK Medical Plan has $7.9 million in assets, and insures less than 3,000 workers. The UFW has an annual income of $6 million, of which 60 percent comes from fundraising. Union dues in 1992, just before Chavez’s death, were only 27 percent of total income4 .

But here we get ahead of ourselves.

In this review, we will emphasize the following key “threads” running through Bardacke’s book:

1. the religious dimension, in the influence of Catholicism, from Cesar Chavez’s early 1950s involvement with Catholic Action and the cursillismo which arrived in the United States from Franco’s Spain, to his use of penance, pilgrimages and fasts, as well as the official Catholic and Protestant organizations which supported his organizing almost from the start;
2. the influence of Saul Alinsky’s methods, specifically designed as an alternative to various “class struggle” traditions which openly challenged capitalist class society, methods shaping Chavez’s lifelong anti-Communism, anti-leftism and periodic purges of his movement;
3. the overall evolution from a hardscrabble, grassroots movement with a serious democratic impulse, enlivened by Mexican-American popular culture, to a depleted, authoritarian union structure almost hidden, under the above-mentioned well-endowed non-profits, with millions of dollars in assets;
4. the tension between, on one hand, the US-born Mexican-American population around Delano, California, Chavez’s original base, and on the other hand the ever-increasing Mexican immigrant population ultimately swamping that base, both within the UFW and in California demography generally;
5. the related tension between the Delano grape pickers and the Salinas Valley lettuce pickers (lechugeros), personified in the final showdown within the union between Chavez and his close aide Marshall Ganz, who went over to the rank-and-file;
6. the union’s movement from unaffiliated obscurity to the national embrace of the AFL-CIO, the UAW, and the ILWU, as well as its battles with the Teamsters (IBT);
7. the closely related absorption of Chavez and the UFW by the national left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, by California’s Governor Jerry Brown, and finally in failed, expensive attempts to play kingmaker in the California state legislature;
8. the “two souls” of the movement, one increasingly focused on Chavez’s strategy of boycotts and outside political influence, the other growing from the rank-and-file militancy of the farmworkers themselves, and the confrontation between the two that destroyed the union as such, leaving only the non-profits and their millions.

The Origins: Catholicism and Alinskyism

Cesar Chavez is of course the main, but hardly the only protagonist in Bardacke’s epic. Whatever else might be said about him subsequently in this review where his political choices are concerned, he was undoubtedly a remarkable figure of great charisma, commitment and talents, as attested by the rise from scratch of a movement that at one point mobilized 60,000–70,000 of the most marginal, neglected and despised workers in the United States at the time. Bardacke himself points out that the very qualities of resolute toughness that led to Chavez’s successes were behind the blind spots that later led him to destroy his creation. But before we can see this clearly, it is necessary to follow out his story.

Chavez was born in Arizona in 1927. In 1939, when he was 12, he watched a tractor level the corral on his father’s destitute homestead in a scene, as Bardacke indicates, right out of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which appeared in the same year. His family joined the migration into California, after which Chavez served in the United States Navy during World War II. His strict Catholic upbringing made him receptive, in 1950, when a priest shaped by the socially-oriented Catholic Action current knocked on his door in San Jose.

Catholic Action derived from the papal encyclical De Rerum Novarum of 1891, in which the church consciously set out to counter the rise of socialism and anarchism with its own orientation to social problems, resulting in the Christian-influenced unions and Christian Democratic political parties still present today in many countries. There were many roads from the 1891 encyclical, and Chavez’s road brought him to cursillismo, a right-wing spinoff of Catholic Action that flourished in Franco’s Spain before arriving in the United States in 1957, and which put adepts through a rigorous four-day retreat from which they emerge committed to both a life of piety and study as well as to (undefined) action in the world. Chavez’s path was prior to and distinct from liberation theology, and he studied St. Paul, Gandhi, John L. Lewis, Debs, Machiavelli and even the management theorist Peter Drucker. Nor was he influenced by the Vatican II reforms of 1962. The priest passed Chavez on to his second mentor, the Saul Alinsky protegé Fred Ross, for the next phase of his training. Starting in 1952, Chavez began a ten-year apprenticeship with Ross and with Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), working for the Alinsky-inspired Community Services Organization (CSO).

Saul Alinsky had emerged from the collapse of the Popular Front era after World War II with, as Bardacke puts it, “an idiosyncratic non-Communist” grassroots orientation, put forth in his 1946 book Reveille for Radicals. Alinsky’s focus was on concrete community organizing, in which the organizer helped people marginalized by the system mobilize and then faded away, his work concluded. Alinsky’s perspective involved making existing institutions responsive to grassroots community pressure, and never calling into question those institutions or capitalism generally. This is what allowed him to operate in the shadow of McCarthyism; he never involved himself in red-baiting or aiding government repression of Communists, but, as Bardacke puts it, he “promoted his own political ideas as the best way to combat Communism.” While coming himself from a secular Jewish background, Alinsky’s work in Chicago’s Back of the Yards district brought him into close contact with the Catholic Church, and both Catholic and Protestant “progressive” groups were always among his backers. As Bardacke puts it, the early Alinsky was not so much a social democrat as a democrat, period. He was not about radicalizing corrupt unions but “reawakening” them with vibrant democratic community organizations of poor people. Not for him taking on union bosses in a fight for radical democracy or class-wide organization; as Bardacke writes, “None of that was in Cesar Chavez’s intellectual arsenal; all of it was missing from the UFW…Alinsky championed John L. Lewis’s destruction of independent locals” in the UMW and saw that destruction as a key to Lewis’s power. Alinsky and his followers replaced theory with conversation and storytelling. They paid no attention to “great speeches and speechmakers”; “political oratory” (read Marxism et al.) was the enemy. (Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules For Radicals is a polemic against the disintegrating New Left and what Alinsky calls “rhetorical radicalism.”) Chavez was in fact an ineffective public speaker, but excelled in one-on-one conversation and small-group organizing meetings.

In Bardacke’s view, Chavez’s twist on Alinsky’s organizer, who faded out when the job was done and the community group established, was a fusion of the roles of organizer and leader. But in that twist, Chavez imported the Alinsky bag of tricks of the “juggler, the catalyst, the alchemist” and made them instead a permanent repertoire. He would never fade out.

Chavez’s first organizing was in Oxnard, a town in the heart of lemon orchards north of Los Angeles, on a one-year project co-sponsored by the United Packing House Workers of America (UPWA), the union Alinsky had worked with in Chicago. The problem there was the impact of the bracero program on the labor market for the local limoneros. The bracero program originated in 1942, involving the importation of tens of thousands of Mexican farmworkers to work in the American Southwest, ostensibly to deal with a wartime labor shortage. (The program, in fact, was only abolished in 1965.) The braceros lived in labor camps in terribly exploitive general conditions similar to those of older company towns, a plentiful cheap labor force for the growers that undercut wages of domestic (white or Mexican-American) farmworkers. With his community-based Alinskyite perspective, it never occurred to Chavez to organize the braceros and the local limoneros together on a class basis; the task, rather, was to “throw (them) out of the orchards” of the big companies such as the Sunkist Corporation. Relating the struggles of native-born Mexican-American farmworkers to the braceros and, later, to waves of Mexican immigrant laborers would be a constant problem Chavez would never solve, for which he would later contrive reactionary policies and which would, by the 1980s, be one factor that overwhelmed the UFW.

Chavez mentor Fred Ross was (in one UFW member’s words) a “heavy red baiter” and his “narrow definition of politics” focused on “community action, voter registration and voter participation.” By 1962 the CSO had registered 400,000 Mexican-Americans to vote and brought together key figures of the future UFW such as Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. This organizing brought them to the attention of the state’s Democratic Party, which they assisted in a liberal Democratic victory in the 1958 elections. Thus another piece of the “non-ideological” Alinsky-Ross-Chavez outlook fell into place: a close relationship to one of America’s two capitalist parties, the Democrats, and especially its (then) ascendant liberal wing. And liberal Democratic governor Edmund Brown, whom the CSO had helped elect, after he had made noises about helping US-born farmworkers, “was turned around in the middle of his term by the power of agribusiness” and “went on to defend the Bracero Program up to its last days.”

This approach, pitting US-born workers against imported labor in California’s rural economy was, to put it mildly, not the only possibility. As Bardacke shows, there was already a long tradition of much more militant struggle in the California fields, including the IWW prior to US entry into World War I, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) of Magonista revolutionaries who fled repression during the Mexican Revolution and who worked with the IWW on both sides of the border (the red flag briefly flew over Tijuana in 1911), as well as the great strikes of 1933, organized in part by Communist Party trade union militants. PLM influence remained alive in Los Angeles and other Mexican-American centers into the 1950s. The Filipino-based Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) around Larry Itliong (about which more below) was in favor of reaching out to the braceros as class brothers. But for the cursillo adept and Alinsky-trained Cesar Chavez in 1950s Cold War America, this classwide approach was not only an “unknown past,” as Bardacke points out, it was a past he would have viscerally rejected, and did reject when it later re-erupted in his periodic purges of “leftists” and real or imagined “Communists” from the UFW, or finally when “in 1979, the ghost of Ricardo Flores Magon”5 made “a cameo appearance at one of the most dramatic moments in UFW history.” This antagonism between braceros and Mexican-Americans even began to crack during a rural strike wave of 1959–1962. At the Dannenburg Ranch labor camp in the Imperial Valley in February 1961, a thousand UPWA pickets striking nearby lettuce fields confronted hundreds of braceros, potential scabs, through a fence topped with barbed wire designed to keep the braceros from escaping. After calling on the braceros to join them, and confronting the local sheriffs who arrived to clear the strikers away, the militants watched as hundreds of braceros jumped out of the scab-herding growers’ trucks and more than a hundred of them climbed the fence in solidarity.

Dealing with the braceros and heading off the growing wave of militancy among US-born farmworkers required action from the incoming Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy, and his Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, “one of the chief architects of the CIO’s expulsion of the Communists in 1947.” Kennedy renewed the Bracero Program in 1961, while pushing Goldberg to raise bracero wages (to $1 per hour, against the legal minimum wage of $1.15) and implement other restrictions on their use against domestic farm labor. George Meany,6 head of the AFL-CIO, later killed off the affiliated Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), but in 1962 it was ordered to become another prop of the Brown gubernatorial campaign under a conservative Meany appointee.

Bardacke, against academic interpretations, credits the struggles of both the braceros and the domestic farmworkers for the end of the Bracero Program. From the mid-1950s onward, they had begun to organize and “unite with striking domestic workers” and ran away from their camps to join “the ranks of undocumented workers outside any government control.” Far-sighted growers such as lettuce magnate Bud Antle decided that “farmworker unionization was inevitable,” and even Time magazine got on board. In the midst of all this, Cesar Chavez was still “a minor player” in the 1960–61 Imperial Valley strike.

Total Social History

Before proceeding any further with the main line of the “story,” we should emphasize, as indicated at the outset, some of the “social history” with which Bardacke brings to life the “events,” complex enough in themselves to unravel. Not to do so would be to focus on an extremely interesting road while neglecting a fascinating landscape around it.

The influence of the Mexican Revolution and of magonismo has been mentioned and will recur; there are detailed descriptions of the labor process in the cultivation and harvesting of an array of fruits and vegetables, and its differing impact on the organizing potential of different “specialists” among, e.g., lettuce (lechugero), celery (apiero) or lemon (limonero) workers, some of them, at least when they were working the seasonal harvests, among the best paid workers in the United States at the time. Bardacke also provides the economic and labor history geography of rural California, from the Imperial Valley in the south to the Central and Salinas valleys farther north; detailed snapshot portraits of dozens of protagonists, as in a sprawling novel; a discussion of the near-impossibility of mechanizing many of the forms of agricultural labor, despite millions spent on research by agribusiness and its university annexes. There is the role of the brilliant and charismatic Dolores Huerta, who became over time a Chavez ultra-loyalist (alone of the main protagonists still living, she refused to be interviewed for Bardacke’s book), as well as of Chavez’s brother, the “saintly” Richard, and his cousin the “charming scoundrel” Manuel, who over time took charge of the union’s undercover and sometimes violent dirty work, always leaving Cesar “plausible deniability.” Bardacke evokes the importance of Mexican-American popular culture, particularly as it influenced the early irreverent newspaper El Malcriado (the “Bad Boy”) and the Teatro Campesino, the latter highly successful in publicizing the farmworker struggle all over the United States, and which gave the early UFW its irreplaceable “feel” as a genuine popular movement. The same feel is present in his description of the freewheeling atmosphere of People’s Bar in Delano, where many of the early disagreements were thrashed out when there was still an open, democratic movement. Bardacke gives the history of US table grape consumption since the 1920s and of the growers’ ups and downs, and later the history of lettuce. Another leitmotiv is the long-standing tension between the more left-wing and politicized Filipino farmworkers in California and their Mexican-American counterparts. Bardacke shows Chavez’s persistent use of Catholic symbolism, penance, the pilgrimage and the fast, which was not unopposed by some UFW militants, and which began over time to make the boycotts into more of a charity campaign. There is background on the 1947 Taft-Hartley and 1957 Landrum-Griffin Acts which outlawed some of the militant labor tactics of the 1930s, as well as the anomalies of farm labor’s exclusion from the Depression-era National Labor Relations Act,7 which initially allowed the UFW to use those boycott tactics. Bardacke shows the tension between Chavez as a “big dreamer” and Chavez the micromanaging small businessman, who once spent two years working on reducing the UFW’s telephone and travel expenses; finally, there was Chavez’s involvement with Synanon8 and even Silva Mind Control.9

Beginnings of a New Union

Chavez tapped the mutualista10 tradition of earlier Mexican-American history when he set out to build something more than just a union in Delano in 1962, with his farmworkers Association (FWA). It provided things ranging from burial expenses to a community newspaper. Chavez mapped out the 86 towns and villages of the California Central Valley to target for organizing. He had no interest in building a typical American union. His low-key, personal and small group methods contrasted sharply with those of the AFL-CIO affiliated Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). He involved women from the outset. “The involvement of so many mothers and wives gave the FWA moral weight, signifying that the association was not just another hit-and-run organizing attempt.” The California Migrant Ministry, a Protestant group linked to Alinsky, offered support. Chavez envisioned a community based on land ownership, “medical clinics, recreational halls, radio stations and newspapers.” The newspaper, which he edited and largely wrote in its early period, became El Malcriado.

The renamed NFWA (National farmworkers Association) had one of its first successes in a rose grafters strike in Delano. It is an early example of Bardacke’s ability to describe a highly skilled labor process whereby those proficient in it could put great pressure on an employer in the short periods of the year when their skills were needed, and how inept unskilled scabs could be in replacing them. Many more instances would follow. A veritable strike wave erupted in the California fields in 1965 with the end of the Bracero Program. The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) countered by issuing tens of thousands of green cards to Mexican farmworkers. The NFWA “was not prepared for mass activity.” This policy change from the earlier self-help orientation was not Chavez’s idea but “just seemed to happen.” El Malcriado became a virtual strike bulletin. Workers were not waiting for Chavez to make up his mind before they struck. The NWFA became a union movement willy-nilly and, as Bardacke puts its, he “was never entirely satisfied with what became of the new child.”

Growing table grapes, like rose grafting, depends on skilled workers at different times of the year for pruning and other tasks. The Delano grape growers were a hard-working ”authentic rural bourgeoisie,” still close to their first-generation immigrant roots. They were not receptive to farmworker unions. The first action was a “stay at home” by Filipino workers who by the 1960s were “the highest paid ethnic group in California agriculture”; they were led by Larry Itliong, whose involvement in farm labor struggles went back to 1929, and by the AWOC. The Filipinos were a sub-culture in rural California whose “union victories in the thirties were among the great adventures of their youth.” At the outset, “there was nothing inevitable about Mexican solidarity with the Filipinos.” Chavez again felt a strike would endanger the fragile young NFWA, but decided to join it. In that decision, he was influenced by the black civil rights movement, just then achieving its final victories.

The out-of-town organizer of the AWOC, backed by the AFL-CIO and with ties to the West Coast Teamsters, brushed off Chavez, “that Mexican,” and left town leaving Itliong in charge of the strike. In the first two weeks enough workers struck to slow production. “The first great triumph of the strike was the newfound warmth and solidarity between the Mexican and Filipino strikers.” The growers recruited strikebreakers, and the California Highway Patrol enforced injunctions. The strike faded over the remaining weeks of the harvest, with some growers granting the wage demands, but seemed to end when the harvest ended. The next key triumph, however, was the breakthrough of the NFWA, both with the outside supporters who came to Delano, and the local Mexican-American families.

The isolation of farm labor from urban America had been lessened by changes of prior decades; “television, radio, faster cars, better roads…airplane travel,” the integration of baseball and the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement were so many factors breaking down earlier barriers. The growers were newly vulnerable to a boycott. Chavez applied “moral jujitsu” to get the strike into the news. Forty-four people were arrested for shouting “huelga” (strike) on a picket line after an overzealous local sheriff had issued a gag rule against the word. The next day the strike was in the national press. It continued until the end of the harvest, but “the NWFA broke farmworker custom” and refused to call it off, making it rather a “call to arms,” and extended to a boycott of grapes. San Francisco warehouse workers of the ILWU11 refused to handle scab grapes until the growers got injunctions against them, though the farmworkers, excluded from the NLRA in the 1930s, were thus, ironically, free to call for a secondary boycott. The NFWA and its supporters shifted to calling for a consumer boycott.

Integration into National Democratic Party and Trade Union Elites

The national boycott struck a chord with liberal Democrats looking for a cause after they betrayed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)12 at their 1964 convention and after their “peace candidate” for president, Lyndon Johnson, escalated the Vietnam war. Marshall Ganz, who had worked with SNCC in the south and had witnessed the Democrats’ betrayal of the MFDP joined Chavez’s movement at this time; “emotionally and politically as well as chronologically, the early sixties were just about over.” Non-violence and Alinsky-style community organizing in black America were showing their limits when confronted with national power politics. Walter Reuther,13 head of the United Auto Workers and one of the key figures who had abetted the betrayal of the MFDP, came to Delano, endorsed the strike and boycott, and announced that the UAW and the AFL-CIO would be donating $5,000 a month to the strike. Despite Reuther’s checkered history, Ganz felt it was Reuther “who was scrambling for a connection to another social movement.”

It was, however, not so simple. Chavez and the NFWA hit upon the idea of a pilgrimage to Sacramento, the California state capital, to build support. Reuther meanwhile was pushing to integrate Chavez into his national political and trade union networks, and got a liberal Democratic Senator from the east to hold Congressional hearings in California about extending the NLRA to farmworkers. The pilgrimage of 25 days took off from Delano just as the hearings ended. Then–US Senator from New York Bobby Kennedy also jumped on board, in the early phase of his 1968 run for president. Thus began an intense relationship with Chavez which ended only in May 1968 when Kennedy was assassinated on the night he won the Democratic presidential primary in California. The die was cast; the NFWA catapulted from obscurity into the big time…of the national liberal Democratic and trade union establishment.

The pilgrimage was a tremendous success, moving from one Central Valley town to the next and gaining momentum with each stop. The radical Luis Valdez of the Teatro Campesino rewrote the Zapatista “Plan de Ayala” from the Mexican Revolution into the milder “Plan of Delano,” which, in contrast to the original template, said “Our revolution will not be armed” but continued: “we want the existing social order to dissolve; we want a new social order…The time has come for the liberation of the poor farmworker.” Such formulations did not slow down the back-room union intrigue occasioned by the march, involving a George Meany emissary, Bill Kircher, sent to “untangle the farm labor mess” in California, as well as Reuther, Harry Bridges14 of the ILWU, and Jimmy Hoffa15 of the Teamsters. All wanted to gain mileage from the farmworkers’ momentum. “But Chavez was reluctant to enter the house of labor…he didn’t like the ostentatious lifestyle of most labor officials. He was worried that he and his association would have less independence as part of a larger union body…Chavez, who had set out to organize Bill Kircher, had himself been organized by the old pro.” Chavez decided to affiliate with the AFL-CIO.

The pilgrimage was galvanized by the news that the NFWA had just signed its first contract with the Schenley Corporation, more a liquor company than a grower and hence more vulnerable to the urban boycott. The marchers reached Sacramento on Easter Sunday 1966, and held a three-hour rally with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders as well as speakers from the AFL-CIO, Longshore, the Teamsters and the UAW. As Bardacke puts it, Chavez would be able to hold this unlikely coalition together “long enough to force the entire California grape industry to capitulate four years hence.”

First Success and Steps In Shedding a Popular Grassroots Image

History was accelerating around the world in the spring of 1966. But, as Bardacke puts it, “if the exhilarated and exhausted folks who lived through this period of democratic Delano ever happened to encounter Dickens’ description of revolutionary Paris, they would have understood what he meant…Across twenty tumultuous months, the virulently anti-union DiGiorgio Corporation moved for a representation election in the fields and sheds; the Teamsters became the NFWA’s rivals in the fields…NFWA affiliated with the AFL-CIO; troubles developed between Chavez and the Teatro Campesino and El Malcriado.”

DiGiorgio brought in the Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters-IBT) in a time-honored Valley tradition in which the IBT offered itself “as an alternative to the radical rank-and-file unionism of the day.” The IBT would contest the unionization vote with the NFWA. The battle would continue for eleven years, also reflecting factional battles between different IBT “barons.” Two thousand DiGiorgio workers were ruled eligible for the union vote, hundreds of whom were former employees. The NFWA found them and brought them in from as far away as Texas. When the IBT brought in goons to intimidate, the Seafarers Union from San Francisco sent goons to protect the NFWA. The NFWA merged with the Filipino AWOC, forming the UFWOC, to present a single force opposed to the Teamsters in the representation election, and affiliated with the AFL-CIO with “an unprecedented amount of autonomy” within the Federation. Its National Executive Board answered to no one in the AFL-CIO, which would moreover be giving the UFWOC $1 million a year. The UFWOC defeated the Teamsters at DiGiorgio, 530–331. Inspired workers elsewhere seized the initiative and the UFWOC won contracts at seven more wineries. Di Giorgio countered by selling off his agricultural holdings, and the new owners did not sign with the union. To the workers, this showed the DiGiorgio victory to be an “empty triumph,” but to Chavez and the boycott campaign, it hardly mattered. “Thus, ‘DiGiorgio’ came to mean something different to a New York City boycotter and a Delano grape worker—a contradiction hardly noticed at the time but a harbinger between the two souls of the union.”

Following the empty but symbolically loaded triumph at DiGiorgio, the next turn of the screw was Chavez’s moves against El Malcriado and the Teatro Campesino. His hatchet man was an austere technocratic former seminarian named LeRoy Chatfield, who had been influenced by Catholic Social Action and Catholic Worker16 activists. “The pruning of democratic Delano was done primarily in the name of efficiency, discipline and unity.” But it was also political: “Chavez pruned to his left, while allowing his right to flourish,” making use of “a standard instrument of internal union repression: anti-Communism.” In early 1967, at one raucous party in Delano, Spanish Civil War songs and the “Internationale” were sung, and many people present were purged from the union shortly thereafter. All of them had opposed the AFL-CIO merger. Then came the shutdown of El Malcriado, “as good an illustration as any of the trajectory of a scrappy farmworker community organization from family association…to independent union…to big labor affiliate…” The paper’s intended audience began to shift from farmworkers to the union’s urban supporters. Criticisms of the AFL-CIO and Governor Edmund Brown were toned down or eliminated. A blast at Brown questioning if he were any better in practice than his soon-to-be victorious opponent for California governor, Ronald Reagan, brought down the wrath of the AFL-CIO. Chavez also imposed public neutrality on the Vietnam war because of the Federation’s support of then-President Lyndon Johnson, and prohibited UFWOC staff from using union flags and symbols at anti-war marches. El Malcriado staff sometimes disagreed with the leadership, and did not back down. They were purged. “Delano had changed. Conversations were more guarded. People were looking over their shoulders. Who was next?”

The Teatro Campesino was next. Its repertoire included acts against the Vietnam War and the Catholic Church which did not go down well with Chavez and Chatfield. It was wildly popular in the cities, as part of the new urban orientation, less so in Delano. Chavez tried to prevent the Teatro from going on a national tour that was already booked, and Luis Valdez and the other Teatro members declared independence from the union and went on the tour any way. When they returned to Delano after publicizing the strike and raising money, Chavez told them they were out.

Rising Arc of Success, 1965–1970

The next major development was the strike at Guimarra Brothers Vineyards, a large table grape producer close to Delano. Chavez’s plan from the beginning was to win with the boycott. Tellingly, he sent Eliseo Medina, a talented organizer, to organize the Chicago boycott instead of organizing Guimarra workers. In light of later developments, some believed it was an early case of Chavez attempting to marginalize a charismatic figure who could challenge his authority in Delano itself. The strike also prefigured another negative development, as the UFWOC pressured the INS to remove the “wetbacks” and green-carders who were flooding rural California as replacements for the braceros.

Both the union and the growers used vandalism of property in the struggle. It was seen by the workers as an alternative to real violence. As always, it was carried out while giving Chavez plausible deniability, given his public promotion of non-violence; the vandalism (chingaderas) was often organized by his cousin Manuel. The boycott spread nationally, and Chavez fasted at the new Forty Acres headquarters of the union outside Delano. Chavez appeared in court after a week, apparently weakened. He read Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi several times; “Like Chavez, Fischer’s Gandhi was a great showman who knew how to maximize the political effect of his moral experiments.” Workers came from all over California and Arizona to talk to him. However, “many inside the union family were put off by the religious aura that surrounded Chavez.” The fast consummated Chavez’s role as a mythical, untouchable figure. He concluded it after 25 days, and Bobby Kennedy arrived in Delano.

In the tumultuous following months, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in face of the rising anti-war sentiment articulated by Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, Martin Luther King was assassinated, blacks rioted across the United States, Kennedy won the California presidential primary and seemed on course to win the election, but, as indicated above, was assassinated a few hours later. “With King and Kennedy gone, Cesar Chavez had a new role to play…He was not only the main representative of the Chicano people, he was also the nation’s principal symbol of nonviolent political action.”

The UFWOC escalated what began at Guimarra by striking the Coachella grape fields in May 1968. The boycott was spreading nationally. In New York, there was an unofficial hot cargo campaign by seafarers. The New York Central Labor Council endorsed the boycott. “No one doubted that the boycott was the key to victory. ‘La huelga’ became a mythic rallying cry, a call to general rebellion rather than a specific reference to workers’ withdrawal of their labor power.” The 300 volunteers working for $5 a week plus expenses were typically putting in sixteen-hour shifts, six and seven days a week, under very tight discipline enforced by Chavez and the ex-seminarian Chatfield. Manuel Chavez intensified the campaign of chingaderas in big cities like New York, ranging from shop-ins to fire bombings of big supermarkets. On the other hand, the boycott “began to take on the feel of a charity campaign,” portraying the farmworkers as victims rather than active militants. Bardacke points out, however, that “the construction of the victim-as-hero didn’t become popular in the United States until the complete rout of the movements of the 1960s…” But in 1968, the union was able to extend the struggle to one against pesticides. When the United States Department of Defense bought scab grapes, it could further extend to the antiwar movement. In April 1970, under the pressure of the boycott, the Coachella growers caved and signed contracts for wage increases, but also for pesticide regulation and a hiring hall. Other growers followed. Mass strike was in the air; peach workers and melon workers struck as well. By July, Guimarra, where it had all begun in 1968, followed in surrender, bringing twenty-eight other Delano grape growers with them.

The sweeping victory of 1970, however, slowly ratcheted up the tension in Bardacke’s “two souls,” the boycott vs. farmworker organizing. 10,000 workers had continued to work in the Coachella vineyards throughout and then became beneficiaries of the improved conditions in the UFWOC contract, which had been won by the boycott in the cities. “If the difference between winning and losing did not depend on these workers’ willingness to withdraw their labor and stop production, then where did they fit in UFWOC’s battle plans? If they weren’t the heroes of their own liberation, who were they?”

War with the Teamsters

There was no time to think seriously about these questions, as a new battle with the Teamsters in the Salinas Valley loomed immediately. “Between 1960 and 1970 the official population of Salinas more than doubled” with the influx of Mexican green-carders and undocumented workers, many of them ex-braceros. And there was also a major difference in outlook from Delano; as one UFW militant put it: “The Salinas workers were so much more confident than the Delano workers…They were clear about why they were going on strike…They were not cap-in-hand guys.” Further, they were made up of thousands of skilled lechugeros. Salinas produced 90 percent of the lettuce crop and 80 percent of all fresh vegetables sold commercially in the United States. It was “among the most lucrative agricultural lands in human history.” In 1970, big national companies moved in.

(These differences between Delano and Salinas would ultimately become the basis of the biggest confrontation between the “two souls” in 1979, in the last major strike waged by the UFW.)

The depth and breadth of the Salinas general strike, which began in late summer 1970, caught the union staff off guard, and “Cesar Chavez most of all.” The growers responded by bringing in the Teamsters to impose sweetheart contracts. It involved national backroom politics between George Meany, IBT president Frank Fitzsimmons17 and the IBT’s decentralized feudal barons, who often went their own way.18 Strikes spread among workers wanting to join the UFWOC and not the IBT. At a major mass meeting, the workers wanted an immediate strike while the UFWOC leadership wanted to wait three days in a complicated back-and-forth between the Teamsters and the UFWOC. Chavez was fasting, as ever worried that a strike would not be effective. The debate over an immediate strike or waiting for three days of negotiations “mattered, as it became the first public airing of the most active workers’ understanding of the situation and an open clash between their assessment and that of the top union staff.”

Three thousand workers attended a UFWOC rally. The strike lasted three and a half weeks. Despite concerted scab herding by the growers, production by the end of the strike had fallen by half. There was mass, enthusiastic picketing. The Franciscan Fathers of California contributed $125,000 to the strike fund. Fifty to 75 “self-satirizing” Teamster goons showed up to intimidate, strut around and protect scabs, but accomplished nothing. A local of white (Okie) workers in the coolers refused to cross the UFWOC picket lines. Dolores Huerta starred in the negotiations. “She did not fear the bosses. She talked back to them, interrupted them, made jokes at their expense. She never backed down. She not only articulated the workers’ current grievances, she talked about the humiliations farmworkers had suffered over generations. She never let a grower’s racist remark or semi-racist assumption pass. She defended women and children. She attacked pesticides. She also used her position as translator to give the workers a running, confidential, often humorous analysis of what was happening.” United Brands, the renamed United Fruit Company of earlier notoriety, signed the first UFWOC contract in the Salinas Valley. The workers won a hiring hall, seniority, grievance procedures, field foremen as part of the union, ten cents an hour for the medical plan, and a ban on five pesticides, with a right to consult on future ones. Wages rose by 20 percent and piece rates even more. The lechugeros would get 40 ½ cents per box, and could earn $10 an hour (more than $50 per hour in 2013 wages) “placing them among the best-paid workers in the country.”

Local growers, their wives and some Teamsters set up their own picket lines to denounce the ruin of Salinas by two giant “outside” forces, the Boston-based United Brands and the UFWOC. Then one local grower caved, and others followed. It was the end of an era for the small-town white establishment. “The strike marked the emergence of the Mexican and Mexican-American community as significant players in Salinas.” The Teamsters rescinded their contracts and Frank Fitzsimmons announced that the IBT was leaving the fields. Chavez declared a boycott of all non-union lettuce, but it never had the momentum of the grape boycott, either in worker participation or in appeal in the larger world. “The scarcity of lechugeros on the boycott and on the union staff pointed to a peculiar inversion in the relationship between the staff and the workers. The grape workers, whose strike had been ineffective, were more heavily represented on the staff than were the lettuce workers, who had proved their strength in the fields. In 1970, this was barely discernible…By 1980, however, this inversion…would be an essential element of the UFW’s internal warfare and subsequent decline.”

A judge ruled that the Salinas struggle was a jurisdictional dispute between the IBT and UFWOC and issued an injunction against the boycott. Chavez ignored it and went to jail with 2,000 people accompanying him to the courthouse. The national left-liberal establishment, increasingly, as indicated, bereft of causes it could support in the polarized atmosphere at the end of the sixties, responded as they had in 1965 to an opportunity to connect with a popular movement, even as the Chicano movement had moved sharply left a few months earlier, following a police riot in which the Los Angeles Police Department had killed three Mexican-Americans. With such national pressure and attention, the California Supreme Court ordered Chavez’s release. But as Bardacke notes, “Chavez had not been with the workers during the strike…he did not develop strong personal ties with many Salinas strikers.” He preferred his close aides and people working on the urban boycott. “Chavez, ever careful about his control over the union, did not seem wary of the potential power of the rank-and-file Salinas leaders.”

Chavez Moves the Union Leadership to a Mountain Retreat

In early 1971 Chavez took another step toward the estrangement of the two souls of the UFW: he moved union headquarters from Delano to the Tehachapi foothills near Bakersfield. The move to the quiet, rustic site, called La Paz, was spun as encouraging more democratic participation by the workers in Delano. There was opposition within the union to the move by people who (rightly) foresaw a greater disconnect from the realities of the fields. The union had 40,000 members, an annual budget of $1.5 million, and a series of non-profits—a health plan, a farmworker development fund, a farmworker service center and a credit union—involving millions more. In La Paz, Chavez’s micromanaging style as a “control freak” was intensified.

One real disaster was the union’s management of the hiring halls that had been won with the new contracts. A Byzantine system of seniority and dues requirements conceived in La Paz resulted in huge backups of workers waiting each morning for job assignments. The ILWU hiring hall, won in the 1934 strike, had been the template, but the UFWOC hiring hall had to operate in the very different conditions of farm work. One sympathizer from the ILWU said “In Delano they didn’t have a union. It was a hiring hall where workers paid their money so they could go to work…From the workers’ viewpoint it was a racket.” Workers were also fined for not attending union meetings.

National Prominence and Estrangement from a Working-Class Base

Attempts to deal with “a rigid leadership at the top of a top-down hierarchy enforcing an inappropriate formula on non-cooperative growers and a suspicious membership” were greatly complicated because the union’s energies also had to confront a new grower offensive, involving national agribusiness, the Nixon administration, and millions of dollars from California growers. 1971 was no longer 1965, and with Reagan as governor and Nixon as president, “reaction was blowing in the wind.” The UFW was able to slow the offensive with its still-considerable influence with still-Democratic state legislatures. The hiring hall problems were somewhat straightened out. But the Nixon administration tried a legal maneuver to bring the UFW under the NLRA, thereby making most boycotts illegal as they were for other unions. The threat to the union’s most powerful weapon, which was successfully repelled, pushed it closer to the national Democratic Party.

In late spring 1972, Chavez began a fast against a particularly reactionary piece of anti-farmworker legislation in Arizona. The nation’s liberal Democratic elite visited him as the fast extended to 24 days. The 1972 Democratic Party convention that nominated left-liberal George McGovern19 for president prominently featured the lettuce boycott. For George Meany, however, the McGovern nomination indicated that the Democratic Party had been taken over by the “radical left.” As a small union with exceptional autonomy, the UFW was able to buck the national unions’ refusal to support McGovern.

Chavez meanwhile threw the UFW forces into a battle against California Proposition 22, which would “prohibit secondary boycotts delay harvest strikes for sixty days, and effectively disenfranchise seasonal workers in all farmworker elections.” The campaign resulted in a sharp electoral repudiation of Proposition 22, and also cemented the UFW’s relationship with Jerry Brown, son of Edmund Brown and future pro-UFW governor of the state: “the UFW was well on its way to being one of the most effective electoral machines in California.” Months later, in February 1972, George Meany presented Chavez with the union charter, and the UFWOC became the UFW. It kept its previous singular autonomy and there was no “restructuring of the organization. Like the UFWOC, the UFW would not have locals with elected principal officers in control of their union budgets. This produced an unnoticed irony: the UFW, supposedly a radical alternative to the old-time AFL-CIO unions, actually had less structural democracy than most of its famously bureaucratic sister affiliates, whose workers could at least vote for their local officials.”

At the same time, however, the union suffered a series of defeats against growers, including at Schenley, where it had won its first contract in 1966. The disconnect between the UFW’s national presence and political power and what was happening in the fields grew wider. The union also intensified its use of the INS against undocumented workers, who had scabbed in several of the defeats.

The Mass Struggles of 1973

Things went from bad to worse. “The 1973 table grape strike was a crushing defeat for the UFW. The union was pushed out of its dominant position in the table grape industry, never to return.” It was a “bountiful scab harvest.” Farmworkers “who had been victims of the hiring hall and back dues fiascos…fined for not coming to meetings…blamed for failed strikes…kicked out or kept out of the union for lack of documents had their moment of revenge.” The larger context of defeat was, however, the ongoing anti-union offensive. Up against an array of forces starting with Nixon in Washington and Reagan in Sacramento on down, Bardacke asks: “Isn’t it, then, misleading to stress the UFW’s errors? Against such power can the union’s contemptuous attitudes, moral lapses and tactical failures count for much?” Nonetheless, “the UFW leaders, unchallenged by democratic debate, rarely admitted their faults…they always explained away the union’s defeats.” For Bardacke, the habitual litany to this day of Chavez supporters explaining UFW decline, i.e., the Republicans in power in the 1980s, the nationwide anti-union climate, the masses of illegal immigrants, whatever its merits, “obscured the truth that haunted the UFW throughout its history and, having been ignored, spelled its doom: that ultimately a union’s power depends on the support of the workers.”

Finally, “the growers might not have won the table grape strike without the intervention of the Teamsters…the biggest and richest union in the country…” The Teamsters would attempt to win farmworkers away “by matching or bettering the wages and benefits won by the UFW, while maintaining friendly relations with the employers by giving them a relatively free hand in hiring, firing and control over production.” The main Teamster organizer in the Coachella vineyards thought he “could get the grape contracts away from Chavez through a combination of collusion with the bosses, high wages, and terror.” In spite of days of Teamster thuggery in June 1973, which were widely publicized in the national media, the UFW’s real problem was the thousands of scabs who worked throughout, picking even more grapes than in the previous year. Then the IBT staged two successful strikes in the canneries and with truckers to prove that it was not a “sweetheart union.”

In the California Central Valley in the summer of 1973, “everything seemed to be happening at once.” The UFW waged three separate strikes. “For a month and a half, as many as 3,000 pickets, 10,000 strikebreakers and hundreds of sheriff’s deputies, police and highway patrolman clashed…no other moment in UFW history contains such a multiplicity of contradictory simultaneous events.” Mass arrests of UFW pickets defying a temporary restraining order in Fresno County “would make Fresno the UFW’s enduring emblem of 1973 and a marker in Chicano history, shorthand for a liberating act of rebellion against years of exploitation and humiliation…A few hundred Mexican American local farmworkers were willing to get arrested again and again, and to spend days, nights, ultimately weeks in jail. They sang, fasted, gave the police false names…and openly, joyfully defied their jailers.” Meanwhile, “nearly unfathomable” internal Teamster politics were the backdrop to Guimarra and most other Delano growers signing with the IBT. A UFW militant was killed by sheriffs’ deputies and his death ruled an accident. A second UFW member was killed on a picket line days later. Thousands of people marched at the funerals. Chavez called off the strike, arguing that it would be won through the boycott and the ballot box. “But the prudent decision to call off the strike could not make up for the failure the strike revealed” in the thousands of workers willing to scab.

In fall 1973, the UFW top staff retreated to La Paz, which was more accessible to outsiders, with its press conferences and publicity, than the farmworker world, which “was hidden, as obscure as pruners in the tule fog, made up of people who either lived outside the law or were uncounted and unaccounted for by government agencies and academics. Farmworkers didn’t issue press releases.” La Paz controlled their public image, “designed to elicit sympathy, even pity.” With the loss of the table grape contracts, union membership had fallen to less than 6,000, and dues were less than 15 percent of union revenue. The difference was made up by “outside supporters—liberals, labor, churches…” But the battles of the previous summer galvanized farmworkers around the United States and even in Mexico. A small tomato strike near Stockton won an important pay raise by the mere threat of calling in the UFW.

In September 1973, the UFW held its First Constitutional Convention in Fresno. The press corps noted the differences with a typical AFL-CIO convention. “The delegates ate bag lunches, not fancy meals; they stayed at supporters’ homes, not at expensive hotels…(nonetheless) this gathering did not depart radically from the pattern of most union conventions, which are designed to be demonstrations of strength and unity, with all big decisions made in advance and presented to the delegates for ratification.” National political, union and church luminaries were present. Chavez spoke, emphasizing three main concerns: “farm labor legislation, settlement of the ongoing war with the Teamsters, and renewal of the grape and lettuce boycotts…‘the only weapon we have left.’ ” The new constitution was ratified, confirming the undemocratic structure already in place. Only low-level ranch committees were elected, and also delegates to the convention every two years, who in turn elected the Executive Board, and “as this first convention demonstrated, voting for the Executive Board meant endorsing candidates pre-selected by Chavez.” Staff volunteers with six months on the job were made full members, just like farmworkers. They could be dismissed by Chavez at will, unlike the workers. The UFW was a “volatile hybrid…a staff organization and a farmworker organization” with 85 percent of the union budget coming from non-farmworker sources. “The UFW now was officially a two-souled body: a farmworkers’ union and a volunteer boycott organization rolled into one.” Chavez worked 20-hour days and micromanaged every detail.

Chavez Bonds with Meany, Reuther

The UFW needed help from the AFL-CIO just as the conjuncture turned against it, and also the rest of organized labor, as the worker insurgencies around the United States in 1972 and 1973 “turned out to be the end of a brief era of rank-and-file militancy rather than the dawn of a new day…In the late 1960s, workers struck more often than they had in the 1930s and ’40s, excepting the extraordinary year of 1946.” But following the 1974–75 recession, “…real wages and working conditions for the entire US working class have been declining ever since.”

Chavez and Meany came together “at a high point of mutual need.” Meany needed Chavez to refurbish his progressive credentials. Chavez needed Meany after losing 80 percent of his members to the IBT. Meany exacted his price: the integration of Chavez into the AFL-CIO’s “CIA-aided operation, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD)”20 ; Chavez would stop criticizing Meany publicly; and the UFW would support Israel following the 1973 war, including with financial contributions. In return, Meany granted the UFW only full AFL-CIO support for the grape and lettuce boycott, and tried to negotiate a truce with the Teamsters, which quickly fell apart.

The UFW also turned to the UAW, which needed Chavez’s progressive aura as well, after sending a thousand officials armed with baseball bats to crush a wildcat at Chrysler the previous summer. As Bardacke points out, Chavez’s acceptance by the AFL-CIO and the UAW, while he was hoping to ride a further wave of militancy, in fact prefigured his own trajectory ten years later when he “found himself following the UAW’s reactionary lead. In the early 1980s, he would destroy the nascent movement of his own rank-and-file militants, thereby setting up his union for the slightly delayed but even more sweeping counter-offensive of California agribusiness. What the events of the mid-seventies make clear is that Cesar Chavez’s attack on his own membership fits easily into the ripe tradition of US labor.”

Forty Years after the NLRA, the ALRA

The two souls of the UFW grew farther apart. A “semi-autonomous strike wave” was set off in early 1974 after the gruesome crash of a bus that killed seventeen Imperial Valley farmworkers, nominally Teamsters but with “fictive contracts.” Seventeen of the company’s buses were torched in a parking lot in response. Fifteen hundred asparagus workers struck around their own demands and, with the help of the UFW, won after a week, and other workers followed their lead. Chavez, however, ramped up the national boycott, assigning to it 85 percent of the union’s volunteers while only a handful worked the fields. But the farmworkers among them mainly quit the boycott. “The people from religious orders brought a spirit of voluntary poverty to these collectives that the people who had spent their lives in involuntary poverty could not understand.” They were further galvanized when in that year Chavez was granted a private audience with Pope Paul VI. Chavez spent more and more time on the boycott circuit and less and less time with farmworkers. “Thus, as he became the living symbol of the United States farmworker movement around the world, he moved further away from the fight in the fields.” A successful two-week strike of limoneros unaffiliated with the UFW, which won most of its demands, was not even mentioned at the next UFW Executive Board meeting, nor was the earlier victorious asparagus strike. The board debated strategy for different types of strikes, which were “puny.” The emboldened growers began to warm to an Agricultural Labor Relations Act which would impose state-regulated elections on farmworkers. A strike wave erupted, unplanned by the UFW. Strikes spread from Watsonville to Oxnard to Stockton. Cesar Chavez’s cousin Manuel, usually involved in organizing the nighttime chingaderas, used the headline-grabbing strikes to threaten a general strike in the fields if the California state legislature did not pass a farmworker law. The strike wave culminated in the apple orchards of Watsonville and generally succeeded in raising wages.

“Finally the growers sued for peace. Two years of strikes, disruptions, boycotts and harassment had clinched the case…Law enforcement officials throughout the state had had their budgets wrecked fighting the UFW. Supermarkets large and small had been harassed for the past eight years.” Newspapers and trade journals called for peace. “The politicians had to deliver it. Some kind of accommodation with the UFW was their best hope. The UFW was ready to be accommodated. What it needed was the right kind of law. That is what it got.”

“Most concessions are made to tame an adversary, and the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act [hereafter the ALRA–LG] was no different.” It conceded a legal framework beneficial to the union, but “it was also meant to diminish the unruly power of the farmworkers movement by bringing it under the formal structure of law. But this concession smelled more of victory than co-optation.” A safety board banned the use of the hated short-handled hoe, and shortly after the bill passed, Jerry Brown, by then governor, made farmworkers eligible for unemployment benefits. “Thus, by the summer of 1975, California farmworkers were covered by a comprehensive labor law, minimum-wage guarantees, unemployment insurance, and industrial safety requirement…” They had “torn down the wall that agribusiness had built in the 1930s to keep the New Deal out…Despite all the losses and setbacks that the UFW suffered later, that wall has never been rebuilt.” The UFW kept up the pressure with rallies and demonstrations to get the provisions in the law it wanted. Jerry Brown knew a friendly UFW would help his presidential ambitions. The UFW thus got almost everything it wanted, but what “the growers got was the prospect of stability in the fields and relief from union recognition via boycott.” Brown appointed a majority friendly to the UFW to the board it established; in Bardacke’s view, “farmworkers and the UFW had won one of the best labor laws in the world…”

The UFW Patrols the United States–Mexican Border against Immigrants

Chavez’s virtually exclusive orientation toward native-born Mexican-Americans, with occasional, short-lived collaborations with long-established Filipinos in the Central Valley farm labor force, had already shown its ugly face in the UFW’s occasional calls on the INS to arrest and expel “undocumented workers” and “green-carders.” Even as it was winning the ALRA, that face got even uglier in the “wet line,” actual union patrols on the US-Mexico border aimed at keeping illegals—“wetbacks” in popular usage, including by the UFW—out of the country. The boycott offices themselves collected signatures on petitions “calling on the Justice Department and (INS) to enforce the immigration laws and expel hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. There were many people in and around the union who opposed this turn. But several hundred people patrolled a main crossing on the Arizona-Mexico border and beat people trying to cross into the United States. “The union leaders, particularly Chavez, seemed blind to the consequences of [the] demographic shift that was happening before their eyes…By the mid-1980s, when the UFW was defeated in the fields, less than 10 percent of California farmworkers would be native born…” For Bardacke, it was in part Chavez’s focus on the boycott which blinded him to the “disastrous policy” of the “wet line.” The policy also served to cover up the union’s failure in many instances to involve illegal workers in strikes. But Chavez went even farther in a memo, saying “We’re against illegals no matter where they work because if they’re not breaking the strike they’re taking our jobs.” But by the time of the anti-“wetback” campaign in mid-1974, “most of the unionized jobs in the fields were not held by Chicanos, and the majority of UFW members were Mexicans…” In Bardacke’s view, Chavez’s visceral commitment was to his original base, the Mexican-American workers.

The INS in the mid-1970s, unlike its post 9/11 successors today, was so understaffed and underfunded that it was almost a joke. Up to 300 people on a “UFW Border Patrol” used “dune buggies, cars, vans and small trucks to chase people down….County, state and federal officials gave the UFW a free hand in this wilderness.” Hard-to-verify accounts differ considerably on the level of violence used by the UFW Border Patrol, organized (as usual) by cousin Manuel Chavez. The border patrol initially emerged as an alternative after a local judge had banned picketing by striking limoneros at both the work sites and the morning shape-up. Cesar Chavez had his usual plausible deniability. But “nothing Chavez did…could stop stories from the wet line from becoming common coin in the farmworker world, a collective memory that still counts in the California fields.” One UFW veteran told Bardacke in 2004: “Unfortunately, I still run into people whose first experience with the UFW was a beating they received in the Arizona desert.” Criticism of the “wet line” grew inside and outside the union, and diminished Chavez’s stature in the larger burgeoning Chicano movement. When the National Lawyers Guild attacked the policy, Chavez told the UFW Executive Board “They’re rats, they’re strikebreakers.” Three members of the UFW legal staff who also belonged to the NLG were “dressed down” for not resigning from “such a chickenshit outfit.” As Bardacke puts it, “…it was a taste, a promise of things to come.”

Honeymoon with Liberal Democrats

September 1975 saw the “first elections for union representation under the direction of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.” Chavez embarked on a 1,000-mile walk of fifty-eight days through farmworker communities to spread the word, speaking constantly in “rallies big and small.” The evening rallies showed a film, Fighting For Our Lives, which the UFW had made during the 1973 battles with the Teamsters, which, as Bardacke points out, conveniently omitted the fact that during the often violent face-offs with Teamster goons, thousands of farmworkers were scabbing on the strikes the UFW was purportedly defending. A problem was posed by the fact that under the law, illegal workers were eligible to vote, the very same illegals against whom the “wet line” had been directed. The union had no real choice but to acknowledge that the campaign as a “mistake” and welcome all workers into the union, even calling “for amnesty for all illegal workers in the country.”

Though the ALRA top board was made up of strongly pro-UFW Jerry Brown appointees, much of the staff under them had been recruited from the NLRB, “famous for its delays and weak enforcement policies.” Few staffers spoke Spanish and they “moved slowly, a pace they had mastered in adjudicating industrial disputes.” The growers and the Teamsters benefited. The growers brought in famous union busting firms. “They would play the ALRB as industry played the NLRB, where employers violated the law with relative impunity.” The Teamsters’ strategy was, as before, to win better contracts than the UFW “while maintaining good enough relations with the growers to use them as allies.” The growers were not pleased with this expense, but still preferred the IBT to the UFW. In Delano, all the groups the UFW had alienated, such as the Mexican migrants and the Filipinos, voted for the IBT 60–40 percent over dozens of elections. One UFW organizer said: “When we got the law, we had not won over the workers. We won the contracts on the boycott. And then when we had people under contract, we didn’t win them over either.”

The UFW did significantly better in the Salinas Valley, deepening and prefiguring the emergence of a militant pole there in the 1979 strikes that brought the “two souls” of the union to a final confrontation. As Bardacke points out, the UFW “had arrived [in Salinas] as the vehicle for a successful strike…[it] hadn’t had the same problems with the hiring halls…hadn’t made the undocumented a target.” This different dynamic also increasingly emerged around Marshall Ganz, who would ultimately take the fall as the main advocate of farmworker organizing against Chavez’s increasingly remote “intentional community” in La Paz. This discrepancy between Delano and Salinas was never discussed within the union. One Teamster summed it up: “In Delano the UFW had mishandled the contracts; in Salinas they had…the skilled lechugeros on their side.”

The UFW “made a strong showing wherever workers knew little about the troubles with the grape contracts and the union’s offensive against undocumented workers.” In the first month, the UFW won 87 elections and 52 percent of the vote; the IBT had 73 wins with 31 percent, and the No Union vote won 19 times with 16 percent.

Chavez attacked the ALRB’s lax enforcement of the law; his religious supporters from around the country, as well as the AFL-CIO, came to check out the situation. The weak enforcement and outcry about it posed a serious political problem for Jerry Brown and his presidential ambitions. His “most important achievement, the ALRA, was being attacked by his most important supporters.” He didn’t want to take on the board’s lax enforcement and he didn’t want a public battle with the growers. Brown finally hired new people to put teeth into the law. The IBT, “typically unsubtle in their reaction,” roughed up a Catholic bishop and a board member, and “slashed the tires of the bishop’s car.” In one dramatic episode in the Imperial Valley, Brown’s new appointee heading the board confronted an aggressive IBT bureaucrat in a face-to-face shouting match in front of thousands of workers at the morning shape-up; the UFW swept the elections there. Agribusiness also counter-attacked, getting the state legislature to defund the ALRB a mere five months after it was established.

Top-Down Management Systems

The UFW had thrown itself into 1975 at a “furious pace” and had won the majority of the elections, but “hadn’t done as well as most people expected.” As a result, Chavez took another step toward the isolation of the leadership and staff in La Paz by deciding to learn management systems. The union had 500 full-time volunteers with a monthly budget of $200,000, and was administering fourteen non-profits with $7 million in assets. “If [Chavez] wanted to maintain control over the UFW, he would have to learn to manage it.” He brought in Crosby Milne, a “retired Navy systems management expert” who was appalled to find more than “fifty or sixty people reporting to Chavez.” Many top UFW staffers welcomed the introduction of more order into the management of the union’s affairs. But “Milne’s military approach to management questions served to reinforce the antidemocratic structure and culture of the union.” The Executive Board had considered the alternative, namely “union locals with officials democratically elected by the workers.” UAW and AFL-CIO officials were urging the UFW to go this route. But the Board rejected the idea unanimously. It was opposed because such locals would use up money, because they would be parochial, with local officials “concerned about themselves rather than the whole union,” and because “they are hard to establish among migrants.” Bardacke dismisses the third objection as “ridiculous,” because in places such as Salinas a nine-to-ten-month season meant that “farmworkers were only slightly more migrant than many construction workers.” But as for the first two objections, money was power, and the idea of “parochial leaders with power” aroused “Chavez’s distaste for politics in the union…‘politics’ was a dirty word for Chavez. In his vocabulary it meant manipulation, deceit and the pursuit of personal interest.” But, as Bardacke notes, “…politics cannot be wished away. Instead of democratic politics, the union was left with a palace politics of the most intense variety, complete with alleged conspiracies and periodic purges.”

Within a year, Chavez lost interest in Milne’s system. As indicated earlier, “Chavez was both the dreamer of big dreams and a small businessman… [unable to]…free himself from an obsessive concern with petty financial details.” And for all its victories in the 1975 elections, “the union was sloppy about post-election follow-up…The promised benefits were slow in coming” because of the complications of actually getting a contract. “Many workers felt abandoned; some felt betrayed.” The Board actually almost blamed “the workers for their high expectations.” A year after the first wins, “the union had converted 113 certified elections into only thirty-five new contracts.” Only 6,000 new members had joined.

Electoral Politics Trumps Organizing; A Major Purge

One reason for the lack of mobilizing workers on the ground was the UFW’s increasing conviction that political influence was the key to winning: “Political power, the ability to shape the policy of the state, became the locus of the union’s hopes and fears in 1976…” which included vaulting Jerry Brown into the White House. Bardacke sees “Chavez’s commitment to conventional politics” as consistent with “his distaste for political discussion within his own organization.” He held the electoral and legislative game “disdainfully…at arm’s length” and “wielded his power without mercy.” But “what he was willing to do in Sacramento he did not want anyone to do inside his union. Sacramento was already corrupt; he wanted to keep the UFW pure.” The passage of the ALRA had drawn the UFW into California legislative politics. The union spent so much money cultivating politicians “that the UFW jeopardized its standing among farmworkers, continuing to impose a mandatory levy on its members despite widespread worker protest.” It threw itself into a campaign for a state proposition, Proposition 14, that would make the ALRA and its funding permanent, collecting 700,000 signatures in a month, the “last great accomplishment of the union’s boycott infrastructure.” This in turn involved them in Jerry Brown’s failed run for the 1976 Democratic Party nomination. Despite political advice from the Democratic pros to drop Proposition 14, which was mobilizing the opposition, the UFW pushed ahead into a disastrous defeat. But the wrong-headed decision had flowed from their whole shift into conventional politics. The UFW presence in the fields withered while the Teamsters intensified theirs. They won contracts in grapes and lettuce. A Salinas newspaper noted the change: “If the rank and file members of a union feel strongly enough about what they’re doing, there is, as a practical matter, no way to force them to go to work.” And Bardacke notes: “It was the Teamsters who took advantage of that lovely, mostly forgotten, proletarian truth. With only a few exceptions, the UFW did not.” Because growers still having UFW contracts had to pay into the medical plan, the pension plan and the service center, their expenses were higher than growers with IBT contracts paying higher wages. “These problems,” writes Bardacke, “required the active interest of the union leadership and an extended dialogue between the leaders and the rank and file. Neither happened.”

Chavez was caught up with electoral campaigns. His top security man noted that “organizing farmworkers was not his main goal…We went to Georgia and Denver to campaign for Carter among Chicanos. He enjoyed that a lot more than farmworker elections and running a union.” A story arose that the defeat of Proposition 14, “the first time that Chavez had petitioned the general public and lost,” changed Chavez permanently, undermining his “self-confidence…[robbing] him of his sense of humor,” and it “pushed him over the edge into severe paranoia.” He began seeing dark forces within the union, undermining it. Farmworkers themselves “were not invited to participate in policy debates.” Chavez attempted to revive El Malcriado, but the only issue that appeared merely echoed the official line, in contrast to the lively variety of opinions expressed in the original. It was later replaced with the officious “President’s Personal Newsletter.” Chavez came to the conclusion that a top-level staffer who had been with the UFW for ten years and had at times worked and lived at close quarters with him was part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy the union. Half the boycott staff was fired or exiled to “demeaning assignments” that would prompt resignations. When the purge became publicly known in the media, the UFW insisted it had nothing to do with “ideology” but was merely about “competence.” The old Alinskyite Fred Ross said the boycott staff had “disrupters” and “losers” in its midst. The Executive Board went along with the purge. Most members later told Bardacke that they “wished they had stood up to Chavez.” And like those who, on a much larger historical stage (such as in Stalin’s Russia) who had gone silently along, “those who failed would pay. Having collectively participated in a major bloodletting, they were not equipped to stop the bleeding that was to come…The purge’s mix of anti-Communism, scapegoating, and peremptory firing of staff was neither exotic nor deranged. It put Chavez squarely in league with the ‘union bosses’ he so commonly scorned.”

In January 1977, the eleven-year war with the Teamsters ended as the IBT pulled out of the California fields for good, and arrived at an agreement with the UFW. The UFW got all farmworkers, and the Teamsters got all non-field workers, such as in the canneries and coolers. The IBT gave the UFW their farmworker contracts, pending worker agreement.

Synanon: Cultish Practices at the Top

The next step in the mutual estrangement of the “two souls” was Chavez’s introduction of the methods of Synanon, known as the “Game” to the UFW top staff and volunteers at La Paz. Management systems had failed to give the union the desired form; using Synanon’s method might rejuvenate its spirit.

Synanon had become known in the 1960s for its aggressive “attack therapy” that had been successful in work with drug addiction and alcoholism. In groups of ten or fifteen, people ganged up on each other in sometimes devastating verbal attacks on personal quirks and failings, in which people who could not take the heat were called “assholes.” Synanon had been founded by Chuck Dederich, who by 1976 was taking in $9 million a year in nonprofit fundraising. Synanon was an “intentional community,” part of the burgeoning “human potential movement” of that period. It had shifted from drug addicts and alcoholics to “increasingly middle class and professional” people, “primarily young and middle-aged adults dissatisfied with their lives and looking for meaning in community.” It established itself in California’s Marin County, “one of the wealthiest counties in the country,” like other parts of early 1970s Northern California, “home to all manner of utopian and dystopian adventures in collective life.” It then shifted to Badger, in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Members were subjected to a highly ascetic discipline. The point of the Game was “to confront and humiliate people for their debilitating life patterns so that they could overcome them.” What Chavez liked about Synanon was the community built by survivors of the Game who stayed on, “emotionally dependent on the people who had simultaneously humiliated and befriended them, willing to work for little pay and do what they were told as long as they were allowed to live in the Synanon community.” Chavez saw it as a way to build “a better, happier, more productive union.” The UFW had always been, for Chavez, more than just a union, and adding the Game might make that a concrete reality.

Applying Synanon methods to the UFW, however, meant confronting the question of democracy on which the union had always been ambivalent. In theory, the convention of the workers set the policy of the Executive Board. But the hundreds of volunteer staff were excluded from any voice in union policy. Chavez saw Synanon’s Game, modified for the UFW context, as a way to reconcile the hierarchy and authoritarian structure of the staff with the presumed democracy of the farmworkers at the conventions.

The question was posed immediately by a proposal from the UFW’s highly skilled paralegal staff to end the $10 weekly wage plus room and board and to introduce a minimum wage for all UFW staffers that would never rise above minimum union farmworker wages, in addition to which the union would pay into “staffers’ Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation funds,” and finally would include staffers in the union’s health and pension plans, with vacation time, sick days and the like. In short, they proposed to shift the staffers from voluntary poverty, which only white middle-class people could entertain and which kept knowledgeable farmworkers with families to support away, to a decent minimum with the accoutrements of what at that time was still considered a normal benefit package. Chavez responded to this modest proposal by saying that the legal staffers had “lost that movement feeling.” He felt that La Paz was already halfway to the kind of community he envisioned. This was particularly true since “the UFW staff was becoming hostile to dissent or independent thought of any kind.” La Paz was already “to a startling degree, independent of the farmworker world,” since the majority of union funds came not from workers’ dues but from its middle-class urban supporters. The Game was, further, kept a secret from farmworker members.

“Chavez’s lifelong fascination with Gandhi” also came into play, since he imagined that La Paz would become “a little ashram.” But, in Bardacke’s view, Chavez seriously misread Gandhi, who never mixed his ashram with his role in the Indian National Congress. But Chavez wanted to do exactly that, a “catastrophic wish” in Bardacke’s view. Combining “his ashram and his union…meant the death of both.” Bardacke situates this in the larger context of the “antidemocratic structure and culture of the union, and the enormous gulf between the membership and the staff.” Chavez’s doubts about the UFW being “just a union” had been present from the earliest days of the NFWA. “Chavez remained pessimistic about the power of workers on the job…” He invoked the idea of a “movement,” “but the authoritarian community he built at La Paz had little to do with any actual historical social or labor movements.” Chavez took what he liked from previous movements, above all the importance of volunteers and the feelings of community. He ignored the fact that in such examples as the nineteenth-century American Populists, the latter “argued out their politics in more than a thousand independent newspapers. For the UFW, even one newspaper was too many.” The UFW was squandering the democratic potential in its farmworker base, which had fought the great battles of the summer of 1973 and launched a strike wave that forced the adoption of the ALRA and won them “unprecedented control over their jobs.” Informal networks of workers were forming in the fields, as they learned how to use their power.

The Game proceeded apace in La Paz. “What had been tolerated as acceptable opinion, criticism, or complaint was redefined as bitching, bad-mouthing or active organizing against the union.” In this atmosphere, Chavez carried out the orchestrated “Monday Night Massacre.” A small group was put up to calling on him “to act immediately to remove from La Paz those who spread discord and unhappiness.” A meeting of the entire community was called and a Chavez shill pretended to be making these charges on her own, and Chavez pretended to be hearing them for the first time. “Department heads read off the names of the people who had to go. They had to leave right then, in front of the crowd.” Those few who protested were ejected by security, one even being handed over to the Tehachapi police for trespassing. To make the line clear, Chavez started the (previously mentioned) “President’s Newsletter” that tried to fill the role once played by El Malcriado, but as a unilateral memo with no dissenting opinions or discussion. The former editor of the freewheeling initial newspaper wrote to Chavez that the newsletter was a “carefully controlled house organ,” in no way drawing on the “vast reservoir of experience, knowledge, and wisdom which exists within the membership.” The “President’s Newsletter” was a “fawning, sycophantic self-serving sheet of narrow views and sanitized news, printed at the union’s expense.”

“Something happened in the course of those years that just really shattered something within him…he sort of lost his soul out there. And became a very different person. The Cesar of 1979 was a very different guy from the Cesar of 1969. It was like he went through a serious personality change…he went mad.”

Chavez ventured into Silva Mind Control and Mexican folk medicine, curanderismo. Some staffers believed he had special healing powers such as laying on of hands.

Bardacke rejects the madness hypothesis. He sees Chavez’s single-mindedness and will power as qualities that were “helpful in winning power but…harmful when he got it…He didn’t change; his situation changed.”

One nurse worked for the union from 1966 to 1971, went away to medical school, and returned as a union doctor in 1983; she said Chavez hadn’t changed during her absence. “He was a control freak when I first met him, and was a control freak when I came back…Only one thing had changed. Cesar had always been a great listener, but in 1984 he wasn’t listening any more.”

Bardacke rejects the madness hypothesis because it pushes into the background all the complexities of the UFW’s development and the larger world context in which it evolved, to focus on “his cruel purges, his paranoia, and his wild claims of being able to perform bloodless surgery.” He locates the indisputable manifestations of paranoia as a “political matter” stemming from unchecked power. He was “not subject to the give and take of ordinary politics.” One victim of Chavez’s paranoia said “[he] never would have been as crazy as he was had there been a good democratic structure in the UFW.”

Bardacke, sifting through this evidence and these testimonies, concludes: “Cesar Chavez did not go crazy and destroy the union. The reverse is closer to the truth: the UFW was crazy, and it destroyed Cesar Chavez.”

Such a conclusion is perhaps the greatest disagreement of this reviewer with Bardacke, first of all because he supplies so much evidence to the contrary, including after the introduction of the Game. The UFW in 1977 was still made up of thousands of farmworker militants who, as Bardacke himself says shortly before, had all the elements in hand to shape a truly democratic rank-and-file union. They were not even aware of the weird evolution in La Paz. In 1979, they carried out, in Salinas, perhaps the most brilliant strike in the UFW’s history, against the caution and skepticism of Chavez and many of his top staff, and won resoundingly. There was nothing “crazy” about this. There were many uneven characteristics in the union, as in many mass organizations, such as the differences, described above, between the Mexican-American workers in Delano and the Mexican immigrant workers in Salinas, with their roots in 1930s cardenismo and even earlier magonismo. There was a “dialectic” at work, which Bardacke has traced from as early as 1970 in the growing gulf between Chavez’s infatuations with the boycott and his national political projection, on one hand, and the real organizing in the fields from which his stature away from them grew and spread. It was, among other larger factors Bardacke introduces, this process which shaped the conditions which, a few years after the Synanon turn, in fact allowed Chavez to destroy the union in the larger, classic bureaucratic pattern that Bardacke had already identified.

New Defeats in Grapes; Delano vs. Salinas

The last quote about the UFW being crazy concludes one chapter, and Bardacke begins the very next chapter saying “If the membership had been consulted about what the union’s organizing priorities should be in the spring of 1977, the UFW might have avoided the calamity that awaited it in the vineyards of Coachella and Delano.” So we are back to the much more substantial analysis Bardacke has developed of the dialectic between the UFW’s autonomization from the farmworker base, and the militants on the ground. The members were not consulted. The UFW turned away from the increasingly militant workers in vegetables and focused on its origins in table grapes. There, in the words of one veteran, it would learn that “some of those grape workers really hated the union.” Marshall Ganz, continuing to emerge as the one member of the Executive Committee most concerned about the growing gap between La Paz and the realities in the fields, argued for a focus on vegetables, where the overwhelming majority of UFW members worked. The union threw its forces into grapes. It won some initial victories, but everywhere else either “lost or was rebuffed without a vote…it wasted energy and resources in a doomed campaign.” One member who had direct experience of both the workers in grapes and those in vegetables said “some of those grape workers had more than enough reason to be pissed off at the union and union leadership. It was then that the skeletons started to rattle and fall out of the closets of every grape growing area…” This contrasted sharply with the attitude of the lechugeros “who really wanted us to organize everywhere they went.”

In response to the defeats, “the union turned on its own.” A UFW organizer was raped by a grape worker. Persuaded not to go to the police in the midst of the campaign, she and other UFW women met to discuss self-defense. The UFW leadership denounced them, saying there would be “no caucus of any kind in the UFW,” and fired the lead organizer. Ganz and others went along. Years later, Ganz told Bardacke “we were really caught up in the paranoia.”

Chavez had convinced himself against all evidence that the union was strong in the vineyards. “He had said it so often, to audiences for whom the farmworker world was invisible…”

The Embrace of Philippines Dictator Marcos

He made the further disastrous decision to visit the Philippines, then under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, to win over the Filipino workers in Delano who were estranged from the union. (This may also have been one of his AIFLD ventures.) The sole Filipino on the Executive Board, Philip Vera Cruz, opposed the trip and ultimately left the UFW altogether. Chavez denounced him as a traitor, married to a woman who was part of a Communist conspiracy against the union. He devised a pledge of silence about the board meeting where all present would refrain from talking or writing about what was discussed. Vera Cruz refused to sign, and never attended another meeting. Later, in an oral history, he said “…one thing the union would never allow was for people to criticize Cesar. If a union leader is built up as a symbol and he talks like he was God, then there is no way you can have true democracy in the union…” Bardacke goes on to quote a Chavez rant about the Vera Cruz episode in which he says: “remember, we have been infiltrated by leftists and by Commies…”

Chavez went to the Philippines on a nineteen-day official tour, quite ignoring the thousands of political prisoners in jail without charges or trial. He met with “government officials, labor leaders [those not in jail] and…[tolerated] newsmen…” He accepted an honorary doctorate and an award from Marcos, praising him, and saying that martial law in the Philippines was different from the way Americans conceive it. He told a press conference that farmworkers were better treated in the Philippines than in the United States. He told a Washington Post reporter the same thing, and set off a firestorm. Protestant and Catholic activists doing political work in the Philippines, some of whom had been jailed by Marcos or expelled from the country, were “especially outraged,” as were many others, both Filipinos and Americans, with real experience there. Chavez not only did not recant but went on the offensive, “beginning with critics on his staff.” One participant at a meeting in August 1977 said later “…[the trip] was such a blatant ploy for votes [among Filipino workers in Delano–LG] that we were all disgusted. It was disgusting.” A lot of staff people announced they were leaving. A lot of volunteers not based in La Paz stayed on, with the reasoning that they were doing good work with the union elsewhere.

Chavez went on to highlight the Philippines visit at the UFW convention shortly after. Marcos’s secretary of labor and the Philippine consul general addressed the delegates. Following another spat about the trip, the convention changed the constitution and “made farmworkers’ contributions to the union’s political fund mandatory.” Despite some opposition, the measure easily passed. Opponents were again accused of being disloyal. The convention had touted the coming election at Guimarra, where the UFW had won a big victory years before, but the workers there voted No Union 900, UFW 673. The union’s past record with undocumented workers, who were half or more of the total, and despite the union’s break with its earlier hostility to them, probably was decisive. “Rarely has the coop been more crowded with chickens coming home to roost. Ten years of opposition to the undocumented and a couple of years of badly administered contracts are not easily overcome in a three-week blitz…The defeat intensified Chavez’s retreat into internal union politics…[he] dressed down critics of the trip to the Philippines in front of 400 people. He set up some of the union’s religious supporters who criticized the trip at a meeting he packed with staffers, pro-Marcos Filipinos and union loyalists. He made a short speech denying that he supported martial law or the Marcos regime. He handed the meeting over “to five representatives of the Marcos government, who spent the next five hours aggressively defending the dictatorship.” Skeptics were threatened with lawsuits and told to keep their mouths shut about things they “didn’t understand.”

Non-Profits vs. Organizing in the Fields

Contracts were expiring for vegetable workers at the end of 1978, but the La Paz leadership was still smarting from the defeats in grapes in 1977. Meanwhile, the various “movement entities” separate from the union, which by the time of Chavez’s death would ultimately loom much larger than the union itself, were in good shape. The service center had $700,000 in assets (which would be $6 million by 1985), the medical plan had $6.8 million, the pension plan had $2.5 million, and the educational fund would have $8 million by 1985. In addition there was the credit union, a health group and seven other bodies. Taken together, these entities were called the Farm Worker Movement, which in 1978 had roughly $10 million in assets. In the previous year, they had received federal grants for $1.8 million. In all this, there were small irregularities, but “nobody was getting rich off the money…What did matter was that the La Paz staff had a separate income stream independent not only of membership dues but to a large extent of the UFW itself…Put simply: the La Paz staff could potentially survive without the UFW.” By calling all this the Farm Worker Movement, Chavez could convince himself that the UFW was “not just a union, but a movement.” Chavez could deceive himself in this way because he was blind to the democratic content of actual movements. The fact that no active farmworkers were central figures in the Farm Worker Movement did not bother him. “He believed he could run the farmworker movement from his ashram in the Tehachapis…The Farm Worker Movement would survive even if the UFW languished.”

In this context, in Bardacke’s assessment, the “anti-left, anti-Communist, anti-disloyalty purges made sense.” For leftists, farmworkers should be something other than recipients of benefits from non-profits. In the spring of 1978, Chavez expelled a volunteer who had been with the UFW since the age of 14, and a Chavez intimate, in the cruelest manner, in front of a large crowd, calling her a “Communist bitch” and having his bodyguards deposit her at the gate. This expulsion “capped the anti-leftist, anti-Communist purge of the UFW staff.” It followed an Executive Board meeting “where the union and its main support operations were cut back.” The boycott operation was dismantled, the hiring hall was eliminated from new contracts, the legal department’s operation were curtailed, health clinics and field offices were closed or consolidated, and it was decided “to conduct new organizing campaigns only among workers who came to the union seeking representation.” Marshall Ganz alone was circumspect, perhaps, in Bardacke’s view, because he “was mostly out in the field…spending more time talking to farmworkers than to the rest of the board.” Or because “monumental decisions about the union’s future were being made without consulting any farmworkers.”

Ironically, just as all these cutbacks were being made, “thousands of limoneros in Oxnard…were pushing at the union’s door and trying to force their way in.” They struck massively and contacted the UFW. The movement was so overwhelming that an ALRB election was held immediately, with the UFW winning 897 to 42 for No Union. Chavez spoke to a rally of more than 1,000 people and the strike continued. They “knew that the farm labor law had not changed the basic truth in the orchards: if they could maintain their unity, they would be a lot more powerful striking than working.” Back in La Paz, discussion of the strike was not a priority at an Executive Board meeting, which was focused on the cutbacks. The next day, an attorney of the growers called to make an offer. “The strikers’ strategy had worked.” Chavez couldn’t stand in the way. “After five weeks of strike, on-the-job action, lockout, mass marches and sit-ins, contract negotiations…intensified…thirty-eight days after the first walkout, Coastal Growers signed a contract providing for a 22 percent raise over three years.” The new organizing director, Eliseo Medina, saw a whole new perspective: “The workers could lead the process from beginning to end.” He saw a possibility of taking the union “away from the lawyers and [to] make it into a workers’ movement.” The UFW by this point represented 70 percent of the lemon pickers in Ventura County. Medina made plans to organize the rest of the state, only to discover that he had no staff and no resources.

Key Figures Diminished

Bardacke describes resistance to the transformation of the UFW staff. Chavez pressured the legal staff to downsize, and became estranged from its long-time head, Jerry Cohen.

Chavez was suspicious because Cohen had moved the legal department to Salinas, and he pressured it to come to La Paz to play the Game. At that very time the cultish aspects of Synanon were coming to public attention, culminating in the placing of a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an attorney who had sued Synanon and won. Chavez spoke in defense of his old friend Chuck Dederich, who was indicted in the case and later pleaded no contest. One month later came the mass suicide of the Jim Jones movement in British Guyana, highlighting (if highlighting were necessary) the intensifying cult phenomena of the period. Chavez insisted on distinguishing “between Synanon’s unfortunate trajectory and the usefulness of the Game.”

A confrontation erupted between Chavez and the legal department when the lawyers followed the earlier example of the paralegals and demanded raises, but with none of the “egalitarian simplicity nor elegant simplicity of the paralegals’ earlier plan.” The issue was bigger than just the lawyers’ demand for a raise. They had been crucial in ALRB elections. Eliseo Medina, who had seen the Oxnard limoneros bypass the need for lawyers, thought there should be paid staff in general. No worker with a family would leave a job in the fields to join the volunteer staff making $10 a week plus expenses. The more successful the union was in driving up wages, the less likely it became “that the rank and file indigenous leadership within the union would rise up and take charge of the organization. So I thought the volunteer system had outlived its usefulness. Because now we didn’t need volunteers. Now we needed the workers themselves to do it.” The board voted against the raises and for ongoing volunteerism. In a one-on-one discussion, the defeated Jerry Cohen “convinced Chavez to close down the (legal) department in sections over the period of a year, so that the union would not be left defenseless.” The legal department was a shadow of its former self by 1981.

Chavez also rid himself of Eliseo Medina. He “ridiculed Medina’s new statewide organizing plan” as “much too expensive.” Medina resigned in August 1978. (He went on to become an official of SEIU.) He had been “the most obvious candidate to rally around” for any challenge to Chavez’s leadership. Underscoring the disconnect between La Paz and the farmworkers, “Medina’s resignation hardly registered in the fields.”

Toward the Salinas General Strike of 1979: The Rank-and-File Rejects Chavez’s Boycott Strategy and Wins

The January–September 1979 confrontation between the UFW and the vegetable growers seemed, to participants, to be a war. Twenty-eight companies’ contracts were expiring. The growers sensed weakness in the UFW. “They believed they could win a strike and thereby eliminate the hiring hall, get their crews under control, narrow the labor cost differential between themselves and the non-union companies, discipline the union, shake up the leadership, and shape its future direction.”

The workers were also optimistic. The union was getting better at signing contracts after winning elections. There were 47 contracts in Salinas and Watsonville and 24 in the Imperial Valley, covering 19,000 vegetable workers. The UFW looked on course to win many more. A grower’s journal in June 1978 had written: “The union is here to stay and must be dealt with as such…most [growers] in California would agree that they would be much better off if they would have accepted unionization ten years ago…”

Chavez wanted to go for a master contract without a strike. But Marshall Ganz discovered that most of the wage gains since 1978 had been eaten up by inflation. He also discovered that “farmworkers still made significantly less than other, mostly white, unionized workers” in the coolers and elsewhere outside the fields. The UFW’s contract proposal amounted, in Ganz’s estimate, to a 70 percent increase in grower labor costs; the growers claimed it was 200 percent. The workers refused to give up the hiring hall. The workers also wanted paid union reps in the fields. If the UFW won what it was asking, “farmworkers would no longer be the poor cousins of other unionized US workers. They would be poised to take their place at the top of the labor pyramid among auto, steel, transportation and skilled construction workers.”

Preparations intensified through December. Tons of food were obtained in anticipation of a long strike, and the welfare committee was able to negotiate late payments in “a surprisingly large numbers of cases” on rent, cars, phones and utilities. The growers also prepared. They decided to go for a master contract to give the appearance of collective strength. This unity was fragile, however, since it “was a heterogeneous coalition in a highly differentiated, complex industry.”

In late January 1979 the growers submitted their offer of 7 percent per year over three years, and 1,700 workers struck at four companies. The UFW aimed to break grower unity by “forcing one company to capitulate, then pressuring the others to follow.” Five more companies were struck. Roving caravans of strikers were successful in pulling scabs, who had none of the skills of lechugeros, out of the fields. By the tenth day, these encounters turned violent. Growers were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chavez came and spoke to 3,000 strikers. “He praised the workers for conducting the strike themselves with minimal help from the staff.” The price of lettuce soared to $14 a box, and one grower estimated that $2 million worth of lettuce had already rotted.

On February 10, a striker was shot dead charging, along with dozens of other workers, into a field of scabs. The three men arrested for the killing were free on bail within hours. All evidence pointed to a trap. (Two and a half months later, a judge dismissed the murder charges.)

Marshall Ganz called for a one-day general strike. Three thousand silent farmworkers, holding candles, marched through Calexico. The Imperial Valley was entirely shut down. Cesar Chavez announced he would lead workers into the fields to talk to the scabs. Ten thousand people marched from the funeral to the cemetery. But instead of leading the strikers into the fields, “Chavez did what he could to cool off the strike.” He went to Los Angeles to resume negotiations with United Brands. He replaced Ganz with an old friend, Frank Ortiz, who told the strike coordinators that “Chavez wanted them to stop aggressive picketing. No more strike caravans, no more rushing the fields or one-day walkouts.”

The coordinators told Ortiz to go to hell. But they were “confused, angry, desperate…They wanted more action, not less.”

Bardacke speculates on why Chavez walked away from the strike. “Most likely, [his] pledge to lead people into the fields was primarily rhetorical flourish.” His friend Ortiz “ran the strike into the ground.” The strike coordinators, however, tried to revive it by calling a one-day general strike. Two thousand people joined a strike caravan, intending to shut down the fields. They came upon “a mixture of high school students, the relatives of small growers, and a few regular scabs.” “It was like Vietnam,” according to one deputy. The strikers destroyed all the property they could find, and flooded the fields. The sheriffs and guards used batons, tear gas, guns and two helicopters. Negotiations went nowhere, the harvest season ended, the struck growers had lost an estimated $24 million, and those growers not struck, with prices peaking at $14 per box, had a windfall season. The main hope became reviving the strike in Salinas.

In the 1970s, 15,000 Salinas workers “produced about 75 percent of all fresh vegetables sold commercially in the United States.” The lettuce harvest moved north from the Imperial Valley and the growers used the time lag to recruit a fair number of scabs. They turned Salinas into an armed camp, with “four camps with eight-foot Cyclone fences surrounded by barbed wire” and 24-hour armed guards; “…foremen, scab herders, and strikebreakers” were also armed; “strikers would know that anytime they went into the fields they risked being shot.”

Chavez put Marshall Ganz back in charge of the strike; “no one else on the board had sufficient authority among the active workers to revive the battle.” Chavez also limited the strike to the six companies that had been struck earlier in the Imperial Valley. The ratio of scabs to strikers was also much higher in Salinas than in the first phase of the strike. Ganz did not inform the strike coordinators about Chavez’s order, hewing to the discipline of La Paz. The Salinas militants wanted a general strike to correct the striker-scab ratio and thereby increase the chances of winning. Meanwhile, “nighttime vandalism became a regular tactic…Vandalism prospered because mass action stuttered.” The California Highway Patrol, sheriffs and police roughed up the strikers they arrested and humiliated them in jail. The strikers were protected to some extent by the 1980 presidential ambitions of Jerry Brown, who refused to pressure the union and appeared at UFW rallies; the ALRB he had established in 1975 made it difficult for the growers to get an injunction against mass picketing. Ganz extended the “pre-huelga,” essentially a slowdown strike, where workers would walk off the job after a couple of hours or work too slowly, which shifted daily from one non-struck company to another. The growers were reluctant to fire regular crews involved in the pre-huelga, because of “the difficulty and expense of finding scabs.” The pre-huelga’s success was “made possible by the special characteristics of agricultural production.” Foremen and supervisors went “slightly berserk” from the surprise and irregularity. If they fired the crews, it “would be the perfect transition into the extended strike” the organizers expected.

Ganz organized strike authorization votes at the companies not yet struck; the strike was voted unanimously. Internal and external solidarity (from unions and churches) was widespread. Chavez, meanwhile, was in Washington, DC, reviving the union’s old campaign against “illegals” and criticizing the INS’s failure to move against them. He attacked then-President Jimmy Carter, for whom the UFW had registered 400,000 voters and sent staffers to work on his 1976 campaign; “we have not heard from since.” Carter, said Chavez, had failed to enforce immigration laws. As a result of this and other gambits, the INS sent extra forces to Salinas; on their first day there, they apprehended 335 undocumented workers. “In an unprecedented intervention by a US government body in support of a farmworker strike, the INS dramatically went into struck fields and pulled out undocumented workers.” The latter, however, were not the majority of the strikebreakers. Over a month the INS was deporting a hundred workers a day, “mostly at ranches that had nothing to do with the strike.” Among Salinas militants, attitudes toward the intervention of la migra were mixed. In part because undocumented workers were not the bulk of the scabs, the INS action, for one militant who was opposed, “was bound to be insignificant and would only make the undocumented mad at the union”; “…the issue of the scabs’ legal status came and went.”

Negotiations stalled; the major growers rejected the union’s proposals. The growers became more confident. Vandalism increased. Six months into the strike, in June 1979, the two sides came closer together on wages, “but the growers were intransigent, still demanding the end of the hiring hall and significant changes in the work rules and grievance procedure.” The workers responded with “Black Monday.” “Workers at the ten UFW companies not on strike would leave their jobs and join the picket lines at the six struck firms.” Different caravans carried out different actions all over the Salinas and Pajaro valleys: they tried to stop scab buses; they led the deputies on wild goose chases while others confronted the scabs in the fields thus left unprotected. Twelve people involved in confrontations required hospitalization. 134 strikers were arrested. Strikers went to nonunion fields and often succeeded in getting workers to walk off for a day. Under this pressure, the growers made their first concessions in secret negotiations with Chavez and Jerry Cohen, but demanded that union “terrorism” stop. “According to Ganz, Chavez was furious about the mass charges into the fields and warned Ganz not to do it again. And he reiterated his opposition to any extension of the strike.”

The Salinas lettuce strike was happening at the same time, in June–July 1979, as an independent truckers’ action protesting fuel costs, the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit and other matters. “90 percent of the lettuce was shipped out of Salinas in trucks.” The harvest slowed down as growers stopped production. Strikers’ morale plummeted; Marshall Ganz said later “it was a very, very hard time.”

The situation widened the gulf between Chavez and Ganz, whom the strike committee came to see as a master organizer and tactician and much closer to the rank-and-file than Chavez. One militant said: “Chavez preached to us. You got the feeling he was doing charity work…He was very paternalistic. Marshall never patronized us…He never treated us like pobrecitos.” Ganz thought that unity and hard work could do it. “And because he believed it, we believed it.”

“Ganz wanted to extend the strike; Chavez wanted to keep it small…The two argued mostly over the phone.” Chavez, once again, was pushing for a boycott. Ganz and Chavez finally agreed on two marches, one by the UFW’s urban supporters from San Francisco to Salinas, and the other a ten-day march of farmworkers approaching Salinas from the south. If the growers had not caved by the time the marches arrived, Chavez would call for a general agricultural strike.

Into this situation arrived the lightning bolt of news that the major grower Bud Antle had signed a contract with the Teamsters paying what the UFW had demanded at the beginning. The strikers thought: “Antle workers had won what the UFW was demanding; with a further push, they could win it, too.” An Antle worker sympathetic to the UFW and the lettuce strike had organized there against a sweetheart contract, and then led a walkout. Two-hundred fifty lechugeros arrived in Salinas and mixed with the UFW strikers.

The march north to Salinas began the next day with 1,000 farmworkers. Chavez went on a fast for “love and patience.” The march north “exploded” and reached 3,000 by the time it reached Watsonville. Comparisons were drawn to the convergence of Villa’s Division of the North and Zapata’s Division of the South in the Mexican Revolution; participants “knew that they were in the midst of a great event, comprehensible only through comparison with other grand achievements.”

According to the police, “15,000 to 20,000 people marches into Salinas on August 11,” led by Chavez walking arm in arm with Jerry Brown, and followed by a state official and an officer of the California AFL-CIO. Brown spoke at the rally and said “farmworkers should be paid as well as factory workers.” Chavez spoke, promising “an extended strike and a full-on boycott.”

Bardacke describes “an extraordinary movement in UFW history. For months the workers had been locked in a blind conflict with the union leadership that was, in its own way, as serious as their conflict with the growers. This night they would confront each other, face to face, and it would all be captured on tape.”

Two meetings took place, first that of the Executive Board and then an expanded meeting including the strike committee. Ganz, while endorsing the idea of a boycott, communicated the desire of the Salinas workers for a general strike. Chavez expressed sympathy for the idea, but insisted the union didn’t have the money for a strike, and that, as usual, a boycott was the way to go. He also insisted that the union didn’t have money for a strike. Their meeting concluded with Ganz and Chavez agreeing on tenterhooks that the union should keep its options open, for either option or both. The action shifted to a joint meeting with the strike coordinators.

The strike committee waiting in the next room was not interested in a boycott; after Chavez outlined a union victory at a tomato company which might influence the lettuce strike, “what followed was unlike any discussion [Chavez] had ever had in La Paz.” He said the union was “broke.” He argued for a boycott, with a general strike as “not difficult, impossible.” The strike would be the “coup de grace.” A militant countered that there was great momentum for a strike and if there wasn’t one, “all the strikers are going to be very disappointed.” Dolores Huerta supported Chavez. Then another militant spoke, “and then the dam broke.” He argued that the great effort to build the march had rejuvenated the strike, and if a general strike was not called, all that energy would be lost. Seconds later, the workers were chanting “Huelga, huelga, huelga,” Huerta argued that there were too many scabs. Chavez argued a strike would deplete the union’s resources. The tone mounted. Then another militant spoke: “…if we don’t go on strike we are going to have to abandon everything, abandon all our fellow strikers. The faith that everyone has in us will turn to dust.” Huerta again insisted that there were too many scabs, over shouts and interruptions. Another militant argued that they could pull the scabs out of the fields.

“The meeting had been polite but ambiguous. Cesar Chavez had had an argument with the rank-and-file leadership, and lost. They had consistently applauded people who spoke against his position.”

The next day was the union convention, at which the matter would be put to a vote. But the resolution, drafted during the night, called for “all-out economic warfare” but mentioned only the boycott. Carlos Bustamante, a key militant and legendary lechugero who had argued for striking the night before, “was furious…the strike committee was being double-crossed.” The gatekeeper, “whose job it was to keep anything discomfiting to the organization’s leadership from reaching the convention floor,” let him add an amendment extending the strike. He saw that “what the strike committee had won the night before would be taken away from them through convention maneuvering.” The amendment “passed unanimously amid chants of ‘Viva la huelga!’ The convention broke up with people snake-dancing through the aisles and chanting “Huelga, huelga, huelga.” Chavez and a few people tried to start a counter-chant of their own for “Boycott, boycott, boycott.” “It could barely be heard.” After this development, the “protagonists woke up on the morning after the UFW convention in a different world.” Chavez “had been defied in a face-to-face confrontation and on the floor of his own convention.” He returned to La Paz to plan the boycott.

Ganz prevaricated. Chavez wasn’t supporting the strike but he wasn’t actively opposing it, even if he might withhold strike benefits. But “when the choice had to be made between the Executive Board and the strike committee, Marshall Ganz took the side of the workers…[Chavez] had been pushed aside by the workers on the strike committee. It was now their strike to win or lose, and Ganz had cast his lot with them.” The strike spread. “What La Paz had to say was worse than irrelevant.” Two tomato contracts were big wins for the UFW. Then two big lettuce companies caved. One contract was “a stunner.” $5 per hour, $700 in retroactive pay since the expiration of the old contract, a cost-of-living adjustment that would pay hourly workers “$6.20 in July 1981, a 67 percent hike over their previous wages.” Lettuce would be paid at 75 cents a box. The following Monday, “farmworkers throughout the Salinas Valley began to enforce that deal as the new standard wage.” They sat down. Most companies caved and agreed to the new rates. A few companies went higher; “even scabs refused to work, demanding that their wages be raised to the new industry standard.” Tomato workers at another company walked out and “voted 201–4 for UFW representation. Sun Harvest, one of the biggest lettuce companies, caved. A few days later, “workers at all the other companies negotiating with the UFW went on strike.” They wanted what had been set in the earlier agreements elsewhere. Hot weather worked for the strikers, with lettuce and broccoli crops threatened with ruin by further delay of the harvest.

“Eventually all but one of the UFW companies in Salinas signed. Nine months after receiving the union’s first contract proposal, the growers were surrendering on terms not much different from those they once dismissed as ‘staggering’ and ‘outrageous.’ ”

Chavez vs. Marshall Ganz; An Independent Rank-and-File Pole Emerges

The aftermath of this impressive victory, however, was “not a happy time for Chavez.” The problem was Marshall Ganz, he said: “He has his own union in Salinas.” Meanwhile, in the Salinas and Pajaro valleys, writes Bardacke, “there had been almost continuous celebration…The picket lines were festive, the meetings raucous, spirits high. The workers were playful, some delirious with joy.”

“Perhaps the most judicious course of action…would have been for Cesar Chavez to go to Salinas, make peace with those who had defied him, and claim credit for what had been won. But Cesar Chavez didn’t know how to do that. He had built an organization that did not tolerate dissent, and he had no experience of continuing to work with people who had disobeyed him.” He did not speak to Ganz for several months. He began a whispering campaign aimed at tearing down Ganz’s stature. Ganz submitted a memo for moving forward but also offered to resign. “Chavez never answered. He was too smart to part ways with the coordinator of the most successful farmworker strike in US history in the immediate aftermath of its triumph.”

The strike committee and other Salinas militants met with a delegation from La Paz to work out terms for the paid field reps which had been won in the new contracts. La Paz wanted them to be appointed by Cesar Chavez, but the Salinas militants wanted them to be elected and independent. The meeting voted overwhelmingly to have elected paid field reps. A compromise was reached allowing Chavez to confirm “that the (ranch committee) president would be the paid rep;… it was a unique episode of democratic dialogue and decision making inside the UFW, it was never to be repeated…the paid reps were a small democratic wedge that potentially could shift the weight of the entire edifice from the mountain to the valley. For the first time in UFW history, people who worked for the union would be elected by their fellow workers rather than appointed by La Paz.” Chavez also accepted this arrangement because he thought he could “handle” the paid reps; in his view, the real threat was, as in the past, “malignant forces” undermining the union from within. A militant slate of rank-and-file workers overwhelmingly won the first ranch committee election, and similar victories over moderate forces more likely to compromise with Chavez followed.

Despite the victories in Salinas, the UFW was still “in a perilous position,” with the vegetables industry only half organized. “It had to grow or die.” The unorganized growers “matched union wages to keep the UFW out…The 1979–80 winter season did nothing to damage the Imperial Valley’s reputation as the graveyard of farmworker unions.” It was a different situation, and “the remarkable rank-and-file democracy that had characterized the last month and a half of the Salinas strike could not last indefinitely.” But Chavez still wanted to go with the boycott, using some “discernible evidence that the strike was still alive…” Ganz hoped to push the strike wave further. There was, however, none of the momentum that had made the Salinas victories possible. The high wages paid to keep the UFW out set 7,000 workers and “several crews of committed scabs” against no more than 200–400 active strikers. At the ceremony opening a new union hall in Calexico, one militant called Chavez the “new Moses,” but the “new Moses…was in Washington D.C. talking up the boycott at an AFL-CIO testimonial dinner for George Meany.”

Chavez envisioned a boycott campaign that might last five years, like the grape boycott of the sixties. “But 1980 was not 1966. The social movements that had sustained the table grape boycott of were long gone.” The student movement, the black movement, and the rank-and-file labor upsurge had been replaced by the era of Ronald Reagan; the “left had suffered a profound historical defeat…” Chavez’s visit to Marcos, stories circulating about the purges and the Synanon connection, and the union’s opposition to illegals had undermined the UFW’s outside support. In 1979, The New York Times ran a story about the violence of the “wet line” and some of the failed scams of Manuel Chavez, Cesar’s cousin, alienating liberal supporters.

In spite of these obstacles, the “farmworker movement was not yet dead. It had just scored its greatest victory, and its power was semi-institutionalized in more than a hundred contracts and in the new system of paid reps.” But the “farmworkers could have used the support of their old allies…The days of mass participation in UFW boycotts were over.”

Chavez turned instead to the Democratic Party, with a plan to back a speaker in 1980 for the state assembly, “the second most powerful political job in California,” who would be beholden to him. But, asks Bardacke, “could Chavez operate in this polluted arena and retain his saintly reputation?” Chavez lacked sufficient weight in Sacramento politics “to deliver enough to the growers on pesticides, land and water” in exchange for contracts. If he could be a kingmaker for the position of speaker, “he just might be able to win there what he was sure he couldn’t win in the fields…Such logic was by then common fare in union circles, as many AFL-CIO leaders tried to win in electoral politics what they had lost on the picket line or across the negotiating table.” Chavez leaned on two Chicano assemblymen to elect his choice, Howard Berman. The maneuver, however, collapsed and Chavez would throw money into the 1981 campaign to elect people who would support Berman.

But before that was possible, further developments within the union and its position in the fields continued to shift the balance of forces. The RFK Medical Plan was in disarray, a major source of complaint among unionized workers. Chavez put Marshall Ganz’s companion Jessica Govea in charge, but things improved only slowly. The paid field reps were establishing their power and presence in the fields; “the power of the 1979 strike had created a UFW in Salinas through the back door.” There was as yet no direct confrontation with Chavez. “[The field reps] didn’t see [their authority] as opposed to the union’s power, but rather as part of it…they were not in rebellion against Chavez or the union; they were enthusiastic unionists.” On the other hand, their new role as effective shop stewards put them in the position of having to enforce discipline on the rank-and-file; having won control of their jobs, seniority and a grievance procedure, “they did agree that the bosses could insist on some basic standards of workmanship.” They also focused on organizing the non-union companies “to organize the rest of the Salinas vegetable industry.”

Meanwhile, the growers regrouped. They paid higher wages than the union contracts, some introduced a medical plan, and “the foremen were on their best behavior.” Other growers “shifted their field work to nonunion growers…private companies appeared and disappeared” in what the workers called “ghost companies.” It was not unlike the kinds of corporate shell games that would sweep through much of US industry in the 1980s and beyond. Sun Harvest, a major company, “slashed its acreage in the Imperial Valley” and “began to shed some of its Salinas operations.” Non-union contractors were brought into do the work, and the union was unsuccessful in stopping it. “All of these grower maneuvers were only a start, a hint of what was to become the entire reorganization of the California vegetable industry. The small stream in 1980 would become a substantial river in 1981, and a wild flood in the mid-1980s.” In Bardacke’s view, a united effort by the UFW might have resisted, but “initially divided, then at war with each other, and finally shattered from within, they didn’t stand a chance.”

Towards Civil War within the UFW

A surprise mini-strike wave that began among garlic workers in August 1980 showed the new dispensation. The strikes were successful in raising wages, and the UFW was able to win thirty-one quick elections under the ALRB, involving 2,000 workers. As it peaked, however, Chavez turned against the movement, and red-baited one of his own loyalists out of the union when the latter got too swept up in the enthusiasm for the strikes. The real problem was that the successes were, as one Salinas militant put it, “a feather in Marshall’s cap, and as far as Cesar was concerned he had enough feathers already.” Shortly afterwards, “Cesar Chavez turned against Marshall Ganz, and this time he never let up.”

A second top leader, Gilbert Padilla, who had been with Chavez since 1955, hit the end of the road in a poorly-prepared grape strike in the Coachella Valley. Padilla was sent in to try to turn it around. Chavez was again talking about “dark forces” stirring up the workers. The company’s manager, with some insight into what had become of the UFW, held out and told journalists that “Union officials were always too busy with Governor Jerry Brown and US Senator Teddy Kennedy to meet with us.” Padilla tried to convince the workers it was too early to strike, only to meet with cries of “Go back to La Paz!,” and some empty beer cans were thrown at him. Ganz was called in and argued for the pre-huelga slowdown tactic that had worked in Salinas. Padilla’s car, provided by the union, was falling apart, “another example of the twisted priorities of the union, which was giving away big money to politicians but refused to provide its officers and organizers with reliable cars.” The pre-huelga tactics, however, worked and the company signed, and “the workers overwhelmingly accepted the contract.” A few months later, however, Chavez turned on a long-term loyalist and friend of Padilla’s working in La Paz, accusing her of disloyalty and, in what was becoming classic fashion, depositing her in tears at the gate. After further, Synanon-style attacks led by Dolores Huerta and others, Padilla resigned.

A few weeks later, it was the turn of Jerry Cohen, who had previously anchored the UFW’s legal department. He felt that Chavez was sabotaging a settlement at a large company because it would be another triumph for Marshall Ganz. The legal department had been dismantled earlier. “From the mid-sixties to the late seventies, the UFW had had the whip hand. More than a dozen skilled lawyers, backed up by dedicated paralegals, worked for the UFW at very low wages while the union’s foes, the growers and the Teamsters, had to hire their own attorneys for hundreds of dollars an hour…the entire UFW legal department understood [the ALRA] better than even the best lawyers on the other side.” By 1980, because of the earlier shakeup, that advantage was gone, and the growers were putting more resources into legal fights, challenging “every decision that went against them, successfully gumming up the works.” Cases were tied up for thirty months, and “pro-union workers were fired without redress…” Cohen himself had no illusions about the ALRA; it was “no substitute for a farmworker movement…Absent farmworker pressure, the board would be of little help…in March 1981, the union would be gripped in a civil war incapable of pressuring anybody…The ALRA, on paper the best labor law in US history, and the board, all liberal Jerry Brown appointees, would be but a legal spider web, snaring the UFW in its procedures so that the growers could come in for the kill.”

As his oldest and most experienced collaborators prepared to bail, Chavez turned to his “latest managerial enthusiasm,” the Top Management Plan. It was the successor to various earlier plans, including the incorporation of Synanon methods. It was, once again, top-down, emphasizing “strict unity of purpose and action.” Chavez argued that the “absence of a management team” was the main obstacle to the union’s growth. When the new plan was first floated, all the emerging dissidents on the Executive Committee, including Ganz, Govea, Padilla and Cohen, had considered it a “total waste of time” when the real task was “organizing the rest of the vegetable industry.” Ganz countered with a long document that became known as the “Marshall Plan,” arguing that the main task was not administrative but rather building “a strong democratic national farmworkers’ union.” The union had to organize the rest of California agriculture, Ganz argued, and could not “long exist as an island…The island must either become the continent or the sea will swallow it up.” He argued that the headquarters should be moved back to the valley, the volunteers replaced by moderately paid staff with medical and pension plans, and that the legal department should be rebuilt. Though Ganz thought differing viewpoints in the union were necessary, “he stopped short of proposing a bottom-up, democratic structure.” But Ganz made no effort to inform the paid reps or the workers of these conflicting proposals. For Chavez, Marshall’s Plan was “a reasoned, direct, open rejection of his policies.” The Executive Board adopted Chavez’s new management plan unanimously, “in a gesture of unity.” Immediately afterward, a Chavez emissary was sent to talk to another key rank-and-file militant, Cleofas Guzman, telling him that “there were two groups in the union, one led by Cesar Chavez and the other by Marshall Ganz” and that Guzman “and all the other paid reps would have to choose between them.”

Palace Politics and Further Involvement in the Democratic Party

“A cupped hand that hides a mouth, delivering a dirty secret, is one of the dominant images of palace politics, and so of the UFW in the desperate, cataclysmic period of 1980–81…Well-sown rumors blighted reputations, sprouted lies, threatened lives…Disagreements were interpreted as disloyalty while betrayal, or the fear of it, prepared the ground for a terrible conclusion…the brisk betrayals and backroom deals of the state capital appeared if not quite wholesome, then at least more like comic opera by comparison.”

Chavez returned to his plan to be a kingmaker in the California state legislature by backing Howard Berman for speaker. But the slick, black, long-time assemblyman from San Francisco, Willie Brown, upended Chavez’s plans. Two key Chicano assemblymen, Alatorre and Torres, backed Brown, and UFW members rang doorbells in their East Los Angeles districts denouncing them as traitors. The feud launched by Chavez “diminished UFW support among some Chicanos…” He made peace with Brown with a $750,000 contribution from union funds.

The now explicit factions influenced ongoing organizing in the Imperial Valley, where six companies had not signed contracts. A Chavez ally talked up the lettuce boycott and a “possible ALRB ruling that the growers had been bargaining in bad faith,” which would require the growers to give the strikers back pay from the beginning of the strike. The Chavez emissary told the workers “straight out, and in no uncertain terms, that the union planned no new organizing in vegetables.” Cleofas Guzman and other paid field reps resisted. Those who did not toe the new lines were told they were enemies of the union. One of them, Mario Bustamante, the militant from Salinas who was close to Ganz, was beaten in the union hall by five sidekicks of Manuel Chavez, Cesar’s cousin and specialist in dirty tricks. “This was not the first time in US labor history that men originally recruited to protect strikers from company goons or to take rough action against scabs attacked union members opposed to official policies.” But it was the first time in the UFW.

Marshall Ganz’s “power base in Salinas accounted for about 80 percent of the union’s dues income.” A UFW sympathizer in Sacramento told Dolores Huerta about an ostensible plan by Ganz “to kick Chavez upstairs into a ceremonial position and take over the UFW.” Huerta took the sympathizer to La Paz where he repeated the story to Chavez. “No one confronted Marshall Ganz,” but the rumor mill against him intensified; in Bardacke’s words, “this was gossip and nothing else.” Ganz only heard about his purported plan twenty years later. None of Ganz’s rank-and-file supporters ever heard him criticize Chavez; “in fact, his silence made them a little angry.” Bardacke in fact thinks “Ganz may have made some remark…about workers getting more power in the union and Chavez becoming primarily the union’s public face” which then “became a full-fledged conspiracy in the ears of Huerta and Chavez.” There was the “Marshall Plan,” and Ganz and Cohen did want to throw the union’s resources into organizing the vegetable industry. “To Huerta and Chavez, this alternative proposal implied betrayal, a plot to bring down Chavez.”

“The union had long run on Chavez’s power to command and everyone else’s inclination to obey, and this had once given the organization a certain strength. But what had been strong became brittle with time, unable to bend in the face of internal differences inevitable in a union of thousands of workers in different crops and regions, with conflicting interests and political views. Under the pressure of disagreement, the union cracked. The wild accusations of conspiracy were the pathetic sounds of an organization breaking apart.” In Bardacke’s view, the great irony was that Ganz had never done what Chavez accused him of, “the very thing he should have done.” He never went outside the leadership, “keeping the active farmworkers out of the internal politics of the union.”

Ganz, Cohen and two other allies spent a week writing out the history of the UFW on four large sheets of butcher paper. They were trying to figure out if there was any chance the workers could take it over. “A major problem of this gang of four was that they were so white.” Further, Ganz and Cohen were Jews; “Chavez’s fascination with Judaism was acute.” Some farmworkers fifteen years earlier had asked “why are there so many whites telling us what to do.” Chavez had always defended the union’s diversity. “As the New Left broke down into competing oppressed identities, complaints from Chicano nationalists increased.” Chicanos were becoming more influential in California politics, and Chavez “began to shift his emphasis, promoting the union and its leadership as Mexican…”

Bardacke sees this shift as “not essentially opportunistic.” For all Chavez’s successes, “he was a brown man in a white racist country…” Ganz had arrived from the breakup of SNCC and the increasingly militant black movement in 1965, “relieved…to be part of an organization where color supposedly wasn’t an issue. To the extent that [he] believed that, he deluded himself.” His excellent Spanish, his being mistaken for a Mexican, his ability “to fit smoothly in the farmworker world…may have prompted him to take insufficient measure of the extent to which, ultimately, he did not fit in.” But as his situation had evolved, particularly after joining the rank-and-file revolt against Chavez in Salinas in 1979, “he had slipped into an untenable position in the UFW…[Ganz’s]… whiteness made his an easy target once Chavez withdrew his support, and prevented him from fighting back effectively.”

The Defeat of the Field Reps

Ganz’s only hope was to turn to the paid reps. But as he and the other white organizers chose “to fight the inside battle exclusively among insiders, they accepted the division between the mountain and the valley, the people who ran the union and those who were just members.” Ganz and his allies “rolled up (the butcher paper), put it in the closet, and went their separate ways. Nothing could be done, they concluded.”

Chavez’s last battle was against the paid field reps, whose independent power base was the result of the 1979 Salinas general strike, undertaken against his will. The field reps “brought their fight onto the open stage in a direct, public confrontation with Cesar Chavez. It was such a departure from the past that Chavez and Dolores Huerta could hardly recognize it for what it was.” They saw it only as a maneuver by Ganz to regain power.

“They couldn’t have been more wrong. The battle between La Paz and the paid reps was different from the UFW’s periodic internal disputes, not something that could be resolved by one more staff purge…it was a claim by farmworkers that the union was theirs.” For Bardacke, it was “two worlds in collision,” pitting the Chicanos on the UFW staff against the Mexicans who had won the 1979 strike. The “Mexican paid reps did not regard work in the fields as a calamity…They considered themselves craftsmen…” They did not like the way they were used to promote the boycott. “They did not feel like victims, and they did not like to pretend that they were…They had not wanted to be obliged to wear old work clothes when they went to press conferences…They sought justice, not charity.”

Mario Bustamante, after becoming a paid rep, “realized that the priorities in the union were twisted by its charitable appeals…Why did people have to wait all day in the service centers when the union had money to hire skilled professionals?…Why was the union staff shopping at thrift stores for their clothes?…It was all part of the union’s badge of poverty, its appeal to the public for help as poor farmworkers and their impoverished union…the performance took precedence over the actual needs of the members.”

Bustamante felt patronized when he went to La Paz. “…It was almost something religious…But if you went to La Paz with something serious to talk about, they weren’t interested in that…we [lettuce workers] work so hard, but it is not easy to push us around. If we have differences, we like to argue them out. Chavez didn’t want to do that.”

As Bardacke comments, Chavez “never wanted to do that.” Not in Oxnard in the late fifties, not in the early sixties. “He didn’t argue politics; he told exemplary stories, and looked for followers.” “The paid reps…didn’t need the veil pulled from their eyes…They would follow a leader, but not one who was unwilling to argue things out. Chavez… didn’t want comrades. He wanted disciples…People like Mario Bustamante could not be integrated into the union staff without changing the nature of the whole enterprise.”

In January 1981, Cleofas Guzman was warned by Mexicali police that Manuel Chavez, Cesar’s cousin, had threatened to kill both of them if they didn’t stop “messing up the UFW.” A Chavez point man instructed Guzman to drive to San Luis, Arizona, the next day for a meeting. On the road, “a cotton truck pulled out from a side road right in front of him.” Guzman suffered head injuries and a permanent speech impairment. The driver of the cotton truck fled the scene. A nearby witness said the truck had been waiting for some time and that the driver had been spirited away in another car. The crash was labeled an “accident.” Many paid reps thought it was a setup organized by Manuel Chavez. Many of them dropped out of controversies on internal union matters. Cesar Chavez had sent Ganz and Govea to investigate, and “Govea believed that Cesar was afraid he would be blamed for it…hoping their report would absolve him… [Guzman] was an extraordinary leader…not afraid of Cesar, nor was he intimidated by him. He was not an in-your-face guy, but he was very clear about who he was and what role he wanted to play in representing workers…he was very principled, and it nearly cost him his life.” A few weeks later Chavez and two acolytes went to Calexico to meet with the paid reps and others “to combat the many rumors surrounding the event.” Chavez produced a memo sent to all involved in the meeting, affirming that Manuel Chavez was a founder of the union and that he “assists the President on special problems and projects.” He implied that there had been no setup, either in Guzman’s case or in the earlier attack on Bustamante in the union office. His memo also said the task at hand was getting contracts signed and not to continue organizing.

As Bardacke puts it, the “civil war had escalated. The dispute was no longer an argument on the Executive Board. It was down in the valley, and blood had been spilled.”

Chavez sent Ganz and Govea to Israel for “a month-long study of agricultural practices of the kibbutzim.” Govea didn’t want to leave the UFW but Ganz interpreted the trip as a “parting gift, a gracious goodbye from Chavez.” Ganz had dropped out of most union work, and “cut his last ties to the paid reps.” He went into seclusion. He told Bustamante that he could not help him and that the paid reps were on their own. But, writes Bardacke, the reps “had no map, no equivalent of the Marshall Plan…” They threw themselves into standard union work, and then the ongoing problems of the poorly-managed RFK Medical Plan. Confrontation with La Paz intensified and the reps wanted the union, with all its money, to hire competent people to run the plan. They refused invitations to go to La Paz to straighten things out, where they “had always gotten the runaround.” Chavez sent a hatchet man and some other errand runners to Salinas, where they broke up a meeting of the reps, and attacked their management of the health plan; one rep was also a “Communist.” Chavez’s men spread slander around town.

A small strike erupted and the workers approached the UFW. One of Chavez’s hatchet men said they had to go back to work, because the union already had a backlog of contracts to settle. He told the reps that “the union was not interested in Salinas any more.” Chavez convened everyone in La Paz for a “Serious Meeting.” In a five-page memo, he reiterated that there was a “conspiracy against the union,” like conspiracies in the past going back to 1965. The “Big Lie” that the union is no longer interested in organizing was being spread by “ex-volunteers…other unions, ‘extremist groups,’ the growers…” “The conspirators would be named ‘at the appropriate time.’ ” Chavez would spend the next few months in Hollister, “a short drive from the alleged conspirators in Salinas.” Ganz later told Bardacke “they just destroyed the whole Salinas operation, and it was a horror to watch.”

Chavez tried to answer charges of his remoteness from the fields with “one last campesino campaign before he made the moves that would finally doom the UFW as a farmworker organization.” Chavez and his son Paul involved themselves in a union drive with local garlic and mushroom workers. The garlic growers had their eyes on selling out to the expanding San Jose property market nearby. They stonewalled and never settled. The mushroom growers caved after a ninety-six day strike, “a considerable success” in Bardacke’s view, given the overall momentum.

Chavez had refused to meet with the paid reps while in Hollister. Many of them still believed in him, thinking, like many before, that they only needed to talk to him to straighten him out, that he didn’t know what was going on. But one day another veteran union militant and field rep was invited to a one-on-one meeting with Chavez. They argued about the problems of the medical plan, and finally Chavez justified the late payments to workers because “meanwhile the union was earning interest.” “The union is a business…you have to understand that.” He had never talked that way to a worker before, always presenting the union as something bigger, a cause. The militant “walked away, devastated.” “[My] world fell on top of me. How could I have been so blind for so long?”

The grower onslaught intensified in 1981, subcontracting to non-union grower-shippers or simply going out of business. The UFW and its depleted legal department could do nothing but “file unfair labor practice charges with the already gummed-up ALRB.” The paid reps organized “what turned out to be their final stand in the union.” They ran three candidates for the Executive Board, pointing out that there had never been farmworkers fresh from the fields on the board. They saw it as an “extension of their victory in the 1979 strike.” It was the soul of the farmworkers against the soul of the boycott, which by then “was accomplished mainly by the UFW’s string of charity organizations and Democratic Party politics.” The field reps ran the first genuine oppositional campaign for the board. “In a union without a tradition of political debate, La Paz considered that treason.” They could only see conspiracy and “evil, behind-the-scenes manipulators.” Dolores Huerta and other Chavez acolytes responded with a “political sledgehammer,” accusing the slate and the field reps “of being dupes of Marshall Ganz. An element of anti-Semitism was slipped in, referring to Ganz and Jerry Cohen. Huerta pointed out that the strikes where UFW militants were killed had been organized by Ganz. The real issues were lost in “charges and counter-charges.” At Sun Harvest, “the UFW’s most important contract was being hollowed out from the inside” but Chavez was too busy quelling the opposition. Huerta tried and failed to convince ranch committee meetings, where convention delegates were being chosen, to vote against the paid reps, and failed. The reps stood firm, but because of the specific history in Salinas, had trouble spreading their campaign around the state.

The UFW’s fifth national convention took place in Fresno. The Chavez leadership used every bureaucratic trick in the book to weaken the opposition, “small tricks commonly used by unions to silence opponents.” As a final blow, they contrived a maneuver that Bardacke nominates for the “Dirty Tricks Hall of Fame,” coming up with a complicated “emergency” voting formula neutering the field reps’ pre-convention victories so that, in the words of one Chavez hack, “they couldn’t vote for anybody but Cesar’s slate.” An opposition attempt to void the voting formula was beaten back. Some Chavez loyalists displayed handguns. The opposing forces faced off at the lunch break. Half the Salinas and Watsonville delegations walked out to cries of “traitors, traitors.” Dolores Huerta led a group to Salinas to force a recall of the “traitorous” paid reps. When they failed to get the necessary signatures for a recall, they began a campaign of dirty tricks and intimidation. They failed again. “The reps could not be recalled, and they would not resign.” Huerta and her hatchet people issued letters to the reps from Cesar Chavez saying they were fired, even though they were independently elected and paid through union contracts. “Since he hadn’t appointed them, he couldn’t fire them.” The affair wound up in the courts and dragged on for seven years, after which the reps backed out. The La Paz campaign had its effect, and a significant minority resigned itself to supporting Chavez. “The unity of the lettuce crews was destroyed.”

Bardacke writes: “in keeping control of the UFW, [Chavez] crippled it. He politically enfeebled its local leaders and divided its ranks. The union still had the contracts, but it didn’t have a united membership and a movement to protect them. La Paz had smothered the farmworker soul of the union. The body would wither and die. Only the head would live on.”

Final Act

It still took the growers several years to push the weakened UFW aside, intensifying the tactics begun in the previous several years. They leased land to non-union companies and blackballed UFW members throughout the industry. The union, incapable of mounting a fight in the fields, fell back on the non-existent boycott and a legal challenge. When the hearing finally took place, the weakened UFW legal department was “shockingly incompetent,” and lost. Joint ventures with non-union harvesting companies increased. Other organized companies went out of business. Huge shipper-retailers appeared which hired non-union harvesters or contractors. “Seven years earlier, the UFW had the grower-shippers by the throat; now the grower-shippers had disappeared.” The shipper-retailers marketed food on a huge scale to supermarkets, while business boomed. “Everything went up but wages,” which fell between 20 and 40 percent, with no benefits. “Farmworkers lost homes they had bought in the good years. Families doubled and tripled up in single-family houses…Some people didn’t have enough to eat, and many filled up on bad food.” The ALRA remained on the books, but remained mainly dead letter. There was speedup, firings and the reintroduction of the short-handled hoe. Shifts in taste nationally allowed the growers to rid themselves of the lechugero crews, and today they work for $8–$10 per hour in vastly devalued dollars. The same tactics that had diminished the union in lettuce also worked against the limoneros, whose work was outsourced to labor contractors. The fall in real wages, after the elimination of union benefits, was 20 percent.

New immigrant groups arrived, such as Mixtecs and Zapotecs from Oaxaca; they did not speak Spanish, and “the UFW ignored them.” Economic crisis in Mexico in 1982 brought millions of Mexican migrant workers into the United States. In 2000, there were “12 million native-born Mexicans” in the United States, up from under 2 million in 1960. “The union had been born in a period of labor scarcity; it died during a labor surplus.”

Bardacke asks “how Chavez, so adept at seeing the opportunities that history provided in 1965, could have been so blind to one of the most significant historical trends of his time: the massive migration of people from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Chavez had tried to put his finger in the dike with his Campaign Against Illegals. Then he tried to make peace with the newcomers. But he never spoke for them or sought to represent them, never even welcomed them. That, along with his commanding role in the destruction of his own union’s farmworker leadership, was his greatest historical failing.”

With the 1983 election of Republican George Deukmejian as governor of California, the wave of reaction accelerated as he attacked Chavez, the UFW and the ALRA. In keeping with national trends where people were appointed heads of government agencies whose very purpose they opposed, Deukmejian appointed David Sterling, a “shill of agribusiness” head of the ALRA, who upon leaving office in 1990 boasted that “The Board is no longer responsive to the needs of farmworkers.” Deukmejian and Sterling popularized the view that “they, personally, had beaten back the Cesar Chavez union. The UFW aggressively promoted the same idea…,” masking the other reasons for its losses. “Thirty years later, Deukmejian, Sterling and the Republicans remain among the most prominent villains in semi-official UFW history…(along with Marshall Ganz, some insiders will add).” Bardacke dismantles the official story, showing that the key legal defeats happened before 1983. As for the general restructuring of agriculture, “that could only have been halted in the fields, by a farmworker movement willing and able to stop harvesting crops…But a movement capable of doing that had been undermined by Cesar Chavez well before Deukmejian became governor.”

The UFW became “a successful cross between a farmworker advocacy group and a family business.” The union soul died, while the “boycott advocacy” soul supported itself in “a string of non-profit organizations that Chavez had earlier dubbed the Farm Worker Movement.” By 1986, the non-profits had assets of $15 million. The union shifted to a “high-tech boycott” strategy. Chavez tried to launch a “Chicano lobby” to pressure the state legislature, but it never took off. The UFW’s political impact, however, greatly increased through targeting money for Democratic politicians. The high-tech methods were shifted from boycotts to fundraising appeals, “expanding on the descriptions of farmworker misery.” La Paz was engulfed by a “commercial ethos.” “The boycott became a ‘social marketing program.’ ” “As a substitute for an actual fight in the fields, the UFW staged one-day appearances by Chavez in California farm towns…serving as publicity for the new boycotts…” The UFW began signing substandard contracts. With 2 percent of pay going to union dues, “people working under contract sometimes received smaller paychecks than before the union signed.” The UFW also organizes against attempts by other workers to fill the void left by its “retreat from the fields.” When a small group consisting mainly of Mixtecs and Zapotecs in Stockton formed La Asociación Lazaro Cardenas to organize, Dolores Huerta tried to get the leader fired from his job. In 1983, when the Asociación launched a tomato strike, the UFW “rushed to the scene, seized control of the strike” and tried to take over the strike leadership.

After Chavez’s death in April 1993, the UFW made a “genuine effort to return to the fields and regain its identity as a union.” The union has about 5,000 members, “who work under contracts with wages and benefits not much different from the current low standards in the California fields.” Chavez is now an “official hero”; his birthday, March 31st, is a California state holiday; “schools, streets, parks and stamps bear his name and image.”

Cesar Chavez, as indicated at the outset, partially broke with the methods of his early mentor Saul Alinsky by not “fading away” after setting in motion a movement of previously unorganized people. The myth of Chavez and the UFW is alive and well, as indicated above, as are Alinsky’s methods, specifically opposed to any anti-capitalist class struggle and cozily ensconced with the Democratic Party. Chavez’s myth will probably survive the publication of Bardacke’s book, as it survived the appearance of Miriam Pawel’s earlier, shorter, far less detailed but still sharp critique.21 Dolores Huerta, at 82, portrayed in Bardacke’s book in a role not generally connected with her public image, maintains the myth and has her own non-profit, the Dolores Huerta Foundation. The myth and the methods which gave rise to the UFW are too valuable to people and groups heavily invested in them, including in a certain wing of support for ex–community organizer, now Commander-in-Chief of US Armed Forces Barack Obama. We see those methods, for example, in the long post-1960s evolution of ACORN and, following ACORN’s partially self-inflicted decline,22 a series of reconstituted post-ACORNs today. We see them in the proliferation of NGOs, in which professionals of identity politics consciously oppose efforts by black and brown militants to develop serious class (read Marxist) politics. We hope that in giving Bardacke’s exceptional book the attention it deserves, we are contributing modestly to a deflation of these myths and are helping to clear the way for a class politics outside all the respectability and organizations of official society that Chavez cultivated from Day One.

• 1The name of the organization evolved from NWFA to UFWOC to UFW to FWM. I will attempt to use the name it used in the period under discussion, but sometimes UFW as a generic term, the name by which it became best known.
• 2Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee, which evolved from a civil rights group in 1960 to one of the sources of the Black Power movement by 1965.
• 3Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins (2009).
• 4In Germany, the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund), the central trade union federation, established the Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft, which in 1982 was the ninth largest German bank. Earlier, in 1974, the DGB created a holding company BGAG, from various firms it controlled. The DGB’s construction company, Neue Heimat, originally created to build worker housing, wound up a sprawling network of 150 companies, including 60 abroad. In 1982, it sank into scandal involving top leaders of the DGB. The Israeli Histadrut (General Confederation of Israeli Workers) controlled an empire so vast that it was the second largest employer in Israeli after the state itself. In the United States and the United Kingdom, pension funds by the 1990s controlled more than half of all stocks, and in 2003, US unions controlled $12 trillion of the $17 trillion invested by pension funds. The trend had begun with the municipal union bailout of New York City. In 1976, Peter Drucker, the management theorist studied by the young Chavez, declared the United States the first country in which the wage laborers were the real owners of industry and controlled the capital markets. See João Bernardo and Luciano Pereira, Capitalismo sindical (2008).
• 5Mexican anarchist (1874–1922) and key figure in the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution.
• 6Head of the AFL-CIO (previously AF of L) from 1952 to 1979.
• 7Also known as the Wagner Act, the main New Deal piece of labor legislation, which carefully excluded coverage for farmworkers and other marginal sectors of workers.
• 8See below.
• 9A form of visualization meditation which purports to raise IQs and tap “higher powers,” discredited as pseudo-science.
• 10Mutual self-help, largely apolitical.
• 11International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union, which won the 1934 general strike in San Francisco and which has had closed shop contracts in west coast shipping ever since.
• 12A racially-integrated alternative delegation to the Democratic Party national convention in summer 1964, which demanded to be seated instead of the official white segregationist delegation from Mississippi. The liberal Democratic establishment maneuvered their ouster, basically ending the honeymoon between the Democratic Party and the still-ascendant black civil rights movement.
• 13Walter Reuther (1907–1970), head of the United Auto Workers from 1946 until his death in 1970, was by the 1960s a left-liberal icon and “labor statesman.” He played a key role in knifing the MFDP in 1964.
• 14Leader of west coast longshore (ILWU) for decades until his retirement in 1977.
• 15Head of the Teamsters from 1958 to 1971; disappeared in 1975.
• 16Catholic organization founded by Dorothy Day in 1933, oriented toward the poor.
• 17Took over leadership of the Teamsters in 1967 when Jimmy Hoffa went to prison; was president until 1981.
• 18An interesting but flawed portrait of the “courtier culture” of many US unions, including the Teamsters, is Robert Fitch, Solidarity for Sale (2006).
• 19Left-liberal US Senator from South Dakota, opposed Vietnam War but also called for wage freeze to stop inflation; massively defeated by Richard Nixon.
• 20The AIFLD was the AFL-CIO’s Cold War international arm, founded in 1962, promoting “free unions” against Communist and nationalist-oriented unions in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. It was dissolved in 1995 when John Sweeney’s “New Labor” took over the AFL-CIO.
• 21Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (2009).
• 22A not terribly critical but factual history of ACORN is John Atlas, Seeds of Change (2010).

See https://libcom.org/forums/general/ak-press-says-michael-schmidt-fascist-25092015 for discussion of Michael Schmidt on this site.

The following review was basically written in early 2010, just after the appearance of Black Flame. I held back from publication while awaiting volume 2, which has yet to appear. Time passing, I decided to go ahead and put it out there. –MM.

The following is a comradely criticism of a quite good book from a Marxist who generally identifies as a “libertarian communist.”

Emma Goldman, it is generally known, said that most Marxists know as much about anarchism as the average Catholic knows about Voltaire. I would generally confess to that characterization, but have over the years attempted to educate myself, both through books and discussions with anarchists and ex-anarchists. The Schmidt/van der Walt book is without doubt the one of the best overviews of anarchism and syndicalism I have come across in a very long time.

Nonetheless…

The authors (both South African, one a journalist, the other an academic) are not trying to write comprehensively about Marxism, but they still seem to have anarchist blind spots where Marx and Marxism are concerned. One can hardly write seriously about anarchism historically without mentioning its “great rival.” And in a good polemic, it is important to present the opponents’ case at its strongest, which Schmidt and van der Walt seriously fail to do.

At times they seem to assimilate Marx and Engels to a “classical Marxism” (the German SPD) which was “statist.” The SPD was in fact statist (i.e., “Lassallean”), but Marx and Engels wrote scathing critiques of it for exactly that. They actually agreed with some anarchist critiques of it, though they kept it to themselves, for better or for worse (mainly in their correspondence: in one letter, one of them says that Bakunin was mainly criticizing Lassalle thinking he was a Marxist; they also wrote to Bebel and Liebknecht completely rejecting the concept of “social democracy” as something utterly foreign to their communist project). And then there is their Critique of the Gotha Program, which the “Marxist” German SPD tried to suppress.

Schmidt and van der Walt want to undo the myth that anarchism was only successful in underdeveloped capitalist economies, and then promptly list ten peripheral countries in which it was important.1

In fact, the “classical Marxist” (and statist) parties such as the German SPD were “substitute bourgeois revolutions” in industrializing countries whose “real” telos was full-blown capitalism and parliamentary democracy, in places such as Germany where the latter barely existed. The opposite pole, Spain and Latin America, confirms this quite nicely, where the socialist parties, unlike the SPD, were nothing but parliamentary organizations of lawyers and doctors and where, as Schmidt and van der Walt say, anarchism built the mass working-class organizations. The only country they mention that might be considered as seriously industrialized with an important anarchist presence was France, and even there France was, prior to World War II, more a bourgeois democracy than a really advanced industrial country (50 percent of the population was still rural in 1945, not to mention when anarchist influence peaked around World War I).

The greatest weakness of Black Flame is its almost total lack of a discussion of the Marxists (after Marx) that one might broadly call “libertarian communist,” namely Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, CLR James and some aspects of Guy Debord. It also lacks an in-depth consideration of the soviets and workers’ councils in the Russian and German revolutions, which in this reviewer’s perspective were a lot more interesting than anything the anarchists, with the important exception of Spain, ever came up with in a mass movement situation.

The world hardly needs another rehash of the Bakunin-Nechaev relationship, but at the very least a book such as Black Flame should mention how Bakunin was taken in by him.

Then there is Schmidt and van der Walt’s discussion of Spain, and the desire to undo the “myth” of Spanish exceptionalism. Whatever else they might say, it was the one country where the anarchists came close to making a social revolution, and (as the authors themselves say) totally failed the test when push came to shove. There were thirty years of CNT/FAI rejection of “politics” and the state, and suddenly, in 1936, they have ministerial portfolios in a bourgeois government. For a book such as Black Flame, this failure (analogous to the failure of self-styled Marxists in Germany and Russia) is a question which deserves a lot more discussion than the authors give it.

Schmidt and van der Walt cast a pretty wide net for their (in my view special pleading) concept of “expanded anarchism,” as with syndicalism (e.g., the IWW, Daniel DeLeon, etc.). It should be recalled that DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party and the IWW briefly attempted a fusion (ca. 1905) which was in no way “anarchist.” Yes, the IWW was syndicalist, but IWW rank-and-filers organized study groups on Marx’s Capital, one of the few mass movements in the West where that happened, to my knowledge. Of course labels are misleading (it might well be said that some anarchist and libertarian critics of the Second International were more Marxist than the official “Marxists” of the time).

Along with special pleading for building a very large tent for anarchism and syndicalism, one footnote (chapter 3, note 108) really made this reviewer sit up and take notice. It is utterly garbled, and points to the authors’ sloppiness. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution for Russia (Marx had one for Germany) was a blast precisely against the two-stage theory, and it is completely false to say that the bourgeois revolution fell to the “party.” It fell to the working class, as was confirmed by 1905 and again by 1917. Trotsky was an anti-Leninist when he developed the theory, and it was a total outlier in the European revolutionary milieu until 1917 when Lenin adopted it. Such sloppiness, even on a small point, makes one wonder just how much Schmidt and van der Walt know about the adversary.

To conclude. What undid the anarchist (and syndicalist) mass movements in many countries? It was the Russian Revolution and the rise of mass Communist Parties, as well as the post-1900 phase of capitalist accumulation based on a preponderance of relative surplus value, the latter a major historical oversight of our authors. But lurking in Schmidt and van der Walt’s portrayal is the old assumption of “mean old statists” winning out. The truth was that many people they call anarchists and syndicalists found something in early Third International communism that was lacking in anarchism and syndicalism. As they do say, many anarchists and syndicalists read Lenin’s State and Revolution and assumed that anarchists had taken power in Russia. They were quickly disabused, and were out of the Third International by 1921–22. Some of them, such as the very interesting character Alfred Rosmer in France, became Trotskyists. Others, such as William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon, both longtime IWW militants, became Stalinists and Trotskyists respectively. Cannon and Foster were unhappy with the IWW well before 1917 or even World War I. A book such as Black Flame, to be convincing to the unconverted, would do well to devote some attention to what such people (in the case of Rosmer and Cannon, among the best) saw in early communism what they found lacking in the syndicalist tradition. They were not dishonest people who wanted to build statism. Let’s face it, as Schmidt and van der Walt do not: a lot of anarchists and syndicalists “failed the test” of World War I just as badly as most Marxists did (and one might mention the American, Italian and Serbian socialist parties, all of whom opposed entry into WWI). There is no reason to think that if Spain had entered the war, a similar split would not have occurred in the CNT/FAI.

With these provisos in mind, the reader (as did this reader) will find a lot to think about in Black Flame, and Insurgent Notes looks forward to reviewing volume 2.

• 1On this problematic, cf. Loren Goldner, Ubu Saved From Drowning: Class Struggle and Statist Containment in Portugal and Spain, 1974–1977. The second part, on Spain, attempts to situate Spanish anarchism internationally.