Alexis – juiced to hear you checked Goodwyn’s books on American populism – hope you’ll go to read “Breaking the Barrier” – his great disappeared history of Solidarnosc. Ends with an amazing “Essay on Authorities” that’s one of the best critiques of elitist world-views (whcih span the Left and Right)…Nobody knows more than Goodwyn about people’s movements..
G recognized O as a brother pretty quickly. I’m sure he wishes O had more clarity re economic democracy and the traditions of worker ownership – but I know he’d reject your parrallel to W. J Bryant…O doesn’t represent a shadow movement that’s contesting with the real populist thing – it’s not as if, say, Edwards ever got any traction last year…O’s “movement” is what there is out there is you’re in the party of hope…
And let’s not forget race matter bigtime in America. Goodwyn surely wouldn’t. bryant/free Silver was a bitch but in the South populism ran up against race – REmember Tom Watson? – O is already much further up the road on that front that the pops ever got. Reminds me of an anecdote I may have already passed on here – A few mnths back Mr. G. got pissed at me when I teased him about his affection for his homie Edwards – we made up quick and few days later he musingly allowed if O won the presidency it woudl be more important than SEVEN wins by Edwards (or his equivs). Goodwyn is a Southern Liberal – born in GA, liven TX and NC all his life. He knows fromn the inside what O’s rise signifies in American history – knows it in his bones better than an Easterner like me! Or a Midwesterner like you?
RE – that petition thingy. IF you read that Trib piece through I htink you’ll see O’s acts weren’t all that egregious. Even his ex-fried the former state sen allows O went out of his way to caution her about giving up her safe seat. Told her she should hold on to it in case her Bid of house of REps failed and that he would NOT run if she wanted to do that. But she told she was Gone – When she tried to get back to her sweet spot, he played hardball. Not lovely but not very ugly either. The woman was feckless…O isn’t.
I’m cutting and pasted a FIRST piece that Goodwyn wrote back in 04 about Obama and a hero of Solindarnosc. Followed that with a passage re Mondragon in Ohio from an interview with William Greder – you can read the whole thing in the Nation section at firstofthemonth.org…
The Cunning of History
By Lawrence Goodwyn
Poland and the world lost a relentless democrat this summer, even as another promising practitioner was emerging in Illinois. The Pole was Jacek Kuron; The American is Barack Obama.
In the post-World War II years, Kuron was raised as an idealistic young activist in the Polish communist party and remained so until he discovered in the l960s that the principal beneficiaries of the party-state were party members, secret policemen and army officers (middle to high ranking in each case). Noticeably missing was the rest of the population, especially workers in whose name the worker state ostensibly ruled.
In the 1970s, Kuron took up station among the democratic opposition, a small group of Warsaw intellectuals who focused more on the censorship and civil liberties generally than on the structural confinement of Polish workers. Kuron felt, simply and correctly, that any agreement with the Leninist state was unenforceable without the support of organized workers since they were the only ones who could stop basic production upon which the party and everyone else depended. Unfortunately for Kuron, his efforts toward this objective ended disastrously in 1976 in the nearby city of Radom when a “strike” of workers collapsed with the brutal beating and imprisonment of the one worker publicly associated with the effort. Kuron thereafter always insisted that strike activities had to come after, not before, large-scale organizing efforts. It was a conclusion grounded in a profound ignorance of the internal dynamics of organizing and one that effectively excluded him from the on-going and eventually decisive efforts of workers on the Baltic Coast centered in the shipyard city of Gdansk. There, organizing in the Lenin Shipyard, a historic hotbed of labor activism, reappeared in the l960s. By 1970, workers on the coast had reconstituted the prewar “occupation strike” and added a postwar refinement – the concept of the Interfactory Strike Committee. This elaborate organizing device offered the prospect of providing centralized labor leadership to multi-factory job actions along the whole of the Baltic Coast – nothing less than a proto-General Strike. The veterans of this long-term organizing effort, Lech Walesa chief among them, did not need guidance from Warsaw intellectuals. Indeed, whatever lessons coastal activists had internalized from their multiple experiences in the 1970s were unknown to the Warsaw intelligentsia, Jacek Kuron included.
Ironically, after Solidarnosc burst upon the world scene in August 1980, intellectuals in Warsaw endeavored to take credit for the achievement, citing Kuron as the operative agent. However, Kuron declined to participate in this high-jacking of historical causality. He candidly announced his unabashed amazement at the successful mobilization of shipyard workers at Gdansk and elsewhere. Said Kuron: “I thought it was impossible; it was impossible; I still think it was impossible.” It was an unsolicited burst of Kuronesque candor the existence of which no Warsaw intellectual (that I know of) has ever subsequently acknowledged. At the time, however, the effect upon knowledgeable coastal activists was telling: Walesa thereafter relied on Kuron, among others, to help him interpret the utility of Warsaw types. Indeed, upon hearing of Kuron’s death, Walesa used Kuronesque language for repayment. Kuron was indispensable, he said. Solidarity was “impossible” to imagine without him. Polish-speak.
After the rise of Solidarity and the fall of the Polish Party, Jacek Kuron became the best Minister of Labor in the world – though in the era of globalization he was necessarily confined to maneuvering for palliatives rather than for any measure of worker autonomy. Welfare money for the increasing ranks of Polish unemployed became known as “Kuron money” and his soup kitchens yielded “Kuron’s soup.” Bitter ironies dogged him throughout his long life of democratic advocacy. But no disappointment succeeded in destroying his morale.
In an environment such as post-Communist Poland where hopes were extremely high and serious opportunities severely limited by the American-imposed global economy, the surfacing of demagoguery was certainly not something restricted to loquacious oppositionists, dazed ex-party hacks, or worker activists. Kuron performed far better than most. He did not believe that consistency was the essential ethical measure of politics. When he thought he had been wrong, he said so. It seems hard for democrats to ask for more than that.
Jacek Kuron understood the subtle social corruptions and the systemic economic corruptions of Leninist power; he did not understand, or experientially learn to understand, how to organize against that power. His fellow oppositionists who formed a tiny minority within the Warsaw intelligentsia did not know he did not know, because they had not themselves come to possess any means to measure coherently his inappropriate admonitions about worker organizing. They thought, pompously and illogically, that Kuron had “prepared the consciousness of the workers” for the coastal upheavals. So within this segment of Polish society, the Warsaw intellectuals, Kuron remains valued for the wrong reasons, as many of his obituaries around the world reveal.
His enduring democratic legacy is his commitment to candor as an instrument of politics and his belief that one worked with anybody who was willing to help one deal with a persisting social malfunction inherited from the past.
Which brings to mind Barack Obama. A forty-two year old state senator, he emerged –astonishingly – from a tumultuous 2004 primary as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.
In the prevailing culture of political interpretation in the United States, Obama is perhaps too easily described as calm and thoughtful. Or alternately – in language that cannot be seen as immediately persuasive – he violates too many rules of spin control. That is to say, he does not sound like a man running for office.
One example should suffice. After defeating the labor-endorsed candidate in the democratic primary (an uninspiring hack it must be said), Obama appeared before a downstate Illinois meeting of mostly unemployed union workers whose jobs had been successfully “outsourced” by their erstwhile American employers. In Decatur, where the closing of two large factories changed the lives of thousands of local families, Obama said: “We have an Administration that believes the government’s role is to protect the powerful from the powerless.” The eleven-word summary of what the Bush administration believed resonated so totally with the exact lived experience of the audience that, according to an observing reporter, “the little community center rang with angry acclamation.” This was a situation that could be changed. “Take a leap of faith with me,” Obama, a black man, went on to say to his blue-collar white audience. As if to test just how far the leap might be, he further informed his audience of protectionists that he was a free trader.
The point, obviously, is not to praise Obama as a political lemming but to emphasize that he does not see political recruitment as requiring the fabrication of constant agreement. Does he consciously raise red flags in front of protectionists? “Look, these guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos. They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.” The point is to confront serious and divisive issues rather than allow Republican consultants to use massive amounts of ad money to trivialize all politics with negative demagoguery. Says Obama: “If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.”
In the name of serious politics, a measured call for the merits of candor. It seems a useful way to honor Jacek Kuron’s memory is to lend a hand to Barack Obama’s campaign in Illinois.
HERE’S THE PASSAGE RE MONDRAGON IN OHIO…
FOTM:You recently heard Logue lead a workshop on what workers might want if they could create “an employee-owned industrial park.” Tell us about that and why you found it inspiring?
GREIDER: The discussion among worker owners and their allies about a “Mondragon in Ohio” – an industrial park composed of small, employee-owned companies sharing assets and overhead functions – illustrates for me the open-ended nature of human possibilities, once people imagine beyond existing structures of control. It also explodes the usual stereotypes about what workers want. They want whole lives, they want more control over their destinies, they want practical, intelligent, self-interested collaboration with others. The present system not only discourages such creative thinking, it makes it impossible for most workers even to entertain new ideas. Given the advanced level of our development, this seems to me a criminal waste of human capabilities.
WHAT ABOUT CHINA? Off-topic. Not as much as you might think. The concerns of Goodwyn/Grieder are pretty relevant to issues raised by China’s state capitalist turn (and the U.S. role as debtor nation)…The connections will be apparent to any reader schooled in Marx’s internationalism..Pace Wretch! Second time as farce? Seemed a bit strange to see you leaning on a writer you’d dissed and dismissed only a few days before. But – waht the hey – Obama’s liberal-mindedness must be catching…
