Customer Reviews

Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Left Out tears the veil of anti-Communism away to reveal the insurgent origins of Communist-led unionism in America. The Communists didn't "infiltrate" or "colonize" unions, but were instead the backbone of popular struggles for decent working conditions, racial equality, women's rights, and participatory democracy. Culling and compiling data from many sources, Left Out reveals a broad, grassroots support for the Communists in America's industrial unions stretching from the long decade of the 1930s through the early 1950s. The postwar decline of organized labor is, then, tied to the aggressive purge of Reds and radicals of all hues and the failure of the expelled Communist-led unions to forge their own labor federation. Left Out goes against the shibboleths of our time and questions the inevitability of American labor's self-destructive accommodation to corporate capitalism. Courageous, clear and compelling, this is counterfactual history at its best -- history returned to the actors who make it.

The suggestion that the communists/radicals were able to infiltrate particular American CIO unions either because they were opportunistic organizers or because their ideology made them worked harder are quickly shown to be false in this revisionist book. The reason: the reds got better results for the rank-and-file.

Because of a range of factors which the authors lay out in a very clear form, red (roughly meaning radicals of a socialist/communist nature not necessarily explicitly tied to the Communist Party) led CIO unions were much more democratic (underminging Michels' iron law of oligarchy), they consistently won more pro-labor contracts in comparison to their moderate and oligarchic counterparts in the CIO, they had higher levels of gender egaltarianism, and finally they had higher levels of racial egalitarianism. The bottom line is that because of the political practices that the reds adopted in certain CIO unions they were able to achieve more substantial gains in the labor movement - in terms of both organizing and collective bargaining.

But what happened? Why did the CIO end of merging with the AFL and move to a business union strategy? The conclusion and epilogue provide a very interesting answer to this question which suggest that the radical leaders made a number of crucial tactical mistakes. But I will leave this to the reader to discover.

This book could not come more highly reccommended. It revises the historiography concerning radicals in American unions and it also provides an interesting sociological analysis of political practices. The errors in research design are too minor to overshadow the great contribution that this book has made.

Left Out tears the veil of anti-Communism away to reveal the insurgent origins of Communist-led unionism in America. The Communists didn't "infiltrate" or "colonize" unions, but were instead the backbone of popular struggles for decent working conditions, racial equality, women's rights, and participatory democracy. Culling and compiling data from many sources, Left Out reveals a broad, grasstoots support for the Communists in America's industrial unions from the long decade of the 1930s through the early 1950s. The postwar decline of organized labor is, then, tied to the aggressive purge of communism on the one side, and the failure of the expelled Communist-led unions to forge their own labor federation. Left Out goes against the shibboleths of our time and questions the inevitability of American labor's self-destructive accommodation to corporate capitalism. Courageous, clear and compelling, this is counterfactual history at its best -- history returned to the actors who make it.