Online Talk: Between Classes: The Rise and Fall and Rebirth of the Labor-Intellectual Alliance [] Center for Global Justice

The New Deal saw the emergence of a progressive alliance between intellectuals and unions. Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” designed policies and programs responding to popular demands from organized workers. This shaped the political landscape of the U.S. up into the 1960s. But this alliance was broken by the 1970s as capital’s offensive against unions weakened their countervailing power and neoliberalism replaced social liberalism as the dominant political ideology.

Historian Steve Fraser will recount this trajectory and the effort to reconstitute an intellectual-labor alliance after the election of John Sweeney of SEIU to the presidency of the AFL. Fraser was one of the organizers of a day-long “Teach-In With the Labor Movement” at Columbia University in 1996. The teach-in was a big event at which Cornel West, Betty Friedan, Richard Rorty, and of course John Sweeney all spoke. After years of decline in unionism, Sweeney’s ousting of the AFL’s old guard had aroused hope for a rejuvenated labor movement. Nevertheless, in spite of the new leadership’s commitment to militant organizing of the unorganized, including especially women and workers of color, labor continued to decline in the face of the class war of advancing neoliberalism. By the time Sweeny retired some fifteen years later union membership had declined by another three million. [Sweeny died just last month at the age of 86.]

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