NEW RADICALISM
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to do is to help them find for themselves genuine reasons for
organizing and for selecting their own leaders.
Once the black poor begin to move, other sectors of society
may be spurred to action. Already the dynamism of the civil rights
movement has led not only to civil rights bills but
also
to a new
look at public education and to at least a rhetorical "war" on poverty.
Successful political action among the black poor could extend beyond
remaking the Democratic party in the black ghettos to challenging
white liberals and white "reformers" to organize
themselves
much
more effectively. And with much more radical programs.
It's all too clear that these are difficult courses of action. But
since organized labor, despite Harrington's overestimation of the value
of its intermittent awakening, is
now
of little relevance to the under–
class, I do not understand what immediate alliances for basic change
Harrington has in mind. As a matter of fact, I expect that Ben
Seligman is accurate in his picture of the kind of labor movement
that
can
become relevant, both to its own increasingly vulnerable
members and to the poor. "Ways must be found," Seligman wrote
in the Winter, 1965,
Dissent)
"to organize and represent workers
thrown out of jobs by automation; ways must be found to organize
and consider the millions of ill-paid 'marginal' workers who scrape
along on the minimum wage and suffer the consequences of racial
discrimination. Perhaps new structures will be needed, amalgamated
unions of workers cutting across industrial lines, just as in the thirties
the CIO cut across craft lines."
When-and if-this kind of labor movement begins to develop,
a coalition of the underclass with labor will be a much more realistic
goal. And when churchmen and white liberals, instead of marching
only from Selma to Montgomery, put real pressure on those who
wield power in the North (many of them Democrats and self-labeled
"liberals"), talk of a coalition with
them
will have some meaning.
Take the city of New York. A "liberal" Democratic mayor, Robert
Wagner, has for fourteen years presided over the steady deterioration
of housing, jobs and education in the growing slums. Had he chosen
to run in this year's election, who would have supported him? Virtually
every labor union, including the "liberal" unions; the Liberal party,
which is dominated by the ILGWU; and many, though not all, in
the predominantly white reform movement in the city. And those
