Rad Geek People's Daily

From Taking the Pledge, Chapter 1 of Martin Glaberman’s Wartime Strikes: The struggle against the no-strike pledge in the UAW during World War II (1980).

By way of context: in December 1941, in the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war, the Roosevelt administration held meetings where a lot of national union and labor federation leaders agreed to a no-strike pledge and major concessions on pay, hours and overtime — supposedly in exchange for no-lockout pledges from management, and for government imposing major regulatory restrictions on war industries, market prices and executive salaries. In most unions these concessions were made unilaterally by union leadership. The United Auto Workers provisionally adopted the measures through their Executive Board and then called a convention of their membership in April 1942 to ratify the program.

The tactics used at the conference by the leadership included the implication that giving up premium pay for Saturdays and Sundays was conditional on acceptance of the whole program. The Equality of Sacrifice program included a prohibition of war profits, a $25,000 ceiling on salaries, control of inflation, rationing of necessities, and so on. Just before the vote a letter that President Roosevelt had sent to the conference was read a second time and then Richard Frankensteen, a Vice President of the UAW, shouted at the delegates, Are you going to tell the President of the United States to go to hell?^[23] The program giving up overtime pay was adopted, with 150 delegates voting in the opposition.

Relinquishing premium pay ultimately proved an embarrassment to the UAW and the CIO. The AFL was not quite as generous, and, as a result, in attempts to organize the aircraft industry, the UAW was having difficulty, losing elections to the AFL International Association of Machinists. The difficulties faced by CIO unions, attempting to organize plants against their AFL rivals, ultimately forced on Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the humiliation of having to demand thatt the government enforce a general ban on premium pay for Saturdays and Sundays, to equalize the situation. Nelson Lichtenstein writes:

A 1942 contest between the UAW and the International Association of Machinists provides a graphic example of this wartime phenomenon. Under the prodding of Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen and at the request of the government, the UAW agreed to relinquish certain types of overtime pay in the interests of a general Victory Through Equality of Sacrifice program. UAW organizers thought this plan would help organize new war workers through its patriotic appeal. For example they [pg]8[/pg] told Southern California aircraft workers: The best way (you) can speed up war production, and contribute even more to the war effort, is to join the CIO, which has made this business of winning the war its main objective.

In contrast the machinists’ union emphasized wages and hours and the maintenance of overtime pay standards. The IAM attacked the UAW: Can the CIO’s masterminds tell you why they know what’s good for the worker better than he knows himself? . . . the CIO sacrifices workers’ pay, workers’ overtime as the CIO’s contribution to the war effort. Big of them, huh? In a series of 1942 NLRB elections the IAM decisively defeated the UAW on this issue. UAW and CIO leaders who had pitched their election campaigns on an exclusively patriotic level were stunned. In defeat they quickly appealed to the WLB and to the Administration, not to restore overtime pay, but to force the IAM and the rest of the AFL to give it up as well. This FDR soon did by issuing a special executive order on this problem.^[24]

It all pointed up to the stupidity of one of the arguments of the union leaders in this, as well as the giving up of the right to strike: the government will move against labor in wartime and legally restrict our overtime benefits and our right to strike. To prevent this, the remarkable strategy of surrendering these rights voluntarily was put forward.

This seeming contradiction between the supposedly conservative AFL versus the supposedly militant CIO exposes one facet of what has come to be called social unionism. The concerns of union leaders (especially such as Walter P. Reuther) who went beyond the traditional bread and butter unionism of the AFL to deal with general social questions have often been misunderstood as a sign of greater militancy. More often, it was simply a tendency to move the labor movement in the direction of incorporation into the structure of the welfare state. Social unionism represented the demands of the state for the social control of the workers at least as much as it represented the generalized interests of the membership of the unions.

The adoption of the no-strike pledge by the leaders of the major unions seems like a sharper turn in labor policy than it is in reality. The outbreak of war, the public demands of government officials for labor peace, the statements and [pg]10[/pg] resolutions of labor leaders, the fact that major strikes for union recognition were still taking place, all combine to exaggerate the degree of change involved in the no-strike policy.

The conflict between militant unionists and UAW leaders seeking to limit the independent activity of the membership dates back to the organizing days of the union. . . . [pg]13[/pg] . . . Control of wildcat strikes had been a continuing problem before the outbreak of war. A discussion at a special meeting of the UAW International Executive Board in Detroit on February 7, 1941 is indicative:

The next issue discussed by President Thomas was the various unauthorized strikes or so-called departmental sit-downs which were taking place in a number of the plants. He then related to the Board his recent experiences in the Briggs plant at which time one of the Chief Steward [sic] openly flaunted the fact that he just closed his department, without first consulting his superior officers or the International.^[1] In view of this instance and similar other minor occurrences Pres. Thomas informed the Board that a letter was issued from his Office stating very definitely that the International would not support or partake in any future unauthorized strikes. To date, President Thomas was happy to report that apparently the letter had some affect [sic] since no such trouble has been encountered in the plant.

(Considerable discussion followed as to what policy the International Union should adopt in such instances and it was the consensus of opinion that the International had been too lenient and should in the future assume a firm stand on these matters.)^[27]

This discussion might support the suspicions that the leaders of the UAW welcomed government pressure on workers to back up their own attempts to maintain labor peace, despite their public opposition to government restrictions on labor. Interesting also in the above minutes is the phrase superior officers, which suggests a hierarchy in which power starts at the top and diffuses downward.

In addition to their own bureaucratic need to control their members, the actions of CIO leaders were also governed [pg]14[/pg] by their desire to be incorporated into the state machine.^[28] Although this was presented as a desire to achieve labor representation in the government and on government boards, it quickly developed into governmental representation in the labor movement rather than the reverse. . . . They would appear to their own members, not as leaders who had been elected to represent the interests of their members, but as politicians whose function it had become to get their members to sacrifice for the war effort. They viewed themselves as patriots first and unionists second. In contrast, with very few exceptions, business leaders never permitted patriotism to interfere with profits. The rush of the UAW and CIO officials to be absorbed into the wartime government bureaucracy was in partial contrast to the leaders of the AFL. AFL bureaucrats, in many ways more conservative than the CIO, nevertheless had an older tradition of avoidance of politics and governmental interference. In their simple business unionism way, they at times refrained from making concessions (such as on the premium pay issue) which seemed to benefit corporate profitability more than the war effort. It is [pg]15[/pg] not that they did not participate on government boards and play the role of government bureaucrats. It was that they were a bit more backward about it. Perhaps they were helped in this by the dictatorial nature of most AFL union constitutions and the fact that they needed less help from the government to control their own membership.^[34]

— Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The struggle against the no-strike pledge in the UAW during World War II (1980), Chapter 1, pp. 8-15.

Glaberman was a hard Left labor historian, deeply influenced by Trotskyism, Grace Lee Boggs, C.L.R. James and radical industrial unionism in Detroit; but the lessons he draws here — about the perverse results of social unionism, the value of jurisdictional competition, or the relationship between labor and the state (or, by the by, about the role of labor organizers affiliated with the American Communist Party) — are not the ones I would necessarily have expected going in.

1. ^[23]Preis, op cit.↩
2. ^[24]Nelson Lichtenstein, Defending the No-Strike Pledge: CIO Politics During World War II, Radical America, Volume 9, Numbers 4-5, July-August 1975, page 55. Footnotes in original omitted.↩
3. ^[1][The International Executive Board of the UAW. —R.G.]↩
4. ^[27]Addes Collection 52A, Box 21, Folder: Minutes, WSULA.↩
5. ^[28]For comparable developments in the different situation of Great Britain, see Angus Calder, The People’s War, New York: Pantheon, 1969, especially pages 393-396.↩
6. ^[34]See Lichtenstein, op cit., pages 54-55.↩

Now we hardly dare suggest milestones like these anymore. Maybe if an AI can write a publishable scientific paper all on its own? But Sakana can write crappy not-quite-publishable papers. And surely in a few years it will get a little better, and one of its products will sneak over a real journal’s publication threshold, and nobody will be convinced of anything. If an AI can invent a new technology? Someone will train AI on past technologies, have it generate a million new ideas, have some kind of filter that selects them, and produce a slightly better jet engine, and everyone will say this is meaningless. If the same AI can do poetry and chess and math and music at the same time? I think this might have already happened, I can’t even keep track.

So what? Here are some possibilities:

First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.

Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.

Third, maybe we’ve learned that intelligence is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).

I endorse all three of these. The micro level — a single advance considered in isolation — tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed intelligence into unintelligent parts.

— Scott Alexander, Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
Astral Codex Ten, 18 September 2024

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s actually true that intelligence tout court is a meaningless concept, or that the predicament that he describes in the third response to the moving-goalposts problem really seems much like discovering that it might be a meaningless concept. (It might show that it’s a complex concept — I would go further to argue that it’s a complex, fuzzy-boundaried family resemblance concept — and one whose component parts just don’t always fractally exhibit the critically distinguishing features of the whole. But, well, big deal; there are lots of concepts like that, and it’s interesting to find out that a concept is like that, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found out the concept is meaningless. But I do think Scott’s right that the moving-goalposts problem is a big problem, and one that ought to provoke more thought amongst people proposing critical tests for what intelligence is or where it can and cannot be found.

What I’m Reading: Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia by Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times, 23 October 2024.

The site was uncovered using lidar mapping of the site during a UAV drone flyover; excavations have turned up a central citadel, artifacts and fortifictations.

The casual tip would lead Dr. [Michael] Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, to Tugunbulak, an enormous fortified city dating back to a medieval empire.^[29] He and his team would spend nearly a decade trying to map out the site, as well as the one he’d originally come to Uzbekistan to explore, known as Tashbulak.

The results of their research, published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, describe the two sites as the largest and most comprehensive urban plans of any medieval city in Central Asia situated at high altitude (defined here as about 6,500 feet above sea level).

. . .

The willingness of medieval merchants to detour up the mountains suggests a complexity of trade routes absent from popular conceptions of the Silk Road. Stereotypically, we think that it’s like a highway, Dr. Maksudov said. No — it’s very highly networked.

Initiated by the Chinese explorer Zhang Qian, who went in search of heavenly horses for the Han dynasty, the Silk Road eventually connected people living thousands of miles apart, in ways both predictable and not.

Because of their position between East and West Asia, the Central Asian cities of Samarkand and Bukhara served as important Silk Road hubs. Much later, they became cities in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Dr. Maksudov explained that the U.S.S.R. imposed a Marxist version of history on the region, celebrating large urban developments while downplaying the contributions of medieval nomadic peoples, like those who possibly settled Tashbulak and Tugunbulak.

Scholars used to think about nomadic and sedentary societies as separate and distinct, Dr. Frankopan said. These sites show clearly that reality was much more complicated, with mobile communities not only creating settlements but large ones, too.

— Alexander Nazaryan, Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia
New York Times, 23 October 2024.

1. ^[29][The reporter is probably referring to the Kara-Khanid (Qarakhanid) Khanate, a Turkic khanate that dominated the Central Asian steppe and Transoxiana from the 800s to the 1200s CE. —RG]↩

The Medium Is The Message? Well no, not really, that’s not really right. But maybe to give the billboard slogan a tweak: The Limits of the Medium are the Limits of the Message.

People will be naturally prone to focus most of their efforts on the medium through which they interact with the most people. A vast majority of people who interact with my work, for example, do so by reading my pieces, not by viewing my social media posts. My written work is the central focus of my professional life, while my social media posts are essentially an afterthought.

But what if that balance is reversed? It bends a person (or a movement) around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay. Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts.

That’s how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr. to an X influencer like @Catturd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It’s one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant.

This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There’s a Can you top this? dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes. In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

— David French, Why Elon Musk Is The Second Most Important Person in MAGA
New York Times, 3 March 2024.