Beyond Social Unionism: Farm Workers in Ontario and Some Lessons from Labour History

As reprehensible as the Teamster bureaucracy's actions were, the response of the [Cesar Chavez] leadership to this attempted union busting was itself a departure from the best traditions of the labour movement. By the early 197Os, Chavez was relying increasingly on the consumer boycott "strategy," the success of which, he believed, depended on the UFW's ability to present itself as both a union and a "civil rights movement" committed to moral suasion and "turn-the-other-cheek" Christian pacifism. Chavez called on "friends of labour" Democrats to pass legislation to guarantee free elections for union representation in the agricultural sector. Rather than calling for militant strike action, mass picketing, self-defence by UFW pickets, and hot-cargoing of scab produce, Chavez appealed to the federal government to investigate Teamster corruption and launched court actions against the union. Objectively, this targeted not only the corrupt officials but also rank-and-file Teamsters, despite indications that a direct appeal to the latter for solidarity action could have struck a receptive chord and catalyzed opposition to the [Frank Fitzsimmons] leadership from within. 8 At the same time, Chavez persisted in his antagonistic attitude toward "illegal" Mexican workers - supporting the anti-"wetback" Rodino-Kennedy Bill and cooperating with the INS border patrol in 1974-1975. During the UFW's strike against grape and lettuce growers in 1973, he reacted to the killing of two strikers and other violent attacks by police and Teamster thugs by calling off the strike in favour of yet another consumer boycott. 11 In a recent critique of postmodernist political fashions, The Postmodern Prince (New York 2004), John Sanbonmatsu has written: "If Gramsci today is largely remembered as the theorist of hegemony - the forging of political unity across cultural differences - Foucault might well be described as the theorist par excellence of anti-hegemony, what Aronowitz describes as a politics 'recognizing the permanence of difference,' and in which 'movements for liberation ... will remain autonomous both in the course of struggle and in the process of creating a new society'." (131) Sanbonmatsu points out correctly that to "say that experience is only a 'discourse' is to remove any basis for substantive human knowledge of any kind, including knowledge that might be helpful to the oppressed." (113) Against Sanbonmatsu, however, we regard Gramsci's ideas as congruent with an authe