Why “Comrade?”
A friend and, dare I say, comrade wrote me and asked why I use the word “comrade” so freely, instead of the more accepted “brother” and “sister.” Won’t people associate you with James Bond villains and bomb-throwing radicals when you use that word? And it’s true. I do throw it around a good deal, both as a warm expression of solidarity and friendship and, a little bit, to make people a bit uncomfortable in otherwise stodgy rooms.
Fuck it; I’ve already been blown up by Fox News for being dangerously un-American, so why pretend to be a safer person than I am? Besides, saying “brother” or “sister” instead of comrade is one of those bits of American exceptionalism, like not celebrating Labor Day on May 1 or calling football “soccer,” that really ought to be resisted as a matter of global solidarity. Comrade is the preferred salutation of the labor movement in most countries. Perhaps it gets lost in translation? The British default to comrade, but, being British, they pronounce it funny (“comb-rayd”).
I was a teenage socialist. I joined the Socialist Party when I was 17 years old. Although I’ve since quit the party, I remain a socialist. In socialist politics, we say comrade. We even abbreviate it as “Cde.” in the minutes (“Cde. Richman seconded the motion”). It was when I first started saying the word and where I first gained an appreciation for its meaning.
Firstly, the word conveys a sense of equality that brother and sister don’t quite get across. As I said, I was a teenage socialist. But I was a comrade, on equal footing and with equal title as people who had been in the movement for decades; people who had been trained by Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, Michael Harrington. I was their comrade.
When I organized a teach-in against one of those many little Clinton wars at Queens College with one of my professors, he called me comrade. Of course, he’s British; it comes easier to him. But it was a tremendous equalizer. I still see him at rallies or union meetings and he still greets me with a warm, “Hello, comrade. How are you?”
I first started using the word in a union context as a dare. A bunch of my co-workers marched together under no banner in the first huge march against the proposed invasion of Iraq. It was an unseasonably warm early spring day. There were a million of us. It felt like a celebration (and then the war started).
At some point during the march, my friend Alan and I found ourselves separated from our group. “It appears we have misplaced our comrades,” I said. Alan paused, laughed and challenged me, “How amazing would it be if you and I called each other comrade at the office on Monday?” And so we did, and so we have ever since.
It’s significant to this story that one of our friends at the union was trans, but not yet out. Hell, he wasn’t even out to me but it just felt wrong to call him sister. Comrade, as a gender-neutral salutation, just made practical sense. This old word has some relevance to the 21st century yet!
Finally, comrade is used in the military. The salutation is standard at VFW halls. (What could be more American than that?) To me, comrade implies that we’ve been through some shit together; a tough campaign, a boss fight, some controversy. And there’s a greater loyalty that comes out of having been through some shit together. Calling someone a comrade, for me, is about trying to always keep that first and foremost. It’s too easy to get into an argument of some immediate political issue or campaign decision and just go to war or give someone up as dead to you. But you don’t do that with a comrade. You’ve been through some shit.
You could argue that brother and sister do all of this equally well (well, not the whole gender neutral thing). But I would say that those salutations in labor have become a bit too pro forma. They are said to fill the air, with not much deep thought behind them. Saying comrade, in America, in the year 2015, requires more of a thought process. And I’m generally in favor of people doing more thinking.
A Robo-Survey from Rep. Donovan
I just received an official telephone survey call from my newly-minted Republican Congressman, Dan Donovan. The 20 or so questions ran the gamut from raising the debt ceiling to abortion rights to putting troops on the ground in Syria. I’ve been exposed to the sausage-making of enough surveys that I know the wording of this one was designed to produce the highest percentage of support possible for Donovan breaking with his party on issues of controversy in our swing district.
Things are getting interesting out here in the 5th borough.
Trump and the Art of the (Union) Deal
The ascendency of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a joke that both bores and terrifies me, but that is not the subject of this blog post. An article in today’s NY Times, “Donald Trump and the Art of the Public Sector Deal,” provides an interesting insight into his shrewd use of public/private deal-making to build up his real estate empire, but misses an even more interesting story about an early example of Trump’s pragmatism around unions.
Unlike his more ideological counterparts in the business world, or his Koch-funded competitors for the Republican nomination, Trump has treated unions as a cost of doing business – when, that is, those unions have organized and demonstrated the power to make their existence a fact of life.
The Times story tells of how Trump, in 1978, secured a 40-year tax abatement from city and state officials in order to redevelop the “closed, blighted eyesore” that had been the truly grand Commodore Hotel into the shiny glass monstrosity that we now call the Grand Hyatt Hotel. What the story does not mention is that part of the price tag for that tax abatement was a card check neutrality deal with the NY Hotel Trade Council, the union that had represented the workers at the Commodore when it had closed six years earlier. Although not well known, it is probably one of the earliest examples of such a neutrality card-check agreement in the modern era.
But the union just won the card check by the skin of its teeth. It is difficult to reconstruct precisely what happened. It’s possible that the neutrality was quietly subverted by lower ranked managers who conducted a whisper campaign of lies or intimidation. (Early neutrality agreements didn’t build in strong penalties for violations of the agreements.) It’s also possible that, like the workers at the VW plant in Tennessee a portion of the Grand Hyatt workers psyched themselves out that the union could make the hotel less profitable and lead to layoffs. (After all, the previous workers at the Commodore had all lost their jobs.)
Whatever the case, the union went to the table in a weakened position…which Trump exploited. All hotels represented by the NY Hotel Trades Council are under the terms of the same collective bargaining agreement, and have been since 1939. Trump pushed for concessions, not in wages but in working conditions. He got them in a side agreement, while the hotel nominally signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement.
But then he did something truly clever. He signed a “Me Too” agreement with the union for the upcoming round of negotiations. A “Me Too” is basically a “pre-signing” of the next contract. It means that an employer agrees in advance to all the terms that its competitors will ultimately settle upon, while securing a no-strike pledge during the contract campaign and beyond. You can see the value of a “Me Too” to a non-ideological employer. But the value is also huge for the union, freeing it to single out particular members of the employers’ bargaining coalition for job actions and pressure.
Trump signed a “Me Too” for every round of negotiations, and after he sold his stake in the hotel the new owners continued to do the same. There actually was a lengthy industry-wide strike in 1985, but the Grand Hyatt Hotel remained open for business.
It wasn’t until the year 2004 that the Hotel Trades Council finally got the Grand Hyatt fully signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement and won for the workers at the Hyatt the same work rules as the rest of the city, which is, itself, an interesting story but one for another time.
Tuli’s Archives
Gothamist has a pretty incredible story about some newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics, to a song-never-recorded about Robert Moses. It’s easy to assume that the lyrics sheet is a hoax. But, because, it was discovered in the Tuli Kupferberg files, I’m inclined to regard it as legit.
Tuli was a true American character. He was a member of the musical avant garde jug-band the Fugs, an early progenitor of the Village underground, a leftist and a proto-zinester. I first learned of him when, accompanied by a (paid!) intern, I poured through David McReynolds’ archives to find suitable material for the Socialist Party’s 100th anniversary conference journal.
McReynolds was a long time leader of the SP, a pacifist and student of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, a two-time candidate for President (I managed his second campaign in 2000; his first, in 1980, is purportedly the first time that an openly gay man ran for the office) and a long-time bohemian and Village resident. Before David complains about this post, I use the past tense because I am describing an event from 2001, not because he is dead. He is very much still alive (and blogging!).
David’s archives included many incredible photographic negatives of Socialist Party and War Resisters League events from the prior 40 years, including some of the last “new” pictures of Martin Luther King – from a WRL (or possibly Fellowship of Reconciliation?) – awards dinner in the early 1960’s.
It also included a shot from that same dinner night that I has developed into a 11″ x 14″ print that has adorned the walls of every home I have since called my own, of A.J. Must and Norman Thomas locked in an intense yet casual conversation at that same awards dinner, (I think) with the glass reflection of MLK’s back behind them.
So, what convinces me of the authenticity of these new Dylan lyrics because they were found in Tuli’s archives? Well, many of Tuli’s archives wound up in McReynolds’ archives – most notably a zine called “FUCK GOD!” When we came across that one, McReynolds chuckled and said, “That was pretty controversial back in its day. I don’t know how Tuli got away with that one!”
A few minutes later, I came across Tuli’s sequel to that particular opus, a mimeographed volume entitled, “FUCK GOD IN THE ASS!,” its cover adorned by a crude line drawing of a be-robed man with long grey hair, from behind, spreading his butt cheeks. “Yeah,” I said, “I think this would still be pretty controversial today.”
So, do I think it’s possible that young Bob Dylan threw a lyrics sheet of a song taking the piss out of “master builder” Robert Moses Tuli Kupferberg’s way? Yeah, you betcha.