Ben Manski: You’ve been at the center of two movement building projects critical to the struggles of the 1990s-2010s – the renewal and reconstruction of labor, and the deepening and and then transitioning of the Black radical tradition. How did you come to those projects?
Bill Fletcher: I grew up in New York, and at the age of 13, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I had been very interested in world affairs and I was increasingly interested in what was happening here in the United States. And as I always love to say, when I read that, it just changed my life. It was then when I decided that I wanted to make a commitment to social justice and movements for liberation and I started moving leftward. At this time, the Black Panther Party was emerging. I liked their politics, I was very attracted to what they were doing, and got very close to them, although I did not join. My father explicitly asked me not to because he was very much afraid of what might happen to me as he had gone through the Cold War and McCarthyism. Still, I was very active in high school and, ultimately, in college, I started identifying as a Marxist.
After I graduated from college in ‘76, like many other leftists of my generation, I went to work in a workplace with objective of organizing and supporting the organizing of workers. In my case, I went to a shipyard, to help with what we saw as a process of rebuilding a real working-class left and the resurgence of the trade union movement. I was there from January of '77 until September of '80. Then after this, I just did a number of various odd jobs and eventually found myself recruited to be an organizer for a labor union, District 65 of the United Auto Workers in Boston. Later I moved to Washington DC, when I was offered a job on the staff of the Mail Handlers Union and was there for a year, before going to SEIU for five and a half years. I left there shortly after Andy Stern was elected president and found myself at the AFL-CIO, first as the education director, and then as the assistant to the president. I was at the AFL-CIO during the whole period of the Battle for Seattle. I was there at the AFL-CIO, in one capacity or another, until January 2002. That's when I went to TransAfrica Forum, as their president and was there for a little bit more than four years. Then, after a couple years as a visiting professor at Brooklyn College, I found myself back in the trade union movement, working for the American Federation of Government Employees. I'm currently an independent consultant working with my wife and professional partner.
Manski: How do you see the goals and practices of the Left as having changed or stayed the same throughout your time as an organizer, leading up to Seattle?
Fletcher: Well, the seventies was a very complicated decade that began with high levels of radicalism in many social movements, and then was affected by a combination of the sort of counterrevolution of the right, the growth of neo-liberalism, and the inevitable downturn that affects social movements. By the later seventies and certainly the early eighties, it was connected to neo-liberalism, which was a reshaping of the domestic economy and having a dramatic impact on the Left. As I mentioned, it is important to remember that in the early to mid-seventies, there were a lot of leftists that either emerged out of working class struggles or were going into workplaces to help to rebuild the Left and rebuild the trade union movement. And then all of a sudden, the economy starts shifting, and there are these massive layoffs in one sector after another, completely destabilizing the Left and the working class. So, it forced some changes; a number of organizations collapsed, people started drifting off, there was an increase of leftists getting staff jobs in unions and community-based organizations, and others were going back to school.
In the backdrop of all of this, was the crisis of Socialism that had reared its head yet again. There was the evolution of the Soviet Union and the whole Stalin question, but also the death of Mao in China. There was also the initial confusion within China, the rise of Deng Xiaoping as well as the challenges in Cuba. And then, fundamentally, there was the inability of the Left, in most advanced capitalist countries, to construct a strategy for achieving power. Consequently, all of these things conspired to create a major challenge for the Left. And by the early eighties, with Ronald Reagan coming into power, repression around the world, it was a very difficult period. At the same time, there began to emerge other forces in response. We started to see a movement rising around U.S. policy towards Central America. We saw the reemergence of the anti-Apartheid movement.
Meanwhile, in the electoral realm, in the beginning of the late seventies, you had this Black-led electoral upsurge, in city after city, where liberals and progressives were being elected. In many respects, this culminated in the '84 and '88 presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and work by the Rainbow Coalition.
Beginning in 1983, there were these exploratory discussions, that started at a much higher level than I ever was at, about Jesse Jackson running for president. And as I said, it was, in many ways, a culmination of this Black-led electoral left surge. Harold Washington running and winning in Chicago, the Mel King campaign in Boston. There were divisions within the Left, about how to approach the Jackson campaign, in part because of different summations of Jackson, but also because of different summations of the moment. Jackson was a very complicated character. He remains so, I would argue. He was brilliant at seizing the moment.
For much of the '70s, he was involved in campaigns that were very much focused on Black business development, getting a greater piece of the rock for Black business. He was also involved in some other campaign, like around saving Black colleges. That was very, very important to him. All of a sudden, in the early eighties, there's this turnaround, and he starts arguing a progressive populist message. In his '84 campaign, and certainly the '88 campaign, he reached out to broader constituencies than just African Americans. So, there were segments of the Left, like DSA, that did not engage, and the Communist Party did not engage in the campaign of '84, and held back. There were others, including various Maoists, former Maoists, other independent leftists, that decided to get involved. Some nationalists, African American nationalists. So coming out of the campaign, there was this energy. Because what was being elaborated, was this notion that it was possible to construct a progressive populist formation that was anti-racist, and was in many respects internationalist, and that this could operate inside and outside of the Democratic Party. So, this was very interesting.
Between '84 and '87, forces that had been around the Jackson campaign started to gel into organizations, what came to be known as Rainbow Coalitions in most cases, and then ultimately with the founding of the National Rainbow Coalition, I believe, at a convention in Raleigh in '87. The organization may have been founded technically before that, but in either case, Jackson started to articulate publicly a message of, "We need to build an organization that can work inside and outside of the Democratic Party." That organization was going to be, I would call it party-like. It was like a party, but it wasn't a party.
And so up in Vermont, the Vermont Rainbow Coalition, under the leadership of Ellen David-Friedman and a number of other people, really just took off like gangbusters. The New South Coalition in Alabama, led by the late Gwen Patton. There were a few of these coalitions that started to gel, and then a national organization started to take form. In that situation, it was evident that Jackson was thinking very seriously about another run for the presidency, and there was a rethinking that started to take place on the Left. So DSA ultimately gets involved. There were other folks that got involved. There was outreach to ... continuous outreach to farmers, to workers, various unions. Jackson became an unusual and unusually progressive champion. When people would struggle, Jackson was there.
This idea of building a mass democratic, with a small “d,” organization, that could operate inside and outside of the Democratic Party, this was very, very compelling. There had been many of us that had sort of given up on the Democratic Party altogether, or just found ourselves constantly in a hold your nose and vote the Democrat position. But this orientation, that there could be a progressive organization and movement, that articulates a set of politics, and for practical reasons they'll be inside the system, will run in the Democratic Party. This had some juice to it.
The '88 campaign was amazing. I remember the cover of Time magazine, after the Michigan primary, I think it was, where they posed the question, "What does Jessie want?" It was an interesting question because he was running for the presidency. Now, did he expect to win it? No, but what I can say is, this was not a symbolic candidacy. This was not the kind of candidacy we frequently see on the Left, where people are waving a flag. This was a candidacy where everybody engaged was running to win, pure and simple.
And so it's unfolding. And then, within the '88 campaign, there's a tension that starts to emerge, first quietly, and then more publicly. It revolved around what was going to happen after the '88 election, with the assumption that Jackson was not going to get the nomination and therefore not win the election.
By late '88, early '89, there were two poles that developed within the Rainbow Coalition. One pole said that, "At the Raleigh convention, we had agreed on the building of a mass democratic organization, chapters and all that stuff." But this other pole basically said, "This is Jesse Jackson's organization, and he has a right to do with the organization what he wanted." Now, to say that many of us were incredulous in hearing that, would be like saying that the sun was equivalent to a firecracker. I mean, it was like, "You've got to be kidding." We were outraged and couldn't believe that this would be the orientation. In early March of '89, there was a board meeting of the Rainbow Coalition, the National Rainbow Coalition. It's a moment that I have subsequently described as Jackson carrying out a coup against himself, a term that was used in connection with Fujimori in Peru. Because basically what Jackson did, is that he and his allies pushed through a reorganization of the Rainbow, that changed it from being a mass democratic organization into being a personal organization of his, with a structure that was based around congressional districts.
Now, that may sound like a kind of odd formulation, of why would it bother anyone one way or the other, about forming an organization around congressional districts? The reason is that, many of us had been building Rainbow chapters at the citywide level, statewide level, with the idea that it was going to be a mass democratic organization and it was going to involve regular people. Most regular people don't identify with their congressional district. They may know their congressional district, they may know their congressperson, they may be involved in congressional races, but that's not their point of identification. In other words, I know my congressional district, I'm aware of who my congressperson is, but when I wake up in the morning, that's not my point of identification. I think about Prince George's County, Maryland.
Manski: It's not the level of daily politics for people who are engaged.
Fletcher: That's right. Exactly. So the idea of building an organization around congressional districts only make sense ... at least it seemed to at the time. Only it would make sense, if your idea is that you're building something that is going to be focused on federal races, and that you're essentially abandoning state and local races. That was completely unacceptable to many of us. And at that point, there was a slow but steady split from the Rainbow. Rainbows were being shut down by the national and taken over by people that were appointed by Jackson, but there was some Rainbows that resisted. The New Jersey Rainbow and the Vermont Rainbow were two of them, that basically said, "No, we've got our organization and we're going to keep going." The Vermont Rainbow did, and I believe eventually became the Vermont Independent Party. The New Jersey Rainbow continued and eventually became the People's Organization for Progress. And then there was some others, I believe, that did. But there was also a high level of disintegration and despair.
Manski: I think in Massachusetts, Oregon, Wisconsin and a few others places they became the Green Party eventually, or else merged with the Greens.
Fletcher: Some did. That's right. A lot of people that had become activated by the '84 and '88 Jackson campaigns, started continuing in electoral work. Danny Cantor advanced what was originally called The New Party, which eventually sort of morphed into the Working Families Party. There was some folks who went the road of the Greens. There were others that became deeply embedded in the Democratic Party, so on and so forth. And then others that just sort of retreated, and went either back to a particular social movement or just disappeared.
Manski: Looking to the 1990s, you have this great mobilization and organizing process, and then this moment going into '89. If you were to construct a narrative that is true ... I'm not just asking you to make up a story, but a story that's true, that ties the late nineties to the late eighties, that accounts not only for Rainbow but also of a broader set of process that were going on . . . how would you do that?
Fletcher: By '88, '89, we start to see the crumbling of the Soviet bloc, and this throws things even more up in the air. It really felt to many of us--as one of the sayings at the time went--that, "Democracy was breaking out all over." Essentially, there were these various movements, that could be described generally as democratic, with a small D, but politically were all over the map. They were emerging, and it looked to some extent, like there actually might be a peace dividend here in the USA with the end of the Cold War. In other words, if the Cold War was coming to an end, there was no particular need for all of these massive weapons systems, and that there would be an opportunity to explore new options.
What ends up happening, however, is that in the early nineties there was this period of real uncertainty, which was accompanied by a recession. In that recession, and in the '92 campaign, it became clear that there were a lot of very ugly things that were emerging on the Right – things that really came out of the 1970s. By the 1980s, for instance, there were these fascist groups, particularly in the Midwest, that were doing active organizing among impoverished white folks, particularly farmers. There was also the Reagan and Bush administration, giving polite aid and comfort to various domestic right-wing forces – not as crude as we're dealing with now with Trump – but giving them space in order to operate and play a very important role. And I think we've underestimated the impact of Reagan, ideologically, by his undermining the notion of collectivism, in the sense of collective work and struggle. By promoting the cult of the individual, even among progressives, there was now this idea of, "I don't need organization. I can start my own business to counter Walmart." This whole ethos really starts taking off under Reagan and it's one of the things that I think that we on the Left have to think about in terms of the kind of educational efforts that we need to do within our own ranks. We need to reaffirm the need for criticism and self-criticism, collective work and collective projects that we basically lost during that period.
In short, however, you have the growth of Reaganism, the right, and these fascists. Basically, it was a growing right-wing populist movement, within which fascists begin to position themselves. So, in the '92 election, the first national election after the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, there was the rise of Clinton as the exponent of neoliberal economics – neoliberal economics which I think of as capitalist fundamentalism, with a velvet glove. And with Clinton's rise, there's several things that happen. One is that you start to see neoliberal multiculturalism, which is distinct from the white supremacist neoliberalism that you see represented in the Republican Party. Virtually every ethnic group and so-called racial group was represented, but the hegemonic framework was still neoliberal economics. Then you had Ross Perot, who I would argue that one could describe as having been Trump's ideological predecessor in terms of the modern “isolationism” and the irony of alleged concern with working people from the mouth of some rich guy who’s benefited from government contracts. He was able to tap into something that I think helped to fuel the Trump campaign. So, the 80s goes from a fight against Reagan and Reaganism, the end of the Cold War, and the very brief expectation and hope that the ballgame could change to the clear hegemony of neoliberal economics, now articulated by a Democrat. And with this, there were further attacks and cutbacks. While simultaneously, this right-wing populist movement is bubbling up. Which really points to something the Left too often fails to recognize-- that neoliberalism contributed directly to the rise of right wing populism.
Manski: With this context in mind, what struggles were you involved with leading up to the Seattle Uprising? What was your relationship to Seattle?
Fletcher: My personal relationship was marginal. I was fully engaged in the trade union movement at the AFL-CIO, working on an educational project that came to be known as Common Sense Economics. What's important to understand about Seattle and the years leading up to it, was an increasing awareness of globalization with the broad Left and progressive movement. Certainly, people had different understandings of globalization. For example, you had those who felt a new era of capitalism had emerged. You had those who felt it wasn’t any different from we had before. You had those who argued that globalization was the inevitable and uncheckable evolution of capitalism. And you had those who said that globalization is something that was actively orchestrated by nation states, bourgeois capitalist nation states, and multinational corporations.
The real question, however, was how to fight it and whether to do so. For those who took the position that it was inevitable, there was nothing you could really do. The best thing would be to cut the best deal you could. That point of view existed, not just domestically, but internationally. Among those who were determined to fight it, the question was, what does it mean to fight it? Is this something that can be stopped? What does stopping it even look like? What's an alternative framework? There was a whole debate and a number of fights over what globalization meant and how to address it. The fight around NAFTA and how to understand trade agreements was probably the earliest and most extensive one in the United States. After Seattle, it just took off like wildfire with demonstrations taking place in Washington DC and all over, but that basically came to an end with 9/11.
One of the problems at the time though, and arguably still, was that the broad Left and progressive forces were unclear about what it was up against and whether or not there can be partial victories when we don't have the power to block something entirely. Furthermore, it had raised the question of how do we engage in fights around global injustice in ways that are not fundamentally about protectionism? And this is a question that I would argue, keeps haunting us, including with Trump's alleged renegotiation of NAFTA. After all, rarely do you hear U.S. trade unionists talking about the impact that the U.S. Canadian Free Trade Agreement had on Canadian workers in the late 80s and early 90s. Rarely do you hear much from U.S. trade unionists about the devastating impact of NAFTA on Mexico. And what emerges from that is the foundation for the sort of Trump victimization narrative that we've been hearing. That it's the U.S. that's been screwed by Mexico, Canada, China, by everyone else. This comes from a very flawed analysis which progressive forces in the U.S. actually contributed to.
Manski: You’ve pointed to many of the debates taking place during this period and informing the broader Left and, in particular, organized labor. Can you talk more about the differences in understandings of global capitalism and what was to be done at that time?
Fletcher: That's really the interesting question because people were all over the map--from those who were anti-capitalist to those who were simply anti-corporate. And, the fact that the AFL-CIO got involved in Seattle, was frankly an amazing victory – a reflection of the reform movement that had taken over the AFL-CIO in '95. But essentially, it was a united front against evil. If you want to summarize the battle for Seattle, that's the way I would do it. It would be a united front against evil. There was not a common or shared agreement on the nature of the opponent. So whether you had anarchist, communist, progressive, liberal progressive, whatever, in that moment they saw a way of coming together. It was a very important moment even with its limitations that became apparent after Seattle and 9/11.
Manski: Before we touch on 9/11, and what that meant for movements in later years, I want to hear from you about the Black Radical Congress [BRC], which I see as a parallel stream of movement activity with some overlap with what we’ve been addressing, but not the same sources as what produced Seattle. How do you think about the black radical tradition and organizing efforts going into the BRC as related to Seattle, if at all?
Fletcher: The black radical tradition goes back to the fight against slavery. And it revolves around one's attitude about the extent to which oppression of people of African descent is systemic versus representing some sort of aberration from an otherwise humane capitalism. The black radical tradition is very broad ranging from folks that are nationalists, various forms of Pan-Africanism, communism, all holding that the problem is systemic. In terms of the Black Radical Congress, it in many ways, followed the footsteps of other organizations like the National Black United Front or the National Black Independent Political Party, which were founded in the early 80s. And it came together in part due to the fragmentation within the Left generally, and the Black Left in particular as well as the rise of the Nation of Islam and Minister Farrakhan to prominence.
So, when the Million Man March took place in '95, which was also the same year as the 50th anniversary of the Fifth Pan-African Congress that took place in Manchester (Britain), there were a group of people from the United States including Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, Barbara Ransby, and Abdul Alkalimat, who began to discuss the need for some sort of counter-force within the Black Left. In the immediate aftermath of the Million Man March, which I opposed at the time, in part, for failing to address women, I contacted Marable. And I remember getting on the phone with Manning Marable, and saying, "Manning, we've got to do something. We can't have a situation where the movement is dominated by Farrakhan."
I believed that there needed to be a Black Left alternative, and that it needed to have the character of a united front. It needed to cross various ideological boundaries that have frequently divided us. So in late '95, early '96, we began discussions that ultimately led to the founding of the BRC in June of '98 in Chicago. The effort parallels the global justice movement and overlaps with it. There were forces involved in the BRC, for instance, that were also involved in the global justice movement. We were also very involved in the UN World Conference Against Racism. So, it was a parallel and related effort at reconstituting a radical left critique and practice as we approached the 21st century. The BRC was also representative of the Black radical tradition that’s called “Black internationalism,” which is concerned with the struggles for liberation in other parts of the world such as against Apartheid or in Palestine. So, there was that global, internationalist perspective as well.
Manski: As you just mentioned, by the time Black Lives Matter arose, there had already been upsurges that emerged in the earlier period. Can you speak about the relationship between the 2008 to 2014 wave of mobilizations and the late ‘90s. What do you see as tying them together and what lessons can we draw from that comparison?
Fletcher: I think that what haunts the broad Left and the progressive movement is the absence of a coherent strategy to win. What became characteristic of a lot of the actions in the 90s and the first decade of the 21st century with the anti-war movement, is a lot of courageous defensive work--opposition to this and defense of that, but not a lot of headway in terms of developing an offensive strategy. And I think that is true in many of our movements. There have been some exceptions, the LGBTQ+ movement, which certainly during the Obama administration, made important progress. Immigrant rights made some progress. But we on the self-identified Left and those of us who are anti-capitalist, have great difficulties thinking at the level of millions. We have great difficulty thinking in terms of building vehicles that can embrace millions of people with the aim of winning power. In fact, there are some on the Left who oppose the entire notion of seeking to win power!
The BRC is an example of the challenge. It emerged with a real head of steam, a lot of excitement, but it's very easy to form an organization and very hard to sustain one. One of the issues about sustaining something that is multi-tendency, however, is that there can be a centrifugal force that tears at it. And so we were chugging along and one of the big challenges that we had was that by 2000 we were making a name for ourselves nationally, including in so-called mainstream African American circles. We got some awards for our website and people were looking to us as leaders in communication with our emails. And we were even on the verge of almost breaking into the mainstream of Black America, that is, being a legitimate, radical and known force within Black America, but at that point we entered a crisis over whether or not we should take money from organizations/funders with somewhat divergent perspectives. There was an inability to understand the centrality of the politics of the united front and the necessity for tactical alliances as well as strategic alliances. This kind of “Leftist purity,” which I've seen in movement after movement, must be overcome. Until and unless we can conquer that, we will be defeated. Politics and alliance building are messy and complicated.
Returning to my work and political influences on activism during that period, beginning in 2006, I was involved in something that was called the Aurora Project, which was based on the idea of the Rainbow Coalition and the need for a “Neo-Rainbow”-- a national network and organization that would represent all kinds of progressive politics working inside and outside of the Democratic Party (but who recognized the Democratic Party as a ‘battlefield’ on which progressives need to be struggling). When the 2008 Obama campaign happened almost everything went on hold. It was like out of the Twilight Zone. It's like everything froze and people went into the campaign, as they failed to see that he was no radical and fundamentally believed in neoliberal economics. And look: I voted for him twice and with no regrets, but I was clear as to who he was and who he was not. Interestingly it seems as if Obama, back in the 1990s, made a conscious decision to move away from radicalism towards neoliberal multiculturalism. There was the idea being widely promoted among African Americans and in the labor movement that we had to give Obama a chance to introduce various reforms that were needed. The bulk of the trade union movement sat and waited for Obama and the Democrats in Congress to do something on labor rights. The leadership of organized labor basically carried out a lobbying campaign rather than understanding that the real campaign needed to be in the streets and linked to the crisis brought about by the Great Recession. We needed to connect labor law reform with economic justice, but we didn't do it. So shame on us and we need to stop complaining about Obama.
In addition to the contexts of the moment and flawed strategy at that time, the other missing element, was coherent organization. In the United States, we're constantly engaging in struggles and sometimes we win. Other times we lose. But these struggles are frequently disconnected from one another in ways that are not necessarily true among the right wing, which is often able to build key linkages. It's something that we need to learn from Tecumseh, a prominent Shawnee leader in first decade of the 19th century. What Tecumseh understood was that the Indians were not going to be able to stop the settlers one tribe at a time. And he started to elaborate this notion of what was effectively a strategic alliance and the creation of an Indian nation state premised on the achievement of a new shared identity in addition to their individual identities as Choctaw, Apache, Wampanoag, etc., that could hold them together. We need an identity in the United States of the dispossessed. And we need to articulate that identity in a way that resonates with the millions of people who are being crushed and who are looking for answers and for something to be done. This moves us away from one defensive struggle at a time towards a more offensive strategy. And that's what the Left needs to be constructing. We need to achieve some sort of collective identity in order to go forward.
Manski: If you could think back to 1990, 2000, 2010, and today say going into 2020, and compare how you understood the period of each of these times, how has your understanding of the period remained the same or changed? And what are your thoughts on the relationships between these different “periods of struggle”?
Fletcher: When I look at those decades, in the beginning of the eighties I completely underestimated Reaganism and overestimated mass movements. I expected a renewal of the more militant wing of the Black freedom movement. I was mesmerized by the decline of the trade union moment. And by the early nineties I was keenly aware of what the trade union movement needed to do in order to turn itself around. I was increasingly aware of the importance of the Left in the transformation of the union movement. The reinvigoration of the Left could contribute to the reinvigoration of labor, and the absence of an invigorated left, means we won't have an invigorated labor movement. Then, in the early nineties, I think that what I appreciated at the level of electoral politics were some of the key lessons out of the Rainbow experience. I underestimated, however, the impact that Soviet style, so-called socialism, or state capitalism, had on demobilizing for the populations that they dominated. I’ll also say that it’s critical to understand the conjuncture or the moment in radical politics. There's even this joke that the Left has predicted seven of the last three recessions. I think that there's a problem that we sometimes fall into – misunderstanding the moment and trying to predict an inevitable collapse. So, I think that where I've been strongest is not predicting, but looking down the long road at tendencies, for example, the growth of right-wing populism or how to look at the crisis of socialism.
Manski: Is there something you'd like to say about the period we're in right now? Do you see it as a different period from the previous one?
Fletcher: While they say the only thing inevitable is death, I believe that those who think history moves in a linear fashion are doomed to failure. There are moments of great reversals and great advancements. There are tremendous ups and downs. And what one has to do is always look at the tendencies that are in operation and understand that we can predict explosions, but we can't predict when they're going to happen. In other words, we know in looking at history that there will be social explosions but trying to pin down when it's going to happen is a fool’s errand. You just don't know. That's not the kind of science that we're operating in.
The second thing that I would say is that we're in a very dangerous period because of the conflation of two major crises, economic and environmental, which has resulted in great instability at the state-level. This, in turn, has combined with the emergence of a transnational capitalist class, which has also had an impact on states and can lead to great instability and fear. And it plays out in a number of ways--with many white Americans, it plays itself out, in the perception that it doesn't pay to be white anymore. Thus, they look for saviors like Trump because what they're going through right now violates every aspect of the so-called American dream. As they see it, the collapsing living standards and sense of hopelessness (as we see in the opioid crisis) is not supposed to happen to white people. And so we on the Left have to articulate a narrative, a strategy and organizational vehicles for people to engage in emancipatory politics. That seems to me to be our major challenge.
