From: "Paul Johnston" To: Subject: Truth, Spin, and Consequences Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 07:22:31 -0700 charset="iso-8859-1" "Truth, Spin, and Consequences: Dare We Speak the Truth?" Our need to discuss and learn from recent organizing failures in the AFL-CIO raises an old question that is particularly vexing for scholars in the labor movement, or to anyone committed to the pursuit of understanding as a guide to practice. Dare we speak the truth? Spin— asserting a self-interested interpretation of the situation— is a resource, even a weapon, in union organizing as in politics as in daily life. Though it can be a weapon for those who lack other weapons it is also used by people with power to impose their definition of the situation, their explanation of problems, and more subtly their rules regarding what may not be discussed. There is a certain conventional wisdom, of course, which justifies spinning freely, fast and loose, in the service of the cause. "The truth", after all, is always subjective, suspect, contested and contestable. But though we may never know "the truth" we certainly do know a lie. Like democracy we may never get to the truth but it is often painfully clear when we move further away from it. When I talk about spin, I am not referring to our always-incomplete and ultimately subjective best efforts to understand a situation but to what might be called strategically self-imposed blinders. I want to include in "spin" not only today's strategic sound-bite but also the interpretations (including things left unspoken) that are on the one hand known to be distorted but on the other hand seem to be built into the situation. "You can't talk about that." Why? "Because it is divisive." "Because it will make people with power angry." Or "Because it will open us or our cause up to the attacks of our adversaries." I am not saying that we should have a reckless regard for the truth. Some statements, no matter how well-founded, are indeed destructive and cruel, and serve neither understanding nor justice, especially when made at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and in the wrong manner. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to believe that we freely impose our a definition of the situation on a workforce, on the internal life of a union, on an organizing challenge, on a political episode— and indeed, on a personal relationship— and not expect to come to come to grief. It takes a special kind foolishness not only to put it out for consumption by the public, within the union, among the workers we seek to organize but also to use our spin to guide our practice. It takes a special kind of naivite to think that we can ignore inconvenient or embarassing circumstances without (a) failing to achieve our goals from a purely strategic standpoint and (b) losing the confidence of those whose faith and trust we rely upon, who will ultimately and inevitably see that the emperor has no clothes. This foolish, arrogant naivite is entirely normal, native, built into political and organizational practice. But it sharply limits the learning capacity of the labor movement in a time when our urgently needed collective learning process is far from finished. So while pandering to the prevailing spin may appear to serve the strategic needs of the moment, and may also be in our interests as individuals, it is no service to labor's cause.