Submitted by Vincent Amato, Sep 5, 2007 11:27

I am currently writing my own memoir of the strike, struggling to complete it in time for the 40th anniversary of the event (along with literally dozens of other events that took place in that unforgettable year). Other than safeguarding the pension rights of its most senior teachers, the UFT since 1968 has little to celebrate. The strike set back relations between the black and white communities to so severe a degree that we still have not fully recovered from it. (Just look at the recent controversy over naming a street in honor of Sonny Carson.) Shanker anticipated the worst of a neo-con ethic that took no prisoners. In his tactics, he replicated the modus operandi of Josef Stalin, arch-nemesis of the old anti-communist bund. There was a real danger by 1967 (to the established order, anyway) that a real alliance would grow between progressive teachers and other insititutions like the welfare workers union. It was Shanker's task to make sure that wouldn't happen. Shanker has in common with such as Wolfowitz and Perlman an antecedent in Max Schactman style socialism. The ultimate irony, of course, is that the Trotskyite end of the political spectrum believed in world communism rather than the Milton Friedmanesque nightmare which the world not threatens to become.

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