Insurgency, Radicalism, and Democracy in America's Industrial Unions*

Contrary to the theory that "oligarchy " in labor unions is an "immanent necessity " of "organization, " we argue that oligarchy is no more immanent or necessary than democracy. Rather, both are alternative possible paths of union development. Which path a union takes is determined by relatively contingent political struggles among workers' "parties, " and by both the resultant pattern of internal political relations and the political consciousness, radical or conservative, of their leadership. Analysis of data on CIO international unions reveals that the strategy and practices involved in organizing them, internal factionalism, and their "political tamp " — left, right, or center — had substantial independent effects in determining the odds that, as of the late 1940s, they veere democratic or oligarchical. The constitutive principle of democracy as a political system is that the aims, methods, and uses of political power are decided through freely self-deter-mined, and juridically protected, political activity (Neumann 1957). So a critical question for an explanatory theory of democracy is, how this "activist elemen