For those of us who continue to believe in the potential and importance of the working class to the eventual transformation of capitalism, it is easy enough to explain away the majority vote against unionization of the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., as a failure of the United Auto Workers’ bureaucracy.

But that is too easy. Unquestionably, and for reasons that go beyond the particular strategy adopted here, the UAW leadership must not be let off the hook. But dumping on that leadership should not divert us from harder questions that run from the contradictions within a rank-and-file the Left so often romanticizes, to the frustrating marginalization of this very Left in worker struggles.

If we expect workers to one day rebel against something as overwhelming as capitalism and as intimidating as the capitalist state, how do we explain the inability of workers to take on the relatively more modest challenge of the betrayals of their own elected leaders? If the vacuum of effective leadership in unions has become so clear, why has the Left not been able to rise to greater prominence within working-class institutions and in worker struggles?