Filed under: Analysis | Tags: industrial unionism, Military, Organizing, Unions, War
When the IWW was founded in 1905, there was no “public sector.” Few countries had advanced government bureaucracies which employed large numbers of workers. And while state militaries were large, there was nothing that approached the scope of the military industrial complex we know today. Since 1905, we have been through two world wars, countless imperialist “local” wars, a Great Depression, many revolutions, the growth and collapse of “socialist” state capitalism, many minor recessions, and the growth of a wide range of new sectors of production. Capitalism has undergone serious changes since 1905, even as the fundamental exploitation workers by bosses has remained a constant.
Most of these changes have been brought about as concessions to or as an attempt to coopt or displace workers struggle, or as an attempt to ’smooth out’ the dynamics of capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles . The main strategies employed by capitalism to overcome its tendency toward crisis has been to regulate the market through state intervention. Since World War II, the state intervenes in the economy primarily through military expenditures. Sometimes war industry spending is termed “priming the pump” of the economy, as economists think that pumping goverment dollars into the military industries will eventually lead to a “trickle down” to other sectors of the economy. The result is that the United States government spends over 50% of its budget on the military. The war industries are such a large part of the economy, and carry so much weight in government spending priorities, that people speak of a “military-industrial complex,” the union of the military with its contributing industries as a political force for militarism and imperialism.
Importantly, the military is used to regulate the labor market as well, with many low-wage workers enticed into military service by promises of a steady paycheck and job training. This dynamic is likely to become more pronounced as the current economic crisis intensifies and unemployment rises. The result is that the armed forces, at least in the United States, are a mercenary army of the poor.
Military spending contributes to another “solution” to capitalist crisis as well. The capitalist state uses its military to ensure the stability of a global supply chain and global market, extending from oil fields, mines, farms, and factories to consumer markets across the world. When workers in a particular state become sufficiently restive, other states offer them military assistance to put down the revolt, or overthrow the newly established government, or simply begin doing business with the new national liberation bosses the same way they did business with the old colonial bosses.
Ironically, the “mercenary army of the poor” is used to crush revolts which could lead to the emancipation of these very same poor mercenaries.
The military is a central structure of global capitalism. Military production dominates the “civilian” economy and is used to regulate cycles of production and consumption. Military domination of the planet by capitalist forces is the last line of defense the bosses have against the workers revolution. And workers increasingly turn to the military as a career option as the capitalist economy slides into crisis, short-circuiting the potential of a workers movement. Without a stable military-industrial complex, global capitalism would collapse.
Serious revolutionaries should consider this fact carefully. The stability of global capitalism depends on a mercenary army of the poor and on a massive armaments industry.
What would happend if the technique of revolutionary industrial unionism was applied to the war industries? What if soldiers on the front lines organized against their officers commanding them to fight, and built solidarity with the workers in the factories producing their weapons? What would happen if soldiers built solidarity across battlelines, uniting with their rank-and-file opponents against a common class enemy?
Filed under: Analysis | Tags: Alienation, Lenin, Organizing, Revolution, Social Factory, Technology, the State, Unions, Work
I have four jobs- two in the fast food industry, one in a large multinational clothing retailer, and another as a substitute teacher. On my way to work today, I was thinking about the different flavors of alienation I have to look forward to. First, I will have to “manage” classrooms of children for eight hours. I have to follow a lesson plan set out by another teacher and approved by the state. But despite the drawbacks, teaching will be the easiestand best-paying job I will do all week. I will get several breaks, including a full paid hour for lunch. I can use the computer while at work. In fact, I’m writing this while on the clock right now.
After my day of substitute teaching, I’ll head to a fast food restaurant for a second full shift. At the restaurant, I’ll work on an assembly line, closely monitored and supervised by management, unable to answer my phone and confined to a ten-sq. foot area for eight hours. I will be physically and emotionally exhausted by the time I get home at the end of the day.
It seems to me that each of these types of work will give rise to different kinds of demands stemming from the particular nature of the alienation workers in each industry confront. Fast food workers are alienated at an intellectual level and a physical level. We have to produce emotion and feeling on the demand for customers. In addition, our bodies are put to work, our motions Taylorized down to the last twitch.
Teachers face a much more subtle alienation. Teachers are forced to “teach to tests” and stick to state-sanctioned curriculum. They are alienated from the students they teach, who confront them as alien objects that must be controlled and somehow brought to reproduce state-sanctioned knowledge. The alienation of teachers is primarily at an intellectual level.
Lenin claimed that socialist consciousness would have to come to the working class from outside because workers would only be able to advance to “trade union” consciousness, making “economistic” demands on their own. However, I think there is a tendency for the demands of workers to become more inherently “political” and less “economistic” as capitalism advances. How can a teacher make a demand without calling into question the legitimacy of the state’s plan?
I believe all workers should organize. However, I think it is worth noting that as workers refuse to perform the most alienating types of labor or as technology makes these jobs obsolete, most workers will face circumstances that are alienating on a more intellectual than physical level. As capitalism advances, every demand will be a demand for workers power, since every demand will be a refusal of capital’s right to manage the social factory. Similarly, as capitalism seeks to manage its crisis, the power of the state has become increasingly interwoven with the power of the bosses on the shop floor. The economic has become political, the political has become economic. Lenin is obsolete.
Filed under: Random Shit | Tags: Organizing, Student Unions, Students, syndicalism, Unions
I wasted 3 1/2 years of my life in pointless pseudo-radical campus organizing projects. Here’s what I think I should have been doing:
1. Actively supporting labor struggles through organizing, community education, and direct action
2. Learning the skills of community and workplace organizing through training and experience
3. Learning the history of labor struggles and various theories of organization
4. Organizing a union of students to fight for our interests.
This is pretty much what I’d like to see a student union movement do in the US. The group could move through these tasks more-or-less sequentially. First, organize in solidarity with unions and workers. Second, get training and experience in organizing. Third, during this process, learn the histor and theory of radical labor. Fourth, organize a militant student union to fight against tuition increases, student debt, and unfair treatment.
Filed under: Analysis | Tags: Coalitions, Corporate Campaigns, Media, NLRB, Organizing, Proletariat, Strategy, Unions
There is a gap between what we are and what we say we are. This is the gap between reality and representation. The reality: we are a collective of workers seeking to undermine the very foundations of the capitalist system. The representation: we are the oppressed, seeking gradual reform within the system, making use of the provisions of liberal democracy to better our lot in life.
We seek tactical allies. Priests, politicians, cops, lawyers, liberals, and bureaucrats come to our aid. We do not turn them away. We polarize society against one boss after another, dividing and conquering the ruling class. This is the air war, the corporate campaign, the liberal cause.
We build our strategic base. Workers unite on the job and in the community. We build our power. We reach a tipping point. The proletariat comes into its own. We take off the training wheels and ride. We turn the world upside down. This is the ground war, the revolution itself. The reality destroys the representation. We lose our allies and win the war.
There are dangers to this strategy. We can mistake the representation for reality. We can become dependent on our allies, the means altering the ends. We can lose our best people to our tactical allies. Nevertheless, as we rebuild our power, we must use every weapon available against the bourgeoisie, including their own.
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There is more to be said about this. Particularly about the subjective effect on workers of winning struggles largely through corporate campaigning or NLRB process. I wanted to get a few thoughts out there to help me sort through this stuff. I’m also not so sure that building community coalitions with liberal groups or bureaucratic organizations is the right way to go, although it’s hard to imagine organizing these days without doing so.
Filed under: Books | Tags: AFL-CIO, Change to Win, IWW, Marxism, Other Workers Movement, Poor Workers Unions, Unions, Workers
When most people think of unions, they think of middle-aged white men, dreary, underpopulated picket lines, heavy industry, and the 1930s. In “Poor Workers’ Unions,” author Vanessa Tait shows that there is more to the labor movement than these outmoded stereotypes. Relegating the business union establishment to the fringes of her narrative, she tells a story of the continual resurgence of independent workplace organizing initiatives since the Civil Rights movement.
Over the course of seven chapters, each covering a different time period, Tait sketches the outlines of an organizational form that she calls “Poor Workers Unions.” Based in sectors of the working class that are excluded from the union establishment, or even excluded from the protections of labor law, Tait’s “Poor Workers Unions” are member-driven organizations that embrace disruptive direct action tactics. In part because they are made up of those who are excluded from the traditional AFL-CIO unions, poor workers unions often are rooted in a particular racial or ethnic segment. Workers turn this specificity into a strength, drawing on specific traditions of struggle and resistance in organizations like the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, or Black Workers for Justice, or the many “workers centers” that serve as organizing hubs for immigrant workers.
The history of Poor Workers Unions is incredibly inspiring. Again and again, workers who have been excluded from unions decide to organize. Sadly, once these new organizations grow and stabilize, they are absorbed back into the business union establishment, losing much of their radical edge in the process.
Tait argues throughout her book for a reorientation of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to organize poor workers. I would argue instead for a reorientation of poor workers away from the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. These organizations are a graveyard for organizing, and are incapable of defeating the bosses, let alone abolishing capitalism. After building their own organizations through bitter struggle, poor workers deserve more than the high dues, lack of democracy, cooptation and purple t-shirts the business unions offer.
Tait is not the first historian to study poor workers unions. German theorist Karl Heinz-Roth studied the immigrant workers movement in Germany from the late 19th century to the 1970s. He claimed that the workers movement is actually two movements- the established trade union movement and its parliamentary corrolary, the Social Democrats, and the “Other Workers Movement,” made up of workers excluded based on trade, ethnicity, race, or gender. According to Roth, the Other workers movement remains dormant most of the time, only to explode in spontaneous self-activity, throwing up democratic organizational forms in grassroots unions, wildcat strikes, riots, and even insurrections. Occasionally, the movement is able to build sustainable organizations to carry on the struggle beyond spontaneous uprisings. The historical IWW is an example.
Tait shows us that poor workers are more than capable of forming unions and fighting. It is now up to radical labor to show that workers can achieve greater goals than access to the sinking ship of reformist trade unionism.
Filed under: Analysis | Tags: Capitalism, Detroit, Mass Organizations, Organizing, Revolution, struggle, the left, Unions, Work, Workers
This past weekend, I had the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being guided through Detroit by a working class militant who has spent the last 36 years in the city. In front of a backdrop of rusting factories and rotting houses, he soliloquized on the long ebb of the tide of organizing in a city that once was both the crown jewel of industrial capitalism and a burning hot bright spot of working class radicalism.
His story is the tale of a long-lost left, of organizers’ iron optimism and steely commitment to a Revolution that has not yet happened. As the machinery of the Motor City goes, so go the motors of struggle built by the last generation.
In the 1970s, Detroit drew a turbocharged mixture of young workers and young radicals. The auto industry was the “most advanced sector” of production. All industries served as inputs to auto manufacturing, and autos in turn shaped the geography of postwar development. Factories like Ford’s “Rouge” plant employed up to 100,000 workers. The social structures that grew around this system of production set the paradigm of normality for generations of workers in the entire country. Americans were told that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Detroit was the heart of the economic, political, and social life of a nation.
Because of this, the city and its industry were a magnet for organizers seeking to overturn the economic, political, and social structures of capitalism. By the 1970s, an alphabet soup of left groups had established bases in Detroit. The cadre of these organizations entered the factories, intending to organize struggles in the heart of the capitalist system. A revolution based in the factories of Detroit would have unparalleled global ramifications.
Fueled by this belief, organizers toiled away, building motors, and motors of struggle. The years passed, and attrition amongst the cadre accelerated. By the late 1980s, the decay of the auto industry was mirrored by the disbandment of many left organizations. Militants left the factories and were not replaced by a fresh wave of organizers. The motors were idled, then scrapped.
The destruction of these motors of struggle is based on subjective and objective failures. Subjectively, few militants are willing to spend years of their lives build ing a long-term revolutionary project. This leads to the burnout of the hard core of activists who keep organizing going. Objectively, for the few people who are serious enough to want to organize, it is now unclear where we might make the most effective intervention.
Since the 1970s, the globalization and informatization of capitalism led to the creation of a globally networked, decentralized system. It is now much harder to find strategic points for organizing. Where would radicals who want to build workers power in the belly of the beast even go these days? Where is our Detroit?
If we can answer this question, then perhaps we will be able to push each other to rise to the occasion of building new motors of struggle, maybe even with some improvements on the previous models.
Filed under: Analysis | Tags: Anarchism, Armed Struggle, Capitalism, Direct Action, Insurrection, Revolution, Strategy, the State, Unions, Workers
Insurrection in Greece. Riots in China. Factory occupation in Chicago.
The pace of things seems to be quickening. A friend of mine says, this is our time. Which of course raises the question, what do we do?
Fortunately, we don’t really need to answer this question ourselves. People already are doing something, it’s up to us to support them, and perhaps, draw out the most radical content of the struggle.
As moments of resistance multiply, the radical lessons become clearer. We don’t need capital and the state. If workers can occupy the factory, workers can run the factory. If workers can run the factory, workers can run the world.
This is the syllogism of direct action. Direct action is not only a tactic to be used to win victories within a larger strategy based on a diversity of tactics. Direct action is inherently revolutionary in that it points beyond itself. Within direct action are the seeds of a new social order, an order without bosses or bureaucrats, capital or the state.
As long as reformist trade union bureaucrats or politicians remain the ideological leaders of the working class, they will seek to stifle the potential of the working class and obscure the meaning of direct action. Workers will take society to the brink, and the reformists will coax them back down.
It’s our job to push the world over the edge.
So how do we do this? How can we act to realize the radical potential of mass struggle?
Here’s a few ideas I’ve some up with based on thinking about how I would act if I lived in Greece, or Chicago, or China. In the abstract,:
-Prefiguration. In a revolutionary situation, the struggle is final. In this sense, the struggle does not prefigure the future. The struggle is the future. The seizure of capitalist assets does not prefigure the seize of capitalist assets in a future revolution; the seizure of capitalist assets is the revolution. There is no turning back. For this reason, the struggle must create the kind of society we want to live in: non-hieararchical, non-oppressive.
-Polarization. Without the support of broad strata of the people of this planet, any alternative will be unable to expand, and will be crushed. It is necessary to polarize the world against the enemy to ensure the safety of liberated areas and enable future expansion. We should act to bring the broad masses to the side of the insurgent workers, even if this means making compromises on the public message in the media.
-Dual Power/Reclamation. Any challenge to capital or the state must endeavor to not only hold territory or assets hostage to win demands, but actually establish a permanent base, linked to other bases in a network of counterpower. The goal should not just be to win isolated struggles, but to hold on to assets, neighborhoods, and constituencies. In the decisive moment, assets should be seized rapidly, then set into motion to create more resources to use in the war against capital. For example, media installations should be taken over permanently in order to spread news of the revolution. This will help maintain and deepen social polarization.
-Generalization. Support is not enough. If the revolution does not expand, it will collapse. The struggle must be generalized, or globalized, in order to stretch out the forces of the enemy (at minimum) or establish a sustainable counterpower culminating in revolution (at maximum). This requires global solidarity and organization.
-Defense. Polarization will only go so far. The working class must build the capacity to defend liberated areas from capitalist attack– by any means necessary. Defense organization should also be ‘prefigurative,’ in other words, democratic. The militant defense of spaces from attack will reinforce popular support for the struggle and prepare the workers forces for future battles.
-Offense. The power of the state must eventually be destroyed. We will not be able to reach certain areas through “generalization.” We will need to either invade or isolate these areas. It’s worth remembering that the capitalist class has no right to exist. Although armed struggle should not be a primary tactic in the struggle, we must build the military power of the working class to defend the revolution.
Concretely:
-Organization. We can’t wait for things to happen. We must organize locally now in order to be able to effectively support struggles as they intensify across the globe. This means building up democratic union organization in the workplace, and solidarity organization in neighborhoods as well. This will help build a revolutionary social bloc.
-the Revolutionary Social Bloc. Through organization, we need to build a social majority that is opposed to capitalism in its concrete manifestations of cutbacks and wage slavery, as well as its domination as a social form. We must polarize society against corporations specifically, and capitalism in general.
-Globalism. We must link all struggles as widely as possible geographically. Currently, there are very weak links between the Middle East, China, and the “West.” This is unfortunate, since China and the Middle East are currently central to capitalist globalization. It would make sense to make a concerted effort to build ties to workers organizations in those regions.
-Subversion. Radicals should consider careers in the military and law enforcement. We need to undermine the repressive apparatus as much as possible, and if possible, bring it to the side of the workers.
-Armed Struggle. This is a failure as a revolutionary strategy, but may have its place as a tactic of defense and offense. It would make sense to start building up armed workers organizations right now.
These are some ideas that have crossed my mind as I have watched Greece burn. The pace of change will probably quicken again over the next year. This is our time. Let’s not waste it.
Filed under: movies | Tags: Capitalism, movies, Revolution, strikes, Unions, Workers
I cried during “Salt of the Earth.” I cried during “Harlan County, USA.” I almost cried during “American Dream,” but I didn’t. It’s odd, because “American Dream” is the most tragic of these three movies.
Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream” is a documentary about the heroic strike of UFCW Local P-9, based in Austin, MN, against Hormel. In the reactionary climate of the 1980s, Corporate America was taking all it could get from workers, ramming concessions down unions throats. But the workers didn’t just have to contend with greedy corporations. The labor movement was rotting from within. Union bureaucrats were too lazy, uncreative, or scared to back up workers who did dare to fight back.
When UFCW Local P-9 in Austin, MN voted to strike with a 93% majority, the International refused to support them. Instead, union bureaucrats began sowing discord in the ranks of the workers, and eventually ordered striking workers back to work and put their local into trusteeship.
The strike was lost. Perhaps the workers were up against unbeatable odds. This was the analysis of the labor bureaucrats in the International. I don’t share their analysis, I think this strike could have been won with the support of the International.
Either way, I am reminded of words I heard from a Wobbly a few weeks ago at a retreat in Chicago: “Solidarity over strategy, every time.” We need to fight to win. But we will never win if we go against our most basic principle: solidarity. And if we forget our principles in the pursuit of victory, it will be a hollow win if we win at all.
Kopples’ movie is supposed to reflect America in a microcosm. There haven’t been too many labor victories we can be proud of in America in the two decades since P-9. It’s been a sad time for working people. Maybe I didn’t cry during “American Dream” because I’ve personally become numb to defeat. It’s always the same story. I don’t cry out of sadness any more. Now, I cry out of hope. I cry when I see workers standing together, fighting against any odds, fighting because it’s the right thing to do.
Battles are fought, some won some lost, but the struggle always continues, the workers rising again and again no matter the odds. And as long as the struggle continues, I will continue to be inspired by the possibilities latent in the human heart, always reigniting my hope that together, we can build a world more beautiful than anything we can imagine. This is what moves me too tears, every time.
Filed under: News | Tags: Capitalism, Precarity, strikes, Unions, Workers
McDonald’s workers in New Zealand are preparing for a summer (it’s summer there) of strike action against McDonald’s. They’re organized in the Unite! union, which is different than the US-based UNITE-HERE. In the past, Unite! has taken credit for the “world’s first Starbucks strike.” Anarchists and Wobblies have participated in these campaigns, but also raise criticisms. Either way, they’re obviously doing something right.
Here’s the story on Libcom: http://libcom.org/news/new-zealand-mcdonalds-workers-escalate-campaign-hot-summer-begin-06112008
