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From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net> Subject: AUT: Perplexed, all variations Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 20:20:54 -0600 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. I find it impossible to keep up with all of the discussions, but a few ideas struck me. 1. Unions (really a discussion of limited struggles in general and the relationship of revolutionaries to that struggle). Unions first developed as workers collectively engaged in defending themselves at the level of a workplace or industry or trade. They existed as a way to exert collective power with limited ends in mind. The unions generally had a separate existence from 'political organizations' of the class. What does this tell us? That unions only attempted to cover a section of the working class in most cases (Knights of Labor come to mind as an exception), and generally only concerned themselves with unionized workers or workers they hoped to unionize. Second, the unions exist to negotiate the rate and terms of exploitation. As such, the unions can only be meaningful within the capital-labor relation. Any idea of 'revolutionary' unions (I think that anarcho-syndicalism is something different) or of making the unions revolutionary is therefore mistaken and a waste of time. The unions need capital to have any reason to exist. For example, we can easily see that in every revolutionary crisis, the unions as a tendency have been on the right wing. The union leadership (more about that in a moment) tends towards the right wing of revolutionary movements (such as in Social Democracy, anarchism in Spain, etc.) This is not because of bad ideas, but because of the relationship of trade unions to capital. This relationship developed over time. Certainly, legalization of unions, collective bargaining, etc all represented concessions to the working class' struggles. The unions provided an apparatus, an apparatus which only developed over time through various struggles, through which the concessions could be granted and the working class recuperated and recomposed (especially in the post-WWII period until the mid 1970's.) This has reached the point where trade unionism no longer represents the working class at all. Almost every struggle in which workers engaged as active participants and with any autonomy depended on a struggle against the unions as well. Any revolutionary worker can tell you about the ways the union collaborates with management to expel 'troublemakers'. We can also see that almost every concessions contract in the US over the last 25 years got pushed through with the help of the union, sometimes only because of the union. In any case, the union IS the apparatus designed to bargain with capital over the cost of exploitation, regardless of the consciousness of the workers themselves. As such, the union becomes more dependent on capital than upon the workers and takes on a life separate from the membership, a life which does not even preclude suicidal behavior in defense of capital. Now, some people will argue that the union cannot be confused with the union bureaucracy. This is a famous Trotskyist argument. However, I think we should turn it on its head. The workers cannot be confused with the union. The conclusion I draw is that in all cases, the workers have to organize their own means of running any struggle, even a union organizing drive, separately from any apparatus. That is the key issue. Do we seek the independent self-organization of the workers in every struggle or do we expect the workers to subordinate themselves to the union? Maybe the workers wind up not wanting a union. Maybe they end up decidng they want a union, but they become unhappy with it. Rarely since the 1930's have I met workers who organized a union without suffering disillusionment in the union in or after the process. With any organization, once that organization is no longer dependent on workers' militancy and self-activity (which it can't be if it wants capital to treat it as a reliable bargaining partner), the organization becomes a throttle. The other famous argument involves the idea that unions are better than not having unions. That ideas rests on two fallacies. Firstly, that unions mean more money and better working conditions. In many cases, outside a mass movement, a union means a contractual organization of the old situation. Often the unions will say that having a contract and a grievance process is enough of a gain. This happened in Chicago with the workers at V & V Supremo recently. But it even happened in the 1930's. The Flint Sitdown Strike only won the union, but no wage, benefit or working conditions gains. The second fallacy assumes that unions organize the workers for their own self-defense. That's not really true. The union disoganizes the workers in struggles, more often than not, and to the extent that it does organize the workers, the union does so in a way that inhibits workers' autonomy, ie it organizes them for production, not resistance. None of this is meant to contradict the idea that unionized areas had higher wages, better working conditions, etc. But that was usually the case as a leftover from workers' militancy, which became enshrined in the unions. To that extent, the unions did represent the codification of partially victorious struggles, and that is why capital would like to get rid of them. Unions still signify, in a warped way, the codification of workers' power. as such, the apparatus is obviously not simply a victimizer of the workers from day to day, in 'ordinary' times. The union can offer benefits of some sort and the workers can use the union to get certain things which do not in any way threaten capital's prerogatives. But under attack, in times of crisis like these, or in times of increased struggle, the unions will play a reactionary role. And that is easy enough to show historically. Finally, because the unions formed based on the limited interests of a particular trade, skill, or industry, the history of the unions, especially but certainly not only the craft unions, is also a history of racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant exclusion. The unions develop and foster among the members those tendencies that see them as competing against other groups of workers, protecting themselves by excluding many other groups of workers from a trade, craft, or the better positions in an industry. Hell, they won't even go on strike to support other workers' struggles or they will raid or cross picket lines of other unions. Sott said: It's precisely because trade unions have bureaucractic leadership and undemocratic structures that we work in them. The same goes for national liberation struggles. Being involved pushing anti-cap politics in an undemocratic union or a nationalist liberation struggle does not make you a party to bureaucracy or nationalism - it makes you an effective opponent of those things, because you are exploiting the contradiction between the base and the leadership of the organisation. You have to be in to win. This is funny. Of all the reasons to work within the unions, it is not because they are undemocratic and bureaucratic. On that basis, we should also run for office, become social workers, cops, join the military, etc. That's ridiculous. Scott is not clear on what he means by 'work in them', btw. Become union officials? That's a sure way to become a hack really fast. Outside a mass movement, the union bureaucracy can apply much more pressure to conform than the movement. Even so, become a union official to do what? The point is to support workers' self-organization, which does not imply joining an organization opposed to workers' self-oganization. As for the nationalists, this smacks of not having paid attention to them. The nationalists like to kill trade union organizers and workplace militants and any other opponents they face. Watch Latin America or Vietnam, where the NLF killed thousands of Trotskyists. Being opposed to French imperialism did not require one to be in the nationalist movement supporting the national bourgeoisie. Trotskyism has a wonderful record of nothing but failure on that score for over 60 years, from tail-ending the Resistance in France to Vietnam to Cuba to Bolivia, and so on. On this idea of 'exploiting the base-leadership contradiction', that sounds like entryism. Why not join the Labour Party then? How about the Democratic Party? In rural working class Illinois, I should join the Republican Party? Your logic assumes that we want to become an alternate leadership, which I, and most of the list, reject. Since we defend workers' self-organization, if we worked in a union shop, I would think our main task would be to defend the self-organization of the workers, which means fighting the union as well as the company. Union or not, it always means workers' committees/councils/whatever, which control the struggle, not some apparatus. On fraternity slogans like 'you have to be in to win', that means that the majority of the working class, which has NEVER been in a union or nationalist party, can't win because they aren't in the right structures. 100% unionization would not mean revolution. 100% of the population in a nationalist movement would not mean communism. This is nonsense. Otherwise, all it means is that revolutionaries not in the unions or with the nationalists aren't with the masses, right? Oops, unionization in the US is 12%. Hmmm... 2. Anti-imperialism. The first mistake lies in the idea that being a libertarian communist (whether anarchist or Marxist or other) requires rejecting the notion of imperialism. Clearly, this is not the case. But anti-imperialism is a political position which of necessity places te struggle against imperialism ahead of the struggle against capitalism. As a politics, it functions like anti-fascism, which places the struggle against fascism ahead of the struggle against the struggle against capitalism. In both cases, the politics provide a cover for capital's 'liberal' expression. In the case of anti-fascism, Stalinism chose the most typical line (along with others): first we defeat fascism, then we make the social revolution. In practice, this means the support of 'democratic' forces ie the liberal bourgeoisie, against the fascists. In practice, this means supporting the 'good', ;democratic' capitalists against the 'bad', 'fascist' capitalists. The outcome of this struggle was fascism because capital will always choose fascism over social revolution or even the threat of social revolution. Anti-fascism is not anti-fascist at all because it lays the groundwork for the defeat of the working class by tying us to enemy class forces. The rejection of anti-imperialism involves the same choice. It means supporting the 'good' nationalists against the 'bad' nationalists. I am not asking anyone to taking this on faith. Just tell me why all of the groups who took this line have tail-ended the radical nationalists in every case. This is not the same as defending the struggle of the workers and peasants against imperialism, because defending such a struggle would imply opposing all of the nationalists as well. Now I am the list freak on this point because I happen to think that the struggle of the mass of people can overcome the limitations of nationalist consciousness in practice and that what may start as a nationalist movement can grow out of the bounds of the nationalists. Therefore, my opposition to the PLO does not mean I oppose the desire for a separate Palestine, if that is what the mass of Palestinians want and lack of support from the Israeli working class makes possible. I am not calling for a two-state solution, however, because that isn't a solution. It is at best a stepping stone. In the meantime, we should support the Palestinians' struggle against Zionism, as we support Israeli opponents of Zionism, but I also support the struggle against the PLO among the Palestinian population, since the PLO is a hinderance to Palestinian struggles. After all, what do 'anti-imperialist' politics mean among the Palestinians? Support the anti-imperialist PLO? Osama bin Laden is a very good anti-imperialist, because for him imperialism is the main contradiction, but certainly not capital, which he is a devout supporter of. The best part though, is to claim that the refusal to support this horrible politics amounts to a refusal to do anything, to 'wait for the revolution'. How assinine. It only means a refusal to tail-end the nationalists and to support struggles in teh manner I described above regarding unions. Anti-imperialism involves tacit support for the 'legitimate' nationalists and I have seen very, very few cases where that is not the case. The only ones that come to mind involve the group Lutte Ouvriere, which I used to be in, and they tend in the direction of a Francophile politics, even defending the teacher in France who forced two Muslim women to remove their veils in school. None of this means accepting "Empire", although we clearly are not looking at your grandmother's imperialism, if that term still has any meaning. However, whether one chooses to see things via imperialism or empire, the problem of anti-imperialism as a prop for the 'democratic' or 'radical' wing of the nationalist bourgeoisie remains the same. Cheers, Chris

HTML VERSION:

I find it impossible to keep up with all of the discussions, but a few ideas struck me.

1. Unions (really a discussion of limited struggles in general and the relationship of revolutionaries to that struggle).

Unions first developed as workers collectively engaged in defending themselves at the level of a workplace or industry or trade. They existed as a way to exert collective power with limited ends in mind. The unions generally had a separate existence from 'political organizations' of the class. What does this tell us? That unions only attempted to cover a section of the working class in most cases (Knights of Labor come to mind as an exception), and generally only concerned themselves with unionized workers or workers they hoped to unionize. Second, the unions exist to negotiate the rate and terms of exploitation. As such, the unions can only be meaningful within the capital-labor relation. Any idea of 'revolutionary' unions (I think that anarcho-syndicalism is something different) or of making the unions revolutionary is therefore mistaken and a waste of time. The unions need capital to have any reason to exist.

For example, we can easily see that in every revolutionary crisis, the unions as a tendency have been on the right wing. The union leadership (more about that in a moment) tends towards the right wing of revolutionary movements (such as in Social Democracy, anarchism in Spain, etc.) This is not because of bad ideas, but because of the relationship of trade unions to capital. This relationship developed over time. Certainly, legalization of unions, collective bargaining, etc all represented concessions to the working class' struggles. The unions provided an apparatus, an apparatus which only developed over time through various struggles, through which the concessions could be granted and the working class recuperated and recomposed (especially in the post-WWII period until the mid 1970's.)

This has reached the point where trade unionism no longer represents the working class at all. Almost every struggle in which workers engaged as active participants and with any autonomy depended on a struggle against the unions as well. Any revolutionary worker can tell you about the ways the union collaborates with management to expel 'troublemakers'. We can also see that almost every concessions contract in the US over the last 25 years got pushed through with the help of the union, sometimes only because of the union. In any case, the union IS the apparatus designed to bargain with capital over the cost of exploitation, regardless of the consciousness of the workers themselves. As such, the union becomes more dependent on capital than upon the workers and takes on a life separate from the membership, a life which does not even preclude suicidal behavior in defense of capital.

Now, some people will argue that the union cannot be confused with the union bureaucracy. This is a famous Trotskyist argument. However, I think we should turn it on its head. The workers cannot be confused with the union. The conclusion I draw is that in all cases, the workers have to organize their own means of running any struggle, even a union organizing drive, separately from any apparatus. That is the key issue. Do we seek the independent self-organization of the workers in every struggle or do we expect the workers to subordinate themselves to the union? Maybe the workers wind up not wanting a union. Maybe they end up decidng they want a union, but they become unhappy with it. Rarely since the 1930's have I met workers who organized a union without suffering disillusionment in the union in or after the process. With any organization, once that organization is no longer dependent on workers' militancy and self-activity (which it can't be if it wants capital to treat it as a reliable bargaining partner), the organization becomes a throttle.

The other famous argument involves the idea that unions are better than not having unions. That ideas rests on two fallacies. Firstly, that unions mean more money and better working conditions. In many cases, outside a mass movement, a union means a contractual organization of the old situation. Often the unions will say that having a contract and a grievance process is enough of a gain. This happened in Chicago with the workers at V & V Supremo recently. But it even happened in the 1930's. The Flint Sitdown Strike only won the union, but no wage, benefit or working conditions gains. The second fallacy assumes that unions organize the workers for their own self-defense. That's not really true. The union disoganizes the workers in struggles, more often than not, and to the extent that it does organize the workers, the union does so in a way that inhibits workers' autonomy, ie it organizes them for production, not resistance.

None of this is meant to contradict the idea that unionized areas had higher wages, better working conditions, etc. But that was usually the case as a leftover from workers' militancy, which became enshrined in the unions. To that extent, the unions did represent the codification of partially victorious struggles, and that is why capital would like to get rid of them. Unions still signify, in a warped way, the codification of workers' power. as such, the apparatus is obviously not simply a victimizer of the workers from day to day, in 'ordinary' times. The union can offer benefits of some sort and the workers can use the union to get certain things which do not in any way threaten capital's prerogatives. But under attack, in times of crisis like these, or in times of increased struggle, the unions will play a reactionary role. And that is easy enough to show historically.

Finally, because the unions formed based on the limited interests of a particular trade, skill, or industry, the history of the unions, especially but certainly not only the craft unions, is also a history of racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant exclusion. The unions develop and foster among the members those tendencies that see them as competing against other groups of workers, protecting themselves by excluding many other groups of workers from a trade, craft, or the better positions in an industry. Hell, they won't even go on strike to support other workers' struggles or they will raid or cross picket lines of other unions.

Sott said:

It's precisely because trade unions have bureaucractic leadership and undemocratic structures that we work in them. The same goes for national liberation struggles. Being involved pushing anti-cap politics in an undemocratic union or a nationalist liberation struggle does not make you a party to bureaucracy or nationalism - it makes you an effective opponent of those things, because you are exploiting the
contradiction between the base and the leadership of the organisation. You have to be in to win.

This is funny. Of all the reasons to work within the unions, it is not because they are undemocratic and bureaucratic. On that basis, we should also run for office, become social workers, cops, join the military, etc. That's ridiculous. Scott is not clear on what he means by 'work in them', btw. Become union officials? That's a sure way to become a hack really fast. Outside a mass movement, the union bureaucracy can apply much more pressure to conform than the movement. Even so, become a union official to do what? The point is to support workers' self-organization, which does not imply joining an organization opposed to workers' self-oganization. As for the nationalists, this smacks of not having paid attention to them. The nationalists like to kill trade union organizers and workplace militants and any other opponents they face. Watch Latin America or Vietnam, where the NLF killed thousands of Trotskyists. Being opposed to French imperialism did not require one to be in the nationalist movement supporting the national bourgeoisie. Trotskyism has a wonderful record of nothing but failure on that score for over 60 years, from tail-ending the Resistance in France to Vietnam to Cuba to Bolivia, and so on.

On this idea of 'exploiting the base-leadership contradiction', that sounds like entryism. Why not join the Labour Party then? How about the Democratic Party? In rural working class Illinois, I should join the Republican Party? Your logic assumes that we want to become an alternate leadership, which I, and most of the list, reject. Since we defend workers' self-organization, if we worked in a union shop, I would think our main task would be to defend the self-organization of the workers, which means fighting the union as well as the company. Union or not, it always means workers' committees/councils/whatever, which control the struggle, not some apparatus.

On fraternity slogans like 'you have to be in to win', that means that the majority of the working class, which has NEVER been in a union or nationalist party, can't win because they aren't in the right structures. 100% unionization would not mean revolution. 100% of the population in a nationalist movement would not mean communism. This is nonsense. Otherwise, all it means is that revolutionaries not in the unions or with the nationalists aren't with the masses, right? Oops, unionization in the US is 12%. Hmmm...

2. Anti-imperialism. The first mistake lies in the idea that being a libertarian communist (whether anarchist or Marxist or other) requires rejecting the notion of imperialism. Clearly, this is not the case. But anti-imperialism is a political position which of necessity places te struggle against imperialism ahead of the struggle against capitalism. As a politics, it functions like anti-fascism, which places the struggle against fascism ahead of the struggle against the struggle against capitalism. In both cases, the politics provide a cover for capital's 'liberal' expression.

In the case of anti-fascism, Stalinism chose the most typical line (along with others): first we defeat fascism, then we make the social revolution. In practice, this means the support of 'democratic' forces ie the liberal bourgeoisie, against the fascists. In practice, this means supporting the 'good', ;democratic' capitalists against the 'bad', 'fascist' capitalists. The outcome of this struggle was fascism because capital will always choose fascism over social revolution or even the threat of social revolution. Anti-fascism is not anti-fascist at all because it lays the groundwork for the defeat of the working class by tying us to enemy class forces.

The rejection of anti-imperialism involves the same choice. It means supporting the 'good' nationalists against the 'bad' nationalists. I am not asking anyone to taking this on faith. Just tell me why all of the groups who took this line have tail-ended the radical nationalists in every case. This is not the same as defending the struggle of the workers and peasants against imperialism, because defending such a struggle would imply opposing all of the nationalists as well. Now I am the list freak on this point because I happen to think that the struggle of the mass of people can overcome the limitations of nationalist consciousness in practice and that what may start as a nationalist movement can grow out of the bounds of the nationalists.

Therefore, my opposition to the PLO does not mean I oppose the desire for a separate Palestine, if that is what the mass of Palestinians want and lack of support from the Israeli working class makes possible. I am not calling for a two-state solution, however, because that isn't a solution. It is at best a stepping stone. In the meantime, we should support the Palestinians' struggle against Zionism, as we support Israeli opponents of Zionism, but I also support the struggle against the PLO among the Palestinian population, since the PLO is a hinderance to Palestinian struggles. After all, what do 'anti-imperialist' politics mean among the Palestinians? Support the anti-imperialist PLO? Osama bin Laden is a very good anti-imperialist, because for him imperialism is the main contradiction, but certainly not capital, which he is a devout supporter of. The best part though, is to claim that the refusal to support this horrible politics amounts to a refusal to do anything, to 'wait for the revolution'. How assinine. It only means a refusal to tail-end the nationalists and to support struggles in teh manner I described above regarding unions. Anti-imperialism involves tacit support for the 'legitimate' nationalists and I have seen very, very few cases where that is not the case. The only ones that come to mind involve the group Lutte Ouvriere, which I used to be in, and they tend in the direction of a Francophile politics, even defending the teacher in France who forced two Muslim women to remove their veils in school.

None of this means accepting "Empire", although we clearly are not looking at your grandmother's imperialism, if that term still has any meaning. However, whether one chooses to see things via imperialism or empire, the problem of anti-imperialism as a prop for the 'democratic' or 'radical' wing of the nationalist bourgeoisie remains the same.

Cheers,

Chris

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