From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexed, all variations
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:40:41 -0500


Chris-

I agree with most of what you have to say about unions below, and I think 
the emphasis does have to be on workers' self-activity. I think part of what 
I and Scott have been trying to address is what type of practical politics 
comes out of an ultra-left position or a focus on workers' self-activity. No 
that's not right. What I mean to say is, how do we respond to struggles? So 
that while I agree with you about unions, I think it was better to support 
the workers trying unionize the V+V plant here in Chicago, while expecting 
that their contract probably wouldn't be all that great and the union 
wouldn't solve a lot of problems (which  is what happened). Similarly, I 
think it's better to support the people struggling for an independent 
Palestine than to not, for parallel reasons. Another parallel might be 
attempts to establish rape crisis center or women's centers. These 
institutions have analogous problems, but I think are still worthwhile and 
are worth supporting.
In each of the above instances all will not be right if those campaigns are 
won, but I would hope some small things will be better. I don't really see 
an alternative that I'm comfortable with to supporting these struggles. The 
most common other position I've seen expressed here is usually one of 
disdain "bah, unions" "bah, national liberation" which doesn't strike me as 
a particularly useful political insight. Scott said it fairly succinctly in 
one of his emails-

"Those who identify as anti-anti-imperialists and oppose a secular Palestine 
in place of Israel and the Territories have had months to come up with a 
single concrete demand for the Palestinian situation and have not offered 
anything except for world revolution!, which inevitably means wait for 
revolution."


I think this applies to a lot of other examples outside of Palestine as 
well, and not only questions of national liberation, and of course 
everything you said about Palestine still stands.

Which reminds me, I like what you had to say about national liberation 
struggles, that a struggle starting around national liberation may grow into 
something larger. couldn't this apply to other examples as well, like trade 
unions etc? And yes of course, there are lots of other struggle worth 
supporting and starting, and some are better than others (and some we 
shouldn't support at all, like some racist and anti-immigrant policies 
backed by unions) but what I'm trying to get at is what a consistent 
response should be to the above mentioned limited types of struggles like 
Palestine etc.

Nate

>From: cwright <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: AUT: Perplexed, all variations
>Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 20:20:54 -0600
>
>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
>
>
>
>




_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---