From: pmargin-AT-froggy.com.au
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 11:28:14 +1100
Subject: Re: SV: AUT: Cobas/SUD




Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:

[snip]

> 
> There is far more to the problems of the IWW becoming
> the force it once was, but this, as I see it, superficial critique of
> unionism as such, revealing, again in my opinion, an unsufficent
> understanding of what makes capitalism go around and what it
> would take to overcome it, is of no great help. Or put otherwise,
> rather than trying to bring about a counter-cultural unionism, the
> escape to the powerlessness of islands of counter-culture becoming
> subculture before turning into passivity or a return to unionsm,
> as the "responsibilities of age" comes along.

Two separate points interest me here. I think Harald is right about the
dangers of what he calls "counter-cultural unionism", and this could be
fruitfully explored.

Secondly, over the past few years I've probably become more sympathetic
to many of the arguments that Harald sets out in his article on whether
anarcho-syndicalism (along with IWW-style revolutionary industrial
unionism) is historically dead - sorry, I don't have the details to hand.

There have been some useful discussions in Italian in journals like Di
Base, in relation to the alternative unions there - I'll see if any of
that is available in English. Of course, the broader debate is at least
a century old, and has arisen within both anarchism (Malatesta for
example) and left marxisms (the whole council communist take on unions -
although the IWW tended to be exempted from much of their criticisms
before the 1930s/40s). But I think the debate has assumed considerable
practical import in Western Europe for example in the past decade or so,
with the emergence of so many alternative unions (sometimes from rank
and file committees outside the unions, sometimes from breakaways from
the latter).

Steve
_______
P.S. I just remembered that, long ago, I translated the following
fragment on this topic from an article in Collagementi:

G. Soriano, 'i sindacati e loro crisi', Collegamenti/Wobbly 31, Autumn 1992

Here is the fragment (in which italicisation etc is lost). Just to
clarify - the 'autonomous' unionism mentioned at the end refers to
established unions outside the 3 big confederations. These date from the
1970s or earlier, and were quite separate from Autonomia or autonomia -
by the 1990s, many the 'autonomous' unions were close to the political
coalition of Forza Italia/Lega Nord/AN.

___________

Is there a link between de-unionisation and the emergence of autonomous struggles?

The situation within which autonomous struggles develop today recalls
that of the workers’ movement’s birth. We can observe, in effect, a
general tendancy towards the elimination or reduction of the system of
guarantees known as ‘the welfare state’: services are cut, indirect and
regressive tax schedules are increased, wage and pension indexation is
curtailed or suppressed—all at the expense of the weakest sections of
society. Unions which in the seventies had carried the demands of the
poorest, most numerous and least skilled sectors of wage labour, now
attempt to restore wage hierarchies, while the bosses raise the stakes
and demand individual performance pay. The middle classes, which had
expanded at a constant rate for half a century, so lending a certain
social stability in the face of workers’ struggles, now find themselves
bearing the weight of the crisis (consider the unemployment rate amongst
middle managers and technical staff, which is particularly high in
France, or the increase in business failures in the commercial sector,
and for small businesses in general).

	The threat of job loss works very effectively, producing insecurity and
a generalised fall in strikes and small-scale, localised disputes
[microconflittualità]. Absenteeism levels decline, working hours, plant
utilisation and workplace accidents increase—all the social indicators
verify that the relations of force are at present unfavourable to wage
labour. Still, not all aspects of this picture are gloomy ones. The
crisis of the unions, coupled with their institutionalisation, clarify
for the majority of workers these organisations’ functions of control.
The unions are ‘unmasked’ as foreign bodies, perhaps still useful as a
legal cloak, but not for struggling, for affirming workers’ own point of
view, for altering the relations of force and overturning the present
state of things.

	The struggles of recent years have displayed some common characteristics:

1)	They have generally had, as a central theme, the affirmation of the
work performed, both in terms of its social recognition (teachers,
nurses, welfare workers) and of pay (all sectors). Often they have
opposed the worsening of working conditions (transport sector,
hospitals), and raised the problem of the quality of social services.

2)	They have developed in almost all European countries, and practically
in the same sectors:

o	transport (trains, ports, airports and, with specific characteristics,
in road transport), in Spain, France, Italy;
o	in the health sector (first only nurses, then also other hospital
workers, with the exception of doctors), in Italy, Britain, France, Germany;
o	within the sphere of social reproduction in general (welfare workers,
those helping the elderly, kindergarten staff), in France, Italy, Germany;
o	education (in particular, secondary schools) in Italy and France;
o	public sector (the finance department in France, social security
workers in Italy and France);
o	banks, in France, Italy, Spain.

	All these sectors share a common characteristic: it is difficult to
blackmail them with the threat of job loss (although waterside workers
are an exception here). As a consequence, the relations of force are
relatively favourable, allowing them to push forward on the wages front.

3)	All these struggles have been characterised as corporatist. Are they
truly, though? Breaking free of the union bureaucrats involves in some
ways an act of rediscovery, recognising oneself as part of a community
with its own interests, and rejecting those identified as foreign
bodies—this is the first precondition of struggle. The second
precondition is that of shared objectives for all involved: an
autonomous struggle, in which waged workers genuinely express their
views, is unlikely to centre around a log of claims which demands a
dozen different pay rates, with all kinds of increments, overtime rates,
holiday and pension schedules. Something of that sort requires a
negotiating process and structure from which workers are excluded by a
professional body capable of managing all kinds of legal quibbles. It is
much more natural that an autonomous struggle develops on the basis of
an egalitarian objective able to be generalised throughout an industry.

	What then is this much-talked-about corporatism? In the first place
it’s the possibility of breaking the union’s monopoly, of rediscovering
a community of interests and struggle, and the need for
self-recognition. It expresses diffidence towards bureaucrats external
to the workplace, towards state structures and disseminators of
ideology. It involves breaking with a union practice which, for all its
talk about workers’ ‘universal’ interests, in practice continues to
manage existing divisions and differences. All of which harks back to
conditions at the time of the workers’ movement’s birth.

4)	Is it conceivable that autonomous struggles may revive without
passing through this stage? Not really, given that we live in a society
that accentuates individual isolation, a condition which in turn incites
delegation to others and the removal of collective responsibility, one
that insinuates hierarchical principles everywhere. And the unions are
the exponents of such values amongst waged workers, when they are not
advocating other values still worse, as the experiences of ‘communism’,
peronism and fascism demonstrate.

	What do I mean by ‘autonomous struggle’? Perhaps that workers have rid
themselves of bosses and unions, and have organised themselves on their
own terms? This is the tendency. In all such struggles, even when their
management is not always and completely in the hands of the workers, the
problem of the union is raised: with a greater or lesser degree of
clarity, with a greater or lesser capacity to shake the unions off,
according to the relations of force—at times through a parallel,
interunion form of management, at times with a cohabitation between
coordinations and unions, at times with the subordination of the latter.

	It’s because of this that I believe there exists a relationship—one
which is neither direct, nor one-dimensional, nor in the form of
‘falling union membership = increase in autonomous struggles’—between
the unions’ crisis and the possibility of workers organising themselves
autonomously, precisely because this crisis—however painful it may be
for waged workers—eliminates a source of equivocation and control,
pushing workers to act on their own.

5)	After a period characterised by the emergence of coordinations and
rank-and-file committees, we are witnessing in some countries—in
particular, France, Italy and Spain, but elsewhere too—the birth of a
series of small radical unions, formed on a variety of bases (some
within a profession or industry, the more politicised attempting to span
such divisions). Some of them meet the need of militant groups which
have survived earlier cycles of struggles, and are exponents of
practices and cultures bound up with earlier movements; others are the
expression of tendencies within struggles themselves. In France, they
range from the profession-oriented nurses union ‘Coordination
infirmière’, which arose from an earlier coordination, to the CRC,
which—within the health sector—raises the problem of links with other
sectors; in Italy, they include the traindrivers’ coordination, with its
whole identity centred upon its trade, or the Gilda which, while harder
to pin down, betrays a similar stance amongst teachers, whereas the
Cobas and the FLMU tend instead to look at things from a broader,
inter-professional stance.

	The birth of these structures, and their evolution towards a stable,
union type of organisational form, is determined in large part by the
persistence of cycles of struggles in the sectors concerned, by the need
to ensure ongoing radical activity even in the absence of open struggle,
but also by developments on the legal front, by laws which in
restricting the right to strike reduce the possibility of struggling
spontaneously within certain minimum legal guarantees, and to avoid
criminalisation. The development of these small unions in one direction
rather than another is obviously the product of many factors, including
the relations of force within particular industries. The culture and
outlook [l’immaginario] of workers and militants alike play a role in
all this, so that even a small nucleus of comrades—such as
ourselves—can, if it has clear ideas, aspire to influence this process.
It would not be the first time, nor the last, and involves being lucid
about one’s own possibilities, without either overestimating or
underestimating them.

	The limits of these groups are evident:

o	in Spain, the attempts to criminalise the non-institutional sections
of the workers’ movement in the wake of Franco’s death has been helped
along by the violent polemics which have split the CNT in two. Here
political opponents were often denounced as police spies, comrades with
different opinions were regularly marginalised, as the legal (and often
physical) tussle between the CNT-AIT and the CGT over control of the
movement’s ‘historical assets’ supplanted political discussion. On the
other hand, the experience of the waterside workers’ Coordinadora
demonstrates perfectly how even a group expousing the anti-bureaucratic
democracy of workers’ assemblies can generate an internal
bureaucracy—not because anyone theorised it, but only because it
responded to the line of least effort in the context of defeat and
restructuring—and evolve in the direction of a traditional union.

o	In France, after the struggles of 1988, and the purges within the
CFDT, we find a variety of small radical unions: some based purely
within one sector, others with a broader base. Their major limit seems
to stem from a tendency to place their energies more into obtaining
legal recognition as negotiating bodies within their own sector, or
participating in elections for workplace delegates and committees, than
in direct action. While the French CNT is not afflicted by the evils of
corporatism and institutional particpation which marks other groups, it
does suffer from its marginal status. As a consequence, it’s likely that
its relative growth will bring with it some of the divisions which have
emerged in other countries.

o	In Italy there has been a process of recomposition amongst the various
groups and unions that emerged from the last cycle of struggles. At the
same time, I have the impression that the weight of militant culture
which stimulated things at the peak of such struggles may, in today’s
less lively circumstances, stand in the way of efforts to find new
solutions. While they express real difficulties and differences, the
divisions between the various groups, their different perspectives, are
no less dangerous for the survival of an autonomous movement.
Corporatism may well bring short term results on the wage front, but it
risks replicating the logic of traditional ‘autonomous’ unionism in the
long term, with its bureaucracy and sectionalism towards other workers.


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