From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Subject: Re: SV: AUT: Cobas/SUD
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 19:29:00 +0100



-----Original Message-----
From: pmargin-AT-froggy.com.au
Date: Saturday, March 30, 2002 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: SV: AUT: Cobas/SUD


Steve wrote:

        "What I took Harald to mean - and maybe I misunderstood him -
        was the severe limits of an approach to workplace
        organising  that confined itself to the inner city left ghetto's
        alternative economy (whether self-managed in the form of
        co-ops, or else as little businesses)."


Well, I actually I was trying to say something like that that I am
very much in favour of counter-culture unionism, I would even
say the unions tend to become counter-cultural to degree they
manage to maintain themselves as unions, but that such a
thing is only possible through moving way beyond the sectarian
confines of "counter-culturalism". I don't believe the later can ever
really become a counter-culture, unlike a "sub-culture," or put otherwise,
can only do so by becoming one contributing ingre-
dient of a greater whole. There were (and partially remain)
many counter-cultural elements in the old "macho" blue-collar
don't talk bull shit attitude to life as well. And unlike what many
seem to believe, it was never only a male thing.

Whatever their other faults (some of which were to undermine
their existence to a degree that at the end not much more than
an empty shell remained, with a few local ) historical unions
were often counter-cultural to a degree that todays "counter-
culturalist" can only dream of.  Which is not to say that the later
has not also produced much of value.

At last, I would say, to the degree and as long as unions function
as real unions, an environment emerges that cannot help but
creating  a counter-culture. It is not unions that are the problem,
it is their almost complete absence. So I claim. I will not here
and now enter into the traditional counter-arguments, rooted
in particularily in the council communist tradition -- or should
I say the unionist tradition today better know under the name
council communism -- that unions have only become what they
had to become and what they always will become, unions as
brokers of labour power, permanent organisations etc.
For me the the class composition thing might be more interesting
in this context, for while I generally find the council communist
critique of unions the best among "anti-unionists," also because
they tend to be far better informed on the topic than rest of the
critiques, their critique none the less differ little from the critique
underlying, and to a great extent incorporated into, anarcho-syndicalism.



Harald





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