Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:11:15 +1000
From: Steve Wright <pmargin-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: Fwd: [VT_THEORY] on empire and negri




Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:

[snip]

>
> As for the IWW, as I am sure that Steve would agree
> on, they obviously functioned within quite another
> context.
>
> Harald

Yes, I was just thinking of the IWW's efforts to respond to the growing numbers
of (often migrant) workers tending machines, and how craft unionism excluded
them.

I had forgotten about the Russian factory committees - I remember that Peter
Rachleff wrote an article about them a long time ago. And there was also a
debate about the Russian factory committees in the British journal Critique
about 30 years ago between Chris Goodey and Maurice Brinton, where the former
drew in part on Bologna's 1967 critique of the workers' council movement in
Germany. It was an odd sort of debate, with the two of them arguing past each
other as I recall ...

It would be interesting to know more about the unions from which the Bolshevik
Workers' Opposition drew much of its base, and the extent to which those unions
were craft or industrial-based, and also the extent to which they encouraged
workers' self-organisation (not a great deal, I suspect).

Steve




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