"Critical Comments in the NEFAC Workplace Position Paper"

There was some discussion here:

http://libcom.org/forums/organise/nefac-workplace-position-paper

and here:

http://libcom.org/forums/organise/critical-comments-on-the-nefac-workplace-position-paper

Shit the cats out of the Bag....

...now what are we going to do?

i might disagree with some of NEFACS positions but the one's Quebec one's that stayed with me in Belfast has their heads screwed on alot tighter than you.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, is a crude ultra leftism mixed with Gilles Dauve fan boyism, no it's Super Communist!

Mr. Wright also said that "All forms of organization are mediations" and if we can only do away with them we can get back to "organic social life". I guess by that logic disbanding our organization would bring us one step closer to revolution.

I have my personal disagreements with the paper and I would be surprised if anyone in our federation thinks it's perfect, but at least we went through the process of collectively producing a text around which we can compare and contrast our disparate experiences and individual strategies in the struggle, and at least we made it public so others can do the same. This guy's assessment of the result is that we are "retarded" and that we need to read Glaberman (many of us have--actually there's a NEFAC collective named Punching Out) and Dauve (sad to say, I don't think I'm the only one in the fed who went through that embarassing phase).

I'm sorry, but most of us live and work almost entirely within capital, and we're not going to destroy it by slipping out one at a time. If your reaction to figuring out that one style of institutional apparatus or another is connected to capital is to kick and scream and say EW GET IT OFF ME and denounce others who don't do the same, good luck. We think that building class struggle is an effective way to fight against capital, and if the conclusion of your series of abstractions is that we should work individually and fight against unions in the hopes of some kind of spontaneous mass paradigm shift, well then you've kind of drifted down on the other side of any decent class struggle that does emerge.

Mr. Wright likes his boss and explains that the guy is merely a "cipher" for capital. That's his prerogative. Continuing down this path we would assume that cops are just "ciphers" for administration and rapists are just "ciphers" for patriarchy. Hey maybe if we click our heels three times and write the best manifesto ever it'll all just go away, we'll have a "spontaneous" citywide mass strike, and through this struggle directly build communism and restore organic social life. Well done! Great Idea!

Back inside history some of us are working together in a group and trying to assess strategies, and we think that given the bleak range of options we have, particularly in the US, it's worth participating in the movement of unions against management. If you haven't noticed, some of the most important organizing going on right now in the US (janitors in Houston and meatpackers in North Carolina, just from this month's news) embraces illegality in unashamedly defending undocumented workers, coming into confrontation with both of the state's linked strategies against immigrants (direct repression and wage depression). Shifts toward organizing citywide and industrywide are promising too, as is the fact that some US unions are at least putting some serious thought into coordinating workers internationally so that we have a framework to act together in rupturing global production lines.

Now sure this is a dynamic that can also rejuvenate the system. Sure class conflict is the motor of development of capital. But to say it can only ever be that is simpering idealism. We happen to think that the political recomposition of the class can also lead to a fundamental break. But it unfortunately won't be "spontaneous"--as a class we have to get to that point where we can make that choice, and then we have to choose to do it. One or the other isn't going to cut it. For the time being people in our federation are going to participate in the labor movement, among other strategies, whether or not some guy on the internet wants to call us retards.

MJ personal capacity

well, take for example his fixing on the word "workplace", that NEFAC aims at self-management of the workplace. He assumes that this must be something like a factory, apart from home life and not integrated with, or with links to the community. But that doesn't follow from the use of that word. He's being pedantic.

He talks as if it was only in pre-capitalist society that people produced in their houses as artisans and farmers. But actually the first form of capitalist "workplace" was the home of workers, in the putting out system.

It might have been better for the NEFAC statement to talk about gaining power over the labor process, including things like its location, the way work is organized including the division of labor and so on. But it is a mistake to reject self-management. Self-management is the opposite of what Marx called "alienated labor." Humans have the capacity to foresee what they produce, to imagine it, conceptualize the product of their work activity in advance, to develop tools to make it, to plan out how it is to be produced, and then to actually do the necessary work to fulfill their plans. This is what self-management is, it is something humans have a very basic need for. and not only of productive activity, because humans have the capacity to self-manage their consumption and other aspects of life. To say that the various aspects of life are to be self-managed is to say that people are to have control over their lives, this is opposite of, the negation of, oppression.

t.

I gotta tell ya t, that's pretty much _Das Capital_ that you're saying. If Wright's a Marxist, maybe he ought to read some Marx.

Right on! The dialectic between contingency and necessity will occur as the workers work to meet their own needs. NEFAC must continue to struggle within the workplace to facilitate the workers meeting their own needs.

I feel the same way Nate. I read it when it first came out and was very impressed with it, actually talked to one of them NEFACers about it, and would like to have a discussion on it here as well.

Completely off the dome, my first critique was that it did not mention building in the bosses' military. The military is a workplace, and it will be vital revolutionary work to have a revolutionary center within the military.

I found the paper to be a breath of fresh air and pretty good. It showed a good anarchist understanding of power, and was quite material. I like how they took the Makhno poistion that syndicalism is a tactic in the class struggle, but not a principle of class struggle. You could tell that a lot of work went into it.

Once I read this:

I realized that he was a fucking idiot and off of his rocker. As a communist, I don't believe in abolishing the workplace. The workplace will be a community space where the emancipated working class can toil in their own interests.

WHAT? Is he just making this stuff up? The oppression of women was the catharsis that allowed the formation of the family, and the nucleus of the family was the origin of the entity of the state. It developed tribe -- family -- tribe -- kingdom -- state (I know this is a bit reductionist, but Wright's an idiot) I'll read the rest of his drivel when I find the time.

uhm, no. Toil is work. The ending of work is not the goal of the emancipation of labor, but the actual sensuos fulfilment of fruits of labor are. When you work for yourselves, your world, your society, to meet both your needs and society, then that is emancipation.

no shit sherlock. The only "class" will be the working class, all those who work to build the society that all benefit from and have their needs met through. Yup, that's the classless society of communism. All are free, and all workers.

As far as "fucking idiot" maybe I shouldn't have shot from the hip so hard, but man, his stuff is ridiculous. Not as ludicrous as a Crimethinc. pamphlet, but nearly so.

god this is semantic bullshit.

but anyway the proletarait abolishes itself and abolishes the division between work and the rest of our lives.

I'm still not too keen on the idea that we abolish "all work" as it brings to mind utopian bollox where no one ever does anything they'd maybe rather not. And of course you also get arseholes like Bob Black making anti work the central aspect of revolution.

Yes, infants and the infirm. Infants will toil to suckle enough sustenance to grow. The infirm will have thier needs met as workers who toiled for the working class, and will toil to the best of their capacity -- "from each according to ability, and to each according to need." will be the fundamental principle of a communist world.

Yup.

Yes, but it specifically means work of any type. Any time tht you struggle to accomplish any task, you must toil to do so. The words "toil" work" and others are particular aspects of the same basic generality.

NO, that would still be toil. If you want to keep playing the word game, then by all means carry on.

I agree rev, and this juxtaposing of the objective skews the dialectic of revolution away from the emancipation of the toilers by the toilers themselves through seizing control of their own lives into some utopian fantasy of a society where nobody works.

I think NEFAC does a good job infusing the understanding that the goal is the working class seizing control of the ways and means of production, with themselves being included as the ultimate means of production.

Yuck!

I don't want a world without struggle! How fucking dull and pathetic would that be, it's just the pinnacle of bourgeois consumerism.

There are plenty of things i struggle at yet still enjoy, because ultimately enjoyment and happiness are not ends in themselves but products of working towards various things.

There is nothing enjoyable about getting your legs kicked senseless in a football game, the enjoyment comes exactly through struggling against that in overcoming it, in the fact you end up nutmegging the oafish fucker and sending it round his keeper.

Likewise I struggled to get a grasp of Marx when I was younger and still struggle with ideas in my head, what would be the point if they were just easy.

It's a very bourgeois idea to harp on about happiness and enjoyment in the abstract as final principles, it's just the flipside of the protestant work ethic that celebrates toil for it's own sake.

What you describe sounds like some sort of Brave New World where people only try things they are good at or enjoy in the most banal superficial way.

Catch how does necessary = coercion?

I'm afraid that breathing and eating are necessary they aren't coercion though.

There is a differance between struggling and not liking something per se as you've now made clear in your point about gardening.

So really no issue but the point is that we can still refer to things as toil or struggle without equating doing them coercion, also kids might not want to learn to read or do maths but they have to if they want to actually enjoy the fruits of society.

So it is infact you whose playing semantic games and in a manner that restricts the field of meaning in a particularly unhelpful way.

It doesn't. Please quote where I said it does, thanks.

You said this:

Which suggests coercion to some extent - whether public opinion or the threat of withdrawl of co-operation.

I'm suggesting that really we ought to be able to go a long way to ensure that if there's a degree of coercion (no matter how soft) in say sewage processing, toilet cleaning, muck spreading, road surfacing or whatever - say a rota and not everyone really wants to do it, then those tasks could be transformed by a high degree of automation so that no one would have to work hard to complete them, to minimise the work involved etc., and therefore they couldn't rightly be called "toil".

That's amazing, I see what you've done there! But yet...

Unless they're breast refusing or have some kind of digestive problem, then generally infants fucking love suckling and it'll often be the one thing that'll calm them down or cheer them up. Calling something as natural and easy as breast feeding "toil" is again a complete misuse of the word.

Yes we can, and I didn't equate them in any of my posts so I'm not sure why you're bothering to argue this strawman?

Considering you're ascribing arguments to me I've not made I find this a bit rich.

wangwei, here's my initial comments from that first thread. I assume you've read the previous threads we had on this?

*(quoted to give the above some context