the role of an anarcho-syndicalist organisation and the role of an anarchist federation

at present, no. people in SolFed recognise there's no point being an anarchist-federation-but-not-really though, and there are discussions on how to shed anarchist federation functions and develop 'union functions' (in the sense i outline on the other thread).

thing is then SolFed would have no purpose, so this would (with some reason) be interpretted as an attack on SolFed/IWA. like i say on the other thread, the most hostile reaction to Strategy & Struggle was that we were accused of trying to turn SolFed into a purely political organisation, when in fact we were saying that's what we are at the moment and we should try and change that!

so we don't want to be a political organisation, therefore we should be serious about developing into a political-economic one. although as vanilla.ice.baby says as well, i don't see why multiple political anarchist organisations wouldn't be involved if SolFed managed to become the political-economic network of miltiants with union functions we aspire to (bit of a mouthful, which is i guess why people say revolutionary union or union in formation).

i do agree, but the terminology is very clunky. the important thing is that when SolFed says 'revolutionary union' it means 'pro-revolutionary network of militants with non-representative union functions that agitates for self-organisation' (or so we've been told by the critics of S&S). while i can see how the former can be confused with the IWW or whatnot, the alternatives employ a lot of clunky jargon. 'anarcho-syndicalist union' might be a workable stand-in.

fully functioning a-s union? yeah i dunno. political-economic network taking on some of those functions? i don't see why not, in principle.

i'm not even sure how much this represents a change in SolFed thinking so much as an actual explanation of it, for all the heat generated by S&S we were actually surprised how much common ground there is (like my description of a 'revolutionary union' is a straight paraphrase of our harshest critics).

that said, we may well get to next conference having taken on board our comrades criticisms and get voted down again for general deviancy/being from the south/talking to the AF

we'll see... we hope to internally circulate a draft of the history section soon and take on board criticisms before we get to a final document.

i'm no going to name names and it doesn't seem like a major problem, and it also certainly seems to have improved (like with the AF's preston nutcases). actually when one of them said all of SolFed should be shot it did help understand why Preston SFers were skeptical of our 'co-operate with the SF' motion.

me neither, but i'd imagine any difference is on 'the union question', and given as loads of you are in the IWW, which definitely is a registered union of the kind A&P #7 criticises, i can't imagine it would be much of an obstacle.

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yes i understand this - which is why we use the term and i think SolFed's main 'political' problem is communicating our politics rather than the politics themselves (i wish we could publish some of the internal discussions which would pleasantly surprise people... i'll ask around, if people agree we might be able to publish an online appendix to the new pamphlet as background to the development since S&S...).

however, the counter argument goes as follows; a network of militants is just that, a revolutionary union can do more, such as the 'union functions' of offering advice and organising solidarity in the workplace. so say a victimised worker could approach the revolutionary union, which would help organise a mass meeting to discuss the grievance and try to collectivise it, perhaps knowing of others int he workplace with similar problems. the argument is a that's more than a simple network, and so 'networks of militants' may be proto-revolutionary unions but aren't synonymous.

on 'unions', the argument continures: there are two traditions in british trade unionism - the dominant one is based on bureacuratic unions which aim to recruit and represent workers on a purely economic basis (and tend to support the labour party, or a 'new workers' party' for political representation). this is the 'primarily organising a union' quoted from 'the Slow Burning Fuse' above.

the second tradition is that of a militant minority typified by the shop stewards' movement 1910-1914. this tradition was not so interested in recruiting all workers, but networking amongst the most militant to 'primarily organise conflicts with employers' as per the 'Slow Burning Fuse' quote above. this is the 'unionism' SolFed draws on.

obviously the problem is both to the 'man on the street' and much of the political milieu, 'union' has lost its original meaning as simply 'a combination of workers' and become synonymous with the former bureaucratic, representative trade unionism. the argument is people have a vague idea that unions are different to political parties, so describing what we advocate as a 'union' at least hints at workplace organisation (compared to all the Trot parties etc), while the prefix 'revolutionary' is meant to differentiate it from regular trade unions.

of course the problem is that there are rank-and-file unions like the IWW which describe themselves as revolutionary, which really muddies the waters. but here we're into semantics/communication of our ideas rather than our ideas themselves. historically we've been poor at this, and assumed anyone who doesn't get it is hostile, which is unfortunate. now i might get in trouble for this, but this is what the most comprehensive internal critique of our pamphlet said on the matter (any SolFed comrades reading, i'm quoting this to give credit to our critics and show there were substantive objections to S&S):

to be honest, i think that puts it more clearly than we do in S&S, and i wish there was SolFed propaganda with that clarity (a 'role of the revolutionary union' akin to the AF's 'role of the revolutionary organsiation' wouldn't go amiss, i'll suggest we do one once the new pamphet and the attendent discussions are done with).

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i don't disagree, but you can see how as given that's basically SolFed's strategy it may be interpreted as hostility to form a new organisation rather than join an existing one. now the most important thing is these organisations exist, but i think there's a serious discussion to be had about this in the wider milieu. if we can clearly explain our actual ideas and strategy that would certainly help too.

ok this is a substantive point. Jack's already pointed out nobody's claiming 60 people is a revolutionary union, and no1's done a pretty good job of describing what is.

so i'll explain why i disagree with your/the ICC approach (you've made your bed there ). as i said in the OP, i think the critieria for a political group are much tighter than required for revolutionary workplace organisation. for example, if there are people who are in favour of direct action, solidarity and self-organisation, with a broadly libertarian communist perspective, then i think they can benefit by all being part of one organisation that organises industrially and regionally. they could produce industrial (and regional) bulletins advocating mass meetings and direct action, reporting on other struggles in the sector and lessons learned etc - like we've tried to do on an ad hoc basis with Dispatch and Tea Break, only more systematically.

there was a definite difference with those being written by workers effected than if they were primarily written by outside politicos - certainly in how they were received on picket lines. the Education Workers' Network tries to do this a bit, but obviously it's pretty small. if the SP were to do this, they'd be organising on a political-economic basis too. it wouldn't be anarcho-syndicalist though as it would be organised along leninist lines and have SP not anarchist politics.

now to organise on this basis, so long as people are opposed to sex/gender/sexuality/race/religious based discrimination (i.e. act on a basis of class solidarity) i think that's sufficient. for an anarchist poltical group however, a more developed critique of gender roles and capitalism, materialist opposition to religion, a critique of the very notion of race etc are all pretty important. so i think an anarchist political group should be tighter than an anarcho-syndicalist network of militants/revolutionary union. this tightness also suggests a plurality of specific political groups, since there will be disagreements - so you have larger ones like the AF, smaller ones like L&S, specific editorial groups like libcom and aufheben and so on. ideally all of those people would also be involved in an anarcho-syndicalist organisation (i'm not saying SolFed is necessarily it).

i don't really understand this... SolFed and the AF (and other specifically political groups) exist, and i don't see a problem with trying to clearly define our roles and objectives. as a member of neither, i can understand if this doesn't interest you.

like i say i'm not particulary attached to the term 'revolutionary union' and we tend to use 'network of militants.' but if you want to engage with the substance of the argument instead of repeatedly telling us to call it something else then i (and no1) have tried to explain the reasons behind the terminology, which are non-trivial. i mean if you were discussing mass meetings direct action etc with someone, and instead of commenting on that they just kept saying 'but THAT's not communism, EVERYBODY KNOWS that the USSR was communism' you'd recognise it's not a very constructive way to carry on a discussion right?

in any event, this discussion is firmly rooted in the real world. just in our local we're involved in supporting various workers' struggles (basically as a political group at present). we've also been involved in a broader group for supporting the Vestas workers made up of Trots, greens, councils communists, anarchists and so on, which organised a packed-out meeting addressed by a Vestas worker, people from the Lewisham Bridge occupation and a Cityclean worker, with a general consensus that we need to support workers' direct action and class solidarity independently of (and even against) the trade unions. what if any grouping comes out of this is up for grabs.

we also have two members in one workplace, who instead of being simply two members of a political group are also part of the EWN, which means they have access to a wider network, an industrial newspaper and so on. obviously the EWN isn't anywhere near the size and influence of a 'revolutionary union', and so the potential benefits of this are somewhat curtailed. but we're not dreaming up strategies out of thin air but out of reflections on our concrete practice in the present and discussions about where we'd like to be in the future. a strategy is that which links A to B.

i'm all in favour of workplace groups that are broader than the (pro-revolutionary) network of militants - in fact a couple of our education workers have had a few meetings in the pub trying to set one up. however if you refuse to define a lot of these day to day things as 'union functions' you're (a) being completely ahistorical as they're things unions have been doing for a couple of centuries and (b) you'd have to say that a lot of the day-to-day stuff Steven does as a Unison convenor isn't union functions either.

i don't think a critique of the unions is furthered by labelling everything bad they do as 'union functions' and everything useful they do as 'practical things which are undertaken by a workplace group day-to-day' - rather i think the critique needs to be of the role of (trade) unions as representatives of labour power and thus mediators of the conditions of its exploitation, not agents of its abolition, then stressing the useful things they do do (link different workplaces, act as a source of advice, help organise collective action) can be done independently of such structures.

ASR is published by Wobblies in the US who consider the IWW anarcho-syndicalist, so i'm not sure what that says about the views of the UK IWA section? I'm not saying there aren't plenty of 'anarcho-syndicalists' who use the prefix completely spuriously. And every issue of DA carries the following disclaimer: "Direct Action is published by the Solidarity Federation, the British section of the International Workers Association (IWA). DA is edited & laid out by the DA Collective. Views stated in these pages are not necessarily those of the Direct Action Collective or the Solidarity Federation."

Now i could help you out and find you a leaflet that appears to copy and paste from the IWW, advocating 'One Big Union' - i'm not saying SolFed is and has always been a paragon of theoretical and tactical unity (i think that leaflet reflects the fact tha until recently there's been no formal method for producing national propaganda so stuff like that slips through). All i am saying is what has been said to us in response to S&S - i wish we could publish the correspondance because it shows a high level of political debate which i think reflects well on the organisation. although if people were just going to ctrl-F for 'revolutionary union' and argue over terminology not substance, there might be little point. (fwiw, the nearest to a defence of 'One Big Unionism' there's been is to say it's simply an aspiration that all workers adopt anarcho-syndicalist politics and join us. which everyone acknowledges is neither likely or necessary, therefore i think it's pointlessly obfuscating to nick the slogan of a different organisation when we don't even mean it. but that's from one individual who's not particularly attached to the term.)

well that's precisely what the 'revolutionary' bit means. if a union is simply a 'combination of workers', then a revolutionary union is a 'combination of revolutionary workers' - adjectives are a wonderful thing

like i say, i'm not particularly fussed about the terminology, the important thing is we actually formulate a strategy to move towards such a situation.

it's still very much a work in progress - we don't have the internal procedures to formally agree things between conference, so someone tends to take the initiative, people make criticisms and a consensus is reached that way. please feel free to elaborate what the problems are. the final sentence - "All decisions are made by the mass membership of the unions" appears to have been added in unilaterally to an otherwise collectively agreed text - the whole thrust of the criticism of S&S has been that revolutionary unions function perfectly well as minorities as they indeed necessarily must most of the time, so the addition of the word 'mass' seems to go back to a One Big Unionist view. please feel free to elaborate any 'questionable details'.

not just Brighton SolFed, it appears to be the 'orthodox' SolFed position going by the post-S&S discussions. the emerging consensus seems to be that anarcho-syndicalists/revolutionaries should organise as workers but as a militant minority who relate to our workmates and the wider class through organising/advocating mass meetings where we argue for militant direct action. i think that's (a) a good approach and (b) very different to the IWW 'revolutionary unionism' which looks to recruit workers into a recognised trade union and then take action on that basis. we really should make this clear, and the current phrasing of a lot of our stuff is ambiguous. but like i say if anyone in solfed basically wants to be the wobblies with circle-As then they haven't said so, and there have been some pretty thorough discussions.

basically SolFed people use union in a very non-loaded sense to mean just a group of workers (and let the adjective do the talking). left/council communists tend to use union synonymously with trade union. so i think there's a lot of mutual misunderstanding. something we're looking to do in S&S 2 is embellish the classic syndicalist critique of unions (pro-democracy, anti-bureaucrat) with Debord's argument that 'the representation of the proletariat has become the enemy of the proletariat' - and thus explicitly develop the idea of anarcho-syndicalism as a practice of self-organisation in contrast to representative unionism, be it traditional or radical rank-and-file like the IWW.

ok cheers, i stand corrected. i've never actually seen a physical copy of ASR, let alone been familiar with its editorial collective.

Also as Jack says, i'm talking about IWW-UK, but yeah the exact legal status isn't so much the issue as the organising model. As far as i'm aware, the IWW tends to organise by getting people in a given workplace to join and then self-manage their own job branch, hence 'One Big Union for all workers'. what SolFed's talking about is revolutionaries organising in the workplace, and involving other workers through mass meetings which control the struggle. the mass meetings may be really regular if there's a militant workplace, or more ad hoc if there's not. but the mass meetings and the revolutionary union aren't the same thing.

as a comrade said criticising S&S: "the aim of anarcho-syndicalism is not to enroll every worker into the revolutionary union but rather to organize mass meeting at which the union argues for militant action. The mass meeting is not the anarcho-syndicalist union but a democratic means of organizing. The union is made up of workers committed to the methods and ideas of anarcho-syndicalism." i actually think we argued something like this in S&S, only we called the revolutionary union a 'network of militants' and the mass meetings the revolutionary union - but the relationship between revolutionary workers and the rest is the same; not leading like a political vanguard but agitating for a democratic forum to air class demands and initiate direct action. certainly this is what led us to cite the CNT's role in Puerto Real and the SolFed comrade's role in Workmates as positive examples to emulate.

i think this difference between 'simple syndicalism' and 'anarcho-syndicalism', which has developed in practice although with much overlap, can be theoretically enhanced with a critique of representation per se. anarchists rejected political representation per se, and turned to the unions, such as the CGT in 1895. subsequently, syndicalists like Tom Mann developed a critique of bureaucracy, to which they counterposed a rank-and-file unionism influenced by French revolutionary syndicalism and the Industrial Unionism of the IWW.

i think the anarchist critique, and thus anarcho-syndicalism goes one step further, e.g. see the AF's critique of unions as representatives of labour power, thus structurally bound to mediate the conditions of its exploitation and unable to be revolutionary (the FORA anticipated this by rejecting the idea the union would survive capitalism, let alone become the structure of the new society. Maximov/Rocker/the IWA took this further by embracing a council system). the upshot of that is any anarcho- or revolutionary union has to reject representation in favour of self-organisation, which i think is the model i've outlined, where it is made up of revolutionaries and agitates for mass meetings, rather than trying to recruit workers, organise a shop then struggle like a more democratic version of a traditional union.