Who else does the IWW organise?

CCU or IWW?

ccu

the iww is a real union in some places, and currently the official line from the iww seems to be acting like a real union.

although much of the membership doesn't want to or doesn't function like on.

Because a lot of leftism in these times of quite low struggle is driven by ideology and analysis alone. What gets valued above all else is never making a theoretical mistake. The safest way of doing this is never to do anything beyond issuing leaflets or denouncing each other for lack of purity online. Keep both of these to the realm of rhetorical slogans, and never actually advocate anything that can be implemented in a meaningful manner and you get near 100% security from failure.

I'm all for the importance of ideology and intellectual analysis but these things are only as useful as the results they generate in terms of struggle in the short, medium and long term. The standard excuse for the above approach is to deny that anything can be achieved in the short term and that it is a question of waiting for the development of the class struggle to demonstrate the glorous correctness of the ideas you've spent all these years polishing.

A huge percentage of the threads here revolve around denouncing attempts to adopt politics to real world conditions. The alternative that is always presented is the advancing of slogans that have no meaningful application in the here and now.

The flip side of this is of course individuals and sometimes groups who spot this problem reacting to it by deciding that everything is simply a tactical question.

good analysis

MPs aren't members of the working class. 90% is too high. Just a substantial minority (though I'm unwilling to assign an exact figure like 15%). Which workers in which industries is important. Dog Groomers ain't gonna bring about a social revolution, even if they put a gun to Fifi's head. Interestingly enough, I think acknowledging such actually strengthens certain arguments because it calls on us to be strategic with what we do. We have limited resources. Do I think every worker should organize in their own interests--sure. Go for it. Kick some ass. Do I feel that every worker's job is essential for either the functioning of capitalism or it's abolition through social revolution--no.

Unfortunately for Chuck, I'm not so sure that cocktail waitresses at casinos are the lever that needs pulling. I'm all for them improving their wages, working conditions, getting benefits like health care etc... and I think the experience of them organizing together, realizing their own power and acting can be a revolutionizing experience for them. But if your long term goal is abolishing capitalism is your long term goal, I don't think organizing cocktail waitresses at casinos is strategic. I do like the aspect of the campaign that causes them to have to build working class power rather than going through the NLRB.

Just a quick example... let's say all of the Foxwoods Casino is struck. So what. If the strike lasts into a long term one, gamblers will go to another casino (as much as they'd walk over their own mother to gamble). But if the NYC TWU Local 100 strikes, they shutdown New York City. After a social revolution that abolishes capitalism, will we even have casinos? After a social revolution that abolishes capitalism, I figure we'll have even more mass transit. Also, I think healthcare is more strategic than casino waitresses.

Many of the strategic industries are already somewhat organized into unions of varying militancy and democracy. And that's specifically because they are vital industries and the workers there can use that vitality to make their jobs less precarious. Some of them might involved skilled trade, which also reduces the precarity. It also gets them higher wages and benefits than the average casino waitresses, and presumably a more comfy situations that they might be less willing to risk and may distort class consciousness for some of them into thinking they are middle class. To me, this seems like why it is important for radicals to be involved in the rank and file of those strategic industries.

In a lot of ways, Chuck is not as far from the IWW as either he or the wobblies would like to believe.

Yeah Joe you keep claiming this but to be fair I'd say the WSM's position on national liberation and in particular the North is something based more on a desire to have the right rhetoric for potential left republican recruits than any sort of reality on the ground.

p.s. I'm still waiting for someone from the WSM to offer one concrete benefit for the working class with the ending of partition?

Probably because your question is not an accurate reflection of our actual position and so is little more than me asking you if you have stopped beating your wife yet.

Not that this will stop you trolling every thread one of us posts on until out of sheer fustration we have to explain why this is in detail. An explanation you will then ignore and continue with the trolling until it becomes too embarrassing for you to do so. A pattern we have seen before and will see again as you continue in your self appointed role as the guardian of world anarchist purity giving heroic battle to the renegades all over the globe.

Have you ever considered joining the Norwegian IFA - you'd fit right in - I can see you handing out brown cards now.

It's amazing Joe it seems to me that quite alot of people seem to be losing something in translation. I mean i'd consider getting myself checked out by a shrink if it wasn't for the fact that others are having the same difficulties.

Tell me Joe when you cover your eyes do you think the world disappears?

To me it seems to be, if you say you want an end to partition to benefit the working class you should point out how doing so would actually benefit it - especially as you yourselves state that ending it will immediately increase sectarian violence.

Your points on "leftists" arguing against politics which have relevance in the real world might have some validity if they weren't based on you arguing for nationalism and reforming bureaucratic unions. Either of those things benefitting workers is far more pie in the sky than any of your detractors' arguments.

Ah, but who else is in a better position to place the arsenic in the cocktails of the bourgeoise? Surely the rev can't be all guns and bombs...

Its also a bit of Flint not acknowledging the shift to a service sector economy not to mention that while he's partially correct, he misses the industrial importance and strategic placement of HERE's many airport workers.

I think airports should be organized industrially, not by trade.

i consider them hospitality workers.

I don't think assassins should publically be members of labor unions.

However, all thieves must belong to the guild.

Good point.

I think there's a higher percentage of wobs and nefacers that play or played dungeons and dragons than in the general populace.

It's good propaganda tho Flint. If you win better conditions for any workers that am amount to which other workers see that as possible increases, particularly with your organisation. Workers in transient workplaces also carry the union message across the service sector industries, making organisation in other workplaces easier. I know exactly what you're saying and have a great deal of sympathy for it (that indeed is the role of the international to co-ordinate agitation in the serious workplaces) but in the current situation it all adds up.

Question to Chuck and Duke - are you guys members of political organisations?

I'm an ex-nefacer and my union is a political organization.

Sure. It's not just good propaganda either. The same tactics used to organize an industry that is more strategic can still be applicable to one that is less so. People also might gain experience winning reforms through direct action in one workplace, and then take that to a different workplace in a different industry. And if history is any guide, organizing class struggle can be infectious. Winning reforms for workers in any industry is a good thing to do regardless of whether it contributes to stragetic industrial organizing from a revolutionary perspective--because as Chuck always loves to point out... it's great when hospitality workers organize and win better wages, benefits and working conditions.

That said, is that where revolutionaries need to be? Or should we concentrate in the industries we think will be strategic, and let do gooder liberal reformists organize the less strategic industries? Sure, we should organize where we work, even if that's grooming dogs; but we can try to make choices on our occupations to position ourselves in industries we regard as more strategic.

Ofcourse, in the anglophone world... most anarchist who are in organizations are too few to have any kind of success with such concentration.

Maybe the IWW has enough members to start thinking that way... but what is most frustrating to me about the modern IWW is that it largely refuses to do so, always chasing hotshops, precarious workers and nonstrategic industries. Historically, the IWW started strong in mining, evolved into agriculture and timber, began getting into manufacturing and marine transport, and lost out to the likes of the UAW, ILWU and ILA. All those industries were strategic (and also vital to the war effort) which is one of the big reasons the government worked to crush the wobblies. (also changes in how that work was done with automation was probably more significant in dispersing the AWO).

When the IWW was organizing ACORN, Green Peace, Friends Center, UAW union staff, Members of Parliament, coffeeshops, bookstores, franchise restaurants, bike messengers, etc... it always makes me scratch my head thing "Well, ok... but where can you go with this in terms of a revolution". When the IWW was organizing at Jeff Boat, Truckers, recylers, grocers and food wharehouses... that seems a bit more strategic. But it's not done coherently. There isn't much of a strategy into what industries the IWW is going to go into from a revolutionary perspective.

The IWW might choose to go for starbucks but it'll do that because that has a high name recognition, it's an international company with lots of branches, it has high turnover so its easy to send in salts, and most other unions won't touch it because of the small sizes of the shops and the precarious situation of the employees. The IWW tries to make the flaws and difficulties of organizing those shops into virtues. While this might be strategic for a tiny union to do so to grow it's overall numbers, it's not strategic if the goal is "abolishing the wage system".

So this leaves me thinking that on one hand, the IWW isn't organized enough to function as a union except in an episodic, exceptional and quite rare situations; and on the other hand... the IWW isn't revolutionary enough to get strategic on it's activity.

With the exception of a Information Technology, most other strategic industries have long had some kind of unions (with varying degrees of densisty). So, in the U.S. at least, gaining recognition as the sole union in a strategic workplace would be quite difficult and even unneccessary in that it would be easier to organize rank and file groups than run a decert and new election, or to organize a wildcat recognition strike for the IWW (which wouldn't even be legal right?); and recognition isn't even so important for the goal of revolutionaries (though useful for collective bargaining of reformist immediate demands).

It's not a huge secret that the TWU Local 100 has had self-concious radicals (albeit Trots) in it for a long time, and that contributes at least partially to the militancy of that local that could defy the international, and pressure their elected officers, go on strike and have high participation, and still after all that have a no-vote rejection of a contract they weren't satisfied with.

Imagine the 1000 or so wobblies focusing on one industry, or even a couple hundred wobblies focusing in one industry, or even a hundred wobblies focusing on one industry in one local. Seems like it would have a lot more revolutionary potential than having that 1000 wobblies spread out between a 100 different industries, mostly in very precarious positions, in shops without any kind of union recognition, in industries that are not strategic.

I always lost this argument when I was in the IWW.

NEFAC, by comparison, simply lacks the members to even contemplate anything on this scale. Even our largest collectives tend to have less than a dozen active militants in a city, generally spread across nonstrategic industries haphazardly.

Still... I know enough to know that a committed group of radicals can do a lot. Chuck might talk about how the radicals literally took over HERE when the federal government cleaned out the mob. Now, I don't advocate siezing international presidencies... but I do know that even a small group of committed radicals can have an influence in organize. Like say the Trots in Minneapolis and the Teamsters Local 574 during the 1930s. Local 574 was a general teamsters local with less than 75 members when the Trots joined as rank and file members. Those Trots helped to change the Teamsters from a craft union to an industrial union, organized a general strike, and got the over-the-road campaign rolling. The Feds imprisoned the core of that crew during the WWII under anti-sedition laws (because they were also bold enough to oppose U.S. involvement in WWII).

They may have been Leninists, but I think they get some points for doing a helluva a job organizing.

Now folks can call me a fosterite, trotskyist, boring-from-within, union hack, reformist, substitutionist, whatever...

I agree with Flint's criticism of the IWW. This has also been one of my long-standing criticisms of it...one of the reasons I've never been a member of it. But in my experience, the libertarian left in the USA has, during my lifetime (i've been active since the late '60s) not shown a lot of ability for strategic thinking and strategic organizing. I know there are exceptions.

WSA has always had exactly the problem that Flint points to for left-libertarian groups in the USA. With a dispersed membership, lack of concentration in particular communities, it's difficult to develop a sustained collective organizing project. Members in Knoxville did organize an independent union of university employees at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. But a faction of incipient bureaucrat wannabes pursued affiliation to the CWA, and won that vote, altho a WSA member in the union fought it. If we'd had more members who worked there, we might have had a larger base of support that could have sustained an independent direction.

I'm not sure whether Flint and I would agree on what industries are strategic. I think there are certain advantages in organizing the "landlocked" industries because the work can't be moved overseases. This includes construction, transportation (motor freight, taxi, public transit, airlines, railways, longshore), public utilities, food service (restaurants and public and private cafeterias), catering, hotels, airports, building operations and maintenance (janitors, window-washers and other building maintenance, security guards), health care, child care, retail, warehousing, education.

Within these sectors I think there is plenty of space for a group of rank and file organizers, with sufficient commitment and rootedness in a community, to try to build a large independent union, based on principles of self-management and rejection of labor/capital partnership. But for us that requirement of "a group of committed rank and file organizers" isn't easy to meet.

I work in IT. A problem with this industry is that the work can be moved overseas. We've seen that in call centers of course. I worked for 14 years in Silicon Valley. During the '70s and '80s the industry pursued a strategy of moving the blue-collar, production end either to low-wage rural areas of the USA or, increasingly in more recent years, to the third world. The IT sector is also divided between its "retail" outfits (dotcoms, like amazon, ebay, etc) and the so-called "plumbing companies" (makers of production goods, tools, the "pipes" of the internet). Since '85 I've worked for hardware and software "plumbing companies." What gets left beyind in the USA is the highly paid control and design work -- marketing, "business development", engineering, documentation (in English, tho this is increasingly being offshored to India along with programming). Some of the other remaining forms of work, such as janitorial, cafeteria food service and security guards, are contracted out and this is part of an explicit strategy to avoid unions.

In 2000 a group of people associated with the CP organized an entity called Digital Workers Alliance in San Francisco. Ostensibly the idea was to organize the "dotcoms" -- the retail sector which was lower paid. There had been 50,000 jobs created in this industry in San Francisco. I brought some left libertarians who work in the industry to the group. Then the dotcom crash happened, and 50,000 jobs disappeared very quickly. The CPers wound up DWA (without a vote of the members, typical of the CP's undemocratic practices). The industry is hard to organize because companies make sufficient profit to pay the large staff of "professional workers" -- engineers and writers and so on -- high enough pay and good enough benefits, and things like stock options, to buy off discontent. Jobs are plentiful enough for this highly educated workforce to move to another company if they get discontented. Nonetheless, i think it would be feasible to organize a minority union, perhaps an explicitly left union, which would organize in part around its critique of the companies, something other than a traditional AFL type strategy.

t.

Tom, Flint, what movement or organization of rank and file workers within strategic industries within capitalism are you guys currently part of? And are those the industries in which you're employed? Just curious. I work in education, which is pretty unimportant, but I don't have the flexibility in my life right now to get a job at a more objectively important location. So I do what I can where I'm at and I support other organizing efforts, do a lot of training.

As for the IWW as a whole - if every wobbly was willing and able to get a job as a longshore worker or a trucker, I'd be all for it. Does that seem likely to anyone, though? It doesn't to me. Personally, I'd like to see the IWW for the near future focus on getting members to organize where their at, either in their own workplaces or supporting other campaigns in their area, or both. After say 2 years, we'll see how that goes. If it's working, we should see both quantitative and qualitative membership growth. We see what changes should be made etc as a result, what needs or problems are coming up that we need to address, do another 2 or 3 years of a similar plan. Then we check back in and have a union wide conversation about targeting an industry using the experience gained. That's my take.

ps- I have a charisma of 20.

Tom and I both work in Information Technology (we are both involved in "plumbing" as Tom calls it). Tom was involved in the DWA before it folded. I've been a former member of IWW IU560, Washtech and Techs United. If I thought any of those groups were doing anything constructive in the field, I'd be involved with them again.

Tom,

Why the emphasis on an independent left union? Couldn't you take any CWA local into a fairly independent direction. I'm not sure how you are using the term "left". Like CNT left, IWW left, UE left or ILWU left? I mean... really, what are we talking about here. CWA has always struck me on the progressive side of the AFL-CIO. It's mostly industrial. It recruits organizers from the shop floor. It's involved in a lot of solidarity stuff through JWJ. It has strikes, even pretty militant ones on a regional (as in the most of the northeast). I know there are problems... like during the last strike when the northern CWA locals settle before the mid-atlantic locals, which resulted in West Virginian CWA workers picketing the workplaces of their union comrades up farther north... but it would seem like in a fairly virgin industry that there would be a lot of lattitude for doing whatever.

I've been watching IT for a long time, and noticed a lot of false starting efforts... like the IWW, UE, Washtech (that eventually became a CWA affiliate), NWU, etc... it seemed to me the only ones with the resources and connection to mount a serious organizing challenge in the industry was the CWA... and it hasn't seriously committed resources to do that yet.

While you might not like the bureacracy of the CWA, there isn't much disupting that it has a very high density of the communications workforce and those workers can sometimes really fuck shit up against the bosses.

Maybe we should move this to another thread of specifically organizing IT.

I don't usually put the emphasis on "left" but on self-management of the union by the members. i think there are definite advantages in starting from scratch, because you can get out from under the AFL-CIO/CtW bureaucracy. This gets in the way of worker self-activity too often. They create channels for advancement up a hierarchy that encourages careerism. I articulated some of my arguments for this in the "Unionism and Workers' Liberation" piece I wrote. If the aim is to develop worker self-management of struggles, why not start by creating a union designed that way?

Historically whevever there has been a big advance in unionism in the USA it has found expression in the creation of new organizations -- Knights of Labor in the 1880s, IWW and other indy industrial unions circa WWI, IUAW and federal locals etc. in early '30s.

t.

i am an ex-nefac member, iww member and a bunch of other anarcho-stuff.

I'm currently a member of my union. My union is a working class political organization.

You mean, your union has a politics. That's not the same as a political organization. You're obfuscating. A political organization is one where people join specifically because of agreement with the political perspective of that organization.

t.

yup. that's why i am a member of my union.

now, most workers are members of it because it's their union. I am a member because i believe in the overall political/economic approach of the union.

Like running democrats for office?

yes

or occasionally Greens. HERE local 2 in San Francisco
backed the Green Party candidate in the last mayoral
election (he got 48% of the vote). but HERE local 2 has
lots of problems. They haven't had elections of shop
stewards in years. HERE's leader guy is reasonably
left-leaning and they've recently had an important
struggle in the hotels but that doesn't excuse the
fact the union is run totally top down.

t.