What do we want? Goods!

hey y'all, thanks for the comments, it's really helpful. Particularly Madashell's point about the short term vs betting on the long term. I was thinking more in terms of how to reconcile 'the goods' and struggling for revolution, as EdWob puts it. There's this essay I like by Don Hamerquist, about Lenin... it needs an edit and probly should be cut into multiple essays, but it makes a point that for Marx in the Communist Manifesto, one key role for communists in mass movements/organizations is to be representatives of the future in the present. I think that's relevant here, in that the communist view is the long shot and not the short term better odds to get the goods. The essay is at the bottom of the page here - http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.com/search/label/Leninism

NCWob - dude I thought we (as in you and me) agreed to just put that piece out. I think you should, full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. Email it to everyone who should have it and slap it on the internet. That will provoke questions about print copies, and maybe provoke some wider responses and discussion like we hope.

JK - I agree that assemblies from the floor etc doesn't eliminate the tension, just eases it. The point I was trying to get to with this was that similar tensions can exist even in workplace organizations that don't go down the contractual route. I think you hit the nail on the head that this is about *why* people are involved, what the vision and values of the members are. If people are simply involved because they want goods, that's simply not a revolutionary perspective. I for one used to believe that just enough workers getting enough rises in their allotment of goods was sufficient for revolution - like, that that was what a revolutionary syndicalist position meant. That's now seems so obviously wrong to me that I can't remember why it sounded plausible before. Part of this over all is about trying to think through what the relationship is between day-to-day struggles under capitalism and struggles to end capitalism. I think in the past I have thought about the link in too linear a way -- as if the struggle to end capitalism is just a really, really big everyday struggle... I don't really know how to talk about this without resorting to terms that I think sound wonky, about the class in itself and the class for itself. The article I posted is partly an attempt to think this stuff out in a somewhat less technical sounding vocabulary.

Also: this is annoying but this morning I found another old draft of an article, that deals with some similar things. Fortunately it's not exactly the same, but I probly could have saved myself some time if I had remembered this earlier piece. Anyway. I'm going to post that in a second too. If folk would be willing to give some editorial feedback I'd really appreciate it, like if the original post and the thing I'm about to post should be combined into one piece or should be done just as one, or something else.

here's the other article draft I mentioned. like i said, some similar themes, feedback requested and gratefully welcomed. The ending bit is really a totally different thing, I think, unless someone has an idea about to make it connect. I also have a hunch that there's some conceptual resonance here with the stuff about communization and with insurrectionary anarchist perspectives, about what we want and why -- as communists we don't just want more stuff and better lives under capitalism, we want a different social order. (I'm not totally sure though because I have a hard time being motivated to read the communization kind of stuff, and I'm not sure I really understand it.)

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I think I first heard Staughton Lynd make this point but I’m not totally sure. Whoever it was, the argument goes like this. The legal system of collective bargaining exists to maintain labor peace. That is, it exists to reduce conflicts between workers and bosses, specifically conflicts that interrupt production in an unpredictable way. There are conflicts under the mainstream system of industrial relations, conflicts that lead to work stoppages, but they tend to be made more predictable – strikes happen around contract negotiations.

All of this has two costs. One, it makes workers’ organizations less powerful in relation to employers, so that workers can't win gains as much. Two, it limits experiences that can politicize the class. I and my closer comrades have used both of these as arguments in favor of noncontractual organizing. I want to lay out these arguments then suggest some of their limits.

The first cost of no strike clauses/labor peace agreements -- workers will not win as effectively under these! -- is about a sort of short-term pragmatic argument for noncontractual organizing, or if you like, a bread-and-butter argument. Here’s a version of that argument: “contracts are only as strong as the organization behind them, otherwise they’re just piece of paper. If you have the strong organization built that you would need in order to get a good contract, then you don’t need the contract at all! You can get as much or more of the stuff you want through a noncontractual approach!” I’ve made this argument before.

I think this bread-and-butter argument is true in some cases, but not in all cases. One to reason why people can get more through contracts sometimes is that labor peace has a price, so to speak. That is, bosses push for having a no strike clause and other contract language that limits and manages workplace conflict. This is worth money to bosses. It’s worth paying for labor peace. So it’s not *really* true when we say “if you can get it with a contract, you can get it without a contract.” In some cases, workers really can get more from their bosses by signing a contract that signs away some of their rights.

People really can get more sometimes in the short term by accepting a labor peace agreement. What I mean is, there is no guarantee that labor peace gets you less or that militant action gets you more, in the short term, in all cases. There are many factors that determine how much people can get from each approach. To be clear, people definitely can win short term gains pretty quickly with a small group taking action together, if the demand is low-cost enough for the employer, and/or the employer is weak enough.

The bread-and-butter argument is also true as a long term tendency: contracts that include signifiant gains are the result of strong organization, they don’t create strong organization. What’s more, there are dynamics in the industrial relations regime that aren’t good for organization over the long term. Without a lot of conscious effort and hard work, over time contracts tend to lead to problems which erode organizations, to push things in a direction away from work stoppages and direct action, to encourage control by experts, and so on. In the long term, contracts don’t help working class power, and they probably harm it. They certainly do if they contain no strike clauses.

As I said, there's a second type of cost to labor peace. In my view – and this isn’t original on my part, I just can’t remember where I got it from – it’s good for workers to experience conflict with the boss. The collective organization involved, the relationship we build, the act of standing up for ourselves, all of this has the potential to help people start to understand the world differently. It can help make less politicized people start to understand that we have to abolish the wage system. This means that when labor peace makes for less conflict, it makes for less of those moments that have the possibility to radicalize people.

The second cost of labor peeace is about a radical argument for noncontractual organizing. I’ve made this one too, I think it goes something like this: “in noncontractual organizing people run their own affairs more, and have more experiences of conflict and collective power, so they’re more likely to be radicalized.” Basically, the argument is that a higher percentage of workers will be radicalized by a campaign that uses noncontractual methods than by a contractual campaign

I still think this argument is basically right. At the same time, this argument involves a criticism of mainstream unionism. I think we should be honest and apply this criticism to noncontractual organization too. A friend told me a story recently about a group of workers who organized themselves independently against a big public facility. This was a relatively small group of workers compared to the size of the facility. It was I think less than 300 people and a facility that has employees numbering in the thousands, serving members of the public numbering in the tens of thousands, and dealing with millions of dollars. The workers had the power to shut the place down, and they used that power to bring the facility to a stop temporarily. They put forward a list of demands they wanted met. The bosses gave in on every one of them. The bosses then said “hey next time you have any problems, let us know and we’ll fix things right away so we don’t need to have any of these headaches.”

In many ways, this arrangement is a victory. The workers got what they wanted and they had an experience of collective action. Most of us would love to be in the position of these workers -- winning something! more money! making the boss concede! -- who wouldn't want those things? At the same time, what happens next time? Management said "come to us, we'll give you what you want." Will the workers do so? Should they? If we think in terms of what I called bread-and-butter arguments, then the workers might as well get whatever they can without action – after all, nothing is too good for the working class, as Bill Haywood once said -- so why not get as much as possible for as little work as possible? The workers can still use direct action to get the goods, when they think they need to. It's also probably true that if the workers did this enough times, after a while their organization would weaken and they would be less capable of taking needed actions. The capacity to take actions is like a muscle - overuse it or underuse it and it atrophies.

On the other hand, let’s think about this in terms of the second issue I talked about, the second cost of labor peace, the issue of radicalizing workers through conflict. If the workers go to management and say “We want the following demands met or else” and they get their demands met, then where is the experience of struggle that radicalizes workers? It seems to me that this points out a possibility for a form of labor peace, within noncontractual orgaizing. It’s not the same as contractualism, but there’s a common element here. That is, if the workers were to go to management to get more instead of taking action to demand more.

As I’ve said, I think both these basic arguments are right in a lot of ways, but I think they’re a bit simplistic. Particularly on the second issue, radicalizing workers, I think some of my closest comrades are too quick to write off mainstream unions and their struggles. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I agree with pretty much all the criticisms. At the same time, I know people who have been radicalized by experiences in the mainstream labor movement – being a worker at a place that was organized by a union, being a worker at a place where people went on strike due to contract negotiations. One of the key people who started my IWW branch got radicalized by going out on strike as a member of a mainstream union during contract negotiations. This experience ended up helping cause my IWW branch to be formed, and our branch has pursued numerous noncontractual campaigns and actions and has had a tranformative effect on many people in our small city. It seems to me that if we care about that second point, radicalizing workers through conflict, then whatever else we say about mainstream unions and the system of industrial relations, we have to admit that some of the time workers get radicalized by conflicts in that arena too. Furthermore, there's a possibility of noncontractual organizing have similar labor peace dynamics as in contractual organizing.

I want to change gears a minute. I want to think about the IWW and revolution. I don't know much about revolutionary transition. I can think of a few models. Here’s one. A group seizes the state and imposes a new society. Maybe the group has broad support among workers and other people, maybe it doesn't. That matters a lot but not for my purposes here. Here's another model. The workers have a general strike which ends capitalism. Vague, I know. Maybe the strike is led by a union or unions, maybe it happens spontaneously or maybe it’s called, maybe it involves non-union workers. I don’t know. In any case, there are a few places the IWW could fit into these scenarios (I know we’re not down with seizing the state). One is for us to be THE organization that makes it happen. We literally grow to be One Big Union of all workers. Or, we grow to One Big Union of a whole lot of workers, enough to kick off some major social upheaval. Or, we’re one organization among many who makes a contribution. I don’t have a crystal ball, but that last one is my hunch about what will happen.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m not sure about the general strike as a model for revolution, even though I like it better than seizing state power. (I know there are other possibilities too, I’m just saying.) I’m also not convinced that the IWW as a formal organization will play a big role in the revolution. I’m not convinced any current organization will do so. I do think the IWW will make a major contribution, along the lines of the sort of transformative experiences that come out of struggle, that I tried to discuss in relation to what I called the second cost of labor peace. I think the IWW will – we already have – make a contribution by radicalizing workers, and by giving those radicalized workers skills and confidence and relationships that they will use to contribute to the movement of our class as a whole. Maybe we’ll play a bigger role than that. That’d be cool. Even if we don’t, I think this role I mentioned is enough. We’re helping make more working class revolutionaries. When there are enough working class revolutionaries at some point, then a big group of them will work out the specifics of how to get down to the historic mission of the proletariat. I don’t think completing that mission is in the cards for the relatively near future, it seems to me that our tasks for now are preparing ways to get that mission onto the agenda in a real and winnable way – but getting the project onto the agenda as a real possibility is not the same thing as actually carrying out that project once and for all.