Comments on WSM trade union position paper

I thought I'd move this over here, to start a new thread.

1. Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) agrees with the Marxist thesis that "the history of all previously existing societies has been the history of class struggles." Does this mean WSM subscribes to the theory of historical materialism? The idea of that is that the mode of production is the key or basic structural feature in explanations of social history. This has the consequence that structures of gender or racial inequality have to be explained in terms of class struggle. But it seems to me that a plausible case could be made that structural gender inequality and structural racism take on a life of their own, at least this seems to be the case in the USA, and these become fault lines along which struggles get organized.

Now you might argue that since society came to be divided into classes, class struggle has been fundamental in explaining the direction that society has taken. This is consistent with allowing that there are other structures of oppression, and fault lines there. It's a question of nuance here, I guess.

2. WSM argues that capitalism is different than previous societies since everyday life prepares the working class to take over the running of society. This happens, they say, through workers being brought together into workplaces where they must cooperate in work, and also presumably in struggle to secure their advance and their freedoms, against the tyranny of the elite.

I would also add that captialism's dynamism in technological innovation forces it to create a working class that is more literate and educated than illiterate peasants.

But the problem with this is that in addition to explaining why proletarian liberation is a possibility due to the way capitalism organizes production, you also need to explain why this hasn't happened, that is, you need to explain how the system sustains oppression.

As long as we're relying on Marxist ideas here, we should also make use of Marx's idea that humans are "creatures of practice," that we end up being shaped, in our capacities, skills, tendencies, habits of thought, etc. by what we actually do. This is one of Marx's best insights.

When workers have their skills taken away and put into the hands of "professionals" and managers, and are in situation where their potential for skill and self-planning of their work, is denied to them, they're required to "do as you're told", and must acquiesce to this subordinated work situation in practice, many workers develop a consciousness of acquiescence to this, based on their actual life, to reduce the "cognitive dissonance" with their actual life, and acquiese in the professionals and managers making the decisions, come to accept the meritocratic ideology that the superior formal educations of the professionals and managers (in a society that tends
to track them away from further education) is what justifies their power over them.

Thus I think WSM is wrong to suppose that what ties worker consciousness to capitalism is just the media and ideology in society. That is only part of the cause of acquiescence to continued subordination.

This is precisely why it is inadequate to focus only on the role of revolutionary activists and organizers in "the competition of ideas" to explain the possibility of a change of working class consciousness in a revolutionary direction. It is also crucial to change worker action, actual practice, so that people begin to practice fighting the bosses and self-managing democratically their struggles, to develop the habits of self-management and independent thinking and action.

In other words I think the following explanation offered by WSM is not adequate:

"Why then don't workers use their numbers, their collective power and take over? Mainly because we are told we are not able to do just that. It is a messaged hammered into us...."

As I say, this is not an adequate explanation, for the reasons I've laid out above.

3. The WSM still sticks to Marx's traditional bipolar analysis of capitalism, the struggle is between labor and capital, there are just these two main classes. I think that this is an outmoded 19th century perspective. At the beginning of the 20th century capital accumulations got large enough that the entrpreneurs/owners could no longer due the planning and managing work themselves. And the need for a more extensive state to regulate and sustain appearances of popular leigimacy, all led to the emergence of a third main class, the class of top professionals and managers. I think the size of this class varies depending on the strategy of the particular national capitalist class, in the context of the politics and balance of forces in their country. In the USA, and the other English speaking countries, this class is larger than in the more social-democratic/social partnership countries of advanced capitalism (Germany, Sweden, etc) because a capitalist class that pursues a strategy of tyrannical subordination to minimize labor costs tends to build a very bloated managerial bureaucracy. Managerial bureaucracies are far larger in the USA, Canada and UK than in Sweden or Germany, for example. (See David Gordon's book "Fat and Mean" on this.)

I view the bloated, overpaid labor bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and CTW unions in the USA as not a part of the working class, but of the coordinator class (the class of managers,
and top professionals, supervisors, lawyers, etc.) Nonetheless, it is true that this bureaucracy is much closer to, and more dependent on, the working class than others, because the unions, at least at the local level, do have some significant element of democracy, however imperfect it is. I would agree with the WSM on that point.

Leninist groups in the uSA usually (but not always) have operated on the basis of Wm. Z. Foster's concept of "boring from within." This ends up being the idea of rank and file oppositions trying to change the labor movement by changing who sits in the union positions. But this leaves the structure the same, and that is the source of the problem with the unions. Because the Leninist concept of the "vanguard party" provides a ready-made justification for management of a movement by leaders, they have no principled opposition to the hierarchical structure of the unions.

WSM: "The rank and file movement is that movement within the unions of militant workers who are prepared to fight independently of the bureaucracy and against it when necessary. The form it has taken in Ireland has been that of combative shop steward committees, inter-factory committees, and groupings of activists within particular unions or trades."

In the USA there hasn't been in a very long time any tradition of independent shop steward committees. (There was some of this in the WWI era, but not more recently, as far as I know.) The rank and file opposition has mainly taken the form of "groupings of activists". Very often, however, these have been merely electoral slates. In some cases, however, they are groups that have a reform program, like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, New Directions in the UAW, and New Directions in the NYC transit workers union, etc. Occasionally WSA members have able to initiate an action committee, independent of the union.

WSM goes on to say they are against the WSM itself trying to "take over" a rank and file movement. The idea is that it should be open to workers moving in a radical direction
and willing to fight. I think I'd agree with this. Although WSA supports the formation of self-managed unions, or other grassroots formations such as workers centers, independent of the AFL-CIO or CTW bureaucracy, we don't convert this into a dogma. It's a tactic that is appropriate in certain situations. In other situations, the action committee in the context of an AFL-CIO union is more appropriate. They are also not mutually
exclusive, because in the USA often new grassroots, militant unions have emerged out of rank and file opposition movements in AFL-CIO unions when they ran up against the immovable bureaucracy. This is how CUE was formed in California, out of AFSCME, e.g.

But WSM says they are opposed to this tactic that American workers have used to gain greater control of their struggles:

"Breakaway unions offer no alternative in the long run as the problems that led to their formation will develop in the new union."

This is way too determinist. Take as an example the ILWU. This was created in 1935 by radicals on the west coast who broke out the west coast segment of longshoremen from the corrupt and authoritarian ILA. The ILWU continues to engage regularly in port shutdowns in solidarity with other workers. For example, they shut down the ports of LA and Long Beach, largest port in the industrialized world, for one day in 2003 in solidarity with the LA grocery strike. The rank and file longshoremen still retain pretty good control over negotiations thru their delegate conference. The union is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it is better than most unions in the USA. Given the perennial corruption in the ILA, the same cannot be said of that longshore union.

Moreover, how do you square this position against breakaways with your current support for the Independent Workers Union? Isn't your position contradictory here?

I have a different conception of unionism than WSM. I think unionism tends to be contradictory -- both a means of workers struggle to advance their concerns, and also at times a mechanism to control workers struggle within bounds acceptable to the elite classes. But unionism exists, throughout history and different countries, in a very broad spectrum, from virtually a worker assembly type of organization to highly vertical "company unions" or corporatist unions (like the PRista charro unions eg.).

This means that the strength of the two "sides" in the contradiction in unionism varies as you go along this spectrum. Control that benefits the dominating classes becomes strongest as you move towards the more corporatist, verticalist end of this spectrum, and the potential for revolutuionary struggle greater at the opposite end of the spectrum. It's also very likely that these forms express or reflect differences in the
level of class consciousness within a particular working calss in a particular period.

"Trade unions are not revolutionary organizations," WSM tells us. Well, it depends on what you mean by "trade union." It's possible you mean to refer only to the bureaucratic existing trade unions. If the working class is to build its sense of collective power, this has to come through pracice, through actually building organizations and struggles they control where they gain the experience and practice of running the struggle themselves. This is why we need to develop more self-managing mass worker organizations.

We can expect that organizations of this sort would become widespread in the period leading up to a revolutionary situation. It would only be if there is the means to widespread solidarity and direct worker collective struggle that a situation is likely to occur where workers would be pressing for a fundamental shift in power, to empower themselves. But because the working class changes itself in this way only thru a protracted process, it seems to me it is likely that there must be such self-managing mass organizations being developed during a protracted period of struggle prior to a revolutionary situation. Precisely because these mass self-managing worker organizations would be existing as organizations of collective struggle, they'd be a form of unionism.

4. WSM on Syndicalism

The fact is, there are quite a few different ways that anarcho-syndicalism can be interpreted. The fundamental failing of the WSM's discussion is that it doesn't acknowledge or deal with the fact that they are arguing only against particular interpretations of syndicalism. Their polemic therefore has the character of a strawman fallacy, because they are fighting a mere caricature.

I debated some of these issues with Alan MacSimoin of the WSM almost three years ago. I told them then pretty much what I am going to say now, so WSM doesn't have any excuse for repeating the same caricatures. That debate is here:

http://www.workersolidarity.org/debates.html

WSM says at the end of their critique of syndicalism that they favor the same sort of union structures as do syndicalists, but they don't really tell us what that might be.

"[Syndicalists] hold that most workers are not revolutionaries because the structure of their unions is such that it takes the initiative away from the rank and file." They infer that syndicalists therefore deduce that the strategy is organize all workers into "one big union in preparation for the revolutionary general strike."

There may be some syndicalists who think this way, but WSM are saying this is a defining feature of what the syndicalist view is, and as such this is a caricature, a strawman.

As I said earlier, there are a variety of things that affect the level of class consciousness. Partly it is the sort of culture that we live in, which the WSM highlights. But it is also a question of activity. Again, people tend to become what they do, consciousness is shaped by practice. What's required is for the working class to change, through the development of self-confidence, skills, habits of solidarity, active involvement, and understanding of the society, of the enemy they face. There are a variety of things that can affect this, such as publishing and training and alternative school efforts within the working class, the experience of greater solidarity around them, the experience of collective power through actually being drawn into struggles with others, the development of habits and understanding of how to organize in a self-managing, directly democratic way, and so on.

Developing mass organizations that are self-managed, and facilitate collective struggle, are certainly important and necessary, but there are a variety of ways that the way the working class organizes itself can change over time.

Given the current level of consciousness in the USA, it is reasonable to view it as a step forward if a sizeable group of workers form a new union organization that is more militant, more open about recognizing the inevitable conflict of interests with the employers, and self-managing in its form of organization. This would be a step forward even if, in keeping with the current level of class consciousness, it did not formally adopt a commitment to some revolutionary verbiage.

Thus the development of new selfmanaged union organization does not have to take the form of an explicitly revolutionary union in an ideological sense.

I've expressed here how the WSA views this. We support initiatives to form grassroots forms of worker mass organization, independent of the AFL-CIO or CTW hierarchies, even if these organizations are not explicitly revolutionary, and even if, from our point of view, they still have organizational defects, such as dependency on foundation grant financing.

I would imagine that the best situation for new independent unions to emerge from scratch would be in some field where there is a substantial number of workers, and a critical mass of initial activist workers. I could imagine this being a regional autonomous local in some field. For example, consider restaurants. in most cities this field is pretty completely unorganized in the USA. You'd need a major movement to organize them, as happened in some cities in the '30s. Here in S.F. we have a workers center, Young Workers United, which works in this field and has about 200 members. They've had some victories at the chain Cheesecake Factory. I could imagine this growing into an actual regional restaurant workers union on a large scale.

The only real reason to have a national union in this field would be because there are some major chains, like Yum Brands or Mickey D. or Starbucks. But most restaurants are local or regional in ownership. And their competition is local, because it's a service. The aim would be to organize all the restuarants in an area, to take wages and other worker-related issues out of competition.

An advantage to a cross-restaurant union in a city is that, if people get fired from one, they can get work in another, and still be in the same union.

We recognize that it is often unavoidable at present that struggles will be conducted through imperfect organizations, and we support the actual struggles, but that is consistent with saying that, as left-libertarians, we should always be looking for ways to push the envelope, towards genuine self-management of struggles and mass organizations.

Now this is in fact one particular interpretation of anarcho-syndicalism. It's a different interpretation than, say, AnarchoSyndicalist Review. But each is still legitimately a form of libertarian syndicalism, and if WSM is to have an honest discussion of syndicalism, it needs to acknowledge that there are different interpretations of anarcho-syndicalism.

In addition to the fallacy of saying that syndicalism must inherently say that it only the union structure that is the cause of a non-revolutionary working class, I would point out that the WSM is equally mistaken in its overemphasis on the role of "ideas" as the counter factor. This overlooks the crucial importance of practice, that practice shapes consciousness, since humans are, as Marx said, "beings of practice."

WSM: "Syndicalism in itself does not create a evolutionary political organization. It creates industrial unions. It is apolitical, arguing that all that is necessary to make the revolution is for the workers to take the factories and the land. After that it believes that all the other institutions of the ruling class will come toppling down. They do not accept that the working class must take political power."

Again, this is a strawman fallacy. There are three separate mistakes:

(A) The assumption that syndicalism is static, an eternal definition unchanging for all time.

This is false because in fact syndicalism has undergone political development over time. WSA's extension of syndicalism acknowledges that class struggle spreads throughout the society, and that there are class struggles in the community, over things like housing or public transit fares. Thus we advocate the development of self-managed mass organizations in the community, such as a transit riders union, a tenant union, and other possible community organizations. In the 1920s there was an intense debate with the CNT in Spain where activists worried about the potential for CNT union struggles to be boxed into just the issues that arise in a workplace struggle. And a number of syndicalists such as Joan Peiro, advocated the development of neighborhood based organization to discuss and struggle and mobilize around broad issues of concern to the working class. This led directly to the mass rent strike in Barcelona in 1931.

(B) Political Organization

The fact is there have been numerous revolutionary left-libertarian political organizations whose main strategy was syndicalist. When WSA was founded, we defined ourselves as an "anarcho-syndicalist" organization. But we are a political organization, not a union or proto-union. We've always acknowledged in practice (if not always very clearly in our political statements) the distinction between political organization and mass workplace organization.

In the 1980s an historical example that I pointed to as a precedent of the WSA was the role of the Turin Libertarian Group -- an anarchosyndicalist political group -- in the Turin factory council movement (modeled on the British shop stewards' movement).

And of course the FAI was a political organization formed precisely to have an impact within the mass unions of the CNT.

There is nothing in the nature of anarchosyndicalism to not have a revolutionary political group. Moreover, if you acknowledge that the change in working class consciousness is likely to be protracted, it is almost inevitable. There are three other reasons. First, there is a great variety of mass organizations thru which worker struggle takes place. You need to be able to have an organization that activists in these struggles can belong to and which can have a strategy for. Second, there are also struggles against oppression not directly on class lines, such as against racism or gender inequality. These are also part of the struggle for liberation, which cannot therefore be reduced to the union organization. Third, as noted above there are class struggles outside the workplace, and community organization may arise in this connection, apart from union organization.

Finally, it is necessary to have a means to bring together and retain and educate the revolutionary libertarian syndicalist activists. Unions are likely to be heterogeneous in their consciousness, and therefore are not adequate to this function.

The Syndicalist League, formed in 1912 by Wm. Z. Foster, is another example of a syndicalist political group. Foster's group said they were trying to revolutionize the AFL unions from within. A feature of syndicalist political groups in that pre-WWI period is that they tended to be loose networks organized around a newspaper, but a syndicalist political group need not be that way. That would be, again, to deny to syndicalism as a political current the possibility of evolution and learning from experience.

(C) Political Power

In regard to the issue of political power, political functions are obviously going to have to continue to be performed in any feasible society we might create -- basic rules must be decided, there must be a way for the society to make these decisions and make them stick, there must be a way to defend the social order and enforce the basic rules and depend against anti-social forms of behavior such as murder, rape or theft of personal possessions. There must be a way to adjudicate accusations of these transgressions that are made against people.

I believe that the working class must take political power to free itself, and I believe this is the position of the WSA, as expressed in its "Where We Stand" statement. It's just that it doesn't happen by taking over and running a state, but by replacing the state with a different type of governance structure, rooted in the participatory democracy of the assemblies, and extended via delegates to grassroots congresses.

Moreover, the Zaragoza program of the CNT, decided in May 1936, obviously provided for a polity, a structure of governance. They advocated regional and national people's congresses to make the basic rules, although controversies or important questions were to be referred back to the base assemblies. They provided for the raising of an army, a People's Militia, to defend the revolutionary society.

The WSM document supports what the Friends of Durruti advocated in 1937. What the WSM is apparently unaware of is that what they advocate was the OFFICIAL PROGRAM OF THE CNT prior to its joining the Popular Front government in Nov. 1936. The Friends of Durruti WERE anarchosyndicalists.

In July of 1936 in Barcelona there was a heated debate on what the CNT should do, a debate at a regional plenary, of over 500 CNT delegates. The local union federation of Bajo Llobregat advocated overthrowing the Generalitat and the unions taking power. This was defended in the debate by Joan Garcia Oliver. He was opposed by Federica Montseny and Abad Diego de Santillan, representing the Peninsular Committee of the FAI. They advocated a "temporary" collaboration with the political parties on the Anti-fascist Militia Committee, which had been proposed by Lluis Companys. This commmittee idea was a clever ploy of Companys because he knew the anarchists could rationalize this by the fact it was nominally independent of the state.

Montseny argued that the unions taking power would create an anarchist or CNT dictatorship. In his reply, Garcia Oliver said he'd never advocated an anarchist or CNT dictatorship, that this was an unreasonable thing to say about an organization with such democratic practices and legacy, and that "a revolution must be governed" (i.e. a governance structure is needed) and that if the CNT unions didn't take power, a Marxist party would gain power and "obliterate us" -- an accurate prediction of what happened, with the CPE gaining increasing power in the rebuilt Republican state.

I think that Montseny was confused because she imagined that a taking of power by the organized working class had to mean just the CNT unions ruling over the region. But the CNT at the Zaragoza congress had called for a "revolutionary workers alliance with the UGT." In Catalonia there was also the FOUS -- the ex-CNT unions of the POUM. They could have called for all of the unions to come together into a convention, with delegates in proportion to size, to work out the region's future, effectively the collective taking of power by the working class. I think that syndicalists historically often did think of their own union as "building the shell of the new society" in the literal sense that it would run things. Thus to think of the CNT as the only structure for running society...well, you see how Montseny could view that as a "CNT dictatorship."

But it's not necessary to think of the self-managed union "prefiguring" a self-managed social system in exactly that way. We could imagine it as creating self-managed governance structures, separate from the union. Apparently after six weeks of debate in the CNT in July and August, they eventually DID come to that conclusion, hence the proposal for joint UGT-CNT defense councils.

But the debate continued in the union and six weeks later, at a national plenary in Sept. 3, the CNT proposed the overthrow of the national Popular Front government, jointly with the UGT, and its replacement by a proletarian government of sorts, a National Defense Council. Under the CNT's Zaragoza program, this council would be an administrative committee that would have to be accountable to the base assemblies by means of a national workers congress, which would replace the parliament (Cortes).

Perhaps the most critical part of the CNT proposal was for a unified People's Militia as the official armed force in Spain, run by "joint CNT-UGT commissions". In other words,
the unions would have a monopoly of armed power.

Now if this proposal isn't proposing "working class political power" what is?

I think the CNT came to the idea of national and regional defense councils, to control the social self-defense function, by an analogy with the national and regional
economics councils, which were part of the Zaragoza program. But because the defense councils weren't in the Zaragoza program, this is why the Friends of Durruti refer to it as an "innovation".

Throughout Sept. and Oct. 1936 Solidaridad Obrera, the CNT paper in Barcelona, mounted a big campaign for the national and regional defense councils. During that time
Liberto Callejas was the managing editor of that paper and one of the main editorial writers and journalists was Jaime Balius. Both Balius and Callejas were initiators of the Friends of Durruti in March 1937. They had been fired by the CNT regional committee from the paper in Nov. 1936 because they refused to accept the turn towards Popular Front collaboration. So, the program of Friends of Durruti is simply a continuation of a particular tendency within the CNT, a particular interpretation of anarcho-syndicalism.

I tell this whole story in my essay on the Spanish revolution:

http://www.workersolidarity.org/spain.pdf

Certainly it is true that there did exist "anti-power" anarchists in the CNT. Jose Peirats is an example. He was opposed to both the National Defense Council proposal as well as Popular Front collaboration. He had some unrealistic notion of society as a dispersed set of local committees and collectives. And there were also people in the CNT who advocated Popular Front collaboration from the beginning, like the Treintista leader Horacio Prieto. But there were also anarchosyndicalists who clearly advocated for the working class taking political power. As I said earlier, anarcho-syndicalism has multiple interpretations.

I also wanted to make one other historical comment on the WSM paper. The paper says the CNT expelled the Friends of Durruti. That is not true. The Popular Front collaborationist regional committee of the CNT in Catalonia did demand their expulsion. But in the CNT constitution, only the assembly of a local union had the power to expel someone. And in fact no CNT union assembly ever expelled any member of the Friends of Durruti.

The disputes and differences of conception of anarcho-syndicalism expressed on this board ought to be sufficient to prove that in fact there are a variety of ways of interpreting syndicalism.

I think that what the WSM is really against is a particular *interpretation* of anarcho-syndicalism. Then you ought to say exactly that, rather than create a strawman.

t.