Mass revolutionary organisations during periods of class retreat?

You two, be polite.

Sorry John.

See ths would be my bug bear with what your saying, i generally agree that in a workplace you should always aim to be calling assemblies and letting them ''do the talking'' with management but at the end of the day if you've got high density in a whole bunch of workplaces at some point you are unofficially going to be forced into ''negotiating with management'' even if its negotiating with your feet so to speak, basically in a few cases the organisation.will be forced by circumstances to act ''like a union'' and collectively defend its members, i mean eve if its on a small scale liek giving colletive support to someone who's got a grievance procedure going on, these things happen, imagining that they can all be turned into mass struggles involving the majority of the workplace would obviously be incorect if its just one person being put through a disciplinary procedure, sometimes struggle is smaller and more individualised and the local of the organisation is going to try and collectively support that individual .I mean say your man works in say a bar or whatever and he's getting fucked over and theirs limited hope of collective action at work coz it was a family business and only two or three people would be sympathetic and they were all part time staff, would it be wrong for a local to sabotage the owner/managers operation in order to get their colleague reinstated or to het him a cash settlement, would tis mean they were filling the role of a union and ''negotiating a settlement with management'' or would this mean they were collectively supporting their mate?
Simply seperating itself from the working class and saying the problems of negotiation are ones that should just be faced by ''them'' while the revolutionary group remains alloof as though revolutionaries never have to make compromises isn't neccsarily a good thing, it carries its own set of problems as you well know.
I can see the problems lying therein but i don't think dodging the bullet and pretending this pure revolutionary organisation is never going to get its hands dirty is the right approach, theres always problems within groups, and bureacracy and informal hieararchies always develop, no offence like but it appears to me that to a certain exent your trying to sort of wash those away.
In short though coming back to anarcho-syndicalism for a moment, the CNT doesn't aim to ''represent'' workers to management it aims to create mass assemlies of all workers in a workplace, and the issue of claiming that theres a lack of ideoogical qualifications for membership seems to be one common in too many modern syndicalist groups even if its only more of a constituional issue when it comes to the CNT rather than something endemic in their practice, it is however not something that automatically applies to an anarcho-syndicalist union, its fairly clear that you could be in an anarcho-syndiclaist union that said you had to abide by the a and p of an organisation no?

I actually agree that i'd prefer a tighter membership qualification than that, i think having a ban on membership of say the SWP, labour party and so on is fairly logical as is requiring at least some level of agreement with the a and p, i would imagine the CNT would argue that people are obliged to abide by the constitution of the organisation in this case rather than agreeing with the a and p and abiding by the constitution is to a certain extent an ideological qualification in itself, but i suppose it could be regarded as a bit of a cop out in some ways. On the other hand i think your presenting things in quite a simplistic light, for example would your turkish communist group ban members from being part of mainstream unions or anarchist groups in the same vein as the ICC effectively does, in extension to that would that then involve having to take a position on whther each individual local single issue campaign was acceptale or unacceptable and so on down the garden path of secthood.
Given that this was written in 1998 though i would imagine the stuff about ecologists and pacifists is a pathetic attempt at broad church rhetoric in the wake of the ''anti-capitalist'' movement, which is illadvised, thankfully it does not seem to have become an endemic attitude within the organisation though.

Unions, no. Neither does the ICC. Anarchist groups, of course. How can somebody be in two political organisations with different politics?
We don't get involved in 'single issue campaigns'. It isn't the way we work.

Well you couldn't get much looser.

Devrim

A bit economical with the truth there aren't you? It's my understanding that the ICC bans its members from union membership unless it's a closed shop where union membership is compulsory for the job.

Yeah, but all the same i'd rather have someone with proper training and experience to help out rather than just having to rely on a work mate being decent.

These aren't inherent characteristics of people in pro-revolutionary organisations though ned, so this isn't really relevant to the discussion.

Well strangely enough I think it is. I think the ultra-left line has a lot going for it but when you end up like Catch just has saying that there's no need for any organisation you just need some confidence then it all falls down a bit. As Malatesta put it it's no good getting rid of something until you can replace it with something better.

Don't call me a liar. That's how I understand what you are saying. Please correct me if I've misunderstood.

I think you are wrong. If I am wrong it is not because I am being 'economical with the truth', but because I am not aware of their position. Why not ask them?

Devrim

Because I don't really care.

So you don't know their position, and you don't care enough to find out, but you are totally happy to repeat what you think may be their position, and accuse someone from another organisation of 'being economical with the truth' when they state the position of their organisation.

That's cool.

Devrim

Firstly, I'll take issue with this. Even being very optimistic about a hypothetical scenario I don't think that you're ever going to get more than say 10% of people in some anarchist organisation say. So I don't think there will be a majority membership in many significant workplaces.

I think this is labouring under a misconception. Unions negotiate on behalf of their members with no accountability.

This is also incorrect. You may think this now, because of the low level of struggle we're in. But if you're envisaging a hypothetical future during mass struggle it certainly won't be the case. Hell it's not even true now. My very non-militant workplace just a few years ago, one department walked out and marched on the council executives when they heard a popular member of staff was to be disciplined.

The second misconception here is that you don't support your coworkers on the basis of them being in the same political organisation as you; you do it because you are coworkers with a common interest. Even if you do happen to be in the same organisation, if you come up against issues at work you act as workers, not as an organisation.

I think the problem is thinking in hypotheticals. Try to imagine a real example. You work at a small office with 4 staff, and 1 other brighton SF member. You have a problem, say you're being bullied. Do you talk to your SF colleague and try to do something, or do you try to involve everyone? (Or as many people as possible at least)

No. But this isn't what unions do.

The latter. They are clearly not negotiating with management here, they are assisting someone take action against them. It'd be up to the worker in this situation to do the negotiating, in his position as a worker.

Huh? What does that relate to?

This is a distortion of what I have said. I never said the group is separate from the class, it's made up of workers.

Such as what? Compromising is bad. Revolutionary organisations should never do it. For a workplace meeting it's fine, most workers don't (consciously) want the abolition of wage labour, but we do.

Can you give me examples of where revolutionary organisations compromising their principles has been a good thing please? If we are to talk about the real world anyway, we have to base this discussion on what has actually happened. I can point to thousands of examples of where terrible things have happened. (cf. the Bolsheviks, the CNT, the FAI... just about every significant group ever, etc.)

How?

What I have done is argue that only letting in people who are actually against bureaucracy and hierarchy is one guard against those sorts of problems.

Yes, like I said, this is good. This is also what I argued.

Yes. But I don't think this would be a "union" by much useful definition, since membership is based on members' political views. Like SolFed is now, say.

Well a bit at least...

It is a complete cop out. As for "abiding by the constitution", if it's a democratic organisation the constitution can be changed by the members; if enough people aren't anarchists say, people could get motions passed about participating in works councils, setting up a permanent executive body (to increase "efficiency"), employing full time organisers (to increase membership) etc.

I think you are throwing meaningless insults at my arguments. How is saying I believe groups should have aims and principles members agree with, "simplistic"?

All organisations should consider who should be permitted to be in their group. Hell even unions do now, many forbid racists, BNP members, etc. You can't call them "sects".

That's not what either of us has said. What we've said is that organisation in your workplace should be based on your coworkers, not people whose politics you agree with. Your political organisation should be with people whose politics you agree with.

Look different tendencies within anarcho-syndicalism aside the basic sticking point in this discussion is not revol or me calling our politics anarcho-syndicalist just to disagre with catch and John. its the retarded use of the word union that see's a union only as a functioning in terms of, like trades and business unions catch, selling labour to and compromising with the bosses. WHy would the CNT not 'sell' itself as a union John., it is afterall an anarcho-syndicalist union - that does not mean it should enter works councils or abandon its promotion of decision making through workers assemblies - but it is still a union. The main sticking point here is in a too narrow definition of union that yez have painted yourselves into.

I've had a look on our Spanish site and the articles on recent struggles are collected together here:
http://es.internationalism.org/taxonomy/term/216

Some of these may refer to 'existing independent unions' but my espagnol isn't very good. I'll ask our comrades in Spain if they have anything specific. I did see something on the SEAT dispute...

I did find an article on the 'co-ordinations' in France during 1988. It's not on the English site yet, but should be later tonight. It also refers to the Spanish coordinadoras in a footnote, and the COBAS in Italy, which I'm pretty sure we've written about elsewhere.
Francia: Coordinadoras, vanguardia del sabotaje de las luchas
(France: Co-ordinations in the vanguard of sabotaging the struggles)
http://es.internationalism.org/rint56/coordinadoras.htm

The main point we make about the various co-ordinations is that they tend to appear when the trade unions have been discredited, but tend to centralise the struggles prematurely and enable the leftists (who we see as part of the left-wing of capital) to gain control of the direction of the struggles, which should really remain in the hands of the strike comittees made up of revocable delegates elected at mass meetings. The example of Poland in 1980 showed how central strike committees made up of delegates from the factory committees formed, although this presumed a generalised level of struggles.

The other weakness of the co-ordinations is that while they play up their role in overcoming the corporatism of the trade unions, they also reinforce the distinctions between different sectors within the class (teachers, dockers, nurses etc) which makes it more difficult for workers to see their common interests and raise common demands. The advantage of mass meetings and general assemblies is that they are open to all workers and reinforce solidarity, as we saw in the struggles in Vigo in Spain, and the student movement in France 2006.

The co-ordinations are thus very dangerous for the working class, because of the way they complement the sabotage carried out by the trade unions.

I did find the BM Blob pamphlet on the Coordinadoras in Spain in the 1980s but it is very long. I'll try to skim through it quickly. Has it been discussed on the Libcom forums? I've had a quick look but can't find anything...

B.

Well, in that case, anarcho-syndicalist unions aren't unions by this definition and hopefully never will be.

Regards,

Martin

What do you think the function of such a political organisation should be? What kind of responsibilities would it have and what would it do?

B.

in equal measure:

to educate itself as to the needs of the working class and therefore the logistical necessities, organizational forms, and tactical meausres involved in the process of building and defending a classless, monelyless society:

to build working class solidarity:

to provide forums for discourse and organs of propaganda that engage the broader working class, and consistently invest those forums and organs with a radical critique couched in intelligible terms.

I think the basic confusion here is that people are conflating the unitary organs (assemblies, soviets) with political organs (workers' groups, discussion groups, 'organisations of pro-revolutionaries') that regroup the minorities of politicised workers. I think both have seperate functions and can't exist in some kind of hybrid 'political workplace union' (with a small 'u', if you will). The latter will just end up looking and functioning like a leftist union, which is where the IWW seems to be going.

So where do the industrial unions come in then? Do you mean that during periods of advance in struggles they are organised and led by the assemblies and strike committees, but during periods of retreat the industrial unions and networks fill the breach to maintain the continuity between waves of struggle?

Yes, you've got a point there. The real situation is more complex than that. There are the existing political groups (such as the ICC) that have been around for decades who have mature and developed positions and structures in place. And then there are more recently formed groups that are in a dynamic of clarification and discussion - and who may decide to intervene in struggles and take position on aspects of the national and international situation (wars etc). They may decide to agree on a basic set of political positions, but which shouldn't be a barrier to their further development. What's important is the contribution the politicised minorities can make to the development of class consciousness.

For us, the class has only two weapons at its disposal - its capacity for self-organisation (unitary organs) and its consciousness (political organs). It has no economic power within society.

B.

How indeed. Dev, do you envisage a working class organisation undertaking a somewhat “ideologically neutral” task sustaining incomes versus prices, within which the communists form the dominant party?

The bit I've highlighted in bold probably needs some qualification. It seems quite common in Spain for disputes to be dealt with by workplace assemblies rather than individual unions or the works councils. I'm not sure exactly how widespread this is but the TMB bus drivers strike in Barcelona is one example. The shipyards at Puerto Real (where the CNT has a longstanding minority presence) would be another. In situations like this the CNT can have more influence than its size might suggest - it isn't necessarily shut out - but it might not make much practical difference whether the CNT is considered as a workplace based political organisation or a union. An organisation that didn't call itself a union - whether anarchist, councilist, left communist or whatever could play a similar role - though I'm not aware of any significant groups acting along these lines in Spain. It's a situation where an "outside and against" position towards the unions might be quite viable. Actually I can see parallels between the CNT's attitudes towards rival unions and councilist/left communist positions on unions in general. Still I suspect this kind of situation will usually depend on having an organised and confident workplace in the first place - and in Spain that means there will probably be various unions and a works council present. Union membership in Spain is actually quite low and it leaves the question of what to do in non-union workplaces. The CNT deals with this by organising as a union - with some limited success - which in turn depends on being fairly open about who it will allow to join.

I know what one of their members/supporters wrote on this forum regarding union membership and I don't really care enough about what left communists do or don't do to chase it up. Will that do?

Beltov - thanks for the links. The article on SEAT is interesting and mentions the CGT in passing. The article on France mentions the Coordinadora in Spain while criticising some fairly dubious French initiatives. I find it hard to judge the validity of the ICC's analysis of the CGT and the Coordinadora from this but to be fair that wasn't the main point of these articles. I can't remember seeing any discussion about the Coordinadora on libcom.

Eh i'm a bit confused by your wording. Are your members also members of mainstream unions or are they not?

Soome people do, for the purposes of contacts and networking or so they can be paying dues to two organisations like AF and Solfed etc. Realistically one of them your going to have to be only a paper member of. Its not something i'd bother doing personally but its hardly the end of the world is it.

Oh get real, that sounds all very nice when written in fairy tale communist land but in reality its a load of horse shite, When a bypass gets laid through your house, they knock down your local bus station or build a big fat nuclear power plant down te road from you whats your response going to be? Or to use another example what would your response to the poll tax have been, surely you would have organised non-payment campaigns no? And wouldn't a non-payment campaign be a single issue campaign?