Once more on the failed transit system fare strike in San Francisco in 2005

Ireland's natural resources? Hmmm... so can we expect a lower shelf price on our side of the pond once Jameson has been nationalized? If so, I can get behind that. Yeah nationalization!

MJ:

Right. if you're involved in actual mass organization building, such as organizing a union or organizing tenants, you run into people with all sorts of views. To have the mindset that you must associate only with people with the "right" or "acceptable" ideology is to have the mindset of a political group, not a mass organization.

CM:

Yes, we should be willing to go to churches. My housing group here in S.F. worked successfully with the S.F. Organizing Project on a campaign to get the city to turn over unused pieces of land it owns for affordable housing. SFOP is an organization of 32 church congregations, including in working class neighborhoods and communities of color. It's leadership have a strong social justice orientation. It's very much a grassroots-driven organization. They'll only do something or agree to something after meetings with the church groups discusses it and agrees to it.

Support by the churches can be an important help in labor struggles. Getting workers in a union who are members of a church to get their church on board is part of the community outreach one would want to do.

Also, as the example of SFOP shows, why assume that churches don't have active members and pastors with a progressive political consciousness? I remember my mother telling me that one of the young pastors at her church was a libertarian socialist.

This idea that the unions are part of the state or incorporated into capital or whatever is a quintessentially ultra-left view, and if that's your view, it defines you as an "ultra-left." Fitch's critique of the unions as they actually exist was intended to motivate projects to form new independent unions.

Unionism is a contradictory phenomenon. Unions have "two souls". On the one hand, bureaucracies develop from the fact that certain activists longago accumulated skills and knowledge from the struggle and their coworkers became dependent on their skills, and they used this to become full-time officials. That's how the AFL bureaucracy emerged in the late 19th century. Once bureaucracies are entrenched, they will tend to oppose actions that they see as risks to their organization, to its survival. They'll prefer narrow bargaining over easier issues that management will more readily be willing to talk about, not issues that will require a massive knock-down-drag-out struggle. They'll try to get people to focus on elections and politicians as a hope for improvement in their lives, rather than risky mass actions.

But the tendency towards risk-aversion and de-mobilization of the rank and file is only one tendency, only one "soul", of unionism. There is also a tendency for people to want to fight, to be willing to fight, because the system forces the need to do this on people. And because the bureaucracy can get in the way, there are periodic rebelliions and reform movements and new organizations formed and so on. Workers taking action together, acting "in union", is the most primitive meaning of unionism.

To be able to transform the society, the working class needs to have mass organizations. It can't develop its strength and its sense of having the power to change things otherwise. Whatever mass organizations emerge out of the class struggle against the employers is a form of unionism. Therefore, some form of unionism is going to be necessary to the transformation of society.

Lol! I'm not a Trot. You really are a bit 'out there' KK.

My work here is nearly complete.

...ANY...

all mass organizations and mass struggles within class society will exhibit contradictory tendencies. even if there is a liberatory social transformation that is successful, there will be contradictory tendencies in it as well. the problem with ultra-leftism is its purism. it can't deal with the fact that the process of social change is an up by the boot straps affair, and thus can't possibly be 100% pure in its elimination of all traces of the effects of a hierarchical, racist, patriarchal class-divided society. KK looks selectively only at aspects of struggles he approves of and cherry picks.

anyway, this ultra-leftism is a feature KK shares in common with the people he's been exchanging brick bats with. they are politer, less rude, but the underlying politics is similar.

I remember that zine. Didn't you used to go by some faux porn name like "Max Power" or something back then?

I don't believe unions are revolutionary. However I also don't believe unions are part of the bosses apparatus of control. They just have a different purpose. They are resistance groups designed to win workers more of a share of their surplus labour value back from the bourgeoisie.

I don't believe unions are revolutionary, but I do believe it's mental to insist that unions, as imperfect as they are, are a tool which is being used to undermine the organised power of the working class. Without formal structures we are weak and have no power. In revolutionary situations, yes, workers will create councils but until then we need unions in our workplaces and unions in our communities to fight in the everyday struggles for a better standard of living. Informal resistance groups are just insurrectionist grasping at straws.

The best pamphlet I've read on this issue actually hails from the SPGB, the British section of the De Leonist WSM:-

"For the workers to win, their struggle must move beyond the defensive stage of resistance to capitalist exploitation. It must become the conscious political movement for the abolition of the wages system through the dispossession of the capitalist class and the conversion of the means of production into the common property of society. This stage has not yet been reached and the working class has for generations been bogged down in the stage of resistance to exploitation, a fact which explains the limitations of the institutions they created to wage this defensive struggle, the trade unions."

[http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pdf/tu.pdf]

No wait, it was Max Anger. Even better!

KK:

the student academic employees union i helped to organize in the early '70s. through a campaign in 1976-77 they built up to the point of being able to carry out a one-week strike, which was victorious on the main demand (against layoffs). they also didn't just strike for their own benefit, but against cuts to tutoring programs mainly used by students of working class origin. they could only carry out a strike because they'd built the organization to the point they had 75 to 95 percent of the people in the various departments. this was based on starting out with little skirmishes against beefs department by department, which were within the level of strength of a small organization to handle, such as winning the first grievance in the history of the University of California for a TA, on behalf of people who were doing TA work but paid at the lower rate as readers, and also a successful campaign against exploitative pressure to get graduate students to volunteer to work for free to get teaching experience. it was on this last issue that i organized my department. i had been informing people about the campaign and then they came to me when it became an issue in our department and i called an assembly that was attended by 23 of the 24 employees. we formed an assemblyist departmental organization and elected a shop steward to the executive committee of the union. the executive committee was basically all the shop stewards. there were no paid officials or paid staff.

Kevin, Your response seems a bit contradictory. On the one hand, you say that SAEU was a reflection of the ferment of that era, and that's true, but does that mean you think no such ferment is possible now? how do we know when the "ferment" is enough to allow mass self-managed organizations like that to emerge? your response is contradictory because you point out, correctly, that the situation for the working class is much harsher today, yet you imply there can't be mass democratic organizations because there isn't the sort of ferment today there was in the early '70s. but then why do you say things are more promising now, due to the greater harshness? if things are more promising, this would suggest that more "ferment" is again possible, yes?

Kevin, by 23 or 24 people, are you referring to the people in the department i organized? That was only one department. The union as a whole had 350 members.

A member of IDP has informed me via private email that he wrote the original draft of the Fare Strike leaflet, and Marc and others had various suggestions, and Marc did the formatting. Fine. I don't care who wrote it. As I said, that is a non-issue. The leaflet was perfectly okay.

KK: " Large-scale social upheaval cannot be "organized" into being."

What was your aim then? What was the point to the posters you wanted to put up? What was the point to the leafletting of the drivers? What was the point to the leafletting of riders? were you expecting a "large scale social upheaval" or not?

Are you saying that having more people actively involved, spreading the strike through networks, would not have been helpful?

"sponaneity" is the deus ex machina of the ultra-left.

Your posts make so much sense when you're not insulting people...

take that for what it's worth.

I prefer this one. Cock.

Which is duke and which is Andy Stern?

I hope you ain't confused and think I'm being playful.

Everyone knows that when Max Anger doesn't let off steam every now and then by insulting people there is a very real threat he might explode...

Why would they waste their time trying to respond to you when all you do is throw around insults.

How old are you? You sound like a fucking 4 year old who hasn't had his nap time yet.