Unions and Communists

Chris,
I think the thanks are sincere. They are in my case anyway, I'm enjoying this thread and getting clearer on my thoughts, so just take it as gratitude when folks say thanks. Thanks. (Fucker.)

Lurch,
In the post where you write "the workers may have developed all these positive aspects to a greater degree had the union not been present" I think we're in complete agreement, except I might substitute "most unions" or "business unions" for "the unions."

As for the Justice for Janitors campaign and corporate style campaigns, I'm really raelly keen to discuss that but I think it's a new thread. Mixing that discussion with this one will I think cloud some of the issues here. I'll start one eventually if no one else does, and quote the comments from this thread that are relevant. I think that stuff gets repeated often when activists take on workplace issues - there's a similar logic in activism as in much unionism of doing things for people, rather than doing things yourself as a worker with other workers.

later,
Nate

Sorry that this has been a long time coming and is going to be such a long post. I’d like to make it clear, once again – and I really hope this isn’t forgotten in replies to this post – that I am not uncritically endorsing unions, or shrinking from a structural critique of them (by reducing it to a failure of leadership, or some such). Rather, I am arguing that the view being presented by some other posters is reductive, made of sweeping generalisations, and in some ways simply implausible. I’m also sorry if this is in academic-ese at times, I will try to explain better if asked. And yes, I’m a big geek for even bothering to write this…

My general view of Lurch’s first post is that it a polemic built around a hollow centre. The central thesis is that the union intervention was inconsequential or detrimental to workers’ self-organisation, and the material gains they won. The relevance of everything else hangs on this. But, for the case-study in question, there is no evidence for this view. Anyway, to a detailed response.

Who said the union (considered apart from the workers) picks up all the credit? That’s not the issue: it’s whether what happened would have happened without the union intervening in the way that it did. It’s a factual question.

Of course the workers faced terrible predations and fought courageously. That’s not under dispute. The question is, rather, as I previously posed it; or perhaps – did the union support or hinder the struggle of the workers?

So here’s the story you’re telling, if this is wrong, let me know how you do see it: Last year, the workers were all ready to self organise and fight – their anger was about to ‘boil over’ into a wave of action. Had not the union intervened, organised them paternalistically and sold them out, greater gains would have been made. It was a coincidence that the SEIU sent 100 full time organisers into Houston last year, luckily (for the union) coinciding with the point when the workers were ready for self organising anyway. Whereupon, otherwise sensible workers were duped into abandoning their insurgent self-activity, and began to believe that the union was a good thing for them – though in fact it wasn’t. I want to clarify that, and then ask: do you have a single piece of evidence for your presumption that we would have seen mass struggle without union intervention? For example, can you point to any wildcat industrial action? Any action of any kind, organised outside, or in spite of a union, or even one which didn’t rely on it? Now, of course you don’t need to show that precisely the same, or better, gains would have been made – or even that it wouldn’t have taken another few years to break out. But what evidence is there, please?

Also, I’d like to understand how you perceive the objective conditions for Houston janitors, and whether you can see why they might have chosen to organise through a union. Don’t you think that the individual back up a union can provide would be useful if you’re a very vulnerable worker, who’s taking a big risk by getting involved in any struggle at all? Don’t you think that the media savvy of the union’s PR department helped get the TV cameras down to the blockade (which generated the positive campaign outcomes which you allude to later in your post)? Don’t you think that a wildcat strike might have been easier to defeat in such an anti-working class environment? Don’t you think that the workers were likely so dog-tired, and down trodden that it was actually a big relief, and a reassurance to know that someone else (i.e. a full-timer) would take a bit of the pressure off you, and speak to workers who you’d likely never get a chance to see in your normal schedule? Can’t you see that’s it’d be a massive risk to spend your time doing something like that, leaving your kids at home, in case it would work? In your view, could things ever be so difficult that a paid full-time organiser (a substantial proportion of whom are former cleaners) would make a difference? And if yes, wouldn't you agree that it follows, unavoidably, that the union had a positive, not negative, impact on the struggle?

nb. Nothing I am saying amounts to the view that 'If you want to struggle, you gotta join the union’. It is a different point: that the resources and organisation which unions can have, if set to helping stimulate workers’ organisation and struggle, can be valuable in that respect.

Nb. It’s only “won by the union ‘for’ the janitors”, as you spin it, if you consider the union to be a body wholly distinct from the workers – of course, very many people don’t see it like that, as Nate’s earlier posts on this topic attest. (I’m not entering here into the semantics of that debate.)

You missed the increase in hours. But anyway (firstly), this is totally irrelevant to the question at hand, unless things would have been better, greater gains could have been won, without union intervention. Of course it’s a compromise with the power of capital; so is everything except revolution. So is every return to work after a wildcat.

Secondly, what on earth do you mean by ‘No union discrimination against 'poor migrant workers' there then’? Of course the level of janitors’ wages is well below that elsewhere. That’s because, due to a whole host of factors which you should know as well as me, it’s much harder to organise in Houston than in Chicago, and there’s a much weaker tradition of organising – within or without unions. I can’t believe you’d try and claim that the lower wages won are a result of union discrimination and not objective social conditions in different areas. You think that janitors in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles aren’t poor migrants? You really think that to level out wages nationwide is something which unions have within their gift?

Thirdly, what’s your point about the minimum wage variance between states? What explains that? Tell me about recent increases in state minimum wages (New York, California, any others you can think of); how have they been one? (It’s ACORN and SEIU organised activity, respectively, if I remember rightly.) If you want, you can claim that minimum wage rises are irrelevant – fine – but in that case, it’s not in good faith for you to try and use them in argument in this way.

Of course the union as a body has benefited. But this is only problematic if: a) you’re right (as I say you’re not) about the unions being necessarily, universally anti-worker; and b) you’re right about the settlement not constituting a significant victory (which I also say you’re not). The reason for me making comments like this is just to reduce what appears to be a whole host of points into the one or two which seem to me to be the genuine issue. (Oh, and I don’t believe you are suggesting that the Houston Police’s brutality was in anyway orchestrated to the benefit of the union, but just to be clear, let me know if you are.)

My second point here responds to your implication that the union called off the fight earlier than it needed to; whereas the workers could have continued the struggle, and won a greater victory. Why do you think this is true? Any calculation to end a struggle must be a function of the political resources which your side, and your opponent have left. Perhaps the workers were tired and scared by that point, and perhaps the level of the bonds meant that the union didn’t have the resources to cover them, and people wouldn’t go and do a similar action without cover. Perhaps it wasn’t clear that morale could be sustained for the fight ahead, and perhaps the cleaning companies weren’t really feeling the heat. It’s obviously better to end something on a high than just drag on… e.g. that UNITE-HERE strike in Chicago which has been going on for about three years with little prospect of victory… Now I don’t know what the weight of all these considerations might have been in Houston. But unless you do, you’ve got no capacity to make a relevant judgement.

This only says that things are bad for workers in the US, and look likely to continue getting worse. It has no relevance to the debate at hand, unless there’s an attempt to hint at some imminent wave of militant industrial action external to unions, which unions might reasonably be expected to restrain. Is that what you’re trying to say? It might be true, though I'm sceptical, but please make a bit more of a case for it...

Leaving aside the union bureaucrats, can you give some evidence for how you think that any other element of the US ruling class is acting to ‘strengthen its union apparatus’? Or are you just making a point under the rubric of ‘functional explanation’? That’s fine, but the way you phrased it does make it sound intentional, like there’s some actor who’s got a plan to make unions beat business in pitched battle every so often. Of course, I know that the US ruling class has done such things intentionally before, e.g. under Roosevelt, but that was expressed through particular legislation; by analogy, I’m not aware of anything comparable, recently. Furthermore, the US ruling class is facing lower levels of militant insurgency than practically any time since the ‘50s. In contrast (it is interesting to note), it is facing almost unprecedentedly high levels of investment in ‘organising’ by unions, workers’ associations and community institutions.

Hopelessly reductive. We do not have to choose between these two alternatives, so counterposed. Here’s my interpretation of the ‘message’ of these events. Workers’ fought a damn hard battle; and won what amounts to a politically significant, but, in terms of financial returns, relatively meagre victory. The experience those workers had, and the power they have built, are perhaps the most important gains. That they came to fight the battle, and that they were able to win it (and that it was no doubt compromised in some ways), was possible because the SEIU union put a lot of resources, particularly organisers whose job was to stimulate self-organisation, behind the battle. The SEIU did this as part of a strategy of high investment in organising unorganised poor immigrant workers; which results from the fact that if the union didn’t do this, it would be, as we have characterised it, ‘fucked’. This is my point now, and it was my point from the start. It appears to have been airbrushed from all replies.

Sometimes, most often, I think that we should join unions (for reasons of struggle that is; I’ve already said I think it’s worth joining for individual reasons anyway). I think that it would have been wrong, for example, to be a janitor in Houston during this struggle and not join the union. Though, of course, we should never rely on them, conceived of as agents apart from the rank and file.

Go on then: explain how the janitors’ “victory” amounts to a victory for the ruling class (without begging the question – i.e. that the unions are necessarily anti-working class). And, frankly, I think it’s indicative of a poor standard debate if a post with barely any factual substance on the important question counts as ‘incisive’.

Which seems a fair enough starting point. Of course, I don’t say, I repeat, that even at the best of times (even in the 19th Century), that unions have an unambiguously positive role by these criteria. All I have to be able to say is that, in certain circumstances, such as I have attempted to begin to define, their effect (when contrasted with alternate real possibilities) is more positive than negative.

I want to address an argument which I suspect may be levelled at me in reply: to wit, that any worker “self-organisation” stimulated or sustained by union organisers is, ipso facto, not self-organisation; rather, it is the workers’ being organised by others. My reply is two-fold. 1) This argument begs the question by assuming that the organisers are not part of a broadly working-class movement, and hence to be counted as apart from the workers. 2) The argument involves an unduly crude and demanding definition of what self-organisation requires – confidence in a series of skills and dispositions, which to some people come naturally, but for many have to be learned through experience. (Also, if anyone thinks that it’s possible to do workplace organising entirely from outside, without developing activists as independent agents, you’re having a laugh.)

What defines a ‘period’, except the usefulness of unions for workers? What other aspects of capitalism in general, or the unions, does the classification rely on? And how do those aspects imply the anti-worker character of unions during the period? Or, if there are no such aspects, then isn’t it the case that we’re in the presence of a totally useless piece of theory? (In that it gives us no deductive hypothesis with which to examine the next, or any, struggle. This may have been the point newyawka makes on p1.)

Furthermore, you’re being hopelessly soft on 19th Century unions. The view that there was some golden age of trade unionism before WWI is ridiculous (or if that’s not your view, how is your classification useful?). For evidence, check out, for example, the first few chapters of Brecher’s Strike, and the Wildcat pamphlet someone’s already mentioned.

That’s you just stating your conclusion again… it advances the argument not at all. I know, and I have never attempted to deny that unions do horrible things. I only resist the attempt to characterise these rigidly by poorly defined ‘periods’.

That’s a totally false argument and it’s worth demonstrating this. The question is: Why can’t x be a one time, but b another?

Baboon’s answer, because:
1: in some set of cases, w, x is always a.
2: (false latent premise): if x is a in a sub-set of cases defined by w, x is a in all cases.
3: (conclusion) Therefore: x is always a, never b.
(where x is 'the unions'; a is 'anti-working class'; b is 'pro-working class'; w is 'when the historic classes confront each other' - whatever that means.)

#2 is nonsense, of course; but necessary to baboon's conclusion, #3.

Just because certain forms of organisation are important at times of immense upheaval, and instability in the structure of capitalist society, doesn’t meant that those forms of organisation are also appropriate to janitors in Houston in 2006. And by ‘appropriate’ I mean ‘plausibly likely to help workers win things’. And by ‘plausibly likely to help workers win things’ I don’t just mean ‘plausibly likely’ if all workers concerned organised in that way, with all the militancy that involves, I also mean ‘plausibly likely to be adopted in the first place, given the risks of organising in the different ways, and subjective and objective conditions in which they are bred’. I agree that workers’ councils have been a signature of insurgent working class organising in the 20th Century. I agree that unions have done may shit things – some of which were listed, like it was news, by baboon – but I don’t agree that this should take over analysis of actual current events. That said, I do accept your later point that ‘the unions aren't neutral, sometimes allowing solidarity, sometimes not.’
Sorry that this has been a long time and coming and is going to be a long post. I’d like to make it clear, once again – and I really hope this isn’t forgotten in replies to this post – that I am not uncritically endorsing unions, or shrinking from a structural critique of them (by reducing it to a failure of leadership, or some such). Rather, I am arguing that the view being presented by some other posters is reductive, made of sweeping generalisations, and in some ways simply implausible. I hope that comrades will not take offence if my tone occasionally verges on the belligerent – none is intended. I’m also sorry if this is in academic-ese at times, I will try to explain better if asked. And yes, I’m a big geek for even bothering to write this…

Just because certain forms of organisation are important at times of immense upheaval, and instability in the structure of capitalist society, doesn’t meant that those forms of organisation are also appropriate to janitors in Houston in 2006. And by ‘appropriate’ I mean ‘plausibly likely to help workers win things’. And by ‘plausibly likely to help workers win things’ I don’t just mean ‘plausibly likely’ if all workers concerned organised in that way, with all the militancy that involves, I also mean ‘plausibly likely to be adopted in the first place, given the risks of organising in the different ways, and subjective and objective conditions in which they are bred’. I agree that workers’ councils have been a signature of insurgent working class organising in the 20th Century. I agree that unions have done may shit things – some of which were listed, like it was news, by baboon – but I don’t agree that this should take over analysis of actual current events. That said, I do accept your later point that ‘the unions aren't neutral, sometimes allowing solidarity, sometimes not.’

There is no such logical fallacy. I never claimed that unions have become, in essence, ‘for the workers’. My claim was that X (on which we agree) has meant some (non-Y) Z: 'unions doing things which are productive for workers on the basis of criteria, indicated above, that we should see (not unproblematic) value in'. In any case, it was never a logical claim, it was a factual one (just as the claim that ‘turning on the tap lets water flow’ is factual, not logical). The reasons to suppose that the connection between X and Z is as I say it is should not be controversial: (i) that is why the unions themselves say they do it; (ii) observably, different unions Organise to the extent that X is true of them; (iii) as you and Lurch accept, Z has mitigated the extent of the application of X to unions, and is hence a rational strategy for them to employ, assuming that they are institutionally self-interested (which is your argument anyway).

Though I would be interested to hear that argument, and wouldn’t presume to have an opinion on it now, I don’t see what this has to do with the matter in hand. (From your sentence, I’m not even sure what your view of that thesis would be.)
I find the rest of redtwister’s post hard to deal with. The reason for this is that earlier in the thread, he’s expressed views which I find to be similar to, albeit less specific and detailed than, ones I’m trying to put forward. I don’t know how far this has to do with our theoretical disagreement about communism, about which more below. But leaving that aside for now,

Except, as I indicate above, there was no such ‘detailed discussion of the particulars of the situation’. There were allegations without evidence, or even substantial exegesis, nothing more. Even if, as I believe is extremely unlikely, substantial evidence is provided that comparable gains (as I style them) would have taken place without the unions in the case of Houston; I’m confident that you won’t find such evidence in the case of London, where similar, albeit far more fluffy events have taken place in recent weeks.

Again, it’s not a universal truth that ‘you need a union to get the workers active’. It’s a contingent possibility; just as its inverse is – or that is my argument, at any rate. (By ‘union’ here I understand a large membership-based workers organisation, the relevance of which being that it has enough money to pay people to ignite and support workers’ campaigns; by ‘need’, I mean that you can’t tell a plausible story in which the object of the need is missing.) And – again I say this – the question in each instance can only be resolved factually. Of course you need a theoretical prism, but it should be a more subtle and detailed one than you set out.

And anyway, if you think it’s the case that any statement about workers involvement in unions can necessarily be applied to workers involvement in parties (which you imply you do, even though I suspect you don’t really), why isn’t it the case that ‘Sometimes parties enable radicalism that otherwise might be difficult’? Or if it is the case, what is your attitude toward it?

The last question you ask is too complicated for it to be appropriate to have it out on this thread. For starters, I’d have to ask how you would define ‘party’… and whether you’d include organisations AF or NEFAC within that definition, for example.

I don’t have a problem with people getting involved in electoral parties (as I’ve actually already indicated, in my previous post), just as long as they do it with their eyes open. (In certain circumstances, that is, in others, it may be unfailingly counterproductive). I know that this puts me beyond the pale as far as many people are concerned, but let’s not pick parties up as a separate dispute on this thread now. In any case, if this conclusion does follow from what I’m saying (I don’t know if it does) then that’s a debate we can have when we’ve more thoroughly thrashed out the basics here. (And I don’t even understand your final question in the paragraph.)

My point, anyway, is (firstly) ‘that workers try to make use of the unions for their own ends’. You say no one denies it; though Lurch did go to some length to show that the unions (in our case study at hand) were not useful for the workers; and you agreed with his analysis. Perhaps you both meant to say that in fact the workers did succeed in using the unions for their own end; but re-reading Lurch’s posts, and your agreement with him, frankly, it’s hard to extract that. Or perhaps you think it's possible sometimes, but wasn't true this time. But if that's the case, I’d have expected a more thorough dismissal of my question. I'd also be interested to hear pf an example in which you think that unions did enable radicalism?

My argument also has another component. (Secondly and more controversially, as I argue is shown by our case study): not only did the workers make use of the unions for their own purposes, but the unions, under certain pressures, can actually tend to seek out the workers, and structure union activity in such a way as to allow the workers the opportunity use the union to advance both their self-organisation and other interests. (Albeit in a manner motivated and constrained largely by the institutional self-interest of the unions – but it’s the specifics of this, not the broad brush stroke that is interesting.)

I agree. This is my point.

I think that unless it sacrifices one part of the class for another, it unfailingly has something to do with communism – i.e. ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. Anything which abdicates from this creates a division between the interests of the class, and the interests of communists – who become a lobby for political idealism within the class, and not an integral part of its material progress. They even risk becoming advocates for the real immiseration of sections of the class (of course, not for the ideal immiseration of anyone, but who cares about that when the real’s on the table?). Perhaps this is the nub of our disagreement all along? (I believe the view I offer here is your point #6 from the original post, and the view expressed by cph_shawarma and revol68 in response to it; I note this in the hope that we don’t just go round in circles.)

Sure. I agree. Anyway…

Redtwister asked a lot of other good questions in earlier posts, particularly about the role of union organisers, which I don’t have time to come back to now. I think the most interesting were raised in the original post and have never been addressed in any serious detail, though some people have offered an opinion. Instead, discussion has revolved around Rosa Luxemburg, the nature of the IWW, and a lot of people spouting off about 'decadence' in a totally unhelpful way.

I know a couple. TESCO, our largest supermarket chain, often encourages workers to join USDAW in the UK (so they won’t join a more militant union); and someone I know, who was sacked for political action at work, had his bosses encourage fellow workers to join the union, and vote against solidarity with him…

Alf: "there can't be permanent mass organisations in this period of history, except during an openly revolutionary period. It's not based on any unchanging distrust of permanent organisations as such."

But of course mass organizations actually exist. You must mean: "There can't be permanent revolutionary mass organizations in a period of history that isn't revolutionary." But then it's clear that it's an empty tautology. And then there is newyawka's point: How can you tell what "period of history" you're in except after the fact? And how do we slip into a revolutionary period of history? In particular, how does the working class become revolutionary without a protracted process of internal change, due to the experience of collective struggle and increasing collective strength? And how does that happpen without mass organizations?

t.

Agreed I need to clarify: there can't be proletarian mass organisations outside a revolutionary period. It's not a tautology because not all proletarian organisations are revolutionary, either in the sense of advocating communist revolution or practically moving towards a direct assault on the capitalist regime. There can be defensive proletarian organisations, and this is what the trade unions once were; in today's period assemblies and strike committees have the same character.
The difference here is one of method and shouldn't be drowned in endless 'facts'. For marxists, indeed for anyone who conistently applies a class analysis to social reality, it is surely inconceivable that organisations so absolutely central to the confrontation between the two majaor classes in society should not have a definite class nature. All posi offers us in his long post (but in this he is echoed by many others, even by Redtwister in his weaker moments)is a kind of agnostic position which can never rise above the snapshot of what this trade union did at this moment at this particular workplace. In this view, unions just don't have a definite class function or nature and it's surely too rigid and dogmatic to try to define one. It's a method which is completely incapable of preparing the way for what is probably one of the most difficult tasks of the proletarian revolution, but one that was already recognised by the KAPD in 1920: the destruction of the trade unions as an integral part of the bourgeois state.

On the basis of the prior experience of the proletarian movement, how else? I am not talking about a "potentially" revolutionary period (one in which the old mole is burrowing underground, and which can last for decades) but an openly revolutionary one, i.e. one in which the working class is massively challenging the legitimacy of the present system, like, for example, in Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1918. We are not in a period like that today or am I too thick to have noticed it?

i wouldn't say you're thick alf, but the ICC wrote this in the spring 2006 Internationalism

http://en.internationalism.org/inter/138_lessons_MTA_strike.htm

so ... are we or aren't we?

First, apologies to Posi who’s put a lot of effort into replying to me and everyone else who has in some way suggested that trades union are not organs which can defend the interests of the proletariat in this period. Apologies, because I’m not going into the same level of argumentation as his post. It would take more time than I have right now. Originally Posi wrote:

My post on the Houston janitors’ strike merely and rather crudely attempted to show why, even at the “economistic, immediate level” (which is not the level on which communists or other class conscious workers should operate, even if we must always be ‘concrete’) there was reason to question ‘ the positive character” of this specific episode.

And apologies because I’m going to refer (defer?) to Alf’s post above and the methodology to be employed in answer to all the detail Posi subsequently raised.

The question is not, IMO, as Posi rephrased it, “did the union support or hinder the struggle of [these particular] workers’, but ‘what lessons can we draw about the role of trade unions from our experience of the past 100 years in the light of the evolution of capitalism and needs of the working class in this period (and how does this affect our view of this or that movement of the working class?)’

This is, unless I’ve got it completely wrong, the kind of level at which Redtwister raised (or rather re-posed) the on-going debate. Posi says this approach is one of “sweeping generalisations.” Or, it’s ‘reductionist.’ I disagree. It is, as Alf says, the framework through which we attempt to understand particular events and periods.

Talking of periods, syndicalistcat and Newyorker have asked questions about what period of history the working class is operating right now: how do we know, how can we tell?

A serious, detailed response demands a different, if connected thread. It would have to consider, amongst many other aspects: the rise and fall of previous class societies, and to what extent capitalism conforms and departs from these experiences; the position of different revolutionary classes within different class societies (by revolutionary, I mean those corresponding to new and progressive ways of organising society, which also have the material means to effect the necessary changes) and, specifically, the nature of the current revolutionary class, the proletariat. It would have to examine the evolution of capitalism specifically and the position of the proletariat within it. In more detail, and studying actual history, it would pose the different conditions under which the proletariat as a whole has actually tended towards a revolutionary consciousness and practice (1917, for example, arising out of the First World War), and the differences and similarities of today’s period. And considering the last 40-odd years, such a debate would look at the ebbs and flows of the proletarian struggle within the material situation of capitalism and the political and economic response of the ruling class to the period and the proletariat.

Or, (for Newyorker, who wants a list of ‘pre-revolutionary criteria) what is it exactly you don’t understand about the extract you quoted from Internationalism?

BECAUSE IT HITS YOU IN THE FACE

Do you seriously think you could have 'missed' moments like the 1980 mass strike in Poland or the May 68 events in France if you had been there? Well, a revolution is even bigger.

Or is there something I'm not getting here?

this makes much more sense than lurch's answer, but it seems wholly to contradict his claim that a looooooooooooooooooooong list of criteria must be examined before an identification can be made.

but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and if a revolution doesn't ultimately take, then what hit me in the face might not be what i thought it was at first. so i wonder about alf's definition too.

full discolosure: i'm a skeptic, allergic to all teleology, keenly sensitive to the contingency of both past and future events and the imponderable nature of human experience, and hence perhaps just incapable of thinking like a left communist.

Vis-a-vis a revolutionary situation, newyorker asked: how do we know when we're in one?

Lurch gave a big long list to consider.

Alf wrote:
BECAUSE IT HITS YOU IN THE FACE

And newyorker replied:

Not in contradiction with, perhaps the other side of the coin of: two elements of a whole: a historical, theoretical approach and proletarian gut instinct: a combination of historically-based theory which arms the workers and their political minorities to look out for the signs, and the evolution of the bleedin obvious when, on an international scale, the proletariat is more or less constantly mobilised, advancing, retreating and rising up once more in an accelerating rhythm (waves? contractions?) making economic and political demands, insisting on a change to the fundamentals of the status quo, making itself the force in the land, offering a way forward to the rest of exploited society.

Lenin defined such a situation (to paraphrase, I haven't got the exact quote to hand), as when 'the ruling clas can no longer govern as before, and the exploited class refuses to be governed as before.'

IMO, such a situation could (at some stage) emerge from the present period. IMO, we ain't at that stage yet.

As part of this (now off-opic) debate, syndicalistcat wrote:

"For a proletarian revolution to be prefigured, there has to be a process, more or less protracted, in which the working class acquires the self-confidence, solidarity, cohesion, skills and organizational strength, as well as increasing clarity about the possibility of getting beyond class subordination, that raises the real possibility of freeing itself."

I think I agree with that, as far as it goes.

I don't agree when he writes that 'the proletariat is not the only "revolutionary class". I don't agree when he lumps in the Russian Revolution together with "the China, Vietnam and Cuba revolutions." IMO we're talking of totally different things here, the expression of different classes.

I think most of what redtwister writes is very helpful, just a couple of comments.

True... I did say that as well as enabling, the union probably constrained the struggle in some ways; though I don't see that Lurch offered a 'series of ways' that the union limited the struggle. I also don't know about the extent of it, I don't know whether it'd be true to say that 'it clearly seems to have had much more potential'.

For example, how could this have happened? e.g. what sectors could have been involved (I think security guards already are, for example. But given whose offices they're cleaning, cleaners are in the 'finance capital' industry, and the opportunity for solidarity is therefore limited...)

Not sure I understand this. Obviously, there are objective conditions in which everyone finds themselves - i.e. conditions beyond their control. I guess it might be true that the working class as a whole has no objective constraints; only 'subjective' ones, i.e. that it doesn't realise its real situation, interests of power. But even those subjective restraints (conceiving of the class as a subject) arise from what are objective constraints to the members of the class. Also, we're part of capital, no?

I've got to say, I'm genuinely amazed by this. By way of comparison, I pay less than £10 (about $20) per month to the GMB (a general union in the UK, not one of those things the IWW has). I believe that AMICUS is the most expensive - perhaps up to £20 per month - but organises mostly higher grade industrial workers. But most (e.g. T&G) are around £10-12. On the other end of the spectrum, CWU charges £3 per month for part-time workers in non-recognised companies. So I hadn't realised that this would be an issue.

I'm off for a while, so again.
Newyawka's post of the 19th appears to be interested in the question of periods, it a "start" he says, which is certainly a start. He then goes on to say is this a "response to buy more time". What a ridiculous thing to say. It's not a question here of buying time, time is a question for the working class but here it's a question of content, a question of framework. "What would be the function of such an analysis other than definition giving" he asks. Fundamental question. A marxist analysis has as its function a tool for action otherwise it's meaningless. You can read all you like, and that's generally a good thing, but if you are serious about supporting the working class, about changing society then you are wasting your time unless theory and practice intertwine. In its intervention - which it does far more often, extensively and effectively than those on these posts who criticise it as "abstract" - the ICC uses the framework of marxist analysis of the periods of societies, particularly capitalism and periods within periods. The counter-rervolution, for example, was a period within the period of capitalism's decadence. There is the period of the collapse of the eastern bloc - the most important period within most of our lives so far. There were events leading up to it, consequences, heavy consequences from it, but it clearly marks a period of the decomposition of capitalism within the latter's decadence. Within this we have to look at all episodes of the class struggle and their perspectives and within this the role of the trade unions based on an already extensive historical grasp of their role in capitalism. Any revolutionary intervention in the class struggle worth its salt during this period has to be clear about the role of the unions, whether it goes "against the current" or not.
In this particular period, which is the decomposition of capitalism - general disarray, irrationality of warfare, economic collapse - the role of the unions, as agents of the capitalist state, as we understand from real, historical experience, will become even more important for the bourgeoisie. We know that they will do everything to control and divide the working class and when the class moves strongly the unions will go along with it in order to drive its struggle into a dead end.

Shit that's cheap, I pay 70$ to CUPW and I'm part time.