Putting class back on the agenda

Good blog!

This is something I have thought about quite a lot. Historically, the differences between Class War, ACF (now AF) and DAM (now Solfed) seem to have been more cultural/friendship based on political.

One guy from Doncaster, telling me a few years ago why in the 80s he joined Class War, said "I didn't have a job, so I couldn't join DAM; I didn't have a jumper so I couldn't join ACF; so I joined Class War".

It certainly does seem that political organisations (including ones which are attempting to be political-economic) do seem to end up attracting the same kind of people who are currently in it. For example, when we started the Anarchist Youth Network, we were predominantly "alternative" kids (also predominantly culturally middle class), and so as we expanded most of the other people who joined were also the same kind of people.

But it's good to try to move beyond this. Although I think it's important to bear these kind of cultural factors in mind, to make sure that organisations don't start to get dominated by more middle class types, which does seem to happen for whatever reason (be it more confidence in public speaking, or assuming a leadership role, or having less responsibility in terms of being a carer or family wage-earner etc)

On a personal note, two of my siblings were raised with the same accent as me (i.e. non-Cockney, middle class) but when they got to about 11 they changed it and started to speak with Cockney accents to fit in with their friendship groups at school. Now they are both builders. I guess the point of this anecdote is that this kind of "class" as it is commonly referred to in the UK isn't really economic class at all (although of course there is a broad correlation between it and income/social status), but is a much narrower and more fluid set of cultural groups.

Aaaaagghhh! So much of this is what I was trying to say when I first started posting on Libcom but lacked the understanding and skill required to put my point across. The result was me basically being called a class apologist. Of course, I also got the obligatory ancap accusation hurled at me!
Anyhow, great post and amusing in spots which is always a winner.

Well you might say that in it's time and place Class War were adept at applying 'affective political strategies' !

Either way 'plasmatelly' presents a rather one dimensional (if admitedly recogniseable and amusing) picture of the class war federation at it's height perhaps reflecting only their experience in Tyneside. As someone very critical of many aspects of Class War's politics whilst a member of both the UK Wildcat and Subversion groups we were still able to work together with their comrades in Manchester and elsewhere from time to time. As with many political groups their usefulness was time limited but they provided a vehicle through which at least some of their members were able to evolve politically and move on.

This piece does come across as a rather flimsy attempt, on the back of a critique of some of Class War's more obvious deficiencies, to defend the SolFed's 'anarcho-syndicalist' strategy against any specific anarchist/communist political organisation.

Class certainly cannot be defined in simply cultural terms but then neither is it a purely workplace matter (let alone a 'union' one). Equally an anarchist and communist politics needs to critically address cultural issues.

This piece does come across as a rather flimsy attempt, on the back of a critique of some of Class War's more obvious deficiencies, to defend the SolFed's 'anarcho-syndicalist' strategy against any specific anarchist/communist political organisation.

Really? Cause I'm not sure it does at all.

I mean, it does quite clearly state that "this piece isn't meant to be about SolFed". Rather, it seems far more to be about (a) someone's experience in CW back in the day and (b) an attempt to evaluate the importance or overcoming cultural identities in workplaces and within organisations.*

I've actually had this hurled at me once or twice (although, to be fair, it wasn't from you Spiky), but everything that every SF member writes isn't some secret attack on other 'competing' anarchist tendencies.

*I should actually note here, btw, that I don't think SF has done a great job of overcoming the cultural ghetto - although certainly it's a lot better than other anarchist organisations I've been a member of in the past.

Chilli Sauce

This piece does come across as a rather flimsy attempt, on the back of a critique of some of Class War's more obvious deficiencies, to defend the SolFed's 'anarcho-syndicalist' strategy against any specific anarchist/communist political organisation.

Really? Cause I'm not sure it does at all.

I mean, it does quite clearly state that "this piece isn't meant to be about SolFed".

It seems to me to be about SolFed. Personally, I am still a bit bemused by this idea that SolFed is not a political organisation, but instead a political-economic organisation, and beyond this being a slogan I don't really see any difference at all in what they are today (not where they see themselves as going but actually are today), and a 'political organisation'.

Steven.

One guy from Doncaster, telling me a few years ago why in the 80s he joined Class War, said "I didn't have a job, so I couldn't join DAM; I didn't have a jumper so I couldn't join ACF; so I joined Class War".

I don't get this, Steven.

Devrim

Really good read, and it's good to see a new blogger!

Devrim

Personally, I am still a bit bemused by this idea that SolFed is not a political organisation, but instead a political-economic organisation, and beyond this being a slogan I don't really see any difference at all in what they are today (not where they see themselves as going but actually are today), and a 'political organisation'.

I'm not sure how much it matters whether or not SolFed calls itself a political-economic organisation (hardly the most captivating of slogans), but I do think our approach is different from political organisations, esp. in the way we see our relationship to the working class. It's described pretty well in the last chapter of Fighting For Ourselves:

FFO

The typical vanguardist position is that consciousness precedes action. This is, after all, why the vanguard party, bearer of ‘revolutionary consciousnesses,’ must lead the working class. This attitude is explicit in Leninist Marxism but implicit in many other political organisations, even when they seek only to be ‘the leadership of ideas.’ For anarcho-syndicalists, it is the other way around. Workers may not all share our goals of overthrowing capitalism and the state, but we’re not asking them to sign up to that as a precondition of organising. We’re simply asking them to take direct action with us in their own interests. If, in this process, anarcho-syndicalism begins to make more sense to them, then the union gains another member. It should be explained that this is not any old union, concerned only with bread and butter issues, but a revolutionary one also pursuing radical social transformation. This isn’t a question of identifying as an anarcho-syndicalist, but rather of identifying with our methods and goals, whatever your preferred political label (or lack of). It doesn’t do us any good to be recruiting workers who don’t share our aims and methods, nor does it do workers any good to be joining a union whose aims and methods they don’t share. But we should not be afraid to actively recruit through activity either, as this is the only way to expand beyond the existing pool of politicised militants. Revolutionary union activity can expand the pool.

no1

Devrim

Personally, I am still a bit bemused by this idea that SolFed is not a political organisation, but instead a political-economic organisation, and beyond this being a slogan I don't really see any difference at all in what they are today (not where they see themselves as going but actually are today), and a 'political organisation'.

I'm not sure how much it matters whether or not SolFed calls itself a political-economic organisation (hardly the most captivating of slogans), but I do think our approach is different from political organisations, esp. in the way we see our relationship to the working class. It's described pretty well in the last chapter of Fighting For Ourselves:

I have read this publication, and to be honest I don't think the idea that action precedes consciousness is anywhere near as particular to anarchosyndicalism as you think. It is actually quite common amongst various Marxists.

However much you may talk about unions the fact remains that SolFed is not a union, and in my opinion has no chance of becoming one in the short to medium term future. What then are you left with? In my view a political organisation with industrial networks. I think that any political organisation that sees itself as socialist and has some sort of orientation to the working class would have industrial networks of some sort once it reached a certain size. SolFed today certainly has less of them than it did when I was a member of DAM in the late 80s. So why is it so different.

Devrim

However much you may talk about unions the fact remains that SolFed is not a union, and in my opinion has no chance of becoming one in the short to medium term future. What then are you left with? In my view a political organisation with industrial networks. I think that any political organisation that sees itself as socialist and has some sort of orientation to the working class would have industrial networks of some sort once it reached a certain size.

I think the difference is that SF seeks to have a fundamental orientation towards the workplace (which is not to distract from the community strategy). That's quite different from most other socialists organisation who, at best, have a dual focus on the workplace and politics - meaning the capture or exercise of state power - and see them, again, at best, as related spheres of activity.

I mean, SF quite clearly states - in another not so catchy slogan - that it's an anarcho-syndicalist union initiative. TBF, the SF industrial networks aren't actually thriving, but we have reached a point where groups of workers come to us looking for practical support. The economic is there even if it's not nearly as developed as we'd obviously like it to be.

I also want to point out here, that's it's non-SFers who have turned this into a thread about SF.

Isn't the point of the blog to make a distinction between two ways of 'doing class politics', one based on culture/identity and the other on economic position/relations? Class War and SF just seem like illustrations, from the author's experience, of that point. I.e. Class War seemed to project a particular image of working clarse identity, while SF is pretty diverse culturally (e.g. DAM veterans who've done mostly manual work and university educated 20-somethings working office jobs/call centres don't necessarily share much identity/culture wise). I think you could make the same argument abstractly without the examples, or using different examples, and it would still be valid point.

plasmatelly

Devrim - I'm struggling to believe you genuinely don't see any difference between a purely political organisation and what SolFed is trying to develop - a political-economic collection of unions.

I am not talking about the organisation that you 'are trying to develop'. I am talking about the organisation you have now. Maoists could talking about setting up a red army and a liberated zone in Epping forrest. Would you judge them on what they did, or what they dreamed about? I think that SolFed today is obviously a political organisation whatever you want to call it, and I don't see that changing at all, certainly not in the short to medium term.

Chilli Sauce

I think the difference is that SF seeks to have a fundamental orientation towards the workplace (which is not to distract from the community strategy). That's quite different from most other socialists organisation who, at best, have a dual focus on the workplace and politics - meaning the capture or exercise of state power - and see them, again, at best, as related spheres of activity.

Again, I don't see SolFed as being any different from this. Are you saying that you don't have a focus on politics however you want to define it.

Chilli Sauce

I mean, SF quite clearly states - in another not so catchy slogan - that it's an anarcho-syndicalist union initiative. TBF, the SF industrial networks aren't actually thriving,

Which I take to mean you just have one that actually functions, and that you are a political organisation in reality.

Chilli Sauce

but we have reached a point where groups of workers come to us looking for practical support.

I think this happens to lots of political left-wing organisations.

Chilli Sauce

I also want to point out here, that's it's non-SFers who have turned this into a thread about SF.

But it was what the article was about.

Devrim

Devrim

But it was what the article was about.

Well, I beg to differ...

Joseph Kay

Isn't the point of the blog to make a distinction between two ways of 'doing class politics', one based on culture/identity and the other on economic position/relations? (snip)

I still don't see what's so complicated about the distinction between a political organisation and a union (even a tiny, not very effective one). If you approach any of the trot groups in my work/area with a workplace problem, they're going to tell you to join a trade union (and become a rep, build the branch, and in a few years maybe take over the branch... sorry what was your grievance?). I've heard that first hand - i.e. this is how actually-existing political organisations operate (they do the politics, if you've got a workplace grievance they tell you to join a trade union).

If workers approach SF with a workplace problem, they get organising advice, training, and material support to organise in their workplace, regardless of trade union presence (they don't really exist outside of the public sector and big private sector workplaces). Again, this is actually happening, not some speculative future. Sure, SF's hardly storming the winter palace, and by its very nature 80% of this stuff isn't very visible or glamorous, but it doesn't seem a difficult distinction to make.

To try and bring this back on topic, that kind of activity would be impossible if SF took a cultural/identity approach to class, because workers come in all sorts, even within a workplace there's can be a big range of demographics. I mean the Class War stereotype relates to a long-gone class composition, but even if you updated the stereotype (underemployed graduate in a call centre or whatever), you'd still run into the same problems of class-as-identity politics. Or as the OP put it...

plasmatelly

She may be a well versed educationalist, former private school pupil, a lover of the arts, of music, of good manners and decorum. I'm not. I'm a bit of a twat. But one thing unites us beyond our politics, is that of our economic class.

Joseph Kay

I still don't see what's so complicated about the distinction between a political organisation and a union (even a tiny, not very effective one).

But SolFed is not a tiny not very effective union, but a political organisation.

Joseph Kay

If you approach any of the trot groups in my work/area with a workplace problem, they're going to tell you to join a trade union (and become a rep, build the branch, and in a few years maybe take over the branch... sorry what was your grievance?). I've heard that first hand - i.e. this is how actually-existing political organisations operate (they do the politics, if you've got a workplace grievance they tell you to join a trade union).

SolFed industrial strategy

In a workplace with a recognised TUC union, an SF member would typically join the union but promote an anarcho-syndicalist strategy. This would involve organising workplace assemblies to make collective decisions on workplace issues. However, workers will still be likely to hold union cards here to avoid splits in the workplace between union members and non-union members. Members would also seek to build collective direct action beyond union structures, organise with other militants independently of the union and seek to build an organised anarcho-syndicalist presence on the shop floor.
In a non-unionised workplace, SF members should attempt to organise collectively with workmates, and form committees of militant workers. The medium term aim should be to build from this into an SF workplace branch. If the mood in the workplacce moves towards unionisation with a recognised TUC union, members would typically join the union whilst continuing to argue for the importance of collective decision-making and direct action and pursuing the strategy for unionised workplaces. However, members would not silence their criticisms of trade unions.

And SolFed tells people to join the union too. Yes, there are provisos about independent organising, but I have seen more radical Trotskyists do that too.

Joseph Kay

To try and bring this back on topic, that kind of activity would be impossible if SF took a cultural/identity approach to class, because workers come in all sorts, even within a workplace there's can be a big range of demographics. I mean the Class War stereotype relates to a long-gone class composition, but even if you updated the stereotype (underemployed graduate in a call centre or whatever), you'd still run into the same problems of class-as-identity politics.

But I think that the whole 'class as cultural identity' thing was quite unique to Class War. Nobody is proposing repeating what Class War did, and criticisng Class War is a bit like shooting fish in barrels, even more so now that they don't exist any more and can't defend themselves.

Devrim

Devrim

But SolFed is not a tiny not very effective union, but a political organisation.

If in doubt, reassert your position, eh?

Devrim

And SolFed tells people to join the union too. Yes, there are provisos about independent organising, but I have seen more radical Trotskyists do that too.

I'm glad you know what we do better than I do!

Generally SF doesn't tell people to join existing unions unless they're already the main vehicle (generally SF members would join, but there's no general policy to promote membership). Most of the workers who've approached us - that i'm aware of - are in non-union workplaces. Recent stuff in unionised workplaces has also involved organising independently, bringing together workers from different trade unions (and none) etc.

I don't really get your point. Trotskyists could do this. They could abandon party politics, restructure their organisation on federalist lines, abandon their orientation to the trade union bureaucracy, and instead plough all their resources into organising with their co-workers directly, based on mass meetings and direct action. Then they'd be the same as SolFed (give or take).

It's not really about what this or that individual does. I'm sure there's Trots who are much close to the SF strategy in practice, just as I'm sure you can find self-identified anarcho-syndicalists who are closer to Trots in practice. The point is one of organisational infrastructure, role, capacity, resources etc. Political orgs - actually existing ones - aren't set up to do union work. They'd usually be the first to say it.

Anyway, doing another round of 'but you're not a union!' is one of the more pointless recurring libcom motifs. I think the blog makes a more general and important point about the problems with treating class politics as an identity politics. That's broader than Class War (*gasp*, you'll even find SF members doing it). Class War exemplified that kind of thing but it comes up quite often (e.g. as a convenient way to dismiss women and black people as middle class if they complain about sexism/racism).

Again, I don't see SolFed as being any different from this. Are you saying that you don't have a focus on politics however you want to define it.

Yeah, we have a focus and politics and a focus on the workplace - hence, the political-economic organisation.

Of course, means are pretty important, too. The part of my post you didn't highlight - "the capture and exercise of state power" - clearly does not form part of SF's politics. Even when we do more "political" campaigns - think workfare - the focus is on direct action and linking up the workplace with wider political and economic issues.

But SolFed is not a tiny not very effective union, but a political organisation.

Well, I guess it depends on how you define union (I have an idea, let's do that go-round again :wall: ), but when I've had problems at work, I've had far, far more support from SF than my trade union.

And, I've given a lot of the SF workplace trainings. I can't tell you how many times people have told me that the training has been far more effective at helping them organise in the workplace than anything they've ever gotten from their TUC union.

And SolFed tells people to join the union too.

"Would typically join" is hardly "tells", Devrim.

FWIW, through my local, I've been helping to give some advice to a group of workers who are the middle of an organisation/unionisation drive and I've desperately trying to reduce their expectations of the union. Instead, I've been trying to get them to develop an independent workplace presence alongside their union drive (without much success, I should add)

TBF, I'm really quite confused how you could take that away from the industrial strategy without a conscious effort to misunderstand the document.

I think there is a quite a lot of talking past each other in this discussion. For instance, the points JK and Devrim make are quite different and do not really engage each other. Devrim's point is quite general. Political organisations have and do, not always obviously, orient to workplace struggle/activity in their own way. Examples would be Lutte Ouvrière in France and early IS in the UK. As SolFed members make a point of the need to orient away from propagandistic, ideologically-centered activity etc. I do not think this involves equating political groups that do this and SolFed as seems to be the implication in JK post above. JK's point is more specific, i.e. what SolFed organising approach involves and how that demarcates them from groups that do not share that practice.

The thing is though, Android, those points would be fair enough had Devrim not specifically called out SF. I mean, he is the one quoting the SF constitution.

He might be trying to make general points (I don't know), but it's pretty tough to do that when, in his first post on the thread and contrary to the author of the blog, he claims that the piece "seems to me to be about SolFed" And, just for good measure, following it up with "personally, I am still a bit bemused by this idea that SolFed is not a political organisation."

BTW, plasma, i know it can be pretty frustrating when the discussion underneath your blog turns into a slogging match. Just say the word and I'll drop this.

This conversation is way out of my realm but the way I saw PTs blog, in simple terms, was that we should leave our prejudices at the door and work with people who's interests align with ours regardless of their educational or social background. As such I thought it was a good piece of writing.
Someone said it was oversimplified but for me, at least in this case, that is a big plus. Some of the stuff I've looked at in the library here, and this is not criticism, is just too complicated for my intellect and level of understanding and straight talk such as Plasma's blog is far more effective with the likes of me than other more intricate and technical writing.

What does it matter whether Solfed currently defines itself as a 'political organisation' or a 'political-economic union initiative'? I'm more interested in what it does and how it goes about it.

Because that's not how left communism works, wojtek.

I'm more interested in those ACF jumpers! Intriguing mystery.

plasma tellies are bigger than the rest but sometimes their definition lacks clarity!

I think SolFed does some useful work by the way even if I didn't like aspects of this particular blog.

Of course 'useful work' doesn't add up to an adequate communist critique.

Spikymike

Of course 'useful work' doesn't add up to an adequate communist critique.

aaaah yes, the mythical communist critique that will usher in revolutionary social change. ;)

Apologies. I was being facetious.

I don't really get what Devrim's point is really, would this all disappear if we said something like 'yes, SF at current is still very small, but it orients itself toward a political-economic organization often engaging in small scale polical and economic struggles'.

Plasma, thanks for the blog. I think you have hit on some quite important issues. I have been implicitly aware of this for quite a while now.

plasmatelly,

At least some of your members seem to show an interest in ''dry as sticks communist musings'' on this site beyond anything I have shown an interest in so lets drop such unwarranted sarcasm. My interest in this blog of yours was initially sparked by the overlap with the thread on 'affective politics' started by another member of SolFed, which comment got overlooked. The rest was simply my attempt to rebalance the comments you made about Class War. I have previously made friendly, if critical, comments on the most recent SolFed 'Fighting For Ourselves' booklet and have no need to repeat myself and have from time to time helped out with SolFed activities here. If you honestly think the previous Subversion or UK Wildcat group members did regard ''the class struggle as consisting solely of producing communist critiques'' then you are clearly misinformed. In terms of Solfed's new 'anarcho-syndicalist initiative' I accept that it has some logic in terms of focussing the energies of your small group on what you term 'political-economic' organising (arguments about the distinction between 'unions' and other forms of agitational workplace networks aside) but that still leaves a whole are of life up for both critique and organising, meaning that there is no one type or form of adequate organisation and certainly no one of the various small political groups, networks or publications in our milieu up to the various tasks required in opposition to capitalism.

plasmatelly

But thanks for mentioning Subversion again; I was just thinking of how, if I had a different set of values and believed that class struggle should solely comprise of producing left communist critiques...

Off the topic I guess, but the Subversion group weren't left communists were they? And for a very small group they at least had a bit of influence on discussions, debates and the political outlook of some class struggle anarchists in the UK. Plus they seemed to really irritate the leftists within the anarchist scene, which is always a good thing.

wojtek

What does it matter whether Solfed currently defines itself as a 'political organisation' or a 'political-economic union initiative'? I'm more interested in what it does and how it goes about it.

Chilli Sauce

Because that's not how left communism works, wojtek.

The impression that I get, Wojtek, is that SolFed presents itself as something different from other political organisations and that this is emphasised by saying it's not a political organisation. It is something different, a political-economic organisation. I don't think that it is that different, and I commented on it. This is a discussion board after all.

I think it is sort of ironic that 'Chili Sauce' states that 'that is not how left communism works'. Unfortunately the experience that most people on here would have of left communism derives from the ICC, which has at times behaved pretty shockingly. The behaviour of SolFed members on here when responding to criticism reminds me, and others I have spoken to, of the ICC at its worst. The comments made by Plasmatelly to SpikeyMike on this thread exemplify this. It is not, however, a new thing.

Arbeiten

I don't really get what Devrim's point is really, would this all disappear if we said something like 'yes, SF at current is still very small, but it orients itself toward a political-economic organization often engaging in small scale polical and economic struggles'.

This is a fair comment, and I think is a fairer description. It is not as catchy obviously. Perhaps saying it occasionally though would remind people of where you actually are. Perhaps 'SolFed is 'for a political-economic organisation' would be more accurate than SolFed 'is a political-economic' organisation.

Chilli Sauce

He might be trying to make general points (I don't know), but it's pretty tough to do that when, in his first post on the thread and contrary to the author of the blog, he claims that the piece "seems to me to be about SolFed" And, just for good measure, following it up with "personally, I am still a bit bemused by this idea that SolFed is not a political organisation."

I am commenting about SolFed. I think that this is a reasonably fair thing to do as the blog is obviously about SolFed. It starts on the example of Class War then contrasts it to that of SolFEd. It mentions the word 'SolFed' seven times in the text. What else should I suppose it is about?

Chilli Sauce

The thing is though, Android, those points would be fair enough had Devrim not specifically called out SF. I mean, he is the one quoting the SF constitution.

Look at the language being used here, 'called SolFed out'. It sounds like I am challenging them to a fight, not merely commenting on a blog on the internet. It is really reminiscent of the way the ICC can behave.

Joseph K

don't really get your point. Trotskyists could do this. They could abandon party politics, restructure their organisation on federalist lines, abandon their orientation to the trade union bureaucracy, and instead plough all their resources into organising with their co-workers directly, based on mass meetings and direct action. Then they'd be the same as SolFed (give or take).

I think that your view of Trotskyist tactics is very coloured by the current main Trotskyist organisations in the UK, and the flotsam that they drag it their wake. Android pointed out that there are other Trotskyist approaches, and gave a past example from the UK, and an example from France. There are obviously more. Trotskyism isn't defined by the SWP, SPEW, and the ragtag group of tiny sects that follows them.

Chilli Sauce

Of course, means are pretty important, too. The part of my post you didn't highlight - "the capture and exercise of state power" - clearly does not form part of SF's politics.

I didn't mention it because I thought it was a piece of the worst sort of anarchist semantics, and I didn't want to pull you up on it, and thus divert the issue.

If you take Trotskyists at face value they advocate pretty much a similar sort of council system to that that most anarchists do nowadays.Yes the see a leading role of the party within it, but the vast majority of them see that the capitalist state has to be destroyed. Semantically arguments about what to call the form of workers power exercised in a post-revolutionary society can actually disguise pretty similar conceptions.

To me these sort of conceptions seem to imply the 'Lenin was an evil dictator who wanted from the start to install a dictatorship over the workers' school of anarchism. Now, in truth that is what Lenin and the Bolshevik party ended up doing, but I think it is the worst sort of anarchist nonsense (and I don't mean to suggest that all anarchists think this) to imply that this is because Lenin was a bad man.

I think that the danger of the Trotskyist parties is not that they will seize state power, but that as they do today, they will end up trying to shepherd back workers into the hands of the traditional organisations of the labour movement (I can remember being involved in a national wildcat strike, and having SWP members outside our office arguing that we had to get the union to call a national strike when everyone was already out, or another similar example is how they focused during the miners' strike on getting the TUC to 'get off its knees and call a general strike' to the detriment of independent activity to spread the strike). In other places it may be calling on workers to join in with national liberation struggles in stead of fighting for their own interests.

Tony Cliff may have seen himself at one point as a British Lenin, but I would imagine that if the leadership of the current Trotskyist parties have ulterior motives, they are more along the lines of maintaining an organisation that can keep paying them in their full-time posts, or at most for the CWI of being elected to parliment in some new founded workers' party rather than seizing state power over the working class.

I think your point was just anarchist semantics really.

Joseph Kay

Devrim

And SolFed tells people to join the union too. Yes, there are provisos about independent organising, but I have seen more radical Trotskyists do that too.

I'm glad you know what we do better than I do!

Generally SF doesn't tell people to join existing unions unless they're already the main vehicle (generally SF members would join, but there's no general policy to promote membership).

Chilli Sauce

"Would typically join" is hardly "tells", Devrim.

I don't, like some left communists, believe it is some sort of moral crime to join a union. That is not what I am criticisng you for. The point I was making was in reply to that is what the Trotskyists do, and we are different. Now, of course the main UK Trotskyist organisations today may only do that. My point was that it is not all that some Trotskyist organisations do, and that you tell them to do it too.

'Would typically join' is not equivalent to 'tell' as you say. It is more similar to 'would typically tell'. I presume that you do tell workers to do what you do yourself.

Chilli Sauce

when I've had problems at work, I've had far, far more support from SF than my trade union.

And, I've given a lot of the SF workplace trainings. I can't tell you how many times people have told me that the training has been far more effective at helping them organise in the workplace than anything they've ever gotten from their TUC union.

Don't you think that some Totskyists will have had the same experience with their organisations?

Well, I guess it depends on how you define union (I have an idea, let's do that go-round again wall ),

People say it because it is so blatant true.

Devrim

Cooked

I'm more interested in those ACF jumpers! Intriguing mystery.

Me too, I think we should be told.

Devrim

The jumper thing was in reference to their - perceived at least - fashion sense:

those jumpers were popular during the 80ies among Greens in Germany, before they became "respectable"

Entdinglichung

those jumpers were popular during the 80ies among Greens in Germany, before they became "respectable"

Did the jumpers or the Greens become respectable?

the Greens:

Joschka Fischer (former member of "Revolutionärer Kampf") and Jürgen Trittin (former member of the "Kommunistischer Bund") after joining the government in 1998, they generally were wearing Armani suits

Edit: this ended up being a long post, sorry. Tried to use real world examples rather than just abstract theory, which pushed up the wordcount.

Devrim

'Would typically join' is not equivalent to 'tell' as you say. It is more similar to 'would typically tell'. I presume that you do tell workers to do what you do yourself.

Typically no, unless there's a good reason (upcoming industrial action say). We're not some auxilliary recruitment arm of the TUC. Most of my workmates would scowl if I tried to get them to join Unison, but aren't necessarily averse to organising or solidarity. That is a very healthy state of affairs imho! To my knowledge (so, my local, and stories i've heard from others or things in the IB), the only time SF members have encouraged workmates in general to join a TUC union is in the run up to industrial action. I'm sure there's other instances I don't know about, but it's far from a general policy. The general orientation is to promote independent organisation regardless of trade union membership. This is spelled out in exactly the same document you're quoting from (the industrial strategy), so i won't retread that ground.

Devrim

I think that your view of Trotskyist tactics is very coloured by the current main Trotskyist organisations in the UK

This is undoubtedly true, my direct experience is limited to the last decade in the UK, when the Trots have generally turned away from the workplace, if not the class struggle altogether. And reading/conversations with older comrades don't fully make up for that. But I'm still not sure the point here. If there was a Trotskyist organisation with an economic capacity or role (e.g. organising independent industrial action, or at least mass meetings which did), and this was its political activity, i.e. not just a means to build a base for separate electoral/big-P Politics, then I'd describe it as a political-economic organisation.

I mean I'm not too attached to the jargon, but i do think it's useful. 'Political organisation', 'union', 'political-economic' are all formal categories, they don't, in themselves, say much about the content. The AF, the Labour Party, the SWP, and three men in a pub putting out a communiqué, are all, formally speaking, political organisations. You can only say so much at this level of analysis/abstraction. If there's an organisation with a syndicalist economic basis and anarchist political content, I'd call that political-economic. That doesn't mean anarcho-syndicalismn is the only possible content.

I mean, there's a natural fit with anarchism, because anarchism is almost invariably anti-party politics, which is the main cause for separating political (party) and economic (union) organisations. But if Marxists come to the conclusion that separate political/party organisation is not needed (whether under specific circumstances, or in the whole historical period or whatever), and if they orient their poltical work to the economic sphere*, then there could be Marxist content. Something like that happened with the people around Ruehle in the AAUD in 1920 Germany(forming the AAUD-E), and maybe with the Italian workerists in the 60s-70s (I'm not sure, would have to brush up on my history).

Devrim

The impression that I get, Wojtek, is that SolFed presents itself as something different from other political organisations and that this is emphasised by saying it's not a political organisation. It is something different, a political-economic organisation.

Ok, you have that impression. That's unfortunate though, as i remember FFO went out of the way to be modest and clear about where SF is at, e.g:

FFO

We need to organise struggles ourselves along direct action lines. And if we’re not capable of doing so at present, we need to aspire to that capability; we need to move from being a political propaganda group to being a revolutionary union. The Solidarity Federation describes itself as a revolutionary union initiative to signify this intent. So far, the struggles we have initiated have been small scale and often focussed on individual grievances. But that merely reflects the limits of our present capacities, capacities we are always seeking to expand. Specific political organisation is not sufficient to this task. We seek to become an organisation which is at once political and economic.

I think you'll struggle to find an SF member, let alone any official statement, claiming SF is a fully functioning revolutionary union. Generally people are at pains to point out it's a work in progress etc.

That said, I've received much, much more support in my workplace activity from SF than from my 'real' union. Maybe that says more about Unison being shit than it says about SF being any good, but I think SF is already different to other political groups, and is also different to the SF of 5 years ago. I know other members have had similar experiences of meaningful SF union activity (one even had a disciplinary which cited the SF industrial strategy), so imho we've come a long way in the last 3-5 years. Though of course, there's lots of development still ahead, fingers crossed.

To give an example of this. I was involved in some long-running workplace organising. For a while, this was just a handful of SF members. As we made contacts with other militants, this broadened out into a de facto organising committee (we didn't call it that, but it played that role). Once we had public actions (demos), at least six months down the road, political organisations of various shades suddenly started making their interventions, passing out leaflets with various proposals on what is to be done.

My point here isn't whether the leaflets were any good (they varied), but that this is an illustration of two different approaches to organisation and politics. One - 'Approach A' - sees political activity and organisation as principally operating on an economic level in your immediate life based on shared interests - in this case, at work (though dues-paying members of the org would share basic ideas/principles too). Much of this daily political activity is subterrenean and unglamorous, building contacts, mapping, agitation, small bits of mutual aid and solidarity without much public aspect. Publishing written analyses or critiques is secondary here, this stuff tending to circulate in conversations or emails, and maybe get written up later if there's anything of wider interest. Here politics mainly happens in innumerable conversations about management, about the trade unions etc, which (hopefully) normalises an anarchist/direct action approach.

The other - 'Approach B' - sees struggle largely as an external thing that flares up from time to time into big public disputes. Political activity is understood to be based principally on shared ideas and to involve various activities (campaigning, electoralism, getting the paper out, public meetings/recruitment, involvement in third party groups/campaigns...). One of them is interventions in such disputes as they arise, typically by way of leaflet and/or bulletin, or in the case of ultra-Machiavellian Trots and open assemblies, trying to stage a coup and centralising power in a steering committee packed by themselves.

There's also a third approach, 'C', which is like A, but tries to empty out the political content and/or separate it off into a specific group (B). L&S's approach to the IWW was like that i think, and the arguments you sometimes hear from anarchists for service unionism to build apolitical membership would fall into that camp. That's a whole other debate though.

I am not arguing (here) the relative merits of A and B (or C), only that they are different. I also think there's better and worse ways to do both (e.g. an intervention by libcom types is far preferable to a Trot coup). I've called Approach A 'political-economic' and Approach B 'political'. Again, I'm not too attached to the jargon, it's a bit of a mouthful tbh, but what it describes is I think an important difference in both organisational role and conception of political activity. What you call it is secondary. To try and link this back to the blog, the relevance here is the importance of class as shared economic position as opposed to cultural identity.

* Old syndicalist texts, e.g. Pouget, refered to this as 'direct action' (economic sphere) over 'political action' (state-oriented), though i think the definition of 'political' has since broadened beyond the state, certainly since the feminist movement.

Just a few thoughts, as I don't really have an opinion on this myself, one way or another. Although I do share the confusion of some people here on the differences between what people are referring to as a political and political-economic organisation.

(One note first, though: some people seem to be getting a little unnecessary defensive, which I think is unhelpful, and I think people should try to remember that even those who are may be disagreeing in this thread are still doing so from a constructive perspective)
Joseph Kay

I mean I'm not too attached to the jargon, but i do think it's useful. 'Political organisation', 'union', 'political-economic' are all formal categories, they don't, in themselves, say much about the content. The AF, the Labour Party, the SWP, and three men in a pub putting out a communiqué, are all, formally speaking, political organisations. You can only say so much at this level of analysis/abstraction. If there's an organisation with a syndicalist economic basis and anarchist political content, I'd call that political-economic. That doesn't mean anarcho-syndicalismn is the only possible content.

Now, on these, the SWP for example is a political organisation, however it does advise its members to become union shop stewards. And then they do work together in their various sectors, normally in the form of union party or "united left" caucuses to pursue workplace related goals. Sometimes these are "political" in nature (like trying to pass political resolutions) but often they are workplace-related, like trying to organise demonstrations of strike action in pursuit of a pay claim or what have you.

I don't see the qualitative difference between that and a political-economic organisation, for example. I mean okay apart from the fact that the SWP would still acknowledge that the unions are the bodies in which economic goals should be pursued. So possibly this is what you mean the difference is. Although the SWP would also believe it should be the leadership of these separate economic bodies.

That said, I've received much, much more support in my workplace activity from SF than from my 'real' union. Maybe that says more about Unison being shit than it says about SF being any good, but I think SF is already different to other political groups, and is also different to the SF of 5 years ago. I know other members have had similar experiences of meaningful SF union activity (one even had a disciplinary which cited the SF industrial strategy), so imho we've come a long way in the last 3-5 years. Though of course, there's lots of development still ahead, fingers crossed.

again, playing devils advocate I've had a lot of support in my workplace activity from trots in a couple of groups. The majority of the union leadership in my branch are trots, who do the bulk of the organising work in the branch.

This isn't to denigrate the activities of Solfed - of which I am a supporter - just pointing out a couple of things which I think might help explain my and others' confusion.

Steven.

The jumper thing was in reference to their - perceived at least - fashion sense

Aren't these types of jumper 'in' again? Beyond Retro seems to be making a kiling on them.

The SWP example I already addressed. It adds up to saying 'if the SWP stopped separating the political and economic, and instead focussed their political activity on the economic sphere, then they'd be political-economic.' Well, yeah. There's a reason why the SWP hierarchy labels that kind of thing autonomist/syndicalist deviation!

I think there's two issues here causing difficulty: (1) I suspect the difficulty is more cognitive than conceptual, and (2) I think there's an issue of what concepts do.

1. The basic idea that an organisation can embody political principles, have an economic basis/role, or both, doesn't seem difficult. I mean rather than saying there's political organisations over here, and unions over there, it's just a venn diagram, where some unions simultaneously
   embody political principles. Conceptually, I do not think this is difficult. It's certainly very simple compared to say, reading Capital, let alone value theory or other theoretical stuff that does the rounds.

   So I suspect the issue is that some people are quite invested in the political organisation/union dichotomy, and so have difficulty 'getting' it. By way of analogy, it's not conceptually difficult to realise some people present an androgynous/genderqueer/trans gender, which doesn't fit either 'male' or 'female' boxes. But if someone's really invested in the idea of gender as an either/or dichotomy, they'll find it hard to 'get' it. 'Is it really a man or a woman? It must be one or the other.'

   I'm just using that as an analogy - i'm not saying anyone's a transphobe or whatever. But there seems to be a similar thing here, everything's either a political organisation or a union, because that's just the way things are. I think this brings us onto the second issue, what concepts do.

2. None of these concepts - political organisation, union, political-economic, is any less constructed or abstract than the other. But yet one generates thousands and thousands of words of critical interrogation while the others are largely accepted as natural, self-evident categories. The problem is concepts of this kind shape how we see things, and I think exclude certain possibilities a priori (i.e. by definition, prior to any facts or experience). If organisations are either revolutionary or they're unions, then by definition, revolutionary unions are a contradiction in terms.

   That's fine for left communists or certain strands of ultra-left anarchism, cos they're not interested in, or maybe even hostile to, revolutionary unionism. So there's no need to refine the categories or interrogate their assumptions, they do what's asked of them. But it's untenable to insist everyone has to use your concepts and terminology, especially when your politics are a priori impossible (or at least impossible to express) using that terminology. It's like telling the androgynous person they're free to be whatever they like, as long as it's clearly either male or female.

The second point maybe sheds light on the first one. A hell of a lot of ultra-left theory is kinda assertoric (great word i picked up from Nina Power's critique of Tiqqun, fwiw), i.e. it tends to assert what needs to be proved. If your critique of unions is something like 'all unions are X by their very nature', then the stability and coherence of the category 'union' is very important. Likewise if you define the role of political organisation as distinct from said unions, these conceptual boundaries come to be really important, cos any slippage undermines the stance. So often you get semantic wriggling, 'X isn't a union, it's a militant workplace workers' struggle group' etc.

I think the 'common sense' binary of political organisation and union comes from social democracy, and it's Leninist offspring. Via there, it gets into left communism and some anarchism. But for revolutionary unionists, a conceptual framework which by definition excludes our politics and practice is not workable. So we need a richer one, to develop a better theory than the hand-me-down social democratic one. The concept of political-economic organisation doesn't exclude specific political organisations or apolitical unions, it just complicates the picture and allows us to talk about more real-world stuff.

But then we also need to explain the dynamics which produce the common sense binary of political organisation and union, separating the political and the economic. And we need to explain - not just assert - the processes by which unions develop interests independent and against their members, not least so we can explain the exceptions (e.g. CNT), understand the trade-offs (e.g. smaller membership), and guard against those tendencies in our own initiatives. So that entails looking at the logic of workers' association, the logic of representation, their interplay, their historical development etc. SF wrote a whole book on this, and it was painstakingly edited to make the prose pretty clear. Like I say, I think the difficulty lies elsewhere.

I'm awestuck by the high fidelity knitwear image! I reccon it ate all my phone bandwith. (I guess I should get off pay as you go...)

Question is what those jumpers meant in the 80's (?) Were they hipster wear of the time or what librarians wore? Apologies to all hipster librarians.

Cooked

Question is what those jumpers meant in the 80's (?) Were they hipster wear of the time or what librarians wore? Apologies to all hipster librarians.

the guy who was telling me it meant it meaning librarians/teacher-types. When he said it it actually made me think of Knightrose (in a good way, not a bad way!)

Joseph:
Joseph Kay

The SWP example I already addressed. It adds up to saying 'if the SWP stopped separating the political and economic, and instead focussed their political activity on the economic sphere, then they'd be political-economic.' Well, yeah. There's a reason why the SWP hierarchy labels that kind of thing autonomist/syndicalist deviation!

on this, it seems like you are saying that to be a political-economic organisation, essentially they have to be an anti-political organisation. And their entire focus has to be on the economic sphere. Is that correct?

To me the difficulty here is not thinking something has to be either one thing or the other. So I can understand on the basis you arguing that Solfed is a political-economic organisation.

But what I don't understand is how by the same logic the AF is not (as it advocates activity in the economic sphere by workplace resistance groups), or even some trot groups like Workers Fight or the SWP are just purely political.

Maybe it's best if we speak about this in person, as I'm not trying to get anyone's back up, and this seems to be a largely semantic discussion.

Steven.

it seems like you are saying that to be a political-economic organisation, essentially they have to be an anti-political organisation.

Iirc this is mentioned in the book. I think 'anti-political' is just as jargony and kinda obsolete, since 'political' has been understood as much more than the state since at least the 70s. I mean, for me, political-economic means orientation to political activity on the basis of economic organisation (i.e. associations of workers). If you do that, but simultaneously, i dunno, run in elections, to me that's separating out 'politics' as something other than workers' self-activity. Typically the result of that is the subordination of the economic to the political.

That plays out in various ways; direct party control of union hierarchies through to instructing shop stewards to take time off to canvass for elections, or to climb the hierarchy of the TUC union to further the interests of the party. So it's also about where politics happens, and where organisation should be based: the shop floor, based on shared economic interests. Does that make sense? As far as I can see, even when Trots have some kind of rank-and-file or industrial caucus, it's still subordinate to the party. If it wasn't it would probably look a lot more like the Italian workerists in the 60s-70s. Does that make sense?

quote

what I don't understand is how by the same logic the AF is not (as it advocates activity in the economic sphere by workplace resistance groups)

Ok, maybe this gets at part of the confusion. Problems with the vagueries of WRGs aside, this isn't really much to do with what groups advocate. Anyone can advocate anything. It's about organisational orientation, practice, and use of resources. I mean, most libertarian or left communist 'organisations' are a tiny handful of people, or a collection of tiny handfuls of people, and have hardly any resources. So whatever group X does with its tiny resources is going to look pretty similar to what group Y does with its tiny resources (i.e. nobody does much).

SolFed doesn't just advocate things, we actively seek to do them. A lot of the time people talk about this like it's hypothetical. Something nice we'd like to do in the future. It's not, it's about stuff that we're doing now, with a view to developing to allow us to do more things in the future. That means directing resources towards those things (and therefore foregoing other possible activities). It means systematically training members up, building up relevant knowledge, skills, and capacities, running proactive campaigns to support members' organising, soliciting grievances, and actively looking to collectivise them etc.

I'm sure individual AF members do what they can, but as far as I'm aware the AF as an organisation doesn't commit resources to say, workplace training, or LRD subscriptions, or basic rights leaflets (Stuff Your... series). This is not a criticism of the AF. The AF neither is nor aspires to be any kind of union organisation, so it doesn't commit resources in this way. That's fine. The AF sets itself seven main tasks (from the constitution); (1) propaganda, (2) memory of the class, (3) a forum for debate and discussion, (4) analysis/coherent communist response to social developments, (5) leadership of ideas, (6) exposing criticising social democrats/Leninists, and (7) intervention.

That's a pretty good summary of the role of a specific political organisation, but it doesn't include the kind of stuff I mentioned above (which is all the stuff SolFed has really been stepping up in the last 3 years). Again, this makes sense, cos SolFed is trying to be an anarcho union organisation, so we commit resources differently. Advocacy is cheap, actually committing resources to things carries opportunity costs. You have to make choices, prioritise certain activities etc. You literally can't do everything, and if you try you'll spread yourself too thin.

I mean, I'm being charitable here, the latest version of RORO explicitly states the workplace cannot be the basis for revolutionary struggle.

AF, RORO wrote

The historical argument that the factory would provide the means to create a revolutionary proletariat or source of social mobilization was false from the start and proved a disaster for humanity. How could industrial workers alone, in tightly managed workplaces and offered only the choice of alienated labour or enforced leisure, ever be capable of carrying through a libertarian revolution?

I'm willing to accept that's not the majority view in AF, and again, I'm not trying to have a go - just to point out that the AF explicitly, in "one of the few pamphlets produced by the Anarchist Federation that intends to be authoritative and prescriptive. Here, more than anywhere, we mean what we say", explicitly rejects the idea of workplace-based revolutionary organisation. Which is fine - not everyone has to agree with anarcho-syndicalism.

You're not getting my back up, don't worry. Sorry if I come off as annoyed. I do think the tendency to get hung up on terminology is a really unproductive discussion though. I don't think the OP was difficult to grasp - that treating class as an cultural thing tends to be mutually exclusive to treating it as a shared economic position.

Cooked

I'm awestuck by the high fidelity knitwear image!

Probably a selfie. :p ;)

Well, JK covered just about all of this pretty extensively. I'll just pick up on one point:

If you take Trotskyists at face value they advocate pretty much a similar sort of council system to that that most anarchists do nowadays.Yes the see a leading role of the party within it, but the vast majority of them see that the capitalist state has to be destroyed. Semantically arguments about what to call the form of workers power exercised in a post-revolutionary society can actually disguise pretty similar conceptions.

I've got to be honest, I've never met a Trot who didn't have some pre-occupation with securing state power - whether it's their party, reclaim the Labour Party, a new Workers Party, the TUSC or whatever. Big-P politics, electorialism, and the desire to use state power for supposedly working class ends is always there.

My understanding is that, if we take them at face value, any Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist group thinks that the "capitalist state has to be destroyed". I mean, "the withering away of the state", "State and Revolution". This isn't exactly new stuff for Leftists.

And that's even after the revolution. Let's return the earlier part of my post: "means are pretty important". At best, Trots see goals as accomplished through state action (social democratic or otherwise) and industrially. SF, on the other hand, has political goals, but sees the workplace and the community (yeah, it's a flawed term) as the means to enforce economic and political demands.

That's not semantics.

Joseph Kay

I mean, I'm being charitable here, the latest version of RORO explicitly states the workplace cannot be the basis for revolutionary struggle.

AF, RORO wrote

The historical argument that the factory would provide the means to create a revolutionary proletariat or source of social mobilization was false from the start and proved a disaster for humanity. How could industrial workers alone, in tightly managed workplaces and offered only the choice of alienated labour or enforced leisure, ever be capable of carrying through a libertarian revolution?

I'm willing to accept that's not the majority view in AF, and again, I'm not trying to have a go - just to point out that the AF explicitly, in "one of the few pamphlets produced by the Anarchist Federation that intends to be authoritative and prescriptive. Here, more than anywhere, we mean what we say", explicitly rejects the idea of workplace-based revolutionary organisation. Which is fine - not everyone has to agree with anarcho-syndicalism.

that says that work place organisation is not enough on its own for revolution, not that it isn't necessary, i would be amazed if any member of the afed thought it wasn't essential, but we also think other things are essential to.

Edit:
Later it says

As we all know, the basis of work is EXPLOITATION and the bosses have no mercy for those who rock the boat. Yet spreading anarchist ideas and organising in the workplace is vital. Here, more than anywhere else, resistance and rebellion can and will have the most effect on the boss class.

Edit: snip, nevermind, rather than derail further with another long post, I'll try and write a blog.

Just a couple of observations;

1.Workplace-based 'revolutionary' organisation can take more than one form but the issue for me is whether in the context of modern global capitalism and the 'real domination of capital' such forms can avoid the pitfalls of traditional trade and industrial unions (many of which are well illustrated in 'Fighting For Ourselves') and also sustain themselves outside of pre-revolutionary periods as mass organisations (or simply large-scale in comparison with existing unions). I see no evidence that they can. The recent SolFed strategy to focus their energies on 'political-economic' (mainly workplace) activity as Joseph defines it may be a sensible option for a small group with limited resources aware that simple propaganda for communism isn't going to get us very far in present circumstances, and there is no harm in being a bit ambitious in that objective, but so long as an expanded SolFed refrain from taking on the usual representational union role (unlike the IWW or CNT?) they are unlikely to grow beyond a more effective minority agitational function and possibly, with their anarchist identity, only one of a number of such organisations performing that function.

2. This still leaves room for and a need in my opinion for other more narrowly, by Joseph's definition, political (and cultural) organisation and activity and it seems to me that Joseph agrees with that except that he and his SolFed comrades choose to concentrate their energies in one particular area whilst expressing their own more narrowly political views through media other than a separate political group or party eg 'libcom'. (Since SolFed members like the rest of us are human beings not 'economic men').

3. So there is a need for both Solfed and the AF and/or their equivalent or similar organisations - an inevitable and unavoidable result of how we live in the real world, but neither have the discovered formula for magically transforming the influence of our pro-revolutionary minorities into a significant influence on the movement of history.

I was originally going to try and rise above the whole political-economic versus dual organisationalist thing and go back to the question of CW and class identity, however in the process of reading the thread, I weakened... (back to class identity next post, honest!)

JK

'if the SWP stopped separating the political and economic, and instead focussed their political activity on the economic sphere, then they'd be political-economic.' Well, yeah.

But isn't restricting your political activity to the "economic" sphere - defined AFAICS purely in terms of the workplace - not itself constitute separating the economic and the political? There seems to be a self-contradiction here.

Secondly, are we even sure that the workplace really constitutes the whole of the "economic" sphere? After all, one of the original big attraction to CW was for unemployed people. Does this not take us back to a pre-feminist rejection of unwaged reproductive work as work?

But I could have passed on those points (I think Spikey and Steven touched on them already). But this...

JK

I suspect the issue is that some people are quite invested in the political organisation/union dichotomy, and so have difficulty 'getting' it. By way of analogy, it's not conceptually difficult to realise some people present an androgynous/genderqueer/trans gender, which doesn't fit either 'male' or 'female' boxes. But if someone's really invested in the idea of gender as an either/or dichotomy, they'll find it hard to 'get' it. 'Is it really a man or a woman? It must be one or the other.'
[...]
None of these concepts - political organisation, union, political-economic, is any less constructed or abstract than the other. But yet one generates thousands and thousands of words of critical interrogation while the others are largely accepted as natural, self-evident categories.

OK, my union activity is with the Independent Workers Union. The IWU is certainly political in that it rejects affiliation to ICTU (Irish Congress of Trade Unions) and social partnership (the former being the framework for enforcing the latter, in our opinion). We are also different from "mainstream" unions in many other political ways as well, not least our independence from political parties (no political levy for Labour or any political party), and insistance on relatively directly democractic and transparent process.

However, in my local, all-volunteer run, branch, the core activists include: myself (anarchist), the chair and his mate (politically unaffiliated, tho the former comes from big Stickie family), another politically unaffliated old-school socialist union activist, the secretary (a Shinner), an unaffliated lefty catholic with republican leanings, our treasurer (People's Movement - local CP front) and an ex-Irps feller. Now we all know each other and that we have very different specific politics. But we can work together in the framework of the union, on the basis that we want to give practical solidarity to people wanting to resist being fucked over by their bosses, and promoting a basically pro-working class activity, anti-austerity, etc line. As a union we work. As a (specific) political organisation we wouldn't even be in the same room.

Apparently this makes us social-democratic transphobes. But I'm not entirely sure why.

That the categories of political organisation and union are accepted as naturally distinct by most people is, imo, mainly due to their experience of coming into contact with people active in unions (or in community-based campaigns like the household tax or - I guess - bedroom tax in UK). The attempt to ascribe this to idealist or intellectual conceptual aprioris seems forced at best, nonsensical at worst.

ocelot

But isn't restricting your political activity to the "economic" sphere - defined AFAICS purely in terms of the workplace defined AFAICS purely in terms of the workplace

It's not defined solely in terms of the workplace, it just simplifies the discussion to not constantly append 'and landlords and dole regime and possibly domestic labour' every time.

ocelot

(...) As a union we work. As a (specific) political organisation we wouldn't even be in the same room.

Right, you've just described how a political-economic organisation operates on a different logic to a specific poltical one. What the political content is another question. This has all been covered at great length elsewhere, I don't really see any point going over it in a tangentally related blog tbh. I mean, we could start posting on all the KAPD articles going 'but are you guys really a party', though fortunately death has spared them the terminological.

ocelot

That the categories of political organisation and union are accepted as naturally distinct by most people

See, you're equating 'some ultra leftists and platformists on libcom' with 'most people'. Most people aren't anywhere near a trade union or a political organisation, membership of, let alone active participation in, both being in long term decline. and I doubt they have strong views on niche ultra left theory.

The point stands that the insistence that everyone use this schema is begging the question, it makes a premise that which it seeks to argue (dual organisation, split between trade unions and specific political organisations). It's still possible to argue for those politics without insisting people who have different politics can't develop different concepts for different purposes. Though, it's nice to find something platformists and the ICC can agree on!

I mean historically, the point of the platform, for example, was to politicise/anarchise unions. That is, it was premised on the idea that organisations with an economic basis could be won to various politics (e.g. Bolsheviks), but were also fertile ground for anarchism. So the goal would still be the politicisation of economic organisation, even if the route differs. So I don't see any reason to throw out the political-economic concept altogether.

Joseph Kay

i'm not saying anyone's a transphobe

ocelot

Apparently this makes us social-democratic transphobes.

And this is just outright dishonesty.

CW was a product of the Thatcher era. On the one hand the smashing of organised labour, the de-industrialisation of the UK and the progressive throwing onto the dole of masses of the working class, and particularly the youth, in the North and Midlands. On the other hand, unprecendented riots against racism, police brutality, from the Brixton riots of 1981, through St Paul's, Toxteth, Broadwater Farm and many other places.

Aside from the streets and the workplaces and mines, another cultural war was being fought through the Murdoch press, extending private (and later satellite) TV, and other streams of popular culture, for an "I'm alright Jack", Del-boy style "be your own" boss new working class tory values.

CW came out of that conjuncture. If the alienated youth couldn't go on strike because they had no jobs, they could follow the lead of black uprisings in the inner city ghettos. The Clash's "White Riot" was less a song and more a programme.

Of course all this may seem unimaginable from over quarter of a century's distance, but its hard to communicate the fact that there was at times, under Thatcher, particularly during the Miners strike or Wapping, etc, the feeling that the country was in a state of near-Civil war at times.

The "culturalism" was in some ways an attempt to fight back against the tabloids attempt to capture a working class constituency for neoliberalism. If you could say the CW was an attitude without a strategy, you could also say that the attitude almost _was_ the strategy.

It should also be said, that at times this approach found a real resonance. Page 3 "Battered bobby" was the favourite reading in the vans of the Miners flying pickets. In the process of the Thatcher revolution that destroyed so much of the traditional working class fabric of the country outside the South East, many working class people were appalled and responded with a heightened cultural class conscious in a way that might seem unimaginable a generation later, brought up with the legacy left by that destruction, once completed.

Finally, let's remember how Thatcher was finally ousted, by the riots of the Poll Tax - for a brief moment it seemed like the "strategy" of CW had actually achieved the destruction of the conjucture that gave it birth.

If that achievement was, in retrospect, somewhat illusory (the riots may have been the political trigger for Thatcher's fall, but it was the non-payment that was the precipitant) what was true was that deprived of its chief inspiring figure (Thatcher, not Bone - he left later) CW struggle to find a role in the new "post-war" era. Ultimately the autonomist strands came out from the first auto-dissolution (modelled on Lotta Continua's, nb), via the Bradford Mayday of 1998, into hooking up with the post-Thatcher anti-roads movement, morphing into what became the "movement of movements" through Birmigham G8 and J18. The only real connection between the class identitarian culturalism of CW and the "movement of movements" being, of course, the prioritisation of activism in the "social factory" rather than real factories or workplaces.

On the question of identity, it should be remembered that the 1980s were also the era of identity politics. As well as the "loadsamoney" identity being pushed by Murdoch & co, the "left" was increasingly under pressure from the "hierarchy of oppressions" ideology of identity politics. In this context, CW's "class identitarian" politics took as much from the identity politics it set itself against, as it rejected. We are still left with undigested legacies of this assumed-to-be mutually exclusive opposition between "class" and "identity politics" today. It may be helpful to see that CW "class identity" was not so much a rejection of identity politics, as a competitor to it, and that ultimately was part of its limit. Once Thatcher's open warfare against working class identity was over, the less militaristic, but ultimately more effective, anonymous forces of the market proved more difficult to resist.

There is, however, a bit of a contradiction in the OP. On the one hand it points to the weakness of CW's class-as-identity-politics, but then goes on to say:

all workers who are organised in their workplaces have an instant advantage over those that collect on a purely political level - they understand their own collective working class identity. They understand their own language and culture, they live on the same economic plain.

It's a problem of language and terminology imo, but I think it's a mistake to reject "class identity" on one hand and then return straight away to talking about "collective working class identity" while clearly intending to mean something different by it. What exactly the differences between the two ideas is, needs to be teased out and made more explicit. I suggest we could start by stopping using "class identity" full stop - except when we are referring to the class-as-indentity-politics meaning - as this would at least eliminate some of the confusion.

Secondly, while JK's distinction between identity and "economic position" is clearer, we still need to find the language for the subjective element that goes from an objectively shared position to consciousness of common interests and shared values like solidarity, etc.

Outta time, later...

ocelot, that is a top (cat) post.

Joseph Kay

ocelot

(...) As a union we work. As a (specific) political organisation we wouldn't even be in the same room.

Right, you've just described how a political-economic organisation operates on a different logic to a specific poltical one. What the political content is another question.

OK. But if I was to go to the next Annual Delegate Conference of the IWU with a motion to amend the constitution to include as part of our A&Ps that "The IWU is a working class organisation which seeks the abolition of capitalism and the state. In their place we want a society based on workers' self-management, solidarity, mutual aid and libertarian communism.

", the other delegates would accuse me of trying to turn the union into an anarchist specific political organisation. Which I think is part of Devrim's point. What are we missing about the distinction between a specific political organisation (albeit with a strong industrial focus) and a political-economic one?

Ok tell you what, whenever you read 'political-economic' read 'political with a strong industrial focus' and carry on with your day :)

Edit: Ok, one more substantive point on this. Imho you're reducing politics to stated ideology. I think that's really problematic, and there's at least three components to the political content of a union - shopfloor, organisational, and ideological. Of these, the ideological is probably the least important. I mean iirc, the RMT has a formal commitment to socialism, maybe even workers' control. If that makes it (and the CGT? The TUC?) a specific political organisation for you, ok, but I don't find a concept that broad to be very useful.

I think the stuff about 'if not Class War style class-as-identity-politics, then what kind of subjective/identity component' is probably a more consquential line of discussion. Off the top of my head there's various possibles - communisation style refusal of identity (whatever that means), Occupy style populist identities (99%!) that arguably rename class, psychological approaches (e.g. to identity change), the stuff about affect, tactical indeterminacy (e.g. speaking of 'we' and letting people fill in the content).

In this, it's probably also worth thinking about what anarchism is. i.e. it didn't fall from the sky, it's largely derived from practices of working class self-organisation. i mean that dyelo truda quote may no longer be true ('anarchism is not a beautiful utopia, it's a social movement of the labouring masses'), but there does remain a close fit between anarchism and working class self-activity which isn't true of just any old ideology (maybe some strains of Marxism).

btw.: there were a number of attempts to set up CW branches or groups modeled after CW in the early 1990 in Germany and a number of other European countries but they failed after a short time, the main reason was in my opinion, that the "concept of CW" was culturally far too "British" to set roots ... 20 years ago, many Autonomen in Germany in a way admired CW (and also RA/AFA) because of their successes (?!) and were longing for UK-style riots to happen also in Germany

Something i've heard from non-British comrades is that class in Britain is particularly culturalised anyway, closely bound up with manners, accents etc? Is that true? I don't really have anything to compare it to.

You're talking a lot of sense, Devrim

Joseph Kay

I think the stuff about 'if not Class War style class-as-identity-politics, then what kind of subjective/identity component' is probably a more consquential line of discussion. Off the top of my head there's various possibles - communisation style refusal of identity (whatever that means), Occupy style populist identities (99%!) that arguably rename class, psychological approaches (e.g. to identity change), the stuff about affect, tactical indeterminacy (e.g. speaking of 'we' and letting people fill in the content).

I think it may be more productive to avoid talk of "identity" in relation to class, as well as equally problematic terms like "culture" (always an amorphous blob) and "class consiousness" (too much baggage from orthodox Marxist concepts like "false consciousness", etc, cf E.P. Thompson on "objectively determinable consciousness").

But because I don't find the programmatic nihilism of "communization" very useful either, that leaves us needing to look for some terms that we can use.

In parenthesis, although this is not a good place to start looking for useable terminology, notoriously opaque as it can be, in purely theoretical terms. it seems to me that there could be a useful parallel with "3rd wave" feminism's critique of 2nd wave essentialism. If, as I suggested, we can see a parallel between the class-as-identity-politics of CW and the 1980s essentialist feminism it was in (reactive) dialogue with, then we could potentially root around in the 3rd wave theoretical toolbox to see what we might adapt to help forming an anti-essentialist view of class subjectivities.

Getting back to useable terminology, a possible line of attack would be to break down "class consciousness" into it's component parts - "shard it out" to use the IT jargon. One component has to be a solidarity ethos. People from a wide range of different ethnic, cultural or indentitarian backgrounds can still share a common ethos of solidarity - negatively of not scabbing, positively of supporting those in struggle.

Beyond that there is the question of self-identifying as part of the class, without seeing that as constituting your whole identity. Here I don't have a good term. The word allegiance seems to touch on some of the idea, but "class allegiance" seems too clunky to be useable.

Whether those are the only components of the subjective "political class composition" I doubt, but I think it's probably useful to tease out the different components, both to increase our understanding of exactly what it is we are trying to promote, and also to avoid resorting to monolithic concepts like "culture" that bring us back to the initial problem.

I'm not sure I understand the most recent posts. The working class was as I understand it hugely varied in income and culture way back in the day? Then the class became more homogenized in pay, skills, culture etc as (fordism?) progressed. Sorry my time scales are a bit soft on this one...

We are now again in a period of great variety in culture, skills, etc. and more so the ruling class is seriously good at exploiting these differences. Identity issues are so incredible ingrained and lots of people have difficulties sharing a common cause with people whose identity somehow clash with theirs and this can be some very minor "lifestyle" differences. The key thing though is that is used to be a bit like this but people still found it easier to see the shared class interest.

Time and space is arranged so that there are very few "natural" opportunities to meet which I think was different in any previous time.

Oops rambled off topic there... guess I was going to say that class is loosing against commercialized individualism. Which is no wonder as our whole society is geared towards producing the latter. Time and space are against us!

OP's point that the workplace cuts across some of those issues as you are forced together (in time and space). Which is rarely true for any other scenarios. Problem is that in some ways the workplace is a weaker site than it used to be?

Joseph Kay

Something i've heard from non-British comrades is that class in Britain is particularly culturalised anyway, closely bound up with manners, accents etc? Is that true? I don't really have anything to compare it to.

Yes, in my experience it is very much true.

Devrim

Joseph Kay

See, you're equating 'some ultra leftists and platformists on libcom' with 'most people'. Most people aren't anywhere near a trade union or a political organisation, membership of, let alone active participation in, both being in long term decline. and I doubt they have strong views on niche ultra left theory.

The point stands that the insistence that everyone use this schema is begging the question, it makes a premise that which it seeks to argue (dual organisation, split between trade unions and specific political organisations). It's still possible to argue for those politics without insisting people who have different politics can't develop different concepts for different purposes. Though, it's nice to find something platformists and the ICC can agree on!

I don't think it is unfair to say that 'most people' would probably see a trade union as an organisation that represents workers, and negotiates with management over terms and conditions.

Devrim

Chilli Sauce

Well, JK covered just about all of this pretty extensively. I'll just pick up on one point:

If you take Trotskyists at face value they advocate pretty much a similar sort of council system to that that most anarchists do nowadays.Yes the see a leading role of the party within it, but the vast majority of them see that the capitalist state has to be destroyed. Semantically arguments about what to call the form of workers power exercised in a post-revolutionary society can actually disguise pretty similar conceptions.

I've got to be honest, I've never met a Trot who didn't have some pre-occupation with securing state power - whether it's their party, reclaim the Labour Party, a new Workers Party, the TUSC or whatever. Big-P politics, electorialism, and the desire to use state power for supposedly working class ends is always there.

My understanding is that, if we take them at face value, any Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist group thinks that the "capitalist state has to be destroyed". I mean, "the withering away of the state", "State and Revolution". This isn't exactly new stuff for Leftists.

And that's even after the revolution. Let's return the earlier part of my post: "means are pretty important". At best, Trots see goals as accomplished through state action (social democratic or otherwise) and industrially. SF, on the other hand, has political goals, but sees the workplace and the community (yeah, it's a flawed term) as the means to enforce economic and political demands.

That's not semantics.

Just to follow this point, I think there are lots of Trotskyists who don't their see goals as being accomplished through 'securing state power'. I think your view is deeply influenced by the major Trotskyists of the contemporary anglophone world.

Devrim