In their reply to my attempts to defend revolutionary syndicalism, Joe Richard and Ty
Carroll try to force the debate into an arbitrarily narrow set of choices. ---- The attack
on "dual unionism" seems to be designed to rule out efforts at building new
worker-controlled unions outside the bureaucratic framework of the AFL-CIO type unions.
---- The basic problem today is the glaring need to build a new kind of worker unionism
that is directly controlled by the workers, is based on direct participation and practices
of powerful disruptive action, recognizes the flat antagonism of interests between workers
and the employers, builds solidarity in action between workers in different sectors, and
builds solidarity with grassroots social movements and struggles outside the workplace. A
workers movement of this kind in the USA would have to be prepared to violate court
injunctions and unjust laws that restrict worker action. To do this, alliances and mutual
support need to be developed between unions and social movement organizations so that
worker action has mass support.
A movement based on direct participation, collective decision-making, and direct action is
essential to the process through which the working class develops the confidence,
aspirations for change, organizing skills, and social cohesion to mount a fundamental
challenge to the dominating classes. Some Marxists refer to this as the process of "class
formation" -- the working class "forming" itself into a social force for change. Marxists
and syndicalists can agree that it's necessary to encourage this process.
A basic problem with the inherited bureaucratic unionism of the AFL-CIO type is that it is
a roadblock or barrier to this process. The inherited "international" unions are very far
from being a worker controlled movement. To the degree there is democracy, it is at the
local level. Some local unions have some democratic vitality and social movement
relationships but some don't even have meetings (like UNITE HERE Local 2 in San Francisco)
or are staff-driven state-wide bureaucracies (like various SEIU fiefdoms). The
"international unions" are dominated by highly paid executives and are largely beyond the
ability of workers to control or participate in effectively. The bureaucratic layer have
interests antagonistic to worker interests.
I'm not saying the officials never initiate struggles, which they do at times (as with
Fight for 15). I'm saying that the bureaucracy tends to place limits on mass mobilization
and disruptive action. They tend to favor compliance with the laws that cage us in. They
do this because they want to avoid risks to the institutions that are the basis of their
prestige and position. Their position emphasizes their role as negotiators and political
operatives. Their ideology of "partnership" with employers favors a restraint on worker
challenge to the system. The union bureaucracy is actually self-defeating because their
tendency to reduce risk and contain struggle means that union membership will continue to
decline.
This means that we need to figure out ways to build mass worker organizations that are not
subject to this kind of bureaucratic control.
Since the '30s American Leninists have almost invariably stuck to a "boring from within"
approach. This has taken various forms. Sometimes this means taking jobs as organizers and
influencing the bureaucratic machine from within. Others talk about "taking power" in the
union apparatus by winning top offices. When Carroll and Richard talk about "challenging
the leaders," this suggests they think the problem is "bad leaders." But the problem goes
much deeper than that.
Since World War 2 unions have been based on a narrow approach where paid officials engage
in "collective bargaining" to obtain contracts. These invariably have no-strike clauses,
management rights clauses, and often have elaborate stepped grievance procedures that take
beefs off the shop floor and into the hands of the professional staff. No-strike clauses
limit worker action and bind our hands. Management rights clauses discourage a struggle
over control in the workplace. This whole approach simply guarantees control of the union
by professional "representatives".
Very often leftists elected to paid union office have simply become little different than
their predecessors over time. As Bob Fitch put it: The unions are like a "roach motel":
"The leftists go in but they don't come out."
Going forward, there is not necessarily a single route to a new worker-controlled,
solidarity-based union movement. Carroll and Richard seem to mistakenly think I'm simply
trying to tout membership in the Industrial Workers of the World. Although I support the
organizing efforts of Wobblies in recent years, I've never been a member of the IWW.
Rather, I'm a member of Workers Solidarity Alliance -- an educational and organizing group
founded in the early '80s to promote revolutionary libertarian syndicalism.
Given that less than 7 percent of workers in the private sector are in unions, there is
surely plenty of space for organizing new worker controlled unions. In Los Angeles, for
example, there are half a million manufacturing workers and only 6 percent are unionized.
Of course there are some important sectors where the AFL-CIO type unions are still
entrenched. WSA's position on organizing in that context is stated in our Where We Stand
statement:
"We cannot hope to play a role in many worker struggles...if we remain aloof from them
because they take place within the AFL-CIO or Change to Win unions. So long as workers
struggles are organized through these unions, we participate in those unions and their
struggles."
But this means participation from the rank-and-file position, not as part of the paid staff.
In the '80s-90s period some of our members developed independent rank-and-file committees
in the context of the New York area garment and textile unions and within SEIU 250 at St.
Luke's hospital in San Francisco. Our members employed at the University of Tennessee
succeeded in organizing an independent employees union there. At the time of the Hormel
meatpacking strike in the '80s, we had members working in that industry. Due to widespread
disgust at the UFCW "international union", many meatpacking locals were not paying their
"per capita" (dues). We supported the (ultimately unsuccessful) effort of the P-9 strikers
to mobilize a "mass split" of packing house local unions from the UFCW.
When revolutionary syndicalists have developed a mass revolutionary union in a particular
era and region, that then becomes an important organizing project that many militants may
commit themselves to. But in the World War 1 era, which Carroll and Richard discuss,
syndicalists in some countries were active in a variety of union organizations, based on
diversity of situations.
Contrary to Carroll and Richard, there were revolutionary syndicalists in Italian unions
in 1919-20 other than the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI). In the Turin branch of the FIOM
metal workers union, the syndicalists of the Turin Libertarian Group worked in alliance
with Antonio Gramsci's Marxist-syndicalist branch of the Socialist Party. They built a
mass movement independent of FIOM through general assemblies and elected shop stewards.
Eventually this movement took over the 40,000-member FIOM branch in Turin and
re-structured it so that the shop stewards councils were the union. At that time Mauritzio
Garino, a member of the Turin Libertarian Group, was elected secretary of the FIOM branch.
As Gwyn Williams documents in Proletarian Order, the syndicalists were very much a factor
in the mass factory occupations in Italy in 1920.
The FIOM was competing for members with USI which had 30,000 members in its metal workers
union. The FIOM was pushing its demands through a slowdown. The syndicalists demanded that
this be transformed into a factory takeover if the employers attempted a lockout. So the
FIOM leaders were pushed into a major confrontation due to syndicalist pressure. Moreover,
the occupations were supported by the railway union, which was under revolutionary
syndicalist leadership. The bureaucrats of the Socialist Party's CGL did everything they
could to back down the confrontation, to avoid the revolutionary transformation the
syndicalists were pushing for.
During the World War 1 era in the USA, the IWW was an important organizing project, but
syndicalist influence was present in other organizations. The left-wing of the Socialist
Party was largely syndicalist in sympathies. At the time of the Seattle general strike in
1919, many left wing socialists were active in the AFL unions. As Harvey O'Connor points
out in Revolution in Seattle, support for the idea of workers managing the industries was
widespread.
The new Amalgamated Clothing Workers union was influenced by the syndicalism of many
worker militants in that period. Thus the union adopted some elements of a syndicalist
program, favoring worker management of industry. This led the Italian Syndicalist
Federation -- a group of influential organizers such as Carlo Tresca and Joe Ettor -- to
switch from the IWW to the ACWA. This also shows that Richard and Carroll are wrong in
assuming that syndicalists in that period were only involved in building IWW unions.
But in the mid-'20s the officials of ACWA decided to take a more conciliatory line towards
employers. They proceeded to ruthlessly expel syndicalists and Communists. This shows very
well the reason why grassroots democratic control of a union is crucial if it is going to
be a vehicle of worker struggle.
"Boring from within" practiced in USA by syndicalists and Communists in that era failed to
work out a solution to that problem.
By the early '30s both the IWW and the Communists were subjecting the AFL top down unions
to severe criticism. This helped to encourage a massive wave of new independent unions in
1933 to 1934. According to some estimates, there were 200,000 workers in independents
organized by socialists and syndicalists and 150,000 workers in the Communist
revolutionary unions of the Trade Union Unity League. Much of the mass upsurge of the
early '30s thus took shape outside the control of the AFL bureaucrats. There was a real
possibility for the emergence of a radical union federation to the left of the AFL. The
creation of the CIO by Lewis and Hillman was a kind of containment operation. They set up
CIO "internationals" with the usual AFL-style top down constitutions. But it took some
time to contain the disruptive worker self-activity within a bureaucratic union framework.
The phrase "anarcho-syndicalism" actually originated in Russia. That's because many
anarchists in the Russian revolution were anti-syndicalists who adhered to an
insurrectionary anarchist concept of "propaganda by the deed." In practice they tended to
engage in small group expropriations, with the hope that this would lead "spontaneously"
to the masses doing likewise. So the syndicalist anarchists, who rejected that approach,
formed themselves into a separate political organization, Confederation of Russian
Anarcho-Syndicalists (KRAS). KRAS was not a union but an organizing and publishing group.
Their militants were active in various areas of democratic worker organizing such as the
Petrograd factory committee movement and the grassroots soviet in Kronstadt. They also
gained control of the Moscow sections of the Menshevik-created railway and baker's unions
(as Emma Goldman describes in My Disillusionment in Russia).
In libertarian socialist circles, this practice is called "dual organizationalism". This
is the view that it is often useful to put together an organization of conscious
revolutionary activists to assist in building mass organizations and in doing work of
popular education.
There are a number of possibilities or avenues today for working towards
worker-controlled, solidarity-based unionism in USA: new independent worker-controlled
unions (IWW or not), independent worker committees or networks in unorganized workplaces
or where the AFL-CIO type unions are entrenched, radical re-reorientation of existing
local unions where existing democracy makes this feasible.
http://ideasandaction.info/2015/06/boring-wont-work/
Home »
» US, WSA - Ideas & Action: Boring from Within Won't Work By Tom Wetzel