Re: AUT: unions and revolution

[Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

CACanny's contribution to the discussion of unions seems
to me the most valuable so far. His post made me want
to add some scattered thoughts.

I also see the unions in general as having become the main factor
upholding capitalist stability. But, although I believe the present
corporative unions to be beyond reform and in need of being
deconstructed, I don't see any answer in a rejection of unions
altogether. On the contrary, I see the need for building new
structures maintaining horizontal links of some *permanence* between
workers on the borderline between legality and illegality. And
whatever the name, such an organization would in fact be a union:
Through no illusionist trick could it uphold a existence cut off
from the daily realities of wage work.
        Any union will to a greater or lesser degree be linked to
the logic of capital. But this says nothing more than that any worker
or collective of workers by defintion is linked to such a logic,
regardless of ones political conviction: The more disorganized the
closer this link, the current corporative unions being just a
particular form of disorganization, or rather the organization of
passivity and isolation. (The most crucial factor contributing
to this latter situation were the national binding contracts,
which very logic created a centralised, bureaucratic union structure,
which were to isolate the workers from each other, and turned the
unions into organs for controlling the workers.)

Workers will always organize themselves whenever they see the need,
and they have the sufficient cohesion and collective strength to do
so. Unions are simply not something we can avoid, even if we so
wished: they are something capitalism imposes upon us, or to be more
precise, capitalism imposes the situation which produces the need
for them, and from this need we cannot escape before we take the
world in our own hands.
        Any workers struggle directed simultaneously against both
the union and the employers will be compelled to either transform
itselves into alternative structure taking up in itselves the
function of a union, or fall back to a situation of atomisation
within or without the corporative union structure. Consequently
within the framework of a total rejection of any form of unionism,
one is seemingly left with the illusionist trick of making atomisation
the springboard of the social revolution. More likely, the tacit
assumption underlying this strategical thought is that a revolutionary
ferment will arise from within the corporative union structure, thus
making itself entirely dependent on the continued existence of
this framework.

There exists no magic insurance against co-option or recuperation.
But I would maintain that the sure recipe to ensure that such a
co-option into either a new or old class relation will take place,
will be the absence of *pre-existing* horizontal links between workers.
We live in a world with an excessively developed divison of labor.
Something which makes such links critical to the success of a social
revolution. This is not entirely a new situation. The absence of such
pre-existing horizontal links was one of the main factors contributing
to the failure of the Russian revolution, sustaining among workers a
lack of confidence in their ability for self-management beyond the
limits of the workplace.
        Unlike what has been suggested by others on the list, there
are good historical as well as other reasons to believe that working
councils (or should we say parliaments?) are organs which very easily
lend themselves to co-option. As they are predominantly structured around
geographical units, they are not adequate to deal with the day to day
horizontal links of production in a non-bureaucratic manner. Thus it was
no coincidence that it was through the soviets the Bolsheviks first
established their separate power, while the factory committees served
as a base for opposition and workers' power during the short revolutionary
period in Russia, a power which soon dissolved in the absence of
functional horizontal ties.

                                                Harald

  in solidarity,
  Harald Beyer-Arnesen
  haraldba@xxxxxxxxx



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