Re: AUT: Re -Liverpool dockers

[sjwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Wright)]

I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on Henri Simon's reflections
following the end of the Liverpool dockers's dispute.

As with other things Henri has written, part of its strength lay in its
(ruthless?) refusal to romanticise class struggle, a quality possessed also
by Gra's running commentary on this particular dispute over the past couple
of years (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/dockhome.html). But I
can't help wondering if Henri's logic still rests upon the privileging of
waged over unwaged work(ers). This comes out in the following passage from
Henri's piece (before section 3)):

"Class struggle is the struggle of workers at first at their place of work,
a struggle which threaten  for a time the possibility to exploit their work
and to extract surplus value. If this possibility of pressure against the
employers is missing, a struggle could be the struggle of a class and of
quite a lot of people identifying themselves with the fight against the
capitalist system but who had no special mean to pressure at the heart of
exploitation. So this struggle can be a substitute  for the struggle of
workers against their employer at their place of work but in no way it is a
threat against exploitation of work. Which does not mean that such a
substitute can have by its size or duration a certain political impact, but
this is another question with more questions for instance of the role of a
vanguard of militants in true class struggle."

>From what I understand of the dispute, I take Henri's point about the
absence within Britain of solidarity struggles from groups of waged workers
in the same and related sectors as the dockers. But from reading the paper
that Anne Gray and Les Levidow wrote for the 2nd Encuentro about class
composition in Britain today
(http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3849/fhuman_paper.html), as well as
one of Gra's reports on a particular dock action, I had got the distinct
impression that the connections made with Reclaim the Streets were
important, tangible, yet beyond the logic of "the workplace" in Henri's
sense of the term ("the heart of exploitation", presumably because the
place of direct production of surplus value).

And does this line of argument mean that the struggles against the Poll
Tax, the M11 and the Criminal Justice Act - interesting interpretations of
which can be found at the Aufheben web site
(http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/~spoons/aut_html/auf1edit.htm)- were
all misplaced, being conducted outside such "workplaces"?

Steve








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