Re: [Marxism] re: Some comments on Stan Goff's post

[Gregory Martin <justanothersocialist@xxxxxxxxx>]

josh, i was interested to read about your involvement with SEIU and was
wondering if you can give me your perspective on the work being done by
Eric Mann and the Labor/Community Strategy Centre in Los Angeles, which
is behind the Bus Riders Union.

Greg
Socialist Alliance
Gold Coast, Australia


On 07/12/2005, at 12:41 PM, Josh Saxe wrote:

> Joaquin-
> You make a lot of good points in your post as usual...!
>
> I worked as a union organizer for SEIU for awhile - doing the kind of
> work that you describe, working class organizing.  I quit working for
> SEIU because I was sick of the sell-out strategies they were having us
> implement.  But coming away from that experience I felt like I had the
> tools to participate in the far left in a whole new way.  In SEIU you
> learn how to have an "organizing conversation", how to "build
> committee," to "identify, move, recruit and develop leaders," you even
> learn how to dumpster dive and glean intelligence illegally, how to
> "plan your work and work your plan," etc, and a whole slew of other
> maxims that are sort of like hard won bits of knowledge that are
> passed on from more experienced organizers.  SEIU has people who can
> go into a small town and build a committee of hospital workers and
> organize the whole hospital, who can talk with working people in such
> a way that they actually make sense!  A lot of leftists think just
> because they have read labor history and have read theory they will be
> able to motivate people in a workplace - I thought this - but it's
> totally bullshit, organizing is a completely different set of skills,
> and there were liberals I knew in SEIU who were the best organizers I
> had ever met.  A good organizer can knock on a workers door, be
> received extremely coldly, and an hour later still be talking, at that
> point in hysterics, about the treachery of the boss and the need to do
> something about it.
>
> Anyways ever since I quit SEIU I have dreamed of a kind of fusion
> between the skilled organizing tactics of the best organizers in the
> organizing unions and militant far left politics (because while the
> Change to Win unions have a left face they certainly are not militant
> and prefer to compromise at every opportunity).  I think that was the
> CP's best asset in the 1930's - they could recruit people to Marxism
> at the same time as they were organizing cannery and agricultural
> workers of the central valley in California.  As far as I know that's
> a big part of the way they built their working class base - recruiting
> the people they were actually organizing with (I wonder how many times
> that scenario in "In Dubious Battle" actually played itself out in
> real life?) I really think that's the only way we're going to build a
> revolutionary party.
>
> But I also think you need a critical mass of people before an
> organization can take this on.  The ISO could take this on but they
> prefer to privilege the campuses in terms of where they put their
> energy.  I hope they do not get so entrenched there so that it will be
> impossible to transform the organization into one rooted in the
> working class, with a majority of its members workers, without
> destroying the organization.  The tiny group I am in has tried to do
> community organizing on the scale of the kind of campaign a union or a
> workers center would run and we just don't have the resources when we
> are working and going to school full time - we failed in our last
> attempt.  The somewhat larger organization which I most closely
> affiliate - Labors Militant Voice has been effective at running a few
> medium size campaigns around tenants rights.  But I really don't know
> of many far left groups that actually do workplace or community
> organizing or make that their focus...
>
> Can people on this list speak to community organizing they are doing
> and the ways that relates to their revolutionary politics?
> Josh
>
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