I guess my sense of the Labor Notes/Soli line is that we support increased democracy in the workplace whenever and how much we can get it. We oppose schemes that do not offer increased democracy, by only get workers to participate more deeply in their own exploitation. The detailed empirical explanation of how things like the Team Concept at Saturn do this can be tracked in Labor Notes and books edited by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter. We think that real democracy is won mainly by rank and file unionism, enhancing ordinary members' power in the union so that they will have the strength to negotiate with the bosses effectively, rather than helping the bosses' squeeze them more from weakness. The New Directions victory in New York is our most recent showcase. Of course, whether any particular propossal enhances democracy or capitulates from weakness calls for a concrete analysis of the particular situation.
It's against this background that I conclude that I was right in my analysis of Leo's critique of Braverman himself, despite his disavowals. It's precisely because Braverman looked on the craft tradition and its destruction with regret, as did his great predecessor William Morris (in very similar terms), that he saw in workers resistance on the shop floor a basis for collective struggle that would reverse the tide of the degradation of labor. He did not think that this struggle could be ultimately effective as long as capitalist relations of productions prevailed. Leo disagrees: that is why he is a "radical democrat" and not a socialist.
Contrary to what Leo says, Braverman did indeed think that workers in the industrialized coiuntries could organize effectively, to slow the rate of the degradation of labor, in something like the way described; and this is what he devoted his practical activity to; and ultimately to radically transform society, dispensing with capitalist production relations. In contrast, Leo thinks, I guess, that labor can be un-degraded and democratized within capitalism and that we cannot get beyong capitalism, or there is no point in talking in that "millenarian" way. That is the real difference between Braverman and him, and between Leo and me.
>
>This is not simply a question of a theoretical
>shortcoming; it is reflected -- and remains a live
>issue today -- in the political work of workerist
>socialists, mostly Trot, who work within the trade
>union movement. As good an example as any would be the
>group around _Labor Notes_, because of their
>significant if flawed work with the TDU and because of
>their links with Solidarity, and its Draperite-left
>Shachtmanite worldview. Every proposal to transform
>the labor process, to democratize the workplace, is
>rejected by them, carte blanche, as a capitalist ploy
>to get greater "productivity" out of workers, to
>"rationalize" capitalist production, to produce a
>better "quality" product for the benefit of the
>capitalist, not the worker -- in short, to [class]
>collaborate with management.
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