Hot to Trot

[Justin Schwartz]

I am going on 13 years in Soli/Labor Notes, so I think I qualify as an 
old-timer and an insider. I am not a Trot and never was, and I can tell you 
that well over half our members are like me in this way, or even more so, 
coming directly out of grassroots movement rather than any left background. 
Soli has Trot antecedents, but the whole point of the Soli project is to get 
beyond that sort of inessential stuff. You don't even have to be a Marxist 
to be in Soli, good thing for me, I guess, since my Marxist credentials are 
pretty doubtful.

It's a caricature to say, as you and Nathan do, that Soli & LN (not the same 
thing, as you comment) reject all expansion of democracy in the work place. 
In fact, that is exactly wrong. We support all expansion of democracy in the 
workplace. But we are pretty doubtful that labor-management cooperation 
schemes are the way to promote this end. It's not democracy when the bosses 
say: we set the big goals and the parameters and retain veto power, you 
figure out how to do waht we tell you.  It is democracatic when workers win 
their own unions back from trade union bureaucrats who have gotten to comfy 
with the boss, and force the management to accept good work rules and 
expanded worker participation in management. This should not be so hard to 
understood.  Democracy has a strong process element, and how the 
participation is won affects what it is like in practice. LN and Soli are 
always for workers winning participation in the workplace through their own 
power, but this will always be at the expense of the bosses. I suppose Leo 
can disagree with that, but he has no right to say that we are a bunch of 
utopian millenarianist Trots who ignore the labor process while dreaming of 
Total Revolution.


>
>Hold up, Justin, I think you're missing the point. At the risk of
>misrepresenting Leo's argument, I think what he was trying to say is that
>the Solidarity/Labor Notes (distinct, but similar) crowds tend to dismiss
>any expansion of worker control/input/etc. *under capitalism* as just
>co-optation. Leo is making the point that, even if these small steps aren't
>the revolution, Braverman's analysis makes clear that they are important
>terrains of struggle. In other words, Solidarity/Labor Notes do focus on 
>the
>labor process -- the problem is, they don't get it. Their only comment on 
>it
>is to say it doesn't matter and is just a way for the boss to buy off the
>masses, diverting them from the real struggle.
>
>And every Labor Notes and Solidarity person I've talked to does say that
>they are in the Trotskyist tradition.
>
>-
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