I do not want to repeat Chris' and Nathan's interventions in the debate over the labor process and trade union strategies, for they said a great deal of what I would have said, and probably said it better than I would have. But I do have a few new points to make.
What Justin describes as his major "beef" with Labor Notes/Solidarity union types can be properly called, I believe, his opposition to their _syndicalism_, that is, their almost exclusive focus on the workplace and union organization of workers to the exclusion of a broader political focus. There is a recent book by Howard Kimeldorf, _ Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement_, which I strongly recommend, as it does an excellent job of recounting how deep the syndicalist strain is in American labor, by correctly pointing out how much the IWW and the AFL were simply left and right forms of the same syndicalism, and how easily former Wobblie locals moved into the AFL after the IWW's demise. I would argue that the left Shachtmanite/Draperite/IS politics which were the tradition which gave birth to and nurtured Labor Notes and Solidarity had an extremely strong and very American syndicalist strain, which they characteristically express as reverence for the "self organization of the working class," and that this strain remains a central part of that tradition today. I agree with Justin's "beef" [I would call it a critique], although I think that, if it is truly followed through to its ultimate conclusions, it may lead places he is not yet prepared to go -- to an understanding that they have an inadequate concept and practice of union democracy. In this respect, it is disheartening to see the lack of any self-critical summary of what went wrong in the Teamsters. But precisely because the Labor Notes/Solidarity perspective is one grounded in a history of real, hard and persistent work in trade unions, precisely because it is not the empty recitation of formulas found in some sacred text, it deserves the respect of an honest, direct engagement and critique. The care of a thoughtful, direct critique is a sign of respect, as well as a statement of difference.
As Chris and Nathan point out, what Justin either did not recognize or did not acknowledge was that my criticism was of the specific content of Labor Notes/Solidarity syndicalism -- of the ways in which (I will take it out of the terms of the labor process here in an effort to bring more clarity to the issue) it is based on an extremely rigid reading of the tradition of left industrial unionism, which sees an unbridgeable divide not simply between the interests, but more importantly, between the functions, of management and labor under capitalism. The point here is not simply that they reject a "team concept" of workplace organization, especially since that term is generally used to describe particular proposals which do very little, if anything, to build workplace democracy and to give workers a meaningful voice in the workplace decisions. The point here is that they reject, en toto, the very idea that it is possible to reorganize the workplace, under capitalism, in a more democratic fashion, the notion that it is possible to give workers meaningful control over the labor process and, specifically, over the knowledge of that labor process.
In a classic industry like auto or steel, where a material commodity is made for sale on a market, and where Taylorist organization of the workplace has been long established, that position has a certain plausibility. [I do think, however, that it is an error to completely dismiss, as Labor Notes did, efforts such as Saturn, which ended up in its current hole because of management's unwillingness to follow through on its commitments to the project.] But, as Nathan pointed out, it is an altogether different matter when that very same model is applied, lock, stock and barrel, to service industries such as health care and education, as Labor Notes/Solidarity does. These are services that working people and poor people need, and that they do not receive in either the quality or the quantity they need.
Take public education, for example. Especially in the current context, there are some areas of shared, common interest between labor and management in public education: the preservation of public education itself against efforts at privatization, and the improvement of the quality of public education delivered to working class and poor communities -- the Achilles Heel of public education as it exists. The failure to recognize and work on those common interests can only be disastrous for public education, and for the working and poor people who rely on that education. Further, the path to providing a quality education to poor and working class communities, and to saving public education from dismemberment at the hands of venture capitalists, is, I am convinced, one in which labor must take more control, as a collective community, over the labor process of education. This means that teachers must seize functions which are generally considered "management" prerogatives in other contexts -- the education and preparation of novice teachers through apprenticeships and mentoring, "professional development" of new and improved skills in one's craft, peer review and evaluation of the work of educators, democratic control of the preparation and implementation of curriculum, freedom to collectively and democratically reorganize the 'schedule' of a school so it does not have to conform to a lowest common denominator factory schedule of identical class periods of equal length, decisions over staff hiring and so on. As Charles Kerchner, Et. Al., argue in their pathbreaking _United Mind Workers_, the quality of teaching must become a union issue, must become an issue that teachers as a community gain control over. Interesting enough, the real struggle is to gain and maintain control over these areas from management types who do not want to surrender the workplace authority and control they represent. But for the Labor Notes/Solidarity crowd in education and in teacher unions, these are management functions, and teachers and teacher unions should have nothing to do with them. As Chris says, they just don't get it: their narrow industrial union vision they employ here is quite counterproductive.
One last word on the use of terms such as Trotskyist and workerist. It is disingenuousness, to say the least, for Justin to be the first to raise the issue of Braverman's years as a leader in the Trotskyist movement and as a Trotskyist militant in the trade union movement, when it suited the purposes of his argument, and then to take up the cudgels of Dennis' crude, ad hominem nonsense about "red baiting" when I made subsequent reference to what everyone on the left in a trade union knows, that Labor Notes/Solidarity came out of a Shachtmanite/Draperite tradition of Trotskyism, and that this tradition informed, both for the better and the worse, its politics. At times like that, and at times when Justin resorts to the level of ad hominem attacks about whether I have a Ph.D., I wonder whether or not he really wants to engage in honest political debate with someone who has a different political perspective and strategy than his own. And I find that sad -- because unlike Dennis, who has made no bones about the fact that he would contribute nothing but ignorant bile to this exchange, Justin could make a positive contribution to what could be a useful and informative debate/dialogue.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20001220/6676a671/attachment.htm>