Leo says that Labor Notes/Solidarity rejects the idea that it is possible to have a more democratic organization of the workplace under capitalism. This is not true, as I have been explaining. We think that the role of unions and of rank and file militant trade unionism is to win more democratic working conditions under capitalism.
Leo keeps repeating this mantra that we think that nothing but total revolution will do. This is rubbish. It is true we wish to transform the relations of production, and Leo does not. In fact, he does not think this is a sensible goal to talk about. But it is not the case that we will not settle for less in the meantime. It is Leo's failure to acknowledge what I have stated quite clearly, and what Braverman said, and what he can find in everything ever written in Labor Notes, that frustrates me into asking about his educational qualifications.
HLeo and I (and LN/Soli)apparently have different conceptions of democracy. He cites as his example of democratic worker-management relationships the Team Concept as practiced at Saturn. He is sorry that LN & Soli have fought this. I am glad that we have a concrete eaxmple on the table, and one I know something about. Saturn is (or was--they've trurned to the usual GM Master Contract, I think) a real archetype of everything that is wrong with labor-management cooperation, with a "coperation" scheme imposed on a fairly unresponsible subordinate union by the management, with the union basically directing the workers to figure out how to speed up and rationalize their own work.
I will put my notion of democracy, also shared by Soli and LN, in which organized rank and file workers take back their unions, build their strength, and use it to win concessions from mabagement, up against Leo's, in which management sets the parameters and delegates to the workers the job of figuring out how to implement them.
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