On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Alex LoCascio wrote:
> Nathan, baby, this is incredibly fucking naive. For bureaucracy's tendency
> to create "vibrant organizational structures," please see:
> Better yet, try actually working for a labor union, then tell me about
> bureaucracy's salutory effects on labor and social movements.
As someone who has been both a staff organizer for a union, an elected executive board member of another union local, and now am employed at the legal department of another, I have full understanding of how fucked up some unions can be versus others. And the difference between a good union and a bad union is not bureaucracy. SOme of the worst unions are personal fiefs where friendly nepotism and good-old-boy personalism make a hash of bureaucratic responsibilities. If you want to throw books around, try reading Weber on the advance of bureaucracy over personalistic organization.
And the most vibrant organizing possible is dependent on strong bureaucracy backing it up. One of the longest strikes of this decade, actually of this century, was the Frontier strike out in Las Vegas (where I was once a staff organizer). For six years, workers walked that picket line and not one crossed it and in the end, the hotel folded and signed the union contract - essentially ending the last major gasp of resistance by the city's hotels (with the MGM making a short run at it). Now no bureaucracy on earth is a substitute for the commitment and militancy that kept that picketline going for six years, but just as truly it took a well developed bureaucracy to keep the strike benefits flowing for all those years, to help those strikers survive, and to keep organizers working out in the field keeping their spirits up.
As true, as various unions mount national and international organizing and negotiation drives, it takes a solid bureaucracy to bring disparate groups together to coordinate strategy, support those efforts with training and research and legal support, and fund long-term efforts to supplement the militancy mounted by various groups.
Of coures, bureaucracy is not a substitute for militancy but it is also not it's enemy, especially not the enemy of effective militancy that needs more than mindless action but requires real coordination.
What is required for effective bureaucracy are effective democratic controls and the subordination of the bureaucracy to elected officials. And it requires militant spirit, strong theoretical analysis and all the other good things required for social revolution.
But a lot of folks mindlessly trash bureaucracy when the real problem is the lack of the latter in a particular group. You can argue that bureaucracy itself kills them, but given the wideranging examples of militant organizing bureaucracies throughout history (from the early Catholic Church to the CIO), it just does not hold water.
-- Nathan Newman