>As I said, which you ignored, was that I said: "What is required for
effective bureaucracy are effective democratic controls and the
subordination of the bureaucracy to elected officials." Real bureaucracies
actually prevent anti-democratic actions by leaders, since procedures and
due process can be used to protect dissident members.<
Hahhahaa! Yeah, this explains, among other things: The CIO bureaucracy's use of the Taft-Hartley act to expel their former communist allies (the latter being, as you correctly note, friends of top-down control during the war years), the UAW's attempts to crush DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, NALC president James Rademacher's attempts to break (and redbait) the 1970s postal workers Wildcat, The Teamsters old guard, personified by the Fitzsimmons-Presser administration's violent intimidation of TDUers and trusteeship of dissident locals, the "socialist" leadership of AFSCME crushing the 1975 wildcat by New York sanitation workers, "socialist" IAM President William Winpisinger's condemnation of Miners for Democracy and TDU (actual quote: "what's to stop a bunch like that from coming in here and doing the same thing?")and refusal to honor PATCO picket lines, the UFCW International's sell-out of Local P-9...
Honestly, what planet do social democrats come from?
>Which goes to the original point about A16, non bureaucratic "consensus"
tends to encourage homogenous personalistic control by an in-group.<
No shit. We're in complete agreement over this. The "non-heirarchical" methodology of the A16 collective manages to create little bureaucracies of its own (although strict Marxists could dispute my use of the term, since there doesn't appear to be a material base for such a 'bureaucracy,' I would argue that the progressive NGOs constitute such a base).
>This is a different argument but since it's part of your ad hominen mixing
of every political critique into a crtique of "bureaucracy" - which seems to
be your catchall word for "I don't politically like it"<
No goddamnit, I'm using "bureaucracy" in the Marxist sense to refer to a layer within the trade union movement with interests SEPARATE FROM and often INIMICAL TO those of the workers they claim to represent.
Whether you prefer the ortho-Trot formulation of a "degenerated bureaucratic caste" or the Third Camp Shachtmanite idea of a "new class," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that L.A. Janitors and Andy Stern do not have the same material interests.
Christ, even the anarchists are capable of understanding this. Why aren't you?
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