>Again, you collapse an (at least) three part division of possible
>interests into just two - the leadership/bureaucracy versus the masses.
>But the point is that current leadership is often undercut by well
>functioning bureaucracies - that's one reason elected leaders in
>democracies often bemoan their existence. It is usually where
>bureaucracies degenerate into pure patronage machines of those leader
>officials that the conflict between functionaries and leadership
>collapses.
I have no knee-jerk response against bureaucracy, in that modern industry & modern organizations (be they corporations, government agencies, or unions) can't function without clerical workers handling data base entries, lawyers, researchers, treasurers, etc. During the local strike I posted about a month ago, I experienced firsthand the horror of a non-well-functioning bureaucracy, for Local 4501 didn't have a well-kept data base of info (phone numbers, addresses, gender, race, etc.) of its own members; sign-in sheets for picket-line duties were not well maintained -- some people signed in, others forgot to do so, and yet others had conflicts with picket captains and moved to different picket sites, etc.; at one point, neither the president of the local nor stewards could remember all the picket captains (due to changes of the captains during the strike), and the guy who was supposed to be a "strike organizer" wasn't doing his job at all; the local didn't have a good database tracking in detail changes in wages, job classifications, working conditions, etc. for the last couple of decades (if we had such a thing, we could have disseminated better propaganda). The absence of a well-functioning bureaucracy created problems during and after the strike.
On the other hand, through the control of the strike fund, for instance, internationals can very well decide when to strike, when to end a strike, etc. If totally left to rank-and-file workers, there would be more strikes, which union officials do not want & are paid to stop. Rank-and-file workers have by and large no control over how money is spent, how information flows, etc. Most feel they are out of the loop, so they don't come to union meetings, which puts them further out of the loop.
Yoshie