Sun Tzu and Seattle (RE: AFL-CIO president blasts globalization (kind of)

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Fri Mar 3 16:52:40 PST 2000



>On Behalf Of Dace


> Do you have to make everything so personal?
> Why didn't he support the blockade of the Washington State
> Convention Center in Seattle? Why didn't he direct his labor march right
> into the heart of the protest?

I wasn't the one calling others police informants and part of the imperialist project. I was questioning your qualifications and experience to judge Sweeney's dedication to agitation and mass action.

The question you ask are real questions, which if you indicated any experience in organizing, you might be able to answer.

First, Sweeney did support the blockade; he just didn't have his own band of unionists participate. From every report I have, the Direct Action Network activists involved in the blockade were generally experienced direct action folks who had trained extensively for the actions. The unionists, on the other hand, were largely regular union members who generally had little experience in direct action of this type. One of the points of Seattle on the union side was to get relatively inexperienced union activists involved in the global trade issue, often for the first time in their lives. So the march and rally was a way to show labor strength with troops that were only getting trained for the next step of combat.

You usually don't start with mass arrests for such new activists in an issue. Basic organizing rule. When SEIU has conducted mass action campaigns, it has been as a culmination of organizing, where the union activists involved have gone through a series of steps of increasing activism and commitment. Seattle was no doubt a training ground for union folks getting more immersed in the issue, but to expect mass direct action at this point just shows astounding lack of sympathy for how hard it is to move ordinary folks toward risking arrest and how careful you should be to make sure that people are trained for when they do it. (In that light, I find the whining by the window breakers in "the fickle heart of DAN" post truly pathetic, since they chose not to coordinate with other activists, then complain that they don't have legal backup for the consequences of their actions. How hypocritical can you get?)

As for the political issues involved, Sweeney does have a less radical political agenda than I would like, but that is quite separate issue from his commitment to agitation when necessary. But to call it imperialist is silly, unless you also are calling thrid world union leaders who marched with Sweeney imperialist?

And to the Sun Tzu (ART OF WAR author) quote that is the base for the subject header. The book was recommended to me by a union organizer and it highlights what bothers me about the whole Seattle discussion, the whole "lefter than thou", macho militancy posturing. It is the assumption that the more aggressive the action, the more dedicated the progressive warrior one is. What makes Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR so classic a work is that as a general, he has total disdain for leaders who actually had to fight battles or wasted effort on fruitless fights. When diplomacy worked (that horrible "negotiations" that labor unions are accused of engaging in), that was all to the good when concrete gains were made. When diplomacy fails, a show of force without combat is the next best course. Only when that fails do you turn to skirmishes.

The core of Sun Tzu's view of combat (and greatly appealing to a fan of Gramsci like myself) is the following:

"The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities. Thus one who excels at employing the military subjugates other people's armies without engaging in battle, captures other people's fortified cities without attacking them, and destroys other people's states without prolonged fighting. He must fight under Heaven with the paramount aim of "preservation." Thus his weapons will not become dull, and the gains can be preserved. This is the strategy for planning offensives."

Most intellectuals have total disdain for the "preservation" parts of strategy, mostly because they are individuals with no troops to preserve, just their big mouths to sound off with. They want to move immediately to useless attacks on "fortified cities" - say heavily insured windows in Seattle - which does no good but looks flashy, exactly the kind of generalship Sun Tzu sneers at.

There is a wonderful roundtable in the current issue of NEW POLITICS about the tradition of union leadership in the United States. While I don't agree with all of it, there are good points made from a range of directions. But one point made even by left critics of Gompers et al struck me, which was that even the most radical union leaders often created good relations with management for periods, because it was the nature of organizing to preserve peace to consolidate gains for the workers involved. It is romantic to see political battle as a constant charge and assault on enemy fortresses, but real long-term strategy requires a complex mixture of diplomacy, shows of force, occasional combat, negotiations for truces and strategic maneuvering.

Yes, some of that can disguise retreat as well as forward movement, but it takes far more sophisticated tactical analysis than I have generally seen on this list to distinguish the two. The general attitude has been: if the unions are not assaulting the fortified cities this week and every week, they must have sold out to imperialism.

It's amazing to me that folks who engage in the most intricate variations on cultural analysis engage in the most simplistic strategic analysis possible. A little Sun Tzu would do you good.

-- Nathan Newman



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