[lbo-talk] Blocks & Filibusters

Chuck0 chuck at mutualaid.org
Sun Jun 1 17:15:18 PDT 2003


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> If nobody wanted to join any union, there would be no firing of union
> organizers.

The main obstacle to people forming unions are unions who want to make everything official. Workers would be better off organizing unofficial unions that are illegible to the company, which would make it more difficult for the company to fire THE organizer.


> Not just business unionists but union democracy activists today don't,
> revolutionary syndicalists of yore didn't, run meetings by the sort of
> consensus method that you advocate here for all purposes.

That's one of the reasons why they suck. Unions are hierachical organizations that exist to protect their exclusive relationship with the capitalists. Unions are threatened by grassroots power. Unions are like Leninist organizations, in that the "democratic" process is controlled by the union pimps, not by the rank and file workers.


> And they have probably learned to work with a variety of decision-making
> processes, rather than try to offer consensus as the "one size fits all"
> solution to all occasions.

Which is what I would argue, but you don't seem to understand the nuances of my arguments.


> When consensus was all the rage, the fashion wasn't confined to
> anarchist youths and impacted a lot of young activists who got
> radicalized by anti-WB/IMF protests and the like. Back then, some young
> activists who got excited about what was (to them) "new" came back to
> the local political scene and wanted us all (including those of us who
> "had been there and done that") to discuss "process" first of all and
> attend "facilitator workshops" that they organized. :-0 That's history
> now, though.

Yeah, like we know that your Leninist groups are rapidly becomes mere shadows of the shadows they used to be.

When consensus was all the rage. Like when it has been the rage throughout human history.


> I suppose that simplifies political life for you.

It means that I have to waste less of my time on Leninists, except when I'm bored and have fun kicking them around.

Chuck0



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