>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>You need fellow organizers and activists before you go out to talk
>>with others who do not know you, _unless_ you are imagining that
>>you can talk to all the people you want in a movement _by
>>yourself_, which is impossible. Organizing is not an individual
>>effort but a collective one. Take union organizing, for example.
>>First, you get together with a few like-minded fellow workers who
>>you already know are inclined to unionizing, and together you try
>>to expand from there to form an organizing committee. Only after
>>doing so can you move onto calling bigger meetings and making
>>systematic home visits (usually as a two-person team) to reach out
>>to other fellow workers and seeking community support from likely
>>supportive institutions such as other unions, liberal churches,
>>community organizations, student groups, environmental groups, etc.
>>Reaching out to the rest of the public comes only after your
>>organizing committee successfully completed all of the above steps.
>
>Ahhh, so that explains why the labor movement has been so ineffective.
>
>Thanks, Yoshie, for the concise analysis of how not to do stuff.
Struggles to organize at work and exercise workers' power without state-regulated collective bargaining processes, in a fashion described by Michael Kozura, Staughton Lynd, Stan Weir, etc., take even tighter-knit formal and informal groups of workers and communities than post-CIO industrial unionism. In either case, organizing is a collective effort which starts with a small group of like-minded fellows (who don't necessarily agree on everything but do agree on crucial things).
Chuck0 wrote:
>I'm saying that what Yoshie is arguing doesn't work, because it has
>never worked and will not work. After all, if it did work, organized
>labor would be a big player in American politics.
In many nations (take Sweden and Brazil, for instance), organized labor is a bigger player than in American politics, but wherever you go, organizing starts with a small group of folks who agree on concrete demands, grievances, etc.
Chuck0 wrote:
>>and it is an odd argument you're making. you mean the CIO had no
>>successes? IWW? the labor movement in the US has had no successes?
>
>The first step towards figuring out what works is to ask questions
>that challenge the status quo and its apologists.
I don't know what you mean by "what works." What's the standard of effectiveness you have in your mind? Winning concrete demands and addressing concrete grievances? Transforming the mode of production and creating a society that is not based on exploitation?
If the former, the labor movement has achieved many partial successes in its long history worldwide. Union density and power have, however, on the whole declined from their height (not just in the United States) due in part to capitalists' successful offensives and union officials' own conservatism, and folks involved in union democracy movements, for instance, are trying to transform the culture and practice of organizing (from business unionism to social movement unionism, from top-down control to rank-and-file control), and winning other workers to their vision of a labor movement, as a partial solution to the problem.
If the latter, whether a given shop-floor or community or other struggle becomes part of a larger revolutionary process depends on an incalculable constellation of material and cultural conditions, so it's impossible to say precisely "what works" ahead of time. You'll be able to theorize what may or may not have "worked" after the fact, and such theorizing has its value, but only as clues and suggestions, because history does not repeat itself.
Even if you think you "figured out what works" by asking "questions that challenge the status quo and its apologists" as you put it, in practical terms you still have to go back to organizing, and it's impossible to "figure out" exactly when and how day-to-day organizing makes a leap to a larger change that transforms social relations radically. -- Yoshie
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