Yoshie wrote:
> It is not necessary for workers to engage in an illegal political strike
> to raise the costs of business as usual for the US power elite, exerting
> indirect and occasionally even direct pressures on the war machine. If US
> workers asserted their own economic interests more militantly, even if
> they didn't link their struggle with the Iraq War in any way, that in
> itself would be good for those who oppose the Iraq War.
>
> Observe the radical decline of industrial conflicts since the 1970s:
> "Table 1. Work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, 1947-2004" (at
> <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm>). The peaks within the
> tables were 1952 (470 stoppages) and 1974 (424 stoppages). The lowest
> number of stoppages recorded in the table, 14, was registered in 2003.
> Last year, the number of stoppages was still only 17. Existing unions
> alone will never be able to raise the level of class struggle from below.
> Currently unorganized workers have to discover such tools of industrial
> struggles as sit-downs and work-to-rule on their own and use them.
-----------------------
The question, of course, is why don't "US workers assert their own economic
interests more militantly"? I don't think we'd have any disagreement that
this would be a constraint on the war machine, not least because a stronger
and more confident US working class would be much less willing to pay for
imperialist wars at the expense of existing social programs (and the
continued forfeiture of long overdue ones like universal health care).
There are, it seems to me, one of two possible explanations for its current weakness - yours and mine. Others may come up with more.
1) You share the widespread view on the left that the workers mostly have an insufficient consciousness of how to assert their own interests. It is a tactical problem. The workers, in your words, have to "discover such tools of industrial struggles as sit-downs and work-to-rule on their own and use them." Actually, I had to look three times to see that you are not situating this problem within the unionized workforce, which you have evidently written off as hopeless, all of it. The standard left critique is that the union leaderships are beyond redemption but that the rank-and-file can still be saved. You assert, though, that "existing unions will never be able to raise the level of class struggle from below", and this task will have to fall to "currently unorganized workers" who will have to discover these more militant tactics "on their own".
This is an anarchist conception which I don't share, and perhaps I'm being unfair to the anarchists. There's no doubt in my mind that if new sectors are organized in retail, finance, technology, etc., it will not be a spontaneous affair but the successful intensification of long-standing efforts by "existing unions" like the SEIU, Teamsters, Steel, etc. to penetrate these industries. The issue to be determined is whether or not there will be splits between and within the unions to accomplish this. The great organizing drives of the 30's were led by the CIO, a coalition of ten unions which had to split from the AFL to organize the auto, rubber, steel, and other heavy industries. To be sure, a necessary condition was the spontaneous welling up of demand from below for trade unions and collective bargaining, and it was the rank and file which sat in and struck and carried on the battle in other ways. But it was not a sufficient condition. The initiative, the direction and targeting and coordination, the funding, the organizers, the lawyers and other specialists, all had to come from the more militant unions. The same resources would be required today.
So I believe most on the left would disagree with your wholesale rejection of the existing unions. But they would still agree with you that the problem is the lack of willingness to organize the unorganized and to engage in more militant forms of struggle. This is the view that even animates the SEIU and its allies in the New Unity Partnership (now nominally dissolved), the analogue in a service economy of the 1930's Committee for Industrial Organization, so the issue extends right into the heart of the labour leadership. I side with the more energetic forces represented by the NUP, as I would have sided with the CIO for the same reason, but the real explanation for the current weakness and conservatism of American labour, IMO, has to be sought at a deeper level than the failings of its present leadership or a lack of tactical imagination.
2) My own view is that militancy is, above all, a function of bargaining power - not good ideas about tactics. If you have power, you can exert your will. If you lack it, good intentions and a good program won't amount to much. Al Capone put it well in another context when he said he'd "often found I can accomplish more with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone." The unions in the US have seen their bargaining power decline; the unorganized workers often romanticized by the left don't have any at all. The unionized manufacturing sector in the US has been declining since the 70's - tracked by the decline of industrial action you traced above. Even little American schoolchildren now know that union density has fallen to 13% of the working-age population, and under 10% in the once-powerful manufacturing sector. To have bargaining power, labour has to be in short supply and the employer dependent on what there is available to maintain production and profits. In periods of rapid economic expansion, in the mines and milltowns and sprawling industrial plants, these were the conditions which made possible the militancy of the IWW and the CIO unionists, and produced their confident ideologies.
In recent decades, there has been a technological and organizational revolution which has adversely shifted the relationship of forces in favour of Western employers and away from workers in very dramatic fashion. The revolution in transportation and communications has made it easier and less costly for corporations to tap into vast new pools of cheap labour and suppliers, both internally and abroad. The new forms of work organization appropriate to a service economy (part-time, temporary, casual, work-at-home) also give employers more flexibility than in industry, which typically requires a more highly concentrated and regimented workforce - a breeding ground for the exchange of common grievances and industrial action. US and other employers today have a much wider and more dispersed worldwide supply of labour available to them - both factors which militate against union organization and militancy. These developments have weakened the better-paid working class in North America and in Europe at all levels, including, increasingly, the most highly skilled. Workers insecure about their jobs and incomes tend towards conservatism, except in those rare cases where it has become apparent these are doomed and they engage in desperate last ditch efforts to save them. That's why I think there would have to be a generalized crisis of capitalism before you would see a generalized working class response, and even then, if it occurs at all, might only occur after a lag, in the context of a recovery and an expanding job market, as in the depression.
In any event, I think we should look first to material conditions to understand the popular mood. I don't discount leadership or program or other "superstructural" factors like anti-labour legislation at the political level and more sophisticated union-busting techniques in the economic arena. I follow developments there also. But timid leaderships, unimaginative programs, savage anti-union repression which makes today's anti-labour laws look benign by comparison, and union-busting employers have always been with us. In themselves, they weren't sufficient to deter outbursts of union organization and militancy and working class political consciousness in the past. In themselves, they're not sufficient to explain the state of the working class at present.
That's why, IMO, your statement "if US workers asserted their own economic interests more militantly" only defines the problem, not the solution.
Marv G