On 2011-12-26, at 11:58 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> [WS:] I was not thinking of "organizing" in a conventional sense, but
> rather creating economic institutions, such as cooperatives of various
> kinds geared toward serving the needs of the working people (I
> deliberately avoid using the term working class in this context.) If
> I am not mistaken, this was an important element of Gompers thinking -
> use economic institutions instead of political organizing to serve
> labor interests, and this was in contrast to European labor - at
> least according to Robert Fitch.
The more radical European unionists and the IWW sought to use the trade unions as instruments to smash capitalism and set up a workers' commonwealth. Many were syndicalists who saw this goal being attained by a revolutionary general strike rather than a revolutionary party. Gompers belonged to the wing of the emergent trade union movement which sought to improve workers' conditions under a reformed capitalism which recognized trade union rights. He and other "bread and butter" US trade unionists were to the right of their than British and European reformist counterparts in that they did favour the formation of an independent labour party but sought to "reward their friends and punish their enemies" in both of the bourgeois Republican and Democratic parties.
These were the main differences which still exist within the trade union movement, though the internal balance between revolutionaries and reformists steadily shifted overwhelmingly in favour of the latter, and the US labour movement has been firmly tied to the DP since the New Deal. So far as I know, unless you can show where Fitch or others have contradicted it, the "economic institutions" Gompers had in mind were trade unions, and not producers' cooperatives, which is your interpretation above.
In any case, insofar as your "panacea" is concerned, retail cooperatives are as old as the trade unions themselves, and the limited experimentation with them has never amounted too much. They've either gone under in short order or where they've grown, e.g.. Mondragon, they've been transformed into enterprises barely distinguishable from well-run capitalist firms which have provided superior benefits to their employees.
But they've never been regarded as a revenue source to fund organizing drives, which is what you are proposing. Your proposal is based on a faulty assumption. The failure of union organizing drives at Walmart and elsewhere has rarely been due to lack of union resources, but to the fact that the economic environment is such that unions are now typically engaged in concession bargaining to save jobs, and no longer have the same appeal to unorganized workers as they did when they were winning model contracts across all industries. In rare cases where workers do show an active interest in unionizing, the unions are hampered in the political arena by labour legislation and regulatory agencies which make organizing and the ability to win first contracts and maintain bargaining units very difficult.
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 2011-12-25, at 10:35 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>>
>>> But revisiting Gompers is probably more fruitful than reliving the
>>> "glorious past" of the Bolshevik revolution.
>>
>> Why do you suppose Gompers would have more success than Trumka or other trade union leaders organizing workers in today's economy? Gompers belonged to an era when the US economy and corresponding demand for labour was expanding rapidly. His successes had little to do with his particular approach to trade unionism and politics, as the parallel growth of the IWW, led by radical trade unionists like Debs and Haywood - both later sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution - demonstrated.
>>
>> You're making the identical error as those Marxists who imagine that a faulty understanding of the Leninist strategy of party-building is what has mainly blocked the many far left groups of varied persuasions from making political inroads in today's environment.
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