It was great to hear that Wisc activists were passing our stuff around. People are thinking. That gives me a lot of hope that this movement is still alive. I don't know what exactly to do, though I have some ideas about direction. But it's great to be provoking collective thinking.
Doug
-----------
People in traditional leadership positions like unions and community organizations do not understand collaborative decision making. At best they try to sell their decision like it was a matter of public relations.
Back in yore, we hashed it out, or collaborated with each other. It wasn't a business model. It was a political model. The business management school is a profoundly sick culture. People who have never done the jobs below, literally don't understand what the jobs are. Somewhere they teach this. Bush had an MBA from Yale. Obama had a law degree from Harvard. As a director of a voter registration org he saw his job as raising money. I'd be very surprized if he ever walked a precinct. He has no idea how to listen to people. And, without going into details, neither did the community organization management I struggled with for a year before they got rid of me.
Their idea of a meeting was I Talk You Listen, Max's old tag line.
That is exactly what has to go. This stuff doesn't come from books and even when some books do apply, the reader will not know what they are reading, unless they've somehow had the experience.
I listened to the interview with Sam Gindin, but I was unclear about how to get beyond sectional jobsite business unions. I've been in two the Capenters and AFSCME. The latter worked great because the union rep worked upstairs in UCB's Labor Relations dept. Also AFSCME represented an amalgam of `sectional' workers. The contrast couldn't have been greater.
I call it collaboration. Doug calls it collective thinking. I know what it is when I see it and it is there in hints. That is what has to develop. It comes from struggle and not submission to organizational order.
Gindin struggles with this sectionalism v. class and mentioned moments in Madison. There were moments in Oakland, very briefly. The OO marched to the main entrance (only?) to the Port in part with coordination with ILWU, and the march blocked the truckers, Teamsters big rigs. It was a moment that happened with little planning. OO was vastly aided by the geography of Oakland where the port, rail, trucking and downtown are very close to each other.
Maybe those moments apply here:
By an intermediate organization I mean something that would be a new form of working-class organization, that would see workers as joining them, linking them across unions. Having networks of activists across unions, so it isn't just a union with a sectional interest, but it's workers joining something because they see it as a class interest, and that it also expresses all the other dimensions of their lives. So it's linked to the community
http://lbo-news.com/2012/06/18/sam-gindin-on-the-crisis-in-labor/
New form? This sounds like forming Soviets, worker councils independent of government managed unions. For all intent working with the Democratic party is a government managed union. Here's a nice wiki on Soviet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)
Using a word like Soviets would scare the bejesus out of both unions and the FBI. It was a third form with the most powerful those of industrial unions and the demobilized military. As Egypt struggles under a military dictatorship, isn't something like a system of public councils or Soviets about the only way out? The military just stripped Egypt of all formal political structures. The other alternative is to convene their own national assembly, where the example is the French Revolution.
I mean look at us. Wall Street bought the government and annulled most of its formal divisions of power, where Obama tossed the Magna Carta and wrote himself an executive order (fiat) to grant himself power of life, prison or death to anyone. This is pure bullshit people.
The IMF and ECB own Greece. The only way out is a similar third form.
Sorry. I've been watching too much news.
CG