Transitions
In making this point we are arguing for a reversal of standard left conceptions of socialist politics. Rather than proceeding from a carefully worked out, analytically correct program to the dissemination of such analysis to the masses (of one sort or another), this shift in perspective would abandon the pursuit of programmatic rectitude in favor of a focus on, and engagement with, existing levels of working-class consciousness and conflict.
The practical corollary is full adoption of a focus on working-class interests and struggle, a focus that has traditionally proved difficult for the left. The recent “resurgence” of labor has been enthusiastically greeted by many socialists, perhaps particularly in the United States, resulting in a welcome stimulation of debate between left union officials and radical intellectuals. Unfortunately, even this degree of left turn toward some aspects of working-class realpolitik may not be adequate for what we would define as the task in hand: that of building an alternative, explicitly class-based current of resistance to capital within at least the “advanced” sections of the class.
Such an approach calls for a consistent orientation toward the everyday “economistic” demands and actions of a working class that may exhibit, for principled socialists, a discomfiting conservatism on many issues, or at least the kind of gulf between its own conceptions and those of middle-class socialism shown in Croteau’s study. Where this gulf relates to issues such as racism or sexism, it must of course be confronted; but confronted in context. Even given such difficulties, the kind of “sacrifice” of principles and program required of socialists in starting from where the working class is, rather than where they might like it to be, is in our view indispensable if existing patterns of working-class resistance are to realize their objective potential and meaning. Any such process requires from socialists the ability to see, and draw out, the political and class implications of what may appear on the face of it to be decidedly “nonpolitical” struggles.
Encouraging a process of transition from acting on basic economic demands to the explicit understanding of the class meaning of such demands may require forms of organization which are themselves “transitional.” The concept of transition is central in shaping a politics that, through its necessary roots in working-class concerns and conditions, can act to build a “bridge” between the material conditions that continuously propel workers into struggle and a political perspective that can address and make sense of that process.
Historically, structures like soviets have been the most revolutionary forms of organization that encapsulate this transitional dynamic in arising from basic mass strike movements while pointing toward class power. Such structures are of significance not least in terms of their spontaneous eruption during major episodes of working-class struggle. As such, they have been a feature not only of the revolutionary era of the First World War period but also of more “up-to-date” upsurges. In 1972, Chilean workers set up cordones to fight for the Allende government; in 1979, Iranian workers created shoras to safeguard the overthrow of the Shah. The Portuguese revolution in 1974 almost immediately created workers’ commissions that united workers across union barriers within the workplace; these developed rapidly into inter-empresa (inter-factory) committees that clearly mirrored the Russian soviets, from necessity rather than conscious imitation.
There has also been a history of political attempts to create cross-union transitional formations along the lines of the Minority Movement of the 1920s in Britain (with the Comintern encouraging similar efforts in the United States and Canada in the Trade Union Educational League, and, with less success, in France through the “friends of unity” in the CGT).41 The Minority Movement explicitly saw itself as “a ‘transitional’ organization, a means of broadening the political consciousness of discontented trade unionists.” The main idea was not immediately to push “the union leadership into militant actions from below” but rather to relate the Communists’ “work in the trade unions directly to the creation of a revolutionary consciousness in preparation for the acute crisis which would arise with the outbreak of conflict in the mining industry.”42
Along similar lines, the need to build a class-conscious, independent leadership rooted within the labor movement in anticipation of future upsurges, is now being explicitly taken up in a growing number of countries through cross-union formations of various kinds, usually based around a publication. One of the oldest of these is Labor Notes in the United States, but to the list of such publications and cross-union centers has been added Trade Union News in Britain, Solidariteit in the Netherlands, Trade Union Forum in Sweden, Labour Notes in New Zealand, and Labour in Taiwan, alongside the Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE) networks in Germany, Brazil, and North America, among others.43 Such publications set out to make coherent what rank-and-file union activists do less visibly day in and day out as they operate on the terrain of their members’ basic interests and need for class organization.
Projects like those listed above, by publishing reports of struggles and issues across the class, providing support contacts in other sectors for those in dispute, and bringing activists across employment together in schools and conferences, begin to demonstrate to rank-and-file trade unionists the class meaning of their everyday activity, without the need for principles and programs dictated from above. Such initiatives cannot be sufficient to complete the transition to a “class for itself” consciousness by the activists involved; but they are a necessary beginning for such a process.
The issue of membership control over even workplace union leaderships is another central focus of these cross-movement organizations, as indicated in the interactions between US Labor Notes and union rank-and-file caucuses like TDU.44 The constant flux identified above between the bureaucratization of unions as organizations and the subversion of this by the concerns and demands of the membership has been consciously confronted by rank-and-file union activists in such formations with the deliberate adoption of strategies structured to pull in the opposite direction—toward the creation of organic links between the workplace-based concerns of the membership and the policies and actions of their representatives. In a few cases, like the rank-and-file based involvement of TDU in the demands and organization of the UPS strike, the threads come together with a powerful result.
We have seen that, with or without the support of socialists, workers will continue to organize on the basis of their own necessary, if sporadic, conflict with the system to create “ramparts” of resistance and, whatever their apparently conservative consciousness, intermittently enter into outright confrontation with employers and the state. Socialists have never been required to generate class struggle and organization; where they may be useful is in pointing out its class meaning and potential. Existing efforts to adopt this approach remain slight in comparison to the yawning gaps in consciousness and organization they confront, yet they present a crucial perspective on, and example of, cross-movement currents of opposition and resistance rooted in the labor movement that can begin to build toward a class response to the deepening social crisis.
This essay was originally published in Socialist Register 1998 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
3
Contextualizing Organized Labor in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the United States
Kim Moody
The relative well-being of the working class depends to a large extent on its state of organization and combativeness. But the ability of unions to improve living and working conditions also depends strongly on the economic, political, and social context in which struggles occur. In discussing the “general law of capitalist accumulation” in Capital, Marx argued that “the conditions which are the most favorable to the workers” are those of “reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e., accumulation.”1 This is more or less what happened in the United States during the long expansion that followed World War II and lasted