Marxism and trade unionism

As I'm sure you can imagine, there's a much much longer response coming at some point, but I just wanted to check this point:

"...arguing that a worker, or group of workers, organising their workplace from scratch would be “working outside the currently existing unions” whether or not they organised through IWGB or Unite. In fact, they wouldn't be “working outside the currently existing unions” in either case, as both Unite and IWGB provide a level of existing infrastructure, resources (both human and otherwise), and accumulated experience and knowledge of struggle. But to pose the matter starkly, if you choose to attempt to set up an IWGB branch in your unionised workplace, rather than attempting to organise through the GMB or Unite, you are “starting from scratch” in a much more fundamental way"

Should "unionised workplace" be "un-unionised" or "non-unionised" here? I don't want to have a cheap dig if it's not justified, but given that a lot of this conversation has consisted of me saying something along the lines of "you're mostly focused on workplaces where union organisation already exists and don't have that much to say about the places where it doesn't", and you saying "nah, that's not true, we totally care about unorganised workers" (paraphrasing wildly here, obviously), then for me to say "I'm not that convinced that the resources of larger unions make that much of a difference in places where they don't already have a membership base", and for you to respond with "but if we change this conversation to be about workplaces where the GMB do already have members then things look different" feels like a bit of a weak counter-argument. But if that bit is a typo and you actually meant to say "if you choose to attempt to set up an IWGB branch in your un-unionised workplace, rather than attempting to organise through the GMB or Unite, you are “starting from scratch” in a much more fundamental way" then that's quite a different point - just wanted to check which one I should be responding to. More to follow.

OK, I've finished off my reply to this. This does feel like one of those conversations where every point made raises a lot of other counter-points, so I've tried to keep some kind of balance between skimming over too much and making this even more unreadably long and rambling.

By the way, if you have the time, this recent piece from the AWW, while very long, is also quite interesting about some of the themes that have come up in this discussion (and has a lot of proper stats in it).

A sample:

"In terms of more serious attempts to understand the revolutionary subjectivity and limitations of the uprisings, what is left is an unproductive separation of analysis: some people emphasise the increasing numbers of proletarians expelled from the immediate production process (surplus population, unemployed) and others focus on the productive collective power of workers in the emerging global supply chains (global working class debate). Some discovered the ‘era of riots’ [8], while others proclaimed the ‘global strike wave’ [9]. Both sides are able to provide ample sociological proof for their position – figures about slum dwellers or the global integration of production.

We can ask ourselves why this separation of political focus has emerged. While it has something to do with the social position, regional location, and political preferences of those who analyse, the main material reason will be the real separation within working class existence: how workers experience impoverishment and productive power is structured and diversified regionally, sectorially, in terms of gender etc. In that sense most theoretical analysis and their one-sided focus only mirrors reality, without questioning it...

This main contradiction of capital appears both as an internal character of production (separated cooperation) and its result (relative impoverishment). The championing of either ‘surplus population’ or ‘workers’ productive power’ separate these two dynamics instead of analysing how, in reality, the experiences of ‘impoverishment’ and ‘collective productivity’ coincide or are segregated within the global working class. The separation also leads to a different understanding of revolution and consequently of one’s own role. If we focus merely on the first aspect of the contradiction – the creation of an impoverished surplus population – we will mainly perceive the social process as a kind of automatic tendency: capital accumulates itself and churns out a growing numbers of discontented unemployed. While this results in a quite deterministic view on social developments on one side – which we can just observe and which has little to do with the agency of the exploited – it also results in a pretty superficial and mechanical view of revolution as insurrection and rupture: at some point there are just too many poor people to be controlled. Instead we should analyse how the experience of cooperation and collective productivity and struggle of workers relates to the experience of impoverishment."

So, this is an interesting article, and I intend to write a fuller reply in a few days when I get the time.
A few quick points (note, I'm not a Plan C member, though I have some time for their ideas, but nothing I say should be taken as representing their opinions):

You say "An article on NovaraMedia by Plan C's Callum Cant frames them as "social strikes" – a “new kind of strike action”... [I]n the case of the Deliveroo and UberEats strikes, it appears one can just slap the label "social strike" on anything that isn't an "official" strike by an established union, involving a ballot mandate, formal notification to the employer, and so on, and say it's not only a “social strike” but a “new kind of strike action”."

The only thing is, is there any sign Callum, or indeed anyone else, actually uses the term social strike to describe the Deliveroo and UberEats strikes? I can't spot it anywhere. If the argument is just that "some of Plan C throw the social strike label around quite enthusiastically, and Callum wrote an excitable article about the UberEats strike, therefore he must think that it's a social strike", that's some pretty sloppy reasoning.

More broadly, on the new/old strike debate, it seems a bit pedantic - if I looked out of my window and saw a wooly mammoth, I might well think something like "blimey, that's new", because it would be entirely unfamiliar to me, even though they existed millions of years ago. Likewise, if some workers carry out a strike in a way that's significantly different to the way that the vast majority of industrial disputes have been conducted during our lifetimes in this country, and someone writes an article pointing out that it's significantly different to the way that the vast majority of industrial disputes have been conducted during our lifetimes in this country, it seems a bit nitpicky to say "your hastily-written buzzfeed listicle which existed mainly to advertise the then-upcoming strike action failed to consider what conditions were like way before any of us were born when it was making the broadly correct point that this strike is significantly different to the way that the vast majority of industrial disputes have been conducted during our lifetimes in this country."

More seriously, your main argument seems to point in some quite minoritarian and substitutionist directions: the working class is folded into the minority of workers who're employed in workplaces with a recognised TUC union. If Al's interview lacks any sense that one can be both a striker engaged in the public sector pay dispute and a Plan C-type engaged in trying to socialise the strike, this piece seems to lack any perspective for what workers in the private sector are supposed to do, other than sit on our hands and wait for the "actually existing labour movement" to rescue us. This is especially perverse given that your piece starts off by talking about the action of the Deliveroo and UberEats couriers, workers who have actually done what you tell us should be impossible by going around, not through, the TUC unions, so that, at least in those workplaces, they are precisely building a new, better, labour movement from scratch.

I could say much more, but I'll stop for now to try and get my thoughts into a slightly clearer order. Also, some recommended reading on the social strike debate:
if you've not seen them already, the AWW's comments on the social strike idea are well worth reading.

And these thoughts from an Australian comrade are also highly recommended (including the discussion in the comments below)

A response from some wobblies

And finally, being a bit cheeky and plugging my own writing on the subject:

I wouldn't start from here

On SATs, strategy and the social strike

More notes on the social strike

Thanks for your response. I haven't read through the links you provided so this will just be a response to the points you raise here, rather than anything in those articles.

Firstly, on the question of whether Callum does in fact view the Deliveroo strikes as "social strikes", I'd draw your attention to the recent addition to the article, as follows:

"Callum has since made it clear he does not regard the Deliveroo and UberEats strikes as "social strikes", and believes that my article misrepresents him. My apparent confusion arose from the fact that, in his Novara piece, the line describing the strikes as "new kinds of strike action" was hyperlinked to the interview about social strikes; I therefore assumed that this is partially what he meant when he referred to their "novelty". As my reference to his Novara article was merely a jumping off point for a wider discussion of the "social strike" concept, responding primarily to his interview with Al, I do not believe that this renders the rest of the article invalid."

Hope that clears things up, at my end at least.

You say that it's okay to call something "new" even if what you actually mean is "it hasn't been seen for a long time". I don't agree. Two absolutely elementary duties of any socialist organisation worth its salt are 1) to strive for clarity, and 2) to attempt to be "the memory of the class", bringing before our fellow workers experiences that the movement has had in the past, and attempting to draw out any lessons for our current period. That's what we're trying to do by banging on about New Unionism.

Saying that something is a new development when it manifestly isn't might be forgivable on a journalistic level but if you're trying to raise the level of consciousness and understanding of the class around you (presumably this is also a goal Plan C sets for itself), then you have to be clear.

I find the accusation that, for me (or perhaps AWL more widely) "the working class is folded into the minority of workers who're employed in workplaces with a recognised TUC union" rather hoary, and not supported either by what I actually wrote in the article nor our wider writing or practise. We have written reams and reams of stuff about strategies for organising the unorganised, and been involved in plenty of campaigns around this (including, often, working with non-TUC affiliated unions). We were the first group on the UK left, to my knowledge, to promote the campaigns of Unite New Zealand in the fast food industry as a model (some of whose strategies are now beginning to be taken up by BFAWU), and we have a long record of engagement with migrant workers' struggles, etc. Given all of this it seems especially ludicrous to accuse me of arguing that workers in unorganised workplaces should "sit on [their] hands and wait for the 'actually existing labour movement' to rescue us".

If your view is that the Deliveroo and UberEATS strikes will result in the construction of a "new, better, labour movement from scratch", you are inverting the error you accuse me of. Is the IWGB/UVW going to "rescue" the six or seven million workers who are currently members of "traditional" trade unions? How? Will it replace them? Will members of a GMB branch in, say, Rotherham, read about the UberEATS strike on the Internet, realise how much better the IWGB is than the GMB, and leave their GMB branch to found a branch of the IWGB?

Would that be desirable, even if it were less fantastical? I don't believe it would. To do so would mean abandoning a terrain of struggle.

There will certainly be mass strikes, of the 2011 type, again, perhaps soon. "Build the IWGB" is not a strategy for developing an alternative, grassroots leadership and political direction for those strikes (or for "socialising" them, if you think that term has strategic value). Without an insurgent, independently-organised rank-and-file with a clear industrial and political strategy, we won't be able to do much more than "sit on our hands" and wait to be marched up and down by the bureaucracy.

I agree that, in certain situations, "minority union"-type projects can play an important role and might be the most effective strategy. But if one's aspiration is not merely for the sparking of small pockets of struggle here and there, but the revolutionisation of the entire labour movement, one can hardly ignore the 99.9% of it currently comprised by TUC-affiliated unions. If you want to transform it (and I mean genuinely transform, and probably organisationally recompose in some way; I'm not talking about an SP-style strategy, which dresses up leftists capturing bureaucratic positions as rank-and-fileism), it has to be gone through, not around.

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DR

I'll put it bluntly: organising the organised is as important as organising the unorganised.

Take the Grangemouth dispute; a massive private sector workplace in a hugely strategic industry with incredibly high levels of union density (organised by the biggest union in the country). Unite got completely turned over. That needs fixing. "Build the IWGB" does not solve the problem.

To give another example; the railway industry (which I guess is sort of public-sector-in-exile but with private employers). Another hugely significant industry in strategic terms. We do sometimes win victories there but we're a lot weaker than we should be. We should have the bosses permanently by the throat. But we don't, partially because workers' organisation in that industry is weakened by sectionalism, and the huge democratic deficit between unions' structures and direction and their mass memberships that exists in all unions (even in a relatively more militant and, in many ways, democratic union like mine, RMT).

Again, "build the IWGB" is not a strategy for addressing any of that.

It requires revolutionaries and other radicals who work in that industry to act as educators, agitators, and organisers for revolutionary class-struggle strategies and politics, with a transformative perspective towards our existing organisations (unions) that doesn't see their current composition as sacrosanct (e.g., arguing for industrial unionist perspectives even in Aslef) nor the power of the bureaucracy as unbreakable.

"Rescue" implies a degree of passivity and victimhood which I'm sure neither of us would be comfortable with. I would never counsel any group of workers to "sit on their hands". But I do certainly believe that better-organised sections of the class, with more strength/power, have a responsibility to the rest of the class.

The aspects of the "social strike perspective" I think might be worthwhile talk about workers who have high levels of organisation and leverage using that power beyond the limits of their immediate economic relationship with their employer, in a way that empowers wider sections of the class. But, as I said in the article, that fundamentally requires subjective agency and political will on the part of the strikers themselves. I'm instinctively uncomfortable with the idea that the "socialising" process is something that's "done to" a strike, "from the outside".

I also believe that we won't make significant inroads into organising the 19.2 million without an integral role on the part of the 7 million. With the best will in the world, the IWGB, UVW, or IWW are not going to organise Amazon warehouses or Tesco's distribution network. For workers there to do that will require resourcing and infrastructural support. Where will that come from, if not the existing labour movement? The existing unions are shit, they won't provide that support, or they'll do it in a shit way? Yes, they will - unless their existing members substantially transform them. So we're back to the centrality of "organising the organised".

Part of the issue with our argument here, I suspect, is that we're talking across each other and, to some extent, ourselves. We're both talking in quite grand terms about rebuilding class power on a mass scale, recomposing the labour movement, etc. But I think we're necessarily also talking about how a small group of revolutionary workers within that movement can most effectively dispose of its necessarily limited resources; that's obviously informed by the grand strategic assessment, but "build mass class power and recompose the entire labour movement" is obviously not an answer to the question: "how should AWL/Plan C/SolFed members [I have a vague recollection from a previous exchange that you're in SolFed, but I may be misremembering or it may no longer be true] prioritise and focus their energies?"

(By the way, in terms of the "mass strike" phrase, I meant it literally - i.e., a very big strike. I wasn't referencing the Luxemburg/Kautsky debate.)

Again - I'm not telling anyone to wait. If a group of, say, Amazon workers organise a fight with their management, the exigencies of their struggle take precedence. They don't have to "take one for the team" by waiting while the rest of us get our act together.

But even if your actual perspective is "fuck the unions, let's just start again in ones and twos in unorganised workplaces and build a pure trade union movement without any flaws" (I know that's not what you're arguing, but let's take that as a kind of hyperbolised version of the "build a new labour movement from scratch" approach), then at some point you're going to encounter the existing movement, even if only as an obstacle when some established union tries to sign a sweetheart deal with the employer you're trying to organise against, and nicks your members. How to prevent or undermine that? An independent rank-and-file in that union would have to rein its officials in.

Again: organising the organised is essential.

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DR

You're boxing with shadows if you think I'm arguing that it's not possible or desirable to engage with, or "intervene in", a strike or struggle in which one is not directly involved.

As I said in the original article:

“... when workers from a workplace in which we have no comrades go on strike, Workers' Liberty necessarily relates to the strike 'from the outside', seeking to support it and help amplify it, and, if we can, to engage the workers in discussions about the strategy and direction of the strike. But we are still relating to it from within the broad labour movement (we can build solidarity with the strike within our own workplaces and unions), and we don't extrapolate from our external position that 'mass collective action at the point of production' might in some way be old hat because we happened not to be directly involved in it at that moment.”

And I think I can say without too much ego that AWL played a fairly key role in sparking the Vestas struggle, in which (a section of) an entirely un-unionised private-sector workforce was persuaded to conduct a sit-down strike by a week's worth of factory-gate agitation by a bunch of Trots and a couple of others.

When we first found out that the factory was closing, we didn't go, "oh, we'd better see if we can get a Unite branch to pass a policy about this", a few comrades just got on a ferry and went to talk to the workers. And when it looked like a struggle might be sparked, we didn't say, "hang on, sit on your hands until a TUC union shows up". So I don't think it's fair to accuse us either of precluding the possibility of action outside the channels of the "official" movement, nor of the possibility of engaging with or even catalysing struggles "from the outside" (although again, I'd stress that while "outside" a given workplace or industry, we should still be relating to it from within the broad labour movement).

I think your Saltley Gate comparison is a bit daft, to be honest, and further evidence that "the social strike" can basically be used to mean anything anyone wants. A direct call from the leadership of the NUM to other unionised workers to take direct action to maximise the impact of the miners' strike doesn't seem to me to have much in common with anything we've been discussing, given that all the workers involved were a) unionised by "traditional" unions and b) had a huge amount of what one might call "old fashioned" industrial leverage.

To be quite honest, I'm not entirely convinced that the "social strike perspective" has any explanatory, strategic, or tactical value at all, but I am interested in the idea of, say, the 84/85 miners' strike as a "social strike" - in the sense of a strike that poses in an acute way "social" questions, that is, questions of who runs society and in whose interests; but solidarity action of the Saltley Gate type seems a different matter.

Finally, on "organising where you are", so to speak: If you're a revolutionary in a totally un-unionised workplace and you want to organise it, you'd obviously have to weigh up whether it was better to do that through a TUC union or an "independent" one. As I've said, I don't rule out the latter as a potentially useful instrument, although on balance I think the circumstances in which I think that would make most sense would be relatively particular and rare.

But either way, a revolutionary left that does not have a perspective for transforming the existing labour movement (whether or not the particular employment circumstances of the existing membership of your group allow you as much direct involvement as you might wish, and whatever else it says about organising the unorganised) would seem to me pretty profoundly strategically limited.

Anyway, thanks for writing a response to the original article. I'm looking forward to reading it.

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DR

Thinking about it, I suppose one of the more interesting points that's come up here is what we want revolutionary organisations to look like, and how we want them to reflect the make-up of the working class.
Thinking about our fantasy football ideas of what a communist organisation "should" be like, I suppose I would want it to reflect the composition of the broader class as closely as possible, not just in terms of the obvious stuff like age, race and gender but also in terms of things like employment status. Having the kind of labour movement focus the AWL argue for would presumably mean (trying to) function as an expression of the best organised sections of the class, which I suppose is quite a different ambition.
Following on from this, perhaps it's healthier to take an "ecology of organisations" view, and accept that no single organisation is going to be able to represent the class as a whole, but a group like the AWL can act as a more-or-less sectional expression of the most organised fractions of the class, and a group like Plan C acting as an expression of those sections of the class who have more precarious and insecure employment situation?
Don't fully know where I'm going with this, but it seems like a possibly more fruitful direction to think in than just arguing about whether "social strike" is a useful phrase or not.

But in fact isn't Plan C's base essentially postgraduates? (Apologies if I've got that wrong.) And does Plan C have more precarious workers than AWL? I think you make an interesting point that's worth thinking about nonetheless.

Sacha Ismail