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Title: Renewing and Reforming Labor Author: Lucien Van Der Walt Date: 2019, Winter Language: en Topics: Labor movement, anarchist analysis, anarcho-syndicalism Source: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #75, Winter, 2019, page 11.
This is an edited transcript of a talk at the 11^(th) Global Labour
University Conference: “The Just Transition and the Role of Labour: Our
Ecological, Social, and Economic Future,” September 28–30, 2016,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
---
Thanks very much for having me on the panel, along with comrades Hilary
Wainwright, who has been a key figure in the British feminist and
socialist movement, editor of Red Pepper, Ozzi Warwick of the Oilfields
Workers’ Trade Union in Trinidad and Tobago, and Martin Egbanubi of the
Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies, Nigeria. There is
quite a nice link between the different inputs, with their stress on
self-activity and the immense creative potential of working class and
poor people, as organizers, as rebels, and as creators of new models and
ideas.
What I want to look at in this paper are the ways that we can think
about the role of the self-activity of ordinary workers as a means of
reshaping society, as a means of taking society in a different direction
to where we are currently going. I want to open a conversation on the
role and potential of unions as a force for progressive change, and
about the possibilities of that change. I do not want to get into an
argument about which labor and left traditions are right and which are
wrong, but rather, to try to push the boundaries of what we think unions
can do. And I want to do this by engaging with the core project of the
most radical, yet maybe the most misunderstood of the big left
traditions: syndicalism.
It is fairly obvious that the world is in a huge mess. It is fairly
obvious that the mainstream political system is not delivering to
ordinary people. Yet the fact is that a lot of the frustration ordinary
people face, and the suffering and the insecurity that characterizes
life today, is being channelled by right-wing, xenophobic and national,
racial and religious fundamentalist forces.
It is in this context that we really need to open up a dialogue on the
left, and to really look into the tool box of left ideas and history,
the repository of the past, of painfully learned lessons and powerful
approaches, to rethink ways that we can creatively take our struggles
forward. Yes, we need to avoid dogma, to avoid imposing formulae without
thinking about context. But we need the record of past experiences. We
have to have a really rigorous discussion, but while we should not
simply pour old wine into new bottles, we should also avoid throwing the
toolbox away by labelling views we do not like “dogmatic” or outdated.
At the heart of syndicalism is the argument that bottom-up, democratic
unions, autonomous of the state and of party control, should defend and
advance working class claims in the present, and at the same time
develop popular technical, organizational and ideological capacities
that will enable the working class as a whole, through its
self-activity, to both defend and advance its power, its claims, its
rights, within the capitalist framework--but also to form, through
unions, the nucleus of a new social order. A new social order based on
workers’ self-management, based upon a democratic planning of the
economy, based upon popular power and workers’ control.
This is an “embryo hypothesis,” which is that the union structures can
themselves form the basis, the nucleus, of that new social order, in
order to avoid the situation which we often have, which is that working
class movements hoist others into power, in the state.
This approach is one in which the self-activity of the working class is
both the means of struggle, and also the aim of the struggle, for
working class power. The struggle for working class power and
emancipation is not something done for a moment and then outsourced to
other forces, like political parties and the state, but is something
developed on a daily basis through self-activity; the struggle itself is
actually the core of the new social order.
Now there are a couple of general points I want to make, before I engage
with some other union traditions.
First, unions matter. Around the world there has been a very popular
discourse that the trade union movement is in decline, that it
represents a minority, that it is something, perhaps, that belonged to
an early period of history. This argument, which is not just made by the
right, but also by a surprising number on the left, is wrong. If we look
at some of the available figures, the number of people involved in
unions has actually increased, looking worldwide.
Underlying this is a larger process around the world, of massive
proletarianization. We don’t have a clear figure of exactly how large
the working class is right now--I mean the class dependent on wages but
lacking control of work, so I include white collar jobs, service jobs,
the unemployed, and the families of employed and unemployed workers--but
we do know that, for example, there has been a demographically much
larger process of proletarianization in Africa, Asia and Latin America
over the last 50 years than in all of the history of the West over the
last 300 years.
We also know that according to ILO’s Global Wage Report, wages are the
largest single source of income for households around the world. We know
that around half the global work force is in waged or salary jobs. We
know that while the industrial working class fell by 5 million from 2000
to 2013 in the Western industrial countries, it has grown by 195 million
in the middle-income countries alone. We know that by 2006, the majority
of the world’s population was urban. And we know that while the overall
agricultural population is declining, within that population the
peasantry is a shrinking part, as agricultural wage labor expands.
So the working class is bigger, unions are getting bigger, and the
potential for unions is growing massively.
Second, we really need to think about the different left traditions as a
family of ideas, that comes out of a common set of struggles and a
common set of concerns. The big traditions, such as Marxism,
social-democracy and anarchism (including syndicalism), emerged in
response to capitalism and the state. As Daniel Guerin argued, anarchism
and Marxism both “drank at the same proletarian spring.” The different
traditions may vary on how they tackle the problems, and we cannot claim
the family has always been a happy one, but, I think, a dialogue between
the different traditions is quite productive.
A constructive dialogue allows us to examine different historical
experiences, the paths of ideas, different insights, and engage in a
process of collective learning. This is a way of both affirming common
concerns and common working class roots, but also of clarifying issues,
surfacing assumptions, and revisiting important challenges, debates and
moments.
I really do not think we are in a position where we should efface
differences in the left; I do not think we need to be afraid of
differences in the left. I do not think the old divides are irrelevant,
and I do not think we are in some new era where the existing traditions
are irrelevant. We have not left the 19^(th) century: classic capitalism
is back, but bigger.
I think we are all in complete agreement about rejecting the dogmatic
methodology of looking at older traditions as having the answers to
everything, from Karl Marx’s implied approval of polyester suits to
workers’ control! But this does not mean we must abandon the traditions.
We need to understand the left traditions as a resource that was and is
collectively and internationally generated. Neither Marx, nor Mikhail
Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin or, for example, C.L.R. James sat in an ivory
tower, and came up with these traditions. They were, rather, part of a
collective process of knowledge production that has been sustained,
elaborated and applied by millions and millions of people across the
world over the last 150 years. If we look at this repository, this
toolbox, with an open mind, we can, on the one hand, find and develop
many good and useful ideas; and, also with an open mind, we must, on the
other hand, draw the lessons from the past experiences.
Critical historical reflection matters. We need to be very careful not
to repeat old mistakes and sow old illusions, and at the same time we
also need to recognize that a lot of what is now being called “21”
century socialism” is not new and not particularly 21” century. Many of
the ideas people put under this label have been around in various forms
on the left since at least the 1820s! Many have been tried; very few
have been very successful. It is easy enough to say, these days, that
the Russian Revolution failed and draw the lesson that revolutionary
dictatorship has failed.
But we also need an honest balance sheet for other proposals. For
example, the idea that we can have a transition from capitalism through
a massive expansion of the cooperative sector, a so-called “social” or
“non-capitalist” sector, was for example, P.J. Proudhon’s position, back
in the 1830s; the idea these should be sponsored by the state was argued
by Louis Blanc at roughly the same time. This did not get anywhere,
despite a mass base and mass support. This grand failure--rather, series
of grand failures--is precisely why people like Bakunin shifted to a
much more confrontational approach, of collectively seizing the means of
production, instead of creating alternative means of production on the
margins.
So a dialogue on the left, with our own history, and a constructive
debate and reflection, can help us avoid reinventing the wheel, avoid
repeating mistakes that we can avoid--and there have been huge mistakes
on all sides, we need to be quite clear on that--but also allows us to
look at how earlier generations grappled with challenges we imagine are
new, but are anything but: mass immigration, hostile states, global
capital, the absence of the so-called “standard employment
relationship”--and a global division of labor that pits workers against
each other.
Third and last, I want to emphasize that, just as the working class is a
universal and global class, its big left political traditions — Marxism,
social-democracy, and anarchism/syndicalism and others--are also global
ideas and traditions. I am proceeding from the premise that we cannot
really think about the world of ideas and politics and class formation
in terms of unique civilizational silos, African, European, Asian and so
on: we are talking, in this case, of class-based traditions,
representing a global class and traditions that have been globally
constituted. For example, Marxism may have begun in Germany, but was
also indebted to British economics and French socialism; it has been
profoundly shaped and reshaped by experiences in, for example, China,
Cuba, India, Mozambique and Russia. So to present such an idea as
“Eurocentric” is inaccurate and misleading. There is no simple one-way
flow from the “West to the Rest,” but something else entirely going on
here, part of a global labor history.
Syndicalism emerges from the broad anarchist tradition: I want to be
very clear, here, that by “anarchism” I mean a working class political
tradition that emerged in the First International from the 1860s, a
tradition indelibly associated with figures like Bakunin and Kropotkin,
a rationalist revolutionary form of libertarian socialism opposed to
social and economic hierarchy and inequality, which fights for a
radically democratic, global, federation of workers and community
councils, based on assemblies, mandated delegates, and common ownership.
It aims at putting the means of administration, coercion and production
under popular control, enabling self-management, democratic
planning-from-below, and production for need, not profit or power.
The core premise is an insistence on the value of individual freedom,
but also the related claim that individual freedom is only possible
through cooperative, egalitarian and democratic social relations. In the
genuinely communist society advocated by Bakunin, people are genuinely
free in that they have both shared, equal relations to major social
resources, no inequalities of class, gender, race and so on, and the
real, substantive possibility of making direct, meaningful decisions in
a wide range of areas of life. The fact of the matter is that you can
have all of the rights that you want in a Constitution, but if you are
homeless and sleep under the railway bridge, you are hardly in the same
position as a railway owner.
This view--individual freedom through economic and social equality, in a
society based on political pluralism--leads directly to a critique of
capitalism, landlordism and the state itself, for all are seen as means
of centralizing wealth and power in the hands of small ruling classes.
But it also involves a critique, for example, of authoritarian family
relationships, of multiple forms of social oppression by gender, empire,
nation, race and hierarchy between people generally.
Thus, individual freedom requires a revolutionary reconstruction of
social relations, one in which all people are guaranteed a basic means
of life, one in which there is greater and every increasing freedom for
individuals and the abolition of artificial and imposed inequalities.
This requires, among other things, the abolition of structures like
capitalism, landlordism and the state that are locked into anti-popular
logics precisely because they are built upon, and express, class
inequalities of power and wealth. They enable as well as require the
subjugation and exploitation of the popular classes.
The state, which is always centralized, is not, from this perspective, a
neutral, technical solution to governing complex societies. It is
primarily a means of placing administrative and coercive power in the
hands of the few, enabling these to administer these resources in a
top-down chain of command, and at the expense of the popular classes.
Writers like Max Weber, who were well aware of the negative consequences
of modern state power, and of how empty the claim that the people
actually govern was, misunderstood this, and therefore saw state power
as a necessary evil. But, for Bakunin and Kropotkin, the state was
neither efficient nor essential, but a form of class rule. When we take
class into account, it follows that the enemy is not everyone in the
state, because state bureaucracies as such are not interest groups that
overlap with classes; rather state bureaucracies are an organized
apparatus of class rule, by a small number of state managers who
cooperate closely with a small number of private owners, and that most
people in these systems are ordinary workers. Opposing capitalism means
opposing capitalists, not the workers they employ or any useful products
they provide or sell; likewise, opposing states means opposing state
elites, not the workers they employ nor any useful products they provide
or sell.
For syndicalism and anarchism, the idea that the popular classes can
play the state, or political, elite against the private capitalist or
economic elite, or that we should replace the existing state elite with
a new state elite, or get the state elite to merge with the private
capitalist elite through massive nationalization, simply misses the fact
that the state elite is part of the problem, is part of the ruling class
and is driven by an anti-popular logic that is no way different, and in
no way more contingent or changeable, than the anti-popular logic of the
private corporations.
This means that people who manage the state are--regardless of intent,
ideology, personal history, or social origins--part of an oppressing
ruling class. It is not that good people are co-opted by the state
because they are corrupted or do not understand the issues; it is the
logic of their position at the top of the state that forces them to act
in ways that are anti-popular. South Africa is a case in point: look at
the once-glorious movement of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 22 years down
the line, and see what it has become. It is not the first example, and
will not be the last, and it cannot be blamed on a few bad apples like
Jacob Zuma. It is completely typical case; there is nothing exceptional
about what the ANC has become, for the story is the same with all
political parties that have got state power, whether they are of the
left or of the right.
Now the question must arise: how do you solve this problem? Electing yet
another party, and hoping that this time, magically, the outcome will be
different, is not reasonable.
The anarchist tradition is a diverse one, with a lot of internal
debates, but the main strand, the anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin and
others, is what I call “mass anarchism.” It argues that we need to
organize, from below, for an alternative society, through a
pre-figurative politics of mass-based, class struggle organizing.
This means, firstly, building alternative mass organizations in struggle
against the ruling class. Organizations that constitute the base of
resistance, the levers of social revolution as well as the nucleus of a
new, self-managed, egalitarian order. This is an approach that can be
described as building popular, class-based counter power.
This involves bottom-up, democratic, mass organizations that can resist,
then defeat, then surpass the ruling classes: the aim is essentially the
extension of a democratic egalitarian popular project that is the
complete opposite of the core, centralized, elite-run, hierarchical
institutions of the state and the corporations. To extend this project
across society requires a move beyond resistance, or small experiments,
to enabling common ownership of, and democratic control over, all core
social resources. I agree with comrade Hilary that the autonomist John
Holloway is wrong to think that capitalism will “crack” through the
proliferation of experiments and exits. It’s far too powerful for that;
we need to warn people how dangerous the system is. We need a direction,
a politics, a plan about where we are going.
As my comrades on the panel have demonstrated, ideas matter: there is
nothing automatic about mass, democratic bottom-up organizing leading to
a transformation of society. On the contrary, the typical pattern is
that mass democratic organizations and popular struggles--despite the
gains they may win and imprint on the social order--get captured; they
get used as mechanisms for small elites to ride into state power, where
those self-same small elites--former union leaders, national liberation
heroes, one-time grassroots militants, whoever--then become part of the
system, and play a role in the reconsolidation of ruling class power.
For Bakunin, without a revolutionary theory the popular classes are
doomed to repeat an endless cycle of ruler replacing ruler, and
exploiter replacing exploiter, as revolts against oppression generate
new oppressors. Therefore, there is a need to use the democratic space
within the mass organizations to make the argument for an alternative,
for a critique of the present, a vision of the future and a strategy to
reach it. A new “social philosophy” (Bakunin), and the real possibility
of a new order and a faith in the ability of ordinary people to create
it.
This project, then, of counter power requires as its twin a
revolutionary project of building popular counter-culture--of
counter-hegemonic struggle--so that, ideally, you have a situation where
there are not only mass democratic, class-struggle movements, but those
mass democratic movements are at the core of the constitution of a
popular alternative worldview.
Therefore we will need specific anarchist or syndicalist political
organizations--not as a substitute for popular self-activity, but as a
force to promote it; not as a party aiming at state power, but as a
force to help push the mass organizations themselves, and so the popular
classes, to take power directly.
What Bakunin wanted, for example, in the First International, was not an
anarchist international, any more than he wanted a Marxist
international. He wanted the First International to be a body that
provided the greatest possible class-based unity, and within that
framework, to have the democratic discussion, elaboration and testing of
different perspectives.
This is not what happened, as the First International split between the
anarchists and the Marxists in 1872, but the record is quite clear that
the anarchist wing included many non-anarchists and that the
Bakuninists, over the next five years, consistently tried to organize a
reconciliation. This was not because the differences did not matter, but
because the unity of the working class and the peasantry was paramount,
because revolution required mass democratic organizations, not small
political sects, and because, they believed, issues could be
democratically resolved. This was at the core of their project.
Where do unions fit in here? For most mass anarchists--Bakunin and
Kropotkin included--unions are an essential part of building
counter-power. As mass-based organizations, based at the workplace, they
are the single most important and irreplaceable means of placing means
of production under popular control; as extremely resilient mass
organizations that function best when overcoming divisions among workers
and championing common demands--for example, around wages--and more
specific demands--for example, around gender equality or immigration
rights--they can be mighty levers of revolution; as formations based at
the point of production, they wield enormous structural power by being
able to disrupt capital accumulation and state functions.
There is obviously a complete rejection here of the idea that unions can
be fundamentally incorporated into the status quo. Obviously union
leaders can be corrupted and incorporated. Obviously many unions develop
a bureaucracy--full-time officials and leaders--which acts as a brake on
struggles and contain the seeds of betrayal. But unions themselves
cannot be co-opted. They represent a fundamental contradiction within
society. They cannot be bought off, and workers cannot be bought off.
The very fact of unions’ existence arises from the inability of this
society to meet the needs, political, economic and social, of the
popular classes.
For syndicalism, you can and should win reforms--progressive changes,
within the existing system--through mass democratic, class-based
movements, including unions, but what is key is how we win reforms. For
syndicalism and for mass anarchism generally, reforms should be won from
below. This enables them to be a means of activating ordinary people, a
means of developing confidence, of building organization and
consciousness, a means of creating further momentum for more and
escalating demands--and a means of improving people’s lives.
But, as someone said earlier, after one contradiction is resolved,
another emerges. Mass anarchism insists that one victory for reforms
does not solve the problem. Reforms are valuable but inadequate.
The point of syndicalism is an application of the counter-power/
counter-culture strategy in the workplace. But the ambition and scope of
syndicalism also means building a union movement that is not just
economistic, focused only on wages and conditions, or reformist, giving
up the revolution, or only workplace-based. It involves a union movement
that organizes on a wide range of issues, at work and beyond work,
economic, social and political. It stresses direct action, is open to
alliances with a range of popular class forces, and it is profoundly
political but independent of political parties. It is popular, radical
and political, but also tolerant of diversity. It is a transformative
unionism that constitutes within itself the seeds of a new order within
the shell of the old society.
I want to be very clear here that the vision of syndicalism, and of the
mass anarchism from which it emerged, involves the idea that unions will
be political, but they will not be “political unions” in the sense that
we usually mean--unions allied to parties. On the contrary, unions will
simultaneously engage in economic and political activities, and in
practice reject any effort to set up a division of labor where unions
“do” economic issues, and parties “do” politics. The aim is to overcome
the gap in the working class between economic and political struggles,
and help therefore block the dead end of seeking state power that
parties tend to follow.
Unions and other forms of counter-power, which would take the same line,
would thus replace parties in many respects, and avoid the pattern of
allying to political parties to betray. Within the counter-power, let a
thousand political currents bloom, and operate, but reject substitution
of parties for the mass democratic organizations, and the path to state
power--for the state arena is an “enormous cemetery,” where the “real
aspirations” and “living forces” of the masses are “slain and buried”
(Bakunin).
As Bakunin argued, a bourgeois-democratic state is a “thousand times”
better than the most “enlightened” dictatorship, but elections are an
“immense fraud” in a capitalist system: “The day after election
everybody goes about his business, the people go back to toil anew, the
bourgeoisie to reaping profits and political conniving.”
We continue to speak, in most of the labor and left milieu, as if the
state is something different than capitalism--as if capitalism has an
essential nature, where the place of power is always occupied by
capital, where the dynamics of capitalism are iron laws of history--yet,
despite all of our experiences, as if the state has no essential
features, fusion with elites, or iron laws. We had reformist and
revolutionary parties in power, we have had left social-democrats, right
social-democrats, we have had radical nationalists and
Marxist-Leninists; right next door to South Africa, we had a revolution
under the Marxist-Leninist party, FRELIMO, in the 1960s and 1970s, in
Mozambique. But every one of these state projects, without exception,
saw the parties join the old elites, or form new elites. There is a
fundamental incompatibility between the logic of mass organizing for the
popular classes, and of self-management and democracy from below, and
the logic of state and corporate rule. Setting up yet another party, or
trying to fix existing parties, is a dead end. The whole approach is
wrong.
In closing, I want to suggest that syndicalism is not the same as
“social movement unionism,” which refers to democratic unions that build
alliances with other forces, and fight for democratic reforms, because
while it shares these elements syndicalism rejects alliances with
political parties aiming at state power, something that the
quintessential social movement unions--Brazil, Korea and South
Africa--all accepted.
While social movement unionism has a vague, often elusive, aim,
syndicalism has a clear revolutionary project, as it aims very
explicitly at a project of self-management through the unions and other
organs of counter power; this is a battle that, it is very clear, unions
cannot fight on the alien terrain of the state, but organize outside and
against the state.
It will involve organizing state workers, but it rejects the use of the
courts, parliament, the official policy and corporatist machinery and
the pursuit of state power. It aims at organizational self-sufficiency
and working class autonomy, including financially. I do not suggest we
completely reject any external funding, for example, from other unions,
even parties, but this must never be a substitute for being largely
self-financing--and every care must be taken to ensure the democratic
control of funds, and subordinating all funding to existing goals,
rather than changing goals to get funding. Every effort must be made to
keep the number of full-time posts in unions limited, paid at the wage
of average workers, and subject to the strictest accountability; funds
must focus on education and organizing, not investments. And every
effort to use funds to build systems of patronage must meet zero
tolerance.
The anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Spain in the 1930s had two million
members, no state funding, no rich donors, had a tiny staff, yet ran
thousands of worker and neighborhood centers, dozens of newspapers
including the largest daily in the country, a radio station, and fought
a brutal ruling class. It is absurd that there are left-wing unions in
South Africa with a billion rands tied up in investment firms, while
they cannot fund a decent media or education programme and chase foreign
funds to keep going. Those billions should be poured into mass
organizing and education. Self-sufficiency is a precondition for
autonomy, and a safeguard against lazy organizing and a union
bureaucracy that controls the money through centralized accounts, access
to donors and a role in union investment companies.
Plans for workers’ self-management, which Hilary mentioned, like the
proposals of the Vickers workers in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, are
absolutely inspirational; I think we can all agree in being awed by the
creative capacities of the working class, and recognize the need to
extend real democratic control over production and roll back management
control. But as Vickers showed, faith in the state was misplaced;
despite support by the Labour Party left, like Tony Benn, no real
support came from the state--and in any case, Benn favored a heavy role
for the state in managing industry, which is the opposite of real
democratic control over production
To fight against capitalism is also to fight against the state; to fight
against social and economic inequality in society is also to build a
mass democratic, class-based movement.
Finally, syndicalism rejects notions that unions automatically develop
in one way or another. It rejects the pessimistic view of Robert
Michels--who had been, by the way, very close to syndicalism before
moving rightwards--that all unions, like other mass formations,
inevitably end up undemocratic; it rejects Richard Lester’s notion that
unions inevitably “mature” into bureaucratic, conservative bodies. It
equally rejects the views that unions are automatically or inevitably
revolutionary. They are not, and in most cases are far from it.
When I talk about the need for the working class to extend power through
unions, I am not making the argument that every single union can do it;
many are completely incapable of doing it; and that is precisely why we
need to reform and renew the unions, through such means as rank-and-file
movements. We need both ideological and organizational renewal.
In South Africa there is a major split in the unions, with the South
African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) emerging from the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU), but this is, so far, basically a
division of unions largely sharing the same political traditions; for
many involved, it’s not a profound political break with the traditions
of the SA Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress movement of the
African National Congress (ANC), but an effort to rescue those from the
SACP and ANC--a return to the “national-democratic” revolution project,
the party form, the ideas of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and so on.
From the mass anarchist and the syndicalist perspective there is nothing
automatic about mass democratic movements becoming revolutionary. There
is also no pre-set trajectory in history that takes us inevitably
towards socialism, there are no stages of history that are taking us
anywhere, or that capitalism itself will inevitably collapse, whether we
give this a 19^(th) century spin, and bet on economic crisis, or a
20^(th) century spin and bet on imperialist wars, or a 21^(st) century
spin, and bet on ecological disaster.
It is fundamentally the self-activity of ordinary people that can switch
history onto a new track, but it is fundamentally by changing ideas that
people will change the track. Ideas are the driving force here. This is
not an idealist conception: ideas only take root when they intersect
with social formations and class interests; but it is the recognition
that it is that ideas that are going to change the world, and that this
is the only certainty we can have about the future.