{"id":5577,"date":"2022-02-10T21:36:11","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T02:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5577"},"modified":"2022-02-19T16:48:16","modified_gmt":"2022-02-19T21:48:16","slug":"from-union-to-workers-council","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/02\/from-union-to-workers-council\/","title":{"rendered":"From union to workers’ council"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>hat is the point of socialists organizing inside unions? For reformists seeking the electoral road to socialism, it\u2019s about gaining union members\u2019 votes, and possibly using strikes to advance and defend pro-working class reform programs. Independent rank and file organization might move unions to the left and line them up behind reform socialist strategy, but so might bureaucratic leadership.
\nFor revolutionaries, unions are schools for struggle where our class learns to take power directly into our own hands. But union leadership structures disrupt this process. Recognizing this, practitioners of rank and file oriented strategies prioritize independent organization from below over running for leadership. Moreover they view union officeholding and staff jobs skeptically as means to advance class emancipation and power. As a result we are accused from the left of having no \u201cend-game,\u201d<\/a> or from the right of a dead-end purism that refuses the responsibilities of power<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2000 Kim Moody\u2019s The Rank and File Strategy<\/a> partially answered this type of criticism: Rank and file organization aims to build transitional organizations that lay the basis for industrial as well as political working class power on an independent basis. But without the next step beyond this\u2014socialist revolution\u2014unions remain subject to conservatizing bureaucracy, and working-class parties, therefore, to overwhelming pressure from the capitalist system.<\/p>\n

The low ebb of class struggle by 2000 meant Moody arguably went as far as he credibly could at the time. But with a new, increasingly labor-focused generation of socialists, and exciting new developments in the union movement, today we might venture to clarify the \u201cend game\u201d of this revolutionary approach to union work.<\/p>\n

For this we don\u2019t have to reinvent the wheel. Almost forgotten today, in the 1910s a group of syndicalist and Marxist workers centered in the U.K.\u2019s stormy class struggles formulated their own rank and file strategy as a direct path to workers\u2019 councils and revolution.<\/p>\n

Britain, the first industrialized country, also had the world\u2019s oldest unions. The world\u2019s first nationwide workers\u2019 movement developed there with the radical Chartist movement, which peaked in the 1840s. Marxism itself emerged only after British workers demonstrated their class potential in this way.<\/p>\n

In the following decades, the labor movement showed flashes of militancy and insurgency but eventually became institutionalized because of exclusionary craft unionism and support for the pro-capitalist Liberal Party. In the 1860s, Karl Marx mobilized Manchester textile workers to support slave emancipation and oppose British intervention on the side of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War. British unions led in the founding of the First International. And in 1888, unorganized industrial workers, led by women, launched an insurgent strike wave. Yet by the turn of the century, British unions shared with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) a uniquely conservative craftism and non-socialist ideology. What\u2019s more, they were older and better established than the AFL, representing 14.5 percent of workers, compared to 5 percent for the AFL. Elsewhere, Marxists and labor anarchists set themselves up for lasting influence in union movements they helped found around this time. But in Britain (as in the U.S.), revolutionaries faced the challenge of pre-existing federations more or less hostile to their strategies and ideas.<\/p>\n