{"id":7252,"date":"2022-07-25T13:49:59","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T17:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=7252"},"modified":"2022-07-28T18:25:21","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T22:25:21","slug":"origins-of-the-rank-and-file-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/07\/origins-of-the-rank-and-file-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Origins of the rank and file strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

M<\/span>ovements of workers\u2019 militancy often develop with little connection to socialist organizations. Workers fight the bosses because they need to\u2014to defend their living standards, their dignity, and their general well-being. They use whatever ideas and forms of organization are available. It helps to have a union, but workers still struggle even when the union leadership doesn\u2019t have their back.<\/em><\/p>\n

One thread of Marxist tradition has developed a distinctive approach to closing the gap between socialist organization and workers\u2019 militancy\u2014by trying to build a revolutionary socialist current in workplaces through common struggles with rank and file leaders of existing unions.<\/em><\/p>\n

The International Socialists in the U.S. made one such attempt to close the gap. After getting a start in campus clubs in the 1960s, many IS members took union jobs in the 1970s\u2014a time of rank and file rebellion. An expanded vision of their general approach would later become well known as the \u201crank and file strategy,\u201d in part because Kim Moody, a veteran of the IS, published a pamphlet<\/a> by that name in 2000.<\/em><\/p>\n

Five years later, Moody took a critical look at the IS experience itself. That November, he spoke at a conference on the \u201cLong 1970s\u201d at UCLA\u2019s Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. His speech, reprinted here, details some of the ideas and practical experience through which the rank and file strategy was adapted to the circumstances of the time. – Eds. <\/em><\/p>\n

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The rank and file union revolts that have been developing in the industrial workplaces since the early 1950s are now plainly visible. Like many of their compatriots, American workers are faced with paces, methods and conditions of work that are increasingly intolerable. Their union leaders are not sensitive to these conditions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

S<\/span>o wrote Stan Weir in 1967 11966 pamphlet<\/a> published by the Berkeley Independent Socialist Club, the center of a network of socialist groups that would eventually form the International Socialists in late 1969. These three sentences form what might be called the bare bones of the rank and file perspective developed by the International Socialists. Compelled by the pressure of conditions, workers act. Their leaders do not respond or even stand in the way of conflict, and rank and file rebellion brews and sometimes explodes into open conflict, not only with the boss but often with the union leaders.<\/p>\n

Weir pointed to what was in reality only the very beginning of nearly a decade of working class upheaval. It was composed of wildcat strikes both local and national, growing official strikes to \u201clet off steam,\u201d the formation of rank and file caucuses, Black and Latino caucuses, the organization of the public sector, and the rise of the farm workers movement. The concept of a rank and file movement wasn\u2019t entirely new, even to us. We had seen documentation of some of them in Herman Benson\u2019s Union Democracy in Action<\/em>, an occasional newsletter that reported on union democracy issues beginning in 19602

This upsurge, of course, took place in a decade of general social unrest in which one movement succeeded or inspired another. Weir recognized this and tied together, in the language of the mid-1960s to be sure, the struggles of students, labor, and the \u201cNegro\u201d people. All of this made a great deal of sense to those of us who had been through one or more of these movements. The potential was that the industrial working class would provide the social weight that could carry the movements of the day beyond the limits of capitalism. The bare bones, three-sentence clue to the rank and file perspective, however, did not constitute a theory or even an analysis.<\/p>\n

The questions raised by this way of viewing things were daunting. What deeper economic forces in capitalism were driving the conditions that sparked revolt? What was the nature of the trade union leadership that seemed to compel them to thwart class conflict rather than ride with it? If there was, indeed, a developing rank and file rebellion, what forms would it take, and could these actually push the unions toward independent class politics? Beyond supporting and, where possible, participating in these movements, what was the role of socialists in all of this?<\/p>\n