My friend David invited me to write something for this thing he’s putting together on winning - what does it meant to win? There’s loads of time yet but I thought I’d get started now, putting down notes on some of my experiences.
The first attempt
In 2003 or so at this place I was working at my co-workers and I decided to form a union. We were working a lot of hours and with very little input into when we worked, and there were major issues of disrespectful treatment by management. Everyone agreed with little fuss that we should organize. We signed cards requesting an election from the National Labor Relations Board, and wrote a letter to management which we all signed. We turned in the cards to the NLRB then went to the big boss’s office to deliver our letter. By that afternoon the anti-union campaign started.
Management extended our hours to close to 70 hours per week, changed our work assignments to make it harder to talk with each other and to give us more unpleasant tasks, and held both individual and group meetings with us where they insulted, threatened, and tried to manipulate us. Management also used legal foot-dragging maneuvers to slow the NLRB process down, to make the election date recede farther and farther away until it was indefinite as to when it would occur. We ran actions in response, circulating flyers and a newsletter on their illegal activities, and conducting a work stoppage. This went on for 3 or 4 months.
Our group started out very strong - in good spirits, cohesive, supporting each other. Management’s attacks took a toll. People started looking for other jobs, then taking other jobs because work was so unpleasant and exhausting, and because they were afraid of the end result. Relations between us got more strained. We were so emotionally exhausted from the daily assaults by our bosses that we were in no mood to compromise with or listen to each other. And we didn’t want to take the time to discuss everything because we were so tired from our work hours. In that setting, disagreements became conflicts, and conflicts made it harder to sustain our morale. One thing that kept causing trouble was that we were all concerned with later on - what would get us a good contract, what would position us to make our demands winnable - and we didn’t do enough actions to fight management’s immediate actions against us.
Management at one point suspended us without pay in retaliation for our union activity. Some of us, myself included, were suspended for two weeks. Others were suspended for a month. I was transferred to another job site in another state, about a ten hour drive from my home, with about three days notice. I hung on for a month and a half or two months, hanging in there for the campaign. This put enormous pressure on my relationship with my partner. In the end I had to make a choice between the union and my relationship. I put in my notice at the job. Another co-worker was transferred four hours away. Shortly thereafter two people were fired for transparently trumped up reasons. The campaign had basically ended.
After we all no longer worked there anymore we filed charges with the NLRB on management’s activities, many of which we knew to be illegal. Three months later we had a ruling and got back our lost wages from the illegal suspension. The money was a big help because we were out of work and couldn’t find much other work. Management finally decided that future employees would be unionized because they wanted to avoid further disruptions and headaches like this. You could say we won, I guess.
Henry McGuckin, an IWW member in the early 1900s, asks in his memoir if a strike has to win gains for the strikers to be considered a victory, or if it can be called a victory if other people get those gains but the strikers do not. [FIND, QUOTE, CITE] Posed this way, the strike is a victory, in one sense. It’s not clear it’s a victory in other senses, though. Or it’s both a win and a loss. The strikers lose their jobs. A loss. Conditions improve in the industry. A win. I think sorting through this means asking about what things we want and need to win.
Rosa Luxemburg, a communist in the early 1900s, wrote that a strike can fail to win any gains, but still succeed in that lays the groundwork for future organizing, in that it founds an active and serious working class organization. [FIND, QUOTE, CITE] In the case of my example, this did not happen. It did shape some of the individuals involved, though, giving us more experience and seriousness, and deepening our class perspective.
After our experience one of the other people involved went on to be part of a winning unionization attempt in a different workplace. Shortly after the losing campaign I also joined the IWW. I was then part of another failed attempt at a new job 9 months later. This was not so spectacular a failure as the first, nor was it so grueling, and had more positive gains. This is in part because of the lessons I’d learned and from advice on how to proceed, given by other IWW folks. I’ve also been active as a volunteer organizer supporting other campaigns which have been more successful.
The second attempt
Nate:
You’re asking good questions. Here’s one back at you: For who? Was your win at your old job a win for you? On an economic level probably not as you found yourself in a relatively shitty position afterwards. Did you gain useful skills from it that have built your capacity as an organizer? Probably yes. Was it a win for your co-workers? For future workers at the job? Etc…
Comment by Nate — October 7, 2006 @ 5:27 pm
This is a big one. It very often happens that the result of a struggle is personal defeat or destruction for the people on the bleeding edge of the struggle and yet the outcome is a gain for the mass of people behind them later on. Take the Irish republican hunger strike of 1981. The strike ended ostensibly in failure (particularly for the ten that died) and yet within a few years of the end of the strike, the entire program of 5 demands had been gained and those gains formed the basis of the prisoners development of their politics and autonomy, which in turn formed the basis of much that followed. By contrast the other one of Thatcher’s early 80’s “struggles to the death” - the miners strike - lead to a defeat that was unmitigated by any subsequent gains. Though I’m wary of the over-use of military metaphors in politics (which are best tend to encourage machismo, and at worst are covers for rampant authoritarianism) I can’t help but be minded of my old SPI wargaming days when end results were assessed in terms of total, strategic and tactical victories (or defeats). A total victory is one where the objectives were achieved without any substantial loss in the front-line units. A strategic victory is one where there is substantial losses in the engagement but the objectives are achieved. A tactical victory is one where both sides have sustained non-trivial losses but neither have achieved their main objectives but one side has gained a clear advantage over the other. There is also stalemate where both sides have sustained serious losses with neither side achieving strategic objectives or gaining substantial advantage. There is also phyrric victory where one side achieves their strategic objectives, but at the cost at such horrendous losses in comparison to the other sides, that the gains are effectively indefensible or now meaningless. But this is just taxonomy even though it does help us get beyond a simple either/or, defeat/victory binary.
Your point is more political though. There are two branches. One is to do with the context of non-military, non-lethal social struggles where each site of struggle exists as only one of a multiplicity and “losses” are not fatalities but subjectivities expelled/liberated to circulate to other sites of struggle to which they bring their accumulated experience (or, possibly, the effects of personal demoralisation and economic disadvantage of previous defeats).
The other branch is the political implications of struggles where the most actively engaged lose the most and the gains (in the case of strategic or tactical victories) are gained by those who fought the least or not at all. I believe there are dangers raised by these implications that are inherent to the process of class formation and composition - dangers that can be mitigated by being conscious of them and critical of them, but not ones that can be simply conjured away by ideological sleight of hand.
Firstly there is the pseudo-religious danger of self-sacrifice in the “greater interests of the class” (pick the transcendant object of your ideological choice). This kind of mentality is the “opener for ten” of every authoritarian cancerous body without organs (OK, ok, too much D&G recently…). The scenario where the organisation substitutes itself for the class we all know well, but those who think that nominal efforts to avoid organisational substitution conjure away these dangers ignore the evidence of certain animal rights or nominally anarchist tendencies where the authoritarian dynamic of the anti-politics of self-sacrifice have been very much in evidence.
There is also the “squaddist mentality” danger of elitism amongst those on the bleeding edge in relation the rest of the mass engaged. I.e. that those on the bleeding edge that can see that they are the ones running the most risks of paying the price of death, imprisonment, loss of livelihood, etc., tend to priviledge their right to decide over that of the rest of the mass in the struggle.
Damn, it’s hard to sustain an argument in a five line high text-box. I’ll leave it at that for now.
all the best,
Paul
Comment by Paul — October 11, 2006 @ 12:13 am
Paul,
Thanks for this, very much. Whenever movement or organizational strategy comes up I try hard to push a position that our strategic target should be ourselves: increasing our capacities and experiences and our power to create power, more than damage to the enemy. I’m on an organization kick lately, so that’s the other big criterion for me - did it result in growth of organization, either quantitatively, qualitatively, or both? That’s the point I want to try to make in this ‘what is winning’ piece. I actually decided this weekend I want to ask three people I know to interviews with me about a campaign they were part of. The campaign won minor improvements at work for about a summer, then those gains went away. But one or two people were radicalized by the struggle and gained a lot of experience and ability, and the other one or two people who were already radicals made gains too. They’ve all gone on to be more active, helping other people begin to put themselves into motion. One way to say this is that the first goal of the struggle in this stage should be to develop more cadre. I think that’s a really problematic term and I don’t like the baggage that comes with it, but I think there is still an important insight in that idea.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 11, 2006 @ 12:40 am
Nate,
As usual you have hit the nail on the head. In order to define what constitutes a strategic victory, the politics is in the strategy. Clearly the strategy must be one of auto-valorisation. However, I know what you mean about “developing the cadre” being a problematic term or formulation. To me it rings of the SWP/ISO in particular or bolshevism in general. Not that negative associations due to past abuse should be a reason for avoiding terms, otherwise we wouldn’t still be talking about communism, etc. On the same topic though we need to distinguish carefully between the building of organisation and “The Organisation”. The latter, of course, being one of the traps I was speaking of in the dangers of the re-creation of new alienating transcendant “ends” to rule over us. That is, organisation as an active process rather than a reified object/goal. The classic trap of “organisation-mentality” is that of betraying struggles in order to preserve the organisation in the “wider interests” of the class. Organisation must be a feedback or viral process of “putting [each other] into motion”, a self-reinforcing cycle of mutual agitation.
Comment by Paul — October 11, 2006 @ 1:25 am
Before I go, one other thing I will throw in for “colour” is the axe-head metaphor. In relation to the relationship between the self-styled “cutting edge” or, as I prefer to call it, the bleeding edge, and the engaged mass. Consider the axe-head. Certainly the cutting edge is the point of impact that appears to do the damage. But without the weight of the mass of the axe-head behing it, it has no power. Also the cutting edge gets blunted and destroyed and must be recreated by filing back into the axe-head’s mass. That is to say, that the “squaddist mentality” of the bleeding edge that it is the one doing the work is an illusion. At worst it can lead to the Brigatisti error of believing that the edge can work in isolation to what’s behing it. I find this a more useful metaphor than the old Maoist guerrilla fishes and sea metaphor. You can see this in operation in large-scale public disorder situations (e.g. the Poll Tax riot). It looks like only a few people are at the front throwing missiles at the cops and hand-to-handing with them. Yet without the mass of the demonstration behind them who appear passive, yet are supporting the front line by their presence and refusal to retreat or run away, the front-line would be wiped off the street in an instant.
Comment by Paul — October 11, 2006 @ 1:39 am
hey Paul,
I’m probably more sympathetic than you are to Organization, though I certainly agree that organization is also terribly important and the two relate to each other in important ways. Essentially in either O- or o-rganization I think what’s most important is as much development of as many folk as possible, so skills and experiences are shared out and accumulate on as wide a scale as possible. Particularly the skills and experiences of self-activity, and of creating self-activity collectively with new comrades (instead of with the old comrades one knows and always works with - that’s important too, but secondary I think). Gotta run.
take care,
n8
Comment by Nate — October 11, 2006 @ 1:03 pm