Die Neue Zeit
18th April 2010, 08:05
I'm earmarking this paper for discussion:
Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution (http://www.unh.edu/philosophy/media/pdfs/dialectic2009/3GlobalTradUnions.pdf)
The slippery slope into broad economism (and narrow, more typical economism further down) begins by not recognizing that the "struggle for socialism" is an economic struggle, not a political one.
The majority of left-syndicalists fall into this trap, and so the call for "mass strikes for the socialist revolution" avoids the question of what is truly needed for workers to obtain policy-making and all other ruling-class political power (participatory-democratic parallelism, recallability, average skilled workers' wages, and so on). To quote the paper above:
Imagine all the workers of the world truly, actually uniting… and then striking. It would be a world-transforming action.
However, does the call for "mass strikes for the socialist revolution" actually become valid after ruling-class political power has been obtained?
I'm not sure how proletarian-not-necessarily-communist elements can accuse "mass strike" communist outlets of conning the workers towards political revolution when that political revolution has already been made. Programmatically speaking, at issue here is the call for "Legally considering all workplaces as being unionized for the purposes of political strikes and even syndicalist strikes, regardless of the presence or absence of formal unionization in each workplace." This is one of the directional roads to "socialist revolution" alongside "Enabling society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans" and "Extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes."
Discuss.
Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution (http://www.unh.edu/philosophy/media/pdfs/dialectic2009/3GlobalTradUnions.pdf)
The slippery slope into broad economism (and narrow, more typical economism further down) begins by not recognizing that the "struggle for socialism" is an economic struggle, not a political one.
The majority of left-syndicalists fall into this trap, and so the call for "mass strikes for the socialist revolution" avoids the question of what is truly needed for workers to obtain policy-making and all other ruling-class political power (participatory-democratic parallelism, recallability, average skilled workers' wages, and so on). To quote the paper above:
Imagine all the workers of the world truly, actually uniting… and then striking. It would be a world-transforming action.
However, does the call for "mass strikes for the socialist revolution" actually become valid after ruling-class political power has been obtained?
I'm not sure how proletarian-not-necessarily-communist elements can accuse "mass strike" communist outlets of conning the workers towards political revolution when that political revolution has already been made. Programmatically speaking, at issue here is the call for "Legally considering all workplaces as being unionized for the purposes of political strikes and even syndicalist strikes, regardless of the presence or absence of formal unionization in each workplace." This is one of the directional roads to "socialist revolution" alongside "Enabling society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans" and "Extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes."
Discuss.