The rise of the "precariat"?

[andrewsplane]

"The weakness of the working class movement is not a permanent structural problem. It is a problem of politics and organization. "


http://socialistworker.org/2012/03/01/rise-of-the-precariat

[citizen of industry]

First, we need to distinguish between what is new and what is not in the picture being described. Precariousness, informality, unemployment and underemployment are nothing new for the working class. The experience of immigrant day laborers lining up in the morning and hoping for a days' work would not be unfamiliar to dockworkers, construction workers or autoworkers a century ago.

It was only the rise of the very unions derided by the Oakland Commune authors that brought a measure of security to a generation of workers in this country. The spread of precariousness for many workers has less to do with the rise of a new class than the effects of a nearly 40-year-long one-sided class war that has hammered union power.

^^^And if centralization of capital makes it more difficult for say a group of workers in a McDonald's shop trying to fight against a multi-national, it doesn't make it impossible. They can join general unions and/or organize city-wide unions that include workers from various "precarious" jobs. If you are in a general union, moving from one precarious job to another doesn't affect membership, merely a transfer in local.



So workers at the point of production are not only seen as peripheral to the general strike, they are seen as possible opponents to it.

There is a profound elitism at work here. Gone is the profoundly liberatory idea central to both Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism that the challenge to capitalism must be a bottom-up act of working class self-emancipation. Instead, liberation is to be brought from without by self-appointed liberators.

^^^And for working class self-emancipation, the working class has to be organized. Above mentioned unions are permanent organizations that don't discriminate based on job or industry.

To prevent against beauracratism, the unions have to be democratic - meaning clauses must be made that don't allow paid staff to make all of the decisions. We all know the election process can be manipulated. Things like a quorum of members attending a meeting overrides executive vote or delegate votes. We have to take the leadership of the unions away from pro-capitalist bureaucrats and put the unions back into the hands of the working class.