Solidarity with the oil workers of Kazakhstan

[Leo]

Here's a new ICC article on the recent oil workers' struggles in Kazakhstan:

On 16 December last year in Kazakhstan, in Zhanaozen, a town with a population of 90,000 about 150km from the Caspian Sea, the forces of order carried out a real massacre by opening fire with automatic weapons on a rally of 16,000 oil workers and town dwellers who had come to show their solidarity. The workers had been protesting against lay-offs and the non-payment of back wages. There were at least ten deaths, according to the official figures, but in fact there were probably many more, perhaps up to 70 killed and 700-800 wounded.

Click here (http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201205/4882/solidarity-oil-workers-kazakhstan-face-state-repression) for the rest of the article.

[Crux]

So that the worker's have raised demands for independent unions is bad because we must abolish capitalism? I'm not sure I agree with the premise of that argument.

[Leo]

So that the worker's have raised demands for independent unions is bad because we must abolish capitalism?

No, they are bad because independent unions end up no different from the dependent ones:

We are certainly not questioning the honesty and decency of the militant workers who are active in the independent unions and who are often subjected to repression and persecuted by the bourgeois courts for “inciting social hatred”, “organising illegal marches, gatherings and demonstrations”, etc. What we do question are the methods of struggle which these organisations propose to the working class. By focusing the workers’ attention on the fact that they belong to a particular branch of the capitalist economy (in this case, the oil industry), the union form imprisons the struggle in sectional demands. It thus disperses the potential force of the proletariat, stands in the way of its unity and fragments it sector by sector. By acting within the national framework, trade unionism cannot see beyond managing the conditions for the exploitation of the working class within the social relations of capital. This is why all forms of trade unionism are doomed to act as an obstacle to the real needs of the class struggle – ultimately, to subordinate the workers to the imperatives of exploitation, to do deals with the ruling class and become an integral part of its apparatus for maintaining the established order.

[Crux]

And I just don't think that can be a priori decided in regards to independent trade unions. Trade unions are fundamentally defensive rather than offensive organizations, but to say that in the abstract they are holding back the worker's movement is simply not something I'm buying. In fact I think it is ahistorical to do so, not that there aren't plenty examples of "yellow" trade unionism but that you are essentially throwing out the baby with the bath water.

[Leo]

Trade unions are fundamentally defensive rather than offensive organizations

I would tend to agree, although I don't think it is the workers they defend.

[Android]

I would tend to agree, although I don't think it is the workers they defend.

I think this is a bit of an overstatement, unions can defend workers on an individual basis.