Syndicalism and critique

[Aslan]

I only have a rudimentary knowledge of syndicalism. I am interested in the idea of having non-profit syndicates as a compromise between statism and anarchism. However I'm not familiar with the specifics.
Any books or websites that can elaborate?

Also any critiques of the ideology?

[Aslan]

I really would like some talk. Any books, websites?

[#FF0000]

Oh wow, I'm surprised this thread went so long without a response.

Syndicalism can be defined in a couple ways -- as a movement that existed in the late 19th to early 20th century, as a revolutionary strategy, and as an economic (and/or political) political system in which industries are organized and run by unions.

Revolutionary syndicalism as a strategy is easy enough to understand; The basic idea is to form revolutionary unions to empower workers to defend their interests on the job, with the end goal of organizing as much of the working class as possible to the point where the union can simply call a General Strike, and take over the factories, farms, and warehouses from there. Most syndicalists these days are anarcho-syndicalists or very sympathetic to anarchism, and favor "Direct Action" on the job over political action or engaging in electoral politics.

At first I think Syndicalism sort of looks like a no-brainer to a lot of people, because a lot of the theory and practice just makes sense and seems extremely practical, on top of also coming real close to presenting a believable blueprint of what a post-capitalist society could look like and function. I have a few issues with it though:

1) I think that it's a huge mistake to ignore the political sphere because, in my opinion, it relegates the worker's movement to a reactive position. Yeah, the revolutionary unions can win concessions from bosses, but I think most of what a union can accomplish in that arrangement is limited to mostly economic and workplace victories (better wages, higher safety standards) restricted to the immediate area. Some kind of political activity is necessary to make more far-reaching demands, imo.

2) Syndicalism isn't necessarily as democratic as it would seem. Bear with me on this really awful example, but lets say all of the syndicates in Asia want to have a vote on whether or not to implement some new technology in all the warehouses in their part of the world. Decisions are made from the bottom-up, so they way that might work is every committee in each warehouse would discuss the issue, vote on it among themselves, then send a delegate to a regional congress with their local's decision of yes or no. A vote is taken at the regional level, and all the regional congresses elect delegates to bring the congress's vote up to the next level, until it goes up the chain to the level that covers all of Asia.

That sounds pretty democratic (although hella confusing but that's my fault), but it causes a lot of issues. First of all, the more steps there are in this pyramid, the less valuable each individual vote actually becomes. And on top of that, the delegate system makes it really easy for a democratic deficit to occur.

For example, say there are three locals with three people in each of them. The first local votes for a motion, 2-1. The second votes for a motion, 2-1. The third votes against a motion, 3-0. Each local sends a delegate to convention, and the motion ends up passing with 2 locals in favor, and 1 opposed, even though it would have failed 5-4 if it were a popular vote. So, syndicalism can end up being less democratic than even what we have right now in most of the world.

That said, I don't think these are reasons to totally dismiss syndicalism. If you want to read about it, I think a good place to start would be Fighting For Ourselves published by Solidarity Federation. You can find it in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI for free at libcom.org (which is another good resource if you're interested in syndicalism).

[ckaihatsu]

My contribution....


Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

http://s6.postimg.org/a6jq3ear5/2374201420046342459e_NEwo_V_fs.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/xxj3liay5/full/)

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I think the problem is that, if I understand how the board software works correctly, if the thread was posted before RedEagle had 10 posts, it had to be approved first, and when approved it did not show up in "new posts" but in "posts with unread messages".

Anyway, Blake's Baby, RevLeft user and suspected leftcom, put it nicely:

"At worst, it doesn't go beyond corporatist capitalism. 'The mines for the miners' only works if 'we're all miners now'. Otherwise you end up with the miners' syndicate trading with the power-workers' syndicate and the railway workers' syndicate and the water-management synicate an the engineers' syndicate... effectively you end up with the Soviet Union run by industrial unions rather than the Party. Which is no improvement."

(Corporatist, here, means a society organised through representation of definite interest-groups, as advocated by e.g. Mueller, or Mussolini, or Cardenas etc. It doesn't mean the American "libertarian" notion that current capitalism isn't "real" capitalism because *gasp* some firms are incorporated.)

Now, I would disagree with the bit about the Soviet Union. But besides that, it hits the nail on the head: whenever you have autonomous organisations interacting spontaneously, you get a market. It doesn't matter if the autonomous organisations are syndicates, communes, of market-"socialist" firms. To move beyond markets and value requires society-wide planning.

[The Feral Underclass]

I think a good place to start would be Fighting For Ourselves published by Solidarity Federation.

Here is a good review (https://libcom.org/blog/%E2%80%98fighting-ourselves-anarcho-syndicalism-class-struggle%E2%80%99-review-21012013) of the book.

[Rudolf]

Here's where i admit i've been planning on posting here for a few days now i just kept getting distracted.


Anyway, i think it best to limit the discussion of syndicalism to its revolutionary and overtly political form. While there is a reformist and purely economic form of syndicalism this has pretty much consistently been overshadowed by anarcho-syndicalism. In this way i also think it more useful to look at it as a method of struggle as opposed to a way to organise a society or an economy (hell, we seek the destruction of the economy).




1) I think that it's a huge mistake to ignore the political sphere because, in my opinion, it relegates the worker's movement to a reactive position. Yeah, the revolutionary unions can win concessions from bosses, but I think most of what a union can accomplish in that arrangement is limited to mostly economic and workplace victories (better wages, higher safety standards) restricted to the immediate area. Some kind of political activity is necessary to make more far-reaching demands, imo.

You are correct about the necessity of political struggle and this is an important critique of a purely economic syndicalism however it doesn't apply to anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-syndicalists aim at the creation of a workplace-community union, this is a political-economic organisation, a means to fight both inside and outside the workplace.

It is a really common criticism but one i find inaccurate.

To quote my namesake:



It has often been charged against Anarcho-Syndicalism that its adherents had no interest in the political structure of the different countries and consequently no interest in the political struggles of the time. This idea is altogether erroneous and springs either from outright ignorance or wilful distortion of the facts. It is not the political struggle as such which distinguishes the Revolutionary Unionists from the modern labour parties, both in principles and tactics. but the form of this struggle and the aims which it has in view. Anarcho-Syndicalists pursue the same tactics in their fight against political suppression as against economic exploitation. But while they are convinced that along with the system of exploitation its political protective device, the state, will also disappear to give place to the administration of public affairs on the basis of free agreement, they do not at all overlook the fact that the efforts of organised labour within the existing political and social order must always be directed against any attack of reaction, and constantly widening the scope of these rights wherever the opportunity for this presents itself. The heroic struggle of the C.N.T. in Spain against Fascism was, perhaps, the best proof that the alleged non-political attitude of the Anarcho-Syndicalists is but idle talk.

Of course anarcho-syndicalists reject participation in national parliaments but this isn't because of a lack of engaging in political struggle but because we consider this the weakest and most helpless form of action. Instead the aim is for our tactics to be situated at where the workers are strongest: that is at the point of production in their capacity as producers. The social strike is one of the strongest weapons the working class can wield in the political struggle. The key is always to disrupt capital.



2) Syndicalism isn't necessarily as democratic as it would seem. Bear with me on this really awful example, but lets say all of the syndicates in Asia want to have a vote on whether or not to implement some new technology in all the warehouses in their part of the world. Decisions are made from the bottom-up, so they way that might work is every committee in each warehouse would discuss the issue, vote on it among themselves, then send a delegate to a regional congress with their local's decision of yes or no. A vote is taken at the regional level, and all the regional congresses elect delegates to bring the congress's vote up to the next level, until it goes up the chain to the level that covers all of Asia.

That sounds pretty democratic (although hella confusing but that's my fault), but it causes a lot of issues. First of all, the more steps there are in this pyramid, the less valuable each individual vote actually becomes. And on top of that, the delegate system makes it really easy for a democratic deficit to occur.

For example, say there are three locals with three people in each of them. The first local votes for a motion, 2-1. The second votes for a motion, 2-1. The third votes against a motion, 3-0. Each local sends a delegate to convention, and the motion ends up passing with 2 locals in favor, and 1 opposed, even though it would have failed 5-4 if it were a popular vote. So, syndicalism can end up being less democratic than even what we have right now in most of the world.

That said, I don't think these are reasons to totally dismiss syndicalism. If you want to read about it, I think a good place to start would be Fighting For Ourselves published by Solidarity Federation. You can find it in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI for free at libcom.org (which is another good resource if you're interested in syndicalism).

Interesting that you go at that angle. The usual complaint you find among anarcho-syndicalists is over different sizes of locals. One local with 100 members having the same say in the federation as a local with 10 pisses people off.

The issue is the same though, one over voting procedures in a federal organisation. I also think it's an issue that a communist society will have to deal with as there would inevitably be some federal structure as afterall what's the point in someone deciding on housing on the other side of the planet.

It's a subject of constant debate.




I

Anyway, Blake's Baby, RevLeft user and suspected leftcom, put it nicely:

"At worst, it doesn't go beyond corporatist capitalism. 'The mines for the miners' only works if 'we're all miners now'. Otherwise you end up with the miners' syndicate trading with the power-workers' syndicate and the railway workers' syndicate and the water-management synicate an the engineers' syndicate... effectively you end up with the Soviet Union run by industrial unions rather than the Party. Which is no improvement."

(Corporatist, here, means a society organised through representation of definite interest-groups, as advocated by e.g. Mueller, or Mussolini, or Cardenas etc. It doesn't mean the American "libertarian" notion that current capitalism isn't "real" capitalism because *gasp* some firms are incorporated.)

Now, I would disagree with the bit about the Soviet Union. But besides that, it hits the nail on the head: whenever you have autonomous organisations interacting spontaneously, you get a market. It doesn't matter if the autonomous organisations are syndicates, communes, of market-"socialist" firms. To move beyond markets and value requires society-wide planning.

And that is at best a self-managed capitalism. Interestingly i think it would completely destroy the very purpose of an anarcho-syndicalist union and render it an obsolete form of struggle yet struggle would have to continue. This isn't merely a problem of syndicalism this is a problem of how a revolution develops. Workers have to expropriate but if two groups of workers in their expropriated workplaces start trading with each other they're only going to reproduce capitalist society. Those use-values they produce must cease to be commodities and those workplaces must belong to us all and controlled socially. But this isn't the role of the anarcho-syndicalist union, that's the role of the "economic communities and administrative organs run by the workers forming a system of free councils without subordination to any authority" to quote IWA/AIT.


The question is how do you combat it? Only thing i can think of is education and pushing for rationing based on need.

[Aslan]

"At worst, it doesn't go beyond corporatist capitalism. 'The mines for the miners' only works if 'we're all miners now'. Otherwise you end up with the miners' syndicate trading with the power-workers' syndicate and the railway workers' syndicate and the water-management synicate an the engineers' syndicate... effectively you end up with the Soviet Union run by industrial unions rather than the Party. Which is no improvement."

You act as if these things are corporations. Why would they ''compete'' with each other? These syndicates are not capitalist corporations but democratic worker's collectives that are intended to be a spider's web of cooperative bodies. However I do not acknowledge anarchism as a viable conclusion to syndicalism. Instead I believe that syndicalism should be a transitional stage between capitalism and communism, not just a direct transformation (which is ridiculous and would be impossible).

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You act as if these things are corporations. Why would they ''compete'' with each other? These syndicates are not capitalist corporations but democratic worker's collectives that are intended to be a spider's web of cooperative bodies. However I do not acknowledge anarchism as a viable conclusion to syndicalism. Instead I believe that syndicalism should be a transitional stage between capitalism and communism, not just a direct transformation (which is ridiculous and would be impossible).

Neither me nor Blake's Baby said that the syndicates would compete with each other. Assuming there is one syndicate per branch of industry, there could be no competition between them (if, however, you think that regional waterworks syndicates will be separate, then competition might occur; in any case the point was something else). What we said is that they would (have to) trade. And that means a market will exist, and that socialism would not.

Production units need producer goods - raw materials, machinery and so on. The Marxist proposal is that these goods be assigned by a society-wide plan, to satisfy human need. But this is anathema to the syndicalists, who insist on the autonomy of the various producer organisations. (Why this is such a popular demand is beyond me.) So the syndicates would have to trade between themselves - they could just give stuff away at random, but without a plan, who is to guarantee to them they would receive anything in return? A social plan outlines where goods are needed; in the absence of such a plan, if a production units wants to secure enough goods to produce it needs to trade.

And then the whole thing starts to unravel.

[Aslan]

The reason why I am a syndicalist myself is because I see it as a good middleground between hardcore tankie ideologies (Stalinism, Hoxhaism, Maoism) and anarchism. I also endorse council Communism as the best way for the dictatorship of the proletariat to work.

However What you are saying is not what I am trying to do. There is no ''free market''. In syndicalism as each syndicate trades with each other, it is just an exchange of services. There would of course be a government that would regulate the trading of these products. This state would be socialist in nature and would be an extension of people's interests. These bodies would serve in a system of checks and balances. However in my vision of syndicalism, Marxism is the official ideology of the state. Also since there would be no profit motive as in a capitalist society, work-hours wouldn't need to be so high. This with extensive encouragement programs from the syndicates/Council means people will not spend as much time in their terrible jobs, but they will spend more time in voting.

Then the whole thing works itself out..

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Many of us would say that the distance between Stalinism and anarchism is not as great as their respective adherents like to imagine. Particularly when it comes to socialism in one country, attitude to the proletariat etc.

In any case it doesn't matter that the market isn't "free", it stil exists, as, then, does generalised commodity production and therefore we're not talking about socialism as it's generally understood. Likewise, the state can't exist in socialism.

[Rudolf]

Production units need producer goods - raw materials, machinery and so on. The Marxist proposal is that these goods be assigned by a society-wide plan, to satisfy human need. But this is anathema to the syndicalists, who insist on the autonomy of the various producer organisations. (Why this is such a popular demand is beyond me.) So the syndicates would have to trade between themselves - they could just give stuff away at random, but without a plan, who is to guarantee to them they would receive anything in return? A social plan outlines where goods are needed; in the absence of such a plan, if a production units wants to secure enough goods to produce it needs to trade.

And then the whole thing starts to unravel.

Is it?

To quote the IWA-AIT

by self-management of the workers, such that every group, factory or branch of industry is an autonomous member of the greater economic organism and systematically runs the production and distribution processes according to the interests of the community, on an agreed-upon plan and on the basis of mutual accord."

Surely there's more to this self-management than independent, isolated factories.

Although i suppose this is a bit unfair as your criticism of redeagle is spot on.

[VivalaCuarta]

"self-management ... autonomous ... community ... plan ... mutual accord."

There's something in there for everyone to like. Sort of like hamburger ice cream.

[Rafiq]

Syndicalism has been met with success in the United States and the United Kingdom, while in continental Europe mass-political movements led the class struggle. The quiestion which remains unsolved is a simple one:

Is the absence of the latter in the US and UK owed to a lack of will, or is it owed to the fact that politics is simply inherently different in these countries (making Syndicalism, De-Leonism, etc. more viable in general). Each question gives us more questions - might this have something to do with certain national considerations, that is, the Irish and blacks in the UK and US respectively, how Socialists failed to solve the national question at least in the case of the latter? The closest thing we have had to a mass political working class movement in the US, hardly based in the INDUSTRIAL proletariat, were the black panthers... Perhaps this suggests, as Trotsky claimed, that the black working class would lead the white working class in the US.

Still, it is highly questionable that the industrial proletariat would lead the class struggle today, or are primarily THE proletarian nucleus that will drag along with it the rest of the working classes. Ultimately, this and this alone is what makes syndicalism rather unviable today - how to redeem union politics today when unions are both fully co-opted to serve capital, as well as severely under attack by capital, where, as far as the GENERAL working class is concerned, to have a steady factory job is actually a privilege and is comparatively high-paying? The increased socialization of labor has led the struggles out of the factories and into the streets - class struggle can only ever take a POLITICAL form today, i.e. rather than concerning workplaces, present struggle must concern political districts, and so on.

[VivalaCuarta]

it is highly questionable that the industrial proletariat would lead the class struggle today

A question that is frequently pondered aloud by deep minds on college campuses.

[Aslan]

My friend syndicalism does not want a market. we do not endorse market socialism but merely the exchange of commodities.
The biggest problem with syndicalism these days is the fact that is outdated. However this is not the fault of the people, it is because of an ideological vacuum. The pioneering ideologues of syndicalism were either murdered in WWII or lost their positions to liberal reform. Today, syndicalism as an ideology from the 1900s is outdated.

Rafiq makes a great point. But I think what is necessary is a new manifesto for the modern day. something like ''Spartacus for the future'', a sort of modern day form of syndicalism. Something that will effectively show the average office worker a guide to revolution. But I am not ready to write something that massive in scale.

Also I really like the term Spartacist and spartacism. It doesn't the same reaction as communism and has a sort of nice ring to it. But I've heard that people who use that term are strange.

[VivalaCuarta]

The exchange of commodities is a market. Or begets a market.

How do you exchange commodities? How do you know how many spools of thread are worth an ignot of steel? Their only common denominator is value, the socially necessary labor time for their production.

As long as you are exchanging commodities, which can only mean exchanging values, it matters not what else you want. Commodities will be produced not for need, but in order to buy (exchange) other commodities. Since steel workers cannot be paid in steel ignots, their labor and the labor of the spinners, dyers and weavers will also have to be exchanged for some sort of universal commodity. Do you see where this is leading? Nowhere -- it is a "revolutionary" conservative re-definition of the capitalist status quo. A trick to fool the workers long enough for the fascists to come around and finish them off. This has happened before you know.

Unless, of course, society so regulates the "exchange" to the point that it is not really exchange of equal values, but socially planned production for use.... this would require the abolition of all private property, including the property of worker-controlled syndicates, hypothetical or transitional as they may be. And with that the abolition of classes. Uh-oh, you've got socialism.

[Ismail]

Rafiq makes a great point. But I think what is necessary is a new manifesto for the modern day. something like ''Spartacus for the future'', a sort of modern day form of syndicalism. Something that will effectively show the average office worker a guide to revolution. But I am not ready to write something that massive in scale.

Also I really like the term Spartacist and spartacism. It doesn't the same reaction as communism and has a sort of nice ring to it. But I've heard that people who use that term are strange.I know you claim to be a syndicalist and not a socialist, but this sort of thinking reminds me of something a longtime RevLeft user named Prairie Fire wrote all the way back in 2007:

Every Commie noob thinks that they’re the new Lenin.

Every red, who's been red for a year or so, thinks that they are the true disciple of Marx, and that they have the ideological “Holy Grail” of insight that all of the other communists in the movement, who have been red for decades, are missing.

It seems to me that very few people come to communism to embrace it; they come to communism hoping to change it. I should know because sadly, I was once among their ranks.

I too, in the beginning, thought that I had a pretty good handle on things. Among my experienced comrades, I thought that I should be the one calling the shots. Rather than embracing the decades of experience of my organization, I questioned every action and every policy, spouting long tirades of social-democratic, utopian-socialist rubbish...

I even wrote a short book, pompously titled the “Manifesto of the 21st Century proletariat”. In this tome, I laid down my own naive thoughts on every element of a hypothetical socialist society...

... To truly understand the wisdom of the classics, rather than suggesting radical and impractical revisions to them, you need to learn for yourself why your own notions are incorrect, through practical experience and study.

To sum up, basically I used to think I knew it all; experience has taught me that I was just another punk commie noob with delusions of grandeur.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Is it?

To quote the IWA-AIT

by self-management of the workers, such that every group, factory or branch of industry is an autonomous member of the greater economic organism and systematically runs the production and distribution processes according to the interests of the community, on an agreed-upon plan and on the basis of mutual accord."

Surely there's more to this self-management than independent, isolated factories.

As VL4 noted, the quote has that "every thing for every man" feel. But how is the proposal supposed to work in reality? If "every group, factory or branch of industry" is autonomous, how are they to be subordinated to a general plan? (And this is supposed to be based on "the interests of the community". Communities don't really exist anymore, capitalism has destroyed them all, and thank fuck for that. Besides, here in Croatland we need electricity from Slovenia, aluminium from Iceland, coal from Bosnia etc. We could produce some of those things "our"selves, but what would be the point?)

The only way in which autonomous units can be subordinated to a general social plan, for a given time period, is for that plan to be the result of negotiation - let's be honest here, haggling - of the autonomous units. But haggling requires value - otherwise it has no basis on which it would proceed.


My friend syndicalism does not want a market. we do not endorse market socialism but merely the exchange of commodities.

A market is the exchange of commodities - commodities are things that are produced to be exchanged on the market. To the production of commodities socialists counterpose production for need, where goods and services will be produced to satisfy human need. But that, then, takes central coordination and planning, not autonomous factories and branches of industry. (And again, why this obsession with autonomy? If I go to the hospital, I don't want my doctors to be autonomous, I want them all to treat me properly and in cooperation.)


Also I really like the term Spartacist and spartacism. It doesn't the same reaction as communism and has a sort of nice ring to it. But I've heard that people who use that term are strange.

A lot of people use the term (e.g. the Mandelites' Greek section is called Spartakos), but the term is mostly associated with the International Communist League (Fourth-Internationalist), and with the League for the Fourth International and International Bolshevik Tendency. My advice would be to see for yourself if any of these groups are "strange" by reading their literature, and also what others have written (the ICL is one of the few groups who publishes polemic articles against themselves).

[Rudolf]

As VL4 noted, the quote has that "every thing for every man" feel. But how is the proposal supposed to work in reality? If "every group, factory or branch of industry" is autonomous, how are they to be subordinated to a general plan? (And this is supposed to be based on "the interests of the community". Communities don't really exist anymore, capitalism has destroyed them all, and thank fuck for that. Besides, here in Croatland we need electricity from Slovenia, aluminium from Iceland, coal from Bosnia etc. We could produce some of those things "our"selves, but what would be the point?)

The only way in which autonomous units can be subordinated to a general social plan, for a given time period, is for that plan to be the result of negotiation - let's be honest here, haggling - of the autonomous units. But haggling requires value - otherwise it has no basis on which it would proceed.


More playing with words eh? Negotiation and haggling are not synonymous and you've failed to prove your conclusion of the necessity of exchange. You've basically done a rehash of the economic calculation problem.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

More playing with words eh? Negotiation and haggling are not synonymous and you've failed to prove your conclusion of the necessity of exchange. You've basically done a rehash of the economic calculation problem.

Then drop the term "haggling" if it offends you. You still have autonomous entities negotiating on common action. How are they going to do that if there is no standard for exchange between them (and exchange involves negotiation about the movement of goods)? How does the steel syndicate know that it has received enough producer goods, for example? When production is planned, as it is in socialism, the quantity of producer goods is directly calculated, but here that can't happen without "autonomy" becoming a mere phrase. So the steel syndicate needs to receive at least goods equivalent (and there has to be equivalence as goods need to be exchanged; the steelworkers can't eat steel bars) to the producer goods they need. See how that goes?

I don't think this has anything with the so-called economic calculation argument; in fact the point of that argument was to "prove" markets are necessary. That's crock, and the people promoting it tend to be praxeology crackpots. But for a market to not exist, there needs to exist either immediate consumption or social planning.

[Aslan]

I'm afraid to say that I don't need to be humbled. I'm not claiming to be the new Marx. I'm just saying that Syndicalism is outdated and someone needs to write more about it. I think I can do it if I just had more time to hone my understanding of communist writings. I've got a lot of reading to do.

Also If anyone here shares my views please message me.

[Rafiq]

A question that is frequently pondered aloud by deep minds on college campuses.

What is ironic is that it is precisely the same kind of detachment from the concrete nature of class today some external fetishizer would have that would lead one to the conclusion that the industrial proletariat would lead the class struggle today uncritically. The reasons for the industrial proletariat leading the class struggle one hundred years ago is rather obvious - most of the working class was either of the industrial proletariat, or were entangled in old social bonds that were known to be on their way to dissolution. This does not hold for today. Of course, we are speaking strictly of western countries, where syndicalism has a significant history, but even in - say China, the (rural) precariat is a giant demographic, and this goes for every other country, and their level of militancy often times exceeds that of the Chinese industrial proletariat.

And it is strange that you say this - considering that the industrial proletariat in the United States, which numbers less than 11 million of the population, most of whom have had their jobs for several, several years and a good portion who have even had them for decades (this holds true at least for one of the largest concentrations of industry in the US - the auto industry), able to keep their jobs only because of unions who have no capacity, nor inclination to spread to those sectors of work which are more common - this demographic is infinitely more likely to be able to send their kids to college than the general working class.

"A question that is frequently pondered aloud by deep minds on college campuses" he sais. This philistine fails to understand that he is just as much an intellectual as I am (and where it counts as far as the class struggle is concerned - you are NOTHING MORE than an intellectual. You are not a socialist as a proletarian, for if you were, this would imply a lively working class politics that actually exists), but he abdicates on his responsibility to fulfill his duty as someone who pretends to being of the socialist intelligentsia by ass-covering behind an imaginary proletariat which he purports to share his sentiments. The only thing which allows him to "understand" social processes in the way he does, is through intellectualizing. So, Cuarta, I would like to know which questions are pondered aloud by the hammer wielding proletariat. Of course, Cuarta arrives at this conclusion not through thinking and "pondering" but because he instinctually knows "da truth". Giovanni Gentile would smile upon such disgusting anti-intellectualism. What filth you speak - what righteous mindlessness and ignorance - like you can't even fucking defend your ideas, you simply reduce them to those of a "hur dur stupid naive little college shit" Your pretenses to the industrial proletariat are clownish and laughable, like O.K., I'm some kid on a university campus detatched from reality? What the fuck does that make you? I want to know what conditions have bestowed you the special knowledge of knowing "da truth" of the situation.

HOW DOES QUESTIONING WHETHER the industrial proletariat would lead the class struggle at least in the US and western countries, HOW DOES THAT EMANATE a sense of detachment from concrete circumstances reserved for kids on "college campuses"? Are you stupid? Go to the ghettos, go to the American slums, go to working class communities and tell me with a straight face that the industrial proletariat will lead the class struggle. Here in Detroit, the white industrial proletariat is almost identical in its character, politics as the petty-bourgeoisie, they share the same disdain for the "lumpen" and the precariat. On college campuses, most don't even dare to think about class struggle in general, most focus on identity politics and the irk.

The reality is that the industrial proletariat in the US is either a dying breed, or represent (relative to the working population as a whole) a privilege cast of those able to get such scarce jobs. Like it literally takes the most mindless stupidity to think that it's as it was a hundred years ago - it is not - getting a RELATIVELY stable job with a decent income (i.e. circa 50,000 a year), with pensions, a minor sense of job security because of strong unions - most people can't get this. All of the struggles waged by the industrial proletariat today in the US are DEFENSIVE ones, this is what you patently do not understand - they have far more to lose than their chains. Now of course a lot of precarious work involves working in manufacturing in the US - but this isn't the traditional industrial proletariat, but a precariat that can do this for a month, be jobless for a year, work in service, ETC. indiscriminately. Meanwhile we see an explosion of marginalized populations, an explosion in ghettos, precarious work, etc. - and those who have politicized these with some luck, the Black panthers, were met with great success, and some of the most traumatic bursts of class struggle in the US have not been in the factories for the past decades, but in the L.A. ghettos, Baltimores, Ferguson's, ETC.

But excuse my "pondering". Thinking about things critically is for bourgeois intellectuals, we should just blindly accept the Cuarta's of the world's instinictual and spontaneous impulses. This fundamentally petty bourgeois disdain for "intellectualizing" is what replaces a concrete understanding of social processes. The logic, the bare bones logic, however, goes like this:

"University intellectuals, by merit of their petty bourgeois sensitivities want to avoid the responsibility of engaging the class struggle as it is, so they instead invent new and 'creative' understandings of class so their egoistic, 'free-spirited' and special-snowflake-mentalities can remain intact, so that their career-pursuing would remain unhindered by real class analysis"

But how does the questions put forward here emanate anything close to this? Fetishizing and placing an emphasis on the industrial proletariat today is in fact is the ONLY detached perversion here - that it is not popular to do on university campuses only reflects the fact that most university students are able to exercise their petty bourgeois consciousness in a way that is in more in "tune" with the times (i.e. not in Spart cults). In fact, most university students put forward nothing close to the questions raised in the manner I did - instead, they will question the emphasis on "class struggle" in general, on "jargonistic" terms like proletarian, ETC. - I know this from firsthand experience, as someone attending a university. But it's interesting that such personal details are now cannon-fodder to ad hominem attacks, had I been jobless and not in the universities, or if I was working in a fucking factory, the notion that I would have fundamentally different views is laughable - social being might determine consciousness, but this does not hold for the class-conscious intelligentsia, and if it did - then virtually EVERY MARXIST including Trotsky would not have been a socialist. So you are suggesting that I am not conscious of how a petty bourgeois consciousness pervades the universities? Please give me a fucking break.

What makes your little remark so fucking insufferable is that I know exactly what you're trying to say, in its entirety, and it is literally almost tragically stupid. Like no, child, you are not paying any homage to the polemical spirit of previous Marxists, your righteous stupidity is literally just clownish. So no, you don't get a free fucking pass here, you defend your fucking ideas or you shut the fuck up, you either own up to pretenses to the idea that the industrial proletariat will lead the class struggle in 2015, or you shut the fuck up, you either demonstrate how recognizing the questionable nature of this is "detached" from concrete circumstances or you shut the fuck up. My god nothing is more insufferable than these fucking early 20th century role-players of the Left. Grow the fuck up.

[VivalaCuarta]

blablablabla

http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/world/2007/10/04/thousands_of_south_african_miners_rescued/south_africa_minersrescued.jpeg.size.xxlarge.lette rbox.jpeg

She and thousands of other like her mined the gold that's in the contacts on the chips that you fill with your words.

The industrial proletariat has power. Either it will lead or the revolution won't happen.

[Rafiq]

Most of the mineals mined for our chips does not come from the US and western Europe but the African continent, and I presume this picture is of South African miners? Did you read my "blablablabla"? What is a picture supposed to mean here? I can give you 1000 pictures. Is it supposed to shut me up?How does this picture explain how the industrial proletariat will lead the class struggle now? Without grocers, you won't get your groceries. Without electricians, you don't get power, without plumbers, you're also fucked. A section of the proletariat's capacity to lead political struggle IS NOT measured by how socially necessary its labor is for society at large, because this is flimsy. Measuring socially necessary labor is relative to the sphere that which the class struggle would be waged in that sector: Its purely TACTICAL. Its not even an exclusively 21st century phenomena. In Wiemar germany the KPD was not successful with the whole steady industrial proletariat but the unemployed. In the US Communists were more successful with tenant farmers than southern factory workers.

At any rate I never claimed that the industrial proletariat in South Africa cannot lead the class struggle in South Africa. I merely claimed that it is NOT a given they will lead it everywhere, or in every circumstance, but that their propensity to lead it is relative to circumstances - what do they have to lose, what is the nature of their hostility to the order, are their struggles of a defensive nature, or are they - as in South Africa - of an offensive one? Indeed at a world-scale the industrial proletariat "has power". But what you fail to understand is that a huge chunk of the manufacturing proletariat is not of the traditional industrial proletariat but belong to a slum-dwelling demographic which works precariously - this holds most true for China, where you can work in a factory and sell trinkets in the cities on the side. That the industrial proletariat has power suggests that they will need to participate in the class struggle - but THIS qualification alone does not distinguish them from the military, which also has power. The question of whether they will lead it, or be dragged along by other sections of the proletariat is what is of concern here - not whether the will engage in class struggle at all. One can even imagine that the "salaried bourgeoisie" if you want, those workers who make an upwards of 100,000 a year and whose class consciousness is therefore supplemented and kept at bay by huge salaries, will be divided when push comes to shove. The point is that political struggle/class struggle today does not take the form of struggles on the factory floor, but mass political struggle that polarizes society, whose intensity is measured not anymore by strikes or sit-outs but by battles on the street, in communities and in political districts. Such is the result of the increased socialization of labor.

And by the way, why emphasize the gold mined by South African miners? Most precious minerals come from the Congo, from actual slaves in mines, and so on. And why stop there? One can speak of the clothing from Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico, and the list can go on. But this does not hold for the United States or for western Europe, where most centers of industry were moved to the countries in question. Therefore understanding class struggle here must respect the fact that the industrial proletariat will most likely not lead the class struggle in the United States, a sector which is either vestigial (owing to the very same phenomena of jobs moving over seas) or a highly privileged one. In Detroit, black workers who are in the factories who come from the ghettos are absolutely privileged compared to their neighbors and people from their communities, in fact, many of them have the same petty bourgeois disdain for the black precariat that the white working class does. The reason they will not "lead" the class struggle is simple - these are very scarce jobs, and there is a lot to lose. The section of the proletariat that will lead the class struggle, in ANY country, is that section which has the least to lose as far as its social character. And before you joke about the "homeless" leading it, the reason for them not leading it is a rather obvious, practical one.

[VivalaCuarta]

Industrial being large groups of workers engaged together in production, not any specific arrangement of assembly lines or other superficial impressions. But you chase after impressions and you think your yakking about them is so wise.

For example the "precariat" as opposed to the proletariat. Nonsense! Everyone at the university talks about the precariat because they are adjuncts, and they think it's the first time it's ever happened to anyone, that before they were denied tenure industrial workers all had 40 hour weeks for a single employer with a pension that they could count on, and then Reagan or Bush or somebody put an end to that. That's not how it ever was, except for a brief period for a specific section of the higher-paid strata of the working class in certain imperialist countries.

[Rafiq]

For example the "precariat" as opposed to the proletariat. Nonsense! Everyone at the university talks about the precariat because they are adjuncts, and they think it's the first time it's ever happened to anyone, that before they were denied tenure industrial workers all had 40 hour weeks for a single employer with a pension that they could count on, and then Reagan or Bush or somebody put an end to that. That's not how it ever was, except for a brief period for a specific section of the higher-paid strata of the working class in certain imperialist countries.

The precariat is NOT opposed to the proletariat - this is what you do not understand, as a word, the precariat is juxtaposed to the old, traditional industrial proletariat. That does not mean they are not proletarians, it simply means that what it means to be a proletarian today has changed (in a concrete way, no matter abstraction-mongering) in coincidence with certain changes in capitalism, the phenomena of mass marginalization. What is subject to debate is a simple one: Some claim for capitalism as it presently exists to function, only 20% of the world's population would be necessary - the rest amount to "disposable" life. Marxists ought to be somewhat critical of this - perhaps on certain semantical grounds, for what constitutes capitalism and how it functions is relative to the actual people who are a part of it, which makes this a tautological point. More likely the rise of the precariat is owed to the following factors:

The present technical capacity in capitalist society requires far, far less work for running society than exists at the present moment - the grand majority, if not the entirety of the service sector has no reason for existing other than the reproduction of conditions of production. Finally, through neoliberalism, the creative circumvention of universally acknoweldged labor standards means that perhaps life today is not simply disposable (as Zizek claims), and capitalism DOES necessiate 7 billion people in order to function. The reason workers can not see this, the reason we are inclined to think of "moochers", is perhaps owed to the fact that work is precisely precarious and ever changing, and its fluid and unbound nature disallows for any real (effective) class struggle at the floor of workplaces, but instead relegates class struggle largely to the domain of politics - to the streets and to actual communities. We have reached a point in the class struggle, in other words, wherein worker is pitted against worker at the most bare and savage level, wherein the amount of people working the jobs that they are working IS wholly and completely necessary for capitalism to function (that is, "job creators" do not employ the people that they do right now for any other reason than the fact that they need them), but the actual, tangible people working the jobs are completely interchangeable and "disposable". For most of the working class a sense of solidarity therefore does not come spontaneously, for the false consciousness of the worker today, in our postmodern society, makes him the independent consumer merely "working" to reach a certain ends. We need political organization and language that speak to the general conditions of life of a worker, and not simply to those of his workplace.

Sorry, but this did not hold true for the proletariat in the past - unless we dabble with uninsightful and worthless abstractions. The fact of the matter is that in the past, no matter the fact that a worker could be layed off, and no matter the fact that people competed for jobs, the difference was that your job was your job, and there was a sense of community between workers in them, even recognizing that you could be fired the next day, there was at least an immediate sense of confidence in the fact that this was your occupation, i.e. your profession. The rise of precarious work represents the dissolution of this, and forces us to re-evaluate the proletariat NOT in terms of whimsically re-defining it, but recognizing 1) What did the proletariat mean for the early 20th century, and what made it a revolutionary class? In relation to sections of the working class in present day society. Often times the INDUSTRIAL proletariat were understood as the nucleus of the working classes in leading the class struggle NOT because they produce tangible value, but because other forms of work were inevitably linked up with old social bonds that Marxists knew would eventually be dismantled. The industrial proletariat therefore represented the future of capitalism, but today - in western countries - it is nothing more than a vestige. Even if it was tire that the precariat is "nothing new" as far as the entire history of capitalism is concerned (Which is wrong) =, it would not make a difference because the precariat represents a new form of work in capitalist society as far as the here and now is concerned, i.e. relative to the past. You are going to tell me that work today is "nothing knew" go to any ghetto, tell me about how work is nothing new:

that before they were denied tenure industrial workers all had 40 hour weeks for a single employer with a pension that they could count on

Actually, at least up until the 1970's this was more or less true for most of the industrial proletariat, union politics were actually one of the most important factors in all of the living jobs shipping overseas. If this was not true for the industrial proletariat of 1844, that has fuck all to do with present circumstances, because the conditions of 1844 are not going to give us much insight as far as the here and now of present struggle, simply for the basic reason that the insecurity of work back then, compared to now, is owed to entirely different factors and reasons.

[Jacob Cliff]

My contribution....


Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

http://s6.postimg.org/a6jq3ear5/2374201420046342459e_NEwo_V_fs.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/xxj3liay5/full/)
These simpler (i.e. NOT the ones with the hard to even read circles, etc.) graphics you make are very good for explaining; do you have these explanatory pictures stored in a publicized folder or something?

[ckaihatsu]

These simpler (i.e. NOT the ones with the hard to even read circles, etc.) graphics you make are very good for explaining; do you have these explanatory pictures stored in a publicized folder or something?


Yeah, thanks. Glad they do something for somebody out there.

There's a dedicated thread, tinyurl.com/ckaihatsu-diagrams-revleft, and my work is hosted at an image hosting site: postimage.org/ckaihatsu.

I have some revisions in mind on the one in particular you referred to -- watch that space...! Thanks again.