This thread is for brainstorming new ideas for syndicalism. State syndicalism, anarcho syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism, reformist syndicalism, whatever… Just brainstorm some ideas for how unions can seize the means.
I'll start:
Anyone got other ideas?
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and who would lend to Union?
and what about profits?
you think union really needs some unprofitable enterprise?
who is gonna subsidize it?
Nobody. It's funded with a portion of dues.
Usually unprofitable because of debt service obligations, or liquidated because it's profitable but not at a high enough margin for the capitalists' liking. Neither of those are a problem for the Union once it seized the physical assets and operates for the workers' needs.
do you really see nothing wrong with trying to fund investment with dues?
union dues are usually only enough to cover union bureaucracy costs and accumulate funds for safety net
it wouldn't operate for the workers' direct needs, it would operate for profit and produce for exchange, also it would be a part of an existing production chain
also I don't understand why are you assuming that union would tolerate lower profit margins
costs would go up with workplace safety costs, labor costs etc
This is honestly the only viable path for modern Syndicalism.
It is just such a shame that left wing Syndicalism is so heavily associated with anarchism.
I think any discussion regarding modern Syndicalism has to begin with modern unions however.
Just about every union in every western nation is either a corrupt and self serving organization, or functionally little more then an extension of the businesses they are supposed to defend their members from.
I think it is quite clear that any modern form of Syndicalism is going to require labour organizations that are both fundamentally different from the unions of the 20th century and have safe-guards in place to prevent them succumbing to the same fate as contemporary unions.
It's dead from the start IMO because of collaboration with state and capital, but I'll throw some ideas out anyways
-unions shouldn't demand pay raises - they should demand to own the proceeds from what is produced by the MoPs and sold for a certain portion of the day. Under feudalism, there were two models of direct surplus extraction by feudal lords - that of a serf giving up a portion of what was produced from his land (analog to pay raise demands) and that of a serf working on his land for his own consumption and on the lord's land for a period of time (analog to what I'm proposing). This has obvious advantages - less vulnerable to inflation and other forms of monetary trickery.
-the bureaucracy should be entirely removed - use an app to create private, freely organized chat channels according to need, use something like an internal cryptocurrency analog to manage the collection and storage of dues to buy necessary materials and services (in order to prevent people from screwing aroud with it for personal gain), base internal management upon in-kind calculation. It ceases to be a formal organization - it is, rather, a temporary, necessity-based one at most defined as a thing at the point of negotiation.
-base them around the logistics of delivering mutual aid to striking workers and the counter-logistics of blockading a company's productive capacity across wide areas.
-invest in cooperatives without demands of stake ownership - instead, a certain percentage of the workers must be unionized by that union
shut up, Howard
It's in their nature to succumb because of the role they play from the start. Piecemeal reformist organizations give up on revolution to advocate piecemeal reform?! Who could have guessed?! Their structural purpose under a mid-century capitalism which had adapted to them was to monopolize and manage the labor market. If they were to return today somehow (which I doubt is possible for a number of a reasons), they would do the exact same. Don't be silly. Making them state-run would change nothing. Then again, you do want fascist class collaborationism, don't you? What's the difference between you and them, again?
Even at their most radical before widespread repression in the '20s and '30s, there were reformist tendencies within the IWW. The CNT, the flower of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, got a lot of flak for collaborating with the government (which didn't save them from tankie backstabs anyways, and while I tend to agree that Gilles Dauve's proposal that the workers should have ignored the bureaucracy and carried through with communization was the more-correct choice, I'm not 100% sure if it would have worked) and rightfully so - through this "pragmatism", it shot itself in the foot.
What a wonderful and well reasoned response.
I'm glad to know that even when I am promoting a left wing ideology, one can still count on an anarcho-kiddie to have a problem with it.
I'm not advocating for state run unions.
I'm advocating for the State Syndicalist position of unions forming a workers state.
I do not.
I certainly never indicated as such in my post regarding State Syndicalism.
Indeed even in regards to my technocratic/stratocratic beliefs, I am not an advocate of class collaborationism beyond not excluding non-proletarians from being a part of the organization responsible for replacing the current system.
After that my system would reduce all people to the same class.
While I do know that this is beyond the comprehension of most anarchists, it should also be noted that class collaborationism is not found exclusively in Fascism.
Catholic distributionism for example advocates for class collaborationism, yet is not at all a form of Fascism.
Between me and who?
Fascists?
Well firstly, I'm not a Fascist by simple definition as I reject Fascist corporatism.
Indeed, if I were a Fascist, I doubt that I would be found in this thread advocating for Syndicalism.
Firstly, the Spanish Civil War occurred in the 1930s, the Hungarian Revolution occurred in 1956.
While I know things like facts, dates, objective reality and such confuse and anger Anarcho-Kiddies.
Please do make an attempt at understanding that no-one could be called a 'tankie' before the opportunity to support or denounce the USSRs intervention in the revolution presented itself.
Secondly, if it were not for juvenile anarchist sectarianism.
Lasting Socialism in Spain could have been a reality.
i'm currently working on developing an online unionizing service using yii framework in php
the implementation will be a non-profit organization with a simple social network with voting functions and stuff, where you could invite your coworkers to sign up by email or sms, without even having to talk about it at work
it will have a bunch of things designed to automate the everyday running of the union as much as possible, like paperwork and stuff. ideally, union representatives and management would be able to run it all from the site/app, as easily and as cheaply as possible
all user names will be automatically randomized to protect from management getting accidentally invited or making a honeypot, until the majority votes to de-randomize names
membership cards might be able to be digitally signed and sent to the nlrb (idk how that would work legally)
there could be a simple union due collecting system with paypal stuff
finally, the organization would fund itself by selling ad space (especially selling ad space to lawyers and law firms who specialize in labor stuff) and donations
when voting for what to do on a contract, the app would have some lefty suggestions like giving each employee partial ownership of the company or specifying that if the owner wants to sell the company, they have to offer to sell the company to the union first
i want to see if I could get the iww to sponsor it or something
idk, i've got big dreams for this thing, but actually doing it is the hard part. I do web development for a living, and including the terrible commute, it takes up 55 hours of my week each week, which leaves me with little free time. too bad programmers don't unionize
So DeLeonism, which is anarcho-syndicalism's end goal but with the inclusion of electoral politics (impossibilism, specifically)? That's not so bad still the left wing of capital, but at least it's not the shameless classcuckery of fascism. I thought you were talking about Falangism! Sorry about that!
It actually had strong ties to the Franco regime and paved the way for many aspects of Italian fascism. I had a good essay on it bookmarked on my old computer, but this is the best I can find right now:
Oh yes, finally we can have real socialism by participating in market competition and we have to keep up with bigger corporations who can produce with a much lower SNLT. It's just like Marx predicted, co-ops will save the working class!
How about National Syndicalism?
No.
It's called fascism.
Syndicates (stop using the fancy French word for trade unions, fuck) are fundamentally conversative organs that by their very design and function cannot transcend generalized commodity production. It's honestly only possible to still believe in the notion of revolutionary trade unionism if you somehow live in the late 19th century or do not understand the genesis of the value form (and relevantly its modern pervasiveness). Read Pannekoek: marxists.org
By Pannekoek's logic, wouldn't any attempt or action aimed at improving working conditions be conservative because it takes place in the capitalist mode of production?
No, and your question seems to lack some coherence.
First of all, any given solution or attempt at transcending the capitalist mode of production must come from within it; you cannot establish post-capital within capital in void and expect it to survive (much less actually qualift as post-capitalist, because capitalism is a manifestly global and all-devouring thing).
Pannekoek's problem thus does not lie in "working within capitalism", which is inevitable, whether you seek to seize the state, organize outside of it, utilize unions or even do what he favored. His problem lies in working with modes of organization that have a conservative character, or lost their revolutionary character due to new conditions in place. "Conservative" ultimately because they fundamentally treat a symptom of capitalism, N.B. a symptom that is no longer fatal to capitalism as a whole if tackled. Trade unions are wholly victims of recuperation.
This is not to say that Pannekoek is a maximalist (anything short of revolution is literally counter-revolution!); of course it is desirable for the working class to fight for its own survival before it can even think of negating itself. The point is that far from being counter-revolutionary, it is also not revolutionary, it is just conservative; an element of capitalism that serves only capitalism and cannot dent it.
His point is thus that workers have to and most certainly will find a new way of transforming society, which to Pannekoek, at least in his time, would be workers' councils. Why? Without anyone telling them about it, workers in the early 20th century organized into councils and assaulted capital that way. All Pannekoek did was spot an entirely organic phenomenon, just like trade unions were one, and then theorized how they surpass the limitations of the old workers' movement precisely because these limitations were limitations to revolutionary ends, not to mere functional ends within what is capitalism's momentary "normal".
Not surprising when leadership becomes detached from the workers. It's the same reason vanguardism doesn't work.
Up until I'd say a few months ago, I would have probably said that the possibility of a Syndicalist movement was a near impossibility or at the very least a dormant movement. However, with what seems to be a resurgence in socialist thought and movements (even among ones that are primarily reformist), I see the possibility to revive revolutionary unionism by way of a form of entryism. A lot of leftist parties and other organizations, in part as a result of their swelling numbers, have once more begun forays into direct workers action through things like strikes. Problem seems to be that most of them are pretty awful at executing those strategies. To list a few problems I've seen, the planning process to take such action takes weeks to months, meaning they end up being more planned demonstrations rather than actually pursuing any tangible goal. Little to no guarantees are given by the respective organizations ensuring the welfare of the participants if their employers attempt to seek retribution, thus what might have been decent turnout is greatly diminished by a lack of sense of the workers having each other's backs. Participants "walk off the job" as individuals or as small groups rather than large collectives that would cripple the operation of a given workplace or whole industry, meaning the efforts don't actually have meaningful impact. The list goes on.
What would serve the interests of these organizations better would be to, rather than trying to organize the actions themselves as non-union entities, work in cooperation with radical union organizations (ie IWW, etc), ideally concentrating in a single general union for greater efficacy. It serves the interests of all involved: the parties/organizations solidify their base of radicalized workers, are able to have a hand in negotiating the initiation (or threat of) tangible large-scale worker action, and have a grass-roots organization working with them to help the larger movement on the ground; while the union bolsters its own numbers and power. If every person joining DSA and other emerging socialist groups today also were members of an organization like the IWW, we could begin seeing the real exertion of worker's power that goes beyond demonstrations and lukewarm attempts to break into local politics, especially when it's clear that many of these new members are willing to participate in direct action if they feel they are properly supported when doing so.
That sounds petite-bourgeois as fuck. The economic goals (as is the case with any proper socialist movement) should be the abolition of wages, property, and value-form, not just encouraging the transference of the individual capitalist role to smaller collectives of workers. Attempting to "buy out" the capitalist class is a battle that cannot be won if there is no access to the accumulated capital of the capitalists themselves; that's not even to mention the fact that attempting to do so through dues (table scraps) derived from wages (table scraps) is not going to be enough money to do anything useful. The unions in question have more power if they use their dues to actually partake in the roles the pre-revolutionary union is built to do; their power through those methods have historically shown to be disproportionate to the resources at their disposal.
So trade unions are conservative in that they only provide a "remedy" meanwhile the worker's councils surpass trade unions as they would bring an end to capitalism?
Seriously, stop being an utopian and read Marx.
Yes, and in the current climate unions fail to even be universally positive for the proletariat. The fact that there is an anti-"scab" climate, for example, or that they cooperative with legitimately reactionary politics, shows that unions have lost virtually all class character and have truly become their own namesake: organs that just unite a trade's interests, regardless of class, with clear preferential treatment for the bourgeois.
Councils already surpass unions in that unions are abound but no council manages to exist anymore: they were all either killed out by reactionaries or suppressed when counter-revolution took a hold of the communist international. The day workers form a council or council-like structure again will be the day the communist movement rear its head again with force.
Considering how often the bourgeois have to undermine unions through force or bribery, couldn't this be taken as evidence that the ruling class recognize the threat that revolutionary trade unions such as IWW and CNT pose?
shitposting flag was on
How and when? Unions are absolutely autonomous organs with very few of them being directly assimilated into the bourgeois state, but they are still capitalistic. Unions face the same "tension" any other non-State firm faces with the State: it asserts its interests as isolated producer versus the other and in the process bargains for its well-being or potentially its well-being through the well-being of the State and vice versa. The bourgeoisie in non-revolutonary times is, just like the proletariat, not a unified body and we should not personalize it. To give an even more banal example of internal bourgeois disagreement just look at the capitalist mode of production's most basic mode of functioning: competition between firms.
Through the course of its continued existence you will notice that the IWW has started to fail to be relevant at all in the struggle against capital. The time period in which it proved the biggest threat to capital was in the early 20th century in the US, precisely when unions temporarily ceased to be tolerated with the centralization of capital, and then after the turn of capital's full centralization during WW2 (which unions failed to oppose or directly coordinated with) unions entered the legal framework again and were even centralized into the state themselves. The IWW, though it remained one of the more radical Marx-inspired and class-centric unions, failed to do much afterwards.
As for the CNT, it was the CNT that entered cooperation with the Republicans and jailed POUM workers and others who wanted to go beyond the syndicalist regime of the united front. Look at that: one of the more radical flavours of trade unionism, anarchist syndicalism, failed to adhere to its principles because its form and position necessitated a counter-revolutionary turn!
As you said the violence of the 20th century between capital and unions would serve as an example of the bourgeois undermining them when they posed a threat, and to lump together revolutionary unions that seek to end capitalism with collaborationist unions which serve capital at the expense of labour seems a bit disingenuous.
Considering the sheer amount of double-crossing and betrayals that took place in Spain up to, during, and after the Civil War, the CNT targeting POUM workers to stay in the Republic's good graces is a prime example of a collaborationist union and is hardly surprising. Not only this but to act as if a certain strain of syndicalism or people calling themselves syndicalists in a select part of the world betraying principles therefore means the whole lot is corrupt to the core doesn't make sense. You may as well cite the actions of maoists as evidence against marxism.