With the launching of new material on this website, we are also archiving some articles that the handful of ultras involved in this project have written elsewhere. This is one of those archived pieces, originally published in another location.
Normally, the rain in Seattle is slight and constant, nothing like the torrential downpours seen in the south or the Midwest during summer storms. But on Thursday, August 29th, it was syrup-thick, the grey clouds speckled with lightning. Almost as much rain fell in that one day as had fallen the entire month prior. South of the city, the unusual weather nearly produced a tornado—a remarkably rare occurrence on the coastal northwest.
In the city proper, fast food workers were striking for the second time in three months, part of a coordinated national walkout that hit more than fifty cities. The strike-first strategy they were using was itself a rare occurrence, standing out distinctly from Big Labor’s normal repertoire of muted sign-holding and closed-door contract negotiation. But even before the rain began, this second walkout had been dampened by low turnout compared to the first strike at the end of May.
In that first strike, at least eight stores were shut down entirely for some portion of the day, twice as many more having to call in additional managers to staff their shops. In the second walkout, only a handful were actually shut down for any period of time. A Subway was emptied early in the morning, a Specialty’s had to close their coffee counter when the worker they’d called to scab decided to walk out instead, a downtown Jimmy John’s was forced to suspend deliveries after all its drivers walked off, and another Jimmy John’s on First Hill had to call in managers to make up for the four in-shop workers who struck. Those who portray the actions as composed entirely of paid staffers and community members ignore these real (if limited) walkouts that did, in fact, happen.
Still, it was immediately obvious that this second strike was smaller than the first, with less worker participation, fewer actual walkouts and a more limited economic impact. At the same time, it was much flashier, with big multimedia set-ups in Westlake Park streaming video of actions in Tacoma and Missoula, politicians lining up to speak at the rally on Capitol Hill, and a fawning lead-up feature by The Stranger, Seattle’s arts and culture weekly, which only rarely deigns to dirty its hands with the problems of the proles.
Each of these dimensions, more or less consistent with what I have heard from other cities, signals that the movement may be confronting its initial limits. After the first strike, I argued for radicals to take on a limited engagement with the campaign where possible, offering a few concrete forms that this engagement could take. It’s essential to now give an update as the movement confronts these initial limits. In most respects, the methods initially advocated still remain valid, though the environment sustaining them has begun to seriously change. As this change progresses, those methods will also obviously have to adapt.
What is Possible?
When offering critiques of the campaign from within—as a radical worker—it was common to be confronted with the challenge: “but you believe that we can actually win this, right?” The presumption, of course, was that without this basis of winnability, engagement with the campaign was either futile or opportunist. But this poses a false choice between wholly endorsing a constellation of reforms (reducing struggle to the reforms themselves) and throwing out the very possibility of reform as such.
The first position is that which is objectively held by every faction except a hyperminority within the SEIU—a reformist organization that, despite the particular views of its members, is designed to foster just such a myth of a neo-Keynesian fair capitalism built on bubble-shaped virtuous circles inflated by free and easy state credit.
The second position is held by a much smaller segment of dogmatic radicals, though not limited to a particular tradition. Such dogmatism tends to arise from every archipelago left by the tectonic collapse of the twentieth century’s emancipatory projects, anarchist and communist alike. Whereas the dogmatic anarchist eschews all engagement with anything in any way tainted by the union bureaucracy, the dogmatic socialist latches onto it in an attempt to leech the union’s dried husk of any vital juices it might still harbor. The first dogmatic approach is uselessly disengaged, while the second is cynically opportunist. Both, however, elide this particular question: are these reforms possible? And, if not, then why?
The false choice here is between an objectively real reformism and a pseudo-revolutionary posturing, both of which fail to engage in any meaningful sense with people’s lives under capitalism. The reformist forecloses any discussion of greater systemic injustice and emancipatory projects for its overthrow, no matter how immediate such issues actually are to the lives of the millennial proletariat, while the pseudo-revolutionary either tails the reformist or refuses to engage even with the workers involved, especially those who earnestly want and need the passage of the given reform.
Both positions obscure the opportunity at any sort of revolutionary engagement with the people. As ought to be obvious to anyone who has been forced to peddle their labor in the lowest rungs of this system, such an earnest revolutionary engagement does, in fact, entail being able to conceive, struggle for and win particular reforms, all while building an independent infrastructure antagonistic to both reformism and capital as such.
The first question, then, ought to be: Does the campaign offer space to build an independent and antagonistic organization/network/resource/service with and for the people themselves? Antagonistic here also implies that it provides outlets for people’s revolutionary development, not just an opportunity to render some service. If not, then what are alternate purposes for engagement? Research, experience, reporting—all these are more minor and perfectly reasonable alternatives. Only in a secondary capacity can we then inquire as to whether the particular reform is itself winnable. This orientation will obviously be shaken up in the future, as more robust, interconnected revolutionary organizations form with roots among the people themselves—but for now this seems to be the more practical approach.
I’ve already covered the groundwork of that first question in the previous article, and will follow up on it, given the new situation, below. But the second question—regarding the actual winnability of the stated demands—was not at all covered in that initial article, even though this aspect is an immediate concern of new workers entering the campaign, as well as a persistent problem for workers who have been engaged with it from the beginning.
The demand, of course, is fifteen dollars an hour and the right to organize without retaliation. In most cities, the second part of that demand (right to organize) has meant a symmetrical call for formal unionization. In other cities (such as Seattle), the phrasing has simply left it at that: the right to organize without retaliation. If questioned by press about what they were organizing, workers were encouraged to simply say, “a movement.”
Obviously, a net raise of foodworkers’ wages to fifteen dollars an hour would be a serious expense for the companies involved. More importantly, the demand has been intentionally conflated with calls by the Progressive Caucus of the House to raise the minimum wage itself at the federal level—their Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which has little chance of passing, proposes a raise to $10.10 per hour across the board.
We then have two questions of possibility regarding the reforms: 1. What kind of general raise in the federal minimum wage would be unsustainable for the profit rate of capitalists invested in the US labor market? 2. What kind of raise for foodworkers would be unsustainable for the particular companies in question?
Raising the Baseline
It’s become a common refrain among the neo-Keynesian economists who are tacitly backing SEIU’s efforts: raise the minimum wage and everyone benefits. Such heavy hitters as the Economic Policy Institute, Center for Economic and Policy Research (headed by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot), Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz—not to mention Obama himself—have all made strong calls to raise the minimum wage, usually just by increments and topping out somewhere near ten dollars, by 2014.
Their logic? Give the bottommost workers more spending money and they will boost consumption while ceasing to rely on expensive state subsidies like food stamps, college financial aid and other forms of welfare. At the same time, offered more opportunities, fewer will fall into criminal behavior, saving taxpayers the costs incurred by a judicial branch and prison industrial complex bloated by the retooling of the mass racial caste system in the US.
The more progressive wing goes further, arguing that such increases at the bottom ought to be paid for in part by concessions at the top, with a decrease in executive pay and bonuses helping to ease the spectacular climb in inequality seen in the US in the last few decades. They argue that such patterns have been successful across Latin America, with Brazil under Silva raising its minimum wage by 60% and seeing record lows in unemployment while other left-wing governments both reduced inequality and sustained spectacular rates of growth.
At first glance, all of this seems like strong argumentation backed by thorough research and proven in multiple instances by success stories like Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Australia, Norway, and any number of other social democratic experiments. Many radicals reject these positions in a petulant and facile way, mumbling about the falling rate of profit and the next crisis while providing very little insight as to how these patterns are exhibited in the real world. If Keynesian underconsumptionism is fundamentally wrong, then why does it appear to actually garner results in these select instances?
This is a much bigger question than can be dealt with in due detail here. But, in brief, the problem with neo-Keynesianism is hinted at by its inability to explain the terminal crisis of Keynesianism itself (the “stagflationary” crisis of the 1970s), and its blindness to the dual centrality of China and oil/mineral reserves as the unacknowledged productive bases and financial engines for this nexus of social-democratic experiments.
At the moment, their theses are only valid for regions that can leverage a natural resource base on global markets initiated and maintained by neoliberal institutions (Venezuela, Bolivia, Norway), regions with large untapped reserves of labor and land (China, Brazil, Argentina), regions that can shift their own risk onto periphery nations (as in the relations between Germany and nations like Poland or Greece), or regions that have undergone massive cycles of devaluation, disinvestment and outright destruction (Argentina after 2004, the “Asian Tigers” coming out of colonialism, Japan before them, and Europe under the Marshall plan). They are valid (valid in a strong, relevant way) for a key minority within global capitalism—valid, moreover, only within the overarching, crisis-prone logic of infinitely compounding growth and infinitely accelerating liquidity.
Right now, this means that this minority is dependent upon the majority rules of neoliberalism. In the future, neoliberalism may not be an accurate name for the application of capitalism’s logic on the global scale—a new global orientation is absolutely possible, and the Asia-Germany-Latin America nexus provides a powerful pole that could restructure the global system along an “uneven Keynesian” model, where strong bubbles of social democracy (“socialist harmony”) exist alongside hyper-exploited wasteland regions, stricken by war, plunder and resurgent forms of outright slavery which are then turned into new frontiers for recuperation and development (i.e., “primitive accumulation”).
But right now the United States is still the imperial hegemon, and its labor market (like everything else) cannot be understood through the same metric as the nations that are currently offering themselves as a softer, social-democratic alternative. It’s true that, compared to other top-tier, high-GDP nations like France, the UK, Japan and Australia, the US has one of the lowest minimum wages—on par more with minimums in Greece and Spain than anything else. But these kind of comparisons miss the point. The US contains within its own boundaries enormous variation in access to higher wages and social amenities, with minimum wage workers in Washington state making around the same as those of the UK or Canada while a waitress in Kentucky might be pulling something closer to the minimum of Argentina or Poland if it’s a slow shift.
More importantly, all the Latin American and Asian examples favored by the neo-Keynesians are still, in global terms, insanely cheap labor markets. Translated into dollars, the 60% increased minimum wage of Brazil comes out to only $1.98, while China steadily rises from $.80 per hour. Even South Korea, a well-established global economy, only requires $4.31 per hour. Obviously, these wages translate into differing degrees of purchasing power country by country—but from capital’s perspective, the rates are rendered into absolute labor costs, minus shipping and other operational expenses. In this sense, even a doubling of China’s national minimum would still keep labor costs there well below those of Brazil and Argentina, which are themselves only a third or so of minimums in Western Europe. A relatively large increase in purchasing power for workers in Brazil will simply cost companies less than the same relative increase in the US or EU.
None of this means, of course, that such an increase is simply impossible. Australia, for example, is able to leverage its significant mineral wealth into higher wages (with a minimum of $16/hr) while maintaining sufficient profit rates and keeping inflation somewhat contained. Norway, which sets its wages through collective bargaining rather than through state mandate, is another example, its initial success funded entirely by oil reserves. With the US set to become a net energy exporter, the possibility of a petroleum-financed wage increase may become more plausible, presuming enough stability between fractions of the domestic ruling class to allow for a new, more limited class bargain.
It’s also clear that the minimum in the US is so low that it forces many onto expensive state subsidies such as food stamps, financial aid and county jails. These things are highly profitable to the particular capitalists that leech from them (large banks stepping in to administer the credit system for state EBT cards, to take one example), but in total they are a costly maintenance of surplus population. It would not be surprising, then, to see some degree of business support for an increased minimum wage, possibly paired with calls to decrease corporate taxation in exchange (or establish a more regressive income tax)—there was, for example, limited business support for raised municipal minimums in San Francisco and Albuquerque, as well as the raise to a $9 minimum in Washington state. This highly limited, business-backed raise (to a federal level of $9 or $10/hr), seems to be what most economists like Krugman, Baker and Stiglitz are actually calling for.
Even more probable is a concerted attack on the National Restaurant Association, which, under Herman Cain, fixed the national minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13/hr almost twenty years ago, where it has stayed since. An attack on the National Restaurant Association could be effective in breaking their lobbying power for long enough to pass a federal raise of the $2.13 tipped worker minimum, as is being pushed for by several advocacy groups already.
Beyond this, it’s far more likely for increased minimum wages to be won city by city, county by county or state by state, rather than federally. Not only is this legislatively easier to win in liberal core cities like New York, Chicago and Seattle, it also better accommodates the actual dynamics of class struggle in the US, where skyrocketing inequality, deepening austerity and generalized political illegitimacy is creating a geography split between enclaves of wealth and vast wastelands populated by disenfranchised and semi-documented workers, the unemployed and the imprisoned.
These wasteland zones are largely abandoned by capital, though they may in the future become the grounds for new primitive accumulation. Where production does happen, the regions are dominated by mind-numbing service work (particularly along interstate routes), dangerous primary production and attendant industries (agriculture, slaughterhouses, fracking, gold mining, hauling, stocking mega-warehouses, etc.), or the black market (in drugs, human trafficking, weapons sales). These areas are largely rural, but also include and interpolate major urban centers—interior Detroit is the most obvious example, but Jackson, Memphis, and Hidalgo county in Texas, would also fit the basic criteria, as would many satellite cities like Camden, NJ, Tacoma, WA or the cities that compose California’s Inland Empire.
The enclave, by contrast, includes revived industry (especially higher-skill manufacturing and bio-tech), accessible financial capital, diverse service work (spanning food production to healthcare to education), and the “creative class” hodgepodge—all concentrated into a dense urban terrain, often encircled by rural “playground” regions for entertainment.
Obviously, these cities contain their own wastelands, often large ones, broken up and spread across ghettoes, slums, impoverished suburbs and hobo jungles. The depth of the crisis can be judged by the degree and severity of this interpolation—as further micro-enclaves form, green zoning themselves from the surrounding territory. But, for now, the center of gravity in these cities lies well within the enclave, with certain regions even attempting to expand that cordon beyond the bounds of the metropole (again, Washington state’s passage of a high statewideminimum wage, led by the urban coastal region, is a good example).
The ultimate point is that enclaves of wealth—cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, etc. and even ascendant Southern cores like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta—can absolutely afford significant increases in wages and social spending within determined limits. Like the incredibly high minimum wage in micro-states like Luxembourg, geographically-constrained raises can actually make the local ruling class tend to feel safer and more full-of-themselves, as it makes poverty less and less visible within their little bubble of social democracy—regardless of that enormous wasteland lying just outside.
Another, even more likely option, is a city-mandated measure to raise the wage in a particular industry—in our case, food service. Right now in SeaTac (an airport-oriented suburb south of Seattle and north of Tacoma), the SEIU is pushing for a city law to raise the wages of all airport employees to $15/hr, as well as the wages of all employees working for companies dependent upon the airport for business (hotels, pay parking lots, car rentals, etc.). This sort of industry-dependent focus, by limiting the scope of the demand even further, decreases its threat to owners generally and thus increases its chances at actual passage.
It is a much more likely possibility, then, that we will see a sharp increase in local political lobbying within the national fast food campaign, as it shifts from inflicting economic damage on the companies themselves to drawing political attention to the issue in the hopes of passing ballot measures and winning progressive candidates to city councils. This would be the path of least resistance—it’s still entirely likely, though, that there will be some major continuing efforts to build up the strikes themselves and make the passage of a federal minimum wage law (particularly to raise the tipped-worker minimum) a major touchstone in the next congressional elections.
Whither the Strike?
The wage increase sits on a particularly volatile structural fissure in capitalism at the present moment. Raising such a strong call for a doubling of most foodworkers’ wages has even pushed commenters into quasi-Marxist territory, in which they basically acknowledge that workers do all the work, and the owners simply take all the money. Nonetheless, the wage demand is not necessarily the most immediate, pragmatic advance generated by the campaign. The walkouts have instead been most successful in their (re)popularization of the strike tactic itself—popularizing it among ununionized, precarious service workers at that. But this is also the very aspect that SEIU is now seeking to downplay.
As Adam Weaver, with the Miami IWW has argued:
This is significant in that this is helping to popularize the use of strikes as a tactic, even for workers who are not formally part of a union, and the idea of the tactic and the experience gained can be built upon. But at the same time an on the ground analysis is needed by folks on the left that doesn’t mistake this for what this is not—SEIU isn’t building a movement to organize workers and fight bosses
Instead, SEIU is trying to use the strike in a highly limited (though still dangerous) fashion, targeted at politicians and media pundits more than the bosses. As Weaver says: “this is a ‘march on the media’ where the strikes serve as the visuals in a narrative of worker protest crafted by professional media consultants.”
This tension between the actual strikes and the “PR campaign” aspect of the walkouts has always been prevalent—with the PR campaign at every stage overdetermining the actual economic attack. The recent strike in Seattle, however, hints that the PR campaign has begun to entirely supersede the strikes, threatening to turn the entire movement into nothing but another toothless activist campaign.
Some have argued that the counterweight to this tendency may no longer lie just in the strike tactic, but rather in the construction of workers’ committees at given workplaces. Such committees are being advocated both by syndicalists on the periphery of the campaign and, now, by the SEIU itself, which is shifting more responsibility onto circles of workers who have been engaged in the campaign for some time. These workers are being tasked with organizing their own workplaces by drawing on the broader resources of the campaign to solve shopfloor issues, as well as to combat any retaliation that may arise. In Seattle, this is being done without the incorporation of these committees into a unionization drive.
Committees, Co-ops and Workers’ Centers
All of this pushes the “venture syndicalism” aspect of the campaign much further. Combined with the opening of workers’ centers in different cities, it seems that SEIU is replicating more than a few of the elements of syndicalist organization and re-gearing them toward reformist ends.
This situation seems to trap us in a sort of conundrum. Many radicals have been calling for the establishment of solidarity-unionist workers’ committees aimed at shop floor issues that would be capable of more embedded organizing driven by the workers themselves—all in the hopes that this could provide the proper counterweight to the PR campaign aspects of the movement while still drawing on the real momentum that’s been created. But the SEIU is now following suit, calling for almost exactly the same thing, though in a fashion that would maintain its oversight and control.
At the same time, the syndicalist focus on building workers’ committees that can confront immediate shop floor issues is made to seem conservative by comparison, since it lacks the larger framework of the national wage demand. These syndicalist projects run the risk of appearing to call for shopfloor agitation instead of $15 an hour and the right to organize, threatening to set radicals to the right of the union. The other option, then, is syndicalist committees tailing the strategic vision of the SEIU, simply by making clear that they are for shopfloor agitation and the fight for the bigger demand.
Both shopfloor issues and the national wage demand are stuck in a revindicative framework, and the SEIU has positioned itself such that it is actually making the more radical demand within that logic. Both also lack the ability to push that revindicative demand onto the same terrain of mass winnability seen in the riots and massive strikes in Asia, for example. The basic tenets of syndicalist organizing, then, appear to be both co-opted and outplayed by SEIU, at least for the time being. This undercuts our basic ability to create our own rudimentary infrastructure.
Meanwhile, SEIU is sponsoring the select formation of workers centers that explicitly mimic syndicalist union structures from the early twentieth century, though keeping them within a brutally top-down administrative structure. The Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) is the most developed model along these lines, and is currently in a process of semi-absorption by SEIU. ROC has a card-carrying (versus shop-by-shop) membership structure, utilizes solidarity network tactics, provides workers a de facto hiring hall alongside access to training, educates workers about broader issues of international imperialism, funds the establishment of worker-owned co-operatives, and bills itself, alongside other leftist NGOs, as broadly “anti-capitalist” within the alterglobalization tradition.
At first glance, this seems like an incredibly productive step. It’s true that ROC uses tactical alliances with “good” employers, legislative pressure and the judicial system to obtain its goals—but even these things are often portrayed as just that: tactics. The ultimate goal, among ROC’s own left wing, seems to be the spread of ROC-style workers’ organizations, seeding worker-owned co-operatives that ultimately lead to the foundation of some sort of networked co-operative system in the US, similar to Mondragón in Europe.
But, just as with Mondragón or the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth before it, the problem is not that simple. Obviously, these co-operatives still depend on the market, forcing their workers to self-exploit in order to meet demands set by the larger dynamics of capitalism. Worker-ownership is not the same as worker-management, and internal divisions (between members and non-members or workers and technicians or engineers) can form. Dreams of market socialism are equally impossible, for all the reasons Marx laid out in his critiques of the exact same ideas more than a century ago, then espoused by Proudhon.
The core of this critique holds for ROC as much as Mondragón: reformism is still reformism, even when perpetrated by NGOs and co-ops, rather than legislative changes. These projects forcibly propagandize the myth of a reformist path beyond capitalism, with the core of class struggle simply being the gradual incorporation of more and more people into these NGOs, co-ops, local “solidarity” economies and “equal trade networks” with overseas partners. The normal slew of autonomist examples are held up, such as workers’ self-management in Argentina, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and now the co-operativist experiments taking place under the “socialist” governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American nations.
The problem here is a double blindness. First, there is a blindness to the reality of crisis and the necessity of a revolutionary break with capitalism. The extension of no-growth, slow-growth or even marginally demonetized “economies” to any significant size would initiate a global economic crisis—it’s key here to remember that the absolute simplest definition of crisis is the decrease or flattening of profitable growth. That crisis would produce what crisis always produces: mass unemployment, overproduction, inflation, austerity, war.
Co-ops dependent on the market would be just as susceptible to this crisis, though more capable of spreading the pain more democratically to all their “worker-owners,” who could then decide collectively who gets fired or who doesn’t eat. Many, still participating in the framework of capitalist legality, would be unable to pay taxes to the state or rent to keep their property—at best, this results in an “autonomous zone” that then becomes a new ground for primitive accumulation by the state. Either through forcible settlement (as is being encouraged in Detroit), or through war and dispossession (whether performed by police or the military). Resistance to these dynamics (by necessity armed) would mean the jump from reformism to revolutionary war.
Secondly, these projects are blind to the reality of present capitalist dynamics, which offer a specific structural niche for them to fill. At their very best, they seem to be simply crafting the most hallowed interior of these bubbles of anarchist-ish social democracy within the enclave—accessible only to the wealthiest and most high-minded consumers.
The proliferation of philanthro-capitalism, NGOs and co-operatives, whether right-wing (Bill and Melinda Gates foundation) or left-wing (Mondragón and ROC), are all dimensions of this same dynamic. They represent the gradual monopolization of what we might call the “means of morality” by the wealthy, a strategy that ethically insulates their material monopoly on the means of production by stretching a vital layer of moral justification over it—“capitalism with a human face” means manufacturing human skin (“ethical” co-ops, philanthropic projects, etc.) in order to obscure the motions of the metal skeleton underneath.
The left-wing of these projects, then, is advocating an approach where we can build a thicker and thicker human skin that would somehow gradually eat up the machinery beneath, ignoring the interdependence between the two—it is that machinery which, ultimately, manufactures and maintains that vital layer itself. The communist response, of course, is that we have to rip the human flesh off the face of capitalism (no matter how pretty it may be) in order to break apart the mechanical skeleton.
It is, then, not simply a temporary tactic or a coincidence that ROC translates labor issues into the “foodie” logic of ethical consumption, simply adding workers at the end of a list that starts with organic produce, cage-free chickens and grass-fed beef. This crafting an ethical consumer illusion is the basic fabric of ideology in the enclave. The highest stage of this logic is to take the same “moral capital” tacked onto artisanal honey or wild-foraged mushrooms and tack it onto the workers themselves. The next level of boutique, then (the very tabernacle of the enclave), is a completed illusion in which the wealthy can be thoroughly convinced that they are exploiting no one by having workers paraded in front of them like free-range livestock. The fact that just as this meat comes from a free-range cow fed only natural grasses, this worker can afford to feed his family, this worker does not have to work while sick, this worker does not get sexually harassed every day, this worker, a person of color, can work as a server in the front of the house, that all these workers make a “living wage,” buying them full entry into the bottommost rungs of the enclave—each of these facts becomes itself a marketable commodity nailed onto the flesh and blood of the laborer, who still expends calories in order to feed more calories to richer people, all in exchange for a wage.
Obviously, working for a living wage without being sexually harassed or held back on account of one’s race is an immensely better situation than the vast majority of food workers have access to. But the actual class dynamic that produces these reformist institutions also ensures that such privileges only get doled out to a slightly larger minority of the workforce than previously. A new niche is carved out of the labor market for expensive, boutique food workers, just as niches have been carved out of the beef market for boutique meats. The trend appears to generalize, but mostly just in packaging. Whole Foods replaces Wal-Mart in upscale neighborhoods, and social corporations like Chipotle and Starbucks call their employees “partners” and make them play the happy slave.
Beyond Reform
How, then, can radicals work alongside or within these campaigns in a way that both pushes the workers involved (and potentially some of the organizers) toward a revolutionary understanding while also allowing us to learn from the workers’ own experiences? The regular syndicalist approaches have often been little more than casual agitation that either re-insulates radicals (who organize “where they are at”) or never gets beyond the handing out of zines and Anarchist FAQs to a handful of workers, with the presumption that micro-struggles at the workplace will have a sufficiently radicalizing effect in and of itself. The focus then becomes on establishing the committees, winning the small fights, and agitating explicitly revolutionary ideas on the edges of the local struggle. Similarly, sometimes “workers’ inquiry” has meant nothing more than a limited sociological surveying of how workers feel about their job, their union (or lack thereof), and what they would like to see changed—a method of surveying that almost guarantees bland answers, since it never challenges workers with difficult questions or offers new information.
Obviously, we ought to fight to inquire among workers while also creating worker-only spaces, including committees outside the purview of the union. At the same time, it’s foolish to place ourselves to the right of the union by just focusing on shopfloor issues or stupid surveys. Establishing a system for information-gathering, mutual aid and solidarity is important, but the syndicalist and solidarity network approaches also risk reducing struggle to simply this, at worst becoming nothing more than social services provided by radicals.
The co-optation of these basic syndicalist tactics have, ironically, pointed out the flaw in this presumption: direct action and organizing at one’s workplace don’t necessarily engender revolutionary consciousness in people, no matter how many “Intro to…” zines they may be handed throughout the process. Larger breaks with the system (things such as Occupy, riots, and even just massive protest movements such as the 2006 immigrant strike/march and anti-war mobilizations) all tend to have more potential for confronting people with those hard questions that can ultimately lead to the development of a revolutionary critique of capitalism.
Short of such an explosive situation, it’s not at all clear that the recipe of “more autonomy,” is in and of itself a sufficient strategy (or a strategy at all). The fact that the structural position of food service workers intersects with several potential political faultlines (immigration, oppression of women, the dismantling of the middle class, “dead endedness” among the youth, etc.) means that one possibility is actually the hastening of a future break emerging somehow out of these strikes. Key to this is pushing for an escalation of militancy within the movement itself—even though it’s a reformist campaign, it’s also undergirded by explosive potentials. Similarly, attempts to fully synthesize the campaign with the political status quo ought to be openly, articulately opposed.
But even these suggestions are just the basic repertoire of almost all radicals engaged in mass movements. In and of themselves, they are not that enlightening, and can lead to dangerous tinderbox illusions. It’s absolutely key, then, that mutual aid and solidarity structures (including workers’ committees), be complemented by infrastructure for the mutual development of workers’ revolutionary understanding. This is more than the pedagogical approach usually associated with orthodox communist trends at one extreme and more than the hands-off, learn-through-struggle approach of orthodox anarchism at the other. It means offering resources, creating a space for widespread discussion of bigger issues, creating structures where people can hold each other accountable for their mutual development, and, of course, confronting people with knowledge that they might otherwise have little access too.
The main ground of struggle at the moment may, then, not be the push for increased militancy or the formation of independent committees and networks (though both these should be done). Instead, the most important fight may be the battle to build much broader spaces outside of SEIU’s oversight—spaces that somewhat mimic the responsibilities of traditional workers’ centers (think the old IWW halls), maybe acting in parallel with reformist projects like ROC to a certain extent, but ultimately providing an exclusive arena for discussion of revolutionary thought and strategy. Obviously these spaces (at this point) will not be physical locations (a hall, co-op or rented social center), but simply time outside the official meetings to study, discuss and debrief.
This may, at first, appear to be a quietist approach, advocating a subtraction from the immediate struggle—basically ceding much of the territory to the SEIU/ROC insofar as they are still offering quasi-syndicalist solutions to the gradual extinction of unionism. But this subtraction is one performed in the context of continued engagement with the workers’ committees (dependent and independent) and the new workers’ centers. The goal is to create space for the development of a much more coherent radical counterpole, based among the workers themselves—but one that does not then petulantly refuse any participation in the broader movement. It is through the formation of this counterpole that the organizing itself can actually advance in a worthwhile direction, particularly through spreading the strikes, extending the support and development infrastructure, and moving laterally out onto those many other potential faultlines (gender, immigration, generation, etc.)—a concrete example would be using this radical pole among the workers to argue that we go out and support striking migrant farmworkers in the countryside, rather than limiting ourselves to only our most local struggles.
At the risk of sounding too traditional, I would offer that the first concrete step in this direction is initiating strategic discussions and studying theory—both providing workers with contemporary revolutionary theory as well as simply sitting down and studying core revolutionary thinkers and basic revolutionary history. This, of course, includes an explicit international element, aimed at educating people on different struggles overseas, from strikes and riots in Chinese factories to recent uprisings in Brazil, Turkey and Greece to the ongoing rebellions in India, Nepal and Mexico.
At the same time, we have to keep the strategic vision here open enough to be reflexive to what is actually going on—too often our radical grouplets become nothing more than glorified study groups (who maybe also fight the police now and then). Study, without strategy or periodic intervention into struggle, risks becoming nothing more than an eclectic, academic exercise. So how does the relative subtraction I am advocating (also assuming continuing participation in workers’ committees and centers) actually play into a flexible strategic goal for radicals?
Daily Bread
Unless something more explosive arises out of these strikes, we have to understand intervention into them as tentatively interim activity. It is interim in two senses: first, it stretches between Occupy (which was the last conjunctural event in the US) and whatever relatively unpredictable event comes next. In this interim between events, it is key that we build our own experience, particularly our technical capacities to intervene, while also developing and growing our (admittedly) small cores of disciplined radicals. Part of this development means intensive study with the aim of making ourselves articulate in our interactions and incisive in our research and criticism. Another obvious part is simply the introduction of revolutionary thought to people who are actively seeking a more coherent critique of the world around them.
Secondly, these interventions exist in the interim between initiating and making workable much larger national projects. These national projects stretch from basic networking, resource-pooling and building infrastructure to coordinated theoretical and research projects. These projects will (hopefully) help us come to a better structural understanding of the US within global capitalism while also allowing us to feel out the political faultlines that might be ideal sites for the concentration of forces in the near future—though there will always be a greater degree of chance dictating where these conjunctural events actually erupt. On the technical side, they will also provide the actual capacity to then rapidly concentrate people first along these faultlines and then on these specific sites (which are not necessarily geographical) when they do erupt.
These kind of interim local interventions and investigations help to unveil where these potential faultlines may lie and then begin to sound out their general shape. They contribute some groundwork to those national research projects, put us in contact with the advanced among the workers in these immediate situations, and ultimately test our ability to engage in targeted intervention without falling into an all-consuming activism (whether of liberal or syndicalist character).
It should also be taken as given that these food strikes are not necessarily the most vital thing happening in every region. While it may be a very good idea to look into initiating strikes independent of the SEIU where they themselves have no concentration, it may be just as useful to devote our energies elsewhere, especially if other movements (such as the resistance to political attacks on womens’ rights in the South) are boiling over while this one merely simmers. Similarly, we have to avoid the tendency toward subsumption into local struggle by maintaining extensive participation in our national projects and developing some degree of division of labor, where people aren’t guilted for engaging primarily on the national level, or contributing skills other than basic organizing (art, design, research, writing, etc.).
Pushing beyond reform means challenging both quasi-syndicalist reformism and legislative reformism while also acknowledging the limits of even an authentic, anti-bureaucratic syndicalism when it is literally out-demanded by a business union. In the end, then, pushing the campaign beyond reform also means pushing the campaign beyond itself, rather than seeking to replicate the same thing at some slight distance from the union and the state.
To portray any of what’s being argued here as a narrow-focused localism or yet another limited syndicalist project misses the scope of what’s going on (a nationwide shift in union strategy) and ignores the character of the concrete measures being advocated (all of which presume a communist approach), all while pretending that what is being advocated is a universal model for communists to follow regardless of circumstance and in priority of all other tasks (obviously, this is not the case—remember that these are interim activities).
At some point, though, such suspicions are beyond banishing, and we must simply affirm a coherent strategic orientation while putting reasonable emphasis on the practical matters of this interim, rather than hand-waving about some so-called “strategy” that remains eternally vague. As Kropotkin says, in Conquest of Bread:
“While middle-class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the “Talking Shops,” and “practical people” are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we, the “Utopian dreamers”–we shall have to consider the question of daily bread.”
—NPC