******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Pertinent to conversations about dual carding/boring-from-within/whatever other appellations you put to it. http://www.sojournertruth.net/goldenbridge.html Noel Ignatiev (aka Ignatin in those days) wrote an essay circa 1975 about William Z Foster's efforts with the Wobblies and later the Trade Union Education League within the AFL. This was composed while the author was part of the Sojourner Truth Organization, which put a heavy emphasis on the ideas of CLR James about "working class self-activity," notions that understandably were trying to distance themselves from vanguard-ism but edge close towards a miasma of spontaneity that Vijay Prashad elaborates upon in an interview: "Over the last two or so decades, there’s been an increase in thinking among the Left, liberals, intellectuals in the direction of so-called spontaneity. In other words that uprisings happen spontaneously, people are frustrated, angry, then they spontaneously rise up. And what they don’t require is preparation, or what we used to call leadership. Leadership is another word for preparation. In other words, in times when the tempo for struggle is not very high, you prepare populations by conducting acts of courage-building, confidence-building, respect for each other. That’s what the preparation is about and it requires leadership. So this aspect of political struggle, leadership or preparation, has been largely denigrated. I consider this a kind of neoliberalism of the Left, this rise and promotion of spontaneity above preparation. And of course I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity. But in this period of the neoliberalism of the Left, spontaneity has, in a sense, overshadowed preparation. So if you don’t consider preparation to be important, why should you put it into the historical record? So in other words there are several studies done of peasant uprisings where the first chapter might be ‘conditions in that area’ and so the conditions are bad, and then the second chapter is a kind of conjectural event, somebody’s shot and then there’s an uprising. But there’s no consideration, no chapter on preparation. And interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you’ve actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don’t necessarily see red flags everywhere. You see all kinds of anarchic forms of rebellion, but the moment of preparation is when the Communists and other kinds of political forces play a roll. So this denigration of preparation actually closes the door on writing the history of Communism and so when we want to bring this history back, we’re also contesting this political method which suggests there’s no room for preparation, you simply merely wait for people to rise up. To take the Arab Spring for instance, the way that history is written, you have the conditions of that region, there’s a huge buzz, and then one particular person, Muhammad Bouazizi burns himself, immolates himself in Tunisia, and that…sparks the uprising. What again disappears is the patient work conducted, for instance, in Egypt by the textiles workers union in Muhalla which played a crucial role of a very patient, confidence-building work among youth done by the four Palestinian groups inside Egypt. You know, they played a very significant role in creating the uprising in Egypt. But if you again, if you denigrate the process of preparation, then you loose the history of all these people and that’s what we really want to recover." -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart Message: 2 Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2019 08:43:31 -0400 From: Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> Subject: [Marxism] Solidarity Unionism and Dual Carding: A Primer - Regeneration Magazine Message-ID: <5886f7b2-b6b1-a84d-275c-3b333af33...@panix.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed There?s a dissonance at the heart of the labor movement. On the one hand, contemporary labor unions were built on the back of militant worker struggle. For example, the massive strikes of the 1930s built the backbone of the present-day AFL-CIO. Any particular long-standing union, if you go far enough back in its history, you?ll find strikes that made the union. On the other hand, the labor movement of the present has been in retreat for decades, in large part aided by the passivity and cowardice of union officials and staff who have preferred to make concessionary deals and shy away from direct confrontation. https://regenerationmag.org/solidarity-unionism-and-dual-carding-a-primer/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
