ravi wrote: > the goals that the Left aims at are highly unlikely in a > gradualist (hence the term "progressive" I guess, to imply > monotonically increasing progress!) framework or reasoning. I would > suggest this is somewhat like (though not reducible) to Zeno's paradox > of Achilles and the tortoise. To invert a popular aphorism, the > "better", in our case, is the enemy of the "perfect".
One thing is how we make decisions and another thing is what we decide. What I'm arguing is straightforward. The union's decision to support Obama (or Clinton or Carter) was made with the resources and within the context then existing. And it was made without full certainty of consequences, good and bad. Often times, I indulge into Monday morning quarterbacking myself, but I admit it's silly. I'm a parent with some experience (good and bad), and I often feel like I know exactly what my siblings have to do to raise their kids the right way. Believe, sometimes they don't even need to ask me for advice. I know. Or so I'd like to believe. However, when I'm confronted with a challenge with my own kids, surprisingly my perception of what I can do to fix things suddenly shrinks to almost zero. How come? When I was an adolescent and was trying to court girls, my older brother thought I was an idiot. He tried to coach me a few times. It never worked. It was never possible to apply his recommendations, because the contexts we speculated about when he was giving me advice rarely appeared the way we envisioned them. I had to make my choices under all the concrete restrictions, uncertainty, and messiness in which they appeared, with the limited wit I had. If we look at things over time, this gradualism vs. no gradualism stuff is a false dichotomy. First off, breaks in the path of development of class power are not disconnected from periods of smoother accumulation of gains. We may not be able to time those breaks in advance, but when you look at them in retrospect it's clear that they are premised on each other. One damn thing leads to another. Evolution doesn't happen without sudden breaks. Revolutions don't happen without a previous, relatively gradual accumulation of tensions. When exactly people decide to leap in their consciousness or political practice depends on conditions that evolve unevenly, conditions that follow the logic of mass dynamics And that's the second key thing. For the most part, whether our next step happens to be gradual or disruptive is rarely up to us. Our choices, the things we can really control, have a much narrower scope than that. The reason is that gradual or non-gradual, we can only implement that "choice" collectively, as members of a mass with a dynamics of its own. The dynamics of masses is, largely, an alienated phenomenon. This is true even for highly regimented institutions, e.g. armies. Tolstoi's War and Peace is -- as Lenin noted -- a vivid description of so-called "friction" in Clausewitzian military theory. Mass actions are not precisely planned and consciously controlled. The exact proportion shifts under different conditions, but I'd say that good leadership of mass movements is 95% sensitivity/adaptation -- sensitivity/adaptation to mass animus and to the broader conditions on the ground -- and only 5% the implementation of bright strategic or tactical ideas. This, however, shouldn't make us underestimate the need for constantly aspiring to smarter, more conscious, more deliberate mass movements. The reason why, in the current conditions in the U.S., we need to start small, local, and topical -- and yes, that presupposes that we strike alliances with other political forces -- is not because we believe that all growth in our power will be gradual. I add here something that makes some people uncomfortable: Supporting the Democrats is, technically speaking, an alliance, just like not supporting them is also (by default) an alliance with those who are in a position to better capitalize the political weakness of the Democrats. This is true whether we wish to contemplate the fact or ignore it. It follows from cause and effect. But, again, that we need to start hitting where the political return is higher doesn't mean that we are committing ourselves to a gradualist approach to social or political change. We start by picking the lowest hanging fruit, because that's a well established, straightforward, dynamic, historically tested decision rule in economics, just as it is in politics and warfare: To advance towards your strategic goal, to win the war, your forces must be concentrate the attack on a limited number of well-chosen tactical targets. Well chosen tactical targets are those that divide your enemy, force it to disperse forces as they attack, and yield the highest strategic return. Unite your enemies, help them concentrate forces to strike you, disperse your own forces when you attack, choose the wrong tactics, or confuse strategy with tactics, and you may not be able to try again. "Each step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs" -- wrote a seasoned Marx who was nevertheless dead set on emphasizing the importance of theory and strategy. Like Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're heading, any path will take you there. However, just like the Neo-Keynesians argue that the long run doesn't exist but as a sequence of short runs, we have to understand that a political strategy exists only as a sequence of tactical steps that you have to get right if the strategy is to have any meaning. > Employment conditions, as you note above are a top priority of > workers. To achieve that priority workers need to gain power. > To gain power, the current accepted vehicle is the union. If > you are arguing that unions are not the only means to achieve > worker power, I do not see an alternative offered by you, > above. What am I missing? Macro policies to reduce high unemployment and dampen fluctuations in the employment level are -- historically speaking -- a political conquest of workers. Other things equal, higher and more stable employment strengthens unions. Also, other things equal, stronger unions help to keep up those macro policies. That said, to a large extent, to get jobs, workers can safely rely on the self-interest of capitalists. If capitalists don't exploit workers, then there's no source of profits. As the 1990s show it, it is possible to have high employment with weak unions. But it's unlikely that you'll have strong unions with low and unstable employment. Unions are very important economic organizations of workers. However, that doesn't mean that the political development of workers requires that the unions be rebuilt prior to any significant progress in other areas. When unions first appeared under capitalism, pretty much in the mold of the old guilds and medieval craft organizations, the capitalist state was undeveloped. Although Sisyphean in the longer run, it was much more economical for the workers in a given factory to take their grievances directly to their bosses. In these conditions, unions were crucial for the economic self-defense of workers. It was precisely due to the social instability that the direct action approach caused which led to labor legislation and, later on, to the welfare state. When the capitalist state became more robust, e.g. able to enforce labor laws, the goal of socialists in the 19th century was precisely to move beyond the mere economic struggle, the private negotiation and renegotiation between workers and their bosses, and develop political organizations aimed to change laws and social policies at the local, regional, or national level. Obviously, at the outset, the political organizations were something like an organic extension of unions. A strong union movement with national ties is not mutually exclusive with a broader political effort. On the contrary, as it's happened historically, they can feed back into each other. But, clearly, socialists have traditionally regarded the political struggle as a more advanced form of struggle than the relatively more punctual, isolated struggle of trade unions. I believe this remains even more valid nowadays. In some countries (Mexico, Venezuela come to mind), the unions have become big obstacles in the political struggle and not infrequently have sided with the capitalists in concrete and decisive political struggles, betraying the broader interest of workers. We are all somewhat familiar with the history of trade unionism in the U.S. There's a strong anti-communist tradition in the unions that has lingered after the end of the Cold War. In my view, the conclusion here is that a strong union movement is not a prerequisite for the political advancement of workers' interest. At some point, the need to rebuild the union movement becomes a necessity, but that bridge can be crossed when we come to it. Can't proof this. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
