tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412105907767891054.post7635370111518692196..comments2023-02-25T02:35:25.601+13:00Comments on The Fatal Paradox: Mass politics without the masses?Fatal Paradoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01850488456819108024noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412105907767891054.post-46557832875943190392009-04-28T20:54:00.000+12:002009-04-28T20:54:00.000+12:00GIdday Tim and Don,
This is a good discussion.
I ...GIdday Tim and Don,<br /><br />This is a good discussion.<br />I think the main problem with the WP is its mischaracterisation of NZ society (of course the method behind that is the real problem). <br /><br />The WP position leads to fatalism. First it fails to see that NZs rapid economic deterioration will generate an anti-imperialist politics that has to be joined and won over to socialism. <br />So it wipes out all nationalist struggles as reactionary when nationalism is the terrain where most radicalism will break through. <br /><br />The SWP did this to Latin America during WW2 to avoid the question of anti-imperialism and hence any questioning of its US hegemonic Trotskyism. The result was a complete lack of orientation to the nationalist left, and in Argentina, where Trotskyists failed to intersect the Peronists or worse joined them.<br /><br />The crisis today shows NZ is in the same position. Most the soft left is nationalist but not necessarily chauvinist. They see the crisis as imposed on them by US bankers not non-existent NZ bankers. If you can't address the reality of NZ's semi-colonial oppression, then of course you will not be taken seriously by workers, and you will end up demoralised blaming the working class for not existing as a revolutionary subject. <br /><br />Well the subjective aspect of the revolutionary proletariat is not something that emerges spontaneously, it has to come from a revolutionary vanguard. The vanguard does not shut up shop and wait for workers to get ready. It helps them to get ready.<br /><br />The other thing about recognising NZ as a semi-colony is that you stop fretting about NZ as a one country, and see it as part of an international global class struggle in which NZ marxists will play a bigger role outside than inside NZ. <br /><br />The revolution won't start in NZ it will roll over Aotearoa like a Tsunami. I would rather be at the epicentre than wait to be washed up on the wave when it reaches this country. <br /><br />Finally, as well as creating new conditions for class struggle in NZ, the global crisis opens up lots of semi-revolutionary situations which revolutionary Trotskyists have duty to interven in. If you were in France today you would be in the NPA fighting for a Transitional Program, no?Dave Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12873621971212067467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412105907767891054.post-86542023907718696882009-04-19T10:41:00.000+12:002009-04-19T10:41:00.000+12:00Tim I can certainly relate to your reference to th...Tim I can certainly relate to your reference to the carplants, where I did my political apprenticeship. <br />It was much easier to organise when 400 people were under the same roof.<br /><br />Now most of that's gone. Over the years I've bumped into former Ford workers from time to time. Most of them got jobs in smaller worksites. Most of them were keen to reminiss about the days gone by when we had a relatively good living and human dignity through mass organisation.<br /><br />I think class consciousness does exist today , on a smaller scale. The recent Auckland call centre workers win was an expression of that I think. In Wellington our support action for the call centre workers was made up entirely of various leftists. Substitutionist it could perhaps be argued. Still, Auckland felt that we had helped their cause.<br /><br />I do find it very hard slow going as a Unite organiser, and can now better appreciate the difficulty of trying to organise in a supermarket. <br />Even so, we don't lose them all. The main thing is,I suppose, the system is so shitty that I still think it is the best use of my time to oppose it.<br /><br />all the best,<br /><br />DonDon Franksnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412105907767891054.post-70763533714680405212009-04-18T21:40:00.000+12:002009-04-18T21:40:00.000+12:00Hi Don,
thanks for your comments.
I completely t...Hi Don,<br /><br />thanks for your comments.<br /><br />I completely take your point about the transient nature of the workforce in low-end service sector jobs being nothing new, but I guess the main point I was trying to make in my original post was that the real problem is the profound structural changes in the composition of the NZ working class over the past few decades. Where are all the large job sites with stable, permanent employment (such as the car plants, freezing works etc) - which made the development of class consciousness and solidarity (albeit usually of a reformist variety) possible - now?<br /><br />My experience of trade union organising in the retail sector is that unlike in the traditional large manufacturing job sites, rank and file activism and shop floor organisation is impossible to develop and sustain for any significant period without continuous external intervention from outside the workplace. This in turn requires an enormous expenditure of human resources which most unions simply cannot sustain and is in a sense quite an artificial or substitutionist mode of organisation.<br /><br />Historically the only occasions when spontaneous shopfloor organisation has been possible to sustain among groups of transient workers (eg shearers or hotel workers) that I can think of have coincided with big upheavals among the big proletarian battalions eg during the era of the miners' Red Federation here in NZ or overseas in the wake of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes.<br /><br />But in NZ these major "proletarian battalions" are much diminished now both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of a percentage of the overall workforce.<br /><br />So my question is, in what sense is it still meaningful in NZ today to talk of class consciousness as an organic entity having its own independent and autonomous existence?Fatal Paradoxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01850488456819108024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412105907767891054.post-31074996736795201822009-04-18T10:20:00.000+12:002009-04-18T10:20:00.000+12:00Tim, that post is interesting; among other things...Tim, that post is interesting; among other things, I guess its a challenge of the point of my preoccupation over the last 37 years. I don't have the time to respond as fully as I'd like to, so I'll just make a couple of points that immediately come to mind.<br />In one of the few concessions you make above to workingclass progress you write " While a small number of unions such as Unite in Auckland through their heroic voluntaristic efforts succeed in unionising some of these workers, even their organisers will tell you that the membership turn-over in a 12 month period is nearly 100%." <br />That's because there is a high turnover in dead shit jobs, even during a recession. The effect of Unite's work has several facets. One of those is introducing young workers to unionism for the first time and, in most cases, giving them a positive experience of it. When they leave KFC for somewhere else they take that stuff with them. That's a huge plus for the workingclass as a whole. Its a very long haul doing such organising work, but not because the working class are inherently obtuse. The main problem is that over the last few decades, capitalism has considerably tightened up. Employers are more aggressively anti union, there are fewer legal rights for unions, there is more surveilance of workers on and off the job, there is more casualisation and more social dislocation. I think there is also a stronger current of class collaboration at the top of the union movement. In face of this darkness, the left is not sitting, nor alone. Even in its worst moments,it never has been. Since my first contact with communists, in the Wellington Committee on Vietnam, I've seen time and again their efforts provide a spine to social movements, without which they would often have collapsed. Along with that there have been all sorts of errors, including some bad ones. What excites me today is the real progress made in getting rid of Cold War era baggage and moved closer to an understanding of proletarian internationalism and revolutionary marxism. The job is very hard, but in my opinion the alternative is impossible.Don Franksnoreply@blogger.com