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[Unions as a terrain of struggle: a thread.] A (the?) key missing ingredient in the class struggle of the past decade has been any substantial independent rank-and-file organisation that could act as a counterweight to the power of union bureaucracies.
That meant, the last time there were significant national strikes (the public sector pension strikes of 2011), members were largely treated as a stage army by bureaucracies, and weren’t able to effectively challenge for control over the direction of their own dispute.
We saw some embryonic developments in the direction of independent rank-and-file organisation in the UCU last year, with the establishment of @USSbriefs, @ucusolidarity, and @UCU_RankFile.
It’s also possible the Education Solidarity Network in NEU (descended from an incipient rank-and-file network, Lanac, formed to challenge the leadership’s strategy in the pensions dispute) could come into its own during the campaign to boycott primary testing.
There are also elections ongoing in various unions (RMT, PCS, UCU) which, in various ways, pose questions of rank-and-file democracy. But even if oppositional, rank-and-file candidates win, they’ll be isolated without a substantial network organised at the union’s’ grassroots.
Other rank-and-file initiatives we’ve seen in the past period have burned bright but brief; “Grassroots FBU”, for example, which succeeded in ousting the union’s leadership and pushing the union to the left, but dissolved itself once the elections were won!
Another feature on the landscape is the smaller non-TUC-affiliated radical unions like IWGB and UVW. I sense that some comrades see building up these unions, as a kind of “alternative” labour movement, as a way of shortcutting around the need to transform the “mainstream” unions.
What would a genuine rank-and-file upsurge look like? We’d need the formation of networks that seek to organise within union structures to fight to transform them, but also have an independent capacity, able to make rank-and-file links *between* unions.
Such networks could advocate radical democratic reform within TUs (election of all FTOs; FTOs on workers’ wages; the right of branches/workplace groups to launch and control disputes; etc.), as well as militant industrial strategies (fighting to win around clear demands).
Because I’m resolutely in the camp of “things were better in the past” on this question, I’d point to something like the Workers’ Committees of the period around WW1, and the National Minority Movement of the 1920s, as possible models for this.
But the NMM was only possible because a core of organised revolutionary socialist worker-activists dedicated themselves to the project of rank-and-file transformation of the labour movement. We need that same element today.
TL/DR: If we want to transform the labour movement and revive workers’ struggle, socialists in the unions need to pivot to a serious rank-and-file orientation and stop fucking around with a feeble broad leftism that boosts “left” bureaucrats. [/Thread]
