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While this chapter focuses on the maritime logistics chain and particularly longshore worker power on the docks, its lessons are universal to the discourse on the exercise of working-class power. There are strategic workers and strategic loci in the supply chain and the production process. Such workers and loci are not fixed for all time, but are conditioned by technology, worker political organization, and alliances. Therefore no working-class strategy can be static or frozen in time irrespective of the shifting terrain.
he goes on later to give an example of tool and die makers who used to be very strategic, but now with CAD, their craft has become deskilled. in general, emergence of new tech -> "a new group of skilled workers and vulnerable power points"
The railroads in the United States carry 40 percent of gross national product (GNP), and remain a vital transportation system. [...] railroad labor has been handcuffed by a rigid Railway Labor Act (RLA) passed in 1926 to prevent strikes in the industry. But it is not only the legal handcuffs that shackle rail labor. The fact that there are 13 craft unions for 132,000 rail workers, all bargaining under separate agreements with the railroads, hampers any solidarity. [...]
Here again we have an example of strategic workers at strategic nodes who have vast potential power to impact capitalism, but remain shackled by legal regimes and fractured internal organization. Eric Olin Wright has written a brilliant essay that establishes a framework in which to think about this dynamic. He distinguishes between "structural" power and "associational" power. Structural power is the power of strategic workers in strategic places in the capitalist system. They have power per se, but the question of whether they can successfully leverage and exercise it depends on their associational power: that is, their organization, consciousness, allies, and so on. This interplay is a dynamic way for workers and their allies to think about their work in organizing at strategic choke points.
essay: "Working class power, capitalist class interests, and class compromise" from 2000
[...] breaking out of treating the workers as isolated individuals clinging to elite status on the waterfront, and instead making common cause with workers along the logistics supply chain. Often the workers doing key functions along the supply chain away from the docks are first-generation immigrant workers toiling at minimum wage with no benefits and no job rights. This employment apartheid cannot be allowed to stand, and these workers must become part of the community of the organized. [...]
ah man so relevant to tech!!
on challenges for dockworkers and how to meet them (if ILWU members get great benefits while workers inland are doing similar jobs in marine supply chain with fewer benefits).
he mentions previous efforts to address this through the Chnage to Win Federation, which failed cus they didn't have the "strategic hammer of port workers backing their exciting community and worker outreach". he also later says the future for dockworkers lies in "conceptualizing themselves as logistics workers and not dockworkers" (similar for tech)
Even on dock the possibilities exist to build power if the union can capture the new-technology work that is part of the use of robotics and other automated processes. Union members can be retrained to repair the robots and develop the software that programs and runs the robots. Right now the ILWU is not prepared to capture the new jobs in maintenance, programming, electronics, and data management that have arisen because of the implementation of new technologies on dock and near dock. The union needs to invest in its own massive training program partnering with vocational high schools, two-year junior colleges, and degree-granting universities, to prepare its members to be the workforce of the future. [...]
i concur with the problem but dunno if i agree with the solution. think about this more
Of course, to effectively question technology requires, first, a critical perspective on the development of capitalism, particularly the relation of technological change to profit rates and the social organization of labor, and, second, intimate knowledge of technology’s scientific bases as well as how it works in specific spheres. Such knowledge, along with a thorough acquaintance with the history of the scientifically and technically based professions and the history of labor’s experience with technology, would be absolutely necessary to the emergence of a labor movement rooted in the relations of production and contemporary labor processes. And we still need an informed history of labor’s attempts to organize professionals in the private and public sectors.
Genuine social movements arise when a social formation can no longer realize its aspirations for the good life in the prevailing system and are prepared to travel the arduous path of social transformation.1 Historically, movements that cease to expand and improve and under adverse economic and political conditions are likely to stagnate and decline. Samuel Gompers’s “More” may have served the AFL’s craft union members adequately for the first decades of the twentieth century, but neither he nor his comrades in leadership considered the aspirations of the industrial workers or the possibility that changing economic, technological, and political conditions might affect the crafts. In the 1930s, industrial workers were inspired by the idea that the union was a way to achieve industrial citizenship—that workers could get off their knees and out from under an imperial ownership that watched and controlled them on and off the job and dictated the terms and conditions of their employment and their lives. These workers sought to take their fate into their own hands. Just as workers had at the turn of the twentieth century, they brandished their desire for dignity in every strike, workplace occupation, and march through city streets. Their vision was not typically anticapitalist, but industrial unionism was a movement of a class that aspired to power over their own labor in the factory and other workplaces at least, and in many instances also in their cities and towns. Union members ran for city council, were elected to school boards, and made their voices heard on a wide range of public policies.
Today, U.S. unions have lost any semblance of this radical imagination, and so are generally unable to inspire working-class passion. They have been passive in the face of dramatic changes in the economy, which have visited hardship on a considerable portion of the workers, and accepted the indifference of the political class to their problems. Their explicit commitment to the existing setup, particularly to the capitalist economic system, and to a perverse version of class peace, have put most of them in a dependent and defensive position. Specifically, they have no tools for any analysis that would help workers evaluate the state of their own affairs and those of the country at large. Dimly, unions recognize that we live in an age when national borders no longer define the economy, but they are still tied to conceptions of reform that this new age has outmoded. More egregiously, instead of acting for themselves, they have fixed their hopes on a series of political “saviors” who either ignore the needs of their labor allies or else pay them lip service and then proceed to betray their trust at almost every turn.
[...] The ugliness of the neo-fascists emboldens violence against ordinary people but protects the wealth of the oligarchy. This is the Violence of Fools. Vigilance by sensitive people is essential. None of this is normal. To see it as such is a defeat. We live in an age of the abnormal, an age of monsters, an age of the strongmen, the devastation of humanity, the ache of decent people.
You are part of the leadership of a popular movement that has just seized power in your country. Your commitment is not to bourgeois nationalism, but to socialism. You are from a country that had been under colonial rule and then neo-colonial subordination or else from a country that was not formally colonised but nonetheless experienced the full weight of imperialism. Your economy is in tatters, its raw materials drawn out of the country, its people reduced to labour on the global commodity chain gang. Your country has not been able to forge an independent foreign policy, nor a capacious social policy. A popular upsurge that began with an anti-IMF riot brings you to power. The window of possibility for your government has begun to close just as its opens.
What will you do?
The US ambassador – accompanied by a delegation of local representatives of monopoly capital firms and the local oligarchy – comes to see you and your comrades. This gaggle of important people flutter about, coming to ensure that your government will set aside its grand promises to the people and – after some mild transfer payment schemes to tackle the terrible poverty – will resume the status quo. After all, says the US ambassador, the status quo has been good for the country. The FDI flowed in, the IMF report of its staff visit has been productive, the GDP is high, the currency is relatively stable and the oligarchy – well, the oligarchy has been the pride of the nation. The ambassador wags a finger in your face – arms deals have to be signed, military agreements have to ratified. The boat is on an even keel, says the ambassador. No sense in rocking it.
You knew that this delegation would come to see you. Nothing they say or do surprises you. Countries like yours – countries of backwardness (takhalluf) – do not control their destiny. Colonial rule altered the structure of politics and economics as well as of society. Old notables had been side-lined or absorbed into the new world where they become merely representatives of forces that lived elsewhere. The new elites that emerged represented the interests of themselves certainly, but also of external forces – not their own populations who had been reduced to rubble by the plunder of colonial rule. Poverty came alongside illiteracy and disease. Backwardness was not the fault of your culture, but of this imperialist history. Your movement came out of the slums, where the bulk of your people live. They have spoken to you. They have given you their programme of action. They want you to act.
When your people won independence or overthrew your monarchy fifty years ago, the new elites seized power. They offered up your raw materials and your workers for rock bottom prices, as long as they got a cut of the profits. That is what they had won independence for – to increase their share of the theft. This large-scale bribe was then replicated down the class ladder as your country became a country of bribe-taking rather than social initiative. No development could come to your country, whose social advancement was blocked by structural obstacles such as the terms of trade for your primary products and your reliance upon finance from the old colonial powers. Your rich minerals and rich agricultural products find their prices fluctuate and remain low, while the prices of manufactured goods that you import from the imperialist powers increase. The gap between these two leaves your public exchequer in permanent debt. You borrow money from the banks of the imperialist countries and you use their currency for your international trade – both drawing you in to what you know is the imperialism of high finance. Underdevelopment is the only development that your country experiences.
Your group of revolutionaries had spent the decades under the clouds of IMF warfare studying the ‘unilateral adjustment’ thrust upon your country. You discover Samir Amin, who gives you that concept of unilateral adjustment. It means that the policy framework for any government of your country will be channelled by rules devised elsewhere, rules that benefit the old colonial powers and impoverish your own country. Even socialists are trapped by this unilateral adjustment. Structures such as unequal exchange and old-fashioned plunder vampirically diminish the wealth of your country. Your country was forced to adapt to the needs and interests of the old colonial powers. You can never be free.
This is the moment for you to test the theory of delinking – the concept you absorb from Samir Amin. To delink is not to break from the world and isolate oneself. Isolation is not possible. If you do break with the unilateral adjustment, you will either be overthrown in a coup or a military intervention in the name of saving civilians or you will be under sanctions and embargos for decades. You do not want to isolate yourself. You are an internationalist. To delink means to fight to set an alternative framework for your relations with the world, to force others to adjust to the needs and interests of the working-class and peasantry in your country and in other countries. Delinking, you read in Samir Amin, means to ‘modify the conditions of globalization’.
fucking hell, this is so good
the recommendations are:
- capital controls
- renegotiating extractive deals
- un-peg currency from USD
- more public services as real commons: free at the point of use, and decentralised
- state-run banking sector
- eco-friendly manufacturing
- strengthening unions
- promote dignity?
- challenge ideology of ruling class (support critical education from below i guess)
- dismantle monuments to oligarchy; replace with monuments to the people
[...] Each of these caravans comes with determination to flee places that the people think have failed them. It brings to mind the words of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire,
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
[...] It does not help that the United States, the dragon that whips its tail and breathes fire into these countries, at the same time advertises itself as a ‘land of opportunity’. US military force and capital has no borders; only people of limited means run into these borders. [...]