Forces of Labor

We are members and organizers in the Industrial Workers of the
World. We write this article not as a representation of the
organization, though, but as individuals with common political and
theoretical commitments. In our experiences in the IWW success and
failure are not always what they seem. While we are all for any
improvement in the lives of workers, in some cases improvements -
ostensibly gains – can create be regressive, as for instance when the
boss improves conditions in the attempt to limit disatisfaction and
workers end up aligning with the boss against other workers. In other
instances, lack of improvement – ostensibly failures – can bring about
transformation and useful experience for workers. In order to address
this further, we will first talk about the type of organizing in the
IWW that we are most excited about.

We take very seriously the criticisms of unions which come out
of the left communist tradition. These criticisms are essentially that
unions have evolved (in semi-recent history) to mediate conflicts
between workers and capitalists, in order to maintain the capital
relation. These criticisms do apply to many organizations  which are
called unions. We call those organizations business unions, because
they create a situation of labor peace which is conducive to the
smooth functioning of capitalism, or service unions, because these
unions operate as fee for service institutions where professional
staff and officers get paid out of dues money in exchange for improved
benefits, conditions, and wages for the workers.

This creates a situation wherein the workers in the shop are passive
and the professional staff are the active parties. Because workers do
not build or maintain the relationships between themselves, and the
knowledge of how to effectively organize required for workplace
action, this creates disorganization.

While we do take these criticisms seriously, we do not believe that
these criticisms apply to all unionism as defined by the IWW. In many
areas of the IWW we practice a different form of unionism. It goes by
different names – direct unionism, minority unionism, revolutionary
unionism, solidarity unionism – and each name highlights a different
aspect of the practice. The most common name in the IWW at the moment
is solidarity unionism.  Simply put solidarity unionism is organizing
collectively (or as a group of workers) to directly implement our
desires whether that’s in the workplace, industry, or economy.
Solidarity unionism is a process of concerted effort, the construction
and action with a collectivity or collectivities. More simply:
solidarity unionism is a way of acting with others. This is not to
undervalue individuals and individual actions, but a union always
involves more than one person. Furthermore, for us a union is an
attempt to construct or exercise collective power against an employer
(or the employing class), with the goal of making them do something
they would not otherwise do. The goals of solidarity unionism, unlike
business unionism, is the transformation of social relations within
the workplace, and building experience in struggle and class
consciousness amongst its participants. This stands in contrast to the
goals both of business unionists and many leftists alike who seek
merely to achieve means to their ends or reforms (even when in the
service of revolution). Solidarity unionism seeks to prefigure
revolution through its building of collective activity and solidarity.

Solidarity unionism means organizing without falling back on some of
the familiar features of union organizing as we’ve known it. These
include comprehensive contracts, election based campaigns requiring a
majority of workers, and the mediating bureaucracies and institutions
(the courts, union bureaucracies, lawyers, politicians and parties)
that alienate workers’ power. With solidarity unionism, we organize
even if there is only a minority of workers who are members of the
union, whether or not the boss and/or state recognize the union, and
remaining strategic about how to avoid and deal with (the generally
alienating and debilitating environments of) the courts, the state and
parties, and hierarchical union bureaucracy that acts for and instead
of workers (often against).

Our experiences with other forms of unionism have demonstrated to us
that these other forms have important limits. These limits are what
make us convinced of the left communist critique, and of the need for
solidarity unionism. Contracts have helped kill job actions through
forcing workplace gripes into a mediating bureaucracy that is hostile
to workers. The hierarchical institutions put struggle into realms
where worker power is weakest, and where workers play a secondary
role. Beyond the power of the boss, the union bureaucracy has all the
power and knowledge creating a hierarchy between the workers and the
means of struggle. Elections and membership-based drives necessitate
sinking huge amounts of efforts into organizing where there is often
little benefit for workers. This form of  organizing privileges
bureaucracies with huge resources, and reproduces  ierarchical
relationships between workers and the union. Solidarity unionism is
about organizing whether we’re recognized or not, whether there’s a
contract or not, and most of all settling direct worker issues by the
workers directly. That doesn’t mean we categorically don’t use things
like contracts, lawsuits, arbitration, but they are tactics we use as
adjuncts to our direct action not our strategy. Likewise we understand
them and hold them to their strategic value, and don’t mistake them
for what they aren’t. Simply put, the union is what we say it is, when
we say it is, where we say it is, and all the decisions about the
unions – its definition and its actions – rest in the hands of the
members. We don’t need the boss, the state, or anyone else to give us
permission or recognition as a union. We recognize and authorize
ourselves. In doing so, and in acting together to improve our lives
and struggle against the boss, we change as individuals.

A solidarity union is a shared project. Grammatically speaking,
solidarity unionism exists in the first person plural. Considered from
outside this first person perspective, the union is something else,
just as I am only I when considered from the first person perspective.
Furthermore, it is best to think about solidarity unions grammatically
in terms of subjective rather than objective pronouns. An individual
is an “I” when the individual is a subject, we are we when we act: I
speak with you, we collaborate together. When an individual is an
object the individual is a “me,” when we are acted upon we are us: the
boss fired me, the police arrested us. When we act with others,
though, we are subjects as individuals and we form a collective plural
subject: I come to the organizing meeting, we refuse to work under bad
conditions.

The assessment criterion for solidarity unionism is internal to the
subject(s) involved. Solidarity unionism has effects internally and
externally. That is, it changes those involved in the project,
produces changes in workplace, and it produces an experience for use
later. These external changes and the experience are in turn useful
internally and externally. The products can help a group encounter
others to work with, either as potential members or as individual or
collective allies. The products also serve to help us act in the
future, both in terms of having experiences to reflect on in order to
make decisions and in terms of greater ability to organize in the
workplace.

Once we begin to think in these terms, and begin to organize with
these issues in mind, we gain a deeper perspective on strategy. For
instance it is no longer necessary to fly the union flag as a hallmark
in every campaign. It might be more tactical to keep the boss in the
dark about union activity at a shop, or in an industry until we have
already won enough gains and a wide enough base of support that
announcing our presence would be strategic. Thus going another route
than majority-based elections allows us to be strategic about when and
how we give knowledge about the union’s presence in organizing. We can
also be strategic about who and when we sign members up. Rather than
having the goal of organizing being to just get people to take out
cards whether they want to participate or not, membership can be an
action itself and a positive step a worker can take in further the
struggle and consciousness building. We can keep dues and membership
for workers who want to be a part of the organization, who are ready
to join, and who have experienced class struggle and organization
together with the union (this of course is a positive feature, rather
than a restrictive). This can draw a line in the sand between unions
that are paper tigers, and unions (like us) that exist in our actions,
education, and struggle. Solidarity unionism also means that simply
becoming a member is not the most important thing a person can do.
Membership should be part of an ongoing process of building
relationships, education in practice and in theory, and of taking
action with other workers. We don’t want membership simply for dues
money or names on a list. That would be to become a paper tiger.
Solidarity unionism presents its own challenges, and poses new
questions to us. The rough model we are working off is one in which
experienced workers assist in workplace struggles where demands are
won through direct action. Workers are brought into the organization
and developed through these struggles,moving towards revolutionary
understanding and practice. At a certain level of strength and roots
these worker-organizers can apply deeper pressure in their industry.
That is we seek to build a foundation to respond and deepen struggle
that otherwise might emerge but deflate through familiar
mechanisms.

Solidarity unionism makes the union there insofar as the workers act
as the union. Solidarity unionism makes the ability to develop workers
especially important since we cannot even be effective as long as
there are divisions between workers and the organization as far as
taking action goes. Likewise we can’t afford to neglect the
development necessary to be a revolutionary union, since the actions
we pursue must reflect both our revolutionary nature and the struggle
and consciousness of the workers. There is, it must be said, no
solution to these problem at the level of theory. We have seen
widespread evidence of our ability to win gains on the shop floor
through solidarity unionism, and even to bring and build workers who
have been truly radicalized for their first time through the IWW. This
doesn’t happen in every instance, however. The issue of winning gains
brings us back to where we started: success and failure. Outside of a
solidarity union context, we tend to think (or at least talk) of
success and failure in terms of winning campaigns, achieving demands,
membership numbers, building members out of struggles, etc. Despite
this language of success, many of our most active members are from
campaigns that didn’t achieve their goals, and few active members are
from campaigns that did. Betrayals, false starts, firings, attacks,
and the like seem to have gotten us some of the best people, whereas
gains often led to slow deaths (contracts leading to passive satellite
shops uninterested in organizing and interaction, direct unionism
campaigns that the workers drop out of after gains are achieved, etc)
and generally few commited members.

Solidarity unionism means that our definitions of success and failure
must be revised. Success is not solely a matter of better wages or
conditions. Winning gains doesn’t always mean radicalization occurs,
and failure to win gains can still entail huge changes on the people
who experience the organizing together. Simply put, solidarity
unionism puts the emphasis on collective struggle, and it is the
struggle which changes people. Improvements in conditions do not
necessarily. We do of course care very much about the latter, about
improving conditions. We organize to protect ourselves and our
co-workers from layoffs and from harassment. We organize to improve
our wages and benefits. Most importantly, though, we organize the
individual worker. The most important thing we do is get involved in
collective struggle with our co-workers in a way that expands
everyone’s experience, understanding, and abilities. We have seen this
occur in many cases, without winning external economic gains.

Winning and losing, success and failure are tremendously important
categories and we do no want to abandon them. When we organize on the
job, something is ruptured. We are able to reshape our lives in ways
that are deeply moving for many people, so moving that people are
willing to risk their livelihoods to be a part of it. When T. was on
strike at a home for children with acute behavioral problems almost
none of the workers planned to stick around for the end of the next
contract period. People were striking for something bigger than that.
N. worked at an NGO that organized a union against bad conditions.
People began to stick around out of commitment to each other, because
of the relationships that were built as part of the organizing. Both
of these instances did not create the improvements in the workplace
that we hoped they would create. Judged from an external standard, our
experiences were failures. Ours were painful experiences and we do not
want to minimize that fact or downplay how devastating this kind of
failure is. At the same time, to some extent, every working class
struggle which does not abolish capitalism is a failure if we judge it
from an external standard. This external standard is important,
because it reminds us of the world we must change. On the other hand,
this standard is too absolute to guide our strategy because it makes
it difficult to draw lessons from our experiences or
identify resources we have gained.

Judged from an internal standard based on what we came away from
those experiences with, they were not such unqualified failures. We
came out of these experiences with improved understanding of how to
organize with our co-workers, deeper commitment to the class struggle
and the IWW, important relationships with other people, and a clear
grasp of the pitfalls of business unionism. These internal results are
part of what can be called the “compositional effect” of a struggle.
Struggle has an effect on us which changes us, makes us different,
recomposes us. This happens to individuals and to organizations,
whether informal organizations like a group of friends and co-workers
or a more formal organization. If struggles are widespread or
circulate enough, they begin to effect what can be called a
recomposition of the working class, which is a set of compositional
effects upon a large number of workers.

The most important compositional effect is the increase of what can
be called “compositional power.” Compositional power is the individual
and collective ability to organize. Compositional power is increased
or made more effective by its use, like a muscle. Solidarity unionism
is a practice of exercising compositional power, in order to increase
compositional power, in order to create other compositional effects:
more widespread compositional power on the parts of others and changed
balances of power between workers and employers.

As we said earlier, winning and losing are tremendously important
categories. The compositional effect of a struggle is what should
determine whether it is a win or a loss. More specifically, the effect
of a struggle on compositional power is the most important question
with which to evaluate a struggle. This is the key to solidarity
unionism as we understand it. We need to make these kinds of
evaluations in order to draw on our experiences so we can make them
effective in the present, to use them in order to work to create
similarly transformative experiences with others, and to win and
maintain positive improvements in our lives at work. In some cases, we
may not know whether something was a win or a loss right away.
Sometimes composition effects take time to emerge. We must continue to
ask ourselves if we are winning or losing, and not to be afraid to
change our answers. Whatever answers we come up with must guide our
practice in the present so that we can some day achieve one of our
ultimate goals, the abolition of the wage system.

Instead of a conclusion, we want to make the final two points as observations:

1. What we call internal effects and their importance for us is
analogous to feminist practices of consciousness raising. It matters
less if something has been said before about women’s oppression and
more that this particular person or group of persons comes to be able
to say it – and does say it – for themselves. In our experience it is
similar with workplace organizing. An agitational conversation, one
involving, say, the question “what is your job like?” is less about
the contents being articulated in order to extract knowledge than it
is about a performative activity in which the person has an affective
experience (becomes angry), makes a decision (to take a small action
toward changing the workplace and coming together with others), begins
to develop a relationship with the conversation partner, and begins to
acquire the confidence, skills, and analysis needed to successfully
organize their workplace. The increase of compositional power occurs
when more people go through this experience and emerge committed to
struggle.

2. Organizing in the workplace uses capacities everyone has. It must,
then, take as its fundamental implicit or explicit presupposition a
capacity to do and be more, that the actual does not exhaust the
potential, and that this is universally the case for all people. This
underlines an important part of what we see as the role of an
organizer. If everyone is capable of organizing then the organizer is
only a temporary role, and one that is not monopolizable. Indeed, one
who occupies that role should aim at the opposite of monopoly, at
collectivization.