[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] The Political Challenge Facing the Trade Union Internationals

• Previous message: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Commoning] Case Pyhäjoki - Artistic reflections on nuclear influence NOW
• Next message: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Another world is possible, yes, of course, but why build it?
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Örsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 3:41 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] The Political Challenge
Facing the Trade Union Internationals
To: "networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org" <networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org
>


below sent by Peter to several lists and highly worth to share here:

Begin forwarded message:

*From:* peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
*Date:* 10 augustus 2013 09:52:45 CEST
*To:* CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk, Debate is a listserve that
attempts to promote information and analyses of interest to the independent
left in South and Southern Africa <debate-list at fahamu.org>, WSFDiscuss List
<WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>
*Subject:* *[WSF-Discuss] The Political Challenge Facing the Trade Union
Internationals*
*Reply-To:* peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com, Discussion list about the WSF <
worldsocialforum-discuss at openspaceforum.net>


*Peter sez:*

Dan Gallin is former General Secretary of the International Union of Food
and Allied Workers (IUF). 'Dave' is Dave Spooner, who coordinates the
GLI-UK, http://global-labour.net/ and the GLI Summer Schools.

*Now read on...*

*Global Labour Institute International Summer School 2013,*

*Northern College, Barnsley, UK, July.*

* *

*The Political Challenge for the International Trade Union Organisations*

* *

*by Dan Gallin*

* *

* *

*Comrades,*

* *

*What we are looking at in this session is the international trade union
organisations. Who are they? Yesterday Dave gave us an overview of the
ITUC, the WFTU, the Global Union Federations and the ETUC.  There are also
other international, regional and sub-regional organizations lurking in the
underbrush, but for now let us mention just one very important development:*

* *

*Recent efforts to organize informal workers have created new international
organizations, principally StreetNet, representing street and market
vendors, and the International Domestic Workers' Network (IDWN). Both work
with GUFs: StreetNet with UNI and the IDWN with the IUF. Home based workers
have organized at regional level in South-East Europe and in Asia.*

* *

*From this quick overview, the political challenge becomes obvious. We are
dealing with a highly fragmented movement.*

* *

*What all these organisations have in common, is that they are workers'
organisations. You would expect that they would have largely common
policies, reflecting a common class interest. Why is this not the case?*

* *

*This may be the most important question we have to face because the
onslaught of capital is world-wide and unified, and that requires a much
greater practical unity in action than we have today.*

* *

*I believe that our main problem is not so much the fragmentation among
different organizations than the fragmentation of our political perception,
of our understanding of society, of our interpretation of what is happening
in society and therefore of what needs to be done. The organizational
fragmentation is a consequence of the loss of a common understanding, not a
cause.*

* *

*The reason is two-fold: one, and this is a paradox, is a consequence of
our movement's own success. The international trade union movement is now
truly world-wide and spans a far greater range of societies and cultures
than at any previous time in its history, and consequently it is also
exposed to and affected by a much greater diversity of cultures. *

* *

*The second reason is that at the same time, its leading organisations,
mainly in the industrialised countries, have become largely de-politicised.
This has been the outcome of a long process starting at the end of World
War II, when a weakened trade union movement in Europe became increasingly
dependent on the State and, in the context of capitalist reconstruction and
the Cold War, retreated to what it believed to be its core business
(collective bargaining), abandoning the goal of a socialist transformation
of society and leaving society to the State.*

* *

*In that context, the merger between the ICFTU and the WCL in 2006 was
acquired by erasing the last vestiges of social-democratic politics that
had survived in the ICFTU. Not much has remained of what were at one time
progressive elements of WCL ideology either, basically liberation theology.
This was a merger based on the lowest political denominator, with the
result that the ITUC today is adrift with no recognizable politics at all.*

* *

*This has deprived the workers of the world of a universal and common
narrative about society: what it is, and how to change it – like for
example the democratic socialist narrative which still existed in the
pre-World War II movement, and which today survives only in some Global
Union Federations, and of course in many unions at national level. *

* *

*The loss of a universal narrative that we share in common is a critical
problem: it weakens international class consciousness and abandons
political consciousness to widely different perceptions of society, shaped
by local or regional realities.*

* *

*For example, the ETUC, which is politically and financially dependent on
the European Union, is deliberately and sometimes aggressively eurocentric,
and, even more than the ITUC, subscribes to an ideology of "social
partnership" which has long since been discarded by the presumed "social
partners".*

* *

*The Latin American unions, acutely sensitive to the dangers of American
imperialism, have been far less aware or concerned about what happened to
the workers for seventy years in the USSR and for forty years of Stalinism
in the Eastern European countries under its domination.*

* *

*Much the same applies to the South African unions, with politics shaped by
the anti-apartheid struggle. Their physical, intellectual and emotional
remoteness from really existing Stalinism has enabled the WFTU to gain some
undeserved credibility. "Socialism", by its Stalinist definition, seems an
attractive option – at a safe distance in time and place. *

* *

*The unions in the former Soviet bloc, emerging from the wreckage of a
society where all forms of independent labour organisation were suppressed
for decades,  have for the most part no ideology at all. Their main problem
has been to repudiate the so-called "socialism" which, by its Stalinist
definition, was the ideology of their rulers, the ideology of a police
State. Some unions have embraced the neo-liberal ideology of their natural
enemies.  Some more radical elements have been attracted to revolutionary
syndicalism, because its class struggle politics are less tainted with the
vocabulary of their enemies.*

* *

*Not having experienced apartheid, they would be totally unable to
understand how the political hegemony of the SACP over the South African
labour movement came about – and what would make the WFTU appear as an
attractive option to some South African trade unionists.*

* *

*Polish Solidarity, a movement of 10 million members at its peak in 1981,
with a strong left-wing component, has since been hijacked by Catholic
conservatives, endorsed neo-liberal policies, invited Margaret Thatcher to
its congress  and is down to less than 1m members.*

* *

*China, the largest nation on earth, has a trade union structure inherited
from the Soviet model, The government has embraced capitalism, but has
maintained a trade union structure designed to control the working class
rather than represent it. While the ITUC and others are cosying up to it,
workers throughout China are daily revolting against it, and against the
system. Which side are we on? *

* *

*I could go on like this with many more examples.*

* *

*The present labour movement resembles far too much the blind men in the
parable trying to find out what an elephant is like and coming up with
incompatible answers.*

* *

*So our challenge is to reconstitute the full view of the elephant.*

* *

*How do we do this?*

* *

*The trade union movement, such as it is, is what we have, and that has to
be our point of departure. Our task is to recover the politics which are
naturally ours, the politics of  our class, and reconstitute our identity
as a movement of our class.*

* *

*We must recover a common understanding, recover our common narrative about
our history and about society.*

* *

*All of us need to rise above and reach out beyond our own experience,
which is of necessity only one part of reality, open up to the experience
of others, always critically, but always with patience and respect,
rebuilding the movement from below, always remembering that we are part of
one world working class. We must become internationalists. *

* *

*Socialism remains our goal but, instructed by experience, we know that the
meaning of socialism must be radical democracy: real power, democratically
exercised, by real people, at every level, not by any substitutes, no
vanguard parties, no so-called "progressive" authoritarians. We cannot
delegate the fight for the emancipation of labour to anyone else.*

* *

*Finally, we must always keep in mind that we are part of society, and that
our goals are no different from the general interest of society. We are not
a "special interest group" as our enemies would have it, we are at one with
society.*

* *

*Therefore we need to remain aware that there are many social movements not
directly linked to labour, but sharing many of our objectives, who are or
should be, our allies. Many have filled the void left by the labour
movement when it retreated to business unionism and the administration of
post-war capitalism, then  known as the "social market economy". We need
them as allies to build a the broad world-wide political coalition that
will eventually liberate mankind from capitalism.*

* *

*I am thinking of organisations like the Clean Clothes Campaign, which has
done more to support garment workers around the world than their own
International ever could, or WIEGO, which has been instrumental in helping
informal women workers getting organized, other women's movements,
movements to defend the environment, human rights organisations, even
political parties of the Left where they still support us.*

* *

*Comrades:*

* *

*This Summer School has a lot to do with meeting our political challenge.
We have created a free space for discussion and action, and that free space
is expanding – use it, and keep using it. We are creating an invisible
International. We have no bureaucratic structures, we do not aspire to any
sort of bureaucratic hegemony. We are a free network of autonomous and
self-determined trade union activists, working together, and with others,
with a common purpose: help rebuild the international movement that the
workers of the world need and deserve.*

* *

-- 

   - *EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/ **
   *
   - ***EBook, November 2012: Recovering
Internationalism<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.
   *[Now *free *in two download
formats]<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
   * <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
   - *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: **For the
   Global Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   - *Blog:** http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman. *
   - *EBook 2011, Under, Against, Beyond (Compilation 1980s-90s)
   http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/*
   - *Paper 2012:** The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade Unions
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
   *
   - *
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>Paper
   2012:  Marikana, South Africa, The March of the
Undead<http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/marikana-south-africa-elsewhere-the-dance-of-the-undead>
   *
   - *Chapter, 2013. 'Many New Internationalisms!', in Corinne Kumar
(ed), Asking,
   We Walk:** The South as New Political Imaginary, Bangalore: Streelekha
   Publications.*
   -


  _______________________________________________
** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of
information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World
Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on
related social and political movements and issues.  Join in !**
_______________________________________________
WSFDiscuss mailing list
POST to LIST : Send email to WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net
SUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to
worldsocialforum-discuss-subscribe at openspaceforum.net
UNSUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to
worldsocialforum-discuss-unsubscribe at openspaceforum.net
LIST ARCHIVES:
http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.net/
LIST INFORMATION:
http://openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.net


_______________________________________________
Networkedlabour mailing list
Networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org
http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour




-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/p2p-foundation/attachments/20130811/2f9edccc/attachment-0001.htm 

• Previous message: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Commoning] Case Pyhäjoki - Artistic reflections on nuclear influence NOW
• Next message: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Another world is possible, yes, of course, but why build it?
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]