blogs

August, 2017

By Ish and Bridget H.

As activists, we are no strangers to the union movement. However we shouldn’t view unionism as a homogenous or a-theoretical force. There are many, often competing, tendencies and tensions that affect the union movement today. One concept that receives little attention in Australia is that of Solidarity Unionism.

Unionism, in Australia, is often understood in terms of the system called Arbitration. Under Arbitration, unions seek to brand themselves as legitimate and representative institutions by negotiating with management and governments for workplace agreements (EBAs) and laws that will be recognised as valid by all parties. All the while supposedly neutral ‘arbitrators’ like the Fair Work Commission and courts monitor for fairness and decide what is legal and illegal. Those who break the rules face a range of criminal penalties. Whilst this is considered the norm, and has seen a significant decline in productivity lost to strike action, what have we given up because of an endless desire of legitimacy?

This system places the points of struggle far away from workplaces where workers have the most power. For example, bosses will often know that when they underpay their workers, only a federal court order can force them to repay stolen wages. They’ll calculate that the vast majority of the people they steal from wouldn’t have the resources to challenge them in the courts and even if someone does, the money they can potentially save is worth the risk. If a worker encourages others to go on strike over stolen wages, their boss can fire everyone who goes on strike or encourages others to do so.

Unions can only make demands during set periods of bargaining, and surrender nearly all forms of workplace power during the years in-between, limiting their power to actually enforce the workplace agreements they bargained for in the first place. Unions are forced to professionalise and become more like the institutions they are fighting against. Survival and growth depend on spreading increasingly high costs over large numbers of members, and the more workers that join the union, the more sustainable it can be.

Anything that costs money but doesn’t generate membership, such as education, campaigns for workers in other industries and social justice, has to be minimised. Spending on marketers, lawyers and lobbyists increase over time. Solidarity unionism is, by contrast, a simple idea. Workers power, and solidarity to each other, can be enough to challenge the power of the bosses directly and achieve immediate wins.

Solidarity unionism puts organising and empowerment of workers at the heart of a dynamic movement. Radically decentralised shop unions and community networks can negotiate directly with bosses, highlight injustices, execute direct actions and share information amongst everyone affected by an issue.

International Women’s Day was celebrated in Sydney on Saturday 10th March 2018, with a rally and march, and members of Jura were there among the more than 2,000 participants (ABC News). The brightly-dressed Asian Women at Work troupe headed up the march from Hyde Park along Castlereagh Street to Belmore Park.

Since 1995 Asian Women at Work supports Asian migrant women workers in low paid and precarious employment across Sydney, including clothing outworkers, clothing factory workers, cleaners, restaurant workers, manufacturing workers, nail and beauty workers, aged care workers, and child care workers. Michelle Zhou from Asian Women at Work shared many stories of migrant women being exploited, including this one: "A group of migrant workers where I used to work are suffering from urinary tract infections, because they are not allowed to take regular toilet breaks."

Report and photos by Leanne.

Jura is pleased to publish this article by John August. John reviews "Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life", which is published by Black Rose Books Canada, and is available at Jura. From time to time, Jura publishes articles on our blog by guest contributors. Please note that articles by guest contributors do not necessarily the position of the Jura Collective.

Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life – a review, and some thoughts on Veblen
By John August

I've long been a fan of Veblen, who had some very interesting things to say; I've also read "Mutual Aid" by Kropotkin, which had some intriguing biological ideas. So, when I saw this book by Louis Patsouras, I thought it would be interesting to get an anarchist perspective.

But what was so fascinating about Veblen, at least, his "Theory of the Leisure Class"? You can look at the ruling ( "Leisure" ) class and their abuses. But Veblen made a quite different attack. While the wealthy justified themselves through their supposed contribution, Veblen took a crack at what it meant to be wealthy.

Rather than being the "enterprising" people they claimed be, they were some sort of hybrid of the "upper class twit" out of the UK, together with the vain superficial elements of the French Royal Court. They were a bunch of inane, superficial, stupidly competitive idiots.

Veblen came up with "conspicuous consumption". The leisure class were consuming for show, not use, in competition with others who were doing the same. Rather than fist waving against the injustice, his analysis was anthropological, with a moderate amount of distance combined with a tone of wry amusement. Because it was not "fist waving", it had all the more impact.

He undermined other ideas about consumption. For example, the more you have of something, the less you want. But, if you're putting together a collection, or you're trying to show off, more is better. Having 10 prestige cars rather than just 9 makes a difference.

The leisure class made a show of distancing themselves from manual labour. Women were ornaments, and it was important that they consume for show, to make the husband worthy. Veblen called it "vicarious consumption". It was also important that women not do anything useful, which might be seen as work.

The effort in selling, not making, undermined the "productive economy". It's an echo of Galbraith, that the economy sells useless stuff people don't need in order to keep people employed. Of course, in the background, there is technological innovation we benefit from, but the "waste" is also clear.

Then there's "planned obsolescence". Things can fail early, prompting replacement. Further, you might replace something before it has stopped working, because the replacement is more "modern" ... or perhaps even, just "more trendy". In using something better, you've thrown the old one away. Have you really progressed that much?

Veblen undermined the idea commodities were useful and worthwhile. When something is only socially appreciated rather than "useful" - why was it so important to make it? The economy making "fairy floss", so to speak? So, the economy does not really provide "useful" goods. Given this underlying waste, there's a certain muddle headedness in trying to make the economy more "productive". You're not generating more happiness - just more stuff to be wasted.

Of course, even with this in the background, people live in poverty, and there's a concentration of wealth. Nevertheless this "underlying waste" does undermine efforts to "reform" the economy in pursuit of "greater productivity". I mean, did our society actually do something useful with the previously existing productivity?

Apart from these issues, Veblen also wrote about labour and other details of the economy. However, for whatever reason, Patsouras does not seem to give much attention to the ideas noted above, for me a significant and intriguing part of Veblen's perspective.

I sent a letter about the following incident to the editor of Sydney Morning Herald. Of course they didn't publish it. 

Robert P. Barbagallo wrote this piece as part of an oral history project he worked on as a student at the University of Sydney. It is based on a series of interviews with Jura Collective members.

This piece will tell the story of the Jura Books anarchist collective as it was told to me through a series of five interviews I had conducted throughout May 2017. Five different members, both present and past, told me about their personal arrival to Jura, what they had experienced along the way, as well as their views on the Australian anarchist movement and their interpretation of anarchist ideas in general.

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Amongst the busy lunch time sprawl at a Sydney University café, between the noisy chatter of students crammed at tables, I spoke to PS about Jura Books. PS had been a member of Jura Books during the 70s through to the early to mid-80s, a time he describes as “effervescently” active—just like the noise around us. We had been speaking for an hour or so. The lunch time sprawl had dulled. We maybe spoke for too long. “My car’s about to be booked, if it hasn’t been booked already.” (I’m deeply sorry if it was) But before he left he told me:

“One of the great things about Jura over the years is that it has been an opportunity for people to learn about anarchism, to learn about how to organise autonomously and work together in a collaborative way with rules, but with rules that are collectively decided and that are changed when they don’t work. They are not just rules for the sake of rules. Where [there are] people form very different backgrounds and generations…Sid, whose now one of the ‘old guys’ was one of the ‘young guys’. LM started when she was at university as an undergraduate. I started when I was an undergrad, now I’m an ‘old guy’ there. People learned to work in an anarchist way which in our society is not—maybe now is more available in kind of networked organisations.—But it’s also a way where people give without expecting material returns. There’s something very attractive about that kind of volunteer work.”

This week saw not only International Women's Day on March 8th, but also its connection to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which celebrates its 100th anniversary. One hundred years ago, women in the cold on the bread lines began protests and riots that led to the overthrow of the 300 year Romanov monarchy. Now, before history-phobia sets in, remember that the events that those women initiated, along with the larger revolution which was initiated, affected hundreds of millions of people and have huge lessons for revolutionaries of today. Those events show as much about what shouldn't be done as what could be done to live on this planet in a peaceful, creative, fulfilling, sustainable way.

Here are some short reviews of books that are relevant to exploring those events which still resonate today. The first is by an overt marxist (Murphy), the second by an academic who is more critical and presents a more realistic view (Pirani). The next group of authors are anarchists, the first a participant in the revolution (Makhno), the other an historian with a cultural background in the area he writes about (Skirda) and the third by an anarchist/libertarian-socialist/councilist and neurologist, (Brinton), should have been read and adsorbed by Murphy, and even Pirani.

Kevin Murphy's Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class struggle in a Moscow metal factory has many fine features, including using recently opened Russian archival material, and attempting to bring women into the revolutionary story. One of the strongest features of the book is in bringing the reader into many of the struggles and arguments on the factory floor during the revolutionary period and the 1920s to early 1930s. Like the next book reviewed, by Pirani, this is a marvelous window into the past, and includes aspects of the social life of the workers and bureaucrats as well as into the factory floor meetings. However, Murphy's main theme is to show how the life of workers was so much better during the era when Trotsky was around as compared to Stalin's rule. What he does not do is recognise how the repression of the Russian people started with the beginning of Bolshevik rule, and certainly may have accelerated under Stalin, but Trotsky, Lenin and the rest were just as complicit in the silencing dissent. Stalin merely built his machine on the foundations of the previous rulers. Much of evidence that the author presents is based on the Bolshevik/Communist Party's meeting minutes, thus a biased account is inevitable. Murhpy just seems sour that Stalin gained the crown instead of Trotsky: there is no evidence to say that Trotsky would have behaved any better, and much to say the opposite. On a positive note, the attempt to look at what was happening 'on the factory floor' is a bonus. Just keep your eyes open as you walk with the author, or you may trip over a litter of 'the party directed' and the 'the party committee expelled x' – accepting the party records as an almost solely valid account of worker reality leaves me with wanting a fuller, more accurate account.

Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-1924: Soviet workers and the new communist elite is along similar lines as Kevin Murphy's book, reviewed above, however it is a vast improvement. The main strength is in not having a seemingly ulterior motive, an inherent bias that clouds the narrative. Pirani does take us onto the factory floor, but uses a wider range of evidence and has a far more refined analytical capacity. Here we read an honest attempt to examine the relationship between the Bolshevik/Communist Party and the working class in the factories, not merely examine the arguments between one set of authoritarians within the Party and other sets of would-be bosses, each set wanting to take over the reigns of power via that very same Party. While Pirani uses similar archival material from Party and Secret Police records, his aim is to find out why and how the growing bureaucratic machine succeeded in destroying worker's power, democratic worker decision-making structures, and the increasing terror used to maintain control over the population, although focusing on this process in the working class factories and districts. Given the focus on the period 1920-1924, the author misses analysing the previous period, 1917-1920, when the foundations for the revolutionary retreat began and the tactics used to repress dissent within the Party were formulated to repress those revolutionaries outside the Party. Good book, though.

Nestor Makhno wrote an autobiography, now published in English in three volumes by Black Cat Press in Canada, The Russian Revolution in Ukraine, Under the Blows of the Counterrevolution (April-June 1918), and The Ukrainian Revolution. These books tell the story of Makhno, a peasant/proletarian's role in building a huge voluntary army in 1917 to fight the invading armies after Lenin ceded the Ukraine to the German & Austro Hungarians in order to end Russia's involvement in World War One. The Ukrainians didn't like the deal and Makhno, the former factory worker, with a small band of supporters, took up a guerilla campaign to free the predominantly agricultural region from the new oppressors. Not only was it a struggle against invaders, but also a fight to establish a revolutionary society that was based on anarchist principles. Within a few months a large area was liberated and new social systems developed by the peasants on the land and the workers in the towns. This is an exciting account of the ups and downs of four years of struggle, not only against foreign invaders, but also against local would-be rulers who wanted to crush the Ukrainian Revolution. Well worth reading this original history.

Alexandre Skirda has written an authoritative account of the Makhnovist movement during the Russian Revolution, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack. The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine, 1917-1921. In one book, this historian has used more recently available material, as well as primary sources, such as Makhno's autobiography and those of others in the Makhno Insurrectionary Army. Skirda examines not only the brilliant military tactics of Makhno and the strategists who fought along side him, but the politics and the revolutionary principles they fought for and the revolutionary structures that were put in place, not only among the anarchist troops, but also by the Ukrainian people that had been liberated. Often missed is that the Makhnovists fought some of the greatest and last of the world's cavalry battles – against the invading Austro-Hungarian and German armies, the reactionary White Russian armies, and finally the Bolshevik troops. Stirring stuff, an exciting and fast paced read.

Maurice Brinton (aka Chris Pallis) wrote The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 1917-1921: The state and counter-revolution in 1970, but don't let that date put you off, as it hasn't really been surpassed for sharp critical analysis of the facts that happened on the factory floor during the Russian Revolution. Importantly, he firstly untangles the notion of 'workers' control' and notes that many political tendencies have trumpeted that as a slogan, from social democrats, Trotskyists, libertarian Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists. But what do they mean, and what does the concept sensibly mean at all. If the Bolsheviks said that they had installed workers control in, say, 1918, when they began dismantling the original Factory Committees that workers themselves build, and replaced them with Party controlled 'factory committees', is that the same idea? Can it be the same beast? Can it lead to the same sort of worker-controlled decision making? And ultimately, the same sort of society? Crucial questions, and ones that we still need to consider, mull over, argue around and come to conclusions about. A must read for any revolutionary, or aspiring change agent in the current times.

The Russian Revolution may have begun 100 years ago, but the challenges that it posed, not only to the monarchy of the time, to the growing capitalism, but to authoritarianism of any sort, and are as relevant today as they were then.