M-L-M Mayhem!

Since it's over a year since the 2015 CUPE 3903 strike in Toronto you would think that any Marxist analysis of its vicissitudes would, having the benefit of perspective, be somewhat thorough. Unfortunately Kyle Bailey's recent article for The Bullet  is about as thorough and rigorous as think-piece for a student newspaper. It's written from the perspective of a vacuum, with no real recognition of the legacy of the local's contentious history and as if the 2015 strike was somehow sequestered from previous strikes; it obliterates, and I'm unsure if this intentional or simply ignorant, key moments of rank-and-file "extra-parliamentary" action in 2015, culminating in the largest and longest march/demonstration in the local's history on March 27, 2015 . Indeed, although the author can be partially forgiven for a failure to recognize the strike history of the local––since the local's reality is such that it often promotes a short term perspective and del

Now that my unit has egregiously ratified a shite contract and left us in a position, come next Monday, of either crossing the picket lines of our own union or getting fired, I feel it's time to reflect yet again on the phenomenon of "paper marxists."  By this I mean those marxist academics whose entire career is built on papers and books about marxist theory but who, in practice, are often the most rank opportunists.  And since it is ultimately practice that matters for marxism, and not just a fucking career built out of published papers and books, paper marxists are about as marxist as carob is chocolate.  Except that I like carob and I don't like these pseudo-marxists. Okay, maybe it's not entirely accurate to use the term "pseudo-marxist" here.  After all, I don't want to be accused of engaging in the "no true scotsman" fallacy (but screw all these random fallacies that are supposedly laws of proper thought!), so let me rephrase: thes

I never tire of quoting Marx's statement about historical events repeating first as tragedy and then as farce, particularly since it often applies to all of the ways in which we are haunted by history and, in this haunting, end up repeating the mistakes of the past.  Now that my union local is back on strike, that statement seems entirely appropriate: if my union's strike in 2008-2009 was the tragic repetition of its previous strike in 2001-2002, then the repetitions called forth by this year's strike have already been enough to place it on the road towards farce. My analysis of the 2008-2009 strike can be found here , here , here , and here .  Much of what was outlined there, particularly the limits of trade union consciousness and a university local, as well as the way line struggle in even these spaces emerges, still holds for the current strike.  There are, of course, differences this time around that make the event of 2008-2009, with all of its limits, far more radi

Recently, due to conversations in both internet forums and concrete life, I have been thinking again about the class position of the so-called intelligentsia ––academics, university students, artists, and other "mental labourers"––especially in the context of the centres of capitalism.  While I find the somewhat pernicious trend of leftwing anti-intellectualism extremely problematic, I have also found the inverse intellectual resignation troublesome.  It is one thing to argue that the intellectual life should be opened up to those who lack the privilege of access, but it is quite another to argue for the primacy of the privileged leftwing intellectual–– especially  when these intellectuals often defect to the bourgeois camp, or at the very least show no interest in agitating for revolution, time and time again. This topic concerns me because, obviously, I currently belong to this class of intellectual workers: I sell my labour in a casualized academic environment while wo

This is the fourth and final instalment of my analysis of the 2008-2009 Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE], local 3903's strike.  (The first part can be found here , the second here , and the third here .)  Again, I have posted this essay because the local (which is also my local) is in its next round of bargaining and hopefully this analysis will remind those involved (some of whom still read my blog) of the problems that disrupted the last round of bargaining.  Since history repeats itself sometimes as farce, this essay series is especially relevant due to the last GMM I attended: the usual suspects, many of whom openly embraced the "right-opportunist" political line of the last strike, attempted to disrupt the bargaining process (again with the same left-sounding language) by arguing for a dubious split in the executive body. I have delayed posting this final part because (surprise, surprise) most of my readers don't know or care about the labour struggle

This is the next part of an analysis of the Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE] local 3903 strike in 2008-2009.  The first part can be found here and the second part can be found here .  Although I am mainly posting this because CUPE 3903 is about to enter its next round of bargaining, and I know that my readership outside of Toronto (and maybe some within Toronto) may not be interested in the strike of a single local, as I noted before, I think the analysis is important because it examines how political line struggle manifests within unions, the limits of trade union consciousness, how to understand right and left lines in these contexts. Anyhow, after the following section there will be only one more concluding post in this series and I can get back to ranting about other things that my readership as a whole will find more interesting. (Again: apologies for the format.  In the first post of this series I tried to fix the formatting to resemble my usual posts and it took

Here follows the second part of my analysis of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903's [CUPE 3903] strike in 2008-2009.   In the first part I discussed the general context of the strike as well as the internal dynamics, but here I focus primarily on how the two-line struggle that would define the vicissitudes of the strike, eventually leading to the triumph of the bureaucratic-right line, emerged in the months leading up to the Strike Mandate Vote. Although this might seem to be a boring history of a tiny local for most of my readers (those of us who spend a lot of time active within a local often start to imagine that our struggles are not as significant as we imagined), and I'm mainly reproducing this document because of the failure of the book to materialize and 3903 is about to enter bargaining again, I think the analysis is useful for a variety of reasons: 1) it demonstrates the need for something larger than trade union organizing; 2) it represents the lim

What follows is the first part of an essay I wrote around two and a half years ago at the end of the 2008-2009 Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE] Local 3903 strike in which I participated.  This strike turned out to be the longest in our sector and resulted in back-to-work legislation.  One of its motivating reasons was, like so many other strikes these days, the casualization of labour and thus the lack of job security in the midst of a recession. In any case the same local is entering its next bargaining term so I figured it was appropriate to post this essay (that was initially meant to be part of a post-strike book that failed to materialize), especially since I feel that some of the key insights many of us grasped at the conclusion of that strike, and that I tried to report in this essay, are now forgotten in this next round of bargaining–-a round which seems highly unlikely to produce a strike. One of the problems with participating in a labour strike is that, unless