Worlds in motion

May 8, 2007

Just a quick note to let y’all know that Worlds in Motion, our article for Turbulence, has finally been approved. All i’s dotted and t’s crossed and it’s here. That’s me with the Engels beard by the way…
The whole Turbulence experience has been a bit, well, turbulent. We wrote the bulk of the article at the back end of last year so it seems a bit stale now, altho it will improve with age, like a fine whine. But one of the tensions that’s become apparent right at the end has been the one between identity and affinity. I’ve just had a look round the back and seen that Keir’s brewing up a blog post on this very subject (“Two sugars, mate! You got any biscuits?”), so I don’t want to steal his thunder. But on the day that this happens, it does raise a lot of questions about the whole identity/affinity thing. Strange things can happen very quickly, and sometimes we find ourselves without the tools to deal with new situations. Which can itself be brilliant.
One of the oddest moments at the recent global meeting in Venice was the session on the Middle East. When Musthapha Barghouti finished speaking, the hall erupted into a massive standing ovation. We were sat at the front and it was weird to turn round and see 700 people on their feet applauding & cheering a government minister. It’s the same with Sinn Fein: one minute we all seem to be moving in the same circles, the next their preferred channels of communication are with Labour ministers. Some of this relates to sovereignty and governance. But part is also to do with how identity politics exploded in the mid-1980s. At its worst, there was an unofficial scorecard operating, a hierarchy of oppressions. Where did this come from? From below, from that drive towards autonomy and self-determination. But also from above, as parties struggled to construct a new constituency: the Labour Party with the GLC, the left with Marxism Today. Of course the miners’ strike fucked a lot of this up, as old-fashioned class war returned to the streets. And it also helped draw a line, behind which another constituency could develop: ‘You want identity politics? What about class, the biggest identity of all?’ But it’s daft to see one as good, and one as bad. Some of the most productive moments come when identity rubs up against affinity. And that was what was interesting about the Barghouti ovation. Right, I can see you’re getting bored, so we can return to this when Keir’s done his post. Class dismissed.

1 Comment

Nate May 16, 2007 at 6:26 am

Okay so it may be bad form to comment about a piece that I’m ostensibly a co-author of but I just reread the worlds in motion piece and I think the problematics/demands stuff is really great and connects up to some of what the solidarity unionism piece gets at that Todd and I did.

A shift came about in the US in the 1930s with the passage of the Wagner Act (now called the National Labor Relations Act). This established elections for unionization, legal process for bargaining a union contract, etc. This made for a shift to demands and in a very specific form of posing demands. This is often taken as a major good thing for workers and it does have its advantages in some ways, but it creates problems. In the Act it said explicitly that the point was to preserve commerce, labor peace.
Quoting from this – http://clnews.org/SolidarityPapers/IWW%20Centenary%20Keynote%20Speech%20-%20Staughton%20Lynd.htm

it’s a piece by Staughton Lynd. He talks about Martin Glaberman, who “argues that in a workplace where there is a union and a collective bargaining contract, and the contract (as it almost always does) contains a no-strike clause, the shop steward becomes a cop for the boss. The worker is forbidden to help his buddy in time of need. An injury to one is no longer an injury to all. As I say these words of Marty Glaberman’s, almost forty years later, in my imagination he and the other departed comrades form up around me. We cannot see them but we can hear their words. John Sargent: “Without a contract we secured for ourselves agreement on working conditions and wages that we do not have today. . . . [A]s a result of the enthusiasm of the people in the mill you had a series of strikes, wildcats, shut-downs, slow-downs, anything working people could think of to secure for themselves what they decided they had to have.” Ed Mann: “I think we’ve got too much contract. You hate to be the guy who talks about the good old days, but I think the IWW had a darn good idea when they said: ‘Well, we’ll settle these things as they arise’.” Stan Weir: “[T]he new CIO leaders fought all attempts to build new industrial unions on a horizontal rather than the old vertical model.””

Sometimes making demands in a certain way – in the way which the state tries to channel us toward – limits our abilities to problematize, and don’t increase our compositional power. That’s part of what can happen if one follows the mainstream model for workplace organizing – the institutional aspects, the mode of posing demands, tends to gradually undermine the bases on which the power to make those demands rested. In the process it also statifies that power. Put differently, the power to produce compositional effects, movements in social relations and subjects, declines more quickly and is more immediately limited by certain forms of posing demands – a group can still have the power to win external gains in the early stages of a local decline, but the results of those struggles are more limited to the external rather than the transformative.