A Class Action
An email excerpt:
Jackie: Lots of successful campaigns (most, I’d venture to say) were preceded by many failures or only partial successes. Also, how are we defining these? Do we get active members from them? Do we build up an organizer? Do we learn some good tactics? Do we raise class consciousness? All are valid as well as the obvious “Do we organize a local.”
Me: Also, I think ‘raising class consciousness’ as a metric is a cop out. Its what we say when we did shit all but talked to people. It’s unverifiable, generally not useful without actual organization around it, and mostly just what we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.
I was lucky enough to participate in probably my first serious action (i.e. it produced tangible results) here in Catalonia. It involved a lot of standing around and I ironically ended up thinking a lot about how this action reinforces class consciousness (after having slagged it mercilessly in the preceding email). So here’s the details:
It was an information picket at a suburb university, we had a two-sided handout in wordy and less-wordy form. There were multiple access points but it was manageable with about three groups. I was initially confused about the objectives, and clearly everybody else was as well. Before arriving I thought we were doing a full blockade, but later thought we were just handing out flyers, then later still I was informed that our objective was to ruin traffic around the university. It became obvious that the objective was to functionally block the university without necessarily announcing it. That didn’t require actually stopping everyone, which is an important distinction.
What I noticed during the initial phase, when we were just pamphleting, is that after a certain period of time the pamphlet became the passport. We started getting cars who already had a pamphlet and it was almost cute the way they would desperately wave it in order to get past us. What I realized was that this was an assent to our power. Whether or not they acknowledged the legitimacy of our makeshift passport, they acknowledged our power. Not only that, we can have a more lasting effect with the ‘pamphlet as passport’: If these people plan on leaving campus and returning, they have to carry that pamphlet with them the entire day. All of a sudden a shitty piece of propaganda has acquired the status of one of those critical things you carry around with you every day.
All of this was subtle ‘could-have-beens’ that I don’t think really sunk in for anyone else. Is it because I’m grasping here, or is it because we don’t normally think in terms of us having power? I think is is the latter, raising class consciousness needs to have a component that acknowledges the fact that we are using and wielding power. We don’t really have the ability to be surgical with it so it mostly takes the form of “We will fuck your shit up if we don’t get what we want.” This kind of recognition of the core truth of a strike action is critical. The ‘what we want’ part can be fair, equitable, and irrelevant without a foundation of ‘we can and will fuck your shit up.‘
Class consciousness is not just “Oh my buddy and I at work have the same grievances.” It is the acknowledgement of our common power and our willingness to use it for our benefit. Exercising that power, even in small ways like pamphlet-as-passport, demonstrate class consciousness and that is the bread-and-butter of day-to-day class struggle. The producers have a demand of the managers, they improve their position by demonstrating their class consciousness. But my ideal isn’t to have a society where the producers are simply in a better bargaining position, it is to switch the balance of power entirely. Here I think a second event from the action is instructive.
Eventually the cars started to get backed up pretty bad, especially when we were only allowing one car through at a time. Being the foreigner who couldn’t speak the language, a good role for me was clearly traffic direction. So I directed traffic effectively for awhile. When one of the organizers came to check up on me I queried whether we were trying to fuck up traffic or distribute propaganda, because we were doing really good of the former, but I wasn’t sure how effective the latter was when people were furious for having to wait 10-20 minutes to get anywhere. Fortunately we were trying to (with success) disrupt traffic.
But why bother in the first place with traffic direction? Not managing people would create additional havoc that adds to our existing disruption, thereby adding to the basis of our class power. I think I instinctively want to prove that we are capable of managing and maintaining some sense of order because how we act now reflects on how we would act if we become dominant. If the population at large only ever sees us causing a mess then they will inevitably turn to the forces of reaction to defend them from the demon anarchists. I’m not saying this should stay the cudgel of the working class — it should still come down like a pile of bricks on our target and when the dust has cleared I am happy with leaving the mess for the ‘haves’ to clean up. But managing the unintended consequences of actions should be part of any strategy which has a goal of fundamentally altering the balance of power. In the case of our action, we could have let the drivers eventually cause a traffic accident. Without our intervention it was not a question of if, but of when.
If our objective is to solely cause enough havoc to force bosses and bureaucrats to cede to our demands, then sure, let the cars crash and burn. But the secondary function of revolutionary unions has always been to prepare its membership to assume the duties of a functional society and I’m not sure we do that. We must be more capable at brinkmanship while simultaneously being able to manage the potential fallout of it. Within revolutionary unions we understand the need and execution of brinkmanship better than mainstream unions, but I’m not convinced we’re preparing for control.
Whenever you make a demand such as “don’t cut workers wages”, people will get up and ask you “what should the boss do instead to cut costs?” anarchist-communists shouldn’t then sit down and draw him up a business plan, but say managing the business is the managers’ business, we care about our own interests.
–Joseph Kay, Libcom.org
Radicals are good at raising class consciousness. The quote characterizes that sense of a common class interest and, more importantly, how we relate to the managers of capital. I want to consider what we should address in our direct action if we ever want the managers’ business to be our business. We have half the formula in place: Our actions should demonstrate power to the boss and if possible the public. That achieves whatever our short-term objective, be it shutting down a university or getting a workers back-wages. I propose that we must also consider collateral damage beyond our objective because this demonstrates responsibility to the public. Having the public recognize both power and responsibility being displayed in class struggle swings their support away from conservative reaction and paves the way for the abolishment of class roles. The public will see the abolishment of class roles as a reversal of positions and it is critical that they see working class people as responsible enough to hold their new class position. To exercise class power without showing the ability to manage the after effects on bystanders is to shoot the enterprise of revolutionary unions in the foot.