It’s true that the last century saw big communist organisations sideline struggles of race, gender and sexuality for class — a mistake that essentially birthed a new left that knew well that oppression doesn’t begin and end at work. But in return, this new left largely sidelined class for these other struggles, and in the ensuing decades radical union activity and union density has dwindled, and with it the left’s prospects of winning their demands has almost disappeared entirely. There is a relationship between these two things.
Anarchists feel that neither reductive ideas based in class nor other types of identity are acceptable, and that class power should be built so that it can be leveraged in solidarity with all struggles, not just those of the white working class.
WHY IS CLASS POWER IMPORTANT:
If we want revolution, we need power. We’ve seen million people protest movements fail to have their demands met because blocking city traffic for a few hours poses no meaningful threat to capital. A million workers downing tools and refusing to make Capitalists money is another story entirely. Profit is realised through exploiting workers at the point of production, and so we must organise to deny it to them at the point of production.
Furthermore, all reasonable revolutionary proposals require working class organs of power and decision-making to replace capitalist infrastructure and those working class organs must be built through struggles in the here and now.
THE STATE OF THE UNIONS:
As Anarchists, we recognise not only the class differences between bosses and workers, but also between paid union organisers and rank and file members of unions. This class difference was intensified due to the class collaboration facilitated by the Labor government and the bureaucracy of the Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU). Union officials consented to working with politicians, setting up corporatist processes that push legal means, fines, arbitration, enterprise bargaining and de-registration to manage class conflict between unions and the state. This means that today’s unions are fined huge sums of money for endorsing ‘unprotected’ industrial action taken by union members. This criminalises effective strike action and pits the interests of workers to win better wages and conditions against the interests of the union officials to maintain high wages and not be fined by the government. The current state of unions are that most are neo-liberal in function and continue to beg the Labor Party for meager scraps of recognition in exchange for a commitment to campaign for their re-election.
SHOULD WE BUILD ANARCHIST UNIONS?:
Anarcho-Syndicalists propose that we pull workers out of these stifled neoliberal unions and begin Anarchist unions, run and operated by and for the workers ourselves without bureaucrats on 6 figure wages to stop us.
The problem with this proposal is that it forces workers to accept and understand deeply the ideology of Anarchism before they can access the ability to campaign for paid lunch breaks at work. This makes Anarchist ideology a barrier to class struggle in a way that we disagree with.
The only way to not make being an Anarchist a prerequisite for union activity would be that these unions aren’t principally Anarchist at all, only worker-run and operated. Such unions could be easily pushed towards reaction, nationalism, and electoralism and tread on all other principles of Anarchism besides workers self-management, which alone is a far-cry from making a union Anarchist.
SHOULD WE TAKE PART IN EXISTING UNIONS?:
Although union density has fallen, and a substantial number of vulnerable workers aren’t in their unions, broadly Anarchists feel we should struggle with workers in existing unions where we find agreement — not because we love those unions, but because they are mass organisations of potential workers power through which we can meet and organise other workers interested in class struggle.
The idea is not to rely on paid union organisers to lead us to victory, but to build a movement of militant rank and file workers that complacent, paid bureaucrats and conservative governments can’t ignore. If the base is strong, the power will flow upwards into more accountable and democratic leadership, of shorter-tenured official positions, into more democratic processes, and into demands for broader solidarity efforts with wider struggles.
If part of that process involves workers starting new unions, because existing unions are not fit for growing class power, so be it. The goal isn’t union sign ups, it’s workers power.
