Sunday, April 21, 2013

Collective Organization and the IWW

What is a collective organization? Collective means that it is the coming-together of multiple different people to act as one, organization means that it has a structure and an existence beyond the individuals involved.

In the IWW, we are far too much of an organization and not enough of a collective. Much of this has to do with the lingering effects, psychological as well as administrative, of being a tiny crew that bears the banner of a famous union. There is a very slight continuity between the current organization and the union in its heyday. That's fine, it's not important to get caught up in concerns about the "authenticity" of repping the IWW's name and vision. But  because the organization became a tiny crew of people who supported its ideals in the mid-century and has only slowly crept back towards functioning as a workers' organization within the past decade or so we have some serious problems to overcome.

The organization, being the thing that has a structure and exists beyond us, as an entity that we create and has its own culture and practices, which can be communicated to people, is moving in more or less the right direction, as most members would probably agree. We are taking on more fights, improving our practice and our ideas, attempting to nail down our administrative practices and become more effective. We are growing, building more members into the organization, who hopefully take on new work themselves.

One of the things that is an ongoing theme in our practice is our relationship to collectivity though. We are quite effective at articulating what it means to be a collective organization on the shopfloor: workers creating their own cultural practices of resistance, taking actions that threaten the boss's dictatorship over work, putting forward ideas of alternate models of how power should flow. It's clear to most people who attend an organizer training or who are brought into a good workplace campaign what exactly the collective experience or collective action means. Yet our weakness is in employing this same sense of collectivity to the organization beyond the shopfloor.

The incongruity between attending a shopfloor committee meeting and a branch meeting or between administering a shop committee and the International is pronounced. Instead of focusing on building peoples' abilities and consciousness, as a group, our administrative structures generally emphasize individuals. Committees, at both the local level and the international, tend to be centered around the few persons that serve on them and their particular visions. Membership outside of a shop committee becomes a question of an individual paying dues (or even signing up online, the most atomized practice of all!) not a group paying dues. In organizing committees we figure out how to keep people learning, keep the good ones involved and keep the difficult ones out until we work on them. In our administration we figure out how to keep people in at all costs, regardless of what they do, as long as they pay dues.

Whereas effective organizing committees pay much more attention to the skills and abilities, the social connections and personalities of its members, the branch pays more attention to who attends meetings, who pays dues regularly, who talks the most. Obviously, different branches and different committees are variable and not all of them fall victim to the same problems to the same degree. But as a general pattern, organizing committees are collective and administrative units are organizational.

A key task in the next few years must be for the organization to figure out how to take its collective approach to solving problems with the boss and turn it into a collective approach to solving questions of the class struggle on a class-wide basis. When we were a tiny organization whose primary requirement for entry was whether or not a person believed in the ideas of the IWW and revolutionary unionism, we were necessarily oriented towards individuals. But as we grow and as we begin actually engaging in widespread collective action and organizing on the shopfloor, we must figure out how to move away from being an association of individuals who believe in the IWW's ideas to becoming a collective organization of people who are doing the IWW's work. Factors like political vision, organizing experience, links through the class, internal hierarchies, class composition and beyond both play into this problem and are perpetuated (or suppressed) as a result of this individualized nature of the organization's life. How do we go forward together?



3 comments:

  1. hey JO'R,

    I like the issues you're raising here but I have trouble understanding the individual vs collective stuff. I also get the sense that you're implicitly saying 'collective' means everyone doing the same thing, or something involving everyone. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, I dunno.

    Anyway you talk about one kind of collectiveness in our shop committees and how you want there to be a similar kind in the rest of the organization. I think that's helpful - what works well in our organizing? How can we do similar stuff in the rest of the organization's life? Those strike me as great questions and I think the approach to developing and mentoring people and so on probly should be the pretty much the same in both parts of the organizations. Still though I don't know that collective or not really gets at this. (In part because there lots of different ways to be 'collective' and I get the sense that you are for one kind of collectiveness but against another, but again I'm not sure I understand.)

    You talk about extending one of kind of collectiveness from the shopfloor into the rest of the organization but for some of this I don't recognize the shopfloor collectiveness as you talk about it here. You say "our administrative structures generally emphasize individuals. Committees, at both the local level and the international, tend to be centered around the few persons that serve on them and their particular visions." That's seems pretty true to me, except that you're basically saying "because of the way leadership works in the organization, I'm going to call the organization insufficiently collectively." That seems especially weird to me because what you say about the organization administratively seems true of our shop committees too. Our shop committees "tend to be centered around the few persons that serve on them and their particular visions." Our shop committees are collective in one sense, but not in the sense to where everyone pulls the same weight and contributes equally to defining and deciding. At least not for a lot of the early life of our shop committees. Our shop committees almost always go through a phase where a minority of the committee has more skills and experience, does most of the work, and has too much control over definitions and decisions. And the committees always spend a long time being a minority within the larger workforce. When our shop committees get relatively large (or in our campaigns that are made up of interactions between multiple shop committees) then what we have is interaction between multiple minority committees and multiple more-active-minorities-of-committees (the core organizers or factions among the core organizers). I think that's basically the same in the administrative structures of the organization - relationships between minorities and more-active-minorities-within-minorities. Those minorities are all collective, in their own ways, and the larger organization is made up of multiple interacting and sometimes contending collectives.

    That said, I think if we have examples of shop committees that became more majority driven and who got more people active who were previously less active, I think it'd be great if we could draw lessons from that to apply within the rest of the organization outside our shopfloor organizing, like what made all of that possible and what could be done to make similar improvements possible in rest of the organization.

    take care,
    Nate

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Nate, late in getting back to you on this. You said: "That seems especially weird to me because what you say about the organization administratively seems true of our shop committees too. Our shop committees "tend to be centered around the few persons that serve on them and their particular visions." Our shop committees are collective in one sense, but not in the sense to where everyone pulls the same weight and contributes equally to defining and deciding. "

    I think that's true and I think it's something we need to try to push past. I think it's possible that what I'm diagnosing here as a problem of administration is really a problem of the organization. We need to figure out how to create majority-driven organization, both in our shop committees and in our administrative structures. I think your point about applying lessons from the shopfloor to the rest of the organization is really crucial. We need to stop thinking like the day you take out a red card you magically become a high-level militant. There are real differences in political experience and organizing capacity within the organization and when we pretend those don't exist, basically when stop organizing each other internally, we create a situation where minorities run things. These minorities tend to be the ones who have the most political experience or are at least able to speak the language of politics most effectively.

    Basically, the shopfloor Wob vs GMB Wob divide has not gone anywhere in the past 5 years I've been in the organization and I think that it's perhaps the most crucial divide in the union right now. I think by thinking through how we create more collectivity, which means at the very least giving people the access politically (through 1on1s, group conversations, etc) to these themes like administration and decision-making, we can think about how to break down these distinctions. Sorry, being a bit rambly here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree on all counts.

    I think I hear you saying (though maybe I'm reading in my own concerns) at least two things. One: we're not majority run enough. Two: our membership are kind of all over the place in ideas and experience and whatnot. I'm not sure I agree with you about the first thing, but/and I personally am more concerned about the second than the first in general. For me personally, the majority thing matters mostly for the ways it does/doesn't shape the membership (how much does it fix the second thing). I also think that serious improvements on the first will only happen after serious improvements on the second. I think that eventually it can get to the point where we are majority-run enough, and in such a way, that our majority-run-ness is a force that maintains and improves the quality of the membership. I think the quality of the membership has to be at a certain level before that will happen.

    take care,
    Nate

    ReplyDelete