Preparedness

It almost seems facile to write it down, but I'm realizing that if organizers are not prepared to do what is necessary to win, they basically invite defeat. I say it seems facile because on its face, that should be obvious, right? It probably says so in the Art of War and a dozen other famous manuals on strategy.

And yet. Frequently this simply doesn't happen to the degree that it should. The work of preparing to do what is necessary to win is a task that I think all too often escapes organizers, because it means having real conversations with people about things that scare them and often scare the organizer. In union campaigns, we talk about inoculation as something that we do to prepare people for the boss's eventual and inevitable retaliation to our organizing. We talk about escalation, about preparing to take next steps, which are more massive or more intensive. Yet I think connecting those two ideas is something that we often don't do in the moment (or at least I've seen IWW campaigns frequently do this.) We need to both prepare an escalation plan and prepare our people for what it will feel like. Escalation requires logistical work to carry it out, but it also requires emotional work to do so.

It's a very different task to sit down with your coworkers and plan a march on the boss than it is to talk about staging a workplace occupation or totally crashing the company's business in order to scare other capitalists in the industry. While the three tactics may be connected in our timeline, they don't feel the same as they are being put into play. It may be easy when we're sitting down and talking over our escalation plan for everyone to say "Okay sure, after he does this and we do this and so on for awhile, then we'll just march in, sit down and refuse to leave til he negotiates." But what happens if we haven't discussed what that will feel like and the emotional fallout from it will be is that in the moment later, when we've finally reached the proper point in our timeline, people clam up. All of a sudden what seemed like such a good idea from the remote and analytical space of creating a campaign timeline seems really scary. Do I really want to risk my safety and my family's livelihood on this? So far everything we have done hasn't worked, so why should this?

In some ways the creation of an escalation plan is a project that works backwards on workers' consciousness, because it says that things will not work for a really long time and then we hope that they will. Yet while this sounds good on paper, in the course of the campaign it doesn't feel like a neatly worked-out plan, and the confidence that we had when we wrote it can evaporate. So the plan works against our consciousness in the lived-in moment of the emotional present, because all we see when we are escalating is that management refuses to meet our demands. It's only after management does so that we can look back and see ourselves at the top of a long staircase that we've mounted. From the staircase itself, the stairs look endless. And what's worse, as we get higher up them, there's a greater chance that we'll fall and falling is dangerous from this high up.

So how can we fight this problem? First, we need to inoculate workers about what struggle feels like so that they don't get scared when it looks like struggle isn't working the way we thought it would. We don't design escalation strategies because we think the first tactic will work right away, and it's important to let people know that we plan for future actions precisely for that reason. Escalation strategies should not be talked about as a series of actions that we might have to do if the bosses don't agree to our demands earlier. They must be explained as a series of actions that we will prepare for and commit to fully because we expect that all of them may need to be used to win.

A plan to win is not just a list of things that come after one another in sequential order. Escalation means anticipating what kind of pressure needs to be built to combat your opponent's moves. The assumption is that they will not react to your actions until a certain threshold of intensity, be it emotional or financial, is encountered, at which point they will cave. If that assumption is correct, then we need to predict what kind of pressure is necessary to actually get what we want and shoot for that the whole time, building up to it in a way that educates workers but that has a clear finale. This means organizers may need to do some sober analysis when creating an escalation plan, anticipating exactly how intense things may need to get in order to get what they want. Discussing this level of intensity with workers early on and frequently during organizing could help deal with the complicated feelings that people will encounter when it's finally time to put them into practice. A stitch in time saves nine, as my mother used to say.

Additionally, we should think about creating an escalation plan as not simply another committee task but an organizing task like any other. Normally when I've seen escalation plans being developed, organizers write a long list of tactics down and everyone discusses which ones should or could be used, and then assembles them into some kind of order. I think this construction of the event leads people to mentally distance themselves from the more intense actions. "Oh well that's way later on the timeline, it probably won't get to that."

Instead we should talk about escalation by asking people what they think it would take to win, and then discuss how we will build our capacity with smaller actions until we get there. Asking workers how they think they will feel if they've been on strike for a month or how they will talk to their boss on Tuesday if we do a sit-down with massive community support on a Monday might inoculate people a little bit to the ideas. I've found myself saying recently that workers should always choose the demands for a campaign but organizers should choose the tactics. This is a question of strategy because organizers should know which tactics will lead us away from revolutionary unionist ideas (running an NLRB election, relying on lawyers, etc) but they will still emerge organically from workers who don't have as much experience. I still think that's right but I think frequently organizers discussing the tactics means that the conversation is not an organizing conversation, but an academic one. I think it's SolFed that talks about associational unionism and conflictual unionism. Here's an example that needs to combine both elements to be successful. Discussing escalation seems like a detached calculus about conflict but actually has strong emotional and personal questions tied into it.

Escalation is often thrown around like it's a project that's purely a power game. And there's a strong element of truth to that, but there's also a question of how we engage people to prepare for fighting. An escalation plan with good ideas but no one willing to implement is a symptom of an undemocratic organization. An escalation plan with ideas that won't win but which gets everyone behind it is the symptom of an unorganized organization. If we don't understand the feelings that are going to accompany the long, slow battle in front of us, we will be unable to carry that battle out. If our analysis of how to win is correct, then our will to put that analysis into play must be similarly sharp.