How to intervene in the Class Struggle?

This down-to-earth discussion between comrades, about how to relate ideas from the left communist milieu to workers discontented with the situation at Verizon, is fresh and honest, and very revealing to someone like me who has no experience at all of this sort of thing, but is longing to know. Now I can sympathize with the difficulties comrades face. They are perhaps summed up in this comment.

" our intervention can often appear quite negative, i.e.: “We don’t know exactly what the answer is, but the unions sure don’t have it, why don’t you guys go and discuss what to do while the union isn’t looking.”

I don't see this as all negative, more a realistic acknowledgement of the facts. And if the speaker had ended with "why don't WE DISCUSS this while the union isn't looking" rather than "why don't YOU GUYS go and discuss...." it wouldn't have been negative at all. But it's easy, sitting in an armchair, to pontificate about what should have been done. As the class struggle heats up - after what seems a long break- maybe we're all going to need a refurbishing of our communicative-communist skills, which only practice will provide.

It would have been helpful too, in appreciating what the comrades are talking about, if a copy of the leaflet they criticize was provided.

It wasn't linked to in the article, but the leaflet was named and that name is searchable.  Also there is a hyperlink available to a category grouping together stuff about the Verizon strike reproduced on the site.  Maybe the addition of a direct hyperlink would be helpful.

In any case, the article's here: http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2011/08/verizon-strike

 This is a very interesting and honest discussion and I think I can really understand the feelings of  comrades who intervened there. First of all I should say that I am impressed by the comrades intervention and the depth and effort put into the leaflet -both in theory but also in the courage to distribute it! In fact this reminded me of the debate in a similar strike in turkish telekom strike when I was in the ICC.

At the time there was just a very similar scenario was played out in turkey. Turk Telekom was a telecomunication company which waas previously privatized and thus accomplished a division among the workers through forcing some of them out of the union thanks to union's passivity and actual support of the privatization! When the negotiations broke down in a collective bargaining process the union declared a strike in early 2000s. At the time we went a couple of times to discuss with the workers but we were not prepared as the comrades in case. We just did not know how to discuss the role of the union but we were troubled by the fact that the union was in total control of the strike. 

At the end the union with the intervention of the government got a 10% wage increase. In our paper at the time our majority declared this as a victory which made me frustrated. I felt that this was a defeat because the union showed its full control of workers and could use workers as a threat to the company to show that it is still a vital organ for the government. At the time this caused a crisis in our group - which was not an ICC section yet.I still think that I could not make my point very clearly then, in the heat of debate. You can find the debate here:

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2008/06/turk_telekom

Anyway my point is, I think comrades should not feel that their intervention was a waste just because they could not receive an immediate positive responce from the workers. As I tried to say, I think the ability to produce a leaflet as clear as the comrades produced, to be able to employ it as a tool for discussion and to be able to organize for this is a great issue itself. I think the comrades should be congragulated for this. 

About the union issue: I understand clearly that in the Verizon strike to put forward the union issue was a very difficult thing to do. However, this may probably be the case because the union also had an interest in the strikes victory too. In telekom case for instance, I think the union was afraid that, it was losing its position because the company ceo thought that it was an archaic and useless apparatus and wanted to get rid of them. So the strike for the union was not perhaps about the workers demands but a show off or intimidation to the state and the company that it was still a vital organ if the workers would be kept in place. So if the situation is complex like this, maybe we should just show this as it is in our interventions rather than stepping back from a criticism of the union. 

Finally, I think more open struggles are emerging even in US. This whole "occupy" issue is a signal of this. In one sense it is as if the american workers are carefully weighting their strength on the streets right now. In my perception that may indicate a clue for the more open and strong future class confrontations. If the future struggles would really be stronger than any clear criticism of the unions will be much more vital and in fact more practical. So even if my whole argument is not adressing the problem above, I would at least humbly want to say that comrades should not be discouraged by this effort. In my experience Telekom strike in turkey was only a single instance of a whole chain of struggles with increasing and open tensions which came to a point in TEKEL struggle where the unions real role became clearly visible in the eyes of a small but significiant segment of the turkish and kurdish workers. Considering the increasing level of combatitiveness of the world working class and the deepening severity of the crisis it may be only a matter of time before the american workers can come to a similar conclusion.

I hope this makes sense,

in solidarity

 I think I'm doing it wrong as they say, where can one read the leaflet?

Don't say what you know, know what to say is the very good synthesis that comes out of the discussion above. Whatever the specifics, the difficulties posed by the unions faced by the working class and its revolutionary minorities are considerable in every major capital. It's important to remember that the unions, in one form or another will, in all probability, still figure at very high levels of class struggle. I think that it's clumsy - and we've learnt that in Europe I think, to steam in with a blanket denunciation of the unions. Of course, while it's extremely important to try to demonstrate the crisis of capitalism and all its effects, not denouncing the unions doesn't mean not putting forward a perspective of self-organisation or defending forms with such content in order to bring more workers together.

The present social movement across the globe is an unprecedented phenomenom - South Africa joining the club with the proletariat and the masses coming up against the "liberating" ANC. As nationalist ideology rots along with the system, the unions here are the strongest force for the bourgeoisie in keeping the working class divided.

It's a good discussion and I agree that there's plenty to say to the working class without clumsy formulations and I alsothink that this is a question of international concern and by no means a US problem. It's also in the discussion above that we should have confidence in the working class to take up the - longer term - challenge.

Don't say what you know but know what to say, is excellent advice put forward by Baboon. Rather than condemning the unions outright, it might be easier to discuss with workers what happened, for example , in Wisconsin, and what the unions did there. If workers can draw their own, correct, conclusions, then we don't have to present the ICC answer in advance as it were. But on the various threads on this site, comrades are asking similar questions: how do we relate to Assemblies, occupations, workers groups, or striking workers. Some comrades wonder whether it's helpful to come up with an actual demand. But surely this is to fall in a bourgeois trap. An actual demand may ( will) lead to the cull-de-sac of a compartmentalised struggle. I agree with what I believe Internasionalysta is saying on a different thread, that more general approaches may be helpful, that can open up more fundamental ideas. Like, for instance, the idea that our rulers fear the contagion of revolt. For why else did they arrest 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge? It might be much better to talk about this, and have a short leaflet about it, than to scramble round for some "demand" to put forward. After all, we want workers, and people in general, to start questioning the nature and validity of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system. And in the present economic climate, there are plenty of things the bourgeoisie are doing that are open to questioning. Like: attacks on welfare, education, employment and their insatiable desire for war - while spouting about peace. But all power to all the comrades who are intervening. In solidarity.

Following up on Baboon's idea of "Dont say what you know, know what to say" I posted something yesterday morning. When I pressed "save" it disappeared completely and a message came up at the top saying it had gone for adjudication. I sent a message to Alf, via the new system, but no reply from him, and no sign of the post anywhere? Has it been " adjudicated" out of existence?

 Sorry about this Fred - I think it must be a technical error. Not my forte, but I will look into it. 

Fred - we don't moderate forum posts manually. Don't have the time. We do have a spam filter, which blocks posts that are 'spammy'. I'll take a look at the spam queue and get your post published. :) B.

EDIT -- sorted ^^

With regard to the question of how the forum is organized, may I make a suggestion? If the article that a particular thread is talking about actually appeared above the comments that people are making about it, wouldn't that be helpful? For instance, I would like to refer to what comrade H said in the original article. If I could just flick back to the article which would be above the first comment about it, that would make life easier. For me at any rate. But then I'm using an iPad and perhaps that makes things different.

All I really wanted to say to the comrades writing about their original intervention, is that an article and a leaflet are not the same thing at all. And the Verizon article is definitely an article, and definitely not a leaflet. Leaflets should be short and easy to read. Articles generally require a much more intense reading (specially ICC articles) followed by thoughtful consideration, and then discussion. We must judge what our audiences are ready for in advance.

Let's make it easy for workers to realize that what we are fighting against is capital itself, not some particular boss, manager, or political party. We are all employed by capital: and it's falling apart all over the world. That's the message. In solidarity.