Letter to Long Haul in reply to Paul Buhle
I’m excited about the recent publication Long Haul (https://longhaulmag.com/about/) which describes itself as a "quarterly magazine of worker writing about culture and organization on and off the shop floor, past and present, in and outside of unions," preferring that such writing “be maximally concrete” and “grounded in particular workplaces and struggles.” As I think I maybe mentioned here before, I can’t remember, I was part of a blog for a while with similar aspirations though less clearly articulated, less well-focused, and less professionally executed. I’m particularly proud of our coverage of the struggles at Canada Post from roughly 2010-2015 http://recomposition.info/tag/cupw/ and our series on work dreams and work’s effects on sleep: http://recomposition.info/tag/sleep/ Anyway, my point is, Long Haul is the kind of thing I’ve been interested in for a long time and I find it exciting as a new development. You should check it out.
The first issue includes a lovely essay by the great Paul Buhle about his political experiences over time and the changing contexts of those experiences. It’s very worth reading. He characterizes his political life as “a syndicalist journey.” I like the essay a lot, and do go read it. Then subscribe to Long Haul, as these kinds of efforts need your support and are much more ephemeral than they seem. They matter in the present as seeds of a better long term future and they will matter in the worsened short term future as past efforts to make a better world, efforts that can be reactivated in new contexts as long as they continue to circulate within the movement and the working class. (There’s a very good article on what makes critical theory critical in the new issue of New German Critique, by William Paris. It’s on the academic side and by a philosopher, none of which I mean as a dig, I like the article very much, I just want you to know what you’re getting into. It’s here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article/52/2%20(155)/11/402176/What-Does-Critical-Theory-Have-to-Do-with-Self The article talks among things about the importance of a working class public sphere as part of the preconditiosn for making left intellectual work meaningfully left - in the sense of helping making a contribution to moving humanity toward emancipation, rather than ‘left’ being just an adjective describing a writer’s individual feelings and values. I think a lot in Paris’s article is good and interesting and the bits about how experiences of the world we’re forced to inhabit are in need of interpretation, which in turn is informed by theoretical and political perspective. That’s part of the value of projects like Long Haul: they help to educate experience, to paraphrase Paris, and, closely related, form elements of a working class public sphere, a place where working class people can discuss and think together, and resources to enrich that discussion and thinking.) So do support Long Haul if you can.
That said, while I appreciate much about Buhle’s essay, and his contributions more generally as a scholar and an activist intellectual, I am, as a good Marxist, preoccupied by disagreeing (that is a joke and is also, coincidentally, entirely true), so I’ve written a letter to Long Haul disagreeing with some specifics of Buhle’s essay (you should definitely read the essay and I do like it a lot, but the bit I disagree with is small, a remark in passing that I summarize here so you could read my letter before reading the essay if you wanted. You do you, frienemy, and know that I support you either way while also privately judging you a little – I appreciate that you read my little blog but surely you have better things to do…?), and after disagreeing on those specifics I spend a little time generalizing about some larger matters of, I don’t know, political spirit? I’m putting the letter up here so it will live somewhere, and I’m going to send them a link to it in case they’re interested (on the one hand, they seem open to dialog, which is great, and on the other hand I’m dull and long-winded so their - and let’s be honest, right this very second, your - interest may flag, and fair enough! I bore me too!) Anyway enough throat clearing, onto the letter to Long Haul.
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Dear Long Haul,
I write in a spirit of comradely objection to an element of Paul Buhle’s “Syndicalist Journey” essay in your wonderful first issue. I appreciate much about the essay and Buhle’s contributions in general but I disagree strenuously with Buhle’s assertion in passing that “the IWW effort with Starbucks almost a couple of decades ago fell short” due to “not enough financial reserves or infrastructure to fight giant corporations.” I was an active supporter of that organizing for quite a long time, providing moral support and being a sound board and so on. I make no claims of the importance of my efforts but I was active enough in IWW circles in and around that campaign that I feel I can say as a well-informed participant that Buhle’s assessment of not enough money or infrastructure is mistaken. I would also point readers to this history of the IWW’s organizing at Starbucks, in two parts: https://organizing.work/2021/10/what-worked-and-what-didnt-a-history-of-organizing-at-starbucks/ and https://organizing.work/2021/10/what-worked-and-what-didnt-a-history-of-organizing-at-starbucks-part-ii/
I think it bears mentioning that the IWW organizing at Starbucks won some significant concessions on pay, conditions, health and safety, and greater control over scheduling. ‘Where are those gains now?!’ critics might rightly ask, but then, where are many union gains now after years of our class enemies being on the attack? I’d be the last person to call the IWW organizing at Starbucks perfect, it was far from it, but the organizing did, so to speak, punch way above its weight class and it won gains for far larger numbers of workers than actively participated in the campaign. The organizing also taught many participants a lot and changed lives, in keeping with the spirit Buhle’s “syndicalist journey” evokes.
That aside, the campaign had some significant infrastructure, connecting members in multiple US states and at least some members in Canada, both electronically and via in-person gatherings, both campaign specific and as part of larger IWW gatherings (I am no longer active in the organization due to the pressures of aging, parenting, and my stupid job, so I can’t speak as much to what’s going on now, but for many years the organization held what it called ‘organizing summits’ bringing together organizers from around the US and Canada and sometimes further away, to compare notes and camaraderie).
Nor were “financial reserves” nearly so much an issue as Buhle’s remark suggests. Measured in terms of money in the bank, of course, the IWW campaign at Starbucks had little, especially when compared to many other unions. On the other hand, to put it very crudely and arguably objectionably, the IWW acquired an absolutely massive amount of person-hours for very low cost, since the organizing was overwhelmingly volunteer-driven. Before I was active in the IWW I was briefly an organizer for AFSCME. In both contexts I attended similarly-sized meetings of organizers. As I said the Starbucks campaign organizers were generally unpaid and were themselves working at Starbucks. Thus the IWW’s smaller budget in dollars compared to other unions’ budgets is less informative than it may at first seem because the IWW’s money goes a lot further. (I will add as well that the IWW’s organizing and its organizer training program has long been very robust, especially for the organization’s small size.)
Why did the campaign fail, then? This is a very reasonable question and one that’s hard to answer. That goes for every organizing campaign (and it’s worth underlining that we are in a context where no one seems to have clear answers on how to get our class on the advance - if we had such answers we wouldn’t be in such dire circumstances these days). I can say that when I worked at AFSCME I organized hospital workers on a campaign that eventually failed. This was no more due to lack of “infrastructure and financial reserves” than any other campaign (and as I’ve tried to underline the way to assess adequate “financial reserves” differs depending on how staff-driven a campaign is.)
The hard reality is sometimes we lose, and sometimes we win, then our wins are washed away by the corrosive pressures baked into capitalist societies. At this level of compression and generality, there is little to say that sheds light - this is part of why Long Haul’s generally more granular approach (like that often taken by Glaberman and James who Buhle rightly praises) is important. To learn lessons that shed light we have to get more concrete and detailed. (I assume many Long Haul readers are already aware but I would point to the Organizing.Work web site as another source of valuable lessons. I’m biased of course because I’ve written for it a few times.)
I’m starting to get old and, predictably, cantankerous about the memory (or forgetting) of things I passed through, but I’d like to think that’s not the only thing at stake in this reply of mine. It seems to me that to suggest that efforts like the IWW organizing at Starbucks failed due to lack of money and to claim the project lacked sufficient infrastructure are two different ways to insufficiently appreciate a great deal about the syndicalism and the larger syndicalist spirit that Buhle rightly praises. Efforts like those fail often, but then again, less laudable (because less syndicalist) efforts do as well. That doesn’t mean they had to fail, or that they would have won if only they had more money. I also suspect, though I don’t know how to prove, that emphasizing the need for money, real as that need is, works against keeping people in a syndicalist headspace. We need money, yes, but that need as it exists concretely - meaning, how much money does a campaign need, actually? - is downstream from a lot about a campaign’s values, analysis, strategy, and tactics.
I’ve already gone on longer than is polite in a letter. With apologies, I ask you to please permit me three further brief points on what I will call the intelligence of syndicalism. First off, it seems to me that we are socialized in capitalist societies to accord respect to forms of intelligence that are individual and high status in character. I find it genuinely embarrassing saying this out loud, but it helps illustrate my point: I have a PhD and wrote an academic book, and I’m a white man, so people often assume I’m intelligent to an unwarranted degree. In my career as an academic I regularly encounter people who have internalized those assumptions about themselves and their peers in ways that make them insufferable. The older of my two younger brothers, on the other hand, has a GED, works with his hands and is a person of color, so he regularly faces the opposite assumption in cruel, hateful ways. And for the record, that I regularly call him for advice is just one of many things that attests to his individual intelligence, certainly relative to mine such as it is.
The flip side of this socialization is that we tend to underappreciate the intelligence involved in collective and low status activity (and effective opposition is always low status, generally speaking, until it is safe enough in the past to be mythologized). Syndicalism and its insights go underappreciated in part because of this hierarchical socialization. Here too projects like Long Haul, the work of Glaberman and James and co, and Organizing Work matter for helping capture the insights of these low status collective forms of intelligence, which often exist far more ephemerally, in things like marches on the boss and well run committee meetings.
Second, a vital insight of syndicalists is that a union is a complex political activity rather than a neutral vehicle or instrument. That is, a union is not just a way to get something else, and all unions are not equivalent because each is a union. I’ve written a little about this at Organizing Work (https://organizing.work/2021/03/union-is-a-verb/) and many other pieces there by other comrades and fellow travelers make similar points. This is one of the subtle dangers of talk of ‘union density’, with its implication that there is some generic ‘unionness’ that we want more of - somewhat analogous to talk about ‘voter turnout’ (we might call it ‘density of votes cast’) during presidential and congressional elections, as if all votes cast for any candidate at all are equivalent and are for the good. (I’ll add I’m particularly partisan to a specific version of syndicalist politics summarized in the Solidarity Federation’s powerful book Fighting For Ourselves, I recommend it highly: https://libcom.org/article/fighting-ourselves-anarcho-syndicalism-and-class-struggle-solidarity-federation. I touch on elements of this as well in a response I wrote to Jasper Bernes’s book The Future of Revolution: https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/the-future-of-revolution-book-review-and-response/)
Third, building on the second, and getting back to the IWW Starbucks campaign: the IWW organizing at Starbucks punched far above its weight class as I said. It did so because it engaged in a specific approach to unionism (this underlines the syndicalist insight that we want specific kinds of unions, not any-old-union equivalent to all other unions in their generic union-ness). Staughton Lynd called this Solidarity Unionism, in a book by that title that is very worth reading. (His book on labor law remains very worth reading as well, the pair work in tandem as something greater than the sum of their parts.) A few of us around the IWW called it “direct unionism” for a while, in a discussion paper by that name and ensuing debate it sparked. (Some details here for the curious: https://libcom.org/tags/direct-unionism) This kind of unionism involves taking action at timetables and in a manner set by workers themselves - and not just during contract negotiations but whenever an issue at work arises that workers want to address (ideally, in a way embedded in a strategy to build power via organization). This sort of action has important effects on employers, in that it works to constitute the employees as a rock, so to speak, which presses the employer against the hard place constituted by the imperatives capitalism places on them. (Those imperatives are summarized well conceptually but in clunky prose in the first few chapters of the second volume of Marx’s Capital. In his wonderful book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism Tony Smith summarizes the Marx in more elegant prose, I recommend his book highly.) Reducing this kind of unionism’s prevalence, specifically in order to prevent disruptions to capitalism’s imperatives, was a major goal behind the National Labor Relations Act, as I’ve written about here: https://organizing.work/2023/08/the-national-labor-relations-act-is-anti-strike-legislation/.
Another effect of the Act, unfortunately, has been to encourage the view I’ve attempted to write against here, that all unions are equivalent and are neutral vehicles for the achievement of some end like more pay. Someone enamored of that view will have a hard time understanding syndicalism’s intelligence. I don’t think it was deliberate, but the way that the Act has shaped left-wing common sense since the 1930s is a significant win for the capitalist state and defeat for the working class. (Taft-Hartley in 1947 deepened the defeat but it did so by drawing on resources the government gave itself via the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which was not a victory but a defeat or a trojan horse fostering subsequent defeat.)
This too is part of why it matters to get it right when it comes to the IWW Starbucks campaign and similar efforts. These are admittedly small instances but still real instances of that syndicalist intelligence that our class enemies (including the ones often not recognized as class enemies by many of us - good cops like Robert Wagner and Bernie Sanders, who work with the bad cops like Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump by being nominally against them) would greatly prefer that we forget. When that forgetting goes far enough, we lose the insight captured in The Internationale, that the better future summarized in “we have been naught, we shall be all” will be our class’s own action. Without that insight we begin to develop a habit of looking upward to the good cops, the ones the Internationale rightly calls “condescending saviors.” It seems to me that a big part of why Long Haul and its fellow traveler projects matter is precisely as contributions to opposing that forgetting, and continuing to insist - with syndicalist intelligence - on our class’s capacity to act for itself on terms that it sets for itself.
Thank you for your time.
In solidarity,
Nate Holdren