[discuss-dan] What is DA? New Left Lessons in Reframing Revolutionary Strategy

["Doug Bohm" <doug@denverradio.org>]

What Is Direct Action?
New Left Lessons in Reframing Revolutionary Strategy

by Mitchel Cohen
Red Balloon Collective

If you have somehow missed the beginning sections, please drop me a line
and I'll get back to you with it. <mitchelcohen@mindspring.com>. Thanx for
all your feedback.

[I’m going to try and get the first segment of this and post it – Doug]

Second Installment

Lackeys, Sellouts & Hacks, O My!

Why have unions, for the most part, concentrated on raising wages and
bettering working conditions, but not on the products the company produces,
the pollution it causes, and a wider array of important concerns? With
these thoughts in mind, I attended a talk by Leonard Woodcock, then head of
the United Auto Workers, at Stony Brook in the mid-1970s. Chairing the
meeting was a professor who was a member of the Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee, now DSA (some of us, over the years, came to believe
that DSA means “Deny Socialism Altogether”). Woodcock addressed the
question, “Are workers intelligent or simply brawny producers?”

Of course the radical students there knew that workers aren't stupid; we're
workers ourselves. But Woodcock took a foolish (but telling!) tack, trying
to prove his point by arguing, “Workers knew all along that the Ford Pinto
would explode when hit from the rear, long before ‘Mother Jones’ -- exposed
the issue. We're not stupid. We knew.”

All right, point taken. But at what cost? I leapt to my feet: “Mr.
Woodcock, if you all knew the Pinto would explode, then why didn't the
Unions stop its production? I agree that workers aren't stupid -- most of us
are workers ourselves -- but are you saying they're immoral?”

Woodcock was taken aback by the way I'd unexpectedly ‘reframed’ his point.
His answer came as no surprise: “That's not what unions are for; that's a
management decision. Our domain is wages, better benefits, work conditions.”

Woodcock, and the workers, didn't see it as within their jurisdiction to
say, “No, we will not build this!” and take action to stop it.

How could anyone knowingly build death traps? Would Woodcock have
manufactured gas chambers for Hitler, claiming “We need jobs”? We expect
that sort of immorality from capital, from corporate bosses. But unions are
supposed to be different. Why should workers accept the rules preventing us
from having a say over what we ourselves produce?

Unlike the popular organizations in, say, Haiti, unions in the U.S. are
hampstering the same old tread wheel, going nowhere fast. In 1935, after a
century of bitter and often violent battles between corporate owners and
workers, the federal government struck its social compact between unions
and capital that has governed us since; the government agreed to recognize
the legal right of workers to organize, but only at the expense of
dramatically limiting the purview of unions and worker organizations to
wage levels, some health and safety problems on the shop floor, grievance
procedures and some working conditions. (In other words, unions accepted
capital's authority over what kinds of issues they're allowed to raise and
“legitimate” ways to fight for them.) That social contract -- now being
sundered everywhere by a triumphalist capital globalized -- has been taken
by many to be inviolate, a law of nature. As a result, we, as workers,
hardly think to raise the environmental, aesthetic or political demands of
our communities, which are so crucial to our lives when we get off work, as
part of our on-the-job struggle through the union machinery and other
formations we ourselves built up over the years. “Those are for consumers
to deal with,” we're told -- as though our interests as workers can be
separated from those of environmental activists, urban “inner city” poor,
even “consumers” -- in other words, ‘us’ -- when we get home from work!

We need to stop accepting the rigid constraints imposed by capital and
government on labor unions, and instead reframe the production of
commodities as a continuously re-negotiated struggle between capital and
labor. It is that false ideological separation of “workers” (producers of
value) and “consumers” (users of value) that has locked us into an
increasingly untenable situation, and has kept unions from: refusing to
build Pintos that explode upon impact from the rear; forcing Exxon to have
double-hulled tankers; shutting down factories that dump wastes into the
Hudson River; boycotting California strawberries to stop the poisoning of
workers and consumers; and deciding, as workers, what happens with what we
produce.

The recent wave of protests that came together in Seattle, 1999, marks a
“new beginning” -- for the first time in ages, workers’ organizations in
the US began to break out of the “wages only” box, and began mobilizing
against NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO as institutions of global capital and
international trade. But let’s get back twenty-four years to Stony Brook,
for the moment.


When You're a Hammer, All Your Problems Look Like Nails

“If you don't accept our cutbacks,” GM president Wilson informed UAW head
Walter Reuther in the 1950s, “we'll automate our plants and lay off half
the work force. Who'll pay your union dues then?”
“And if half the work force is unemployed, who's going to buy all your cars
and make you rich?” Reuther reportedly shot back.

Capital works hard at maintaining the illusory wall between “workers” and
“consumers” -- a bogus term in itself, a pitiful and disempowering way to
describe workers when we're not at work in order to drive a wedge between
an alleged “middle class” (generally women) and blue collar workers
(portrayed, in the still-dominant paradigm, as mostly beer-consuming
blue-overalled men, although that always-wrong image has been changing
lately). With the assistance of trade unions, most workers have
internalized this split; it keeps us from taking action where capital is
most vulnerable and where we have the most leverage -- on the job. Capital
expends enormous sums -- part of its overall cost of production -- to
maintain the acquiescence of worker organizations to its labor/management
rules. And unions, where they have not been demolished outright by the “New
World Order,” have been instrumental in assisting the imposition of
capital's “structural adjustment programs,” at home and abroad, by serving
as a cop for the system against their own members' wider interests and
direct action impulses.

At the same time, most leftist parties accept the worker/consumer
distinction, and proselytize workers to “vote for” candidates who would
better tend to their interests. And Greens, running consumer advocate Ralph
Nader for President of the US, all-too-often present the primary clash in
our society as between “consumers” and “irresponsible corporations,” and
therein avoid confronting the system of exploitation itself. Even those
organizations arguing for a different social-economic system altogether see
job actions solely in terms of leverage to win demands. Rarely are we
encouraged to take action, on the job as well as off, to begin putting into
effect portions of the new society we'd want to live in. To the official
left, implementation of their program is to occur only ‘after’ socialists
come into control of the state.

Radicals must find ways to break down that false dichotomy between
“consumers” (and by that I mean community members, activists, etc.) and
workers. We need to create new organizational forms that go beyond the
traditional trade union ‘and’ vanguard party models which are based on
acceptance of that duality. We need to challenge what is seen as legitimate
to fight for on the job, and merge those fights with what we need in our
communities. All this entails “reframing the question” -- challenging what
we take for granted today, what is perceived as “natural” or “legitimate”
-- so that in all areas of our lives we begin to take direct responsibility
for the world around us, instead of ceding it to others exalted as
“experts”: politicians, bankers, priests, corporate execs, scientists,
media moguls, union managers, or even that dubious category: “activists.”

All of this, however, was but an unconscious impulse as I crashed my next
question against the great union leader's fortress of deception. Noting
that secretaries at the UAW offices had organized themselves, I asked: “How
come, Mr. Woodcock, you and the rest of the UAW's executive board crossed
the picket-line of the secretaries who work for the United Auto Workers but
who are part of a different union? Is that your idea of class solidarity?
What does it mean for labor when the UAW's leaders turn out to be bosses
and scabs?”

All hell broke loose. The DSA professor quickly branded me “anti-union.”
Me! Who was at that very moment organizing cafeteria workers on the campus
into our own independent union! “That's a lie!” I shouted.

“Next question!” he hollered -- Such are the devious ways apologists seek
to cover their bloody tracks. But the question still lingers: ‘Why didn't’
auto workers, knowing the Ford Pinto would explode upon being hit from the
rear, collectively refuse to manufacture such death machines, expose the
company's plans and save dozens of lives?

Raise Less Consciousness and More Hell

The challenge for any radical organization of a new type is not so much to
proselytize around political questions or exhort the exhausted to hustle
back to the barricades, but to enable us all -- particularly workers (who
are, after all, ‘us’) -- to dramatically expand our organizations' purview
to include ‘what's’ produced, and ‘how.’

In accepting the false dichotomy between workers and consumers, we allow
invisible constraints to strap us to the gears of capital and the periodic
bluster of trade union hacks and “minimum common-denominator
coalitionites.” We need to bust them open.

So we have two inter-related points of address: First, we need to reveal
the hidden environmental, political, racial, sexual and cultural dimensions
within ‘every’ seemingly economic issue. And, second, we must make it
possible to organize and fight for them on the job as well as in the
community, by taking direct action to insure company or government
compliance with whatever we are demanding. In that way, we can begin the
process of taking political, ecological and social responsibility for the
world around us.

What if nurses, for instance, decided to challenge the patriarchal and
denigrating hospitals and, instead of just striking, also set up ‘their
own’ community-based worker- and client-run clinics? And what if they
combined with AIDS activists, midwives, holistic and herbal healers,
acupuncturists, chiropractors and nutritionists to create underground
buyers' cooperatives and a qualitatively better complementary health care
system, not the same old medical meat-market based on industrial medicine
and pharmaceutical corporate profits that all the current health care
proposals are bent on preserving? ‘That’ would be a health plan worth
investing in.

What if striking newspaper workers in San Francisco publicized those
activities in their strike paper, “The Free Press,” and kept publishing it
even after the strike ended, as the “voice of labor” in the region?

What if mass-transit workers fought against fare hikes, demanded -- as part
of their union negotiations -- that transportation be free and “looked the
other way” when people walked through the gates instead of calling the
police?

What if homeless people began squatting the thousands of abandoned housing
units, and community groups rallied around them to hold back the police?
What if construction unions and neighborhoods worked ‘with’ squatters to
apprentice them, creating jobs and fixing up the buildings at the same
time, instead of (at best!) forming advocacy groups ‘for’ the homeless and
lobbying for more shelters?

What if students took over their campus newspapers until they no longer
accepted ads from companies on strike, and systematically rejected ads from
the armed forces, CIA and the Department of Defense?

What if progressive scientists and ecologists circumvented the U.S.-imposed
embargo on Cuba and helped develop that country's organic agriculture and
alternative energy programs, relieving its dependency on foreign oil,
domestic nuclear power plants, one-crop sugar economy and petroleum-based
fertilizer? What if we helped make that island a beacon for
ecologically-sound planning and alternative health care?


Turning Motion Into Movement

All of these proposals embody a radical vision that is fundamentally
democratic (with a small “d”); they are based upon direct community
participation through which people take charge over the decisions that
affect their lives on every level and minimize ‘relying upon’ petitioning
those in power to make the changes we seek.

That doesn't mean we should never petition; it means we don't concentrate
on it. Instead, we focus on putting our demands directly into effect, and
create in the here and now some tiny sliver of a future society worth
living in. These will hopefully inspire others and become bases --
liberated zones -- from which to launch further sorties against the system.
Direct Action/Participatory Democracy serves as both means and ends at the
same time.

Clearly, direct action as conceived here is not simply a more militant form
of protest, as some portray it, but a total reconceptualization of how
societal transformation comes about and the role of conscious activists in
organizing themselves to achieve it. That is, direct action is a
‘strategy,’ not just a tactic, for achieving a new society.

The strategy of direct action explicitly draws out connections between what
to demand, how to achieve it and what forms of organization we need. It
seeks to bring everything that impacts on our lives within our control.
Direct action as strategy, therefore -- even over the most mundane and
seemingly non-political aspects of daily life -- is inherently political;
it has no need to bring in “the political” from the outside, but -- in this
new way of seeing our “mission” -- uncoils the politics that is already
present and wound up in everything. As a result, it necessarily expands the
left's (and everyone else's) conception of what to consider valid political
work.

Direct action is, most of all, a ‘way’ -- a Tao. It is a strategy of dual
power based on participatory democracy, of building up the embryo of
liberated or autonomous zones (often quite temporary ones; sometimes they
are not even geographical but based on affinities around subverted norms),
which serve as communities of resistance and nurturance within the shell of
the old. They create, in effect, a parallel, communalistic universe; but
these are different from utopian communes in that they are continuously
‘engaged,’ they can't withdraw from the effects and pressures of the system
even if they want to. The more successfully they build outward from the
base of participatory democracy the more inevitably the capitalist system
comes to clash with them. Participants then fight to defend them and expand
their reach.

END SECOND INSTALLMENT OF PART ONE

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