kind of explicit class perspective cannot be left to chance. It requires a strategy of grassroots activist organization of the kind that informs Labor Notes and similar projects in other countries and, more immediately, the sort of rank-and-file organization exemplified in the example above. But it is also important to be clear that the possibilities of class “consciousness-raising” invoked in such activity are not the product of socialist wishful thinking but of the material roots of resistance arising from class relations and conditions themselves. The political implications of “everyday” working-class struggle are not imposed from without, but are inherent.
Looked at from a purely “political” perspective, the implications of the postal workers’ resistance to teamworking, for example, are remarkable. Not only did they succeed in thwarting the goals of a multimillion-pound “corporation” in a struggle based on workers’ rejection of supposedly all-powerful management ideology, they also resisted teamworking in direct defiance not only of their own union leadership but of the closely aligned “modernist” perspectives of the (then) prospective Labour government.39 The tradition of rank-and-file militancy that made this struggle possible was itself rooted in a series of spontaneous walkouts by postal workers that consistently flouted the draconian anti-union laws introduced by the Conservatives but stoutly backed by “New Labour.” For workers supposedly colonized by (if not ruling-class then at least reformist) capitalist ideology, this stand must carry massive potential political significance. It remains to develop ongoing organizational vehicles through which such potential can be realized.
We have already referred to the impact of cataclysmic, long-fought struggles like the Staley dispute in transforming the consciousness of their participants—in a small number of cases, with permanent effect. Yet less prolonged and dramatic strikes like the postal workers’, and more recently, that of British Airways cabin crew and catering workers, are linked to the same dynamic of detachment from both the material and ideological constraints of capitalism. Such “breaks” in hegemony, which can be acknowledged to be an ordinary fact of capitalist class relations, do not stem from any preexisting opening up of consciousness among the workers concerned. Rather, in many ways they reflect the ongoing nature of working-class consciousness in its many-stranded character, which both resists and admits the potential of a wider conceptualization of existing socioeconomic structures.
British Airways staff, particularly the cabin crew involved in one dimension of the dispute, are hardly the standard cast of working-class rebellion. Yet, like countless other groups of workers propelled into struggle, they were forced to transcend subjective conformity and conservatism by the brutal reality of (in their case) a “Business Efficiency Program” based on a £1 billion cost-saving pay and conditions package that effectively froze pay and removed overtime enhancements. In the words of one senior cabin crew member: “We are being forced to strike for our basic rights.”40
The point here, then, is not that workers need to be “incited” to resist capital by a corps of eager socialists. Rather, what is required of socialists is a commitment to focusing on and developing the implications of existing, contradictory, conflictual worker consciousness. The observation made by Lenin, among others, that the working class is ultimately far more revolutionary than any socialist “vanguard” when it comes to fully fledged struggle may seem absurd within today’s round of undramatic, economically motivated confrontations. But the point we are making here is that it is not the readiness of the working class to resist which is in question, but the understanding, channeling, development, and sustaining of that readiness—and its potential for challenging labor movement reformism from within—by a socialist leadership locating itself within the class rather than reading that class politically correct programs from without.
Transitions
In making this point we are arguing for a reversal of standard left conceptions of socialist politics. Rather than proceeding from a carefully worked out, analytically correct program to the dissemination of such analysis to the masses (of one sort or another), this shift in perspective would abandon the pursuit of programmatic rectitude in favor of a focus on, and engagement with, existing levels of working-class consciousness and conflict.
The practical corollary is full adoption of a focus on working-class interests and struggle, a focus that has traditionally proved difficult for the left. The recent “resurgence” of labor has been enthusiastically greeted by many socialists, perhaps particularly in the United States, resulting in a welcome stimulation of debate between left union officials and radical intellectuals. Unfortunately, even this degree of left turn toward some aspects of working-class realpolitik may not be adequate for what we would define as the task in hand: that of building an alternative, explicitly class-based current of resistance to capital within at least the “advanced” sections of the class.
Such an approach calls for a consistent orientation toward the everyday “economistic” demands and actions of a working class that may exhibit, for principled socialists, a discomfiting conservatism on many issues, or at least the kind of gulf between its own conceptions and those of middle-class socialism shown in Croteau’s study. Where this gulf relates to issues such as racism or sexism, it must of course be confronted; but confronted in context. Even given such difficulties, the kind of “sacrifice” of principles and program required of socialists in starting from where the working class is, rather than where they might like it to be, is in our view indispensable if existing patterns of working-class resistance are to realize their objective potential and meaning. Any such process requires from socialists the ability to see, and draw out, the political and class implications of what may appear on the face of it to be decidedly “nonpolitical” struggles.
Encouraging a process of transition from acting on basic economic demands to the explicit understanding of the class meaning of such demands may require forms of organization which are themselves “transitional.” The concept of transition is central in shaping a politics that, through its necessary roots in working-class concerns and conditions, can act to build a “bridge” between the material conditions that continuously propel workers into struggle and a political perspective that can address and make sense of that process.
Historically, structures like soviets have been the most revolutionary forms of organization that encapsulate this transitional dynamic in arising from basic mass strike movements while pointing toward class power. Such structures are of significance not least in terms of their spontaneous eruption during major episodes of working-class struggle. As such, they have been a feature not only of the revolutionary era of the First World War period but also of more “up-to-date” upsurges. In 1972, Chilean workers set up cordones to fight for the Allende government; in 1979, Iranian workers created shoras to safeguard the overthrow of the Shah. The Portuguese revolution in 1974 almost immediately created workers’ commissions that united workers across union barriers within the workplace; these developed rapidly into inter-empresa (inter-factory) committees that clearly mirrored the Russian soviets, from necessity rather than conscious imitation.
There has also been a history of political attempts to create cross-union transitional formations along the lines of the Minority Movement of the 1920s in Britain (with the Comintern encouraging similar efforts in the United States and Canada in the Trade Union Educational League, and, with less success, in France through the “friends of unity” in the CGT).41 The Minority Movement explicitly saw itself as “a ‘transitional’ organization, a means of broadening the political consciousness of discontented trade unionists.” The main idea was not immediately to push “the union leadership into militant actions from below” but rather to relate the Communists’ “work in the trade unions directly to the creation of a revolutionary consciousness in preparation for the acute crisis which would arise with the outbreak of conflict in the mining industry.”42
Along similar lines, the need to build a class-conscious, independent leadership rooted within the labor movement in anticipation of future upsurges, is now being explicitly taken up in a growing number of countries through cross-union formations of various kinds, usually based around a publication.
