LETTER FROM CHICAGO

Long-Haul is one of the more worthwhile political/publishing projects I’ve stumbled upon in quite some time. I am a  semi-recovering Trotskyist-type guy who’s spent his fair share of time hawking newspapers, so I’d like to think that I know when a publication is a waste of time.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with spending an afternoon distributing literature and washing ink off your hands, but after a while, you start to develop a sixth sense that whatever you’re selling isn’t going to actually get read by workers. Thus, you’re subsequently left pulling your hair out trying to figure out why that is. The point is to get working people to read your perspectives and act with agency, right? Yet the sort of “outside-looking-in” publications always seem to struggle to tap into very real discontent. It’s as if they’re using fire to try to light a wet fuse.

Anyhow, I’ve worked in Chicago transit on the rail side for a little under a decade and have appreciated the narratives from other rank-and-file workers in the magazine, whether they’re union or not. I could barely get Issue 2 read at work with all my coworkers asking me about the train conductor on the front cover. (We lost conductors/two-person crews in the late 1990s, so it was an easy segue into that conversation and all its implications).

So what is it I’m doing besides lamenting my current demoralization? I’ve spent years doing what a comrade once told me to do when you’re really the lone wolf advocating class struggle politics in your workplace: you run like a submarine — quiet, but deep. I still find some wisdom in that. I suppose at this point, I’m just hoping the time is approaching when we’ll all rise to the surface instead.

LETTER FROM THE DISTRICT

Zach Hicks and Olena Lyubchenko’s exposition of the Russian revolutionary factory committees in “When Scythe Met Stone” from issue 3 is intriguing. They describe the committees as forming out of absolute necessity caused by “the absence of factory managers from their stations on the second day after the February revolution.” As we consider the state of the  US labor movement today, this history and some of its primary sources raise unnerving questions. Hicks and Lyubchenko point to how these committees replaced a prior “council of elders” system with a “fundamentally different” structure: “They were elected, freely and without any kind of coercion, by a general assembly of workers of a given enterprise, with no restrictions on the active or passive electoral rights of any of the workers.” At every step, worker suffrage and democracy are emphasized in the described resolutions, even as the provisional government tries to restrain the forms of worker organization. A conference of the committees themselves proposes that workers at each factory “form a democratic organization with elected committees from the entire factory and from individual workshops for the purpose of protecting the interests of labor.”

Union democracy is often portrayed by rank-and-file organizers as a necessity, but one that is won after a local is formed. A glance at the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee’s Unite & Win guide reveals that it only discusses local democracy in relation to NLRB elections and contract fights. Scant attention is paid to how democracy could be used to determine the internal structure of organizing committees or local strategies. Like many popular organizing manuals, Unite & Win asks workers to organize for workplace democracy without any description of how democracy is done in practice and outside of relations to the boss. Our historical comrades, however, seem to have disagreed. Their first “fundamental [principle] of factory organization,” from their 1917 conference, states clearly, “The principle of collective management and broad democracy – that is, the election and replaceability of all members of the factory organization – must be the basis of the organization of factory workers in all state industries and factories.” It is the first fundamental, not an afterthought.