Posted by Ian M on March 12, 2019, 8:02 pm, in reply to "Re: organisation"
Hi Brooks, I should've said I've got no +experience+ of organisation, especially not working class / labour organisation. I've only ever worked service-sector jobs, so pretty difficult to consider worker control over the means of production when there isn't any production! I agree that organisation is necessary for progressive social change, but it's a hollow, alienated agreement because it's still outside of my experience and (probably) class outlook.
'organizing needs to be understood in its broadest sense, not merely as traditional labour struggles' - well, that makes me feel a bit better about the various bits of environmental campaigning I've done, but I think there's a difference between those thoroughly middle-class concerns and the immediacy of controlling the fruits of your own labour and not being exploited by boss/capitalist parasites. Not to say the working class has no interest in a clean, healthy environment, but that having time to spend in the defense of 'the environment' exhibits privilege and can even work against working class interests, eg: nature reserves displacing farming, green belts preventing housebuilding etc.
'the Yellow Vest movement came about and continues because of organizing and the fact that there were already organized groups that could be mobilized' - I love them, but... are they really 'organised' in the above sense? Beyond showing up on streets and roundabouts (valuable in itself) and articulating a general anger and frustration, they don't appear to have coalesced into a movement with specific demands and levers of power to actually get what they want and make it stick. Same happened with Occupy - valuable expression of dissatisfaction and lots of idealism but it eventually fizzled under attack from the state and... what changed?