The UAW is a dying Fordist yellow union which absorbed graduate students to sustain itself and inject a façade of petty-bourgeois youth radicalism. This ended up being wise since much of the leadership of the national union recently went to prison and an election was forced on it by the government and the only thing the union had to show for itself was the recent UC strike which occurred during the election. But a dose of transient semi-workers can’t save a dead body and the result was that the Graduate Student bargaining team members are the same bureaucrats as the national leadership but with pettier ambitions. Given that capitalism is no longer able to compromise with labor and the structural foundation of Fordism has collapsed, neither the UAW as a whole nor the gradate student sub-bureaucracy has any hope of achieving real reforms. The only possible decision is how best to sell selling out.
The strike itself is not that interesting. The union hoped that the university would budge from the threat of a strike because their only reason for existing is the fantasy of labor-management harmony in the interests of capital. Since that did not happen, the union was forced to call a strike they did not want, they believed ontologically would get weaker every day, and wished to end. Just about everything was compromised on immediately and all manner of justifications were offered to let the bureaucrats do their work behind closed doors, only notable because they were so condescending and vacuous that they managed to piss everyone off. Nevertheless, the only real resistance that developed was a dissident faction of the bargaining team bureaucracy that came far too late to do anything. The union used every trick in the book to push through its sell out contract and the dissidents were fractured by campus, lacked the infrastructure to communicate and were always playing catch up, but the fundamental weakness of the “no” vote dissidents was they had no plan except to continue the strike and hope this would somehow motivate the university to reevaluate its austerity. They not only could not escape the logic of economism, they couldn’t even escape the logic of bureaucratic economism, as everything had to remain legal and within the terms set by the majority bargaining team who had been allies just yesterday. The main ideological difference was the union believed the turnout on the picket line was the measure of the strike’s success, meaning every day could only be worse than the previous day (and completely doomed once vacation began), whereas the dissidents believed not submitting grades was the substance of withholding our labor. The former is purely performative and entirely under the union’s control whereas the latter is closer to reality but only enforceable through morality and shame. It was the tactic of the 2020 COLA strike but without any of the democratic and radical features of that strike, had little chance of success, instead ultimately relying on the begrudging legal protection of the same union we were rebelling against to assure isolated teachers withholding grades they were safe.
The difference between the two factions of the union were ultimately irrelevant, abstractly and literally true since the UAW national election produced a mix of old and new factions who will now share power to implement the exact same politics as before. This, in fact, already happened a decade ago when the “Academic Workers for a Democratic Union” overthrew the old bureaucracy of in 2011 to no effect.
https://livinghistory.as.ucsb.edu/tag/awdu/ - some history of the post-Occupy revolt against the union bureaucracy and their wretched self-pity – they were forced to become minor California democrats
The contract is a joke, only 5,000 dollars more than the initial offer of the university before the strike (from an initial demand of 54,000 to now 34,000), to be achieved in 2 years with no cost of living index, different pay for “prestige universities,” a no-strike clause, and a better contract for postdocs approved prior (also with a no-strike clause upon approval) to remove them from the strike, fracture the union for the future, and stick a dagger in the heart of the strike as it was occurring. Given the pay of other graduate students throughout the country, this would have basically happened through the labor market anyway and UC workers are still significantly underpaid compared to many private universities. There were also various compromises on disability, international students, and other issues that were sold out purely because of the union’s weakness and incompetence which leaves them open to attacks on identity politics terms; despite being composed of graduate students, the union bureaucracy act like “hard hat” unionists from the 20th century which is remarkable if you think about it. But ideology always follows function; pay anyone 70,000 dollars to work full time for the union and they too will lecture you about the importance of the adults in the room compromising behind closed doors no matter their background. That is, even if the goal of communists was to win reforms through unions, which it is not, this is a terrible contract. Pessimism and infighting are now the order of the day on discord, signal, twitter, and all the other ways isolated and impotent members can amplify their moral outrage in the hope that quantity will transform into quality.
A representative experience for me was when the contract was being proposed for a 12 month pay period with no guarantee of summer funding, meaning that the actual amount was for 9 months. So you had to take the number they were giving us, divide it by 12, and multiply it by 9. The union refused to acknowledge this simple math and kept avoiding giving the real number, hoping that the larger number would fly by unnoticed. The current amount is for 9 months after a local democrat was brought in to mediate so that whole experience is memory-holed but I still remember it as well as the ghost of Kiev.
With that out of the way, how did the left respond? First up is the DSA. To no one’s surprise, they merely repeated the talking points of the “majority” bargaining team
https://jacobin.com/2022/12/university-of-california-strike-fifth-week-bargaining-table-demands-union-strategy-uaw
The only thing notable about them is that, unlike the rest of the left which slavishly followed the bureaucrats in a position of power, many of the bargaining team members joined the DSA of their own free will prior to the strike. This is partially so they feel like they are socialists - no one is a villain in their own head. But practically, the DSA serves as a good way to connect professionally to younger democrats and aspiring union bureaucrats. Frankly, it would be stupid not to join the DSA unless you are already from a politically connected family. They have a slate running in the UAW as well and have had some success convincing the old senior figures in the union that they need young PMCs to avoid revolution, the strategy of the "squad" transplanted.
Next up is the IMT. Like most actually-existing trots, the IMT survives by cycling through undergraduates who join study groups, graduate to handing out newspapers (or the online equivalent), and eventually burn out. In this case, the IMT sent a small group of undergraduates to the “picket line” (which to be clear was neither a picket nor a line and prevented no one from teaching) for “solidarity.”
https://www.marxist.com/united-states-strike-action-on-the-rise-marxists-join-the-picket-lines.htm
The “socialist revolution” reading group basically just shouted the generic slogans of the strike (and you would be shocked how awful these slogans are, partially because of the history of American union anti-communism and partially because these graduate student cum labor bureaucrats are scared of creativity spiraling out of control). They briefly flirted with insisting on COLA but once it was clear the union bureaucracy would tolerate no further dissent on this issue they fell in line. As you can see that article contains no concrete content and these undergrads pretend at being academic workers rather than bringing their own issues as undergraduates (which is outside the acceptable discourse of the union). Members do not make their party affiliation clear and use their own vague slogans and front group names unless you ask them directly who they are affiliated with.
The PSL sends people, usually one senior member and one young recruit, to walk around in PSL t-shirts and participate in slogans. The shirts sets them apart from the IMT but, more significantly, they are envious of the DSA and try to make friends with leadership of the strike and one day recruit them. They recently posted this article
https://www.liberationnews.org/uc-academic-workers-win-historic-contracts-after-40-day-strike/
completely echoing the talking points of the bargaining team including this paragraph
The “Vote No” campaign consistently framed the unions’ democratically elected leadership as the main obstacle towards a strong contract. But the strength or weakness of a union does not stem from a handful of leaders, it comes from the entire membership. Rhetoric which replaces this core principle with distrust of fellow coworkers elected to leadership positions sends the message that workers are always doomed to be betrayed. It shifts the focus from the employer to the elected union leadership. Such an orientation makes any contract, however strong, a de facto defeat and promotes demoralization rather than hope, confidence and a deeper commitment for the next fight.
The PSL are the only ones who unapologetically criticize the no vote campaign, a position everyone else is too embarrassed to state openly given the yes vote already won and there is nothing to gain rubbing it in the faces of the rank-and-file. Only Marcyism allows this freedom from all principle.
Finally the WSWS/SEP. They are the only party which consistently stood against the union’s sellouts at every turn and the only one to cover the strike in depth.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/26/ucst-d26.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/workersCategory/2022-university-california-academic-workers-strike
This was partially because they decided to run a candidate in the UAW election but also their workload is insane. Basically, their strategy is to put out statements and flyers on campus and hope that people contact them. Eventually this turned into a “rank and file” strike committee as you can see in the article which was basically the local party members and a few grad students who had contacted them. The weakness of their line was that as the “no” campaign developed and rank-and-file committees started to form, SEP cared about party control over their own group and wasn’t involved in the mass movement. To be fair, as I pointed out the mass movement was merely a factional split from the bargaining team with strategic differences so subordinating to its leadership would be a terrible idea. But 99% of rank-and-file members have no idea the “rank-and-file” strike committee exists and now that the dust has settled, it’s not clear what was gained except a few more sympathizers. They are, for good or ill, very clear about their political positions and manage to tie the strike to both the history of the 4th international and the war in Ukraine and could not get “friends of the party” even if they wanted to. I was peripherally involved with WSWS during the strike because they were the only ones with any principles but they dug their own grave. For example, party members would get the police called on them if they showed up to the picket line and they would get shouted down and/or muted if the UAW election campaign was brought up (though the latter happened to basically anyone who criticized the union during online meetings). This points to the violent enforcement behind revisionism, part of the long bloody history of social democracy’s suppression of the left, but these are also things that have to be expected and can only be overcome by making oneself too important and too powerful to be excluded.
As previously mentioned, after the garbage contract in 2018 a wildcat strike over COLA (cost of living adjustment) occurred in early 2020 which the union tried to control and/or end which was much more promising. That had mass meetings, real political discussion, cooperation across campuses, and efforts to extend the strike to undergraduates, adjuncts, custodial staff, etc. That was mostly defeated by Covid which broke the momentum and no one could have predicted. However, the union did fight for those who had been fired to be reinstated after the wildcat strike had been completely defeated so I imagine a backroom deal took place. I bring this up because the fact that basically nothing happened between then and now shows even the SEP, for all its principles, made few inroads over the past 3 years. Given the current contract fundamentally destroyed inter-campus and inter-union solidarity, the next fight will be much more difficult, so defeat now is not just a success for the next fight.
As for the rest of the left, it was nowhere to be found. Socialist Alternative released a statement supporting the mainstream campaign for a “no” vote
https://www.socialistalternative.org/2022/12/23/tentative-agreements-fall-short-for-uc-academic-workers-how-can-more-be-won/
but I did not encounter any of them. My assumption is just like the SEP puts all of its time into WSWS, the SA puts all of its time into Kshama Sawant, basically the only thing that separates them from another tail of the Sanders movement and Green Party. Perhaps in Seattle they exist.
CPUSA released an article supporting the bargaining team
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/uc-graduate-student-academic-workers-reach-tentative-pact-ratification-vote-underway/
which only mentions the “no” campaign briefly at the end (you can see how offensive the PSL statement is in comparison to even the total bankrupt CPUSA) but they were also not involved in any way that I saw. Since they are not as offensive as the PSL, they are merely derivative of the DSA.
FRSO put up a statement critical of the union but otherwise generic
https://www.fightbacknews.org/2022/12/8/university-california-academic-workers-strike-say-no-cola-no-contract
and they, like the Maoist left, are more interested in foreign policy where positions are clear and inconsequential. If any of these parties do care about labor, it is the railroad strike where the Biden administration stepping in to end the strike was the best thing that could have happened to the left, allowing it to criticize a clear bad guy in the state rather than labor reformism within the union movement (except for the CPUSA of course which found a way to defend the democrats – funny to mock online but inconsequential).
I am critical of the very concept of academic-workers, despite or perhaps because I am one. Nevertheless, there are some interesting lessons. First, most of the left desperately wishes to become the official communist parties of Eurocommunism or, in the American context, a social democratic party of the European type. This is justified with reference to the “sectarianism” and “ultraleftism” of the new left but as soon as the context is an old style labor struggle, the old revisionism comes out. For communists, discussing foreign policy is important but at the level of party ideology, it is basically irrelevant. Of course, one should not join a party that is explicitly in favor of war and imperialism but beyond empty rhetoric, the question of the labor aristocracy (both the old union bureaucracy type and the new global commodity production type) is decisive and always comes up on the side of revisionism and social fascism. The PSL is only interesting as the vanguard of a combination of anti-imperialism in rhetoric and reformism in politics but that is now common; all that’s left is cross promotion between the party and the new post-post-colonial intellectuals like Vijay Prashad and internet personalities.
All American parties at present have room for only two types of people: cadres who work full time for the party and important people who can help the party. It is natural that professional union reps fit into both of these categories whereas for the WSWS and any other principled organization, the demand to work against the union full time as well as maintain one’s life and job is difficult. Having said that, I am lazy and an internet personality of a type, I have always forwarded my perspective as one to be used and critiqued for the reader’s purposes. If you choose to spend your life working for a party that has principles don’t let me stop you and don’t let the historical role of Trotskyism distract you from avoiding the truly vile parties. Finally, a rather obvious point: you never know whether your position is ultra-left, right, or correct until history has judged. The only protection is understanding that, in general, ultraleftism is an aberration and was always seen as a disagreement among friends whereas rightism is the norm under capitalism and characteristic of enemies. It is better to maintain one’s principles, even if this leads to isolation, than to abandon them for relevancy, since principles today may lead to success in the future whereas opportunism will always lead to failure today and tomorrow. Worse than isolation is irrelevance: there is simply no reason for most parties to exist now that the DSA has colonized the reformist left. All that's left is to make this clear to anyone who still believes the ostensible communism and anti-imperialism of these parties has any substance.
e: I also posted this on reddit because I want to burn all bridges with the PSL where I know they'll see it but I wanted to post it here first.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
you never know whether your position is ultra-left, right, or correct until history has judged
i really hate that to the hard-nosed ultraleftist, everything looks like revisionism, and to the callow revisionist, everything looks like ultraleftism, and all the while both ends are insisting that they're the ones behaving scientifically. makes us all look like a bunch of clowns tbh, but i guess that's the cost of doing marxism in the imperial core.
best i can ever manage for my own peace of mind is to make sure there's always someone to either side of me that i can point to and say "well at least i'm not that guy"; when i can't find anyone like that, i am left to wonder if, indeed, i am that guy. of course, then the problem is that you're always kinda grading on a curve, and maybe sometimes i should be That Guy, with the understanding that all i'm actually doing is staking out a horizon for someone else trying to stay balanced. i don't think lenin concerned himself overmuch with triangulation, but i also don't have lenin's confidence in my reading of the revolutionary potential of a given situation, since every time i look it seems so poor overall that it leaves me wondering if i'm just a full-stop opportunist.
it is pretty funny, actually, how the ultraleft deviation, which uncompromisingly overestimates the revolutionary potential of a situation (i.e., rooted in a kind of idealist optimism) is nevertheless compelled to overwhelmingly negative conclusions about comportment; and, like yin to yang, the opposite, rightist deviation, which persistently underestimates revolutionary potential through an intrinsically pessimistic outlook, tends to celebrate with an undue sense of joyous accomplishment very minor reformist gains.
in fact, we might even describe a sort of pipeline, here -- not of people but of judgments. a given actor takes a situational evaluation before an event as the input and after the event outputs an evaluation of comportment. the ultra outputs negativity; the right-opportunist takes that as one input when next evaluating situation; outputs positivity over table scraps; ultraleft takes excessive positivity as input in situational evaluation; etc.
see, i've imagined a little putt-putt engine of deviants. just for fun, why not
however, i would question this line:
in general, ultraleftism is an aberration and was always seen as a disagreement among friends whereas rightism is the norm under capitalism and characteristic of enemies
this seems to need heavy qualification: on the basis of the problem mentioned up top (and excluding "the norm under capitalism," which is true), this doesn't work unless the ultraleftism in question is the sort of self-aware and self-critical ultraleftism i mentioned second. otherwise, how can we have "a disagreement among friends" when one party becomes more inclined to see the other as behaving in a way "characteristic of enemies"? runs into a contradiction.
anyway bhpn, i want to hear more from your POV on this, because you've made it clear what a shitshow this has been, but I am curious if you think there was ever a point at which something almost happened or could have happened that might have been cause for greater excitement, or if that possibility was foreclosed from the outset or what. if these struggles are incapable of proceeding beyond mere spectacle, do you see that as a circumstantial issue or a constitutional one? if they're not, what short-term move (aside from the immediate initiation of PPW, of course) would you bill as a welcome step in a useful direction for the parties and organizers on the ground?
'tis the season of hope, after all
Edited by Constantignoble ()
how can we have "a disagreement among friends" when one party becomes more inclined to see the other as behaving in a way "characteristic of enemies"? runs into a contradiction.
I'm thinking about the WSWS line and if it is ultraleftist or not. Well obviously it is in some capacity, they are infamous for defending Roman Polanski and other celebrities accused of various things and in the age of the internet you can't take positions like that and hope no one will find out about them until they've already bought in to the party line or set it aside. More practically, they are totally isolated from the "no" movement and, as you point out, this leads to no change in theory or practice after its defeat. I was the one who seemed pessimistic for basically the exact feelings of self-doubt you talked about with yourself, since we both feel that way I suspect it is because we are rational people and not trying to sell something at all times, which is what working with different parties has always felt like. Abstractly they would love a revolution but their purpose is mostly to recruit people and get them involved so by that standard, it's hard to fail, hence the constant positivity of ultraleftism which you usefully point out is a bizarre and ironic result. Nevertheless, I respect the line the WSWS took and their stubbornness whereas PSL and IMT I consider unredeemable.
anyway bhpn, i want to hear more from your POV on this, because you've made it clear what a shitshow this has been, but I am curious if you think there was ever a point at which something almost happened or could have happened that might have been cause for greater excitement, or if that possibility was foreclosed from the outset or what. if these struggles are incapable of proceeding beyond mere spectacle, do you see that as a circumstantial issue or a constitutional one? if they're not, what short-term move (aside from the immediate initiation of PPW, of course) would you bill as a welcome step in a useful direction for the parties and organizers on the ground?
The defeat of the 2020 wildcat COLA strike is still hurting and online teaching delayed realizing it fully (that strike was also a mess don't get me wrong but at least it had political content instead of explicitly excluding politics as bad for negotiation/scaring our friends the Democrats). Being reabsorbed into the official union set everything back significantly, although since people are only really around for 5 years (+1 year research) there was at best one opportunity anyway. There might have been hope if the no vote won since there would then be time to discuss more fundamental questions like what a strike actually means for graduate students, the reactionary nature of the union, larger political questions like the Democrats killing the rail strike, and kicking out all the union reps. If there's hope it's that, even though the power to resist the union will be much weaker in 2 1/2 years, the situation will be much worse because of no COLA (the first thing that was compromised on immediately as revenge on the wildcatters and to put them in their place). Eventually the union will lose, but since I won't be around and the union always has professors to dredge up to support their version of history hopefully some memory remains. Also international students are more and more the foundation of the system and eventually they either won't take it anymore or the money spigot will dry up, the system that currently exists is not sustainable even being as shitty as it is.
One thing I thought about writing this is that no party was involved in the "no" campaign. For WSWS it was incidental to the "rank and file" strike committee, some of the parties whose position I only know because I wrote this were critical of the deal but detached from the whole thing, and all the parties who were involved were fully on the side of the union. Since the "no" campaign only happened after the "Wednesday night massacre" when the minority of the bargaining was completely outmaneuvered and everything capitulated on, you have to be a special kind of naive to be caught by surprise that the union bureaucracy acts in its own interest. With that kind of goldfish memory, even a revisionist party is not possible and sure enough the whole thing has dissipated into nothing.
Socialist leadership of the "no" vote could have only been accomplished far ahead of time, even if most people who went on strike voted no (which probably was the case, the bargaining team members are so obnoxious they alienate everyone except their flunkies) the majority just vote yes for a raise since they don't even think of themselves as workers. This would make it easy to isolate since convincing people to reject a sellout that hasn't occurred is difficult but if you wait it's too late, at least in this industry where there is always an escape.
The immediate thing, which I think is what I'm trying to stress to people who hear the word "union" and think "socialist" because they'll never be in one anyway, is that the unions that actually exist are fully reactionary. They are a wing of the democrats and the larger anti-communist, social fascist apparatus and they cannot be changed, worked with, or worked within. There is no relationship between economism and socialist politics and they are not "schools of communism" except in the struggle against the betrayals of revisionism. This isn't exactly a new thought, rather one that has been forgotten. For example people are so excited about the unions being built at Starbucks or Amazon they don't ask what kind of unions are being built; it's our job as the anti-revisionists in the room to go against "revolutionary optimism" which condemns even thinking about these questions as eminating negative energy which will disrupt the harmony of the universe or whatever.
The reason communist parties work within official unions but outside of the Democratic party has never been clear, division is fine as long as you are open about it and your reasons why it is necessary. It's quite possible that forming our own unions is the only way forward (as happened in many countries with a government union) with all of the short term isolation that may come from it. But the idea that we shouldn't split unions because they are already so weak is nonsense (it is in fact the exact argument the union uses to accuse anyone who criticizes it of being "anti-union"), we are instead in a great position because the official unions have been killed off for us. Existing unions are not a boon for organized socialist politics, they are a crutch, and if no parties had showed up because they don't consider us important I could at least respect that principle. It's not even clear what the structure of a communist union would look like given all the issues of global labor arbitrage we discuss here, probably something closer to the Italian Red Brigades as the forum discussed a while ago. The whole left was involved in this strike because it combined both the new left's student membership and their fantasies of going to the organized working class but it's the opposite: graduate students combine the worst features of both categories of student-worker. But they are a microcosm of all the problems we will have to face working with irregular labor, overeducated service workers, transient gig workers, etc. I wanted to make sure, before it's all forgotten, people realize how truly reactionary the existing socialist parties are and the unions they parasitically attach themselves to, including myself who in the past has excused revisionism with "well if they are against arming Ukraine they can't be all bad.". The entire "Marxist-Leninist" left that developed in the last few years online and increasingly in person (both the PSL and CPUSA have been taken over by this line) is toxic and must be combatted whatever that means practically.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
lo posted:i wonder if there's more to this than just strategic opportunism by the right
i'm open to this possibility, but i'm having a hard time imagining what a good example of that something-more might be, especially when strategic opportunism seems to describe it well.
i think it's only too easy to fall into the trap of misrepresenting an ideological opponent, for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons. people with the integrity and discipline to steel-man their opponents from the jump are generally standouts in their milieu the first place. moreover, i'd argue that deliberate falsehood is, ceteris paribus, usually more common on the revisionist/rightist end of the spectrum, and indeed farther rightward than that, too, onward to the apex in fascism's constitutional dereliction of any and all truths. on some level i'm still thinking of something like this post, but maybe i can express it as a syllogism, or at least something approximately diet-syllogism flavored:
1) rightism is the dominant tendency in world politics right now, whether bourgeois or socialistic
2) it is easier to go with the stream than against it, to surrender to gravity, etc
3) some percentage of rightists became such by way of that inertia
4a) it is time-consuming and effortful to understand the best version of your opponent's point of view and weigh it honestly against yours
4b) it is much easier to use shorthands, shortcuts, caricatures, and strawmen that you can easily knock down and gratify your ego
5) falling into rightism-qua-path-of-least-resistance does not suggest a predisposition toward more effortful modes of political engagement
of course, anarchists, ultralefts par excellence, are often quite ungenerous in their readings of marxists, which seems like an all-too-easy counter to the above. might be able to rebut it via those who adopt anarchism as a kind of "second-option bias" rendering of the same, a simple idealist negation amounting to no more effortful an engagement with reality at the end of the day. which is maybe a very pat way to end a post about studious and careful representation of opponents, but there's honesty and then there's relitigating centuries of arguments at a fleeting mention.
(this does put me in the position of also equating opposites, but i am no less skeptical just because the guy typing this is the one doing so. screw that guy)
Edited by Constantignoble ()
