Unions and other movements are often formed in the heat of struggle as workers go on strike and communities organise protests. How do we maintain the militant spirit and democratic practices that are many times seen in these inspiring, busy days? What happens to the revolutionary potential of struggles when the initial upsurge settle and organisations are formalised?
This question was raised by comrade K in response to my article on ‘The Making of Revolutionary Wage Struggles and Unions’ published by the Institute of Anarchist Studies in December last year. She noted that the two examples of revolutionary unions in the article were both cases where worker organising were associated with the needs of an on-going strike. The strike committees of the De Doorns farm workers and Marikana mine workers faded from prominence after the strikes ended. Could they have formalised as unions and registered with the labour department in order to maintain themselves? What would have happened to their revolutionary practices described in the article if they had done that?
To help us consider these questions I want to note the following:
The article argues that unions who join statutory bargaining councils accept a legal obligation to respect no strike agreements and adopt top-down decision making. Therefore, if unions register in order to join these councils, they will not maintain their revolutionary orientation. Apart from this, unions are motivated to register because it means union members can represent workers at dispute resolution bodies and can access workplaces where they are not employed. In many cases this is what workers want, which is an obstacle to building an unregistered union.
At the moment it is not possible to register a union that practices direct democracy and branch autonomy with the labour department. The department insists on the centralised, top-down structure of the mainstream conservative and reformist unions. I know of two attempts to register unions that deviate from that structure and they were both turned down.
In the cases of De Doorns and Marikana the workers were organising outside of the official labour relations framework for years before the famous strikes broke out. In the case of the farm workers I have personal knowledge of this continuing after the strike. While I do not know whether this also happened in Marikana I will not be surprised if it did. The point is that the revolutionary orientation that was seen in the big strikes did not appear on the day of those strikes. It was there before in less visible ways and, at least in the case of the farm workers, it is still there. Instead of mass assemblies, there are meetings of small autonomous groups, instead of general strikes, there are small protests, and instead of blockades of national roads, there are smaller direct actions such as putting evicted workers back into houses. Also, the demands of these smaller struggles continue to be guided by the idea of what workers need instead of neoliberal wage norms.
If we bring these points together it suggests that it is possible to maintain revolutionary unions and movements long after mass outbursts and uprisings have brought them to wide attention. This requires deliberate practices of direct democracy, autonomy and direct action, which are possible on the scale of small groups of even two. It is possible that registration with the labour department can support such a process because it will help jobless workers and workers of one workplace to meet with, accompany and provide solidarity to workers of another workplace. If this is to work, it must be a tactical registration, where the registered constitution reflects what the department wants and not the actual practices of the union. The risk is that this tactical registration will overwhelm the direct democracy of the union, but it is not inevitable.
When struggle groups become institutions
Again to register a trade union is to weaken it. Once registered you are bound to comply with laws that favours the bosses!