Tag Archives: democracy

A creamy white fabric is covered with a winding series of small flowers, leaves, stems growing from left to right. The design is colored in brown.

“Don’t run for executive board”: How to Take Over Your Union from the Bottom Up

[This post is part of my series on union organizational structures.]

Many workers today find themselves asking, “If unions in general are good, why does my union suck?” The member meetings are unbearably tedious, abuses and unsavory conditions are widespread at work, wages keep falling against inflation, health insurance premiums keep going up, and, worst of all, none of the union’s initiatives or campaigns seem to be helping. 

For many workers who are dissatisfied with their union, taking over the executive board appears like the logical way to make their unions better. They think that the union itself is a good thing and all that needs to be done is replace the bad leadership with good leadership. As common as this mindset is among union activists, it ignores a deeper and structural critique of why today’s unions are so dissatisfying in the first place. More often than not, such efforts to win union leadership end up perpetuating the very structures that are responsible for the dissatisfaction in the first place.

Unions have different structures and dimensions that are worth teasing apart and evaluating separately. What’s good about the union is the bringing together of workers to fight for better a better life. At its core, the union is democratic because workers are taken together as all having equal standing and voice. The union is militant because it’s based on workers taking action together. The union is radical because workers deciding and acting together in their own interests sets them apart from and against the overarching economic structures of society wherein workers merely exist to be squeezed by investors for profits.

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A black silouette of a dozen birds sitting on power lines against a dark grey sky.

Baseline Anarchism

[For more of my posts on anarchism visit this page.]

I was hanging out in the woods with a few old friends over a long weekend recently and we got to debating about our usual political topics. One friend is a Silicon Valley brand of conservative libertarian, another is a progressive liberal, and I am the resident leftist anarchist. The progressive is more willing to consider other viewpoints and finds some aspects of both the libertarian and the anarchist perspective appealing, whereas the libertarian and myself are much more rigid and uncompromising in our contrasting and long-standing convictions. As such, the libertarian and myself end up trying to win over the progressive on various points. Our hours-long debates are mostly cordial but sometimes get heated. Nonetheless, we all seem to enjoy these skirmishes.

During this sojourn in the woods, I came up with a way of framing anarchist politics that captured better than any other phrasing I’ve come across the distilled essence of my commitment to anarchism. The progressive asked me what about anarchist politics was appealing. In response I posed the following question, “Would you ever want to have less influence over the things in your life that you care about most?” 

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Democracy as the Grounding Value of Radical Grassroots Politics

(Featured image: “File:Murmure d’étourneaux.jpg” by Anne Jea. is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The US isn’t a democracy, but it plays one on TV. When election year comes around, a lot of video cameras point at politicians making speeches about how they’re gonna fight for you and your grandma. A paradise is promised and all you have to do is vote for them as a show of your belief in democracy and freedom. Then after the election is over, politicians go back to playing golf with CEOs.

In a world like ours, one with so many horrors and so much duplicity, it’s not hard to see why some people tire of hearing about democracy. But is there any other way to dream of a better world and move toward it than to get with others and decide collectively what is needed and how to get it?

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What You Need to Know about Liberalism: What It’s Made of, What It’s Missing, and What It Means for Organizing (Part I)

(See Part II here.)

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It is of the utmost importance that we know our enemy. In the context of radical grassroots organizing, this means we must know liberalism.

Liberalism is the water we all swim in. It’s the institutional and ideological political-economic-social apparatus of the contemporary US and Western Europe and has spread to countries on every continent. It’s all too easy to forget it’s there at all because it’s what we all grew up in and is all most of us have ever known.

Naming and defining liberalism can be a small revelation to those who are starting to question the status quo but don’t have the vocabulary to understand what they find unsettling about it and what the alternatives are. To show what liberalism looks like today and to give it a past makes it appear less written in stone and more part of an ever-changing and thus contingent historical process. What can be built can be taken apart.

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The Anatomy of Organizing, Part I

(See Part II here.)

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My mean little idea is that organizing is the most important thing the left should be doing. This would be a nice little idea if in fact the left did any organizing, but this largely is not the case.

Progressive and leftist political organizations engage in a very wide range of activities, but year after year, it seems so little is gained and so much is lost. I suspect a lot of leftist activity is just not advancing the ideals that we hold so dearly.

Organizing is a particular kind of activity for changing society. So much is bound up in that concept that it gets investigated and poked at a lot less than should. If it’s organizing that we want to do but we don’t know what it is, we’re condemned to eat every plump red berry we come across in the name of organizing.

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