WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #21: Anarchist action in the unions - Marco T. of Rome. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The exponential growth, which characterizes the technological
development system, defines the rhythms of our time. All political and
social categories are marking time and are progressively losing
comparison with the hand of the clock, which at the pace of the machines
increases in speed every time they self-reproduce, self-feeding.
Technology is causing entire professional categories, shifting
competition and therefore competitiveness onto the terrain of speed.
Weakened by the loss of centrality of twentieth-century ideologies,
including religious ones, which are replaced by a system in which money,
from a means of achieving every end, becomes the "single purpose,
representative democracies are distorted in the pursuit of challenges
that explode on a planetary scale at frenetic pace, tending increasingly
to centralize decision-making power in the hands of a few, if not a
single man. The ties and strings are torn, the checks and balances are
dumped like ballast, in a race aimed at pleasing enormous economic and
media powers, concentrated in super companies, which concentrate a power
greater than that of entire continents. "Progress is beauty!", the very
term progress, which has crossed and to a large extent characterized,
everything positive that the mass and political movements of the 20th
century hoped for and promised, has been distorted, blurred. Certainly
no better fate awaits the mass movements and among them the trade
unions. The comparisons between reformist trade unionism and
revolutionary trade unionism in the first part of the twentieth century
now seem linked to prehistory. After the season of the large confederal
unions and the birth of conflictual unions, today a fragmented panorama
opens up. The autonomy from politics of the workers' movements, so
sought after by anarchists, is returning under a new guise, marginality.
The unions are losing their place in the political landscape, moving
towards the path of mere demands. The logic of compromise, often
downwards, of corporatism, of the frantic search for productivity, to
guarantee its managers a place at the tables where decisions are made,
who remains clinging to the handles of the train of new progress, and
who loses it definitively.
Whether this is linked to the management of today's trade unions or is,
rather, a logical consequence of the very nature of today's forms of
trade unionism is a central question. For those like us who are well
aware of the importance of workers' organisations, mere resigned
alarmism is not very suitable. Any analysis cannot ignore the need not
to disperse the value of the work of the unions on the one hand while on
the other the need to identify forms of action aimed at actively
supporting and fueling the recovery of the centrality of workers'
organisations. In this, the reformability or the need to revolutionize
the trade union system, however, becomes a question far from being on
the agenda, given the limited and fragmented presence of the comrades
anarchists in trade unions and in society in general. To mark a starting
point, perhaps it would be enough to outline a possible attempt to
contribute by the anarchist movement to the trade union structures in
which they operate, starting by defining which concepts constitute the
basis of the anarchist idea and action and which are not present in the
trade union context?
Delegation, for example, is an integral part of the current system.
Assigning to individual workers not the role but the work of trade
unionist is understood as an unavoidable necessity because the amount of
work necessary to manage disputes and negotiations is too great and
requires a full-time commitment. There would be nothing strange, all
organizations need, when they grow beyond a certain number of members,
to set up bodies that carry out administrative, legal and practical
functions full time. This is even more true when trade union activity
mainly performs the function of providing dispute consultancy for
workers. But does this also apply, or can it apply, to political issues?
If delegation is a method contrary to anarchism, it is not just an
ideological question or a conceptual quibble. Delegation generates
power, it is necessary to protect a particular interest, which is
determined when the interest of one or more individuals becomes third
compared to the position of the two classes compared, both of the
workers and of the employers, but also of the State, which is an
instrument of the bosses. A trade unionist who has tied his livelihood
to his role is inevitably the bearer of an interest other than that of
the workers he represents. This is a fact.

It doesn't matter how one manages it, how much one or the other
sacrifices, this duality of interests and the inevitable consequences it
leads to are the practical reason why anarchists reject power and
consequently delegation. No one can any longer think of denying that
trade union action entails dangers. The greatest of these dangers
certainly consists in the militant's acceptance of trade union
functions, especially when they are paid.
Anarchist action can start from supporting the delegates, without
entering into the delegation mechanism, but demonstrating in practice
how the direct action of self-organised workers, with factory
assemblies, can complete the union's demanding function, without
conflicting with it.
We are already experimenting, in Rome, albeit with a thousand
difficulties, workers' assemblies, at times different from those of
trade union assemblies. In these assemblies, the methods of working, of
interlocution with the managers, with the trade union organizations,
with the company and with the liaison figures of the client are defined.
Furthermore, the methods of requesting equipment, PPE, materials, etc.
are defined. tries to build a real capacity to fight against the
company's negligent or malicious deficiencies regarding shifts, coverage
of shifts for holidays or illness of colleagues. In these moments, the
value and social function of the worker are claimed, training sessions
are practiced and expected from the company, to qualify the worker not
only in terms of productivity and income, but of real understanding of
the value of own knowledge and skills, which deserve and must demand
respect.
Furthermore, from this the seed of the need to rediscover the now lost
pride of wearing a "suit" is sown which is and remains the pivot on
which the entire economic system is based. This is not only a source of
pride and responsibility, but it also gives a measure of the strength of
a sector that has the ability to paralyze from within all the apparatus
and hardware on which today's economy and politics travel.
With this we are certainly not talking about a reorganization of the
trade unions, (not yet) which are not anarchists, and which by their
very nature and conformation anarchists cannot be "[...]I am not asking
for anarchist trade unions which would immediately justify social
democratic, republican, realist trade unions[...]" (Malatesta 1907).
What we are trying to affirm is that, without prejudice to current trade
union practices, completely confined to demanding trade unionism, the
margins can exist or must be created to conduct coordinated and
effective anarchist action within them. Action that should aim to use
the current structures and the cover they give to workers, to bring
anarchist practices and methods into the workplace. Anarchists have
defined organizational models, capable of growing, without verticalizing
their structure. The adoption, among others, of the federative model,
allows for an effective and efficient organization, capable of growing,
without creating frameworks and superstructures, which once again, would
take on the characteristics of governmental structures, because they
bear, a third interest, respect at the basis of the organization itself.
For this reason the various experiences, positive and negative, must
connect and communicate. Our models capable of creating horizontal
organizations can allow us to build networks, invisible in their
dimension to trade union leaders and carry out coordinated action.
Propaganda and targeted criticism magazines must be created to increase
the culture of workers and their conscience, to achieve the construction
of real federations of libertarian workers, within trade unions which,
although often called confederations, adopt not only the formation of
managers organized in a pyramidal structure, but lead to the appointment
of the role of secretary, and therefore of sole management. Here the
warning of every anarchist theory is realized, the collateral birth of
competition for power, which absorbs a large part of the energies and
strategies of the union leaders. This, in the perception of the workers,
represents everything that distances them from politics and often from
the unions themselves .
Anarchist action within the unions must make them one of the instruments
of struggle, it must lead to experimenting with the practice of direct
action, horizontal decision-making methods, hopefully by synthesis,
solidarity between workers, all practices which once consolidated, will
also be aimed at directing the trade union action of the delegates in
the manner and within the terms decided by the workers' assemblies.

This method should not be taken in the direction of criticizing the
structures and power struggles of the unions, which would push them to
replace them, but if it manages to underline the inevitability of the
concentration of power in systems in which delegation, not dependent on
value, exists of managers, while through direct action and solidarity
results are achieved independently of existing vertical structures.
To win together, we must also have the courage to make mistakes
together, propose every step towards libertarian models, as a solution
to failed attempts, due to fragmentation, ignorance, lack of
professionalism. We must have the clarity to warn of the risks, but also
to know how to follow fellow workers, on paths that we know to be wrong,
so that the methods adopted subsequently are truly collective
achievements, rather than enlightened strategies imposed from above.
Already in the early 19th century it was evident to the comrades that
without the action of anarchists inside and outside the trade unions,
these would quickly tend to drift towards forms of trade union
aristocracy, which aim to preserve, for the needs of subsistence and
maintenance of privilege, the class employer, without which the trade
union structure would have no reason to exist. For anarchists, the
union, in addition to arousing sympathy, as it is capable of improving
the living and working conditions of workers, is a catchment area in
which to bring and experiment practices that can lead workers to acquire
the necessary awareness, to undertake a real path of struggle towards
social transformation, which only the anarchist revolution can bring
about. From this it is neither functional nor productive to belittle
beyond a certain limit the errors and compromises that trade union
structures and their leaders make. This does nothing but, at most, push
workers towards other union structures, which are not, or will not be,
immune from the same errors. If we accept that the drift is the result
of the union's impossibility of being a revolutionary structure, we
accept the contradictions that develop within them as inevitable, and we
would do better to develop methods that allow us to evade them, to
concentrate on our activity, such as starting from demonstrating how
anarchist methods can be the solution to the problems and shortcomings
of the union superstructures.
We must work to create permanent assemblies within the workplace, which
interact with a united voice both with the employers and with the union
itself, which becomes an instrument at the service of the workers'
community.
Therefore, encourage forms of self-management that are able to respond
to what cannot be achieved through disputes, becoming a field for real
experimentation in the collective management of resources. Never abandon
the activity of emancipation, demonstrating how the master and his
servant state always aim to overwhelm the workers, in order to rob them
of the fruit of their labor, the only source of well-being and wealth of
the entire society.
In self-management, greater awareness and class unity grow, feeding each
other in deciding and experimenting with forms of resistance and
sabotage, so in addition to supporting union demands, the energies
poured into practical and contingent organization make workers'
conscience flourish again of their real strength, individual and
collective, which has fallen asleep over years of abuse.
The existence of the unions and the assiduous and coordinated presence
of comrades and anarchist contents is an absolute priority. We know that
however it is not enough, because the roots of power are not rooted only
in the economic organization of current society. Coordination must find
physical meeting spaces, to build that system of human relations
indispensable to forge sincere, sincere and lasting relationships
between comrades. But even places like this, for discussion and exchange
of ideas and experiences, are no less vital. Confining the debate within
organizations or their direct bodies is not enough. It is not enough
because it seems to have determined, in many comrades, the inability to
be a minority in anarchist organizations, within which they often
experience their dissent as isolation. If we look at the history of our
movement we realize that precisely in moments of public discussion, in
the numerous newspapers and magazines of the time, the moment of most
effective propaganda of ideas and methods was reached.
The path by which the synthesis between the different positions is
achieved and the management of any divergences, which cannot be
reconciled, are the true strength of the anarchist method.

Construction site no. 21 November 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

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