WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL CA #336 - SUD education: from radical unionism to class collaboration unionism (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The SUD education federation is experiencing departures and splits
revealing its evolution. We return to this to try to understand its
mechanisms. This text is the result of collaborative writing with
comrades from SUD education or ex-SUD education. Included in italics are
extracts from a text "Why we are leaving SUD education" from September
2023 written by a small group of higher education and research (ESR)
activists who left SUD education. ---- Different SUD education unions
were created following the social movement of 1995 to form a federation
in 1998 built around self-management and anti-hierarchical principles:

Each union is autonomous;
The life of a union and its decisions are based on general meetings of
members;
At the federal level, a Federal Council (FC) meets every two months.
Apart from the Congresses, the CF constitute the federal decision-making
body;
A federal executive commission (CE) is elected whose sole role is to
animate federal life between two CFs and therefore does not have the
right to make the slightest decision which would not respect the
decisions of CF or Congress (combined every 3 years). The political
bases were a radical class struggle positioning vis-à-vis the hierarchy
with the desire for a culture of militant consensus.
Since its origin, SUD education has evolved significantly. The
generation that initiated SUD education has largely left union life to
retire; new generations have arrived, most often having no militant
past. The memory of the singularity of SUD education has therefore
crumbled little by little.

The civil service reform in 2003 led to the transfer of technical agents
from high schools and colleges to local authorities. Most of the SUD
education unions therefore decided to no longer unionize these
categories of staff, therefore falling under SUD Territorial
Communities, even though they remained colleagues of the teachers. Only
the ESR sector, a very minority, continues, at the national level, to
unionize members of administrative and technical staff. SUD education
now mainly unionizes secondary school teachers.
The center of gravity of union action therefore corresponds to the
concerns of activists most often belonging to educated middle classes
and sensitive to fashionable intersectional identity theories (sexism,
racism, Islamophobia, validism, transphobia, etc.). We must combat this
discrimination, but it is clear that massive propaganda on these issues
has become the specificity of SUD education on the union market. The
prospect of a common fight, class struggle, most often disappears apart
from occasional incantatory calls for a general strike.
During the last Congresses or in SUD education publications, if an
orientation towards AESH and AED exists, the working conditions of
administrative and technical staff are left aside. New members cannot
therefore be made aware of these concerns. This is all the more serious
as they most often have no union culture. For example, in a local
Solidaires AGM on the results of the retirement movement, an AGM
dominated by SUD education activists, the discussion essentially
revolved around homophobic or sexist comments that appeared during the
demonstrations.

The SUD education federation includes national thematic commissions
which theoretically have no decision-making power. In fact, certain
national commissions, as well as the EC, become political authorities
prohibiting any contradictory debate: "Whether on the COVID crisis,
feminism, anti-racism, criticism of the education system, etc., the
expression of divergent opinions very often leads to reactions of
categorical rejection, with no real opportunity for debate. There is
therefore a more or less explicit political line, defined by the EC or
the influential federal commissions, and never really debated, which
could be summarized as follows: "Being in the camp of Good means
deconstructing oppression and to block the extreme right. Those who dare
to express a point of view (even nuanced) that does not conform to the
line expose themselves to all kinds of inconvenience, ranging from
hostile looks against a backdrop of heavy silence in certain general
meetings to downright insulting adjectives on discussion lists/ internal
diffusion: if you argue against the doxa, it is necessarily because you
are a conspirator, sexist, racist, XXXXphobic, confusionist,
reactionary, etc. ".

The SUD education federation is increasingly becoming a union like any
other. At all levels of the federation, verticalization and bureaucracy
are emerging. A minority of "leaders" imposes itself with the acceptance
of the majority under the pretext of efficiency. The federal EC,
representatives of Solidaires and the heads of certain commissions have
thus become experts. Certain activists, considered essential, have seen
their discharges exceed what the statutes authorize: "the EC pilots, in
fact, federal life (CF, Congress) and very regularly allows itself to
take political positions, without seeking consensus, or even without any
discussion. This is generally done urgently, since the EC considers it
must keep pace with media news.»
 From then on, any criticism is fought: "comrades are accused in
particular of "collusion with the extreme right" because of their
involvement in anti-pass demonstrations or a collective of caregivers.
In these cases, the EC takes the liberty of sending local structures (UL
Solidaires or SUD education unions) denigrating messages targeting
comrades individually, making accusations without proof and going so far
as to expose their private lives, all without prior information, not
even to interested parties. ".

The federal positions of SUD education are increasingly imitative of
traditional unions, running as soon as they are whistled into
ministerial offices and adopting political positions that are less and
less divisive with the dominant union currents. For example, during the
Covid crisis, the SUD education federation called, without any internal
discussion, for the mass vaccination of children and refused to
participate in "anti-pass" demonstrations (under the pretext that the
latter were extremely RIGHT). More recently, at the Solidaires level,
SUD education supported the position of a bilateral meeting between
Solidaires and the government during the 2023 pension defense movement:
in the middle of a social movement where the objective was to strengthen
grassroots struggles, SUD education was ready to discuss face to face
with E. Borne in the chairs of Matignon.
Behind a so-called radical screen in the field of feminism and
anti-racism, SUD education espouses the political orientations of class
collaboration unions. During the retirement movement, the
co-spokesperson of Solidaires, Simon Duteil, member of SUD education,
considered that the national inter-union had done "faultlessly".

Activists tried to lead an internal struggle to counter the shifts
previously exposed, but it received little response. The vast majority
of members are not informed about federal life, local AGs bring together
few people and the majority of militant activity is carried out by a
minority of discharged people.
In reaction to these criticisms, the federation, notably through the EC,
led a witch hunt. The Corrèze union was excluded from the Caen Congress
(May 2022) by a trial worthy of the worst Stalinists, under fallacious
pretexts of "porosity with the extreme right" and "sexism". In June
2022, it was the turn of the Grenoble academy union on questionable
statutory grounds which in reality cut across many other divisions.

Other critical attempts emerged which were all unsuccessful: "All recent
attempts to initiate a substantive discussion on the above issues, at
various levels of the federation, have been swept aside. The PIF-PAAAF
grouping (For a Federative Ideal - Perpetuating Anti-Authoritarianism
and Self-management within the Federation) requested recognition as a
minority (in accordance with article 12 of the federal statutes), as
well as a right dissemination to local unions: rights refused by the CF
of September 2022. SUD education 76-27 proposed a text requesting the
opening of a reflection site on internal democracy: request rejected by
the CF of December 2022. SUD education 47 proposed a discussion point on
the problems potentially posed by the creation of a federal "anti-sexist
monitoring unit": point removed from the agenda during the CF meeting in
June 2023. We therefore note that A majority of local union
representatives are ready to stand together with the EC/political office
to hold their line against any internal criticism. ".

For a year and a half, different unions (Grenoble academy, Corrèze,
Oise, Aquitaine) have united into a new trade union to which members of
other unions having left SUD education (Guyane, Sarthe, Nord, Pas-
de-Calais...). Furthermore, pillars of the ESR's activist work
collectively left SUD education in September 2023, some creating a SUD
ESR union outside of Solidaires. Incidentally, let us point out that
these splits mainly concern long-time activists and represent a
relatively small number of members compared to the total federal number
which is growing.
During union splits, it is usual for the splitting fraction to partly
take up the name from which it came: CGTU (split from the CGT in 1921),
CGT-FO (split from the CGT in 1947), CNT-SO (split from the CGT in
1947). split from the CNT in 2012). When SUD education Corrèze and SUD
education Grenoble were excluded (2022), they created SUD Lutte declass
education; similarly SUD ESR was created.
SUD education banned in November 2022, via the ministry, the
presentation of SUD Class Struggle Education lists in professional
elections and has since paid a law firm specializing in commercial law
for a legal appeal on the name of the brand "SUD ". Recent case law
considers that, as soon as a union collects contributions, it falls
within the framework of commercial law (members would pay for a...
commercial service!).
Several thousand euros of contributions from SUD education members are
used to prohibit another union from using a name (SUD) under the pretext
of "commercial" ownership of this name. To our knowledge, only the CFDT
and the UNSA had dared to rely on bourgeois commercial law to counter
dissident unions.

SUD education obtains only weak results in professional elections. SUD
education is therefore trying to imitate the large unions to gain
institutional recognition, thus hoping to gain votes in these elections.
Thus, during recent social movements, SUD education has never tried to
develop a critique of the inter-union, seeking to stick as closely as
possible to the CGT. This political shift is associated with an
organizational shift. In 30 years, generational evolution and the
domination of postmodern ideas have caused SUD education to slide from a
radical self-managing position to a bureaucratized unionism integrated
into class collaboration.
SUD education is far from being the only organization experiencing
splits following the monolithic authoritarianism of intersectional
identity currents. However, the evolution of this federation raises
questions about the union action of revolutionary activists and the lure
of being able to currently constitute a revolutionary unionism in the
image of the Charter of Amiens (CGT, 1906). Organizing in a union is a
way of trying to create collectives of resistance to the aggressiveness
of capitalism where we work[1], which is necessary and can be a
political lever. But campaigning for the revolutionary transformation of
our society requires going beyond purely union action, which is
ultimately quite sterile today, and investing in the struggles and
structures that are emerging beyond the world of work because the class
struggle for years, it has been spilling over into the world of work
(GJ, Sainte-Soline, etc.).

VR

Notes
[1]For the interest of unions, see CA 335, December 2023: "United
States: the reasons for the anger"

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4052
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