The Masses Editorial Board is re-publishing the following piece which we find unity with and was written by our comrades at the New Labor Press. This piece contains vital information on the taking up of mass work and the organizing struggle.
NLP is happy to present its most comprehensive and complete guide to date: our Shop Organizing Guide. In addition to replacing our earlier “Shop Unit Guide”, which was one of our first works and because of that had a few limitations (such an imprecise use of the term “unit”), the new Shop Organizing Guide also combines and integrates the other guides we have written, such as the Distribution and Writing guide, into one single comprehensive document. The guide includes new sections on things like how independent unions should be structured, the shop committee system, etc., based on work comrades have done since NLP was first launched.
If you are a class-conscious worker, we hope this guide will be useful, and if you read this document, agree with its approach and contents, want to put them into practice, and haven’t already reached out to the New Labor Organizing Committee, make sure you do so as soon as you can.
To download and read the Shop Organizing Guide click here.
Introduction
A correct approach to shop floor organizing is the cornerstone of the class-conscious labor movement. That is because fundamentally the basis of our movement is in the workplaces, on the shop floor, in the factories and warehouses, on the farms and in the mines, wherever labor is exploited by capital. The success or failure of our movement will be determined by our ability to mobilize, organize and politicize our fellow workers for the political and economic demands of our class, serving the eventual establishment of a workers’ state via socialist revolution.
These fundamentals imply a correct approach to the creation and leadership of shop organizations, whether they be the most basic shop organizations like shop committees, or the most broad, like a class-conscious union center. In theoretically outlining, and practically implementing, this type of work we apply some of the most fundamental principles of the modern working class, like industrial unionism and class struggle.
A shop floor organization is an organization of the workers within a single workplace. It is the smallest body in the labor movement capable of making decisions and carrying them out collectively. On a literal level, it is simply two or more workers who have united on the basis of shared political-economic objectives. Political, because at a fundamental level all of our problems as workers come back to the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist government, and economic because many of our day-to-day problems have to do with pay, bad bosses, overwork, the isolation/robotic nature of our work, etc. Political struggle means challenging the political rule of the capitalists, or their representatives in the workplace, and economic struggle means challenging the particular rate of exploitation in the workplace through an improvement in working conditions, pay, slowdown in the work rate, etc. It is unthinkable that one struggle could take place without the other and so all labor organizations must unite on the basis of both.
The purpose of a shop organization is to organize a particular workplace, raise the political level of the workers there, and struggle for their immediate concrete demands. What this looks like will be different at every place of work. Nevertheless, there are certain ideological, political, and organizational features that are common across all shop floor organizations, and it must be this way if we are to achieve broader mobilization and organization on an industrial level without degenerating into the divisive, weak, reactionary organizations that characterize the state-dominated labor movement. Due to the potential for repercussions, shop organizations must be organized semi-clandestinely. This means that on an organizational level things like the personal information of the workers in the shop organization and the specific details and extent of their work must be known only by those people contributing to the shop organization. This is practical necessity due to the presence of snitches and traitors in all workplaces, and to protect against the use of the capitalist legal system and its police to crush workplace organizing. Politically however the goals of the shop organization should be known among all the advanced and intermediate workers, and in the run-up to and during the course of actions like walk-outs, strikes, mass meetings, rallies, stand-outs etc., the organizational aims and plans of the shop floor organizations must be propagated, taught to, and grasped by the workers in a given workplace as appropriate.
To some shop organization members, their day-to-day tasks might seem very administrative, routine, or basic, like trying to regularly talk and listen to their co-workers, or consistently distribute a certain number of shop papers. While the day-to-day tasks of the shop organizations could superficially resemble routine administrative work, these tasks allow us to build up the capacity to successfully mobilize our co-workers and carry out much larger and more powerful actions like rallies, slowdowns, walkouts and strikes. Because of this unique capacity, politically and economically shop organizations are absolutely fundamental organizations of the working class. This makes a correct ideological and political orientation an important and permanent necessity in them. Reactionary ideas of any kind, whether it is something “casual” like homophobia or something more “professional” and “educated” like support for capitalist politicians, state unionism, opportunism or revisionism must be relentlessly criticized and its proponents corrected. The effect of these ideas in the long-term is to strengthen the capitalists, politicians, and corporate management by dividing us and pitting sections of the workers against each other. While the ideological-political basis of unity of shop organizations is class-conscious trade unionism (for a concrete example of this see the New Labor Organizing Committee’s objectives and principles), that doesn’t negate the need for the shop organizations to combat opportunism and revisionism in the labor movement or the need to study, learn from, and appropriately/correctly apply Marxist theory. The shop organization cannot tolerate opportunism, chauvinism or revisionism in any form within its ranks and must pursue the correct political line no matter the short-term costs. Otherwise it ceases to be a true shop organization and becomes little more than a gang for advancing the factional interests of a narrow minority of workers.
To read the rest of the NLP Shop Organizing Guide click here.
