Movement in retreat
International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
THE democratic left in Russia has, to date, failed to win mass support, particularly amongst the working class, its natural social base. In the first of two articles our correspondents begin an analysis of this failure by examining the social and political situation in the working class. In the second article (appearing in July) they continue their analysis with an historical overview of the left's development since the last days of Gorbachev, and ask what the future holds. POUL FUNDER LARSEN & DAVID MANDEL
W E should start with
some definitions. By "working class" we mean those that depend mainly on wages or salaries for their subsistence and do not hold managerial positions. We also include the "intelligentsia" (that is, people in non-managerial positions which normally require higher education qualifications), although on occasion we will refer to the latter as a separate group. While the social structure of Russia is in rapid flux, the working class and their dependents (with or without the intelligentsia) still constitute the overwhelming majority of the population.
A definition of the "left" however, is more difficult. Strictly speaking, these are the democratic socialists, that is, anti-capitalist currents striving for the maximum extension of democracy (in the literal sense of popular power), not only in the narrowly defined political sphere but also - and perhaps especially - in economic and social life. This consistently democratic left objectively reflects the interests of the working class.
But there are also those anti-capitalist currents who refer to themselves as socialist or communist, and while their practice and real programmes may have little to do with the extension of demo22 cracy, we will expand our definition to include these currents. For want of a better term we will refer to these groups as the "nostalgic left".! Working class emerges from bureaucratic rule Until the late 1980s, there was a widespread assumption among the democratic left, both inside and outside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), that the anti-bureaucratic revolution would be socialist in content; that is, it would lead to a genuine socialisation of the nationalised economy. This has obviously turned out to be illusory. But the illusion (which may yet be overturned) did have some basis in reality. Workers played a leading and independent role in all the anti-bureaucratic movements in Eastern Europe following World War Il. These movements almost always gave rise to workers' councils and to demands for self-management, and their participants often displayed remarkable solidarity and organisation. Even in the USSR disillusionment with de-Stalinisation in the early 1960s provoked a significant protest movement among workers, which was severely repressed.
The basic thrust of the labour movement since the very origins of modern capitalism has been to subordinate the market to social needs, when it was not to completely replace the market with a planned economy based upon production for use. It seemed reasonable to assume that workers in the bureaucratic states would oppose attempts to restore capitalism.
That capitalism is now being restored, albeit in a confused and incomplete manner, is primarily the result of the weakness of the working class as it emerged from decades of bureaucratic dictatorship. However, the extent of this that hom love unt the be weakness was not immediately evident return to socialist principles (a banner that soon proved false), gave rise to a growing, but uneven, mobilisation in the working class.
Nonetheless, this activity played an important role in the gradual expansion of political freedoms under Perestroika which finally led to the fall of the bureaucratic regime. But the fruits of this mobilisation were harvested with relative ease by liberal forces (in and outside the bureaucracy) hostile to the workers' interests. Despite their promises of democracy and Western-style living standards, the policies of the new/old elite have left workers worse off both economically and politically than under Perestroika. In many respects, they are worse off than under the pre-Perestroika regime.
In retrospect, the weakness of the working class is not difficult to explain. The rapid collapse of bureaucratic rule left in its wake an atomised society. The bureaucracy had for over sixty years prevented independent collective activity and organisation. The relative ease with which some workers were able to mount collective actions during Perestroika was largely due to the fact that the state itself provided a ready organisational framework for mobilisation: the party-state bureaucracy organised society in order to control and administer it. When repression was relaxed in the first years of Perestroika, these structures — especially the state enterprises and their centralised ministries — were still in tact, and economic protests quickly became politicised. The centralised, authoritarian state was the natural target of discontent. The goal — popular control - was self-evident.
The high point of this popular mobilisation was reached in 1990, with the election of many liberals, running under democratic, anti-bureaucratic banners, to local and republican soviets. After that, activism steadily declined.2 In August 1991, the liberal forces around Yeltsin were able to defeat the attempted putsch by conservative forces with minimal popular mobilisation. This development opened the way for a time to the unlimited dominance of the liberals and the launching of "shock therapy": a massive assault on popular living standards and social and political rights.
1.Their social and economic programmes tend toward social democracy, while the parties which actually desribe themselves as social democratic tend toward neo-liberalism.
2. There were some, admittedly weak, signs of a resurgence towards the end of 1993 before Yeltsin's tanks gutted the Supreme Soviet.
International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
B
Y then, much of the old state structure had already been dismantled, especially in the economic sphere, and it no longer served as a focus for popular discontent. In particular, enterprises, though still state-owned, had won their autonomy. The atomisation which resulted was reflected in the union movement, where decentralisation was carried to the extreme. The national unions and federations lost their former dictatorial powers and most of their budgets to the factory-level unions and saw their role reduced to mere co-ordinators and political lobbyists. In most of industry, collective agreements became almost irrelevant; it was increasingly "every plant for itself". There is some reaction against this today, but the absence of solidarity in the union movement remains very striking.
At the same time, once democracy had been won — or, at least, appeared to have been won — and once the grandiose promises associated with market reform (which had been sold to the populace as the opposite of bureaucratic centralisation, and so the natural economic counterpart of political democracy) had proved empty, it became much harder for workers to find positive common goals which could unite their opposition to the poliliberal/bureaucratic regime.
Another factor was that socialism had been discredited by the old regime, making it difficult to conceive a coherent, working class alternative. However, this problem played a more central role in the final period of
Perestroika, when people still took the promises of the market reformers seriously. Today, the majority of workers look back fondly at their economic security and living standards under the old system. Despite the government's continued propaganda,
"socialism", at least as an idea, no longer provokes negative reactions in most people.
Today the basic obstacle to the emergence of a working class alternative to capitalist restoration is the social and political demoralization of the working class against a background of unprecedented peacetime economic cri-
SiS.
In brief, Russian workers today find themselves in an entirely new situation of economic insecurity which is increasingly resembling the situation in Third World countries. The reactions to this social earthquake among workers, the great majority of whom have no experience of collective action, has been to retreat into the private struggle for survival, while clinging to the hope that somehow management and/or the State will defend them. This attitude comes naturally as a legacy of the past: though ultimately backed up by the threat of repression (made good whenever workers openly clashed with their masters), the relationship of management and the political authorities to workers, was, for several decades, one of more-or-less benevolent paternalism. Today, in conditions of rapidly deepening crisis, few workers have any faith in their own collective ability to defend themselves.
### Trotsky
In a largely forgotten passage of The Revolution Betrayed, in the chapter significantly entitled The Inevitability of a New Revolution", Trotsky, writing in the mid 1930s, said that the fate of the October Revolution was inextricably tied to the fate of Europe and of the whole world and that if no revolution were victorious in the developed capitalist countries then bourgeois counterrevolution rather than an uprising of the workers against the bureaucracy would be the most likely outcome. However,
Trotsky concluded that: "If, in spite of the united sabotage of reformists and
'Communist' leaders, the [western
European working class] finds the road to power, a new chapter will open in the history of the Soviet Union. The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass like an electric shock through the
Soviet masses, straighten them up, raise their spirit of independence, [and] awaken the traditions of 1905 and 1917...
Only in that way can the first Workers'
State be saved for the socialist future. "3
Not only has there been no successful revolution, the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes occurred at a very low point in the fortunes of the international workers' movement, a not insignificant factor in explaining the relative ease with which Russian workers fell prey to liberal ideology. Today, with, perhaps, the exception of the Brazilian
Workers' Party, there is no mass party which fights for and believes socialism to be a practical and realisable objective.
Russian workers were constantly reminded that "the whole world has embraced the market". Ideological, economic and political pressure from abroad played a key role in directing the anti-bureaucratic revolution onto a capitalist path.
Now, more than two years into "shock therapy", Russian workers have been immunised
M against the siren songs of the liberals, but they still cannot conceive of a practical alternative to capitalist restoration. It is on this background of demobilisation and despair that fascism in Russia can become a real potential (Vladimir Zhirinovsky's electoral support is evidence of this.
Indeed, if one considers the international context of the collapse of the bureaucratic regime
(and it was more collapse than overthrow, the elite of the ruling caste itself having lost confidence in its system), the turn which events have taken no longer seems quite so predestined. If, for example, the collapse had occurred in 1968 (it was in progress in Czechoslovakia before the
Soviet tanks rolled in), it is not hard to imagine the ensuing transformation taking an entirely different direction.
This is not to deny that the crisis of the
3. The Revolution Betrayed - What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?', p. 290, Pathfinder Press, New York,
1972.
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International Viewpoint #257 June 1994 labour and socialist movements in the capitalist world and the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes are linked. But that link is much less direct than the coincidence of the two crises might lead one to think.
Russian labour and the old regimes' collapse
So what was the response of the main workers' organisations to the collapse of the bureaucratic system and the process, still far from complete, of capitalist restoration. Perestroika gave rise to many new organizations, but most remained small and were short-lived. The three types of organization that displayed some staying power and have retained significant membership are the new trade unions, the work-collective councils (STKs) and their associations, and finally the old trade unions. We will examine them in that order, since that is how they made themselves felt on the political scene.
• New or alternative trade unions
With their general strike in the summer of 1989, the miners became the vanguard for renewal of the labour movement. That strike eventually gave rise to the Independent Miners' Union (NG), the rival to the old Union of Employees of the Coal Industry. The founders of the NPG reproached the old union, among other things, with being conciliationist and including management in its ranks. They set out to organise a union exclusively of underground coal workers, unlike the old union which also included thousands of surface employees. (The NPG eventually yielded on this point, but it still excludes anyone above the rank of foreman).
Overall, the new union movement has made rather limited progress outside of the coal sector. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the old unions organise around 90 percent of all workers. Even among coalminers, probably less than ten per cent belong to the NPG, though the latter's influence, now on the decline, has in the past gone well beyond its formal membership. Outside of coal, the new movement has met with some success mainly in the transport sector (aside from the relatively small number of new unions in scattered industries and factories elsewhere): among air-traffic controllers, pilots, train drivers, port workers, city transport drivers. These are strategic economic positions which give these relatively small 24 groups of workers exceptional leverage.
The decision to form new unions was based on the belief that the old structures were unreformable. The obstacles to reform in 1990, when the NPG was founded, must indeed have seemed formidable. Even today, more than three years later, the main problems - the absence of democratic accountability of union leaders and their subordination to enterprise management — are still far from being resolved in the majority of enterprise-level unions, where the real power now lies.
While progress is being made, albeit at a pace which is slow and uneven and from a starting position which was already weak, it may prove insufficient to save the organised labour movement from a definitive defeat by the forces of capitalist restoration. One example of reform at the national level is the old coal employees' union itself, which has no doubt benefitted from the competition provided by the rival NPG. Under a young president who rose from the ranks (rather than coming from the party apparatus, as was the tradition), this union has become increasingly militant in the defence of its members interests, and its president's authority among miners today far surpasses that of the leaders of the NPG. Other unions which have undergone far-reaching reform at the national level are the Byelorussian autoworkers and radio-electronic wor-
These examples, while still quite rare, nevertheless demonstrate that reform of the old structures, however difficult, is possible. It is true that most of the old unions' new-found militancy has been directed at the State and not against enterprise management. Indeed; much of the collective action which has been organised by these unions has had the active or passive support of management, since their aim has been to force the state to live up to its commitment to pay subsidies, provide credits, and to lighten the tax burden on enterprises. These and similar issues, upon which the very survival of a factory can hang, represent interests which are still shared in common by workers and a number of managers. Privatisation, at least in the large factories, has, in most cases, not significantly affected worker-management relations, which retain much of their old paternalistic character.
Thus, if union reform has not gone very far at the level of the factory committees, it would be wrong to attribute this merely to corruption or to the allegedly unreformable nature of the old unions. There remains an objective basis for the close collaboration between management and the union. The problem is not the co-operation itself, but that the union rarely takes part in it as an equal and independent partner. Then again, there are examples of old unions, at the level of the factory-floor, which have become accountable to the membership and independent of management. This has occurred when rank-and-file union members themselves have mobilised against management to elect democratic leaders prepared to adopt independent positions.
That this is still rare is certainly in part due to managerial repression of union activists, often with the co-operation of old union leaders. But, as we argued above, the main reason is the prevailing demoralisation and demobilisation among the rank and file. The strategy adopted by some activists to form new unions alongside the old ones is, at least in part, a way of avoiding the difficult task of mobilising the majority of still inert workers for union reform by concentrating efforts on the minority, who for one reason or another, are prepared to support more independent and accountable union organisations.
But if in the early stages of the new union movement, its activists adopted more solidary positions and made some real effort to reach the broader layer of workers (for example, by founding the • now defunct Confederation of Labour in r1990), this movement has increasingly taken on a narrow craft character, to the point where sectors of it have become a • sort of labour aristocracy in their attitudes and practice.
ЯКОВСКИЙ
International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
T HE "aristocratic" outlook of
the leaders of the ng came to the fore in the spring of 1992, when they refused to support the strike movement - some even condemned it — among the health and education workers, the lowest paid workers in Russia, whose wages remain well below the poverty line. (The old miners" union supported this movement, although its support rarely went much further than declarations.) The ng has also come out in support of individual social security and health insurance accounts.
"Golden tap"
The support for Yeltsin and his neoliberal policies among almost all of the new unions is closely linked to this aristocratic outlook. On the one hand, the strategic economic positions of their members (as one old union activist put it: "They sit on the golden tap") have allowed them to fare better than other workers under the liberal reforms. On the other, these unions try to compensate for their political isolation from the broader mass of workers by developing a special relationship with the government: their political loyalty has won them a certain degree of favoured treatment. All the major new unions supported Yeltsin to the hilt in his bloody confrontation with parliament in September-October 1993, while virtually all the old unions, to one degree or another, supported the parliament (whose majority had been shifting to the left (or rather centre) against Yeltsin's shock therapy).
So, the paradox is this: the new unions generally adopt militant, independent positions toward local management but display touching loyalty to the government; the old unions tend to do the opposite. Consequently, the most active elements of the working class, those in the new unions, have been detached from, and to some degree even turned against, the majority of workers.4
Despite all this, one has to doubt whether these new unions (at least, those of them that are real unions and organise the workers in entire factories and industries) can long maintain their aristocratic orientation. In Russian conditions, to say that the material situation of these workers is privileged is only to say that they are not quite as poor as the rest. In addition, the special relationship with the government is anything but secure and is certainly no protection against periodic efforts on the part of factory management at the State level to break these unions through strong-arm tactics.
•STKs and self-management
The STKs (work-collective councils) were created by order from above on the basis of Gorbachev's 1987 Law on the State Enterprise (factory), adopted when Perestroika still paraded under the banner of a return to socialist ideals. Largely remained subordinate to the factory administration. The STK movement as such only began to take off after the first miners' strike in 1989, and especially when Perestroika began to shift to an openly restorationist course. The new 1990 Enterprise Law, which virtually abolished the STKs, provided the major impulse for the creation of national and regional sk unions, with the first national congress taking place in Moscow at the end of 1990. Even so, the activists of this movement came disproportionately from the factory intelligentsia.
At its high point, this current came closest to a socialist programme in its demands for reform of property relations, calling for the full transfer of management of the State sector to the workplace collectives. This meant that the factory would have economic autonomy, with the employees collectively deciding its basic policy and hiring management. At a later date, the collectives would themselves decide what form of property the factory should take. This could range from full collective ownership to full State ownership, but the most important point was that any change in property relations would be the voluntary decision of the collective.
The major weakness of this position was that it presented no macro-economic vision, in that it neither dealt with nature of relations between factories in the same industry (or between industries), nor with the role of the State or other political and collective institutions in the economy. This critical issue was left open because of a reaction against the old centralised, bureaucratic system of management and the influence of liberal ideology, which painted any direct State role in economic management as totalitarian (whether the State was democratic or not was irrelevant to
Nevertheless, the STKs' position was anathema to the reform-minded section of the nomenklatura, originally Gorbachev's main political base, which by this time was fast abandoning its attachment to "socialism", hoping itself to appropriate the best parts of the nationalised economy. The STKs' demands were also strongly opposed by the liberal forces that dominated the elite intelligentsia and by their political allies abroad in the imf and World Bank. They constantly cited the Yugoslav example as proof that self-management does not work. But, in fact, they saw self-management and worker ownership as a major obstacle to rapid capitalist restoration.
### Explcit
This opposition to the STK movement was well-founded. It is true that the absence of an explicit macro-economic conception of reform, at least among the majority of activists, implied an essentially market-dominated view of the future economy. Nevertheless, worker self-management would have put a break on rapid privatisation (primitive accumulation), which (along with the creation of favourable conditions for foreign investment and trade — in practice, outright plundering) is the real goal of shock therapy (all the talk about restructuring and efficiency being a smoke screen to hide the rapid formation of a bourgeoisie). Worker self-management would have left open the possibility that workers would be led by their practical experience to see that a genuinely democratic State and other accountable collective institutions have a positive and necessary role to play in economic organisation, since a market system of self-management would spell bankruptcy for many factories and entail mass unemployment. In the summer of 1993, for example, after getting a taste of privatisation in practice, despite a massive propaganda campaign (largely financed by the U.S. government), seventy-two per cent of the respondents in a national survey opposed privatisation of large-scale industries and factories.
The major weakness of the movement was more political than ideological: it failed to mobilise the support of workers. The great majority of workers apparently did not see the practical relevance of the property question for themselves. Back in 1990 and even 1991,
4. This, of course, is not unrelated to the ties that the AFL-CIO's U.S government-funded Russo-American Foundation have managed to develop with these new unions. This foundation openly professes a liberal ideology and supports the pro-Yeltsin forces, while decisively refusing any contact with the former Communist organisations belonging to the old union federation.
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International Viewpoint #257 June 1994 few understood that privatisation would eventually put an end to the prevailing paternalistic practices of management and the State, or that it threatened workers with the loss of important social benefits and, especially, with mass unemployment. Russian workers had no direct experience of capitalism and they typically reacted with disbelief when told that in capitalist economies productive, disciplined workers are regularly fired when their labour can no longer make a profit for the owners. On the contrary, many workers believed that a
"real owner" (the liberals insisted that under the old system
"no one" owned the factories)
would introduce the latest technology and eliminate the semiorganised anarchy that characterised
Soviet factories.
Worker indifference and even distrust toward the stks was bolstered by their official origins and their widespread subordination to the plant administration.
This problem was compounded by the tacit and often open hostility of most unions to the stks.
Union leaders tended to see them as rival organizations. Many
Gerd Arntz believed that self- management and/or collective ownership would lead to the elimination of trade-unions as unnecessary. Rather belatedly, toward the end of
1991, both the new and the old trade unions, at least formally, finally came around to supporting the original demands of the STK movement. Nevertheless, both union movements consistently refer to their main task as defending "hired labour", a phrase that would seem to imply that they have, in fact, given up on defending the workers' claim as collective owners of the nationalised economy, built by their labour and that of previous generations.
But part of the responsibility for the failure of the movement lies with its lea-
26 dership, who did little to mobilise workers around the movement's demands.
Instead, they concentrated their efforts on political lobbying in the corridors of power. This choice of tactic was probably related, at least in part, to the predominance of the "factory intelligentsia"
among the movement's activists. They tended to be less confrontational and more trusting of authorities than workers.
In
Russia, the national stk movement's leaders cast their lot with Yeltsin and his push for
Russian sovereignty (this was at a time when the ussr still existed). No sooner had Yeltsin and his liberal supporters acquired the power they coveted than they openly turned against the self-management movement.
(Kravchuk repeated the same trick on the Ukrainian movement.)
Under tremendous ideological and political pressure from above, and with little active support from below, the sTK movement gradually retreated from its original demands and began to defend the workers' right to at least some share of the nationalised property. But the choices offered by Yeltsin's Law on Privatisation included neither self-management nor collective worker ownership. Today, few STKs still exist, but despite the official self-congratulation on the progress of privatisation, the issue of property is a long way from being resolved. As we have noted, worker-management relations in most of the factories which have formally been privatised have yet to change fundamentally. In some factories where conflicts over property have become acute, and in the absence of stks, the trade unions and other ad-hoc organisations have taken up the battle for the workers. In a number of cases, workers have tried to circumvent the law by pooling individually-held shares. In a few instances, workers have openly revolted and de facto annulled the privatisation of their factory, once they had understood what it meant in practice
The real change in property relations in Russia will be marked by mass dismissals. It is difficult to predict how workers will react to that. A major labour upsurge would surely spell the end to the neo-liberal reforms. So far, there are few signs of such mobilisation, but the contradictions - and the anger — are mounting.
The old unions HE miners' strike in 1989, which saw saw the old miners' union sitting beside government representatives across the table from the strikers, provided the first real impetus for change, albeit slow and tortuous, in the old unions. But probably more decisive than the competition from new workers' organisations was the shift in government attitude toward the old unions. With the change in State policy to a liberal course, the old unions lost their status as junior, subordinate partners and became the object of open government hostility.
The onslaught caught the old unions quite by surprise: they had done next to nothing to win the confidence of their members.
Between 1989 and Yeltsin's coup d'etat coup in September-October 1993, the old unions gradually shifted to a position of open opposition to the government. But this evolution was halting and contradictory. They continued - and continue today — to embrace the slogan of "social partnership", even though the government consistently violates its signed agreements. At the same time, the old unions mounted, or tried to mount, campaigns to force the government to live up to its commitments and to change an economic policy ruinous for their members. One such campaign was building up, with somewhat more success than usual, in the weeks preceding Yeltsin's decree that abolished the constitution and shut down the parliament. (Most of the new unions also embrace the slogan of "social partnership", which is being pushed vigorously by the International Labour Organisation and the American Federation of LabourCongress of Industrial Organisation.)
International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
In conditions of a collapsing economy, unions can achieve relatively little for their members through traditional trade-union activity. To be effective in
Russia today, the main struggle has to be conducted on the political level. To a degree, this is understood in the old unions, since most of their militant actions have, as noted, been directed at the State. But the political action of the old unions suffers from two major and related weaknesses.
One of these is the failure of the plant unions clearly to demarcate themselves from management. This, of course, does not rule out co-operation when it is in the workers' interests, but it must be from an independent position. Unless unions can demonstrate to their members that they are something more than the tail of the administration; unless they clearly take up the defence of the workers' interests and gain at least some small, but real, victories; they have little hope of leading them into political action against the State. Today most workers do not even understand why they need a union (and most local union officers do not understand why they need an active, conscious rank and file.
### Inconsistency
The other major weakness of the old unions' political action has been its inconsistency. This, too, is related to the unions' refusal to assert their independence from management. The Federation of Independent Russian Trade Unions (FNPR) and its affiliates support a "centrist" position on economic reform in a tacit alliance with the so-called "directors' corps", that is, those directors who have remained more-or-less "red", in so far as they have not totally given up on saving their factory and its work force. This position (which also characterised the majority of the old parliament in its latter days) accepts the inevitability of capitalist restoration, but calls for a socially-oriented market — a regulated transition to a capitalism oriented to national needs, with a strong state sector and social-welfare safety net: in other words — capitalism with a human face. But one has to seriously doubt the realism of such a programme, given the current crisis and restructuring of world capitalism and the subordinate place the Russian economy would inevitably occupy in it.
In this sense, the liberals' criticism of the centrist programme as inconsistent has some merit. In effect, the old unions' want it both ways: they accept capitalist restoration but reject its consequences. They are not opposed to privatisation but it should be carried out "in the interests of the work collectives", a vague and meaningless phrase. If they are serious about defending their members' interests, they have to opt for a clean break with the the government and the directors' corps (that is, abandon social partnership) and come out with a clear workers' alternative to capitalist restoration. In private conversations, many union leaders appear to understand that the defense of workers' interest in current conditions has to assume an anti-capitalist character, but most refuse to adopt that position in practice.
### Labour party
In the past, the old unions have toyed with the idea of forming their own labour party but have never decided to do it. (In Byelorussia, the autoworkers' and radio-electronics workers' unions created such a party at the end of 1993) The idea is still in the air, but the new leadership that was elected to the FNPR after the October 1993 crisis has so far shown itself even more timid than the old.
This is partly a response to government repression: the unions lost their control of social security benefits at the end of September 1993 (a few days after the FNPR executive condemned Yeltsin's coup), and the government made clear that if they are disloyal, they stand to lose their automatic dues check-off and their property, if not worse. At the same time, since the defeat of pro-shock forces in the December 1993 elections, there seems to have been some shift in government economic policy toward a more centrist position. This has created an expectant mood among some of the union leaders.
But probably as important is the old union leaders' sense of isolation from their millions of members, who are not ready to support them in a confrontation with the government. This is a vicious circle that can only be broken by a labour upsurge from below or by the adoption by the union leadership of an independent, far-sighted, and consistent strategy that their members can begin to believe in. Ideally, it would be a combination of both. Whether any of these eventualities will happen, and when, is anyone's guess. The only thing that is sure at this point is that the immediate future is not bright for workers and the labour movement. *
Plant unions have failed to clearly demarcate themselves from management. Unless unions can demonstrate to their members that they are something more than the tail of administration ...
they have little hope of leading them into action against the State
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