CIO[might put print references here]Links: http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/03/birth-of-the-cio http://www.isreview.org/issues/25/The_1930s.shtml http://www.isreview.org/issues/78/feat-marxism&unions.shtml http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/10/the-sit-down-strikes http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/2011/11/from-socialist-alternative-website-75th.html http://www.kclabor.org/big_three_get_big_deal.htm http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2012/02/75-years-since-flint.html http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/771 http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2363 http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2126 http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2576 http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1186  http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/129 http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3159 page 49, http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/112497585582936.pdf chapter on the new deal  http://books.google.com/books?id=NIwrnwD6Y4kC&lpg=PA289&ots=1mfWKPjutx&dq=CIO%20%22radical%20america%22&pg=PA49#v=onepage&q&f=false chapter 11 http://books.google.com/books?id=NIwrnwD6Y4kC&lpg=PA289&ots=1mfWKPjutx&dq=CIO%20%22radical%20america%22&pg=PA133#v=onepage&q&f=false http://libcom.org/tags/cio *  http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/transition/ch2.html http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1186  http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/laborparty/ch2.html http://books.google.com/books?id=s9zkqku2zAgC&lpg=PA99&ots=hTKBjM4U06&dq=%22sharon%20smith%22%20CIO&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
An aside on terminology - Most political/political-theory terms are a sort of arena of disagreement, like a range of different uses of a same term. Class composition is no exception. Pinning down what a term *really* is strikes me as inviting endless semantic debate, rather than just saying “when I use the term I mean the following” or being like “when this writer used it they seem to have meant the following.”  But for whatever it’s worth, on the terms ‘class composition’ and ‘political composition’ and ‘technical composition’ -  technical composition is meant to be a somewhat detailed description of the working class as an object for capitalists including detail like workplace technology (assembly lines etc) and managerial practices. Political composition is meant to be a description of the class as a subject. Different figures use these terms differently and a big difference is in how much they think about the relationship between political and technical composition. I think Negri tends to use the term in a way that the working class’s political and cultural qualities follow from the labor process. There’s at least a bit of technological determinism in that. There’s also a fairly clumsy and mechanical way of talking about organization - there’s one and only one best way to do organization for the working depending on the prevailing labor practices at the time. (For instance, Negri and Hardt in their book Commonwealth suggest that the Leninist party form was the most appropriate organizational form in the early 20th century because of the predominance of certain kinds of factory work.) All of that’s goofy IMO. Panzieri on the other hand argued basically for starting from autonomous working class politics and seeing technical factors as a response to this. A different sort of idea follows from that. Both fit under the term ‘class composition’ but they involve using the ideas of ‘political composition’ and ‘technical composition’ differently.  The terms are also meant to be dynamic - movement from recomposition to decomposition and recomposition again etc. At any moment the class has a political composition and a technical one and those relate. The class struggles within current arrangements, in response to and also making use of current arrangements. (So, at one point with assembly lines, a work stoppage in a small unit on a line could back up and eventually shut down a much larger part of the line, and the amount invested in fixed capital made that work stoppage quite costly for capitalists.) Political struggles of the working class lead to capitalists responding in part by changing technical and institutional arrangements: technical recomposition. That make some forms of struggle less effective, undermining workers’ ability to struggle: political decomposition. That in turn pushes the class to find new forms of struggle: political recomposition.
http://libcom.org/library/general-remarks-question-organisation-pannekoek “Organisation is the chief principle in the working class fight for emancipation. Hence the forms of this organisation constitute the most important problem in the practice of the working class movement. It is clear that these forms depend on the conditions of society and the aims of the fight. They cannot be the invention of theory, but have to be built up spontaneously by the working class itself, guided by its immediate necessities.” “In normal capitalism, the workers’ share is the value of their labour power, i.e., what is necessary to sustain and restore continually their capacities to work. The remaining part of the product is the surplus value, the share of the capitalist class.” - sort of. quibble with this. “The capitalists, in order to increase their profit, try to lower wages and increase the hours of labour. Where the workers were powerless, wages were depressed below the existence minimum; the hours of labour were lengthened until the bodily and mental health of the working class deteriorated so as to endanger the future of society. The formation of unions and of laws regulating working conditions — features rising out of the bitter fight of workers for their very lives — were necessary to restore normal conditions of work in capitalism. The capitalist class itself recognised that trade unions are necessary to direct the revolt of the workers into regular channels to prevent them from breaking out in sudden explosions.” For the political parties “so long as capitalism lasted, the practical fight had to centre on immediate needs and the preservation of standards in capitalism.”  “Councils are not only made up of workers, having common class interests; they are a natural group, working together as the personnel of one factory or section of a large plant, and are in close daily contact with each other, having the same adversary, having to decide their common actions as fellow workers in which they have to act in united fashion; not only on the questions of strike and fight, but also in the new organisation of production. Council representation is not founded upon the meaningless grouping of adjacent villages or districts, but upon the natural groupings of workers in the process of production, the real basis of society.” - roots in informal work groups “In a wildcat strike, the workers decide all matters themselves through regular meetings. They choose strike committees as central bodies, but the members of these committees can be recalled and replaced at any moment. If the strike extends over a large number of shops, they achieve unity of action by larger committees consisting of delegates of all the separate shops. Such committees are not bodies to make decisions according to their own opinion, and over the workers; they are simply messengers, communicating the opinions and wishes of the groups they represent, and conversely, bringing to the shop meetings, for discussion and decision, the opinion and arguments of the other groups. They cannot play the roles of leaders, because they can be momentarily replaced by others. The workers themselves must choose their way, decide their actions; they keep the entire action, with all its difficulties, its risks, its responsibilities, in their own hands. And when the strike is over, the committees disappear. (…) Here we have the organisation of the workers in revolutionary action, though of course only imperfectly, groping and trying for new methods. This is possible only when all the workers with all their forces participate in the action, when their very existence is at stake, when they actually take part in the decisions and are entirely devoted to the revolutionary fight. After the revolution this council organisation disappeared.” - where do the upsurges come from? how to orient toward creating them? and after the upsurge? Organization outside of upsurges? “in ordinary times politics are left to a small group of specialists, politicians, whose work consists just of taking care of these general, political conditions of bourgeois business. The same holds true for the workers, as long as they think only of their direct interests. In capitalism they work long hours, all their energy is exhausted in the process of exploitation, and little mental power and fresh thought is left them. Earning their wage is the most immediate necessity of life; their political interests, their common interest in safeguarding their interests as wage earners may be important, but are still secondary. So they leave this part of their interests also to specialists” * http://libcom.org/library/organization-key-question-left-libertarian-movement “The question is not whether we should organize, but how to organize.”  “An informal organization has a structure, whether the members are conscious of it or not. The structure by which decisions are made is based on informal social ties. Therefore, one’s access to, and participation in, the decision-making process is dependent upon who s/he knows and how well they can relate socially.” http://libcom.org/library/class-war-issue-73-getting-organised Class War, UK “the Federation stagnated so that within a couple of years of the anti-poll tax movement, huge amounts of energy were being expended on internal bureaucracy - amending the constitution, electing a whole raft of full-time ‘officers’, tinkering with the Aims & Principles, drafting proposals and counter-proposals for conference, and the usual factional politicking. And all this for an organisation that never exceeded a membership of 150! None of this is really new or exclusive to Class War (…)  maybe it’s also a consequence of the fact that the way we organise as revolutionaries doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last hundred years. 1997 or 1897? Despite all our big talk and grand ambitions, Class War’s organisation has ended up hardly different from a revolutionary outfit at the turn of the century. Like them we have a readership, a passive membership, an active membership (which in our case constitutes the effective ‘leadership’), a paper, a fitful ‘journal’, delegates, conferences, etc., etc. (…) In non-revolutionary times like this, there are two standard ways of coping. The first is to turn back to theory, to the security of some more or less academic version of marxism-leftism-anarchism-communism-autonomism - sometimes backed up by the vague idea that ‘we’re in a downturn and it’s time for quality not quantity’. This approach is often supported by some sort of spontaneist theory - which loosely translates as ‘it’ll be alright on the night’. The working class will eventually become aware of its historic mission and sweep away capitalism and in so doing throw up new forms of organisation and politics. In fact some variants of this even suggest that to be organised in the here and now is actually counter-revolutionary as any form of organisation today will be inevitably corrupted by bourgeois thinking. This is the twilight world of the ultra-left, where you don’t really have to do anything except read obscure Belgian journals and slag each other off in densely worded articles. We’ve got nothing against conscious attempts to increase our understanding of the world - that is part of what we need. But the ‘theory’ solution smacks too much of a retreat from the real world, of pure bedsit intellectualism - a turning-inward when we should be trying to look out more. (…) The second traditional response is almost the exact opposite: activism and the ‘kick it till it breaks’ tendency. If the theory types defend their strategy by arguing that there’s nothing going on, the activists act as if worldwide proletarian revolution is just around the corner - ‘It’s happening now, man!’ This is a less sophisticated version of voluntarism - which loosely translates as ‘if you want it enough, it will happen’. If you’re a Bolshevik, it means selling more and more papers, recruiting like mad and pushing for revolution; for anarchists, it translates as activist groups - leafleting, picketing, anti-fascist work, always thinking that if we all ‘do’ a little more, the system will come tumbling down. (…) both approaches - the activist/voluntarist and the intellectual/spontaneist - have been present within Class War, and both share the same underlying attitude: just like the traditional Left they are more oriented towards the needs of individuals within the group than the needs of the wider working class. The sad fact is that most groups (including, in the end, Class War) do things not because they believe it will affect the world, but to defend their own integrity and maintain their sense of identity (this is the ‘group patriotism’ that we’re determined to destroy). We think it’s time to rethink the whole idea of political organisation. What is ‘being organised’ all about? Why do we do it? Organisation is organisation for a specific purpose. It might sound obvious but people come together to do something. We come together as revolutionaries to organise and contribute to struggle, and to deepen our understanding of the world around us.” 
climate change links http://climate.nasa.gov/ http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ http://www.unep.org/climatechange/ http://climatechange.worldbank.org/ http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/clima/mission/index_en.htm http://www.nature.com/nclimate/index.html http://www.newscientist.com/topic/climate-change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/ http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/urgentissues/climatechange/index.htm http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/07/your-climate-steriods http://news.discovery.com/earth/extreme-summer-heat-120622.html http://www.usda.gov/oce/climate_change/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/defense-secretary-climate-change-has-a-dramatic-impact-on-national-security/ http://www.rand.org/topics/global-climate-change.html http://www.cfr.org/climate-change/climate-change-national-security/p14862 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?pagewanted=all http://www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?id=6020 http://www.em.gov.au/Publications/Australianjournalofemergencymanagement/Pages/AJEMvolume26/Policingandclimatechange.aspx http://www.npr.org/2012/07/13/156731302/climate-change-ups-odds-of-heat-waves-drought http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/07/23/120723taco_talk_kolbert http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-lovinger/heat-wave-elderly-2011_b_905145.html http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environment-and-health/Climate-change http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/russian-heat-climate-change/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/climatedesk-stop-climate-change-cost/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/10/texas-heat-waves-climate-change_n_1662168.html http://www.climatecentral.org/news/falling-into-the-climate-gap/ http://www.nyserda.ny.gov/Publications/Research-and-Development/Environmental/EMEP-Publications/Response-to-Climate-Change-in-New-York.aspx ch.3 entitled “equity and economics” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_gap http://nefac.net/node/2525 http://nefac.net/theecologicalchallenge
http://mms.newberry.org/html/Rosemont.html          One Big Union - 6th edition - pamphlet, 1970    One Big Union - 7th edition - pamphlet, 1979     http://books.google.com/books?id=vQlQAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA307&dq=%22no+politics+in+the+union%22+%22industrial+workers%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jCHvT4HMMsHYqAGir8GOAg&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22no%20politics%20in%20the%20union%22&f=false   “I have seen men out under the guise of the I. W. W. simply talking politics. I have seen men who stood as organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World, or 1 so understood them, who took the attitude of mind that the Industrial Workers of the World was a recruiting station for some political party. That is wrong, violating our constitution, and going contrary to the Manifesto and contrary to the Preamble, and I have criticized members of the Socialist Party to their face, and I criticize them today, and say it is wrong to take such an attitude; I will not say that they are the only ones. Now, take the history of politics in the unions. The charters to the labor unions, local and international, have had a clause in them, “No politics in the union.” Well, we have seen some active revolutionary men who wanted to have a politico-economic discussion of wage slavery and were not allowed to. What was the result? They said “If we can’t talk economics here we will go outside and organize a class conscious organization where we can talk politics,” but the great error was that they subordinated it to a political party.”   (…) We are going to take and hold these industries in which we shall be organized, and operate them for the benefit of the co-operative commonwealth, and we are not going to allow this work to be defeated by the capitalists or the capitalist politicians.” *  * GOB 1999 #6 Sept-Oct, p16, report from lit committee, only 4 pieces of official IWW literature listed, calls for creating literature index. One of them was the OBU pamphlet. * May 1999 page 26, lit committee report with list of IWW lit * PDF online says “8th revised edition, 2001”
I hate that I keep buying books and not reading them. The problem is that Amazon.com makes it really hard to shoplift. * I have all these unread books around my house. It means if I ever run out of stuff to do I could always start a bonfire.  * My house gets all cluttered with stacks of books, my wife’s like “we can’t have anyone over when the house is such a mess!” That’s why I keep buying them.  * I was complaining to my brother about how I have all these  unread books and he goes “well are they good books?” I was like “Well, I’ve really enjoyed not reading them.” *  There’s too many books. New rule, no one can write a new book unless there’s an actual need for it, like say if someone has a table leg they want to prop up.
Motorhead http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElQgqtb5vjM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWEyjb7baDo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb3zSgxMuug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di9EJ6H1cvk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyq5L0UpLFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njMgeThQvS8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhE5EHPMfOA * bands to check out/listen to more - firewater - more stuff by the Mescaleros - the hours - handsome - shades apart - channels - texas is the reason - shai hulud - kiss it goodbye - garrison - sincebyman - sinking ships 
http://libcom.org/library/workerism-wildcat-uk I don’t like some aspects of the piece. It talks about some people who it calls ‘workerists’ without giving any examples or quotes, which weakens the piece a great deal, and it talks about ‘workerists’ as a discrete and existing group rather than about tendencies/impulses that people get pushed or pulled in.  “ex-marginals who make a moral decision to become a “revolutionary” manual worker” as “compensation for their lack of sureness about their own class status, and a moral condemnation of proletarians who are willing to make different choices.”  I think for a lot of men this is often also about their gender identity too - ‘marginal’ men are in a certain way emasculated and by taking on what they think of as ‘manual’ work they not only take on a radical pose but a really dudely pose as well, IMHO. The piece rejects the idea of “revolution arising from an escalation of the day to day struggles of workers in capitalism” because this leads to “the role played by non-workers” in revolutions being “marginalised or denied.”  The piece rejects the “The search for crucial fractions within the proletariat, whose struggle is privileged.” This means rejecting the view that “Productive workers (…) hold a crucial position because they can, by withdrawing their labour, bring down capitalism. In fact the centrality of productive workers is exaggerated, as production is only one part of the cycle of accumulation. Workers involved in communication, distribution and circulation can also have a powerful lever. A strike of bank workers might have a stronger effect on capital than a strike of workers in a car factory. A wave of urban riots might have a stronger effect than either. The piece also criticizes radicals who fetishize manual labor and use that rhetorically in theoretical or political debates, where a radical like this “pretends to be something other than a specialised thinker.”  The piece also suggests that this idea about some jobs being actual manual labor and being more important, that this is sexist. This sexist idea “corresponds to a sexist (now superseded) composition of capital,” specifically one where “the model family unit consists of a male factory worker and a stay-at-home wife.” I’m not sure if that’s true or not. Even if it is true, that “model family unit” was more of a representation of the working class (and perhaps an aspiration of the class) than it was the reality for a lot of working class people.
Notes. Militant reform and intermediate level.Militant reform supports claims about intermediate level as dynamic - http://libcom.org/library/defining-practice-intermediate-level-organization-strugglePoints to divergent perspectives/directions in that level.  Trajectories of militant reform? http://libcom.org/library/intermediate-level-trajectories-struggleStruggle as goal-achieving (“gets the goods”) vs as compositional/person-making/capacity building - different for individuals vs collective, and at different scales of collectiveness. Improvement in the different elements identified (from logistics to vision). Limits…?All of this is composed of conflicts. Militant reform not static and not flat, ie, they disagree among each other about goals and methods, that’s important. (Differ in terms of quality but also in decisions re: logistics, tactics, etc) Contending forces within a grouping help shape an over all dynamic or tendency of that grouping. Simply: How will this round and the next round play out? How will that playing out set up/contribute to the following round?- tactical legalism vs illegalism, continuum not binary. - who plays who, to what ends? (strategic use of more radical forces?) Where is the center of gravity and who orbits, how can smaller orbiting grouplets shape larger trajectories/orbits/over all tendency?- analysis doesn’t dictate action but does pose decisions. What decisions are posed here? 
Militancy http://libcom.org/library/worker-student-action-liberation-militants http://www.reocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/guactivism.html http://www.reocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/necessity.html http://www.reocities.com/immateriallabour/cleaver-autonomist-marxism.html http://www.reocities.com/cordobakaf/moles.htmlhttp://libcom.org/library/us-labour-aufheben-7 
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