Can ordinary people run society? ~~ Paul D'Amato

https://socialistworker.org/2007-1/620/620_11_RunSociety.php

A COMMON argument against socialism is that the majority is incapable of ruling collectively. We need educated, intelligent experts to run such a complex system.

The legendary stupidity of George W. Bush, whose rich parents and crony friends bought him passing grades and much more, or the incompetence of Federal Emergency Management Agency bureaucrats during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are both strong arguments against this view.

"I think we are welcomed," said Bush when asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's predictions that U.S. troops would be greeted with thanks by Iraqis. "But it was not a peaceful welcome." When Brazilian President Luiz Ignácio "Lula" da Silva showed him a map of Brazil, Bush exclaimed, "Wow! Brazil is big."

There are many other examples that could be cited of presidents, industrialists and bureaucrats with limited, if non-existent, abilities.

Most people at the very top of society, the multimillionaires and billionaires, play no direct function in its running--they merely collect the rewards of ownership. The ruling class today has become entirely parasitic, siphoning wealth, but serving no useful social function.

As early as 1881, Frederick Engels wrote that the capitalists do little but cash in dividend checks. "The social function of the capitalist here," he says, "has been transferred to servants paid by wages; but he continues to pocket, in his dividends, the pay for those functions though he has ceased to perform them."

"We [can] manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country," Engels concluded. "Stand back! Give the working class the chance of a turn."

Bankers and investors don't make steel. It hardly takes intellectual brilliance for some who inherits a million to double it. Society could do away with the ruling class and suffer no more than when an appendix is removed from a human body.

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BUT DO workers possess the capacity to rule? Won't they still depend on experts?

Often, it is workers' own hard-won, first-hand knowledge that engineers and managers use to figure out how to improve production--that is, to squeeze as much out of workers as possible.

Not to deny the genius of a Newton or an Einstein, but "if science is understood in the fundamental sense of knowledge of nature," writes Clifford Connor in his People's History of Science, " it should not be surprising to find that it originated with the people closest to nature: hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, sailors, miners, blacksmiths, folk healers and others forced by the conditions of their lives to wrest the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis."

Given the opportunity, everyone is capable of learning the scientific, administrative and mathematical skills necessary to play a direct role in running society, just as in pre-class society, knowledge of terrain, plants and animals or tool-making was shared by the group, and not treated as the monopoly of a minority.

Experts and scientists would still be needed for a time even under socialism, until the education system was improved to the point that the majority received education which today is reserved only for the privileged few. For a time, workers would have to exercise democratic control over the bookkeepers, managers and engineers.

But with society's vast resources diverted toward education, the distinctions between mental and manual work would break down, and the majority would be capable of doing many different kinds of jobs, from manual work to scientific work to administrative work.

If workers, through their own directly elected representatives, were to seize control of production, mistakes would no doubt be made. But they would be the mistakes of the collective rather than the blind workings of the market--and could quickly be remedied by experience.

For example, if the workers of Chicago ran the city instead of corporate bigwigs and their corrupt political hirelings, they would immediately begin solving the city's most pressing problems.

The homeless would be quickly housed in unused homes, excess hotel space, and the requisitioned second and third homes of the rich. Meanwhile, unemployed construction workers would be organized to begin building more houses.

The ill-gotten gains of the city's patricians and their hangers-on would be seized and used to provide jobs, feed the hungry, improve dilapidated schools and provide better park services, improved transportation and real after-school programs for all.

In our society nothing is done if it isn't profitable. In a society run by the collective producers, these problems could be solved because social need, rather than the market, would determine how decisions are made.

CDC’s maskless mandate puts workers at risk

https://www.workers.org/2021/05/56453/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recklessly capitulated to pressure from U.S. corporations in issuing their latest guidelines lifting masks requirements. They announced May 13: “Fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal or territorial laws, rules and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.” 

While the percentage of adults getting vaccinated continues to rise, only 1 in 3 people in the U.S. are fully inoculated. The CDC guidelines contain no mandate stating individuals must provide proof they are fully vaccinated. This puts the lives of essential workers at serious risk. 

Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, scientific studies have shown that  mask wearing and social distancing are the most effective ways to limit the spread of COVID-19. Removing mandatory mask wearing is bound to result in new spikes of viral infections and deaths, particularly among the poorest and most oppressed communities, whose access to vaccines has been more limited. 

The CDC’s guideline, which came as a surprise to many people working in public health, conflicts with the views of many scientists. A New York Times informal survey of 723 epidemiologists found that 80% said individuals need to wear masks in indoor public areas for at least another year, and 88% responded that even fully vaccinated people should wear masks at large outdoor gatherings.

Vivian Towe, program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, said to the Times, “Unless the vaccination rates increase to 80% or 90% over the next few months, we should wear masks in large public indoor settings.” (May 13)

States, bosses coerce workers

Some states are beginning to cut off access to unemployment insurance benefits to force workers to return to jobs in dangerous environments lacking adequate safety measures to protect them from the virus or where they are paid subsistence wages.  Already burdened with enforcing mask mandates, frontline workers are now being put in the impossible position of determining if customers or others whom they encounter are truly vaccinated. 

Even with mask mandates implemented, there have been multiple incidents of workers being harassed and even injured while trying to enforce the protocols.  Most at risk are workers in jobs with heavy exposure to the public, in grocery and retail stores and warehouses, and those toiling in the service sector in transit, health care, postal or sanitation jobs or employed in restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses. Children under 12, not yet eligible for vaccines, now account for 22% of new cases.

The year-plus history of the coronavirus pandemic is rife with examples of large gatherings where unvaccinated people deliberately flout mask mandates, further fueling the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, the right-wing, anti-mask movement has ignored protocols by appearing in public without the vital protection of masks. Many are vocally anti-vaccine.

With mask mandates in place, workers in restaurants and other businesses open to the public could restrict access for these individuals. Now the door is wide open for anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers to fill public spaces without restraint, endangering people’s lives.

People who are immunocompromised, not yet immunized, or who lack access to, or eligibility for, the vaccine will pay the consequences. This affects the many Latinx immigrants, who want to be inoculated as soon as possible but are afraid of risking their jobs, or their immigration status, if they take time off to get vaccinated.

IWW Organizing Manual

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/industrial-workers-of-the-world-iww-organizing-manual

A few snips from the detailed IWW manual about how to organize..

What Is Organizing?

Organizing is the process by which a group of people take power over some aspect of their lives—on the job or in their communities. While community struggles are important in their own right, this Organizing Manual concentrates on organizing our fellow workers in the workplace—where we, as workers, have the industrial power to enforce our demands. Too often, organizing is viewed as leaders’ selling an external agency to workers to ‘represent’ them. A vast body of law and huge bureaucracies exist to reinforce such notions. But this is not what our organizing is all about.

IWW organizing aims at enabling a group of working people to build a union and use it to express their needs and desire and to accomplish the changes they want to make in their economic lives. The important consideration is their needs and their lives. The organizer simply makes the tools available to them. The union is the people in it. If it is not, it will not be worth the trouble of fighting for, and it will be abandoned at the first pressure.

The basic feelings most working people share, that make the union their natural tool, are already there: class consciousness, the conviction that their interests are not identical with their employers’; alienation from jobs they see as unrewarding and/or useless; self-respect that is outraged by the conditions of their work or the attitudes of their superiors. Organizing involves first understanding these working people as they now are, and then giving them information they need in order to be able to figure out how a union can meet their needs. The understanding is the important part.

A Class Conscious Working Class

For many, “working class” has become a dirty word since the 1930s. Paternalistic liberals try to define the working class out of existence by assigning workers above the poverty line to the middle class and the rest to an underclass (to become objects of government ‘benevolence’). Part of the elitist left likewise tries to deny that wage workers are a class conscious, potentially revolutionary class, and many left political parties identify class consciousness with acceptance of their party line. Establishment academics and politicians try to hide the working class in an amorphous middle class. None of these opinions changes reality.

The potential for a class-conscious working class exists because capitalist production exploits wage workers. Class consciousness depends not on labels and revolutionary rhetoric, but on the fact of oppression and each worker’s awareness of his/her own individual exploitation. The intensity and breadth of working class struggle depend upon the pressure of exploitation and the viability of the practical tools available for struggle.

Each generation of workers learns for itself the bitter truth that, regardless of the myths and success stories they were taught in school, in reality they will not rise out of their class. The options are closed off, and they are stuck. For the next 40 years or so they will work (assuming they can find jobs) for wages. And for most those wages will be so modest that they will live their lives on the edge of financial disaster—only two or three paychecks from the street.

For most workers, class consciousness does not extend beyond their particular employer and their immediate fellow workers. They do not connect their situation to a capitalist class controlling a capitalist government for their enslavement. Nevertheless, every time a worker supports his/her fellow workers or union—any union—that worker is saying: “My employer is my enemy. I must combine with my fellow workers to fight this situation.”

Our job as organizers is to build on that latent class consciousness, to show our fellow workers how their individual situations are fundamentally the same, and result from the structure of the workplace, the economy and the society. Only by working together, by recognizing that an injury to one is an injury to all, can we hope for substantive improvements for ourselves.

Who Can Organize?

Only class-conscious working people can organize their peers. We learn class consciousness in our blood and bones. We, each individually, learn the feel of our own particular boss’s foot on our own particular neck. Without this personal experience, the knowledge in our heads is useless.

Our shared work experience develops understanding impossible to acquire in any other way. If you have never felt that you simply could not stand the last hour of a shift, how can you hope to understand that feeling in others? Or endured the humiliation of a boss’s bawling out because you couldn’t afford to quit? Or, for that matter, faced a job you hated every day because people you cared about depended on you for support and you didn’t see another job in sight? If you have not had to make the thousand and one compromises with yourself and the way you would like things to be, how can you possibly understand most working people, who are forced to make such compromises?

Any class-conscious worker can be, and should be, an organizer. The business unions and government have led many of us to think of organizing as a job for specialists—rather than as something we do everyday on the job. The labor movement was not built by professional organizers (many of whom have never worked the jobs they’re trying to organize). It was built by working people like us, who recognized that only by uniting on the job—in industry—could we hope to win better conditions and build a better world.

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Part 5: Conclusion

Workers are increasingly becoming convinced, and for good cause, that the AFL-CIO business unions are incapable of stopping the current world-wide employer offensive against labor. Several strategies have been tried as alternatives—rank and file groups, union reform, corporate campaigns, political parties, electing new officers, and reform of labor laws. While all of these indicate a rebel spirit, none of these approaches has been effective.

The Industrial Workers of the World has demonstrated that a labor movement can be controlled by workers, win immediate improvements, and make major steps towards social change. Our experience shows that strong, fighting unions can be built in workplaces large and small, that workers can unite across ethnic and skis lines, and across national borders. As the old Wobbly saying notes, “Direct Action Gets the Goods.”

The IWW is practical, democratic, and up to date. While the AFL-CIO and kindred organizations limp along with structures, ideas and tactics forged in the 1800s (and obsolete even then), the IWW recognizes that class collaboration is a dead end, and that the employing class and those they hire (the working class) have interests as different as those of any group of buyers and sellers in the market place. IWW unionism looks toward the future, building on the lessons of the past.

The time has come to return to the tried-and-true methods of revolutionary industrial unionism. Growing numbers of workers are turning to the IWW, both to win better conditions from their bosses and to help build a brighter future for all workers. Whether or not the IWW takes root at your workplace and in your industry will depend upon you and your fellow workers, and the effort you’re willing to put into building the IWW.

This organizing manual is intended to help you get started.