“I don’t believe in borders, I don’t like flags, I have no boundaries.
My only homeland: friendship, love and justice for all.”

Dedicated to the memory of
Myra Landau (1926–2018)

We are very excited to announce the launch of our eighth issue, on revolutionary internationalism in the twenty-first century. Beyond the Border features important contributions by a group of world-leading scholars, activists and organizers on the necessity of organizing across and beyond the border in the fields of workers’ internationalism, feminist internationalism, no-border activism, migrant and refugee solidarity, Black internationalism and much more.

You can now read the individual essays on our website or download the issue as a high-quality PDF. The issue is currently in press and should be delivered to print subscribers this autumn.

Please note that Issue #8 is our last issue to appear in print. For continued coverage of social struggles and revolutionary movements around the world make sure to keep following us at roarmag.org! If you value our work and want to continue supporting us, please consider becoming ROAR patron.

Read Issue #8 Online

A selection from the issue’s content:

Women’s Internationalism against Global Patriarchy

Dilar Dirik

Women’s liberation is at its heart a struggle for the liberation of all humanity from the most treacherous and insidious forms of oppression and domination. Read on ROAR

Africa’s Place in the Radical Imagination

Zoé Samudzi

Our internationalist concerns for Africa must necessarily transcend the flattened talking points to which the continent is frequently reduced in our discourses. Read on ROAR

Workers of the World

Erik Forman

To avert a descent into barbarism, the labor movement must develop an effective and innovative internationalist praxis uniting workers across borders. Read on ROAR

Beyond the Border Kaleidoscope

Natasha King

As borders change, they pose new challenges for migrant movements — yet those same movements also continue to radically transform the borders they oppose. Read on ROAR

Translocal Solidarity and the New Municipalism

Laura Roth & Bertie Russell

By conceiving of transformative social change in “translocal” terms, the municipalist movement enables us to redefine internationalism for our times. Read on ROAR

Towards a New Internationalism

Thomas Jeffrey Miley

If the class struggle is to be reignited, we must denounce the left’s resurgent social chauvinism. The worker, once again, must come to realize that she has no country. Read on ROAR

The post ROAR Issue #8 : Beyond the Border appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A quick glance at the headlines appears to confirm this gloomy assessment. From the rapid succession of tropical storms ravaging the Caribbean and the spate of unprecedented forest fires raging across southern Europe and the western US, to the deadly mudslides in West Africa and the worst monsoon flooding to hit South Asia in years, the past twelve months have seen an unusually high frequency and intensity of climate-related natural disasters. By late October, the year 2017 was on track not only to join 2015 and 2016 in the top-three hottest years on record, but  —  for the United States at least  —  also to become the most expensive ever in terms of extreme weather damage.

As the empirical evidence continues to mount, then, it is rapidly becoming clear that the threat of catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be considered a distant prospect. It is already here. In a highly symbolic development earlier this year, the so-called Doomsday Vault, built deep inside the Arctic to protect the seeds of billions of food crops from regional crises or environmental disasters, flooded after the permafrost in which it is embedded suddenly began to melt. As a Norwegian official explained, “it was not in our plans [when the Norwegian government built the vault 10 years ago] to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that.” This is how fast things can change in the space of a decade.

Now that the atmospheric and planetary implications of two hundred years of capitalist development and the associated systemic dependence on fossil-fuel combustion are beginning to manifest themselves in the form of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, it is slowly starting to dawn on large parts of the world population that climate change has now become a material force to be reckoned with in the present. A recent report by The Lancet finds that hundreds of millions of people around the globe are already being affected by the health consequences of rising temperatures, ranging from crop failures and undernourishment to heatstrokes and the spread of infectious diseases.

With the notable exception of Donald Trump, most world leaders are still formally committed — through the Paris Agreement of 2016 — to reducing carbon emissions fast enough to avoid anything more than an already very dangerous two-degree increase in global temperatures by 2100. In reality, however, they are doing nothing to avoid the worst-case scenario. The World Bank now warns that the planet is on course for a four-degree increase by 2100 — a scenario that, according to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, “is incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.”

Yet even the World Bank’s estimates are widely considered to be on the conservative side; many experts believe that a business-as-usual scenario would lead to something far worse. The International Energy Agency, for one, estimates that a continuation of current trends would set the world on course for a six-degree increase by 2100, rendering the vast majority of the planet entirely uninhabitable for humans — and, indeed, for most existing species. When global temperatures reached a comparable level at the end of the Permian, some 251 million years ago, 90 percent of species were wiped out.

And as if this were not enough reason to be deeply concerned, scientists are increasingly starting to raise the alarm about a number of other looming ecological crises as well. In November, a group of over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed an open “letter to humanity” warning of the potentially disastrous consequences of widespread deforestation and the sixth mass extinction. To this, we should add the threats posed by the combination of water loss, soil and fish stock depletion, plastic waste and pollution. Even more acute, it seems, is the bee colony collapse that has been unfolding over the past decade, and the related “insectageddon” that — according to one recent study — has reduced Germany’s flying insect population by 75 percent over the past 27 years. The complex knock-on effects of these dramatic changes on wider ecosystems and agricultural production are not yet fully understood, but are likely to be highly disruptive, if not outright catastrophic.

As public awareness of these developments grows, many people find themselves riven by an increasingly acute sense of anxiety — about the state of the world we live in, about the self-reinforcing disorder that appears to have grabbed a hold of late-capitalist society, about the relentless death drive of global capital that has sent humanity careening towards the abyss of ecological self-destruction. The resultant social malaise, fruit of a generalized sense of helplessness wrought by neoliberalism’s decades-long assault on all expressions of popular power and collective agency, has penetrated deep into the body politic. “No one is in control,” the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once noted. “That is the major source of contemporary fear.”

The truth is that a dystopian end-times imaginary has been stirring in the collective subconscious for some time already. The radical theorist Mark Fisher, who passed away earlier this year after a protracted battle with depression, called this condition capitalist realism  —  or the widespread conviction that, even if the systemic imperative of infinite growth on a finite planet is pushing our species headlong into extinction, there is simply no alternative to the present order of things. This has left us in a situation in which, as Frederic Jameson famously put it 15 years ago, it has become “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

The reign of capitalist realism appears to be further entrenched by the fact that, in some respects, we are already living through this epochal denouement. The “end of the world” is now unfolding before our eyes as a grim spectacle, widely represented in popular culture and screaming at us daily from increasingly alarmist newspaper headlines. “The catastrophe,” Fisher wrote of Children of Men, that masterwork of contemporary dystopian cinema, “is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.”

In the wake of the disturbing political developments of the past year, with the rise of Trump and Brexit throwing the liberal postwar order into profound disarray, the emergent realization that we are already living through the catastrophe now seems to loom increasingly large. Last October, for instance, when hurricane Ophelia unleashed its fury upon Ireland (the farthest north that such a major tropical tempest has ever been recorded), and a thick layer of sand swept up by the storm over the Sahara combined with smoke and debris from the Spanish forest fires to shroud the financial district of London in an eerie yellowish hue, social media feeds across the UK lit up with references to the impending apocalypse. Much of this was sardonic, to be sure, but the millenarian irony clearly resonated with the apocalyptic zeitgeist that has come to define the popular mood of the early twenty-first century.

Those in power are not impervious to this cultural climate of socio-ecological catastrophism. In fact, the rich seem to be keenly aware of what is coming their way, and are already preparing for the worst. One particularly telling indication of growing elite anxiety is the spread of survivalism — or “doomsday prep” — among America’s ultra-wealthy elite. Earlier this year, an investigation in The New Yorker revealed how libertarian Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires like Peter Thiel of Paypal are rapidly losing faith in the ability of political leaders and the democratic system to keep the situation under control. In response, they have been buying up luxury condos inside converted nuclear missile silos in remote rural areas and self-sufficient boltholes in New Zealand to ride out the institutional breakdown and civil disorder that are likely to accompany a possible nuclear holocaust or climate apocalypse, in what the Financial Times has called “the latest craze for a global super-rich hedging against the collapse of the capitalist system.”

With this, we arrive at the crux of the problem: the fact that not everyone will be equally vulnerable to the unfolding catastrophe. Like every other crisis under capitalism, the climate crisis — and the ecological crisis more generally — will have profound social and political implications. As in finance, the costs of the crisis will be borne overwhelmingly by those who are least responsible for causing it, while those most to blame will likely find creative ways to escape the worst consequences — at least for a while. Long before rising sea levels, scorching temperatures and civilizational collapse leave vast stretches of the planet uninhabitable, the super-rich will seek to establish a regime of global eco-apartheid to manage the resultant disorder and shield themselves from the inevitable mass migrations and debilitating social unrest, hiding behind a rapidly expanding authoritarian complex of militarized police, mass surveillance, drone warfare, concentration camps and border walls.

Climate change, then, cannot be understood in isolation from its social, political and economic context, including the structural violence of the neoliberal shock doctrine, the systemic logic of extractivism, the asymmetric integration of the Global South into the world economy, the concentrated power of the fossil fuel industry, the investment decisions of the big banks and financial institutions, or the deep-seated inequalities of class, race and gender that lie at the heart of capitalist society. As the environmental historian and critical geographer Jason Moore has forcefully argued, there is “a profound interconnection between biophysical transformations and biophysical problems and crises, on the one hand, and the central institutions of the capitalist world economy, on the other  —  of financial markets, of large transnational firms, of capital intensive agriculture.” The ecological crisis, in short, is inextricably bound up with the general crisis of late capitalism.

It follows that the central focus of action should not just be on reducing global carbon emissions, but on confronting the underlying asymmetries in the balance of power and making sure that those who benefited most from the extraction, sale and combustion of fossil fuels end up paying for the burden of adaptation and the worldwide transition to a renewable energy future. Crucially, this fight cannot be waged on the basis of failed multilateral negotiations, elusive technological fixes or flaunted emission reduction targets; it inevitably necessitates a broad-based popular struggle for climate justice —  involving not only radical action to mitigate the worst effects of global warming, but also extensive technology transfer and the payment of sizeable and sustained reparations for the enormous climate debt that the wealthy citizens of the Global North owe the poor of the North and the South alike, especially the Indigenous peoples who have been at the front-lines of the struggle against extractivism since the days of European colonialism.

It has long since become clear that piecemeal reform and corporate techno-utopianism will do little to resolve the structural drivers behind the present ecological calamity. As one recent study has shown, 71 percent of global emissions can be traced back to the activities of just 100 mega-corporations. If anything, this indicates that we are confronted not by a Malthusian crisis of over-population, as many liberal environmentalists in the Global North continue to argue, but by a clear-cut Marxian crisis of unbridled over-accumulation, which has brought about an “irreparable rift” in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature. What we are living through, in short, is the Capitalocene — a distinct geological epoch in which the capitalist formula of “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the planet’s biophysical environment, to the point where the survival of the capitalist system has come to constitute an existential threat to the survival of humanity as a whole.

The only sustainable solution now lies in a profound transformation of the global political economy and the market-based social relations that underpin it — especially in the way we produce, distribute and consume things to meet human needs, wants and desires. While we can no longer reverse climate change or completely undo ecological destruction, we can still mitigate the worst consequences, adapt to the inevitable changes and avoid wholesale eco-civilizational collapse. But doing so will require a veritable revolution in the underlying production, energy and transport systems, which will inevitably involve an epic showdown with the concentrated power of capital, including not only the fossil fuel industry but also global finance, industrial agriculture and the aviation and automotive industries, which will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privilege to poison the soil, oceans and atmosphere and make life impossible for the rest of us. Clearly, if we leave it up to them, the response will amount to nothing but empty talk and endless tinkering at the margins.

This seventh issue of ROAR Magazine does not pretend to offer any concrete policy proposals, nor a detailed roadmap for the coming clean energy transition — even if such interventions will certainly be very necessary. Rather, the aim is to shed further light on the profoundly social and political nature of the climate crisis, and to emphasize the importance of rebuilding popular power from below. Taken together, the contributions collected on these pages set out to problematize some of the ideological assumptions of the mainstream narrative, which completely overlooks the systemic nature of the problem, continuing to prescribe highly individualized solutions, market-based technological fixes and the further commodification of nature in place of the transformative social change the world so desperately needs.

Against these neoliberal delusions, we must stand firm and insist: the real catastrophe is capitalism, and the only acceptable outcome system change, not climate change. As unrealistic as this may seem from the dominant perspective of capitalist realism, the future of our species — and that of countless others — now depends on it.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by Zoran Svilar

The post Climate change: Living Through the Catastrophe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To revitalize labor unions, workers themselves will have to be put in control. Applying participatory budgeting to dues allocation would be a good start.

Originally posted by Alexander Kolokotronis at ROAR Magazine.

According to exit poll data, Donald Trump won Ohio union households 54 percent to 41 percent against Hillary Clinton. At the national level, Clinton achieved a narrow victory, winning 51 percent, to Trump’s 42 percent. This despite the fact that labor unions spent more than $100 million in support of Clinton. Of course, factors relating to race, gender and class are at play. Nonetheless, the right-wing slant of union households should also be cause for concern.

Unionization of US workers has declined both under Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses. In the 1950s, approximately 35 percent of US workers were in unions. Today, this number has dropped to a mere 11 percent. Unless organized labor finds solutions to problems pervasive within its own organizations and structures, union membership numbers will continue to shrink, and remaining members will be too cornered to mobilize effectively.

To tackle longstanding administrative and organizational problems endemic to labor unions, we must start with how we approach union dues. That is, creating member-focused and driven mechanisms which endow the rank-and-file with direct control over dues allocation — a fiscal base amounting to $8.6 billion in the United States.

Fortunately, such mechanisms of direct control — like participatory budgeting — have been tried and tested in other areas of social life. Participatory budgeting has revitalized social life and empowered people through its implementation in municipalities, in schools and colleges, in public housing and now even at the national level. What problems could participatory budgeting address in labor unions? And how can it provide a socialist thrust to one of the bulwarks of the American left?

Organized labor’s democracy deficit

Too often union members are seen as dues-paying devices that are to be turned out and checked off. Leaderships view their rank-and-file as a burdensome hurdle to contract ratification. Members see their unions as corrupted empty shells that nevertheless offer some valuable legal services and a defanged formal check on their employers. Members don’t see themselves as the union, but see it as an entity over and above them. These phenomena are, in part, a result of a deficit in democratic decision-making apparatuses.

The democratic deficit was witnessed in splits between and within unions prior to the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. The Intercept reported that, when leaders decided which candidate to endorse, Hillary Clinton received the organization’s support. When members decided, Bernie Sanders received the endorsement. In times of rampant populism, the former only intensified existing distrust of union leadership felt by members.

In the face of this, there has been a sporadic rise of rank-and-file unionism. Yet, rank-and-file unionism often amounts to simply more regularized interaction. Meetings that are substantively deliberative, organizers in consistent contact with individual members, occasional referenda and generating informal spaces that inject energy into the union. When members are encouraged to step up, it’s often for positions requiring skills in mobilization. These are all valuable ingredients to a well-functioning workers’ organization. However, none of them alter the very structure of a labor union.

It is not enough to simply hold general membership meetings and assemblies. Particularly meetings that consist of talking at people, rather than talking with people — and people talking amongst themselves. How can we expect members to constructively discuss union issues and activities on their own time when we don’t make official union meeting spaces and times an example of how this can be done? General assembly participation fades in quantity and quality if such spaces are not tied to the exercise of material power.

Lack of proposals

Even with all the talk of unions being in crisis, many proposals exclusively focus on organized labor’s external relations. In more extreme forms, proposals veer off into disavowing unionism itself. For example, in an article in The Nation, proposals to rectify organized labor’s external relations are framed in a manner that appears to almost renounce unionism:

The organizations we give birth to won’t look like old-school unions. Instead, these new models and platforms could look more like politically constructed regional or sectoral bargaining (such as the Seattle minimum-wage commission, or the New York fast-food wage board); increased worker ownership of firms; a system of labor-employer co-determination as in European nations; more collective power over work distribution technologies like TaskRabbit and Uber; deeper and more effective labor standards enforcement; the launch of purchaser-facing certification and labeling; or better systems for connecting all workers with the quality, portable benefits they deserve.

Yet the conclusion is: “Labor might seize an opportunity to switch gears from merely acting as bargaining agents to fostering vibrant, participatory workplace democracy.”

Prior to her illness, Karen Lewis, current president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), was slated to run for mayor. Lewis called for “the restoration of participatory democracy,” which meant a call for the implementation of participatory budgeting in “in everything from the Board of Education’s annual budget to the city’s annual budget.” Even recent participatory democratic books such as Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Life of American Labor: Towards a New Workers’ Movement, and Julius Getman’s Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement, fail to make real proposals about the internal structure of unions.

While the above-stated proposals are concerned with fostering participatory workplace democracy, they do not aim at doing so within unions themselves. How do we do this? Where do we begin? To effectively and sustainably implement participatory democracy within unions, it is worth looking at those areas in which material power can be exercised. One such area is the collection of union dues.

Dues collection apparatuses are both a binding force and a source of toxic tension. Even the most sympathetic non-union workers fear union dues. And while this fear is often the result of right-wing propaganda, we do not put the rank-and-file at the heart of our most effective responses to such fears. We correctly point out that dues are never instituted without at least an equal increase in wages. And we also correctly point out that these dues go to essential services. If this wasn’t the case, we would not be witnessing sustained right-wing efforts to deplete union capacity through right-to-work legislation.

Yet, in speaking about union dues, organizers rarely frame their introduction as a positive development. We almost never speak of dues as a collective resource for the workers themselves to command. We implicitly regard dues as a necessary evil in labor’s struggle against capital. But if dues are one of the largest sources of power for the workers — and potentially the left — then we cannot continue to regard them as a necessary evil. Dues should not be ignored, or considered a burden that must be borne. Instead, dues must be discursively and materially readied as a resource for the workers themselves.

More substantively, this means we cannot continue to only design, implement and defend dues-collection apparatuses, which so much of the present-day dues check-off battles are about. We must also design membership-driven dues-allocation apparatuses. The workers themselves cannot put themselves on the road to emancipation if they are deprived of exercising control over what can and should be one of their primary sources of social power.

To flesh out what this might look like, it is worth putting this proposal in conversation with what Moody identifies as four problems in organized labor: (1) unpredictability and lack of control in raising class-consciousness; (2) unions as schools for socialism — particularly in the operationalization of the micro-structures and mechanisms of socialism; (3) the adversarial character of relations within unions; and (4) the role of bureaucracy in such adversarial relations.

Fostering class consciousness

Recently, political theorists like John McCormick and Jeffrey Edward Green have touted the creation of a class-based political organization, with strong institutions of “plebian democracy.” McCormick stresses the need to create “class-specific, popularly empowering, and elite-constraining institutions that accomplish two tasks: … raise the class consciousness of common citizens and formally enable them to patrol more exalted citizens with a vigor that electoral politics in and of itself does not provide.”

Despite the current right-wing imbalance, we need not foreclose ourselves to this thinking. In the absence of government initiative to create class-based democracy, labor unions can create such institutions. Unlike other sectors of the left, unions possess an infrastructure of buildings, meeting spaces, massive mailing lists and extensive administrative apparatuses.

As such, participatory budgeting need not be circumscribed to union locals. To foster class consciousness, participatory budgeting can be operationalized at the level of cross-union formations, such as geographically-based union federations and other types of cross-union arrangements. This builds off of Kim Moody, Fred Eppsteiner and Mille Flug, who wrote in 1966 that “participatory democracy is just as viable for workers as for anyone. In fact, it is absolutely the best way to organize workers, because it is the only way that actually builds revolutionary consciousness.” If we do in fact believe in the democratization of our unions — and a number of unionists do make explicit commitments to “participatory democracy” within unions — then the question is one of mechanism and operationalization.

Cross-union participatory budgeting processes could foster feelings and material networks of solidarity. Currently, when solidarity is expressed between unions, it is characteristically between respective leaderships. Union leaders often symbolically express solidarity with one another, but there is little opportunity for rank-and-file to do so — and worse, there’s little opportunity to convert and operationalize such solidarity when it does exist. Unions that conduct sympathy strikes are often punished. There has not been a general strike in a major US city since 1934.

The left needs other ways to foster class consciousness through labor unions and their various federated arrangements. Leftists also need other ways to foster cross-occupational solidarities, primarily by using the existing material infrastructures of unions, which the rest of the left so sorely lacks. Union halls and buildings can become sites of participatory budgeting assemblies. Municipal central labor councils could also become sites of municipal labor assemblies, where rank-and-file educators, manufacturers, transit workers, etc., intermingle through the exercise of material power. Contact between the rank-and-file of various unions, on the basis of constructive power, will generate positive spillovers into arenas outside of participatory budgeting.

Cross-occupational labor assemblies are not foreign to US unions. For the Knights of Labor, assemblies were the bedrock of union power. From this perspective, it is no surprise that the Knights of Labor promulgated a vision of moving beyond capitalism to a cooperative commonwealth. It is equally unsurprising that the Knights of Labor proved to be the most effective union in US history in developing cooperatives. This leads to our next point: labor unions organized as schools for socialism.

Participatory budgeting as worker education

Before the working class can aspire to generalized control over the means of production, it must aspire to and operationalize control over the means of its defense: labor unions. In operationalizing the self-management of its defense, labor — en masse — would acquire the know-how and organizational capacities to eventually self-manage production, wherever and however opportunities for this might arise.

Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker wrote of unions serving as schools for the working class:

[…] the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the socialist society of the future, the elementary school of socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence.

To be schools for socialism, unions must do more than simply mobilize. They must create structures that prepare workers for what are the ingredients of a socialist society. How many warehouses and factories with idle physical capital have been left vacant? What if those formerly employed in such facilities were prepared — by their unions — to take over production? While participatory budgeting does not in itself fully acquaint workers with how to self-manage production, it can serve as a big step towards preparing workers for control of their workplaces.

Before initiatives of workers’ control can be put into full effect — as the United Steelworkers and Cincinnati unions hope to do (as well as the more general union co-op model from “1worker1vote”) — the workers themselves must be collectively empowered with a vocabulary and material experience to act in such a manner. Workers are far more likely to succeed in operationalizing workplace democratization schemes if they have already experienced and dealt with issues related to participatory democracy. Participatory budgeting within the union could provide such a training that helps operationalize democratization schemes within the workplace and beyond.

Furthermore, unions’ participatory budgeting processes could also be designed to ensure equity. This means designing processes to address issues of gender and race. Just as any school of socialism must provide workers with technical training and administrative capability, it must also be a school for a kind of socialism that aspires to and enacts racial and gender equality.

Transforming bureaucracy, forging collaboration

At a May 2014 event at the New School, Moody repudiated the idea that union bureaucracy could be eliminated. Bureaucracy is here to stay, and the question, instead, is how to deal with it. As Gabriel Winant notes, in contrast to the other segments of the American left, “organized labor … is at its finest both reliable bureaucracy and mass spirit.” Winant rightfully argues that “rank-and-file insurgency simply will not form without being fostered.” He argues that “forming organizations and hiring staff is a necessary step toward enabling workers to be heard; it is not, in itself, the elimination of their voices.”

Winant also writes that the union exists as an organization for workers to “pool their resources,” as opposed to being a “network of felt solidarities.” To its detriment, organized labor often lacks a network of felt solidarities. Nowhere is this more apparent than between rank-and-file and union bureaucracy.

One of the transformative innovations of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre was the reorientation and reorganization of municipal bureaucracy. Through a study of participatory budgeting, scholars Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza assert that “self-rule … does not rest only in communication … [but in] the coupling of the assemblies with administrative structures.” In Porto Alegre, spaces of non-coercive and egalitarian deliberation were coupled with reform of government administrative apparatuses. Baiocchi and Ganuza identify three key administrative reforms.

First, they point to the “exclusive conveyor belt.” The idea is that “the chain of popular sovereignty” is protected from external interference. It also means documenting every phase of the participatory budgeting process in a publicly accessible “Book of Projects.” Furthermore, to ensure neutrality and evenhandedness, a new budget planning office was created to stand above the other municipal departments to ensure city agencies did not deviate from the wishes of the residents.

Second, neighborhood assemblies generated a need for reforms in the internal structure of each administrative office. Each office was required to hire “community facilitators” that interfaced between residents and technical experts. Community facilitators were required to attend assemblies, and a weekly forum that ensured the coherence of the participatory budgeting process.

Third, the Municipal Council of the Budget constituted a “forum of forums” wherein representatives from different phases and points of the process where brought together “to debate and legitimate the process as a whole”:

[…] members of the council dealt with unexpected events beyond the rules; they deliberated and decided on the rules of the process; they set broad investment priorities according to abstract social justice criteria… This forum of forums provided the ability of participants to self-regulate the process and to have a second-order debate about the general principles that finally would shape administrative public policies.

These dimensions of the Porto Alegre process could also be translated to — and even deepened within — the labor union. One could imagine a union hiring a small staff whose job is to interface between the various administrative departments and the rank-and-file. Bureaucrats themselves may even be required to attend participatory budgeting assemblies. This would allow for the transmission of information about union benefits that members are often unaware of as a whole. It may also work to uncover the levers of power too often hidden in the backrooms of union staff and leadership.

Organized labor could also create Labor Union Council(s) of the Budget. Such Labor Union Budget Councils would bring together various actors within a union to ensure member input and control — which in turn would reflect beyond the participatory budgeting process. This Council could serve as a site of collaborative relations between the rank-and-file and the union leadership.

The untapped potential of the rank-and-file

Participatory budgeting within unions is not simply about addressing the problems outlined above. It’s most simply and primarily about unleashing the untapped potential of nearly every union member. It’s about creating the networks of solidarity that can unleash a scale of people power that by far and away surpasses the fiscal power possessed by unions. If the power of the union is in its membership, then the power of the membership must be harnessed and materialized.

In speaking about his experiences at union meetings, Dave Kamper writes that at union meetings he often asks “members to raise their hands if they ever talk to their nextdoor neighbor about their union or their politics. After counting the number of people who respond, I always have fingers left over.”

A union that endows its members with the power to decide its direction — to decide where its funds go — is a union that a member will surely talk to their neighbor about. It is a union their neighbor will want to join.

Photo by ProgressOhio

The post Democratize the union: let the rank-and-file decide! appeared first on P2P Foundation.