yeah, so i'm really not going to get into the specific examples about specific unions fighting for specific things; it's all very reactionary, politically, and none of the case studies provide for much of anything useful when it comes to building a real, revolutionary movement outside of the constraints of the workforce. it's just all about workers fighting for benefits within the context of existing capitalism. if anything, her interest appears to be in trying to take ideas from revolutionary politics and apply them to labour organizing, which is pretty much the definition of being a reactionary.

she basically just sets up this false dichotomy between mobilizing and organizing, then runs through a series of what are really rather frivolous discussions about it. it consequently has this kind of academic aesthetic to it, but it's too silly on it's face to be serious scholarship. i could spend a lot of time trying to disentangle the nonsense and word salads and working out and correcting the underlying logic, but it would essentially be a waste of time; at the end of the day, nobody is really going to disagree with observations such as that a successful revolutionary movement has to be run by workers itself (that is, in fact, a tautological statement.), or that the social revolution has to come first or much of anything else that she has to say. but, a lot of her analysis is ridiculous, in the sense that she assigns causes to personalities rather than systemic pressures. in one baffling section, she talks about how smashing the communists in the ctu was a great accomplishment, then fails to tie doing so to the loss of militancy in the union.

her discussion of power in the introduction was not meaningfully extrapolated upon, so my hypothesis was not borne out. there is not any kind of interesting theory of power explored within the text, at all.

rather, the text is a reformist analysis by what appears to be a textbook progressive/conservative. there's no meaningful socialist analysis in the text at all. there's almost no discussion of class. and, i think i'm mostly interested in observing how these people that organize under the socialist label can explain away wasting their time with such an obviously anti-revolutionary text.

but, i've been through this before, and i've learned my lesson: just because the group calls itself socialist doesn't mean that it actually is. but, i can wait and talk to people and judge them as individuals, like they should be judged.

it seems obvious that they picked this text to try and expand their movement. i can imagine that i'm going to walk into a group of people that have been organizing together for a long time and can't figure out how to attract new recruits to the cause, so they picked this up thinking it might help. are they doing too much mobilizing and not enough organizing? well, drop the attempt to redefine the terms for a second and just read that in english and tell me if you think it's coherent or not. in the end, a group like this needs to ask the question: why aren't any actual union members showing up at their meetings? why is it just a bunch of students and unemployed people? where are the rank and file?

and, the answer is as obvious as is possible: the decline of the revolutionary left is a function of the success of the union movement. somebody making $60,000+/yr with good benefits doesn't need to be helped out of their oppression by a benevolent arts student.

these groups need to focus on what is in front of them. america has a major housing problem, and i see it every time i go over there. social benefits are far too low. people don't have access to health care or education, and they're stuck working dead-end jobs that don't pay the rent. these are your foot soldiers for the revolution - not the union rank and file, who are too busy watching tv to organize or mobilize or, really, do anything else at all.

i might not even make it there. we're looking at a long weekend.