Category: Trade unions

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Antonio Gramsci: Workers and peasants

A new translation of Gramsci’s Workers and peasants from L’ordine nuovo, 3 January 1920.

Industrial production must be controlled directly by the workers organized by company; the activity of control must be unified and coordinated through purely worker trade union organisms; the workers and socialists cannot consider useful to their interests and to their aspirations a control of industry exercised by the (corrupt, venal, unaccountable) functionaries of the capitalist state, which can only signify a resurgence of the committees for industrial mobilization, useful only to capitalist parasitism.
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Convention for Higher Education: IV

The final session began with reports back from the workshop session, followed by talks from John Holmwood, Tom Hickey and Martin McQuillan.

John Holmwood talked about the trajectory of higher education from the Robbins (`social democratic’) to the Browne (`neo-liberal’) report, describing the changes in policy. He rejected the claim that there is a need for cuts in education spending, mentioning the Aubyn report showing that UK higher education is the best value for money in the world, and the Wolf [?] report on aspiration to university.

Tom Hickey discussed the UCU response to the current situation and asked what connection there is between trade-unionism and the vision of a university. Like John Holmwood, he noted that the public strongly supports access to education. On the subject of organization, he pointed out that autonomy is dangerous in a system of privatized universities, and that UCU is the only organization distributed throughout the sector. He proposed that UCU put forward a vision for universities, defending self-managed scholarly activity.

Martin McQuillan took his topic from Tamson Pietsch’s idea of the enclosure of the epistemological commons. He gave an account of the forms of management of English universities such as companies limited by guarantee (which can be taken over). Other models are available, such as the University of California system, or private universities backed by private equity, as in continental Europe. He gave two examples of dangers for university education: `open access’ which is put forward as giving the public access to taxpayer-funded research, but will mainly benefit those (business) who previously paid for data; and MOOCs, which as well as being criticized for their pedagogy, but which are also run by private bodies which want to monetize lectures. The ideological drive is to justify private profit as a public good.

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Convention for Higher Education: III

The second day began with talks from Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor at Salford University, and Terry Brotherstone who had served on the von Prondzynski review of university governance in Scotland.

Using experience from Africa, Martin Hall talked about world cities and the role of universities in understanding the contemporary urban condition. Drawing an analogy with the Manchester cotton trade, he described a process of importing raw data from Africa (East Africa currently generates a disproportionate number of data, especially in medicine) which are then refined and returned as books which cost (literally) the salary of a Kenyan academic. Having come from South Africa four years ago, he described a University of Cape Town study on black students entering university and the disruptive effect it had on their relationship to their home village, and compared it to the similar disruption experienced by `widening participation’ students who are the first in their families to go to university.

Terry Brotherstone described the von Prondzynski review of governance which arose from a union campaign on policy and not simply in defence of terms and conditions. The report, he said, addressed a double democratic deficit, of democracy within universities and of public engagement with universities, so that `autonomy’ was interpreted as management doing what they like. He noted that the report needs a serious critique from the left.

In a workshop session later that day, Harriet Bradley from Bristol and UWE opened a discussion on (mis)management in universities, beginning by saying that it is possible to manage without being managerialist. The main weapon used in imposing this particular management style on universities was devolved budgets where academics were made to feel that another department was getting `our’ money. The introduction of private sector practices in public universities had led to a layer of aggressive middle management, and to universities being run by non-academics (businessmen as dispensers of wisdom, in Priya Gopal’s talk) or by academics who depend on non-academics, such as directors of finance.

The discussion here was especially good with managerialism being explained as a version of the Zimbardo experiment. One piece of advice put forward was that academics should learn to read accounts. With regard to governance, the question came up of who owns our universities, to whom management is accountable (in theory to parliament, meaning in practice, to nobody) and of whether we should look for a maximum wage for heads of universities. A telling statement was that it is common to hear the phrase `I can’t tell who made that decision.’

The question of student engagement was raised, where students are often seen as a threat, due to evaluations and the National Student Survey for example, and the danger of student participation coming close to the student satisfaction agenda. One question which arose was where students are equal and where not (i.e. where should students have, or have not, an equal say with staff?).

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Convention for Higher Education: II

This is the second part of a summary of talks at the Convention for Higher Education, following part I.

The second plenary session was opened by Gill Scott who spoke on twenty five years of the BA in Humanities at Brighton, a successful interdisciplinary (carefully distinguished from multidisciplinary) programme bringing students into critical engagement with the disciplines. The video on the programme’s site gives a better flavour than my account.

The panel for the rest of the session was Thomas Docherty from Warwick, Priya Gopal from Cambridge, and Will Hutton, journalist and now principal of Hertford College Oxford.

Thomas Docherty spoke on the relation of forces (circumstance and nature) in the university, saying that on current trends the university will not even be a marketplace, with all the hubbub and argument that would imply. Finally, he quoted Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex taking over the university.

Priya Gopal spoke on the neoliberal university, making the point that businessmen have replaced intellectuals as the providers of universal wisdom. (This is the stand-out talk of the convention for the combination of style and content.)

After declaring his interest as chair of the Independent Commission on Fees, Will Hutton spoke provocatively on university reforms, claiming that fees have been good for the autonomy of universities. He described George Osborne’s introduction to the government’s new aerospace policy document as something Tony Benn could have written forty years ago. He was heard respectfully.

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Convention for Higher Education: I

Having just come back from the Convention for Higher Education at Brighton, I am putting up summaries of discussions. These are broken up by session, to avoid having a very long account, and to make it easier to comment. Panel speakers are named, because they had already agreed to have their names used, but not contributors from the audience. Apparently, videos of the talks will be online in the near future.

In the first session, I estimated about sixty people were present. The speakers in the first session were Caroline Lucas MP, Luke Martell from University of Sussex, and Peter Scott columnist and one-time Vice-Chancellor at Kingston.

Caroline Lucas spoke mainly about the political context of the public university and especially the effects of fees on applications and access, and how the idea of studying for love of learning rather, and the words `public good’, have largely disappeared from discussions of higher education. She also mentioned the UCU proposal for an education tax on large corporations, which would allow the abolition of fees.

Luke Martell talked about resistance to privatization at Sussex and the balance between trade unions and students in the campaign. He described an initially negative response from the trade unions to the campaign, with academics complicit in marketization, and considered the limitations of information or propaganda activity as opposed to occupation and other forms of action. He was especially critical of the one day strike.

Peter Scott gave his view that we must take back the claim to be radical, which is currently made by the government. He said that supporters of the selective, academic (in the bad sense) system have not come to terms with mass higher education, and that while higher education needed reform, to deal with inequities that were in the system, it did not need this reform. Noting that the question is what is the trajectory of the reforms, he pointed out that Browne introduced a paradigm shift in the sector (this was developed further by John Holmwood on the second day). In answer to the question `what is to be done’, he said we need clarity about values, and that we should celebrate the mass system of higher education, end league tables, and weigh all forms of impact including social critique.

In the discussion at the end of the session, the issue of role of trade unions in universities was raised, and the problem of the depoliticization of unions and the lack of concern amongst academics about outsourcing. There was a comment about a general lack of radicalism amongst staff, even those organized into trade union branches. A participant from Brighton said that the Sussex occupation had shaken his faith in trade unions, and that he was supporting the `pop-up union’. Luke Martell shared this disillusion with trade unions but pointed out that they do have important resources and mobilizing capacity. It was noted from the floor that while class had been raised as an issue of access and widening participation, the white maleness of the panel (Caroline Lucas had had to leave early) did not inspire confidence in its ability to deal with the diversity of university students and staff. The von Prondzynski review of governance in Scottish universities was mentioned in the context of the role of academics in governance. A colleague visiting from the US mentioned the role of debt in higher education and how it destroys any idea of education. Finally, it was stated that unions are best placed to resist the changes in the sector, but cannot do so in a narrow way, and the question of how to politicize `support staff’ was raised.

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Vice-Chancellors’ pay

This is a speech I made at the recent Congress of the University and College Union. It went down well, so I have tried to reconstruct it. If anyone has some notes of it, I’d be grateful for a look to get closer to what I actually said.

Michael Carley, University of Bath, moving Motion 12.

I have in my hand a piece of paper. It’s a great piece of work. I can say this, because I didn’t write it. It’s an analysis of the pay of our Vice-Chancellor. You can get a copy over there, where the South West delegation is sitting. We carefully used the figures in such a way as to show our Vice-Chancellor in the worst possible light. I recommend you try doing the same.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath is paid two hundred and eighty four thousand pounds per year, figures two, eight, four, and a pension contribution of sixty five thousand. She is paid more per member of staff than even the head of Harvard. She is paid one hundred and fifty pounds per member of staff, which is, oddly enough, last year’s pay rise for the rest of us.

This motion is not about cutting Vice-Chancellors down to size–that’s a happy side effect. It is a motion which aims to restore some balance to universities. Universities essentially run themselves: “whilst the performance of a university may be `moulded’ by the characteristics of its leader, most of the variability is explained by non-leadership factors.” We know this because, ironically, our Vice-Chancellor carries out research on university leadership [pause for hysterical laughter to die down] and she said so in a recent paper. In other words, the Vice-Chancellor makes very little difference.

But we know this. The one thing you can guarantee in a university is that most of the staff are smarter than the boss. All you need to do with most academics is slide a pizza under the door now and again, keep us fed and watered, and let us get on with doing what we love doing. Most of us are eternal students: we went to university because we loved learning and scholarship and we stayed there to work because we still do. We want to do research, develop knowledge, and pass that knowledge on to students. But universities are run by CEOs, by people who think that Alan Sugar is good management.

The aim of this motion is to restore the idea that a Vice-Chancellor is one of us, primus inter pares amongst the academics (only the second use of Latin today, standards are obviously slipping). A Vice-Chancellor, and indeed other senior staff, should be elected by the staff of the university. They should be respected scholars, prepared to take on the job of chairing the committee that does the essential work required for the administration of the university. They should have the same interest as the rest of us in seeing a university run well for the benefit of learning. What we want are the people who are almost reluctant to give up their scholarly work. We want them to be elected because that makes them legitimate–they command the respect of their peers.

We propose that Vice-Chancellors’ pay be capped at ten times that of the lowest paid member of staff [which would still be a salary of about £150,000]. A large difference in pay and incentives leads to a difference in interests: leaders disconnected from the university’s academics do not act in the interest of scholarship. We want to restore the idea of a university being a community of scholars who want to do scholarship. We want our universities run by people like us, not by a bunch of jumped-up Alan Sugars.

 

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Gramsci: Unions and the dictatorship

A new translation of
Unions and the dictatorship by Antonio Gramsci.

The international class struggle has culminated in the victory of the workers and peasants of two international proletariats. In Russia and in Hungary the workers and peasants have established the proletarian dictatorship and in Russia as much as in Hungary the dictatorship had to sustain a bitter battle not only against the bourgeois class, but also against the unions: the conflict between the dictatorship and the unions was thus one of the causes of the fall of the Hungarian soviet, since the unions, though they never openly attempted to overthrow the dictatorship, operated always as “splitting” organisms of the revolution and incessantly planted discontent and cowardice amongst the workers and the red soldiers. Even a rapid examination, of the reasons and the conditions of this conflict cannot fail to be useful in the revolutionary education of the masses, the which, if they must be convinced that the union is perhaps the most important proletarian organism of the communist revolution, because on it must be founded the socialization of industry, because it must create the conditions in which private enterprise disappears and cannot be reborn, must also be convinced of the necessity of creating, before the revolution, the psychological and objective conditions under which will be impossible every conflict and every division of power between the various organisms in which the struggle of the proletarian class against capitalism is embodied.

The class struggle has assumed in all the countries of Europe and of the world a strictly revolutionary character. The conception, which is due to the Third International, according to which the class struggle must be directed towards the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has the upper hand over the democratic ideology and spreads irresistibly amongst the masses. The socialist parties adhere to the Third International or at least they adhere to the fundamental principles developed at the Moscow Congress; the unions on the other hand have remained faithful to “true democracy” and miss no occasion to induce or oblige the workers to declare themselves adversaries of the dictatorship and to refuse demonstrations of solidarity with the Russia of the soviets. This stance of the unions was rapidly overcome in Russia, since the development of the organizations of trade and industry was accompanied in parallel and with a more accelerated rhythm by the development of factory councils; it has instead eroded the base of proletarian power in Hungary, has caused in Germany great slaughters of communist workers and the birth of the Noske phenomenon, has caused in France the failure of the general strike of 20—21 July and the consolidation of the Clemenceau regime, has blocked until now every direct intervention of the English workers in the political struggle and threatens to sunder deeply and dangerously the proletarian forces in every country.

The socialist parties are acquiring ever more a definitely revolutionary and internationalist profile; the unions tend on the other hand to embody the theory (!) and the tactic of reformist opportunism and to become merely national organisms. From them is born an unsustainable state of affairs, a condition of permanent confusion and of chronic weakness for the working class, which increases the general imbalance of society and favours the sprouting of ferments of moral breakdown and of barbarization. The unions have organized workers according to principles of class struggle and have themselves been the first organic forms of this struggle. The organizers have always said that only the class struggle can bring the proletariat to its emancipation and that union organization has precisely the aim of suppressing individual profit and the exploitation of man by man, since it is proposed to eliminate the capitalist (the private proprietor) from the industrial process of production and to thus eliminate classes. But the unions cannot immediately bring about this aim and so they turn all their strength to the immediate aim of bettering the conditions of life of the proletariat, demanding higher salaries, reduced working hours, a body of social legislation. Movements followed movements, strikes, and the condition of life of the workers became relatively better. But all the results, all the victories of union action are set on the old basis: the principle of private property remains intact and strong, the order of capitalist production and the exploitation of man by man remain intact and thus are complicated in new forms. The eight hour day, the pay rise, the benefits of social legislation do not touch profit; the imbalances which union action immediately brings about in the test of profit recompose themselves and find a new accommodation in the play of free competition for the nations in the world economy such as England and Germany, in protectionism for the nations with a limited economy such as France and Italy. Capitalism, that is, directs to the amorphous national masses or to the colonial masses the increased general costs of industrial production.

Union action thus shows itself incapable of overcoming in its domain and with its means, capitalist society, shows itself incapable of leading the proletariat to its emancipation, of leading the proletariat to the achievement of the high and universal end which it had initially set itself.

According to syndicalist doctrines, unions should have educated workers in the management of production. Since the industrial unions, it was said, are an integral reflex of a particular industry, they will become the cadres of workers’ ability to manage that particular industry; the union roles will act to make possible a choice of the best workers, of the most studious, of the most intelligent, of the most apt to master the complex mechanism of production and of exchange. The worker leaders of the leather industry will be the most capable in managing that industry, and so on for the metal industry, for the book industry, etc.

Colossal illusion. The choice of the union leaders was never made on criteria of industrial competence, but of merely legal, bureaucratic or demagogic competence. And the more the organizations became larger, the more frequent became their intervention in the class struggle, the more widespread and deep their action, the more it became necessary to reduce the leading office to an office purely of administration and accounting, the more industrial technical capacity became a non-value and bureaucratic and commercial capacity took the upper hand. There was thus formed a real and proper caste of union functionaries and journalists, with a corps psychology absolutely in contrast to the psychology of the workers, which ended with assuming towards the working mass the same position as the governing bureaucracy towards the parliamentary state: it is the bureaucracy which reigns and governs.

The proletarian dictatorship wishes to suppress the order of capitalist production, wishes to suppress private property, because only thus can the exploitation of man by man be suppressed. The proletarian dictatorship wishes to suppress the difference of classes, wishes to suppress the class struggle, because only thus the social emancipation of the working class can be completed. To reach this end the Communist Party educates the proletariat to organize its class power, to make use of this armed power to dominate the bourgeois class and to set the conditions in which the exploiting class will be suppressed and cannot be reborn. The task of the Communist Party in the dictatorship is thus this: to organize powerfully and definitively the class of workers and peasants in a dominant class, check that all the organisms of the new state really develop revolutionary work, and break the ancient rights and relations inherent in the principle of private property.

But this action of destruction and control must be immediately accompanied by positive work of creation of production. If this work does not succeed, political strength is in vain, the dictatorship cannot hold: no society can hold without production, even less so the dictatorship which, establishing itself in conditions of economic breakdown produced by five years of war worsened by months and months of bourgeois armed terrorism, thus needs intense production.

And this is the vast and magnificent task which should be opened to the activity of the industrial unions. They precisely will have to begin the socialization, they will have to initiate a new order of production, in which the enterprise will be based not on the owner’s desire for wealth, but on the common interest of the social community which for every branch of industry comes out of the generic formlessness and solidifies in the corresponding workers’ union.

In the Hungarian soviet the unions absented themselves from all creative work. Politically the union functionaries placed continual obstacles before the dictatorship, constituting a state within the state, economically they remained inert: more than once the factories had to be socialized against the will of the unions. But the _leaders_ of the Hungarian organizations were limited spiritually, they had a bureaucratic-reformist psychology, and they continuously feared losing the power which until then they had exercised over the workers. Since the function for which the unions had developed until the dictatorship was inherent in the predominance of the bourgeois class, and since the functionaries did not have technical industrial capacity, they maintained the immaturity of the proletarian class in the direct management of production, they maintained “real” democracy, that is the maintenance of the bourgeoisie in its principal positions of the proletarian class, they wanted to perpetuate and worsen the era of the agreements, of the labour contracts, of social legislation, to be capable of making their competence valued. They wanted the international revolution … to be awaited, not being able to understand the international revolution was happening precisely in Hungary with the Hungarian revolution, in Russia with the Russian revolution, in all of Europe with the general strikes, with the military decrees, with the conditions of life made impossible for the working class by the consequences of war.

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Gramsci: Unions and councils

Gramsci: Unions and councils

A new translation of Antonio Gramsci’s article, Unions and Councils, from 1919.

 

The leaders of the organization do not notice this deep and widespread crisis. The more it clearly appears that the working class is not organized in forms corresponding to its real historical structure, the more it happens that the working class is not lined up in a configuration which incessantly adapts itself to laws which govern the intimate process of real historical development of the class itself; the more these leaders persist in their blindness and force themselves to “juridically” settle dissent and conflicts. Eminently bureaucratic spirits, they believe that an objective condition, rooted in the psychology which is developed in the living experiences of the factory, can be overcome with a discourse which moves feelings, and with an order of the day unanimously voted in an assembly made ugly by hubbub and oratorical meanderings. Today they force themselves to “rise to the height of the times” and, as if to demonstrate that they are also capable of “hard thinking,” refashion the old and worn-out union ideologies, tediously insisting on relations of identity between the soviet and the union, tediously insisting on affirming that the present system of union organization constitutes the system of forces in which the dictatorship of the proletariat must be made flesh.