Jeff Noonan, a supposed radical philosopher who teaches in Windsor, Ontario, wrote the following on his blog about Trump’s threat of tariffs. He first outlines the problem and then looks at possible solutions:
The threat is real, in particular to the auto industry, situated in Southern Ontario. Windsor-Essex where I live could face economic obliteration. I am not exaggerating. Tens of thousands of workers in the assembly and engine plants and dozens of smaller tool and die, injection mold, and parts plants could lose their jobs. Parts go back and forth across the border multiple times. Do the math: if every time a part crosses into the US the manufacturer must pay a 25 % duty, the costs will be enormous. Experts predicted that the entire North American auto industry, dependent as it is on the integrated supply chain and just in time production, could grind to a halt in 7-10 days from the imposition of tariffs. While the fact that American auto workers would be laid off would be sure to get Trump’s attention, it would also get the attention of the owners of parts plants and future investors. Capitalists are risk averse: they will close plants on this side of the border and not make future investments if they are going to be exposed to tariffs. The industry will not disappear tomorrow (because plants cannot just be moved overnight), but overtime the plants will relocate to the US to avoid tariffs, or even the threat. That is Trump’s plan, and it may be starting to work already. Even though the tariffs have been suspended, a number of firms located in Canada have announced lay offs in anticipation that they will be applied in March. But even if they are not, Trump can keep them dangling like the sword of Damocles over Canadian heads. …
Which brings us to the crucial, as always, question: what is to be done? And as soon as that question is posed one faces a problem– a paradox, really– that I have been wrestling with, without success, for many years: the short term damage caused by phase transitions between one form of global economic governance and another is real, suggesting that only fundamental, long-term, system transformation can solve the problems, but the short term pain that would be required to reach those long term goals would be at least as bad if not worse than trying to re-float the system, which impedes political mobilization in support of structural changes.
Noonan provides no argument for his claim that “the short term pain that would be required to reach those long term goals would be at least as bad if not worse than trying to re-float the system, which impedes political mobilization in support of structural changes.”
An obvious question would be: bad for whom? Another question: In what way bad? Noonan does not even outline the actual situation of autoworkers in Windsor and elsewhere. Indeed, his references to the exploitation of workers are few and far between and lack any concrete references. Noonan’s reading of workers is that they aim only for short-term interests–but he never questions whether such a focus on short-term interests is not itself due to, among reasons, of leftist reformists like himself who fail to enlighten them about their actual situation by doing any research relevant to their lives and critcizing those who try to paper over the real situation. Rather, he talks about defending the rule of law (see The Poverty of Academic Leftism, Part Eleven: Superficial Rejection of Aiming for a Socialist Society in the Present by Idealizing the Rule of Law in the Present: Part One).
Thus, on Noonan’s blog, he writes the following:
Slogans do not pay the pills, and workers are unlikely to be persuaded to leave high paying (often unionized) work in the fossil fuel industry for promises of a socialist future. What might move them are serious just transition programs that allow workers to leave environmentally harmful industries to retrain and find equally well-paying work in a new field. Perhaps Callinicos would respond: but the capitalist state and the fossil fuel industry will never adequately fund just transition programs, because capitalism is not about just transitions but the exploitation of labour in industries where it is profitable to do so [here–such vague terms. Has Noonan tried to determine the extent to which workers are exploited in the auto industry in Windsor? Or if that is not possible, in other industries? Or if that is not possible, in other cities? Or for a specific firm within the auto industry? See, for example, The Rate of Exploitation of General Motors Workers] , under conditions of labour determined by the competitive dynamics operating at a global scale. Theoretically, he would be correct. But look at how that just throws workers back onto the first horn of the dilemma: unable to afford to leave the environmentally destructive industry they will almost certainly choose to stay if the only other alternative that socialists offer is a promissory note about how good the socialist future will be. And if governments offer something more concrete than a promissory note– an actual reform that can improve their lives right now– then what concrete role does the demand for revolution play?
It is up to the workers whether they will risk their lives–and possibly make it worse (through employer oppression, persecution and possible firing and, in addition because the capitalist state might jail them, peresecute them, maim them or kill them). However, they should at least be provided the tools necessary to understand their own real situation–their exploitation and oppression, and the real nature of the capitalist state and legal system.
Noonan hardly provides such tools. Quite to the contrary. He himself has functioned to hide their oppression (if not their exploitation) by arguing on his blog the following. From Thinkings 4: Collected Interventions, Readings, Evocations, 2014-2015, page 13). From Thinkings 4: Collected Interventions, Readings, Evocations, 2014-2015, page 13):
Whether or not it was ever practiced in reality, the principle of collegial self-governance is the goal to which universities should aspire. Unlike for profit businesses, universities do not have owners whose goal is to maximise profits. Instead, all members of the institution– faculty, librarians, learning specialists, lab technicians, students, support workers, and administration have the same goal—the advance of human knowledge and creativity in the widest and most comprehensive sense. If that claim is true, then it should follow that all the groups who together make up the university ought to cooperate (not without respectful disagreement) in the determination of the budgets, policies, rules, and goals that guide the institution’s mission. The best ideas emerge through deliberative and democratic argument—no one group knows best just because of the position they occupy in the hierarchy.
This view is ideology in the worst sense of the term. It is an appeal to what ought to be in some utopian world (“the principle of collegial self-governance is the goal to which universities should aspire”)–that can never be in the given context, and then assuming that the utopia is somehow possible in such a context (“the principle of collegial self-governance is the goal to which universities should aspire“). In a society dominated by employers–including public-sector employers like universities, it is highly unlikely that such workers as “lab technicians, students and support workers” have the same goal–“the advance of human knowledge and creativity in the widest and most comprehensive sense.” Such a view may apply in a socialist organization, but to assume such a situation in universities, which function in a capitalist context, is bound to lead to inadequate policies and theories.
The illogical nature of the assertion is called asserting as a fact what you are supposed to prove; more technically, it is called begging the question. Professor Noonan assumes that all the workers at universities have the same goal. This view can be criticized on a number of grounds.
The collectivity called the university, in a capitalist setting, involves the purchase of workers on a market for workers. The workers do not collectively and consciously get together to decide to form an organization called the university; rather, it is the employer who sets up a formal organization called a university and then hires workers as employees for a certain period of time. These workers “belong” to the university as a formal collectivity but, since they do not freely unite to form the university, this organization is something imposed on them as a force that is external to them. In other words, the unity which is supposed to be the university is a formal unity that is not self-organization of that which is organized or unified (the workers); the unity is imposed from without or in an external and therefore unfree manner.
The self-organization of workers and the formal organization of workers into a unity makes all the difference in the world in the quality of lives of the workers. In self-organization, the workers express themselves in their unity as something which they have made and to which they have freely subordinated themselves as a power that is their power. In formal organization, workers are brought together as a unity by an external force (in this case, through a formal organization that owns money); their own unity is not their unity but the unity of the employer. The workers then find that the unity is oppressive in various ways.
Consider support workers. I worked twice at a university library, once doing my practicum to obtain a library and information technology diploma (from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) between 1988 and 1990) at the University of Calgary main library, in the cataloguing department. One worker remarked, when I noted that the work was very hierarchical (something which academic Marxists seem to overlook in their own workplace often enough–at least on a practical level when they acknowledge, in the books they have published, the work of librarians, who necessarily oppress workers lower in the hierarchy, but fail to acknowledge the support workers), that she would prefer having a benevolent dictator than a mean one (implying that she had a benevolent dictator).
Again, at the University of Manitoba, where I worked on a temporary library project for Dafoe Library, one of the library assistants, Juliette (a feisty Philippine woman) talked to me explicitly how her supervisor, a white German woman, had explicitly indicated that she did not want to have any more Asians filling the higher ranks of library assistants (library assistant 4, if I remember correctly). Juliette complained to the Human Rights Commission, which apparently found that such library 4 positions were indeed being filled illegitimately by non-Asians.
Although Juliette was protected in some ways from being fired because of the finding that there was discrimination in the assignment of library assistant 4 positions, she also told me that one time she found feces thrown onto her car. Another time she found that someone had somehow opened her car doors and slashed some of the interior. Another time she was driving her car home from work when she found that she had a flat tire. When she had it towed to a garage, the mechanic remarked that it looked like someone had slashed her tires (perhaps with a knife).
Consider another situation at the University of Manitoba. The racism evident in Dafoe Library of the University of Manitoba led someone to post a petition for an Ombudsman’s office on racism at the University in the library staff lounge. I showed Juliette this, and she circulated the petition to library workers in circulation and in the cataloguing department. Only a handful of workers signed the petition (including Juliette and me), not because there was no racism in those departments but, according to Juliette, but because the workers were afraid to sign it out of fear of the possible repercussions from management–and fear is characteristic of many work sites among the lower levels of the hierarchy (whether public or private).
Of course, academics at the University of Manitoba knew nothing about this situation; despite their research skills, they are often blind to events that immediately surround them.
Professor Noonan evidently looks at the world in terms of class harmony–at least in his own environment. Such a world is not filled with degradation and oppression in order that he engage in his activity. Such a world can-without opposing his and all other employers–realize a world where all who work can freely pursue the same goal.
Far from providing workers with the tools necessary to understand their exploitative and oppressive situation inside work and the various forms of oppression outside work, Noonan papers over such situations by implying that workers and management are to pursue the same goals.
Losing a job in the context of the class domination of employers can certainly be devastating–but then again so can working for an employer and being oppressed and exploited every day. I have already shown that many Canadian workers working for large employers do not necessarily consider that their work is all that bad–but then again many probably do not believe that they are systematically oppressed and exploited. If they did, the organizational situation might be very different. But the reformist left express such cliches as “fair wages,” “decent work,” “fair collective bargaining” and like cliches rather than enlightening workers about their real situation.
Or does Noonan not believe that workers in the private sector are systematically exploited and oppressed? Is he only paying lip service to the term? Perhaps so, because he displays little criticial distance from Gindin’s own lack of providing such criticial tools to workers.
Conclusion
I will conclude this post by copying a rather long critque of Gindin’s position in one of my posts–a position undoubtedly shared by Noonan (practically even if not theoretically). It is a conversation between Sam Gindin (a self-claimed “leader” of radical workers here in Toronto despite his probable own explicit denial of such a title) and me:The criticism directed at Gindin therefore also applies to Noonan.
Re: A Good or Decent Job and a Fair Deal
Sam Gindin
Sat 2017-02-18 8:05 AM
Something is missing here. No-one on this list is denying that language doesn’t reflect material realities (the language we use reflects the balance of forces) or that it is irrelevant in the struggle for material effects (the language of middle class vs working class matter And no one is questioning whether unions are generally sectional as opposed to class organizations or whether having a job or ‘decent’ pay is enough. The question is the autonomy you give to language.The problem isn’t that workers refer to ‘fair pay’ but the reality of their limited options. Language is NOT the key doc changing this though it clearly plays a role. That role is however only important when it is linked to actual struggles – to material cents not just discourse. The reason we have such difficulties in doing education has to do with the limits of words alone even if words are indeed essential to struggles. Words help workers grasp the implications of struggles, defeats, and the partial victories we have under capitalism (no other victories as you say, are possible under capitalism).
So when workers end a strike with the gains they hoped for going in, we can tell them they are still exploited. But if that is all we do, what then? We can – as I know you’d do – not put it so bluntly (because the context and not just the words matter). that emphasize that they showed that solidarity matters but we’re still short of the fuller life we deserve and should aspire to and that this is only possible through a larger struggle, but then we need to be able to point to HOW to do this. Otherwise we are only moralizing. That is to say, it is the ideas behind the words and the recognition of the need for larger structures to fight through that primarily matter. Words help with this and so are important but exaggerating their role can be as dangerous as ignoring it.
What I’m trying to say is that people do, I think, agree with the point you started with – we need to remind ourselves of the limits of, for example, achieving ‘fair wages’. But the stark way you criticize using that word, as opposed to asking how do we accept the reality out there and move people to larger class understandings – of which language is an important part – seems to have thrown the discussion off kilter.
On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Frederick Harris <arbeit67@hotmail.com> wrote:
I was waiting to see whether there was any dispute concerning either the primary function of language or its material nature. Since there has been no response to that issue, I will assume that the view that the primary function of language is to coordinate social activity has been accepted.
What are some of the political implications of such a view of language? Firstly, the view that “But material conditions matter more” has no obvious basis. If language coordinates our activity, surely workers need language “to reproduce themselves.”
The question is whether coordination is to be on a narrower or wider basis.
Let us now take a look at the view that a contract (a collective agreement) is fair or just and that what workers are striving for is a decent or good job.
If we do not oppose the view that any collective agreement is fair to workers and that the jobs that they have or striving to have are decent jobs, then are we saying that a particular struggle against a particular employer can, in some meaningful sense, result in a contract that workers are to abide by out of some sense of fairness? Does not such a view fragment workers by implicitly arguing that they can, by coordinating their action at the local or micro level, achieve a fair contract and a good job?
If, on the other hand, we argue against the view that the workers who are fighting against a particular employer cannot achieve any fair contract or a decent job, but rather that they can only achieve this in opposition to a class of employers and in coordination with other workers in many other domains (in other industries that produce the means of consumption of workers, in industries that produce the machines and the raw material that go into the factory, in schools where teachers teach our children and so forth), then there opens up the horizon for a broader approach for coordinating activity rather than the narrow view of considering it possible to achieve not a fair contract and a decent job in relation to a particular employer.
In other words, it is a difference between a one-sided, micro point of view and a class point of view.
As far as gaining things within capitalism, of course it is necessary to fight against your immediate employer, in solidarity with your immediate fellow workers, in order to achieve anything. I already argued this in relation to the issue of health in another post.
Is our standard for coordinating our activity to be limited to our immediate relation to an employer? Or is to expand to include our relation to the conditions for the ‘workers to reproduce themselves’?
“They turn more radical when it becomes clear that the system can’t meet their needs and other forms of action become necessary -“
How does it become clear to workers when their relations to each other as workers occurs through the market system? Where the products of their own labour are used against them to oppress and exploit them? Are we supposed to wait until “the system can’t meet their needs”? In what sense?
I for one have needed to live a decent life–not to have a decent job working for an employer or for others to be working for employers. I for one have needed to live a dignified life–not a life where I am used for the benefit of employers. Do not other workers have the same need? Is that need being met now? If not, should we not bring up the issue at every occasion? Can any collective agreement with an employer realize that need?
Where is a vision that provides guidance towards a common goal? A “fair contract”? A “decent” job? Is this a class vision that permits the coordination of workers’ activities across industries and work sites? Or a limited vision that reproduces the segmentation and fragmentation of the working class?
Fred
I guess workers’ explicit consciousness of their own exploitation and oppression and their discussion of such experiences is to arise only after the emergence of “larger structures to fight through.” It is, however, likely that such “larger structures” will simply mimic the “narrower” structures if both are not criticized. How is the CLC (the Canadian Labour Congress) substantially different from union structures in terms of challenging the class power of employers? Or is Mr. Gindin referring to the larger structures, such as the class power of employers?
My own experience with union reps has been that they assume the necessity and legitimacy of the class power of employers–and do not do anything to raise the issue of the legitimacy of the class power of employers, the exploitation of workers and their oppression among their own members; their aim is to improve the working conditions without questioning at all such class power, exploitation and oppression. I have been a union member, a union rep (union steward and member of a collective-bargaining committee), a member of the executive of a union and a rep for an Equity and Social Justice Committee. I have seen up close the assumptions and limitations and unions–and have tried to address such limitations when and where I could.
The false nature of Mr. Gindin’s political position stands out when he claims the following:
Which brings me back to the point that the problem is not [Wayne] Dealy [union director for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3902] or Sean [Smith, Unifor Local 2002 Co-Ordinator and Toronto Airport Workers Council (TAWC) activist”] or others but OUR Collective inability to provide them with an effective alternative politics…They can be criticized but only if we do so with humility and part of criticizing ourselves. [my emphasis]
Is there evidence that Mr. Gindin criticizes his own views? Are union reps (and union members) really conscious of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the class power of employers as such? If so, what are they doing about it? I fail to see evidence of it. I also fail to see evidence of Mr. Gindin engaging in self-criticism. He implicitly assumes that he knows what workers need–and that is not an explicit and real consciousness of their exploitation and oppression–with or without unions, collective bargaining and collective agreements.
The same could be said of Noonan.
The Abolitionary 