Jon Las Heras (@jonlhc) & Lluís Rodríguez (@lluisraeco), political economists and members of the Institute of Economics and Self-Management.
Is capitalism built through class oppression? Of course. Although it
seems that as we keep talking about how things are so bad, even, about
how worse they are getting with the rise of proto-fascist governments
across the world – despite all these (new?) phenomena – it is obvious
that nothing is really changing, or at least in our favor. To such
pessimist answer, we should dare to make a provocative extension and
state the following: yes, capitalism is disgustingly built by putting us
against each other but WITH OUR INVOLVEMENT, with us being necessary
accomplices of its hegemony and of its ugly transformation.
To our mind, we need to start changing our object of attention and acknowledge that capitalism is ALSO the expression of labor’s incapacity to organize and strike back effectively. We should be more self-critical, which does not mean self-destructive and start trying new things. Don’t you feel we have had enough of compassion and that it is already the time for a recalcitrant dose of strategic realism? But when we talk about new “things”, new “methods”, we are not talking about “original” or “utterly new” forms of class struggle – as some may prefer to believe they do exist outside history –, but instead we conceive them as basic forms of class organization and solidarity that perhaps, in the right context and dose, can unfold a set of new events that surface underlying contradictions. To our mind, as it stands now, right-wing class movements are making “goals” while the radical-left remains in a sort of state of confusion, an impasse, in which the time is running against us.
In such apparently gloomy landscape, and after seeing how European
workers and class organizations have not managed to build effective
transnational solidarity structures and discourses to counter-fight
austerity and neoliberal regulation since 2008, a little country –
Euskal Herria – in the Spanish state has provided us with renewed hopes.
But these are not hopes of the kind in which the world is going to
change to the much better very soon, but more realistically, that from
the standpoint of an average Basque worker, there are some few things
that one can do in order to make a step forward, no matter how small,
but still, a step forward. A sort of successful incursion in a context
of guerrilla-warfare perhaps?
More concretely, Euskal Langileen Alkartasuna (ELA), the largest and most representative
trade union in the Basque Country, is a class organisation that, and
from a position of ‘counter-power’, has sought to build organisational
strength vis-à-vis the employers, the government and conservative
unions, through the empowerment of its rank-and-file, predominantly, in
collective bargaining and industrial conflict processes. Since the
mid-1990s it opted to leave aside the historical turn that the rest of
social-democratic unions were taking across the western world: to change
from a position that seeks greater working conditions to that of
conformism and micro-corporatism. A corporatist logic makes us think
that the worse is to come and yet that it is better not to trigger the
conflict, so we buy-into the enemy’s discourse and believe that by
lowering the standards may be the explosion will put off. Ironically,
such very strategy undermines all the conditions that once were gained
and, at the same time, makes such actors to the eyes of the rest as
accomplices of the course of history.
ELA has bet on gaining both political and financial autonomy
(around 93% of its expenditures are self-covered) in order to be
capable of setting some ‘red-lines’ that the rest of big unions are
currently incapable of setting: not signing dual-wage-scales, not
signing working-time and workload increases, not fostering calendar
flexibility, not signing vacuous sector agreements that are not likely
to be implemented at the workplace, and establishing new alliances with
more confrontational unions and social organisations among other things.
Or put it differently, this union has gained political and
organizational autonomy and strength by rejecting social dialogue with
the government and other conservative unions in order to establish a
‘counter-power’ strategy that seeks to protect and organize the whole
Basque working class in and through their organization.
ELA has 100.000 members but it organizes just less than 10% of all
the strikes taking place within the Spanish state (60 out of 600-800 per
year approx.), and in the last years it has managed to organize,
overall, more strikes than the second largest social-democratic trade
union in Spain (Union General de Trabajadores, UGT) which has 10 times
more affiliates than ELA. Moreover, the scope of action of the Basque
union is smaller, i.e. the Basque Country only represents less than a 5%
of the Spanish workforce, and this union only represents one-third of
all Basque unionized workers. In other words, this union is the main
force behind the fact that the Basque Country hosted 36% of all the
strikes taking place in Spain between 2000-2017. This concretizes also
in the statistical fact that a worker engaging in a strike organised by
ELA loses at least 7 days more for every day lost by a strike organized
by UGT. Therefore, and taking into consideration that Spain is already
supposed to be one of the most conflictive countries in Europe, this
Basque union is playing very tough.
