This month sees a conference on ‘the politics of demands’ in Britain, ‘inquiring into what it means, and what it could mean, to make demands’. Fast Forward 2014 asks, among other things, whether demands – ‘possible and impossible’ – can moves us beyond ‘a simplistic revolution/reform debate’. A hypothetical exchange between possible positions is listed on the conference website:

“Demand the impossible,” said the Situationists. “Demand nothing, take everything,” said the Anarchists. “Demand moderate reforms,” said the Social Democrats. “Demand something everyday but only if you’re never going to get it,” said the Trotskyists.

If you are committed to social transformation, or, in other words, to revolutionary politics, there is something challenging about formulating demands. If a demand can easily be achieved under present circumstances, then it may well just reinforce the existing framework of power. If ultimate revolutionary aims are presented as immediate demands, they have no hope of being implemented, and are effectively just another way of reinforcing the existing framework of power.

The influential community organiser Saul Alinsky believed in seeking easy wins, early on. He thought a key goal for organisers should be to boost the confidence of demoralised communities. In his famous manual Rules for Radicals, Alinsky tells the story of how he manipulated the first community he attempted to organise, the ‘Back of the Yards’ in Chicago. One of the demands in the community was for infant medical services (who had been driven out years earlier by the local churches). Alinsky found out that all that was needed to reinstate the services was a simple request. He hid this information from the community group, called an emergency meeting, and organised a storming of the offices of the Infant Welfare Society. On his instruction, the group banged on desks and loudly demanded a return of infant medical services, refusing to allow officials the chance to explain the procedure. The delegation ended their tirade by saying: ‘And we will not take “No” for an answer!’ Alinsky cut off the woman official, demanding: ‘Is it yes or is it no?’ She said: ‘Well, of course, it’s yes.’ Alinsky led the triumphant delegation home, as they digested this ‘lesson’ about the power of protest.

Personally, I don’t agree with deceiving people, but there is an important message here about the psychology of social change. It’s indisputable that people’s sense of themselves changes in the course of struggle, that it is in struggle that we can overcome the psychological limitations that we place on ourselves, that have been implanted and reinforced by existing institutions.

Alinsky’s basic point was that organisers need to nurture confidence:

‘The organizer knows, for example, that his biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something, that while they may accept the idea that organization means power, they have to experience this idea in action. The organizer’s job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence and the feeling that “if we can do so much with what we have now just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong”.’

Strategy is about selecting a sequence of ‘limited victories’ that lead in the direction of your ultimate goal.

In 1964, French Marxist André Gorz put forward the idea of pursuing ‘structural reform’, which he also called ‘non-reformist reform’. Gorz described this as ‘adecentralization of the decision-making power, arestriction on the powers of State or Capital, an extension of popular power, that is to say, a victory of democracy over the dictatorship of profit’ (Strategy for Labor, emphasis in original). Gorz pointed out that the demand for 500,000 new housing units to be built every year in France, to meet people’s housing needs, could be either a neo-capitalist reform (if it involved public subsidies to private enterprise) or an anti-capitalist reform (if the construction was a socialised public service on territory confiscated from landowners).

In the labour movement, Gorz argued for ‘a strategy ofprogressive conquest of power by the workers’, uniting ‘wage demands, the demand for control, and the demand for self-determination by the workers of the conditions of work’. The purpose of this progressive conquest of power was to build the ‘autonomous power’ of workers within capitalist enterprises. Non-reformist reforms ‘assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake it joints’. There is always a risk that such powers could be reabsorbed by the system and subordinated to its functioning, but Gorz argued that the risk had to be run as there was no alternative in France at that time: ‘Seizure of power by insurrection is out of the question, and the waiting game leads the workers’ movement to disintegration.’

Gorz argued that unions should demand, among other things, a ‘collective output bonus’ for all, rather than bonuses for individuals. They should seek to negotiate the speed and rhythm of work, and the qualifications required for a job. The unions should gain control of vocational training schools ‘to ensure that they do not train robots, mutilated individuals with limited horizons and a life burdened by ignorance, but professionally autonomous workers with virtually all-sided skills, capable of advancing in their jobs at least as fast as technological development’.

These ideas from the New Left of the 1960s were in many ways a return to the level of insight of the First World War era. What Gorz called ‘increasing the autonomous power of workers’, the British Guild Socialists had called ‘encroachment’ fifty years earlier. Guild Socialism was a short-lived movement advocating a half-way house to anarchism, with workers’ control of industry and a restricted parliamentary democracy. The Guild Socialists argued that the labour movement should aim to advance the ‘frontier of control’ exercised by workers in their workplaces, to steadily win decision-making powers from management. This largely middle-class movement of theorists found itself growing at the same time as a movement of radical shop stewards in the war industries, against the background of a rising tide of syndicalism. The leading theorist of Guild Socialism, GDH Cole, explained encroachment thus:

‘By “encroaching control” is meant a policy directed to wresting bit by bit from the hands of the possessing classes the economic power which they now exercise, by a steady transference of functions and rights from their nominees to representatives of the working-class. It is not the same as “joint control”, with which it is sometimes confused; for “joint control” aims at the co-operative exercise of certain functions by employers and employed, whereas “encroaching control” aims at taking certain powers right out of the employers’ hands, and transferring them completely to the organised workers. A quite simple instance will plainly illustrate this fundamental difference. “Joint control” involves joint works committees, on which employer and employed work together: “encroaching control” involves Trade Union shop stewards’ committees, which the employer has to recognise, but to which neither he nor any representative of his interests is admitted…. [There is] all the difference between dependence and independence.’

It is easy to see that these ideas of ‘encroaching control’ can be applied in every area of life. It is not so easy to find limited victories in these areas that could advance people’s ‘autonomous power’. Harder still is the work of organising ourselves to pursue goals that not only meet immediate needs, but that could be stepping stones to the radical democratisation of society, to a deeper liberation.

 

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