Means and Ends

You can’t take technology out of politics, and you can’t take politics out of organization. A perfect example of this effect is the means and ends debate. This discussion directly impacts the use of technology in unions. How union organization confronts the necessity of gaining worker’s trust and participation goes hand-in-hand with their attitudes towards the significance and use of tools.

There at least two divergent ideas of how to convince workers to join the union struggle. The first is a variation on “build it and they will come.” This is a bureaucratic theme which argues that good organization is a meritocracy run by experts that understand the “big picture,” plans the strategy and looks out for the best interests of the members. This is identical to the old industrial division of labor where “efficiency” was achieved when managers understood the purpose of the assembly line and the workers only understood a piece of it.

It is not a democratic vision because what democracy means within this model is not good. If you flatten the organizational decision structure you simply get mediocrity and self-interest. You get everyone looking out for themselves, opportunists and free loaders and a bunch of timid people afraid to take risks or a bunch of hot heads who charge off into oblivion. You get ill informed debates because of uneven experiences and different levels of political savvy. You magnify your weaknesses. So, as long as you feed them steaks, who cares how you slaughter the cows? Results matter.

Anyone with experience in the nitty gritty of union politics recognizes that this argument has some truth to it. For example, bargaining committee members who only care about their pet demand. Executive board members who only want to get their hands on the treasury and accumulate perks. Weak International leadership that enables corrupt, business unionism to flourish. Racist, white guy’s cabals.

The other idea takes off from Kurt Vonnegut’s contention that “You are what you pretend to be.” If you adopt a corporate boss organizational structure, well, that’s who you are. Your organizational structure “prefigures” your result. It argues that workers are not passive consumers but need to feel active ownership in their organization. Otherwise your operation will become a mile wide and an inch deep. The problem with only concentrating on results, is that as soon as you don’t deliver what the workers think they deserve, they leave. One leader, no matter how charismatic, is a liability. Organizations, just like complex computer systems, need redundancy.

Even if Democratic organizations do contain all of the faults listed above, you’re not looking for perfection in the bureaucratic sense. There are no shortcuts. You have to have an organization build on a solid foundation of people who want to be there and do not flee at the first sign of adversity. Without this you have a mirage.

We also know that this is true. I’ve been on picket lines where the only thing holding them together is a shared sense of justice. The history of labor in America wasn’t built on a string of victories but a stunning series of defeats where worker’s organizations rose phoenix like from the ashes based on a shared sense of injustice.

Ownership involves communication. The “noise” of democratic give-and-take is a necessary prerequisite for strong communities. It assumes that there is more value in diverse opinions and experiences than problems. It is not an undifferentiated, “mass” it is a series of individual strengths which you’ve now made available for the group to use in problem solving. Democracy is efficiency because it is flexible and fast and avoids bottlenecks that arise when every decision needs to be threaded through a small circle of decision makers. It routes around disruptions just like Internet protocols.

The whole means and end thing reminds me of a discussion I had when I was an enlisted man in the army. I was organizing to restore the idea of a citizen solider rather than a professional one. A Major confronted me on base and said it would never work. He said even the Chinese revolutionary army restored the concept of command and control by restoring officer’s rank because they realized you couldn’t convince someone to charge a machine gun nest. Recently, I ran across the picture of that single individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. More on the connection to technology later, this is all for now, I need more coffee.