I'm in a union that's swayable left and already Bernie-friendly. It's large enough to have full-time paid organizers and several committees that focus on distinct focuses. I'm on several and slightly influential. One of them is a very small committee with an electoralism focus.
This committee uses a dumb lib process to hand out endorsements like candy based on very little info and without distinguishing candidates by their pasts or by interviewing them or by saying, "hey, what are you going to do for us (you piece of shit)?". I don't like it. It's lib shit and imo weakens our union since there's clearly zero leverage from such a process and it's stupidly easy to just pander and pass the litmus test.
My question is about this: I'd like to change how this works. The committee is small, so I could just take it over with a few comrades but I think that's disruptive and hurts trust and connections in the unit. Instead, I'm thinking of pushing hard to move this process to be membership-focused, where this committee does work to support membership-facing work, like hosting interviews to which at actively work to turn out wider membership, prepare questions with membership, and actively seek a set of demands for candidates from membership. Membership is not socialist, but at least this process would make endorsements an act of both flexing and increasing our power and flow from workplace democracy.
Does anyone have thoughts on this strategy, the more divisive one I mentioned, or any other strategies? I know that electoralism is already annoying bourgeois democratic shit, but I do think that things like this are a way for a SocDem membership to move closer to an understanding and use of worker power, that a union isn't just a bureaucracy of other people.
Hi! This is a new account for opsec reasons.
I'm in a union that's swayable left and already Bernie-friendly. It's large enough to have full-time paid organizers and several committees that focus on distinct focuses. I'm on several and slightly influential. One of them is a very small committee with an electoralism focus.
This committee uses a dumb lib process to hand out endorsements like candy based on very little info and without distinguishing candidates by their pasts or by interviewing them or by saying, "hey, what are you going to do for us (you piece of shit)?". I don't like it. It's lib shit and imo weakens our union since there's clearly zero leverage from such a process and it's stupidly easy to just pander and pass the litmus test.
My question is about this: I'd like to change how this works. The committee is small, so I could just take it over with a few comrades but I think that's disruptive and hurts trust and connections in the unit. Instead, I'm thinking of pushing hard to move this process to be membership-focused, where this committee does work to support membership-facing work, like hosting interviews to which at actively work to turn out wider membership, prepare questions with membership, and actively seek a set of demands for candidates from membership. Membership is not socialist, but at least this process would make endorsements an act of both flexing and increasing our power and flow from workplace democracy.
Does anyone have thoughts on this strategy, the more divisive one I mentioned, or any other strategies? I know that electoralism is already annoying bourgeois democratic shit, but I do think that things like this are a way for a SocDem membership to move closer to an understanding and use of worker power, that a union isn't just a bureaucracy of other people.