Eric Lee

If you ever want to be a best-selling author, take my advice: don't write books about and for trade unionists. Our movement with its millions of members does many things very well but one thing we do not do well is buy and read books that are written for us.

A couple of years ago, I was having a discussion with what might be called a "labor intellectual" at a conference in Chicago. He was bemoaning the fact that even the most intelligent and best-informed trade union leaders he knew simply did not read the books that they should be reading, if they read books at all.

The best-seller lists reflect this. Even though there are millions of union members, the books aimed at trade unionists are never listed there. If you're a gardener, or a cook, or a movie-goer, the books targetted at you may sell in the tens of thousands. History books are sometimes big best sellers -- but not books about labor history.

I was thinking about this as I recently searched through online bookstores looking for candidates for the Labor Book of the Day, which is currently being promoted on LabourStart. There are so many books out there dealing with the issues of union-busting, organizing, globalization, labor history -- and yet these books are not reaching nearly enough trade union activists. I'll bet every one of you has heard of "The Da Vinci Code" but how many of you have seen "Reorganizing the Rust Belt", "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart" or "Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America". And we're not just talking about serious books for adult activists; online bookstores are full of children's books which teach the next generation about why we need unions. In fact, the best selling titles in LabourStart's online bookstore have been "Click, Clack, Moo - Cows That Type" and "Kids on Strike!".

It's not for lack of trying. There are companies like Union Communication Services which sell a whole range of union books. The IWW always devotes considerable space in its newspaper, Industrial Worker, to promoting labor books, and sells these online as well. There are groups like Labor Notes, whose latest book, "A Troublemaker's Handbook 2", is one of those essential titles which should be in hands of every union activist. And LabourStart has long been partnered with unionized Portland, Oregon bookshop Powells.com and more recently with UCS in efforts to promote the sale of books aimed at trade unionists.

The good news is that the Internet offers us a real chance to finally get labor books into the hands of labor activists. Amazon has shown the way, doing what many pundits thought impossible: they have helped stimulate sales of books during an era when many were predicting a decline in book sales. Thanks to the tremendous choice now available online -- many times more than you'd find in a local bookshop -- people are tempted more than ever to buy books.

I can almost guarantee that your local bookshop will not be carrying very many books like "A Troublemaker's Handbook 2". And this is a problem not only for small, local shops. I had the experience not so long ago of wandering through one of the best and largest bookshops in Toronto, trying in vain to find any books at all about Canadian unions. Such books exist, but you won't find them will browsing in bookshops.

If union activists were to read more books about labor history and strategy, they would do their jobs better. They would know what works and what doesn't. They'd learn from the experience of others. They'd expand their horizons and understand better our globalized world and how we fit in. I think it's obvious that we in the labor movement should be doing all we can to promote the sales of such titles to our members.

This is what we've done on LabourStart: We've partnered with unionized bookshops. We've identified titles that trade unionists should own. We've asked our readers to recommend and review books. And we've selected and promoted a new title every day of the week. All this is just a beginning. We could do much more, but we're just one website.

Unions could do even more. They already sell all kinds of goods and services to their members. The Teamsters, for example, sell a whole range of products through their online store including watches, clocks, jewelry, clothing, t-shirts, sport shirts, outerwear, leather goods, glassware, hats -- but not books. Not a single book. The American Federation of Teachers has got the right idea -- the front page of their website does promote online book sales through Powells.com, but the union doesn't make even a single recommendation of a book one might want to buy there. It's all well and good for the union to earn its share of sales of the latest Harry Potter book, but if you've already got the members doing their book buying online, why not also point them to books they might find useful and interesting as trade unionists?

Imagine what would happen if the Teamsters, with their 1.4 million members, were to aggressively promote the sales of a book like "Teamster Rebellion," the great history of the 1934 Minneapolis strike. Don't such books deserve to enjoy the same kinds of sales as, say, books about the Scott Peterson case? (This week, 3 of the top 15 nonfiction bestsellers are about that trial.)

Wouldn't it be great to one day look at the New York Times Best-Seller list and see it topped by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman's new book, Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World?

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Posted by Eric Lee at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Most unions that have websites have sections that are devoted to health and safety issues. But frequently those are among the more static parts of a website. Once set up, they are rarely updated. To keep up with all the breaking developments in the field of health and safety was beyond the capacity of most union websites -- until now.

The Sheffield-based health and safety magazine Hazards announced last month that it was teaming up with LabourStart, the online news and campaigning website, to create a global health and safety newswire that could be used by any union website, completely free of charge.

That newswire is automatically updated every 15 minutes throughout the day, and shows the latest 10 health and safety related news stories from LabourStart's news database. It is available to unions from http://www.labourstart.org/hswireand to install it, union webmasters simply have to copy and paste a single line of code.

A glance at today's top 10 stories shows the newswire's global scope -- and the common problems faced by unions everywhere. From Russia, it reports on 10 dead in a mine explosion. A report from the USA focusses on the worker safety training grants that have been eliminated by the Bush administration. And from Egypt, there's a report on a protest by asbestos workers. News stories from Britain frequently appear on the page as well.

Within two weeks of the launch of the new service, some three dozen union websites in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia were using it, and nearly all of the largest unions in the UK had already made commitments to adopt the service as well. Among the earliest adopters have been union branches and workplace organisations, which are often the first to innovate with their websites.

For those with a somewhat more technical bent, there is alternative version of the newswire in the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format, which allows the display of up to 15 news stories.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This article has now been published in Swedish.

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"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." -- Groucho Marx

Seriously, if you were born before 1985, you might have some problems understanding this. So let me start at the beginning.

There is a phenomenon called online gaming. Simply put, you combine computer games with the Internet, allowing you to interact with other people who are online at the same time. Many of these games are known as MMORPGs, which stands for massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games.

Some of the more popular MMORPGs include Ultima Online, EverQuest, City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and Runescape. They often have magical themes involving wizards and monsters.

Many of the games have hundreds of thousands of subscribed players who pay fees to use them. (Some of the games are free to play.) There are an estimated 27 million players of such games today, one third of them in South Korea.

So far, you must be thinking: what possible connection could this have to the trade union movement? Be patient -- we're getting to that.

In these games, as in many computer games, over time one acquires possessions, skills, rank and so on. Often, moving on in the game is a long, slow tedious process -- and many computer gamers look for short-cuts to get beyond the lower levels of the game.

In MMORPGs, those shortcuts might involve getting hold of objects (including virtual money) from other players. Those objects can be traded. Which means that outside of the virtual worlds, trading can also take place. Many players seem willing to part with their cash (real-world cash, that is) in order to buy virtual objects in the games.

This activity made headlines in December 2004 when a 22-year-old Australian gamer spent $26,500 (real money) to buy a virtual island in the online game Project Entropia. This was no ordinary island. According to the game developers, "The island boasts beautiful beaches ripe for developing beachfront property, an old volcano with rumors of fierce creatures within, the outback is overrun with mutants, and an area with a high concentration of robotic miners guarded by heavily armed assault robots indicates interesting mining opportunities."

"This is a historic moment in gaming history, and this sale only goes to prove that massive multi-player online gaming has reached a new plateau," said a spokesman for the company behind the game.

Meanwhile, eBay, the online auction service, is filled with people buying and selling virtual objects for use in online games. Some game companies, such as Sony, which is behind EverQuest, forbid players from buying or selling game characters, items, or currency -- and have moved to block the sale of such items on eBay.

So far, it all sounds pretty crazy, but where's the relevance to trade unions?

According to the BBC, the problem begins with something called "grinding". This is a process in which "gamers have to perform long-winded, mindless tasks, to bring up their levels and gain access to more adventure". And this problem has created a market, and an opportunity for profit.

If you were to go online, join in one of these games, over time you'd advance, acquire objects, and these would have value to other players -- especially those who wanted to avoid those "long-winded, mindless tasks". You could sell those objects, either to your friends or players you've met in the game, or to online brokers, or via eBay. In fact, you could hire people to play such games on your behalf for hours on end, and you could sell what they have acquired. If you employed those people in countries with very low incomes, in countries with weak or non-existent trade unions, you could make bigger profits. Get the idea?

According to an article by Tim Guest in the Telegraph Magazine, in mainland China "people are employed to play the games nine to five, scoring virtual booty which IGE [Internet Gaming Entertainment] can sell on at a profit to Western buyers."

China, as is known, has no free trade unions which makes it easy to pay sweatshop wages. Tony Thompson, writing for The Observer, investigated a California-based company known as Gamersloot.net which employs Romanians to play MMORPGs for ten hours a day, earning $5.40 -- $0.54 per hour. That is the considerably less than what IGE claims to be paying Chinese workers.

When you visit the website of gamersloot.net, you won't find any mention of virtual sweatshops in Romania, China or anywhere else. The site bills itself as "a central location to purchase or trade online game cd-keys, accounts, gold, items, and powerleveling services", whatever that means. The company says very little about itself, except that it is soliciting investors -- and hopes to work with a children's charity. Not a word about the "loot" it has acquired, where it comes from, etc.

Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), whose website is located at http://www.ige.com, touts itself as a place to "buy gaming currency, items, accounts, and more". Its website is a little bit more revealing about where the virtual currency it is selling comes from: "The stock we have available has been purchased legitimately from game players the world over who chose to sell their excess." Presumbably, these are the people working in virtual sweatshops in Romania, China and elsewhere.

As massively multiplayer gaming takes off (and broadband Internet is driving this), the market for virtual products will hugely increase. Which means that more and more people will be employed to play these games in low-wage, union-free countries.

That's why this is going to become an issue for trade unionists. Fortunately, there is a difference between these virtual sweatshops and those producing, say, toys or garments. The virtual sweatshops creating objects for sale to online gamers are themselves online. The workers are using the Internet every minute they work, and they probably need a certain proficiency with English in order to play the games. This could make them targets of online, global organizing drives.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Sacha Ismail's response to my article on Menshevism confirms my belief that even in the very best Trotskyist organizations, members remain ill-informed about the very foundations of their politics.

That's a harsh thing to say, but there are several passages of Sacha's polemic that reveal a rather slight grasp of historical facts. For example, Sacha claims that the Bolsheviks were right to base their hopes on a world revolution breaking out which would rescue them from their isolation. "There were revolutions across Europe in 1917–23," he tells us, "but they failed precisely because the workers who made them were led by 'socialists' who lacked the Bolsheviks' revolutionary politics, i.e., who were Mensheviks!"

The dates are, of course, significant. The only revolution I imagine Sacha could be thinking of in 1923 would be the abortive insurrection carried out by the German Communist Party -- an insurrection planned in Moscow by Zinoviev and other Comintern leaders. The workers who made that insurrection (it's really tough to call it a revolution) were not led by Mensheviks or even the German equivalent of Mensheviks. And the same is true for probably all of the failed revolutions of that period. Those poorly-planned, poorly-executed attempts at instant revolutions -- modelled on the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in 1917 -- were all disasters. Even Rosa Luxemburg was a strong opponent of the Spartacist uprising, even if the Communist Party which she founded led it. To somehow blame the Mensheviks for them is ludicrous.

But it's not the lack of historical knowledge which Sacha displays which disturbs me. It's the fundamental argument which he makes early on. He distinguishes between "authoritarian measures ... carried out by a workers' revolution fighting almost literally the entire world for its survival" with the "totalitarian violence" of the Stalinist regime.

The Bolshevik government was not fighting "almost literally the entire world" in 1917 when the first persecutions of socialists, anarchists and trade unionists began. Nor was this the case when the Cheka and Gulag were established. No historian that I am aware of dates the foreign intervention in Russia or the outbreak of civil war until mid-1918. The unpleasant fact is that Lenin and Trotsky used authoritarian measures long before the revolution was besieged. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, for example, took place at a time when no one on the left -- indeed, hardly anyone at all -- had taken up arms against the Soviet regime. You can call it a pre-emptive strike, but to consider Bolshevik authoritarianism in the time of Lenin and Trotsky to be some kind of reaction is to completely misunderstand the history of the revolution.

Furthermore, with the end of the civil war in 1921, and the end of the foreign intervention with it, with Trotsky and Lenin still firmly in control, the Mensheviks were banned, the Soviets were reduced to hollow shells, and what was left of internal democracy in the Bolshevik Party came to end. All this after the end of the life-and-death struggle that took place during the years of civil war and foreign intervention.

One could go on, but what's the point? I think that the clearest evidence that the AWL needs urgently to educate its comrades in the history of the Russian revolution can be found in this remarkable comment: "The isolation of the revolution in a backward country did lead to unexpected consequences in the form of Stalinism, but this was due to the dominance of Menshevik politics outside Russia, not Bolshevik politics inside it."

Unexpected consequences? Not only did the Mensheviks, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and even Trotsky predict it, but anyone familiar with Marx was well aware that you cannot leap over historical stages, and that the consequences will be tragic if you try. (Plekhanov predicted that if a bourgeois revolution failed to take place in Russia, the result would be the restoration of an "Oriental despotic" regime. Stalin's Russia would not have surprised him in the least.)

Even worse than this, Sacha is saying that well, okay, there were pretty awful consequences to the Bolshevik seizure of power -- but it's the fault of the Mensheviks!

One final observation. At one point, Sacha summarizes by saying, "In short, we were revolutionaries and they weren't."

One often hears this kind of language on the far Left -- you know, "you killed Rosa Luxemburg". That kind of nonsense has stop. You were not there and neither was I. The reason why it's important to say this is because if you had been there, you would not make all the historical errors you do. (Trotsky, for example, never blamed the Mensheviks for the rise of the Stalinist regime. He knew better.)

Because you were not there, because you (and I) were born long after these events took place, we owe it to ourselves to study revolutionary history and know our facts. When you do so you will learn, as I did, that the Mensheviks were one of the most interesting and important currents in socialist history. You will learn to respect them.

Posted by Eric Lee at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)