anne's dispatches from sydney

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I just went to the Students against Sweatshops conference. It was great. [Note: if you are interested, here is an interesting essay comparing and contrasting USAS to the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960's]

I arrived at the USAS conference (at the UNITE offices in Teamster City, Chicago) in the afternoon on a Wednesday, a few days before the conference was due to begin.

There was a workshop taking place, to train new regional organisers. They were talking about race oppression. I walked into the room, and sat down, feeling a bit uncomfortable. Some people were trickling in carrying big bags- with airline tags- I later found out they were returning from overseas internships with workers organisations in Mexico, Korea, Cambodia, and many other places.

I walked down to a Thai restaurant with four other returned interns- they were sharing their experiences. One guy was talking to me about government - I was talking about our leverage over the government- he was saying eventually, hopefully we wouldnt need government at all. I went to disagree with him and stopped myself- questioning my reaction. Whilst I call myself an anarchist, I still think there needs to be governance- where delegates take on decisionmaking responsibility- that rotates. Whilst I disagree with the structure of the State, I still believe there needs to be grassroots government. Too many people understand Anarchy to be a lack of responsibility. When we talk to skepical people, we just don't advocate an end to government, because that would imply an end to decisionmaking. I have done so much thinking about building institutions, and working out good governance structures, that I cannot tolerate the more abstract and vague rejection of governance in general. We want decisionmaking structures that are accountable to the people who are most affected by those decisions- and by accountability I mean a deep accountability- where delegates can be recalled.

To me just a simple rejection of government seems to be an uncredibly vague type of anarchism, hard to differentiate with right wing liberals. Perhaps this is my point of departure from mainstream anarchism to a more platformist approach (there are many models for this).

The conference itself

The conference was an interesting window into a very influential student movement in the US. It had several components. Firstly, the caucus times, where there were spaces for oppressed groups to meet in parallel with spaces for their "allies" to come together and discuss how they can address that 'ism' in their personal actions and within the organisation of USAS. During the working class/ working class ally caucuses, it was surprising for me to see their definition of class was based on socio-economic status rather than political connection to production. This definition was very broad, and not very socialist- Where I come from, many activists would call that 'bad politics'- but, however, I did not think that the definition necessarily had an impact on their strategy much at all.

Secondly, there were skills workshops- pretty much standardised, similar to those at home, but augmented with the US experience and with resources from the many organising centres.

Thirdly, there were strategy sessions for the campaigns. In particular, the sweat-free universities campaign is pretty fascinating, revolving around goals that entail the following:
1. disclosure by universities of the factories where the apparrel is manufactured
2. getting the university to join the Workers' Rights Consortium
3. getting the university to source apparrel from Union factories (with democratically run unions)

There also was a very spirited protest (see photos) in the downtown area about Eddie Bauer's failure to pay the workers their entitlements in Indonesia. It was a very wet day...

That night, there was a fundraiser for the local Chicago Latino Workers organising centre. It was very fun because there was lots of Latin American dance music. Here is one photo that I took:

posted by: anneinchaosland at 04:00 | link | comments |

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