"ACORN is an organization trying to change the plight of the poor in a capitalist society at the same time it contributes to the problem. The organization is tripping over itself as it perpetuates the injustices of the capitalist system."
by Erin Howley
One of ACORN management's main positions in confronting union interests is that community organizers are not workers. If the ACORN union is to ever be recognized by management, this is the first assumption which we have to take apart. Then we need to look at what it is that continues to alienate workers from the organization and what has moved a handful of us to stand up and speak for change. To do this, we have to look at ACORN as a capitalist organization.
Karl
Marx wrote extensively on the relations of labor within the capitalist system
and is considered by many as the founder of the scientific approach of
studying this economic system and the social sciences. I am offering a look at
the labor relations of ACORN through a Marxist perspective so that we can see
why it is imperative for ACORN management to recognize and support the union.
ACORN is an organization with a definite purpose, and it produces social change. But this social change doesn't come from nothing. Organizers are continually being trained with skills to help achieve these changes. In very simple and real terms, we exchange our labor for wages, and this is indisputable.
The product of our labor is social change. It is important to make the distinction that workers in capitalism do not sell a product; they sell their capacity to work. "The laborer ... must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity [the] very labor power which exists only as his living self." By this I mean that as workers, ACORN organizers are not selling social change in exchange for wages. We are exchanging our capacity to do the work of an organizer in order to receive the wages on which we survive. This is important because it distinguishes the fact that we are workers, and we labor to produce social change.
So
we produce social change. But as a worker how do I feel about what I produce
with my mind and body? How does this social change affect me? The reason why
organizers are standing up and forming a union is because our lives are losing
the reality and power of the social change that we are laboring to further.
Marx said that in the capitalist system, a product - in this case social
change - is the objectification of the worker's labor. "The worker is related
to the product of labor as to an alien object ... whatever is the product of
his [or her] labor, he [ or she] is not." In other words, the movement becomes
something alien from our lives, and the organizer does not experience what she
or he has produced with her or his labor power. We are being estranged from
the movement.
But ACORN is a part of the social movement. In that case, how could ACORN organizers be alienated from the movement? The reason is that as organizers, we are told we must make sacrifices to the movement, we must be so much a part of the movement that we lose ourselves to do it. We find ourselves living with Marx's words: "External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice." We must sacrifice our safety and personal lives in order to earn ages while ACORN profits from our labor. "He [or she] works in order to live. He [or she] does not even reckon labor as part of his [or her] life; it is rather a sacrifice of his [or her] life." This is when we begin to feel imprisoned by our labor. "...In his work, the worker does not feel content but unhappy ... does not develop ... and in his work only feels himself outside his work." The clearest example of this alienation is the fact that we ACORN workers fight for a living wage and way of life which in return we do not receive.
A main difference between Marx's argument and the relations of ACORN is that bourgeois society exploits workers in order to increase the capital profit of the ruling class. But ACORN organizers are laboring to increase a profit which supposedly does not come in the form of capital in the hands of the rich, but social change in the hands of the poor. Does this mean that we are not being exploited?
The
fact is that we are exploited for a different reason. We are being exploited
in the name of the movement, and most likely for the accumulation of capital.
[Note: I was paid up to $8 an hour which amounted to $32 per night to knock on
doors. I was expected to collect $120 per night. If I didn't I was considered
to be doing poorly at my job. Few workers seldom ever raised $120 per night
yet that was ACORN's unrealistic expectation of us as their workers.] A
contradiction occurs in the organization in that it is fighting the wage and
class gap by using the same motives and manipulations that corporations have
been using for well over a hundred years. ACORN is an organization trying to
change the plight of the poor in a capitalist society at the same time it
contributes to the problem. The organization is tripping over itself as it
perpetuates the injustices of the capitalist system.
Marx said that eventually the system ruptures when the indignation of the workers compels them to fight for better living standards. If the movement is to survive, the organizers must feel that we are inside it, that our labor is of us and from us as a community, along with all other activities. There must be a community which shares the power of production, in which all people in the movement control the movement. This cannot be done within the hierarchy of an organization such as ACORN. We must appropriate the movement collectively. Marx said that, "This appropriation ... can only be effected through a union...."
I am not suggesting that ACORN should become a communist organization. What I am urging is that ACORN management recognize that the organization is patterned on a capitalist system of exploitation and alienation of the worker. In recognizing this, the organization should function as a less hierarchical activist group in which workers have a voice through union activity. They need to become consistent with the "ACORN People's Platform" and stated labor principles of their organization. In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx's most famous words were, "Workers of the World, unite!"
If the movement is to succeed, all workers must demand the human right to organize ... and receive it.
Tell Dallas ACORN to give their employees the justice they deserve! Send email to Dallas ACORN offices at txacorndaro@acorn.org