June 4 to October 8, 2026
All classes on Zoom. Register anytime.
The working class in the US is living today in a time of uncertainty, transformation, crisis, and opportunity. New technologies are disorganizing workplaces while new border regimes diorient global processes of production and new articulations of gender and race power shock social and political orders. In such a confused historical conjuncture, what are socialists to do?
Fortunately and unfortunately, nothing is new under the sun. Socialist groups and activists have been dealing with these problems for centuries, and in this discussion group we will grapple with the legacies and lessons of the hard-fought experiences of our ancestors. Our goal will be to understand, analyse, and apply the lessons of 125 years of socialist strategy in the US labor movement in order to better orient our class struggle organizing today.
This, Solidarity’s fifth reading group series since 2024, will consist of seven classes organized thematically around problems in working-class struggle and how socialists have confronted them.
We will begin by discussing our premise that the working class remains a key historical actor for revolutionary socialism. Then a history of general strikes, social strikes, political strikes; AI in the history of technological and industrial revolutions; socialist feminism; anti-racism and Black power; unemployment; and socialist responses to capitalist assault and labor’s retreat. We will end the series with a public panel discussion assessing the rank and file strategy, which has guided Solidarity’s labor work for decades.
This discussion series is open to all Solidarity members, friends, and others in and around social and socialist movements who want to participate. You do not have to commit to the whole series and you do not have to read all the readings.
Each class’s readings are divided into “critical” and “archival” readings – with main readings being between 20 and 100 pages. The archival readings are primary sources drawn from debates from the historical struggles we are studying that week. We have also included movies and podcasts each week so participants who don’t have the inclination or capacity to do the readings also have a way to prepare for discussions each week. Read whatever you’re able.
We will begin each discussion with a presentation from special guest presenters, often from authors of the readings for the week, to help launch and guide discussion.
REGISTER If you have any questions, email info@solidarity-us.org
Outline of classes
- Why still the working class? (June 4)
- Against the state-capital nexus, the general strike! (June 18)
- Three, four, many industrial revolutions? (July 2)
- Socialist feminist struggle from equal rights to wages for housework (July 16)
- Strategies of anti-racism at work and against global capitalism (July 30)
- Reserve armies or surplus populations? Poor peoples movements and unions of the unemployed (September 10)
- Capital strikes back: Socialist responses to labor’s moments of retreat (September 24)
- Closing Panel: For the union, against the bureaucracy: Assessing the rank and file strategy and the legacy of reform caucuses (October 8)
Week 1: Why still the working class? (June 4)
Speakers
- Robin Li, philosophy lecturer and socialist activist
- Wendy Thompson, retired former president of UAW Local 235 at American Axle and member of Solidarity-US
Readings
- Mike Davis, Old Gods New Enigmas, Catalyst, Vol 1, No 2 (2017)
- Kim Moody, New Terrain of Class Struggle in the United States, Catalyst, Vol 1, No 2 (2017)
- Tithi Bhattacharya, How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class, in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017)
A/V
- Tithi Bhattacharya, On capitalism, Marxism, Feminism, and Society, Behind the News interview with Doug Henwood, January 4, 2018.
From the archive
- Kim Moody, Fred Eppsteiner, Mike Flugg, “Toward the Working Class: An SDS Position Paper;” Hal Draper, “Why the Working Class?” International Socialist Committee (1966) [Link to pamphlet pdf]
- Paul Romano and Ria Stone (Grace Lee Boggs), The American Worker (Bewick Editions, 1947)
- Marcel Van Der Linden, Rumors of the death of the working class have been greatly exaggerated, Jacobin, November 5, 2022.
Week 2: General strike! Social strike! Mass strike! (June 18)
Speakers
- Jeff Schuhrke, labor historian and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University. He is the author of Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade and of a forthcoming book about general strikes in US history.
Readings
- Bryan Palmer, The Mass Strike,” and, “Uneven and Combined Developmment: Class Relations in Minneapolis, Chapters 2 and 3 in Revolutionary Teamsters (Haymarket Books, 2013)
- Jeremy Brecher, 1919: Depression Decade is on SF & Minneapolis, Chapter 5 in Strike! (PM Press, 2020)
A/V
- Podcast: The Strikes that Broke Through, Fragile Juggernaut: History of the CIO, March 2024.
- Podcast: Minneapolis Fight Back, The Dig, January 30, 2026.
From the archive: Evaluations of mass strikes in US history
- Dan Denvir, The Minneapolis Strategy for Fighting ICE Is Worth Studying: Interview with Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and JaNaé Bates Imari, Jacobin, February 4, 2026.
- Kim Moody, General Strikes, Mass Strikes, Against the Current, September-October 2012.
- Sam Darcy, The San Francsico Bay Area General Strike, The Communist, Vol. 13 No. 10. October, 1934.
- Ian Angus, What Socialists Learned from the Winnipeg General Stike, Talk given at the Marxism 2004 conference in Toronto.
- Cal Winslow, When Workers Stopped Seattle, Jacobin, March 7, 2019.
Week 3: Three, four, many industrial revolutions? (July 2)
Speakers
- Ansar Fayyazuddin is a physicist active in Solidarity and Science for the People. He is an associate editor of Against the Current.
- Jason Dawsey works at the National WWII Museum and Arizona State University and is a member of Solidarity-US.
Readings
The development of large scale industry
- Harry Braverman, The habituation of the worker to the capitalist mode of production,” and “Machinery, Chapters 6 and 9 in Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1999)
- Sophia Clarke and Daniel Judt, A Half-Century of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, Jacobin, June 1, 2025.
- Kark Marx, The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts and Domestic Industry, Chapter 15, sub-section 8 in Capital, Vol 1 (Penguin, 1976)
Automation: 1980s-2000s
- Tony Smith, From Fordism to Lean Production,, Chapter 1 in Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production (State University of New York Press, 2000)
The AI question
- Ansar Fayyazuddin, AI: Oracle in an age of reason, Against the Current, no 241, March/April 2026.
- Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism as Fordism, Law and Political Economy Project, April 22, 2026.
A/V
- Podcast: Passing Laws, Breaking Jaws: The Wagner Act and the Founding of the CIO, Fragile Juggernaut: History of the CIO, April 4, 2024.
- Kim Moody, The Production of Things: From Lean Production to Artificial Intelligence and Worker Resistance, Talk at Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, February 16, 2026.
From the archive: Struggles and setbacks in the face of increasing automation
- Art Preis, “Three Strikes that Pave the Way” and “Industrial Versus Craft Unionism”, Chapters 3 and 4 in Labor’s Giant Step (Pathfinder, 1972)
- Jane Slaughter, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Against the Current, September-October 1996.
- Kim Moody, Why the Industrial Working Class Still Matters, Against the Current, September-October 1995.
- Joe Allen, Studying Logistics, Jacobin, February 12, 2015.
- Keith Brower Brown, Four Union Strategies to Fight on A.I, Labor Notes, March 5, 2026.
Week 4: Socialist feminist struggle from equal rights to wages for housework (July 16)
Speakers
- Sylvia Federici, author of Patriarchy of the Wage, amongst other sigificant books, is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and Marxist feminist activist based in New York.
Readings
- Sylvia Federici, Revolution begins at home: Rethinking Marx, reproduction, and the class struggle, from Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (PM Press, 2021).
Women workers in industry
- Candace Cohn, Working Class Women’s Liberation and Rank-and-File Rebellion in Steel, International Socialist Review, Issue 90
- David McNally, The Return of the Mass Strike: Teachers, Students, Feminists, and the New Wave of Popular Upheavals, Spectre Journal, Issue 1, Spring 2020.
Global care chain and the gendered double shift
- Mariarosa DallaCosta, Women and the Subversion of the Community, from Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa DallaCosta Reader (PM Press, 2019).
- Johanna Brenner, Socialist Feminism in the Twenty First Century, Against the Current, March/April 2014.
A/V
- Daniel Denvir and Sylvia Federici, On Women and Capitalism, The Dig, September 13, 2019.
- Kirstin Munro, Sixty Seconds on the electric washing machine (The New Institute, 2025)
- Osmane Sembembe, Black Girl (59 minutes, Senegal, 1966)
From the archive
- Candace Cohn, “My Experience as a Steelworker in the IS,” in From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor (2026)
- Dianne Feeley, Why Women Need the Equal Rights Amendment, (Pathfinder Press, 1973).
- Tilly Olson, I Stand Here Ironing (Short story)
Week 5: Strategies of anti-racism at work and against global capitalism (September 10)
Speaker
- Paul Ortiz, labor historian and a professor of African American and Latinx studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including Emancipation Betrayed and Remembering Jim Crow.
Readings
- Paul Ortiz, “Forgotten workers of America: Racial captialism and the war on the working class, 1890s to 1940s” and “El Gran Paro Estadounidense: The Rebirth of the American Working Class, 1970s to the Present”, Chapters 6 and 8 in An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2018)
- Paul Ortiz, Coda: “To Continue the Work of Our Foreparents”, Vol 2, Ch 17, American Social History Project: Who Built America?
Anti-racist rights in unions and at work
- Jacqueline Jones, “Can you see a tomorrow there? Industrial transformation and Federal Civil Rights legislation, 1929-1978” and “Industrial devolution and the persistence of the ‘race watch’ at the end of the twentieth century”, Chapters 11 and 12 in American Work, Four Centuries of Black & White Work (Norton, 1998).
- Paul Ortiz, Latinx Workers Are Organizing Fierce Resistance to Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda | Truthout
Black Power
- Robin Kelley, In Egyptland: The Share Croppers Union, Chapter 2 in Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990)
- Philip Foner, Black Power in the Unions, Chapter 25 in Organized Labor & the Black worker 1619-1973 (International Publishers, 1974/1981).
A/V
- Miles of Smiles (Film about the Pullman Porters, 56 minutes, 1982)
From the archive
- Jane Komori, We Are Workers: The Founding Declaration of a Japanese Immigrant Labor Union, Long Haul, Issue 2, Spring 2025.
- Harvey Swados, Big Boy, Chapter 3 in Standing Fast: A Novel (Doubleday and Co, 1970).
- Dianne Feeley, Ernest Rice McKinney: Fighter for the Unemployed, Socialist Action, Vol 2 No 2, February 1984.
- Ernest Rice McKinney, Negroes in the Labor Movement: An Answer to Freddie Forrest, New International, March 1946.