A Renewed Strategic Perspective on Socialist Work in the Labor Movement

Preamble

This February, the Solidarity Labor Commission held a two-day retreat at which we reflected on Solidarity’s labor work and the rank-and-file union perspective that has guided it for decades. This outline of a renewed strategic perspective is what emerged from our discussions. Although there is much here that is new, this perspective reflects our attempt to interpret the trajectory of union reform work since the 1980s and the political dynamics of the current period through the lens of Solidarity’s long-standing commitment to a politics of “socialism from below.”

The Rank and File Strategy (best described in Kim Moody’s paper of the same name) directs socialists to root our political work in the activist layer of the working class by prioritizing the development of militant, rank and file, “grassroots” organizations. The Rank and File Strategy points us to the need for for working class self-organization independent of the labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party in order to build a fighting labor movement and recruit workers to socialist ideas. For socialists, these militant and democratic formations within the labor movement play several essential roles. They ensure that socialist politics develop from an understanding of the actual conditions of the working class. They work to enlarge the activist layer of the working class, bringing more rank and file workers into struggles and experiences that draw out militancy and class consciousness. They provide an active and conscious rank and file base to press against the conservatizing and bureaucratic tendencies of union officials. And these efforts help to connect union militants with socialist ideas and organization. As socialists who believe in revolutionary transformation, the broader aim of this work is always to develop the capacity of the working class for democratic self-organization–the only solid basis upon which to build a socialist society free of bureaucratic domination.

In practice, Solidarity members implemented the Rank and File Strategy primarily by building rank and file caucuses within major unions—most notably and successfully, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). We have also worked, with varying degrees of success, to build solidarity between militant insurgent movements in different local and international unions, and to foster the creation of a left milieu in the labor movement. We focused on work within unions for good reasons. Unions, with all their shortcomings, bring together millions of workers across the many lines of division and oppression that divide the working class. Unions bring workers together at the point of production—where some workers have the ability to interfere with profit-making or with the functioning of the social order more generally. Unions provide a relatively stable organizational setting in which sustained political work is possible. And unions are, by definition, organizations of workers and are therefore always potentially oppositional.

While the Rank and File Strategy provides socialists with an organizing method and an understanding of the relations between democracy, bureaucracy and radicalization, it does not automatically provide a clear political direction for our work. In its most narrow application, much socialist rank and file union organizing has focused on questions of internal union democracy and efforts to mount anti-concession struggles. While those fights remain critically important, the main argument of this paper is that a broader approach to the Rank and File Strategy is necessary and possible – especially under today’s conditions. This broader approach would emphasize work to build broad “class-wide” transitional organizations and movements that extend well beyond sectoral, formal union structures and the workplace setting, and which pose broad demands that speak to the needs of the working class as a whole.

Why do we need a broader, “class-wide,” approach to transitional organizations today?

Although the official labor movement, with 16 million members, remains an important potential source of social power for workers, the great majority of workers are not in unions and do not look to unions for solutions to their daily problems. Perhaps more importantly, though, our historic emphasis on the power that comes from workers’ position at the point of production lacks balance. In the first place, workers’ dependence on particular workplaces and companies can promote conservatism, competitiveness, and class collaboration as well as militancy. Indeed, we were not always able to combat the tendency of many dedicated, militant workers to focus exclusively on their particular union or industry. And, given the changes in the structure of the economy and the drastic decline in union density, most workers today are not in industries where their position in production provides significant, direct social power. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our traditional emphasis on the point of production as the source of working class power neglects the social power that comes from the political practice of solidarity—and the political weakness that comes from failing to practice solidarity.

It is certainly true that bureaucratic mis-leadership hobbled the industrial unions. But the bureaucracy’s failing was not only its reluctance to use militant tactics like strikes and work-to-rule—something that the Left rightly emphasizes. The labor bureaucracy also failed to position the unions as fighters for the whole working class. This allowed capital to portray unions and union members as a special interest, and to isolate the labor movement from its organic base of support in the broad working class. Imagine how history might have been different if the industrial unions had never given up the fight for universal health care or if the UAW had launched a real assault on racism and disinvestment in Detroit in the 1950s when the writing was already on the wall.

Today, in order to rebuild class power for workers we need to construct solidaristic, class-wide, transitional organizations and movements that unite the working class against austerity and pose more universal demands as solutions. We cannot hope to accomplish this from a relatively narrow perch within formal union structures. Instead, we need to awaken the social power that is inherent in the unions, in alliance with other workers and working-class communities. As the Wisconsin Uprising and the Chicago Teachers Union both demonstrate, reviving the social power of unions requires sustained rank and file rebellion. And the best way to provide an impetus to rank and file rebellion today may be to alter the broader social and political context in which union members assess the prospects of a fight against the bureaucracy, the bosses, and the state.

This paper represents an effort by the Labor Commission of Solidarity to grapple with these questions, draw lessons from recent struggles and contribute to discussion about socialist labor strategy in these times. This document is not intended as a comprehensive program or a detailed plan of work. We have intentionally kept its scope narrow, in order to focus on those points that we find most essential to rebuilding the Left and maximizing the potential of emerging anti-austerity struggles. This document is intended as a starting point not an end point. Coming to grips with the challenges we face will require much wider discussion and debate within and beyond the ranks of Solidarity. The Labor Commission is committed to using this document as a springboard for discussions and political projects—and to revising and refining our thinking, and our political practice, based on what we learn in the process.

Teamsters battle police during the 1934 strike in Minneapolis. Read several retrospectives on the strike and its impact on the US labor movement here.

Starting Points

It is obvious that there is much to lament in the current state of affairs. In the U.S. and around the world, the neoliberal ruling class offensive is devastating the working class. The trade unions, weakened by relentless attacks and by their own political and organizational shortcomings, have failed to mount effective resistance to the ruling class agenda. Union density in the U.S. has fallen to historic lows. While the labor bureaucracy experiments with new approaches to reversing the decline in membership, most union officials will not consider initiatives that would fundamentally transform the relationship of rank and file members to their unions. In the U.S., the small Labor Left and the even smaller revolutionary Left have thus far failed to coalesce around a meaningful strategy to break out of their isolation or to take full advantage of the organizing opportunities that have arisen.

But there are glimmers of hope. In the period since the financial crisis we have seen the sporadic emergence of more determined, bottom-up campaigns and struggles. We have seen that, even in a period of retreat, militant campaigns that pose broad class demands can resonate widely. And we have seen growing recognition in the still-too-small activist layer of the working class that the traditional bureaucratic approaches are a dead end. While we do not want to overstate the positives, we nonetheless believe that they point to the potential for the development of politically independent, class-wide formations capable of offering meaningful resistance to capitalist austerity—if the Left can intervene effectively and democratically to move things in that direction.

In the first section of this document, we briefly touch upon some of the new (and not so new) and emerging struggles that are shaping working class organization and consciousness. Second, we specify some of the causes of the Left’s political paralysis in this period. In the third section we begin to pose a clear, if not comprehensive, strategy rooted in the realities of this period. Fourth, we identify some practical areas of work that we see as starting points for implementing this strategy. And finally, we address some of the political questions and challenges we expect will be raised by this new direction.

I. What’s New?

Socialists must address the following realities in any attempt to develop a relevant strategic perspective today:

• The impacts of the ruling class offensive on the structure of the working class and the daily life of workers. The U.S. working class has been restructured toward low wage, precarious, non-union work, whether in the service sector, manufacturing or logistics. Workplaces tend to be smaller and less socially cohesive, even when they are owned or effectively controlled by huge multinational corporations.
• The decline of official union structures and the weakness of rank and file organization. Union density and strength in the private sector has sharply declined, partly as a result of capital’s aggressive re-organization of the geography of production, both domestically and internationally. The public sector unions, where density remains much higher, are under attack. Teachers and health care workers, who make up a larger share of unionized workers, are now at the center of key defensive struggles. With rare exceptions such as the Chicago teachers strike, we are not seeing militant worker uprisings tied to rank-and-file revolts within the unions.
• The broad ruling class assault on the legacy of Twentieth Century working class struggle. We are witnessing a sustained and historic assault on collective bargaining, the social safety net, pensions, health care, public education, indeed all of the mechanisms that protect workers from the raw discipline of capitalist labor markets. Governments at every level have joined the employer assault by implementing austerity policies that affect the broad working-class.
• The new youth-driven movements emerging outside of formal union structures and away from the socialist Left. As demonstrated most dramatically by Occupy, younger militants are alienated from politics and the “system,” but also from unions, the socialist left, and even the idea of making demands on the capitalist state.
• The “new” forms of worker organizing with tenuous connections to official union structures. While sometimes compromised by their dependence on the labor bureaucracy, the rise of “alt-labor” groups such as non-majority unions and worker centers, and the emergence of militant movements of immigrant workers and youth, indicate the need and the potential for worker organizing that breaks with dependence on the state and traditional organizational forms. These efforts also speak to the potential to organize among groups of workers who have long been ignored by the official labor movement. In the right-to-work South, especially, necessity has given rise to valuable experiments which should be developed further, and which can provide lessons to workers in other regions.
• The new and broader forms of struggle emerging tentatively around the country. The state of working class consciousness and organization is weak and workers remain in a broadly defensive posture. At the same time, we have seen that militant resistance to austerity, organized from below and framed around broad class-wide demands, can inspire renewed working class activity, raise consciousness, and even begin to win concrete victories. We are thinking here about the emergence of movements such as Occupy and Moral Mondays, the profound nationwide impact of the Chicago teachers strike and the rise of social justice teacher unionism, the growth of the Labor Notes current, the success of the movement for universal health care in Vermont, and the election victories of Kshama Sawant and Chokwe Lumumba. These developments have all revealed an opening for the kind of broad, class-wide forms of struggle and political perspectives that are necessary in order to organize effective resistance to capital’s austerity drive.

In our view, these developments signal the need—and the potential—to put class-wide movements and organizational forms at the center of a renewed perspective on revolutionary socialist labor work. We are fully aware that the development of class-wide movements linking political and workplace struggles is more characteristic of periods of rising struggle than periods of decline, such as the present. The challenge we face is that, given the depth of capitalist restructuring, the political successes of neoliberalism, and the present relationship of forces, the narrow sectoral approach to unionism that remains dominant today has left unionized workers increasingly isolated from the broad working class, and unable to defend past gains, let alone make advances. Under these conditions, the labor movement can only build power by championing the working class as a whole—by posing its demands within a larger sociopolitical context, fighting for more universal goals (e.g. single-payer health care, livable wages), developing member self-activity, and forging genuine alliances with workers and working class organizations outside of the unions. As the debate rages about how to revive Labor, we should be clear that the only viable path forward is through rank and file struggles that consciously link the workplace and sectoral demands of union members to the needs of the entire working class.

We are proposing a more balanced approach to applying the Rank and File Strategy—one that retains our fundamental commitment to working class self-activity, develops a more politicized approach to union reform struggles, and places greater emphasis on work in broad class formations and among the unorganized working class. In order to clarify the kind of shift we are proposing, we want to take stock of those dynamics that we believe led to a narrowing of Left work in labor over an extended period dominated largely by defensive struggles.

II. Causes of Left Political Paralysis

Within the unions, recent decades have been marked by the labor bureaucracy’s concessionary retreat, the periodic eruption of one-off defensive struggles, a general absence of sustained worker militancy, and a general decline of the socialist left. This set of circumstances created very difficult conditions for the generation of socialists who went into industry in the 60s and 70s, during a period of upsurge that seemed likely to intensify. Many of these individuals subsequently played a historic role in organizing significant rank and file movements within key industrial unions, including the UAW and the Teamsters. This work continues in places, most notably with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. The work of the comrades who went into industry in this period, and the movements they helped build, deserves a much fuller discussion, debate, and assessment than we are capable of providing in the context of this document.

It is important, however, to recognize the impact that major working class defeats have had on those efforts since the seventies. In key, standard-setting industries such as auto, top union officials met the ruling class offensive with a policy of serial surrender. By openly embracing competitiveness and class collaboration—and actively working to discipline their members to accept the employers’ never-ending demands for concessions—union officials contributed significantly to the demoralization of the rank and file. In the absence of an organized and powerful Left, the state-backed employer offensive—and the massive reorganization of the economy that has been central to it—divided workers against each other and put them squarely on the defensive.

Facing their own officials’ staunch opposition to militant, class-wide resistance, and with no social force on the horizon capable of challenging capital’s freedom to restructure on its own terms, many workers understandably shied away from militant resistance. This lack of organized resistance had a profoundly conservatizing effect. Facing a concerted employer assault enabled by the bureaucracy’s suppression of internal democracy, Left union work became heavily focused on building reform coalitions to contest local union elections on a program of union democracy and opposition to concessions, based on top-down reform, not rank and file organizing. In making this pivot, many Left union activists shifted their focus away from attempts to build independent, militant rank and file movements that could overcome the limitations of the labor bureaucracy in order to fight capital. This narrowing of focus was generally accompanied by a retreat from taking up shop floor/workplace struggles, on the one hand, and from strategizing and organizing around broader political and social questions that might disrupt electoral coalitions, on the other.

In our view, the turn away from broader political and social questions left socialists unprepared to think about how to apply the Rank and File Strategy in settings external to union reform work—in relation to the problems of the broader unorganized working class, and particularly specially oppressed groups within the class; and in relation to contexts such as organizing drives and community organizing. Now that there are fewer workers in unions and fewer Leftists in those unions, these gaps in our thinking and acting become even more problematic.

The Rank and File Strategy, with its core principle of working-class self-organization, was expressly intended to counter the tendency of unions under capitalism to pursue narrow, sectoral aims under the domination of a self-reproducing labor bureaucracy. The objective has always been to develop the capacity of the militant minority within the working class to overcome the limitations of the labor bureaucracy—not only to fight specific employers, but also to develop the unions as fighters for the whole class. Today we need a renewed socialist labor strategy, rooted in a broader, more political iteration of the rank and file perspective; one that recognizes the impact of the defeats we have endured and responds to new and emerging realities on the ground. We need to join our commitment to working class self- organization at the point of production with a broad, class-struggle, social justice unionism perspective in order to build the power we need to win defensive struggles and to lay the basis for more transformational anti-capitalist political projects