Report on the first week of Solidarity’s “Socialists in Labor” reading group, “Why still the working class?”
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
There are stock Marxist answers to the question “why the working class?” The working class produces capitalist values so it has a strategic capacity to shut down capitalist production, where other oppressed classes and groups can only protest or temporarily block production. The working class makes the things that all people need to survive so its exploitation has a second character of potential future world making. The interests of the working class can only truly be understood globally, so a united working class can overcome national borders and national oppression to defeat global capitalism.
Yes, but when these potentials do not feel possible, what then? What now?
To begin answering this question (which is, rightly, a task of this entire “Socialists in Labor” reading series, not only the first class), two introductory speakers, Robin and Wendy Thompson, framed that discussion for the forty three participants who called-in.
Their presentation is available to watch here, and to listen to here.
Class struggle at the point of production-distribution-reproduction
Robin synthesized the arguments in the main readings for the week. She said they agreed, “We are alive in this time when the backbone of the organized labour movement has, since the 1980s, been broken. This ‘breaking’ is made up two problems: first, the weakness of working class struggle overall; and second, and analytical weakness, that we struggle to understand our situation under capitalism today, and to strategize our fightback.”
Robin said each of the three authors of the main readings for this week had their own emphasis in their analyses of these weaknesses. Mike Davis took a more abstract and historical approach, arguing that the working class will get out of this bind through struggle –– where it comes to understand our “qualitative needs.” She referred to an anecdote from Vanessa Wills’ book, Marx’s Ethical Nature as an example of this. Robin explained, “In this book she talks about French factory workers who are sitting at lunch talking about what they need, how to get it, and through this practice they become friends and sit together at lunch because they want to spend time together. They came to feel and desire this comradeship through the experience of struggle, coming to identify a need through struggle.”
She said that Kim Moody’s article “offers us a novel explanation for the weakness of the working class and the decline of manufacturing. The orthodox view he’s critiquing is that the working class is weak because of offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Moody says that in fact, this decline was an outcome of a class struggle defeat: the intensification of labour imposed by lean production’s ‘management by stress’ that accomplished increased productivity, ‘filling up the pores of the workday’.”
And if Moody is saying: instead of production as a closed factory, we need to include production as a whole, including distribution. Tithi Bhattacharya says instead of just production, we need to include reproduction.
Robin concluded by asking how we can include informal workshops of social reproduction in our class struggle strategy. She had two suggestions: one, “bargaining for the common good,” like the Chicago Teachers’ Union bargaining for housing for their students in 2024. Another was for “what Eric Blanc calls ‘bouncy castle socialism,’ recognizing that people need social and community spaces to come together.”
A tight knit of social movements and class struggle
In her presentation, Wendy Thompson offered stories from her own personal history in struggle to fill in the ‘pores’ of the story of socialists in labor. She said she joined the International Socialists (IS) when she lived in Los Angeles, and, along with a cadre of other members who were mostly white students, moved to Detroit to get involved in factory organizing.
She said they were conscious of being white students going to work in majority Black workplaces. And they did notice and interact with race power in the factories, but not in the ways they expected. “There was a definite difference between the white men and Black men in the plant,” she said. “The white men were saying you women shouldn’t be here, you should be at home. While the Black men were saying welcome! The fact that it was a majority Black plant meant that we could be there, working and organizing.”
“I was was one of the first woman hired in American Axle,” she said. “It meant a lot that I was a woman. The fact that we had a womens’ movement going on had a big effect on the union. When the womens’ movement went up, it went up in the union.”
This wasn’t the first time in our classes that we’ve heard that the politics taken up in workplace strikes and actions have been informed by social movements. “We always brought in social issues, like Vietnam, the womens’ movement, and raising funds for Zimbabwe,” Wendy said. “We campaigned around a young Black man named Gary Tyler, in the south, who had been wrongly convicted of murder and condemned to death. Because it was a political time with mass movements, people expected us to bring in these issues.” The interweaving, syncretic struggles of social movements and workplaces seems to have been a recurring and maybe definitive dynamic of struggles of 1960s and ’70s socialism.
Seeming to answer Robin’s question about how socialists can take up social reproduction demands and struggles in spaces of production, Wendy said, “One effect of the influence of feminism in the factories was that the UAW took on demands for childcare and won childcare in our contract.” But these wins were not institutionalized to the extent of wage and working conditions concessions. “Where is that childcare today?” she asked. “Gone. And the union doesn’t talk about it.”
The problem of working class historical agency
I want to add my own thoughts about one problem that we weren’t able to really get to in the discussion, which I think is critical to the question of “why the working class” remains the socialist protagonist.
In his 2017 article, “Old Gods, New Enigmas,” cribbing from historian Eric Hobsbawm, Mike Davis asks whether the working class still has the “historical force” necessary “to support a socialist project?” Do classes fragmented by automation and the global division of labour and production still share a “common sentiment and shared destiny” needed to bind them into a single world working class, as Marx envisaged?
This is what he means by the problem of working class historical “agency,” which he says is the “major problem” of the left today. He offers two definitions of agency. One by Ellen Meiksins Wood, who says agency is “the possession of strategic power and a capacity for collective action founded in the specific conditions of material life.” The other, his own: that agency refers to “Resources for self organization and action as well as the interests that mobilize them and the historical tasks that demand them.”
The difference between these two definitions is in the level of actualization required to consider the working class an empowered, coherent, singular force for socialist action. Wood’s agency hinges on the word possession. The possession of power and the capacity for action. Wood’s definition reads as though possession and capacity are a given, and that the antecedent clause (“founded in the specific conditions of material life”) is the qualifier that makes this action working class. Wood’s definition makes sense for a historian who is working on a working class subject that was emergent in the 19th Century and coalescing (imperfectly) in the 20th.
Davis’ definition is more contingent. His keywords are resources for organization and action, and consciousness of interests. This definition is more open to potentials; more forward looking at processes rather than Wood’s adding-up of conclusions. Davis’ argument also ends up more partial. The working class is still producing value, its “resources” for organization and action, but what of its consciousness of common interests and shared destiny?
One answer comes from Kim Moody’s 2017 article, “On New Terrain,” from the same issue of Catalyst as the Davis article. Moody argues that it’s not correct to characterize the working class as “fragmented” or atomized — one of the premises of Davis’ piece. Moody writes:
“While many have long seen globalization as a force of fragmentation, like many aspects of capitalism, it has generated the opposite. Under the pressure of intensified competition, capital has undone its clumsy conglomerate configuration and reorganized along older, familiar, more industrially rational lines, and in vastly larger concentrations of capital and labor that rival those even during its heyday a half-century ago. It has sought to annihilate the space created in extended supply chains by time in networks of tech driven transportation and movement centered in huge agglomerations of labor. Despite its global reach, US capital, along with a good deal of international capital, has done this within North America as well as across the globe. As a result, to cripple a major “node” in this new configuration of capitalism is to halt the production of surplus value at home, across the continent, or over an ocean.” (72)
In Moody’s framing, the disorganization of the working class is not an objective problem of how global capitalist production deploys us. Our problem is subjective: that our organizations, neither socialist nor union, have adapted to the capitalist modifications that have better sychnronized and more perfectly honed its machinery of variable capital. But that should not get us down because, as Moody also says, “The growth of labor organizations comes in waves or leaps in class struggle, not through gradual additions.” So it’s possible to catch up.
In coming weeks, we’ll discuss different ways that socialists have acted in order to catch up and surpass capitalist disorganization in their own times.