Introduction
This letter is an internal critique of the Marxist Unity Group Labor Strategy, passed at our February Membership Meeting. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the meeting or begin this writeup before the vote, meaning that I offer what follows only for future consideration should we deem it necessary to revise our approach.
I am in broad agreement with the spirit of the Labor Strategy as passed. DSA’s commitment to the labor movement is laudable, but it is currently confined by the limits of the bourgeois legal order. Escaping from it requires an all-in commitment to political agitation and education, treating unions as schools for communism through which broad sections of the working-class can prepare to take power and govern. My questions are about the operability of our strategy—are we able to implement it as written? What resources would that require? How do the specific planks listed bring us toward this goal?
The section below critiques particular sections within the numbered list at the core of the document, followed by suggested amendments. It identifies two main issues:
- Unclear relationship to the National Labor Commission. The end of the document professes that its listed goals are “intended to transform the NLC from a simple support body into the central hub of all DSA labor work.” However, it offers no practical path to do so, with the exception of adopting a revolutionary labor policy—an act better fit for convention, which at least in theory directs the politics of the NLC, even if an intervention would be necessary to ensure implementation; hosting a labor convention, the plausibility of which will be discussed in the next section; and a list of tactics with no plan for implementation.
- Confusion of politics and tactics. While the document’s explicit aim is to provide political direction for DSA’s labor work, in practice it asks the NLC to hold a conference on a certain date and encourages chapters to experiment with new tactics and organizational forms. These are fine things to encourage, but no justification is provided for how they would lead toward DSA adopting a revolutionary policy or the development of a socialist labor movement.
Problems With Implementation
The second plank in the document reads:
Host a labor convention in 2024 composed of delegates from various labor organizing efforts of local DSA chapters to debate strategic priorities and establish operational NLC bodies for organizer trainings, local chapter coordination, and a national labor publication to analyze current trends and events within the labor movement and to investigate burning questions about the proper role of unions staff & officers, what sort of labor law should socialists fight for, and what part unions will play in a socialized economy.
The implementation of this plank is extremely vague. Hosting a conference is a high-cost and labor-intensive aim. MUG is currently underrepresented on the NLC, and taking action through it would require significant buy-in from Bread & Roses, who hold a plurality on its Steering Committee. This means we either need to spend time and resources lobbying B&R to our position, or campaigning for leadership in the NLC. Since most of us seem to anticipate disagreement from B&R on our policy, and B&R has deep roots within the NLC’s membership, both are likely to be relatively long-term endeavors. However, to launch a successful conference in 2024, the NLC would likely need to begin planning it this year. Unless B&R come to a consensus with us sooner than expected, or there is a crisis of leadership within the NLC (something more likely to immobilize it than transform it), the NLC hosting a labor convention on these terms is extremely unlikely, and if they were to, it would be at some unspecified point in the future, not 2024.
Moving on to the third plank:
Encourage local DSA chapters to politicize their labor work by forming explicitly socialist union caucuses complete with shopfloor publications, complement strike actions by canvassing local neighborhoods for community support, making demands of local electeds to intervene in workplace struggles on behalf of the workers, uniting the labor movement with the struggles of the oppressed, and naming capitalism as the source of all shopfloor struggles in agitational and educational materials.
This is largely a laundry list of tactics, some of them agreeable to the average socialist, and some even to liberal unionists. Experimentation, however desirable, is not a policy. Both the most strident and least developed point listed—and the climax of this critique as a whole—is “forming socialist union caucuses complete with shopfloor publications.”
I have written positively on moving away from broad union reform caucuses ala Teamsters for a Democratic Union and toward explicitly socialist bodies, and I more or less stand by that in the context it was written—that of an individual provocation to socialists in general, not the policy of a faction working within DSA. As a policy, it essentially asks chapters to devote time and resources to an untested organizational form without providing clear guidance on what its goals, methods and operations should look like, and does not tie it to the existing structures of DSA.
Amending Our Policy
These issues led me to write an amendment meant to replace both the third (reproduced above) and first planks on the document, though unfortunately I was not present to motivate it during the debate.
Transform the National Labor Commission into a political force capable of advancing
the labor movement through a national labor publication, united front formations with
union reform caucuses, the creation of new left-wing caucuses, making demands of
electeds to intervene in workplace struggles and naming socialism as the political
solution to all shopfloor struggles in agitational and educational materials.
The aim of this amendment was to capture the spirit of the policy as a whole and channel it into a clear and centralized goal for MUG’s work within the NLC. Replacing the call for socialist caucuses with one to transform the NLC toward the same aims—political intervention within the labor movement—allows us to use an existing national structure with high buy-in to further our political goals, rather than asking chapters to duplicate this project with multiple new, untested structures union-by-union.
From there we could work backwards to develop clear steps toward a transformation of the NLC—amendment to the consensus labor resolution at convention, systematic recruitment of MUG cadre to the NLC to build up its capacity for political education, and then intervention on a chapter-by-chapter and union-by-union basis to recruit advanced workers, educate the unpoliticized and challenge both the union bureaucracy and the liberal wing of the reform movement. By doing so we proceed with a direct set of actions rather than a wish list of loosely related tactics without a path toward implementation.
Marisa Miale
