I have enjoyed reading the dialogue, both formal and informal, sparked by the recent release of Marxist Unity Group’s labor strategy position paper. I feel it is a strong document that addresses many of the most serious issues confronting the modern American socialist movement in the realm of labor organizing—that crucial realm where our movement’s prospects will either live or die by the merits of our approach. I particularly appreciated points 1, 3, and 5, concerning the movement’s obligation to intervene in the day-to-day self-activity of the class with the goal of transforming trade union consciousness into revolutionary socialist consciousness and bread-and-butter economic struggles into a unifying struggle for political power.
Comrade Alexander Gavrilovich took objection to these goals, or at least Marxist Unity Group’s articulation of them, in the letter A Gap in Marxist Unity Group’s Labor Position. I would like to respond to some of this comrade’s critiques in an effort to defend MUG’s political approach to labor organizing.
Alexander’s argument, as I understand it, amounts to this: neither the U.S. labor movement nor the U.S. socialist movement is in a position to sustain a campaign of socialist agitation within labor unions. At this stage, supposedly, any effort to build distinctly socialist consciousness in unions will fail to get any purchase and ultimately serve only to further alienate socialists from organized labor. Instead, DSA should focus its funds and the time and effort of its members on building up unions’ organizational infrastructure, expanding the base for labor organizing in America’s workplaces, and supporting non-socialist reform caucuses on a case-by-case basis. I do not believe this to be a winning formulation.
The first objection comrade Alexander raises is that union density in the United States is “at an all time low.” This is true, of course, and something we socialists must incorporate into our organizing strategies. The prevailing unionization rate of 11.3% (as of 2022) is not, however, an argument against socialist agitation in labor unions, as Alexander implies. The union density in the U.S. workforce was almost exactly half of that figure—5.5%—in 1910, when the Socialist Party of America was engaged in practically the textbook example of the “explicit socialist politicization” our comrade warns against: the boring-from-within strategy. Under this strategy, Socialists who dual-carded with various trade unions, mostly in the American Federation of Labor, organized in the open as socialists. They put forward their own candidates for executive offices, voted in blocs, and attempted to secure endorsements for the party’s electoral candidates and parts of its program during national conventions. These efforts yielded impressive results. The United Mine Workers of America, for example, endorsed collectivization of the mines and other major industries at its 1912 convention, the culmination of a long campaign of socialist politicization within the union by the West Virginia chapter of the SPA. Socialists reliably represented around half of all UMWA delegates at national conventions during the early to mid-1910s. This, once again, was achieved when union density was half of what it is today.
What today’s low union density should impress upon us, rather than a skittish aversion to fighting within labor unions for the adoption of a socialist program, is the need to adopt a multi-faceted approach to workplace organizing. We need to understand why, exactly, union membership is at such a low point relative to the highs of the mid-twentieth century, and adapt our strategies to account for that reality. The hostile labor law regime is here to stay for the foreseeable future across most of the country—let’s face it, the PRO Act is likely never going to be passed, at least not without a massive political intervention by militant organized labor which would itself violate the Taft-Hartley Act. Workers in states like South Carolina and Arkansas would be unwise to bank their hopes on state-level legislation like the bill that recently repealed right-to-work in Michigan. The United States working class will have to build a new mass trade union movement on uneven terrain, starting with a far less robust foundation than it had in the era of the CIO. Socialists, of course, need to be spearheading efforts to do so. But we can’t afford to wait until said movement has reached some arbitrary level of development where it becomes strong enough to suffer socialist politicization. We have to build it as a socialist labor movement, not merely as a labor movement that might one day be swayed to socialism.
Comrade Alexander also brings up the lack of developed labor organizing infrastructure in DSA at the local level and the anecdotal lack of socialists in unions like the Teamsters. These points are valid, and they are the strongest arguments for MUG’s strategy! The strategy of non-socialist politicization our comrade proposes will not make more union members into socialists. It will instead make socialists into union members who leave their socialism at the door. Having socialists join unions just for the sake of unionism is certainly not a bad thing if the alternative is a socialist movement that is not active in unions at all, but it is still a definite (and artificial) shortening of our horizons. As socialists, we extend the horizons of the possible, we do not shorten them.
The fact that many DSA chapters do not yet have labor committees or a real plan of action to integrate their aims into the labor organizing objectives of the national organization is something I’m sure our comrades in MUG wholeheartedly agree is a serious problem, but their strategy presupposes a concentrated effort to improve upon that situation; after all, DSA chapters that do not have labor committees and are not seriously thinking about workplace organizing would be incapable of “forming explicitly socialist union caucuses” or “canvassing local neighborhoods for community support” for workplace struggles. Building strong labor organizing apparatuses at the chapter level will require a shift in DSA’s organizing culture, a coordinated cross-chapter campaign for more militant labor policy, and a rededication of resources. The question is, what do we do with all of that? Whose project do we build towards? If not ours, the project of the emancipation of the working class, then whose?
There is no such thing as an absence of politicization. A seeming lack of politicization is in every instance an accommodation of the politics of the ruling class. When socialists say we must “re-politicize” organized labor, we mean it not in the sense that we must give labor unions political direction where presently they have none, but in the sense that we must orient them in a socialist direction, the direction of the historical interests of the entire working class, where presently theirs is the direction of the absorption of the organized energies of the working class into the system of capitalist class rule. If we are to re-politicize organized labor at all, we must do so as socialists.
Comrade Alexander’s closing statements seem out of place to me. The remainder of the letter is reasonable, if disagreeable, but the last lines seem to be a misplaced snipe at MUG for “sectarianism” of the newspaper-pushing variety. I do not believe this is a charitable interpretation of the position MUG has outlined. Compare and contrast MUG’s five points with the actions of ultra-sectarians like the Socialist Equality Party. The SEP, in its intervention in the recent United Auto Workers elections, advanced a platform with no bearing on shop-floor struggles or the real internal politics of the union, demanding dissolution of the UAW into “rank-and-file committees” that would effectively serve as fronts for the party. MUG, meanwhile, calls on DSA to intervene in a way that directly addresses and furnishes support for existing shop-floor struggles, to form socialist caucuses that would engage with union politics with the goal of electing “tribunes of the people” to union offices, and to work with the current advanced guard of organized labor to build the party of the working class on the terms already being forged by workers progressing towards that goal, rather than on terms dictated to the rank and file from the bureaucrats of an external party-sect. These are the foundations of MUG’s labor strategy as I understand it. They are not sectarian, they are the application of the merger formula to the present conditions of the class struggle in America.
Revolutionary regards,
S.A. Reed
