Dear Cosmonaut,

I read Frank Zon's great "A New Strategy, Pt. 1--A New Typology of Trade Unions" with great enthusiasm while I should have been working today (as a college educated, socialist union bureaucrat working for and increasingly frustrated by an external-bureaucratic business union). 

I hope the writer will publish the next parts of their analysis soon; I think they are pretty spot-on as I look around at the floundering state of our labor movement. I also really want to commend the writer for talking about the actual dynamics of union structure which I see scarcely discussed as I have tried to search for various answers as to why my work often feels so far beside the point of actually helping organize workers so they can exercise their class power. The closest I have found outside this article is Daisy Pitkin's recent book about her experience as an organizer, "On the Line," which echoes the problems I hear from my coworkers in the field. Pitkin, I believe, is or was also working on the Starbucks Workers United Campaign which has a very different, more democratic model. 

But Zon's typology will hopefully help us as socialists to answer more systematically some of those key structural questions about why many unions are failing not only to organize the unorganized but even keep their current members. The typical answers--a combination of bad labor law and lack of desire by feckless leaders--pale in comparison to the real institutional dynamics, inertia and internal politics of labor organizations. The amount of structural paralysis and dysfunction in some of our nation's biggest unions is hard to grasp from the outside.

And indeed as the author makes clear here, no amount of desire from well intentioned officers or professional labor staff (of which there are many dedicated, passionate and even socialist staffers out there) can change those structures or make a union democratic or radical through sheer force of will alone. To think so is just idealism, and as Marxists we should know idealist explanations are woefully inadequate for examining the contradictions of our material world. Worse, such idealist explanations lead us to totally incorrect solutions like thinking we can "one weird trick" our way out of bad labor law--see SEIU and the Center for American Progress promoting European-style sectoral bargaining or labor standards boards as an easy answer--or just elect a reform slate of union officers who will fix everything by fiat. I believe this essay points us at the real material structure which must be changed in these organizations in order for them to fulfill their purpose, a structure which cannot be adequately changed without real organization of the rank and file to demand and win reforms that make their unions more like a union of the separated-powers or synthesized-powers type. 

So this is all to say I agree strongly with the thesis and as someone who looks to William Z. Foster's TUEL for inspiration about what communist labor organizing can look like, I look forward to reading the next parts of the article as soon as they are published. We deserve a true and materialist analysis of the labor movement rather than just taking press releases and the bluster of career labor bosses at face value. 

- Jo