It is a very good thing that a more avowedly radical Marxist group in the DSA is turning its attention seriously towards labor work. However, I think that the labor strategy position paper does not sketch a perspective towards the stated goal of an independent workers party. Further, if implemented as written it would do damage to the MUG’s own perspectives, and the reputation of avowed “lefts” in the labor movement more generally. From a certain distance to the MUG, it seems to me that the position paper is abstract. If the authors of the paper are connected to ongoing labor work — either in fresh organizing or radical rank-and-file or member-driven campaigns in existing unions — then this experience is not well reflected. Without practical experience in this sort of organizing work, any sort of strategy or position paper will fall flat, at best.
Let’s begin with a polemical point, which I think gets to the heart of the disagreement: Point four advocates socialists running for union office “increasing transparency among members of inner union corruption and most importantly to use the office to combat imperialist, racist, sexist, and anti-trans tendencies within the labor movement and instead advance socialist ideas of total human emancipation.” This is exactly wrong. Of course one should combat these tendencies, and of course one should increase transparency. However, the point, and the most important thing, is to win victories for those you represent. The history of the labor movement is littered with social reformers who won posts and waged various broader political campaigns but neglected the fight for the defense of and betterment of conditions of their own membership. They got swept back out of office like mayflies swarming and dying on a warm summer day, and the only lesson the membership learned was “beware of big talkers, they don’t bring home the bacon.”
I am not suggesting that the issues raised — from trans-rights to imperialist wars — are unimportant or should not be raised. But they are not to be raised as union issues as opposed to “bread and butter” issues or bringing home the bacon. They are to be raised as part of such issues. They are to be raised because the class independence of the labor movement from the capitalists (and their parties) and the need for workers to fight for all amongst them, and against all forms of oppression which can divide and weaken them — be it along national, race, gender lines — are fundamental parts of cohering the united power and solidarity necessary to win real victories. Or, they are also just to be raised as part of day-to-day conversations with coworkers. People talk about politics at work all the time, and I would hope that any leftist in any given workplace would not be averse to these discussions with their coworkers.
If one goes through any training in militant, rank-and-file, or member-led labor organizing — be it Labor Notes, or that provided now by any number of other unions, they will emphasize that the people who make the best and reliable organizers, those who can lead their coworkers, and who you want as voices on your organizing committee, are often very different than those who are big talkers, or outspoken radicals. This is not because such trainings are anti-leftist. It reflects hard-won experience. Being a slick talker doesn’t mean you will put in the hours of work, nor does it necessarily mean you will be a careful listener who can understand and sympathize with the concerns of others of widely varying views and experience. Further, campaigns (especially but not only in fresh organizing) go through many phases — some very covert and conducted person-to-person, and only sporadically in militant mass action. The outspoken loudmouth may be unreliable — may blow your cover before you are ready, may attract undue attention, may be such a target that others are wary of associating, may escalate in a period where instead you need to cool things off and regroup your forces, etc. Of course people should be honest and overt about their politics. In my organizing experience, especially these days, many already are, and this is to be encouraged. But an injunction to “talk about socialism more” or “blame capitalism more” is besides the point and may be counterproductive. Political points should be consciously raised — but not artificially or indiscriminately so. They should be raised when they are relevant and matter — and again, in my experience, I do not think people shy away from this. If you have found in your experience that DSA members are not raising points you may find it appropriate for them to — it is not because there is not a resolution encouraging them to — rather it is because they do not want to raise these points. And a resolution will not fix this.
Work in the labor movement is not just some political arena where various ideas are studied and debated, and where political views can carry the day in resolutions passed at labor conventions endorsing one or another legislative campaign. It is the active site of ongoing class struggle, and in every campaign the livelihood and conditions of workers are directly at stake. If any political organizer does not understand the seriousness of that, then workers will in turn not take them seriously. It is where the class war is waged every day, in the attempts of the bosses to extract as much profit as possible, and the struggles of workers — some inchoate and individual, some organized, most in-between — to resist this and claw back some fraction of the vast riches extracted from their labor. Marxists should seek to root themselves in that struggle, to deepen it, cohere it, and to bring to it a consciousness of the necessity that it result in a durable victory — in the form of a party that represents the working class, and ultimately in the form of the victory of that class in the creation of a state governed by that same class.
You want to win the working class to Marxist ideas. Good. But how will this be done? Through books, reading, discussions, education, speeches, sure. In part. But in greater part, complementing this, driving this, it will be done through proving that Marxist ideas can lead to victories. It will be through helping workers understand that, like it or not, they are already engaged in class struggle (at a minimum, as victims of a class-war waged against them and their institutions), and that Marxism is the means by which they can understand the nature of that struggle, and how to win. You can tell people all day that the interests of the bosses and workers will never be the same (and of course one should do this). But if you open up bargaining and get people in the (perhaps Zoom) room to watch a contract being negotiated, they will see it, understand it, believe it, and internalize it in a much deeper way.
Jane McAlevey, for example, rightly emphasizes that victories rely on mass mobilizations of workers, and credible threats of strike action. To achieve such mass mobilization, she goes on to explain, requires engaging the mass of the workers in organizing. And this is connected to what she terms “radical political education”. And then the question is posed — what radical politics are you educating workers in? How does Marxism go from some old library books to providing a framework by which workers can understand that they can and should win organizing victories? Why is it the sort of radical political education to achieve the victories we need? This is not a question that can be answered in a single position paper — rather, it is the question that Marxist organizers in the labor movement need to be asking themselves and finding new answers to every day. And if Marxists are not providing this education, then others will, with different conclusions.
Here is one small example. I was talking with someone involved in organizing a group of public workers in a medium-sized city. One obstacle, they explained, was that they found it hard to build solidarity across all workers in the workplace because most workers resented the security guards, who searched them and treated them poorly and gave them a hard time in general. I first broadened the discussion, talking about cops, and why cops aren’t workers. Not only did they already agree with me, they readily filled in more arguments. Well then, I explained, in workplaces like this, often security guards see themselves as and function as junior cops. The resentment between the workers and the guards wasn’t something that needed to be bridged — if anything it was better that the workers didn’t organize the guards, and understood them instead as agents of the employer who were doing their jobs by hassling them. This clarified a concrete issue in the campaign, opened the way forward for them to pursue further political conversations with those they were organizing, and also helped move the organizing campaign itself forward.
More generally, in any organizing committee, as it develops the message it sends to other workers, basic principles of class-struggle militancy are indispensable. We do the work. They appropriate our labor, and extract profit. Therefore we can and should fight for more. Often workers look towards resolving issues going via a Human Resources department. Human Resources serves the bosses, and the bosses are the enemy, they don’t want good conditions for us, they want profit — this is not an abstract point, it is one that needs to be understood to formulate the militant strategy necessary to win. What is the NLRB? What are its limits? Why is it so crippled? To what extent should we utilize or trust labor law or its enforcement? Immediately we are in broader territory once again. You can’t have these discussions on strategy without finding yourself in a discussion on the nature of the Democratic party. The more workers are won to what the UE calls a “Them and Us” perspective, and the more convinced they are that they have the power and strength, then the more able they are to be organized and prepared, to engage in workplace actions, and, importantly, to win victories.
Winning victories sets precedents and provides inspiration outside of a single workplace — it empowers other workers and drives future organizing. It also accrues, as it should, authority to the people that helped fight for those victories, and to the principles by which they organized for those victories.
The position paper says it wants socialists to lead the labor movement. Even more directly it calls for socialist caucuses in the unions. Well, if you have a caucus then that is for the purpose of running a slate of leaders. And if you have a slate of potential leaders, they had better be able to lead! And they had better be able to lead to victories, not defeats, or workers won’t ever want to elect a similar caucus again. So far I have only discussed the role that a Marxist understanding has to play in organizing, and some ways in which it is transmitted in the process of organizing, cohering, and educating workers in the course of mass organizing. But if one hopes to have Marxist labor leaders, they must be able to actually be labor leaders at all. And a correct understanding of the world (no matter how correct!) does not suffice.
Labor organizers need tactics, which can only be acquired by engaging in and learning from many campaigns and their successes and defeats. In existing unions, stewards need also the knowledge of labor law and negotiating to successfully win the grievances of individual members, and defend them against employer discipline. (Of course how they do so reflects if they see themselves in partnership with management or opposed to it). One also needs strategic analysis, needs to learn how to assess individuals on the basis of short conversations, and rooms full of individuals on the basis of how they respond in the course of debates and discussions. They need to be able to gauge the direction of a discussion and note when it is steering itself into a strategic dead-end, and deftly turn the course. And, importantly, they need practice, practice, practice in the basic skills of how to approach workers in organizing conversations, and even more importantly the intermediate skill of how you then transmit their own acquired skills to others — training them up into a new generation of organizers. That training is not only transmitting skills — it is also imbuing others with a set of politics and perspectives. And beyond that one needs to then learn to organize all those people who have been activated into a functioning collective that can democratically debate and then act with militancy and unity, mobilizing the whole workforce into supermajority actions. To have a generation of socialist labor leaders, this first means socialists learning how to lead real struggles, with real livelihoods at stake, to real victories. For workers to become convinced of socialist ideas requires proving their worth, and the class struggle, not least in the form of the labor movement, is where that takes place.
In this sense, the position paper is, if anything, too uncritical of the DSA’s current labor work. While advocating a different “policy,” it endorses the current strategy, writing merely that “our strategy focuses on raising the militancy of rank and file workers to move beyond the shortfalls of business unionism”. But the issues facing the labor movement are not simply about relative militancy or the “shortfalls of business unionism.” They are about if workers are to recognize the bosses, their institutions, and their parties, as enemies — or if unions are going to pursue a strategy of allying with them and relying on them. This is to say, they are about the difference between liberalism and Marxism. The problem with the existing union leadership is not particularly that it has a “service” or “business” union perspective or that it is at times corrupt, or comfortable, or entrenched (though all this is often true). The basic problem is that it ideologically seeks class peace — labor-management partnership, and failing that, reliance on state action or capitalist politicians, typically (but not exclusively) the Democrats. (To that point, the position paper calls for “naming capitalism as the source of all shopfloor struggles”. There is nothing special in this. You will find plenty of established union leaders who do this, and then still crush rank-and-file militancy and negotiate miserable contracts behind closed doors. There’s a very long list of sellout, do-nothing, and pro-imperialist union leaders over the years who have in fact been DSA members.) More generally, as a tactical consideration, if one is critical of DSA’s current electoral broad electoral political orientation, then seeking to “politicize” labor work by coupling it more closely to DSA’s broader work will, if anything, undermine and weaken that work. The success of that work thus far has been, on the contrary, because it is less tied to the orientation to capitalist political maneuvering which is pronounced in many areas of DSA work.
Here, the call in the position paper for discussion of “what sort of labor law should socialists fight for,” if anything, undercuts what a Marxist perspective should be here. The story of the crushing of U.S. labor over past decades is in no small part the story of the diversion of independent, militant struggle into lobbying and legalistic channels. This is all the more absurd in a current day situation where the PRO act is almost certainly a dead letter and the Supreme Court has been rolling back labor protections for at least the last decade. Even “mainstream” militant labor activists are increasingly pointing out the need to prepare workers not only for mass militant struggles, but also potentially illegal ones, or at least ones with fewer protections than the already scant ones we currently attempt to utilize. Once you commit yourself to lobbying for a law, you commit yourself to supporting the politicians who say they will support the law, and then next thing you know you are acting just as the current labor leaders do — directing union funds into politicians and PACs instead of the mass organizing this upsurge in labor militancy calls out for.
Similarly, many rank-and-file and “reform” caucuses have also historically tied themselves not only to politicians, but directly to the existing courts and labor law — typically to their detriment. Ron Carey, the Teamsters reformer who oversaw the 1997 strike, was first able to win the presidency of the Teamsters by elections overseen by the government due to a “consent decree”. But he was also kicked out of office, and the union itself, by that same court-mandated government supervision shortly after the strike. Socialists should emphasize that, as friendly as the NLRB may seem at times, the courts belong to the bosses and not the workers, and should be highly critical of and opposed to attempts to leverage the courts as mechanisms to institute changes within the unions.
All of this points towards the need for a genuine workers party, based in the trade unions, and socialists in the labor movement should not be averse to saying this, especially in answer to those who want to direct resources to supporting Democrats. However, it will take a series of militant struggles, notable victories, and a general upsurge in even elementary class-consciousness before such a party is on the horizon. Militants in the labor movement should focus on bringing that about, and preparing the political way in the course of doing so.
Engaging more deeply and fully in the labor movement is a good arena for those that consider themselves for a break with the Democrats. It is the front line of the class struggle, and it is a place where the independence of the workers movement is posed very starkly against looking to capitalist politicians. It is a place where real victories may be won, and may be won not by lobbying Democrats, but instead in opposition to them. As such, carrying out militant organizing work that opposes reliance on capitalist politicians and courts is a concrete way to make the case for a break with the Democrats, and in so doing convince those outside the labor movement as well. My advice to the MUG is this — worry less about making labor work a place where people proclaim “socialism” more vividly, and instead focus on the development of a layer of militant, experienced labor organizers and leaders who pursue a policy of class independence. If you work towards this, many other good things will follow.
Gary Levi
