Rudy is joined by Jonathan, Henry, and Felipe from the Boston Independent Drivers Guild for a discussion on how gig drivers are resisting and organizing against precarity in their jobs. We discuss what a typical working day looks like and how drivers relate to their jobs and what the workforce looks like and what challenges that entails when organizing, such as multilingualism. Felipe discusses how Uber and Lyft workers can meet each other, how BIDG was started, its current organizing strategy and the long-term goals of the guild, and what their relationship to other unions is. The episode then pivots to the context of Prop 22, how that battle was lost, and how the guild is planning for future fights. We end by discussing Uber’s interface with venture capital and its common lie that the company is not profitable
As Felipe said, if you are a gig worker, or a ride-sharing driver, you are not alone. There is probably a driver union somewhere near you, with people getting organized to fight.
Chris Wright details the popular campaign for the Communist authored Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, a moment in US labor history that is overshadowed by Roosevelt’s more conservative New Deal programs.
Historiography on the Great Depression in the U.S. evinces a lacuna. Despite all the scholarship on political radicalism in this period, especially the activities of the Communist Party, one of the most remarkable manifestations of such radicalism has tended to be ignored: the bill that was introduced in Congress in 1934, ’35, and ’36, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill (called the Workers’ Social Insurance Bill in its 1936 version). This bill, originally authored by the Communist Party, was noteworthy in two respects: it was both very radical and very popular. In brief, it provided unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, race, or political affiliation) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week, plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages. Commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organizations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. In its 1936 form, it was particularly generous: it included insurance for widows, mothers, and the self-employed, appropriated $5 billion for the year 1936, established a Workers’ Social Insurance Commission to administer the system, and elaborated in much more detail than earlier iterations on how the system would be financed and managed.
Despite, or rather because of, its radicalism, the Workers’ Bill attracted broad support across the country. To quote its advocates, by early 1935 it had been endorsed by “more than 2,400 locals [eventually about 3,500], and the regular conventions of five International and six State bodies of the American Federation of Labor; practically every known unemployed organization; thousands of railroad and other independent local and central bodies, fraternal lodges, veterans’, farmers’, Negro, youth, women’s and church groups…[and] municipal and county governmental bodies in seventy cities, towns and counties,” in addition to millions of individual citizens who signed postcards and petitions in support of it.1 All this support was not enough to get the bill passed in Congress, although in 1935 it was reported on favorably by the House Labor Committee. In fact, its provisions were so terrifying to the business class that it never had a chance of becoming law. What is interesting, however, is the momentum that developed behind it, despite what amounted to a virtual conspiracy of silence from the press and extreme hostility from conservative congressmen, business constituencies, and the Roosevelt administration.
Given the political and social significance of the Workers’ Bill, it is unclear why historians have largely ignored it. In a book called Voices of Protest (published in 1983), Alan Brinkley does not devote a single sentence to it. Neither does Robert McElvaine in his standard history, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (1984). David Kennedy devotes half a sentence to it in volume one of his 2004 history of the Depression and World War II, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. Likewise, neither Ira Katznelson nor Jefferson Cowie mention it in their recent popular books, respectively Fear Itself (2013) and The Great Exception (2016). One reason for the neglect may be that the mainstream press tended to ignore it at the time, instead giving far more attention to the less radical—but also, arguably, less popular—Townsend Plan, an emphasis that historians have followed. In any case, in this article, I intend to rectify the historiographical oversight by telling the story of the Workers’ Bill—from the perspective of the popular enthusiasm it inspired—and arguing for its importance.
The history of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill (in its various forms) began in the summer of 1930, when the Communist Party proposed its first iteration—an incredible $25 per week to the unemployed and $5 for each dependent—and immediately proceeded to agitate on its behalf. The reception that the unemployed gave this campaign suggests, contrary to what historians have sometimes argued, that it did not take long at all for a large proportion of the Depression’s victims to reject the voluntarist ideology of the 1920s and the Hoover administration in favor of massive government intervention in society for the purpose of income redistribution. By late summer of 1930, in the very early stages of the Depression, the Daily Worker was already reporting mass petition signings and continual demonstrations for the bill in scores of cities.2
In these early months, much of the agitation for the proposed bill was being done by the Unemployed Councils. We should recall that the Councils were being organized already in January and February 1930 and that urban areas of the country were in ferment a mere three or four months after the stock market crash of October 1929. Almost every day the Daily Worker reported mass meetings and marches on city halls in cities from Buffalo to Chicago to Chattanooga and beyond, by the spring spreading even to the Deep South. In the next few years the mass protests, including hunger marches, “eviction riots,” collective thefts, bootlegging, relief demonstrations, occupation of legislative chambers, etc., would surge from coast to coast; “hardly a day passed,” the historian Albert Prago writes, “without some major demonstration taking place in some town, city, or state capital.” As historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and Randi Storch have argued, at the forefront of much of this turbulence were the Communist Unemployed Councils.3
Even in February and March 1930, before the CP had officially proposed the Workers’ Bill, enormous demonstrations in cities nationwide featured the demand for “Work or Wages,” meaning either give us work or give us relief at full wage-rates. This demand already anticipated the Workers’ Bill, and within months evolved into the even more radical provisions of that bill. As the Unemployed Councils grew in the early 1930s, so did awareness of and support for the Communist bill.
The pace of actions died down a bit in the fall of 1930 but picked up again in December and January, in preparation for February 10, 1931, when 150 delegates elected from around the country were going to present the bill and its hundreds of thousands of signatures to Congress. Requests for signature lists flooded into the New York office of the National Campaign Committee for Unemployment Insurance from not only the large industrial centers but even towns and farms in the South and West, and Alaska. Metalworkers in Chicago Heights got involved in the campaign; railroad workers and section hands in Reno, Nevada signed petitions; letters like the following were sent to the Daily Worker:
Let me know what I can do to help carry forward the fight for unemployment insurance? This is the greatest need at this hour. I am the only reader of the Daily Worker here in Ashby, Minn., and am one of four Communist votes cast here in the elections. I am a woman of 60 years, living on land; I pass out all my Daily Workers to neighbors and am getting new subscribers. Will help all I can to get signatures for the bill.4
Countless united front conferences of workers’ organizations took place in cities around the country, for instance Gary, Indiana, where the keynote of one conference was sounded by an African-American steelworker and veteran of World War I who said, in part, “It’s no use going way over to France to fight. We can demand things here just as good as we can there, fight here just as good as there, and if need be, die here just as good as there… Let’s fight for ourselves, right here, now.” They fought in Charlotte, North Carolina; Ambridge, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, West Virginia; Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, and San Antonio; Hartford, Buffalo, and San Francisco. City hunger marches were so numerous in these months that the Daily Worker could not keep track of them. The Workers’ Bill, of course, was not the only or even the most pressing issue addressed by all these actions, but it did figure prominently among their demands. On the big day, February 10, demonstrations and state hunger marches occurred in at least 63 cities as the delegation in Washington, D.C. interrupted a session in the House and was forcibly ejected by police. In St. Paul, Minnesota, a certain type of action that was already becoming rather common: demonstrators broke through police lines around the state capitol and occupied the legislative chambers, announcing that they would not leave until the legislature had acted on their demands for relief and unemployment insurance.5
In short, arguably even before churches, charities, and benefit societies had conclusively demonstrated their inability to meet the economic crisis, well over a million people nationwide were demanding that the federal government become in effect a radically social democratic welfare state. In general, the statist orientation that Lizabeth Cohen discusses in Making a New Deal, which often was an extremely collectivist orientation (as embodied, e.g., in the Workers’ Bill), did not have to wait for Roosevelt and the New Deal to act as midwives, as Cohen and other historians seem to suggest. It emerged organically on the grassroots level, stimulated both by radical groups and by suffering people’s sense that society, with all its abundant resources possessed ultimately by the federal government, had to do something to end the epidemic of unjust suffering. Roosevelt and the New Deal were products of the country’s growing collectivism more than they were causes of it. And for many millions of Americans, they never went far enough.
Support for the Workers’ Bill grew during the next few years, with the help of continued demonstrations, petitions, postcard campaigns, and the efforts of radical unionists to enlist union members’ support. Hunger marchers in many states demanded that legislatures pass state versions of the bill. To take one example, Illinois saw at least four such marches to Springfield between 1931 and 1933, at the culmination of which a delegate delivered a speech before the legislature requesting enactment of the bill. The two national hunger marches Communists organized in December 1931 and 1932 gave publicity to the bill; on February 4, 1932, which the Communist Party had dubbed National Unemployment Insurance Day, hundreds of thousands of people around the country demonstrated for it. Petitions garnered thousands of signatures: in Chicago, for instance, during just three weeks in March 1932, over 30,000 people—in factories, AFL locals, public shelters, and neighborhoods—signed the bill, in preparation for May 2, when 200 workers “from all important industries from every section of America” were again going to present the petitions to Congress. Across the country, 1933 saw the organizing of numerous conferences of unemployed groups to coordinate the campaign for unemployment insurance and to prepare for the CP’s National Convention Against Unemployment in February 1934.6
Meanwhile, workers were waging their own battles in their unions, trying to get members, unions, and federations on record as supporting national unemployment insurance, preferably in the form of the Workers’ Bill. By late 1930, despite the opposition of the AFL (which was committed to the anti-government principle of voluntarism), many constituent organizations had called for legislation, including eight state federations of labor, the central labor bodies of nine cities, and the American Federation of Teachers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the ILGWU, the United Textile Workers, the United Hebrew Trades, and a number of other Internationals. Public pressure continued to mount in 1931, as 52 bills for unemployment insurance were introduced (unsuccessfully) in state legislatures. But at the 1931 AFL convention, the leadership was still able to smother the growing demand that the Federation change its voluntarist position. A rank-and-file movement, therefore, was organized in January 1932, when Carpenters Local 2717 in New York City called a conference of AFL unions. Representatives of 19 locals passed a resolution to appoint a committee—the AFL Trade Union Committee for Unemployment Insurance and Relief (AFLTU Committee)—that would gauge sentiment and build support among unions for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill. In part because of its activities—and despite its being viciously persecuted by the national office as Communist—by the spring of 1934 over 2,000 locals and many central bodies had joined in its endorsement of the Communist-authored bill that Representative Ernest Lundeen had just introduced in Congress.7
The head of the AFLTU Committee was Louis Weinstock, a Communist member of the Painters’ Union in New York City. To advocate for the Workers’ Bill, which became the Lundeen Bill in 1934, he conducted a national tour that year, in each city contacting unionists who helped him organize meetings that hundreds of workers attended. Some cities had their own local AFL Committee for Unemployment Insurance, while in others Weinstock helped create one (or several). In reports to the Communist Party, he made some telling observations about the left-wing militancy of the local unions he encountered, as contrasted with the conservatism of the Internationals to which they belonged. For example, while some locals insisted that unemployed members should be able to remain in good standing even if they could not pay dues, Internationals were more likely to want to purge their out-of-work members. In many cities, building trades unions followed the practice of the Unemployed Councils in electing small relief committees to take members to a charity office and demand more relief. They often even united with the Councils in these activities, a tendency that, from the perspective of higher union officials, was growing to “alarming proportions” all over the country. Internationals, on the other hand, usually followed the conservative AFL line in its absolute rejection of cooperation with Communists, to the point that members who participated in Unemployed Council demonstrations risked being expelled from the union. In a case in Minneapolis, for instance, a local refused to accept the decision of its International that one of its members be expelled for having taken part in a Communist demonstration. The International replied that unless the union expelled her, it would have its charter revoked.8
But already by 1932, sentiment in favor of unemployment insurance had swept the large majority of rank-and-file unionists, in addition, of course, to the long-term unemployed whether unionized or not. Members were radicalizing, growing friendlier with Communists in their disgust at the inaction of union leaders. To quote Mauritz Hallgren, a keen observer of the labor movement,
although in the early years of the crisis they had tended to drift away from the unions, [jobless members] were in 1932 taking an increasingly active part in union affairs. The fear was expressed that in some organizations the unemployed might even come into control of the bureaucratic machinery. That they exercised a tremendous influence over local unions and city and state central bodies was seen from the avalanche of radical demands that poured in upon the quarterly meeting of the Federation’s executive council at Atlantic City in July [1932]. The rank-and-file workers, whether unemployed or not, were no longer to be put off with windy promises of action…9
After the powerful United Mine Workers endorsed the principle of government action at its convention in early 1932—which followed endorsements in 1931 by the Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Molders’ Union, and many others—the AFL’s executive council saw the writing on the wall. It could prevaricate and postpone no longer; it had to accept, and propose at the next national convention, a version of compulsory unemployment insurance, thereby accepting the idea of government “interference” in the affairs of organized labor. But it certainly did not endorse the Workers’ Bill, or even the principle of federal action; instead, at the 1932 convention in November, the executive council recommended that the AFL endorse the idea of state unemployment insurance. Many of the delegates present considered this proposal too conservative, but nevertheless the convention approved it by an “overwhelming margin.” Not content with this victory, the AFLTU Committee continued its activism in the following years.10
As stated a moment ago, the growing support for the Workers’ Bill finally managed to get it introduced in Congress in early 1934, when Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party sponsored it in the House (as H.R. 7598). While it fared even worse in this session of Congress than it was to fare in 1935, its presence at the federal level increased the momentum of its popularity among the working class. In Chicago, for example, leaders of the conservative local Federation of Labor began to have less success than in previous years preventing unions from endorsing it, as locals of the Railway Conductors, Railway Clerks, Machinists, Painters, Metal Polishers, School Custodians, Women’s Upholsterers, Granite Cutters, Millinery Workers, and many other unions sent delegates to a Communist-sponsored unemployment insurance conference in the summer of 1934. In July, representatives of 43,000 workers who were organized in fraternal and benevolent societies (specifically, in the Federation of Fraternal Organizations in Struggle for Unemployment Insurance) attended a hearing before the Chicago City Council to demand that that body support the bill; committees also visited aldermen in their wards to demand the same. In September, at another conference in Chicago, delegates from the National Unemployed Leagues, the Illinois Workers Alliance, the Eastern Federation of Unemployed and Emergency Workers Union, the Wisconsin Federation of Unemployed Leagues, and the Fort Wayne Unemployed League—in the aggregate claiming a membership of 750,000—endorsed the measure. Similar conferences occurred in other regions of the country.11
In January 1934, another organization had been founded that was to play an important role in lending academic respectability to the bill: the Inter-Professional Association for Social Insurance (IPA). While not officially affiliated with the Communist Party, it had close ties to leading Party members and coordinated its campaign for passage of the Lundeen Bill with organizations of the Left. Within a year it had dozens of chapters and organizing committees around the country, made up of both individual professionals and representatives of groups—nurses, physicians, actors, teachers, engineers, architects, authors, etc. The distinguished social worker Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation led an army of her colleagues in supporting the bill and, in some cases, proselytizing for it in the press and before Congress. Economists and lawyers associated with the IPA testified to the economic soundness and constitutionality of the measure, especially in 1935, when Lundeen reintroduced it as H.R. 2827. Left-wing professionals considered it vastly superior to the Wagner-Lewis bill of 1934 and 1935—what became the Social Security Act—a professor at Smith College, for example, damning the latter as “a proposal to set up little privileged groups in the sea of misery who would be content to sit on their small islands and watch the others drown.” The Lundeen Bill (or Workers’ Bill) was certainly not without flaws, including its vagueness and, arguably, the financial burden it would impose on the country, but evidently, its Communist-style radicalism was so appreciated that even experts in their field were willing to overlook its defects.12
Significantly, it was in fact far more extensive than the Soviet Union’s measures for unemployment and social insurance. While the Lundeen Bill provided (among other things) for unemployment benefits for an unlimited period of time equal to 100 percent of wages—or much more, since an unskilled laborer with a wife and four children who might be lucky to get $16 a week would get $25 if unemployed!13—in Soviet Russia only about 35 percent of the customary wage was paid, and that for a limited time. Moreover, the various forms of insurance that H.R. 2827 would establish (unemployment, old age, maternity, disability, and industrial injury) were to be administered by councils of workers and their representatives, thus embodying a “workers’ democracy” that the Soviet system only lived up to on paper. In effect, then, the millions of Americans who advocated the measure desired a system that was, in some respects, more authentically communist/socialist than the Soviet one.14
A few days after Lundeen reintroduced his bill on January 3, 1935, the National Congress for Unemployment and Social Insurance was held in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Auditorium. Organized by the CP and its many allies, the congress comprised almost 3,000 delegates who had come by truck, jalopy, rail, box car, and on foot from every region of the country and forty states. To quote one historian, “cowboys from Colorado and Wyoming, black sharecroppers from Alabama, Texas oil hands, Florida housewives, skilled and unskilled workers, employed and unemployed” in the dead of winter made the pilgrimage to the nation’s seat of power, guided by visions of an egalitarian society, conscious that in their aggregate they directly represented millions and indirectly represented well over half the country. Unions of all types—professional, AFL-affiliated, independent; fraternal organizations and political groups; farm organizations and shop delegates; women’s groups, church groups, veterans’ groups, and unemployed groups—hundreds of such organizations, in an anticipation of the Popular Front, managed to overcome the congenital sectarianism of the Left and call as one for unprecedented social democracy. A few of the scores of lesser-known unemployed groups that were represented included the Chinese Unemployed Alliance, the Farmer Labor Union, the Italian Unemployed Groups, the Relief Workers League, the United Mine Workers Unemployment Council, the Workers Union of the World, the Right-To-Live Club, and the Dancers Emergency Association. The National Urban League, which endorsed the bill, also sent delegates.15
The legendary socialist and feminist Mother Bloor, who addressed the congress, pithily summed up its significance to a reporter from the Washington Post: “‘The congress is a success. It’s proved a big crowd of people can break down barriers of race, social position, political opinions, and convictions for a common cause. Why, there are white people and yellow people and black people out there.’ She nodded toward the mass meeting going on in the auditorium. ‘There are Communists and Socialists and Republicans. There’s even some Democrats.’” At the Congressional hearings on H.R. 2827, the chairman of the congress stated, not implausibly, that it had “formed the broadest and most representative congress of the American people ever held in the United States.”16
The Congressional hearings themselves were noteworthy. While the executive secretary of the IPA may have exaggerated when he wrote, “The record of the hearings on H.R. 2827 is one of the most challenging ever placed before the Congress of the United States and probably the most unique document ever to appear in the Congressional Record,” that judgment is understandable. Eighty witnesses testified: industrial workers, farmers, veterans, professional workers, African-Americans, women, the foreign-born, and youth. “Probably never in American history,” an editor of the Nation wrote, “have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress.” The aggregate of the testimonies amounted to a systematic indictment of American capitalism and the New Deal, and an impassioned defense of the radical alternative under consideration. Witness after witness described the harrowing suffering that they and the thousands they represented (in each case) were enduring, and condemned the Wagner-Lewis bill as a sham. From the representative of the American Youth Congress, which encompassed over two million people, to the representative of the United Council of Working-Class Women, which had 10,000 members, each testimony fleshed out the eminently “class-conscious” point of view of the people back home who had “gather[ed] up nickels and pennies which they [could] poorly spare” in order to send someone to plead their case before Congress. Most of the Congressmen on the Labor subcommittee they were addressing were strikingly sympathetic.17
For example, when Herbert Benjamin, one of the leaders of the CP, had this to say on press coverage (or the lack thereof) of the Lundeen Bill—
So much has been said in the last few weeks about the Townsend plan [for old-age pensions]. I have discussed this question with a number of Members [of Congress], and they tell me that, outside of California, they received not a single postcard on the Townsend plan, but they received thousands of cards from all over the United States on the Lundeen Bill, asking for the enactment of this bill. Yet the newspapers, by reason of the fact that they really fear this measure and do not fear the Townsend plan, knowing that the Townsend plan can be a very good red herring to draw attention away from social insurance, have given publicity to the Townsend plan, and have yet avoided very studiously any attention to the workers’ unemployment and social-insurance measure—
the chairman of the subcommittee, Matthew Dunn, interrupted to say,
I want to substantiate the statement you just made about the Townsend bill and about this bill. Now, I represent the Thirty-fourth District in Pennsylvania, which is a very large district. May I say that I do not believe I have received over a half dozen letters to support the Townsend bill; however, I have received quite a number of letters and cards from the State of California. In addition to that, I have received many letters and cards from all over the country asking me to give my utmost support in behalf of the Lundeen bill, H.R. 2827.18
Incidentally, Benjamin’s complaint about press coverage was justified. Overwhelming press attention was devoted to the much less radical—and less economically sound—Townsend Plan, while virtually no coverage was granted the Lundeen Bill except during and after the subcommittee’s hearings, and even then it was mostly local papers that covered it. According to the executive secretary of the IPA, “forty-three news releases to all the news agencies and newspapers of the major cities during the course of two weeks [i.e., during the hearings] were, with few exceptions, suppressed, although in those outlying districts where organization has made the demands of the workers more articulate, some papers carried workers’ testimony as front page news.”19 As mentioned earlier, historians have followed newspapers’ lead by tending to ignore the Lundeen Bill and focus on the Townsend Plan, in some cases condescendingly interpreting the popularity of the latter’s provisions as evidence of the credulousness and simple-mindedness of the American public.20 This emphasis is unfortunate in that (1) it was the press that was significantly responsible for propagating the Townsend Plan (presumably to divert attention from the Lundeen Bill), and (2) the supposedly simple-minded public had the organizational sophistication and political savvy to build momentum behind a more reasonable bill premised on both the reality and the valorization of class conflict, not only without help from the press but despite active hostility from nearly all sectors of power—the press, the AFL, the Roosevelt administration, reactionary Southern landowners and politicians, and big business in general. Under such conditions, for example, organizers’ ability to get over five million signatures on their petitions was no mean achievement.21
Admittedly, compared to the number of signatures they likely could have collected had they possessed more resources, five million is not terribly impressive. In the spring of 1935, the New York Post conducted a poll of its readers after printing the contents of the Lundeen, the Townsend, and the Wagner-Lewis bills. Out of 1,391 votes cast, 1,209 readers supported the first, 157 the second, 14 the third, and 7 none of them. Of the 1,073 respondents who were employed, 957 supported the Lundeen Bill, 100 the Townsend Bill, 7 the Wagner-Lewis Bill, and 5 none. It would not be outlandish to infer from these findings that, had they known of the contents of the bills, a majority of working-class (and perhaps even many middle-class) Americans would have preferred Lundeen’s Communist-written one. This is also suggested by the enormous number of letters congressmen received on the measure, such as this one sent to Lundeen:
The reason I am writing you is that we Farmers [and] Industrial workers feel that you are the only Congressman and Representative that is working for our interest. We have analyzed the Wagner-Lewis Bill [and] also [the] Townsend Bill. But the Lundeen H.R. (2827) is the only bill that means anything for our class… The people all over the country are [waking] up to the facts that the two old Political Parties are owned soul, mind [and] body by the Capitalist Class.22
Feeling the pressure of this mass support, both the subcommittee and the House Labor Committee voted in favor of H.R. 2827 that spring, making it the first unemployment insurance plan in U.S. history to be recommended by a committee. It had no chance in the House, though. The Rules Committee refused to send it to the floor, although it allowed Lundeen to propose it as an amendment to the Social Security Bill (as a substitute for the unemployment insurance provisions in that bill). It was defeated in April by a vote of 204 to 52.23
As far as its advocates were concerned, the fight was not over. Throughout the spring and summer of 1935, the flood of endorsements did not stop. The first national convention of rank-and-file social workers endorsed it in February; the Progressive Miners of America followed, along with scores of local unions and such ethnic societies as the Italian-American Democratic Organization of New York (with 235,000 members) and the Slovak-American Political Federation of Youngstown, Ohio. Virtually identical state versions of H.R. 2827 were, or already had been, introduced in the legislatures of California, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other states. Conferences of unions and fraternal organizations were called in a number of states, including the Deep South, to plan further campaigns for the Workers’ Bill. That year’s May Day was one of the largest in American history, “monster demonstrations” (to quote the New York Times)of tens of thousands taking place in New York City, for example; and in many cities, included among the marchers were united fronts of church groups, workers clubs, fraternal lodges, and Communist and Socialist groups parading under banners demanding the passage of H.R. 2827. While the majority of AFL unions never endorsed the bill, perhaps because William Green and the executive council were exerting intense pressure on them not to do so, it is probable that most of the rank and file supported it.24
In January 1936, Ernest Lundeen and Republican Senator of North Dakota Lynn Frazier introduced in their respective houses of Congress a more sophisticated version of the bill, which the Inter-Professional Association had written. Again it was endorsed by unions, labor councils, and other institutions, including the 1936 convention of the EPIC movement in California. The National Joint Action Committee for Genuine Social Insurance, which had grown out of the 1935 Congress for Unemployment and Social Insurance, coordinated a nationwide campaign. In New York, “flying squads” from the Fraternal Federation for Social Insurance visited lodges and fraternal organizations throughout the city (e.g., Knights of Pythias, Woodmen of the World, Workmen’s Circle, etc.) to secure their support. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and several other cities, united-front conferences and committees were organized to campaign for the bill. The hearings before the Senate Labor Committee in April resembled the hearings on H.R. 2827, with academics, social workers, unionists, and farmers testifying as to the inadequacy of the recently passed Social Security Act and the necessity of the Frazier-Lundeen Bill. A representative of the National Committee on Rural Social Planning spoke for millions of agricultural workers, sharecroppers, tenants, and small owners when he opined that this bill was “the only one which is likely to check the fascist terror now riding the fields” in the South (directed against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union).25
The fascist terror continued unchecked, however, for the bill did not even make it out of committee. After its dismal fate in 1936, it was never introduced again.
From a certain perspective, one might say that the Workers’ Bill, in its radicalism and collectivism, departed from traditions of “Americanism,” whatever that word is taken to mean. From another perspective, however, we might see the bill as something like the apotheosis of radical collectivist strains that for many decades had been embedded in American popular culture. The class solidarity it embodied in its frontal attack on fundamental institutions of capitalism—private appropriation of wealth, determination of wages by the market, maintenance of an insecure army of the unemployed—has perhaps just as much claim to the title of “Americanism” as anything else, for U.S history abounds with the solidarity of the wealthy and the solidarity of the poor. It so happens that with regard to the Workers’ Bill, as on so many other occasions, the solidarity of the wealthy triumphed—because, as always, of the greater resources at the disposal of the wealthy.
In any event, it should be clear from the foregoing discussion that the Workers’ Bill deserves more attention from historians than it has received, not only as an intrinsically interesting phenomenon but also because its popularity suggests that “ordinary Americans” in the Depression years were a good deal more radical than historiography has tended to assume. If a significant proportion of Americans favored the Workers’ Bill, to that extent they must have been quite dissatisfied by the comparative conservatism of the Roosevelt administration.
On one hand, there is much truth to Jefferson Cowie’s argument, for example, in The Great Exception, that the comparative radicalism of the New Deal moment in American political history was a result of very specific and contingent circumstances, such as the damming of the flood of immigration to the U.S. in the early 1920s. Whether people would have expressed so much support for the explicitly class-conscious Workers’ Bill in the absence of these circumstances is an open question. It is quite possible that the “labor aristocracy” of white men in particular would have shunned such a bill in the 1920s or earlier, given its premise of cross-racial and cross-ethnic class solidarity. Nor is it very likely that by the late 1940s, in a political environment of increasing conservatism, an ever-more-economically-secure working class would have expressed the same enthusiasm for the Lundeen Bill that it did during the 1930s, when radical horizons opened up and a new world briefly seemed possible.
On the other hand, I can detect no significant differences in support for the bill between races, genders, or regions of the country: women and men, white and Black, industrial worker and sharecropper, Northerner and Southerner signed petitions, attended rallies, and organized meetings to advocate for a legislative measure they saw as a final guarantee of economic security. Its promise to radically disrupt the American political economy was no bar to their advocacy; indeed, it is more apt to say that such disruption is precisely what attracted them to the measure.
The near-universality of working-class support is suggested by an unusual incident in March 1936, which may serve as a coda to the story of the Workers’ Bill. In order to advertise its liberal position on freedom of speech, CBS invited Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party, to speak for fifteen minutes (at 10:45 p.m.) on a national radio broadcast, with the understanding that he would be answered the following night by zealous anti-Communist Congressman Hamilton Fish. Browder seized the opportunity for a national spotlight and appealed to “the majority of the toiling people” to establish a national Farmer-Labor Party that would be affiliated with the Communist Party, though it “would not yet take up the full program of socialism, for which many are not yet prepared.” He even declared that Communists’ ultimate aim was to remake the U.S. “along the lines of the highly successful Soviet Union”: once they had the support of a majority of Americans, he said, “we will put that program into effect with the same firmness, the same determination, with which Washington and the founding fathers carried through the revolution that established our country, with the same thoroughness with which Lincoln abolished chattel slavery.”26
Reactions to Browder’s talk were revealing: according to both CBS and the Daily Worker, they were almost uniformly positive. CBS immediately received several hundred responses praising Browder’s talk, and the Daily Worker, whose New York address Browder had mentioned on the air, received thousands of letters. The following are representative:
Chattanooga, Tennessee: “If you could have listened to the people I know who listened to you, you would have learned that your speech did much to make them realize the importance of forming a Farmer-Labor Party. I am sure that the 15 minutes into which you put so much that is vitally important to the American people was time used to great advantage. Many people are thanking you, I know.”
Evanston, Illinois: “Just listened to your speech tonight and I think it was the truest talk I ever heard on the radio. Mr. Browder, would it not be a good thing if you would have an opportunity to talk to the people of the U.S.A. at least once a week, for 30 to 60 minutes? Let’s hear from you some more, Mr. Browder.”
Springfield, Pennsylvania: “I listened to your most interesting speech recently on the radio. I would be much pleased to receive your articles on Communism. Although I am an American Legion member I believe you are at least sincere in your teachings.”
Bricelyn, Minnesota: “Your speech came in fine and it was music to the ears of another unemployed for four years. Please send me full and complete data on your movement and send a few extra copies if you will, as I have some very interested friends—plenty of them eager to join up, as is yours truly.”
Harrold, South Dakota: “Thank you for the fine talk over the air tonight. It was good common sense and we were glad you had a chance to talk over the air and glad to hear someone who had nerve enough to speak against capitalism.”
Sparkes, Nebraska: “Would you send me 50 copies of your speech over the radio last night? I would like to give them to some of my neighbors who are all farmers.”
Arena, New York: “Although I am a young Republican (but good American citizen) I enjoyed listening to your radio speech last evening. I believe you told the truth in a convincing manner and I failed to see where you said anything dangerous to the welfare of the American people.”
Julesburg, Colorado: “Heard your talk… It was great. Would like a copy of same, also other dope on your party. It is due time we take a hand in things or there will be no United States left in a few more years. Will be looking forward for this dope and also your address.”27
In general, the main themes of the letters were questions like, “Where can I learn more about the Communist Party?”, “How can I join your Party?”, and “Where is your nearest headquarters?” Some people sent money in the hope that it would facilitate more broadcasts. The editors of the Daily Worker plaintively asked their readers, “Isn’t it time we overhauled our old horse-and-buggy methods of recruiting? While we are recruiting by ones and twos, aren’t we overlooking hundreds?” One can only imagine how many millions of people in far-flung regions would have flocked to the Communist banner had Browder and William Z. Foster been permitted the national radio audience that Huey Long and the wildly popular “radio priest” Father Coughlin were.
But such is the history of workers and the unemployed in the U.S.: elite efforts to suppress the political agenda and the voices of the downtrodden have all too often succeeded, thereby wiping out the memory of popular struggles. Indeed, to the extent that anti-statism and “individualism” have reigned in American political culture (as Cowie, among many others, emphasizes), it is largely because opposing tendencies and traditions have been actively suppressed, even violently crushed. But if we can resurrect such stories as that of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, they may prove of use in our own time of troubles, as new struggles against political oppression are born.
Three of our writers are joined by veteran union organizer Chris Townsend for a podcast discussion on labor organizing across history and in the present day. Chris, Remi, Peter, and Annie will explore how to do what Lenin emphasized had to be done: how do we inject the political ‘good news’ of socialism into the workers’ economistic struggle? They recapitulate how the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party situated itself in the labor organizing of the early 1900s, how the ‘third period’ of the Comintern laid the basis of the formation of the CIO in the US, and attempt to extrapolate what can we learn from those tactics to apply in the present day.
As always, please subscribe to our Patreon for early access to podcasts and other rewards.
Anton Johannsen argues that labor law is a terrain of class struggle that can only be ignored at our own peril.
Nick Walter, labor organizer, IWW member, and writer at Organizing.Work recently published an article titled “Labor Law Doesn’t Advance Class Struggle, The End.” As the pithy title indicates, the argument is that labor law isn’t the answer for developing and pushing forward the class struggle. Walter’s solution? Direct action.
But Walter’s piece suffers from a simple error – a reification. To reify is to mistake an abstract category for something concrete. In Walter’s case, he mistakes the particular or concrete labor laws which he dislikes for the abstract category “labor law” as a whole. This mistake is a function of ideology. Walter’s outlook is straightforwardly in line with that of Organizing.Work (OW from now on) more broadly, which is a kind of mass strike anarchism. This outlook views the law, and thus politics and the state, in a reified way – as nothing more than a distraction from direct action militancy. Unfortunately, this position is ahistorical and ends up contradicting itself in practice. As a result, either the theory or the practice must change.
The error is simple: If I claim all sandwiches are bad because they have mayonnaise, I’ll be hard-pressed to justify any future obsession with paninis. Even if I drag out the point that the paninis I eat don’t have mayonnaise, I’ve contradicted my initial claim: how can paninis be good if all sandwiches are bad? This silly illustration highlights the logical problem of Walter’s position. What he’s really after is better labor law, not the abolition of labor law. He even says as much:
“I was arguing for concerted activity protections like exist in the United States and the people from a few of the unions were uneasy about that.”
This is also the clearest sign that not all labor law is the same. Walter likes Section 7 of the Wagner Act. This section protects the right of workers – union or not – to engage in certain protected, concerted activity while at work. But then is this too a mere snare? How does this hold back militancy? If anything, it appears to protect it. So does all labor law hold back militancy or not? Walter’s position reveals itself to be a contradictory one.
I suspect that such a frank contradiction of the essay’s central argument is a result of Walter’s practical focus. He’s less concerned with abstract consistency than with what works in practice. That’s not a completely unreasonable position to have as a labor organizer, but unfortunately that approach will lead to contradictions in practice. In order to describe the contradictions that Walter’s pragmatic unionism runs into with the law, it will help to establish the outlook of OW more clearly.
OW is a blog edited by organizers in the IWW. It is not an official publication of the union, but is instead an effort by organizers to share stories about organizing and discuss strategy. OW’s outlook is basically that of the anarcho-syndicalists and left-wing of the Second International, which dedicated its efforts to organizing for mass strikes:
“Many of us – the contributors and editor – are members of the Industrial Workers of the World. As a model, we favor “solidarity unionism”: a committee of workers in the workplace democratically running the union effort, and taking direct action “on the shop floor” to get what they want.”
This is to be expected, as the IWW was firmly in this camp from its founding throughout its peak.
The outline of the mass strike strategy is that any sort of revolutionary movement of workers for a new society requires the development of the working class’s ability to carry out mass, militant direct actions to force their demands. This much united the Left-Wing and Center of the Second International.1 Where the Left goes one step further than the center is its claim that direct action and direct action alone is the class struggle, and everything else a mere reaction to or distraction from this activity.
Walter and other authors at OW have argued that unions ought to exist primarily to develop this direct action capability. Where unions don’t develop direct action, they fail, no matter the bread and butter gains, changes in working dynamics, and power at work. In contrast, where unions develop militancy, they are winning, no matter their size, their reach, and barring only outright manifestations of backward political development (racism, misogyny, etc.). For example, Walter writes:
“CUPW won pay equity in the 1970s through massively disruptive strikes that were less than legal. The Employment Insurance we have in Canada is as much due to a riot in the 1930s in Regina, Saskatchewan than any other single factor. Class struggle is how we turn around the current state of things. We certainly don’t win every time. But if you count up all the wins over a long period you notice that you make a staggering amount of progress that way, far more than you would from all of the best legal minds and an infinite budget for arbitrations and board hearings.”
Here, Walter is equating mass direct action to class struggle. Indeed, this position has been put forwardin multiple OW pieces.
In “Canvassing is not Organizing”, Ray Valentine argues that political organizing isn’t the same as union organizing. But this isn’t what the title says. The title argues that a tactic which even unions have used to success is somehow not organizing at all. The author’s real point is that “The techniques of political campaigns are designed for a particular purpose, and that purpose is not organizing the working class to wrest control of social institutions and emancipate itself.” This outlook appears to suggest that because capitalists use the “technique” of drafting organizational rules, any working-class movement must avoid drafting rules. After all, we’re told that because a capitalist might organize a political party and campaign for support, the very practice is therefore off-limits. This is absurd on its face.The state is the preeminent social institution in capitalism, and politics is a struggle between classes over which controls the state. Valentine’s claim that politics is not a struggle over which class controls social institutions falls on its face.
Walter’s own review of Jane McAlevy’s “No Shortcuts” argues that electoral politics are a snare for union members and leaders. Elections distract union members and leaders from the use of their “subversive” and most effective element – direct action:
“This subversion of the existing economic logic of society is why the right wing and business interests hate unions so much. But when unions break from this logic and enter conventional politics they find themselves drawn onto a terrain where they have no power. It allows union leaders (and high-profile union staff) to believe there is something other than economic disruption that gives them a bargaining chip. It’s not that union leaders can never have political influence inside the halls of power; it’s that the only influence they can have comes from laying down the source of their power.”
The essay at hand provides other evidence of this outlook. Walter is critical of card check, first contract arbitration, and imposing certification where the employer’s illegal anti-union conduct tainted the election process. Why? Because these laws: “exist[] to condition a certain kind of union into existence.” What kind of union? A union that dampens militancy rather than developing it. The unstated premise is that developing workers’ capacity to carry out militant direct action should be the primary focus of unions.
I want to note that I agree with Walter’s criticisms of the limits to card check and first contract arbitration. They pose the danger of conferring the responsibility of being a union without having developed local leaders and organizing capacity. But what are we developing militancy and direct action capacities for? To change social relations. As noted above, the purpose of politics is to contest sovereign power. I’m using the concept of sovereign power here because I share anarchists’ reasonable skepticism of the capitalist state. But politics doesn’t have to be solely about winning control in the extant state. Politics can also be about reshaping that state, or even fighting for a new form of state, or sovereign power, altogether. Ultimately it is the form of state power that determines which class is sovereign. This need to contest the sovereign power in society – the need to engage in politics as such is connected to Walter’s aversion to legal issues: the law is, after all, what the state enforces.
In contrast to the Left, the Center of the Second International saw mass direct action as a necessary but insufficient component of class struggle.2 One purpose of the political realm of the class struggle is to shape the legal terrain upon which direct action can take place. Viewed in this light, questions of law lose their mystification – no law vs. some law becomes a debate about what kinds of laws and why? Though the state form determines which class is sovereign, the nature of class sovereignty is such that it must permit some degree of freedom, even for members of the oppressed and exploited classes. This is a key feature in the distinction between slave societies and class societies – the exploited in a slave society aren’t juridical persons, but instead, property. In contrast, workers are, constitutionally speaking, afforded the same rights in the state as professionals, small business owners, landlords, bankers, and capitalists. However, in the regulation of private affairs, the state may reach out and accommodate landlords here, or tip the scale against workers there. Thus, the state’s structure – its working rules, the limitations it puts on the actions of workers on the one hand, and capitalists on the other – determines which class is sovereign in and through its regulation of ‘civil society’ or contracts, agreements, and disputes between supposedly ‘non-state’ individuals.
Here is where the contradictions come in for Walter. It is illusory to fight for a purely state-independent labor movement in the U.S. and it always has been. The first reason this is true is that it isn’t practical. The second reason is that there is no historical basis for doing so.
In theory, Walter wants to develop the independent power of the working class to take militant direct action to force demands. But in practice, almost every I.W.W. campaign touted on OW has availed itself of the National Labor Relations Board and filing Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs) in order to pressure employers to cave. When we file a ULP we’re asking a well-salaried government official to investigate the illegal conduct of the employer. We’re asking that they bring the weight of the government to bear on employers, that eventually this weight either leads to a decision and enforcement against the employer or, more likely, ends up pressuring the employer to settle.
This isn’t a marginal question if you argue that working-class power comes from direct action and self-organization alone. It’s a straightforward contradiction. According to this logic, if we really want to develop mass working-class militancy, then we need to eschew ULPs, the NLRB and everything related. We would also be expected to eschew even the rare federal injunctions by courts against employers and many other court-ordered judgments. But why? What business does a class struggle (read “direct action”) union have relying on the bourgeois state?
After all, any reliance on the state and its force against the bourgeoisie supposedly legitimates the state as an institution that executes law on behalf of workers. Even if it is merely a court injunction, it deludes the workers into thinking that they can expect the state to go to bat for them again in the future.
However, Walter and OW clearly do not advocate for a pure anti-state position. And the reason they don’t do this is the same reason Walter doesn’t actually believe all labor law holds back class struggle: it wouldn’t be practical. Indeed, beyond his praise for Section 7 rights, Walter admits to even minor benefits from contracts: “A union contract can represent a more favorable legal terrain for certain disputes but more often than not it’s also about writing down a series of trade-offs.” It is indisputable that all law is just words on paper or in the mouths of lawyers and judges without enforcement. But when we assume an anti-legal political posture, we cut off opportunities to utilize court-ordered enforcement of the law and any discussion and development of a strategy to do so. Walter’s position foments the type of disengagement that leads to less favorable enforcement of the law and as such, it is a retreat from a theater of class war.
The second contradiction is that labor history provides uswith legal reforms that have allowed or encouraged the development of class struggle. It is common for leftists, especially mass strikists and anarchists to point to the 1933-34 strike wave as a spontaneous or at least purely direct action affair. The strike wave was an explosion of working-class militancy and organizing which then led to the emergence of legal reforms that certified in law the rights won in practice. But this is a convenient fiction. The 1933-34 strikewave wasn’t spontaneous. The central flaw of this claim is that it assumes what it needs to explain. Why did workers decide to engage in strikes across the country in 1933?
It wasn’t just prior organizing. Yes, for years prior to the passage of the Norris LaGuardia Act, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists were involved in every type of organizing – boring from within and forming independent unions.3 This organizing developed the radicals as militants within the labor movement, earned them respect, and set them up to take advantage of the economic crisis that would emerge at the turn of the decade. But most of their organizing attempts were rolled back and crushed. The historical reality is that it was a set of political-legal reforms that triggered the strike wave. The passage of the Norris-LaGuardia and the National Industrial Recovery Act was the 1-2 punch that opened up space for workers to lead the 1933-34 strike wave.
The first punch was the Norris LaGuardia Act, which restricted the power of federal courts to issue injunctions in labor disputes. For decades, U.S. courts had granted and enforced injunctions against striking workers. Anytime an employer was faced with mass direct action of workers, they would go to the courts and argue that this action violated the rights of the employer.4 Senator George Norris and Representative Fiorello LaGuardia were two progressive Republican politicians that pushed their bill through Congress in 1932. The act laid out 9 things Federal courts could no longer enjoin, including striking, joining a union, supporting striking, and publicizing about an ongoing strike or labor dispute. This restraining of federal district and appellate courts helped tie up the hands of the judiciary for the 1933 strike wave.
The second punch was the National Industrial Recovery Act. Passed in 1933, the NIRA included this language:
“employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection[.]”5
This is Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act. It would go on to form the basis for the same Section 7 of the Wagner Act which Walter finds so appealing. This second blow pushed the capitalist class off-balance enough that millions of workers began streaming into unions – liberal, communist, anarchist – whichever, in the wider context of the depression. These two pieces of legislation opened up space for workers across the country to assume an offensive posture against employers. In other words, they advanced the class struggle.6
These contradictions suggest two things. First, it suggests that the position of OW and Walter is untenable because it is contradictory in practice. This in turn calls for the OW types to reconcile their outlook, either going for the deeply impractical position of being ‘purely anti-state’ or merely adjusting their ideology to reflect their practice – admit that the law can at times “advance” class struggle. That is, law can be useful for workers and unions to use because it can allow us to leverage power to limit some conduct of the employers. OW accepts this in practice but rejects it in theory.
Second, if it is true that the state can be leveraged to help worker organizing, then it suggests that class struggle is not exclusively limited to direct action by workers. Then we should develop a clearer theory of the law and a better strategy for using it in practice. We should ask what ways of using the legal arena comport with our principles.
I suspect this will be a hard pill to swallow. I have a great deal of respect for Walter and the writers and editors of OW, but by reducing the class struggle to direct action, they risk painting themselves into a corner. The argument goes like this: We need a revolution in our political system. Political change happens with class struggle. Class struggle is the mass direct action of the working class. Then, either true politics is limited to direct action or if politics is defined to go beyond direct action (voting in elections, running campaigns for legal reforms) then politics is merely a distraction from class struggle. The result is that as long as this outlook is hegemonic, we will continue to organize on legal terrain laid down by our class enemies, instead of winning reforms that shape the terrain in ways advantageous to the working class. If we don’t start thinking politically and legally, we’ll remain cornered in our defensive posture indefinitely – and labor’s last 50 years of body blow after body blow will continue, unabated.
On this episode of Cosmopod, Donald and Parker welcome Cosmonaut author Josh Morris on to discuss the history and historiography of the US Communist Party. Academic accounts of the party have largely fit in two camps; Josh’s upcoming book The Many Worlds of American Communism attempts to go beyond the standard story and rethink the scholarship for a post-Cold War era. Below we have included a preview of Morris’ book which is based on the preface.
The Communist Party of Philadelphia holds a rally on May Day, 1935, across the street from City Hall.
In 2019, amidst a wet and humid June afternoon, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held its 100th anniversary conference. There, members young and old gathered to meet and greet as well as vote in the new generation of Party leaders. The conference numbered over 500 and attracted a large number of youth activists ranging from students to hard working young adults. In recent years, a growing interest in the concepts of Marxism, communism, and anarchism developed around the world as the international economy reached a crisis point during the 2008 recession. After the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century in 2013, which unveiled systemic conditions about income inequality throughout the modern world system, sales of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital soared throughout Britain and the United States. He Nian, a Chinese theatre director, re-created an all-singing, all-dancing musical to commemorate Marx’s work in 2014. English literature professor Terry Eagleton published Why Marx Was Right in 2011 while French Maoist philosopher Alian Badiou published The Communist Hypothesis to rally activists into a new era of communist theory.1 In the 2016 American Presidential Election, the CPUSA ardently advocated for opposition against Donald Trump in a manner that mimicked their historical attitude toward the ‘lesser of two evils thesis,’ earning them both attention and criticism from American activists, leftists, students, and unionists. Finally, in November of 2018, the Historians of American Communism gathered in Williamstown to discuss the 100 years of American communist history and its legacy in the United States.
My research examines the American communist movement from its origins in the spring of 1919 until the transition into what is increasingly being called the New Communist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I examine the role of communists in U.S. history by dividing up the narrative into multiple worlds of activity and engagement; particularly political activism, labor organizing, community organizing, and the experiences of anticommunism. I argue that American radicalism in the 20th century took on features that distinguished it from a specific effort, such as civil rights legislation or collective bargaining agreements. Whereas communism as a movement in the United States has been depicted historically as a rather exceptional and unique movement, I understand it as an expression of American radicalism. American Communism has a difficult and sometimes contradictory history; conflated between questions about ideological motivation and the practical gains netted by both American workers and citizens as a result of such motivation. American communist history is not a history of organizations, nor is it a history of how certain ideologies had effects on the actions of individuals. It is a history of people at the grassroots and how they chose to balance their lives within the context of American democracy and through the ideals of Marxian socialism.
This research asserts that American Communism can be understood in a variety of ways depending upon the context from which the examined organizers and activists engaged with American citizens. As Perry Anderson pointed out, to write a history of a communist party or movement one
“must take seriously a Gramscian maxim; that to write a history of a political party is to write the history of the society of which it is a component from a particular monographic standpoint. In other words, no history of a communist party is finally intelligible unless it is constantly related to the national balance of forces of which the party is only one moment, and which forms the context in which it must operate.”2
People engage in social movements with a passion that expresses the very conditions of societal pressure and a desire to change specific said conditions. When one examines the work of communist political activists, they will find experiences that unveil a deeply ideological political movement. By switching to an examination of communist labor activists, one reveals a much different narrative; focused on legal strategies for obtaining collective bargaining rights, and cared less about the conclusions of a political committee than it did the demands of local workers. Finally, if one examines the work of communist organizing in the communities against institutionalized forms of societal oppression, they will find a more emotional and cultural narrative that sees American radicals trying to balance the ideals of the nation with the ideology of Marxism.
I refer to the “many worlds” of American Communism as the variances of experience displayed in the historiographical and biographical record in an effort to unpack how American Communism meant different things to different people, and most importantly that these meanings changed with people as the years went by. American Communist history is best understood as one component of a larger history encompassing a variety of radical political, labor, and civil rights movements dating back to the late 19th century; the history of Pan-Socialist Left in the United States.3 By the 1930s, American Communism was indeed a “world political movement,” but it also existed as a domestic movement with localized influences that varied in experience from person-to-person. As a movement in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, American Communism varied from state-to-state, dependent upon geopolitical circumstances, social tensions over issues such as race, the extent of unemployment in dominant industries, and the palatability of industrial unionism within a given workforce.
Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on American Communism has expanded as newer sources became available, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDMII/RGAJPI) digitized its archives on the CPUSA, and new methods of interpreting history, such as an emphasis on personal experiences—sometimes referred to as social history—became more widely used. James Barrett’s William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism along with Randi Storch’s Red Chicago were among the first works to benefit from newer sources and demonstrated a clear break between the ‘traditional’ and ‘revisionist’ schools of thought, as put by Vernon L. Pedersen in The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-57. The traditionalist school, best represented by Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism, viewed the ideological link between the CPUSA and the Soviet Union as the most significant aspect of this history, particularly when defining the boundaries of what made a particular strike, event, or organization “communist.” These historians depicted American Communism as a wholly unique phenomenon; so unique that to be a member of the CPUSA was to already be considered anti-American. Seeking to understand American communism as a domestic ideological movement, the revisionist school countered with an emphasis on the “correction of injustices in American society,” with works such as Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem during the Depression and Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Black Radicalism and the Communist Party of Alabama.4
The traditionalist school suffers from a general negative perspective of communist ideology and treats it as a foreign/alien movement that only existed because of the Soviet Union. The revisionists suffer from a nuanced and overly positive perspective and make very little effort to explain why such a history requires a methodology that emphasizes context both internationally and domestically. In turn, criticism of revisionist scholarship on the subject by traditionalist historians, particularly Draper’s essays in the mid-1980s, do not take into account how by 1985 younger history scholars were in the midst of transformative academic overlapping fields of study. Michael Brown identified some of these overlaps which contributed to a shift in how revisionist scholars approached American communist history as: anthropological studies concerned with links between power and social differentiation, a more critical understanding of “resistance” and “identity,” intersectional feminism and its focus on gender and the relationship of social norms to heterogeneity, and new sociological studies on the cultural dialectics of populist activism. Both schools, however, unveil an over-arching handicap that prevents the writers and readers of the subject from fully grasping the complexity of American Communism.
At the root of the traditionalist and revisionist schools of American Communist history is the placement of the CPUSA and its leadership class as the nucleus of the entire history; where the narrative both begins and ends as a political history of dissidents and radicals. This depiction convinces the reader that they are examining a fundamentally un-American concept; a history of radicals in America as opposed to a history of Americans who turned to radicalism. Both schools use the CPUSA as the nexus from which their conclusions are drawn: The CPUSA’s ideological link and involvement in the Comintern as well as the policies of the Soviet Union served as the foundation for traditionalist claim that American Communism was merely a front for Soviet espionage and subversive activities. The CPUSA’s promotion of African American, labor, and civil rights as a political policy served as a foundation for the revisionists rejecting the significance of traditionalist claims and focusing on the positive contributions of communists toward labor and social history. In both instances, the CPUSA is the beginning and the end of the narrative, while the externals are used as contextual links and exceptions to the rules. A prime example is the preferential use of the term “ex-Communist;” which according to Draper and Klehr does not express someone’s rejection of socialism and Marxist ideology but rather merely their former membership in the CPUSA. Additionally, the individual testimonies of low-ranking communists and communists with shared membership across various organizations are overlooked in most analyses. Rather than see leaders and ex-members of the CPUSA as the cohort of what communists were, the examination of ‘many worlds’ asserts that all participants, from leaders to rank-and-file activists to so-called ‘fellow travelers’, must be understood as involved in the movement to varying degrees in overlapping efforts, even if only some of their efforts are associated with the CPUSA.
Hugo Gellert poster for Daily Worker circa 1935
The traditionalists focus on what I call the political world of American Communism; which indeed developed into a highly centralized political movement by the 1930s, with direct connections to the Soviet Union, centered on the CPUSA; but filtered out into other organizations such as the Communist League of America (CLA), the Workers’ Party of America (WPA), and later the Workers’ Party of the United States (WPUS). Little effort was made to understand the internationalist link; instead preferring to merely depict it as an act of subversion. The revisionists focus generally on one of two different worlds, the labor and communityworlds of American Communism and also tend to generalize the distinctions between the two around issues such as racial equality in the workplace and at the community despite the fact that organizing for racial equality in the workplace was fundamentally different from organizing in the community. Randi Storch was among the first scholars to abandon the approach of a single narrative history by examining the social dimension of communist political culture during the Third Period (1928-1934) and utilized a geographical approach of focusing on Chicago. While not ignoring the overt ideological connection with the USSR, Storch demonstrated that amidst the early portion of the Great Depression, American communists both inside and outside the CPUSA “learned how to work with liberals and non-Communists” by developing “successful organizing tactics and fight[ing] for workers’ rights, racial equality, and unemployment relief.”5 Jacob Zumoff expanded on Storch’s approach in his work The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, where he demonstrated that while the traditionalists were indeed correct in the overt connection between the Communist International (Comintern) and the CPUSA, they failed to address the nature of the relationship parties shared at the international level, such as how the Comintern emphasized that the CPUSA “Americanize” itself and act as a more independent political organization and did not ask of them to blindly follow the dictums of another communist party.
The division of American communist history into multiple narratives complicates the historiography and at the same time more accurately portrays the experiences of those who participated in the movement. Storch observed that the historiography had a few particular avenues; one which observes the political dimension of communist activity, one which examines the community-based organizations and localized communist activism for localized projects such as the Unemployment Councils, and one which observes the movement’s interconnection with other scholarship, such as labor and cultural studies.6 The concept of “many worlds” or “rival histories” is a common claim in the field of International Relations where “competition between the realist, liberal, and radical traditions” consistently reassess our understandings of social movements. International Relations scholar Stephen M. Walt argued this concept on a broad level when discussing the nature of international political ideology throughout the mid-to-late Cold War (1960-1991). In a subject where multiple interpretations exist in addition to multiple variances of experiences among sources, “no single approach can capture all the complexity” of a social and political movement. Furthermore, the end of the Soviet Union and the availability of new sources did little to resolve the struggle of competing theoretical interpretations of the history. Instead, it “merely launched a new series of debates” about the extent to which social movements were domestic in nature versus the by-product of international relations. For Walt, this was a matter about “contemporary world politics” using a variety of sources and contextual evidence to develop a well-rounded approach to policymaking.7
The notion of multiple worlds of a single movement also incorporates observations from world literature scholars about how “writers frame their respective cultures as ‘windows on the world.'” Daniel Simon asks, given the subjective nature of writing about international issues, “how do we read world literature?”8 This same question applies to almost any social/political movement at the domestic level: How do we read the histories of social/political movements that are invariably linked at the international level to various other cultures, movements, and people? The answer, whether conscious of it or not, is that we read it divided: When we want to understand American Communism as a political movement, we look to its international roots and its ideological links abroad; when we want to understand American communist activism in labor, we look to its temperament and palatability with specific working groups, such as industrial auto workers and non-white agricultural workers; when we desire to understand anticommunism, we look to the Cold War for contextual explanations for the violation of domestic constitutional rights. The particular ‘world’ focused on―labor, community, political―is invariably written with a subconscious emphasis of the specific circumstances of each case, but rarely do historians take the next step of linking these various worlds as multiple experiences of the same history; as subjective relationships to the same movement. Instead, each approach tends to emphasize itself as the history to be examined; be it the history of American Communism’s ideological roots in Europe, the history of the American labor movement and its tendency to utilize radical and militant communist organizers, or the history of individual American communist’s resistance to racial injustice and social inequality.
The history of American Communism must be understood through a lens that emphasizes the particulars of the society within which the movement existed; American society and the traditions as well as conflicts common to American people—both communist and non-communist. American Communism as a movement possessed a reach that extended into the political, the legal, and the civil corners of the United States during multiple transformative periods of American society. While both the revisionist and traditionalist schools of thought have added important contributions to this history, they have also both suffered from an approach that treats a multi-faceted social movement as a singular, monolithic phenomenon. Despite the depiction of acting as mere conduits between Soviet policy and American communist activism, grassroots rank-and-file communists in the United States channeled increased political energy into specific areas thought to be effective at, or at least open to, organizing for social change and typically sought only tacit approval from their local Party club. For example, by utilizing a geographical approach, Storch was capable of examining outside a framework that centered on the national CPUSA from 1928 to 1935 to demonstrate how “a wide variety of communists coexisted in Chicago,” including high and low ranking Stalinist cohorts and also non-Stalinist activists engaged in social, political, and labor-oriented activities. Additionally, both the break-away CLA and the CPUSA enjoyed the increasing romanticism and popularity of the Bolshevik Revolution among youthful activists, which by 1929 had “sparked the imagination of liberals and radicals throughout the United States.”9
Elements of the pan-Socialist tradition, which in urban areas like Chicago included “socialist, anarchist, and militant trade-union traditions,” rushed to engage with their society under an increased sense of urgency. The CLA and the CPUSA sought to gain momentum by seizing control of the increasing interest in revolutionary theory, Marxism, and the idealism of the Bolshevik Revolution by a newer and younger generation of scholars and activists.10 Under this context, it should be easy to understand that the term “American Communism” does not refer to exclusively one group, one organization, or one political party—as it has been used in the past. The tendency to view the movement as a “monolith,” where the degree to which someone is or is not a communist is measured by the degree to which they are separated or under the thumb of the CPUSA, dominates the existing scholarship on American Communism. It is important, however, to understand the subtle and theoretical differences of this movement if one is to understand the totality of its impact on American history.
The Communist International, or Comintern, played a role in the development of American Communism but it was not the sole actor as it did not have, and ultimately lacked the means of, direct influence over all communist organizations in the United States throughout the CPUSA’s heyday. Factional disputes and power struggles internally—themselves an inheritance of the first generation of communist party leaders from 1919 – 1921—contributed significantly to the redirection of local American communist politics during the Third Period (1928 – 1934). Although much of this factionalism was not alien to the Soviets and the Comintern, the acute and specific conditions of the factional disputes were linked to disputes about American labor traditions and conflicts with American political organizations, such as the Socialist Party. The CLA continued to operate throughout the Third Period, but its work focused on advancing “Left Opposition” to the CPUSA instead of pushing a general political policy for the United States. The CPUSA, in turn, resisted oppositional groups like the CLA as endemic of what they called “social fascism.”11 This dynamic forced the CPUSA to act politically and organizationally in ways the Comintern could never predict. Following the 1928 presidential campaign and the formal separation of anti-Soviet groups, the political agenda of the CPUSA “had neither a beginning nor an ending point,” as it sought to “register the extent of [the] Party’s support in the working class by mobilizing the maximum number to vote for candidates.”12 Throughout the Third Period, American Communism solidified into a social movement through the emergence of grassroots communist activism and the rise of multiple areas of strategic importance for communist work in the United States, areas that I call the many worlds of American Communism.
The primary sources chosen for my research are broad, and for good reason: to understand what American Communism was we must examine not just Party records and the memoirs of Party leaders but also the memories of the lived experiences of the movement across different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The sources break up into two categories. First, there are the Party’s own documents and those archived by the Soviet Union; usually referred to as the Comintern Archives. During the Third Period, the primary means of distributing communist theory in the United States was through a wide variety of Comintern and CPUSA publications, such as The Communist,The Daily Worker, and its regional variants such as The Southern Worker and The Western Worker. For communists outside of the CPUSA, such as those that filled the ranks of the CLA and the SWP, periodicals such as The Militant served as the basis for discussion and followed a format similar to that of CPUSA publications. These publications were unabashedly anti-Soviet in their rhetoric and ultimately central to understanding how communists thought domestically about issues such as unemployment, race, gender, and the day-to-day struggles of working people during the Depression. As such, these resources are the best remaining examples of American communist thought throughout the late 1920s and 1930s and include theories both constrained by and liberated from Soviet oversight, as some of the sources extend from groups disassociated from the USSR.
Among the most significant and dominant publishers for communist literature for American communists were Progress Publishing, based out of Moscow, and International Publishers, based both in New York and Chicago. International Publishers Company started in 1924 in a joint-venture investment project started by A.A. Heller, a wealthy socialist who had ties to production industries in the Soviet Union. The publishing company struggled for over 15 years. At first, it was held up only by Heller’s overinvestment. It later gained a significant amount of support and cohort of dedicated readers from the Workers’ Party of America. The Workers’ Party of America later became the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1927, but it helped Heller find outlets for the publisher to distribute. To compete with the publication of Marxist and communist works by other publishers, International Publishers focused on books “not yet published in English” but written by prominent socialist thinkers.13Progress Publishers, based in Moscow, printed the various works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the Comintern’s theoretical journal, The Communist, in multiple languages for communist parties in Europe and the United States. Since most American communist political philosophy had its origins in the broad theoretical traditions published by both International Publishers and Progress Publishers, they can be seen as the lens through which the political, labor, and community communist activism evolved throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
The next category of sources are personal memoirs, autobiographies, historical biographies, and oral histories. Part of this analysis accepts that party documents, government reports, and political newspapers present one interpretation of the historical narrative. But it also asserts that in between the depiction of events in official records and the memories of those events by people there exists some semblance of the truth. Autobiographies, like that of Peggy Dennis, provide insight into the way American communists thought about Party leaders and their experiences with Soviet policy decisions in the immediate aftermath of major political shifts. Similarly, autobiographies of grassroots communists, such as musician and chronic traveler Russell Brodine, do not focus exclusively on their identity as communists but rather incorporate their ideological experiences into their broader life experiences. The same case applies to the autobiography of the CPUSA’s oldest living member, Beatrice Lumpkin, who published Joy in the Struggle in 2015. Lumpkin’s work, like Brodine’s, uses her involvement in ideologically-motivated events as tangential and parallel to her overall life experience and thus provides a dynamic look into the life of a communist involved in multiple aspects of political, labor, and civic engagement. Personal memoirs, like George Charney’s A Long Journey, as well as historical biographies such as The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: Life as a Negro Communist in the South by Nell Irving Painter do a similar service of discussing communist activism as part of what these American radicals believed to be a component of their own personal and learned American ideals. Similarly, memoirs that focus exclusively on specific, chronological, and widely-known historical events, such as James Yate’s Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, help connect what grassroots communists believed to be patriotism to their ideological investment in socialism and Marxism.
Oral histories are continuing to serve historians as the ideal ways to understand what lived experiences mean to individuals still to this day. One of the most important aspects about oral histories of a movement such as American Communism is how they convey a tremendous gap between the average activist and the ideological world of politics. While possessing the fault of any primary source in terms of questionable validity, oral histories do possess a fundamentally unique trait: they are guaranteed to be real in the mind of the person telling their story. Over the course of eleven years my research has built upon over 10 oral histories of living and deceased American communists. Some of those interviewed remain active members of the CPUSA, others are part of political clubs in different parts of the country, and others prefer to remain anonymous for personal reasons. All of their stories, however, help fill in the gap of meaning for a movement that is told mostly through the lens of ideologically driven reports. In total, the sources used are intended to provide a broad examination of the American communist movement from multiple angles. The sources chosen for this research were picked because of their desire to tell their personal side of the story, and to explain why some individuals dedicated years, often decades, of their lives to a movement regardless of how the majority of the nation viewed them at any given time.
Outside of strictly industrial workspaces, individuals across the nation joined the American Communist movement for a wide range of reasons and from an even wider range of backgrounds. As a Jewish second-generation immigrant from New York City, Lumpkin spent years learning about the plight of workers from her leftist parents and family, as well as fellow community members, as the nation descended into the Depression. William Z. Foster joined after facing difficulty within AFL and syndicalist unions in the post-World War I strike wave. Danny Rubin joined after witnessing anti-Semitism in Philadelphia and linking the treatment of the local Jewish population with the general treatment of the working people in his city. Hosea Hudson joined the CPUSA in the wake of the Scottsboro case and the rising influence of the International Labor Defense (ILD) as an organization to fight discrimination. James Cannon, like many who eventually held leadership in either the CPUSA and/or other organizations such as the CLA, became inspired by the actions and tenacity of Russian Marxists to restore the “unfalsified Marxism in the international labor movement” and the romanticism of the Russian Revolution.14 Len DeCaux joined the CPUSA as a result of his perception of “herd impulses” he felt from teenage conformities while attending the Harrow School during World War I and the subsequent shortcomings of the IWW with regard to a practical plan to organize the masses. Russell Brodine joined after experiencing difficulties at his college’s local organization of fellow musicians in securing spots on the orchestra and defending against a cut of existing pay rates. In short, there never was a single particular reason as to why American communists became American communists—just like any political/social movement, American Communism attracted people by the message it delivered and the hopes it promised. The outlets for these citizens were the organizations previously mentioned and the subsequent labor and community organizations, such as the Unemployment Councils, the CIO, the ILD, and countless civic organizations that emerged out of the struggle.
While not exceptional by American political standards, the American communist movement was without-a-doubt one of the most diverse of all communist movements worldwide. The political idealists who crafted domestic communist policy in the United States under various organizations, clubs, and union locals faced a constituency with American values and American experiences, regardless of what their ideological schools of thought taught them. Either they, their parents, or their grandparents immigrated from Europe, or were liberated through emancipation subsequent to the American Civil War, to escape political and personal persecution. Many who came to publicly identify as communist during the ‘heyday’ of the movement viewed the tenants of socialism as compatible with or parallel to the virtues of American liberty, while others viewed the American system as a viable Republic merely corrupted by the special interests of an oligarchic elite. In this sense, American communists by the late 1920s were genuinely American first, and communist second. This is not to say that the majority of communists in the United States lacked a fundamental understanding of class analysis and awareness; but rather to suggest that the majority of American communists sought to relate their American experiences to their understandings of Marxism as opposed to use Marxism as a means to alter the social conditions of the United States. Furthermore, the diffusion of communists across various organizations masks the numbers of active communists throughout the Third Period and Popular Front, as noted by more recent scholarship. Many of the organizations and unions commanded by communists were not “numerically dominated” by members of the CPUSA, the CLA, or the SPA. The International Labor Defense (ILD), for example, operated as an independent organization of 2,520 individuals but was led and organized by a small group of 150 CPUSA members, and given a substantial amount of funding to operate in cities like Detroit and Chicago. Auxiliary organizations, which combined political members with union numbers and groups such as the ILD, “suggest a much wider support base than membership numbers allow.”15
Moving forward in the subject of American communist history requires a more radical departure from traditionalist narratives than provided by revisionist scholars. The approach of understanding the complexity of a movement through its “many worlds” of experiences is not merely a new historical account of the CPUSA; it is a history of a social movement of which the CPUSA is a significant part of. A critical analysis of American Communism must focus on the everyday, the grassroots. This approach is an attempt to create what Michael Brown described as necessary for the subject: a theoretical and methodological defense of what is legitimately unorthodox about traditionalist claims of American Communism. Rather than treat participants of a social movement as mere functionaries or as a component of a heterogeneous mass, this approach places participants at the front and center of the narrative. It also acknowledges the existing schools of scholarship on the subject as the product of an intellectual culture of all fields, not just tendencies in the discipline of history. Acknowledging the “many worlds” of American Communism is not just an acknowledgment of the complexity of the experiences of American communists, it is an acknowledgment of the complexity of all social movements—of which American Communism is one example of. It is only from that point that it becomes possible to expand upon such a method—critique it, develop it, modify it—thereby establishing some semblance of a history that is liberated from the contextual constraints of the high and low Cold War.
In this special edition of Cosmopod’s ongoing labor interview and history series, Remi is joined by two legends of the US socialist labor scene: Adolph Reed and Ed Bruno. Tune in for a long and enlightening discussion of the attempt at an American Labor Party in the 1990s-2000s, where we stand both as a working-class and an organized left in light of waning neoliberalism, the trendlines emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessary order of priority between identity- and class-based organizing, how socialists should relate to electoral struggle, and much more.
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Marisa Miale interviews Kali Akuno and Adam Ryan, labor organizers in the south, on class struggle in the era of COVID-19. Read more about Cooperation Jackson here and Target Workers Unite here.
“Manifestación”, Antonio Berni (1934)
The American South has long been a forbidden fruit for organized labor. Haunted by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and beaten down by anti-worker right-to-work laws1, Southern workers continue to face harsh conditions. With the deep concentration of poverty across the South, COVID-19 is poised to leave a trail of devastation in its wake, disproportionately impacting the South’s Black, immigrant, and working-class communities.
Since the failure of Operation Dixie in the late 1940s, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations poured resources into organizing Southern industry and saw little success, the increasingly stagnant and bureaucratized unions of the 20th century have, for the most part, either failed to make inroads below the Mason-Dixon line or given up on Southern workers altogether. The United Auto Workers have spent years trying to organize Volkswagen manufacturing workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee2, but Volkswagen’s sophisticated and relentless union-busting has continued to ward off the UAW leadership’s shallow, business-oriented approach to organizing. Though a rising tide of worker-led reform movements like Unite All Workers for Democracy3stand to change the labor movement for the better, the union bureaucracy remains incapable of breaking the Southern ruling class.
Like a light shining through the cracks, though, a different kind of organizing has emerged in the South. Often fighting without contracts or legal recognition, insurgent and unorthodox organizers like the Southern Workers Assembly, Cooperation Jackson, and Target Workers Unite have made waves among Southern workers, relying on militant, experimental tactics and rank-and-file democracy rather than slow-moving bureaucratic machinery and top-down leadership. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, these organizers have stood on the front lines, charting the path toward mass action for workers across the world. In coalition with dozens of organizations across the country, they’re calling for working people everywhere to rise up on May 1st in their homes, workplaces, and communities to fight the program of austerity and mass death imposed by the state in the midst of the pandemic.
In anticipation of May Day, we’ve sat down to talk with two organizers from Cooperation Jackson, an organization building economic democracy and solidarity in Jackson, Mississippi, and Target Workers Unite, a militant retail worker organization fighting one of the largest corporations in the United States. The full interviews are below.
Marisa Miale: Hi Kali. Can you start by telling me a little bit about your background as an organizer and the work that Cooperation Jackson does?
Kali Akuno: Mm-hmm. I live in Jackson, Mississippi. I’m one of the co-founders of Cooperation Jackson. I was initially born in Los Angeles, California, and migrated here very explicitly for political work, work around the Jackson-Kush Plan4, which is a long term strategy, first and foremost centered around the self-determination of people of African descent. It’s part of a broader program of decolonization and socialist transformation.
M: What led you to Jackson specifically?
A: What led me to Jackson specifically was the organization I was in for a good chunk of my life, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. After September 11th, we assessed that the state and the forces of capital were going to use that to really press forward neoliberalism on a deeper level and in much more oppressive ways. Some of the work that we were particularly focused on at that time was around reparations. There was a huge reparations, global reparations movement, that we were playing a leading role in developing.
And then the other main campaign that we were focused on at that time was around political prisoners, some of the things around Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case and fighting against him being executed in the late 1990s, being the tip of the spear of that. After that, we knew just from our own history of fighting COINTELPRO and being victims of that, that this was going to be a perfect excuse to make everything that happened during COINTELPRO5, this was going to make that legal
So we kind of reorganized our plans, re-articulated a number of different things in our work, and said that we wanted to re-pivot to do a much more concentrated power building project, and we wanted to see what we can really build. This was in 2003.
We created a five-year plan, and we were looking to recruit many of our members to come on down, including myself, leave different places that we were scattered out over in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Detroit to move on down to Jackson and add some skill and capacity there.
I moved to New Orleans right after the flood, as I was a national organizer of the organization at that time, to really try to focus and hone in on that effort. But that really sharpened some things for us in our minds at the time, that led us to believe we were on the right track around trying to concentrate our forces and it made us look much more deeply at the impact that ecological calamity and climate change is going to have on the black communities in the Deep South.
So we really honed in on Jackson, and made it much more important for me and others to move here and try to concentrate our energy in doing a real dual power type experiment, and that’s what we’ve been working on the past 15 years really, with the Jackson-Kush Plan.
Logo for Cooperation Jackson
M: Could you tell me more what you mean by a dual power experiment?
A: For us, particularly at that time, it meant building autonomous institutions and an autonomous practice of self-governance in the community. That would do two things. One, it governs itself and does a lot of taking care of basic needs, particularly in a poor community like Jackson, that they did not have the capacity and will to do, to try to meet some of those needs on our own through mutual aid and solidarity economy type work, [like] building cooperatives. Then the other piece of it was really to stop the repressive arm of the state.
That’s the notion of dual power that we were trying to build and trying to push forward with the Jackson-Kush Plan. For us in practice what that would look like from 2003 to 2012, 2014, was People’s Assemblies, I think was the highest expression of our practice in that regard, where we were bringing different forces in the community together just to make real democratic decisions on how to handle everything from supporting a lot of the elderly, a lot of work around mediating the turf wars and communal violence taking place, both in the community and on a domestic front. Those are things that People’s Assemblies specialize in. Also raising broader democratic issues around how to contain the police, how to have a counter-force to violence perpetrated by the police.
So those are all things that the People’s Assembly did well. Then at different times, it also came together real well to provide extensive mutual aid during times of crisis or, one of its best moments was doing, right after Hurricane Katrina. Jackson had a distinguishing note of being the city with the fourth highest number of folks who were displaced from New Orleans in particular and were forced to move here. They could be just dumped here. That initially created a lot of tension within the community, particularly around some of the government programs like housing. There’s not much public housing in Jackson, not anymore. What they did have was a lot of Section 8 housing.6 They moved them up in the priority list, where a lot of folks in the community had been on the waiting list for 5, 10 years. That created some real tension in the community, but the People’s Assembly did a good job of mediating that, and then providing relief to folks.
M: I want to walk back a little bit and ask if you could give a brief explanation of what a People’s Assembly is and how they make decisions.
A: The People’s Assembly model you had here, that I first had because there’s still an institution called a People’s Assembly here, but it’s unfortunately in my view turned into more of an information sharing institution for the Mayor, more so than an assembly. For us, an Assembly, it was something that was facilitated by, in essence, a coalition of forces. The group that initiated a call for it was the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, in alliance with a longstanding set of left forces in town. Which here would range from the NAACP. We had a small fraction of Communist Party and Committees of Correspondence, a few small anti-fascist groups that have been around for a while. All of them played a key role over the years, building the People’s Assembly.
It was really rooted in five particular neighborhoods where it had some real strength. Two in South Jackson, one in West Jackson, which, West Jackson is the largest geographic area in the city, but one in West Jackson and then two in North Jackson. These are all working-class neighborhoods, Black working-class neighborhoods. They would primarily meet in parks and churches, depending on the season, depending on weather. Folks would come together primarily based on different issues at their height once a month, and people would bring forth different issues that they wanted to have addressed, make a pitch or argument for. People would take up counter-arguments for. There would be a striving first for consensus. If consensus couldn’t hold after two rounds there would be a vote, and that would have to win by two thirds.
Then once the decision that was made by the group that was there, typically there would be a committee, a volunteer committee would emerge to carry out the work, that would be actually right there, people would sign up for. Then the continuing of executing that work would be handled primarily through that committee. Then the different committees that were created would form what was called a People’s Taskforce. The People’s Taskforce was really coordinating a lot of in-between times of the Assemblies, to make sure the work was carried and what folks could do, and at different times set the agenda.
I would say just for my own editorial, just so folks know, the Assemblies typically work best in times of crisis. Here, that was quite often because of being a Deep South state run by neo-confederates and fascists in the main. Both politically and socially, they were always advancing some measure attacking immigrants or queer people or abortion clinics. You name it, there’s always some level of attack which is going on even now, with COVID.
So folks would be very good in responding in defense of each other. Where we would often see sometimes some challenges and troubles was articulating what we were for, and building a degree of consensus around that. That sometimes often broke down between those who had some form of a religious or spiritual practice, those who were more either agnostic or atheistic in their orientation. So the impact of being in the Bible Belt would show up at those kinds of moments. In terms of fighting the forces of white supremacy and fighting reaction, that’s typically when it was at its full strength.
M: That makes sense. Do you want to tell me a little bit about how the current crisis is impacting people in Jackson, with COVID and everything?
A: Yeah. For lack of a better term, it’s very schizophrenic. The mayor has been trying to enforce fairly strict physical distancing type orders, and encouraging folks to take it seriously. That’s been hard because there was a bunch of conspiracy and just nonsense stuff floating around the Black community, not just here but nationally. So I know I started, even in February, was arguing with folks in different radio forums here and online. There was this notion that started getting put out in a lot of Black, Afrocentric political circles that only Chinese people could get COVID-19 and Black people were immune. I don’t know whose pseudo-scientific bullshit that is, but that’s utter nonsense. But it was very widespread, very popular.
Also combat different notions I’ve heard going in the other direction, but with the same impact, if people are true believers in Jesus, the blood of Jesus will protect them from COVID-19. We’ve been battling that.
But then on the other hand, you got the Governor [Tate Reeves], who basically has just been following behind everything Trump and the right-wing think tanks that have been pressuring him, and been in his ear, Tate Reeves has been on the front lines of trying to implement their programs and policies. It wasn’t until Florida, and I think it was six or seven of them all on the same day, they gave these weak stay at home orders but weren’t requiring that the state shut down or anything of that nature, clearly weren’t following the medical and scientific advice. But for two weeks, he was on air, on a government channel, with supposedly this liberal-type division of Church and State, which has always been a sham here, but he would be on TV for several hours a day reading the Bible in mid-March. That was his response to COVID-19. So you get a sense of how just all over the place things have been here.
We first started noticing its impact with several members of the homeless that live in our community, just a part of our community, part of our membership. They disappeared for a couple of weeks and we started asking around folks here. “Well, you know, they died.” It was like later putting one and one together, we were hearing more about what people died from, which was just unusual that they died from COVID-19. It was spreading pretty early around here.
But folks have no access to medical care. There’s no real public transportation in Jackson. So the nearest hospital from my house is five miles away, and not many people will walk there. Most homeless people, even if they do show up, the first response typically is have them arrested and then have the police determine whether they need healthcare. That was even pre-COVID-19.
So we’ve been watching that escalate. There’s at least 10 homeless folks we know about from our masking work (trying to distribute masks), and just talking to folks that we know in the community about what’s going on. There’s at least 10 people who’ve got it, none of whom have been tested, none of whom have been included in the official count of the state. But we know there’s a severe under-count of how many have been infected, and how many people have died from it here in Mississippi.
I think the under-count on this thing here is pretty severe. What we do know from what’s been counted, it’s primarily Black women who have been exposed, from primarily service work that they dominate here in Mississippi, store clerks and things of that nature that have been the most infected, and it’s been overwhelmingly Black people who die.
It’s having a serious impact here in Mississippi. Not to the degree I think of what we saw in New Orleans last month, but I think Mississippi, and Jackson in particular, I think is just starting to really pick up. I don’t think we’re nowhere near peak infection here at all. The only thing that might stop it, because there’s nothing that the government is going to do, and nothing that the medical institutions here have the capacity to do, the only thing that might stop it is nature, and that being the changing of the season, and sun killing the virus in a lot of places. So people where it might come into contact with a door or something like that, sunlight killing it.
That may be the only thing that stops it temporarily but I think our biggest fear in what we’re getting prepared for, learning from other past epidemics, that this is probably going to be like the flu in 1918 and it’ll probably last some years and be seasonal, because of some of the populations of poor Black working class and homeless population that it’s clearly been embedded in now, but this is going to be around for a while.
M: Do you want to tell me more about the programs that y’all are implementing in response to COVID?
A: Yes. So, the first thing we tried to do was what we know how to do. Many of us being veterans of Hurricane Katrina, we learned a thing or two about mutual aid and emergency relief from that experience. So we quickly got into that mode, early March. Luckily, I would say for us, with our international orientation and politics, we’ve been in dialogue with folks from Naples and Milan, at that time, who told us ‘stop, don’t do that. Unless you have the proper personal protective gear, that’s not going to work.’ They let us know that they did it in late February, responding to how it was picking up real quickly in Italy, particularly the folks up in Milan, where it’s more concentrated. They all got sick. They let us know, ‘back off, don’t do that because you’ve got to have the gloves, you’ve got to have the face mask, you’ve got to have the mask.’ Which at that time, a few of us did, but not many.
So we stopped doing that, and then we tried to repeal and to figure out what the hell could we do? Because by that time, we had figured out a couple of folks that we knew when they had died, so we knew we had to do something with the resources that we built up and amassed and the skills that we amassed. Then we got a call from one of our members about, you know, “do we have any masks or could we make some?”
We went, wait a minute, we can do that. We’ve got enough skilled folks who know how to sew. It was in like the second week of March, we pulled a team together. They started researching which would be the best mask, got the sewing machines out and started working.
Then our crew that does the 3D printing, we got some information again from Italy, that some folks in the Fab Lab network7 that we’re part of, that they started printing masks and [3D] printing ventilators. We got some 3D printers. So we got our own masking program now that’s been developed, that we’re sharing out with folks, so they can freely download it and do all those things, and hopefully use it in their communities, anybody that has those kind of tools.
And we’ve been doing mask distributions basically once a week, every Wednesday. So we’ve got another one tomorrow. It could be about 120 a week that we give out of the foam mask. The 3D printed masks, we’re doing about, I think now about 20 of those a week. We make a distinction that the 3D printed masks go primarily to healthcare workers. So we can only do a certain limit of those and they’re much more efficient and more medical grade. So trying to give those to a lot of the nurses and stuff in particular, so they don’t get infected and they can help defend other people’s lives.
So we’ve been doing that, and since that’s kicked off in the last two weeks, we’ve been ramping up a food distribution program. So it’s not a full mutual-aid practice that we would normally do, but things that we can do safely, given the kind of protocol that we’ve set out. So those are the two emerging community responses that we’ve been doing, and now we’re trying to ramp up the political response, and that’s calling for May Day actions on a mass scale, that we fought for, that’s what that’s about.
People were saying, look, there’s more people who die from the flu every year, or more people who die from malaria. I was like that’s true, that’s correct but those are things that are calculated very much so by the health and insurance rackets that exist on a global scale, so that’s acceptable death for capitalism. This is something new and outside the bounds, so they don’t know how to factor it in yet. I always kept telling people, let me speak to you from more of a personal connection, tragedy for one of my best friends, died from SARS 10 years ago, which is another type of coronavirus.
M: Right.
A: Fortunately, none of our members that we know of at this point have gotten sick. And nobody’s died. Now I know over 50 people throughout the world who have died personally. It impacted me in that way. But none of our folks, I think, from us taking precautionary measures, none of our folks have gotten sick.
M: I’m glad to hear that. Do you want to tell me about your political response now and the May Day actions?
A: Yeah. The thing that really kind of propelled us in motion was this rush to put people back to work, that we first heard on a state level. We didn’t have the evidence then that we have now, but we suspected that this thing was killing Black people and Latinos at a disproportionate rate. That was our suspicion in March.
That means we need to take, not just a community response, we got to take a political response and try to send a clear message that we’re not going to die for Wall Street, we’re not going to die for deep pockets. We’re going to try to reach as many of our people as possible to say, no, this is time to put out some maximum demands, basically.
They’re not gonna provide hopefully the basic things we need. Gloves, masks, no protective gear. There’s no way in hell that people should go back to work. We have been agitating for that in our own community. They had to shut stuff down here, so a lot of things would just open in March. And then when Trump got on the bandwagon, saying that he wanted the country to all open up again on Easter.
And looking at the overall conditions and the number of wildcat [strikes] that were already popping up at that time. This would be the perfect call to start building toward a general strike in this country. Because the things that we were seeing, like in February, most folk just shake it off, any notion that universal healthcare could be a possibility. Now, that’s like a basic demand. So, the situation has just elevated people’s consciousness to a great degree. And we were like, let’s try to play a role, step into their void. Let’s not let the Right define what the feeling is, we need to from the Left, try to define it.
I don’t think we made it clear enough in that first statement8, that we didn’t think May Day could be a general strike. So that’s why we’re calling it towards a general strike. We need to take mass action on May Day, send a clear message. But we got to work our way up towards that. This is going to be a protracted struggle.
So the coalition we’ve been pulling together, and we’ve joined forces with CoronaStrike and General Strike 2020, who were out before us, earlier than us, we’ve kind of all come together, you know, joining messages, working together, trying to build some links, plan out all the different activities that are going to happen on May Day.
So that’s what we’ve been focusing on through the last two weeks. I see a lot of momentum going. Trying to put it all together, I think is going to be one of the next major challenges. The first critical thing is getting people in motion. Say hell no, we’re not going to work, we’re not going to shop, we’re not going to pay rent, we’re gonna shut it down, navigate all the hills of that.
We’re working to start building levels of self-governance in our community. To really balance out the system. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to get through that. And eradicate it, no ands ifs or buts. But easier said than done. We got to move millions of people to that program. So that’s something that we will keep pushing for on our end. Struggling for that clarity and programmatic unity. It’s going to take time.
But I think that if nothing, this pandemic I think has exposed the sheer exploitative nature and brutality of the system. So I think there’s many millions of people who are waking up, as this hit home with millions of people now being unemployed. You know, millions being cut off from their healthcare. I think the inhumanity of the system I think has become apparent and people are going to be demanding a whole different set of social relations on the heels of this, and how we fight that out is going to be critical.
M: The last thing I want to ask is what the best way for workers across the country to get involved in this movement is?
A: For workers, particularly essential workers, you got to start with organizing your fellow coworkers. So there’s an inward look that folks first have to do, if they’re being honest. Because what we’ve been stressing in our calls is kind of arming them to agitate, to do a level of education and inspiration. But the real actions have to take place by decisions made by workers at the point of production. I know, here we can have an impact in Jackson and we plan on doing that. But folks in New York, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, everywhere, it’s themselves who have to make that determination of what level of risk they’re willing to take, and that’s going to be determined by what level of strength or level of unity or solidarity they have with their coworkers. So our thing is to uplift actions, like wildcats that have been done and rouse people’s imagination, let them know that a fight like this is possible.
And so to uplift that direct action to show that we can get some immediate results. With deeper levels of organization, you get a lot of results. One of the things that we’ve put out there is encouraging folks to organize to seize the means of production and democratize it, turning it into co-ops, or things of that nature. We’ve seen some level of initiative with that, with folks saying in some of the auto plants, they want to start producing masks and ventilators and things like that. But I have to stress, you first got to start with organizing their coworkers at the point of production. And try to move as a team, don’t move alone. That’s how they can isolate you. When you organize with folks move as a team.
M: Great. Okay thank you so much for speaking to me, this was a really great interview.
A: No problem.
Marisa Miale: Hi Adam! Thank you again for agreeing to the interview. Could you start by introducing yourself for our readers, telling us a little bit about your background as a worker, and explaining how you got involved in organizing at Target?
Adam Ryan:Yea, my name is Adam Ryan, born and raised in southwestern Virginia, the Appalachian region of our state, specifically in Christiansburg. We have a lot of the same problems as other parts of Appalachia in terms of poverty, drug addiction, shitty jobs and slumlords, but we have two local colleges that act as a sort of buffer to all those issues, so while we do have more infrastructure developed here than in other parts of Appalachia, that infrastructure is only geared towards the students and the colleges and not the local working class. Some folks have even designated our area as “Metrolachia” because of the college system and the huge import of wealthy students and their families largely coming from the DC suburbs in northern Virginia. There’s definitely animosity between the local working class and these students who basically get to live in bubbles the colleges work to cultivate, so they don’t have to see or really know what it’s like being a local living in the area.
I got hired on at our local Target back in 2017. The store has been here for over a decade. My family has worked there and many other similar shitty low wage, no-benefits jobs in the area. You either work in the service sector or manufacturing in the New River Valley. I specifically went to Target after our collective New River Workers Power was conducting social investigation with local working-class families primarily through canvassing our local trailer parks. That’s how we got the lead about the abusive boss Daniel Butler at our local Target store. We hit a roadblock trying to organize working families against these trailer park slumlords and decided to switch gears to labor organizing.
I had prior experience with labor organizing back when I was an IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member and went through their Organizer Training 101. This was back when I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2010 when I was organizing Black working-class families disproportionately affected by our state prison system. We started a group called “SPARC” (Supporting Prisoners Acting for Radical Change) as a joint initiative between ourselves as workers in southwestern Virginia and the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter headed by comrade Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, who’s a Richmond native. This was all before New River Workers Power had formed. We had an exclusive focus on prisoner organizing at the supermax facilities at Red Onion and Wallen Ridge state prisons located out in Wise County. It was when I moved to Richmond with others in SPARC to better serve those most affected by the prison system that I got tied in with a recently-started IWW chapter. We saw an opportunity to tie the two efforts together and basically were doing a proto-IWOC campaign of sponsoring the prisoners we were organizing as SPARC into the IWW as union members. We figured it would at least give us some legal room to not have our mail tampered with since it was official union business with our fellow workers in the state prisons. As SPARC we got our mail censored all the time and were designated as a group trying to “promote insurrection” in the prisons. This all came to a head when we had a series of prisoner hunger strikes we helped organize and support back in 2012.
Long story short we were stretched too thin trying to take on the largest, most well-funded department in the state of Virginia with only a handful of organizers scattered across the state, we also were young, in our early 20s with very little organizing experience under our belts and it became too much, so we transitioned to organizing locally within Richmond city itself (still a monumental task). I spent several years trying to do some workplace organizing as well as community organizing around school closures, tuition hikes, and police brutality, but eventually ended up homeless since the shitty service sector job I had at CVS wasn’t enough to cover my rent. I never had enough funds to even afford a rental unit with a formal lease. I was always living in illegal housing and paying slumlords under the table, so it was easy for them to push me out, and I had nowhere else to go but to return back to my hometown. That’s when I started up New River Workers Power and all the local organizing we are doing here now, including the Target organizing campaign.
M: Could you tell us a little about the history of Target Workers Unite and the kind of work y’all do?
R: We launched Target Workers Unite at the beginning of last year initially as a fail-safe to our attempt to collaborate with this NGO called “Organization United for Respect at Walmart” otherwise known as “OUR Walmart” – which now goes by the name “United For Respect.” This organization was initially started as a front for the union United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) back in 2012. It was a very similar model the “Fight for $15” front started by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Their goals weren’t to formally unionize these shitty low wage service sector jobs from Walmart to McDonalds, but rather to build a lot of PR to then funnel that energy into electoral politics and aid the Democratic Party in the hopes some reforms could be passed through state and national legislatures.
Workers were instrumentalized to become spokespersons and advocates rather than trained as militant organizers who engage in collective direct action to win concessions from the bosses. By the time United For Respect (U4R formerly OUR Walmart) reached out to us they had split from the UFCW after their union president cut funding to their front. The executive directors then found new funders through the Center for Popular Democracy, also a front largely funded through these bourgeois philanthropist foundations and trusts like the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, etc. They scour the internet and news outlets to see any manifestations of worker activity outside the unions and try to bring those workers into their fold, that’s how they found us after our first wildcat strike against our local abusive boss.
I didn’t intend the wildcat strike to transform into a national Target worker organizing campaign, but that’s how it organically developed. The paid staff of U4R reached out and wanted to incorporate us into their efforts, saying they wanted to “organize all retail workers, not just Walmart workers,” hence the name change. But after struggling with them for over a year on what organizing workers actually meant, I found out they already had their agenda formed – which wasn’t determined by the rank and file workers, but rather the paid “professionals” whose strategy is essentially dictated by the bourgeois foundations that fund their NGO. We wrote a full statement of what that experience was like and why we had to launch Target Workers Unite if we wanted actual rank and file Target workers to be trained up as organizers and take direct action in our stores. After seeing what tools they utilized and what “organizing” looked like to them I also figured they weren’t really doing anything that drastically different from what we had been doing, minus the huge source of funds and paid staff they could rely on to do the work for them.
I should clarify that we weren’t trying to organize along the lines they were – in terms of trying to take workers out of the workplace to become public advocates pushing reforms and teaming up with opportunistic politicians to push a reformist agenda, but more-so their heavy use of digital organizing techniques through social media. That is probably the only thing I feel I may have learned from them after participating and trying to push for rank and file worker organization in our stores. Maybe a slight refinement of what we had been doing, but there wasn’t really that much substance behind their efforts beyond trying to produce high-quality propaganda that looks good in the press.
I figured if these “professionals” could bullshit their way into a “legit” labor organization, then why can’t us rank and file workers do it ourselves? At least we would have autonomy and the ability to determine what path we take vs constantly having to struggle against their paid staff over what constitutes real organizing or what are we ultimately trying to achieve as workers. I really was turned off by their default social democrat ideology that drove their slogans and abstract demands they had no real leverage to realize. Like when Bernie Sanders came out talking about getting workers on corporate boards as a policy in partnership with this NGO that to me was the epitome of their politics and endgame. Why should we be trying to emulate the European mainstream unions when they’ve run into deadends themselves when trying to build workers’ power that isn’t dominated by capitalism? If we are going to make pie-in-the-sky demands, we might as well advocate workers’ control and taking over the shopfloor, eliminating management and the capitalist division of labor. At least we send a clear political line to workers by doing that rather than the default opportunist, class compromise politics they were pushing, which was tolerable for their bourgeois funders.
In terms of the work we do now it’s a combination of digital organizing, going into the social media spaces we know Target workers are at and agitating them to organize directly about shopfloor issues and corporate-wide issues over things like unstable scheduling, lack of hours, lack of benefits, ageism, favoritism, and all-round poverty this corporation purposefully enacts for the purpose of control over our workplaces, dividing the workers, and repelling any efforts by workers to capture a larger share of wealth generated within the company. We work to find workers who are most motivated to take action in the stores and show through direct action we can win smaller demands, prove our competency and leadership and build morale that there is an alternative to how the jobs are structured, what can workers to to change the conditions and boost morale which shows workers we don’t just have to accept things as they are. A lot of this is class struggle on the ideological level, most workers don’t know their labor rights as defined by the NLRA, they don’t know how to build a labor strategy to organize and win concessions, we have to build that culture from scratch and that’s just where we’re at, even in the middle of a pandemic.
Logo for Target Workers Unite
M: It sounds like it’s been a long road to build worker power for y’all. Can you tell us more about some of the shopfloor issues you’ve been organizing around the solutions you’ve put forward to them?
R: Management abuse and worker disrespect have been the most prominent for us. But we’ve also organized against fascism, specifically at my store, by pressing to get a local notorious member of the alt-right banned from our premises. It was definitely a heartwarming experience to see so many of my coworkers willing to sign on and say we don’t want fascists in our space, they are a safety hazard to our coworkers who are LGBTQ, Jewish, workers of color, and leftists. We didn’t fully escalate on that campaign, but this fascist Alex McNabb decided he wanted to try to mess with us over this and did what any reactionary would do and call up our management to complain he was being “harassed”. Our unity was strong enough that management didn’t do a single thing to us for utilizing our labor rights to organize for a safe workplace. That fascist hasn’t dared to come back to our store since. We’ve done a lot of mutual aid for coworkers too, fundraisers for LGBTQ coworkers trying to get top surgery, showing support for LGBTQ coworkers by distributing and wearing trans pride bracelets in the face of Trump’s announcement to remove certain protections for LGTBQ coworkers on the basis of discrimination.
A lot of what we’re doing is base-level stuff of trying to educate coworkers at my store and across the country what are our labor rights and how to exercise them in a strategic way without getting caught up in legal battles, especially outside the context of a formal union. So many workers view unions as service-based in the same way they pay for a good as passive consumers and expect the “officials” to fix their problems for them. So we have to cultivate that new worker culture of solidarity that’s only surviving in small pockets across the US right now. It’s not a living practice for the majority of US workers.
I’m not going to pretend we have this huge network with worker committees across hundreds of stores, but we do have a lot of coworker contacts across the country we’re actively working to engage and trying to train up to essentially become “shop stewards” in their stores. When you get the reputation of being a worker who can get issues on the shopfloor fixed without having to go to management and coworkers see you have knowledge and experience in exercising these rights they come to you with issues, much like a shop steward would function in a formal union.
The big joint effort we’ve been working on across Target stores was our Target Worker Survey project. Every year the corporation has us take their “Best Team Survey” which is really superficial and doesn’t allow workers to elaborate on how they feel about their jobs, nor do workers necessarily trust it enough for them to be honest, especially when their store managers press upon them to answer in a positive way or stand behind them as they take the survey. Us workers crafted our independent survey all by ourselves, with over 60 questions to get an understanding of what life is like for Target workers both on and off the job. We got over 500 responses from across at least 380 stores in 44 states, the results weren’t surprising, but also very condemning of Target. We’re actively working to expose what work conditions are like at our jobs and working to push back on the hegemony Target’s PR wing has in making it look like it’s all honky dory at their stores and distribution centers. We’re working to counter their propaganda with our own based on the accounts of workers themselves. Out of that survey we crafted a Target Worker Platform which was again based on the responses we got from Target workers on what they think we need to make our jobs something we can live on. COIVD-19 has sort of put that on the backburner now and we’ve had to develop an emergency petition calling for more safety and compensation for us Target workers since we are at such high risk of exposure to the virus – in large part because Target doesn’t want to take the right measures to limit foot traffic in our stores.
If you’ve ever worked in a public-facing job where you have to deal with consumers you know they have their own narrow interests in mind and that usually means them being disrespectful and inconsiderate of us Target workers. For instance, it’s not uncommon for us to find half-eaten products on the sales floor, or used tissues stashed around the store, let alone practicing social distancing, respecting our personal space as workers, and making unrealistic demands upon us because they feel entitled to “customer satisfaction.” These recent waves of protest over the economy being shut down are really indicative of that selfish attitude, Americans don’t like being told they can’t do whatever they want as consumers, it’s the trade-off they got instead of things like worker power or a social safety net, let alone political agency which doesn’t relegate them to a passive role.
Online organizing has been a huge component to what we do as well. There are a lot of Target worker social media spaces that we constantly agitate in to make workers aware we even exist and bring the ones who are interested in organizing into the fold of Target Workers Unite. Social media is a crucial aspect of labor organizing these days, if you’re not using it, you’re missing out as an organizer and worker organization. Recently we’ve started building relationships with Shipt drivers because Target owns Shipt, it’s basically like instacart or other gig worker jobs where they shop the items for a customer and deliver it to their homes. By connecting with these folks we get a much better understanding of Target’s strategy and vision as to how they’re transforming our work and also responding to market forces and competitors like Walmart, Amazon, and Kroger. We also are just going to be stronger by organizing along the supply chains because each sector of workers has knowledge of their operations and helps us counter the bullshit narrative Target likes to put out there to the general public. One of the next steps for us is to establish contact with the workers in the Chinese factories where the majority of the commodities we sell are manufactured.
M: Could you tell me more about how COVID-19 has impacted Target workers, and how you developed the emergency petition?
R: Target workers and their families are beginning to contract the virus, it’s not surprising considering the corporation isn’t restricting foot traffic in a serious way, they instead leave it up to the discretion of the customers to engage in best practices, but if you’ve ever worked in a public-facing job like ours you know when people assume the role of a customer they become very entitled and take offense to being regulated on their shopping behaviors. We need proper administrative controls which don’t rely on the discretion of consumers. The corporation knows what it’s doing by leaving it up to customer discretion as to whether or not they behave in a way that actually respects us as workers and prioritizes our safety. They rather make sales over our concerns for worker safety.
We developed the petition very quickly after the national emergency was announced, reviewing what practices other countries had engaged in to minimize spread and contamination, as well as reviewing the recommended protocols from organizations like the CDC and OSHA especially towards healthcare workers. Because we weren’t seen as essential workers nor respected as essential prior to this, many people were overlooking our needs as frontline essential workers because we usually aren’t seen as “real workers” nor having a “real job”, therefore why should we be considered for such things? It’s a contradiction that has only sharpened as this has progressed and more and more workers are realizing how vulnerable we are, how much we’re just sitting ducks at our jobs as we have to rely on customers to be considerate of us and our needs.
One thing we notice about Target even before the pandemic is how quick they are to try to route us and defang our demands by issuing press releases to the public which at least gives the appearance they are going to address safety and compensation concerns. They are very good with the smoke and mirrors, they even have some workers believing in their bullshit. But in a way we have to be thankful that capitalists can never meet our needs in the end of the day because the nature of capitalism will never permit that.
M: I think that speaks to what essential workers across the country are feeling right now. Can you tell me more about the action you’re taking on the shopfloor to respond to COVID?
R: We’re calling for a mass sickout across Target stores and distribution centers. We want to show Target us workers are not ok with their feet dragging on rolling out more safety precautions we’ve been pressing for since the announcement of the national emergency. Beyond this action we’ve been doing the same thing we were doing before all this, educating our coworkers on their labor rights, working to build out shopfloor committees, and pressing our management to respect us or we’ll escalate and make their lives hell.
M: Hell yeah. How is the crisis impacting the shopfloor committees and their ability to organize?
R: To answer your first question, its caused more workers to see the need for independent action, so we are in a good position just by making our presence known and workers reach out on what they can do about the issues at their stores. At my store I’ve been helping some new members of our store committee to take on issues of favoritism and disrespect, those everyday workplace issues are still in place despite the virus, the virus has just exacerbated it all and pushed people to the point of being fed up and wanting to fight back.
M: Do you have a vision for how COVID-19 will impact Target Workers Unite in the long run, and how it will develop after the virus subsides?
R: I think this virus has lit a fire under people’s asses and those who aren’t totally brainwashed by the corporate narrative see that if they don’t take independent action then nothing will ever change and corporate will only do the bare minimum to “protect” workers. A lot of workers are seeing they are being left high and dry, that’s an opportunity to consolidate more workers into our network. We should emerge from this action and this pandemic stronger than when we went in and it already looks like that is playing out just by the rates or participation in our sickout action for May Day.
M: Can you tell me more about the shift in consciousness for workers who weren’t active before and want to fight back now?
R: The shift hasn’t been huge, but it’s happening. I would say it’s the vanguard of workers who have been fighting to raise awareness and educate their coworkers on the safety issues we face and to push back on the corporate narrative which tries to lull them back to sleep. The contradiction is that many workers were black-pilled or primed by various authority figures on how COVID19 isn’t that serious and people are overreacting, so we’re already having to fight from the opposite end in challenging those reactionary ideas propped up by billionaires. We have to be the militant minority that pushes the rest of the working class forward, even if a bunch of them may resent us initially for breaking this unprincipled labor peace with the corporate executives.
M: What lessons do you think workers across the country can take from Target Workers Unite about organizing during COVID-19?
R: I think the lessons are that while this moment has definitely spurred worker action the working class is still a class-in-itself rather than a class-for-itself. Many are still caught up in the corporate ideology, remain passive, and don’t view their workplaces as sites of struggle. We have to operate as a militant minority and work to reconstitute the working class as a subjective force able to effectively fight capitalism and these corporations. This is a good beginning for that.
M: Thank you so much Adam! Perfect note to end on. See you on May Day.
What is Socialism? Is it the abolition of the state, the abolition of Value as an economic form, the abolition of private property, production for need rather than profit, or a rationally planned economy? All of these are cited, and rightly so, as essential features of communism. But while each of these deals with social relations, none but planning deals with the relations of production of the new order. Value is realized in exchange, property exists in the relations of consumption and prior to production, the state governs and secures the relations of production, and production for use governs the relations of consumption, not production. Even economic planning, which describes the overarching laws that govern the system of production, does not really describe the relations within production. The key feature of socialism or the Co-Operative Commonwealth, missing above is the abolition of the division of labor.
From the earliest socialists like Fourier through Marx and Engels, the division of labor was a central concern of the workers’ movement. Fourier describes an elaborate model society called a Phalanx where everyone rotates their job, although given tasks suited to their individual talents and interests. While he rejected the utopian impulse to craft a model society, Marx talks about the alienation in the separation of manual and mental labor which unevenly develops people. In “The German Ideology” Marx half-ironically describes a world where alienation has been abolished and even “critical critics” are free to do any job they wish throughout the day. Continuing this tradition, in his Short Course on Economic Science, Alexander Bogdanov gives a rough sketch of what the transformation of the social relations of capitalism into socialism would look like through the gradual abolition of the division of labor. A biologist, philosopher, field medic, proto-cybernetician, cultural worker, science fiction author, revolutionary communist, and economist, few figures in the history of Marxism are as criminally under-examined as Alexander Bogdanov. Introducing his life and the breadth of his work is a task for another essay. What concerns us here is the final chapter of the Short Course entitled “Socially Organised Society: Socialism”. This chapter represents something relatively unique for the time: non-utopian futurism.
Bogdanov begins by laying out the great principle of social science: that the study of the existing tendencies and factors in society can allow us to predict in the broad strokes how history will move forward. By using a rigorous historical materialist lens, Bogdanov was able to make stunningly accurate predictions. For example, he correctly predicted the transition from steam power to mass electrification, the development of wind power and nuclear power, the development of a worldwide wireless telecommunications system, and the mass automation of labor. The first edition of the text was published in the 1890s! Bogdanov argues that while there are historical examples of societies that exist unchanged in relative stagnation or regress to earlier and less complex forms of organization, the force of movement in bourgeois society are toward complexity as such that stagnation would require an external shock. Such a shock would need to be bigger than a catastrophic world war to slow the progress of social development. In Bogdanov’s day, such an external shock seemed almost inconceivable. There was nothing that could stand in the way of Capital reshaping the world ever more in its own image. Sadly, today the metabolic rift between the autonomous technosphere of capitalist production and the biosphere has grown to staggering proportion. It’s now possible to predict a scenario where world capitalism regresses, decays or collapses into much less complex or productive forms of social organization. Nevertheless, the trends and factors Bogdanov observed in the early 20th century still exist, if only heightened and more advanced. His outline of the new socialist world implicit in the old capitalist world remains as relevant as ever.
Bogdanov examines five key aspects of the future socialist order that can be drawn out from trends in bourgeois society: Relation of Society to Nature, The Social Relations of Production, Distribution, Social Ideology, and the Forces of Development. Although the text is short and accessible, it’s worthwhile to summarize them in order to tease out what it means for today.
In his section on the Relation of Society to Nature, Bogdanov does not discuss ecology, something he spends considerable time on in other works, but rather focuses on the first principle of socialism: “the actual power of society over nature, developing without limit on the basis of scientifically-organised technique.” Because industrial society is based on machinery and socialism will inherit that productive basis, Bogdanov looks to the tendencies within the development of machines to see how society will change. He breaks down his predictions into three parts: 1) the source of motive power 2) the transmitting mechanism of power 3) the techniques of communication. Bogdanov argued that power would move from steam toward electricity because it was more plastic in use. He claimed that this would allow us to develop the potential of waterfalls, tides, wind and even the atom into energy. The transmitting mechanism of energy, that is machinery itself, would move toward automation and machines which self-regulate. But Bogdanov does not see this tendency developing within capitalist firms, because the outlay of investment is too dear, but rather in the militaries of capitalist countries who are not constrained by seeking short-term profits. In socialism, where society is focused on the long term wellbeing of people, first priority would be given to moving toward mechanical self-regulation, with ever-expanding machine energy utterly dwarfing any human labor inputs. Finally, Bogdanov predicted that wireless telephony would enable people to communicate instantly across any distance while improvements in transportation would make distance and geography no longer barriers to interchange at all. All of this points toward socialism as a system where humanity as a whole, rather than a small minority, will be increasingly emancipated from nature.
In exploring the social relations of production, Bogdanov says that the second defining characteristic of socialism is “the homogeneous organization of the whole productive system, with the greatest mobility of its elements and groupings, and a highly developed mental equality of the workers as universally developed conscious producers.” In practice, this means an end to the social division of labor and the development of worldwide central planning. Bogdanov sees the nucleus of the end of the division of labor in capitalism’s tendency toward the de-skilling of workers. Increasingly, “the technical division of labor loses its “specialized” character, which narrows and limits the psychology of the workers, and reduces itself to “simple co-operation,” in which the workers carry out similar work, and in which the “specialization” is transferred from the worker to the machine.” This breaks down the division between people with different trades and makes the political community of interests among workers expand as their vital conditions become more and more the same in all fundamental ways. Furthermore, with the development of increasingly autonomous machines, the division between “executors” (the people carrying out labor) and “organizers” (the people directing it) will become superfluous as the day to day controlling of machines will take a more comprehensive education. Organizers and managers of labor will only be distinguished by having greater experience than executors and could be replaced by their fellow workers at will. Further, because the technical basis of production is constantly improved and will require more flexibility, workers will change their work regularly and no longer be bound to particular trades. Because socialism will abolish the chaos and anarchy of capitalist production it will necessarily create a central plan, centered around a great statistical bureau rather than an authoritarian security state, that coordinates labor on the basis of comradely discipline. In effect, for the first time in history socialism will solve the contradiction between the liberty of individuals to universally develop themselves and their equality as active members of the body politic.
Turning from how the relations of production are to be organized to the relations of consumption, Bogdanov outlines the classical Marxist conception of a two-stage process. In Socialism, society as a whole will own all means of production and will initially own and distribute the proceeds of social labor, but individual ownership of the articles of consumption will also exist and represent the right of workers to reproduce themselves. Initially, during the transitional period before collectivism has penetrated the spirit of the great majority, remuneration based on work will be used to compel people to contribute to society. But, as culture changes and the process of production is humanized, access to the proceeds of labor will be free for all. To facilitate this Bogdanov sees in modern banks, stock exchange organizations, mutual aid societies, and insurance agencies as providing partial prototypes of the type of apparatus that will be developed in socialism.
Beyond the relations of production, social relations will be fundamentally different in the world to come. In socialism, says Bogdanov, the first feature of the new psychology will be socialness and collectivism. Although we ourselves are socialized under conditions of competition and alienation, in a society based on comradely production will produce greater solidarity than we can imagine. The second feature is that fetishism will disappear from society. Whether fetishism of commodities and money, fetishism of nature, or superstition, all will become superfluous because, “The unknown will cease to be unknown because the process of acquiring knowledge – systematic organization on the basis of organized labor – will be accompanied by a consciousness of strength, a sense of victory, arising from the knowledge that in the living experience of man there are no longer any spheres surrounded by impenetrable walls of mystery.” By abolishing both the antagonistic relations between people and fetishism all social compulsion would come to end. Bogdanov argues that the Law and State emerge as a means to contain the anarchy and contradictions of class society through external force which takes on a fetishistic character. Fetishists root the power of the state in either divine authority or in “the nature of things,” but with the triumph of a universal science, Tektology, people won’t need to turn to such metaphysics to justify social relations. Instead of relying on fixed and abstract laws enacted through violence by “authorities” the people will collectively, democratically, and informed by science, deal with social contradictions directly. In extreme cases of violence or other anti-social behavior, “laws” and a carceral state would do far less good than having a highly organized community using its efforts to avoid harm to any party and science to cure the perpetrator. Even in the case of organizing production Bogdanov says, “The distribution of labor in society will be guaranteed on the one hand by the teachings of science and those who express them – the technical organizers of labor acting solely in the name of science, but having no power – and on the other by the power of the social sense which will bind men and women into one labor family by the sincere desire to do everything for the welfare of all.” It’s only in the early stages of a socialist society that a state in the true sense will exist because a state is nothing but an instrument of class domination. In the early stages of socialism, the state is the domination of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, but in its later stages, there can be no state.
Under exchange society, social life is defined by inward contradictions like class struggle, market competition, and so on, while non-exchange societies are defined by an outward contradiction with nature. In feudalism and past non-class societies the primary economic contradiction existed between the needs of the population and what its environment could provide. As a self-sufficing economy, socialism is distinguished from its predecessors by not only its developed technical basis but also the far greater scale, embracing the whole of society and possibly humanity. Where in previous self-sufficient economies economic growth and technical development was determined directly by the growth in population, in socialism humanity will struggle to expand its knowledge and mastery of nature in order to fulfill its creative impulse. Socialism will not represent a regression to a steady-state economy but instead accelerate the accumulation of energy by humanity while maintaining the sensitive balance of our interchange with nature. Unlike in class society where the mass accumulation of energy has only led to the refinement of debauched classes of parasites and perverts, in socialism accumulated energy will be turned toward creative labor and self-perfection. Bogdanov further claims that the diversity of humanity, united, free and equal in socialism, will unlock a heretofore unseen capacity for progress that will dwarf the spurts of innovation seen in exchange-society. With profit removed as the motor force of economic organization, productivity will be the determining factor to save as much labor and as many resources as possible. The natural bureaucratic conservatism of capitalist firms against innovation on the ground level will be overcome and the whole of humanity will participate in expanding the sphere of development. In sum, “the general characteristics of the socialist system, the highest stage of society we can conceive, are: power over nature, organization, socialness, freedom, and progress.”
Looking around at the development of modern capitalist society, Bogdanov’s predictions have become so true as to almost seem banal. What skilled laborer doesn’t live in fear of being replaced by a self-regulating machine and so feel some pressure to learn new skills and gain new certifications in order to remain competitive? Who can imagine a world without wireless phones? Aren’t logistics companies already prefiguring the technical apparatus of socialist planning? If one is to believe texts like The People’s Republic of Walmart, all we have to do is put existing technical infrastructure under public control. Yet without transformation by subordination to the Co-Operative Commonwealth, this technical apparatus can only serve to increase the domination of workers by capitalism and continue to shift the externalities of production onto colonized people. Beyond the mere conquest of state power, socialism represents a dual revolution in both economics and culture. Having a clear vision of what that entails will allow us to prepare the revolutionary movement to exercise real power and take the necessary steps to get there. Bogdanov shows us how Socialism emerges in comradely relations in production and consumptive relations are secondary to it. He eschews fantasies of every worker having a mansion or luxury boat, while also rejecting the reactionary cowardice of those who would reign in humanity’s productive potential. Waste will be minimized in socialism, but our capacity for freedom, inextricably linked to our capacity to harness the energy, will not cease to grow.
The aim of Socialism is the free association of producers in the commonwealth of toil. By rooting our understanding of it in an emancipated yet disciplined comradely cooperation of the whole of society to master nature we can dispense with utilitarian-reformist illusions, revenge fantasies, and other distractions. As the International Workingmen’s Association declared, there are “no rights without duties and no duties without rights.” Each person in the Co-Operative Commonwealth will be expected to apply their brain and muscle toward their shared collective good while receiving in return the means for their individual development. Even in a world of material abundance, social labor will increase its command over nature. One might balk at the idea of a “struggle with” or “mastery over” nature, but nature is nothing less than mankind’s external body and expanding our technical control over it as a species is no different than developing habits and techniques of self-discipline for the individual. In the face of climate disaster, there is no way for our species but forward toward assuming a mantle of responsibility for the health and direction of the biosphere. Humans have always been a geological force and it is time that we recognize it. This means reigning in the wasteful, blind, and inhuman economic order which must invent needs from thin air to bind our species under the wheel of dukkha. It means establishing conscious self-control over our world, what the Soviet geologist Vladimir Vernadsky proposed as the Noosphere: consciousness, rather than technology, as a geologic force. The ethics of the “luxury communist,” rooted in a crude middle-class communism of consumption, and “degrowth,” rooted in a middle-class skepticism of humanity are both inimical to working-class socialism. By seizing hold of production for itself, and aided by the universal sciences of Tektology and cybernetics, the working class will remake the world in its own image through the commonwealth of toil.
Socially Organized Society: Socialist Society
Transcribed from Chapter X of A Short Course of Economic Science, 10th edition, 1919. English translation J. Fineberg, 1923 by Adam Buick.
The epoch of capitalism has not yet been completed, but the instability of its relations has become quite obvious. The fundamental contradictions of this system which are deeply undermining it, and the forces of development which are creating the basis of a new system, have also become quite clear. The main features of the direction in which social forces are moving have been marked out. It is, therefore, possible to draw conclusions as to what form the new system will take and in what way it will differ from the present system.
It may seem that science has no right to speak of what has not yet arrived and of what experience has not provided us with any exact example. But that is erroneous. Science exists precisely for the purpose of foretelling things. Of what has not yet been experienced it cannot, of course, make an exact forecast, but if we know generally what exists and in what direction it is changing then science must draw the conclusions as to what it will change into. Science must draw these conclusions in order that men may adapt their actions to circumstances, so that instead of wasting their efforts by working against the future and retarding the development of new forms, they may consciously work to hasten and assist such development.
The conclusions of social science with regard to future society cannot be exact because the great complexity of social phenomena does not permit, in our times, of their being completely observed in all details, but only in their main features, and for that reason the picture of the new system also can only be drawn in its main outlines; but these are the most important considerations for the people of the present day.
The history of the ancient world shows that human society may sometimes regress, decline, and even decay; the history of primitive man and also that of several isolated Eastern societies shows the possibility of a long period of stagnation. For this reason, from a strictly scientific point of view, the transition to new forms must be accepted conditionally. New and higher forms will appear only in the event of a society progressing further in its development as it has progressed up till now. There must be sufficient cause, however, for regression or stagnation, and these cannot be indicated in the life of modern society. With the mass of contradictions inherent in it and the impetuous process of life which they create, there cannot be stagnation. These inherent contradictions could cause retrogression only in the event of the absence of sufficient forms and elements of development. But such elements exist, and these very contradictions develop and multiply them. The productive power of man is increasing and even such a social catastrophe as a world war only temporarily weakens it. Furthermore, an enormous class in society growing and organizing is striving to bring about these new forms. For this reason, there are no serious grounds for expecting a movement backwards. There are immeasurably more grounds for believing that society will continue along its path and create a new system that will destroy and abolish the contradictions of capitalism.
1. Relation of Society to Nature
The development of machine technique in the period of capitalism acquired such a character of consecutiveness and activity that it is quite possible to determine its tendencies and consequently the further result of its development.
With regard to the first part of the machine – the source of motive power – we have already indicated the tendency, viz., the transition from steam to electricity, the most flexible, the most plastic, of all the powers of nature. It can easily be produced from all the others and be converted into all the others; it can be divided into exact parts and transmitted across enormous distances. The inevitable exhaustion of the main sources of steam power, coal, and oil, leads to the necessity for the transition to electricity, and this will create the possibility of making use of all waterfalls, all flowing water (even the tides of the oceans ), and the intermittent energy of the wind which can be collected with the aid of accumulators. A new and immeasurably rich source of electrical energy, infinitely superior to all other sources of electrical energy, has also been indicated, atomic energy, which is contained in all matter. Its existence has been scientifically proved, and its use even begun, although in a very small scale where it automatically releases itself (e.g. radium and other similar disintegrating elements). Methods for systematically releasing this energy have not yet been discovered; the new higher scientific technique will probably discover these methods and united humanity possess inexhaustible stocks of elemental power.
With regard to the transmitting mechanism, we also observe a tendency towards the automatic type of machine. Following this, we observe an even higher type – not only an automatically acting, but an automatically regulating machine. Its beginnings lie on the one hand in the increasing application of mechanical regulators to present-day machines, and on the other in the few mechanisms of this type already created by military technique (e.g., self-propelling submarines and air torpedoes). Under capitalism these will hardly find application for peaceful production: they are disadvantageous from the point of view of profits as they are very complicated and unavoidably dear; the amount of labor which they save in comparison with machines of the former type is not great, because automatic machinery also dispenses with a considerable amount of human labor. Furthermore, the workers required to work them must possess the highest intelligence; hence their pay also would have to be high, and their resistance to capital would be considerably greater. In war, there is no question of profits, and for that reason, these obstacles to their application do not arise. Under socialism the question of profits will disappear in production also; first consideration will be given to the technical advantages of self-regulating mechanism – which will render possible the achievement of a rapidity and exactness of work incomparably greater than that achieved by human organs, which work more slowly and with less precision, and moreover are subject to fatigue and error.
Furthermore, the number of machines and the sum total of mechanical energy will increase to such a colossal degree that the physical energy of men will become infinitesimally small in comparison. The powers of nature will carry out the executive work of man – they will be his obedient dumb slaves, whose strength will increase to infinity.
The technique of communication between men is of special significance. The rapid progress in this connection observed at the end of the capitalist epoch has been obviously directed to the abolition of all obstacles which nature and space place in the way of the organisation and compactness of humanity. The perfection of wireless telegraphy and telephony will create the possibility for people to communicate with each other under any condition, over any distance, and across all natural barriers. The increase in the speed of all forms of transportation brings men and the products of their labor more closely together than was ever dreamed of in the past century. And the creation of dirigible aircraft will make human communication completely independent of geographical conditions – the structure and configuration of the earth’s surface.
The first characteristic feature of the collective system is the actual power of society over nature, developing without limit on the basis of scientifically-organized technique.
2. The Social Relations of Production
As we saw, machine technique in the period of capitalism changes the form of co-operation in two ways. In the first place, the technical division of labor loses its “specialised” character, which narrows and limits the psychology of the workers, and reduces itself to “simple co-operation,” in which the workers carry out similar work, and in which the “specialization” is transferred from the worker to the machine. Secondly, the framework of this co-operation is extended to enormous proportions; there arise enterprises that embrace tens of thousands of workers in a single organization.
We must suppose that both these tendencies will proceed considerably further under the new system than under machine capitalism. The differences in the specialization of various industries will be reduced to such insignificant proportions that the psychological disunity created by the diversity of employments will finally disappear; the bonds of mutual understanding and the community of interest will unrestrainedly expand on the basis of the community of vital interests.
At the same time organized labor unity will grow accordingly, grouping hundreds of thousands and even millions of people around a common task.
The continuation of the development of the two previous tendencies will give rise to two new features of the post-capitalist system. On the one hand, the last and most stubborn form of specialization (the division between the organizational and executive functions), will be transformed and lose its significance. On the other hand, all labor groupings will become more and more mobile and fluid.
Although in the epoch of machine capitalism executive labor at the machines approaches in character to that of organizational labor, nevertheless a difference between them remains, and for that reason, the individualization of the functions of the executor and the organizer remains stable. The most experienced worker in machine production is very different from his manager, and cannot replace him. But the further increase in the complexity and precision of machinery and at the same time the increase in the general intelligence of the workers must eventually remove this difference. With the transition to the automatic regulators, the work of a simple worker approaches nearer and nearer to that of the engineer and acquires the character of watching the proper working of the various parts of the machine. If automatic regulators are attached to machines there is no need for the mechanic continually to watch his gauges and indicators to see whether the required amount of steam pressure or electrical current is maintained. All he then has to do is from time to time to see whether the regulators are in working order, to alter them as occasion requires, and to see to their speedy repair when necessary. At the same time the knowledge, understanding, ingenuity, and general mental development required of the worker increase. It is not only practical common sense that is required, but exact scientific knowledge of the mechanism, such as only the organizing intellectual possesses to-day. Consequently, the difference between the “executor” and the manager will be reduced to a purely quantitative difference in scientific training; the worker will then carry out the instructions of a better informed and more experienced comrade rather than blindly subordinate himself to a power-based upon knowledge inaccessible to him. The possibility will thus be created of replacing an organizer by any worker and vice versa. The labor inequality of these two types will disappear and they will merge into one.
With the abolition of the last survivals of mental “specialization” the necessity and the sense of binding certain persons to certain particular work will also disappear. On the other hand the new form of labor will require mental flexibility and diversity of experience, for the maintenance of which it will be necessary that the worker from time to time change his work, going from one kind of machine to another, from the function of “organizer” to that of “executor” and vice versa. And the progress of technique, more. rapid than in our day, with its continual improvements of machines and contrivances, must make the rapidly-changing grouping of human forces and individual labor systems, or “enterprises” as we call them today, to a high degree more mobile.
All this will become possible and realizable owing to the fact that production is consciously and systematically organized by society as a whole. On the basis of scientific experience and labor solidarity, there will be created a general all-embracing organization of labor. The anarchy which in the epoch of capitalism disunites individual enterprises by ruthless competition and whole classes by stern struggle will be abolished. Science indicates the path to such organization and devises means for carrying it out, and the combined force of the class-conscious workers will realize it.
The scale of the organization must from the very beginning be world-wide or nearly so, in order that it may not be dependent in its production and consumption upon exchange with other countries that do not enter it. The experience of the world war and the revolutions that followed it shows that such dependence will immediately be converted into a means of destroying the new system.
The type of organization cannot be other than centralized; not, however, in the sense of the old authoritarian centralism, but in the sense of scientific centralism. Its center should be a gigantic statistical bureau based on exact calculation for the purpose of distributing labor-power and instruments of labor.
The motive force of the organization at first, i.e., as long as the whole of society has not yet been trained in the spirit of collective labor, will be comradely discipline, including an element of compulsion, from which society will step by step emancipate itself.
In this system of production, each worker will be actually on an equality with the rest as conscious elements of one sensible whole; each one will be given all the possibilities for completely and universally developing his labor-power and the possibilities of applying it to the advantage of all.
Thus the characteristic features of the socialist society are the homogeneous organization of the whole productive system, with the greatest mobility of its elements and groupings, and a highly developed mental equality of the workers as universally developed conscious producers.
3. Distribution
Distribution generally represents an essential part of production, and in its organization is wholly dependent upon it. The systematic organization of production presupposes a systematic organization of distribution. The supreme organizer in both these spheres will be society as a whole. Society will distribute labor and also the product of that labor. This is the very opposite of the anarchic unorganized distribution which is expressed in exchange and private property conducted on the basis of competition and the crude conflict of interests. The social organization of production and distribution presupposes also the social ownership of the means of production and the articles of consumption created by social labor until society hands them over to the individual for his personal use. “Individual property” commences in the sphere of consumption which essentially is individualistic. This, of course, has nothing in common with capitalist private property, which is primarily the private ownership of means of production; but does not represent the right of the worker to the necessary means of existence.
The principle of distribution arises directly out of the basis of co-operation. As the system of production is organised on the basis that it secures to every member of society the possibility of the complete and universal development of his labor-power and the possibility of applying it for the use of all, so the system of distribution should give him the articles of consumption necessary for the development and application of labor-power. With regard to the method by which this is to be achieved, two phases may also be foreseen. At first, when the scale of production is not particularly great, and collectivism has not yet penetrated the spirit of every member of society, so that the elements of compulsion must yet be preserved, distribution will serve as a means of discipline: each one will receive a quantity of products in proportion to the amount of labor he has given to society. Later on, when the increase of production and the development of labor co-operation renders such careful economy and compulsion unnecessary, complete freedom of consumption will be established for the worker. Giving society all that he is able in strength and ability, society will give him all that he needs.
The complexity of the new method of organizing distribution must obviously be enormous and demand such developed statistical and informative apparatus as our epoch is far from having achieved. But even in our time, the elements exist in various spheres of economic life which should serve as the material for such apparatus. In the sphere of banking and credit, for instance, there are the agencies and committees of experts for studying the state of the market, stock exchange organization; in the labor movement, there are mutual aid societies, co-operative societies; and organized by the State are schemes of insurance. All these will have to be radically reformed before they can serve for the future system of distribution because at present they are wholly adapted to the anarchical system of capitalism and therefore subordinated to its forms. They may be described as the scattered rudimentary prototypes of the future harmonious system of distribution.
4. Social Ideology
The first feature of the social psychology of the new society is its socialness, its spirit of collectivism, and this is determined by the fundamental structure of that society. The labor compactness of the great human family and the inherent similarity in the development of men and women should create a degree of mutual understanding and sympathy of which the present-day solidarity of the class-conscious elements of the proletariat, the real representatives of future society, is only a weak indication. A man trained in the epoch of savage competition, of ruthless economic enmity between groups and classes, cannot imagine the high development between men of comradely ties that will be organically created out of the new labor relations.
Out of the real power of society over external nature and social forces there follows another feature of the ideology of the new world, the complete absence of all fetishism, the purity and clearness of knowledge and the emancipation of the mind from all the fruits of mysticism and metaphysics. The last traces of natural fetishism will disappear, and this will reflect the final overthrow of both the domination of external nature over man and the social fetishism reflecting the domination of the elemental forces of society; the power of the market and competition will be uprooted and destroyed. Consciously and systematically organizing his struggle against the elements of nature, social man will have no need for idols which are the personification of a sense of helplessness in the face of the insuperable forces of the surrounding world. The unknown will cease to be unknown because the process of acquiring knowledge – systematic organization on the basis of organized labor – will be accompanied by a consciousness of strength, a sense of victory, arising from the knowledge that in the living experience of man there are no longer any spheres surrounded by impenetrable walls of mystery. The reign of science will begin and put an end to religion and metaphysics forever.
As a result of the combination of these two features, we get a third feature, the gradual abolition of all standards of compulsion and of all elements of compulsion in social life.
The essential significance of all the compulsory standards – custom, law, and morals – consists in the regulation of the vital contradictions between men, groups, and classes. These contradictions lead to struggles, competitions, enmity, and violence, and arise out of the unorganized state and anarchy of the social whole. The standards of compulsion which society, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes consciously, has established in the struggle with the anarchy and the contradictions have become a fetish, i.e., an external power to which man has subjected himself as something higher, standing above him, and demanding worship or veneration. Without this fetishism, compulsory standards would not have the power over man to restrain the vital contradictions. The natural fetishist ascribes a divine origin to authority, law, and morals; the representative of social fetishism ascribes the origin to the “nature of things”; both mean to ascribe to them an absolute significance and a higher origin. Believing in the high and absolute character of these standards, the fetishist subjects himself to them and maintains them with the devotion of a slave.
When society ceases to be anarchical and develops into the harmonious form of a symmetrical organization, the vital contradictions in its environment will cease to be a fundamental and permanent phenomenon and will become partial and casual. Compulsory standards are a kind of “law” in the sense that must regulate the repeated phenomena arising out of the very structure of society; obviously, under the new system, they will lose this significance. Casual and partial contradictions amidst a highly-developed social sense and with a highly-developed knowledge can be easily overcome without the aid of special “laws” compulsorily carried out by “authority.” For instance, if a mentally-diseased person threatens danger and harm to others, it is not necessary to have special “laws” and organs of “authority” to remove such a contradiction; the teachings of science are sufficient to indicate the measures by which to cure that person, and the social sense of the people surrounding him will be sufficient to prevent any outbreak of violence on his part, while applying the minimum of violence to him. All meaning for compulsory standards in a higher form of society is lost for the further reason that with the disappearance of the social fetishism connected with them they also lose their “higher” form.
Those who think that the “State form,” i.e., a legal organization, must be preserved in the new society because certain compulsory laws are necessary, like that requiring each one to work a certain number of hours per day for society, are mistaken. Every State form is an organization of class domination and this cannot exist where there are no classes. The distribution of labor in society will be guaranteed on the one hand by the teachings of science and those who express them – the technical organizers of labor acting solely in the name of science, but having no power – and on the other by the power of the social sense which will bind men and women into one labor family by the sincere desire to do everything for the welfare of all.
Only in the transitional period, when survivals of class contradictions still exist, is the State form at all possible in the “future State.” But this State is also an organization of class domination; only it is the domination of the proletariat, which will abolish the division of society into classes and together with it the State form of society.
5. Forces of development
The new society will be based not on exchange but on natural self-sufficing economy. Between production and consumption of products, there will not be the market, buying and selling, but consciously and systematically organized distribution.
The new self-sufficing economy will be different from the old primitive communism, for instance, in that it will embrace not a large or a small community, but the whole of society, composed of hundreds of millions of people, and later of the whole of humanity.
In exchange societies, the forces of development are “relative over-population,” competition, class struggle, i.e., in reality, the inherent contradictions of social life. In the self-sufficing societies referred to above, tribal and feudal societies, the forces of development are based upon “relative over-population,” i.e., the outward contradictions between nature and society, between the demands for the means of life arising out of the growth of the population and the sum of these means which nature in a given society can supply.
In the new self-sufficing society the forces of development will also lie in the outward contradictions between society and nature, in the very process of struggle between society and nature. Here the slow process of over-population will not be required to induce man still further to perfect his labor and knowledge: the needs of humanity will increase in the very process of labor and experience. Each new victory over nature and its mysteries will raise new problems in the highly-organised mentality of the new man, sensitive to the slightest disturbance and contradiction. Power over nature means the continual accumulation of the energy of society acquired by it from external nature. This accumulated energy will seek an outlet and will find it in the creation of new forces of labor and knowledge.
The new forces of development arising out of the struggle with nature and of the labor experience of man operate the more strongly and rapidly the wider and more complex and diverse this experience is. For this reason, in the new society with its colossally wide and complex system of labor, with its numerous ties uniting the experience of the most diverse (although equally developed) human individualities, the forces of development must create such rapid progress as we in our day can hardly imagine. The harmonious progress of future society will be much more intensive than the semi-spontaneous progress, fluctuating between contradictions, of our epoch.
All economic obstacles to development will be abolished under the new system. Thus, the application of machinery, which under capitalism is determined by considerations of profit, under the new system will depend entirely upon productivity. As we have seen, machinery which may be very useful for saving labor is very frequently useless from the standpoint of capitalist profits. In socialist society, such a point of view will not prevail and there will, therefore, be no obstacles to the application of labor-saving machinery.
The forces of development which will dominate at this stage will not be new forces; they will have operated previously. In the natural self-sufficing system, however, these forces were suppressed by the general conservatism prevailing in it; under capitalism they are suppressed by virtue of the fact that the classes which take for themselves the product of surplus labor, i.e., the main source of the forces of development of society, do not participate in the direct struggle with nature, do not conduct industry personally, but through others, and consequently remain outside the influence of the forces created in the struggle.
Under socialism, however, the sum total of surplus labor will be employed by the whole of society and every member will directly participate in the struggle against nature. Consequently, the main and greatest driving force of progress will act unhindered and at top speed, not through a select minority, but through the whole of humanity, and the sphere of development must increase unceasingly.
Thus the general characteristics of the socialist system, the highest stage of society we can conceive, are: power over nature, organization, socialness, freedom, and progress.
Up close, DSA Bread and Roses (the “centralizers”), DSA Build (the “decentralizers”), and Marxist Center look prettydifferent. What do a unified social-democratic faction, a loose opposition alliance, and an aspiring cadre party have in common?
Step a few feet back, though, and their distinctions lose significance, like the different-colored dots of an Impressionist painting blending into a coherent whole.
Class is everything. A libertarian professor of economics and a radical professor of women’s studies may hate each other, but they both make five times as much as the janitor who cleans up after them – and more importantly, they spend their lives in the same educated, affluent milieu.
Despite its egalitarian pretensions, the US political system is run by the middle class for the benefit of the ruling class. There is effectively no political culture outside of those classes (a very few isolated and localized examples notwithstanding). As Bernie Sanders said, poor people don’t vote, let alone protest or form political organizations. Of course, the dispossessed do resist their dispossession, all the time – but they do so outside of the political system (and usually, in limited and decentralized ways, everyday oppression and everyday resistance tending towards a socially-stable equilibrium).
US socialism is a fringe of the official political culture. Its class makeup reflects that. It is college-educated, affluent (or at least with affluent parents), and attuned to the concerns of middle-class professionals and students in general. Whether they’re door-knocking for Bernie, waving anti-imperialist placards for the cameras, or running brake-light clinics, it’s the same people from the same backgrounds mobilizing each other.
In other words – should they arrange themselves into a centralized electoral front, a federation of autonomous activist hubs, or an ideologically united party? Shouldn’t they first prove why they, as a subculture, matter in the first place? Normcore social democrats and social-reproduction-theory feminists both claim to represent the authentic working class. If that’s true, why do both sides seem to be made up mostly of journalists and humanities postdocs?
Where are the call-center workers? Where are the home health aides? Where are the McDonald’s fry cooks? Everyone talks about them, but when was the last time you saw one running an activist meeting? How many of the working poor have you ever seen at a leftist event – other than the venue staff?
Traditionally, Marxism draws a line between intellectuals (professionals, technicians, and all those whose specialized training and knowledge gives them a uniquely strong position in the labor market) and the proletariat (the truly dispossessed, the mass of workers and unemployed whose “unskilled” status makes their labor more-or-less interchangeable from capital’s point of view). The latter, not the former, carries the revolutionary seed, both because it owns no means of production (not even professional licenses and training!) and thus has no stake in preserving class distinctions and because the logistically-socialized, large-scale economy it operates makes it possible to raise everyone’s standard of living. Now, intellectuals can contribute to the great work of organizing the proletariat for power, but only by immersing themselves in its life. They must make their struggles their own.
These days, US leftism has lost that awareness. To hear any faction of DSA (or Marxist Center) talk, K12 teachers, college professors, and even professional athletes are proletarians. Instead of dedicating their lives to serving the masses, intellectual-class radicals would rather band together with each other and creatively redefine the proletariat to include themselves. But while they may fool each other, they can’t fool the larger social process of class struggle. In terms of their historical and economic context, all their factions are variations on the same theme as MoveOn, the National Organization for Women, and for that matter, Young Americans for Liberty. They’re all ideologically-defined middle-class protest movements.
Now, as an individual, there’s nothing morally wrong with being an intellectual. That’s my class background, and if you’re reading this there’s a better-than-even chance it’s yours too. Intellectuals can contribute plenty – they have administrative, research, fundraising, and bookkeeping skills (from higher education), extra time and energy (from middle-class jobs), and better physical health in general (from better healthcare access). If intellectuals go to the proletariat, immerse themselves in it, dedicate their lives to it, and help organize struggle committees in low-wage workplaces and slumlord-owned buildings, they can be a truly valuable part of the class struggle. And historically, red unions and communist parties have always attracted their fair share of radical-minded intellectuals. Many of them have brought social-scientific and historical knowledge that’s helped break the stability of the oppression-resistance equilibrium, opening up new space for class struggle.
However, the US’s actually-existing socialist groups are there for their own sake, not as supporting organizers for struggle committees. Their understanding of “mass” as “anyone who shows up to protests” (and “vanguard” as “anyone who agrees with this list of ideas”) help keep their concerns and membership middle-class and insular. So does their commitment to the US’s political process – and even the ones with the most revolutionary posturing are still committed to participating in that process, albeit via protest rather than lobbying. It comes out the same either way.
Revolution does not mean “sweeping social change” in some abstract sense. Sure, it involves deep and systemic changes, but those are an after-effect, not the thing itself. Revolution means overthrowing the government. It’s literal. Similarly, socialism doesn’t mean “Liz Warren’s policies but more so” (and flawed as my four-tendencies typology was, I stand by “government socialists” for those whose “socialism” means taking progressive Democrat ideas and extending them just a few degrees further than John Oliver). Socialism means the proletariat (not the liberal-democratic state) owns the economy and runs it according to a central plan, not an ad-hoc collection of welfare programs and “socially-conscious” nonprofits. Creating that will take a full-blown revolution, not a gradual build-up of legislative reforms, because the liberal-democratic political process will never allow socialism. It never has and it never will because it was designed from the get-go to make that impossible. It does that not by banning dissent but by giving it a venue to express itself and lobby the government (or protest it!), thereby taming it into a perpetual loyal opposition.
That’s why any socialism that’s bound to the political process is self-defeating in the end. However, class is thicker than ideology, so any movement based in the middle classes will always bend back towards the political process.
Inasmuch as it’s more than a buzzword, base-building contains a kernel of the right idea. Socialist intellectuals can engage with proletarian tenants and workers in a mutually-transformative process, accumulating experience one struggle committee at a time. That process can eventually rekindle the mass socialism that the US hasn’t had for generations. However, the thrust of that organizing must always be away from and against collaboration with the government. That means not lobbying it, participating in its elections, taking its money, or – and this is what almost no activist figures out – protesting it. Part of the normal function of a liberal-democratic government is to be periodically protested; why else do you think it’s in the Bill of Rights? Liberal states are stable in part because they work like lightning rods, attracting dissident anger and channeling it harmlessly into the ground.
Instead, the way forward is to steadily and patiently gain experience with class struggle, gradually cultivate a base among the dispossessed, and eventually begin to develop the necessary forces to establish revolutionary sovereignty: not joining the official political realm but creating an entirely new one, an insurrectionary proletarian state (“dual power” the way Lenin meant it).
I spent years in the middle-class, activist Left, including as an early Marxist Center organizer. I don’t write this to set myself up as embodying some kind of virtue that others lack; everything I’m critiquing here, I was doing myself two years ago. When I call it a dead end, I’m not talking from ignorance.
But I left. I changed the type of organizing I’m involved in and, more importantly, the constituency towards which I orient. I invite you to do the same. Would you rather spend the next ten years rehashing the same debates as the last ten with the same people from the same class background (voting or consensus? Smashing windows or holding banners? Democrat or Green?), while history continues to leave you behind?
Communists must take a leading role in rebuilding the labor movement and fighting against anti-union laws like Taft-Hartley, argues Anton Johannsen.
Teamsters and police battle in the streets of Minneapolis, 1934.
There is a continuum of left positions on unions. Syndicalism argues for very particular forms of unions as the central revolutionary organizational bodies, and often views existing unions as corrupt and useless. Trotskyists and most Stalinists see bureaucratic unions as in need of a leadership change; communists must lead them, and in turn the unions must be subordinated to the party. Anarchists, like syndicalists, often support unions of a particular anti-statist bent. With the exception of Bordigists, left communists see little to nothing of use in unions or involvement in union work. There are partial truths that all tendencies recognize across the board, yet none of these views are sufficient. In this piece, I will try to briefly outline an argument for why communists need to develop a unique strategy to help build unions and that communists must fight to strengthen workers’ rights by repealing Taft-Hartley’s provisions which treat U.S. workers like indentured servants.
Unions are on the front lines of the class struggle for workers under capitalism. By “union” here I mean some form of organization for defense and attack at work. Note that this is an abstract definition, i.e. a simple model or category. From this abstract model, we can then bring in factors of the world or the particular form a union takes in order to concretize the discussion and clarify problems with unions.
For example, unions charge members’ dues and use the money to pay staff and officers to carry out their work. We can concretize this further. Most unions pay executive national/international positions relatively fat salaries. In most unions, these positions are monopolized by bureaucrats, a form of legal corruption, and in some, outright illegal corruption.
This is beneficial to the bourgeoisie and they prefer it this way. In the 1990s, members of the Teamsters voted out the union’s president, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., the notoriously employer-friendly son of the mobbed-up union boss, Hoffa Sr. Ron Carey, a reform candidate endorsed by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, won on a platform of slashing bloated union-executive compensation and waste, democratizing the union, and supporting the drive to strike against UPS in order to bring part-timers into full-time positions, among other demands. In 1997, with Carey at the helm, 185,000 Teamsters went out on strike for 3 weeks after years of preparation through a rank-and-file organizing drive among members. The union brought UPS to its knees, and they were not happy. Carey himself recalls the negotiating meeting where UPS accede to the union’s demands:
“I recall an incident which occurred in the last hours of those strike negotiations which illustrates the level of animosity the corporate community felt for me: one of the negotiators for UPS said, in the presence of then-Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, “Okay Carey, we agree on the union’s outstanding issues,” and he proceeded to leave the conference room. As he was leaving, he leaned over the conference table and said to me, “You’re dead, Carey, and you will pay for this, you s.o.b.” I looked at Ms. Herman, and asked, “Did you hear that?” She responded, “I heard nothing.”1
Over the next four years, Hoffa Jr., UPS, the corporate media, and House Republicans led a smear campaign against Carey that saw him barred from running for re-election and eventually banned from the Teamsters for life. They alleged that Carey had knowledge of a scam worked out by his campaign consultant, Jere Nash, to use union money to fund the election campaign, a significant chunk of which was kicked back to this consultant’s business,
“”Nash’s testimony also revealed that he may have been neck-deep in a shady conflict of interest. In 1996 he received $128,000 from Martin Davis’s consulting firm, which was the largest vendor for the Carey campaign. This pay was ostensibly for six months of part-time work Nash did related to the Clinton-Gore campaign. (Nash’s compensation from the Carey campaign was much less: $2,500 a month.) Nash simultaneously was managing the Carey campaign and employed by its biggest creditor. The swaps occurred when Nash and Davis were looking for money to pay for a $700,000 direct-mail push for the Carey campaign–a direct-mail effort to be handled by Davis and one that would result in large profits for his firm. With Davis his main income source, Nash, then, may have had a financial incentive to go along with Davis’s swap scheme and not inform Carey of it. And as Carey’s attorneys noted, Nash, who is cooperating with the U.S. Attorney, might be testifying against Carey to win a reduction in sentence.”2
In 2001, Carey was acquitted by a jury of any knowledge of the scams. By that time, Hoffa Jr. had won a re-election campaign for President of the Teamsters. The business community was ecstatic, with the trade magazine Transport World writing in 2000:
‘United Parcel Service, the nation’s largest transportation company, feels that it has taken part in one of the great trades of all time in labor: James P. ‘Jimmy‘ Hoffa for Ron Carey as president of the Teamsters union.’3
To be clear, the bourgeoisie rule through legal corruption, and delight at the illegal corruption of workers’ organizations. This helps them maintain hegemony over these organizations or crack down on them through the state. By legal corruption, I mean access and retention of office by means of money. This is legalized through restrictive pressures put on political campaigns by money: it’s much easier for the wealthy to reach a broad audience. As well, access to public relations firms and resources to carry out an election campaign, even within a union, require a lot of resources.
Jere Nash, Carey’s consultant, was a Democratic Party insider and campaign strategist. The set-up to Carey’s downfall was also the decades of corruption fostered in the Teamsters by Hoffa Sr., which led to the standing Federal monitoring of Teamster elections through an Independent Review Board, the representatives of which also played a role in bringing Hoffa Jr. back to power.
The key here is that the anti-democratic features of the Teamsters, their corruption, led to the political intervention of the state, not in the direction of ending corruption, but ensuring the corrupt leaders retained control.
The other features of bureaucratic unions are liberal and anti-republican organizational rules such as meaningless referendums, powerful executive bodies, and non-representational forms of organization. Strong executives in unions and a lack of membership vote (let alone membership control over bargaining and negotiations) are preferable to the bosses because they make it easier to wring a favorable solution out of the union by buying off union bureaucrats or taking advantage of divisions between the leadership and the membership to compel agreement.
This dynamic toward corruption is often cited as a reason to oppose the “bureaucratic unions” by anarcho-syndicalists and for the left communists, at times a reason to abstain, forsaking any kind of struggle for influence and leadership in the unions. But there is another logical step. Left communists argue that unions are naturally prone to becoming corrupt in this way by virtue of their form, no matter the ideology. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalists point out that unions are like any social organization: they reflect the choices of members and leaders in their form and their activity. Thus, unions must be anarcho-syndicalist in nature in order to succeed. So far, so good. The problem with this? The reduction of virtually every anarcho-syndicalist union in the world to national membership levels of less than 10,000 across the globe. For anarcho-syndicalists, especially in the U.S., the form of a union is in equal measure to the strategic choices of the union participants in determining the more or less effective or revolutionary aspects of the union.
Direct Unionism, a view of union organizing promoted by a tendency in the American and Canadian sections of the IWW, proposes the following as an alternative to “bureaucratic unionism”:
“. . . that instead of focusing on contracts, workplace elections, or legal procedures, IWW members should strive to build networks of militants in whatever industry they are employed. These militants will then agitate amongst their co-workers and lead direct actions over specific grievances in their own workplaces. The goal of such actions will not be union recognition from a single boss. Instead, the goal of the actions is to build up leadership and consciousness amongst other workers. Once a ‘critical mass’ of workers have experience with, and an understanding of, direct action the focus will be on large scale industrial actions that address issues of wages and conditions across entire regions or even whole countries. It will be from this base of power that the IWW will establish itself as a legitimate workers’ organization.”
The Direct Unionists want to build up networks of union activists, essentially. In practice, this is little different from the Labor Notes strategy. The following argument is not that this strategy is in error, just that it is incomplete. How then would the Direct Unionists proceed?
“When organizing without contracts—as direct unionist believe we should be—it is of great importance the IWW is (1) very strategic and tactical in our organizing and (2) honest with ourselves about how much power we can effectively exert in any workplace or industry.”4
The record of the I.W.W. over the past 20 or so years has shown that regardless of how well committee organizers performed according to item 1 above, with respect to item number 2 the reality is that lasting power was never really built.
Partly this must derive from their illusion that there could be a linear growth in the number of committees in the “network” that would work together without some organizational glue to coordinate and facilitate this increasing scale. What Direct Unionism does, in fact, is ideologize a component of many other types of organizing pursued in industries and areas difficult for unions to get a foothold in. This is often called “minority unionism” because the committee, no matter how plugged-in and representative of the workforce, is in the position of not being recognized by the company or the state as the representative agent of the workers.5
Nevertheless, the Direct unionist attempt to deal concretely with the challenges faced by organizers, given the slate of anti-union policy in the U.S., is admirable. But the naiveté of trying to build an industry-wide strike via ad hoc committee-building without any plan of centralization from the beginning reveals an underlying decentralist-anarchist ideology, whether explicitly held by the authors or not. Again, this is made clear by the persistent failure of what end up being isolated campaigns of volunteer committees associated with the IWW in various cities.
The other component to the Direct Unionist line is anti-contractualism. This rightly identifies the pernicious way that most contract provisions which employers are able to get into contracts are contrary to the interests of the workers and that the particular strategy of unions relying on contracts works to demobilize the membership in favor of emphasizing the role of thestaff and officers of a union. The problem with anti-contractualism is that it turns this criticism of particular strategies utilized by unions under current conditions into a dogmatic opposition to contracts that holds back effective organizing that can win long-term power on the shop floor. The very existence of a contract results in the development of a staff corps in the union, marshaled by an entrenched officialdom to rotate throughout the country, servicing bargaining units as their contracts come to expire, and leaving as soon as they are negotiated.
Instead, contracts should be seen for what they are: a measure of strength. The provisions of a contract illustrate the power of the workers to compel an employer to agree to the given provisions. Ultimately, a contract is a piece of paper with rules that must be enforced. The problem to which the Direct Unionists ought to respond is that of the balance of power between members and officials, to the extent that the officialdom and staff enforce poor contracts against members. The other side to this is the role the state plays in limiting the actions and types of demands unions may make, as well as in regulating their internal structure.
Direct Unionists, members of the IWW that they are, are very quick to point out the importance of membership-involvement, democracy, and hold a general anti-staff position. But from here we run into a problem in the question of concrete form. To make a comparison, the UAW (United Auto Workers) and IWW both have general conventions of elected delegates as the main decision making body, with executive boards making decisions in the interim. The UAW has a presidential office, which is an anti-republican office, so that’s one notch against them. The point is that every aspect of ‘form’ betrays a particular interpretation of the world, the structure of society, who can or ought to be able to make what decisions, and so on. Ultimately, the form gives way to the politics. The UAW has a particular form for the same reason they have lengthy provisions about collective bargaining: they have a root theory about how best to defend and help the working class and that theory is at odds with communism.
So, we have an organizational form on the one hand, and politics on the other. The organization is the means to accomplish the ends you seek, and the political ends that liberal union bureaucrats seek are collective bargaining, contracts that track in new members, land nice lump-sum payouts from profit sharing, and the like. At a minimum, through the AFL-CIO, the idea runs that collective bargaining is the best way to defend and attack for the working class. The classic line from the IWW or some leftists is that the bureaucratic unions are just a means for the bureaucrats to make money, and that the best method is committee-driven direct action; strikes and street protests are what show the workers’ true power. This approach bends the stick too far.
After all, isn’t collective bargaining all that unions do anyway? Even the Local 8 longshore workers in the IWW in the 1910s were engaged in a type of collective bargaining. They made agreements with the employers, independent of whether or not these were drawn up on paper or arbitrated by a state agency. What mattered was that every member of the local was educated about the agreement and ready at a moment’s notice to enforce it through industrial action.
The ideology of the bureaucrats is a reformism that collapses toward liberalism. It isn’t simply a question of the existence of the bureaucrats, but the nature of their grip on the organization and the ideas they offer to the members and public to justify this arrangement. These ideas are political positions of the bureaucrats.
The dominant ideology of the labor bureaucracy in the United States has been a form of liberal, as opposed to republican, democracy. These political positionsmatter because they undergird the organizational forms and strategies adopted by union leaders, distributed among members and new recruits, and lay the foundation for close links between labor and the Democratic Party. But why has this ideology persisted through generations? One interpretation is this: bureaucrats in capitalist society in general are prone to liberalism in the philosophical sense, that is, their fundamental political commitment will be to discrete individual rights, with property rights at the center, rather than democracy and equality. This is because bureaucracy is a form of private property in skillset or office. Of course, most U.S. unions are still more ‘democratic’ than the U.S. government. This is partly because they have to be, in order to mobilize enough workers to strike at least for initial recognition, but also because of the ideology of the core organizers and members. So the particular form of organization is tempered and guided by the political outlook of those who found, organize, and accompany its development. To demonstrate this point, we can briefly look at the respective constitutional preambles of the UAW and the IWW. Though they have some similarities in governing form (and many divergences) their preambles couldn’t be more different. Let us first look at the preamble of the UAW:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; expressive of the ideals and hopes of the workers who come under the jurisdiction of this INTERNATIONAL UNION, UNITED AUTOMOBILE, AEROSPACE AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENT WORKERS OF AMERICA (UAW): “that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men and women, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Within the orderly processes of such government lies the hope of the worker in advancing society toward the ultimate goal of social and economic justice.
The precepts of democracy require that workers through their union participate meaningfully in making decisions affecting their welfare and that of the communities in which they live.
Managerial decisions have far-reaching impact upon the quality of life enjoyed by the workers, the family, and the community. Management must recognize that it has basic responsibilities to advance the welfare of the workers and the whole society and not alone to the stockholders. It is essential, therefore, that the concerns of workers and of society be taken into account when basic managerial decisions are made.”
Note that while the UAW asserts the ‘rights of workers’ as individuals in a democracy to have their voices heard, they don’t deny the right of management to manage, or the right of the idle rich to exploit. This is reflective of a liberal-democratic outlook, amenable to workplace reconciliation and democracy through collective bargaining. Note too that the material basis for the labor bureaucracy is this regime of collective bargaining. Their salaries are based on their success in this field. On the other hand, the IWW’s preamble asserts that class struggle is the governing mode of the worker-capitalist relation:
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. …It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
The world outlook of the IWW argues that class struggle shapes the relationship between worker and employer and that this will be the case until the workers get organized and overthrow the capitalist system of governing society. Unions play the role of defending the day-to-day needs of the class, educating workers about the class struggle, and drilling them into fighting shape.
The point here is that there is a limit to the ‘structuralist’ critique of form. At a certain point, the question becomes what the political commitments of those advocating the particular form are, and what political commitments are implied and accomplished through an organizational form. This needs to be viewed with respect to particular classes in society. Petit-bourgeois professionals and bureaucrats are perfectly happy with an organization investing significant powers in salaried officials and staff. Their role as lawyers, managers and the like endears them to the ‘noble’ applications of their skills in helping out the little guy. This is where the anarchist critique of the bureaucracy has a truth: the position of the bureaucrats does incline them to act differently.
However, this is true for the bureaucrats as a class. The form this self-interest takes hold ideologically or politically is through reformism. Anarchists say that reformism creates bureaucrats. While this true in the sense that particular reforms may create funding for more bureaucrats, it elides the origin of the given reform in the efforts by particular forms of bureaucracy organic to capitalism: the lawyer, the manager, the organization official, and so on. The development of reformism as an ideology is a cyclical process. The bureaucracy requires justification, both for the bureaucrat’s own conscience, and because the bureaucrat must get some support in wider democratic society, especially among the workers.
The flip side of this is that some bureaucracy is necessary as a result of the uneven development of capitalism. That is, given the social division of labor based on property relations, bureaucrats do often possess necessary skills for the growth and survival of the organizations they serve in. The dilemma then is one of whether or not an organization is governed by or governed in the interests of bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, the IWW is also reliant on Robert’s Rules of Order, as are most bureaucratic unions. While parliamentary procedure is important, it can be a tool to monopolize discrete knowledge of procedure and rules for the benefit of bureaucrats to maneuver and control the process. This can be seen in both the UAW and the IWW. Anyone who has been to an IWW convention, or has paid attention to the internal controversies in the organization, can attest to the fact that it is often the case that for a democratic decision to be taken, it has to overcome technical machinations of process. On the other hand, when faced with a seemingly obscure set of unfamiliar rules, the membership response is to simply pressure the parties involved or move the debate away from substantive disagreements and toward interpersonal conflict. The IWW lurches from one political-crisis-as-personal-dispute to the next. Effectively, by adhering haphazardly to some fundamental principles of bourgeois law, the IWW has crafted a situation where every member must be a bureaucrat in order to participate. Rather than abolish bureaucracy, it has abolished any other role for members.
New members elected to leadership positions in the IWW often find themselves in the middle of a handful of formally and informally organized cliques in the union with overlapping members based on political positions. This is to be expected in any large organization, but the goal of the structure of an organization then should be to overcome the dynamic that this fosters, frustrating any resolution of political disagreements to the effect of frustrating effective growth and successful execution of the organization’s program. Instead, the mechanisms of the organization should draw out and clarify political distinctions in order for the membership to become openly apprised of them and to select at congresses or conventions the positions they support.
This is not to let officers off the hook. As leftists tend to point out, there are indeed problems with the leadership of unions. This leadership is exceedingly liberal-democratic in their outlook, which leads to definite problems with respect to organizational form and strategy. As anarcho-syndicalists often point out, business unions invest too much in PR campaigns, officer salaries, and staff-driven symbolic stunts. And as some left communists argue, the tendency toward the development of and coup by bureaucracy is persistent in capitalist society, both in parties and in unions.
But our response to these problems shouldn’t be abstention from unions as a principle or the simplistic alternative of a change to a structureless organization. Instead, we should fight for changes in the governing structures and principles of unions. That means putting the maximum program of socialism in the constitution and making structural changes that allow for transparency and democracy, as well as preparing workers to govern as a class.
A central aim of communists in unions, then, is to build working class power on the shop floor. Workers without a union are barely citizens, as a result of their inability to enforce any rules in their favor at work. Mere inputs for business, workers are disposable, replaceable, and reminded of it daily. The employers exercise a dictatorship over their employees. Workers are completely at their mercy. The union offers an alternative. It offers a democratic formalization of the workers’ own authority. Organized workers are prepared to act in unison. They’re educated and aware of their rights on the job as a result of the work done by the union. They can stand and look their exploiters in the eye as equals, not in terms of bourgeois law, but in terms of power. They can begin to assert themselves as the inheritors of the fight for human emancipation.
Democratic, member-led bargaining has a history of wrenching contracts from employers that got better wages, better conditions, and restricted the grievance procedure to a short process, or, better yet, enabled workers to strike or take action to resolve grievances rather than do so through arbitration. Judith Steppan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin have shown this in their work on left-led unions during and after WWII and the nature of their contracts and constitutional provisions. The authors write, with regard to “pro-labor” contract provisions:
“The crucial finding is that the comparative odds of the Communist camp’s local contracts being prolabor, as opposed to those in the anti-Communist camp, were consistently much higher on each provision, as follows: The comparative odds that the contracts did not cede management prerogatives were 4 to 1 in favor of the Communist camp; that they did not have a total strike prohibition, 7 to 1; that they were short-term, 4.6 to 1; that they had a tradeoff, 11 to 1; that a steward had to be present at a grievance’s first step, 11 to 1; that the grievance procedure had no more than three steps, 3 to 1; and that each step had a time limit, 2 to 1.” 6
That rank-and-file- and socialist-led unions are more effective is also demonstrated by the aforementioned Local 8 of the Marine Transport Workers’ Union in the I.W.W.’s past. They were able to wrench concessions from their employer and enforce workplace conditions through direct action. If the employer tried to bring in a work gang of non-union members, the work delegates would ensure that the workers immediately ceased work and walked off the job.7Communists must work to break the reliance of workers on their employers and reorient them to the institutional forms of union self-government: the shopfloor committee, the Industrial Union Local, and the International Union. This means employing the known committee-building tactics, promulgated by the IWW Education committee and groups like Labor Notes, in the context of an explicitly Socialist effort to rebuild organized labor, across the country. Workers without a union rely on the mercy of their employers. They are subjected to an undue and illegitimate authority, forced to produce profit for shareholders and lavishly wealthy corporate executives in order to get crumbs with which to get by. The only way to fight back is to build up the democratic self-reliance of the working class into fighting unions where workers can make collective decisions to wage class war effectively.
Democratic organizing gets concrete results. Union workers are involved not just in voting for a union that will bargain on their behalf, but in fighting for their own demands through group effort, and will not soon forget the power that they build, nor ignore the broader political opportunity to use such power. Witness the West Virginia teachers’ strike that violated the law successfully, not just for narrow demands for teachers, but for demands that would benefit teachers and the public. Union organizing prepares the working class to take part in politics, at the granular level. As Eugene Debs once argued:
“Voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal. Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped and the place to begin is in the industries where the workers are employed. Their economic power has got to be developed through efficient organization, or their political power, even if it could be developed, would but react upon them, thwart their plans, blast their hopes, and all but destroy them.”8
For these reasons, union organization raises the dignity and education of the workers themselves which opens up the possibility of workers becoming a conscious and active political constituency, fighting for their own interests. Rather than dependent wage workers, union workers build independence by organizing to fight the employers at work. They force the boss to treat them with dignity and exert equal power in that relationship.
Building this alternative democratic authority calls forth all the intense political questions we face under capitalism. The workers’ chains are money, and workers spend most of their living hours for it and end up losing it through high prices, rents, and loan scams, all the while facing disenfranchisement through corruption and bureaucracy. As the bosses, challenged by workers, call on the state to enforce their interests to the exclusion of the workers, they will be forced to ask: who does the state serve? Who ought it serve? And how do we break these chains? Bureaucratic unions often have to deal with these political questions even as their power weakens. But they retreat into the realm of lobbying bourgeois politicians in ways that are often extremely ineffective.
In stark contrast to this, communists must pose a two-pronged strategy. First, there must be a commitment to organizing workers based on democratic principles of membership, sovereignty, and transparency. This entails organizing the working class to use direct action for enforcement of every demand and contract provision as well as a bargaining strategy aiming for zero-recognition of management rights and no-strike clauses, and lengthy grievance procedures as far as possible. Second, communists must augment this work with political work mobilizing votes to repeal Taft-Hartley. Taft-Hartley is a federal law which requires advanced notice for strike action wherever workers hold a contract with an employer. This severely limits workers’ abilities to enforce their contracts through direct action and attain the robust and fighting labor movement we aim for, outlined above.
Prioritizing the repeal of Taft-Hartley means making it a litmus test for any candidate for office. This further requires that there be a broad enough base of support in elections, but ultimately in the streets and at work, as the French Yellow Jackets and West Virginia teachers have shown. Politicians are important to help spread our ideas and eventually pass reforms, but street protests and industrial actions are key to winning and keeping them. This is why the need to begin organizing now is so important. Communists must combine the day-to-day fight to rebuild the labor movement with a national political campaign to repeal Taft-Hartley. In turn, Taft-Hartley’s repeal will bolster union organizing and help strengthen the fight for a communist movement based on democracy.
