
Socialism is back.
Download the PDF version of this document for printing.
Socialism
is back. After declaring nearly three decades ago that “there is no
alternative” to capitalism, the ruling class in the United States
has worked itself into a frenzy denouncing socialism at every turn
–totally baffled by its growing popularity among young people.
They’re
not making it up. A 51% majority of people ages 18-29 in the U.S. had
a favorable view of socialism according to a 2018 Gallup poll. When
asked about capitalism, just 45% of young people had a favorable view
– a staggering 12-point drop from the same poll question posed
eight years ago.
While
the ruling class and their media mouthpieces puzzle over socialism’s
roaring comeback in U.S. politics, the cause is plain to see. It’s
not “those lazy millennials and their social media,” or
overprotective parents, or public school curriculum. It’s
capitalism.
In
that poll’s eight-year timespan, Wall Street saw its profits
skyrocket to new heights. Banks and corporations received deep tax
cuts and inflated their stock prices through share buy-back schemes.
Eager to forget the 2008 financial crisis, politicians and media
pundits proclaimed an ‘economic recovery’ across the USA.
But
the working class experienced no recovery at all. Hundreds of
thousands of working families lost their homes through foreclosure.
Millions of young people graduated college with crippling student
debt, only to enter a terrible job market offering low-wages,
part-time hours and few if any benefits. Black and Latino workers saw
the little wealth they had evaporate, and wages for the entire
working class remain stagnant, even as their bills grow more
expensive. Is it any wonder why young workers think capitalism sucks
and want an alternative?
Sooner
or later, capitalism’s loss of legitimacy was bound to take on
political dimensions. In 2016, tens of thousands of young workers got
involved with Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination. Drawn to a platform of social democratic
reforms like Medicare For All, free college and a $15/hour minimum
wage, countless workers and young people acted on their
anti-capitalist instincts for the first time and got involved in
politics.
Sanders
lost, but interest in socialism and activism only grew as thousands
flocked to left-wing groups, particularly the Democratic Socialists
of America, to learn more and get involved. Out of the Great
Recession, a whole new generation of socialists has emerged with the
conviction that capitalism is the problem and something has to
change.
But
capitalism is an enormous system and overthrowing it will require
more than debates on Twitter. Where should socialists and radicals in
the U.S. put their energy towards fighting capitalism and building
socialism?
This
paper lays out the labor strategy of the Freedom Road Socialist
Organization (FRSO), which guides our organizing work in trade
unions. It argues that socialists belong in the labor movement,
organizing with the working class on the shop floor to fight our
class enemy. Only the working class has a material interest in the
complete overthrow of all the exploitation and oppression, and unions
represent the most organized section of the working class. To that
end, serious socialist revolutionaries in the United States need to
root themselves among the rank-and-file and join with union militants
in rebuilding a fighting labor movement.
While
socialism has grown in popularity, many people have different ideas
of what it actually means. Bernie Sanders calls himself a ‘democratic
socialist’ and embraces the social welfare states of Denmark,
Sweden and Norway. In the same vein, others suggest that socialism is
any government program, ranging from Social Security to the police.
The right-wing calls just about anything ‘socialist’
if they don’t like it, even the 2008 government bailout of Wall
Street. Whatever their differences, all of these views have one thing
in common: their ‘socialism’
easily coexists with capitalism – and all of its contradictions.
But
capitalism is more than just a market economy. It’s an entire mode
of production characterized by particular economic and social
relations between two classes: a small ruling class of property
owners and a large working class. Having neither wealth nor capital,
the worker survives by selling their labor power to the capitalist.
Profit and the immense social power of the capitalist comes from this
exploitation of wage labor. If this exploitation of the majority by
the minority were to end, so too would capitalism.
These
two classes have conflicting interests that inevitably express
themselves through struggle. While the capitalists have their immense
wealth and the state on their side, workers have their labor and
superior numbers. In its drive for greater profit, capitalism forges
together an ever-growing majority class of workers drawn from every
nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age and walk of
life. They can organize together, withhold their labor and fight back
against their class enemies.
To
end their misery once and for all though, the working class will have
to overthrow their rulers and take political and economic power for
themselves. When we talk about socialism, we don’t mean a ‘Green
New Deal’ or ‘Medicare for All’ legislation. Reforms like these
would certainly help the working class under capitalism, but they
won’t put an end to the capitalist system’s exploitation,
oppression, war and misery. We want to end the rule by billionaires,
corporations, banks, and their politicians. In its place, we want
socialism – rule by the working class over the economy, government
and society. To get there will take nothing short of a revolution.
The
working class is the natural home for socialists. This isn’t out of
some moral obligation to help the poor, or because workers are
perfect people. Plenty of contradictions exist within the working
class, especially in the United States. But only our class has an
objective interest in the end of capitalism and the victory of
socialism. If you want those things too, the working class is where
you need to organize.
It’s
fitting that as socialism returns to the mainstream, so does trade
unionism. Since the 2008 economic crisis, a greater number of
Americans support unions and would join one if given the opportunity.
But while public opinion shifted to labor’s side, right-wing
politicians launched an all-out legal and political attack on unions,
particularly in the public sector. It looked like 2018 would deal a
body blow to organized labor in the form of the Supreme Court’s
decision in Janus
v. AFSCME. But something bigger happened to labor in 2018: Starting in West Virginia, teachers across the country came down with a bad case of strike fever. They took to the picket lines, often in flagrant violation of state laws, and raised bold demands over wages, health care, and funding for public education – and in most cases, they won. Worker militancy is contagious, and hotel workers in many cities followed the example by striking. UPS Teamsters voted for strike authorization and voted down their contract for the first time in history, and steelworkers forced employers to accept their demands by presenting a credible strike threat. Rank-and-file union militancy has breathed new life into a labor movement on life support. Now is the time for socialists to dive in, join the class struggle, and bring these two movements back together.
Unions
are the most important mass organizations of workers. Situated at the
point of production, unions bring workers together to address their
day-to-day issues and immediate concerns on the shop floor. They
provide a vehicle for workers to struggle with their bosses over
wages, benefits, working conditions and more.
Pitting
labor against capital, these struggles over economic demands are
actually larger struggles over power and control of production. They
draw sharp lines of demarcation between workers and capitalists,
allowing those workers engaged in the fight to see their individual
interests as part of a larger, collective class. Struggle is the most
powerful teacher, and fighting unions operate as schools for workers
to become conscious of their class interests – “schools for
socialism,” as Marx once said.
But
we won’t have a revolution without a fighting labor movement, and
most unions today are not oriented towards class struggle. Unions
will need to get back to basics: taking on employers, mobilizing the
rank-and-file, organizing the unorganized and making use of the
strike weapon. That transformation won’t happen by itself. It will
take a militant minority of union fighters coming together to
organize their coworkers, struggle with their bosses, and kick out
any sellout union officials who get in their way.
The
U.S. labor movement developed differently than its counterparts in
Europe. For one, there was a shortage of labor in the North American
colonies, which large plantation owners supplemented by kidnapping
and enslaving Africans. Even as capitalism took off in the north, the
wide availability of land in North America acted as a ‘safety
valve’ preventing too much worker rebellion. When cities became too
crowded by poor wage workers and their families, the state could
entice some with the possibility of land out west and upward
mobility. Early U.S. courts outlawed strikes and criminalized
collective bargaining as ‘conspiracy’.
But
the main obstacle for the U.S. labor movement was slavery. Slave
labor drove down wages for workers and made it harder to collectively
bargain. Slave-owners and capitalists alike used white supremacy to
promote a fraudulent unity between rich whites and the white workers
they exploited on the basis of color. So long as slavery existed,
workers in the U.S. would not develop a consistent class
consciousness.
The
civil war started as a conflict between northern capitalists and
southern plantation owners, but it unleashed a social revolution that
abolished chattel slavery and transformed the country. Emboldened by
the promise of emancipation, slaves called general strikes across the
south and shut down the plantation economy. The earliest labor unions
and socialists in the U.S. supported abolition and fought valiantly
for the Union Army against the Confederacy. After the war, Black
freedmen built powerful political and labor organizations to
democratize the south, protect African American civil rights, and put
more economic power in the hands of workers and poor farmers. But the
old planter class reasserted itself through Jim Crow, lynchings and
the Ku Klux Klan, desperate to keep Black labor in bondage and divide
it from white labor. It’s a contradiction the working class still
reckons with today.
There
was a time in U.S. history when a socialist movement outside of the
labor movement was unimaginable. Socialism was not the ideology of
middle class students and intellectuals. It was a major political
trend in the labor movement, drawing the best shop floor leaders into
its ranks and bringing workers into pitched battles with employers
and the state. From the great railroad strikes of the 1890s led by
Eugene Debs to the massive picket lines of the Industrial Workers of
the World at the turn of the century, socialists stood tall as the
most consistent fighters for the working class.
The
Great Depression brought American trade unionism into a new era of
struggle. Facing crippling poverty and unemployment, workers fought
back and made widespread use of their greatest weapon: the
production-halting strike. When the conservative leaders of the
American Federation of Labor refused to seize the moment and lead the
rebellion, union militants formed the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), organized industrywide strikes, and won
countless gains for the working class.
At
the core of the CIO’s incredible success sat communists, socialists
and radicals. The Communist Party of the 1920s and 30s drew thousands
of union militants into their ranks, who in turn mobilized millions
of workers, employed and unemployed, for battle against the
capitalist class. Even labor leaders who rejected socialism
recognized their crucial role and built strong alliances with them in
the CIO. Because their ideology allowed them understand capitalism
and class struggle beyond individual fights, communists became the
most resolute and dependable soldiers in the labor movement.
As
workers returned home from the battlefields of World War II,
employers quickly moved to quash the power of organized labor at
home. Politicians from both parties passed the Taft-Hartley Act,
which outlawed key labor tactics like solidarity strikes, and purged
communists, socialists and radicals out of the labor movement with
the Smith Act. Shamefully, conservative and opportunistic labor
leaders fell in line and forced out some of their best, most militant
fighters.
Despite
these attacks, unions would reach the height of their numerical power
in the post-war decade. 35% of workers (17 million) belonged to a
union in 1954, the most in U.S. history. Labor’s strength reflected
its continued militancy and use of the strike weapon. In 1952, 470
major strikes involving 2.7 million workers rocked the United States,
costing employers 49 million work days.
But
without the presence of socialists and radicals pushing a class
struggle approach to trade unionism, labor leaders became more
accustomed to striking deals with employers than actually striking.
In exchange for raises or pension contributions from employers, union
bureaucrats accepted no-strike clauses in their contracts and
promoted the bogus idea of shared interests between bosses and
workers. As class collaboration took greater hold among labor’s
leadership, the number of strikes declined and concessions to
employers increased. These sellout bureaucrats discouraged membership
participation and quashed militancy among the rank-and-file,
transforming unions into top-down service organizations run like a
business. Predictably, union membership rates dropped.
Without
a class struggle approach, union leaders fell for the oldest trick in
the capitalist playbook and gave up the working class’ biggest
weapon: mobilizing masses of workers to withhold their labor.
Employers, sensing the weakness of their class enemy, launched a
brutal offensive against organized labor in the 1980s headed up by
Ronald Reagan. Beginning with the air traffic controllers strike in
1983, employers took cues from the federal government as they busted
strikes with permanent replacement scabs, closed union plants to
relocate overseas, and force contract concessions on their workers.
This
anti-union offensive continued in the decades after Reagan, from the
passing of NAFTA in the 90s to the Tea Party attacks on public sector
unions of the 2010s. Strikes hit an all-time low in 2009, which saw
only five major work stoppages. Nine years later, union membership
hit a record-low with just 10.5% of workers (14.7 million) belonging
to a union. Labor’s 30-year retreat gave corporate America free
rein to exploit the working class with increased intensity and drive
up their profits. From the 1970s to present, real wages for workers
remained stagnant while productivity increased 77%.
Everyone
knows there’s a crisis in organized labor, but most of today’s
union bureaucrats are as resistant to the solution as their
predecessors. Hundreds of millions in campaign contributions to
Democrats hasn’t produced a single piece of pro-labor legislation,
nor have community-based social justice efforts like the Fight for
$15 stopped the bleeding of membership.
Nothing
good for either movement came out of socialism’s separation from
labor. Divorced from its natural base in the working class, the U.S.
left became increasingly dominated by middle class radicals and
intellectuals – and their ideas. For many, capitalism was here to
stay and the best we can do is push for reforms through the
Democratic Party. Others, seeing the painful decline of organized
labor, looked outside the working class for solutions –
non-profits, academia, radical small businesses, co-ops and more.
Whatever form they took, both approaches shared the same pessimism
about the working class and its power to transform society.
The
2008 financial crisis devastated the working class economically, and
the government’s response – bail out the banks, let the people
suffer – made it perfectly clear which class rules in this
so-called democracy. Raw outrage boiled over in 2011 when the Occupy
Wall Street movement took to the streets against the 1% ruling class.
But without a strong, fighting labor movement as its backbone, Occupy
Wall Street couldn’t formulate a consistent working class platform,
and its anarchistic structure allowed the state to easily tear it
apart.
After
decades of decline and retreat for both movements, the future looks
promising. But nothing happens without struggle. Workers in the U.S.
need a strong, fighting labor movement to confront and eventually
overthrow capitalism. To do that, unions will have to revive the
strike and commit to class struggle, and socialists have an important
role in making that happen.
History
has given socialists in the United States the crucial task of fusion:
reuniting Marxism with the workers movement. To this day, a
separation persists between the working class and socialism. Workers
have no political party of our own, and most of our unions are led by
sellout bureaucrats invested in seeing capitalism continue at the
expense of our class. If we want this to change, the working class in
the U.S. will have to take up socialism as its aim and Marxism as its
analytical tool for getting there.
Fusion
isn’t a matter of debating more workers into socialism or handing
out Marxist reading lists at the warehouse gates. Marxism is the
science of making revolution, and its home is among the working
class. The main reason we don’t have millions of working class
socialists in the U.S. today is the low level of class struggle,
which means fewer workers are conscious of themselves as part of a
class.
While
more workers are developing class consciousness on picket lines than
any time in the last 30 years, the majority of workers don’t yet
think of themselves this way. On some level, every worker understands
that someone else gets rich from their hard work, and few are
satisfied with their paycheck. But naming that ‘someone’ is a
different story. Right-wing media and Republican politicians tell
workers to blame immigrants, or poor people on food stamps, or secret
societies – and some believe them. Others see the problem as a few
bad apples in management.
A
class conscious worker knows their enemy: the ruling capitalist class
that exploits us and gets rich from our labor. They see themselves as
part of a large, multinational working class with its own economic
and political interests, which conflict with those of the ruling
class.
Without
class struggle, it’s harder for workers to see themselves as part
of a larger working class with its own distinct interests, let alone
take up the fight for socialism. Class consciousness is not the same
as becoming a socialist. But we won’t have socialism without tens
of millions of workers developing class consciousness.
People’s
ideas about the world and their place within it come primarily from
their social relations and their material conditions. But people’s
thinking isn’t carved in stone by fate. The question organizers
have is, how do people learn? We primarily learn through practice;
from taking action; by doing something. Practice is the source of
knowledge, as any good scientist conducting an experiment knows. You
form a hypothesis, test it through an experiment, sum up the results
and draw conclusions for next time.
This
holds a lot of importance for socialist organizers. It means the
working class will only develop class consciousness on mass scale
through struggle. Fusing socialism with the working class only
becomes possible with class consciousness, which itself comes about
through class struggle.
Socialists
have an important role in this process. In every battle, there are
actually two fights taking place: against the enemy and over the
summation. Whether a particular fight ends in victory, defeat or
something in-between, all sides will try to sum up the key lessons
from the experience. It’s in our interests to make sure the people
we want to organize sum up the fight correctly, building on successes
and learning from setbacks.
In
the labor movement, this process of ‘struggle, summing up, and more
struggle’ is key to raising workers’ class consciousness. To the
boss or a sellout union bureaucrat, the takeaway from a defeated
strike might be that workers shouldn’t strike at all. Militant
strike leaders would have a different take on the same event:
assessing its strengths and weaknesses in order to make future
strikes more successful. The question is, which summation do the
masses of workers accept?
Scientific
socialism, which is Marxism, arms workers with the tools to
understand capitalism as a system and effectively fight it. It’s
the duty of socialists, armed with this tool of ideology, to bring it
back to the labor movement as rank-and-file workers, unite with those
forces who want to struggle, and help win the battle of summation.
2018
marked an exciting explosion of union militancy in the U.S. as public
school teachers across the country went out on strikes, breaking the
law in many cases. The inspiring victories of teachers in West
Virginia and Chicago’s charter schools reignited conversations
throughout the labor movement about union militancy and the
importance of the strike weapon. Some of the more progressive union
leaders have started talking about strikes too, like Sara Nelson of
the Association of Flight Attendants, who proposed a general strike
to end Trump’s government shutdown. In total, 20 major work
stoppages involving 485,000 workers happened in 2018 – the highest
since 1986. Class struggle is re-emerging as a significant trend
within organized labor.
But
the victory of this trend is not certain. In the same year teachers
risked it all on the picket line and won, the Teamsters’
international officers overturned the historic majority no-vote on
the UPS contract and ratified the concessionary agreement anyway.
Union membership levels hit their lowest point in a century, no doubt
fueled in part by the Supreme Court’s disgraceful decision in Janus
v. AFSCME.
Even as it bleeds out, the U.S. labor movement remains led by class
collaborators who have zero interest in class struggle.
Throughout
its history, two trends have existed in the American labor movement:
class struggle and class collaboration.
Class
struggle unions anchor themselves in the workplace among the
rank-and-file workers. They openly challenge the boss’ power on the
shop floor, fight employers for better wages and conditions, and
embrace union militancy up to and including the use of strikes. They
see the membership as the union’s greatest strength and encourage
democratic participation from the rank-and-file. They consider their
particular fights as part of a larger struggle against a ruling class
of employers and strive for united action with other unions. They
‘organize the unorganized’ and set their sights on broader
political fights for the entire working class.
Unfortunately,
a different trend of trade unionism predominates today: class
collaboration. Instead of irreconcilable conflict between workers and
bosses, class collaborators see a harmony of interests. Early
American socialists called them the ‘labor lieutenants of capital’
for good reason. They work out common policy with employers and
objectively serve as a check on working class militancy. In no
uncertain terms, transforming the labor movement will require
overthrowing these class traitors and discrediting the union
philosophy they practice.
This
destructive trend in the labor movement has predominantly expressed
itself as business unionism, which centers union power around paid
staffers, lawyers, professionals and lobbyists. Seeing no inherent
class conflict between employers and workers, business union
officials fear rank-and-file militancy and avoid empowering the
members. Their cowardly unwillingness to battle employers has
degraded the single-most important mass organizations of workers into
little more than job insurance and benefit providers.
It’s
no surprise that business unionism failed to stop the decline of
organized labor that began in the 1970s. Class collaborator
bureaucrats gave away the farm through no-strike agreements, an
over-reliance on labor law and arbitration, and deliberate
demobilization of the rank and file. Losing ground but unwilling to
break the law, these bureaucrats looked to lobbying and electing
Democrats to save labor, even as that party embraced free trade
agreements and union-busting measures. Of course, the real solutions
were the ones most offensive to business union bureaucrats: revive
the strike, build shop floor militancy, and bring back class
struggle.
In
the last decade, another type of unionism has emerged in the U.S.
labor movement: social justice unionism. This trend, pushed by middle
class activists and embraced widely by business union leaders as a
way out of labor’s crisis, emphasized the need for unions to build
alliances with social movements and community activists on broader
political issues. The Fight for $15 campaign at fast food restaurants
came directly out of this approach and scored some notable victories.
But while social justice unionism correctly recognizes the need for
labor to build alliances, it puts the cart before the horse. After
all, unions can’t offer much meaningful solidarity if they’re
bleeding members and losing ground to employers. It makes the same
error of business unionism by mistakenly locating labor’s power
outside of the workplace, away from the rank-and-file. Unions are not
lobbying groups for progressive issues; they’re fighting
organizations of the working class.
How
then do we put the labor movement back on a class struggle basis? How
do we transform our unions into fighting workers organizations
capable of challenging the ruling class?
Socialists
in the United States have grappled with this question before. In the
1920s, union militants and shop floor radicals joined the Communist
Party. Government repression during World War I had left the IWW in
shambles, and the vast majority of organized workers belonged to the
more conservative, class collaborationist American Federation of
Labor (AFL). Writing off the existing unions as hopeless would be a
mistake since it would just leave the majority of organized workers,
including those who wanted to fight the boss, under the misleadership
of class collaborators. Instead, communists joined the AFL unions as
rank-and-file workers with the goal of uniting with the ‘militant
minority’ interested in struggle and transforming the labor
movement. Their approach worked, evidenced in the labor upheavals of
the 1930s and the formation of the CIO. Socialists today need to take
a page from their playbook.
The
militant minority are those union workers who know the score. They
clearly see management as the enemy of workers and want to fight
back. But they also understand that most of their union officials
don’t share their view and collaborate with the boss. Whether
organized or not, large or small, a militant minority exists in every
union. They represent the natural trend towards class struggle in the
working class, and that makes them key to transforming our unions.
Militant
minorities exist at every level of the labor movement. In many local
unions, they organize themselves as caucuses or networks. Some unions
have large reform caucuses, like Teamsters for a Democratic Union,
which provide union-wide organization for the militant minority.
Within the AFL-CIO federation, some international unions have
represented a tendency towards more militant action. On the world
stage, class struggle unions have generally congregated in the World
Federation of Trade Unions, though many agitate within the more
collaborationist International Conference of Free Trade Unions for a
different approach.
But
the militant minority is not just a grouping of workers. It’s a
tactic for transforming our unions.
Since
today’s union officials are workers’ main obstacle to fighting
back, the struggle against the boss simultaneously becomes a struggle
against class collaboration. This important principle determines the
militant minority’s approach to transforming our unions. We target
our attacks principally on the boss, rather than sellout bureaucrats,
because it allows us to unite and mobilize the most workers for
action. We approach the union officials, asking them to stand with
the workers and join the fight against the boss. This puts
collaborators between a rock and a hard place, forcing them to
declare their class allegiance for both workers and bosses to see. If
the officials join with us, good! Our struggle against the boss –
and the class struggle in general – grows stronger. If the
officials refuse, they are forced to step between the workers and the
boss, exposing themselves as collaborators and opening themselves up
to attack by the rank-and-file. This tried-and-true tactic works at every level of the labor movement. As we win victories at lower levels, we can use the militant minority tactic at higher levels. The goal of the militant minority is to transform our unions into class struggle organizations. In concrete terms, this means overthrowing collaborating union officials and replacing them with class struggle forces.
It’s
no surprise that those unions engaged in the recent strike wave have
active, well-organized militant minorities. The Chicago Teachers
Union (CTU), for instance, has led several major strikes since 2012,
including the first charter school teachers strike in U.S. history
last year. Their union wasn’t always at the forefront of class
struggle. A militant minority of teachers, united under the Caucus of
Rank & File Educators (CORE), organized their coworkers
school-by-school to fight for greater funding for public education.
CORE kicked out the do-nothing bureaucrats and sellouts, took over
the CTU and mobilized thousands of teachers, students and their
parents against budget cuts and school closures.
Socialism
isn’t going to develop as a major trend among the rank-and-file of
the labor movement by itself. It will take conscious, collective
effort and organizing to rebuild fighting unions and fuse Marxism
with the workers movement.
Here’s
one effective way for this new generation of socialists, radicals and
progressives to fight capitalism in the United States: Get
rank-and-file union jobs. Find and unite with the militant minority.
Learn the contract and the grievance procedure. Organize your
coworkers to fight the boss. Push class struggle unionism as a shop
floor militant.
The
basic foundational class conflict under capitalism starts in the
workplace, where capitalists exploit workers for their labor power to
generate profit. This doesn’t mean that socialists should only
participate in their unions and nothing else. It means that trade
unionism is an economic struggle containing the seeds of political
struggle. A fighting labor movement will strengthen the entire
working class movement on its many battlefields. But we won’t ever
overthrow capitalism without it.
While
any one socialist can get a union job and start organizing on the
shop floor, that’s not a recipe for success. We face enormous
obstacles in the workplace: repression from the boss, repression from
union bureaucrats, inertia and sometimes hostility from coworkers, to
name a few. Rank-and-file organizing requires a lot of patience, hard
work and creativity, and it’s better to tackle this challenge with
others committed to the same project.
The
FRSO promotes a policy of ‘concentration’
in our work. At the local level, this means that three or more
comrades should get jobs within the same union; if possible, at the
same workplace and on the same shift. In our experience, as more
hands join the same project, the work becomes exponentially more
successful.
At
the national level, ‘concentration’
means making collective plans to determine where we dedicate our
limited forces to make the greatest impact. Here again, Marxism plays
a crucial role in analyzing capitalism and observing trends in the
economy.
The U.S. economy today has shifted away from labor-intensive manufacturing that marked the core of early 20th century trade unionism. While the U.S. manufactures more today than ever before in its history, the number of manufacturing jobs has plummeted by almost a third since 2000, which significantly weakened the power of organized labor in this sector. As capitalism becomes even more monopolized and integrated, however, logistics and transportation take on greater importance as ‘choke points’ in the economy. This industry still remains partly unionized and represents a powerful, growing sector of the working class with potential for militant action.
UPS,
for instance, is both the largest employer of union members in the
U.S. private sector and the biggest trucking company in the world. On
any given day, UPS handles about 4% of the U.S. gross domestic
product and 2% of the world’s gross domestic product in its
logistics network. The Teamsters, which represents the nearly 250,000
workers at UPS, have an active and well-organized militant minority
that has mounted serious challenges to their class collaborationist
leadership under Jim Hoffa Jr., even voting down the UPS contract in
2018. As the Amazon behemoth grows larger and develops its own
logistics network, the Teamsters are uniquely positioned to mount a
working class challenge to the power of monopoly capitalism.
Militant
unionism has seen its strongest revival in the public sector,
particularly public education. Emerging out of the 1960s and 70s,
public sector unions had to fight just to win the right to
collectively bargain, often striking illegally to force city and
state governments into collective bargaining. Victories won by the
civil rights movement, like affirmative action hiring practices,
opened public sector jobs to African Americans, Latinos and other
oppressed nationalities, and women. Through public sector unions,
these oppressed workers often confronted both their employers and the
racist, sexist and discriminatory policies they faced on and
off-the-clock.
Reagan’s
anti-union employer offensive took a steep toll on private sector
unions, which made their counterparts in the public sector
increasingly vital to the labor movement. No longer the small
fraction of union members they were in the 1960s, public sector
unions make up a simple majority of the unionized workforce today.
It’s the most heavily organized sector of the working class in the
U.S. today, with 33.9% of public sector workers belonging to a union
in 2018.
Employers
took note of this shift. It’s no surprise that most attacks on
labor in the last decade targeted public sector unions. Starting with
far-right Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s Act 10, which stripped
public employees of the right to collectively bargain, employers have
waged a countrywide offensive to further break organized labor. This
latest anti-union assault has taken a markedly racist and sexist
character, owing to the diverse membership of public sector unions.
It’s proof-positive that the entire working class suffers when the
democratic rights of African Americans and women are under attack.
But
this right-wing offensive has not gone unanswered. Teachers in
Illinois, West Virginia, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Arizona, California
and many other states led a wave of strikes over funding for public
education and the rights of teachers, often joined by support workers
like bus drivers and cafeteria staff. Public sector strikes differ
from their private sector counterparts in that a work stoppage
usually saves the employer money, rather than costing them profit.
Since the ‘costs’ must be of a political nature – disruption of
essential services and routine – these striking teachers unions
have built large coalitions with students, their parents and their
communities to win. Where a well-organized militant minority existed,
they won their demands.
By
bringing together different workers on the basis of a shared class
interest, unions provide the organizational vehicle for the working
class to confront racism, sexism and other forms of oppression
experienced under capitalism. As a class, workers share a core
interest in ending their exploitation, poverty and misery. But while
the capitalist system is an economic formation, it also has social
and political manifestations. Racism, for instance, comes out of a
system of national oppression central to capitalism at its highest
stage, in which the ruling class seeks to dominate and exploit entire
nations. Sexism too has its roots in the oppression of women in class
society.
These
forms of oppression are key pillars propping up the social, political
and economic power of the capitalist class. They create real
inequalities between sections of our class, making fertile ground for
spreading destructive ruling class ideas among workers. But the
working class’ power lies in its capacity for unity, which means it
has an objective interest in tearing down all forms of oppression
under capitalism. People overcome backwards ideas through struggle,
not moralizing or online debates, which makes class struggle unions a
proven vehicle for overcoming chauvinistic ideas among the working
class.
From
the beginning, racism has presented the single biggest obstacle to
working class unity. Capitalism in the United States was founded on
the theft of Native people’s lands and the labor of African slaves.
These extreme forms of exploitation were the material basis for the
rise of racist ideologies in the United States.
White
supremacy is an ideology of class collaboration, which promotes a
fraudulent unity between white workers and their exploiters on the
basis of skin color. In practice, the entire working class suffers.
The enslavement of Africans in the U.S. South degraded and weakened
the early labor movement of the North. After emancipation, northern
capitalists and southern elites used segregation, lynchings and
racist discrimination to break off white workers from their natural
class allies. It’s no coincidence that avowed white supremacist
politicians from the Jim Crow South, elected only by disenfranchising
Black voters, imposed the first Right-to-Work-for-Less laws that
weaken unions to this day. It’s not just a question of backwards attitudes or prejudice. Racist ideas and attitudes persist because of their material roots in real inequalities between nationalities. It’s a question of national oppression. In the U.S., the ruling monopoly capitalists oppress and exploit African Americans as an entire nation, stripping them of their resources, labor, wealth, dignity and freedom. Chicanos – the people who historically lived in the southwestern states taken from Mexico in 1848 – and Hawaiians also face this national oppression, as do other national minorities and indigenous peoples. Even to this day, the U.S. maintains Puerto Rico and several other islands as colonies, robbing their wealth and denying them independence.1
The
Working Class & Socialism
Why
unions?
Problems
of Socialism & Unions in the United States
Socialists
in the labor movement
The
Hard Divorce & Labor’s Retreat
The
Task is Fusion
How
does class consciousness develop?
Transforming
Our Unions & the Militant Minority
Class
struggle unionism vs. class collaboration & its forms
Tactics
of the Militant Minority
The
Shop Floor, Rank-and-File Strategy
Concentrating
our forces
Reviving
the Strike in the Public Sector
Uniting
the Working Class
Breaking
the Chains of National Oppression with Union Power
For many decades after emancipation, many conservative labor leaders refused to organize Black workers and fought to maintain segregated unions. Class collaborators promote the ideology of the boss to disarm the workers movement so it’s no surprise that these misleaders of labor also promoted white chauvinism among white workers. The capitalist class took full advantage of this division, bringing in Black workers as low-wage replacements to break strikes called by whites-only unions. Time and again, our history proves that a divided working class is a conquered working class.
But class struggle unionism takes a different approach, promoting solidarity over chauvinism. At the turn of the century, the Industrial Workers of the World organized integrated unions, bringing together Black and white workers, men and women into a single union capable of mounting an effective challenge to the boss’ power. Throughout the 1920s, communists in the Trade Union Education League agitated for AFL unions to admit Black workers and women as members, which later became central to the formation of the CIO during the Great Depression. Braving the brutality of Jim Crow, communists organized some of the first unions in the Black Belt South – sharecroppers and industrial workers – in defiance of racist anti-union laws and KKK brutality.
When unions embrace class struggle, they can strike powerful blows against national oppression. In 1954, for instance, communists and Longshoremen union militants in Hawaii and California spearheaded the revolutionary movement that overthrew white minority rule on the islands. Amid the anti-union offensive of the 1980s, Chicano and Mexicano workers in California won a historic 18-month strike against Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food, challenging racist union officials and class collaboration in the process. Similarly, a militant minority of Black autoworkers in Detroit formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in 1968 to combat racist inequalities at work and white chauvinism in the union.
Building the Strategic Alliance Through the Labor Movement
A socialist revolution won’t happen without national liberation. But the working class gains its power through its numbers and its capacity for solidarity, giving it a strategic and material interest in supporting the fight against racism and national oppression.
All serious socialists have to reckon with revolutionary strategy – how do we actually win? In Russia, the Bolsheviks saw the large numbers of peasants and realized they could only overthrow capitalism through a strategic alliance between the working class, a minority class that was growing, and the peasants, a majority class that was diminishing.

Based on the history and material reality of the United States, the FRSO also sees the need for a strategic alliance. We want to bring together anyone and everyone who has conflict with monopoly capitalism to overturn this system. It’s a big tent strategy, although some parts of this big tent are more essential than others. The U.S. has a large multinational working class, but it also has powerful movements of oppressed nationalities, like the Black liberation struggle, which have shaken the ruling class throughout history. Our big tent strategy for revolution in the U.S. must have a strategic alliance between these two movements as its core.2
In concrete terms, socialists in the labor movement need to take up fights against racist discrimination at work and organize coworkers to do the same. While this often takes the form of fighting a racist manager or work policy, it’s no secret that some white workers hold racist and chauvinistic attitudes. But unlike organizing on campus or in the community, labor is the one arena of struggle where the enemy chooses your mass base. We want principled unity among the working class. This doesn’t mean we should coddle backwards views among union members, like so many labor bureaucrats do. It means we commit to long-term struggle, rooted in practice and summation, against white chauvinism.
Transforming our unions into class struggle organizations opens new possibilities too. Class struggle unions can help in forging this strategic alliance by supporting the fights against national oppression. Take for instance immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America, who make up a growing part of the labor movement. The right-wing capitalists who back racist anti-immigrant policies are the same who target the labor movement. We have a common enemy, making it important for the labor movement to take up the struggle for immigrant and refugee rights.
Women’s Liberation & the Labor Movement
Although the labor movement has its own problems with sexism, unions give women the fighting organizations necessary to strike at the root of the oppression faced today. Today women comprise almost half of all union members, earning 30.9% more per week than their non-union counterparts. Throughout U.S. history, working women have provided dauntless leadership in the labor movement, from the garment workers strikes of the early American republic to titans like Lucy Parsons, one of the IWW’s co-founders. Militant women of all nationalities spearheaded the 1960s public sector strike wave, just as they would in the 2018 teachers strike wave. Socialists need to build on that legacy by confronting the abuse and harassment faced by working women today.
Women’s oppression has its roots in class systems of private property. Whether in ancient empires, feudal kingdoms, or under modern capitalism, the ruling order has always forced women into subordinate positions, exploiting their labor both at home and in production, abusing their bodies, and denying their dignity.
Today it manifests in domestic and sexual violence, discrimination, wage inequality and more. Under capitalism, women are paid less based on their continuing role in replicating the working class. Women are expected to raise children and carry out most of the unpaid domestic labor for the family. By shifting the burden of necessary domestic labor onto women and the family, the capitalist class lowers the cost they must pay to reproduce the worker’s labor power – the minimum wage. It heightens the exploitation of all workers.
Using both law and social customs to enforce their role as ‘home-makers’, the ruling class barred a subset of women from the paid workplace for centuries. When women did work, they received pitiful wages and suffered humiliation and degradation not experienced by their male counterparts. Black women under chattel slavery received no wages at all while also suffering untold sexual horrors at the hands of white plantation owners. Even after emancipation, Black and immigrant women had few if any workplace protections extended to their labor since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically denied union rights to domestic workers.
To this day, women working without a union contract earn lower wages than men working in the same industry. Sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace remain widespread and unpunished. Unable to afford decent child care, working mothers are expected to balance full-time jobs while also raising their families.
To maintain this system of women’s oppression, the ruling class stigmatizes and targets people who fall outside their ideal of a heterosexual nuclear family. Gay, lesbian and bisexual people, for instance, experience homophobia under capitalism because their family unit does not center on the generational reproduction of labor. Transgender people, similarly, face discrimination and violence under capitalism for rejecting the rigid gender norms at the root of women’s oppression.
The entire working class has an interest in women’s liberation, and socialists need to take up the fight on the shop floor. Concretely, this can mean battling sexist supervisors and managers, confronting sexual harassment on the job and challenging discriminatory work rules (i.e. pay gaps, job classification). Unions should take up the demands of working women for free child care and quality health care, and working men should struggle against male chauvinism when it manifests.
Building a Party of the Working Class in the United States
At a certain point, the economic struggles of workers against bosses has to become a larger struggle for political power. Working class militancy has won incredible victories and life-changing reforms for workers and our families in every capitalist country. In the U.S., for instance, the tidal wave of sit-down strikes, factory occupations and work stoppages during the Great Depression won Social Security, bans on child labor, legal union rights, and more.
But these victories are never safe under capitalism. Slowly but surely, the ruling class fights to reverse our gains at every corner, whether through legal channels like austerity or through force using the state. That’s abundantly clear in the U.S., especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Even in capitalist social democracies like Sweden and Norway, the working class saw their health care, housing, job security and more under attack.
If we want to actually secure a socialist future, the working class will have to overthrow the capitalist ruling class and take power for itself. To accomplish this Herculean task, the working class needs a fighting political organization of its own: a workers party, bringing together the best, most forward-thinking working class leaders and fighters. Armed with the science of making revolution, this party sees the big picture, making it the tip of the spear in the struggle to overturn capitalism and create a socialist future. In every country that has a revolutionary workers movement, the fusion of the labor movement and the socialist movement takes the form of a communist party.
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization wants to see that party created in the United States, but we’re not there yet. Socialists across the U.S. will have to bring Marxism back to the working class and become fighters in the class struggle. We don’t want to sit around waiting for that to happen on its own, all while capitalism continues grinding down the working class, waging war on oppressed nations, and destroying the earth. The resurgence of socialism’s popularity in the U.S. has opened revolutionary new doors, making possible things that just a few years ago seemed impossible.
We hope this new generation of socialists join with the FRSO and take up the task of fusion. The strategy outlined in this document guides our work in the labor movement today, as it has since our founding in 1985. The FRSO wants to see a renewed, fighting labor movement in the U.S. stronger than ever before. If you’re interested in working to make that happen, come work with us.
Now is the time for socialists to become rank-and-file militants in the labor movement, leaders in the class struggle, revolutionary fighters for socialism, and raise high the banner, “Freedom in our lifetime.”
Sources & Continued Study
For those interested in better understanding class struggle unionism, the labor movement and the fight for socialism in the United States, the following books helped shape this pamphlet:
- Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America by Joe Burns
- Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today by Joe Burns
- Labor’s Untold Story by Richard O. Boyer
- The History of the Communist Party of the United States by William Z. Foster
- American Trade Unionism by William Z. Foster
- Wage Labor & Capital by Karl Marx
- Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii by Gerald Horne
1 For a more detailed explanation of national oppression in the U.S. and its relationship to racism, see National Oppression, National Liberation and Socialist Revolution and Immediate Demands for U.S. Colonies, Indigenous Peoples, and Oppressed Nationalities.
2 For a more in-depth look at the FRSO’s strategy for revolution, see Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution.