In this moment of wildly escalating state violence, a critical thing to remember is that only industrial worker organizing can defeat capital. I say “worker organizing,” instead of “union organizing,” because on its own union organizing is absolutely not enough. If we organize in unions just for the sake of doing so, we’ll stagnate while our enemies keep accelerating their offensive. We need to reach the union workers, but we must do so while building independent worker organizations, ones that centrally prioritize the industrial sector. This is the proven path to defeating fascism and winning victory for the workers: stay committed to waging a fight for the proletariat, rather than letting this fight be diverted towards efforts which aren’t connected to the proletariat.
This is the short version of the argument I’m putting forth. The long version involves extensive delving into history, and into the crucial nuances between the different types of labor organizing. Amid our government’s effort to crush organized labor, and to weaponize ICE towards terrorizing the people, one historical lesson we need to apply is that a reformist labor leadership will always make way for fascism’s victory. As William Z. Foster wrote about how Italy’s union bureaucrats sabotaged the country’s revolutionary momentum, and thereby let the fascists win:
The stage was set and the actors ready for the Italian proletarian revolution. In this critical moment the whole revolutionary movement was steered into collapse and disaster by the men at the head of the workers’ parties and labor unions. These yellow leaders were men whose entire training had been in the peaceful era of reformism and compromise with capitalism. They were constitutionally incapable of dealing a death-blow to the capitalist system. Despite their revolutionary phrases which had infused the masses with hope, they backed away from the actual fact of revolution when they faced it. They settled the revolutionary strike of the metal workers on the basis of an ordinary trade union action, and thus practically cut the head off the surging anti-capitalist movement.
This betrayal of the revolution by the reformist labor leaders had a shattering effect. It destroyed at one blow the faith of the masses in the workers’ program and movement. It seemed that the very concept of the proletarian revolution itself had failed. Almost immediately the air of expectancy of a workers’ society was dissipated amongst all classes. Even the workers themselves became disheartened and discouraged, and largely lost faith in their own cause.
This brings us to the question of which political forces within today’s labor organizing pose a threat of demobilizing the workers movement in the same way, and letting our class enemies carry out their plans for a violent purge against dissent. These are the forces that seek to uphold craft unionism—like that of baristas—as the central type of labor organizing to focus on. A goal of the “democratic socialist,” pan-leftist, and otherwise weak “socialist” political actors is to divert the movement away from industrial unionism, which is what comes from centering the craft unions. The American Communist Party’s chairman Haz Al-Din has long been warning about this error, and as explained by Midwestern Marx, such erroneous practices assist in capital’s designs for crushing the unions:
Do Starbucks baristas add something to the product when they grind and pour the coffee? I would say yes. However, this does not mean they hold the same economic power as workers who grow and harvest the coffee beans or transport them across the globe. The labor involved in growing, harvesting, and transporting coffee beans represents the core of productive labor that drives the economy, whereas Starbucks baristas operate at capitalism's surface. Their role is to help realize the value created during production by facilitating the sale of coffee to consumers. This is not a moralistic judgment but a scientific and strategic assessment.
We fully support Starbucks workers in their efforts to organize; however, it is a reality that a strike by largely commercial laborers, such as Starbucks baristas, would not wield the same level of economic power as a strike by productive workers, like those in the rail industry. For example, in 2022, Joe Biden and the Democrats went to great lengths to prevent a potential rail strike, even using the power of the state to intervene, while showing minimal concern about the unionization efforts at Starbucks in recent years. Another critique Haz made of the Starbucks baristas is their pursuit of a craft union rather than an industrial union. A craft union, being narrower in scope, often fosters class collaboration between the company and the union's rank and file. The ACP would fully support the creation of a coffee workers' union encompassing the entire industry, including major chains like Dunkin' Donuts or Tim Hortons up in maple leaf land. However, history has shown that a craft union limited exclusively to Starbucks workplaces is likely to result in class collaborationism. This is a dynamic that Walter Reuther and the UAW understood very well during the height of their power.
The Trump White House is hoping for the union leaders to fold, and react to the government’s aggressions by becoming essentially non-existent. This is how the upswing in unionized worker actions that we’ve recently been seeing could get thwarted; and the factor which could bring such a collapse into being is a workers movement that’s made itself dependent on the collaborationist leaders. That’s passively gone along with the trend towards centering craft unionism, rather than building up the industrial working-class power that we need.
As professional revolutionaries, a critical part of how we avoid this vulnerability is by diligently connecting our militant work with the unionized workers. This is what Foster explained in his analysis on why the U.S. labor movement became bankrupt:
In the past the militants have voluntarily isolated themselves from the organized masses, which was very convenient indeed for the labor bureaucrats. But now these active spirits fight desperately against such isolation. They realize fully that their place is in the big trade unions. And when the controlling reactionaries, who instinctively know that the rebels are dangerous to them only if in the unions, expel individuals and local unions, the latter must fight their way back in again. Such a policy however, does not mean that the old organizations must be maintained at any price. In extreme cases secession movements may be unavoidable through the reactionaries’ refusing to obey the mandates of the rank and file. But when such splits occur the militants must have so maneuvered as to keep the mass of the membership on their side. Otherwise disaster will come upon them and the labor movement.
The winning combination for the rebel movement, the typical situation that the Trade Union Educational League is trying to create everywhere, is for the militants to function aggressively as a highly-organized minority in the midst of the great unconscious trade union mass. The heart of the League’s tactical program is that under no circumstances shall the militants allow themselves to become detached from the unionized section of the working class. “Keep the militants in the organized mass,” is the slogan of the new revolutionary movement.
In the conditions we’re facing today, where the late 20th century’s working-class defeats have left union membership enormously reduced, we also need to account for how the non-union or de-proletarianized masses must be organized. Which is something Foster covered in his analyses on organizing the unemployed workers, but in modern America this question looks very different. Not only have the unions been shrunken, but America has been de-industrialized, and this means there’s a vast proportion of the masses who’ve been separated from the traditional avenues for gaining class consciousness.
Just because these avenues have been largely destroyed, though, does not mean we can’t organize the masses. If we properly understand what class consciousness looks like under conditions like ours, we’ll be able to tap into the dissatisfaction of the people, which has greatly increased due to these anti-worker assaults. The classical definition of class consciousness is when the workers have entered into an organizing role, and thereby become directly involved in the class struggle. We absolutely need to bring them into this role; but what U.S. communists must grasp about class consciousness under our conditions is that it can exist among the people without them yet being organized.
Under circumstances where the ruling class has successfully crippled the revolutionary institutions which the workers had been able to access in the past, you need to look for class consciousness in different places. You need to find where proto-revolutionary sentiments have arisen, and seize upon those sentiments so you can solve the problem of disorganization. It’s this adeptness at connecting with the masses which will let our movement overcome the reformist elements, and prevent them from exploiting de-industrialization for their pro-capitalist purposes.
This is what the anti-communist “progressives” hope to do by pitting baristas against industrial workers: present the unionism of non-industrial workers as not just the central focus, but something superior to industrial labor organizing, which in this liberal narrative is depicted as being reactionary. This is the message which comes through in their accusation that the ACP’s barista critique is about appealing to right-wingers in the culture war; the party’s industry-based class analysis is about transcending the culture war, while reformist “socialism” seeks to exclude the actual proletariat on a cultural basis. The propagators of liberal reformism see the working class as socially backward, and undeserving of the focus that would preclude an actual revolutionary project. So they exclusively give faux-respect to the types of union workers who they don’t view as the biggest threats, while attacking anyone who seriously acts to organize the proletariat.
It was because the workers movement became co-opted by these political actors, and got captured by the Democratic Party, that the state got enabled to launch the terror campaign it’s now unleashing. The only way we can fight back is by rectifying this problem, and building up industrial worker power which is centrally based within independent institutions. This is the mission that we need to keep making progress on, even if the repression forces us into a retreat and makes us need to start operating underground. As long as we keep making inroads with the masses, and giving the workers the tools they’ll need for leveraging their economic role, we will be in place to reverse the power balance.
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