Good Morning America!
It’s
a sleep that puts Rip Van Winkle to shame. The long, fitful slumber has lasted
for more than a generation. But the alarm has sounded and the snooze button is wearing
out. Sooner or later, the giant that is the American working class will awaken.
When that happens, the game will be dramatically altered; the majority, so used
to playing defense, will take the offense; the score, so long lopsided, will
begin to shift.
What
will it look like once that celebrated last straw has been added to the camel’s
back? How will we know that the long slumber is over?
Oh,
we’ll know!
Union Power
The
place to focus our attention is on the working class. This is not for abstract,
doctrinaire reasons, but because that is where the power lies. It is there that
numbers and proximity to production combine to yield a force capable of
challenging the 1% for control.
Control
of what exactly? The whole works, including which class should be running the
country.
When
working people finally decide to stop hating their friends and loving their
enemies (Malcolm X),
the pent up rage and fire from centuries of deceit and exploitation at the
hands of corporate elites will be turned toward forging a new normal. People
will insist on painting outside the lines, refusing to be bound by convention
as they search for effective answers.
We
know that greater organization and labor militancy correlate directly with stronger social safety nets and public policies that benefit the majority. On the other hand, a
weaker labor movement goes hand-in-hand with increased exploitation and income inequality. So, as with the rise of the CIO
in the 1930s, the end of the current big sleep will be signaled by waves of
strikes and other labor battles. New, militant labor leaders will come to the
fore and bigger, stronger unions, encompassing an ever-growing percentage of
the working population, will take root.
In1933,
at the peak of the great depression, more than 12.8
million people were out of work. In
response, crucial labor battles were fought in Minneapolis, Toledo, San
Francisco, New England and throughout the south. These were followed by other
crucial contests, including the historic Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and the
coal miners’ strikes of 1941 and 1943. For the first time in a long while, this
wave of labor militancy moved the ball down the field, scoring important points
for our team.
Meanwhile,
at the height of the most recent recession (2009), 17.1
million were listed as unemployed – over four million more than at the
height of the great depression. While today’s figure represents a smaller
percent of the total working population, that distinction provides little
comfort to the millions who have had to scrape by. And still the giant sleeps.
House Cleaning
As
with the labor battles of the last century, the battles this time around will
be led by socialists and other radical workers who have come to understand the
class nature of the playing field. Politicians – including Bernie Sanders-type socialists in name only, whose first
loyalty is to the capitalist system – will either stand aside or get trampled
along with other obstacles that get in the way.
It’s
an open secret that the union leadership today is overwhelmingly
corrupt, bureaucratic and ineffective.
But as the working class torpor comes to an end, so too will the reign of the
bureaucrats. We will see more efforts like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Steelworkers FightBack and Miners for Democracy. The effective, fighting unions of the near future will amplify their
strength through rank and file democracy. The outrageous salaries and perks
enjoyed by top union officials today – benefits that set them apart from the
ranks and make it easy to cozy up to corporate execs who enjoy similar riches –
will no longer be tolerated. More and more, we’ll see rank and file movements
insisting on:
- Union officials receiving no more in compensation than the workers they represent.
- Complete union democracy, from the local to the international level, with the highest authority and final word resting with assemblies of the rank and file members.
- Open and democratic elections for all officials, with immediate recall of any official not meeting the needs of the ranks.
As
this revitalization process unfolds, the new fighting unions will spread to new
factories, offices and shops. Workers never before organized will join or form
unions of their own. Even the unemployed will become organized.
Workplace Organization
At
some point, committees may form in factories, shops, offices and fields, where
people gather to discuss their grievances and map out a strategy for fighting
back. Both local and national issues would be taken up.
Here,
the lack of democratic rights in the work place could be addressed head-on. The
work place – where people spend most of their waking hours, where all of
society’s wealth is produced, where, for centuries, those who do the work have
had no say it what is produced or how – will become a hotbed of discussion and
rebellion. Everything will be up for debate, from who should be supervising the
shop floor to who should be running the enterprise.
These
new committees will not be limited to places that are unionized. In some cases,
more radical unions will promote the formation of the new committees; in
others, the committees may precede formal union organizing.
Yes,
it will be an upheaval like no other. But there’s more.
Political Power
If we were to point to one thing that has held back
the US working class more than any other – one ingredient that, like an
anesthetic, has induced and prolonged the big sleep – it would be illusions in
the Democratic and Republican parties. Touted by the union bureaucracy as
“friends of labor”, the two corporate parties have proven time and again to be
a deadly trap for the working class. Their aim is to tame any discontent. Like
Tai Chi masters, the big business parties are experts at channeling the anger
and energy of the working class back against itself. There will be no
awakening, no end to the current nightmare, without breaking decisively with
the capitalist politicians and their parties.
For this reason, one of the best indications that a
new day has arrived will be the building of a political arm of the labor movement that can take the fight beyond
the shop floor, out into the streets and to society at large. Such a political
arm will be both an organizing tool and a weapon to fight for political
power. That fight will be waged against
the very parties that have held society captive for so long, and against the
class that pulls their strings. By constructing a party of its own, the labor
movement will for the first time in US history move from begging for crumbs
from the slave masters to openly moving to supplant them. (For why the Green
Party and other formations not anchored in the working class don’t fit the
bill, see here.)
Solidarity
While
everyone who lives from paycheck to paycheck under capitalism is exploited,
some are exploited more than others. Immigrants, African Americans, Native
Americans and Latinos all face higher rates of unemployment and persecution.
Women still earn 79 cents for
each dollar earned by men for equivalent work.
Classical
economist, Adam Smith, understood
that while workers outnumber capitalists, this asymmetry makes it harder for
workers to act collectively. The key to overcoming this disadvantage is solidarity. The ascendant labor movement
will either champion the struggles of the most oppressed, or it will quickly
slip back into a coma. Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights, Native American
rights, and the fight against racism, sexism and xenophobia in all of their
forms are life and death struggles for the labor movement as a whole. This is
not just because each of these causes is morally right, but because each is
used to sow divisions among working people – divisions which, if not overcome,
would prevent building the momentum necessary to change society, thus ceding
the advantage to our exploiters.
* * *
The
movements in the streets today – for immigrant rights, women’s rights, Black
Lives Matter, 15-Now and for action on climate change – are all immensely important.
Progress on any one of these would be a victory for working people and a blow
to the ruling rich. But to win the overall war, these and other battles need to
link up with the now-dormant labor colossus. In this way, each struggle for
justice becomes transformed into a palpable threat to the powers that be. This
is also one of the best ways to coax the working class out of its slumber and,
in so doing, take the offensive after so many years of having to play defense. Harnessing
the power of the labor movement makes it possible to change the rules of the
game, allowing the majority to advance from fighting for concessions to giving
the orders.
When
the working class rose up in the 1930s, many gains were won. All of the
progress attributed to Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was a direct result of the
militant labor upsurge that forced his hand. Unfortunately, the most effective
weapons of the working class – the unions – were captured by reactionary bureaucrats
who steered labor toward a century of somnambulistic class-collaboration. The
most militant, conscious leaders were driven out of the labor movement. The
victories achieved were never protected on the political front by breaking with
the capitalist parties and launching a labor party. The unelected titans of
industry were kept in charge and given ample time to regroup. As a result, all
of the gains of past struggles have been constantly under attack, and some have
been severely rolled back.
History
can repeat itself…but it doesn’t have to. We can learn from the past and avoid making
the same mistakes.
Is
this image of the coming awakening overly idealistic? Far from it. We’re not painting
a picture of how things might look if
we were to turn around the decades-old corporate assault on our lives, liberty
and pursuit of happiness. Rather, this is a sober assessment of what we must see if we are to have any possibility
of beating back that assault. Mapping out the path ahead – navigating around
multiple obstacles, through difficult terrain – is not utopian. On the
contrary, it’s how you win. When the giant reawakens this time around, hold
onto your hats. We’ll be in for quite a ride.
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