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By: Emma Buckley
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.
Issue 1 of The Internationalist, the Boston-based paper of CW Fitzgerald, an early leader of the American communist movement.
We try to help the working class to get the smallest possible but real improvement (economic and political) in their situation and we add always that no reform can be durable, sincere, serious if not seconded by revolutionary methods of struggle of the masses. We preach always that a socialist party not uniting this struggle for reforms with the revolutionary methods of working class movement can become a sect, can be severed from the masses.
V.I. Lenin in Letter to CW Fitzgerald, November 1915
Over the last several years DSA members have industrialized, embedding themselves into union jobs and helping the labor movement fight for concessions against capitalist greed. DSA members have made a big impact in the rank and file by helping lead new organizing campaigns and pushing for increased militancy within existing unions. This has helped unions make some of the largest gains they’ve had in decades. But at the end of the day, these victories mostly have been limited to concessions on pay and working conditions. While increases in militancy and momentum are meaningful in their own right, these victories remain reforms at the margins, not a challenge to the roots of the capitalist system. If we’re going to improve the lives of all working people, the fight for labor justice will have to transform into a movement beyond the fight for reforms on bread and butter issues.
While the victories won through new organizing and at the bargaining table are meaningful in improving workers’ lives, they fail to resolve the pervasive exploitation and oppression which workers face every day. Winning higher wages matters. However, workers are still servants to their bosses, and the larger issues of racism, sexism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe remain unresolved. Under such harsh conditions, working people need a horizon to fight for beyond the temporary concessions they can win in their next contract.
Not only are these victories small relative to the comprehensive oppressions workers face under capitalism, but they also remain insecure. Nearly all of the reforms to the National Labor Relations Board won under Biden have been reversed under Trump. Wage gains won by the inspiring, hard fought struggle of workers are constantly eroded by inflation. Capitalists use their positions of power to escalate attacks on workers from all sides: from the new attacks on federal workers; to the expansion of the attacks on immigrant workers; and a thousand other abuses workers face every day. These flagrant assaults on workers’ solidarity occur alongside systemic stagnation of wages and ever-increasing inflation. If workers’ lives are going to be substantially and permanently improved, the labor movement must unite the struggle for immediate reforms with a movement directed towards taking political power away from the owning class.
Bring DSA to the Labor Movement!
The amendment to the DSA National Labor Committee Consensus Resolution, A Partyist Labor Strategy, was a collaboration between comrades from the Reform and Revolution caucus and the Marxist Unity Group, presenting a revolutionary vision to organize DSA within the labor movement which begins by centering the key political questions.
The amendment takes on a debate that held huge prominence on the labor left a century ago and has continued to inform labor organizing ever since: Should we reduce the labor struggle to economic demands? We say no. Rather, we must infuse the labor struggle with revolutionary politics in order to make each fight against the boss a fight for the whole working class.
Proponents of reducing the struggle to economic demands believe that socialists should focus almost entirely on the economic fight to bring workers around to socialism and class struggle. Within the radical labor movement there is a widespread fear that anything more would push away workers and isolate socialists. We certainly believe that socialists should be the best fighters for the achievable economic reforms in each labor struggle; however, it isn’t true that organizing on bread and butter issues is the only way to build power. Our vision is for mass socialist politics, which requires uniting our socialist horizon and the daily struggle into one indivisible movement.
There is certainly a balance to this, as it’s possible to get lost in revolutionary rhetoric and lose relevancy. However, by rooting ourselves in the day to day struggles it is possible to connect shop floor issues to our larger goals in ways that make sense to our co-workers. As rank-and-filers in labor struggles, we often see our most engaged co-workers – those who do the most to support new organizing – are not just motivated by wage and benefit increases. They are also committed to winning back their sense of dignity over the daily injustices of the workplace, and the related potential for unions to address larger issues of racism or sexism on the shop floor. In fact, for the most active rank and file workers, the amount of time they spend fighting for their union does not make sense for the piecemeal gains they are able to push through negotiation.
Our vision is for mass socialist politics, which requires uniting our socialist horizon and the daily struggle into one indivisible movement.
If these worker leaders were only motivated by improving their individual paychecks, their energy would probably be better directed towards searching for a higher-paying job. Politicized rank and filers are often written off as just GenZ workers radicalized around BLM, trans rights, or Palestine, however, this is a shallow view of the most active contingent of rank and file activists. We saw in 2016 and 2020 that the vast majority of left-unionists who became radicalized and began organizing for change within their unions did so on the political basis of the Bernie campaigns, not on pure bread-and-butter reforms. Politicized workers are not an anomaly or divorced from the movement, they are the beginnings of a larger movement that we should seek to expand.
To become an active organic leader, and to persist in the face of unrelenting union-busting from management and bureaucratic bullshit from union leadership, worker-leaders need to relate the struggle for immediate improvements to a bigger mission. While DSA members under the rank and file strategy have certainly diligently worked towards developing other rank and file leaders individually or in small groups, DSA can bring many more workers to the labor movement by acting as an organized body which raises the overarching political horizon of the working class taking power.
However, politicizing the labor movement does not mean DSA members should adopt the strategies of the SEIU and UAW by simply advocating for the Democratic Party. Having long abandoned the working class, Democrats in many ways mimic the model of business unionism, which claims to represent the working class while undercutting workers’ ability to self organize. The Democrats only make empty, symbolic gestures towards economic relief and liberation for the oppressed. As a key step in connecting immediate struggles with a socialist horizon, DSA members should put forward a working class politics that is independent from the Democrats and Republicans, one which points towards socialist politics, a new party, and a mass movement of workers.
Bring the Labor Movement to DSA!
If DSA is going to build an independent party with thousands and eventually millions of union members capable of becoming the heart and soul of a militant labor movement, then we need to dramatically grow the ranks of DSA’s labor activists. Industrialization, the strategy of socialists taking union jobs, has been a good step in this direction and should be continued and expanded; but this alone will not be enough. To grow to the numbers we need, we must recruit union members to DSA instead of relying on DSA members to join unions.
It is far easier to recruit a union member to DSA than for a DSA member to industrialize, and existing union members already have the trust of the coworkers and union siblings. DSA can become a recognized current fighting to make the labor movement a place where workers can democratically participate. This fighting current would oppose not only the bosses, but also business unionists and the Democratic Party, which seek to keep working people passive in their own movement in order to quietly capitulate to capitalist and imperialist interests.
Business unionists and the Democratic Party both excel at making workers feel powerless while pushing their agitation into passive support for bureaucratic leaders. The increasingly low voter turnout in elections shows that nearly half of the working class feels completely cut out, apathetic, and unable to meaningfully participate in our political system. It’s DSA’s job to provide a clear, differentiated example of how we can fight against the authoritarianism of the bosses and the chauvinist political leaders from the bottom up, making the labor movement the field for everyday workers to meaningfully participate in political activity.
Even workers that don’t join DSA will be motivated into activity by seeing an active and organized contingent of their coworkers fighting for such an expanded vision of the labor movement. However, for them to be able to meaningfully participate, we have to fight to create robust union democracy that establishes member control of bargaining, elected and active stewards and shop representatives, and member control over the unions political endorsements.
If workers recognize DSA as the force in their unions fighting consistently for immediate workplace improvements, standing up for the rights of their immigrant, trans, and marginalized co-workers, leading campaigns for union democracy and reform, pushing to expand the labor struggle to unorganized shops and into rural areas, and tying all this into a larger political vision, they will recognize that DSA is an organization worth joining.
Bring the NLC to Our Chapters!
It makes very little sense for the NLC to operate as a body completely separate from the work that thousands of DSA labor organizers conduct through their chapters. Our national committees should create deeper ties to local chapters, operating campaigns not through one separate national NLC phone banking list, but through how we traditionally organize campaigns in our unions – through communication at each locale with organic leaders, connecting to each chapter’s organizing conditions. The amendment, A Partyist Labor Strategy, puts forward an organizational plan to coordinate DSA members in the labor movement, connecting the NLC to chapters and connecting DSA members by industry and by large national unions where it makes sense.
Once we accept that DSA’s labor work must tie fights for immediate wins in the workplace and for reforms in the unions to a larger political project, we still must answer the question: how do we make this happen? Our amendment answers this by calling for changes to the structure of DSA’s labor work, including the structure of the National Labor Commission and the relation between the NLC and the chapter labor formations. We must connect the NLC to chapters and connect DSA members organizing with the same industries or national unions.
This is a large undertaking and can only be accomplished by implementing small logistical steps and connecting what we’ve already built. Many local chapters already have local industrial sections, whether they’re called educators meet up, healthcare workers meeting, or logistics subcommittee, but it’s up to the NLC to connect these local groups nationally with a common communication platform and develop a toolkit for chapters that do not already have these formations.
Once connected, these groups will be better situated to nationally develop the labor movement in their industry or major union through democratic coordination: they will be better equipped to implement trainings, push for contract language, or organize to pass resolutions in their locals. The NLC could facilitate this by creating a library for DSA labor organizers to keep training resources and template resolutions. By connecting through their national industrial section and using NLC resources, DSA members will be able to fight for more robust internal democracy as part of reform movements and act as a bottom up force to push labor leaders past capitulation and reformism. Even a handful of DSA members organizing together within an industry or national union will immediately be a touchpoint for reaching non-DSA layers of progressive and reform-minded workers within that industry or union. As each group takes shape in their industry or national union, we will have the skeleton of a national, comprehensive, and systematic fight for control of the entire labor movement.
Likewise, this process will help the NLC improve its ability to continue previous projects such as Labor for an Arms Embargo, Mask Off Maersk, and the development of local EWOCs. The NLC shouldn’t be an obscure body DSA labor organizers have to seek out instead, it should be part of our chapter ecosystem, a connective tissue for our labor work around the country. Combining a new orientation which centers a political approach and these structural changes, we will take the first meaningful steps towards a new DSA labor movement.
There is No Such Thing as Apolitical
Opponents of this amendment will state that the attempt to politicize the labor movement will limit our ability to reach a broad political spectrum of workers, and that leading with our socialist politics will only isolate us. However, won’t workers be more motivated by a movement actually fighting for their interests? The attempt to hide ourselves and our politics in the movements of liberals and reformists only allows liberal and reformist politics to remain dominant. Time and time again, we have seen that liberal politics have failed to sustain a democratic mass movement. Workers are looking for something different because they are looking for results.
The major revolutionary strains of socialism a century ago, from Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia to figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, consistently fought against subsumming the labor movement’s socialist politics within purely economistic demands. While necessary to fight for, the economic concessions we can win will never be enough to match the rise in automation, increasing authoritarianism, and the global climate crisis.
In the early twentieth century, ideological opponents to the “Politicals” at the time were best exemplified by the trade unionists in Britain. The UK trade unionists often only represented workers in skilled trades. Every economic win of these trade unionists was divorced from larger political goals and, as a result, remained isolated within these unions instead of spreading through the class. The lack of a larger political movement that could expand the struggles of trade unionists to the working class at large meant that the benefits of these struggles did not make it to the many workers; in particular, it was disproportionately those from oppressed national backgrounds who were left unrepresented. Not only was this unjust, but by leaving a large section of the workforce behind to remain underpaid, these unionists undercut their own efforts by giving capitalists a steady supply of cheaper labor.
Less than a quarter of the workforce in the US today is represented by unions. Simply tailing union struggles without expanding on them through working class politics leaves behind every US worker who isn’t lucky enough to secure one of the few jobs with representation. DSA must help grow the labor movement into a fighting mass movement. We do that not by hiding our politics, but by putting our politics into practice. Creating a mass movement is not an easy task that can be achieved in a year, but if we center politics in our labor work while building our structures to work systematically as a national force, DSA can become the beating heart that workers need to expand their struggle.
Emma Buckley is a member of the New Seasons Labor Union, Portland DSA, and the DSA caucus Reform & Revolution.
The post OPINION: DSA Can Bring Socialism to the Shop Floor appeared first on Working Mass.
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