The Unity–Struggle–Unity Editorial Board has decided by a unanimous vote to retract one article by Comrade-Editor J. Katsfoter, titled “Transporters, Unite!”, published in the Red Clarion on 28 September 2022.
Yesterday, Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter brought to our attention a discussion held a few days ago in a Facebook group concerning the aforementioned article. Commenters were highly critical of several of Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s arguments and claims, as well as his overall “rhetorical approach” throughout the article, which one commenter, who works in the transport industry as a truck driver, described as “alienating at best.”
The Editorial Board takes all comradely and mass criticism seriously as a matter of basic principle and policy. We discussed the matter at some length as a team, and found ourselves broadly in agreement with the criticisms raised.
We will briefly summarize the errors we’ve identified in Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article.
In his article, Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter states the following:
[N]ot all people who call themselves “truck drivers” are workers — not all these people are actually truck drivers. Some of the people who drive trucks (or who call themselves truck drivers) are owner-operators. Others are fleet owners. In other words, some people who call themselves “truck drivers” are actually petty business tyrants or big business owners. Roughly 9% of all “truckers” (because these people are not really truckers at all, but truck-owners) are owner-operators.
While we maintain that Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s characterization of “fleet owners,” namely that they are haute-bourgeois capitalists, is correct — to be clear, this point is not in dispute by our comrade-critics — we recognize that Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s characterization of owner-operator truck drivers is incorrect. Owner-operators are not necessarily petite-bourgeois, and certainly not “tyrants” over other truck drivers. We would instead characterize owner-operators as semi-independent contractors — who own their instruments of labor, but not their objects of labor, and therefore lack a completed means of production; who, while controlling a portion of the means of production, still sell their labor to a capitalist, and so fall outside the exchange relationships necessary to advance those small, one-sided means as capital; who are, therefore, not “bourgeois,” and are instead semi-proletarian workers; who, the facts and data suggest, enjoy certain privileges above those of the proletariat generally, but do not participate in the exploitation of labor, and are instead themselves exploited by capitalists.
To be clear, this characterization does not extend to those “owner-operators” so-called who actually are petite-bourgeois, i.e., who own complete means of production, exploit laborers and reap profits, and thereby advance their means as capital.
Now the question will be raised: Why do we say owner-operators are semi-proletarian? What is the difference between the semi-independent worker, who owns his small means, and the proletarian worker, who owns nothing but his labor-power? Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter points out in his article, “Owner-operators made [on average] roughly $165,000 in 2021, or $80.43 an hour. The top ten percent of owner-operators make around $250,000 a year.” This average salary is almost four times that of a proletarian truck driver. A comrade criticized this point by noting that this much higher average salary enjoyed by an owner-operator will be eaten-into by the costs of maintaining the truck they own; the comrade says that these costs can “easily” amount to “well over half” of a $160,000/year salary. Assuming this is correct, this still leaves the owner-operator worker with nearly double the yearly salary of the average truck driver, but even so, we can appreciate that the margin may be much smaller (or larger), depending on the costs incurred by the owner-operator.
To rephrase this point in Marxist terms, the owner-operator worker assumes the costs of simple reproduction of the instruments of production (in our case, the truck), whereas, in the case of non-owning workers, these costs are instead assumed by the capitalist, who owns both the instruments and objects of labor.
Two conclusions follow: First, the owner-operator worker clearly stands in a different position within the mode of production than the proletarian worker. The relations of production that define the owner-operator’s place in the capitalist mode are clearly not identical to those of the proletarian. However, the owner-operator and proletarian workers clearly share some relations of production: Both sell their labor-power to a capitalist in exchange for a wage (or, a salary; it makes no difference), although under differing circumstances. The workers in either class are deprived of a portion of the value their labor creates by the capitalist; the capitalist expropriates labor from either, although, once again, under differing circumstances. Second, then, we must regard owner-operator workers as workers, and recognize within this class of semi-proletarians a revolutionary potential — despite their relatively privileged position. This revolutionary potential is to be found in the capacity of the relatively privileged workers to stand in solidarity with the proletariat, to struggle alongside the proletariat against the capitalists.
The elements of class analysis outlined above have critical strategic implications. In highly advanced (and highly moribund) capitalist economies like the U.S. Empire, this privileged semi-proletarian class of owner-operator contract-workers (we have no firm opinion on the “correct” term for this class) seems to be growing in size; consider, for example, the massive growth in recent years of contract-based private transportation and delivery services like Uber and Lyft. It would be — and in Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article, in fact, was — a strategic blunder for Communists to simply dismiss this growing class as reactionary. Communism must strive not only to win over the proletariat, but to win over certain sections and strata of the many other classes in society, including even some of the petite-bourgeoisie (we would qualify that this will mainly mean the colonially and nationally oppressed petite-bourgeoisies), as allies of the proletariat and the sub-proletarian masses. In the near-term, it would be a tactical blunder if we excluded from our industrial labor organizing efforts this owner-operator class, whose interests are fundamentally aligned with those of the proletariat proper and against the capitalists; it would be especially foolish to sow antagonisms between these two laboring classes, when their antagonisms must be directed, in unison, against the capitalists.
In this regard, as far as we can tell, we are basically, if not completely, in agreement with the aforementioned comrade who criticized Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article, and who made a similar argument concerning the article’s strategic errors. We further concur with the comrade in question’s criticisms of the deficiencies in Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article regarding the practicalities of union-organizing among truck drivers: Classic “talking shop” modes won’t work when most of the workers are continually on-the-road — when the road, or the truck, is the workplace. Put bluntly, if we want to make progress, then we’ll need to get creative, and Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article fails in this respect. The criticizing comrade admits that they aren’t sure how we’ll pull this off — we aren’t sure, either, as this is, in some ways, “new ground” — but correctly, in our view, states that a “significant outside infrastructure” will be required.
Finally, we fully accept the comrade’s criticism regarding the “rhetorical approach” used throughout the article: By oversimplifying the problems of organizing truck drivers and other transport workers, and by failing to acknowledge the difficulties involved, Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter reads as unserious and potentially patronizing. In our view, this error stems from Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s failure to conduct a thorough investigation of the matter before attempting to formulate a course of action.
In light of these considerations, the Editorial Board has unanimously agreed that the article in question stands as a detriment, and should be retracted. We have attached the full text of Cde.-Ed. Katsfoter’s article, in its published form, in a document on this webpage, because, on principle, we do not believe in merely “erasing” our errors. But we have taken down the article from the Red Clarion, as we do not want its publication to result in further potential detriments.
We thank the comrades who voiced criticisms of the article for doing so.
The Unity–Struggle–Unity Editorial Board is committed to fostering a comradely forum for all revolutionary socialists, regardless of declared ideology, political tendency, or organizational affiliation (or lack thereof), centered on this work-in-progress project of a mass political newspaper. Our goal is to advance the Communist movement in North America by serving the people — and by learning how to do so effectively. To these ends, we welcome any and all comradely and mass criticism of content in the Red Clarion.
We also welcome and encourage all comrades who are or endeavor to become mass propagandists of revolutionary socialism to send letters and articles for publication in the Red Clarion — including articles framed within a context of comradely debate. Please use our form for contributors or get in contact with the Editorial Board.