The labor union, prior to the entry of the US-bloc into the capitalist-imperialist competition at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, served as the “school” of collective worker action in Europe. It was never so in the US, because the US capitalists simply sent restive workers westward to conduct the continental equivalent of European imperialism but amongst Indigenous peoples. The early 19th century unions were illegal, confrontational, and engaged in direct battle with the bourgeoisie and their capitalist states. Although the western countries reeled from this conflict, they were able to manage the contradiction by doling out the rewards of imperialist exploitation. In Europe this manifested as social democracy; in the US, it took the form of Indigenous genocide and the internal Black colony. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was increasingly in the form of the creation of a “white” (Euro-Amerikan, as opposed to the earlier Anglo-Protestant) national project.

By this time, labor unions had become instruments, not of working class power, but of labor discipline. Unions were legalized and given a stake and a share in the US imperialist project. In this way, the unions were “housebroken” and the mass of the labor aristocracy was broadened just as the frontiers were closed and entry into the petty bourgeois homesteader class was restricted. Failure to recognize this fact (which is obvious to anyone who bothers to investigate for even a moment; see, for instance, the rates of equity held by US workers in real property — the average home equity held in the US is $300,000 — has driven many would-be Communists directly into the arms of reaction.

But what were the features of the labor union that made it a school of communism?

1. Workers were organized and developed experience organizing and running meetings, coming to collective decisions, and exerting power.
2. Collective grievances were compared and conclusions could be collectively drawn as to their source — the contradiction between workers and owners.
3. It was a venue through which the advanced elements and conscious Communist could draw intermediate elements and develop their class consciousness by propagandizing, not only the abstract, but around specific conditions affecting those particular workers.
4. It was directly antagonistic to the continued existence of the bourgeoisie and their state, at least until it was captured.

Present-day labor unions do not possess any of these features. Meetings are pro forma affairs, ill attended, and run by bureaucrats. The unions themselves are managed by professional union hustlers whose job security depends on their capacity to (1) deliver beneficial contracts, (2) come to an agreement with management, and (3) not break any laws, like the ones making it illegal to advocate for revolutionary consciousness or suggest a strike unless the union contract is up.

There is, however, an organ of working class power that possesses these features: the Communist-led mass meeting.

What is a Mass Meeting?

A mass meeting is a gathering of people in one place where they are led by the meeting’s organizers to debate and decide on issues that affect them. The character of the meeting will be determined by, in the first instance, the class character of those in attendance and, in the second instance, by the class standing of the meeting’s leaders. We can think of this as, (1) the potential character of the meeting and, (2) as the direction of change or realization of that character.

A single mass meeting occurs over a period between forty minutes to several hours and is a one-time event. There’s no guarantee that it will develop into a standing organ of working class power, but this question depends on whether the organizers have taken care to answer several underlying issues which will be explained below.

There must be advanced preparation. First, it is important to identify the locality from which the meeting’s attendants are to be drawn. This is ideally an urban working class neighborhood with a high number of nationally oppressed workers and a low rate of real property ownership. This is the mass base of our organizing efforts, and focusing on these areas will ensure a good attendance as well as both a receptive class composition at the meeting and increase the likelihood that anyone drawn into the organization as a result of the meeting will have a revolutionary class standing.

Next, efforts must be made to identify the most pressing concerns affecting the community in question. This is traditionally done by conducting a social investigation. During a social investigation, the organizers go into the community and have detailed conversations with residents and workers. The organizers must keep good notes and direct the topics of conversation into the following areas: (1) the biggest problems the interviewees face on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis; (2) the interviewees’ views on local political figures and bastions of state and civil authority (police, relief workers, religious institutions, local politicians, big politicians, etc.); (3) avenues of relief that are available for community members like local shelters, food pantries, etc.; (4) other local conditions that are particular to that area.

Then, the organizers must analyze the data they’ve gathered. It’s not enough to understand what people say on a surface level. To stop there would be to engage in workerist tailism. The data must be subjected to Marxist analysis, and problems must be understood not only in their surface manifestations, but also in the fundamental contradictions that are causing the problems identified in the reports and investigations. The sharpest contradictions responsible must be sought. The organizers must make explicit the links between these problems, the contradictions that underlie them, and the general tasks of the social revolution in the US bloc: national liberation, sex liberation, and proletarian internationalism. The organizers must have a firm grasp on decolonial, antipatriarchal, Marxist theory in order to avoid the reactionary-opportunist pitfalls that will present themselves.

This analysis is the same kind that’s done when an organization performs other general propaganda work. It is the linking of a particular grievance to the general capitalist system, as embodied concretely in the state and civil society, in such a way as to orient toward proletarian internationalism and a revolutionary outlook.

Once this analysis has been performed and an organizational “line” has been developed which connects the most acute problems of the area with the necessity for organized, antagonistic class action, the necessity to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution, the necessity for supporting or attaining national self-determination for the oppressed nations, of national-suicide for the oppressor nation, anti-patriarchal action, etc. — once this has been done, the organization must begin a campaign of mass agitation. A date, time, and place must be set for the mass meeting. Flyers and handbills must be drawn up and copied. Members of the organization must go into the community, armed with this material, and hang posters, have conversations, and hand out literature. The call should be clear: This is the problem; here are its causes; come to a mass meeting to decide (or learn) how to combat it.

If the investigative and analytical stages are carried out correctly, the agitational stage is sufficient, and the date and time are selected with careful attention to the general availability of the masses in the area, then the meeting should be successful. That is not to say that the first few calls for a meeting may not be unattended or sparsely attended. This is not only because of the errors an inexperienced organization is likely to make on their first or early attempts, but also because the organization will not be known and will not yet have currency among the masses.
It is worth noting that the Soviets and councils of the successful Communist revolutions were essentially mass meetings that took on standing form. Indeed, Indigenous nations have been holding mass meetings as the primary method of political engagement for centuries. (See, for instance, Kathleen Duval’s Native Nations: A Millenium in North America, for a survey of Indigenous practices. Random House, 2024). 

What Do You Need?

First and foremost, in order to run a mass meeting you must be organized, that is, you must be a member of a Marxist-Leninist cell that has a defined membership in which labor duties are required of members, has regular and consistent meetings and keeps records, and has written internal rules that govern its structure and actions. Without an organization, it’s impossible to direct a mass meeting effectively or to elevate a mass meeting from a one-time event into a mass organization capable of embodying the will of the working class, which is the ultimate goal.

Your organization must have a sufficient number of real, actually-working members to carry out not only the preparatory tasks, but also to run the actual meeting. We have found that five dedicated cadre-level members is an appropriate benchmark. Each of these five members should be capable of mass work, trained in historical materialist analysis, able to conduct searching social investigations and keep detailed notes, perform analysis on the fly, and have training managing a crowd.

You will also need at least rudimentary graphic design and printing capabilities to prepare the flyers and literature. Your organization will require the use of a large space, whether indoors or out-, to hold the meeting and should secure at least a simple PA system — a megaphone with a detachable mic will suffice. Preferably, all organizers should be able to dress in a manner that marks them out as members of your organization, whether it is a single article of clothing or a shared color. This will allow them to stand out at the meeting and help manage it.

Running the Meeting

It is wise to formally open the meeting by announcing that it’s beginning and asking the attendees to gather around the speaker. Ideally, the speaker will be elevated above the rest of the crowd for visibility and there will be room for at least one other person to stand up there with them.

A short speech is a good way to open the meeting. This should lay out the main topic, any critical ancillary topics, and connect the issue to the imperialist state and the oppressor bourgeoisie. This is a good time to begin getting the crowd involved. Simple questions that can be easily answered (even with just a “yes!” or “no!”) will prime the listeners for engagement and signal that this meeting won’t be a passive affair.

Once the stage is set, the meeting leader should ask the crowd if anyone present has experienced the issue which is the subject of the meeting. If the organizers recognize anyone in attendance who has a particularly good and demonstrative experience, it  can help to call that person to speak first. From this point, tactics will diverge depending on what the organizers intend to do with the meeting. If the goal is just to use the meeting to propagandize, generally elevate class consciousness, test the organizer’s own organization, and make connections with the masses, then the meeting can be comprised almost entirely of calling individuals up to the PA system to speak about their experiences while the meeting leader interposes questions, clarifications, and reframes the issues in a Marxist lens. Once the crowd has been sufficiently propagandized and exhibits a high degree of energy, the meeting leader can deliver a short closing speech to summarize what was said, to draw a broad connection to the capitalist state, to identify the ruling class as the collective enemy, and to stress the need for organization. The meeting leader should propose further meetings and discussions and clearly articulate what organization entails. These somewhat restrained aims are a good target for an organization’s first mass meeting, and may help it develop internal rigor.

That being said, the organizers should never attempt to restrain or repress the organically-occurring maturation of the masses. If the attendees want to engage in debate, discussion, adopt an organizational form, or even settle on concrete steps that can be taken to begin addressing the problem presented, they must not be delayed or put off. The organizers must be ready to capture the energy and foster any kernel of consciousness with real suggestions and real action. This should not turn into a run-away meeting in which the attendees decide to go to war with the state immediately, but neither should the organizers offer platitudes. Real steps may be required.

To that end, it would be wise for the organizers to become familiar with rules of procedure for running mass meetings as an organizational form. These may be home-made, but the latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order contains good rules for a mass-meeting form that can help an organization run a meeting, maintain a good flow of conversation, and ensure that decisions are made collectively.

The Meeting is Not the End

The most important thing to impart is that the first meeting is only the beginning of organizing. If the organizers wish to push further with their meeting and the mood of the attendees permits it, they should call for a debate on action, set further meeting dates and times, and even consider calling for volunteer officers to serve as an interim executive committee to carry out decisions adopted by the meeting. This body of officers should hopefully contain a mix of the organizers and attendees, and should be subject to elections at the soonest possible opportunity (generally the next scheduled mass meeting).

The organizers should also urge attendees to join any public-facing political education classes they offer. Indeed, this is an excellent opportunity to urge attendees to assist in or join any of the organizers’ other initiatives: Red Aid, community self-defense, etc.

The critical thing is to continue holding meetings, to develop the attendees, and to drive struggle to an ever higher degree. The more meetings are held, the more the class consciousness in the area will be fostered. It is important to ensure that this consciousness does not develop in a reactionary direction, which is why the organizers must be well trained in the most advanced decolonial theory. Armed with the advanced theory and the energy of the masses, the mass meeting is the chief organ of class power available to us at this time.

That’s all it would take, indeed.

For any debate-bro logicheads, this ludicrous argument has a very simple and identifiable error. It’s called begging the question. Certainly, all it would take to bring down the capitalist order is a coordinated assault, the execution of a few key government officials and particularly awful capitalist robber-barons, the expropriation of their land and wealth, the establishment of a socialist legality and decolonial government, etc., etc. A simple matter!

The question is hidden. What would it require for every worker to militantly agree to go on strike, resist police attack, and prevent scabs from working? Why, not much. Only a total revolutionization of the labor movement.

Only the creation of a centrally coordinating body. Only the joining together of the various labor struggles into a militant political party of labor.

The primary weapon of the working class is organization. Each individual capitalist commands an enormous number of resources. Each capitalist firm is itself an organization designed to marshal and control those resources. When we confront these massive accretions of capital, of political power, of physical repressive violence, we confront them alone and singly unless we are organized. A single strike requires local organization; a mass strike requires mass organization across the entire economy. For a strike against one of the capitalist behemoths that now stand behind the U.S.-Canadian governments, that strike must attack all the bases of the capitalist firm at once. That cannot be done without a high degree of organization. But we cannot organize against capital from within the labor unions until the labor unions themselves are won back from their current class-collaborationist leadership.

We can identify, then, the series of steps needed to break the stranglehold of the labor bureaucrats — those who speak revolution yet perform obeisance to capitalist leadership like Sean Fain, and those who don’t speak revolution at all — on the labor unions. These are the very first and necessary steps toward any question of a mass strike.

1. Active revolutionists — those people now calling for a general strike every so often on the internet, as well as those trained Marxists within the unions who are truly revolutionary — in short, the radical union members, must begin the task of propagandizing and agitating to the rank-and-file, bringing them to the understanding that they are being betrayed by their leadership;
2. Radical union members must form internal organizations capable of challenging the stifling rules and the environment of anti-democratic suppression that now surrounds the election of union leaders and determination of union policy;
3. These organizations must engage in the sharpest possible struggle against their internal union enemies — the labor bureaucrats — and force the addition of new rules to their constitutions, namely: i) thorough and democratic discussion on every issue, with the membership being permitted to pass dictates to its officers, ii) recall provisions for treacherous officers and other officials, iii) caps on officer salaries to be no more than three times the average rank-and-file salary, iv) completely clearing out all current elected officials and employees of the union and replacing them with radical members.

Only when this struggle is won in at least a number of major unions can we begin to discuss formation of a mass strike committee and the enactment of a general strike across all industries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

This work can be begun in an uncoordinated fashion. Small cliques and groups of revolutionists within the labor movement can start the undertaking. However, for it to coalesce into a general strike, these cliques and groups must coalesce into the form of a dedicated, militant, revolutionary party of labor; a Communist party.

If the argument in Relentless and Loper are any indication, the center-leaning minority of three justices on the court stand no chance of carrying even a single decision in the year to come. As Butcher Biden continues to unleash hell on the people of Palestine and his government at home breaks the backs of unions, enforces cruel debt recovery schemes, and fails to achieve major policy objectives, he and his rickety coalition are under attack from even farther right enemies within the ruling class. Going into the 2024 election year, we should expect this assault to grow in strength as the ruling class continues its consolidation around the farthest right reactionaries in government and abandons its pretensions to centrism.

What do these cases mean?

Relentless and Loper: Ending the Last Vestiges of the New Deal

The regulatory state is a term that describes the expansion of the U.S. government by the New Deal progressives. The U.S. federal regulatory agencies — the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve System, the Environmental Protection Agency, etc. — are the result of this expansion of government. As you can see from the short list, many of these agencies were conjured into being by the Roosevelt progressives in order to “tame” the “excesses” of capitalism. The Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are designed to manage banking and money-flow and prevent enormous capitalist crises like the Great Depression. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is designed to ease the conflict between labor and capital and act as a mediator between them.

These agencies were created to avert a revolution during the Great Depression. They were the conscious design of a cartel of “progressive” capitalists who had chosen to forgo immediate profits in order to adjust the long-term stability of the capitalist state. The unregulated markets that produced the Great Depression were supposed to be tamed, the rampant class warfare practiced by corporations (who had, until the late 1930s, frequently resorted to openly hiring mercenaries to break strikes by killing strikers) was meant to be brought under control. At the same time, this plan of progressive New Deal politics had, beginning in the early 1930s, reinvigorated the dead Democratic Party and created an unholy coalition of labor leaders, Black voters who were steadily being alienated by the realignment of the Republican Party, and social liberals by redistributing some of the profits of the capitalist class back to the suffering working class.

Obviously, that coalition has broken down. The New Dealers are dead. The extra profits have been clawed back. The agencies no longer provide much benefit to the working class, other than a tangle of regulations that capitalists see as intruding on their rightful domain. Do businesses want to be told that they have to comply with environmental regulations? No. Do they want the NLRB breathing down their neck if they crush a union drive with a little too much vigor? No.

The far-right wing of the reactionary ruling class has forgotten or doesn’t care about the systemic danger of removing the regulatory agencies. They see their rate of profit declining and are pushing to increase it. There are only a few ways this can happen, namely through warfare with foreign countries and the expansion of a colonial or neo-colonial empire, or through the immiseration of the U.S. working class at home. They long for a return to the 1890-1936 period of U.S. capitalism, before regulation and codified labor rights, when striking was a crime punishable by death.

If the court rules in favor of the corporations in Relentless and Loper, it will be the first step on the road to dismantling the federal regulatory state. Federal agencies are created by U.S. Congressional laws. Both of these cases represent an attack on the court’s deference to regulatory agencies reading of their own statutes and will invite the Supreme Court to peer into how the agencies regulate and control the areas they have been assigned authority. More important than this arcane legal question (which will dismantle fifty years of precedent and allow the court to intervene in any ongoing question before a federal agency) is that this will signal to the court’s far-right fascist allies that the time has come to bring a challenge questioning whether the federal agencies can exist at all.

The question in Loper is whether the Department of Commerce can require fishing boats to pay for the federal observers required by a certain law; the lower courts followed what is known as Chevron deference, stating that an agency can read its own statutes expansively, and the court grants deference to that reading. The same question is presented in Relentless.

In two years, the court could strike down and basically dissolve all executive regulatory bodies. In a stroke, this would deregulate all markets, end all labor rights, and open the doors for a full fascist reaction on every political front.

Fischer: Rehabilitating Far-Right Paramilitaries

The Fischer case is about the constitutionality of a charge brought against the January 6 putschists. Joseph Fischer, along with many of the other putschists, were charged with obstructing a congressional proceeding, a felony with a penalty of up to five years incarceration. This charge, a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1505, is the core of many of the prosecutions against the January 6 defendants. Fischer’s lawyers — and potentially the Supreme Court — argue that the law doesn’t apply, because the “obstruction” was intended to refer to interfering with an ongoing investigation, not physically occupying the capitol.

If the court rules in favor of Fischer, we can expect the already lackluster prosecutions of the January 6 putschists to begin to fall apart. Those who have already been sentenced will likely seek redress, and those who are awaiting sentencing or trial will make hay from such a ruling.

But that’s what it would be designed to do. By weakening this law, which will never be used against, for instance, poor or working-class defendants, the Supreme Court would thereby grant its blessing to the far-right putsch. We must understand this for what it is: unlike the hysterics by the Biden camp surrounding January 6, we cannot classify this as a “failed” coup; this was a putsch exercise that was never intended to make it as far as it did. This trial run was so remarkably successful that the leadership had no idea how to turn around and transform that success on the ground into political action.

Next time, they will.

Starbucks v. McKinney: Weakening the Unions

The McKinney case was brought before the Supreme Court by the bottomless legal fund of the Starbucks Corporation. In 2022, Starbucks fired seven employees in a Memphis, Tennessee store for attempting to unionize. Those workers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (which is under threat from Relentless and Loper as discussed above). The NLRB asked the U.S. District Court in Tennessee to grant an injunction requiring Starbucks to rehire those employees, and it did.

The Starbucks Corporation says that the District Court shouldn’t have granted that injunction, and that the way the NLRB gets injunctions is wrong. This more lenient test that the courts grant to the NLRB is part of the National Labor Relations Act, the law which created it. Starbucks and its lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to attack a core part of the National Labor Relations Act and strike at the NLRB’s power to compel corporations to behave in accordance with the law.

The growth of union drives and the expansion of the power of labor within the last three years has spooked the corporate owners of the U.S. ruling class. McKinney is part of the two-pronged attack by these interests on the rights won by the struggles of working people in the United States over the past century. Unlike the broader assaults of Relentless and Loper, McKinney is a direct blow aimed at weakening unions and their legal powers.

Should the Supreme Court grant the relief requested in Relentless and McKinney, it will only be a matter of time before the National Labor Relations Act is completely nullified.

Grants Pass: Killing the Poor Outright

The footsoldiers of American fascism are the local organizations of white supremacy. At the most granular level, they are represented by homeowner’s associations. The city government sits at a  level above the dreaded HOA, but still holds very local power. In Grants Pass, the power of the city government to criminalize homelessness is up for review. Critically, the currently controlling decision in Oregon is the Ninth Circuit decision of Martin v. Boise, which prohibits governments in the nine Western states under that court — including California — from punishing homeless people for sleeping outside when cities don’t have sufficient space in their shelters.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (another executive federal agency) announced that more than 650,000 people were houseless in January of 2023, a 12% increase since 2022. Over a third of the nation’s unhoused population was in Washington, California, and Oregon, which each had more than 20,000 unhoused people at the time of the count. We know homelessness will be on the rise as the tidal wave of evictions follows the lifting of the rent moratoriums and renter’s assistance that ended when the government declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The court is being asked to prepare for the murder, arrest, and criminalization of tens or hundreds of thousands of unhoused people. This wave of evictions has been foreseen; the ruling class is aware that it will cause social unrest, anger, resentment, and prove the failures of the capitalist system. What are they doing to get ready for it? They’re training more cops in urban warfare and counterinsurgency, and they’re asking the Supreme Court to permit cities (and states) to proclaim unhoused people to be outlaws, subject to arbitrary search, seizure, and arrest.

A Dark Road Ahead

There is no doubt that these are grim tidings. The ruling class is eating itself alive, an ouroboros of recrimination and fascism, as it seeks some way to bring stability to the failing U.S. empire. It is critical for the advanced masses to be prepared; to foresee the acts of the ruling class; to prepare for them. Even if mass organization and direct action fails to prevent the Supreme Court from acting on each of these cases — even in the worst case where each passes into law — we must be prepared to mitigate the consequences and to organize those who will undoubtedly be thrown out of work, out of their homes, and abandoned to die in the streets by the uncaring machinery of profit.Forewarned is forearmed. And we must go armed.

As we have warned, union organizing is the beginning, not the end, of class consciousness. This week, the United Auto Workers proved that it is a corrupt organization, its very bones riddled with the infection of political opportunism. Shawn Fain, mastermind of the UAW strike, hailed by the naive and undiscerning as a new labor hero, gave a full-throated endorsement of Butcher Biden and encouraged all UAW workers to vote for him. On the same day, protestors at one of Genocide Joe’s events were drowned out by UAW workers who support the murderous president of the current White House regime.

You heard that right! Butcher Biden, who spent a huge amount of his presidency breaking the backs of unions, endorsing anti-union legislation, and chastising workers for asking for too much, is the new darling and political ally of the supposed firebrand Shawn Fain. This man, who proclaimed his intention to organize toward a general strike and a shutdown of the U.S. imperial economy in favor of the workers, has come out in a full-throated endorsement of the genocidaire that his own rank and file denounced mere weeks prior.

Unionism, when untethered from the international struggle for the rights of the working people, is merely political opportunism. In 2018, the UAW president made $207,000 from his UAW salary alone — hardly the wage of a struggling proletarian — even after a voice vote from the union delegates voted down that 2018 salary increase. Fain has followed in the footsteps of the past presidents of the big business unions and accepted the crumbs of imperialist superprofits for his members while bowing to the unholy union of labor and capital that is represented by the Democratic Party.

Fain has abandoned the surging internationalism pressing him from below. Rank and file UAW members, ever staunch internationalists, have called for a ceasefire resolution from Butcher Biden. They’ve gone so far as to interrupt Biden speeches. “A president who supports genocide and is actively funding weapons to israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement,” said member Johannah King-Slutzky. At least 500 UAW workers signed the ceasefire petition circulated internally in the UAW. Indeed, the union has its own committee called UAW Labor for Palestine. As recently as last week, Fain said “We don’t stop our fight for justice because it’s not the right time. When and where there’s a war, whether it’s in Vietnam or Gaza, we call for peace.”

But Fain can’t put his money where his mouth is. He’s constitutionally prevented from it! Only a resurgent internationalist movement from within the rank and file of the UAW can overthrow the stagnant slime of opportunism; if it is not swift and powerful, upsetting the entire order of the union and throwing off the old, Democrat-loyal chains for independent action, it won’t be long before the UAW lobbying arm is pouring union money — rank and file members’ money — into Genocide Joe’s campaign chest.

Merwan Beydoun, a 29-year member of the UAW in Dearborn, Michigan, withdrew his support of the UAW’s political arm ahead of the endorsement. “It is disheartening to note that some politicians associated with the UAW PAC have not actively called for a ceasefire…. I believe that endorsing and supporting candidates who prioritize the cessation of hostilities is essential for the promotion of peace and justice.”

Yet, there is Fain, on stage, parroting the lie that Biden has been a “pro-labor” president, all while the Butcher still stinks with the blood of the SMART Transportation and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, who he condemned through state action to continue to work without sick time. As trains crash and explode with increasing frequency on the U.S. rail lines, both parties celebrate the chaining of union expectations to the decaying political consensus of Washington. Why do we call for death to the UAW? Because its leadership is dead already. All rank and file members must recognize their necessary commitment not just to increasing the contract payments and benefits of their members, but to the international working class. Death to the labor bureaucrats and their lackeys! The UAW membership must kill the beast, and forge a new future!

—David Beck, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 1952-1957, until his indictment on charges of embezzlement

More and more today, our struggle as the working class in the U.S. Empire is embodied in unionism. This is a return to something that had been long abandoned. The Bessemer and Long Island Amazon drives, Starbucks United, service unions, Railroad Workers United, the UPS-Teamsters dispute, the ILWU strike, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes — these are merely the most visible of the recent upsurge in labor struggles. There’s a new generation of labor standing up to Capital. We’re becoming more and more conscious of our existence as the working classes: that we share common economic, political, and social demands. As this resurgence of class consciousness spreads and grows, we have to take stock, pause for a moment, and learn our history. The lessons of the last century are crying out to us: take heed! Unless we look back, we won’t be able to chart a course forward. We have to learn from our defeats, because the capitalists won’t forget them. In fact, they already learned from the past century and have been applying all their efforts to  crush us.

Why did the working class movement abandon unionism as a strategy for organization?

Why do the unions, as they exist today, seem to be on the side of Capital?

Why can’t we seem to expel the cop unions from our international organizations? Why do our international organizations force contracts on us that we don’t want? Why, for instance, did the Teamsters Brotherhood International force the UPS workers to ratify a despised contract in 2018, in the face of the popular vote of the membership?

How can we organize in a way that isn’t undermined, diverted, and destroyed by the capitalists and their pet politicians?

Which Side Are You On?

You know it in your flesh and bones: when you go to work, you’re at the mercy of your boss. Your boss — probably a manager, someone employed by the owner of the company to monitor you and make sure they can get the most out of your work — can change your hours, change your job description, give you more work, ask you to work on weekends, even fire you for any reason or for no reason. If you say “no” enough times, they can fire you.

It’s so self-evident why this is the case that it seems almost trite to spell it out: the employer owns everything that you use to do your job. If they don’t want you there, they can call the police to get rid of you. The employer has a huge amount of money. If they don’t want to pay you, that’s it — you’re done. In contrast, individual employees have no leverage over the employer. If you get angry and quit, that doesn’t hurt the employer. They’ll find someone else to fill your place. You have no leverage. They have all the power.

Now, if you’re in a union, if you’re organized, that boss lacks this power. By combining, by agreeing to act together, you can take back some of the leverage the boss has. It makes no difference if one person quits or withholds their labor, but if many people do it simultaneously, it costs the boss money and worse, from the employer’s point of view, it proves that the workers can extract concessions by organizing and refusing to work.

This fundamental imbalance in power is part of capitalism. As long as capitalism persists, workers will have an incentive to organize collectively against the employer. At the end of the day, this threat of work-stoppage, of a strike, is the greatest weapon we have and is the final resort in a labor-management relationship when the employer tries to exercise their power over the workers.

That’s the theory behind unions, and how they’re supposed to work. So why, in the modern world, does that not seem to be the case? Why do we still see strikes being broken, unions being busted, and unionized workers accepting decreases in pay, concessions, and bad contracts?

There are some terms that would be helpful in answering this question. There are two overall shapes that unions can take: craft unionism, on the one hand, and industrial unionism on the other. Then, there are two philosophies that unions can adhere to: social unionism and its polar opposite, business unionism.

Craft unionism is the organization of a union on a narrow basis — everyone in a certain trade belongs to the same union. This divides workers at the same site into different unions and, as a result, capitalist employers can play the different groups of workers off one another and try to keep them divided.

Industrial unionism is the organization of everyone in a given industry into a single union, preserving solidarity and permitting the maximum amount of force to be concentrated against the employer.

Social unionism sees union organization as part of a broader social program to empower workers; this was the form unionism in the U.S. almost invariably took until the late 1930s.

Business unionism sees unions as a business and their membership as clients. The philosophy of the business union is to restrict union struggles to one narrow field of action: wages and benefits. Business unions openly admit that they believe that management has the “right” to make many decisions: hiring and firing, closing plants, etc. Business unionism has all but conquered every major union in the U.S. Empire. It is the professed and avowed philosophy of every one of the big “International” unions — the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, etc.

This still doesn’t provide an answer to our questions, although you can begin to see the outlines of one. To get the full picture, first we have to look at how U.S. law has treated and shaped unions, and then we have to examine how business unionism has manifested within the movement.

The Enemy Without

The U.S. law has never been friendly to unionism. In the 19th century, unions were prosecuted as illegal conspiracies. Working people struggled against the government for formal recognition under the law and, after several major uprisings in the late 19th century — the 1877 mass uprising, which led to the short-lived St. Louis Commune, the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, the 1894 Pullman Strike, and others — labor organization  finally won some legal protections — the bare minimum.

The law keeps working class organizations divided, makes it difficult (if not impossible) for new unions to be certified, and has been transformed to be a tool of the employers rather than a tool for unions.

The law that governs labor disputes and union certification is the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the “NLRA”). The NLRA establishes an all-empire board of arbitrators, the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB, that oversees unions and labor complaints. The NLRA determines the form that unions have to follow to become certified, or recognized, at workplaces and gives labor protections against suppression by employers. Under the NLRA, employers can be enjoined from interfering with the exercise of their employees in seeking self-organization, forming unions, and engaging in collective bargaining. It also grants the Board jurisdiction over employers who try to dominate or interfere with unions, engage in discriminatory  hiring to encourage or discourage union membership, fire employees because they filed charges or gave testimony under the NLRA or “refuse to bargain collectively.”

None of these rights are self-enforcing. That is, if an employer (or their managers) does one of these things, you have to file a labor complaint with the NLRB. The NLRB then investigates the complaint and determines whether it will take action on your behalf. In the meantime, if the company fired you, you stay fired. The remedies available to workers when their bosses commit these “unfair labor practices” are limited to back pay, being re-hired, and monetary damages. NLRA cases take years to prosecute. The average time for the NLRB to investigate and decide if it will take a case is 2 months. The average time it takes an NLRB case to resolve is around 650 days. That’s 650 days after they complete their investigation that you might get your job back.

The NLRA was amended by what’s called the Taft-Hartley Amendment in 1947. Taft-Hartley edited the law to make labor unions liable for unfair labor practices, just like employers. In addition, along with the Employment Act of 1990, it makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to engage in what’s called a “sympathy strike” — that is, to strike in support of another union. It also makes “secondary boycotts” illegal — that is, to boycott or strike a company that does business with a struck company. 

For instance, let’s say you work at the countrywide grocery chain, Pause and Procure. The shipping company, Containers Inc., delivers supplies to the grocery stores. If the Containers Inc. union strikes against Containers Inc. for firing someone, and Containers Inc. management hires scabs to defeat the union strike, your union at Pause and Procure is legally prohibited from striking, boycotting, or picketing Pause and Procure for continuing to work with Containers, Inc. and their scab drivers.

How Did It Get That Way?

The process that culminated in these laws was ongoing through the 20th century. It accelerated when finance capital in the U.S. firmly and forever merged with industrial capital and the largest shareholders of major corporations became the banks and mutual funds. For instance, Vanguard, a mutual fund, owns the majority of shares in 330 of the top 500 companies in the U.S. That’s two-thirds of the world’s most important stocks according to Investor’s Business Daily. Their competitor, BlackRock, is the largest investor in another 38 of those top 500 companies. “Management” is no longer a person or even a particular corporation’s CEO — it’s a faceless multi-corporation conglomerate that demands unions be broken both on the shopfloor and in the government. Since 1970, these financial corporations have driven U.S. companies to attack unions in the courtroom and in the halls of Congress, and they have succeeded.

Why do they want to break unions? Well, let’s look at the source of profits for U.S. companies over time: in 1950, 3.4% of total profits made by U.S. companies came from operations abroad. In 1965, that number was 5.9%. In 1970, it was 9.4%. By 1980, it had gone up to 15.6%. In 2017, it was 44% of all profits made by U.S. companies. As the percentage of profit acquired overseas increased, the profitability of domestic investment decreased.

The rate of profit, the profitability of investment, in the U.S. was decreasing for two reasons: the increase in machinery costs, and the increase in labor costs. Both of these had increased, at least partially, due to concessions won by unions. Corporations don’t want to pay U.S. labor costs. When they are obligated to pay such costs, they fight tooth and nail to keep them as low as possible. This necessitates crushing workplace organizations, and any inkling of solidarity among the working classes. 

In a 1970 congressional report, it was noted that “close to three-quarters of total U.S. exports and upwards of one-half of all imports [were] transactions between the domestic and foreign subsidiaries of the same multinational conglomerate corporations.” The post-war boom secured record profits at home, and was primarily built by the U.S. state securing its position as global hegemon, dominating global markets, and sending forth billions of dollars in the Marshall Plan to “rebuild” Europe,. That profitability declined in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the domestic industrial slump and the consolidation of finance capital in every industry. In the face of declining profits, corporations began to squeeze the maximum surplus from workers, and claw back the previous decades’ labor victories.

Corporate Scheming

This is the world we live with today: a corporate America that is openly and brutally hostile to union organizing — as vicious as any boss of the early unionizing period, and as cruel as any of the men at Blair Mountain or the Coal Wars. They’ve learned new tricks, and now they have the NLRB to help them. We aren’t organizing and fighting for our unions under the same conditions as those late-19th and early-20th century pioneers. The bosses have cut their teeth, and now they have a whole new assortment of tricks and legal powers at their beck and call. If they don’t call armed Pinkertons to shoot up workers’ barracks anymore, it’s only because they no longer need to.

U.S. corporations have adopted tactics to indefinitely delay elections for union certification. Because these representation elections can’t be held while there are any unfair labor practice charges pending, management simply ensures there are always grievances from the employees. J.P. Stevens put off a union vote at its Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, plants for over 10 years using this method.

The number of unfair labor practice charges against employers has continued to grow over time. From 3,655 in 1957 to 20,311 in 1975, they exploded as employers fought against workers. By 2020, that number had stabilized around 20,000 a year. Employers consistently provoke unfair labor complaints by their actions; part of this is clearly intended to bog down the NLRB and prevent it from timely resolutions.

Corporations created lobbying bodies in the late 1960s and early 1970s that have carried on the fight against unionization behind closed doors, in the offices of  Senators, Congresspeople, and Presidents. In 1972 trade associations contributed $8 million to elections. In 1984, business PACs contributed $23.6 million to Republican congressional candidates and $20.7 to Democratic candidates. In 1978, the Wall Street Journal noted that “Business PACs aren’t experiencing any difficulty in finding outstretched hands, and they seem to be getting their money’s worth from a growing contingent of Democrats.” Under Carter, the White House had an open door policy for businessmen to come and air their grievances. Not so for labor. While the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, labor has suffered some of its most stunning defeats. Since 1971, the only significant piece of labor-friendly legislation to pass while Democrats controlled congress was the Family Medical Leave Act in 1993.

The capitalists have reorganized themselves; they are marching together under one banner, and they’ve identified their enemy: us.

The Enemy Within

Yet we aren’t immediately able to confront the bourgeois state or the corporation as our enemy. There’s something that we have to deal with first, before we can get to them — the business union. We can trace the origin of business unionism to the American Federation of Labor — the AFL, now one half of the merged AFL-CIO — and its founders, men like Adolph Strasser, who said, “We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting for immediate objects – objects that can be realized in a few years.” As George Meany, the AFL leader responsible for merging with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) put it in 1955, “We are dedicated to freedom… through a system of private enterprise. We believe in the American profit system.” John L. Lewis, a business unionist who was integral to founding the CIO said, “Trade unionism is a phenomenon of capitalism quite similar to the corporation. One is essentially a pooling of labor for the purpose of common action in production and sales. The other is a pooling of capital for exactly the same purpose. The economic aims of both are identical – gain.” Regardless of any concessions that these men won for the working class, their intent was never to actually triumph over the capitalist system.  They were only ever reformers, who were content with the continuation of exploitative systems so long as their people got a slightly larger piece of the pie.

Union organizers like these men eventually recognized the profitability in what they were doing and  decided that business unions were just that, businesses, and they should be run like businesses — from the top down. Business unions attempt to routinize and bureaucratize bargaining. The big umbrella unions — the “International Unions” — centralized all of their processes in the 1940s. Contracts were extended from one year to three, giving more power to the International Unions in bargaining. The Internationals developed bargaining patterns, centralized methods and norms of bargaining. They hired an explosion of administrative staff. Labor unions employ some 105,000 people in the U.S. Empire. This glut of administrators serves to bureaucratize and endlessly convolute labor bargaining. 

As an example, United Auto Workers didn’t get any new union members from 1949 to 1970, but its administrative staff grew from 407 to 1,335. Sidney Lens, a labor leader, wrote that the representative from the central offices

develops a whole set of special attitudes. Since he is appointed by the regional directors or top officers rather than elected by the membership, he tends to lose a feeling of responsibility. His post is now a ‘job,’and he is no longer vitally concerned about pleasing his own sense of mission as in pleasing his regional director, or at least keeping clear of his lash. His own salary and benefits become progressively larger by comparison with the members who still work at the lathe, and his economic stake tends to make him moderate just as the secure doctor or lawyer tends in the same direction. He is now an ‘organization man.’

While the welfare state grew in Europe, in the U.S. Empire it was replaced by benefits-bargaining from the business unions. The immense wealth flowing into the U.S. from its conquest of the global markets gave domestic workers healthcare, paid time off, bonuses, child care assistance, life insurance, and pension plans. Rather than receive the traditional blessings of the welfare state from the government, which represents the collective arrangements and desires of the capitalists themselves, workers in the U.S. Empire must cajole these benefits from their individual employers. In 1951 fringe benefits accounted for 17% of the value of compensation of manual laborers. By 1981, that had risen to 30% on average, and firms covered by the former CIO unions were spending 50% of all their labor costs on these fringe benefits.

In the 1920s, only a handful of companies like Ford provided a limited number of benefits like company clinics or doctors. By the early 1980s, 75% of contracts had health care programs and 60% had major medical benefits. By 1980, over 130 million Americans were covered by employer or union health care plans.

Because strikes forced employers to provide benefits, strikes were tamed and controlled. The “contract strike,” the only kind that’s now legal thanks to the business unions’ development of the “no strike clause.” This has deprived unions of their most powerful weapon so long as a contract is in place. The NLRA doesn’t recognize spontaneous strikes, so-called wildcat strikes,  and employers are permitted to fire strikers when they violate these clauses — that is, when they strike while their contracts are still in force. They remember their defeat by wildcat strikes such as the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which resulted in the unionization of the American automobile industry. Locals can no longer call strikes of their own; strikes must be authorized by leadership, and they are now run as a more or less passive affair with a few token pickets at the gate or on the street while the majority of members are told to stay home. Thus, strikes today are a sad mockery of those in the past. Even the aforementioned reformers staged dozens of spontaneous strikes that terrified the capitalist class. 

Bargaining secrecy — that is the use of non-disclosure agreements and secret bargaining teams — has become the norm. That means the members don’t even know what the offers and counter-offers are being made between the union and the company. Just like the latest Teamster-UPS contract, members are left with nothing to do but wait for reports. As we’ve reported in the past, union leadership often claims that this kind of closed bargaining makes it easier to reach an agreement with management. In fact, it’s only “easier” because the labor bureaucrats can claim that they were outmaneuvered and that the contract they came out of the bargaining room with was as “good as they could get.”

This type of secret bargaining goes hand-in-hand with the business unions’ explicitly stated philosophy that they are in partnership with the managers — that, in fact, the goal of union organizing is to ensure the owners get enough money so they don’t close the factories or warehouses. The bankruptcy of this approach was revealed in its full, vile, form during the Chrysler bailout of 1979. To protect the rest of the domestic economy, the U.S. Congress approved a bailout plan to prevent Chrysler from collapse but the banks and the financial capitalists that run the show wanted concessions from the union as part of the plan. Chrysler was eventually given $1.5 billion in loans and credits but the United Auto Workers had to agree to wage freezes, the loss of $125 million in expected wage increases from nonunion staff, and, eventually, a $1.15-an-hour wage cut in UAW wages. Doug Fraser, then-president of UAW, was rewarded for his loyalty in pushing these horrific concessions with a seat on the Chrysler Board of Directors.

The UAW used this kind of back room bargaining to agree to a total of $203 million in wage and benefit concessions and $100 million in deferred pension funds payments. What was Fraser’s public position, so he could sell this to the thousands of Chrysler autoworkers? That “these actions make it clear that UAW has met its responsibilities in the broad effort to save Chrysler workers’ jobs and restore the company to stability.” Even before the vote was taken, Fraser and the UAW Vice President had gotten on a plane to meet with Chrysler exec Mark Stepp in Washington with Vice President Walter Mondale. The UAW’s monthly magazine Solidarity reported “We know how to strike, how to fight, and how to bargain. We don’t have to prove those things as much any more. What we do have to prove is that we can solve problems.”

During World War II, Communists, other tendencies of socialists, and various other militant groups formed organizations within their unions to debate policy and to vie for power. These debates were a source of union democracy. No matter how bureaucratic the authority the union leadership secured over the bargaining process, the top leaders still had to contend with opponents in their rank-and-file membership. Sadly, in each of the major unions, this opposition was systematically defeated. The internal democratic life of the union was crushed, and political pluralism was reduced to a mere anti-Communist crusade by the mid-1940s. Red-baiting, which had little traction during the ‘30s and the war, exploded into McCarthyism. The leaders who adhered to business unionism purged their ranks of Communists and other socialists. The 1946 CIO convention banned members of the Communist Party USA from membership. The question asked by leadership was, “Are you going to be loyal to the CIO or the Communist Party?”

The now well-known tactic of cutting local organizations off from one another became the standard in the unions. Rank-and-file workers lacked (and often still lack!) any means to communicate with their counterparts in other areas. The business unions became an entrenched, self-perpetuating clique of leaders at the top dictating all terms and making all important decisions.

It is only relatively recently that groups within the big unions have once again built up enough power to challenge this trend. Organizations like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UPS Teamsters United (to name a few within the Teamsters themselves) have begun the titanic effort to address business unionism by attacking the very structures that have historically been used to silence the voices of the workers.

So What Do We Do?

Lenin called the tendency of unions to pursue narrow economic gains trade-union consciousness. U.S. unions have a different term for the same thing: business unionism. One of the leading theorists of the tame labor struggles in the U.S. Empire, Gregory Mantsios, wrote in 1998 that unions

exist in order to address the immediate and practical concerns of unionized workers. The objective of unions is to protect their members economically, primarily by negotiating and enforcing the union contract. Unions are seen essentially as service organizations, whose task is to ensure fair wages, increase job security, protect against victimization, improve the conditions of work, and provide additional economic benefits… In the arena of  politics, unions are concerned only with those issues that have a direct or indirect impact on unions, their members, and the industries in which they function.

When capitalists are not capable of actually making unionization illegal, this is what they dream that unions should be. When the ruling class isn’t actively union-busting, it has focused its efforts on restricting the activity of unions to narrow, trade-union consciousness — to business unionism. A business union will never challenge the capitalist status quo. It will never stand in solidarity with migrant laborers, or with Black workers who are excluded from the workplace. It will protect its members first and foremost, and do that by restricting access. Even unions that once acted broadly for the benefit of all workers have been corrupted by this tendency toward business unionism.

Nothing is easier than allowing this blinkered, narrow vision to predominate among union members; it is the natural, organic consciousness that develops out of the struggle of the workers in combination against the owning class. First becoming aware of their narrow, shared economic interests, unionized workers will tend to become closed-off, focused on protecting the jobs that exist now, for the workers who are members today. It is by funding, rewarding, and exaggerating this natural tendency that the capitalists have made their deepest inroads to disarm the threat posed by unionized labor in the U.S. Empire — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Solidarity is the ethos of revolution.

The struggle against capitalism is not a narrowly economic struggle.

It’s not enough to merely join a union. Joining a union is joining an organization that long ago betrayed the working classes in an effort to come to an agreement with the bosses. Similarly, it’s not enough for new unions to be created if they will fall into this same tendency. Labor bureaucrats claim that business unionism gets the goods, but in fact it’s nothing more than begging for crumbs. When the bosses’ table is overflowing, the crumbs will come, but when it comes time to tighten their belts, the business unions will be first to go starving.

The business unions can’t act in solidarity. They’re scrupulously observant of labor laws (even when their leaders don’t seem to care at all about breaking criminal laws) and the labor laws were designed to break up solidarity. Solidarity is acting in support and defense of another person without knowing them; it’s supporting a stranger on their own terms. It is the fundamental ethic of the workers’ movement! It’s only in solidarity that we can overcome the competition that capitalists sow between workers.

Therefore, before unions can be the vessel of a mature workers’ movement, those unions must be won away from the business unionist model. We have to defeat the narrow parochialism of craft unionism and the entrenched leadership of business unionism. We must form organizations and fight within our unions, for solidarity between all oppressed peoples, sexes, and classes. The first stage of that fight is the fight against union leadership, to democratize the unions. Until this occurs, modern unions will continue to shamble along as undead husks of what they once were.

Two particularly powerful forces are shaping the landscape of the negotiations: streaming technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, streaming services have grown to dominate the entertainment industry, and the new model for intellectual property monetization no longer conforms to the terms of the writer’s contracts. The WGA says that the changing landscape has effectively transformed the industry into a gig economy, leaving its members to fend for themselves between contracts.

After weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP ultimately refused to budge, causing the writers’ contracts to expire and leaving them with no choice but to go on strike. Recently, the writers have been joined on strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), motivated both by solidarity and by similar grievances with the studios. 

The Cutting Edge in Strikebreaking: Artificial Scabs

Just as a torturer must skillfully select the right implement to extract a confession from his victim, so too do the Hollywood producers have at their disposal brutal strikebreaking tools — the classic, of course, being the infamous “scab.” Sure enough, the AMPTP has already attempted to replace the striking workers with scabs. Alongside this tool, the producers are employing a fundamental tactic of siege warfare: cut off the enemy’s supply lines, and slowly but surely starve them out. Because the bosses can withhold the workers’ means of subsistence, that is, in the form of wages, and because they have a greater horde of wealth, the producers are betting that they can outlast the workers. One anonymous producer infamously stated as much with unusual honesty: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” In a now-deleted instagram reel, actor Ron Perlman said that he knows which “motherfucker” (sic.) producer said this, “and where he fucking lives,” suggestively adding, “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making $27 million a year for creating nothing? Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful.”

Mr. Perlman is right to call out the producers for living in extravagant luxury while the workers who actually create the value, who pay for the producers’ lifestyles, struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps most insidiously, these ungrateful parasites are attempting to entirely replace these very same workers, not just with scabs, but with machines. One need not cross the picket line to get a fill of their dystopian cyberpunk fantasies: artificial intelligence is already here! Only, the kind of “intelligence” in demand by the market is a very limited and mundane sort of intelligence: intelligent scabbing.

The final counter offers turned down by WGA and SAG included two critical “compromises.” In the first case, AMPTP maintained the right to replace writers with AI text generation. If you doubt the efficacy of existing AI technology, its capacity to replace writers, and whether this is an idle bluff by the studios, then I encourage you to re-read the first two paragraphs of this article, which have been co-authored by Chat GPT.

The studios also insist that they have the right to digitally scan background actors; the actors would be paid for a single day of labor, and the studio would walk away with full ownership of that actor’s likeness, to use as they please, forever, without even a single cent of compensation. This grotesque move has spurred the SAG to join their fellow workers in the WGA in protest.

Perhaps the AMPTP is bluffing. We can surmise that their plot to replace writers and background actors with AI was an empty threat, never intended to leave the negotiating table. Of course the studios knew this would be unreasonable and offensive to the workers before they proposed it — but that’s exactly the point! In both cases, the studios are challenging the power of labor by threatening to automate and thereby replace it with an unlimited supply of robotic “scabs.” They’re saying: “if you don’t step back in line, we will eliminate you, and you will starve.” The entertainment industry bosses have clearly signaled their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. They’re confident that, one way or another, they will win — the workers be damned.

Indeed, it’s as the old saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. Nowhere is this truer than the entertainment business. As the bourgeois propagandists in the capitalist news media rally behind the corrupt studio executives and attempt to sow division between the workers, it is paramount that we not get beguiled or misled. Unconditional solidarity to the writers and actors in their fight against the producers is the only policy for the class-conscious proletariat. All power to the workers! Down with the producers and the executives! Down with the bosses! Down with all the parasites who feast upon labor!

School is the singular place in American society where all manner of social reproduction is expected and taken for granted. Schools shelter, feed, and sometimes clothe their students. Educators are expected to assume the roles of teacher, mentor, counselor, and even friend and parent. Professionally, there are too many hats for one person to wear, boundaries that are pushed, and generally too many responsibilities for one person to bear. Tragically, it’s at the discretion of each individual educator as to how much they will give of themselves to their job.

Such is the case for nearly all aspects of education. How many school events will you volunteer your already scarce time and energy at? How will you configure your classroom furniture to be open and inviting to all students? How will you implement accommodations to keep vulnerable kids from falling through the cracks? How frequently are you contacting home? How often are you meeting one-on-one with your students? Are you advising a club? How are you conveying to your students that you are a safe person while not alerting the reactionary students and parents? Are you interrupting bigotry and implementing restorative practices?

The list of questions is endless, and all answers are ultimately for each individual teacher to decide. 

As more and more aspects of social life are privatized and made inaccessible to the poor, public schools have become a final bastion of public life that can help many families meet some of their most basic needs. But, of course, public schools are themselves under threat from privatization, with charter schools and traditional private schools in addition to a steady increase in homeschooling — all of which ultimately steal funds away from public schools. We are called to do more with less, and the demands and scarcity of resources are increasing daily.

This is not to mention the societal threats that plague our schools. American fascism in crisis has resulted in the constant barrage of attacks from the far-right against educators, championing a delusional conspiracy theory that educators are “grooming” their children and making them gay or “woke” (anti-racist) — or worse yet, both! These attacks are not only launched online; the threat of violence is all too real: angry mobs instigating fights, such as the incident in Glendale, California, where a teacher was put on leave for speaking out against transphobia at a School Board meeting; or school shooters whose manifestos clearly lay out their bigotry, such as the May 2, 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Educators have lost their jobs, have been severely injured, or even been killed for their conviction to create a more just and equitable world.

Educators are exhausted. For our sacrifice to public service, we are called upon to give even more while the mass media demonizes us and our profession. The problem isn’t that educators care too much or that educators don’t actually believe in the social justice we try to implement in our classrooms — to the contrary! It is precisely because of our dedication to service, social justice, and the youth that so many of us chose this profession in the first place! But, it’s also the reason our deteriorating society can exploit us so. 

This is not to say we should abandon our shared beliefs and morals or our students’ and families’ needs. We would never abandon them. Educators deeply understand the enormous magnitude of the task that stands before us, and we know the necessity of taking on that challenge. So many of our students face struggles that could be easily solved with proper funding, and so, the “solutions” often presented are unsustainable and, regrettably, sometimes the only option available. At our lowest points, when we are overwhelmed by a system designed to work against us, this necessary task seems insurmountable. 

But we will not give in; we will not falter; and we will not cave to fascist reaction. We will win! The future we desire is within our grasp — we need only reach out and seize it. How will we achieve this victory? Only through a stalwart and unified labor movement — through our unions. The cure to the plague of fascist reaction is solidarity. We must unite and work together to achieve our goals!

Traditionally, most will think of the union simply as a negotiating body to get a better contract — an increase in pay. This is true, but a union can also accomplish so much more. We understand just how much work needs to be done inside our schools, but in order to begin that work in earnest, we need to relieve some of the pressure and return most of the social services our schools provide to the broader public sphere. Educators must fight for more than just a better contract for ourselves — solidarity is the key! 

We are not alone in this struggle. In the fight for educator needs and the welfare of the families we serve, we are also fighting for worker rights more broadly, as well as the rights of children. In linking our struggle with our fellow workers, we can win and create a more sustainable and democratic society in the process. For this, we can look at the history of the Chicago Teachers Union. Since the 19th century, educators in Chicago have organized and fought for the needs of the people. In his article, “A People’s History of the Chicago Teachers Union,” Rethinking Schools editor, Jesse Hagopian, illustrates the necessity of courageous and unswerving union organization. It is in this history of those who came before us, and those who carry on their legacy today, we can find not only the lessons of how to tackle the tasks at hand, but the strength to continue the struggle.

Learning from these examples, our immediate goals become more evident. Who stands with us? And who of those that are in opposition could become an ally? What can we do to support our community? To this question, there are infinite answers, but some examples: rallying against an anti-work bill, raising funds for an organization that helps the unhoused, collecting and distributing meals to families during the summer, rallying to support our worker-siblings who are on strike, etc. Our unions must unite the workers it represents and the families and communities we serve. 

Our struggles are all so deeply intertwined, and it is the process of atomization and alienation that created these horrible conditions we yearn to rid ourselves of. Only through solidarity and unity of action can we successfully fight back and win!

This, of course, has always been a myth. Child labor persists both in the brutal exploitation in modern colonies, where children labor for little or no pay to produce chocolate and cobalt, as well as within the great imperialist countries themselves, where carve-outs for child agricultural workers were written into law from the very beginning. Even at its best, child labor has merely been constrained by the law, never abolished. And “its best” is quickly decaying as the empire falls apart and struggles to maintain its workforce. Those practices which were finally extinguished didn’t cease through the benevolence of the capitalists; the working class fought to keep our children out of the mines and the packing plants. This wasn’t a gift, but a hard-won victory.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, it quickly altered the landscape of every economy on the planet. Production was paused, consumption plummeted, workers stayed home to protect their lives, and in many places, the state stepped in to keep everyone afloat. Unemployment benefits and health coverage were expanded in even the most committed laissez-faire strongholds, such as the U.S. Measures such as eviction protection, aid payments, tax refunds and more were deemed necessary to prevent the entire working class from instantly collapsing into abject poverty and seeking more radical changes to the economic system. Top members of the Democratic Party have bragged that one measure, the expanded child tax credit, cut childhood poverty in the U.S. in half. Yet that truthful statement is undercut by an obvious revelation: this entire time, the state had been sitting on a tool to eliminate child poverty, used it only partially, and then, months later, opted to reverse the measure, thereby doubling childhood poverty.

Throughout the beginning stages of the ongoing pandemic, workforce participation stagnated. Workers were laid off en masse; some stayed home to protect themselves and their communities, others retired early, still more became unable to work due to disability, or simply died. The capitalists groaned and quailed, crying to their state and media cronies that “no one wants to work anymore!” Measures to protect these workers from both economic devastation and physical damage were instated only to be quickly reversed, replaced with harsh punishments for prioritizing their health. The pandemic was swiftly erased from public consciousness, meager reparations were rescinded, and unemployment began to fall, as desperate workers returned to the workforce en masse in order to make ends meet.

Still, the capitalists were not content. Unsatisfied with merely multiplying their wealth throughout this crisis, they demanded more. More production, more profit, more exploitation. So many workers dropped out of the labor market permanently, and so many are too sick to work on any given day, that the workforce availability declined by an estimated eight billion working hours in 2022 alone. This number is not captured in official unemployment metrics, but it is certainly noticed by the capitalists, who demand every hour of labor they can get. They demand not only an astonishingly high number of total working hours to keep their production running, but a massive reserve army of labor to undermine the negotiating position of existing workers. When they complain of a “tight labor market,” their grievance is not that there are no workers to be found, but rather that there are insufficient extra workers on the market to drive down wages. The capitalists need us to be desperate.

So with a shrinking population of adults willing and able to work, where do these predators turn their fangs? Our children. They have lobbied successfully for the loosening of child labor regulations -– easing restrictions on minimum age, hours worked, schooling requirements, sectors of employment, the need for parental permission, and even the mere enforcement of existing standards. These measures have been championed and signed into law by politicians across the bourgeois political spectrum. Across every capitalist state, every bourgeois party demands only one thing: the constant flow of profit, even at the expense of our youth.

The rising tide of efforts to expand the legal exploitation of children pales in comparison to the capitalists’ flagrant disregard for both law and decency, with violations of child labor law in the U.S. nearly quadrupling since 2015, and growing every year. Children as young as ten are working with dangerous machinery in car factories and handling caustic chemicals in meat-packing plants. This willingness to flout their own standards of morality while violating  labor laws has always been exacerbated by periods of economic strain : the last huge spike in violations happened during the 2008 financial disaster. In every crisis, the most despicable vultures swoop in and pick clean every carcass they can find. There is ample profit to be made by siphoning the blood of the most despondent workers. 

This combined assault on child labor protections — the degradation of regulations and the violations of existing ones — is so egregious that it cannot escape the notice of even pro-capitalist institutions. The Department of Labor has recently been investigating child labor violations by PSSI and Hyundai. The PSSI case in particular has generated so much public outcry because of its sheer brutality: children were expected to use caustic chemicals to clean industrial blades, leading directly to the injury of three minors. These injuries represent only a droplet in the rising tide of blood spilt by capitalists in their pursuit of profit. The investigations by federal agencies are themselves laughably pathetic; they carry no criminal charges, only fines. To the capitalist, this is only the cost of doing this depraved business. Still, the cost seems too much for them to bear, hence their push to scrap regulations altogether. Well-funded and highly-coordinated capitalist organizations, like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce have drafted and lobbied for bills toward this heinous end. So far, 10 U.S. states have proposed or enacted bills that expand working hours, lower working age requirements, lift restrictions on hazardous job duties, or even grant immunity to employers for workplace injuries or death. For children. The primary aim of this legislative blitz is to protect capitalists from legal action for the death and mutilation of children. The capitalists are enriched and empowered by their shamelessness, greed, and depravity. In their vampiric frenzy, not even children are spared the bloodlust.

The working class must act immediately to defeat this reanimated monstrosity. Child labor laws did not spring out of nowhere. They were the capitalists’ begrudging concession to a mobilized, militant labor movement. Our forebears told the bosses in no uncertain terms: release our children from this despicable practice, pay us enough to support our families, or you will not get our labor. United in solidarity, workers beat back the specter of child labor and other abuses, securing some level of dignity and power for our class. But their fight was incomplete. It was exclusionary, leaving gaps where the hyper-exploitation of racialized and colonized children could continue unabated. It was impermanent, leaving capitalists the profit stream to claw back all reforms. It was unambitious, unwilling to imagine and fight for a society built on true liberation. And now this old beast is now roaring back with a vengeance. This time, we must win not only the battle, but the war.

On May 12, the Baltimore Student Union received word through a secondhand source that we had been invited to a town hall to be co-hosted by WJZ, the Baltimore Banner, and the University of Baltimore Law School where some of Baltimore City’s top political leaders — Mayor Brandon Scott, State’s Attorney (DA) Ivan Bates, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, and City Schools Chief of Staff Allison Perkins-Cohen — would be present to engage in a conversation about what could be done to curb the rising tide of youth violence. 

In response, we issued the following public statement outlining that we would be boycotting that forum, and any such forum where student voice was an afterthought rather than a deliberate, centralized goal:

This week, Baltimore Student Union received a secondhand request to participate in a so-called “youth violence” forum hosted by WJZ, UBalt Law, and the Baltimore Banner to be aired live next Thursday. Also in attendance will be mayor Brandon Scott, police commissioner Michael Harrison, City Schools chief of staff Alison Perkins-Cohen, and state’s attorney Ivan Bates.

We want to be clear — “solutions” to youth killings will not be found in BPD, who allowed the death of Donnell Rochester, and just last night allowed the shooting of a 17 year old, or in district board staff, who are authorizing Evolv, or in the mayor, who has accelerated the police budget & eschewed every promise that got him elected.

As community organizers, we understand that political “solutions” to the deaths of young people in Baltimore will not be found through the theatrical exchange of ideas on live radio, but through a comprehensive mobilization of civil society & community residents in Baltimore fighting in one motion for true community safety.

As such, we will not legitimize the authority of city officials who have failed to act in arm with the demands of the community, and we certainly will decline to participate in any event where youth voice is an afterthought; these events must be after school hours and easily accessible to student attendance.

If the press wants to hear from us, they know how to reach us. Solidarity.

Indeed, there is an epidemic of youth violence in our city. On the very first Friday of the school year, a Mergenthaler High student was killed amid a dispute between several people on the street. Only four days later, a Carver High student was killed, and Baltimore students were thrust into a fever pitch of fear and mass panic as the school year kicked off in early September.

Then, in January, a student at Edmondson-Westside High was killed, followed by a nonfatal shooting at Ben Franklin High only two days later, setting students into a spiral right after a return to school from the December holidays.

In March, gunshots afflicted Baltimore students yet again with a mass-shooting ‘false alarm’ at Digital Harbor High, resulting in a school lockdown and a SWAT team being sent in. Students, already on edge, then watched as a Patterson High student was shot and killed, and only three weeks later, a mourning Baltimore City went aflame with rage and grief as the Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville made national news.

The school year is now approaching a close, but it has been a year bereft with loss of life, and a city already weary of ineffective government has only grown more discouraged by the embarrassing missteps made by various government institutions in response to this epidemic of violence in the school system.

In response to the Edmondson-Westside High shooting, Councilman Kristerfer Burnett introduced legislation to the Baltimore City Council to raise fines on businesses that serviced minors during school hours — say, students going to the mom & pop shop on their lunch break for a coffee — and Mayor Brandon Scott announced that new youth curfews would be imposed over summer break, prohibiting students under 16 from being alone in public after 11pm. On the part of the school district, the School Board moved forward with a $300,000 new weapons detection regime pilot program from Evolv — a manufacturer that is notorious for producing ineffective, shoddy equipment that has been pulled out of numerous school districts in the last 5 years for ineffectiveness, most recently in Utica, NY. And the City Council, which unanimously passed resolutions asking the School Board to adopt restorative justice practices in all schools and institute trauma-informed training for teachers and staff, has seen their pleas ignored by the school district. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Police Department has been embroiled in scandal over the cops’ murder of Donnell Rochester, an 18-year old who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in 2022.

The Scott administration, like all others before them, has continued to offer nothing to the city’s youth but condescension, disdain, and harm. It is no coincidence that the city has selected Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Federal Hill as their “primary static locations,” stationing police around the sites of the greatest class privilege in the city. The message sent is clear: the mere presence of working class and racialized youth is offensive to bourgeois interests, and must be met with the full force of state repression. The young people of this city are not so easily placated by facile promises of an “exchange of ideas” or fooled by empty gestures that hint toward reform. They demand — and deserve — justice, dignity, and an end to the policing of youth.

In the midst of all this, we workers have very few options to defend ourselves. Historically, the most effective tool has been to simply refuse to make our bosses rich at our own expense. We’ve put down our tools, walked away from the factories, and left the mines. Strikes are nothing new. Work stoppages, lockouts, slowdowns, boycotts, and every other flavor of depriving the bosses of profits have historically been the bedrock of workers’ rights. Why do these efforts work? Because we are stronger together than they are. Alone, we’re weak: subject to harassment, firing, eviction, jail. But the bosses can’t jail us all, and without us they can’t run the machines that make them rich. If we want to get results, we have to make sure that when we strike, no one breaks the line. Strikes are as effective as they are unified.

There’s a reason the bosses paid their cronies in the government to make solidarity strikes illegal. There is nothing they can do in the face of united opposition. When one workplace puts down its tools, the bosses groan. When all the workplaces of a single company refuse to work, the bosses tremble. And when all workers in all sectors of the economy proclaim as one “No more!” the bosses scream in mortal terror. 

The second a single strike begins, the bosses start to sweat. They know they cannot survive without a constant stream of profit — without our labor to provide them goods and services to sell, and without our consumption to realize those profits. They employ all manner of tactics to put an end to our united front. They hire scabs. They abuse the legal system. They call the cops. They cancel healthcare. They sic their hired guns on us, beat us, shoot at us, even drop bombs on us. But as of late, their strikebreaking weapon of choice has been the media. At the mere whisper of a strike, they get to work crafting a narrative designed to drive resentment. “See these selfish workers? How they refuse to compromise? How their actions deprive you — the poor consumer — of the goods and services you so desperately deserve?”

It’s all nonsense. It’s the bosses who deprive us. Their avarice drives them to extract as much profit as possible from every drop of sweat off the workers’ brow. They squeeze the working class on both ends: production and consumption. As workers, we face low pay, harsh work conditions, and scant time off. As consumers, we face soaring prices, shoddier products, and manufactured scarcity. These twin struggles are one and the same: capitalist greed at our expense. Try as they might to separate labor disputes from the bulk of “the working class” who need the services our fellow workers provide, it is a fool’s errand. We are all the working class. We are rail workers, teachers, baristas, researchers, nurses, harvesters, artists, hospitality workers, steelworkers, caregivers, builders, writers, and more. We deserve dignity, respect, health, stability, and all the wealth we are due.

It is not just our duty to stand with striking workers. It is our right. Solidarity is the ethos of the working class: to stand together, regardless of the identity of your fellows, so long as you are all people who work. Solidarity is the basic tool by which we wring concessions from the bosses. Every successful strike strengthens us all. We shoulder whatever pain may come from this, we blame the bosses, and we make each other whole. This is what it means to be working class. This is solidarity.