Can the Working Class Change the World?

http://monthlyreview.org/0304yates.htm

by Michael D. Yates

Radicals of every stripe believe that capitalist
economies are incompatible with human liberation. That
is, while human beings have enormous capacities to think
and to do, capitalism prevents the vast majority of
people from developing these capacities. Therefore if we
want a society in which the full flowering of human
competencies can become a reality, we will have to bring
capitalism to an end and replace it with something
radically different.

Marx believed that the new society would have to be one
in which the means of production were controlled
democratically and collectively and in which the goal
was to create a society in which labor was offered
voluntarily for the good of the whole and in which
society’s outputs were distributed more or less equally.
The primary agent of the transition from capitalism to
this new society would be the class of wage laborers
created by capitalism itself.

The question which immediately comes to mind is whether
the working class is capable of fulfilling the role Marx
sets for it. Today, the consensus among radicals is that
it is probably not; it has had a lot of time to do so
but so far has not. I disagree, and in this paper I
attempt to say why.

Before doing so, some preliminary remarks are necessary,
to put the question in its proper context. The first
thing to note is that capitalism, like the class
societies that preceded it, is an exploitive society. A
class of property owners, capitalists, extracts a
surplus from the non-owning or working class which
actually does the work of producing society’s output.

While the history of capitalism shows that the working
class has often enough included slave and serf labor,
the largest and, over time, increasingly dominant part
of this class consists of wage laborers, workers
formally free, in the double sense of being free to sell
their ability to work to any employer and free from the
nonhuman means of production.

Second, unlike slaves and serfs, wage laborers are
exploited not by direct coercion (although direct
coercion may be used either by the capitalists or by the
capitalist state) but behind the veil of the market.
Wage workers are not owned by the capitalists nor do
they pay a part of the output they produce directly to
them. However, they are exploited nonetheless, by virtue
of their dependence as a class upon being hired by
employers. Employers use their ownership of the nonhuman
means of production to compel wage workers to work
longer hours than those necessary for the workers to
produce the output needed for their own subsistence.
This extraction of surplus labor, which is the source of
the capitalists’ profits, is maintained in part by the
creation of a reserve army of labor, brought about by
the very nature of the system itself.

Third, capitalism, again by its nature, is an
expansionary economic system. It pushes local markets
into national markets and national markets into
international markets. Since profits depend upon wage
labor, the relentless accumulation of capital, the drive
to maximize both profits and growth, which is the very
heart of capitalism, tends to continuously enlarge the
working class and more and more divide the world into
two classes: capitalists and wage laborers.

Fourth, from the beginning, capital accumulation has
been embedded inside strong states, and these have
greatly aided the capitalists in their drive to
accumulate capital, not least by suppressing the
collective actions of workers. These states have shown
no sign of collapsing or disappearing.

Fifth, the accumulation of capital requires the constant
revolutionizing of the techniques of production, which
in turn requires systematic thinking, that is, the
development of science and engineering. Invention is, in
effect, internalized, made a necessary part of the
system.

Sixth, and of great importance, the constant development
of the means of production, both human and nonhuman,
opens up the possibility of abundance, that is, of a
high level of material comfort for all, along with a
reduction in the time each person must devote to work.
The possibility, in other words, of the full flowering
of human capacities. The possibility of an end to the
base subsistence life of prior class society and a
return to the egalitarian and integrated original
economies of gatherers and hunters, but with a higher,
conscious, level of development.

Is it possible that capitalism can fulfill the
possibilities it creates? The answer must be no. This is
because capitalism is a class system, and because of
this, it presents insurmountable barriers to an abundant
life. Let us look at these. We have seen that capital
accumulation requires the exploitation of wage labor.
This exploitation, in turn, requires things obviously
detrimental to the good life, however defined.
Exploitation demands a sharp separation between the
conceptualization and execution of work. A few get to
think and the many get to do. Exploitation demands a
universally employed detailed division of labor which
condemns the masses of people to boring and tedious
labor. And exploitation demands a reserve army of labor.
The ILO estimates that there are some 160 million openly
unemployed persons in the world and between 700 and 900
million underemployed persons. Not much abundance for
them.

Capitalism also creates and continually reproduces an
uneven development both within and among nations. This,
in turn implies that whatever inequality exists to start
with will continue to exist as a result of the normal
operation of market forces. As economist John Gurley put
it, capitalism must and does ’build on the best.’ To put
this into the vernacular: ’them that’s got is them that
gets.’ What abundance there is must be concentrated into
a few nations and a few hands within each nation.

Capitalist economies inevitably pass through periodic
crises, so just as some people are beginning to see
light at the end of the tunnel, the lights go out. And
if those at the bottom get too uppity, the state always
stands ready to use its many repressive apparatuses to
beat them back down again.

We are led inexorably to the conclusion that to bring
about that which capitalism makes possible, capitalism
must be superseded, abolished and replaced by an
egalitarian mode of production, one in which whatever
surplus is created by labor is controlled by labor. How
might this happen?

We know that, given capitalism’s great power and
resilience, it will not likely collapse of its own
weight. An agent (or agents) is needed to lead a
struggle against capitalism. Our objective, then, is to
identify the agents of change.

The capitalists themselves, even so-called ’enlightened’
capitalists like George Soros, will not be their own
grave diggers. The most fundamental contradiction of
capitalism, its inability to allow full human
development, demands and end to the capitalist class.

This leaves the remaining classes. Let us look at each
one in turn. In all capitalist societies there are
independent proprietors, neither capitalists nor wage
laborers. History tells us that most of those in family
business, private practice, or cottage industry, are
looking to become capitalists, and it is unusual when
these people oppose themselves to the capitalist system.
Sometimes they ally themselves with mass progressive
movements, but this cannot be assured. The system can,
in the end, function without them.

Peasants comprise another class in nearly all capitalist
societies. Peasants are capitalism’s first victims;
everywhere capitalism touches down, peasants find their
ancient attachments to the land threatened by commodity-
loving capital. Land cannot be used to produce food for
subsistence. Instead it must be converted into private
property for the production of profit-seeking
commodities, including food for export,-an element of
capital accumulation. As Marx was coming to understand
toward the end of his life, peasants can be a
revolutionary, anti-capitalist force. They want land and
will often fight for it. In addition, they have
collective ways of doing things, and these make them
amenable to the more collective organization of a post-
capitalist society. Mao grasped this most deeply and
built his Red army upon a peasant base. Today, the
communists in Nepal are doing the same thing. Egyptian
economist Samir Amin estimates that nearly half the
world’s population is still embedded in fundamentally
peasant circumstances. Given this, we cannot ignore the
radical potential of peasants nor refuse to ally
ourselves with their existing progressive organizations,
such as the Landless Peasants’ Movement in Brazil.

But while peasants can be important elements in a
revolutionary struggle, it is doubtful that they can be
the primary agent of it. For one thing, in many places
peasants are isolated and under such intense economic
pressure that it would be miraculous if they could
organize effectively enough to challenge capitalism on a
global scale. They are being dispossessed en masse, and
it is more likely that they will cause trouble as
members of the urban reserve army of labor than as
peasants. Second, in the rich capitalist countries,
peasants are such a tiny minority that their possible
political strength is minimal. In the end, peasants are
not needed by capital; the system can survive and expand
without them. This is not to say that it is progressive
to applaud their disappearance. We should do what we can
to stop or slow down this process. Society is confronted
daily with the anti-human nature of large-scale
capitalist farming, which pollutes the environment and
poisons the food supply. We are going to have to find
ways to produce our food differently, and peasants and
their knowledge are invaluable resources for all of us.
[I might note in passing the tremendous strides toward a
more human-centered agriculture being made in Cuba,
which is pioneering a pesticide-free and smaller-scale
farming still capable of achieving national food self-
sufficiency. I might also note in passing a certain
anti-rural bias among some leftists. They are too much
taken with Marx’s famous comment about the ’idiocy of
rural life.’ But as the editors of Monthly Review
pointed out recently (October 2003), ’idiocy’ is not the
correct translation of Marx’s German. A better word is
’isolation.’ And it is this isolation which must be
ended as we strive for a better integration of urban and
rural life. In this connection, let me recommend a fine
article by Jeremy Seabrook in the April/June 2002 issue
of Race & Class titled ’The Soul of Man Under
Globalism.’]

If neither small-scale proprietors nor peasants are
likely agents of change, the default class, so to speak,
the only one which has the possibility of leading the
struggle against capitalism, is the working class. This
class has many advantages in terms of its capacity to
wage war against capital. First, it is the dominant
class everywhere capitalism has had enough time to
assert its rule. The overwhelming tendency of capitalism
is to create wage workers, so while peasants and
independent proprietors live with the possibility of
extinction, wage workers are always expanding in
numbers, foolish talk of a ’jobless future’
notwithstanding. Second, and in connection with the
first, wage workers are absolutely essential for
capital, the source of the surplus value which is in
turn the source of the profits which fuel capital
accumulation. If as Istvan Meszaros argues, capitalism
is the perfection of class society, the wage workers it
creates are the perfect class in terms of exploitation.
They are exploited, so to speak, behind their backs,
behind the veil of seemingly equal market relationships,
and what is more, they are wholly responsible for their
own reproduction.

Third, since workers are at the center of the system,
inside the workplaces where the surplus value is taken
from them, they are best situated to figure out what is
going on, to grasp the nature of the system. This is not
to say that most workers will be able to grasp the
nature of the system on their own. But some will and
they can teach others. Often skilled workers have done
this. And there will be those outside the working class
who will com into opposition to capitalism, and they can
be teachers as well. [Let me note here that I have been
a labor educator for twenty-five years, and I can say
that almost without exception, working people react
positively to the labor theory of value. It fits their
experiences, and when someone explains it to them, eyes
light up around the room. It is always an ’aha!’
moment.] Of course, once workers understand the nature
of the system, they are bound to become more class
conscious and may become willing to struggle against it.

Fourth, wage workers are more likely to be forward
looking. Unlike peasants they have not lost anything to
look backward toward. They are propertyless, with only
their labor power to sell. Skilled workers are sometimes
backward looking, seeking a return to the time when
their skills commanded status and respect. But
capitalism wages war against skilled labor, so the
homogenization of the masses of workers strengthens the
forward-looking thinking of the working class.

Before examining the achievements and failures of the
working class, that is, how it has changed the world and
how it has failed to make a revolutionary change, I want
to address an issue brought to the fore by Hardt and
Negri in their much-discussed book Empire. In this book,
they argue against the collectively organized working
class (organized nationally and internationally) as an
agent of revolutionary change. They argue in favor of
working people disengaging from the system, deserting it
in favor of self-production. While a ’do-it-yourself’
movement has arisen and has managed to engage in some
production independent of the market mechanism, it seems
to me that a politics of desertion is bound to fail.
Capitalism has created at least some large-scale
production units which we will no want to abandon. Can
we ’do it yourself’ and get steel produced or
electricity produced and distributed? Some production
will always have to be coordinated across large
territories. How will this get done? And can it really
be imagined that tens of millions of workers are going
to desert work and do their own thing? Under what
coordination and with what strategies against the states
that will actively and viciously oppose them? No wonder
Hardt and Negri think the state is now irrelevant. It is
a very convenient argument.

In terms of the working class as the primary agent of
opposition to capitalism, I agree with Ralph Milliband,
who said,

the ’primacy’ of organized labour in struggle arises
from the fact that no other group, movement or force in
capitalist society is remotely capable of mounting as
effective and formidable a challenge to the existing
structures of power and privilege as it is in the power
of organized labour to mount. In no way is this to say
that movements of women, blacks, peace activists,
ecologists, gays, and others are not important, or
cannot have effect, or that they ought to surrender
separate identity. Not at all. It is only to say that
the principal (not the only) ’gravedigger’ of capitalism
remains the organized working class. Here is the
necessary, indispensable ’agency of historical change.’.
And if, as one is constantly told is the case, the
organized working class will refuse to do the job, then
the job will not be done.(New Left Review, I (15), 1985)

It is easy to get discouraged by focusing on the
failings of the working class, but it is necessary to
take a look at our achievements. The self-consciousness
of the working class is not much more than 200 years
old. Subject to the control devices implemented by
employers, workers take advantage of the contradictions
brought forth by these devices and begin to organize
themselves into trade unions. For example, employers
introduce factory production to enhance control, but
workers find themselves more class conscious due to
their proximity with one another. Workers employ the
very language of the bourgeoisie and turn it to their
own advantage. When the capitalists speak of freedom of
contract, the workers talk of freedom of assembly.

The unions organized by workers serve not only as
defensive organizations, winning for their members some
protections against the insecurities inherent in a
capitalist economy, but as educational enterprises,
teaching workers the ABCs of the system in which they
live and labor. The organization of the working class
forces intellectuals to take notice of it, and some of
these not only try to analyze the system but become
active allies of the workers. From their workplaces,
labor spreads its organization to the level of society
as a whole, forming political organizations and parties,
which both agitate for political reform and for direct
control of the state itself. Workers also form self-help
organizations, newspapers, music groups, theater; in a
word, a working class culture forms alongside and in
conjunction with unions and political parties.

It is difficult to think of a part of capitalist society
that has not been transformed by the activities of the
working class and its allies. It is not just that labor
unions and labor-based political organizations have
improved the material lives of workers, though they
certainly have done that: Higher wages, benefits of all
sorts, an end to arbitrary boss rule of workplaces,
protections against the insecurities of layoffs,
injuries, sickness, and old age, the right to vote,
freedom of speech and assembly, safer workplaces, the
opening up of the schools to the masses of people, the
overall enhancement of democracy, and much more. But it
is also that the working class has forced itself upon
bourgeois society and changed all of its culture: from
literature (think of how common it is to believe that
the class surroundings of a writer matter in terms of
what is written or of how the working class becomes a
subject of literature) to art (think of the murals of
Diego Rivera), to films (Eisenstein and many others),
even to music (folk music of course but sometimes
classical music too). What is more, there have been
times when the working class, often in alliance with and
sometimes in subordination to peasants, has overthrown
capitalism and attempted to establish a noncapitalist,
socialist mode of production. Examples include the USSR,
China, and Cuba.

But despite its many achievements, the working class has
not made much of a dent in capitalism’s hegemony. In
fact, the Soviet Union, once the beacon of hope for
working people around the world and even toward its end
a counterbalance to the rule of capital, was
ignominiously torn apart more than a decade ago, and
since then the people in the former soviet republics
have suffered the kind of degradation normally
associated with the ’primitive accumulation of capital.’
And China, which once fired the radical imagination, is
rushing headlong toward capitalism and has seen what
must surely be one of the most massive regressive shifts
in the distribution of income in world history, complete
with an enormous reserve army of labor, starvation
wages, and sweatshop labor. Only tiny Cuba holds onto
the socialist vision, the two-tiered economy created by
tourism notwithstanding.

In the rich capitalist countries, capital unleashed a
vicious attack on the working class in the early 1970s
and over the next three decades dealt workers a
seemingly unending string of defeats. There is no use to
spell these out; I am sure that you are well aware of
them. In the poor capitalist countries, economists speak
of lost decades. Everywhere neoliberalism had descended,
and everywhere it is still the order of the day. Despite
the onslaught of capital, workers are, for the most
part, far from taking to the barricades and trying to
put an end to this oppressive system. It is no wonder
that many people who concern themselves with such
matters have concluded that the world’s workers cannot
and even if they could, will not lead the struggle for a
better world.

What went wrong? Looking at the broad sweep of history,
we can perhaps identify some of the forces at work and
bad decisions taken. First, as Marx pointed out,
capitalism creates workers in its own image. It is hard
for workers to grasp the nature of their circumstances,
to see that they create capital rather than the other
way around. So even when organized, they strive for a
’fairer’ wage and better conditions rather than an end
to the wage labor system that is the ultimate source of
their circumstances. The system appears to them as
inevitable and immutable, though they might win a better
deal. Of course, this notion is reinforced by a vast
propaganda machine, including the media and the schools.

Second, the accumulation process itself creates
divisions among workers, and employers are quick to
encourage these and to utilize those which predate
capitalism. For example, capital accumulation inevitably
creates a split between skilled and unskilled workers, a
division often exacerbated by ethnic, gender, racial,
and religious differences. In the United States, the
most troublesome division has been that of race. The
legacy of slavery had never been overcome and has
poisoned the labor movement from its beginning. In
addition, until recently the labor movement has been
defined in gender terms, as a movement of men, and this
too has sharply impeded the ability of the movement to
both organize and unite the working class.

Capital accumulation also creates a reserve army of
labor, and this mass of unemployed labor threatens those
who are working. The circumstances of the unemployed
make it hard for them to organize, and when they do they
cannot be assured of support from the employed or even
from the unions of the employed. The labor federations
in Argentina were not in the forefront of support of the
movement of Argentina’s unemployed.

Once workers are at all successful in winning some of
their demands, they inevitably develop a stake in the
status quo. This may be true both of the relationship
with employers and with the state. Successful
negotiations with a particular employer can lead to a
union embrace of labor-management cooperation,
especially if this employer faces difficulties in the
marketplace. This can lead to a situation in which the
union members identify more with the employer than with
workers at other facilities, even when these other
workers are in the same union. This problem is
exacerbated when the state uses its considerable power
to coopt union leadership. When there was an opportunity
for the new industrial unions of the United States to
develop an independent politics in the1930s, the
Roosevelt administration was able to coopt certain CIO
leaders, such as Sidney Hillman and Phillip Murray, and
use them as a wedge against the more independent John L.
Lewis. Even the Communists fell into this trap, the end
result of which was the close and deadly alliance
between organized labor and the increasingly anti-labor
Democratic Party. In Europe, the threat of the Soviet
Union and the strength of left-led labor organizations
added urgency to the cooptation strategy. A full-fledged
partnership among employers, unions, and the state was
established, and while this ’labor accord’ proved
beneficial to workers in that it led to the formation of
the welfare state, it has proved labor’s undoing in
recent years when employers have abandoned the accord
but unions have no alternative to it.

While seeking the protection of the state or even making
alliances with employers can sometimes be useful tactics
for labor, they cannot be labor’s strategy. In the
United States, the consequences of the ’labor accord’
have proved particularly disastrous. The most basic
condition for the embrace of the accord by some
employers and the state was the abandonment of labor’s
left-wing. The left-led unions were purged from the CIO,
the very unions that not only embraced the struggle for
civil rights and, to a lesser extent gender equality,
and the unions that upheld the tradition of
international working class solidarity, but also the
unions that won the best contracts and were often the
most democratic. As a consequence of the CIO’s embrace
of a virulent anti-communism (joining the already
rabidly anti-communist AFL), labor was left bereft of
its best people and without any kind of working class
ideology to guide working people as they tried to make
sense of the world. Labor abandoned the growing civil
rights movement and came to be dominated by white male
bureaucrats, sometimes still dedicated to the members
but often enough union careerists intent mainly on
holding office and sometimes corrupt semi- mobsters. The
president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, actually bragged
that he had never walked a picket line. Some of his
minions worked for the CIA and helped overthrow
democratic governments around the world. The post-World
War Two economic boom and the initial unique power of
the U.S. economy allowed the labor movement to claim a
share of the booty for union members, but when the long
expansion ended in the mid-1970s and employers went on
the attack, labor’s weaknesses were glaring and near-
complete capitulation followed.

The power of the market mechanism along with the deal
labor made with capital made what went on inside the
workplace off-limits for organized labor. While some
workers won high wages and good benefits, their
employers were given free reign to strengthen managerial
control of the labor process. Continued use of the
detailed division of labor, mechanization, and
Taylorism, along with the many techniques developed
first by Japanese auto companies and given the apt name
of ’management by stress’ have allowed employers not
only to rely less on union labor (by reducing the need
for workers by mechanization, outsourcing, exporting
jobs, etc.) but to make many modern workplaces into what
Ben Hamper, in his book Rivethead, called modern gulags.
With unions relinquishing the right to contest the
nature of work, is it any wonder that so many workers
buy into the various managerial schemes which claim to
empower them?

Third, I think that the joint forces of nationalism and
imperialism have seriously derailed the labor movements
of the rich capitalist countries. As I said in an
article I wrote in 2001:

Two important problems confront the unity of the world’s
workers. First, capitalism has always developed in the
context of a nation, with an active and complicit state.
Second, capitalism has, from its beginning, developed
unevenly in different parts of the world. The original
capitalist nations of Europe and later those special
cases of the United States and Japan subjugated the rest
of the world through their military and economic might,
creating an imperialistic system of rich and poor
capitalist nations. These twin developments, nationalism
and imperialism, have erected very substantial barriers
against the unity of the workers of the world.

If capital is bound geographically within a nation, it
is certainly possible that organized workers will be
able through their own actions to compel their employers
to pay them more money and benefits, reduce their hours,
and better their working conditions. They will not need
solidarity from workers in other nations to achieve
these things. They may also be able to contest for state
power on their own, so to speak. English craftsmen could
and did organize effectively within England, and they
did not require the help of French or German workers.
The same is true for workers in the United States.
Automobile workers organized the great sit down strikes
which brought General Motors to heel, and while they
needed their wives, other workers, and some sympathy
from the governor and the courts, they did not need an
alliance with Mexican or Canadian workers to establish
their union and win their first collective bargaining
agreements.

Not needing the support of workers in other nations does
not, of course, mean that such support might not be
useful or that it should not be requested. Perhaps the
position of English craftsmen and U.S. automobile
workers would have been even stronger, if not in the
short run certainly in the long run, had they aligned
themselves with the workers of other nations. So, why
hasn’t international solidarity been labor’s rallying
cry from the beginning? Two reasons can be offered.
First, nationalism as an ideology of exclusiveness
quickly became very powerful. The establishment of
official languages, the institution of a universal
propaganda mechanism in the public schools, and the
drafting of working people into national armies all had
the effect of encouraging workers to be loyal to the
nation. The converse of this loyalty has been distrust
or even hatred of those who are ’foreign.’ My father was
a union factory laborer for 44 years, but his life
experiences were not conducive to international
solidarity. The Second World War especially shaped him
as an almost fanatical supporter of the U.S. government
(and defacto supporter of U.S. capital in most respects)
and as an outright xenophobe when it came to the
Japanese or the Soviets or the Chinese.

Second, nationalism in the advanced capitalist nations
was intimately connected to imperialism. The vicious
exploitation of workers and peasants in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America went hand-in-hand with the promotion
of a racist ideology that taught that these peoples
either deserved what they were getting or were lucky to
be associated with the rich nations. Furthermore, the
surplus value pumped out of the peripheral nations gave
the large multinational corporations money which, under
enough trade union pressure, they could be convinced to
share with workers. This went along with successful
efforts by the corporations and the government to coopt
labor leaders, through the formation of various kinds of
labor-management organizations, assignment to public
boards and commissions and the like. The goal here was
to convince labor’s leaders as well as union members
that imperialism was good for workers in the core
capitalist nations. All of these efforts were, for the
most part, successful. Labor organizations in all of the
advanced capitalist countries have not only supported
their own multinationals in the brutal exploitation of
the economies and workers of the poor nations, they have
even supported wars in which the workers of one rich
nation fought against those of another. (Monthly Review,
July/August 2000).

Of course, we no longer live in a world in which capital
is bound inside a nation. Far from it. But the
nationalism and the racism deriving from an earlier
period linger on and make it difficult to do the things
which must be done to forge an international labor
movement. Even today, some years after the AFL-CIO
notorious International Affairs Department was
abolished, the AFL-CIO’s website has precious little
news about workers in the rest of the world. When
unemployed workers in Argentina were blockading highways
and discharged workers were occupying factories, the
AFL-CIO took little note. Today, the occupation of Iraq
is providing cover for the oppression of Iraq’s nascent
labor movement, but you don’t hear much about this from
organized labor. On another level, labor organizations
find it necessary to begin meetings with the national
anthem or worse yet, a flag salute. Worst of all,
working class parents countenance the enlistment of
their children into the military and, with rare
exceptions, hale them as heroes even if they get killed.

I suppose that it is fair to say that, given the array
of forces set against them, it is amazing that workers
have accomplished what they have.

Now it is time to return to our initial question: Can
labor change the world? Let me make two preliminary
points. First, I want to reiterate what I said before.
The world will not be changed permanently for the better
unless the mass of workers do the changing. Wage workers
are necessary for capitalism to reproduce itself, so it
is clear that only labor can stop this reproduction and
reorganize society mode of production and distribution.

Second, we have seen that capitalism inevitably
generates contradictions and these open up chances for
workers and their allies to challenge the power of
capital. However, capital always stands ready to learn
from these challenges and blunt their impact or even
turn them to its advantage. Capitalism is resilient and
hegemonic in its development. This makes the task of its
supersession a daunting one.

So, given this, what does the future hold? Even in the
midst of what appears to be a desperate environment for
the working class, there are many hopeful signs. I am
sure readers are aware of most of these so I won’t go
into details, but merely mention the burgeoning global
justice movement, the student-led anti-sweatshop
movement, numerous successful living wage campaigns, all
sorts of successful bridge-building by the labor
movement (these along with innovative organizing
campaigns, many led by women, minorities, and immigrants
are skillfully analyzed by Dan Clawson in his new book
The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements),
the current debate within organized labor about how to
increase union density, the anti-war movement, which now
includes U.S. Labor Against the War, and many others. I
have also discussed some of the new movements, here and
in the rest of the world, in the last chapter of my book
Naming the System.

However, no matter how you slice it, capitalism shows
little sign of imminent collapse, and even its most
virulent form, neoliberalism, shows few signs of waning
in significance. So, what kinds of things might be done
to really rejuvenate the labor movement, to at least
make it ready to lead the ’next upsurge?’ I confine
myself to the United States here, although some of my
points are probably relevant to the rest of the world.
And I suggest these things with the assumption that I am
talking about what we on the left can do. We must try to
build the left in everything we do. In my labor
education I must stress the nature of capitalism first
and foremost. In environmental work, we must argue that
capitalism is the primary source of our alienation from
the natural world. We must do what we can to make the
anti-globalization movement an anti-capitalist movement.
We must push a left perspective in our unions. We must
never cease pointing out the essential sameness of the
major political parties. We must be alert to show the
connections between capitalism and patriarchy and race
oppression. And all forms of oppression.

Specifically, here are some things to consider:

1. Organized labor (the AFL-CIO in particular) must
confront its racist and anti-left past. We must
continue to demand national meetings within organized
labor on these issues, and we must bring them up
whenever we can. We must proudly point out the
tremendous achievements of the left-led unions, not
just on nationally and internationally critical
issues such as race and peace but in terms of
collective bargaining agreements and union democracy.

2. We must promote a left ideology, a worker-friendly
way of seeing the world. We must hammer home the same
themes (right to a job, health care, right to
organize, meaningful labor, community and worker
control, a democratic state, a healthy environment,
no to war, anti- imperialism, equality in all human
relationships, etc.) over and over as the right did
with its demands from the 1960s on. Workers have to
know why they are organizing. Here we need to promote
and develop a left culture-in all of the arts.

3. We must focus on democracy and equality. All forms
of oppression must be fought together, not least of
all in our unions. And we must insist on as much
democracy as possible in all of our organizations.
This is not to say that leaders shouldn’t lead and be
out front in terms of the demands made on employers
and the state but only to say that change cannot come
solely from the top down.

4. The working class needs to educate itself, and
this means that there must be a lot more labor
education. Working people need to embrace a working
class way of looking at the world, an ideology which
will give them direction and a way to judge what is
going on in the world. What if the AFL-CIO and its
affiliated unions spent some of the millions they now
spend supporting Democratic Party politicians, with
precious little in return, on labor education
(classes for every new union member, full-time
education directors, labor radio, etc.)?

5. International solidarity is a must. U.S. labor
does a better job here than it used to do, but lots
more could be done, including real support for all
progressive activities by workers abroad and, most
especially, opposition to U.S. foreign policy, which
is invariably anti-worker in both intent and impact.

6. Building the left inside and outside the labor
movement means building political independence. And
this means keeping class foremost in mind (broadly
construed) and trying to build a labor political
presence.

7. The working class must, and soon, come to grips
with the rapid despoliation of our natural
environment. As labor productivity continues to rise,
output must grow more and more rapidly to absorb a
growing labor force. However, under capitalism, this
can only mean more poisons in the water and air, more
contaminated food, and more workplace sickness and
injuries. What will be needed is more labor-
intensive, smaller-scale, more localized, and energy-
conserving production. Such a production regime could
be combined with demands for universal health
insurance, meaningful job training, generous leave
programs, universal education, and reduced working
hours- all things the working class should champion,
with its leaders showing the way.

Let me conclude by saying that this is not the time to
abandon the working class. Capital is conquering the
world, making the earth a gigantic cesspool of
exploitation. What is more, this is happening pretty
much as Marx said it would. His analysis is as relevant
today as it ever was. And his singling out of the
working class as the only viable agent of capital’s
demise is as correct now as it was when he wrote
Capital. Workers are the necessary element of the
system, and they are the only force capable of forcing
this system into the dustbin of history. Those who write
it off as reactionary or too nationalistic or racist or
sexist or not attuned to the environment cannot offer us
an agent to replace it. Of course, if we look to our
history, we do see that workers have been all of the
things those who dismiss it revolutionary potential. But
we also see that workers have done the most remarkable
things too, and have shown the world what collective
solidarity and the action based upon it can do. We must
remember that the class struggle is a long hard slog.
But one well-worth making and the only one capable of
leading us toward a society that can even begin to
realize the radical dream: From each according to
ability, to each according to need.

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Harry Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, Robert W.
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