A SOLIDARITY WORKING PAPER

$1

the
rank and file
strategy By Kim Moody

Building a Socialist Movement in the U.S.

SOLIDARITY • [Link] • info@[Link]
Labor Donated
A Solidarity Publication

Originally published in 2000.

Kim Moody is a long-time socialist activist, journalist, educator and a founding

member of Solidarity. Kim Moody co-founded Labor Notes ([Link])
in 1979 and until recently taught politics at Brooklyn College and labor studies at
Cornell University. He is the author of An Injury to All and Workers in a Lean World,
and most recently, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from
Above, the Promise of Revival from Below. He is currently a research fellow at the
University of Hertfordshire, lives in London and is a member of the National Union
of Journalists.

SOLIDARITY is a revolutionary socialist, feminist and anti-racist organization with

branches and members throughout the United States.
If you want to know more about Solidarity and our work in the labor movement,
please email info@[Link] or call 313-841-0160. You can also visit our
website at [Link].
Against the Current is an analytic journal for the broad revolutionary left,
sponsored by Solidarity. If you’d like to subscribe to Against the Current, you
can fill out the form on the back of this pamphlet. To browse articles online, go to
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Labor Donated
The rank and file strategy
By Kim Moody
Introduction..............................................................................................2

The Setting: Why the Unions?...................................................................3

The Deep Roots of Working Class Self-Activity........................................5

The Roots of “Common Sense”..................................................................7

Accumulation, Class Formation and Consciousness in the U.S.................9

The Rise of Bureaucracy and Business Unionism..................................10

Business Unionism’s Defeat of the Socialists.........................................14

The First Experiment in Rank and File Strategy......................................15

The Lesson of Transitional Politics..........................................................17

Permeation & The Highjacking of the CIO...............................................18

Modern Business Unionism & The Problem of Consciousness................22

Fragmented Rank and File Rebellion.......................................................24

The Rank & File Perspective: A Contemporary Synthesis.......................25

The Roots of a New Revolt......................................................................25

Internal Union Dynamics.........................................................................28

The Tasks of Socialists in Today’s Resistance and Rebellion...................30

Notes........................................................................................................32
2

Introduction: The Problem There is no more “American exception,” no more

“American Dream.” There is no more upward mobility
America, it has been said, is the exception. It is the for the vast majority. A highly internationalized
only developed industrial nation where no mass capitalism is dragging most of us down, here and
socialist movement took root in the working class in abroad. The crisis of capitalist “globalization” was
the twentieth century. To be sure there have been never more evident. And all across the world, we
times of mass upheaval and even the growth of sizable see growing resistance to the power of capital and
left organizations with a significant working class its neoliberal political allies. Even in the U.S., there
membership. In the years before World War One and are signs of revitalization and renewed militancy in
in the 1930s, Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist, and organized labor. This is not just a matter of more strikes
anarcho-syndicalist organizations had some impact on like those at UPS (1997), General Motors (1994-98)
the development of organized labor and even on U.S. and US West (1998), although, as we shall see, they
politics. But, then, unlike their European counterparts, represent something very important. We also see more
they would shrink to be marginalized as political relics and more attempts by rank and file union members to
or sects. make their unions more democratic and more effective
in fighting today’s highly aggressive employers and in
Some scholars saw the problem as one of “American organizing the unorganized. At the same time we see
exceptionalism.” The United States, it was argued, had the beginnings of class independence in the political
too much upward mobility, too much available farm sphere, with the formation of the Labor Party by several
land, too regular a turnover as old ethnic groups worked national and scores of local unions in 1996.
their way up into the “Great American Middle Class.”
While these theories always had limited powers of Yet at no time since the 1950s has the isolation of
explanation, much of the period of economic expansion socialists from the working class been greater.
that followed World War Two lent them credibility. Not Socialist organizations in the U.S., including Solidarity,
only did the so-called middle class grow and prosper, remain small and largely populated by people with an
but even much of the traditional industrial working educated middle class background. Many socialist
class achieved a living standard never before achieved groups’ connection with the working class is limited to
by blue collar or even most white collar workers support work for various strikes. The gap between the
anywhere in the world. African Americans, Latinos, and socialist organizations and the active sections of the
other people of color were largely excluded from this working class who are the organizers of much of the
upward march to prosperity, which is one reason why resistance to the employers and rebellions within the
the enormous movements of Black and Latino peoples unions is too great. The gap has many facets: some
exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. For the majority of arise from different class origins, others from the habit
white working class people and those people of color of defeat on the left and the proclivity for symbolic
lucky or forceful enough to break into the unionized actions and campaigns that flows from it. Most of
blue collar workforce in those years, the “American the gap, however, is one of consciousness. The left
Dream” seemed within reach. with its highly theorized, often moralistic politics, and
the worker activists with an un-theorized pragmatic
Today, the upward mobility theories look as outmoded outlook are often like trains passing in the night. This
and irrelevant as a “Dick and Jane” first grade reader can be true even where left groups or individuals work
with its all-white, tranquil world. Only the top twenty within the unions.
percent of U.S. families have seen anything like upward
mobility in terms of income. For the vast majority, The Rank and File Strategy attempts to bridge that
today’s forced march is down hill all the way. For African gap. We call this the Rank & File Strategy because it is
Americans, Latinos, and single women it is more like a based on the very real growth of rank and file activity
free fall. The proportion of poor people is on the rise. and rebellion that occurs in periods of intensified class
The gap between the rich and the rest has grown to struggle. The theory behind the strategy tells us that
obscene and highly visible levels. Even the wages of the conflict inherent in capitalist social relations of
unionized workers in the big corporations are lower in production becomes more intense under conditions
real terms than they were in the 1970s. of increased competition and crisis. The experience
of this conflict, the reality of intensified exploitation,
 3

contradicts older imbedded conservative ideas. The usually in specific racial or ethnic communities are also
old ideas are not so much a clear pro-capitalist ideology transitional worker organizations. Some examples of
as a mixture of contradictory ideas and sentiments held these are The Latino Workers Center in New York, the
by most people in our society. Within the working class Black Workers For Justice in North Carolina, and the
rudimentary democratic and collectivist ideas coexist Xicano Development Center in Detroit. At a slightly
with and sometimes combat both socially conservative higher level are organizations that cut across union,
ideas (from racism to cynicism and feelings of industry, racial, and gender lines and give a class-
powerlessness) and a general acceptance of things as wide perspective to the daily workplace and union
they are. experience. This includes organizations and projects
like Jobs with Justice, Labor Notes, local cross-union
The task of socialists in this situation is not simply to support committees, or more political organizations
offer an alternative ideology, a total explanation of such as local living wage campaigns or the new Labor
the world, but to draw out the class consciousness Party.
that makes such bigger ideas realistic. The notion of
a transitional set of ideas is key to this strategy. The This pamphlet will explain why such organizations and
socialist analysis of capitalism and what capitalism rank and file rebellion in general are the result of real
is doing to workers today relates directly to the daily social forces. It is this social reality that makes rank and
experiences of more and more working class people. file rebellion key to a successful strategy for building a
But the fact that the vast majority of working people lack revolutionary socialist workers movement in the U.S.
even a consistently class-conscious way of looking at
the world makes it difficult for socialism to get a hearing. This strategy starts with the experience, struggles, and
The gaping lack in the U.S. at this time is the lack of a consciousness of workers as they are today, but offers
sea of class-conscious workers for socialist ideas and a bridge to a deeper class consciousness and socialist
organizations to swim in. How do we help create that politics.
sea (with all due respect to Mother Nature)? Socialists Most of all, it is a strategy for ending the isolation of
can build transitional organizations and struggles socialists and socialist organizations from the day-to-
that help to raise the class-consciousness of activist day struggles and experiences of the organized sections
workers, in order to enlarge the layer of workers in the of the working class. It is not a panacea, a quick fix, nor
class who are open to socialist ideas. The existence of guaranteed of success. . The strategy does not assume
a strong current of active, class-conscious workers is that socialist consciousness flows automatically from
a precondition for the development of a strong current “economic” struggles. If it did, no strategy would be
of socialist workers—and a socialist party. We need necessary. Those looking for a way out of the dilemma
to be, at the same time, bringing our socialist ideas of socialism’s isolation from its natural base are urged
directly to workers who are already ready to hear them, to join the discussion this pamphlet aims to provoke.
and also helping to create the struggles that produce
more such workers. The Setting: Why the Unions?
Such struggles and such organizations are expressions
of worker self-activity and self-interest. But capitalism The Rank and File Strategy for socialism in the United
attempts to demobilize and disempower workers; States focuses on the unions and the workplace.
our experience is that it often takes people trained in This is not because these are the only places where
organization, with a commitment and perspective of consciousness is formed or struggles conducted.
worker organization—that is, socialists—to take the We are well aware of the many community-based
lead in pulling ongoing organization together. campaigns, organizations, and struggles by working
class people. Indeed, some of these play a role in the
Transitional organizations include rank and file reform Rank and File Strategy. We also understand that one’s
movements and caucuses rooted in the workplace identity or consciousness in this society is shaped
and the unions. The best known example is Teamsters by many forces in many different settings. Class
for a Democratic Union, but there are many others. consciousness never exists alone; it is accompanied by
Community based worker organizations, sometimes the consciousness of other oppressions, such as that
called workers centers, that organize on a class basis of race or gender, or their mirror images in the relative
4

advantages of “whiteness.” account for 40% of union membership, just under the
45% of the workforce they compose. In 1987, two-thirds
Indeed, part of the transitional approach involves of all union members were white males. Today they are
projecting a labor movement that is more than the unions. just half, albeit due largely to the decline of once male
We see the working class movement as composed of a dominated industries. As America and its workforce
variety of organizations, each with a distinct role to play changes, so do the unions.
in creating the sort of diverse, class-based movement
that points toward a new society. Socialism, of course, An even more basic reason is that unions bring people
will not be based primarily on union organization, but together at the heart of the social relations of production.
on a range of democratic organizations and structures This is where both class formation and class conflict
that bring all the exploited and oppressed to power. begin. Except on those rare occasions when the class
The movement we build today will in some degree struggle breaks into open political warfare, it is at the
prefigure the goals of the future. The unions take a workplace that the tug of war between labor and capital
central role in our conception of a broad working class is sharpest and most recurring. It is at the workplace
movement by virtue of their size and their place at the that the conservative ideas and assumptions that blunt
heart of capitalist accumulation, a position that gives class consciousness are most consistently confronted.
them great potential power, but our vision of a labor
movement is far broader. This confrontation is typically social in nature. Not
only in the sense of labor versus capital, but of working
We want to make it clear that we do not proceed from people functioning together. In this context people from
some faceless, raceless, neutered idea of the working different races and backgrounds are most likely to join
class. We endorse the thoughts of the Caribbean forces to combat the employer. The education received
revolutionary Aimé Césaire who rejected the crude in class conflict on the job or originating in work is a
Stalinist version of class “universality” held by the social one. Some, of course, will learn faster, while
French Communist Party when he resigned in 1955. some will not care or participate actively except in rare
In his resignation letter he wrote, “I have a different moments of struggle. But here is where the activist
idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is layer of the unions takes shape.
particular, rich with all the particularities there are, the
deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them Finally, the unions provide a political/organizational
all.” Nowhere does diversity shape the particularities setting in which on-going education, organization, and
of the working class more than in the U.S. Nowhere is struggle can be conducted. While most union work is
this diversity more central to the divisions, diversions, done at the local level, the union also provides a national
and strengths experienced by working class people in or international context that cuts across workplace
different ways. No where do working class people see lines and these days, with most unions recruiting in
themselves and one another in such different, usually many industries, even across industry lines. Unions
distorted, ways. The prism of race, in particular, is highly also provide the most concentrated working class
distorting of class perceptions, even though in different organization for intervention in community affairs. The
ways for different groups—although it is also a source living wage campaigns of recent years are a good
of class strength for many people of color. Indeed, the example of union organized or backed political action.
problems and potential of diversity is a theme we will The cross union activist organization Jobs with Justice
return to again and again as we address questions of is another. Union backing has made the Labor Party,
consciousness and organization. founded in 1996, a viable project with the potential of
creating a genuine class politics in the U.S. for the first
One reason for focusing on the unions is that with some time in decades.
notable exceptions they are the most socially integrated
organizations in American life. African Americans Unions, of course, are far from perfect political
compose 15% of union members compared to 11% of the organizations. They are bureaucratic. They often
employed workforce. Latinos make up 9%, slightly less embody or protect racist and/or sexist practices. Their
than their share of the workforce. They are, however, official ideology, which we will call business unionism,
the fastest growing ethnic group in the unions. Women, is a mass of contradictions, including the idea of labor-
who were only 25% of union members in the 1970s, now management partnerships. Their leaders generally do
 5

their best to straddle class conflict. Yet it is precisely simply, capital does not get these increases without
some of these contradictions that makes the Rank putting enormous pressure on the workers.
and File Strategy realistic. Today those contradictions
within unions are interacting with the pressures that More and more workers, facing the pressure for more
come from employers’ efforts to remake the workplace production and all the rhetoric about competition these
and with the intensified competition of world capitalism. days, understand that it is they who create this profit.
It is that interaction—between employers’ pressure on One UAW member expressed this in an ironic way
workers and union leaders’ inaction or collaboration— when he wrote to his union newspaper, “Believe me,
that creates rank and file rebellion—and potential for we know how hard it is to make a profit—we spend 50
the Rank and File Strategy. to 60 hours a week at the company working to make a
profit for our employers.”[1]
The Deep Roots of Working Class Self-Activity The struggle over what workers produce does not
take place only at the workplace. The government
The roots of worker self-activity and self-organization backs capital with policies that redistribute the
in opposition to the employer lie, in the first place, in the surplus between classes, limit the social safety net,
reality of exploitation; i.e., the wage relationship—the impose greater market discipline on workers though
very heart of capitalist accumulation, expansion, and deregulation and “free” trade agreements, and limit
growth. union action. Broad political struggles around these
Put simply this means that workers produce more value and other social issues play an important role in the
or wealth than they make in the wages and benefits development of class consciousness. At critical
that make up their standard of living. So, for example, moments, they can make the difference between
in 1995 manufacturing companies made $5.39 of value mass mobilization and fragmented struggles—even
added an hour for each $1.00 in hourly wages they paid revolution or defeat.
production workers. Communities, too, are an important site of struggle.
This ratio is not constant. While we hear much from the National, racial, or ethnic identities and neighborhoods
capitalists’ about their competition for market share, often provide a place to mobilize against oppression.
the fact is that growth in profitability (the rate of profit The workers centers mentioned above provide one
or return on investment) actually comes from increases form of resistance, consciousness, and organization for
in this ratio. So for each dollar capital paid to workers working class people of color and women—particularly
in the U.S., capital skimmed $2.47 in 1947, $3.23 in 1967, those not working for wages or outside the unions. Like
$3.73 in 1977, $4.64 in 1987, and $5.39 in 1995. This rip- the workplace, these are essential pieces of the class
off ratio grows in spite of the fact that hourly wages puzzle.
also rise. The reason the ratio rises is that productivity But it is in the workplace, in the basic social relations
increases. of production, that the fight over the extra product of
While this neutral sounding economic category seems productivity occurs most sharply on a regular basis,
harmless, it is not. Over time the workers’ increased and where even perceptions of bigger events can be
productivity reduces the amount of time they spend shaped in a class perspective. The workplace is also,
producing their own wages and benefits and expands of course, where workers have the most power to act
that devoted to producing the surplus from which profits on their class consciousness, whatever its source may
are taken. This might be the result of new technology be.
which eliminates workers’ jobs or of increased effort by Karl Marx analyzed these relationships and saw them as
the workers or, typically, a combination of both. the basis of worker self-activity in resistance to all the
New technology is hardly ever introduced without employer attempts to increase the rate of exploitation.
attempts to increase worker effort as well. The Trade unions and other working class organizations
introduction of lean production methods in the last arose in the 19th century around this most basic
twenty years has emphasized increased effort along struggle between labor and capital over the surplus.
with downsizing and work reorganization . To put it Trade unions are a natural outcome of capitalism.
These organizations expand beyond the workplace into
6

labor federations and workers’ political parties, but it in raising class consciousness, remained basic to their
is the experience of exploitation and its intensification view of society.
that lies behind the great labor upheavals of the last
century and a half. The notion that unions could raise consciousness and
train workers in various political skills rested, of course,
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the first leading on the assumption that the members and not only the
socialists to see in the trade unions the potential for officials actually played an active role in the conduct
a growing class consciousness and organizational of unionism—that they are democratic organizations.
experience that would make socialist ideas common Most of today’s unions appear to fall far short of that
currency across the working class. They didn’t think assumption. They are hierarchical and bureaucratic.
unions were revolutionary organizations themselves. At the national level they are typically dominated by full-
They understood well, long before most economists, that time officials, appointed reps, and staffers. The members
their basic purpose was, as modern labor economists tend to be excluded from the union’s administration and
put it, to “take labor out of competition” in the fight to decision-making. So long has this been the norm that
prevent falling wages. Engels noted this early on in his most members judge the effectiveness of their union by
1845 Conditions of the Working Class in England, when how well it “services” them, rather than by how well
he wrote: they themselves are using it to pursue their goals.
The active resistance of the English workingmen has It should be said that some national unions are more
its effect in holding the money-greed of the bourgeoisie democratic than others and that the vast majority of
within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition the 50,000 or so local unions in the U.S. are relatively
of the workers to the social and political omnipotence democratic organizations—certainly in contrast to the
of the bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that corporations that employ their members, to the dollar-
something more is needed than trade unions to break drenched national and local elections that claim the
the power of the ruling class. But what gives these name of democracy in this country, or, indeed, to most
unions and the strikes arising from them their real voluntary organizations. But these local unions typically
importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the function in the context of a national or International
workers to abolish competition.[2] union culture that is top-down by design, politically
dead by habit, and narrowly focused on contract
This reminds us of just how closely linked were the administration by labor “professionals.”
origins of trade unions and the socialist movements
of the time in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. The evolution and consequences of this sorry situation
For the abolition of competition is certainly a classic are central to the Rank and File Strategy. For this
socialist goal. The difference, of course, is that unions bureaucratic reality gives the political conflict within
only reduce competition among workers, not among unions a certain “sociological” character. Ranks versus
capitals, and leave industry in the hands of capital. Tops to put it crudely. While the social aspect is real,
it can also be deceptive. Just as not every leadership
Additionally, however, Marx and Engels saw the contest in a union has much in the way of political
unions that arose in the 19th century as “schools” in content, so not every shop floor gripe or expression of
which workers learned the realities of the system first distrust or hatred of the union leadership is an incipient
hand, but also developed the organizational, tactical, rank and file rebellion. But where opposition to the old
and political skills needed to take the struggle further regime arises in the grassroots of the union, drawing
to the political and revolutionary levels. Marx and into action at least much of the active membership,
Engels’ assessment of just how well trade unions and resting on the support of the majority, there is
performed these tasks waxed and waned with the level almost always an authentic political difference over the
of struggle, the rising conservatism of the craft unions, direction, culture, and politics of the union and the way
and, in Engels’ lifetime, the explosion of the “New it fights (or cooperates with) the employers.
Unionism” that brought tens of thousands of unskilled
workers into more struggle-oriented unions. But the It is here, whether it is a strike movement, prolonged
notion that unions had a role in capitalism beyond their workplace campaign, or union reform caucus that
obvious economic collective bargaining function, a role the “school” Marx and Engels saw in the early unions
 7

in England comes back to life. It is here that the union consciousness was bourgeois conscious he
institutional attempt to suppress competition among argued later. Revolutionary socialist consciousness had
the workers through contract administration turns to come from outside, from professional revolutionaries
into living solidarity. It is here that the opportunity for trained in socialist theory. Three years later in 1905 a
consciousness to deepen and grow presents itself trade union struggle grew into a mass strike movement
again and again. It is also here that socialists have the and a revolutionary confrontation with Czarism. Lenin
chance to reconnect with socialism’s natural base— revised his view allowing for the “spontaneous”
the active working class. development of socialist consciousness. Yet, he knew
that sections of the working class everywhere remained
The Roots of “Common Sense” mired in reformism.

The question of bureaucracy in workers’ organizations is Lenin was one of the first Marxists to explicitly draw
linked to consciousness as well as to material, historical, the link between reformist consciousness and the
and cultural conditions. Indeed, it is impossible to pick economic impact of capital’s expansionary imperative.
these elements apart completely. We will begin with In Imperialism, written in 1917, he saw the problem of
the question of consciousness and then proceed to the backward and uneven consciousness as a function
conditions that produced the uneven consciousness of of the development of a privileged layer of the class.
the American working class and the phenomenon of Although he didn’t use the term, it has generally
bureaucratic business unionism that is unique to the become known as the “labor aristocracy” explanation.
United States and, to a lesser degree, Canada. (The term was first used by Engels.) Lenin attributed the
growth of imperial expansion to the economic surplus
Here we stress that while we think consciousness generated by monopoly profits. This same surplus,
is crucial in building a workers and revolutionary Lenin argued, allowed capital to buy off a privileged
movement, we are not saying that great upheaval and section of the working class, which became the base
even revolutions require or are likely to depend on a for reformism. The economic analysis, borrowed from
thorough-going, complete revolutionary consciousness a British liberal economist as well as from the Austrian
across the class. People act on their understanding Marxist Rudolph Hilferding, that imperialism is the
of the moment, but the logic of struggle can carry result of a “monopoly” surplus doesn’t accord with the
them farther than that consciousness. Furthermore, facts of the time. A far more plausible explanation for
consciousness is always uneven within the class, or the expansion of overseas investment and the rush for
any of its sections, even when everyone is moving in the colonies, above all in Africa, that began in the late 19th
same direction. That in fact, is why understanding the century was the falling rate of profit that was at the
relationship of action to consciousness is so important. roots of the world-wide crisis of the 1870s.
In many situations, including revolutionary ones, action
may well precede total consciousness. The proposition Lenin’s view can’t explain, either, the enormous
that social movements or revolutions are only made by employer resistance to craft unions of skilled workers
people with a total understanding of social reality or in most countries throughout the entire period he writes
some compete “political correctness” is not validated of and after. This was the era of Taylorism (deskilling),
by the history of any of the great revolutionary upheavals Homestead, and the “Open Shop” drive in the U.S.
of the last two centuries or more. and of skill “dilution” everywhere. Such a vicious
employer offensive directed at skilled workers is
While there are many different Marxist approaches better understood in the context of the repeated crises
to the question of class consciousness, we will look and profitability problems of the era and contradicts
critically at two of the more popular explanations the picture of the corrupting hand of capital passing
among socialists, those of Lenin and Gramsci. out raises to craftsmen. Additionally, the “labor
aristocracy” approach can’t explain why these same
Lenin’s most famous statement about the limits of trade skilled workers can become revolutionary in outlook as
union consciousness was in What is to Be Done? they did in many countries during and following the First
where he wrote, “the history of all countries shows that World War. Finally, it doesn’t explain why the mass of
the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able unskilled industrial workers can and did become just
to develop only trade union consciousness...”[3] Trade as conservative in outlook in the years following the
8

Second World War. world that most people carry around. “Common sense”
is not some consistent capitalist ideology. It was, as
The problems of differing skill levels and the pay he noted, “fragmentary, incoherent.”[4] It is usually a
differentials inevitably attached to them are inherent clashing collection of old ideas handed down, others
in a capitalist labor market. They can and typically do learned through daily experience, and still others
produce a narrow “job trust” consciousness among generated by the capitalist media, education system,
skilled craftsmen. At the same, however, capitalism religion, etc. It is not simply the popular idea of a nation
is always attempting to dilute or eliminate these same tranquilized by TV and weekends in the mall. “Common
skills and replace them with cheaper labor attached to sense” is both deeper and more contradictory
technologies that incorporates yesterday’s skills. The because it also embodies experiences that go against
attempt to dilute, eliminate, and degrade skills can the grain of capitalist ideology. It is, nevertheless,
produce a radical consciousness, as it did even under capitalist “common sense” in that it tends to embody
Lenin’s nose. The process of degrading skills is very an acceptance of the capitalist system as the natural
much at work today. background of life. Gramsci counterposed to common
This is not to say that Lenin wasn’t right about the sense “philosophy,” meaning Marxism or socialist
connection between capitalism’s colonial expansion, consciousness. While Gramsci’s prison writings were
material conditions, and conservative or reformist necessarily highly abstract and aesopian, his answer
consciousness. Imperialism, conquest, and continental to the transition from “common sense” to “philosophy”
expansion are certainly major factors underlying or “understanding” appears to lie in the “feelings” or
the fact that socialist ideas have never won over the “passions” of the masses. Here we will interpret this
majority of American workers. Lenin’s contribution to mean the drive to resistance that comes from the
remains critical because of the confusion of so many experience of exploitation.
socialists over questions of national liberation than and Working class life, after all, also embodies experiences
now. The wealth extracted over the decades by these that contradict many of the old ideas and assumptions.
activities as well as by slavery has played a big role As we have argued, these contradictions tend to be
in the accumulation of capital in the United States. In sharper and more frequent at the point of production, but
the period following World War Two, this allowed U.S. they can and do break out in other realms of life as well.
capital to make extensive concessions to a majority of The experience of exploitation and the intensification
the working class. It is not monopoly, but the reality and reorganization of work and/or falling real incomes
of capitalist competition, however, that drives this that inevitably accompanies it push workers into
process, as well as the fight over the ill-gotten gains of collective conflict with their employers. People will put
imperial expansion. We will discuss the ways in which up with a lot when they feel they have to, but sooner or
this worked and its impact on worker organization and later some people begin to fight back, then more join
consciousness shortly, but first we want to look more in. The experience of collective struggle against the
closely at consciousness itself. boss challenges much of the old “common sense” even
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci also attempted to more directly as people begin to think through the real
analyze the problems of working class consciousness power relationships they are confronting and start to
and reformism in particular. His emphasis was on feel their power as a group.
the ability of the ruling capitalist class to maintain its Class consciousness is a slippery item to investigate.
rule through ideological means. Gramsci called this Gains in consciousness can be gradual or rapid, partial
“hegemony.” Many neo-Gramscians and “hegemony” or more or less total depending on the magnitude of
theorists have turned this into an absolute, undialectical the experience that shakes up the old ideas and the
domination of working class consciousness by alternative ideas available. But consciousness can slip
bourgeois ideology. Here we want to employ a more back into old habits as well. While we will talk about
contradictory concept of “hegemony” using Gramsci’s different levels of consciousness, we do not mean to
idea of “common sense.” imply some stage theory of consciousness. The means
By “common sense” Gramsci meant the contradictory by which thoughts and perceptions of the world change
accumulation of ideas, beliefs, and ways of viewing the within an individual are clearly complex. We won’t try
to deal with this “psychological” side of consciousness
 9

here. roots in that historical accumulation process. The

third is the American “business union” ideology that is
Marx made the distinction between the consciousness largely the result of the course of capital accumulation
of being a class “in itself” and “for itself.” The first in the U.S. and which attempts to deny the importance of
is the simple recognition that the working class is a class. The fourth, a consequence of all the preceding, is
distinct class with interests opposed to the capitalist the lack of an independent mass working class party to
class. This is something like what Lenin saw as trade perpetuate rudimentary political class consciousness
union consciousness. It involves an awareness of beyond sectional trade union awareness and business
class conflict and the need for organization, but a more union ideology.
or less unquestioned assumption that “the system”
is here to stay and all that is to be done is to make it Accumulation, Class Formation & Consciousness in
better for the workers. The consciousness of being a the U.S.
class “for itself” is the awareness that capitalism can
be replaced and that it is the task of the working class The development of capitalism in what is now the
to emancipate itself by doing just that. This is socialist United States differed from that of Western Europe
consciousness. and much of the Western hemisphere as well in two
For Marx and most twentieth century Marxist major ways. First, its ruling class had to remove and/
theoreticians in Europe, class consciousness “in itself” or eliminate (not, as in Europe, employ) the indigenous
was assumed to be a natural product of capitalism and population in order, by the late nineteenth century,
class conflict, at least among organized workers and to gain uncontested, low cost access to the land to
their communities. The great problem of the twentieth feed and clothe the new working class as cheaply
century, that which Gramsci addressed, was how as possible, to extract the natural resources which
to get from this given “in itself” consciousness to a fed and fueled industry, and to build the canals and
revolutionary consciousness of being a class “for railroads that tied it all together.[5] This is not just a
itself” with the historic task of abolishing capitalism matter of continental expansion, per se, which might
and establishing socialism. Viewed in this way, as most have been accomplished on a live and let live basis
European Marxists did, the answers tended to focus on as was somewhat more the case in Canada, but of
political organization—the tasks of the revolutionary the possession of the land and natural resources. The
party. resistance of Native Americans to the advancing white
population was as much a barrier to accumulation then
In the United States and in many other countries, this as the resistance of indigenous people in Chiapas is to
consciousness of being a class “in itself,” however, agribusiness and oil interests in Mexico today or as the
cannot be taken as given. Not that it is totally absent land rights of Canada’s First Nations are to extractive
all the time. There have been times like the 1930s when industries there.[6] As a result of eliminating these
this sort of consciousness rushes to the fore in the human barriers, burgeoning U.S. capitalism had little
minds of millions. It is, not surprisingly, in such times need of expensive imported food or raw materials. The
that a small layer of the class moves beyond to socialist uncalculated wealth this contributed to accumulation
consciousness. In more “normal” times, however, even in the nineteenth century was certainly enormous.
the “in itself” level of consciousness recedes to a small
section of the class. It is this situation that underlies The second equally unique and involuntary contribution
the isolation of socialists for the last half a century. to U.S. capital accumulation was African slave labor.
Slavery is, of course, the opposite of capitalist wage
At least four major interrelated factors more or less labor. Nevertheless, the unpaid labor of millions of
unique to the United States underlie the fragility of “in Africans provided the cash crops which supplied
itself” class consciousness within the American working industry and a good deal of the population, but also
class. The first is the ability of American capitalism to brought in foreign exchange through trade. To be sure,
continue its expansion over the past century and a half British and French capitalism got a big leg-up from
regardless (or because) of depressions, wars, or the slavery, but their slave labor force was housed in the
emergence of new competing powers. Second is the Western Hemisphere thousands of miles from their
distorting effect of racism in U.S. society and its deep white populations. In the U.S., the fact of racial slavery
10

within the same nation as the dominant white settlers much of the sociological thinking on the topic. Early
laid the basis for a domestic racial division of labor in the twentieth century, the University of Wisconsin
that has never gone away completely—even though spawned two generations of institutional theorists
as Jacqueline Jones has shown, that division of labor who continued this tradition. In the 1950s and 1960s,
changed shapes and rationales from time to time.[7] academic “maturity” theorists reasoned that unions
follow a natural pattern of development from earlier
The ideology of modern racism took root in this rebellious behavior to “mature” collective bargaining.
historically unique social phenomenon as the slave This latter stage requires bureaucracy to build stable
owners and policy-makers sought to justify the bargaining relationships.
institution and to sell that justification (racism as a
consistent ideology) to the population as a whole. It At best these “theories” are descriptive. They are
mattered little whether or not the white merchants, all apologetic and meant to make the phenomenon
farmers, and artisans of the early U.S. Republic absorbed of bureaucracy in workers’ organizations of any kind
the whole pseudo-scientific rationale of eighteenth seem inevitable—and a democratic socialism, thereby,
and nineteenth century racism. It became part of the impossible. The anti-socialist uses of the “Wisconsin
“common sense” of the white population and, hence, School” in the early part of the 20th century and Cold
of the new working class as it took form. Naturally, the War convenience of the “maturity” theorists should
conquest of the Native American nations, of Mexico, be clear enough. These theories, however, live on
and later Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands also fed past their original applications in the minds of many
into racism as part of the rationale for the “Manifest academics for whom the idea of a radical, democratic
Destiny” of the white settler nation’s ruling class. working class movement is the relic of another era.
And, of course, these ideas justify the thinking of many
In this unique situation, as David Roediger and others a high-level union leader as well. Virtually all of them
have shown, where almost all wage earners were of assume an immutable capitalism, perhaps not free of
European descent, the social construct of “whiteness” problems, but inherently stable over the long run.
spread first by the slave owners and their apologists
became part of the very definition of “free” wage labor. It is surprising that neither Marx and Engels nor the great
For decades following the Civil War and the abolition Marxist theoreticians of the early twentieth century
of slavery, this attitude went largely unchallenged as attempted anything like a systematic theorization of
the vast majority of African Americans remained tied to trade unions. To be sure, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky,
the land in the Old South where large scale cheap labor Gramsci, and others had things to say about unions and
was still needed to mass produce cash crops. While certainly observed the bureaucratic and conservative
racism was common to all classes, for the working tendencies of the labor bureaucracy of their day. As
class of the nineteenth century the very idea of class people deeply involved in revolutionary struggle, it is
identity was intertwined with that of race. Each new perhaps understandable that they were so dismissive
wave of European immigrants would learn this bit of of unions. But for Marxists in countries then and now
white American “common sense.” When competition where revolution was not “around the corner,” such a
between Black (or Asian or Latino) and white workers luxury does not exist.
did begin to emerge, racism and the old class “common
sense” provided the rationale for the exclusion of Bureaucracy and conservatism in the trade union
workers of color from many jobs and for the segregation leadership are by no means unique to the U.S. To a certain
of social institutions in much of the country. extent, bureaucracy is the product of the intermediate
position of full-time union leaders as negotiators and
The Rise of Bureaucracy and Business Unionism mediators between the members who work for capital
and the capitalists or their representatives. In times of
There are many theories that attempt to explain the rise economic growth the temptation to stabilize bargaining
of trade union bureaucracy. One-time socialist turned relationships by insulating this intermediate position
fascist admirer Robert Michels and elitist Fabians from the rising expectations of the members is great
Sidney and Beatrice Webb saw union bureaucracy indeed. If some sort of political “machine” already
as the natural outcome of organizational growth and exists among the leaders, as it usually does, the
efficiency. Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy” still informs leaders’ ability to institutionalize their independence
 11

from constant member influence is increased. If there irresistible force, would spread with a rapidity of a
is no counterposed “machine” or organization in the prairie-fire, would shake American society to the
ranks, the path to gradual bureaucratization is fairly foundations...”[8] This story has been well told by
open. If this insulated and growing machine can deliver Jeremy Brecher in Strike! and won’t be repeated here.
the goods to the members, as it did for many years in [9]
the U.S., it is likely to go unchallenged by a majority
of the members, although it seldom goes completely Despite the crisis of the 1870s, this period was
unchallenged. simultaneously very good to capital. In his 1947 work
analyzing the rise the business unionism, Sidney
What is somewhat unique to the U.S. is the extent and Lens summarized the incredible growth of American
depth of bureaucracy and the explicitly pro-capitalist capitalism from the beginning of the Civil War to the end
ideology that justifies it among other things. While of the century well when he wrote:
a general theory may explain the rise of permanent
union bureaucracy, it cannot explain the particular The growth of American capitalism was phenomenal.
development of either trade union ideology or the From 1859 to 1899, the number of capitalist establishments
dominant forms of working class “common sense” tripled; the number of wage earners quadrupled. The
that have been influenced by it. For this, we must turn value of its products went up sevenfold, and the amount
to the history of trade unionism in the formative years of capital invested in industry increased ninefold. In
of business unionism and its struggle first with the the same period in England, the value of its products
radicalism of the post Civil War era and then with the increased by only approximately 50 per cent; in France
explicitly socialist and revolutionary ideas presented by approximately 45 per cent; in Germany, 65 percent.
by the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the [10]
World after the turn of the century. To this must be added the dramatic expansion of the rail
The first two decades following the Civil War were system, which by 1900 totaled more miles than those of
hard on both the newly freed slaves of the South, the all other nations combined. To a greater extent than
remaining Native American nations, and the emerging in Europe, which was engaged in the race for colonies
working class still mostly in the North, though their abroad, this expansion took place within the nation’s, by
experiences were still separate and distinct. African now, continental boundaries. Fueled by a combination
Americans lost the fight for Radical Reconstruction of the exploitation of millions of new immigrant workers,
and land and faced the onslaught of “Jim Crow.” The the surplus of Southern Black agrarian labor, and the
“Indian Wars” of this era saw the final military defeat land and natural resources taken from Mexico, Spain,
of these nations. Early attempts by workers around and the indigenous population American capitalism,
the country to form unions generally failed. A financial though by no means every capitalist, flourished indeed.
crisis beginning in 1873 threw many workers onto the Lens, in one of the few attempts to provide a material
streets and into poverty. From the late 1870s to the basis for the rise of business unionism, sees this
mid-1880s, the growing working class turned to various expansion as a sufficient explanation. It is certainly the
forms of radicalism, including the radical and racially background that made the success of the new unions
inclusive unionism of the Knights of Labor. This period of the 1880s possible, and allows us to understand the
saw the insurrectionary strikes of railroad workers in anti-socialism that became central to business union
1877, the fight for the eight-hour day that culminated in ideology. But it would be an enormous oversight not
the May 1, 1886 general strike and Haymarket incident to integrate the impact of the pre-existing racism
that followed, the proliferation of labor and farmer-labor that informed the whole strategy of the new business
parties, and the rise of socialism within the working unionists—the strategy that gave them the upper hand
class movement. in the fight with the radicals in the late nineteenth
Looking at these developments, Engels was astounded century. As we argued earlier, this racism was part and
at the rapidity with which this new working class parcel of the process of accumulation as it unfolded
radicalism took shape in the U.S. in these years. He in what is now the United States. Business unionism,
wrote, “no one could then (1885) foresee that in such largely a product of the rapid expansion that followed
a short time the movement would burst out with such the Civil War, also incorporated the “common sense”
12

racism of the pre-War period. rather than organizing all the workers in a given trade.
Their central method was to limit and control the local
Craft unionism was not unique to the U.S. It had existed labor market. The strike was used primarily to bring
in Britain for some time and would evolve elsewhere recalcitrant employers into line. Each craft bargained
as well. But almost everywhere else it would be on its own, but a picketline by any union would usually
accompanied by some kind of class-based political be honored by all. They expressed cross-craft and
party and socialist ideology by the late nineteenth industry solidarity through central labor councils
century. The major alternative in Europe and Latin composed of delegates of most local unions whether
America was Christian, i.e., Catholic, unionism not AFL or not. These CLCs called strikes when necessary.
business unionism. Indeed, even in the U.S. many of the In the earliest days these new craft unions expressed
founders of the new craft unions of the 1880s regarded some of the same egalitarian ideals embodied in the
themselves a socialists, and socialism would contend Knights of Labor. Members initiated into early AFL
with business unionism and a small organized Catholic unions pledged, “I promise never to discriminate
presence as the ideology of these unions for some against a fellow worker on account of color, creed, or
time. The first political contest within organized labor, nationality.” There would be monumental struggles in
however, was not primarily that between socialists and which Black and white workers in AFL unions would
business unionists, but between practically minded fight side by side, most notably the New Orleans
craft unionists, both “pure and simple” and (reform- general strike of 1892. Some unions, notably the United
minded) socialist, and the labor radicalism of the 1880s. Mine Workers and Longshoremen, while by no means
The answer to why business unionism triumphed, free of racism, recruited Black workers and had African
however, lies in the intersection of American capital’s American officers and organizers. The state AFL in
incredible expansion with the way the new craft Alabama fought for the inclusion of Black workers.
unions attempted to protect their members. The period These were, however, the exceptions.
following Haymarket in 1886 was one of growth. Capital, Obviously, a restricted labor force in a growing market
however, did not see this as a reason to be generous to characterized by small, local employers feeding off
the existing unions. In fact, the employers launched a the enormous expansion of capitalism in the U.S. gave
mighty anti-union offensive that destroyed the Knights these building trades and other local craft unions a
of Labor in short order. This offensive also destroyed or shelter from the bigger offensive of the increasingly
drove underground those craft unions that had carved national corporations. It also gave them the ability to
out a place in industry. In the early 1890s, great strikes keep wages up and rising while the employer passed
that involved both craft and unskilled workers like those the cost on to cities, corporations, the wealthy, and the
at Homestead and Pullman were defeated. new middle class consumers flush with money. None
The unions that survived and grew the most in this of this is to say that these craft workers were handed
period were those based in local labor markets in the big wages voluntarily by their bosses. Strikes were
new and growing large and small industrial cities of frequently necessary. Nevertheless, the practice of
the period. Primary among these were the building collective bargaining would change significantly for
trades unions of the new American Federation of these unions over the next decade or so.
Labor and various local transport unions such as the First of all, the practice of limiting the labor supply of
Longshoremen and Teamsters. These unions dealt skilled workers rather than organizing all workers in a
with small local employers in local labor markets, not given industry rapidly took on a racial character since
with the emerging industrial corporations. As industrial most such skilled workers outside the South were white
cities large and small arose across the country, these to begin with. This was soon codified in the constitutions
small employers had plenty of work and plenty of of several craft unions. Given the unique economic
income building homes, the new office buildings, and context in which it arose, this exclusive craft unionism
factories and in the growing transportation networks worked, where the radicalism and egalitarianism of the
within and around these cities. Knights had failed. If the ideology of the Knights and
The craft unions regulated their wages by restricting of most of the embryonic labor parties of the 1880s had
the supply of labor to a limited union membership, been classless and often rooted in monetary and land
reform, the ideology that began to take shape in the
 13

craft unions was clear and well in line with much of the unions in this formative period gave them and their
“common sense” of American capitalism. approach credibility. They spread this ideology and
where applicable the practices to other unions through
Calling it “pure and simple” unionism, the bolder of the the city central labor bodies and state federations of
AFL leaders rejected any grand mission like socialism the AFL.
in favor of limited collective bargaining. The putative
father of business unionism is not Samuel Gompers, Racism and racial exclusion were built into this ideology.
but his friend Adolph Strasser, a fellow cigar maker, It is not just that the racism of the society spilled over
and for a while a socialist, who in the 1870s spelled into these unions as it did into early industrial unions
out a practical and centralized version of unionism like the United Mine Workers, or other unions that did
he thought compatible with the pragmatic outlook of not exclude Blacks, it was in the constitutions and
American workers. It would be over a decade before collective bargaining agreements of a growing number
his ideas could be put into practice. Samuel Gompers, of craft unions. It was in the publications of the AFL and
however, did more to develop this as a self-conscious most of these craft unions.
“philosophy” of labor and by the economic crisis of
1893, it was well developed and widespread. Its main The triumph of business union ideology was given an
rival in the early years of the new century would not additional boost by the simultaneous development of
be vague radicals but socialists of various stripes, from the embryo of bureaucracy and “machine” rule in the
reformists to revolutionaries. AFL. While in most of the theories mentioned above, the
development of a labor bureaucracy is associated with
Strasser, Gompers, and the other “pure and simple” large organizations, the development of corporations,
unionists did not reject politics, but had little chance and bargaining stability, the actual roots of American
to practice them at the national level until the unions labor bureaucracy were initially the result of conflict in
began to grow after 1896 when recovery set in and local labor markets.
the employers turned nasty. The first major entrance
of the AFL into national politics was a lobbying effort Following the Haymarket incident, American capital
in 1895 to win legislation to limit the use of injunctions went on an anti-union rampage. The new craft unions
against unions and for the eight-hour day.[11] After were not spared the rage of capital or even of that of
this it was a short road to the practice of hoping to the small employers for whom many of these skilled
win legislative influence for labor by “rewarding our workers toiled. Union members were frequently
friends and punishing our enemies,” which meant dismissed out of hand, particularly if they raised any
staying well within the two-party system that had come grievances on the job. To protect themselves, they
to prevail after the Civil War. Anticipating Lenin, the began to select the more vocal militants as “walking
“pure and simple” unionists unashamedly embraced delegates,” the first full-time union negotiators. We
bourgeois politics as trade union politics in a uniquely know them today as business agents. This in itself was
direct way. The British Labor Party might practice hardly bureaucracy. But as bargaining regularized
bourgeois politics from an independent working class itself in the years of growth before 1893, the delegates
position when it emerged at the turn of the century, settled into routines and the city-wide local unions
but American business unionists went directly to the sought to bring them under their control rather than that
bourgeois parties. This fact, of course, left an indelible of the members who had originally selected them. If the
mark on the rudimentary class consciousness that members attempted to replace a complacent business
flared up from time to time. agent, as they sometimes did, the business agent and
local officials could turn to the employers to get rid of
As the AFL grew and a new kind of liberal bourgeois the troublemakers, as they increasingly did.
politics emerged at the end of the century as
“Progressivism,” the practical experience of the This period also saw the rise of the national unions,
leaders of “pure and simple” unionism led them to which up to now had played little role. These were
support the “progressives” in the two major parties the major carriers of business union ideology. But on
rather than following the minority of trade unionists top of that, like the local leaders, they saw in these
into the new Socialist Party. The relative success of new full-time business agents the possibility of a
the building trades unions and other locally-based political machine not unlike that of the urban political
14

machines they increasingly dealt with. All of this Association of Manufacturers. The years after the turn
was further intensified as the national business union of the century through World War One saw intense
leaders of the AFL brought the formerly autonomous class conflict, new forms of cross-craft organization in
central labor bodies and state federations under their industry, and the growth of regional bargaining.
control. Increasingly, these practices spread to other
AFL unions taking on the characteristics of normal In the wake of this new class-based radicalism came
union practice. By today’s standards this machinery the growth of the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs.
was pretty minimal, but it did aid the entrenchment and Unlike in Europe where both unions and parties shared
insulation of business union leaders and their ideology a socialist outlook, however, the major trade union
from a rank and file that would become increasingly federation, the AFL, was ideologically hostile to the SP.
restive and radical as the new century opened. Inside the unions and the AFL, Socialist Party members
fought business unionists for control or at least
The AFL and most of its affiliated unions had survived influence. Workplace-based rank and file rebellions in
and grown through employer repression and the this period typically took on a more political character as
disastrous depression of 1893-96 where the Knights, the SPers challenged the “pure and simple” unionists who
labor parties, and the Populists had failed. Reflecting were increasingly aligned with the “progressives” of
both this reality and the goal of stability so important to the Democratic and even Republican parties. By 1912,
business unionism, Gompers could say with pride at the Socialist typographers’ leader Max Hayes won a third
1900 AFL convention: of the votes in a contest with Gompers for leadership of
the AFL.
It is noteworthy, that while in every other previous
industrial crisis the trade unions were literally mowed Debs, himself a former union leader, an advocate of
down and swept out of existence, the unions now industrial unionism, and leader of the Pullman strike,
in existence have manifested not only the power of held the conservative craft union leaders in contempt.
resistance, but of stability and permanence.[12] He noted their separation from the ranks, their change
in dress, habits, and associations—notably with
Business Unionism’s Defeat of the Socialists employers and politicians. Debs remained a supporter
of the IWW. The Socialist Party, however, had no trade
When the crisis of 1893-1896 ended, American union policy. It made no demands and put no pressure
capitalism took another leap forward. In 1898, for the on members who became high level union officials—
first time U.S. productivity surpassed that of its major other than that they support the SP electorally. It was
commercial rival Britain, as well as all other industrial a simple matter for these Socialist union leaders to
powers. Despite recessions, from 1870 through 1913 separate the running of the union from their politics, to
the growth of real per capita Gross Domestic Product become business unionists in practice while retaining
in the U.S. outstripped that of any industrial nations their “Socialist” membership and identity. While some
save its neighbor Canada. Unionism, too, grew rapidly Socialists held on to leadership of AFL and independent
and the AFL went from 280,000 members in 1898 to 1.6 unions such as those in garment and textile, the Socialist
million in 1904. This time, unionism reached deep into Party itself split, faced the general repression against
the manufacturing industries. Along with the growth of all radicals, and then shrank after the First World War.
the craft unions came the rise of new industrial unions
such as the United Mine Workers, the radical Western The triumph of the business unionists was, however,
Federation of Miners, the socialist-oriented garment guaranteed more than anything by the impact of the
workers unions, and the revolutionary syndicalist First World War. As one labor historian put it:
Industrial Workers of the World. On the railroads, World War I, in fact, helped make the American
the craft unions turned from mutual assistance and Federation of Labor a permanent and lasting organization
insurance to collective bargaining. by giving it the strength to survive the 1920s.[13]
The return of economic growth, the vast merger It did so in three ways. First was simply the growth in
movement of capital, and the growth of unionism number of members caused by war production, to 5
brought a quick response from the employers in the form million by 1920. Second were the wage gains that came
of a national “Open Shop” drive led by the new National with the swelling of war orders after 1914. These secured
 15

the loyalty to incumbent leaders in many cases. Third a year-long strike, while 100,000 textile workers in New
was the government’s policy of favoring AFL unions England hit the bricks. In 1922, 400,000 rail shop craft
in war industries, while at the same time conducting workers struck.
violent repression against the IWW and SP. A corollary
of this relationship with the government was the further This explosion was made possible in part by the
bureaucratization as war-time decision-making moved enormous growth of the unions and the rapid economic
up the hierarchy into various tripartite bodies and as expansion associated with the war. But it was also a
attempts were made to regularize grievance handling. response to the industrial speed-up that had underlain
Business union leaders, practices, and ideology were the entire period of growth from the end of the Civil War
now deeply entrenched, while the radicals were on the through World War One and the carnage it produced.
defensive and their organizations severely weakened. Industrial death rates in the U.S. were estimated at
two to three times those in Europe. On the railroads
The First Experiment in Rank and File Strategy some 75,000 workers perished from the Civil War to
the beginning of the First World War. In construction
The last years of the war and those immediately the industry itself said that each story of the new
following saw sharp class conflict and industrial up- skyscrapers cost a worker’s life. The Triangle Shirtwaist
heaval in the United States as in much of the developed fire of 1911 underscored this reckless disregard of life.
capitalist world. In 1918, it looked as though German Alongside of this and partly responsible for it were the
workers would follow the example set in Russia a year constant and deep changes in work associated with
earlier as workers councils spread across the country Taylorism, skill dilution, and work intensification that
and revolution seemed an accomplished fact—though drove workers to resistance.
in fact the leaders of the Social Democratic Party would Altogether, from 1919 through 1923 over 8 million
soon derail the revolution. workers struck. Almost all of the strikes, however,
Across the industrial world, new forms of rank and were defeated. In the wake of these defeats, union
file-based worker organization sprang up to deal with membership plunged from its 5 million highpoint to 3.6
the massive changes in industry and work the war million in 1923, stabilizing at around 3.4 million later in
had brought on. The Shop Stewards and Workers the decade. All the issues that had led to industrial
Committee Movement in Britain, the Revolutionary rebellion remained unresolved, the political position
Shop Stewards in Germany, factory committees in of labor weaker, the unions less and less able to resist
Italy, and similar organizations in France exemplified while relying on the conventional methods of business
the workers’ effort to take on issues the old leaders, unionism and of craft unionism in particular.
even so-called socialists, shrank from. Indeed, by 1920 The political state of business unionism was aptly
the newly formed Communist International based its summarized by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen in
strategy for revolution on these rank and file upsurges the African American socialist weekly, The Messenger,
that swept across industry in the developed nations. where they described the 1921 AFL convention:
As one study of this period put it, “...in the Communist
International’s own judgement—which we share—it is The recent convention of the American Federation of
primarily in the industrial struggle that the opportunities Labor held in Denver, Colorado, was colorless except
for intervention by revolutionaries are to be sought, for the fight for the presidency between Gompers
and it is a party’s performance in relation to these and John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine
opportunities on which it is primarily to be judged.”[14] Workers. The convention opposed trade with Russia;
refused to condemn the unspeakable Ku Klux Klan;
The U.S., too, saw intense class struggle. An attempt ratified Gompers’ withdrawal from the Amsterdam
to organize the steel industry in 1919 with a coalition of Labor International; closed the door in the faces of
craft unions led to a strike of 365,000 workers. Soon a Negroes and women; reelected its archaic pilots; then
strike of 400,000 coal miners followed. A general strike adjourned...[15]
in Seattle led to a near “Soviet” situation as the unions
took charge of the city. In 1920-21 600,000 coal miners While the triumph of the business unionists and their
struck leading to a virtual civil war in West Virginia ideology had not really been in doubt, it is natural that
and central Illinois. In 1921 the Typographers waged thousands of union activists should question these
16

leaders and their methods, including craft unionism confrontations with employers, while conservative
itself. At the same time, this was the first time that union policies precipitated rank-and-file opposition
capital had inflicted such a massive defeat on labor movements. League militants built united fronts with
without destroying the unions. Despite the setbacks, these groups by addressing genuine industrial problems
union membership remained well above its pre-war and confronting unpopular leaders.[16]
level, allowing for the growth of opposition within the
unions. A symbol of this new mood was the rebellion in There were no dues. Membership was established
Gompers’ home local of the Cigar Makers that blocked by subscribing to is national paper, The Labor Herald.
his election as a delegate to the 1920 AFL convention. The TUEL had both industrial and local geographical
Opposition groups grew in several unions, notable the organizations. Its major campaign was for industrial
International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Fur unionism through the amalgamation of craft unions
Workers, the Machinists, the Carpenters, the Iron and or their industry divisions, such as rail. Resolutions
Steel Workers, and the United Mine Workers. Though favoring amalgamation passed in thousands of local
they were often led by radicals, they tended to take on a unions, seventeen state federations, and twenty
broad, rather than partisan (SP, IWW) character. international unions. These same militants brought their
local unions into the new movement for a labor party,
In 1919 in the midst of the industrial upheaval, following where TUEL also worked with progressive officials like
a long and destructive fight in the Socialist Party, the John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor.
former SP Left Wing formed the Communist Party (two
of them at first). After the defeat of the 1919 steel strike, TUEL activists, however, didn’t just build the TUEL or its
its organizer William Z. Foster, and other like-minded campaigns. They got involved in the issues confronting
veterans of the steel and other struggles, organized each industry, sometimes led strikes, and participated
the Trade Union Educational League in 1920 to do in or led the various rank and file movements of the
revolutionary syndicalist work within the AFL. After a time. Several of the TUEL industry groups were based
couple of years of infighting and underground existence, on existing rank and file movements and on the new
the new Communist Party (called the Workers Party shop delegates and shop stewards movements. These
for a while) recognized the potential of the TUEL for included rank and file oppositions in the ILGWU, the
establishing and expanding the party’s roots in the Fur Workers, the Carpenters, the Machinists, the
organized working class. Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers, and the United
Mine Workers, all of which had considerable success.
By 1921, when Foster like many syndicalists around
the world, joined the CP and abandoned his anti-party The TUEL demonstrated the power of rank and file
position, the program of the TUEL took shape. It stood, rebellion and the ability to organize beyond those
above all, for industrial unionism and a labor party—two already loyal to the left. Their day-to-day work
ideas that made enormous sense as the craft unions focused on workplace issues and union democracy
faced one defeat after another. The TUEL also stood for as well as industrial unionism, a labor party, and, less
the end of all racial barriers to union membership, equal consistently, racial equality.[17] The combination of
status within the unions for African Americans, and for this very basic program and the activities of the TUEL
union democracy. At the same time, it supported the moved tens of thousands of workers to action and many
young Russian Soviet republic, as did many trade union more to vote for resolutions and candidates backed by
militants in its earliest years. It was endorsed by a TUEL activists. It also linked the various rank and file
broad cross-section of militants and officials, including opposition movements into a broad progressive current
Debs. across the labor movement giving these efforts a class-
wide framework, a shared vision of what unionism
Labor historian James Barrett summarized the could be, and a common basic program.
orientation of the TUEL aptly as follows:
By 1924, however, the TUEL class-wide experiment lay in
The TUEL mobilized in more than a dozen industries shambles, with the Communists isolated from the mass
but built its strongest and most durable movements in of activists they had helped to motivate and organize.
the needle trades and coal mining. In each industry Probably the major reason was the vicious counter-
economic problems and competition led to dramatic mobilization of the business union bureaucracy across
 17

the AFL. TUEL and CP activists were expelled right and Herald, with two other CP controlled papers, the Soviet
left with no means of recourse. Despite big votes for Russia Pictorial published by the Friends of the Soviet
opposition candidates in several unions and strong Union and The Liberator, the CP’s official paper, into the
bases in many locals, the entrenched AFL leaders Workers Monthly, which was supposed to serve as the
maintained control over the expanded machinery of official publication of both the TUEL and the CP.
their unions. For the expelled rebels there was no
place to turn. It must also be said that Foster himself was part of the
problem as well as the initiator of the solution. He had
At the same time, the reaction of the bureaucracy realized that the only way the new CP could overcome
was made all too easy by the policies of the CP and its isolation was to work in the AFL building rank and file
the weaknesses of the TUEL. One weakness was the movements to replace business unionism with a class-
resolutionary nature of its central campaign, that for struggle brand of unionism. Unlike most other top CP
amalgamation. While TUEL activists had great success leaders, he understood this to be a long process. At
in getting resolutions in favor of amalgamation passed the same time, he had a certain elitist view of this work
across the labor movement, they had almost no success as well as a tendency to maintain personal control of
in actually forcing or carrying through amalgamation the operation. In 1922, he wrote that most rank and
toward industrial unionism. Resolutions can not be file workers were “ignorant and sluggish.” In 1924, he
a substitute for organization and the ability to follow told the socialist Scott Nearing, “Revolutions are not
through on a goal. There isn’t much doubt that most of brought about by the sort of far-sighted revolutionaries
the activists, including party members, who participated you have in mind, but by stupid masses...goaded to
in the TUEL campaigns wanted such organization and desperate revolt by the pressure of social conditions...
influence, but the way in which the CP “ran” the TUEL led by straight-thinking revolutionaries who are able to
made this difficult. direct the storm intelligently against capitalism.”[18]
This is far from Marx’s idea of trade union struggle as
The greatest weakness of the TUEL was that it a school in which the masses learn political skills and
was controlled top-down by the CP. It never really come to a clearer class consciousness—though not
developed a democratic structure of its own, nor an so far from the Stalinism Foster and the CP would soon
independent rank and file leadership to combat the adopt. In the end, the combination of CP control and
growing sectarianism and erratic behavior of the elitist outlook killed this first experiment in conscious
CP. The TUEL’s lack of independence was signaled rank and file rebellion.
among other things by its affiliation with the Moscow-
controlled Red International of Labor Unions. More By the second half of the 1920s, the bureaucracies
importantly, virtually all the leaders of the various TUEL of the AFL, its affiliates, and the independent unions
bodies were CP members. Both of these realities left in garment and rail were safely entrenched. The
TUEL without a self-organized base and unnecessarily price paid for the failure of the TUEL was high. The
open to red baiting. unions lost more members, real wages slumped, they
adopted labor-management cooperation schemes,
The problem of party control was compounded by the and the number of unions excluding workers of color
sectarian direction that came from the party’s central constitutionally or by ritual actually rose from 11 in 1920
leadership in New York. Far from the daily course of to 24 by the end of the decade.
class struggle and preoccupied with internal factional
matters and Russian policy requirements, these leaders The Lesson of Transitional Politics
attempted to push their line on the CP leaders of the
TUEL. This was particularly sharp in the case of Foster’s In his assessment of the problem of CP control and the
work in the labor party movement. There, the CP failure of the TUEL Sidney Lens wrote:
leaders pushed for a premature launching of a farmer-
labor party, which led to a break with non-Communist By permitting this state of affairs the TUEL obviated
leaders and the collapse of the whole project. In 1924, the original purpose for which it was established, to
the CP leadership guaranteed the end of the TUEL as become a bridge between the Communist party and the
a broad rank and file-based movement when it took trade unions, to offer an instrument that could neither
the absurd step of merging the TUEL’s paper, the Labor be accused of “dual unionism” nor of being a radical
18

force outside the unions. It was to be a class-struggle For Trotsky in 1938 capitalism was in its inescapable
left wing, rather than a revolutionary dual union. It “death agony,” and the revolution blocked primarily by
was to advocate militant strike tactics, democracy the degeneration of working class leadership in the form
within the existing unions, amalgamation into industrial of social democracy and Stalinism. Capitalism’s obituary
forms, a policy of spreading strikes to make them more proved premature in the extreme and the reduction of
effective, no faith in government arbitration machinery, the problems of the working class movement to one
and other such union strategies based on the theorem of misleadership insufficient. We can also question
of “class against class.” It was not to be the instrument whether any system of demands can by itself lead
of the revolution itself, as was the conception of the “unalterably” to revolutionary consciousness.
I.W.W. by Vincent St. John and his successors. It was
to avoid the recurring difficulty of having new members It is important to locate the purpose of such a transitional
endorse the idea of revolution. The TUEL in life itself, program. Trotsy’s program was designed for a situation
however, was so indistinguishable from the Communist in which revolution seemed imminent if only effective
party that it isolated itself from all but party members or leadership were in place. The 1938 transitional program
the closest of sympathizers.[19] was meant to provide direction for a new revolutionary
leadership. The far more limited program of the TUEL
In other words, the TUEL could not serve as a bridge had a more modest purpose, to raise the general class
between the basic class consciousness of most workers consciousness of the activist layer of the unions and
and the class “for itself” politics of the revolutionaries if to bring the revolutionaries into a common organization
it was itself solely the revolutionaries’ possession. That and movement with these militant, but still largely trade
it showed so much promise in doing just this for the first union-minded worker activists.
three years of its brief life is testimony to the viability of
this strategy. Yet, the leaders of the early CP, still heady The idea of a transitional politics and program that can
with the model of the Russian revolution and obsessed serve to bridge the gap we described in the beginning
with internal party matters, bombed their own bridge to of this pamphlet, between today’s “common sense”
the activist layer of the class. and genuine class consciousness is an important tool
in overcoming both the isolation of socialists from the
The notion of a bridge between rudimentary class class and the limits of leadership within the class. Such
consciousness or trade union militancy and socialist a program for today is not so much a list of demands as
consciousness is the corner stone of transitional a combination of demands, goals, and actions.
politics and the Rank and File Strategy. The notion
of a transitional program and politics was meant to Before developing the idea of a transitional politics
replace the old idea of the minimum and maximum for today’s labor movement, we want to look at the
programs of classic social democracy, where the major competing left wing strategy for work in the
minimum program became the real practice and unions, permeation or the attempt to gain influence by
the maximum (revolutionary) program a ceremonial sidling up to the incumbent bureaucracy or its alleged
artifact. Sometimes employed by the early Communist progressive wing. This was, above, all the strategy of
International before its corruption into Stalinism, it the Communist Party in the new CIO unions of the 1930s.
was resurrected in the late 1930s by Leon Trotsky
who incorporated it into the founding document of the Permeation & The Highjacking of the CIO
Fourth International in 1938. Formulating it primarily as
a program of demands, Trotsky wrote: The outlines of the story of the industrial upsurge that
led to the formation of the CIO are well-known. Most
It is necessary to help the masses in the process of daily of the craft union leaders of the AFL has learned
struggle to find a bridge between present demands and nothing from the experience of the 1920s. In the face of
the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge growing rank and file outburst in the unorganized basic
should include a system of transitional demands, industries, they offered patch work aid and solutions
stemming from today’s consciousness to wide layers of when they offered anything. The first wave of strikes
the working class and unalterably leading to one final from 1933 through 1935 were mostly examples of rank
conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. and file self-organization. Some of these workers
[20] seized on moribund local unions to create new mass
 19

organizations, other got temporary charters as AFL elements of a new labor ideology that would distinguish
“federal local unions,” while others simply created the CIO from the pure and simple business unionists
their own unions. The massive 1934 strikes in Toledo, of the AFL for many years—social unionism. Yet, this
Minneapolis, San Francisco, and in the textile plants meant that from day one, the CIO was a contradictory
particularly in the South were led by men and women movement with a self-organizing rank and file in its new
with no more than a local title, little in the way of money, unions, but a full-blown bureaucracy at the federation
and even less in terms of staff or “labor professionals.” level, and within those old unions that joined, that did all
Many of them were radicals who saw the need for in its power to keep this movement within the channels
industrial unionism as a priority and a training ground of capitalism, orderly collective bargaining, and the
for a new generation of union leaders and activists— Democratic Party.
and revolutionaries.
It would take almost two decades to turn the CIO with its
The radicals, however, were not the only ones to read social unionist outlook into a modern business unionism
the hand writing on the wall. A handful of AFL leaders similar enough to the AFL unions, some of which now
following the lead of John L. Lewis of the Miners began had a more industrial character themselves, to make
to push for industrial unionism. Lewis was no radical. possible the 1955 merger that gave us the AFL-CIO.
In fact, he had been a life long Republican and as There were too many radicals and radicalized workers
dedicated a business unionist as Gompers or anyone entrenched in the locals of the new unions, with too
else. But his union was organized along industrial, much support in the ranks, and too good a track record
not craft lines. He had also learned a few things in in the midst of the big struggles of the second half of the
his long fight against the TUEL-supported opposition 1930s to make their taming easy. Furthermore, most of
movements of the 1920s. So, he, Sidney Hillman of the new unions were too democratic, with plenty of open
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and a handful of political debate and competition, to easily succumb to
other top leaders formed the Committee for Industrial the bureaucratic norms of the Mine Workers or the CIO
Organization to push the AFL toward organizing the itself.
mass production industries along industrial lines. They
got no where and left to form the new Congress of Almost all of the left organizations of the time played a
Industrial Organizations in 1936. significant role at one time or another: the Trotskyists
in the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike, A. J. Muste’s
The men who launched the CIO as a new federation American Workers Party in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike,
were not out to make the revolution. Rather, the new the Communists in San Francisco’s general strike, the
CIO leaders presented themselves as an alternative not local Socialist Party in the Flint Sit-Down, and so on.
only to the moribund AFL, but also to the rank and file Had all these organizations worked together, as they
leadership already in formation throughout industry. often did in specific struggles like the Flint Sit-Down,
They did not have to do much organizing, as we think in an autonomous TUEL-type rank and file project the
of that today, for workers were already pouring into or history of U.S. labor might have been very different.
creating unions on their own or with the help of radicals
and their organizations. Indeed, as industrial struggle Indeed, the potential of radicalled rank and file
grew and became more confrontational the new unions mobilizations to create a class conscious labor
became schools of class consciousness and leadership movement was evident not only in the new CIO unions,
development. The 1934 strikes in Toledo, San Francisco, but even in the old AFL unions, as the example of the
and Minneapolis had all been led by socialists of one Minneapolis Teamsters showed. Here, a small group
kind or another. of Trotskyists transformed a moribund craft union of
truck drivers and helpers into an industrial union in
It would be overly simple to say that Lewis and the new the local and eventually regional freight and local
CIO parachuted into this situation to save the day for cartage industries. When the process began, the entire
capitalism. No doubt many of these leaders, like many Teamster Joint Council in Minneapolis-St. Paul had only
in the ranks, saw the chance for a change in the balance one full-time official and less than a thousand members.
of class forces within American capitalism through the Each step in this process of transformation involved
organization of the mass production industries. Some, accelerated rank and file mobilization, not only of the
like erstwhile socialist Sidney Hillman, even brought the members of Teamsters Local 574 but eventually of the
20

entire labor movement in Minneapolis in the dramatic local was rooted in the programmatic concepts essential
1934 strike. The approach used by the Trotskyists is to a policy of militant struggle against the employers.
spelled out in Farrell Dobbs’ book Teamster Rebellion Although this perspective entailed an ultimate clash
and represents a classic case of the application of the with conservative union officials, their removal from
rank and file strategy to the conditions of that time and office was not projected at the start as an immediate
place. aim. That could have given the mistaken impression
that the Trotskyist militants were interested primarily in
Dobbs notes that, “Workers were radicalizing under winning union posts. To avoid such a misconception
the goad of economic depression. To mobilize them for a flanking tactic was developed. Instead of calling for
action it was necessary to start from their existing level a quick formal change in the local’s leadership, the
of understanding. In the course of battle a majority incumbent officials were pressed to alter their policies
could be convinced of the correctness of the Communist to meet the workers needs.[22]
League’s trade union policy.” (“Communist League”
was the name of the Trotskyist organization at that Dobbs and the other socialists allied themselves with
time, later the Socialist Workers Party.) He pointed to non-socialists who had supported their strike strategy
the contradictions of the union bureaucracy, but made and eventually changed the leadership of the local.
the important point that the direction of the struggle in Their rank and file approach didn’t stop there, however.
these circumstances was against the employers. In all They realized that most of the trucking industry was
likelihood, the bureaucracy, particularly in the persons still nonunion and that they would have a hard time
of Daniel Tobin General President of the Teamsters holding on to wages and conditions if this remained the
and Cliff Hall of the Minneapolis Central Labor Council, case. Dobbs developed a strategy for organizing the
would get in the way. As Dobbs put it, “Thus, the over-the-road truckers and the freight workers in other
indicated tactic was to aim the workers’ fire straight at towns in the region. In effect, Dobbs did what more and
the employers and catch the union bureaucrats in the more unions are finally doing today. He recognized that
middle.”[21] the best organizers are not necessarily professional
staffers, but committed members. So, each trucker
Using this approach, Dobbs and the Minneapolis became an de facto organizer. The campaign to
Trotskyists went on to lead a massive organizing drive organize the central states (Midwest) trucking industry
followed by three mass strikes. These strikes were is told in Dobb’s book, Teamster Power. It was no easy
models of rank and file mobilization, innovative tactics matter. The rank and file Teamster organizers met with
such as “cruising pickets,” and alliances with other violence from the employers, police, and governments.
unions and farmers organizations. In the face of massive The president of the International Union, Daniel Tobin,
police and vigilante violence, the strikers mounted their opposed them all the way. Their fight was, of necessity,
own escalations with rallies reaching 40,000 people. almost always a dual one against the employers and
In effect, the Trotskyist Teamsters, working with other conservative union bureaucrats. The main enemy was
militants, had turned a mere organizing drive into a always capital, but the business unionists were always
major political confrontation with all the powers-that- in the way.
be.
Although the militant leaders of Local 574 would
The 1934 strike victory did not end the problems faced eventually face enormous repression, the victory of
by workers in the Minneapolis trucking industry. Local Local 574 in Minneapolis and the organizing strategy
574 was still burdened with conservative officers. The that followed, were a clear demonstration of the
role of the Trotskyists in the strike movement, however, power of rank and file unionism under the leadership
made them recognized leaders in practice. Dobbs and of revolutionaries who understood both transitional
the other went about organizing a broad rank and file politics and the potential of a mobilized and informed
caucus with the object of bring in a consistently militant rank and file. It was an alternative kind of unionism
leadership. But they didn’t simply run for office. Once to the top-down brand favored by Lewis, Hillman, and
again, Dobbs explains what is still an important lesson other CIO leaders. In embryo form it existed across the
for rank and file rebels: labor movement of the time. But this potential would
From the outset the building of a broad left wing in the be sidetracked by the abandonment of a rank and file
orientation by much of the left in the second half of the
 21

1930s. file CPers might still be militants in their workplace, and

might even resist authoritarian moves by the leadership
By far the largest left organization was the Communist when those leaders weren’t CPers themselves, but
Party. While it is clear that the CP of the 1930s was a their party had its sights set higher on the big alliance
thoroughly Stalinized, bureaucratic party, it was also a with Roosevelt, Lewis, et al.
contradictory movement. On the one hand, the CP and
its thousands of worker members played a major role in The Second World War accelerated the process of
building the new CIO unions from the bottom up. They bureaucratization and the formation of a modernized
and the unions they came to lead were usually well business unionism, much as the First World War had. A
ahead of other left groups on matters of racism. And series of government labor boards set the precedents
while some CP-led unions showed the same top-down and patterns of bureaucratic labor relations that shaped
tendencies as those lead by liberal social unionists, the whole post-World War Two era. Historian Nelson
others were or would become more democratic than Lichtenstein summed up the impact of these boards
most. when he wrote:
Nevertheless, the Popular Front policy adopted around For the next four years, these boards were instrumental
1936, just as the big struggles were heating up, precluded in setting for the first time industry-wide wage patterns,
any real united front with the other left parties, much less fixing a system of “industrial jurisprudence” on the
a rank and file strategy like the TUEL. The Popular Front shop floor, and influencing the internal structure of the
meant building alliances with the leaders of the new new industrial unions. They were a powerful force in
CIO wherever possible and supporting the Roosevelt nationalizing a conception of routine and bureaucratic
Administration in the name of fighting fascism. This industrial relations that had been pioneered in the
meant abandoning the idea of a labor party in practice garment trades but that the Wagner Act and the NLRB
and orienting more and more toward the Democrats. had thus far failed to implement fully.[23]
Such alliances inevitably led to attempts to permeate
the highest levels of both government, which were not The CP, by war time far and away the largest left
very successful, and the bureaucracy of the CIO and a organization, saw the war not as an imperialist war,
number of its unions, which were more so. but as an anti-fascist war for democracy. Its vigilance
in supporting the war effort and war production
The most famous case of the CP’s permeationist policy surpassed that of ordinary anti-fascists or American
was that of Lee Pressman and Len De Caux who jingoists to include opposition to any and all disruptions
became, as the joke went, “left hand men” to “The of production. Indeed, when Lewis broke with Murray
Three” as the CIO’s top leaders, John L. Lewis, Sidney and Hillman (and Roosevelt) first rejecting government
Hillman, and Philip Murray, were known. Pressman mediation in the miners contract in 1941 and then leading
was general council for the CIO, while De Caux was its four miners’ strikes in 1943, the CP sided with Hillman
publicity director. Pressman may have dropped formal and Murray. They fully supported the CIO leadership’s
membership in the party after 1935, but he continued no strike agreement. And when strikes against the
to have those politics for a decade or so. While only a inhuman pace of work or other issues began to spread
few could insinuate themselves at the top of the labor in 1943 they opposed those.
movement in this manner, many more Communists
became staffers helping to build the apparatus of the The CP’s elite alliance also hurt the African American
CIO and some of its affiliates. liberation struggles in which they had previously played
a major role in communities like Harlem. With the coming
The vast majority of CP members, of course, had no hope of the war, however, they played down racial struggles.
of permeating their union’s leadership or staff. They They didn’t support A. Philip Randolph’s proposed
either ran for office, often successfully, or remained march on Washington to demand jobs for African
rank and filers. But the Popular Front alliances and Americans in the burgeoning defense industries. Nor
the permeationist orientation that flowed from it meant did they support the Double-V campaign for victory over
that the largest group on the left had checked out of fascism abroad and racism and segregation at home.
any fight against the growth of bureaucracy in the new
unions and in some places contributed to it. Rank and With the entrance of the U.S. into the war, the number
of workers involved in strikes dropped dramatically
22

from 2.4 million in 1941, the highpoint of the pre-war staffers to a degree few had ever dreamed possible.
years, to 840,000 in 1942. In 1943, however, the number
shot up again to nearly 2 million workers and kept rising Modern Business Unionism & The Problem of
until 4.6 million workers joined the huge 1946 strike Consciousness
wave. Except for the coal miners strikes, the strikes
from 1943 through 1945 were almost always rank and The stabilization of collective bargaining and the
file actions, frequently led by stewards willing to buck institutionalization of modern business unionism were
the increasingly entrenched CIO bureaucracy and the aided by another period of economic growth and
government. These were the greatest counterweight expansion for American capital—this time as the world’s
to the bureaucratic trend accelerated by the war time leading economic and military power. This allowed a
institutions. Yet, the largest left party opposed them— labor movement that now covered over nine million
although it is likely that many rank and file CPers workers, as De Caux put it, to win “all that capitalism
participated. would allow it,” which in this period was more than most
workers anywhere had ever seen. This, in itself, partly
Ironically, one of the pithiest descriptions of what came explains the uniquely conservative consciousness that
next comes from Len De Caux’s memoirs: swept most unions and their members. The Cold War
Once the CIO won all that capitalism would allow repression and a political atmosphere that equated any
it...sitdowns and mass struggle gave way to union form of leftism with the Stalinist regime of the Soviet
administration, dues collection, labor board briefs, Union was another big factor in delegitimatizing any
detailed negotiations. The swivel-chair tribe began brand of socialist politics. On top of this setting, the
its own long-lasting sitdown in union office. This tribe practices of modern business unionism contributed
rode to office on the broad shoulders of Lewis and the many of the specifics to the new post-war working
backs of the agitators, the militants, the reds. Once they class “common sense.”
arrived they turned—dutifully, patriotically, devoutly— The knot between the new CIO and the Democratic
to kick in the face those on whom and over whom they Party had been tied by 1936. Nevertheless, labor party
had scrambled.[24] sentiment reemerged during the war. In 1943, Hillman
The Popular Front, permeation, and war time patriotism and Murray set up the CIO Political Action Committee
were repaid with Cold War purges of the Communists (PAC) specifically to combat local and state labor party
and then other leftists as well. When the alliances at initiatives and to mobilize the union ranks right down
the top shattered, the lack of an independent rank and to the precinct level for Roosevelt and the Democratic
file base left the radicals isolated. The Communists Party in the 1944 elections. Thus, the new unions
faced the additional problem of having lost a lot of entered the post-war era with a political practice
credibility for their war time collaboration. For the CIO virtually identical, though far more organized, to that
as a whole, the swivel-chair crowd rapidly completed of the AFL, with its own Labor’s Non-Partisan League.
their insulation from the ranks in most unions and This, no doubt, eased the way to the 1955 merger with
established the norms of modern business unionism the AFL. Any idea of class politics was abandoned or
that are still dominant. To be sure there was plenty of squelched, a fact that would shape and limit working
rank and file resistance to the loss of democracy, the class consciousness enormously for decades.
increased length of union contracts, the increasingly By the end of the 1940s, the CIO had surrendered its
infrequent and ritualized conventions, and the cozy and political program of full employment, national health
stable relations with employers that more and more care, generous social security, civil rights for African
leaders sought. But the resisters fought alone with Americans, and public housing for all who needed
few experienced political leaders among them and little it, when it became clear their Democratic “allies”
or no contact with the oppositionists in other unions. had no interest in such reforms. This political choice
The marvelous fighting democracy that had been the meant that the liberal social unionist ideology of the
unions of the early thirties and then the CIO had been CIO turned away from the political arena and toward
highjacked by leaders who soon made their peace the narrower field of collective bargaining. The new
with capital and institutionalized labor relations as the benefits bargaining for pensions, health care, and other
property of a layer of professional labor leaders and items previously seen as part of an expanded welfare
 23

state like those in Europe, created what some have believed in exclusion, but that they valued the alliance
called a “private welfare state” tied to the employers. with their new conservative colleagues more than that
with the Black community.
This had at least two long term affects. The first
was to increase the professionalization and hence All of these features of modern business unionism and
the bureaucratization of collective bargaining as the economic context in which it solidified combined to
contracts became incredibly complex and their bury, if not completely obliterate, the kind of basic class
administration more expert-heavy. The number of full- consciousness that arose in the 1930s and lasted well
time “International Reps” grew and their power over into the 1940s. The fragmented consciousness was
contract administration increased. The notion and reinforced by the rise in real wages and, at least for a
practice of the union as a service agency took root. large minority, the new benefits that brought a middle
Along with this came the erosion of basic democracy class life style to millions. Average real hourly earnings
as conventions, once annual affairs, became every in manufacturing rose by 50% from 1950 through 1965.
three or even five years in many unions. The new benefits, furthermore, meant that more of these
growing wages were available for direct consumption
The second was the fragmenting affect this “private than had ever been the case before. All this was made
welfare state” had on the consciousness of union possible by the continued growth of the economy. From
members, along with the growing separation of their 1947 through 1967, industrial production more than
living standards from workers in weaker unions or doubled, while productivity grew by over 50%.
in no unions. With benefits flowing from company
coffers, the idea that the well-being of the company is a While many on the left like to talk of this period as
union goal was given a previously unknown economic one of a “social compact” in which capital willingly
underpinning. At the same time, just as any idea of a handed over wage and benefit increases in exchange
distinct class politics had been squelched, so too had for increased production, the fact is that even in this
the idea of the labor movement as a class movement period it took a high level of strike action to win this new
been laid to rest. It was now a bureaucratic agency standard of living. There were more strikes and more
dependent on employer well-being (i.e., productivity workers on strike in the first half of the 1950s, while
dragged out of the workforce) to deliver services to the new standards of collective bargaining were being
it members and them only. Narrow “interest group” carved out, than during the years 1935-1939.
consciousness was certain at most times to beat
class consciousness as a contender for this period’s There was, however, a big difference. The strikes of
“common sense.” the 1930s had been enormous battles seen by millions
as part of a bigger class struggle. By the 1950s, strikes
The replacement of social unionism, in all but tended to be orderly affairs with token picketing. With
convention-time rhetoric, by a top-down service some notable exceptions, strikes became as routine
model and fragmenting “private welfare state” as collective bargaining itself. Furthermore, the
was accompanied and sometimes preceded by the solidaristic movement-wide pattern bargaining of 1945-
abandonment of the CIO’s commitment to racial equality. 1946 had given way to a much looser system in which
While this commitment had always been limited and each union was on its own. Most studies showed that
seldom carried into white bastions like the skilled even by the early 1950s the affect of major patterns set
trades, the alliance with the progressive organizations by the UAW or the Steelworkers was fading. The idea
of the African American community had contributed of solidarity was reduced to one’s own union and one’s
to a racial egalitarianism largely absent in the older own “private welfare state.”
business unionism of the AFL. But, when organizing,
striking, and mobilizing were replaced by orderly All of this produced the kind of consciousness, the
professional bargaining in the context of economic “common sense,” thought to be the natural state of mind
growth, there was little need for such active alliances. of workers and union members in the U.S. Neither class
When African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph as an active concept nor any vision above the level of
proposed that the merged AFL-CIO ban racial exclusion collective bargaining was a part of this consciousness
by any union at the 1955 merger convention, not one for the vast majority. But the conditions that underlay
white CIO leader voted with him. It was not that they the stability of this whole arrangement were beginning
24

to change by the mid-1960s. The organized left of this period was largely student-
based and focused on the anti-war and social
Fragmented Rank and File Rebellion movements. While these movements also had an
impact on the working class in various ways, the
By most accounts U.S. capitalism’s rate of profit began to socialist left, except for Black radical groups like the
fall (or fall more rapidly) around the middle of the 1960s. Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers,
Production actually accelerated at first due largely to paid little attention to this rising tide of rank and file
the War in Vietnam. Whereas industrial production rebellion. Yet, the rebellion became highly visible as
had risen by about 50% from 1953 through 1963, from strikes swept the coal fields in the late 1960s, when
1963 through 1973 it rose by 68%. Nevertheless, the national wildcats broke out among postal workers
falling rate of profit that corporations were beginning and Teamsters in 1970, when the Lordstown GM plant
to experience more severely brought on both inflation became the focus of national attention for the militancy
and a push for increased productivity across much of of its young workforce, when 40,000 telephone workers
industry. Inflation and speed-up, in turn, brought forth in New York State struck against Nixon’s wage freeze
a new period of increased resistance and rebellion for seven months in 1971-72; and when the Miners
within industry. For Democracy overturned a corrupt and murderous
leadership in 1972 and reshaped the United Mine
While we tend to think of the 1960s and early 1970s Workers.[25]
as the era of the mass anti-war and “new” social
movements, it was also one of considerable labor The absence of a well-organized socialist left in
unrest. Millions of public sector workers poured into most of these movements meant that the fragmented
unions and for a moment, on the eve of Martin Luther consciousness inherited from the modern business
King’s assassination, it looked as though the labor union practices of the post World War Two years,
and civil rights movement might converge. The new though challenged by action, was not displaced with a
Black Power consciousness of the late 1960’s found broader class consciousness or significant movement
expression in auto assembly plants and steel foundries toward independent working class politics. Even
as well as in rebellious communities. the more visible rank and file organizations had little
contact with one another. They fought their battles
At the same time, the number of workers involved in with their employers largely within the spheres of
strikes rose steadily from just under a million in 1965 to their own “private welfare states.” Furthermore, they
2.5 million in 1971. A growing number of these strikes fought from a position of assumed job security, while
were wildcat strikes in violation of the contracts and the new militancy kept real wages ahead of inflation
against the will of the now entrenched and routinized for most groups. As noted above, the economy was
leaderships. The strikes were typically against speed- growing fast and the impact of falling profit rates on
up and other management practices, but just as Dobbs the economy as yet marginal. The “common sense” of
had pointed out in the 1930s, the union bureaucracy— the period had been challenged by the actions taken
now a much bigger target—stood in the line of fire. by millions of workers, as well as by the anti-war and
Once again, rank and file rebellion was on the agenda. social movements. But there was no socialist left within
In the wake of these strikes came several rank and file the working class, nor even a left focused on workers’
based organizations such as the Teamsters United Rank struggles, that was big enough to bring these strands
& File, Miners for Democracy, and the United National together.[26]
Caucus in the UAW. In addition, Black caucuses spread
across the auto and steel industries, of which the most The 1974-75 recession, the deepest since the Great
famous is the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement Depression, brought the militancy to an end and
(DRUM). The connection of DRUM and some other wildcat strikes virtually disappeared. Some rank and
Black caucuses with both Marxism and revolutionary file movements lasted past this turning point and the
nationalism was direct, but the exception. While Teamsters for a Democratic Union was actually born
leftists played a role in many of these new rank and file in 1976, but the militancy and sense of confidence that
movements, there was no significant organized left in made this period of rank and file rebellion possible
the unions in this period. and gave it its particular character was swept away
as a new era of economic turbulence took shape. The
 25

fragmented consciousness encouraged by modern Drawing on the lessons of these major periods of
business unionism not only survived, but was now class activity and rank and file rebellion, we need a
reinforced by a sense of economic insecurity across synthesis in which socialists play a leading role in these
the class that allowed the bureaucracy to re-impose rebellions without subjecting them to the control of any
its authority and to open a new period of retreat and “party” or socialist organization. At its most basic,
concessions bargaining in the 1980s. this leadership means confronting the bureaucracy
within the unions and its policies by focusing on the
The Rank & File Perspective: A Contemporary Synthesis fight with the employers over real conditions on the
job and in society. This leadership role also draws on
If the fact of and the reality and importance of rank and the concept of transitional politics to provide a bridge
file movements and rebellions is clear, the relationship from today’s consciousness to deeper and wider
of socialists to these is still not clear. There have been forms of class consciousness and organization. This
three different problems rank and file movements of requires some institutional or organizational means of
the 20th century confronted. The first was a party- bringing a class-wide perspective to the various rank
controlled attempt to provide a program and class and file groups in order to transcend the fragmented
wide framework in the early 1920s through the TUEL. consciousness encouraged by the “private welfare
This had a promising start but came to grief largely as states” and the intensified competition that increased
a result of the CP’s control, on the one hand, and its international economic integration has brought. This
erratic politics, on the other. Party control meant that would include cross-union formations, community-
no independent, growing leadership was developed based worker organizations such as workers centers,
that would give the movement the strength to replace and steps toward active class politics.
the business union leadership.
While the pressures of capital on working class life are
The second was the industrial upheaval of the 1930s. always present, there are obviously times when such a
Here the major left organization, the CP, pushed an perspective offers greater possibilities. The rest of the
alliance with the CIO bureaucracy, or what they pamphlet will argue that today’s unfolding conditions do
imagined to be its “progressive” wing, as well as with offer such possibilities, that rank and file rebellions are
the Roosevelt Administration. This meant permeation a common contemporary response to the realities of
where possible, but also a certain passivity toward the changing conditions and bureaucratic inertia, and that
bureaucracy by rank and file CPers. This crippled the there are specific things that socialists and socialist
possibility of independent rank and file organization organizations can do to maximize the potential of the
in most CIO unions, and meant the substitution of the period and to minimize the gap between convinced
party for an intermediate or transitional cross-union socialists and the majority of worker activists.
organization. Under these circumstances, the CIO
bureaucracy and those of its affiliates were able to gain The Roots of a New Revolt
or maintain control, close down the rough and tumble
democracy of the first decade or so of the CIO, and then The closing of the twentieth century seemed to bring a
expel their Communist allies. resurgent hegemony to North American capital in the
post-Cold War world economy. Every crisis appeared
The third was the rank and file rebellion of the late 1960s as an opportunity for the United States and its leading
and early 1970s. The many actions and organizations of transnational corporations to break down barriers to its
this period had very little contact with one another, let accumulation goals and impose new political/economic
alone cross-union organization or a shared view of the structures and relations that enforced its new advances.
changes needed to beat the speed-up and inflation of From the passage of the North American Free Trade
the period. This rebellion, while exemplary of the self- Agreement to the new World Trade Organization,
activity and power of the working class in many ways, from the “Drug War” on Latin America to the criminal
was hurt by the almost total absence of a political left bombing of Iraq and Yugoslavia, no force seemed
or socialist wing within the movement. It remained able to counter U.S. power. The recurrent economic
the captive of the narrow consciousness of modern crises of Latin America, the financial collapse in East
business unionism. Asia, and the overall meltdown of Russia all provided
26

opportunities for North American capital to extend The second difference in North American capitalism’s
its already massive global reach. Despite the circus fin de siecle resurgence is that, unlike the post-World
around Bill Clinton’s scandalized presidency, big War Two boom where American living standards rose
business could rest assured that the same center-right on average, this expansion of U.S. corporate power
political consensus that had ruled in Washington for has seen the living standards of the vast majority sink
years was intact no matter the President’s fate or which for twenty years. Indeed, Wall Street insider Stephen
major party sat in Congress or the White House. Roach calls the U.S. economic expansion of the 1990s a
“labor crunch recovery.” In 1998, for example, the real
But the 1990s’ apparent deepening of U.S. economic wages of those who work for wages and salaries in the
and political hegemony was not a rerun of its post- U.S. remained 12% below their 1979 level. This general
World War Two rise to dominance. Two major changes decline has been accompanied by a sharp division
in the world made this renewed surge of U.S. power between the bottom three-quarters of the population
far more fragile than the period of growth experienced whose incomes have fallen and the top quarter whose
by the United States and other major industrial nations incomes have risen. The higher one goes, furthermore,
in the quarter of a century after the end of World War the greater the increase in income and wealth. Income
Two. The first was that neoliberalism, the policy of most measures, however, only scratch the surface of what
of the world’s governments, stopped working, both as the majority of the working class has experienced in the
a political phenomenon and as a stabilizing force for last two decades. While there have been no mass or
capitalism. The economic turmoil in East Asia and, general strikes in the U.S. in recent years, the return
above all, the prolonged and seemingly irreversible of high profile class struggle is now apparent and the
stagnation of Japan’s formerly powerhouse economy reasons for it clear. Far from providing the material basis
were the certain signs that any hope for global stability for the continued loyalty and ideological submission of
was fading as fast as the century itself. the working class majority, the new power of North
The symbol of neoliberalism’s crisis as a political American capital is purchased in part by the increased
movement was the return, in the last few years, of degradation in working and living conditions of the vast
significant opposition, primarily from the working class majority within the U.S.
and proletarianized peasantry across much of the One aspect of this change was the profound workplace
world. Mass strikes in opposition to neoliberal policies and labor market reorganization associated with “lean
and their consequences erupted across the globe. The production.” The promised brave new co-managed
similarity of these mass actions in such diverse settings workplace of the future turned into a top-down, well-
as Zimbabwe, Colombia, France, Greece, Russia, South lit Satanic mill. Whether you worked in a hospital or
Korea, Canada, and many more reminds us that while an auto plant, a post office or post-industrial techno-
a majority of those who toil in capital’s uneven global office, more than likely your job was worse than it
system remain outside the formal relations of wage was a decade ago—if you were lucky to have one
labor, the working class has continued to grow on a that long. Whether or not it is decorated with the
world scale. Indeed, even by the narrowest measure, trimming of employee participation, TQM, or the like,
that of industrial workers, the industrialized OECD it was certainly more stressful, probably harder, and
countries, where industrial decline and downsizing definitely more dangerous by the 1990s. U.S. injury and
was widespread, saw a slight growth from 112 illness rates in the first half of the 1990s were running
million in 1973 to 115 million in 1994. In the economic anywhere from 9% to 100% higher than in the first half
South, including the former Communist countries, the of the 1980s measured by the number of cases reported.
industrial workforce has risen from 285 million in 1980 Contributing to this rise in occupational illness and
to 407 million in 1994. Organized labor movements that injury are changing work time patterns. Full-time
were repressed in the 1960s and 1970s, arose again or manufacturing workers were putting in more overtime,
for the first time in much of the Third World, as well as while millions were becoming part of the precarious
southern Europe. Fascism was overthrown in Greece, workforce that fills the country’s growing number of
Portugal, and Spain and unions emerged and were part-time, temporary, or casual jobs.
legalized again. By the late 1990s. these movements,
new and old, were expressing their opposition to the The monthly figures published by the Bureau of Labor
crushing impact of nearly two decades of neoliberalism. Statistics put the number of “part-timers” (those
 27

working less than 35 hours a week) at 21 million in Mexico-border-based Committee for Justice in the
mid-1997, or about 18.4% of the workforce, up from Maquiladora’s put it eloquently at the 1997 Labor Notes
16.6% in 1975. But including those in the 35-40-hour conference in Detroit, “The hunger is stronger than the
range, over 38 million people actually work less than fear—hunger for justice, not only for food.” First one
40 hours a week, while an uncounted number of “part- group, then another tests the waters and open conflict
timers” earning part-time pay work 40 or more hours returns to labor relations—despite the trimmings of
week-in and week-out. More startling is the growth of company unionism or labor-management cooperation
temporary workers. Those who work out of “personnel schemes. That is the meaning of the bitter strikes of the
supply agencies” have grown from 640,000 in 1987 to last few years in the U.S. Some lose, as at Caterpillar
over 3 million in mid-1999. An undocumented additional and A.E. Staley. Some are more or less draws, like that
number of temps work directly for a growing variety of at Wheeling-Pittsburgh. Others win something, as at
firms. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute UPS in 1997, at several telecommunications companies
puts the total proportion of “nonstandard” jobs at 29.4% in 1998, in the seventeen local GM strikes of the last two-
of the workforce, 34.4% for women workers—figures and-a-half years, the brief strike at Dunlop, the 69-day
that adjust for the overlap of part-time, temporary, Boeing strike, the week-long general strike of Oregon
and contract work. With the arrival of “modular” state employees, the on-again-off-again strike at Yale
production at the end of the 1990s, which emphasizes University, and the 54-day confrontational struggle at
outsourcing and sub contracting even more than its WCI Steel in Warren, Ohio.
“lean” predecessor, still more full-time and well paid
jobs will be turned in for temporary and/or lower wage Then there are the massive strikes of immigrant and
jobs. Latino workers on the West Coast: janitors, dry-wallers,
and carpenters in Los Angeles; waterfront truckers in LA
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the majority and Seattle; and in the last days of the twentieth century
that compose both the shrinking middle-income and casualized waterfront workers in Southern California.
growing lower-income working class—and they are To these should be added the struggle to organize 20,000
angry. Whatever glow may have accompanied the early strawberry pickers in California, the smaller number of
days of labor-management partnership or workplace apple pickers and processors in Washington state, and
participation faded rapidly for many workers, as their those harvesting cucumbers in North Carolina. These
jobs were cut and/or intensified to boost profits, stock and similar struggles of immigrant and Latino workers
prices, and top salaries. Contesting with this anger around the country also point to something new—the
and disillusionment, however, is fear of job loss by the rise of Latinos not only in the workforce, but in the
same forces: downsizing, outsourcing, facility closures, unions. While union membership overall continued to
or scab herding. As a Multinational Monitor editorial decline from 1992 through 1996, the number of Latino
put it recently, “A ruthless employer class blends these union members grew by 12%.
multiple sources of job insecurity into a whole greater
than the parts.” Thus, in the long economic expansion of the 1990s
militancy returned to many sections of the U.S. working
The other side of the downsized coin, however, is class. What arose, however, was not the old rhythm
work intensification. If no one with power listened of U.S. collective bargaining, with a large number of
to the workers who complained about this, at least a relatively short, conventional strikes aimed at winning
few ears perked up when Wall Street insider Stephen wage and benefit improvements. The strikes and
Roach wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the so-called struggles of the 1990s were largely defensive in nature,
productivity resurgence of recent years has been on often very long and bitter, mostly focused on workplace
the back of slash-and-burn restructuring strategies that and labor market changes, and increasingly “political,”
have put extraordinary pressures on the workforce.” in the sense that they made demands that all workers
Roach predicted a “worker backlash.” could identify with (sometimes deliberately), and thus
struck a sympathetic chord in the working class public
There comes a point, after all, when the pressures and often appealed directly for broader support. The
and inevitable indignities of intensified exploitation Staley, Detroit Newspapers, and UPS strikes all did this,
outweigh the fear of job loss, as it did in the Great and the 1998 GM and telecommunications strikes also
Depression. As Marta Ojeda, director of the U.S.- garnered majority public sympathy.
28

The strikes of the last few years revealed the times in the U.S. there is only one labor federation. There
contradictions of business unionism and its limitations is no division by political loyalty: socialist, Communist,
in today’s world economy. They also often showed the Christian. Differences in direction or political outlook
new power that many organized workers have. Strikes must be expressed within a union that has sole
at Staley, Caterpillar, and the Detroit Newspapers were representation rights in its bargaining unit. In addition,
lost partly because local or national leaders pulled most unions in the U.S. have developed bureaucratic
their punches or even helped derail the strike. (It is structures beyond the reach of labor leaders in much of
impressive that the struggle against the newspapers the world. So, political conflict tends to take an almost
continued despite this, with an impressive core of sociological character: ranks versus bureaucrats. The
activist resisters.) At General Motors in 1998, where forms of this clash may be many. Pressure from the
it was clear that the union had enormous power to activist layer to act is one, a major factor in the GM
shut the company down, national leaders refused to and Boeing strikes. Another is turnover at the top. The
use the strike to make serious gains at the national or Association for Union Democracy (AUD) estimated
even local levels. Instead, they settled for small, often that about a dozen union presidents were ousted in
reversible, gains that didn’t resolve the bigger problems contested elections from the late 1980s through the
of outsourcing and downsizing. Where some important 1991 victory of Ron Carey.
things were won, as in telecommunications, it was
largely because new tactics, member mobilization, and The ferment continued into the 1990s. Labor democracy
public outreach were deployed. attorney Paul Levy summarized it in a speech to the
National Lawyers Guild in the Fall of 1996 when he said:
In 1995 a significant change occurred in the leadership
of the AFL-CIO. Throughout the 1990s, rank and file There is extensive intra-union activity in a large number
rebellions occurred in many unions, and took power of national unions, much more than ever before. In
for a time in the 1.4 million-member Teamsters. There service unions such as the Food and Commercial
would be major setbacks to these gains, but it was clear Workers, the Service Employees and the Hotel Workers,
that union politics were changing as the new century construction unions such as the IBEW (Electricians) or
approached. the Bricklayers and the Carpenters and the Laborers,
government unions like the Letter Carriers, the AFGE
Internal Union Dynamics (Federal Employees) and the Treasury Employees,
industrial unions like the Machinists and the Auto
Most of this new consciousness and militancy comes Workers.
from the activist layer of the unions. These are workers, To this list of challenges in national unions can be added
workplace representatives, and local level union officials similar movements in large local unions such as the
who keep U.S. unions going from day to day. They work New Directions caucus in the 30,000-member Transport
between the upper layer of career officials and staffers, Workers Union Local 100 in New York’s transit system,
on the one hand, and the majority of members on the the Caucus for a Democratic Union in the California
other. Some are full-time, paid officials, many are not. State Employees/SEIU Local 1000 that has twice won
They are forced to confront the reality of the workplace, control of this 40,000 member union, the successful
as opposed to its ideology, whether or not they accept rebellion in Atlanta’s transit union, or the reform group
this current partnership ideology in whole or part. A in the similarly large union of New York City janitors and
significant minority of this layer, however, rejects the doormen, SEIU Local 32J/32B—John Sweeney’s home
labor-management ethos that comes from employers local. Even the famous Justice for Janitors local union,
and career union officials alike. It is in this layer that SEIU 399 in Los Angles, saw a massive opposition
the return of resistance has gathered the greatest force movement of Latino and African American workers,
and, now and then, breaks through the passivity of the called the Multiracial Alliance, replace the old guard
members and the backward-looking immobility of the executive committee—only to be placed in trusteeship
top officials. by John Sweeney who was still SEIU president at
The activists and the top leaders are often at odds over that time. The split of the militant California Nurses
how to respond to the changing workplace and labor Association from the more conservative American
market. Unlike in some European countries and at past Nurses Association in 1996 represents another form of
 29

rebellion from below. Recently formed local opposition first election, in 1991. The old guard candidate, Jimmy
caucuses, as opposed to traditional caucuses of the Hoffa, son of the famous Teamster leader of the 1960s,
“in” and the “out” opportunist union politicians, have had campaigned for four years and had the best known
appeared in unions as diverse as the Auto Workers, name in the union. He won by 54%.
Steelworkers, Teachers, Hotel Employees, Carpenters,
and the IBEW. The central role of TDU in both the reform movement
and the UPS strike was no fluke. It survives the Hoffa
Nowhere was the challenge from below more victory. It exploded in 1999 in the strike by 1,000
successful or the process of union reform deeper than immigrant meatpacking workers at IBP’s plant in
in the Teamsters. It seemed as if the reelection of Ron Pasco, Washington. Here, TDU leader Maria Martinez
Carey over Jimmy Hoffa “Junior” in 1996 not only spelled was elected chief shop steward. Opposed by the old
the end of the corrupt old guard, but it opened a new guard white leadership, the TDU-led coalition fought
phase of transformation. As Ken Paff of the Teamsters the intolerable working conditions in the plant and
for a Democratic Union (TDU) explained, “We won the eventually forced a strike. The spirit of rebellion could
political battle over the value of a clean, democratic also be seen at Anheuser-Busch, where members
union. Hoffa had to adopt our program and promise to repeatedly rejected deals pushed on them by old guard
do even better at it. But we have not yet won the battle leaders and the Hoffa-led International.
over the need for a new kind of union that derives its
power from a mobilized and involved membership.” While the TDU-backed rank and file movement will have
to fight to regain leadership over the union, the question
The dynamics of the Teamster revolution, as many that faces the Teamster reformers is essentially the
TDUers call it, had brought TDU a long way from 15 same question that faces the entire labor movement:
years in the wilderness as a clear-cut opposition to five what kind of unions, what kind of movement can be
years on the front lines defending the reform regime built that is adequate to the challenges of corporate
and defeating the old guard. Now the most difficult power, international competition, and the dominance of
question of all was posed: how to go beyond the norms conservative politics.
of “clean” American business unionism? For most
activists, the key to anything new was an informed, Many of today’s struggles have taken a certain political
activated membership. Whether speaking of winning character. As we noted, the UPS strike captured the
a strike at UPS, organizing the unorganized, or building attention and support of the working class public.
broader coalitions for bigger social goals, success Many of the struggles mentioned above, brought the
would depend on mobilizing the tens of thousands of state into action on the side of the employers—a fact
workers on whom the real power of the union rests. that politicized many union activists. The struggle of
members of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 in
This dynamic suffered a serious setback when New York City’s transit system illustrates another way in
outside consultants hired by the 1996 Carey campaign which “simple” union-employer conflict turns political.
organization along with the union’s political director The fight for a new contract in late 1999 became a four-
were caught in a illegal scam to direct union money way conflict. The simple negotiating process between
into the campaign coffers. Carey was disqualified from he union and the Transit Authority would never
the election and eventually expelled even though it have taken center stage in New York as the holidays
was never proven that he was directly involved. In the approached if it had not been for the New Directions
wake of this turn of events, the union reform coalition caucus in Local 100.
around Carey fell apart. It took months for the TDU-
backed union reform movement to pull itself together. New Directions began back in the 1980s as a small
The slate that it ran in the 1998 election rerun reflected dissident newsletter called Hell on Wheels. By the
the thinking of those prepared to go well beyond “clean late 1990s, it was a powerful movement that controlled
business unionism.” But its presidential candidate, Tom about 40% of the executive board of this 35,000-member
Leedham, was not well known and had only six months local union and dominated the subway division. It’s
to campaign. Furthermore, the union members were candidate for president of the local had come within a
made cynical by the allegations against Carey; voter few hundred votes of winning in 1998. As during past
turnout, at 28%, was no higher than in the Teamsters’ contracts it conducted its own contract campaign.
30

The size and influence of the organization by this time, there are victories. But the basic problem remains
however, meant it played a significant role in the now one of power. The multinational corporations and the
complex negotiations. Reacting to the fear that New politicians they so generously fund (and, of course, the
Directions would push the union into a crippling strike in state and multilateral institutions they direct) have a lot
late December, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani entered the fray of it and we don’t.
by getting a court injunction not only against a strike,
which was illegal in any case, but against the use of This brings us right back to where we started, right
the word strike by any union member. The daily press back to Karl Marx and the working class. Marx didn’t
in New York carried endless stories highlighting both look to the working class because of some supposed
Giuliani and New Directions leader Tim Schermerhorn. moral superiority, the clarity of their ideas at any
particular moment, or the infinite effectiveness of
New Directions had become more than a powerful rank their trade unions. We have already argued that these
and file movement, it was the center of city politics for things can be as absent among workers as individuals
a time. The main reason was that the transit contract as among members of any other class. No, Marx
was the first in a series of labor contracts for the city’s looked to this class because in capitalist society they
tens of thousands of employees. For these union city were the only other class, besides the bourgeoisie,
workers, New Directions played the role that the UPS who had the potential power to change things. Their
strike had for the country. Indeed, rank and file caucus power flowed from their position in the economy and
activists from several of the city’s public sector unions from their numbers. “Ye are many, they are few,” as the
had formed a coalition and met together for some time. poet Shelley put it. More than that, this class has the
Giuliani, who actually has no part in the negotiation with power to create society’s wealth and, acting as a class,
the Transit Authority, panicked at the idea of a series to bring society and its production to a halt. “Without
of struggle in which the outcome was an accelerating our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn,”
city payroll—not to mention a re-energized labor the Wobblies sang. We might add: “not an inch of fiber
movement. A genuine class against class conflict was optic cable laid, no just-in-time delivery made, not a
taking shape. whole ball season played.” You get the picture.

The Tasks of Socialists in The problem has always been organizing that power and
Today’s Resistance and Rebellion giving it conscious expression for a common purpose.
What is being argued here is that there is already a
Thinking about the tasks of socialists in today’s United starting point in the form of the rank and file resistance
States can be overwhelming. From Reagan through and rebellions, community-based organizations,
Clinton, the U.S. government has been able to launch and transitional formations discussed above. While
an endless series of high-speed wars that deny us the socialists can and do play an important role in
time to organize effective opposition. The racist politics building and providing direction for such movement,
of prisons and punishment have reached such tidal they don’t have to invent them. The existence of the
proportions they, too, seem to laugh at opponents. The organizations, networks, projects and activists that
growth of poverty, the servitude of workfare; the threat make up this rebellion and resistance, of course, do
of ecological disaster; and the seemingly unstoppable not solve the problems of power, or rather the left’s lack
drift of mainstream politics to the right all taunt the left of it, immediately. This is a long range, multi-faceted
and tempt it to do everything at once. strategy. It is a perspective that requires a division of
labor, for which reason it is most effectively conducted
To be sure, there are good signs as well. Not only by organized socialists even though there is plenty for
rebellion in the workplace and unions, but a proliferation individuals to do. It is a strategy that focused primarily,
of community-based worker organizations, the rise of though not exclusively, on the unions, so it follows that
cross-union campaigns and organizations, and a new most of those carrying it out will be union members,
generation of student and youth activists taking on although there are roles for those not in unions.
sweatshops, “free trade,” and many other important
issues. All of these and more came together in Seattle In summary, the tasks of socialists in the labor movement
at the end of November 1999 to stake out their place include:
in the global political landscape. Here and there,
 31

1. B
 uilding the rank and file movements and movements, these organizations and campaigns
organizations that are fighting for a more effective, train working class leaders and activists needed
democratic, and inclusive union in the context of to enhance the power of all working people and to
the main fight with the bosses—the Farrell Dobbs deepen the reach of the broader labor movement
approach of letting the bureaucratic old guard get we seek.
caught in the cross fire. Realistically, however,
the bureaucracy is far more omnipresent and 4. Building active international workers’ solidarity.
in the way these days than in the early 1930s, so There are a growing number of opportunities to
that there is no hope of avoiding internal union build direct links between workers in different
conflict if any progress is to be made. People are countries as well as engage in solidarity actions at
compelled into struggle by real conditions and home. The Transnationals Information Exchange,
these are mostly shaped by capital and its endless the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, Labor
attempt to regain or improve profitability. These Notes, the U.S./ Labor Education in the Americas
efforts to increase exploitation impact in all areas Project, and other groups make worker-to-worker
of working life including the different position of contacts to foster internationalism.
white and Black, men and women in the workforce
and the union. We build these rank and file groups, 5. Building alternative class-based politics. This would
acts of resistance, and movements on their own include working in and building the Labor Party,
terms, but offer an analysis of the roots of the local independent campaigns with a working class
problem and a bigger vision of how to address them base and politics, and efforts like the living wage
when appropriate. We call this social movement campaigns that promote transitional class politics.
unionism: a unionism that is democratic, acts like a Through these efforts transitional ideas such as
movement and not just an institution, and reaches national health care gain legitimacy and can be
out to other working class and oppressed people to brought back into our daily work in appropriate
build a mass movement for change. ways.

2. B
 uilding the growing number of cross-union, 6. Building socialist organization that relates to all
hence by implication class-wide, transitional of these levels of working class activity as well as
organizations, publications, and projects that help promoting and acting on a broader socialist politics
provide a broader class vision for the work within covering the entire range of social, economic, and
the unions and direct links between activists in political issues. To the degree that a significant
different unions and industries. These include both portion of the members of the socialist organization
union-backed and explicitly oppositional groups. are involved in one or more of the first four areas of
Among them are Labor Notes, Association for activity, the organization will have the roots in the
Union Democracy, Jobs with Justice, strike support life of the activist layer of the organized working
campaigns, and single and social issue campaigns class that lay the basis for bigger developments
where relevant. The on-going organizations and as events unfold. To the extent that others of its
projects, in particular, provide opportunities to raise members are involved in the whole range of issues
transitional ideas like shorter work time as well as a and politics, they can enrich the vision and analysis
living demonstration of aspects of social movement of the labor activists. Overall, socialist organization
unionism. also makes possible the coordinated division of
labor of its activists that is essential to the rank and
3. B
 uilding and allying with community-based working file strategy. It is also the organization that carries
class organizations. We have mentioned workers the transitional ideas to their socialist conclusions;
center as important, but others like the environmental the organization that makes and trains socialists.
justice movement based mainly in communities of
color are also important. The significance of these Each of these points begins with the word “building”
organizations if both that they bring to the overall because the kind of socialist politics we are talking
movement sections of the working class, mostly about involves building movements, struggles, and
people of color, not in unions. Like rank and file organizations that can make a difference. Explicitly
32

socialist education and political work must be done in (Monthly Review, 1999) in the 17th and 18th century
connection with such work in the world of the working England was still the only country with a truly
class. It must be done in a nonsectarian manner in integrated national market based on competition
which socialists from different groups work together and accumulation. Its trade and colonial systems,
where they agree, along with union and community unlike those of France and Spain, ran on capitalist
activists who haven’t yet drawn socialist conclusions. principles of expansion, economic compulsion,
and agrarian “improvement,” i.e., productivity. It
Solidarity, as a revolutionary socialist organization, was John Locke who, in the 17th century, provided
attempts to follow these prescriptions in its labor work the capitalist rationale for expropriating Native
as well as in other areas of political activity. We are a American lands in the name of “improvement,”
multi-tendency organization with a wide range of views basically the same as that for the land enclosures
on many questions, including the rank and file strategy. within England. The distinctly un-English rough
We are a “work in progress” that recognizes that the and tumble culture of the U.S. flows in part from
road to the type of mass democratic revolutionary the decidedly “English” nature of its continental
socialist party (or parties) needed to end the disastrous expansion from the 17th century through the 19th,
rule of capital and usher in the rule of the working class unmitigated by the direct rule of England’s highly
is still a long one. While we don’t claim to have the centralized state even in colonial times.
road map, we do claim to have a compass. It points to
the working class and the means to expand and deepen 6. For this point I am indebted to Deborah Simmons,
class consciousness and organization in such a way as whose “After Chiapas: Aboriginal Land and
to make socialist ideas credible in American society. Resistance in the New North America,” brought
This route leads first to the active rank and file of the this point home to me.
unions and the struggles they are engaged in. If we
carry out this rank and file strategy intelligently, if we 7. Jacqualine Jones, American Work.
can win large numbers of leftists and union activists to
this strategy, and if socialism becomes the outlook of 8. Frederick Engels, “Preface to the American edition
more and more of these activists, we can put socialism of The Condition of the Worjking Class in England,
back on the political agenda in the United States. January 26, 1887, in Kenneth Lapides (ed.), Marx and
Engels on the Trade Unions, International Publishers,
Notes New York, 1990, p. 141.
1. Solidarity, December 1996, United Automobile 9. Jeremey Brecher, Strike!, South End Press, Boston,
Workers, p. 5. 1997, passim.
2. F rederick Engels, The Condition of the Working 10. Sidney Lens, Left, Right, and Center: Conflicting
Class in England, quoted in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Forces in American Labor, Henry Regnery Company,
Theory of Revolution, Volume II: The Politics of Hinsdale, Illinois, 1947, p. 33.
Social Classes, Monthly Review Press, New York,
1978, pp 91-92. 11.Labor’s first major political effort in the 1870s and
1880s was the disgraceful campaign for state and
3. q uoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin, Volume I: Building the national legislation excluding Asian workers from
Party, Pluto Press, 1975, pp. 79-80. the U.S. This occurred prior to the formulation of
the AFL, but was supported by most of the unions
4. A
 ntonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison that would join it and by the otherwise egalitarian
Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, Knights of Labor.
1971, p. 419.
12. Thomas R. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: A History of
5. T he particularly rapacious nature of U.S. capitalism American Labor, Delta Books, 1965, p. 97.
stems in part from its origins in English capitalism.
As Ellen Wood argues in The Origins of Capitalism 13. Brooks, ibid., p. 133.
 33

Glenn Perusek and Kent Worcester, Trade Union

14. J ames Hinton and Richard Hyman, Trade Unions Politics: American Unions and Economic Change,
and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early 1960s-1990s, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1995.
British Communist Party, Pluto Press, London, 1975,
pp. 10, 23. 26. An exception was the Independent Socialist Clubs,
which became the International Socialists (IS) in
15. P
 hilip S. Foner, The History of the Labor Movement 1970, whose members chronicled the events of
in the United States, Vol. 9, International Publishers, that period and played a role in some rank and file
New York, 1991, p. 323. movements. The IS was one of the groups, along
with Workers Power and Socialist Unity, who
16. J ames R. Barrett, “Boring fromm Within and founded Solidarity in 1986. The Sojourner Truth
Without,” in Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Organization and some Maoist groups also had a
Laurie (eds.), Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and small presence in the working class towards the
the Working Class Experience, University of Illinois end of this period.
Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1998, pp. 315-316.

17. T heir success in the amalgamation campaign and

the labor party movement contrasted, according to
the historian Philip Foner, with their general failure
in the fight for racial inclusion and equality. Foner,
op. cit., p. 338.

18. Barrett, op. cit., p. 312.

19. Lens, op. cit., p. 180.

20. L eon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and

the Tasks of the Fourth International, Pioneer
Publishers, New York, 1964, p. 9.

21. F arrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion, Monad Press,

New York, 1972, pp. 41-43.

22. F arrell Dobbs, Teamster Power, Monad Press, New

York, 1973, p. 24.

23. N
 elson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New
York, 1982, p. 51.

24. q uoted in Roger Horowitz, Negro and White

Unite: A Social History of Industrial Unionism
in Meatpacking, 1930-1990, University of Illinois
Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1997, p. 143.

25. A
 n account of this period can be found in Kim
Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American
Unionism, Verso, London and New York, 1998.
For a somehwat different view of this period see
Interested in learning more about organizing with

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