by Michael D. Yates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If neither small-scale proprietors nor peasants are likely agents of
change, the default class, so to speak, the only one which has the
possibility of leading the struggle against capitalism, is the working
class. This class has many advantages in terms of its capacity to wage
war against capital.

First, it is the dominant class everywhere capitalism has had enough
time to assert its rule. The overwhelming tendency of capitalism is to
create wage workers, so while peasants and independent proprietors
live with the possibility of extinction, wage workers are always
expanding in numbers, foolish talk of a “jobless future”
notwithstanding.

Second, and in connection with the first, wage workers are absolutely
essential for capital, the source of the surplus value which is in
turn the source of the profits which fuel capital accumulation. If as
Istvan Meszaros argues, capitalism is the perfection of class society,
the wage workers it creates are the perfect class in terms of
exploitation. They are exploited, so to speak, behind their backs,
behind the veil of seemingly equal market relationships, and what is
more, they are wholly responsible for their own reproduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Specifically, here are some things to consider:

Organized labor (the AFL-CIO in particular) must confront its racist
and anti-left past. We must continue to demand national meetings
within organized labor on these issues, and we must bring them up
whenever we can. We must proudly point out the tremendous achievements
of the left-led unions, not just on nationally and internationally
critical issues such as race and peace but in terms of collective
bargaining agreements and union democracy.
We must promote a left ideology, a worker-friendly way of seeing the
world. We must hammer home the same themes (right to a job, health
care, right to organize, meaningful labor, community and worker
control, a democratic state, a healthy environment, no to war, anti-
imperialism, equality in all human relationships, etc.) over and over
as the right did with its demands from the 1960s on. Workers have to
know why they are organizing. Here we need to promote and develop a
left culture—in all of the arts.
We must focus on democracy and equality. All forms of oppression must
be fought together, not least of all in our unions. And we must insist
on as much democracy as possible in all of our organizations. This is
not to say that leaders shouldn’t lead and be out front in terms of
the demands made on employers and the state but only to say that
change cannot come solely from the top down.
The working class needs to educate itself, and this means that there
must be a lot more labor education. Working people need to embrace a
working class way of looking at the world, an ideology which will give
them direction and a way to judge what is going on in the world. What
if the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions spent some of the millions
they now spend supporting Democratic Party politicians, with precious
little in return, on labor education (classes for every new union
member, full-time education directors, labor radio, etc.)?
International solidarity is a must. U.S. labor does a better job here
than it used to do, but lots more could be done, including real
support for all progressive activities by workers abroad and, most
especially, opposition to U.S. foreign policy, which is invariably
anti-worker in both intent and impact.
Building the left inside and outside the labor movement means building
political independence. And this means keeping class foremost in mind
(broadly construed) and trying to build a labor political presence.
The working class must, and soon, come to grips with the rapid
despoliation of our natural environment. As labor productivity
continues to rise, output must grow more and more rapidly to absorb a
growing labor force. However, under capitalism, this can only mean
more poisons in the water and air, more contaminated food, and more
workplace sickness and injuries. What will be needed is more
labor-intensive, smaller-scale, more localized, and energy-conserving
production. Such a production regime could be combined with demands
for universal health insurance, meaningful job training, generous
leave programs, universal education, and reduced working hours— all
things the working class should champion, with its leaders showing the
way.
Let me conclude by saying that this is not the time to abandon the
working class. Capital is conquering the world, making the earth a
gigantic cesspool of exploitation. What is more, this is happening
pretty much as Marx said it would. His analysis is as relevant today
as it ever was. And his singling out of the working class as the only
viable agent of capital’s demise is as correct now as it was when he
wrote Capital. Workers are the necessary element of the system, and
they are the only force capable of forcing this system into the
dustbin of history. Those who write it off as reactionary or too
nationalistic or racist or sexist or not attuned to the environment
cannot offer us an agent to replace it. Of course, if we look to our
history, we do see that workers have been all of the things those who
dismiss it revolutionary potential. But we also see that workers have
done the most remarkable things too, and have shown the world what
collective solidarity and the action based upon it can do. We must
remember that the class struggle is a long hard slog. But one
well-worth making and the only one capable of leading us toward a
society that can even begin to realize the radical dream: From each
according to ability, to each according to need.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0304yates.htm