Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On December 1st, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) officially voiced their support for a ceasefire in Gaza, becoming the largest labor union to do so. The announcement came from the union’s director, Brandon Mancilla, during a press conference outside the White House. In announcing, the UAW added its name to a growing list of union locals, national chapters, and labor organizations that have called for an end to the genocidal violence still unfolding in the region.

On January 24th, the UAW went on to announce their endorsement of Joe Biden for president during the union’s national Community Action Program (CAP) conference. Thus, in just under two months, UAW managed to call for an end to a genocide whilst simultaneously endorsing a second presidential term for one of its most powerful proponents. And they are not alone. Of the roughly 150 organizations that have signed onto the labor movement petition calling for a ceasefire, nearly one third have also publicly endorsed — or are directly affiliated with a national chapter that has publicly endorsed — Biden for the presidency. Such a gross contradiction cannot be ignored, especially as it represents only the latest example of a broader phenomenon present in much of the American labor movement: capitalist dissonance.

The movement’s shortcomings are well-documented. Much of the labor landscape in the United States — while certainly working to win immediate material improvements for the working class — often fails to provide a more comprehensive framework for revolutionary praxis that looks to a liberated future. The Black Rose Anarchist Federation said it best in their piece ‘The State of Labor: Beyond Unions, But Not Without Them,’ when they described contemporary American unionism as a largely “bureaucratic, service-oriented form” that remains “controlled by a hierarchy of career officials who operate outside the workplace, manage the sale of labor to capital, confine union struggles to narrow and legalistic ‘bread and butter’ issues within their respective industries, and encourage members to pin their hopes to the Democratic Party.” In other words, unions in the United States exist within a heavily enclosed space, one in which their organizational structures and strategic logics, either by external force or internal conviction, do not move past the operational and theoretical limits imposed by the powers that be.

On the domestic front, this can mean a gross lack of worker militancy. Pro-establishment sensibilities make many labor unions averse to necessary direct action and militant resistance in the workplace, especially when financial and legal stability is at stake. This was the case when bureaucratized inaction kept grocery workers across the country from winning tangible post-pandemic gains with their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It exacerbated the ever-growing division between rank-and-filers and leadership in the education sector with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It also prompted members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to begin a petition campaign calling on leadership to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, career organizers and labor leaders are incentivized to chart the path of least resistance, forged by impotent contract negotiations and anti-strike clauses. The same can be said for international solidarity. A top-down labor union in cahoots with the US government may state their disagreement with a foreign policy decision — as many did by signing the ceasefire petition. But their entrenched incentive structures and hierarchical layout will rarely allow for a wielding of labor power that truly beats the state into submission. 

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This is because such radical resistance would put the stability of the managerial labor class at risk. Domestically, opposing a two-party candidate for the presidency means foregoing an otherwise surefire way of securing business-as-usual governance for the next four years. The third-party-facing or non-electoral implications of such opposition would produce a level of uncertainty not compatible with the otherwise predictable “bread and butter” issues, industry-specific bargaining, and established labor relations so characteristic of big unions. On the international scale, the same is true. The stability of managerial labor is feasible only if preceded by that of US capital, as downturns in economic growth and fluctuations in performance can pose a risk to corporate power -- the de facto handler of labor managers -- and radicalize workers into embracing more militant sympathies and radical action as a result. One outstanding threat to such stability is the emergence of left labor movements abroad, as such movements are often characterized by policies that harm US economic interests such as the nationalization of industries and the cutting of economic ties with Western nations. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic can be seen in institutions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center. This agency has a stated mission of “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” Meanwhile, its exploits have heavily involved confrontations with leftist governments in South America, often via funding they provide to opposition groups in countries such as Venezuela.

Highlighting this unfortunate reality is hardly an all-encompassing indictment of the US labor movement. The undeniable upsurge in union activity following the COVID pandemic improved people’s lives and deserves credit. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, “the National Labor Relations Board saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, the highest single-year increase since fiscal year 2016.” The embrace of more militant leadership by unions such as the UAW and the Teamsters has yielded significant victories as well, not to mention the advances made by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in September of last year.

But the imperative of organizers and class strugglers to reshape unions to better facilitate collective liberation remains. This can take many forms, such as bolstering organizing efforts by independent unions like (ex: Trader Joe’s United, Amazon Labor Union), supporting the ongoing work and growth of rank-and-file-oriented unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, and backing the emergence of caucuses and coalitions within established unions that either organize to push their organization in a more radical direction, or ultimately become an independent union that can subsequently hold a candle to its establishment counterpart in terms of size and resource access.

Reformist concessions at the negotiating table and rhetoric restricted to the worker-boss dichotomy do not have to be our daily bread. Worker militancy on the shop floor and a rhetoric of class warfare are more in line with the aims of a revolutionary movement. Moreover, symbolic slaps on the wrist and stern talking to’s — petition signatures, public denouncements — needn’t be the only forms of accountability when our government actively finances and endorses acts of genocide. We can do better. Acknowledging this potential will allow us to transform labor in America, liberating ourselves and each other in the process.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Stalin in Ukraine: A Critical Examination of the Holodomor

By Anton

Republished from the author’s blog.

In this piece, I will examine the situation in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine, 1932–1933, of what is commonly referred to as “Holodomor”.

“Holodomor” refers to the claim of an “intentional man-made famine-genocide in Ukraine caused by Communist collectivization of the Soviet Union” or often times more specifically, of Stalin himself.

To begin, I will start with its origins. Its origins are widely credited to a Welsh man named Gareth Jones. Who was he? Jones before arriving in the Soviet Union in March of 1933, he was in nazi Germany. In an article entitled, “WITH HITLER ACROSS GERMANY” which was published on February 23rd of 1933, he outlines his experience flying on Hitler’s private plane along with other high ranking nazi officials such as Goebbels. In the piece he says of the nazi leaders, “There is nothing hard and Prussian about my fellow-passengers. They could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot nazi myself.” Continuing, after fawning over the nazis, he says regarding Hitler: “There are two Hitlers — the natural boyish Hitler, and the Hitler who is inspired by tremendous national force, a great Hitler. It is the second Hitler who has stirred Germany to an awakening.” In a following article by Jones, he states regarding Goebbels that “He has a remarkably appealing personality, with a sense of humour and a keen brain. One feels at home with him immediately, for he is amusing and likeable.”

After leaving nazi Germany, he arrived in the Soviet Union. After arriving, Gareth Jones reported that “millions are dying of hunger”. In the article he gives multiple anecdotes of unidentified and nameless persons — devoid of any information of any backgrounds, of their class interests, etc — making claims such as “we are waiting for death”, while presenting the entirety of not only Ukraine but the entire Soviet Union, as a monolith.

Following this, on the 13th of April of 1933, Jones expands in this article his claim regarding the cause of the situation. He states “the main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation.”

Today, by the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, collectivization is pushed as being the sole cause of the situation. Despite this, Gareth Jones of all people, even admitted the following factors played a role: natural droughts in some areas, landowning kulaks who he says their “incentive to work disappeared”, “massacre of cattle by peasants not wishing to sacrifice their property for nothing to the collective farm”, and that “prices have dropped most in precisely those products, wheat, timber, oil, butter, & co., which the Soviet Union exports, and least in those products, such as machinery, which the Soviet Union imports”.

In the previously attached article from April 13th of 1933, Jones also predicted that the next harvest will likely be worse and stated, “The outlook for the next harvest is, therefore, black. It is dangerous to make any prophecy, for the miracle of perfect climatic conditions can always make good a part of the unfavourable factors.”

Jones placed the blame mainly on the Soviet policies of collectivization, but still admitted — unlike the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners of today — the previously stated factors. Today if you mention these factors, you are demonized by certain people as being just as bad as the people who deny the holocaust, that you are a genocide denier equal to a holocaust denier.

Here we have the following factors by Jones, aside from collectivization:

1. Drought

2. Exporting grain & co. for industry machinery

3. “Disincentives” among ex-landowners

4. Slaughter of cattle by disgruntled ex-landowners

Before moving forward, it is important to take into account the location and the era of which this situation had occurred. For centuries prior, the entire region had regularly struggled against famines and droughts, including in Ukraine. Due to the economic backwardness of the feudal era, the entire region was largely ill-prepared to overcome these situations. As Jones mentioned, the Soviet Union was importing machinery. This was true. The reason for this was that it was that industrialization, as part of the first five-year plan, was a key to improving the agricultural system and overcoming the famines which had been inherited from the pre-revolutionary era. In a sense, the decision was as follows: “Do not industrialize, save some food, and allow the famines to continue anyway, or do industrialize, sell some food, and try to overcome the famines as quickly as possible”.

According to anti-Communist Nicholas V. Riasanovsky in “A History of Russia”, he states that the Soviet Union went from being the 5th in terms of industrial power, to second, only behind the United States, within the span of the first five-year plan. This bares out in many ways that industrial production was rapidly expanding. The first of which is that after industrialization and the end of the second world war, the famines which had plagued the regions for centuries, had stopped. They did not worsen, or even continue. It is also made clear through the fact that the industry of the Soviet Union was capable of repelling nazi Germany to the point of pushing the Germans not only out of Moscow, but all the way back to Berlin and the Reichstag. Finally, it is also shown by official statistical data of the Soviet Union. Granted that many will claim statistics from the Soviet Union cannot be trusted at all or are entirely fabricated, the fact still remains that even the western capitalist governments such as the United Kingdom will begrudgingly admit that during the era “almost all heavy industries [in the Soviet Union] enjoyed substantial increases in production”.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

Regarding the issue of kulaks having no “incentives” to work, Isaac Mazepa, a hardline nationalist who had nothing but hatred of the Soviet Union & Communism, admitted the same as Gareth. He notes in the excerpt that kulaks and nationalists had first began murdering collective farm workers and Communist officials then eventually adopted a “passive” form of resistance. He openly admits that kulaks and anti-Communists had intentionally and knowingly left ‘whole tracts unsown’ and left “20, 40, and even 50 per cent” of crops to rot in the fields. To reiterate, this is not being claimed by a Soviet government official or a Communist, but by a leader of the Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has stated that “Starting in February 1933, in order to ensure the spring sowing campaign, assistance began to arrive in Ukrainian regions. It was designated for local party leaders and activists as well as for those who worked at the collective farms.” It is in this that we begin to realize the class character of the situation and understand a little more of the truth of the situation. Above, Jones noted that the ex-landowning class refused to work in collectives saying they had ‘no incentive’, then we have Mazepa stating that many refused to sow land and harvest grain in the collectives out of spite, then the Institute claims that the aid was given to what largely amounted to those who worked. In essence, the picture painted by these admissions is exactly what Louis Fischer had stated when he was in Ukraine in 1932, as shown below.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

This begins to paint a picture of exactly who, largely but not exclusively, starved and suffered. Though “the kulaks starved themselves” is regarded as “Stalinist propaganda”, that is effectively something that the “holodomor-genocide” campaign itself has inadvertently through this admitted to be true.

According to the infamous anti-Communist Robert Conquest, he reaffirms that kulaks did in fact slaughter their own cattle out of spite.

“The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine” by Robert Conquest

Though some will undoubtedly claim that since these statistics come from the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 that it must be fake, despite Conquest even saying that the numbers are “supposedly lower than the reality”, it is shown to be evident due to the fact that Soviet documents report that the Soviet Union had to and did import cattle to attempt to replace some of that what the kulaks destroyed.

To summarize this far, it has been well-documented, even among anti-Communists of the early “holodomor-genocide” campaign, that in fact kulaks did refuse to work and actively acted to harm the production of the harvest, kulaks did slaughter their cattle out of spite for the collective farms, natural drought did impact the harvest’s quantity, and industrialization was crucial to stop the famines.

According to Gareth Jones, collectivization was supposedly the main reason for the situation of 1932–1933 and he said that famines would likely continue due to it. By the end of the year of 1931, according to official statistics, the percentage of farms that were collectivized was only at 52.7%. By the end of the year of 1933, the percentage of farms that had been collectivized rose to 65.6%. Had collectivization as a policy, in and of itself, been responsible for the situation, then it would only be inevitable that the situation would not only continue, but intensify and worsen. But it did not. Given that by the end of year of 1937 some 93% of farms had been collectivized, it would only make sense that if the situation from 1932–1933 had been caused by collectivization with only 52.7% of farms being collectives that in 1938 there would be a situation much, much, much worse and intense. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, Jones was unable to witness this fact to prove his theory wrong for himself as he had passed away in 1935.

In addition, and despite some people (i.e., Norman Naimark) saying “The Soviet Union made no efforts to provide relief”, reports show that the Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food aid to Ukraine. In early February of 1933, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk regions each received 3,300 tonnes of food aid. By the end of February, the Dnipropetrovsk region received 20,000 tonnes of food aid, Odessa received around 13,000 tonnes, and Kharkiv received almost 5,000 tonnes. Reports document that from February to June in the year of 1933, over 500,000 tonnes of food aid was sent to Ukraine.

According to archived documents, Joseph Stalin himself, along with Molotov, personally took it upon themselves to scold Joseph Vareikis, First Secretary of the Voronezh Regional Committee of the CPSU, on March 31st of 1933 for his objection to sending 26,000 pounds of potatoes to the Donbass region of Ukraine. These behaviors including, but not limited to, sending food aid and at that personally intervening to ensure food aid is being given, is fairly odd or strange behavior for, as the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners would say, a “genocidal maniac who wanted to kill Ukrainians”. Truly, there was no reason for Stalin to go as far as personally intervening in that situation as he did to ensure food aid was sent to Ukraine if he was genuinely trying to create a famine to crush Ukraine.

Regarding the issue of “intent”, on March 16th of 1932 the Politburo stated that “The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow in Ukraine.”

This is one piece of conflicting evidence among many that was presented to Stalin and others of the Central Soviet Authorities. Conflicting reports of whether or not there was an issue, and if so to what degree or totality, by regional members and others in Ukraine casts doubt on the claim that Stalin was aware of the situation or that he was orchestrating it. Though the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin were suspicious of it being worse than some had claimed, they still pushed for them to be careful and cautious.

Following that, Stalin wrote on the 2nd of July of 1932 to Lazar Kaganovich and to Molotov regarding Kosior and Vlas Chubar stating “Give the most serious attention to the Ukraine. Chubar’s corruptness and opportunistic essence and Kosior’s rotten diplomacy…and criminally frivolous attitude toward his job will eventually ruin Ukraine. These comrades are not up to the challenge of leading the Ukraine today.” By this point, it is without a doubt that Stalin is aware of the situation and automatically began to critically evaluate the situation and isolate the problems.

Shortly after this, Stalin sent another letter to Kaganovich on July 17th and mentions to Mr. Lazar that “These shortcomings are a great economic (and political!) danger to us”. The claim that this situation had been an intentional and man-made situation on behalf of Stalin & co. does not square up with this. For if it was, Stalin would not be concerned of these “shortcomings” and would certainly not be viewing them as ‘dangerous’ to them.

It is at this point that it is also worth noting the distinction between squarely blaming Communism & collectivization for the situation and between identifying elements or persons within the government as being responsible in part for the situation, in the way that Stalin identified specifically Kosior and Chubar and specific failures produced by them that in part led to this situation being able to develop under their watch.

By August 1st of 1932, Stalin wrote, and quite poignantly & savagely, regarding Kosior that “Instead of leading the raions, Kosior keeps maneuvering between the directives of the CC CPSU and the demands of the raikoms — and now he has maneuvered himself into a total mess”. Stalin continues, ripping into Chubar, stating that “Chubar is no leader. Things are bad with the GPU […] Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may well lose Ukraine.”

At this point, it becomes beyond evident that Stalin is now aware of the situation, is actively concerned about the situation and worried, is actively identifying the problems that have allowed this situation to unfold as it did, and began taking steps to begin to rectify the situation.

The situation 1932–1933 being viewed as a “genocide to crush Ukrainian nationalist resistance” is further undercut by the fact that the situation encompassed the entire union in varying levels and degrees. Nevertheless of the varying intensities, it included but was not limited to, Siberia, the Volga, the Kazakh ASSR, etc. With that being said, it was then not a man-made famine from the start, as some pretend, to “crush Ukraine” nor was it manipulated and weaponized to do the same. We’ve seen the true cause of the situation, that the food aid sent from other regions less impacted to more impacted regions such as Ukraine, and that the Georgian leader Stalin, the “evil Russian chauvinist who wanted to crush Ukraine”, personally intervened to make sure food aid was being sent when a regional official within the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic objected to sending aid to Ukrainians in Donbass.

The situation in 1932–1933 did lead to suffering and some death. But the level of which has been grossly inflated and exaggerated, disrespecting the people who actually did suffer and perish — it belittles the truth of the situation. The estimated range of the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners ranges from 3 million to as high as 12 million, some even higher, like Conquest alleging 14 million. Regarding these tolls, “starved to death” is not always accurate or truthful — intentionally or not. At the same time, there was a record outbreak of over a million cases of typhus and typhoid fever, a dramatic spike from the prior years and higher than in the rest of the Soviet Union. This resulted in a number of people dying due to the diseases, but not from hunger. However among certain historians, it is not differentiated, or even often noted — intentionally or not. That in fact many of the people who “starved to death” were not all people who did.

In 2010, in the same ruling that the Court of Appeals of Kiev decided to qualify the situation as a ‘genocide against Ukraine, to crush Ukraine’, they also made some noteworthy admissions. In it they claimed that 10,063,000 people had “died”. However, their qualification for a “death” is rather unusual. They note that 6,122,000 of the “deaths” are unborn people. Not even unborn babies that did not make it, but a person never born, a fetus never even conceived. Approximately 60% of the “deaths” were not even people that were even born! This is unimaginably childish logic, equivalent to saying one person being murdered is actually 10 people being murdered because that one person being murdered may have had kids and they may have had kids too, etc. According with the ruling, that leaves slightly under 4,000,000 people they claim were actually alive. Of the usual death toll claimed by the campaigners, the Ukrainian court’s is only a third. Meanwhile the Soviet archives estimate that around 1,800,000 people died.

The death toll alleged by the Ukrainian court was approximately 4,000,000 and the Soviet archives estimated 1,800,000 deaths during this period, which includes from the typhus outbreak, typhoid fever, etc. The number of deaths during this period being so significantly lower than what today’s “holodomor-genocide” campaigners claim may be relevant to the fact that Jones himself had admitted on May 13th of 1933 that he never actually saw any dead people. Jones stated that “Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true…” continuing, he implies that the reason he didn’t see anybody who had died during his entire trip that all of the people who had died were buried before he had the chance to witness a single person who had died.

For whatever reasons, since the 1930’s, and even to this day, the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners repeatedly and constantly use photos from regions and eras which are not 1932–1933 Ukraine. Beyond simply ordinary people who falsely attribute a photo, whether it is intentional or not, it is also “journalists” and other so-called “experts” such as Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in Ukraine in an article she wrote for the British tabloid called “The Times”

Unfortunately, and for some reason, this is a reoccurrence throughout the campaign.

Anne Reid fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in an article she wrote for the American rag “The Wall Street Journal”

Above all, the misusing of photos is truly horrific and reckless. In the carelessness, or even in cases of intentional deceitfulness, the “holodomor-genocide” campaign citing photos from the Volga in the 1920’s or using photos from other famines disrespects the people who had actually perished or suffered in the photos we see.

From the anti-Communist “Black Book of Communism” where it openly admits that Ukrainian nationalists conducted pogroms and sought to create an ethno-state and purge ethnic minorities

Before moving forward, we must address what and who the “Ukrainian nationalists” were, that the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin wanted to allegedly “genocide”. One major manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism existed in form of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) — which eventually extended itself into the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, of which both collaborated with nazi Germany and actively participated in atrocities of the holocaust such as the massacre of Babi Yar. Before and during the Soviet revolution, before the OUN was formed, the Ukrainian nationalists perpetuated some of the most horrific pogroms of the early 20th century.

Website of the oun-upa.national.org.ua with bios of various leading members. In this bio, it states that Mykhailo Kolodzinsky was trained in fascist Italy — in 1932 through 1933 — along with the fascist Croatian Ustaše. This was in fact at the will of the National Executive of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

The Ukrainian nationalists had connections and ties to among other fascist organizations and leaders, the Italian fascist regime.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

The exact nature, the characteristic of what this rabid nationalism entails is fairly easy to understand — a similar variant of the nationalism by the nazi Germans.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

This becomes much more clear and visible after 1932–1933 in which the Ukrainian nationalists are emboldened by the rise of Hitler in 1933 and become more violent and destructive. As a matter of fact, through analyzing “Ukrainian nationalism” and what ideology came with it (fascism, pursuing an ethno-state, etc) and the acts of the Ukrainian nationalists themselves (i.e., violent pogroms against ethnic minorities, aiding nazi Germany in committing crimes in the holocaust, etc) further bares out the truth of what “Ukrainian nationalism” exactly entails and means and what the people who bore that identity did and believed in.

Prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Eugene Onatskyi, regarding what “Ukrainian nationalism” actually means. From “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist : Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” By Grzegorz Rossolinsk

Though the disdain for this nationalist movement by the Soviet authorities is brought up by “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, it is presented as if it was only the Ukrainian nationalists who received disdain. In fact, all sectarian ethnic nationalisms were treated in kind. German nazi collaborator Russian nationalist General Vlasov, in a similar sense to the Ukrainian nationalists, viewed Stalin and in fact Communism as being evil and the greatest threat to “his people”. In the civil war, the White Armies were largely a rabid Russian nationalist movement that the Red Army obliterated. When the White Armies failed, younger nationalists turned to German-style fascism; in Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the Russian Fascist Party were extremely nationalistic. Rodzaevsky was executed in August of 1946 after he voluntarily handed himself over to Soviet authorities after he had previously “fled” to land occupied by imperial Japan. Stalin, who was Georgian, also maintained an equal hostility to the rabid Georgian nationalist movement. It was Georgian Stalin who led the Soviet forces against the Georgian nationalist “August uprising” in 1924 and it was under Stalin that the rabid Georgian nationalist leaders were executed for their nationalistic treason.

The Black Book of Communism (page 231) counts executed and gulaged Russian nationalist nazi collaborators as ‘victims of Communism’

The idea that Stalin was uniquely hostile to bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism becomes less and less plausible as you examine Stalin’s hostility to the rest of the sectarian bourgeois nationalist movements, including the Georgian bourgeois nationalist movement.

Regarding the issue of “genocide”, we must first define it. According to the Genocide Convention of the U.N., it states “genocide” as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. In order for something to be qualified as a “genocide”, it must be that there was intent to kill or otherwise destroy said groups. That is more like the European colonialists invading the Americas and telling the Native people, such as through the Spanish requirement of 1513, that they must “submit, or we will kill everybody”, as they did. As noted above, the situation had been created through various factors, none of which were intentional by means of the Soviet Union, but of which a couple included intentional acts by the Ukrainian landowning class & Ukrainian nationalists — again, even admitted by Jones himself. It’s also been established that the Central Soviet Authorities had sent massive amounts of food aid to Ukraine, and that Joseph Stalin himself intervened against regional authorities of the Russian region in order to ensure food was taken from Russians and being given to Ukrainians.

The issue of “genocide” specifically, as a qualifying term, the vast majority of countries on this planet have rejected it. Of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, the vast majority reject the “holodomor-genocide” claim. Of the ones that do, let’s examine a few of them briefly. You have the U.S. which genocided millions of Native peoples in the Americas, Australia which genocided hundreds of thousands of Native peoples, Belgium which committed a genocide in the “Congo Free State”, Canada which genocided Native people, Israel which is currently genociding Palestinians, etc. Regardless, even with these genocidal countries accepting the “holodomor-genocide” campaign, it remains that the vast majority of the countries of the planet do not.

Upon analyzing and breaking down the “holodomor-genocide” campaign’s theory and the implications, it becomes much more visible as a violent and dangerous campaign. The campaign claims that Stalin fighting bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalism was tantamount to genocide. However, when you break down this logic and apply it elsewhere, it becomes more visible as the foolish logic that it is. If Stalin destroying rabid bourgeois nationalism that sought to create an ethno-state in Ukraine, which was part of the Ukrainian society, was “genocide”, then what would that mean for the crushing of bourgeois German nazi nationalism, when that was part of German society and resulted “in part” the destruction of some Germans? This logic would then also foolishly and wrongly interpret, for instance, the Haitian revolution as “white genocide” since it targeted and destroyed the French colonialists. And so forth. The notion that any of these can be considered “genocide” is far from being logical or sensible.

The Central Soviet Authorities had stated on December 14th of 1932 that Ukrainization policy had inadvertently given legal cover to rabid bourgeois nationalist elements to organize anti-Soviet agitation, treason. In the decree which is cited by the campaigners as proof of a secret conspiracy to crush Ukraine, if you actually read it, it states that they recommend them “expel petliurites” (the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who had conducted pogroms under Symon Petliura) and others, and for them to carefully supervise the implementation of Ukrainization as to not embolden the rabid elements. It also states the following: “…instead of the correct Bolshevik implementation of nationality policy, “ukrainization” was carried out mechanically in a number of raions of Ukraine, failing to take into consideration the peculiarities of every raion and without the meticulous selection of Bolshevik cadres. This made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, petliurites and others to create their legal facades and counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

The Black Book of Communism openly portraying the OUN/UPA terrorists who participated in murdering Jews with the nazis such as in Babi Yar, where they set up the syrets concentration camp as heroic victims who fought against the “Communists and Jews”

This was evidently true as the fascist OUN had formed and began to rise under this policy which bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalists had exploited. These elements of Ukrainian society, the bourgeois-nationalist elements, that eventually collaborated with nazi Germany and sought to create an ethno-state had themselves proven in retrospect that Stalin was correct to be critical of them and their nationalist movement. They were not going to be happy until an ethno-state was created. This is the so-called “national liberation” movement of the Ukrainian nationalists which Stalin allegedly crushed, though the Ukrainian nationalists and the OUN persisted. This further demonstrates, in retrospect, that the so-called “national liberation” of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who are portrayed as victims of “Stalinist repression” are less like a legitimate national liberation movement such as that of the Haitian national liberation and more like the bourgeois-nationalist nazi German movement which sought a distorted and truly fucked concept of “national liberation”, to create an ethno-state and remove ethnic minorities.

The “holodomor-genocide” claim of today is even more detached from reality than the campaigners of decades prior. The ethnic interpretation of the situation 1932–1933, and especially of the magnitude they claim and in claiming that it was an intentional genocide to crush Ukrainians, is far from the truth. The conception that a famine was created as a weapon to “stop Ukrainian national liberation”, above all, makes the assertion that the rabid Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN & co. were in fact “liberators”, good people, not evil like the German nazis. OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko stated in July of 1941 that he supports “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.

The rehabilitation of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists such as the OUN & UPA is an inevitable consequence and implication of accepting the “holodomor-genocide” claim. This rehabilitation should be rejected, forcefully. The perception of the Ukrainian nationalists as being “heroes” rather than, as they actually were, pogromists and nazi collaborators who committed some of the most horrific crimes in the holocaust and sought to create an ethno-state, is highly objectionable. The “holodomor-genocide” claim, de facto, asserts that these people are “victims”. It’s at this moment that we begin to see exactly why the comparison between the “holodomor-genocide” and the holocaust is so incredibly insidious. The holocaust was the large-scale systematic killing of ethnic minorities and other groups of peoples, especially Jewish people, by the German nazis and their collaborators, of which included the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Meanwhile the “holodomor-genocide” campaign claims that the Ukrainian nationalists who perpetuated pogroms before the 1930’s and the crimes of the holocaust in the 1940’s are the same as their victims who they massacred in the holocaust.

In summary, we have established the following facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:

1. Natural drought played a role in creating the situation

2. Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns

3. Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible

4. The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended

5. Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities

6. Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists anymore than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising

7. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state

8. Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food

9. The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians

10. The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities

11. The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”

The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts. Due to the nature of this perspective, I am without a doubt positive that words will be placed in my mouth alluding to me claiming it was utopian or something of that nature, but I would just like to categorically say that during this period some people did die. Though we’ve established that a large portion of the people who did die were people from the ex-landowning class who refused to work or actively pursued actions to sabotage the harvest and lessen the production of food, which was unfortunately largely successful, as it played a major role in creating this situation, that did result in some innocent people suffering and dying. In my view, the situation of 1932–1933 was tragic, but the false claims, notions, and the ensuing logic of the “holodomor-genocide” campaign should be vehemently rejected.

Revolution in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

By Atlee McFellin

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” [1]  His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented.  To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. [2] Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”  That “new middle class” is not the “irreversible feature of the system” he thought it would be though.  Despite his misplaced optimism, rather than an electoral path to socialism, Harrington argued for the proliferation of “little republics” across the so-called USA, looking to Antonio Gramsci on a cross-class “historic bloc” and the Paris Commune of 1871. [3]

This Paris Commune was catalyzed in defense against an outside force invading the city to restore the power of a monarch, a dictator supposedly appointed by god.  The commune in Paris sprung from socialist clubs that had formed throughout the city, and where feminists had been building internal systems of mutual aid for decades. [4] They learned from a similar experience during the decline and fall of the republic twenty years earlier.  Marx referred to those socialist clubs in 1851 as “constituent assemblies” constituting a “proletarian commune” to sustain general strikes as a systemic alternative during that republic’s fall to dictatorship. [5] Back then though, the left remained dependent on electoral approaches until it was too late.  Twenty years would pass before that dictator was overthrown and the Paris Commune of 1871 was born.

When it came to the German left against Hitler and the Nazis, Harrington criticized socialist strategy that solely relied on the republic and its supposed capacity for managed capitalist development.  Throughout Germany there were also autonomous councils in communities and workplaces, formed by people in both the socialist and communist parties who rejected orthodoxy in recognition of the threat posed by fascism.  Though these councils were identical to the socialist clubs in France, they also looked to the successful 1917 revolution in Russia, similarly catalyzed in defense against violent forces who sought to restore the power of a monarch. 

 Against the Nazis and using the Russian word for council, this approach was best described as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany,” socialist clubs as dual power with inherent mutual aid to sustain general strikes as another republic declined and fell. [6] Harrington never wrote on this particular commune against Nazi fascism, but whether it is a little republic, soviet, assembly, council, or socialist club, they were all meant as systemic alternative, dual power in the midst of crisis.  

But this is just European history.  No matter how important it is to learn from these past struggles, our fight against resurgent fascism is taking place in the settler colony known as the USA.  However, we can relate these European movements to historical forms of Black abolitionist mutual aid, communes, and the solidarity economy along with contemporary queer, feminist, Indigenous perspectives on communal resistance.  

Going back to at least 1780, Black communities in both the north and south pooled resources, financial and otherwise, democratically deciding how to sustain the movement for abolition, most often led by women.  In some cases, this resulted in the formation of rural communes for raids on slave plantations.  Over time and up to the first decades of the twentieth century, “mutual aid societies” spread across the country.  These democratic organizations operated their own internal solidarity funds so members could support one another and from which the nation’s first Black church, first Black labor union, and first movement for Black reparations were born. [7]  They were like European socialist clubs, but far more sophisticated.

This important yet still largely hidden history informed Ella Baker’s work running the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League from 1930-1933.  As a chapter-based organization, each would first form a council made up of young Black leaders.  These councils sought to identify what critical infrastructure was needed in the community to then learn enough about cooperative development and solidarity economics to turn those ideas into reality. [8] Importantly, many of these chapters were located in the Jim Crow south.  The YNCL practiced a socialist strategy meant to help communities survive conditions of racial segregation and white supremacist violence, conditions that inspired Hitler himself. [9]

Hitler was also inspired by the genocidal origins of the USA, the “cult of the covenant” at the core of our settler colonialism. [10]  As such, Nazi fascism sought Lebensraum or “living space” in pursuit of their own version of the American Dream as “summons to empire” for war and holocaust. [11]  Though fighting for bread and butter issues is imperative, especially in these times of profound crisis, the dream of universal middle classes masks a genocidal settler nightmare.  The actual alternative to resurgent fascism is not a more inclusive settler colony, but the proliferation of communal societies like what has repeatedly emerged from within sites of Indigenous resistance like Standing Rock, i.e. “caretaking relations, not American dreaming.” [12]

Constant warnings of constitutional crisis means that defeating fascism at the ballot box is essential, but also fundamentally insufficient for the cause of multi-racial democracy and socialism.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 could lead us down the path of a possible quasi-constitutional fascist coup.  Without our own systemic alternative as dual power rooted in mutual aid and the solidarity economy, including to sustain an uprising, we could again be dependent upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military to supposedly save democracy in a “color revolution” inspired by the CIA. [13]  Instead of repeating the mistakes made as other republics declined and fell, we have the chance to build an alternative as communes of resistance in process of formation from the midst of crisis. 

References

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303 ; Ibid, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Verso Press, 2019).

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, (New York: Macmillan Press LTD, 1976). P. 208-215 ; Ibid, Socialism: Past and Future, (New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1989). P. 53-59.

 Ibid, 275-277.

Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24-26 and 130.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, (New York: International Publishers, 2018). P. 83 and 98-99.

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 175.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). P. 27-47.

Ibid, 112-125.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). P. 86-88.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 13-14, 28, and 325.

Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289. ; Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 24-38.

Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava, “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” The Intercept, August 11th, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/08/11/trump-november-2020-election/

Organizing in the “Inferno of Misery”: Jewish Workers’ Struggles in Britain Between 1900 and 1914

By Panos Theodoropoulos

Introduction: Why study the history of migrant workers’ movements?

When Rudolf Rocker, one of the central theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, began exploring London in the turn of the 20th century, he witnessed “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery” (Rocker 2005: 25). Eager to get acquainted with the workers and the movements in his new city, he started going to the East End to attend meetings and socialize with fellow migrant socialists and anarchists. Many recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had congregated in the area, which was “a slum district”. He remembers “a church at the corner of Commercial Street, at the Spitalfields end, where at any time of the day you would see a crowd of dirty, lousy men and women, looking like scarecrows, in filthy rags, with dull hopeless faces, scratching themselves. That was why it was called Itchy Park”. The Jewish working-class Londoners who attended these meetings, primitive cells of what would soon become a powerful migrant trade union movement, “looked sad and worn; they were sweatshop workers, badly paid, and half starved” (Rocker 2005: 26-27). The destitution he saw in London led him to conclude that, contrary to popular beliefs that revolution is triggered by a worsening of living conditions, “there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise. Those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt” (2005: 25). A social movement in these locations, targeting these specific circumstances, had to be based on more than abstract theory. It had to directly fight for the improvement of living conditions, while at the same time providing resources for the masses of Jewish (and English) workers to expand their horizons, emerge from the alienation of daily life, and imagine alternatives. This is a conclusion that remains relevant today.

The history of migrant workers’ movements in the United Kingdom remains, largely, unwritten. Plenty of books have been written focusing on specific ethnic groups or on specific time periods. However, no singular book or study exists that specifically surveys the historical struggles of migrant populations as migrants and as workers, attempting to draw connections between the experiences of different ethnic migrant groups and, ultimately, lessons for movements wishing to organize with migrant and marginalized people today. This is, however, an incredibly important task, as these groups not only had been organizing along broadly intersectional lines long before these concepts were formally introduced in the 1970s, but also because their methods of organizing offer fruitful suggestions for working around the effects of precarity, transience, alienation, language and cultural difficulties, and disorientation that frequently debilitate attempts by migrant solidarity movements to organize (with) these populations. Broadly speaking, despite the innumerable differences that stem from different ethnic groups’ cultural backgrounds, positions within the labor and social hierarchy in their host countries, locations on the gradient of whiteness, etc., all the migrant groups that managed to organize themselves in the UK did so by acting on at least three crucial ideas.

Primarily, they understood that, rather than fight for acceptance within the dominant structures of society and trade unions (which were often outright racist and exclusionary), their exclusion necessitated their autonomous organization. Critically, this autonomy emerges historically not as detrimental, but actually beneficial to, the empowerment of the working class as a whole. Secondarily, their autonomy and continuous empowerment depended on their physical embeddedness within the communities that they represented. Third, this embeddedness, and their wider analysis and praxis, had to extend beyond the narrow domain of class politics; they understood that cultural symbols play a key role in maintaining the illusion of disempowerment amongst oppressed groups, and thereby operationalized a broad, non-economistic conception of capitalism which recognized its multi-faceted, culturally dependent character. The example of the Jewish workers’ activities in London, specifically those coalitions that were established around the Arbeter Fraint group, is one small but inspiring instance of how a completely marginalized, hated, divided, and alienated mass of migrant workers managed to not only disprove Rocker’s initial pessimism, but also support the very same British local working class that excluded them.

The wider context: Struggling in a hostile environment

While migrant worker groups in the UK during the 1900s varied in countries of origin, occupations, and specific experiences, they shared some characteristics in terms of the social exclusion and exploitation they faced upon arrival. These characteristics bear significant resemblance to those experienced by migrant populations currently in the West. In the early 1900s, minorities in the UK consisted mainly of West Indian, Caribbean, Asian and Irish populations, all of which arrived through the networks fostered by Britain’s expansive imperial activities (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Freyer 1984). Migration in Britain is deeply historically structured by imperialism, and the role of Empire cannot be ignored when analyzing migrant lives and trajectories. As such, the experiences of migrant groups have been determined by an interplay of both the demands of British capitalism and an imperial ideology of racial difference and superiority, which enabled and justified their exploitation and socio-political exclusion (Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994).

Migrants were swiftly inserted in those occupations that demanded workers or were otherwise kept as a reserve army of labor until demand rose again (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994). Located in the most insecure and exploitable segments of the labor hierarchy, a variety of interrelated factors impeded migrants’ chances of joining trade unions. Perhaps the biggest contributor to this were the attitudes of the British trade union movement, which was active in anti-immigration campaigns under the claim that migrant workers represented “unfair competition” to British labor. Lack of familiarity with the English language and culture, spatial segregation, de-skilling, and the unwillingness of many bosses to employ migrants pushed them to the lowest paid and most exploitative occupations; importantly, these occupations were usually not covered by the union victories that had been gained by many British workers in the course of their historic struggle. These same characteristics, alongside a necessity to constantly fight for one’s survival stemming from their precarious circumstances, were also a contributor in migrant workers being used as strike-breakers in various instances of labor struggle. For example, when the skilled tailors from the West End of London went on strike in 1911, the owners turned to Jewish labor from small and mostly unskilled East End workshops (Rocker 2005: 127).

These factors combined in making it easy for unions, bosses, British workers, the local media and politicians to draw a fictitious connection between migrant labor and the threat to established labor rights, which was used to establish and expand a climate of hostility and exclusion that further cemented migrant disempowerment, and therefore, exploitability (Fishman 2004). Migrant workers mostly found themselves outside the organizing priorities of the major unions and were regularly directly blamed for the wider economic difficulties of the British working class. Their exclusion from mainstream unions combined with the aforementioned cultural and subjective factors to create a highly vulnerable and exploitable population.

The Arbeter Fraint and the organization of London’s Jewish workers

Williams (1980) locates the beginning of significant numbers of Jewish migration to the UK in the 1840. However, in response to an increase in pogroms and wider anti-Semitic activity in Europe, Jewish migration to the UK peaked between the 1880s and 1914, with the Jewish population increasing from 60,000 to approximately 300,000 (Virdee 2014). Between 1881 and 1882 more than 225,000 Jewish families fled Russia, with many settling in the East End of London (Fishman 2004). Newly arrived Jewish workers were predominantly absorbed by the tailoring industry, finding themselves in a complex network of independent workshops, many of which were sweatshops (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980;). Over time, Jewish workers became fully connected in popular imagination to these workshops, which further curtailed their chances of finding other types of employment (Fishman 2004). Caught between being heavily exploited by wealthier members of their own communities, known as Masters (the owners of the workshops), and being excluded from most significant trade unions while facing intense racism from wider society, Jewish workers were forced to organize themselves and struggle for both labor and social rights (Virdee 2014; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980). In so doing, they engaged with and directly aided the wider working-class movement, with individuals such Eleanor Marx playing key organizing roles in the social struggles of the time.

The competition inherent in capitalism combined with the general poverty of migrant Jewish communities to create a constant race to the bottom in terms of working conditions in the workshops. Rocker (2005: 89) writes that “the clothing industry in the East End was run by hundreds of small master-tailors who were sub-contractors for the big firms in the City and the West End. In order to get the contract they under-bid each other mercilessly, thus creating their own hell. They passed that hell on of course to their workers. The new immigrants, the greeners, as they were called, who had just arrived from Poland or Russia or Romania and had to earn their bread, went to these small sweatshops to learn to be pressers of machinists. They started as under-pressers or plain-machinists, working for about six months for a skilled presser or machinist, doing the first preparatory work for him, till they learned to work for themselves.”

To further complicate matters, the skilled presser or machinist was usually responsible for paying and organizing the labor of the workers under him, while he was being paid directly by the master. This is illustrative of the wider chain of relationships that created the adverse labor conditions experienced by Jewish workers: large firms and industries, themselves engaged in competition with each other, constantly demanded lower prices from masters; therefore, masters demanded more work for less remuneration by the skilled workers; who, in turn, demanded the same from the “unskilled” workers under them. Jewish workers, especially the newer arrivals, were poor and willing to accept whatever conditions saved them from starvation. According to Rocker, “the evil of the sweating system was that it was so contrived that each drove everybody else” (2005: 89). There were frequent attempts by individual workers to amass the money required to open a private workshop and join the ranks of the masters; however, this proved very difficult and only a few managed to sustain their businesses. Most workers remained workers (Fishman 2004).

The unionization of Jewish workers was rendered difficult due to a variety of factors, including the fact that organizers had to contend with the exploitation stemming from within the community as well as hostility from without. Class divisions quickly solidified as Jews were simultaneously excluded from the wider labor market and therefore pushed to find work within their communities (Buckman 2008; Fishman 2004). Jewish masters were adept at forming coalitions amongst themselves when threatened by strike or other activity and were supported by other industrialists (Williams 1980; Buckman 1980). To further problematize matters, early arrivals were unacquainted with the traditions of English unionism, exasperating local organizers when they attempted to engage with them (Buckman 1980). Furthermore, the structure of the industry meant that there was a high degree of mobility; workers moved between sweatshops as well as gradually gaining skills and rising up the hierarchy. The oscillations of the trade meant that during one season there could be a large pool of workers ready for union activity, while in the next season the majority of those workers could be unemployed (Rocker 2005; Buckman 1980). This precarity also acted as a barrier to workers’ readiness to engage in potentially risky oppositional actions. However, the most significant barrier to Jews joining unions were the unions themselves: despite some notable exceptions, generally unions were unwilling to work with Jews and were active campaigners in favor of stricter migration controls (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005).

Despite the difficulties, the exclusion and exploitation experienced at all levels of social existence led Jewish workers to approach some local unions and to eventually begin organizing themselves autonomously as migrant workers (Virdee 2014; Buckman 1980). The efforts of the Socialist League, which included the Jewess Eleanor Marx in its ranks, were instrumental in providing an initial impetus for organization as well as material support. The Socialist League was one of the few British socialist formations of the late 19th century that explicitly rejected refused to subscribe to a myopic, white and British-centered view of the working class, instead promoting internationalism, anti-imperialism and migrant solidarity (Virdee 2017; 2014). The Jewish working class, which already had members with highly developed radical ideas, resonated with the SL and began organizing. Crucially, the SL managed to forge alliances between Jewish and British elements of the working class. In 1889, for example, the Socialist League pressured for an alliance between the Leeds Jewish tailors and the anti-immigration Gasworkers union. The tailors joined the struggle for the eight-hour movement, which culminated in a successful strike that won the demands within days (Buckman 1980). This, and subsequent victories by the Leeds Jewish Tailor’s Union made a significant contribution in the battle against anti-immigrant sentiment, while at the same time advancing the interests of the wider working class in the UK (Buckman 2008).

The years between 1900 and 1914 also witnessed a period of intense organizing and victories by Jewish workers in the East End of London (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The first seeds for radical activity in the region had been sown in the 1870s through the establishment of the Hebrew Socialist Union, led by Aron Lieberman (Fishman 2004). The HSU was involved in a plethora of campaigns, its main purpose being to spread socialism amongst the Jewish working class and assist in their organization in trade unions. While the group was short lived, it set the stage for subsequent actions. A variety of Jewish unions began emerging in the late 19th century, including “the Hebrew Cabinet Makers’ Society, Stick and Cane Dressers’ Union, International Furriers’ Society, Tailor Machinist union, Tailors and Pressers Union, Amalgamated Lasters; Society, United Cap Makers’ Society and International Journeymen Boot Finishers’ Society” (Fishman 2004).

In the early 1900s, a group of Jewish radicals and anarchists centered around the radical Yiddish newspaper Arbeter Fraint expanded these attempts (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The existence of the newspaper was fundamental in unionization processes because, since most British trade unions were unwilling to organize Jews, it was imperative that they organize themselves. For that, political education was of paramount importance (Rocker 2005). The paper’s readership increased significantly through the years, gaining thousands of readers and becoming firmly embedded in both local and international movement circles. Most importantly, it was read and supported by the working-class, with Rocker (2005: 96) remembering that “young girls who slaved in the sweatshops of a weekly pittance of ten or twelve shillings, literally took the bread from their mouths to give the movement a few pennies.”

In 1906, the Arbeter Fraint group opened a social club in Jubilee Street which was to play a major role in the East End Jewish workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). It quickly became one of the centers of community life, organizing events that connected Jewish workers to their culture as well as maintaining a commitment to political education and providing meeting spaces for workers to organize. It consisted of an 800-capacity gallery, some halls with space for meetings and various events, and a library. It offered classes in English, history and sociology, as well as hosting a range of cultural events, including debates, live music, and poetry readings. Importantly, most of these provisions were open for everyone regardless of club membership or background (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). An example of the club’s activities which illustrates the organizers’ priorities is the annual trip to Epping Forest, regarded by many workers as “the highlight of their lives, in contrast with the everyday gloom and drudgery of the sweatshop” (Fishman 2004: 262). People would bring their families, and, following a long walk, would then congregate to listen to Rocker lecture on topics ranging from literature to history and politics (Fishman 2004). Rather than simply viewing workers as faceless units in need of strict labor organization, emphasis was placed on substantial empowerment, experience of beauty, and the destruction of the alienation experienced in the course of their daily occupations.

The constant agitation and work inside the community eventually led to a wave of militant union activity, extending beyond the narrow spaces of East London (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). At its peak, Rocker (2005: 6) claims that the East End had “the most powerful migrant movement that had developed in Britain.” Years of political education had resulted in the mass meetings of the Federation of Jewish Anarchists being attended by “five, six, seven thousand people” (2005: 6). Crucially, and in contrast with many other immigrant communities, Jewish immigrants had no intention of returning to their countries of origin, which resulted in them becoming fully invested in the improvement of their daily lives in the UK (Rocker 2005). When, in 1912, the skilled tailors of the West End commenced strike activity, the Arbeter Fraint group used the opportunity to agitate for a general strike amongst East End Jewish tailors, many of whom were being used as strike breakers.

Thousands attended the general meeting that was called, and more than 13,000 workers participated in the strike in the first 2 days. They attempted to permanently do away with the sweatshop system, demanding a normal working day, the abolition of overtime, higher wages, and the closure of small workshops with unhygienic conditions. As this community was not wealthy, many participated in the strike without strike pay. They forged alliances with the contemporaneous London dockers’ strike and held joint meetings and demonstrations. The strike was ultimately successful after 3 weeks: the masters conceded shorter hours, no piecework, better conditions, and committed to only employ unionized workers. Emerging victorious, the Jewish workers didn’t stop there: seeing the dockers’ strike drag on, they decided to ask Jewish families to care for the dockers’ children, and over 300 were taken in Jewish homes. This strike represented the culmination of decades of organizing, its results ranging far beyond narrow material gains: it succeeded in abolishing sweatshops in the East End, while at the same time challenging the dominant British perceptions about Jewish workers and establishing strong bonds of solidarity with the local workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004).

Between the East End and the future

This wave of radicalization ultimately faded away with the onset of the First World War and the British government’s crackdown on all radical activity. Rocker and many of his comrades were imprisoned, and the legacy of the East End Jewish workers was largely forgotten as it was erased from most accounts of history emanating from British trade unions. However, despite the vast differences that exist between the 1900s and now, there are several crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Jewish workers’ methods of organizing. They address structural barriers to organization that are shared by many migrant groups today: namely, their exclusion from most mainstream trade unions (despite the lip service paid to notions of “equality” and diversity”), their precarity and transience in the job market, their spatial segregation in specific neighborhoods and areas, and their exclusion from the host society more generally.

In the example of the East end workers and their club in Jubilee Street, the issues of patience and embeddedness emerge as paramount to organizing the excluded. The first noteworthy attempts at unionization and collective resistance from Jewish workers in Britain can be located at least as far back as the mid-1800s, slowly sowing the seeds for the powerful movement that emerged in the early 1900s. These consistent efforts laid the groundwork for establishing physical entities which the workers could access outside of their workplaces: this was critical for their capacity to organize because, 1) being based close to where they lived, it provided a space to come together despite the transitory and precarious nature of their labor trajectories, 2) it was a safe space to organize away from the masters and their cronies, and 3) far from myopically attempting to organize workers purely on the basis of their class status, it was a space which enabled the generation of various activities that aimed at substantial empowerment.

These elements were all undoubtedly impacted, to some degree, by the Arbeter Fraint’s broad, non-economistic conception of capitalist oppression. Their analysis, informed by anarchism, Marxist economics, but also sociology and philosophy, was able to understand how marginalization and alienation not only debilitate oppressed groups’ capacities for action now, but also penetrate deep into their psyches and foreclose those possibilities for the future as workers begin to naturalize their circumstances. The Arbeter Fraint’s patient agitating work, and the existence of a physical space that became a beacon of hope in the East End, were direct, tangible examples that another world is possible. And that we can collectively begin crafting this world today, in our daily interactions.

The combination of embeddedness and a broad conception of capitalist oppression is perhaps the most critical lesson the East End movement has to offer in terms of organizing (with) oppressed groups today. In the West’s hyper-precarious realities, where social bonds have generally grown weaker and liquified, where migrant workers are not only marginalized and exploited but are actively hunted and imprisoned, where worker transience has expanded to almost all sectors of the lower rungs of the labor hierarchy, and where capitalism is increasingly becoming naturalized as an unalterable quasi-natural phenomenon, social movements and those wishing to organize with oppressed groups must focus on becoming rooted in the communities they claim to represent. Furthermore, they must offer imaginative, inspiring alternatives that engage with workers as full human beings, rupturing the sterile and literally depressing one-dimensionality of capitalist realism. Recall how the Jubilee Street club’s annual retreat to Epping Forest represented, for many workers, the highlight of their year.

These activities are inseparably connected to the movement’s militant success: as anarchists and socialists, we are not simply fighting for improvements in our socioeconomic statuses. We are fighting to develop the conditions for all humans to have the resources, space, time, and ideas to fully actualize themselves, to emerge from the drudgery of daily alienation into an empowered state where everything is possible, as long as we work towards it together. Although we are workers, our outlook is geared towards the emancipation of labor, and towards emancipation from the status of wage laborers. In response to capitalism’s tendency to minimize, regiment, and direct the complexity of human existence purely towards the production of surplus value, the Jewish migrant workers in the East End foregrounded culture, education, community, and, crucially, having fun. These characteristics were vital in inspiring others to join their ranks as empowered individuals uniting for a collective cause, and can be equally powerful and inspirational today. To reach these horizons, community embeddedness, especially through the establishment of autonomous, open, and radical social spaces, emerges as an inescapable necessity.

This article includes segments of Panos’s PhD thesis on the barriers to the organization of precarious migrant workers in Scotland, available in full and for free here.

References

Buckman, J. (1980) Alien Working-Class Response: The Leeds Jewish Tailors, 1880-1914. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

Fishman, J. (2004) East End Jewish Radicals. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Freyer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press

Ramdin, R. (2017) The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. London: Verso

Rocker, R. (2005) The London Years. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Tabili, L. (1994) “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. New York: Cornell University Press

Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, B. (1980) The Beginnings of Jewish trade Unionism in Manchester, 1889-1891. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

About the author:

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist based in Athens, Greece, and is currently active with the Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE). His Ph. D thesis was focused on examining the barriers that precarious migrant workers in Scotland experience in regard to labor organization. Previously active with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he has been involved in various organizing campaigns as a migrant worker in the UK and is currently focused on using sociology to develop theoretical tools that can practically assist social movements organizing towards our complete liberation.

Join in the Grand Industrial Band: Contextualizing Contemporary IWW Cultural Initiatives

By Jackson Mann

“The laboring of American culture” is how historian Michael Denning described the aesthetic effects that Popular Front cultural organizing had on mainstream U.S. performing, visual, and media arts in his sweeping 1997 history of U.S. left-wing culture in the 1930s and 40s. According to Denning, these were the first decades in which the experience, ideas, and language of the working classes came to be represented in mainstream U.S. culture, which was “labored” as a result. This cultural victory was achieved through a coalition of workers’ arts organizations, associations of socialist and communist émigré artists fleeing Fascism in Europe, and industrial unions of creative laborers in the newly-developing Hollywood film industry, all of which were grouped around the then-ascendent labor movement, specifically the political bloc formed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) association with the American Communist Party. Denning shows that this coalition understood itself as a “cultural front” within the broader Popular Front movement. 

But while “the age of the CIO” may have been the first time the US working class was able to enter mainstream cultural production and discourse, subaltern, working-class culture in the US had been developing for much longer. The organization that contributed the most, perhaps, to the development of pre-CIO, subaltern working-class culture was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant industrial labor union founded in 1905 by a coalition of labor movement leaders that included Lucy Parsons, Eugene Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Daniel De Leon, Thomas Hagerty, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, who represented the union’s original institutional backbone, the Western Federation of Miners. Over the next three decades, the IWW became famous for producing an extensive roster of what Daniel Gross calls “worker-scholar-poets,” rank-and-file organizers who doubled as theorists, songwriters, poets, authors, playwrights, and cartoonists. The IWW cultivated this milieu by operating a nationwide cultural-production apparatus that included dozens of newspapers, journals, and the extensive publication and distribution of sheet music and songbooks. Music was the spearhead of the IWW’s own cultural front, and it is through music that the IWW made its most durable impact on Leftist culture in the United States. Songs written by its organizers and members, and produced by the IWW cultural apparatus through its publications, became anthems of the US labor movement, and remain so to this day. Joe Hill, the Swedish-American IWW organizer, songwriter, cartoonist, and theorist, who was executed by the state of Utah under dubious circumstances in 1915, has become a revered icon in even the most conservative circles of US labor. His songs, written or commissioned for specific strikes or actions undertaken by the IWW, continue to resonate with left-wing labor activists today. Without the IWW, what Denning would later call the laboring of US culture in the 1930s and 40s would not have been possible.

In the popular imagination, the IWW has become the stuff of legend. The distance of history has transformed it into mythology, a process which has been exacerbated by the fact that most scholarship on the union has been conducted by folklorists. And indeed, by 1937, a little over 30 years after its founding, the IWW had become “a shell of an organization…” One would not be wrong to assume that soon after this the IWW disintegrated entirely, hastening its entrance into folklore. 

However, like its music, the IWW persisted, albeit mostly in the form of a perpetual rump organization. In 2016, the IWW had a membership of just under 4,000. Given that at its height it could boast a membership of 100,000, this may be seen as representative of the union’s complete marginality. Due to its legacy of cultural organizing, the IWW transformed from a militant industrial labor union into a small, left-wing cultural organization as its ability to organize workers at an industrial scale declined. 

The IWW’s most recent cultural initiative was the Greater Chicago chapter’s curation and release of a punk and hardcore music compilation, titled We Don’t Work May 1st, on May 1st, 2019. Because IWW music is the most enduring aspect of its labor culture, this release is a particularly interesting nodal point for analysis. In fact, this cultural commodity, i.e. this compilation of new original music, represents the possibility of a transformation in the cultural strategy of the contemporary IWW. While the IWW has, for the past several decades, been an organization concerned with re-interpreting and preserving its early-20th-century cultural legacy, the release of We Don’t Work May 1st, an album of contemporary, popular music, might be speculatively connected to the union’s renewed commitment to involvement in long-term labor organizing campaigns, and speak to the resulting changes in the structure, size, and make-up of its membership given the nature of these campaigns, themselves. To show this transformation, however, necessitates a brief overview of IWW cultural history, particularly its music, after the union’s first period.

IWW’s First Period & Second Period Folklorization

In 1948, the CIO had just experienced a disastrous electoral failure in its support for Henry Wallace and the collapse of its organizing initiatives in the South. It was also under increasing pressure due to the “Non-Communist Affidavit Requirement” of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and the growing right-wing radicalism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Moderate elements in the CIO leadership responded to this political climate by initiating a massive anti-socialist and anti-communist purge of CIO leadership, staff, and rank-and-file members. Over the next two years, one million members were expelled from the organization.

While the CIO remained a powerful force even after this self-imposed blow, the IWW was almost entirely obliterated by the same events. Beginning in the 1920s, when the union’s first generation of leaders were either exiled, imprisoned, forced underground, or murdered, the IWW gradually lost strength and the organization seemed doomed to obsolescence by the 1930s. In 1946, however, the union still had a membership of over 20,000, most of whom were metalworkers concentrated in Cleveland, Ohio. But, between 1947, when the national leadership refused to sign the Non-Communist Affidavit, and 1950, the IWW’s remaining locals all voted to leave the union, fearing that the national leadership’s refusal to comply with Taft-Hartley would lead to a crackdown on their ability to organize. In 1955, the IWW “celebrated its fiftieth anniversary unable to engage in collective bargaining anywhere.” 

While it is tempting to see the end of the IWW’s first period as occurring  in the 1920s, when its original leadership was destroyed, it is more helpful to see 1947-50 as marking the end of this period. At this time, the IWW was transformed from a militant, industrial labor union with  a mass-membership, into a left-wing cultural organization. Without the institutional backbone of a working class mass-membership, all that remained of the IWW was its cultural apparatus. And without a mass-membership, even this infrastructure had withered to almost nothing. This distinction is important to understanding second period IWW music because without a mass-membership, the IWW represented no-one and, more importantly, produced culture for nobody in particular. This change in the nature of the organization left the cultural legacy of the IWW open to re-interpretation.

According to Franklin Rosemont, it was not until the 1960s that the IWW saw even a minimal resurgence in membership due to the interest it held for a subset of the youth counterculture movements of the era.  Even with this influx it remained a small, cadre organization. At this time, the IWW leadership began to push these newcomers to compose new songs for the Little Red Songbook, which had grown stale with an “overall lack of contemporary relevance.” Following precedent, attempts were made to write new lyrics to the melodies of contemporary popular songs, though these failed to achieve the mass appeal of the songs produced by previous generations of songwriters.

It was also during this period that the ‘folklorization’ of IWW culture began in both the academic and popular spheres. As a result of the work of prominent re-interpreters of IWW history, particularly folklorist Archie Green and singer-songwriter-activist Utah Phillips,IWW culture became associated with an academic definition of folklore that emphasized pre-industrial, non-economic musical production and oral transmission across generations.

The leaders and members of the IWW’s first period, according to Green, “paid little attention to academic issues in defining their music” which signaled its proximity to a form of extra-institutional cultural production that he would term “laborlore.” Though he never defines the meaning and scope of this designation, Green's insistence on the status of IWW musical production, and its cultural production more generally, as 'lore' paradoxically aligns it with the pre-industrial past.

This project was simultaneously carried out in the popular sphere by Phillips, who recorded or was featured on IWW repertoire records and wrote original songs in the stripped-down style of Woody Guthrie, the Popular Front songwriter-turned-folk-hero whose image would be iconic for the 1960s folk-revival movement from which Phillips emerged. Over the course of his life, Phillips became the most popular outwardly-facing representative of the IWW and its cultural legacy. His emphasis on working within the semblance of an oral folk tradition where he and his collaborators “can’t or won’t read music” had the effect of aesthetically-framing first period IWW music, itself, as folklore. In his reinterpretation of early IWW songs, Phillips also cast the strategy of contrafactum in IWW songs as universal, ignoring numerous songs that had both original lyrics and music. In doing so, Phillips misinterpreted the function that contrafactum originally performed. In his afterword to The Big Red Songbook, Phillips quotes a rank-and-file member who states that first period IWW songwriters “used common tunes that you might have heard in a church or in a bar.” From this quote it might seem obvious that IWW contrafactum should be understood as a use of then-contemporary popular standards as a building block in forging a militant left-wing subculture. However, by interpreting contrafactum as naive, unschooled creativity, Phillips comes to an entirely different conclusion. IWW songwriters were not engaging with the popular culture of the time, but were instead tapping into a pre-existing oral tradition. Therefore, according to Phillips, today’s activist-songwriters and activist-musicians should “learn these songs. Use them. Change them. Put them to work,” referring to a mostly-static repertoire of first period IWW music, itself conceived of as oral tradition.

One particular strategy that both Green and Phillips utilize to bolster this way of framing IWW music is to universalize the experience of one particular subset of the IWW’s mass membership during the height of the first period: the American “hobo.” Hoboes, migrant laborers that were common in the 1910s, were one of the “unorganizable” groups that the IWW worked with and they made up a large chunk of the IWW membership during the union’s most successful period (1910-1920). Much of Hobo culture, which should not be conflated with IWW labor culture, could indeed be described as folkloric owing to the oral nature of its transmission.

While labor leader and early member of the IWW Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn did once refer to Joe Hill’s music as “folk songs,” this was probably in reference to its mass-appeal among working-class audiences rather than the nature of its production, distribution, and transmission. Both Green and Phillips obscure the IWW’s modernist, world-building project by mapping folkloric notions, such as oral transmission, onto music that was semi-professionally composed and professionally published and distributed with the intention of creating a cohesive militant working-class subculture that could contest for subaltern economic power. The IWW music of the second period, then, is marked by the absence of this large-scale production and distribution of new music. Rather, the figures of the second period were engaged in an anti-materialist project of folklorization, which sought to transform the modernist, subaltern culture of the IWW into an oral tradition of folklore. With this historical context regarding the history of IWW music, how it has been framed, and how it has functioned in the popular imagination, in mind, it is possible to see the Greater Chicago IWW chapter’s release of We Don’t Work May 1st as a pivot away from the folkloric project of the past 60 years.

Contextualizing We Don’t Work May 1st

On May 1st, 2019, the Greater Chicago IWW released a 25-song compilation of local Chicago punk and hardcore bands titled We Don’t Work May 1st. The project was spearheaded by Paul Scanty, the Greater Chicago IWW’s Director of Education and Outreach, and Danny “Cheap Date,” the founder of Don’t Panic Records & Distro and a rank-and-file member of the IWW. The compilation was sold through the music distribution website Bandcamp.com and profits from the sales went directly towards a strike fund on reserve for future industrial actions by the Greater Chicago IWW. During an interview with Scanty and Cheap Date conducted by the author of this article, however, Scanty traced the genesis of the project to a period before either he or Cheap Date were IWW members. In fact, Cheap Date had been developing the idea of a Chicago punk and hardcore compilation, to be released by his record label, for several years prior to his joining the union and had mentioned the idea to Scanty at the time. In February 2019, Scanty, who by that point had joined the union, “approached [Cheap Date] about doing the comp [sic] for the IWW.” 

Cheap Date had already designated a number of bands for the compilation before it had transformed into an IWW-affiliated project. After deciding to make it an IWW initiative, however, Scanty and Cheap Date focused on contacting groups whose music was politically-aligned with the IWW’s beliefs. According to Cheap Date: 

“when we [Scanty and Cheap Date] first discussed this it was definitely… well, we want all these songs to be labor songs or, like, political songs or something that’s going to be left-leaning but… we really didn’t have time to ask bands to record songs specifically for this so the guidelines were… we want this to be new music and… we were reaching out to bands that had political songs.”

The majority of the songs do contain explicitly-political themes. These range from topics such as feminist empowerment (Underwire’s ‘Not Dating’ and Payasa’s ‘Muñeca’), anti-fascism (La Armada’s ‘Fire’), anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ inclusion (2Minute Minor’s ‘Unite the Crew’). There is even a song, ‘Written in Red’ by The Ableist, a band in which Scanty sings, written as a tribute to anarchist activist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose writings and oratory were in dialogue with the ideas of other turn-of-the-20th-century leftists, including the first period IWW.

Many of the songs also contain themes specific to labor. For example, pop-punk singer-songwriter Davey Dynamite’s ‘380 Times’ deals with the disparity between the wages of average employees and the giant sums given to corporate CEOs and shareholders:

Well I think this is going too far, I think they are getting away

with our future, our past, everything that we once had

And I work, and I like it, I haven’t had it bad so far

but my degree seems to be worth less than the paper it was printed on

And my friends, and my family, stuck working dead end jobs

what did they do to deserve it, a minimum wage barely helping at all?

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, is what they always say

they always forget to tell you, just how the boots get made

They are products of thievery, of telling the poor to be grateful

they are fine with you starving, as long as you’re willing and able

to work, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to know, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to starve, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to make, three hundred and eighty times less than they do

Other songs deal with specific labor rights violations endured on contemporary job sites. For instance, The Just Luckies ‘Bossman’ deals with sexual harassment of workers by management:

Why do you think that you own me

and know me enough to touch my hair?

Creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands

creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands, oh

Don’t fucking touch me

don’t fucking touch me

keep your hands off my body

don’t fucking touch me

Cheap Date’s own group, The Cheap Dates, are also featured on the compilation. Their contribution, like Dynamite’s song, deals with the poverty wages earned by today’s working class, focusing specifically on the health issues that result.

Aspects of this initiative reveal a break from the folkloric framework that has dominated conversations about IWW music, and its culture generally, since the 1960s. Certain elements of this break represent a return to the modernist project of the first period, which sought to appropriate contemporaneous popular culture for political ends, while others break from it entirely. This is most obviously shown in the formal aesthetic qualities of the music itself. In his press release in the newly-reconstituted version of the IWW’s flagship publication, the Industrial Worker, Cheap Date claims that there “are bands of nearly every style of punk on here. Ska bands, hardcore bands, pop bands, folk bands, and crust bands.” In fact, Cheap Date understates the stylistic diversity of the compilation, which spans the numerous post-punk and -hardcore styles that have proliferated since the early 1980s, most of which remain culturally relevant today. The project’s engagement with culturally relevant musical styles signals a return to the goals of the first period. While we cannot be sure how, exactly, first period songs were performed in terms of instrumentation and performance arrangements, we can be sure that IWW songwriters of this era were attempting to work in contemporary and culturally-relevant styles since IWW contrafactum was “almost all… set to popular song hits of the 1900-1915 period, or to familiar gospel and revival hymns…”

The cultural relevance of the styles represented on We Don’t Work May 1st is the project’s most obvious break with the second period’s folkloric notions of repertoire and the resulting predilection for a historical performance practice that maintained anachronistic stylistic elements. However, while this focus on contemporaneity creates a bridge between We Don’t Work May 1st and first period IWW songwriters and composers, it also produces an element that is entirely novel. While contrafactum was an enormously popular trend in the first period, all of the songs on We Don’t Work May 1st (except for Shots Fired Shots Fired’s cover of Life Sentence’s ‘Problem’) are entirely original. This break in IWW tradition (though it must be stated that this tradition was never an institutionalized facet of the IWW cultural apparatus and was only articulated as such during the second period) can be attributed to the nature of post-World War II musical culture up until the present day, in which the popularity of original musical compositions over “standard” songs has increased.

These breaks were not conscious decisions made by Scanty and Cheap Date. When asked about how the IWW tradition of songwriting and musical composition, with all of its folkloric baggage, had influenced this initiative, Scanty stated that neither he nor Cheap Date had thought about this at all: 

“Did we see it in the context of, like, you know, new songs, or, a future generation of songs for the Little Red Songbook? No… Did our heads even go to a place of, like, ‘Oh, hey, this is a part of the history of making music that’s such a big part of the IWW…’ continuing that tradition? No.”

For Scanty and Cheap Date, it was not loyalty to continuing an organizational tradition, but their general knowledge of the IWW’s history of cultural production that led to their decision to transform what began as a general punk and hardcore compilation CD into an IWW initiative. In fact, the only other function of the compilation that was explicitly mentioned by Scanty and Cheap Date, besides raising money for the IWW’s strike fund, was to grow the Greater Chicago IWW’s roster of musically- and artistically-inclined members and organizers. 

Scanty and Cheap Date were not consciously deciding to break with precedent, but the idea that these changes in the cultural framing of IWW musical production were mere chance is unconvincing. A stronger theory pivots back to the earlier argument for placing the transition from the first- to the second-period IWW at the 1947-50 mark: it is changes in organizational activity and membership size and demographics that might be seen as initiating the re-evaluation of the function of cultural production in labor organizing by the IWW. 

Indeed, the past 5 years have seen the IWW actively organize workers for the first time in decades. As recently as October 2019, the IWW-affiliated Burgerville Workers Union, made up of employees of a large Pacific Northwest fast food chain, went on a four-day strike over failed wage negotiations. In addition to organizing workers in the fast-food industry, the IWW, through its Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), was instrumental in supporting and publicizing attempts by incarcerated workers within the United States’ gargantuan (and now significantly privatized) prison system to go on strike in 2018.

It remains speculative to connect the IWW’s current, renewed commitment to industrial labor organizing campaigns with the reframing of its musical tradition evidenced by the We Don’t Work May 1st project. However, if the IWW begins to transform, through its organizing, from the cadre organization it has been for almost 60 years to a mass-membership, working class organization, it seems logical to assume that new attempts to reframe the IWW's cultural legacy in light of both contemporary political projects and the specificity of contemporary cultural production, consumption, and distribution will arise from within the ranks of the IWW's membership.

Conclusion

IWW culture, its framing, production, and the way it has functioned strategically in the union’s activities has changed immensely over time. This was due to changes in both the size and demographic composition of its membership, going from a 100,000 strong mass-membership working class institution at its height in the 1910s, to a regionally-bound but still robust labor union in the 1940s, to an isolated cadre organization which for decades had, at most, a few thousand members. 

As we have seen, two major cultural frameworks resulted from these periods. From the mass-membership industrial labor union there emerged a modernist project of culture-building which resulted in an enormous alternative cultural apparatus that produced newspapers, journals, and songbooks to disseminate a wealth of literature, visual art, and music produced by rank-and-file members, organizers, and union leaders across the country. From the cadre organization emerged a project of folklorization and invented tradition, where the artifacts of IWW culture were collected and transformed into static repertoires.

What makes We Don’t Work May 1st such an exciting release is that it represents the possibility of a third period of the IWW. The possibility of the IWW’s re-building itself as a mass-membership, working class organization committed to the labor struggle in the long term contains the further possibility for a reframing of its cultural tradition and a change in its contemporary cultural production strategy. Within these changes exists the potential for an entirely new type of militant, working class culture. The particular musical style, content, and formal qualities of first period IWW music were the result of IWW songwriters’ engagement in contemporaneous popular culture. Subaltern intervention into mainstream US culture today, which has changed considerably since the IWW’s heyday, may produce entirely novel results. If the We Don’t Work May 1st project is any indication, this culture has already begun to emerge. 

Bibliography

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On the Latest Developments Within the U.S. Working Class

By Ekim Kilic

The 2016 Presidential Elections were a turning point for U.S. labor and popular movements. Since then, provocative statements and decisions by the Trump government have been threatening millions of working peoples' lives. However, the actions of the current U.S. government are not independent of its predecessors and their economic applications that also carried out the needs of U.S. capital and its forces. Today, precarious employment and life conditions, a declining social safety net, and not being able to resonate their voice politically are headlines of the U.S. workers' current problems as a result of long-standing neoliberal policies and the 2008 financial crisis.

In the midst of these issues, the U.S. working class experienced a revival the likes of which that has not been seen in a long time. According to an opinion article that was written for CNN by Richard Trumka [1] , the president of AFL-CIO, " In the year since, working people have been doing just that. From airports and hospitals to newsrooms and college campuses, workers are organizing on a scale that I haven't seen in decades. More than a quarter-million Americans joined unions [2] last year - three-quarters of them under 35. Half of the nonunion workers say they would vote to do the same [3] if given the chance, and Gallup has even pegged unions' popularity at a 15-year high. " [4]

As a side note, the unions organized Labor Day 2018 at a time when the workers' struggle was accelerating: the successful state-wide strikes of elementary school and high school teachers, the struggle of the Chicago hotel workers, which then inspired several others in the sector across the country, the strike authorization of the United Metal Workers' Union (USW) on the collective bargaining agreement with the metal bosses, 27% wage increase of window cleaners as a result of their struggle, 260,000 UPS postal workers authorizing a strike and struggling against the union bureaucracy, struggle for unionization from New York construction workers, and the university assistants' struggles for unionization. The US labor forces celebrated Labor Day in an unusual and special atmosphere. On the other side, one should note that the U.S. labor movement saw several struggles for unionizing and wage increases against weak work conditions in prisons and main sectors, such as cable, automotive, packaging, arms, and agriculture in last 2 years.

Despite the recent upsurge in labor struggles, current demands and problems of U.S. labor are rooted in the past. A short account of the history of U.S. labor may be helpful to make sense of the significance and characters of today's labor actions. Because the dominant narrative on labor comes from liberal or social-democratic accounts, which have avoided representing the U.S. labor as a working-class force for a long time. Instead, their accounts consistently blur the line between working class and middle class through using income and level of education as almost the only metrics. Besides that, the story of U.S. labor remained either one-sided and descriptive academic sources on the U.S. labor or narrating the labor history as if it was only a cultural motif.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS

Based on 2016 data from "employment by major industry sector" chart of the U.S. Department of Labor, distributions of the labor force are in mining, construction, manufacturing, 12.6%; in service industry, 80.3%; agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, 1.5%; and nonagricultural self-employed 5.6%. [5] Another important finding from the statistics is that although union membership is more likely to experience a revival, the general situation remains stagnant. According to data on union affiliations was obtained from the Department of Labor website, employees from all backgrounds, industries, and occupations who are 16 years old and over;

Change in union membership and Representation in the US, 2007-2017, by the data from the Department of Labor [6]

As is illustrated in the chart, although the popularity of the unions has an upward trend, according to a Gallup poll referred to before, union membership and representation capability still remain steady. [7] However, this recent situation is not independent of national and international condition for the U.S. labor movement. The Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which strengthened the right to work law, the witch-hunt operations of McChartyist era against American communists after WW2 throughout the 1950s, the removal of communists from union leadership as a result of the Communist Control Act of 1954 [8] , then Nixon's dirty war against Black and Anti-War activists through the "war on drugs" after Lyndon Johnson's acceptance of "civil rights act of 1964" as an adjustment of the American social contract, then trickle-down economics of Reagan era, which sought to decrease taxes on the companies that they may encourage growth in the short run and benefit society in the long run, all weakened the labor unions politically, economically and socially. Even though some of the honest unionists maintain their struggle to some extent, most unions are stuck with an extremely legalist approach, which directly or indirectly broke the workers' initiative.

As a matter of fact, the historical processes considered above also grew U.S. capital's capacity for outsourcing and movement overseas. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) increased the mobilization of the U.S. capital, and reduced tariffs, which caused loss of many manufacturing jobs, and increased the competition to the detriment of small producers. Seeking markets that have lower labor prices left American workers jobless eventually. On the other hand, weak healthcare services, precarious employment conditions, weak access to education, affordable daycare, safe housing, healthy and reasonably priced food, gender wage inequality in non-unionized workplaces, open-shop practices, and politicians who ignore workers' concerns are main challenges that the U.S. working class currently has.

All in all, this overview may draw attention to the background of the current situation of the U.S. working class. The escalating problems of the working class generated a discussion around the 2016 presidential elections among the media, pollsters, and academics. Despite the imposition of the caricatured idea that " president Trump was supported by the white working class" it is becoming clear that the radicalizing right-wing anxiety of petty-bourgeois classes as a result of losing their class positions, unemployment, and years of years of nationalist and religious propaganda were other main reasons. This caricatured idea is utilized as a scapegoating attempt by the Democrats to avoid their responsibility in the current political, economic and social atmosphere in the U.S.. While Charles Post explains why white workers supported Trump, he underlines that casting no vote as white workers could be more effective than casting a vote for Republicans, which Christine J. Walley and Claudine M. Pied make similar points. [9] In other words, the loss of trust in the electoral democracy that may fundamentally shift the tides of U.S. politics can be read as another reaction to neoliberalism. As a result of analyzing three workers' cases, their resentment and voting behaviors/rationalities, Pied concludes that " there is… not one white working-class reaction to neoliberalism ." [10] That is, one may say that the US working class has been seeking different solutions instead of just supporting right wing nationalist candidates. Yet, we have to acknowledge the considerable impact of right-wing nationalism on white workers.

CHARACTERS OF CURRENT WORKING CLASS ACTIONS 2017-2018

Since the 2016 presidential elections, new Trump anti-labor appointees to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) [11] , recent restrictions by the NLRB to unions' right to picket, and demoralizing decisions in the cases "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" [12] and "AFSCME vs. Janus [13] have been unrelenting, successive defeats for the labor movement.

In April 2018, the U.S. Senate confirmed pro-business lawyer John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board. The senate handed control of the board over Republicans. Ring is a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, and was appointed to a five-year term. The board now has three Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump and two Democrats.

An October ruling of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared that janitors who were picketing for better working conditions were not protected from unfair labor practices committed by their employer. The Board ruled that the janitors, who were being contracted by a building management company, were engaged in secondary picketing. [14]

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the bosses could hinder workers' rights to collective and legal action for better wages and working conditions in the "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" case. Another case, which was concluded in June and known as "AFSCME vs. Janus," was again decided against the unions. Even if the U.S. unions manage a majority in the workplace, not all workers in that workplace are required to become members of that union. However, workers who are not members of that union paid a certain amount of contribution to the union, because they still benefited from the collective bargaining in the same workplace. In June 2018, such a necessity has now been eliminated in unionized workplaces of the public sector by the Janus ruling.

However, tides are still turning for the U.S. working class. Even if the labor movement received significant counter-attacks, these are not likely to end this new and energetic tide. Because patterns of today's strikes for wage increases and betterment of working conditions and unionizing struggles in non-unionized workplaces appear as radical, contagious, and encouraging worker and laborer actions.

Radicalization of workers for their economic demands are important as future opportunities for the political transformation of the unions and boldness of the labor movement. For a long time, U.S. unions have relied on collective bargaining processes with bosses, in which the most union leaderships would seek were ways of compromising with bosses. On the other hand, except a few labor occasions, one may find union presences mostly through their political action committees, which run election campaigns for a candidate that union endorsed. And those candidates are mostly from the Democratic Party. Additionally, union representatives run their campaign through the motto "more middle class jobs" as if they already acknowledged that being a part of the working class is unsustainable. Hence, these unions are more likely to avoid even from the strike authorizations since they can negotiate with bosses through union lawyers and court cases.

Worker and laborer struggles in the aftermath of the 2016 elections reveal radical characteristics in many aspects. Pending strike authorization of UPS workers, whose union has tended to compromise with bosses, state-wide wildcat strikes of teachers, early morning protests of New York construction workers once every week, hunger strikes, and occupations of grad students are several examples of this radical turn. In addition to that, laborers in the same sector, but from different states, follow each other's example. Hence, this pro-active pattern may spark a fire easily in the same sector, such as in teachers, grad students, prison complex, and hotel workers.

Therefore, it shows that emergent radical union members will not necessarily tolerate waiting for legalist solutions as it has always been; because these are generally long-lasting court cases, which may break workers' initiative. On the other hand, workers' reactions to the Democratic Party became apparent in the 2016 presidential elections. Rising support for the Trump's Republican Party, not casting a vote at all, or voting third parties instead of for both grand parties were different reactions against the neoliberal policies that are being supported by former labor Democrats, especially in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Wildcat teachers' strikes had an encouraging effect on the labor struggle. On February 22, starting with West Virginia, wildcat strikes spread out among 8 states, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and West Virginia with reactions to low wages for teachers and support staff, inadequate school budgets, overcrowded classrooms, and other problems. Following this wave, workers at 26 hotels of Chicago went on strike as members of UNITE HERE Local 1 on September 7, which was then followed by Marriott hotels workers' strike in 8 cities, in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Maui, and Oahu. Wages, workloads, and health insurance are among the issues at play. [15]

Although grad students are the most vulnerable one because of their recent recognition of employee status, their strikes and unionizing struggles are still ongoing. Cafeteria strikes, occupations, hunger strikes and ongoing strikes take place at the country's most privileged schools, such as the New School, Columbia University, and Yale University. They are also faced with weak working conditions, precarious insurance-pay, and lack of resources for their livelihoods. Additionally, the CUNY adjunct's struggle arose from precarious work conditions. Full time lecturer positions are difficult to come by. As academic laborers say, more than half of CUNY classes are taught by CUNY adjuncts, their salaries make 5% of the budget.

As another type of precarious work, seasonal farm workers, who are mostly Central American immigrants, from Sakuma Brothers and Driscoll's (the world's largest distributor of berries) were successful in their struggle for unionizing and obtaining their rights for minimum wage. In a statement from their website, the union claims that Sakuma Brothers is guilty of " systematic wage theft, poverty wages, hostile working conditions, and unattainable production standards. " [16]

On the other hand, since December 2017, New York construction workers, who work in the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, have been fighting against the union-busting tactics of the bosses, who impose the open shop model. The Hudson Yards redevelopment project is the largest construction project in North America and the largest private real estate project in U.S. history. The open shop agenda pushed by Related Co. may create a precedent for the expansion of the already growing open shop work model. The struggle of workers against the open shop model is crucial for future labor struggles that will take place in the city. Since December 2017, workers have been regularly doing protests in front of the construction site every Thursday morning at 6 a.m near their workplace. That can also be count another radical characteristic of the recent labor struggle.

Last spring, negotiations between the Teamsters, UPS, and UPS Freight started over the union's proposals, which would address a range of critical issues facing UPSers - ending forced overtime for package car drivers, raising part-timers' wages, imposing monetary penalties for management harassment, and protecting jobs from automation, among others. This negotiation included about 260.000 workers. Even though an overwhelming majority of workers voted yes for strike authorization last summer, and no for UPS contract in this fall, union leadership ignored the decisions of workers, creating a wave of reactions to union leadership from rank-and-file union members and workers.

In another important development, the U.S prisons saw the largest strike in their history. Beginning at the end of last summer, prisoner workers were on strike for voting rights of millions of American prisoners and better prison conditions against slavery-like work conditions. In the U.S., the anti-slavery law includes all citizens except prisoners. According to 13th Amendment, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Moreover, in heavy industry, USW's (United Steel Workers) pending strike authorization, IBEW's (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) struggle against Spectrum Cable Company last year, and UAW's (United Automobile Workers) unsuccessful attempt to organize union in a Nissan factory of Mississippi in summer 2016 have been other headlines of the U.S. workers' struggle. Unfortunately, the struggle is relatively weak while comparing with other sectors. Considering that terrific and racist anti-union campaign in Nissan plant, especially against African-American workers, the union's inability to build a strong organizing committee, and the fear of losing their jobs at Nissan, underlines how the U.S. represses their workers while hiding it from public eye. However, as one of Nissan workers mentioned, those are educative processes that may prepare workers for future struggles.

As a last note on the current struggles, Amazon workers' voices are still up for a union in the U.S. A month ago, McDonalds' workers led by Fight For $15 went on strike for better wages, against weak working conditions, and harassment. For Chicago teachers, strikes are on their agenda.

TEACHERS AND UPS WORKERS SHOW HOW TO USE "THE STRENGTH THAT COMES FROM PRODUCTION" [17]

Among all fruitful labor struggles, wildcat teachers' strikes and UPS's collective bargaining process show many other lessons specifically and clearly. Wildcat teachers' strikes were named by the U.S. media as "the red wave" which refers to dominant Republican politics in those states. Another reference to "the red wave" is that almost all statewide strikes happened in right-to-work states. Beyond being widespread, teachers' strikes have a daring character as we mentioned before. These strikes had that daring character because they were mostly led by grassroots organizing among teachers with the progressive rank-and-file teacher union caucuses in AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and NEA (The National Education Association) since the union leadership had shown a trend of abandoning the working class. [18] Similarly, the progress among Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) affiliated UPS workers is being directed mostly by rank-in-file members. A pending strike of UPS workers has been unexpectedly persistent. One may expect that workers would quickly lose their hopes in the struggle, but it consistently developed while challenging the union bureaucracy and bosses in a well-organized manner. Considering that this labor issue involves 260,000 workers, it is not easy to maintain such a struggle.

Teachers' strikes took the stage in West Virginia on February 22, 2018 with the demands of lowering health insurance costs, made worse by stagnant wages. [19] Undercover groups in social media were utilized as a way of organizing, and debating. West Virginia has a famous history within the U.S. working class struggles. Including the famous struggle of the Battle of Blair Mountain, heroic miners struggles of the 1920s, wildcat strikes of the 1970s, and the victories of the Miners for Democracy movement are several key historical moments, which make American worker today "proud to be union." [20] It truly shows that the memory of class struggle is alive, which appears through discussions on social media, or the general trend of daring to follow rank-in-file instead "the leadership."

Teachers went on strike against budget cuts, decreased employee benefits, low per pupil spending, low salaries, right-to-work laws, school choice, and school vouchers. A 20% pay raise in Arizona, 2% pay raise and increased school spending in Colorado, increased school funding, teachers raises by $6000, support staff raises by $1250 in Oklahoma, and 5% pay raise in West Virginia are the gains of these struggles. [21] Arizona teachers, for instance, won their struggle with their gradual action from low-intensity to high-intensity actions, such as wearing red T-Shirts on Wednesdays and posting photos on social media, then handing out flyers, then rallying at the capitol with signs and stickers: " I Don't Want to Strike, But I Will" and finally, walking out and massive marches. [22] The West Virginia teachers' strike, the most advanced struggle of the many that erupted in 2018, started with rallies and walkouts from the beginning of February 2018, the strike month. [23] Therefore, one may say that although the social media reach-out played an important role, more or less all strikes and labor struggles escalated from low-density actions to high-density actions.

However, strikes remained valuable considerable remarks. Almost 80% of U.S. public school teachers are women, and women made up almost all of the leadership of strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Particularly because of this, some of West Virginia teachers carried out the matter of preserving abortion rights into the strike efforts. Another positive development is exposure of the betrayal of the union leadership, or their compromising tendencies with state governments. Teachers do have a feeling of being undervalued by the business and state governments. But the political perspective of many teachers, for example in Kentucky and West Virginia, doesn't exceed the slogan "vote all the enemies out of office," which means for them supporting teacher-friendly candidates in the Democratic Party. [24]

As a note for our readers, one may expect that the U.S. democracy values on the surface liberal values and human rights, besides the racist history and present that could not be solved totally. Ironically, similar to slanders and racial slurs of the bosses and their associates against black workers of the Nissan factory, teachers were mostly blamed by the state incumbents and political authorities to hurt educational process. Kentucky governor went further, and said " You know how many hundreds of thousands of children were left home alone today? I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. " Oklahoma governor found her cure to the strikes by classifying striking workers as: "a teenage kid that wants a better car." [25]

CONCLUSION

Some of the struggles considered here are still ongoing among the workers. The most important characteristics that may be extracted from these examples are the radical, contagious and encouraging actions. In addition, a majority of these actions ended with relative victory. This new accumulative process as for workers' experiences may provide future opportunities to transform unions politically towards unions which are strongly tied with workers and their class interests. On the other hand, the awakening sections of the youth, and an increase in sympathy to socialism are turning towards to the working class and the organizational problems they face. Although it might be early to make a guess about what may happen, one may definitely say that the U.S. working class is seeking ways to escape from this recent, oppressive and extremely exploitative situation, while organizing politically and economically.

Notes

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/opinions/labor-day-working-people-deserve-our-fair-share/index.html

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/biggest-gains-in-union-membership-in-2017-were-for-younger-workers/

[3] https://aflcio.org/2018/6/22/study-popularity-joining-unions-surges

[4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[5] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

[6] https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab3.htm#union3.xlsx.f.1

[7] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[8] "The Communist Control Act of 1954", The Yale Law Journal 64, no. 5 (1955): 712-65. doi:10.2307/793898.

[9] Post, C. (2017). The roots of Trumpism. Cultural Dynamics, 29(1-2), 100-108.

[10] Pied, C. (2018). Conservative populist politics and the remaking of the "white working class" in the USA. Dialectical Anthropology, 42(2), 193-206, sf. 204.

[11] https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-nlrb/senate-confirms-trump-nlrb-nominee-handing-control-to-republicans-idUSL1N1RO28L

[12] https://theredphoenixapl.org/2018/05/22/a-blow-to-the-working-class-reveals-capitalist-ruthlessness-and-fear/

[13] https://www.afscme.org/now/janus-for-leaders

[14] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[15] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[16] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-18/workers-who-pick-your-summer-berries-are-asking-you-not-buy-them?fbclid=IwAR03gjveysa610ss2nzGxqiaGe_H56hpBjtqtUh8Y_LLerArll_20On14nk

[17] The Strength Comes From Production: A widely used worker slogan from Turkey. One may encounter with this idiom in workers' and unions' informative materials in Turkey.

[18] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/05/whats-behind-teachers-strikes

[19] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[20] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-learned-1970s-miners

[21] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-teacher-protests-20180503-story.html , https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/12/pueblo-teacher-strike-is-over/ , https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/teachers-strikes-oklahoma-socialism-sanders-unions , https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/west-virginia-teachers-strike-future-unions/index.html

[22] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/04/heres-how-arizona-teachers-organized-their-first-ever-statewide-strike

[23] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[24] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3732-striking-teachers-and-wildcat-politics

[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/04/04/oklahoma-governor-compares-striking-teachers-to-a-a-teenage-kid-that-wants-a-better-car/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c9f793c87e21 , https://www.vox.com/2018/4/16/17242812/kentucky-governor-bevin-teachers-strike-child-assault , http://time.com/5176094/west-virginia-teacher-strike/ , https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/23/arizona-teachers-walkout-governor/544535002/

The Nurses' Union That Made Medicine Sick: How the Oligarchs Hypnotized Labor Leaders to Betray Working-Class Communities of Color

By Jon Jeter

Opened in 1889, O'Connor Hospital was the first in the city of San Jose, and the second in California to be chartered and managed by the Daughters of Charity, a 400-year-old Catholic mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Its benefactor, Judge Myles P. O'Connor, made his fortune in mining and he and his wife, Amanda, were two of Silicon Valley's first philanthropists. They had originally planned to open an old-age home and an orphanage, but the local Archbishop convinced the couple that the needs of what would grow to become the state's third most populous city were far too prolific to address only that which vexed the very young, and the very old.

For the next 125 years, the Daughters of Charity faithfully served San Jose's sick, pregnant, and poor, the hospital's fortunes rising and falling in tandem with that of Santa Clara County's laboring classes. With paychecks buoyed by postwar productivity and assertive trade unions, the order built a new, state-of-the art campus on the city's east side in 1953, just as Americans were bursting at the seams with hope, and babies.

Similar to the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, however, O'Connor went broke, gradually at first, and then suddenly, as good-paying jobs dried up, culminating in the ruinous 2008 recession that left millions of Californians unable to pay their hospital tab. Forced to borrow heavily just to stay afloat, the Daughters of Charity Health System announced in 2014 what would've once been unthinkable: a sale of its network of six hospitals.

More jarring still was the colorful streetscape that greeted morning commuters on Forest Avenue as they approached O'Connor's main gate in the first days of 2015. As the low-watt January sun doused the Santa Cruz mountains in a champagne-colored dew, motorists were visibly puzzled, some even scratching their heads as they passed by.

On the campus' north lawn, nearly 100 protesters clad in robin's-breast red, chanted, cheered and hoisted placards that read: "Nurses and nuns agree: Approve the Sale."

To the south, maybe 20 yards away, stood another 100 or so demonstrators clad entirely in blue, brandishing signs that read: "Save our Hospital; Reject the Sale."

The dueling rallies prefaced a public hearing by California's State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is legally required to approve the sale of nonprofit hospitals, and pitted one powerful labor union - the California Nurses Association in red - against another - the Service Employees' International Union, in blue.

Dubbed by the Nation Magazine as the country's most progressive trade union, the CNA and its umbrella organization, National Nurses United, endorsed a proposal by Daughters of Charity executives to sell the chain to Prime, a southern California-based healthcare provider with a reputation for ripping off Medicaid, its patients, and its workforce. A 2014 federal audit of Prime hospitals, for instance, found 217 cases of improperly diagnosed kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that is seldom seen in the US, and typically found only in the global South. Unsurprisingly, Medicaid reimbursement rate for the the disease is quite high when compared with other maladies.

The SEIU, on the other hand, favored a sale to a Wall Street hedge fund named Blue Wolf with no management experience in the healthcare industry, but a demonstrated proficiency for dismantling businesses and auctioning its parts off to the highest bidders.

But here's the thing: San Jose's working-class communities - a Benetton- blend of Latinos, south Asians, Blacks and Whites - wanted neither, Prime least of all.

Had they bothered to show up for any of the dozen or so community stakeholder meetings held in 2014, the CNA's leadership might have known this. But Bob Brownstein, the executive director of the civic organization, Working Partners USA, could only remember seeing a CNA labor representative at a single meeting, and if he chimed in on the discussion, Brownstein couldn't recall.

Labor representatives for the SEIU, on the other hand, and Blue Wolf executives were fixtures at the stakeholders' meetings.

"I don't think either union did much of anything," Brownstein recalled more than a year later, "but SEIU was clearly more comfortable in dealing with the community. As I recall, there was someone from Blue Wolf and the SEIU at every meeting and they answered every question that everyone put to them. They were clearly trying to generate answers and they even made some changes to the original proposal" to win the community's approval.

"Their offer was more opaque but they did a much better job than Prime did in acknowledging community concerns. We never trusted Blue Mountain but the community was much more worried about Prime."

So much so that a coalition of 15 civic groups wrote a joint letter to Harris urging her to veto the sale to Prime. The stakeholders' clear preference was Santa Clara County which had bid on O'Connor, and whose health care network had a regional reputation for providing quality care to the uninsured that was second only to O'Connor's.

But Daughters of Charity executives did not want to break up the set, so-to-speak, and preferred selling all six hospitals to a single bidder.

"I don't know why the California Nurses Association didn't help us push the county's bid," said Grace-Sonia E. Melanio, Communications Director for Community Health Partnership, which was one of the authors of the letter to the attorney general's office.

"I assume it was because they don't represent county nurses but I don't know that for a fact."

By January of 2015, Brownstein, Melanio and others knew that shifting the conversation from the two labor-backed bidders to the county's bid was a longshot, at best.

Still, Melanio recalls her astonishment at seeing the the tsunami of red and blue as she pulled into the O'Connor parking lot ahead of that January public hearing.

"I was shocked," she said, "to see that the unions had the community outnumbered by roughly 100 to 1."

"You Got to Dance with Them That Brung You"

The question of who killed organized labor in the US has always been something of a whodunit for me, until I went to work as a communications specialist for the California Nurses Association in January of 2015.

The action at O'Connor was my first week on the job and the hospital's ultimate sale to a Wall Street hedge fund was tantamount to an exhumation. After examining the cadaver close up, I can report that all evidence identifies the killer beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It was a suicide.

What proved the undoing of the labor movement was not the bloodlessness of conservatives, but the faithlessness of liberals; not the 1 percent's dearth of compassion, but the 99 percent's failure of imagination; not the corruption of the managerial class but trade union leaders' desertion of the very communities that made the American labor movement a force to be reckoned with in the first place.

"You got to dance," the immortal Molly Ivins once wrote, " with them what brung you." After collaborating with workers of all races to create a middle-class that stands as the singular achievement of the Industrial era, unions switched dance partners mid-song.

In championing Prime Health Care, the nurses' union, and its Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, carried water for a venal corporate class in much the same fashion that the Democratic Party, and its titular leader, Hillary Clinton, runs interference for Wall Street, leaving the people of San Jose to choose from the lesser of two evils, just as voters in next week's presidential ballot have no good options.

This is no coincidence. Beginning in earnest with Wall Street's 1975 takeover of New York City's budget, corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats' to a draw.

To put only slightly too fine a point on it, financiers' courtship of labor in the postwar era mirrors Napoleon's recruitment of Haiti's mulattoes to help put down the island's slave mutiny. Both counter- revolutions drove a wedge through the opposition with a psych-ops campaign that can be reduced to a question of identity:

Are you a worker, or are you white?

No More Beautiful Sight

The Bay area can make a credible claim to being the birthplace of the modern labor movement. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike at the height of the Great Depression, Blacks who had consistently been rebuffed in their efforts to integrate the docks, jumped at the chance to work, albeit for smaller paychecks than their white peers.

Confronted with a failing strike, the head of the longshoremen's union, an Australian émigré named Harry Bridges, toured African American churches on both sides of the Bay bridge, according to the late journalist Thomas Fleming.

From the pulpit, Bridges acknowledged the union's historical mistreatment of Blacks, but promised skeptical parishioners that if they respected the pickets, they would work the ports up and down the West Coast, earning the same wage as white dockworkers.

They did, and the strike's subsequent success triggered a wave of labor militancy that not only imbued the economy with buying power, but connected workers' discontent with broader political struggles for affordable housing, free public education, infrastructure improvements, and civil rights.

"Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners," the historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, "against the raiders and all our enemies."

When Oakland's two chic department stores, Kahns and Hastings, denied pay raises to their mostly women employees in 1946, nearly 100,000 union members - mostly men - walked off the job in solidarity.

But they didn't stop there, shutting down the whole of Alameda County for the better part of two days, ordering businesses to close, and turning back deliveries of everything other than essential medical supplies and beer, which they commandeered to hold a bi-racial bacchanal in the streets of Oakland, dancing, singing, and exulting in the power of the many.

It was the last general strike in US history; within months, Congress overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which, among other things, outlawed so-called sympathy strikes, and mandated trade unions to expel Communists from their ranks.

Still, the working class maintained its swagger for another generation.

Invoking eminent domain, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency razed thousands of structures in the city's "blighted" Fillmore neighborhood, forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity which sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights.

In a 1963 interview with the Boston television station WGBH, about his iconic documentary, Take This Hammer, James Baldwin said this:

"A boy last week - he was 16, in San Francisco - told me on television….He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "You do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging - as most Northern cities now are engaged - in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out."

Among those who took notice of the Fillmore's gentrification was Lou Goldblatt, who was, at the time, the second-in-command of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the very same union that had integrated the West Coast's docks.

"There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities, Goldblatt later recalled. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn't be used to build some low-cost housing."

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks-out of a total of 60- that the city had set aside for affordable housing.

In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs: "I've just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square…and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in…and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon."

Who's The Boss?

"C'mon people, what are some more nurses values?"

I was nearly four months into my stint at the CNA when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union's downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe 7 or 8 other communications staffers, all but two of us-an Asian woman and myself-who are non-white.

The task this late April afternoon was to identify "nurses values," which I had assumed meant that I would help pore over the results of a nurses' questionnaire to produce a coherent ad campaign.

Instead, the communications manager, Sarah Cecile, stood astride an easel that leaned like a sprinter at the finish line, her magic marker poised to add to the wan list of nouns that glared accusingly at me, reducing Hegelian dialectical inquiry to a game of fucking charades.

"Wait," I said, "we're telling the nurses what their values should be? Shouldn't we be asking the nurses what their values are, you know, like in a survey, or a poll?"

"That's a bad word for us," said a graphic artist who'd worked for the CNA for several years. "Polling is frowned upon here."

"Maybe they know something I don't," I said sarcastically, "but if we're telling the rank and file what to do, doesn't that make the union just another boss that the nurses have to answer to?

Should communications organize a coup of sorts?" I asked provocatively.

When I returned to my office 30 minutes later, I had an email from De Moro's secretary, summoning me to a meeting with the executive director the following morning.

This was extraordinary for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that despite sharing the same floor as the executive staff, it was an unwritten rule that communications was to have no contact with top management. This directive went so far as to prohibit communications from either emailing executives directly, or from entering or exiting through the executives' north wing.

Moreover, I was told that both the executive staff, and the board, were almost all lily-white, save for one Latino and one African-American on each.

What I remember most about the next day's meeting is the mirthless half-smile that DeMoro wore like a mask for nearly the entire 45-minutes, reminding me of Sir Richard Burton's description of Lucille Ball as "a monster of staggering charmlessness."

She began by asking me if I had any ideas for trying to improve the union's communications effort, which was odd, since she'd blown off an email with my suggestions for doing exactly that only weeks earlier.

"Anything we could do to make this more of a bottom-up effort would be to the union's benefit," I recall saying. "It seems we spend an awful lot of time trying to talk to people who really aren't interested in what we have to say, and not enough rallying and organizing the community to put pressure on decision makers."

By this time, California's Secretary-of-State, Harris had already, effectively vetoed the sale to Prime by attaching such stringent conditions to the transaction that she knew no corporation would accept the terms. I had publicly predicted as much months earlier; knowing that Harris would rely heavily on Wall Street to finance her US Senate campaign, I'd proposed, unsuccessfully, writing articles interrogating the investment firm's mishandling of other businesses it had acquired.

But DeMoro's communications' director, a walking mediocrity named Chuck Idelson, had all of the imagination of a lamp post, and only half the personality. His idea of media relations was sending out at least one anemic press release per day, then marshaling the entire communication staff for two days to badger journalists we had no relationship with to cover news conferences that were wholly absent any news. A North Carolina rally for the Robin Hood tax on Wall Street transactions was attended by two people, the parents of Cecile, the communications manager.

As presidential hopefuls began campaigning in Iowa ahead of that state's all important caucus, the nurses' union planned to launch an ad campaign against Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I asked Idelson one day in early 2015 just as the primary season was beginning to take shape.

"Well, Walker is really bad on labor," Idelson said.

"All the Republicans are bad on labor," I said. "All the Democrats too. You're gonna tell the rank-and-file that you spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars to help send union-busting Hillary Clinton to the White House? Why don't they spend that money on organizing, or on an ad campaign to support Black Lives Matter. Police violence against people of color is a public health crisis," I said. "Who is more credible on that issue than nurses?"

Moreover, I said, a California-based trade union buying ads in Iowa with union dues will surely be used as a cudgel with which to beat organized labor upside the head.

I repeated my concerns to DeMoro, but with that awkward smile on her face, she made it clear that she shared neither my faith in the rank-and-file, or the community.

"The nurses have some issues," she said at our meeting. "We need for more of them to support the Democrats and to work the phone banks and things like that," she said. "And frankly," she said, abandoning all pretense now, her smile dissolving into a contemptuous frown, "they need to be more progressive, more radical and to take more chances."

DeMoro's annual salary at the time was $359,000, more than triple the average nurse's yearly pay.

You Ain't White

Portraying Leftists as subversives, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required trade unions to weed out suspected communists, according to the historian Foner, by asking Black workers questions like:

"Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?"

And this: Have you ever danced with a white girl?"

Whites were asked if they had ever entertained Blacks in their homes, and witnesses, Foner wrote, were asked "Have you ever had any conversations that would lead you to believe (the accused) is rather advanced in his thinking on racial matters?"

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, would later acknowledge that this purge of communists from trade unions was akin to severing the umbilical cord while the baby was still in the womb, starving the most democratizing social movements of a vital fuel-source.

Much of the labor movement's bandwidth however, could not be measured in muscle, or union-dues, but in imagination, as demonstrated by the ILWU's Goldblatt's vision of a Beloved Community, fashioned from the stevedores' pension fund.

"So let's all be careful," United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther once said, "that we don't play the bosses game by falling for the Red Scare."

And then Reuther went on to play the bosses game, expertly, chasing Marxists from the union, isolating Black workers, and reverting to the anodyne reforms that characterized the ineffective, segregated unions before the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. So disillusioned were Black autoworkers with Reuther's tripartite alliance with Detroit's industrialists and the Democrats that by the late 1960s, many had begun to joke that the acronym UAW stood for "U Ain't White."

The tipping point, however, occurred in the midst of the 1975 fiscal crisis, when New York bankers hatched a scheme to recoup their losses on bad real estate investments from the wages, pensions, and subsidies shelled out to city employees and the working class. The facts were not on their side, and so the financiers played the only hand they knew to play: race.

Doubling down on the Birth-of-a-Nation narrative, the city's oligarchs, and their friends in the media, portrayed Blacks as a menace to the civic project, exploiting racial resentment of a Black polity that had found its voice mostly through labor unions.

In a 1976 episode of the NBC television series, McCloud, titled "The Day New York Turned Blue," the stetson-wearing New Mexico sheriff- an avatar for white, male supremacy- almost single-handedly rescues Gotham from ruin, largely by convincing an Italian cop named Rizzo to cross a picket line, and help repel an attack by the mafia, who ambush police headquarters to kill a mob attorney-turned state's witness.

Aside from the mafia, the villains in this urban morality tale are the police union-led by the Bad Nigger that 1970s America loved to hate, Carl Weathers-which refuses to call off a labor walkout in the city's time-of-need, and a prostitute who is drugging her clients-one an accountant visiting New York to audit federal bailout money-with a fatal, suffocating blue paint.

Playing the role of Rizzo in real-life was the head of the city's largest municipal union, Victor Gotbaum. In his book, Working Class New York, the historian Joshua B. Freeman wrote of Gotbaum and his partner, Joe Bigel:

"Having seen the power of the financial community,the hostility of the federal government, and the divisions within the union movement, they shied away from a militant, independent labor strategy which might have led to them being blamed for a city bankruptcy. Instead, they preferred to make concessions and invest their members' pension money in city debt in return for a place at or near the table, where discussions about the city's future were being made by financiers, businessmen, and state and federal officials. Gotbaum became so entranced by the power elite . . .that within a few years he and (investment banker Felix) Rohatyin were calling each other best friends, even holding a joint birthday party in Southampton."

DeMoro is an heir to Gotbaum, not Goldblatt. If she or any of her lieutenants had an ounce of imagination I never saw it. Consider that at no time during the Daughter's of Charity sale, did I ever once hear anyone mention the possibility of pushing for legislation to convert O'Connor to a worker, or community-managed health co-op, similar to the ILWU's response to the Fillmore's housing crisis.

Shortly after Harris nixed the Prime deal, DeMoro called an emergency all-staff meeting in March of 2015, in which she bluntly asked the 65 or so staff members for their suggestions.

"If we don't do something different now, we're going to die," she said.

A young Latina labor organizer raised her hand, and said: "Why don't we start to build partnerships with the immigrant rights community that's politically active and organizing across California," I recall her saying. "We could really strengthen our own organizing capacity and deepen our roots in a community that is looking to join forces with institutional allies."

You could've heard a gnat piss on cotton in Georgia.

Later, the young organizer would tell me privately me that had she been a white, male labor organizer, and replaced immigrant rights community with some off-brand faction of Silicon Valley white liberals, say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, DeMoro would've been over the moon.

"Everybody knows that RoseAnn loves her white boys," she said.

As for me, I was fired a week after proposing a coup because "you don't seem happy here."

It was May 1, or May Day.

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

To Escape Trump's America, We Need to Bring the Militant Labor Tactics of 1946 Back to the Future

By lifelongwobbly.com

Back to the Future, Part 1:

The last general strike in the US was in Oakland in 1946. That year there were 6 city-wide general strikes, plus nationwide strikes in steel, coal, and rail transport. More than 5 million workers struck in the biggest strike wave of US history. So what happened? Why haven't we ever gone out like that again? Congress amended US labor law in 1947, adding massive penalties for the very tactics that had allowed strikes to spread and be successful - and the business unions accepted the new laws. In fact, they even went beyond them by voluntarily adding "no-strike clauses" to every union contract for the last 70 years, and agreeing that when they do strike in between contracts it will only be for their own wages and working conditions, not to support anybody else or to apply pressure about things happening in the broader society. When we allowed ourselves to lose our most important weapons 70 years ago, we took the first step towards Trump's America. We're stuck in the wrong timeline - if we want to get out, we have to bring the militant labor tactics of 1946 back to the future!

Back to the Future, Part 2:

The Oakland General Strike began early in the morning of December 3, 1946, when police were trying to break up a picket line of mostly female department store clerks who had been on strike since October 21 ("Back to the Future Day"). A streetcar driver saw it happening and stopped his car. This stopped all the cars
behind him. All of the passengers who were no longer going to work began immediately picketing at other businesses in Oakland, calling out those workers, and shutting down the businesses. The strike spread from there. Some important points:

1. The heroes of this story are the department store clerks who maintained an effective picket for 6 weeks, shutting down the operations of the business, refusing limitations on their ability to picket, and defending their picket when the cops were trying to break it. We need to re-learn how to organize "hard" pickets which actually disrupt commerce, and how to defend those pickets from our enemies. We also need to reject all of the limitations that courts, and the unions, will tell us we have to impose on our pickets.

2. The streetcar driver who stopped his car when he saw the cops breaking the picket deserves an honorable mention, like Peter Norman ("the white dude" at the Mexico City Olympics). He knew which side he was on, and he didn't just keep moving. He saw fellow workers under attack and he used his power as a worker to support the right side - despite the fact that the retail workers strike had no immediate tie to his own wages and working conditions. He didn't ask his union if it was OK. He didn't wait to go back to his union meeting and ask them to pass a resolution supporting the retail workers. Basically, it doesn't even matter whether he was a union member. It doesn't even matter if he abstractly thought that women should be quitting their jobs now that World War 2 was over, or if he abstractly supported Jim Crow - he supported fellow workers against the cops. Since 1947, "secondary strikes" like that have been illegal, and his union could have been attacked by the court - but the union probably would have been training him all along that he can only strike in between contracts, and definitely not for anyone else's cause. We need to reject any limitation on our ability to strike in support of fellow workers, or to strike about things beyond our own specific workplaces.

3. The passengers on his streetcar and the ones behind it also deserve credit for immediately forming mass pickets, reinforcing the retail workers' picket and also spreading throughout the city and pulling other workers out on strike. They didn't come up with this all in the moment, they learned how to do this over years of tough strikes, including the 1934 general strike in San Francisco that also shut down Oakland. Mass pickets have also been illegal since 1947, and we've lost those traditions. We urgently need to relearn them.

4. The unions didn't call the Oakland General Strike - but they sure as hell called it off, and left the retail workers alone in the cold. The general strikes that have happened in the US have almost never been called ahead of time by union. They've almost always happened by workers semi-spontaneously going on strike in solidarity with other workers, supporting the demands of the first group and adding their own. (I say "semi"-spontaneously because the working class had years of practice and preparation leading into each strike - something that's been forcibly removed from our culture over the past 70 years.) Yet by the third day of the Oakland General Strike, the local union leadership was already declaring that the strike was over and everyone except the retail workers should go back to work. As the streetcar drivers were told by their union president, " The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible … No general strike has ever yet brought success to the labor movement. " Once the retail workers were left to keep striking alone, it was only a matter of time before they were beaten and had to give up. If we're serious about reviving strikes, we need to prepare people as much as we can for how quickly the union leadership and the Democratic Party will do everything they can to prevent strikes from the start, and to get workers back to work.

Back to the Future, Part 3:

The 70th anniversary of the Oakland General Strike is coming up in three weeks, on December 3rd. As all of our movements go into overdrive, and we all start networking and holding bigger events than we're used to, we should consider holding "Spirit of '46" events across the country on December 3rd to talk about the Oakland General Strike and the relevance of their tactics for today. This is obviously coming up very soon, but it seems do-able, and if it's presented right, could pull a lot of interest. What else can we start doing to prepare for the kind of labor movement we need - the kind that is ready to stand up to the state and the capitalists? What should we think about the calls that have already started circulating for a general strike to stop Trump's inauguration?

1. The "Labor for Bernie" initiative showed the potential for a cross-union, bottom-up movement that fought for big goals, overcame the separation that is built into the labor movement, and directly challenged the right of the Democratic party and the labor bureaucracy to speak for union members or the working class . We've all just seen that electoral politics are inadequate to stop fascism - it's time for union members and supporters to build a similar movement that is based on supporting all labor action, rejecting all limits on strikes and pickets whether they come from the government or the unions themselves, making all pickets effective, and spreading strikes when they occur (through so-called "secondary" strikes and pickets) - as well as driving police out of the labor movement. This movement should organize in city-wide groups independently of any union structure, inviting all workers to be involved, and then those groups could network nationally. The groups should be open to any worker, union member or not, but should keep union and non-profit staff and and high officers out. Once they get going, it is important that they consider themselves to have all of the legitimacy they need to organize pickets or call strikes, whether through calling for mass workplace meetings to organize action or through supporting minority action - these groups will need to do this because the existing labor structures will put brakes on all action by citing their no-strike clauses and respect for labor law. It's important for these groups to have a name that people can identify with, like "Labor United for All", "Labor Against Fascism", or "One Big Union."

2. The IWW is experiencing a sudden growth spike, as most radical left groups probably are right now. In particular, the IWW's General Defense Commitee, which focuses on defense of the working class and community self-defense, is seeing a lot of interest of people wanting to start new locals. The GDC has a picket training that began with the 2005 Northwest Airlines strike, when the union was trying to tell workers to keep the pickets tame and ineffective. The training focuses on the tactics needed to hold effective, disruptive pickets and to maintain them against scabs. These tactics have ended up being very useful for community self-defense. We should try to make sure that we spread this picket training to as many of these new locals as possible, and prepare as many trainers as possible. If we're going to have the labor movement we desperately need, we're going to have to re-learn how to hold effective pickets, and how to engage in community self-defense - very, very quickly.

3. The growth that we're seeing shows that people think we have something to offer now that electoral anti-fascism is discredited. We should double down on our efforts to recruit and to integrate these new members. We also need to prove that they are right when they think we have something to offer. We need to organize boldly, which will inspire our new members to become active and take leadership, and will also inspire hundreds and thousands of more people to join.

4. We absolutely need to double down on our support for Latino workers. We need to prepare to mobilize boldly against any repression that they face, and to support them when/if they take action. They've already proven through the May Day strikes of 2005 and 2006 that they know how to organize mass industrial action better than any other group of workers in this country. We also need to emphasize our Spanish-language materials and infrastructure in an effort to make our organization a useful tool for Latino workers.

5. Millions of union members, and workers, voted for Trump. A lot of factors went into this, including massive undercurrents of hatred and bigotry, but it also seems that there was an economic element - many white workers saw him as the only program offering anything different from decades of factory closures, social cuts, and poverty with no escape. Our best bet to win them away from fascism is if we show that we have a real program to fight for, and win , a better world. If we can't do that, we won't. (The business union leadership have already thrown themselves on the mercy of the victor and declared that they're ready to work with Trump - but it's debatable whether he'll have any use for them.) We're on the verge of being in a similar situation for organizing as radicals were during Jim Crow - and we will have to organize in the same way, focusing on the needs and defense of the most oppressed and vulnerable groups of workers and forcing bigots at work to decide whether they'll side with the boss or with their co-workers. Someone can vote based on abstract bigotry and still choose to side with their flesh-and-blood co-workers against the boss that yells at both of them every day. And if they don't, they're scabs, and we'll have to treat them as such. As CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs put it in 1958, " if a white worker or group of white workers after reading and contributing to the paper as a whole finds that articles or letters expressing Negro aggressiveness on racial questions make the whole paper offensive to him, that means that it is he who is putting his prejudices on the race question before the interests of the class as a whole. He must be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary fought to a finish. "

6. It's good that people are already thinking in terms of how we can use our power at work to exert pressure on our lives outside of work. We're supposed to think that we only have power at the ballot box, every four years. It's just become much more obvious to a lot of people that we don't have any power there. We need to encourage workers to think about leveraging their power at work in new ways in every possible respect. As the old slogan goes, the National Guard can't dig coal with bayonets - if the government legislates against women's reproductive rights, it can only do so if healthcare workers accept it; if the government sends more police into schools, they will only find students to criminalize if the teachers have not gone on strike. We need to push as hard as we can to break through this limitation of self-confidence, where workers think that workplace action (if they even take it at all) can only be about their own conditions. Even the head of the Chicago Teachers' Union, one of the most confrontational and inspiring unions in the country, accepts copsin schools and does not challenge these limitations. When workers do break through on this - and they've got to, sometime, somewhere - we need to be ready to support them with everything we've got.

7. The initial discussion of a general strike points to the kind of labor movement that we've needed for a long time and we're going to desperately require now. We are entering a period where the state will bring on all ferocity against any oppositional movement. They've also made it clear that the very existence of unions is one of their targets - Reagan focused on crushing militant unions to scare the rest; the current Republican party, including Trump, want to completely abolish unions, as they basically have in Wisconsin since 2011.

8. A general strike will only ever happen over the ruins of labor law and workplace contractualism. As we saw in Wisconsin in 2011, the day after people began talking about general strike, the international unions came down hard saying that nobody in Wisconsin had the authority to call a general strike, since each union's contracts prohibited striking. Ironically, if the Republicans try to pass nationwide right-to-work laws or outlaw dues checkoff, the only way to stop it would be a general strike - but the union leadership is neither willing nor even capable of calling such a strike. At the end of the day, if we believe that workers can overcome capitalism - then we have to believe that they can overcome US labor law and workplace contractualism.

9. We will also need to be ready for minority strikes or action when and if they happen. Many workers and union members may have voted for Trump and may actually want him to take office. We still need to create a movement that encourages and supports action by any size group of workers, whether it's individual fast food workers refusing to serve cops , or groups of workers going on strike, for whatever reason, even if they aren't the entire workforce. We particularly need to support trends where workers are taking action at work over issues beyond just wages and working conditions, and to emphasize how much potential power we have if we only use it. As we all begin holding mass meetings in cities around the country and building new infrastructures, we should plan out some kind of "flying picket" infrastructure which can mobilize mass pickets in immediate defense of any minority workplace action especially.

10. And what about the ideas which have begun floating around about a general strike on January 20th to stop Trump's inauguration? I would say that we in the IWW should be cautiously optimistic, but should wait and see whether this catches on more broadly before we consider officially engaging with it - in the meantime, we should emphasize our efforts to build a sustained, pro-strike culture and infrastructure along the lines of what I've written above. I want to be clear, that I think it is absolutely correct to promote as much unrest as possible (including industrial unrest) to prevent the inauguration. If there is a lot of excitement around the country for a day, or a week, or a month of "no work, no school" to prevent the inauguration, that would be a fantastic development. There are some who think that the IWW can just ignore Trump because we do not take a stand on politicians - this is missing the point of what is happening in this country and would be a disastrous mistake. The biggest challenge towards any industrial action will be the union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO is "ready to work with Trump", and would be incapable of calling for or organizing a general strike even if they wanted to. We need to build the kind of movements which can challenge the hegemony of the business unions and call for strikes over their heads. Maybe a starting point would be agitating hospitality and restaurant workers in DC to shut down all hotels and restaurants leading up to the inauguration, or agitating media workers to refuse to broadcast anything by Trump. The main point is that there won't be one general strike that saves us and then we all go back to normal - our focus has to be recreating a culture of militant, production-stopping strikes which seek to spread through secondary strikes and mass pickets, and which take aim at all injustice in society, not just workplace issues.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion, as bad as it looks right now. One day we will raise a cooperative commonwealth from the nightmare of capitalism, and one day there won't be any more presidents to inaugurate. As surprised as we all might be to have waken up on November 9 and found ourselves hurtling towards fascism, we have to remember that sometimes we will be surprised by spontaneous outpourings of solidarity that people will show as they create new movements which leave us struggling to catch up. The protests which began the night after the election are a very encouraging step in that direction, and they still have time to spread from the street to every aspect of society.

This was originally posted at lifelongwobbly.com.

On the Front Lines of Class War: Why the Fight for a Livable Wage is Everyone's Fight

By Colin Jenkins

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class - the rich class - that's making war, and we're winning."

- Warren Buffett (2006)

In the spring of 2004, amid the thaw of a frigid New York City winter, a brave group of Starbucks baristas began organizing. Like most service-sector employees in the United States, they were faced with the daunting task of trying to live on less-than-livable wages. Inconsistent hours, inadequate or non-existent health insurance, and less-than-dignified working conditions paled in comparison to their inability to obtain the most basic necessities. Apartment meetings, backroom discussions, and after-hours pep talks - all fueled by a collective angst - culminated into a sense of solidarity, the natural bond that occurs when workers take the time to realize their commonalities and shared struggle. On May 17, 2004, they officially announced their affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World, an all-encompassing union with an impressive history of labor activity in the US. A petition for unionization followed suit. Their demands were simple: Guaranteed hours with the option for fulltime status, an end to understaffing, a healthier and safer workplace, and increased pay and raises.

"Solidarity Unionism," Grassroots Organizing, and the Formation of a New Front

It is only fitting that such a daring endeavor would fall under the banner of the IWW. Proudly asserting itself as "One Big Union" and "A Union for All Workers," the "Wobblies" shun hierarchical and highly-bureaucratic union models that have dominated the American labor scene for much of the past half-century, instead promoting and utilizing direct action that is member-run and member-driven. Deploying what they refer to as "solidarity unionism," as opposed to "business unionism," the preamble to the IWW's constitution echoes an old-school, militant, trade-union tone, boldly (and correctly) proclaiming, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people" - a far cry from the timid and capitulating modus operandi of the modern adaptation. However, it is not just a much-needed infusion of labor militancy that makes the IWW attractive, it is its grassroots approach to labor organizing. In a post-industrial landscape that is overrun with underemployment, the IWW's model represents accessibility and a sense of empowerment for disconnected workers who find themselves on virtual islands - outside the potentially radical confines of a traditional shop floor. And when considering that wages have either dropped or remained stagnant in the midst of ever-growing costs of living over the past 30 years, it is no surprise that American workers are reaching their collective breaking point and seeking refuge in the form of a shared struggle.

After decades of a disastrous neoliberal agenda that has placed the American working class in an all-out sprint to the bottom, the growing needs of low-wage workers coupled with the "wobbly way" to create a perfect storm. As such, the Starbucks Union captured a vibe and sparked a movement. 2007 saw the arrival of Brandworkers, "a non-profit organization bringing local food production workers together for good jobs and a sustainable food system." Following a similar grassroots blueprint, the NYC-based organization was founded "by retail and food employees who identified a need for an organization dedicated to protecting and advancing their rights," and stands on "a simple principle: that working people themselves, equipped with powerful social change tools, were uniquely positioned to make positive change on the job and in society." Their direct-action, "Focus on the Food Chain (FOFC)" initiative specifically targets "the rapid proliferation of sweatshops among the food processing factories and distribution warehouses that supply the City's (NYC) grocery stores and restaurants" and that of which "increasingly relies on the exploitation of recent immigrants of color, mostly from Latin America and China." In an unprecedented effort, FOFC "creates space for the immigrant workers of NYC's industrial food sector to build unity with each other, gain proficiency in the use of powerful social change tools, and carry out member-led workplace justice campaigns to transform the industry." Ultimately, "Focus members and their allies are using organizing, grassroots advocacy, and legal actions to build a food system that provides high-quality local food and good local jobs."

Groups like the Starbucks Workers Union and Brandworkers created momentum. In 2010, six years after baristas came together in Manhattan, a band of sandwich makers gathered 1,200 miles westward, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thus, the next wave of grassroots, low-wage labor activity - this time stemming from the fast-food industry and, more specifically, the corporate brand of Jimmy John's sandwiches - took hold. Sporting T-shirts that read, "Wages So Low You'll Freak" - a mockery of JJ's corporate slogan, "Subs So Fast You'll Freak" - JJ workers, also under the direction of the IWW, embarked on the first ever unionization drive for fast-food workers. Emily Przybylski, a bike delivery worker at the restaurant chain, captured the spirit of the moment. "A union in fast food is an idea whose time has come," she told reporters. "There are millions of workers in this industry living in poverty, with no consistent scheduling, no job security and no respect. It's time for change." As Labor Day 2010 approached, JJ workers at one Minneapolis store filed for a union election, and actions such as leafleting and picketing were coordinated at stores in 32 states, "from Clovis, California to Miami, Florida."

The embryo created by baristas in NYC, and nurtured over the better part of a decade by the likes of the Brandworkers and Jimmy John's workers in Minneapolis, came to a head in 2012. On Thursday, October 4th, 2012, the spread of low-wage discontent struck the epicenter of corporate exploitation, as "more than 70 Los Angeles Wal-Mart workers from nine stores walked off the job." These walkouts accompanied over "20 charges of unfair labor practices" filed with the National Labor Relation Board. A week later, Wal-Mart workers across 28 stores in 12 states, staged labor protests in the form of strikes and walk-outs. The first workers' strike in the company's 50-year history spread to stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Orlando. This movement, much like its predecessors, was largely formed out of grassroots organizing efforts that were over a year in the making. In June 2011, "OUR Walmart," a workers advocacy organization supported by and coordinated with store associates from across the country, dispatched "nearly 100 Associates representing thousands of OUR Walmart members from across the United States to the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Ark., and presented a Declaration of Respect to Walmart executive management." The Declaration included a list of requests: Listen to us, the Associates; Have respect for the individual; Recognize freedom of association and freedom of speech; Fix the Open Door policy; Pay a minimum of $13/hour and make full-time jobs available for Associates who want them; Create dependable, predictable work schedules; Provide affordable healthcare; Provide every Associate with a policy manual, ensure equal enforcement of policy and no discrimination, and give every Associate equal opportunity to succeed and advance in his or her career; and provide wages and benefits that ensure that no Associate has to rely on government assistance.

In November of 2012, merely weeks after Wal-Mart workers took a courageous stand, fast-food workers from McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell and KFC staged protests in various locations around New York City, "demanding $15 an hour in pay and the right to form a union." A few months later, in the spring of 2013, fast food strikes gained momentum with numerous walk-outs across the country. In April, NYC workers - backed by labor, community and religious groups - staged protests at more than five dozen restaurants. Over the course of the next month, similar actions were carried out in Pennsylvania and Chicago. In Chicago, the actions spread from the fast-food industry to retail, with low-wage workers from Macy's, Sears, and Victoria's Secret also participating. On Friday, May 10th, "400 workers at more than 60 fast-food restaurants in the Detroit metro area walked off the job" in what may have been "the largest fast food strike in American history." The Detroit event was significantly effective as it "shut down multiple restaurants entirely, including multiple McDonald's outlets, a Long John Silver's, a Burger King, two Popeye's restaurants, and a KFC." "One McDonald's worker, Jay Robinson, told reporters that when he started at McDonald's over two years ago, he was paid $7.40 an hour,"writes Aaron Petkov for Socialistworker.org. "Robinson has gotten raises since then - and now makes $7.48 an hour." In his efforts to care for himself and a 2-year-old daughter, "It's a day-to-day struggle," he told reporters. "And the owners make millions." At another McDonald's restaurant, "management attempted to avert a shutdown by bringing in replacement workers, but those replacement workers (in a moment of incredible solidarity) then promptly joined the strike." This wave of low-wage labor militancy continued through the summer. On Thursday, August 29th, workers at numerous fast-food chains participated in coordinated strikes in nearly 60 cities nationwide. Citing poverty wages and the need for more rights in the workplace, "a dozen workers didn't show up for their shift at a McDonald's on 8 Mile Road (in Detroit), forcing the closure of the dining room." In Raleigh, N.C., about 30 workers picketed outside a Little Caesars location. One employee, Julio Wilson, expressed the discontent of his peers, saying the $9-an-hour he was paid was not nearly enough to support himself and his 5-year-old daughter. "I know I'm risking my job, but it's my right to fight for what I deserve," Wilson said. "Nine dollars an hour is not enough to make ends meet nowadays." In Indianapolis, "several employees walked off the job from a McDonald's outlet at 16th and Meridian streets." "Most people here have a family to support, and most people here barely make enough to make ends meet,'" employee Dwight Murray said. "We're here today because we feel like McDonald's is a $6 billion entity and it's not unfeasible for them to pay $15 an hour.

Corporate Greed, Propaganda, and Union-Busting

Despite the obvious needs for livable wages, there is much opposition. Union-busting has become a staple of employee orientations throughout the corporate landscape, with retail giants like Target and Wal-Mart regularly unleashing "aggressive anti-union push (es), and distributing pamphlets and other propaganda to employees." Corporations like Target have become notorious for making employees watch dramatized "training videos" on the so-called "dangers" of unionization in an attempt to convince workers that higher wages, more benefits, and an overall sense of dignity at the workplace would somehow not be good for them. This concerted effort to maintain a grip on poverty wages has led to the formation of intricate networks of union-busting firms that employ corporate lawyers and "anti-union strategists" to offer "continuing education" for business owners and executives. "At these seminars," writes Kim Phillips-Fein, "lawyers and labor relations consultants from the nation's top union-busting law firms come to speak to rapt, intimate groups of executives, advising them on how to beat union election drives, do end runs around the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and decertify unions, all the while hawking their own firms' services." Of course, "union members are expressly banned." To complement this behind-the-scenes movement, corporate mouthpieces like Fox News have taken up the propaganda charge against unions by referring to them as "monopolies" that prevent non-union workers from securing jobs, coining terms like "union thugs" as a fear tactic, displaying video snippets of supposed "union violence," utilizing doublespeak like "right to work" to suggest that accepting low wages is somehow a right that should be fought for, and airing modern-day snake oil salesmen to convince its working class viewers that unions are given extra benefits at their expense. In addition to ideological propaganda, special interest groups, wealthy donors, and Super PACs fueled by the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision - such as Koch Industries PAC - have placed virtual ATMs in Governor's mansions and Congressional offices to ensure political opposition to workers' needs while remaining corporate (and thus profit)-friendly.

Starbucks' corporate response to the organizing efforts made by those fateful NYC workers in 2004 was fierce. "Faced with the first serious effort in decades to unionize one of its stores, Starbucks launched what a former worker called 'a scorched-earth campaign' against pro-union employees," reported Josh Harkinson. "The union busting has just been absolutely relentless," says the worker, Daniel Gross, who was fired in 2006 due to his involvement in the initial organizing efforts at the Manhattan store where he worked. The Minneapolis Jimmy John's workers were met with similar tactics, which included bizarre personal attacks from store owners and management through social media. On March 22, 2011, after lobbying for sick days from the restaurant chain, six workers - all of whom were "key figures" in the union organizing efforts - were fired for "defaming the brand and disloyalty to the company." Shortly thereafter, another "pro-union" employee was berated and humiliated on social media by owners and managers, some of whom went as far as posting the employee's personal telephone number on a public Facebook page and asking people to text the employee to "let him know how they feel." An Assistant Manager then posted disparaging personal comments about the pro-union employee, making fun of his appearance and including a picture of the employee for all to see. In addition to these reactive measures deployed by some companies, corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart have relied on proactive union-busting programs for years. In 2007, Washington-based Human Rights Watch released an extensive report accusing the retail giant of "routinely flouting its workers' human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organizers, discriminating against long-term staff, and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda." The report includes examples of "workers forced into unpaid overtime and an alleged strategy of squeezing out long-serving staff who are more costly than low-wage, temporary, younger workers," highlights "elaborate tactics to stop staff from coming together to fight for better conditions," and even describes detailed measures such as "focusing security cameras on areas where staff congregate and shifting around loyal workers in 'unit packing' tactics to ensure votes for union recognition are defeated." The report also found that each store manager, as a part of their training, receives a "manager's toolbox" manual which instructs them on "how to remain free in the event union organizers choose your facility as their next target," and that managers are also given access to and instructed to call a 'union hotline' if they suspect staff are discussing unionization - an action that would deploy corporate specialists from the company's headquarters to "address the situation."

The reasons for such opposition are clear. Corporate profits remain at an all-time high because companies are able to pay poverty wages to their employees and rely on government welfare programs to cover the rest (ironically, while also enjoying historically low corporate tax rates ). Additionally, the economic storm that has lingered over the heads of the American working class for the past five years has equaled a virtual paradise for corporate America. Three simple facts highlight this current economic landscape:

• Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high as companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before.

• Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low as companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP.

• Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades as companies don't employ as many workers as they used to. As a result, the employment-to-population ratio has collapsed.

Maintaining this environment has become a top priority for wealthy investors, the corporations themselves, and the politicians who are funded by both. By gutting the middle class through the destruction of unions (as of 2011, only 11.9% of the American workforce was unionized - a 70-year low) over the past three decades, corporations have enjoyed a relatively clear path towards establishing these beneficial conditions of today - where 20% of the population owns 89% of all "privately held wealth;" and where the top 1% of the population owns 42.1% of all "financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home)." In addition to corporate-friendly policies that became commonplace starting with the Reagan years and continuing through both Bush', Clinton, and now Obama, the emergence of globalization has allowed for the replacement of American workers through the process of offshoring and the subsequent exploitation of extremely impoverished populations of workers abroad. Therefore, this latest surfacing of labor militancy from within the ranks of the domestic, low-wage, service-sector workforce represents the biggest threat - not only in its tangible fight for economic justice in the form of a livable wage, but also in its potentially revolutionary orientation which identifies with the modern working class and, most notably, the working poor - that corporate hegemony has faced within the geographic confines of the U.S. in decades. "If these guys are seen to succeed, it could really light a fire, because the dissatisfaction is unquestionable," labor historian Peter Rachleff explains. "The corporation knows that, and they have a lot of resources [and] plenty of lawyers" to combat these working class movements.

Workers' Victories and Building Momentum

Despite a well-funded and highly-coordinated opposition, there have been many victories and positive developments along the way. The mere emergence of a new labor resistance - let alone the fact that it has developed from within the low-wage service-sector and from one of the most disenfranchised demographics of the working class - is very encouraging. While some have questioned the roots of the movement and the extent of the involvement of more traditional, hierarchical unions like SEIU (Service Employees International), there is no denying the politicization and sense of empowerment that is being internalized by the involved workers themselves. Considering the near-death of working class consciousness in the U.S., this development simply cannot and should not be underestimated. The infusion of a direct-action model that insists on a worker-controlled approach to labor battles (i.e. the IWW) is certainly a leap forward. And this method has proven effective in more ways than one. On Tuesday, December 28, 2008, NYC Starbucks baristas were vindicated by National Labor Relations Board judge, Mindy E. Landow, when she ruled that Starbucks had "illegally fired three workers and otherwise violated federal labor laws in seeking to beat back unionization efforts at several of its Manhattan cafes" and ordered Starbucks "to pledge to end what she said was discriminatory treatment toward workers who supported the union at four of its Manhattan shops: 200 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, 145 Second Avenue at 9th Street, 15 Union Square East and 116 East 57th Street." Two years later, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, following a "determined campaign of grassroots actions in Starbucks stores and communities all over the country," secured another victory when the company's corporate office gave in to demands for workers to receive time-and-one-half pay for working on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. "We're deeply moved to have been able in our modest way to increase respect for Dr. King's legacy while ensuring that Starbucks employees who work on his holiday are fairly compensated," said Anja Witek, a Starbucks barista and SWU member in Minnesota. "This is a great example of what baristas and all low-wage workers can achieve by getting organized and taking direct action in support of workplace justice issues." In February of 2012, after a long and drawn-out battle with Jimmy John's, a federal judge ruled the company illegally fired the six employees who had campaigned for sick time, and ordered the company to "reinstate the workers with back pay within 14 days." In a spirited testimony, Erik Forman, one of the fired employees, remarked:

"It has already been over a year since we were illegally fired for telling the truth. For all the hard work and dedication of the NLRB's civil servants, employers like Jimmy John's prefer to break the law and drag cases through the courts for years rather than let workers exercise their right to win fair pay, sick days, and respect through union organization. The dysfunctional U.S. labor law system gives Mike and Rob Mulligan (JJ franchise owners) and their cronies in the 1% carte blanche to trample on workers' rights. Jimmy John's workers, and the rest of the 99%, will only be able to win a better life by taking our fight from the courtroom back to the shop floors and the streets."

The latest low-wage workers strike, which took place on December 5th across "100 cities through the day," signified, according to the Guardian's U.S. affiliate, "a growing clamour for more action on income inequality." In front of a Walgreen's in downtown Chicago, nearly 200 protestors chanted, "We can't survive on eight-twenty-five…Walgreen's, Walgreen's, you can't hide. We can see your greedy side!" In Washington, D.C., dozens of workers carrying signs singing loudly, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, it's no fun, to survive, on low low low low pay." "In New York City, about 100 protesters blew whistles and beat drums as they marched into a McDonald's chanting "We can't survive on $7.25." This collective outrage has empowered workers while also placing the problem of income inequality back on the public agenda. Major media sources that had barely uttered a word about such inequality in recent decades have now begun to showcase it. The Catholic Church's latest Pope, Francis, has made waves during a near-month-long tirade exposing the flaws of capitalism, recently asking, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market drops 2 points?" and referring to the "widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs." And calls for a federal minimum wage increase have gained steam with U.S. Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez, writing on his blog, "To reward work, to grow the middle class and strengthen the economy, to give millions of Americans the respect they deserve - it's time to raise the minimum wage." Though, of course, the Democratic Party's proposal to raise the current rate from $7.25 to $9.00, or even $10.10 in other proposed legislation, would hardly equal a significant change for tens of millions of working poor. Still, despite reformist-based rhetoric from politicians, the agenda is being shaped by the brave workers who have risked all to take a stand.

The battle cry "Fight for $15" has stuck. Numerous small and localized labor organization like Detroit 15 - a group of fast-food and retail workers from the Detroit area fighting "for fair wages and the right to form a union without interference" - and Fast Food Forward - a movement of NYC fast-food workers coming together to "build community engagement, hold corporations and their CEOs accountable, and to raise wages so that all Americans can prosper" - have sprung up amidst the movement-at-large, helping to form collaborative efforts with community and religious organizations which possess built-up social capital to be used, and to make the collective decision-making process more accessible to the workers themselves. Socialist candidate, Kshama Sawant, who made the "Fight for $15" cause a key part of her election campaign, made history by winning a seat on the Seattle City Council in November. Sawant's victory was significant not only for working class interests that have been in dire need of a true "left wing" for decades, but also for the fact that her platform was able to pull local Democrats toward a more authentic (though still reformist), left-wing, working-class agenda. As Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat, reported:

"You can't look at the stagnant pay, declining benefits and third-world levels of income disparity in recent years and conclude this system is working. For Millennials as a group, it has been a disaster. Out of the wreckage, left-wing or socialist economic ideas, such as the 'livable wage' movement in which government would seek to mandate a form of economic security, are flowering."

The Future of the American Working Class

If you're reading this article, chances are you are a member of the working class - not because the article specifically pertains to your interests but because, by definition, a large majority of us are compelled to work for a wage or salary to survive. The Occupy slogan which may seem a bit hyperbolic on the surface - breaking society into two camps: the 99% and the 1% - is actually not far off. The 99% essentially refers to the working class - those of us who are underemployed, unemployed, making minimum wage, making an hourly wage, working multiple jobs, earning a salary, working as "salaried professionals," working "under-the-table," etc.. In other words, if you weren't born with enough privilege and generational wealth to carry you through life, you are likely working for a wage in some form or another, or would be compelled to do so if left to your own means.

Jay Robinson, Julio Wilson, Dwight Murray, and their fellow employees are correct in their estimation: Multi-billion dollar corporations can and should pay their workers a livable wage. Considering how far removed we are from the age-old concept of workers "enjoying the fruits of their labor," a seemingly minimal expectation of earning a livable wage for fulltime work has become a revolutionary notion. But it shouldn't be. This issue is not just a low-wage problem - it's a working class problem. It's a middle class problem. It's a societal problem that destroys living standards for everyone outside of elite circles. And, while it is nowhere near the end-all, be-all of solutions to a toxic system, the premise of "a chain being only as strong as its weakest link" is certainly an improvement over the neoliberal, "greed is good" mantra which has dominated monetary and governmental policy over the past thirty years. For low-wage workers themselves, besides allowing the dignity of "earning a living," a livable wage infuses more expendable income into the economy while allowing for the opportunity to live without a chronic reliance on public assistance. "If you earn your money through wages (unlike many of the 1 percent, who earn through things like investments and a tax system biased in favor of capital gains over income) then a higher wage, minimum or otherwise, would mean that you'd spend the additional dollars, creating jobs for other workers," explains market analyst Marshall Auerback. "You'd pay down your mortgages and car loans, getting yourself out of debt. You'd pay more taxes - on sales and property, mostly - thereby relieving the fiscal crises of states and localities. More teachers, police and firefighters would keep their jobs. America would get a virtuous cycle toward higher employment and, more importantly, the cycle would be based on a policy which creates higher incomes, not higher debt via credit expansion." Furthermore, the establishment of livable wages eases the burden placed on the rest of the working class, which has contributed approximately $7 billion per year to fund public assistance programs that serve as a form of subsidization for Fortune 500s. That figure, from an October 2013 report by UC Berkeley's Labor Center, includes four major social benefits programs that low-wage workers are forced to use in order to provide basic necessities for themselves and their families. Specifically, the amount is broken down to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program ($3.9 billion), the Earned Income Tax Credit ($1.9 billion), food stamps ($1 billion), and Temporary Aid for Needy Families ($200,000), and doesn't include other publicly funded programs like child care assistance, WIC, or section 8 housing, among others.

For those who see low-wage workers protesting for higher pay and think, "why don't they just get a better job" or "why don't they go to college, like I did, and earn a degree?" - think again. In 2012, nearly 300,000 Americans with college degrees were working minimum wage jobs. Furthermore, nearly one-half of all recent college graduates with jobs are underemployed. "Of 41.7 million working college graduates in 2010, about 48 percent of the class of 2010 work jobs that require less than a bachelor's degree, and 38 percent of those polled didn't even need high school diplomas." Even worse yet, 40% of recent college graduates are unemployed. In other words, the idea that earning a degree guarantees a livable wage is exactly that - an idea, no longer based in reality. For those who see low-wage workers striking for a livable wage and think, "what do they expect, they're working at McDonald's" or "these aren't careers we're talking about" - think again. Fact is, since the arrival of globalization, American manufacturing companies - the traditional suppliers of a livable wage - have jumped ship, moving their operations overseas to exploit impoverished workforces that are compelled to labor for next-to-nothing. Since this shift, America's working class has become largely reliant on the service industry. In other words, low-wage, service sector jobs are now careers - not by choice, but by necessity. The 2008 economic crisis and subsequent "recovery" only intensified this shift as "mid-wage occupations ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) constituted 60 percent" of job losses during the 2008 recession, but only 22 percent of the job gains during the recovery. In contrast, "low-wage occupations ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) constituted 21 percent" of job losses during the recession, while representing 58 percent of new jobs created during the aftermath. This is a staggering displacement that has seen once-livable employment virtually replaced by now-unlivable wages. As a result, the "characteristics of minimum wage workers" are changing, as 75 percent of them are now adults, many of whom have dependents to care for, and 70 percent of who have at least a high school degree.

The American working class has found itself in a breakneck "race to the bottom" during the corporatist era. However, recent developments stemming from "solidarity unionism," low-wage worker revolts, and a backlash against neoliberal policies and the extreme income inequality which they have bred have shown that American workers are, in fact, beginning to "rise like lions after slumber." If the thundering wave of low-wage labor militancy that has swept the country is any indication, the slumber is officially over. And if the "dramatic actions by and on behalf of workers" in places likes Seattle the past few months - including a "defeat of concessions at major grocery chains, Boeing workers' big 'no' vote on concessions, a $15 minimum wage voted in for airport workers, and election of a socialist (a candidate who made a city-wide $15 minimum wage the centerpiece of her campaign) to city council" -represent a microcosm of things to come, the proverbial race to the bottom - whether it has struck bedrock or not - is over. Because of their emergence as a viable sector of embedded labor, courageous, low-wage workers in the service industry now represent the front lines of an ongoing class war. They represent, as Dave Frieboth notes, "a general uprising of young, displaced workers trapped in low-wage jobs;" people who "looked at the wage disparities and saw that, as a simple matter of fact, the system isn't working." The further they can be kept down in terms of wages, benefits, and overall standards of living, the more effectively their lowly presence may be used as leverage to drive all working Americans' standards down. Thus, their status affects the status of the working class as a whole. They are not only fighting for themselves - they are fighting for all of us. In this sense, "an injury to one" truly is "an injury to all." Their fight is everyone's fight.

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