DSA & Labor: Resurrecting the Rank & File Strategy

The Different Labor Movement Strategies within DSA — in Theory and Reality

By Stephan Kimmerle

It feels like the start of a rising tide for labor.

Starbucks workers in Buffalo broke the dam. As we print this magazine, over 50 Starbucks stores in 19 states have petitioned the NLRB to unionize.

John Deere workers fought against the two-tier wage system. They voted down one contract offer after another, voted to strike, and won many more concessions than their union leadership claimed was possible. 

Two major unions, the UAW and the Teamsters, won improvements in union democracy and developed a more combative strategy.

However, although “the walkouts of Striketober were exciting, especially those taking on two-tier wages and stretched-out work hours, overall the labor movement is rickety and on the defensive,” writes Jane Slaughter, former editor of Labor Notes and co-author of Secrets of a Successful Organizer, on the website of DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus, The Call.

Members of DSA, one of the largest socialist organizations in US history, have been playing leading roles in recent labor struggles, including the educators’ “red state revolt,” an uprising of strikes in 2018 led by rank-and-file educators in Republican-dominated states. John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, made a similar point: “If you think about the kinds of employees [Starbucks has], the stereotype of people that work there seems to be true — a lot of young people, Bernie supporters, DSA types.”

DSA is making a difference. 

That’s why it’s crucial that we in DSA discuss the best labor strategy. Political caucuses or trends within DSA have advocated for different strategies — which we evaluate below.

SMC’s Case-by-Case Approach 

The Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) emphasizes developing friendly relations with unions. They approach the need to reform unions and form reform caucuses on a case-by-case basis. They don’t see a structural need for a Rank & File Strategy.

For example, Russell Weiss-Irwin, a co-author of the labor resolution adopted at the 2021 DSA convention, promoted this resolution on the SMC website, saying: “There certainly can be an uncomfortable tension between a desire to change unions and challenge existing leadership, and to partner with unions to win strikes and organize new workers! This resolution recognizes that and suggests that local chapters and labor groups, as well as national networks of comrades in certain industries or unions are best positioned to find the right balance case-by-case when facing that dilemma.”

We don’t think we can solve the structural, recurring problem of business unionism on merely a “case-by-case” basis.

CPN: Build Unions First, Politics Second 

Ryan Mosgrove, one of the leaders of CPN before moving on to the Renewal slate in 2021 criticized the Rank & File Strategy (described below) adopted by the 2019 DSA convention for assuming “[f]irst, that all labor leadership are by their nature ‘conservative’ and antagonistic to the interests of the workers they represent regardless of, whether they actually are or not. Second, that socialists represent the real leadership of workers, again regardless of whether they even have members in that union or not, by their nature as socialists.”

He’s right that not all union leaders are conservative. However, his argument lacks a structural critique of the union bureaucracy and how to fight it.  He ends up with a pragmatic, ad hoc criticism of conservative union leaders — this or that union leader might sell out; others might not. He covers up the overwhelming dominance of pro-capitalist politics and business unionism among most union leaders with alleged modesty: Who are we — a small, newly-emerging socialist organization — to criticize unions (or their leaders) from the outside?

CPN downplayed the role of the business unionist ideas: “We cannot cling to the notion that if more unions simply had better politics, our power would grow,” wrote Ryan Kekeris on CPN’s website (August 14, 2020). “We must reject the tendency to assume that the primary causes of our weakened labor movement are grounded in ideology.”

CPN also downplayed the role of the union bureaucracy and denounced the Rank & File Strategy as “seek[ing] to create a militant minority that can be a vanguard for the rest of the workers in a given union or union local.” To try to replicate the victories of reform caucuses like CORE in the Chicago Teachers Union “misreads local conditions,” wrote CPN (May 7, 2020). 

CPN’s approach does not arm workers and DSA with an understanding of where business unionism comes from, or how to fight it.

Libertarian Socialists: Dual Power 

Many anarchists and libertarian socialists in DSA want to build “dual power.” They believe that we must focus on carving out a space for economic power and autonomy within this capitalist society (or adjacent to it) until a different economic system takes its place. They support unions as an organizing tool for workers; however, they often think that unions fighting for reforms (higher wages, better working conditions) should focus instead on building cooperatives in which workers themselves run the shop. 

“Democratic labor unions can seize the workplace; worker-owned cooperatives can build it anew in democratic form,” writes the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC, December 31, 2018) in a caucus statement. Unions are described positively as counter-institutions. However: “Our goal in building up this infrastructure is to create *counter-power*.”  

Anarchists view workers’ co-ops as power independent of capitalism, a second, coexisting power, a “dual power” alongside the forces of capital. Since unions don’t seek to create and maintain a situation of dual power, most libertarian socialists maintain that unions represent reform, and workers’ cooperatives represent revolution.

Still, co-ops have to survive within the framework of a competitive market system, and are not at all above or outside of capitalist power. Structurally, the workers as their own managers have to exercise wage restraint to be able to compete, as long as competition prevails in their specific industry. They then depend on the framework set by the financial institutions and large corporations (e.g., interest rates and conditions, machinery, computer and software production). 

The LSC statement agrees with this danger and writes, “we must not emulate the traditional capitalist firm.” But how would they propose to avoid this?

In our view (but not the LSC’s view) this brings us to the battle for state power — and the need for powerful unions. Co-ops can point in the direction of workers’ control and management. But to break the framework of capitalist competition, its drive toward environmental devastation and to stop the race to the bottom, we need the power of a state to regulate industries and protect such worker-run factories from the destructive force of markets. This is why we need a political struggle to break the power of the capitalist market by taking the big corporations into public ownership as part of a democratic socialist planned economy, along with the working class taking state power — not autonomous, small-scale worker co-ops.

Rank & File Strategy

The *Rank & File Strategy* is promoted by DSA’s Bread & Roses (B&R) caucus, the Tempest Collective, and the most influential network of left and rank-and-file workers, Labor Notes, although each of these groups approach the Rank & File Strategy differently. The term was explained in a working paper that Kim Moody wrote in 2000 for his organization Solidarity called “The Rank and File Strategy: Building A Socialist Movement in the US.” Kim argues:

The gap between the socialist organizations and the active sections of the working class who are the organizers of much of the resistance to the employers and rebellions within the unions is too great … The Rank & File Strategy attempts to bridge that gap.  We call this the Rank & File Strategy because it is based on the very real growth of rank-and-file activity and rebellion that occurs in periods of intensified class struggle.

The task for socialists, Moody writes, “is not simply to offer an alternative ideology, a total explanation of the world, but to draw out the class consciousness that makes such bigger ideas realistic.  The notion of a *transitional* set of ideas is key to this strategy.”

Moody emphasizes the importance of unions, without any false romanticism. “Unions, of course, are far from perfect political organizations.  They are bureaucratic.  They often embody or protect racist and/or sexist practices.  Their official ideology, which we will call business unionism, is a mass of contradictions, including the idea of labor-management partnerships.  Their leaders generally do their best to straddle class conflict.”

The Rank & File Strategy includes challenging those leaders in an organized form: “Transitional organizations include rank-and-file reform movements and caucuses rooted in the workplace and the unions.”

This is the strength of the Rank & File Strategy. A conscious approach to rebuilding the labor movement inevitably requires a struggle against the trend of business unionism, which is enforced by the labor bureaucracy.

Business unionism — the cozy relationship between union leaders, the capitalists, and the Democratic Party — goes hand-in-hand with a bureaucratic regime within working-class organizations that must pressure workers to accept the demands of the capitalists. 

The struggle for democracy is one essential part of the liberation of workers in the unions. The other key part is the battle for a class-struggle approach. 

Successes like the strikes of the Chicago Teachers Union would not have been possible without the organized effort of the Caucus Of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE). The changes within the Teamsters are at least to a significant degree the result of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). In the UAW, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) is trying to bring people together to reform the union and was involved in recent changes. 

There are many more examples that underline this point — organizing is power. This is true both in the struggle of a union against the boss, and also in the intra-union struggle of activists who oppose business unionism against the bureaucrats who defend it. 

Jeremy Gong from B&R writes, “Socialists must aim to change the calculus of even the most conservative labor bureaucrats. We can do this by growing the class struggle and building independent politics and socialist organization” (“The Rank & File Strategy is Political,” The Call, February 1, 2022).  This is a good starting point. However, Jeremy Gong fails to spell out the most essential and the most political element of the Rank & File Strategy — the need to organize rank-and-file caucuses to take on the labor bureaucracy, along with their entire business-unionist philosophy that has devastated the labor movement. 

Jeremy also refers in his article to Lenin’s argument in What Is To Be Done? about the limitations of what Lenin describes as “trade unionist consciousness” — namely that workers, if left to their own devices and not guided by outside intellectuals, only develop a kind of reformist consciousness under capitalism rather than socialist consciousness. 

Hal Draper argues very well that Lenin himself later reversed this position, acknowledging that it was inaccurate (see “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of The Party’”). Unfortunately few socialists are aware of Lenin’s reversal on this key point. 

Lenin’s 1902 argument seems to lead Jeremy Gong (like many others) into a schematic understanding of the role of trade unions in contrast with the role of a socialist party or movement. There are important differences between a party and a broad trade union, but the question of the need for socialist ideas within unions is, in our view, essential to emphasize. 

The Disappointing Realities of the Rank & File Strategy in DSA

With a narrow majority, DSA adopted the Rank & File Strategy at its national convention in 2019. The 2019 debate was relatively heated. B&R won this battle, but presented the Rank & File Strategy as mainly about finding “organic leaders” at workplaces (see tinyurl.com/bnr2019labor). B&R was opposed in 2019 by CPN. (You can find the 2019 labor resolutions, #3 by CPN, #32 by B&R here: tinyurl.com/dsa2019resolutions). 

These issues were not debated as much at the 2021 convention. A worked-out compromise about DSA’s labor strategy was presented to the convention, and it passed without much controversy (except for one amendment). 

Mel Bienenfeld of the Tempest (“What’s Become of the Rank & File Strategy?” December  19, 2021) traced these discussions:  

After the 2021 Convention, what can we say about the general consciousness within DSA regarding the [Rank & File Strategy]? This brings us back to [the labor resolution of the DSA national convention], itself a compromise between the pro- and anti-RFS factions. Does the language of supporting the ‘organized efforts of Rank-and-File workers…to transform their unions into militant and democratic vehicles’ and ‘tying workplace demands to whole community demands and campaigns and building possibilities for experiential solidarity’ indicate a clear commitment to the RFS, at least among significant sections of DSA, in anything like the form Moody intended it? I doubt it. The resolution was not discussed in any public forum within DSA—there were no pre-convention meetings, for example—and once it became part of the ‘consent agenda,’ that precluded discussion at the convention itself.

Andy Sernatinger, in his article (Tempest, January 13, 2022) argues that even the “2019 Convention debate never addressed the central question, the relationship to the labor bureaucracy,” but focused on an abstract debate about whether to focus on already unionized workplaces (emphasized by B&R) or on organizing the unorganized at non-union workplaces (advocated by CPN). Andy Sernatinger describes a shift even further away from the Rank & File Strategy:

Every political shift has a corresponding intellectual shift. Bienenfeld doesn’t address the celebrity status of SEIU-staff-organizer-turned-author Jane McAlevey in DSA, but her ideas are important to consider. In mid-2019, DSA began a partnership with McAlevey, offering free copies of her book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age and organizing webinars (still on the front page of DSA’s website). This matters in understanding the fate of the RFS because McAlevey’s politics served as an addition and then replacement perspective for DSAers.

On its surface, there’s no direct conflict between the common understanding of RFS within DSA and McAlevey’s politics — she frames her task as union organizing in today’s context, takes up ‘power structures’ among workers and capital, and tries to establish her legitimacy by drawing on the legacy of militant CIO organizers in the 1930s. This is appealing to young DSA members who are historically disconnected from the labor movement; McAlevey is a capable writer who can give entry into concepts from organized labor and rule over a void.

McAlevey speaks to the core anxieties of the DSA milieu: her writings center on organizing unorganized workers with a comprehensive model, all while delivering a sense of legitimacy to DSA labor efforts that might otherwise be an outsider affair… Since the central questions of business unionism and the labor bureaucracy were avoided in the DSA discussion of the RFS, the RFS was cut off from much of its central explanatory power and was routed by the professional organizer logic expressed by McAlevey.

We suspect Andy Sernatinger would agree with us that there is a lot of strength in many of the tactics promoted by Jane McAlevey. However, they need to be combined with the fundamental wisdom of the Rank & File Strategy — the need to organize for a class-struggle approach and a vibrant democracy within the labor movement, against the resistance of the bureaucracy. 

A Socialist Rank & File Strategy

DSA and its Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, as well as individual members, can play very valuable roles in rebuilding the labor movement and building rank-and-file caucuses within unions. From DSA solidarity work for strikers, to the role of DSA members in the teachers’ “red state revolt,” to the role of socialists in organizing Starbucks —DSA is playing a valuable role.

However, we need to revive the Rank & File Strategy. 

The first part that needs to be revived is an understanding that we need to build an organized opposition to the dominant trend within labor — business unionism.

The second part is that socialists have something unique to contribute to labor. 

When the Rank & File Strategy is mentioned in DSA, the question of the battle of ideas within labor is, in our view, underrepresented. We quoted Kim Moody above arguing that the Rank & File Strategy “is not simply to offer an alternative ideology.” Not simply, yes, but, in our view, it’s still a key part. 

Even the best union activists will be blackmailed if they accept the logic of capitalist competition and production for profit. When an employer claims that a decline in the company’s income means that layoffs or wage cuts are necessary, socialist ideas give workers the confidence to fight back and win. Socialist ideas empower workers not to give in to the bosses’ demands. Socialist ideas help workers question why an unelected boss gets to control their life.

Socialists have to be part of workers’ struggles and try to be the best organizers while also striving to unite all workers regardless of their political views. At the same time, who will offer the ideas necessary to fight beyond the narrow limits of capitalism, if not us?

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The Pro Act, Labor, and the Democrats

The PRO Act was a law proposed in early 2021 that would have made it much easier to unionize workplaces. If passed, it would have done away with the anti-union “right to work” laws that exist in 28 states and banned many of the union-busting tactics used by employers. DSA played a very positive role, organizing phone-banks of nearly a million calls. At least 2 senators (including Joe Manchin!) who didn’t initially back the bill were flipped, and they pledged support. In the end, though, the bill was killed by Congress. It wasn’t just the filibuster; some Democrats helped kill it too. 

This is not the exception, but the rule how Democrats deal with workers´ rights. Still, most union leaders use their authority to provide cover for the corporate Democrats. One of the most appalling examples was when the AFL-CIO itself publicly argued to abandon the leverage-boosting tactic of linking the “Build Back Better” bill to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. When the progressives (all except the six Squad members) surrendered, labor’s official voice helped the Democrats cover up this capitulation.

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Labor’s Ugly Side

“I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people. I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human, more civilized for their children, and for their children’s children.”

Mother Jones, labor organizer, 1837 – 1930

There is clearly a new interest in organizing unions. A September 2021 Gallup poll found that “68% of Americans approve of labor unions,” the highest since 1965. 

However, after decades of setbacks, anti-union propaganda can still find an echo. Labor is not in good shape.  

The vast majority of labor leaders are entrenched in *business unionism* — the belief that we have to cooperate with the bosses to make sure the corporations we work for compete well in the market, as if the workers have as much stake in the company’s success as the capitalists. Business unionism also tells us we must support our country in global market competition, pitting us against foreign workers rather than developing international solidarity with them. Furthermore, business unionism views the role of unions as providing services for their members, handling grievances, administrating healthcare and pension funds, and providing consumer benefits for members. This is in sharp contrast to a socialist conception of unions as bodies for organizing the working-class struggle against the bosses.

Often, business unionism goes hand in hand with the self-enrichment of labor leaders. The corruption scandals of the UAW are just the tip of the iceberg (two of UAW’s former presidents reported to prison in 2021). It’s clear that the corruption of labor bureaucrats is extremely damaging to our movement.

The ideas of business unions which dominate the unions — as well as the lack of a strong labor movement —have heavily influenced the consciousness of all working-class people.

What the working class faces is a triple crisis of leadership, organization, and consciousness. The number of organized workers and the state of the unions (in terms of  democracy, effective management, etc.) have both reached a historic low point. Working-class people, including many union members, suffer from a lack of self confidence, have low expectations, and little awareness of our collective power. This is exacerbated by the vast majority of union leaders, who are wedded to the capitalist social order which has entrenched a culture of unions collaborating with management, serving as loyal foot soldiers for the Democratic Party, begging for crumbs before elections, and leaving empty-handed.  

The triple crisis cannot be solved by focusing on just one aspect in isolation. No new leadership will arise without fundamental changes in workers’ consciousness, which develops through struggle and organizing. However, a bold leadership can be of tremendous help in turning the situation around, helping workers gain experience and confidence through struggles.

Rebuilding labor in organized and unorganized workplaces requires a clear rejection of the status quo and an entirely new vision —unions based on democracy and anti-capitalist class struggle. For example, if we want to convince workers in car factories in the South to unionize, we need to present a completely different model than the UAW’s model in the North, which has failed for decades. 

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Should Unions Engage in Politics?

The multiracial working class around the globe has the power to reorganize society and end capitalism and all forms of oppression. Why? Because the working class produces all the goods and services, and the working class has the power to take production into its own hands. To accomplish this, the working class needs to raise its consciousness and be organized. 

Unions are a first line of organized defense in the class struggle. Starting at a factory or office, a union can unite workers against the managers and capitalists of that specific corporation. This is the economic struggle.

However, as soon as workers succeed at the workplace level, capitalists usually turn to their state and the power of the capitalist class in society. Workplace and industrial battles over wages and working conditions often escalate into struggles about labor laws, the right to organize, economic regulations, and so on.

Various forms of cultural, racial, gender, national and/or religious oppression are also used to divide and conquer the working class — and we need to relentlessly struggle against all forms of oppression, or else working-class unity — the source of our strength — will be blown to pieces.

Political struggles, whether they are about government policies or forms of social oppression, are therefore closely linked to economic struggles. Unions should strive to organize all workers in an industry, regardless of their political views, whether they support Republicans, Democrats, or whatever. At the same time, unions will not be able to avoid for long  the questions of their political orientation and action.

There are a whole host of political questions unions are confronted with under the framework of a capitalist market system. For example, should unions accept the competition between corporations and the race to the bottom to protect their own company’s jobs? Or should unions organize beyond one company and fight for policies that serve the interests of our class as a whole? Should unions accept the competition between nations — or should they develop international solidarity between workers? Should unions fight to take environmentally destructive industries out of the hands of the capitalist class by the state, to protect jobs, and to organize a just transition to clean energy — or should they fight to protect fossil fuel jobs? Should unions question that the current state is fundamentally controlled by the capitalists — and should the unions fight to establish an alternative workers’ state?

Today, most labor leaders and unions do not even deliver on the level of defending the working class on an economic level. Should we just focus on workplace struggles rather than dealing with all these difficult political challenges? 

We believe that, without tackling these broader political, ideological, and cultural questions, activists will fail to overcome the obstacles unions are currently facing.

We must keep unions open to everyone who wants to fight, regardless of workers’ political ideologies.And we need full democracy in our unions, whether socialists are in a minority or in a majority. However, that does not mean we should give up the struggle to win over our co-workers and our unions to the struggle for democratic socialism. In fact, when socialists have gained the confidence of their co-workers and been elected into leadership positions, such as in the 1930s and 1940s in the US, that’s when unions achieved their greatest gains.

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The Labor Bureaucracy

Is every union staffer a bureaucrat? What is the labor bureaucracy exactly?

Often terms like “union bureaucracy” lead to an understanding that somehow the apparatus, the full-time organizers, the leadership of unions is inevitably corrupted, and it’s better for socialists to steer clear of these positions. 

When we use the term “labor bureaucracy” in a Marxist sense, we are not referring to the sociological group of union staffers, but rather to the political force that militant union activists are confronted with — a pro-capitalist political trend within labor rooted in powerful positions in our labor organizations. 

The reality is that the people who make up the union apparatus, the people who live not just for the labor movement but directly from it (receive their wages from unions), often become a conservative obstacle to struggle. From their viewpoint, the organization “has gradually been changed into an end in itself, a precious thing, to which the interests of the struggle should be subordinated,” Rosa Luxemburg argued in 1906. She was the first to identify this “dialectic of developments” that powerful workers’ organizations ironically create a “trade-union officialdom” with a “restricted horizon,” a “bureaucratism and a certain narrowness of outlook.”

Rosa Luxemburg continues: “In close connection with these theoretical tendencies [of opportunism] is a revolution in the relations of leaders and rank-and-file. In place of the direction [of the union] by co-workers through local committees with their admitted inadequacy, there appears the business-like direction of the trade-union officials” (all quotes from The Mass Strike: The Political Party and The Trade Unions, 1906).

One factor is that the union bureaucracy relies on the labor movement for its livelihood. So if unions were wiped out by the capitalists, the union bureaucrats would lose their careers, salaries, and power. At the same time, the labor bureaucracy also relies on a peaceful coexistence with capitalism. Their business unionism ideology — which strives to bring workers and capitalists together to work out their disagreements — is an expression of their contradictory position.  

However, the problem is bigger than simply the question of staffers. Even rank-and-file union leaders on the shopfloor experience pressure from the bosses. Often the “carrots” — the concessions management offers the union — have a bigger impact than the “sticks” of union busting and repression. It would be mistaken to think the pro-capitalist bureaucracy is an isolated evil and that rank-and-file workers are inherently good. In fact, a key function of the union bureaucracy is precisely to act as the instrument by which the pressures of capital are transmitted onto the workers’ movement at large.

Workers can’t free themselves without getting organized to fight for their interests. However, even the most dedicated, well-meaning organizers develop some conservatism, some inertia, some fears of losing this or that position or elected office.  “Each party, even the most revolutionary party, must inevitably produce its own organizational conservatism,” writes Trotsky in Lessons of October  about the experience of debates within the Bolshevik Party.

In unions, socialist, and social-democratic parties all around the world, these trends developed over time and eventually crystallized into an organized force. Initial waverings and sell-outs gradually grew into an organized bureaucracy. Labor leaders and parliamentary groups were at the center of this development.

Capitalism would have been overthrown long ago had it relied on only a small minority defending its rights to exploit and oppress, or if it relied just on the military might of armies and police. Instead, the class struggle is brought into our own organizations — unions, parties, community organizations — in the form of the battles within our ranks about effective policies and ideas. The bureaucracy is a network of people — including significant, powerful staff in our unions — who strategize and work hard to maintain business unionism as the dominant ideology and practice.

On the other side, workers who fight for leadership positions, staffers who carry out a fighting, class-struggle policy and are held accountable by workers are a part of the struggle against business unionism. So no, not every staffer is a bureaucrat.

To clarify, here is a different usage of this term: “[T]he union movement today is weak and conservative, and it will not be possible to revitalize these organizations primarily by joining the bureaucracy as staff or top leadership,” argues Jeremy Gong (The Call, February 1, 2022).

Jeremy is right that individual staffers do not have much power. The power to change comes from organized workers themselves.

However, his understanding of “joining the bureaucracy” if you work for a union uses the term bureaucracy as a socioeconomic category, not as an analytical tool the way we in Reform & Revolution would use this Marxist term. If you view every staffer as a “bureaucrat,” then you minimize the damage done by the real labor bureaucracy and take away your tools to fight them.Reform & Revolution believes that both elected and non-elected positions in a union can be useful tools to fight the labor bureaucracy. 

This is not to minimize the need to acknowledge and talk about the opportunist pressures on every staffer. We are aware that the closer even the best fighters come to some form of power and influence, the bigger the pressures on them become to sell out and avoid class conflict. (And it doesn’t have to be that influential of a position; sometimes a union job or a council seat is enough.) 

For our unions, this means we need to get organized to hold leaders accountable, and we need for full democracy in all working-class organizations, the power to recall elected representatives, and a leadership that fights for these basic democratic norms.

Labor Aristocracy?

We believe the labor bureaucracy is a product of the class struggle. Wherever the warring classes come into conflict, that is where the heat is the hottest, and the pressures the strongest. If workers’ organizations simply represented the interests of workers alone, the outcome of many battles, uprisings, and revolutions would have turned out differently. However, there is a class struggle going on within our own ranks. Pro-capitalist ideas dominate our organizations, often influenced “from above” by politicians, intellectuals, and the union leaders themselves. 

The labor bureaucracy, with its ideology of business unionism, is an expression of the class struggle itself. These bureaucrats (not in a sociological sense, as a synonym for union staff, but in the Marxist sense of a crystallized pro-capitalist trend rooted in the professional apparatuses and formal structures of working-class organizations) are an expression of the totality of the class struggle. 

How can such a small number of union officials—  tens of thousands in the US — have such an impact in society? How have they been able to transform our organizations from a force for struggle into a tool to hold workers back?

Let’s use the analogy of the state — the state arises out of the class struggle and appears to mediate conflict while still maintaining the dominance of the ruling class. Society would not be able to function if it were consumed by constant physical or violent class struggle. The state therefore reins in some of the excesses of the capitalists, passes some labor protections, etc.; but, fundamentally, these regulations serve to continue the capitalist system. The state appears to mediate the sharp conflict between the classes, only to perpetuate the system of class oppression.  The state is an expression of class conflict — and a precondition for maintaining class rule.

In the long run, democratic, powerful, class-struggle unions will not be able to coexist with capitalism. This inherent conflict will have to be resolved — either by moving forward to a socialist society — or by wiping out such organizations. Brutally crushing these unions is one option, for example, in Nazi Germany or  Chile 1973. The slow-but-still-poisonous option is to turn unions into tame, bureaucratic organizations with pro-capitalist leaders. Then this layer of bureaucrats arises over our unions like the state over capitalist society and brings the peace and stability of a graveyard. The fundamental character of the unions as working-class organizations remains, but the contradiction is quite stark.

Some Marxists try to explain the existence and importance of this bureaucracy by other means. For example, certain writers (see below) point to a privileged layer within the working class, which they called the “labor aristocracy,” as being the social base for the bureaucracy, which they say explains how such a comparatively small number of individuals could have such an outsized influence. 

Friedrich Engels wrote in his article “England 1845 and 1885” that in times of crisis two sectors of the working class stood out against the trend: “A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’ sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory-hands… Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organizations of those trades in which the labor of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable… They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.

This would suggest that skilled workers and the unions themselves are the basis for the union bureaucracy. There is truth in the fact that workers who have achieved some successes and have a certain economic position (less in fear of losing their job because they are less replaceable by the capitalists) can be slower to move into struggle and at times more conservative. However, their economic power is also greater than other parts of the class. 

Marxists often refer to these layers as the “heavy battalions” of the working class. When they move — like the Putilov workers in Petrograd in 1917 — it matters. History has shown how these privileged workers have two sides — both a conservative tendency as well as a powerful revolutionary potential.

Looking at privileged workers, Lenin wrote in “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” about parts of the working class in imperialist countries who were allowed to benefit to a certain extent from the exploitation of the world by turning “into ‘eternal’ parasites on the body of the rest of mankind.” He goes on: 

The important thing is that, economically, the desertion of a stratum of the labor aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular “difficulty.”

We can add that imperialism, racism, sexism, and many other forms of oppression create powerful sources of division that privilege some sections of the working class over others. These divisions are not easy to overcome. However, none of these privileges has made it possible for these workers to escape  the daily misery and alienation of life under capitalism. 

On the one hand, more privileged workers have something to gain by maintaining the divisions as long as we’re living under capitalism. On the other hand, all workers, even the more privileged ones, would benefit much more by uniting and overthrowing this oppressive system.

While divisions within the working class — more conservative sections, different layers, and so on — can provide a basis for a union bureaucracy, these forces are not stable or “eternal” enough to explain the ubiquity of the labor movement bureaucracy. 

Different bureaucratic union leaderships base themselves on very different layers within our class, yet all maintain shared bureaucratic traits. The United Auto Workers leadership benefited a lot from a highly skilled, trained, and powerful factory workforce. This would be the more traditional “labor aristocracy.” In contrast, the Service Employees International Union often seems to base their undemocratic organizing model on the inexperience of a highly exploited workforce laboring under huge pressures just to make ends meet.  Few, if any, would argue that SEIU workers could in any sense be considered part of the labor aristocracy.

The so-called “labor aristocracy” is itself not a stable group of people on whom the bureaucrats could base themselves in a lasting, reliable way. Similarly, Marxists should not base our analysis of the labor bureaucracy on the labor aristocracy either.  

The idea that the existence of a stable labor aristocracy — defined as skilled workers, trade unionists (as Engels described), and more privileged workers— explains the phenomenon of the labor bureaucracy is not a very helpful way of looking at it. However, to see how the bureaucracy exploits differences within our class, and bases itself on workers with a more backward consciousness is useful. Sometimes these workers are better off than others; sometimes they aren’t.

The source of the bureaucracy can be explained much better if we do not divide the working class in sociological terms, but rather look at society at large. Within the whole of capitalist society, as soon as the working class organizes itself and fights back, the class struggle expresses itself inside of our own organizations — otherwise the tiny minority of the ruling class would have been swept away long ago. That expression of the contradictions of society within our organizations is represented in the contradictory character of the union bureaucracy.

When Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov, one of the leaders of the Marxist movement in his time, looked at the sources of the power of the bureaucracy in the young Soviet Union, Sedov wrote in 1936 that “the [Stalinist state] bureaucracy bases itself on the ‘non-party Bolshevik,’ the Stakhanovist, that is, the workers’ aristocracy, on the foreman and, above all, on the specialist and the administrator.” However, while the bureaucracy used those layers, Sedov and Trotsky were very clear that this was not the *source* of the degeneration of the first workers’ state in the world. 

They explained the existence of the bureaucracy and the power it developed to rise above society as emerging out of the stalemate between the achievements of the Russian Revolution and the fact that capitalism remained the dominant force on the global stage. The balance of power between the working class and the capitalist classes on an international level allowed the bureaucracy to rise above the rest of society in the Soviet Union.

This analogy with a bureaucratised workers state is a better analogy for the bureaucracy in the unions. The labor bureaucracy will always try to base itself on more conservative parts of the working class (whoever they may be at the moment). Its existence, however, cannot be explained as a representation of those layers, but rather as an expression of the class struggle in society reflected within our own organizations.

Attempting to unite workers and bosses to work together in peaceful cooperation, as business unionism promotes, is utopian under the capitalist system. Uniting these opposing forces is impossible as long as corporations are forced by market competition to prioritize profits above everything else. This is why the labor bureaucracy’s strategy has been a total disaster for the working class and our organizations, as we have seen in the long decline of the labor movement under business unionism. It is the task of the new generation of socialists to organize unions with a socialist rank-and-file strategy.