In the last issue of Reform & Revolution magazine, we focused on the state of labor in the US and DSA’s approach to the Rank & File strategy. Stephan Kimmerle laid out our caucus’ position in an article titled “For a Socialist Rank & File Strategy,” in which he wrote “we need to revive the Rank & File Strategy. …we need to build organized opposition to the dominant trend within labor—business unionism.” The article also outlines R&R’s understanding of the political trends and caucuses within DSA, with their differing methods and perspectives on labor. On CPN and its various successors, Kimmerle wrote: 

Ryan Mosgrove, one of the leaders of CPN before moving on to the Renewal slate in 2021 criticized the Rank & File Strategy […] 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 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.” […] CPN’s approach does not arm workers and DSA with an understanding of where business unionism comes from, or how to fight it.

We appreciate that Ryan Mosgrove took the time and effort to respond to our critique, and to engage in comradely debate around a socialist approach to the Rank & File Strategy.  The following is his contribution to this debate.

For An Actual Strategy, Not Simplified Internal Struggles

A successful labor strategy must reckon with the entire field we operate on – economically, politically, and even internationally

By Ryan Mosgrove

Ryan Mosgrove is a union organizer, former 2021 National Political Committee candidate on the Renewal Slate, and member of Metro DC DSA.

In his article on the Rank-and-File Strategy Stephan Kimmerle presents an overview of the various labor strategies expressed within DSA. The main thrust of his critique is that socialists must emphasize the political struggle within labor to counter the prevailing trend of business unionism. While Kimmerle raises some cosmetic differences with how the Rank-and-File Strategy (RFS) has already been articulated within DSA, he doesn’t grapple with RFS’s inconsistency in accomplishing even it’s own stated goals or how it can in fact blunt the political struggle rather than sharpen it. 

The Example of the Teamsters Election

The Teamsters election is a recent example of this trend, which resulted in the election of the first slate endorsed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) since 1991.  Incoming General President Sean O’Brien, who led the TDU-endorsed Teamsters United slate, defeated Hoffa’s chosen successor. The defeat of the old guard comes on the heels of a concessionary UPS master agreement, which members initially rejected before the leadership used an obscure rule in the bylaws to approve it against their will. Given the context, RFS advocates have presented the election as a victory for their approach, a point which R&R largely echoes. 

The reality is less straightforward however. O’Brien spent almost his entire career not as a reformer but squarely within the old guard camp with a long history of harassment against reformers. In 2013 he made threats against reform supporters in Providence Local 251 and in 2016. While he was running on the slate with Hoffa for the General Executive Board, he was investigated for threatening TDU convention delegates attempting to nominate opposing candidates and was later found to have lied to investigators about it. Beyond O’Brien, the slate itself is still mostly former old guard, with only eight of twenty-four members being bonafide reformers, only three of which are TDU members.

The article “Return of the Teamsters”in Reform & Revolution’s last issue which covers the election condenses many of these problems in favor of the more optimistic tone echoed in most left coverage of the election. They counter concerns about the slate’s shaky record by stating that TDU’s influence on the platform and their ability to mobilize the rank and file to which Teamsters United owes its victory “suggests it will continue to play a major part in the OZ administration.” With only 15 percent of members even voting in the election, the lowest turnout since the move to direct vote in 1991, it’s difficult to establish what decisive role TDU played outside a handful of specific locals.

TDU itself was divided on the question of getting in bed with O’Brien. Former TDU candidates like Tom Leedham and Sandy Pope, who led their ticket in 2001 and 2011 respectively, were among many high profile reformers who opposed the endorsement and subsequently distanced themselves from TDU. At that same convention, members were alarmed by the removal of the “Rank-and-File Bill of Rights” from the TDU constitution at its convention, which included core demands such as just salaries for union officers. The stated reason being so that it could be revised and later reinserted, but some have alleged its removal was motioned at O’Brien’s request. 

We need an actual strategy that soberly ties together all of the fronts labor faces, rather than condensing these strategic questions into simplified internal struggles.

Despite this, most left labor coverage on the election has papered over many of these political questions and its implications for the left. The Hoffa-endorsed Teamster Power slate was no alternative of course, exemplified in the slate’s architect Rome Aloise being found guilty on corruption charges just weeks before the election. The problem goes beyond lesser evil type arguments. Reducing the complex challenges facing labor to mainly an internal ideological one dulls our understanding of what is actually happening and our ability to wage that struggle effectively. Were the results a change for the better? Without question. Do they represent a strengthening of socialist forces within labor? That answer is far more muddled and may in fact demonstrate how fundamentally marginal we are more than anything else. 

Magical Thinking

In their 2015 essay, “The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States,” veterans of the US Labor Party effort Adolph Reed and Mark Dudzig contextualize how these internal struggles are expressions of a broader political crisis and outline two “dysfunctional responses” to the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s onward. 

One openly accommodates neoliberalism and shifts its focus away from class conflict, instead seeking common cause with “willing employers” while turning unions into little more than extensions of management’s own HR department. 

The second model, “persists both as a cynical pageantry of protest as prelude to defeat and its mirror image in the magical thinking that produces the rank-and-file fetishism and ‘activistist’ fantasies that this or that spontaneous action will spark a mass movement.” This approach, which is predominant in much of how the left talks about labor strategy, bases itself on a terrain that no longer exists. It assumes the “framework of postwar pluralist liberalism” as well as working-class mass organizations that would make tactics like those RFS seeks to deploy more consistent, but in the modern context of this broader crisis end up totally rudderless. Unable to find much tangible success, and when it does, unable to capitalize on it. 

Magical thinking produces the rank-and-file fetishism and ‘activistist’ fantasies.

We need an actual strategy that soberly considers these broader factors and ties together all of the fronts labor faces, rather than condensing these strategic questions into simplified internal struggles. Without it we will continue to find ourselves trapped in this same cycle of bitter defeat: Heroic organizing drives like at Bessemer, busted by a corporation that knows it can violate what passes for labor law in the US at will. Inspiring mass strikes like in West Virginia, who within a year had almost everything they won washed away by a uniformly pro-business legislature. 

A successful labor strategy must reckon with the entire field we operate on – economically, politically, and even internationally – linking together diverse sites of struggle under a unified plan to ultimately forge a working-class mass organization with the potential to change not just the pieces, but the whole board.

Ryan Mosgrove is responding here to an article from our last magazine on labor, tinyurl.com/rnr-labor , and the broader position advanced in our magazine tinyurl.com/rnr-07 (PDF).