A Class-Struggle Strategy to Rebuild the Labor Movement
A Pamphlet by Reform & Revolution – a Marxist Caucus in DSA
1 // Workers’ Power: The Force Awakens // An Introduction to the Moment: Workplace Militancy and Labor Revival
2 // Video Interview | Starbucks Workers on Strike // “That’s how you show corporate you’re not fooling around”
3 // ALU: It Wasn’t Just Chris Smalls // Three Theses on What the Labor Movement Can Learn from the Amazon Labor Union’s Victory
4 // Video | DSA and the Rank & File Strategy – Discussion
5 // Book Review: No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey // A well-written, bracingly honest book which takes the big questions facing the labor movement head on.
6 // DSA & Labor: Resurrecting the Rank & File Strategy // The Different Labor Movement Strategies within DSA – in Theory and Reality
7 // A Response to Reform & Revolution’s Position on the Rank & File Strategy // by Ryan Mosgrove
8 // Salting 101 // “Salting” is a union-building tactic in which organizers strategically choose to work for non-unionized workplaces with the intent of helping form a union. Outlined here is a labor-organized approach to this tactic.
9 // Salting – Should You Do It? // My experiences with organizing at Amazon, March 2022
10 // Return of the Teamsters // The Teamsters´ reform slate that won the leadership can and must act quickly: All eyes are on preparations of the UPS contract negotiations in 2023.
11 // Generation Bernie hits Starbucks // Interview about the Strength and Challenges of the Wave of Unionizing at Starbucks
12 // Lessons Learned // Five Take-Aways from the Educator Strike Wave
13 // Labor Library: Coaxing the Phoenix Out of the Ashes // Book Review | Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement – by Jonathan Rosenblum
Reclaiming Our Power
An Introduction to the Moment: Workplace Militancy and Labor Revival
New workplaces are getting organized. Starbucks workers continue to organize across the country, unionizing store by store despite an atmosphere of intense and brazen union-busting tactics. Workers in Staten Island took on Amazon in a bold display of worker power, against one of the most notoriously brutal and powerful corporations in the world. After decades of setbacks for working-class people, these efforts could open the door to a new era of fightback.
Labor reform movements in our unions have made gains. The success of the labor revival we’re witnessing now will require a serious reckoning with business unionism, to prevent the conservative and the liberal representatives of class collaborationist union policies from turning our labor unions into forces of collaboration with the bosses and rallying troops for the Democratic Party.
These two developments are connected. Both demand that we build something new: a real representation of working-class people and their interests. Without a credible claim to do so, the fresh waves of union organizing we’ve seen so far have begun with a huge disadvantage, which bosses and managers have exploited shamelessly.
We must build our new labor movement around independent class politics, not in collaboration with the corrupt representatives of capitalist interests. The new labor movement must unite all working-class people, which will require a conscious anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-oppression approach. The many years of poisonous division and distrust forced onto oppressed people of all identities means that we will not be able to unify around economic, bread-and-butter issues alone. Developing the full power and potential of the working class means to actively take on the struggles against all forms of oppression as well.
A strong labor movement will require a strong socialist core. A socialist movement would arm activists across these organizing efforts with the understanding that we live in a class society, in which we have fundamentally different interests from the ruling class. It would provide the political clarity that we need to organize and fight for each and every improvement in the workplace, for better working conditions and wages, for workers’ power on the shop floor to decide on safe and healthy working conditions ourselves – and to fight against not just the ways in which we are exploited, but the whole system of exploitation, capitalism, altogether.
Nature and workers together create all the wealth in society. But capitalism both destroys the natural resources human life depends on and deprives the working class from the fruits of their labor. We have an alternative: we fight for a democratic socialist society where the top 500 financial institutions and corporations are taken under democratic, public control. A society that is able to put people before profits because the power of big business has been broken. A society where ruling-class domination is history and the interest to divide and conquer is ended.
Working-class power is rooted in a whole-worker approach. We are humans, with an interest to work in collaboration and dignity, and to live a productive life in harmony with each other and the environment. We have needs for social interaction: for sports, culture, and collective self-determination. To organize ourselves means to organize in all of these areas. Still, the biggest source of power lies in the workplace, where we produce all the value that the bosses exploit. It is in the workplace that we can withhold our labor and disrupt their system of endless capital accumulation, and it is here we can reclaim our power over what we create.
Reform & Revolution is publishing this pamphlet just before the biggest Labor Notes Conference to date, at which 4,000 people will come together to share their experiences in this first push of upheaval against the status quo. This is an expression of the revival of class struggle organizing from below that we’ve witnessed in the recent weeks and months. We plan to learn from these new experiences and bring our Marxist ideas to these discussions. Together, we have a world to win!
In solidarity,
Reform & Revolution – a Marxist caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America