Why Aren’t There More Radicals at Work?
Works sucks and it’s been getting worse in the U.S. for decades.
So why aren’t there more radicals at work?
For the first part in a series about radicals and labor today, we asked a dozen radical workplace organizers—teachers, Teamsters, telephone technicians, union organizers, and more—that question. Read what they had to say.
The activists we talked to blamed the American Dream, persistent racism, and a feeling that struggle and collective won’t do any good. They also laid some of the blame on radicals themselves, for failing to connect with working people.
It hasn’t always been this way. Before World War II, radicals in the United States had much deeper roots in the working class. Employers, the government, and even union officials purged those Reds after the war.
If we want to rebuild those connections, we have to understand the barriers that hold us back.
American Dreams
For over a century, historians and organizers have said that American prosperity—and the hope of getting a slice of the pie—explained why there was “no socialism in America.”
Millions of workers still see the path to success through individual hard-work, not collective struggle.
“There’s a sense among some—not all—that ‘I got to where I am by hard work, and other people should be able to as well,’” said a telephone technician in New York.
That hope doesn’t just apply to people who’ve “made it” and are living the American Dream.
“Most of the folks that I worked with in the Army, construction and restaurant industries, ended up in those low-wage jobs because of a lack of resources and education,” said a union organizer in Pennsylvania. “A good percentage still subscribed to the whole ‘pull your self up by the bootstraps’ bit, even though they were clearly struggling with no end in sight.”
The same is true for jobs with a lot of prestige—even though many of those jobs are getting worse.
Take college professors. There are way more Ph.D.s looking for work than tenure-track positions. Many are getting by cobbling together part-time adjunct work.
But that doesn’t stop many Ph.D.s from hoping. “In grad school TAs think: ‘I don't need a union, I'm going to get a cushy job,’” said a college professor in New York. “That's just not really the reality anymore.”
“Then when someone lands a full-time position, they think, ‘I realized my goal and compared to most people I have it good, so no there’s no need to rock the boat,’” she said.
American Nightmares
For years, many white workers achieved their own American Dream by keeping workers of color out of “white” jobs, “white” neighborhoods, and “white” schools.
Competition over jobs, housing, and schools has led many white workers to identify as white first, workers second—if at all.
And that’s still true today. “A lot of the white folks I work with are really drawn to the Tea Party movement,” said a telephone operator in the South. “Part of it is backlash against having a Black president. Part of it is backlash against immigrant workers in their communities.”
“White workers often respond to exploitation by pushing others downwards rather than attempting to tear down those at the top,” said a union organizer out West.
Today, those fears are played up by the right-wing press. “A lot of my co-workers get almost all of their news of the world from the New York Post or other tabloid papers, supplemented by the local news or CNN,” said a telephone technician we interviewed. “There’s almost no counter-weight to the conservative B.S. they hear on the radio, the TV news, the tabloid papers,” she said.
Historically, many unions have helped to confront working-class racism. Unions formed in the great upsurge of the 1930s brought together workers across the color line, promoted the leadership of workers of color, and challenged white racism.
But historian and activist Bill Fletcher points out that many U.S. unions have followed a different strategy: rather than including all workers, some unions have reserved jobs for white men by excluding workers of color and women.
That practice goes back to the nineteenth century, when craft unions kept Black workers out of skilled trades, and unions promoted legislation to exclude Chinese workers from the U.S. And that’s why white males still dominate the construction trades to this day.
We’re Getting Our Butts Kicked
It’s hard for most workers to imagine an alternative to those individual survival strategies offered by the American Dream and racism. Why?
Being a radical means that you think ordinary people can improve our lives and change the world when we work together. But the organizers we talked to said that most workers feel alone, isolated, and powerless.
“People don't feel empowered in life. Their entire life they've been socialized to defer to authority,” said a UPS part-timer in Pennsylvania. “People aren't sure they deserve better. People have never seen collective action.”
A big part of that powerlessness is the weakness of the labor movement. Factory closings. Lockouts and permanent replacements. Tough anti-union employers: Organized labor has been getting its butt kicked since the 1980s. Only 12.3 percent of workers in the U.S. were in unions in 2009.
Even when workers are in unions, many don't feel the power.
A New York nurse sums up the problem: "Nurses feel powerless and vulnerable. Management has managed to structure things in a way that reinforces that feeling, and there is no history of recent collective struggle and solidarity to chip away at that overwhelming feeling."
For decades, officials treated their unions like a business—not a social movement. When employers went on the attack in the 1980s, they were caught off guard, and the union movement is still scrambling to respond today.
That’s not to say that there isn’t fightback on the job. But the barriers to collective action are high: Most workers don’t have any experience in fighting back. And most aren’t in unions. And many unions have given up challenging “management’s right” to run their business—even when workers pay the price.
Sometimes workers who speak out are sidelined—either by the employer, or even by their own union officials: “When anyone speaks out about some injustice on the job, they are called a troublemaker and harassed until they learn their lesson: just do your job and shut up,” said a union dissident in the longshore industry.
Given all that, it’s no wonder most workers choose individual, not collective, solutions to their problems.
Freaks and Geeks
Even if they are open to alternative ideas, most workers in the United States have never met a radical.
“There is very little exposure to radical culture: arts and literature that is motivated by radical politics, news analysis of the effects of capitalism on our lives, a sense of history of radical struggles, a familiarity of leaders of radical movements,” said a former hotel worker on the West Coast.
Many people associate radicals with the mistakes and tragedies of Russia under Stalin. “They think that’s Stalin’s Russia was real socialism—and that socialism is doomed to failure. Totalitarian Communism couldn’t be more different than grassroots, bottom-up socialism,” said a web designer in New York.
But without contact with real radicals, most people don’t make that distinction.
Even when they have met a radical, that experience isn’t always that good. For many, their first experience meeting a radical is someone trying to sell them a newspaper, or getting in an argument with them.
Let’s face it—we’re partly to blame for our isolation because so often we fail to meet workers where they’re at.
All that doesn’t mean that people don’t have some radical ideas. Here’s what one teacher in a small town in the mountain states said: “One reason that people who have left views on a wide range of issues don’t identify as radicals is because they don’t know what it means to be a radical, or all the self-professed radicals they’ve met have been off-putting in some way.”
“In my case, this was definitely true until I met radicals who seemed smart, relatable and sane,” she said. “Once I met them, and they exposed me to more radical ideas and perspectives, I was ready to join!”
Breaking Through the Isolation
Radicals haven’t always been so isolated.
Scratch a union struggle before World War II in the United States, and you’d find some Reds. Anarchists at the Haymarket. Socialists in the garment industry. Communists in the auto union. Trotskyists in the Teamsters. Reds inspired and led some of the greatest organizing drives and union battles in our history.
Socialists, Communists, and Trostkyists were on the frontlines of building the CIO during the thirties and helped build big industrial unions in meatpacking, auto, steel, and transportation.
But in the Red Scare after World War II, the union leadership purged these Reds—and since then, most radicals have done a pretty poor job of re-connecting those roots.
Here’s what socialist activist and theorist Kim Moody had to say about that:
At no time since the 1950s has the isolation of socialists from the working class been greater. Socialist organizations in the U.S., including Solidarity, remain small and largely populated by people with an educated middle class background. Many socialist groups' connection with the working class is limited to support work for various strikes. 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 gap has many facets: some arise from different class origins, others from the habit of defeat on the left and the proclivity for symbolic actions and campaigns that flows from it. Most of the gap, however, is one of consciousness. The left with its highly theorized, often moralistic politics, and the worker activists with an un-theorized pragmatic outlook are often like trains passing in the night. This can be true even where left groups or individuals work within the unions. (Kim Moody. The Rank-and-File Strategy for Building a Socialist Movement in the United States. Solidarity. 2000)
Some radicals are trying to break through that isolation—including all of the activists we talked to. You’ll hear about what they’re doing differently in future articles in this series.
Now tell us what you think.
Why do you think that there aren’t there more radicals at work? Share your ideas and your stories in the comments below.
Why There Aren't More Radicals at Work
The decisive event in the disappearance of radicals from the workplace occurred over 50 years ago. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, radical and revolutionary leftists were purged from the trade union movement. This had four major consequences:
First, the ideology of the labor movement shifted to the right. "Class struggle trade unionism" was replaced by "business unionism". Underlying this was, of course, the ideology of the marketplace and its encouragement of a concept of self interest in its most narrow and socially acidic form. This gradually isolated the union movement within the larger society. By the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan could denounce the union movement as just another "special interest". Internationally, the AFL-CIO pushed this concept of unionism, in effect spreading its purge of the left beyond U.S. borders. The sorry state of the union movement today is a direct testament to the bankruptcy of this ideology.
Second, the attitudes of the union leadership gradually drifted down to the rank and file and reshaped their idea of what a union is and does. Against these expectations, leftists in the labor movement found it increasingly difficult to successfully fight for the adoption of a much broader social and political agenda in their unions. Forced to accept the business model, organizers had to make their case within a set of increasingly hostile economic constraints over which capital, not the working class, has control. This made organizing new workers was made much more difficult:
Third, the labor movement made itself politically subservient to the Democratic Party. As leftists found it harder and harder to maintain their position within their unions, they quickly found themselves politically isolated within their communities as well. The narrowing of the political content of union meetings was mirrored by a collapse in the political life of working class neighborhoods. Today, there is no organized radical presence in working class communities. And the historic opportunity to create a true working class party foundered fifteen years ago in the face of the opposition of the leadership of the union movement.
Fourth, the left responded to its growing isolation within unions and working class communities by relying on media events (marches, demonstrations) to get our message to the working class. In this way, the left's communication with its working class base was mediated by the capitalist media. This became increasing problematic if not counter-productive as the owners of the media asserted their prerogatives as controllers of media content since the Reagan election.
Finally, the purge contributed to the abandonment of ideology by the broad left. In part, this was encouraged by the myth of "totalitarianism", a concept invented by Cold War liberals to justify their anti-communism. (Heaven forbid that we should act like Stalinists!) In practice, by the late 1970s, most of the left had abandoned the advocacy of its traditional program in favor of agitation around isolated issues in the belief that these issues would restore their political credibility in the community. Here too, the results have been less than hopeful.
In the face of all this, there is a simple starting point. We can begin to change the way we think.
1. Rejecting the importance of ideology has not led to an increase in democracy. It has only abandoned the field to the ideological hegemony of the other side.
2. Since Marx, the "hard" left has shared the belief that workers are the engine that will power the political transformation of the world. This belief has been quietly dropped within much of the left without much debate. Without question, working class racism and sexism have served to create doubt on this score. But without it, the only viable program of reform is reforming capitalism.
3. To most working people, "politics" means "electoral politics". And yet, on this question the left acts like deer caught in the headlights. There is no serious attempt to subvert the Democratic Party on a local basis or to organize a national labor party. Instead, there are periodic enthusiasms for particular candidates which, like a fever, passes by the first day of December, leaving no trace (not to mention any organizational advance).
4. We need to reestablish our presence in working class communities. At present, this probably requires an overt effort in electoral politics.
5. Above all, we need to rethink what working people "really want". We need to listen much more carefully (and imaginatively) to what they are saying, even when they express things that are anathema to us. It is worth pointing out the conventional justification of business unionism -- that it is what workers really want -- has been proven staggeringly wrong (if union membership statistics are to be believed). That is: it is entirely possible that we are trying to organize workers on the wrong basis.
Read my response
Read my response to this article at my new blog.
http://classconcious.blogspot.com/2010/02/radicals-at-work.html
Why don't I think there are
Why don't I think there are more radicals at work? I think this answer may get me into some trouble, but I think it's important enough to share it anyway.
I think the answer comes in 3 parts: The radical right, apathy, and the left being pompous.
In my work place there are plenty of radicals, they just aren't left. The radical right is growing in workplaces and it isn't because workers are buying their explanation of the world. The radical right is offering answers to the problems workers are facing today. We know them as wrong answers, hell they've all been tried before. With white workers in particular it is always much easier to point the blame at people of color or women. It takes a lot less thought and it makes for a quicker soundbite. When times are tough white workers without a clear well explained analysis of capitalism and hierarchy will resort to the far right wing easy bigoted analysis. I think our job as leftists is to tackle this issue head on.
I think it's much easier in today's time to "turn on, tune in, and turn off.." so the few radical leftists that are in the workplace have to combat a apathetic workforce along with apathy among themselves. We live a culture that produces apathy partly for this reason.
The part that I think is most important is the left's opposition to talk about labor and a labor movement. I don't know if it's because we live in a culture that the working man is always made fun of from Tim Taylor to Homer Simpson, it's damn near impossible to find a working class hero today. If it's because radical leftists seem to be running to higher education rather then take the time necessary to become apart of the labor movement. Or if it's because some radicals seem to have contempt for labor activism. Not sure if this has something to do with their past history of being in the labor movement or if they just think they're too good to work dirty hard jobs. I suspect it's all three of those and we have some serious mental roadblocks to overcome within the radical community.
One thing missing ...
I pulled this article together, but I think I left one thing out ....
Some workers who weren't born inside the U.S. bring with them rich traditions of organizing, struggle, and radical politics.
You can see the influence these folks are having from the immigrant rights' demos of a few years ago to grassroots organizing efforts, like the CIW in Florida.
Lack of Success
I agree with everything said above, but I also think that the lack of success even when people do fight back for example as the Hormel workers did in 1985 as documented in "American Dream" also has an effect. That fight tore families apart.
In Allentown over the past 20 years I've read quotes from union officials who just accept the fact that cuts of people, wages and benefits have to be accepted or the plants will close. I also think that American workers identify too much with American capitalists. Nationalism is very strong. There's a guy I heard about on the Ed Schultz show on Sirius radio who actually wrote a book telling people not only to "Buy American" but not to buy from foreign corporations who are employing American workers because the profits are not going into American banks - "How Americans Can Buy American," by Roger Simmermaker. His website has articles on contaminated Chinese products and the Toyota recall. What about the Pinto, or E-coli in our food? Buying American isn't going to save any jobs. The auto industry ran away in the late '70's. Capitalists have no patriotism, why do American workers cling to it?
I also think that the industrial past is being romanticized. Even Micheal Moore did it in "Capitalism-A Love Story." My husband worked in both auto and steel in the '70's and 58 hour work weeks, mandatory overtime, the heat, plants built far away from where workers could afford to live adding to the time away from their families; Sweetheart deals that the USWA made with plants that allowed them to pay lower wages, asbestos laying all around the work areas; Not to mention the monotony of assembly line work and the danger of working either in a fabrication or continuous casting steel plant are not the "good old days" I would like to return to.
As work becomes more productive we should be able to share in the fruits of our labor that provided the profit to buy the better machinery by having a shorter work week with no reduction in pay. Higher productivity should result in more free time for the worker.