by K. Wilson
This article is part II of a three-part critique of solidarity unionism. It follows Solidarity Unionism I: Two Questions for Solidarity Unionism.
The half century from 1900 to 1950 was the formative period of industrial unionism. It was also a time of disappointed radical hopes. At the turn of the century, revolutionary enthusiasm ran high across the industrialized world. With mass production exploding, urban working classes growing restless, socialist parties on the rise, and imperialist powers careering toward war, it was easy to believe that the mounting tensions would be too much for the capitalist system to bear, and that social revolution was immanent.
The following fifty years would be filled with intense class struggle, but the end result was not revolution but something much more confusing: class compromise. By mid-century the workers’ movement had won many of its socialistic demands. But these gains would not be administered directly by the working class, but instead through a tight alliance of bureaucratic labor institutions, corporations, and the state. The 1950 Treaty of Detroit epitomized the moment: the UAW secured rising wages and generous benefits for its members, but in return it conceded the company’s “right to manage”.
How had this happened? What ‘went wrong’? This question is not only important to historians. How we interpret the events of this half century has direct ramifications for how well we are able to understand our own situation, and how we try to organize today.
***
One way of interpreting this period in US labor history has recently been tied to the concept of “solidarity unionism”. This view may be summarized as follows. 1 In the early 1930s, before the CIO, an “alternative unionism” of rank and file workers briefly thrived. It was egalitarian, democratic, and effective at signing up members. But it failed. Why? Essentially, we are told, because of error and betrayal within the labor movement. Well-meaning but misguided organizers and intellectuals convinced workers to put faith in high-level negotiations and government mediation; the Communist Party waffled, pursuing dual-unionist and other ill-conceived strategies; and most fatefully, union leaders like Philip Murray and John L. Lewis deliberately stifled independent worker activity, sacrificing worker democracy in the name of “industrial peace”. The end result was that, by mid-century, the promising self-organization of the rank and file had been displaced and destroyed by the business unions.
But now that these business unions are on their way out, so this story continues, organizers have a chance to try again. As we do so, we must above all take care not to repeat the old mistakes. How do we do this? By mining the past, sifting through case histories and separating the strategies and organizational forms used by the early solidarity unionists from the ones associated with the rise of business unionism. In this way, we build up a sort of solidarity unionism tool kit for use in struggles today.
While this approach sounds very reasonable, so far it hasn’t led to much in the way of positive theories of movement-building. Rather, in practice it has tended to result in a narrow sort of pragmatism, guided by a feeling that it is both unnecessary and dangerous to work toward goals like winning contracts, supporting full-time organizers, and building unions with permanent activities beyond whatever struggles are going on at any given time. No doubt this means that we run little risk of recreating the ‘top-down’ bureaucratic unions of the past ourselves. But if these are the limits of our vision, it also means that we won’t be able to accomplish much at all – and we risk leaving the job of real organizing to people who have no such scruples, who don’t care so much about worker initiative and democracy. It is therefore important to ask ourselves whether this way of looking at history is correct.
***
The most conspicuous weakness of the “alternative unionism” narrative is that it tends to exaggerate the spontaneous and leaderless character of the struggles it holds up as examples, as well as downplaying the extent to which participants strove for and saw as necessary the kinds of formal agreements and institutions that would later become means of bypassing worker democracy. But this is not just a matter of careless scholarship. As long as we have no way of understanding the triumph of business unionism except as the result of bad organizing practices, it is hard to avoid drawing a sharper line than actually existed between the supposedly good and bad decisions of organizers. The real trouble is a failure to place the events of this period within the development of the capitalist system as a whole. We need to step back and ask, why did efforts to build working class institutions in the early 20th century lead to integration into capitalism, rather than a movement to overthrow capitalism? The answer is more complicated than the “solidarity unionism” framework allows.
First of all, the labor unrest of this period did not signify quite what revolutionaries hoped. Workers’ solidarity and ability to self-organize grew out of their participation in the ethnic, religious, and familial relationships and institutions that held life together in the new urban working class neighborhoods. These also provided crucial material and social support for labor struggles. But this was a knife that cut both ways. As much as capitalism exploited and threatened these traditional forms of community, it also held out a promise of freedom from all the oppressive and impoverishing aspects of traditional life. As a result, workers’ struggles in this period had a contradictory character. They were pulled in three different directions, torn between the conservative desire to halt the disintegration of traditional, non-capitalist relations; the progressive desire to share in the prosperity and liberation promised by capitalism; and the radical desire to move beyond capitalism to a new world.
Meanwhile, the early 20th century crises of inter-imperialist war and depression did not signify the final decline of capitalism that revolutionaries had anticipated. The barriers to capital accumulation that lay behind these crises were far from absolute, and the system merely needed to be restructured in order to surmount them. Half the world still lay open, offering vast untapped markets and pools of labor ripe for exploitation. Even within the most developed regions there was much work left for capital to do, invading and breaking up all traditional institutions, replacing them with specifically capitalist relations, commodifying every sphere of life. This expansion, extensive and intensive, gave the state-industry alliance two powerful weapons for dealing with labor unrest: repression and concession. Most crucially, it turned out that capital could accommodate labor’s more moderate demands.
In one way or another, the ability of capitalism to generate prosperity and opportunity for a significant minority of workers was bound to meet up with the ambiguous character of worker unrest and result in class compromise. While in a sense it is true that workers were betrayed by CIO leaders and so on, this was more or less inevitable – capitalism simply had ample strength to win the war of legitimacy. Could more have been accomplished, if organizers were more principled, vigilant and far-sighted? Of course. Much more? Perhaps. Radically more? Probably not. 2 In retrospect we can see this half-century as the period in which the new working class was tumultuously integrated into capitalism, and capitalism was forced to partly socialize itself.
***
This interpretation of the rise of industrial unionism opens up new possibilities, because it invites us to ask how the capitalist system has developed in the past hundred years and how our situation today is therefore different. When we do this, we discover first that we will have to do things that organizers in the past did not have to do. In particular, we have to figure out how to fill the void left by the near-total disintegration of traditional culture and community in the developed world. 3 But once we do this, we will find that we are able to do things that were impossible in the past: we will be able to build a genuinely radical and democratic worker movement that is not corrupted and co-opted by capitalism. 4 But this movement will not just look like the “alternative unionism” of the past, writ large. We have to build institutions specifically suited to our own time. This task will be the subject of the next and final essay in this series.
***
Notes:
- This summary is based on Staughton Lynd’s writings. See especially his introduction to the volume “We Are All Leaders” (1996), where he (following the other contributors to the volume) uses the terms “alternative unionism” and “community-based unionism” more or less interchangeably with “solidarity unionism”. Although Lynd’s narrative focuses on the early 1930s, he draws a parallel with earlier IWW organizing strategies. ↩
- If proof is needed of this, or if we want to imagine how much more might have been accomplished, we can look at the various versions of class compromise that were achieved by labor movements in the European countries. ↩
- This idea is developed in the essay Organizing in the Community, or the Organizing of Community? ↩
- Globalization has eroded the ability of capital to accommodate significant worker demands, so that capitalism is less and less able to provide prosperity even for a privileged minority. No longer pulled in three directions, the global working class more and more will have no choice but to look beyond capitalism. This idea is developed in the essay Global Capitalism in Crisis: What Next?. ↩
Wow, what a thought-provoking essay! I really like how you’ve framed the issue here. I’ve tended to understand and analyze the failures of past movements in a somewhat either/or way: either they made mistakes that we can learn from, or they were doomed to fail from the start because capitalism was too adaptable and too powerful for them to win. The former is useful because it *does* provide us with a way forward, but one also misses a lot of the picture when focusing entirely on what the left is or isn’t doing and ignoring the changing dynamics of the thing we’re fighting in the first place. The latter can lead to defeatism and hopelessness. But the framework you’ve offered helps me understand how changes to capitalism itself, which is not at all a monolithic and unchanging force, can lead to new opportunities for revolution that our predecessors didn’t have. This, *along* with learning from their organizing successes and failures, is very useful. As far as I understand, this type of analysis is part of the marxist method. :)
I’m very interested to know more about the 3 directions pulling the early 20th century labor movement,
(Apologies in advance if my attempts to use unfamiliar html tags failed.)
Could you expand on this: how did these tensions play out in organizing? How were these related to ties and tensions between US-born workers and immigrants, or between white workers and workers of color? Your statement also seems to hint at the ways that some folks say that capitalism facilitated the creation of gay identity, and the liberatory aspects of that.
Finally, I wonder how we can be sure that capitalists won’t just find ways to reorganize and reform in order to defeat a working class revolution. I can’t really imagine how capitalists will be able to continue buying out a significant minority of workers with higher wages and better working conditions, but I’d be interested to hear arguments as to how they could. And I’m not sure that capitalism can’t overcome other sources of instability. For instance, I do believe it might be possible for green capitalism to, at the very least, stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations enough to prevent catastrophic global warming.
Thanks for your encouraging response, and for the useful questions!
First of all, I think you are right to emphasize that we need to pay attention both to “changes to capitalism itself” and to past “organizing successes and failures”. Although I take a critical stance toward the (uncritical) ‘mine the past’ approach, I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t draw lessons from the past. It’s always a matter of seeing what people did and what they accomplished, relative to what they could have done and what they might have accomplished, given their particular historical situation – and then asking what (if any) are the implications for us, given our particular historical situation. Not a simple matter!
You asked me to say more about the “3 directions pulling the early 20th century labor movement”. Immigrant communities offer some great examples.
The successive waves of immigration around the turn of the century led to the formation of urban neighborhoods (and ghettos) divided along ethnic lines – Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc. The most recently arrived groups were usually at the bottom of the heap, suffering the worst poverty, consigned to the worst jobs, etc. Internally, the ethnic groups were bound together not just by a shared cultural identity but by the traditional kinship and religious institutions they brought with them from their homelands. On this basis, they pursued strategies of collective self-help to raise themselves up in American society. This took a number of forms (in addition to the obvious networks of support among family and church members). For one thing, the neighborhoods provided a sheltered space where an ethnic group could build up its own small business economy – shops and services, small savings and lending banks, etc. Immigrant groups also formed mutual aid organizations, legal and illegal (think Knights of Columbus, Italian crime syndicates, Irish political machines), to advance their particular interests.
How did the existence of these semi-traditional ethnic working class communities, these societies within a society, impact the labor movement? First, consider the workers’ aims and motivations. Immigrants worked long hours in the factories, but the real locus of their lives and aspirations was in the neighborhoods. This meant that while they might be prepared to be very ‘militant’, especially when their families were starving, the nature of their demands tended to be what revolutionaries thought of as ‘economistic’. (This applies not just to workplace struggles but also to eviction resistance and demands for poor relief, e.g. during the Great Depression.) This wasn’t because the immigrants had been imbued with capitalist values, or because they only cared about material advancement. It was because they already had in their communities, in their families and churches and local shops and fraternal clubs, something worth preserving – and toiling away for industrial capital was a means to this end. They weren’t about to risk everything for some radical dream of revolutionizing relations on the job, because they weren’t looking for personal fulfillment from their jobs (not to mention the fact that they tended to be relatively uneducated and unskilled, and were confronted by an increasingly complex and technical system of industry – remember this was the era of Taylorism, mass production, etc!). So here we have a case of ‘conservative’ motivations contributing to labor struggles, but weighing against ‘radicalism’. Political radicalism (I think – I don’t have any specific source in mind here) tended to be strongest among single young men or workers detached from any tight-knit community. A kind of radicalism could also be born of desperation, but it wasn’t likely to become a creative force.
Second, consider conflicts between ethnic groups. These conflicts were not just based on what we think of today as prejudice or racism. Preferential treatment among members of a immigrant community at the expense of others was part of collective self-help, and this was a viable way of rising in society. There were real gains and privileges to be won, because despite ups and downs American capitalism was booming – remember this was the beginning of the era of mass-produced consumer goods, automobiles, etc. So ethnic groups were not just fighting to preserve their communities, they were competing for the best terms of integration into capitalism, for access to the prosperity that the rise of industry promised. Capitalists could exploit this competition, and of course they did. So for example in the 1919 steel strikes loads of black strike breakers were brought in and spies were sent into the unions to stir up animosity between ethnic groups. Although in the context of any particular labor struggle it was generally in the real interests of different ethnic groups to co-operate with each other, the hostilities that made this co-operation so difficult to achieve grew out of a wider situation in which the real interests of these groups were often at odds. So here we have a case of the ‘progressive’ desire to integrate into and benefit from capitalism – which of course motivated labor struggles – working against labor unity, and thus limiting what the labor movement could accomplish. (On a related note, unions themselves were open to being captured by factions – think crime syndicates and the Teamsters – and used as yet another lever in their own advancement. This was obviously destructive of an effective labor universalism, let alone radicalism.)
The contrast with today is sharp and important. Of course there are still many layers of privilege within the working class, but there are two huge differences today: first, the fact that the various strata are no longer organized as communities whose members’ fates are bound up together so that they are really in competition as groups; and second, the fact that the direction of motion has changed, so that instead of rising prosperity we have general decline – today it is a matter of the top strata being squashed down, rather than the bottom ones clawing their way up. This gives us a chance to build a new universal kind of community that unites the whole working class, simultaneously reflecting and further creating the historical conditions in which our real interests more and more coincide – and it means that although capitalists will still try to exploit the remaining divisions they will not have so much success. The upshot is, today the working class has little left to ‘conserve’ and capitalism can no longer offer it room to ‘progress’ – so it has to become radical.
This is getting really long, so I will end here even though this picture is far from complete. As you saw, I at least started to answer your question about capitalists reorganizing and reforming in Global Capitalism in Crisis: What Next?. I’ll add a few more thoughts about this when I respond to your comment on that post. (Here they are.)
“a feeling that it is both unnecessary and dangerous to work toward goals like winning contracts, supporting full-time organizers, and building unions with permanent activities beyond whatever struggles are going on at any given time (…) means that we won’t be able to accomplish much at all.”
Why? Is it because of what you see as the absence of “much in the way of positive theories of movement-building” or is it because “winning contracts [and] supporting full-time organizers” are required to “accomplish much”? Or something else?
“While in a sense it is true that workers were betrayed by CIO leaders and so on, this was more or less inevitable”
It was inevitable that the CIO opted for no strike clauses? How so? And either way I don’t see what the point of the claim is.
“we are able to do things that were impossible in the past: we will be able to build a genuinely radical and democratic worker movement that is not corrupted and co-opted by capitalism.”
I don’t think this claim makes sense. We have no more and no less knowledge that this project is possible today than anyone else thought they had in the past, and claims to the impossibility of this project in the past seem to me questionable intellectually for sure and perhaps politically.
“this movement will not just look like the “alternative unionism” of the past, writ large. We have to build institutions specifically suited to our own time.”
The notion of suitability here seems questionable to me. The present is highly heterogeneous – there’s no single “we” and “we” don’t live in one “our time.” And, there’s no real way to describe what is “suited” to a time until after the fact, “suited” just means “it worked,” with the implication that failure is tied to lack of suitability. It seems to me that suited just takes “happened to succeed” and adds an implication of necessity, and the reverse, not suited, just takes “happened to fail” and adds the same implication. I don’t see the point of any of that and I think on close scrutiny it dissolves.
The quick answer to your first question is Yes and Yes. In the next (and last) article in this series, I will lay out more specifically why I believe “alternative unionism” is insufficient, and what more is necessary in order to “accomplish much” today.
The footnote about comparisons with European countries is relevant to your question about no-strike clauses. Here is an article detailing some of the differences in striking rights across Europe. There is a fair amount of variation, but nowhere was the basic balance of power in favor of the business-government alliance essentially disrupted. The point of the “more or less inevitable” claim is that it is unrealistic to suppose that if people had just been more principled and refused to sign such agreements things could have been radically different – and that, therefore, the secret to success today is simply to make sure that we are principled in this way.
We have knowledge of the past that the people living through it did not have, because we can at our leisure analyze and connect events that for them were going on simultaneously and at a furious pace, and of course because we know what came next. This knowledge (in principle, if we use it well) enables us to make judgments about what was and was not possible that are better-informed than the judgments they were able to make at the time. People in the future will be in a similarly advantaged position with respect to ourselves. I don’t think there is anything intellectually suspect about judging that what some radicals in the 30s believed to be possible or inevitable (and what, remember, many other people thought ridiculous) was in fact impossible or extremely unlikely. Nor is there anything wrong with attempting to piece together as accurate a picture as possible of our own time and situation, viewing this picture against the conclusions of our study of the past, and judging that we have opportunities today that they didn’t have. Of course our judgments are fallible, and there is a lot we do not and cannot know. But it is the job of historical and social science to make these fallible judgments – this is our best chance of understanding how the world works and of being able to act in it other than blindly.
One important conclusion of this kind of historical analysis is that there is, increasingly, a single “we” – the global working class – and one “our time” – the age of global capitalism. The process of ‘homogenization’ is by no means complete or perfect, but globalization has put us all in the same boat to an extent unheard of in any past historical epoch. The transnational capitalist class recognizes this, even if we don’t. The fact that working class consciousness is fragmented serves their purposes just fine. The idea that social reality is irreducibly heterogeneous (I’m not sure this is what you were suggesting, but it is an important point anyway) can easily serve to confine our actions to the politics of identity and personal rebellion. The sooner we, as radical workers, begin to organize on the basis of there being a shared objective reality, the sooner we will be able to change it for the better.*
To do this, we as radical workers have to start organizing in a way that is suited to our time, suited to our shared objective reality. The notion of suitability is not just about seeing what worked or failed after the fact. It is about being alert to the opportunities and obstacles raised by our specific historical situation, and consciously formulating strategies to deal with them. As above, knowledge gained in hindsight generally enables a better judgment of what was or was not suitable at any given time, but this doesn’t mean we can’t make informed judgments about suitability in the present.
* A more general note on the use of the word ‘we’: I realize that we (Katie and Scott) use this word heavily in our writings, and with several different senses: ‘we’ the global working class, ‘we’ the working class of the old industrialized countries or of the U.S., ‘we’ radical workers who are trying to figure out how to organize, ‘we’ the left more generally, or ‘we’ Katie and Scott who are putting forward specific views as to what one of these wider ‘we’s is facing or should be doing. Unfortunately this ambiguity is unavoidable. But the context should make it clear in what sense the word is being used.
In brief because again in a rush –
the comment about the role of the historical and social sciences is a bit odd. I’m a historian by trade, I can’t remember the last time I heard a historian use the word ‘inevitable’. I think notions like ‘inevitability’ make little sense when we push on them analytically. (Actually, I think that in all likelihood inevitability or contingency are closer to philosophical axioms that inform historical inquiry methodologically, and neither is subject to much clear proof in the face of skeptical responses, as is often the case with axioms.) In terms of the present and operational decision-making today I think the notion of adequacy to the moment is a fetish, more heat than light, adding additional affective content (a feeling that history is on our side, or not) but no real truth content. Not least because the time frame in which adequacy to a moment could be assessed (if the concept could be made clear internally, which I’m skeptical of) is a timeframe larger than the one in which we act on a day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year basis.
All of that said, I’m skeptical, as you can tell, but I look forward to reading the final piece on solidarity unionism. I’m particularly interested in the details of the prescriptive claims you will make/are making.
cheers,
Nate
ps- on the global working class, I agree about our existence as a class. I think the implied historical claim there – greater mobility etc – is a false one. Labor mobility across national boundaries was as high or higher in the late 19th century as today. I believe that’s in a work by Arrighi but am not 100% sure and can’t check at the moment.
I don’t mean “inevitable” in any grand philosophical sense. I mean that, based on a judgment of the range of realistic options that were open to various actors in the labor movement, and the range of realistic responses that could be expected from various other actors (rank-and-file workers, capitalists, government, etc.), one can mark out a range of possible outcomes, none of which was particularly radical. Of course we can disagree about what was realistic or not.
What makes the working class “global” is not (or not primarily) labor mobility across national boundaries. The crucial indicators are the transnational mobility of productive capital, and the degree to which single capitals operate at a transnational scale – both of which have increased dramatically in the past fifty years. The result has been the creation of a global labor market, and the need for workers to organize at the global level in order to exert leverage against capital at this new scale.
Katie:“While in a sense it is true that workers were betrayed by CIO leaders and so on, this was more or less inevitable”
Nate:”It was inevitable that the CIO opted for no strike clauses? How so? ”
I would tend to agree with Katie on this historical question. Not so much on the question of wartime “no strike clauses,” the die was years before. Aside from many local unions being very good, the national CIO and CIO organizing committees (such as steel & textile, for example) were top-down, centralized, controlled outfits from the git-go.
While engaged in militant tactics in the first couple years after formation, the CIO sought pretty much the same sort of relationship and labor-management set-up as the AFL sought for its members (sans the craft orientation). Tom W. has an interesting piece on the CIO and I’d suggest folks read it, it puts a bunch of stuff into perspective: http://workersolidarity.org/archive/union3.html
Syndicalist, framed that way I agree with you but I’m pretty sure that’s the position that the article is rejecting — “in a sense it is true that workers were betrayed by CIO leaders and so on, this was more or less inevitable – capitalism simply had ample strength to win the war of legitimacy. Could more have been accomplished, if organizers were more principled, vigilant and far-sighted? Of course. Much more? Perhaps. Radically more? Probably not. “