get their way, since the active members are also actors in this social dialectic. Nevertheless, at crucial times the leaders are pulled toward defending the institution, which can mean avoiding strikes, staying within the law, and abiding by the contract even as management bends or breaks it. It’s not simply a question of betrayals or sellouts, but of the contradictory role of the high-level union official as both a leader of workers and a mediator between labor and capital.
As David McNally reminds us, following Marx, much in the way capitalism works is invisible yet real. We do not see markets or the circuits of capital—only the results. Yet they are all too real.3 For example, let’s look at Marx’s concept of the commodity. “The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing.”4 As he investigates the commodity, Marx finds that its value consists not in its use or even its exchange, per se, but in the socially necessary labor it embodies. After a long examination, we discover that “it is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”5 Actual social relations are concealed, rendered invisible, in both the commodity’s physical and exchange forms.
The union, of course, is not a commodity and the social relations within it are not those of exploitation, so this analogy has its limits. Nevertheless, if we look beneath the surface of the union as institution we find a somewhat complex social organism. Officials who deal regularly with management will tend to insulate themselves from the daily influence of members, or various groups of members, in order to stabilize the bargaining relationship. This leads to forms of bureaucratic rule. In the case of US unions, the administration of vast benefits programs, their “private welfare state,” and elaborate, legalistic contracts adds further layers of institutional insulation. The members, however, have needs, desires, and expectations that may well go beyond what the leadership sees as realistic from its vantage point. Thus, the layers of bureaucracy and insulation become a barrier to achieving those needs and expectations.
Some socialists emphasize the relative privileges of top union leaders—their high salaries and expense accounts, their social mingling with managers and politicians, vastly improved working conditions, and so on. These are the symptoms of the problem, not the causes. No doubt most union leaders work hard and are dedicated to the cause of labor as they see it. At the same time, they are the guardians of the institution and of the “bargaining relationship.” Most high-level US union officials still think, whether consciously or not, in terms of “business unionism”—in which, among other things, the bargaining relationship (more than the outcome) is the priority, the contract it produces sacrosanct, and labor politics incarcerated in the prison of the Democratic Party. Ages ago, most union leaders, often with membership support, to be sure, granted capital management’s-rights and no-strike clauses in these sacrosanct contracts. In doing so, they have limited their own options as well as those of the rank and file.
As a result, it is precisely in the battle between labor and capital that the fight against bureaucracy and the norms of business unionism becomes a necessity. As contradictory organizations of class struggle, unions embody a dialectic between bureaucratization and rebellion from below. As I write in the essay on the “rank-and-file strategy,” it is all too frequently, when capital and its management are the target of increased conflict, that the leadership in its role as guardian of the institution steps into the crosshairs. It is for this reason that the history of American labor is punctuated by rank-and-file rebellions at one level or another. The object of such rebellion ought not to be simply replacing one leadership group with another. It must involve the transformation of the union from the ground up. Here is one opportunity for socialists to play a leadership role from a grassroots position. It is a leadership that cannot be proclaimed by some vanguard identity or won simply by election. It must be earned in the course of struggle.
In this fight, union democracy is essential. As one Labor Notes book puts it in a title, Democracy Is Power.6 This is about more than honest elections or better democratic forms. It should begin in the workplace with strong organization and accountable shop stewards, for here is the ultimate source of working-class power. Here direct democracy can be a reality, and it is on this basis that further democratization is possible. Union democracy should involve members in union administration and mobilization far beyond today’s norms. It must also speak to the potential divisions within the unions and the working class as a whole.
Unions include groups of workers with real or potential conflicts of interest: skilled and unskilled, Black and white, men and women. To unite these sections of the membership often requires special attention to those most disadvantaged or underrepresented. It is a task that too many union leaders have avoided. Solidarity is not always a simple matter, but as countless struggles have demonstrated, it is not impossible. It is something to be built in the struggle with capital by and among the ranks themselves. Socialists have a key role to play in this.
Some Assumptions and Omissions
This is a collection of essays, most of which have been published previously elsewhere—all too often in places where too few activists would find them. As such it does not present a coherent narrative. There is some repetition and overlap, perhaps even some contradiction where my thoughts have developed over time. Nevertheless, I believe it presents a set of ideas and analyses of value to union and movement activists, based primarily in Marx’s view of class struggle, spelled out in the first essay. As is always the case, the influences on my thinking have come from many sources, past and present. They, in turn, have shaped my views within the context of a particular socialist current.The shorthand self-identifier for this tendency is “socialism from below,” a phase associated with the Marxist theorist Hal Draper.7 His works have been one of the major frameworks in which the many other influences and experiences have been sorted out. This does not mean total agreement with all the many works and talks produced by Draper or his political offspring, but it does mean a general adherence to the idea of socialism from below, in which the emancipation of the working class (and humanity) is the task of the working class itself.
Coming from the same political current, the working-class socialist who first introduced me and many others to the reality, if not the idea, of rank-and-file movements was Stan Weir. His 1966 pamphlet A New Era of Labor Revolt: On the Job vs. Official Unions was an eye-opener for a young socialist activist not long removed from campus and only recently involved in organizing a union.8 In it Weir revealed an aspect of the social rebellions of the 1960s that has often been overlooked. This early political and theoretical underpinning was much enriched by my involvement in the International Socialists and Solidarity and, above all, my twenty-two years with Labor Notes and the many staff members there, and the contact with countless rank-and-file union activists that provided. In addition I want to thank my colleagues at the Work and Employment Research Unit of the University of Hertfordshire for making it possible to produce some of the articles that appear in this collection. Many thanks, as well, to the folks at Haymarket Books for encouraging me to publish this collection and for their help in producing it, especially Anthony Arnove, Julie Fain, Sarah Grey, Rachel Cohen, and Caroline Luft. Finally, I want to acknowledge the constant contributions to my thinking and morale from my partner of many years, Sheila Cohen.
Ultimately, it has to be conceded that there is much more to building a socialist movement than union work. Unions, after all, are not revolutionary organizations. As many have pointed out they arise in the context of capitalism and exist to adjust the conditions of workers within that system. Much more in the way of organization, education, and action is needed than even militant union activism can provide. Yet unions, as movements, are also oppositional by nature. As Engels wrote to Bebel in 1875, they are “the real class organization of the proletariat, in which it carries on its daily struggles with capital, in which it trains itself.”9 No matter how imperfectly they do this or how much they retreat, they are on the front lines of class conflict more consistently than any other mass organizations in the United States. So, while there is more to socialist strategy than working in the unions, unions remain the obvious place in which to reconnect the theory and practice of socialist politics to the only force that can fulfill the vision of those politics.
