Red Star Communist Organization

Economism, Class Struggle, and the Tasks of Communists in the Labor Movement

“Our leadership of the revolutionary struggle of our class can be won only through the capable leadership of struggles for partial demands, through our ability to organize and lead the struggles of mass organizations of workers for partial demands. It is at best extremely doubtful whether any considerable number of workers will believe in our ability “to make a revolution” unless we can organize and lead the smaller but necessary struggles which arise out of rationalization, and in which we must be able to convince workers of the necessity of engaging in higher forms of struggle.” – William F. Dunne, Introduction to Problems of Strike Strategy

Introduction

The following document sums up a roughly 18-month sequence of practical work organizing a union among professional workers in the journalism and media industry, as well as a small strata of logistics and operations staff in the same shop. At the time of this writing, the contract struggle on the shop-floor is still ongoing; this summation will only cover the period of underground organizing (January 2022 to November 2022), the election campaign (from when the union ‘went public’ in December 2022 to the NLRB election in March 2023), and the first phase of post-certification struggle, culminating in the organization of a wall-to-wall work stoppage in June of 2023. In the period following the composition of this document, two further work stoppages have successfully won revindications from management, and workers in the shop have begun organizing towards an open-ended strike action with a target date in the spring of next year.

The preparation of this document serves the dual function of (provisionally) outlining our position on the role of communists in the ‘official’ labor movement in the current conjuncture—a period defined principally by the lack of a proletarian communist party in the vanguard—and to respond to the line advanced by the comrades of the Southern New England Labor Council in their document on ‘State Unionism in the United States,’ and the line of Comrade Saoirse of the Revolutionary Maoist Coalition in their ‘Preliminary Theses on Communist Work in the Labor Movement’ document.

Broadly, our position is that the comrades of the SNELC put forward an essentially diagnostically accurate analysis of the character of the official trade union movement in the “united states.” The characterization of the official unions as ‘state unions’ remains basically correct and we are largely aligned with the polemic against the so-called “rank-and-file” strategy, here articulated by FRSO in the 2019 paper Class Struggle on the Shop Floor: A strategy for a new generation of socialists in the United States, of pursuing “transformation” of the unions and returning to the “basics” of

“taking on employers, mobilizing the rank-and-file, organizing the unorganized and making use of the strike weapon. That transformation won’t happen by itself. It will take a militant minority of union fighters coming together to organize their coworkers, struggle with their bosses, and kick out any sellout union officials who get in their way.”

We cite this example as a representative of a trend reflected in the broader “labor left” of rank-and-file tailism, which is largely indistinguishable from LaborNotes-style Trotskyism. Such positions are shared by groups ranging from left caucuses in the DSA to former NCM organizations like FRSO. The ‘flip-side’ of this strategy is the bureaucrat tailism of the DSA right-wing which aims to cozy up with union electeds.

On this point, we fundamentally agree with SNELC: the incorporation of the official trade unions into the process of capitalist restructuring as an extension of the capitalist state apparatus (realized maximally under the Roosevelt ‘New Deal’ government) forecloses the possibility of political justification for a strategy of “[confining] our labor work to expanding and attempting [to] become the leadership of and transform the state unions.” Such a strategy is fundamentally economism, an argument which we will develop below.

Where we break with the SNELC comrades is in their position that: “all revolutionaries in the labor movement must strive to construct ‘a class-based, combative and independent unionism’ in the United States without exception.” We maintain that such a position, when unqualified, essentially reproduces the economism of the “rank-and-file” strategists under a red banner; we will develop this argument in detail below.

The particular error in question here, which we characterize as ‘left-economism,’ is representative of a broader trend in the anti-revisionist left of a noble effort to build fiercely independent mass organizations that are, in the main, isolated from the class and its day-to-day struggles while still subject to the same political circumscriptions characteristic of the legal mass organizations.

The comrades from SNELC are aware of this problem:

revolutionaries must continue to agitate, penetrate, and organize within the employer and state-sanctioned collective bargaining units (i.e. state unions) as the CPUSA did within the company unions and the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s did within the fascist state unions. In doing this revolutionary workers and labor activists can avoid isolation from the sections of the working-class and lower-petty bourgeoisie organized within the state unions, and utilize these state-sanctioned bargaining units to intervene in and lead the struggle for revindications and reforms.

But we contend that their categorical opposition to the organization of unorganized workers within the so-called ‘state unions’ is erroneous; they raise the false contradiction between “educating the workers in class struggle and forging the advanced workers into the bones of an independent and class-conscious workers movement,” and “[building] an ‘army’ of petty-bourgeois professional organizers and have them go among and organize the workers and attempt to expand the reach of the establishment state unions.”

Where one divides into two, for us, is the question of to what degree we can reasonably expect to impose the correct line of insistence on proletarian independence (and even, where possible, openly communist politics) while still accessing the broad sections of the working class currently organized in the state unions. That tactical assessment cannot be subjected to dogmatic categorical assertions of the above type; instead, we must ask at each step which approach most advances the immediate objective common to all legitimate communists (the reconstitution of the party) without sacrificing a correct understanding of the counterrevolutionary role of the state unions in the process.

Again, we note that it is clear that the SNELC comrades are aware of this concern, and they occasionally note the importance of avoiding a dogmatic approach to these questions; such notes are, however, inconsistent with the assertions made again and again throughout the document. We hope it is clear that our intention is not to misrepresent the claims of the SNELC comrades, but to draw out what we understand to be their primary points in order to engage in principled struggle. We emphasize that we in large part agree with the SNELC comrades’ critical remarks on the theses advanced by comrade Saoirse.

While we therefore agree that, ideologically and politico-militarily, the road to socialist revolution must pass through the shattered remnants of the so-called ‘state unions,’ we also maintain that it does not, and cannot, begin there. So long as the anti-revisionist tendency remains objectively marginalized and isolated from the mass movement, so long as our forces are politically and organizationally dispersed and so long as our ideological level remains so abysmally low—in other words, until a national pre-party formation and national political leadership worthy of taking up the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism are forged, and forged in deed rather than just in word—the main tasks are ideological rectification and uniting the advanced around proletarian communist politics.

  1. Ideological rectification: developing the subjective level of our trend through struggle over political line (a practice of which this exchange is a part). Summing up and systematizing the experimental knowledge produced by sequences of of mass practice provides the raw material for such a struggle, the resolution of which is the only real basis for unity among the circles today.

  2. Uniting the advanced: as above, this entails uniting the existing circles through a process of struggle-transformation-unity, but also winning over advanced workers to communist politics.

We have long maintained that the advanced in question are otherwise than those who merely profess ideological commitment to “Maoism” or communist ideology understood in the abstract. The evaluation of the correct ideas of the revolutionary masses which would equip us to divide that undifferentiated category into advanced and intermediate strata depends on their participation in the class struggle as well as ideological development—fundamentally, on their participation in mass rebellions, of which the day-to-day class battles organized (whether by or despite) the ‘state unions’ are a type.

Consequently, forging unity of the advanced depends immediately upon our own insertion into the mass struggles and linking up with advanced workers over the course of those struggles; our answer to the question of labor line in this conjuncture depends on an assessment of which approach (‘boring from within’ or the construction of independent organs) best equips our militants to conduct that work. This document intends to argue in favor of the former (‘boring from within’) strategy in the context of one particular organizing sequence in the journalism industry, and lay out the tactical logic which informed that decision, while disputing the variation on the “rank and file” strategy advanced by the comrade of the RMC.

We will begin by discussing the initial situation and the conditions of the shop in early 2022, including the composition of the labor force, the structure of the labor process at the shop, and some notes on the problem of organizing the professional “white-collar” strata. We will then move to a discussion of the initial phase of underground work, the formation of an organizing committee, and the eventual decision to affiliate with an existing national union formation. Throughout, we will attempt to also show how the two-line ideological struggle within the developing union organization took shape.

From there, we will proceed to a discussion of our NLRB election, and a discussion of the utility of formal NLRB certification, the hurdles of the NLRB bureaucratic apparatus, and the struggle to organize despite (and against) our own union bureaucracy in the context of a ‘vote yes’ campaign. This will be followed by brief notes on the work of members of our nucleus within the broader national union after certification, leading up to a walkout and work stoppage in June that was organized across 12 shops owned by our company.

We will conclude with some analysis of the “fusion” and so-called “rank and file” strategies, particularly as articulated by the comrade from the RMC, as well as the application of our own perspective on mass work to the union context. The development of a clear line on the relationship between party building and political work within the state union movement is a core task for the antirevisionist left today, particularly as we are faced with an objective dispersal and isolation from the advanced strata of workers active within that struggle. As the reformist labor movement takes qualitative forward steps, it becomes increasingly urgent that we prepare to intervene with a concrete line of march which can link up with the broad masses already mobilized within the unions and organize the struggle against both the bosses and the state union leadership, in order to facilitate consistent exposures of the capitalist system as a whole and the necessity of the reconstitution of a proletarian class party in order to initiate the armed struggle for political power – people’s war – necessary to topple it.

Shop Overview

Financialization and the Economic Context

The shop in question (Shop Z) is a subsidiary of one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States (Company X), itself a holding firm with controlling interests in a number of newspaper and media production shops (including digital production and distribution, as well as print production and distribution, for both a constellation of local outlets and a national paper) and digital marketing services, as well as a handful of professional journals. Via a subsidiary, it also controls hundreds of publications in the United Kingdom. The high level of monopolization in the media industry is well-documented, and X’s predecessor firm was consistently at the vanguard of the overall trend towards concentration. It was one of the first major firms to transition from individual ownership to being publicly traded on the NYSE, embracing financialization and ruthlessly expansion, often by buying out its competition, selling off or shuttering local papers in regions where they faced saturated market conditions.

For more background on the structure of the media industry, we recommend Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly which traces the process of concentration and the impact of monopolization on the ideological reproduction of capital. Despite its political eclecticism and lack of consistent theoretical framing, Bagdikian’s book is the most thorough account of the contemporary media industry and its political economy.

Following a merger with another media conglomerate, X was directly controlled by Fortress Investment Group, itself a subsidiary of Japanese finance capitalist firm Softbank (it bought itself out of ownership by Fortress in 2020). The merger facilitated an immediate financial restructuring of the resulting firm, with newly installed management openly aiming at cutbacks across the entire structure, chiefly taking the form of layoffs targeting so-called ‘inefficiencies.’ By 2022, the ongoing austerity policies lead to another round of 600 layoffs, roughly 6% of the newsroom staff, and X ceased publication of a number of local papers in its portfolio, with many others exclusively publishing “evergreen” (search engine-optimized content that isn’t tied to breaking news or updates) and regional content; dozens of newsrooms lack any staff writers whatsoever, and merely republish syndicated or wire content under the direction of regional editorial management.

While still overseen by a professional austerity manager (and representative of the finance capitalist firm which oversaw the merger), X bought itself out of contract with Fortress Investment Group / Softbank in late 2020; today, its principal shareholders are investment funds – Alta Fundamental Advisors is the largest, followed by BlackRock (including BlackRock’s child fund IJR), Vanguard Group, Apollo Management and Goldman Sachs.

The context of the general economic crisis situation – precipitated by the overall tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the department II realization crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic – has had a pronounced impact on the so-called legacy media (principally print newspapers and magazines) sector, especially at X; falling revenues from print newspaper sales and advertising were considerably worsened by the lockdowns, and digital circulation revenue failed to keep up with direct industry competitors. The consequently exaggerated decline in rate of profit for the firm was used to justify attempts at raising absolute surplus value extraction, employing layoffs and restructuring to increase the length of the working day for the remaining staff while reducing overall variable capital investment. This disinvestment was driven, on one hand, by fiduciary responsibilities to its finance capitalist overseers, and on the other, in order to pay off its considerable debt (X owed $1.37 billion in 1Q2022).

But from 2020-2021 Shop Z had largely avoided that trend, remaining one of the few profitable outlets for X. Z began in the ’90s as an independent tech journalism and product testing outlet (initially a constellation of smaller websites that were merged in the late 2000s), and was acquired by X’s predecessor company in 2011. Its primary revenue stream was traditional page-view advertising (as well as licensing deals with partner firms, typically appliance and electronics manufacturers) until roughly 2018, when affiliate revenue (a percentage of sales from products purchased via links included in articles) overtook advertising. This trend was exacerbated by the massive pivot to online retail and distribution during the COVID-19 lockdowns; where other subsidiaries of X were operating at a loss, especially in early 2020, Z had its most profitable year on record. From 2019-2022, average annual revenue increased consistently each year.

General Overview of the Labor Process, Composition of the Labor Force

Setting aside the business intelligence/development section, which reports directly to Shop Z’s general manager, and a handful of web development workers (the “product” team), Shop Z is made up of two primary labor sections: an editorial department and a logistics, operations and lab workers layer which functions as an auxiliary strata supporting the editorial workflow.

The day-to-day labor process involves the transmission of assignments from “editorial leadership” – based typically on assessment of trends in search engine use, the emergence of new consumer commodities and trends in consumption, as well as direct dealing with other firms in the form of ‘partnerships’ (payments in exchange for ‘advertorial’ content production) – to a staff writer (or a freelancer), who then passes product requests to the logistics layer, and, in the case of certain large appliances, testing requests to the lab layer. Products are purchased or shipped from our warehouse space to a writer or our lab, tested, and then copy is written on the basis of the test results. This copy is passed back to an editor, finalized, and then sent to the production team for publication on our website.

Compositionally, the editorial department is the majority of Shop Z’s staff (approximately 60 employees, including management), and is divided into three categories of worker: writers, editors, and producers (as well as a small “art” team composed of a photographer, a videographer, and two graphic designers, as well as a community manager and data entry specialist). Writers and editors represent a professional strata of skilled workers, largely if not exclusively college educated with a (typically) petit-bourgeois class background, while producers represent a lower strata of worker, with little to no direct editorial duties (the title was changed from “editorial assistant” to producer in 2021) and who are primarily responsible for transferring and formatting final copy into the website’s content management system.

Editorial titles are stratified, with little direct link between seniority or job function and the actual title (‘Staff Writer I,’ ‘Editor II,’ ‘Senior Staff Writer,’ ‘Senior Editor,’ etc.); the arbitrary differentiation in title became a point of contention during a struggle over the composition of our bargaining unit (with management claiming that certain titles were definitionally supervisory, based purely on the title rather than the concrete labor practices or responsibilities of the workers in those roles). The highest paid members of the current bargaining unit are workers with a ‘Senior Editor’ title, followed by Editor IV, III, II, I and then Senior Staff Writer, followed by Staff Writer IV, III, II, I, with Digital Producers at the bottom of the scale making approximately $40,000 (~$18 per hour). Additionally, merit-based pay increases and inconsistent, individually granted COLAs (along with regional pay disparities based on local labor law) mean that within each job role there is considerable variation in wage scale.

Internally, the Editorial department is subdivided into a number of teams based on coverage (tech, home, deals, etc.). While these divisions determine the concrete labor function of a particular worker, the production process as a whole can be treated abstractly in terms of the exchange value of the “advertorial” copy and the money-capital valorized by the retail circulation which it facilitates. We find it educational to quote extensively from Marx’ Draft Chapter 6 of Capital here on the nature of apparently unproductive labor and its place in the general process of reproduction of capital:

Labour with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A schoolmaster who educates others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage labourer in an institution along with others, in order through his labour to valorise the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. Yet most of these kinds of work, from the formal point of view, are hardly subsumed formally under capital. They belong rather among the transitional forms.

We make this clarification in order to head off the possible accusation that – by virtue of its composition as a ‘white-collar’ workforce at a distance from commodity production – our efforts were not focused on organizing the ‘working class.’ Such a position is patently false and betrays a fetishized caricature of the nature of the proletariat. While it is true that the workers in the shop – regardless of national background – were members of the labor aristocracy, journalism is nevertheless a classic example of skilled, proletarianized labor which is today fully subsumed under the logic of capital. Newspaper workers have long been a stronghold of militant industrial unionism – and indeed, historically the newspaper unions were a bastion of explicitly communist influence in the trade union struggle in the US.

Like the layer of digital producers, the Logistics, Operations and Lab workers constitute a discrete strata of employees, distinct not only in terms of their day-to-day experience of concrete labor (working out of an office and lab facility vs. remote work, and generally only supporting, rather than directly engaging in, the production of editorial copy) but also the composition of the workforce: this strata is made up of unskilled workers, generally of a proletarian class background, composed of almost exclusively oppressed nationality workers, roughly a quarter of whom are transgender (compared to only 2 transgender workers in the entire Editorial department, which is 80% white). Overwhelmingly this strata is also the lowest paid, along with the digital producers of the editorial department (among whom there is a disproportionate concentration of nonwhite workers); we consequently consider these two groups to constitute the lowest and deepest sections of Shop Z’s workforce.

Before proceeding, we wish to provide a brief account of the role played by the development of AI technologies in the escalation of this organizing sequence. The rapid explosion of language generative AI software during the period under assessment here was a significant flashpoint in the shop floor struggle. In this, we dealt with a two-headed monster – on one hand, the very real threat of AI-driven job replacement continues to loom over journalists, and X has already begun to publish AI-composed articles in test markets at the time of this writing. On the other hand, a persistent, Luddite false consciousness took hold among workers on the shop floor, for whom the threat of AI was perceived to be existential, and it became our job to win them over to a correct grasp of the dialectic between technological development and capitalist exploitation. That is, the body of skilled workers who depend on their training as writers for their employment were disposed toward an ultimately petit-bourgeois ideological conception that the emergence of such technologies heralded the death of “authentic, human” writing and arts altogether (fields upon which their employment fundamentally depended).

To counter this, we advanced the position that the use of generative AI is only harmful to workers insofar as it is used to increase productivity and reduce variable capital expenditure by the capitalists, driving up the rate of profit, but that such tools can and will be to the benefit of the working class in the context of a socialist organization of production. The fact that technological development – the development of the productive forces – is always already subsumed into the capitalist production process in order to accelerate the accumulation of capital does not provide that technology with an eternal class essence, but its employment in that process exposes the contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and its socialized character.

We quote Marx from the Grundrisse fragment on machines:

In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso […] The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.

The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital. The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency.

It is our view that the development of generative AI technology represents the realization of the trend towards mechanization for a number of forms of copywriting; that this was an inevitable historical development of production technologies; that only class struggle on the shop-floor could lead to workers’ appropriation of the benefits of increased productivity accompanied by such advances in the productive forces; and that such appropriation is necessarily temporary without the revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class, the establishment of socialist organization of production, and the eventual transition to communism.

The sharp exposure of the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which the implementation of generative AI facilitated was a rallying cry for the advanced strata of workers in the shop, and we developed agitation and slogans which enabled our initial organizing efforts to target not just the bosses, but the capitalist mode of production and class dictatorship in general. While in the main this has yet to generate more than a negligible handful of new communists from the intermediate strata, it did serve to further consolidate the advanced section of workers, and enabled us to adopt explicitly revolutionary slogans in our propaganda work.

First Phase: Underground Organizing

The wild profitability of 2020 – only a year after X’s merger with the predecessor firm which owned Shop Z – led to Z’s local management overpromising a similarly high rate of profit for 2021 to their superiors at X, and overhiring new staff to reflect those projections. When this failed to materialize (largely due to “inflation” generating a slump in the circulation and retail sectors which began in 1Q2021, and which impacted affiliate sales), conditions at Z began to change: in an effort to make up the difference in profitability, management froze hiring and aggressively increased labor expectations for individual workers, resulting in an increase in absolute surplus value extraction by de facto lengthening the working day for the editorial workforce. This was coupled with a round of layoffs (to which Shop Z had previously been immune) and an end to corporate 401k matching.

It was in the context of this shift in working conditions that our organizing sequence began. A militant from our formation began working in the shop’s operations department in late 2021 after receiving a lead from an established contact – an unconsolidated activist with whom some of our organization had worked in the sequence discussed in FTP Boston’s document ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,‘ – already employed there. By early December, a series of informal one-on-one conversations facilitated by that contact between our cadre and a handful of the more advanced strata of the workforce had coalesced into the formation of a proto-“organizing committee” (OC): six employees, overwhelmingly from one team within the editorial department, plus our existing contact, and our activist. Of these, three had experience with union shops, but only our activist had experience actually organizing a new union. One of those three openly discussed communist politics – he was a DSA-adjacent non-member and referred to his experience in a union as having ‘radicalized’ him – and another two committee members referred to themselves as socialists.

Our activist was quickly able to earn the trust and respect of the committee through their willingness to engage in confrontation with the bosses, their past experiences with organizing work, and their familiarity with labor law; communist ideological leadership of the struggle was consequently established early in the sequence, with the organizing committee immediately taking up a militant orientation towards the bosses which emphasized independent shop-floor activity rather than mere pursuit of the NLRB process alone.

The coalescing of our OC was immediately followed by our organizing a series of trainings, on security culture, labor law, and, most significantly, the organizing process. Our insistence on the importance of secrecy was crucial in the underground phase, and we were able to reach our go-public date without any major exposures to management, but our overemphasis on secure communications did lead to problems after the election (principally in the form of a reticence to engage in organizing communications with other rank-and-file workers using company communications platforms).

To ensure our leading organizers were familiar with the law, we read and discussed Labor Law for the Rank-and-Filer as a group. During this discussion, communists on the OC emphasized that while labor laws can provide a useful shield in some cases, our real power and our real defense come from organization and willingness to take combative action against the bosses. Despite our generally militant approach, vacillating middle strata on our committee – and, after our election, among our formal leadership – often had to be reminded of this, and consistently demonstrated a desire to fall back on the legal state apparatus in order to resolve shop floor battles. The struggle against this trend will always remain critical for communists in the labor movement, as it reflects the class struggle within the unions themselves, the two-line struggle between proletarian autonomy and revisionism (the expression of bourgeois ideology within the working class movement). This struggle also expressed itself in a sluggish approach to action, in which elements of leadership failed to advance the struggle – against the wishes of the rank-and-file – and liquidated the principle of justified rebellion.

Our trainings on organizing employed Industrial Workers of the World documents and Foster’s ‘Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry,’ emphasizing the need for one-on-one conversations between militants and other workers in the shop in order to mobilize them for action. We discussed the importance of the mass line, of asking questions of our colleagues, receiving their input, and transforming their dispersed ideas and concerns into concentrated slogans and agitation which we could use to lead the fight, rather than leaping ahead of them and isolating ourselves. In parallel, communists on the committee discussed TUUL documents in order to assess what our role in the struggle might look like. It was this process which allowed us to transform our informal OC into a structured leading core of class fighters which could begin organizing our colleagues in earnest.

To do so, we began by mapping our workplace structure, noting the division of labor and production process, and the weak links that could put more intense pressure on management if mobilized. This enabled us to divide one into two, interrogating our workforce according to the question posed by Mao: who are our enemies, who are our friends? Assessing the alignment of forces within the shop allowed us to more effectively divide our efforts, and we assigned members of the OC to organize different layers and departments of workers according to agitation appropriate to their level, with the goal of talking to each worker at least once weekly.

Initially, these conversations were primarily aimed at assessment rather than recruitment, in order to divide our enemies and our friends, and to conduct an investigation into the primary struggles of our workforce in order to develop a list of demands which could synthesize them. We adopted the (trade unionist) method of assessment which ranked a worker from 1-5 according to their support for the union effort, which was intended to be determined by their demonstrated willingness to take action rather than verbal expression one way or the other.

This process was stunted somewhat by a tendency among OC members to project their understanding of a worker’s ideology onto their assessment; workers perceived as politically pro-worker (which often meant liberals) were ranked as supporters without real interrogation, while ideologically conservative workers were treated as enemies, even if they showed a concrete willingness to take action against the bosses. Such errors reflected a petit-bourgeois idealism, treating ideas as the principal factor in the development of the struggle; successful mass organizing required rooting out and smashing that deviation. We were eventually able to do so, but only after the error had isolated us from a potential ally who was then laid off in late 2022.

By the spring of 2022, we successfully matriculated from our period of investigation (uniting the advanced and consolidating a program) to one of growth (bringing up the intermediate), and began actively recruiting workers to our campaign; rather than adopting the trade-unionist method, which relied on a hyperactive organizing committee (supported, or supporting, professional staff organizers from an existing union) preparing a passive rank-and-file for an eventual NLRB petition, we elected to mobilize the rank-and-file at every step along the way, integrating them into our organizing committee (which bloomed to 12, with membership representing every department except the production team, which we were never able to fully penetrate), tasking them with agitating their colleagues or taking other low-level actions, and offering trainings and mass meetings regularly to keep them organized and ready to fight.

As mentioned above, we employed the ‘AEIOU’ structure for organizing conversations, which we adopted from IWW training documents; according to this model (one also used by most business unions and iterations of which inform trainings in organizing conversations offered to campaign organizers in movementist work outside of labor organizing) one-on-one meetings with contacts should be initiated with a clear goal established in advance (the “ask” which we would make, usually to do something like join a committee or take part in an action), and then proceed through the following stages:

  1. Agitation – generally in the form of asking pointed questions to assess a contact’s demands or concerns, and then connecting those demands to the class struggle by identifying the contradiction between the workers’ interests and the bosses;

  2. Education – linking agitation to the need for action, either by explaining the sloganized demands of a union action and why they matter, or the nature of the union organization, etc;

  3. Inoculation – working with the contact to help them understand why and how the bosses will respond to union activity, that the shop floor struggle is part of a broader struggle for power, and that management will not relinquish their unilateral control over the shop without a fight;

  4. Organization – moving the contact to action by making a concrete ask;

  5. Union – closing the conversation with renewed agitation and clear optimism to ensure the contact is ready to fight and engaged in the mobilization with enthusiasm;

We made trainings in this method available to all workers sympathetic to the struggle, and required those we recruited to the OC itself to participate; we also held collective inoculation trainings for the broader mass of workers in the shop once we reached a support base of more than half of the workforce. Our approach was informed by Foster’s position in the ‘Organizing Methods’ pamphlet that

an elementary aim in the campaign should be to activate the greatest numbers of workers to do this individual button-hole work. The campaign can succeed only if thousands of workers can be organized to help directly in the enrollment of members. This work cannot be done by organizers alone. Their main task is to organize the most active workers among the masses in great numbers to do the recruiting. The tendency common in organization campaigns to leave the signing of new members solely to the organizers and to recruitment in open meetings should be avoided.

It was also during this stage that we began reaching out to existing trade unions for support. Considerable struggle preceded this decision – even our most vacillating leaders recognized that such a move could cost us our autonomy by subjecting ourselves to external bureaucratic leadership. We ultimately voted unanimously to agree to affiliation with an existing union so long as we steadfastly combated any future no-strike, no-walkout proposals from management or union officials, and to operate independently to whatever degree possible. Our outlook – which has borne out in the development of the sequence – was that our place in the Company X profit structure positioned us well to support the struggles of other newsrooms currently in contract fights, that coordination with other such shops would allow us to make stronger demands, and that it would enable contact with other advanced workers across the company and industry.

This outlook drove us to contact one of the two primary “state unions” organizing in the media industry, with whom we are now affiliated; their rank-and-file orientation, as well as the density of Company X unions affiliated with them in ongoing contract campaigns, and their willingness to take strike action and support independent militancy appealed to our leading core and broader membership, who had been inspired by a wave of successful strike actions in our industry throughout 2021-22.

This period involved overcoming two major obstacles:

  1. the remote workforce meant diminished awareness of the socialization of the labor process, which meant that agitation often focused on drawing out the isolated concerns of each individual and only later connecting them with broader mass demands;

  2. the composition of the professional workforce, a strata who often see themselves as having more in common with the bosses than their fellow workers, and who lack the practical discipline which often accompanies “traditional” proletarianization in productive industries.

The former issue of isolation – which primarily impacted the editorial department – was particularly pronounced when considered in comparison to the logistics, operations and lab department, whose labor is socialized; this strata, objectively the most exploited, rapidly became the most organized and militant, both because of the more direct influence of communist agitation over the department and because of our ability to hold regular, in-person mass meetings. It was only through slow work engaging in “forced” socialization that organizers in the editorial department were able to finally penetrate some of the less organized sectors, a process which took months of group video-calls and delayed our eventual union election from an initial projected go-public date of August 2022 to December.

The latter issue remains a problem today; petit-bourgeois tendencies among the leadership result in consistent indiscipline and liberalism, which must be patiently struggled against by the left line. However, in the months after our election, despite the payoffs given to the upper-strata of our workforce, we have seen considerable solidarity and a relatively high level of (trade union) consciousness which has facilitated our ability to act in concert with other shops experiencing a considerably higher level of exploitation and repression. The current wave of worker militancy and our high level of internal organization has allowed us to generally overcome a petit-bourgeois aversion to conflict in favor of consistent direct action against the bosses.

Second Phase: NLRB Election and Post-Certification Struggle

Our motivation for pursuing formal NLRB recognition hinged on the above-enumerated advantages to affiliating with an existing union organization and the advantages of status quo protections for the contract campaign period. We recognized that objectively, such advantages could only be secured through shop floor action – although, as the OC grew in size, there was a dilution of the subjective level of consolidation around this line, particularly as some of the initial organizers left the shop because of the deteriorating conditions – but that the low level security they afforded would better equip us for longer term activity. As the Peruvian comrades in May Directives for Metropolitan Lima wrote,

“Negotiations are reached by pressuring with persistence, and sharpening the struggle. Not like some say now, ‘stop struggling and let’s talk.’ Today everything is dialogue with reaction and revisionism; we must fight against it. In every struggle the time comes to dialogue, but at the negotiating table you can only win what you have already won at the battlefield; that is a fundamental military and political criteria."

Our ability to win revindications in the form of a contract hinges directly on our ability to exert leverage on the shop-floor; the bargaining table is fundamentally secondary, a stage-play that reflects the balance of power in the real battles of the day-to-day struggle.

For the communists on the OC, this also entailed recognition that permanent forms of worker mass organization are preferable for the long term development of the movement rather than more temporary or transitional organizational forms, and that while affiliating with an existing union would mean sacrificing some of our autonomy and limiting our immediate capacity to intervene in the course of this struggle, it would better equip us to engage with broader masses of workers organizing against X, and to link up with advanced workers in the union itself.

From the beginning, once we had clarified our determination to pursue NLRB certification, we established that we would only do so when we held a reliable supermajority support of workers in the shop (we set a 75% number, which we eventually dropped to 70%), to ensure that – with proper inoculation – there was no chance that we would lose our election.

By the fall of 2022, we believed ourselves to have reached that number: over 70% of the workforce had verbally committed their support of the campaign, and had participated in some level of organizing activity. But as we began to collect signatures on union cards from the staff – and began to request signatures on our public ‘mission statement,’ which would be presented to management along with our petition to unionize – we quickly realized that we had overestimated our actual levels of support: workers readily signed union cards, but when asked to express their public support for the campaign, they were often more reticent to agree.

This, again, reflected an idealist error: we assumed, incorrectly, that expressions of support would translate to concrete commitment to the struggle, that ideas would determine material events and not the other way around. Instead, we found that a considerable number of workers, particularly among the upper strata (whose union eligibility would eventually be challenged) were actively afraid of retaliation, even after months of careful inoculation. Ultimately, this error resulted in several more months of struggle and preparatory work, and we did not issue our public petition until December of that year.

As soon as we did, we were met with complications – within days of refusing to voluntarily recognize our bargaining unit, X’s lawyers contested our petition, baselessly arguing that a handful of workers included in our proposed bargaining unit were ‘supervisory,’ challenging others on “community of interest” grounds (a qualitative metric used by the NLRB to determine who should be a member of a bargaining unit), all in order to delay our election date indefinitely.

We were faced with a difficult political question: delay an election while the NLRB evaluated the contestation, in order to ensure that all units in the shop would be part of the unit we proposed, or counterpropose a two-unit structure (dividing the editorial department and the logistics, operations and lab departments into two separate bargaining units affiliated with the same union) to expedite an election, and then fight to include the handful of allegedly supervisory workers later?

Ultimately we decided that the latter option – securing a timely election and access to status quo for the broad majority of the workers, including the most exploited strata, in exchange for the temporary insecurity of the upper strata; while the division into two bargaining units was a setback, we were determined (with, unexpectedly, the backing of our union staff) to function as one unit in all but name, organizing a joint unit council, joint bargaining committee, and electing shared leadership which represented both shops. We might sign two separate contracts, but we were confident that we could ensure that they were identical in content.

Despite earlier reticence among workers from the upper strata to put themselves on the line, the overwhelming majority of the group of contested workers – largely but not entirely consisting of Senior Editors, an arbitrary title with ambiguous and inconsistent distinctions in job function compared to other editors – eagerly agreed to this plan. Their support eventually lead to a combative NLRB hearing some time after our election, during which testimony from both contested workers and their supporters on the shop floor so thoroughly embarrassed management that they agreed to admit nearly all of the contested workers into the editorial unit without further struggle. At the time of writing, only two workers remain contested, one from the Logistics, Operations and Lab unit, and one from the Editorial unit.

It should be noted that while we eventually won the election with an overwhelming supermajority (76% of cast ballots were ‘yes’ votes), turnout was lower than our organizers had initially expected. We suspect that this was in large part a consequence of the remote ballot model employed by the NLRB. Our request to hold a hybrid election – which would’ve benefited the campaign, since our in-person workforce was our most highly organized – was declined, and the mail-in ballot model is notoriously complex to navigate. Even so, the push for a remote ballot was an early example of the relatively ineffectual anti-union campaign run by management.

Their counter-organizing during the entire election period was weak – driven principally out of personal fears about losing control over the shop (rather than the strategic policies laid out by their own corporate leadership), they engaged in a campaign of union-busting so flagrant that it drove vacillating workers from outside of our support base directly into our arms. A common adage in the reformist trade union movement claims that “the boss is your best organizer,” because they tend to accelerate and accentuate contradictions in the shop, rather than ameliorate them; this bore itself out in a myriad of ways in our campaign.

Most notably, an ill-advised attempt to retaliate against a worker for speaking up in an NLRB hearing – revoking an on-the-job benefit he and a handful of other workers from the logistics unit had been receiving for years (which, it should be noted, constituted a clear and deliberate change to the terms and conditions of employment for those workers during the status quo period after our election) – provoked a two week campaign in which the entire staff refused to commute to the office and worked from home until status quo was restored. We later leveraged that violation of status quo into an unfair labor practice (ULP) claim, which provided legal cover for a strike action we took in conjunction with a broader regional campaign later in the spring.

This regional campaign represents the highest point of our struggle, and our strength, thus far. Even before our certification by the NLRB, we had begun to engage in coordinated work with other unionized shops at X, relying on the links we built there to energize our own organizing and exchanging notes on the kinds of resistance we should expect to face from management. Once we were certified, this rapidly developed into a full-fledged integration of our own shop-floor struggle into a national campaign whose power and momentum were driven by a regional formation of which we are a part.

That formation is principally made up of small local papers which cover primarily working class neighborhoods across the region; consequently, a significant section of its campaign against X focused not only on shop-floor questions, but on the political relationship between X’s monopoly over local newspapers and the increasing gap in access to local news for working class people outside of major urban centers. Such agitation belied a comparatively high level of political consciousness among the shop leadership involved in the regional campaign, though this was tempered somewhat by an over-reliance on ultimately conciliatory tactics in the shop-floor struggle.

Its strength comes from the density of unionized shops fighting for first contracts within a single local – with only a few exceptions, there was nothing which even came close to resembling this dense concentration of shops working in lock-step.

In April of 2023, only a few weeks after our certification, the national coordinating committee of unionized shops at X made the call for units to hold a one-day walkout which would coincide with the quarterly shareholder meeting of X in June; this was understood to be a first-step on the path to an open-ended strike across multiple shops. Within a month, we were able to organize a wall-to-wall walkout before having even reached the bargaining table. Our success in the contract fight to come depends on sustaining the level of militancy which we were able to achieve early in this struggle.

The Role of Staff

The conspicuous absence of any mention of the role played by union staff in the above account is not an omission—from the onset, we were firm in our position that we would be organizing our own shop on our own terms, and that we would accept resources from staff but not direction. Our ability to do so was a consequence of a trend noted by the SNELC comrades:

Even during the TUUL Red Union period the CPUSA continued to pursue a “boring from within” strategy within the American Federation of Teachers due to the widespread militancy and relatively advanced political consciousness of the members of that particular business union. The vast majority of the major establishment unions (AFSCME, IBT, UAW, NEA, SEIU, etc.) are, however, part of the state unionist current within the labor movement and must be dealt with and understood as such.

It should be clear that our assessment of the union with which we organized situates it within this current: a widely militant, striking union composed of a comparatively advanced strata of workers. This does not alter its character as an organ of the state apparatus, but its militancy and (comparatively) democratic internal culture enabled us to operate without significant interference from staff; where such interference did occur, we responded with militant resistance and forced their retreat. Furthermore, the union apparatus enabled and encouraged us to engage directly—and in an unrestricted way—with workers at other shops, consistently providing us the resources necessary to do so without having to go through staff bottlenecks. This has been a key link in our current participation in the formation of a militant minority organization within the union, which is being constructed around an anti-imperialist struggle linked to our shop-floor work and grounded in the connections we have made over the course of this sequence. This project lies outside the scope of this paper and, for security purposes, we will not expand on it at this time.

The latter point is critical: work within the state unions can enable the expansion of our contact with advanced workers beyond the reach of our immediate and localized practical work in the mass movement. Particularly because we remain skeptical—to put it lightly—of the program of “left networking” conducted via social media, of the “we are reaching out to link up and build” type, we consider it a priority to establish relationships with advanced workers or other circles with whom we have fought alongside over the course of mass struggles or those willing to struggle with us over summations such as this. Consequently, an evaluation of the ability to engage in “horizontal” communication within the union apparatus should be considered as part of the assessment of its viability for “inside” work. In this, we share the position of the comrades from the SNELC, in their critical remarks piece published in The Masses, that “[o]ur point of departure, and the basis for organizing, should be the workers themselves, our co-workers, not the leaders, agents and professional organizers of the state unions.”

Party-Building and the Union Question

We consider it timely that the current struggle around communist work in the labor movement has come about during an apparently historic revitalization of the trade union movement in this country. Our aim is to show that an orientation not informed by a party-building line (and instead guided by strategic principals applied in the abstract) is incapable of advancing the anti-revisionist trend towards the necessary next stage of struggle. Such an approach means to liquidate the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party as a vanguard of professional revolutionaries, in favor of an essentially syndicalist organizational orientation towards the working class.

The errors in question are rooted in a conception of mass work largely received from the “fusion” oriented regroupings from the so-called New Communist Movement-era. We believe that this definition of mass work, and the practical orientation which followed from it, have led our trend to take up an ultimately left-economist outlook which mirrors the ‘rank-and-file strategy’ of ‘class struggle unionism’ upheld by groups such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and those caucuses of the DSA which emerged from the wreckage of the Marxist Center I.E. Marxist Unity Group and others who support the “merger” formula; such an outlook fundamentally misunderstands the character of the current conjuncture and the tasks of communists which necessarily follow from it.

The FRSO strategy, as we noted in our introduction, is to “transform” the existing labor movement into a vehicle for revolutionary political struggle through the takeover of the union apparatuses by a militant rank-and-file, in order to fuse the socialist movement with the labor movement. This is mirrored in the construction laid out by comrade Saoirse, who advances that “there must be thorough, consistent, and deliberate participation of Communists in the labor movement for the express purpose of transforming trade-union consciousness into Communist consciousness, and growing the Communist movement.” (emphasis ours).

As the comrades from the SNELC correctly point out, any argument for such a strategy must immediately confront the reality of the failure of some several dozen left groups operating within the state unions with the same aim for decades (FRSO among them), a concern which is only sharpened by comrade Saoirse’s idealistic presentation of the current status of the “industrial proletariat” as having

“a) the strongest unions in which we can do true mass work; b) most easily embrace Communist ideology due to their basic condition of working at the point of production where, not only is the international plight of all workers most apparent, but so too is the basic contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation most obvious; c) as a class, have regular and consistent contact with all other strata of society. This does not mean we neglect other issues or strata, only that we must presently engage other issues/strata through the industrial proletariat.”

Even bracketing the labor-aristocratic position of much of the “industrial proletariat” in the u.s.a, the fact remains that—in no small part due to the correct assessment of their position at the so-called point of production—the state unions of the industrial proletariat in this country are perhaps the most compromised of any organized sector to which we could point.

But the answer to these concerns is patently not, from our perspective, the generation of independent organizations capable of carrying out the work of the unions without interference from the bureaucrats.

The comrades from SNELC argue,

“The first point in Comrade Saoirse’s list [ed.: “Unions are the most basic organization of the working class,”] has the same fundamental problem that plagues the social democratic and revisionist groups. It simply does not answer the first question materialists should ask: whose class interests are served by this organization? The class legitimacy of the corporatist state unions is simply taken for granted–after all, what communist would oppose a “basic organization of the workers”?”

Let us be blunt: a union is a union, whether red or yellow. Both are fundamentally proscribed by their structural role, which is defensive, and have no “class legitimacy” in the absence of the organizational expression—that is, self-articulation—of the class itself, in the form of its party. While an independent union offers the opportunity to operate openly as communists, the construction of an administrative apparatus capable of organizing the masses in their millions depends on a highly organized and professionalized communist cadre organization—that is, again, the party—which does not exist.

Further, there is danger in flattening out the distinction between an independent and class-conscious workers’ movement, which can only be led by the communist party and whose organizations intervene in the labor movement from without, and the union movement itself, which, so long as it remains a union movement rather than a revolutionary political movement, will always be proscribed by trade union consciousness.

Our characterization of these errors as a left-economist deviation follows from the main task of communists in the current conjuncture, e.g., that of the construction of the party through subjective development of our trend and the forging of unity of the advanced. Victory in the struggle for revindications and the growth of the labor movement in general matter only insofar as our work is in service to the former tasks.

To conceive of our role today as the mobilization of a revolutionary political movement of millions of workers to smash the state unions entails a gross misevaluation of our forces and our main task.

An approach to the mass movement emphasizing that the role of communists in a mass struggle is to develop their political base through the generation of new mass organizations that can “revolutionize” the struggle is fundamentally economistic—relying on the “politicization” of economic struggles—and left-sectarian in its consequent self-isolation from the broad masses of the working class. Our view is that it represents the inverse of the rank-and-file error of attempting to “revolutionize” the state unions themselves, as it retains an implicitly stageist conception of the development of class consciousness.

In each case, the argument remains that it is through the experience of a victorious struggle for partial demands, won through tactics which we understand to be militant or revolutionary (such as strike action), that the consciousness of the masses can develop sufficiently for explicitly revolutionary agitation to take place. Thus the call for, in the red union case, the politicization of the struggle, while in the boring-from-withinist case, the politicization of the trade union organization itself.

Compare this conception of the qualitative leap accomplished strictly through work within the economic struggle to Lenin’s polemic against the economists in Ch.2 Footnote 5 of his classic 1902 pamphlet What is to be done?:

The “stages theory”, or the theory of “timid zigzags”, in the political struggle is expressed, for example, in this article, in the following way: “Political demands, which in their character are common to the whole of Russia, should, however, at first (this was written in August 1900!) correspond to the experience gained by the given stratum (sic!) of workers in the economic struggle. Only [!] on the basis of this experience can and should political agitation be taken up,” etc. (p. 11). On page 4, the author, protesting against what he regards as the absolutely unfounded charge of Economist heresy, pathetically exclaims: “What Social-Democrat does not know that according to the theories of Marx and Engels the economic interests of certain classes play a decisive role in history, and, consequently, that particularly the proletariat’s struggle for its economic interests must be of paramount importance in its class development and struggle for emancipation?” (Our italics.) The word “consequently” is completely irrelevant. The fact that economic interests play a decisive role does not in the least imply that the economic (i.e., trade union) struggle is of prime importance; for the most essential, the “decisive” interests of classes can be satisfied only by radical political changes in general. In particular the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat can be satisfied only by a political revolution that will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Some of our members had already criticized the incorrect notion that combativity corresponds to a break with economism via a polemic issued by their previous organization against the regroupment of FTP organizations in 2021:

the problem is not militancy or lack thereof, at least in the general sense, but whether or not the struggle for economic demands is synthesized with the politico-military conditions necessary to achieve them (that is, whether a particular course of activity is guided by a clear strategic line ultimately aimed at the conquest of state power).

Our concern is that many comrades seem to believe that they are capable of articulating a revolutionary approach to an economic struggle, and that it is their ability to do so which divides communist leadership of a given struggle from its spontaneous or organic trajectory. This is, in the last instance, an anarcho-syndicalist outlook, implying, intentionally or not, that it is the mere escalation of the economic struggle which will eventually result in the initiation of armed struggle (or a general strike).

As Lenin wrote in that same tract above,

“the assertion about “absence of conditions” is diametrically opposed to the truth. Not only at the end, but even in the mid-nineties, all the conditions existed for other work, besides the struggle for petty demands — all the conditions except adequate training of leaders. Instead of frankly admitting that we, the ideologists, the leaders, lacked sufficient training — the Economists seek to shift the blame entirely upon the “absence of conditions”, upon the effect of material environment that determines the road from which no ideologist will be able to divert the movement. What is this but slavish cringing before spontaneity, what but the infatuation of the “ideologists” with their own shortcomings?”

As early as the nineties, well before the rise of the mass revolutionary upsurge of 1905, he tells us, the conditions were appropriate for political struggle beyond the mere day-to-day battles for revindications; it is only by diverting the mass struggles away from their economic circumscription and towards a revolutionary political outlook that we can break with bourgeois ideological capture.

Such a diversion is not a question of merely the organizational vehicle through which the struggle is carried out.

Therein lies the ‘left’ component of the error in question, precisely in the position that – in order to successfully carry out our task of political intervention in the movement today – communists must transform or generate new organizations independent from revisionist or bourgeois ideological influence or the organizational interference of class enemies (corporatist union staff, etc.).

In William Dunne’s account of the Trotskyist sabotage of the Minneapolis worker rebellion of 1934, he issues the following self-criticism of the role of the CP:

“In this sense the Communist Party, although its members fought heroically side by side with the strikers on the picket line, although the Communists in the International Labor Defense rendered great services in the struggle, and the Communist Party fraction in the Unemployment Councils mobilized the unemployed in support of the strike, the Party District was unable to expose clearly the disastrous influence of the Cannon-Dunne leadership. It was only by consistent work within the union of the drivers and in the other unions that their defeatist policy could have been efficiently exposed and thwarted. As it was, the agitation, propaganda and work of the Party District, in the main correct, came for the most part from outside the main body of striking workers.

The Party District was not keenly aware of the developing wide mass support for the strike of Drivers Union 574. The pent-up resentment of the working class was released. The sympathetic strike declared by the building trades council is evidence of this. It had failed to estimate correctly the growing will of the workers to battle for the right to organize and for better wages and working conditions. It seems to have failed to sense at the beginning of the struggle the great feeling of the masses for solidarity with the Drivers Union, who were, so to speak, the shock troops of the working class offensive.”

The failure of the CP to overcome the Trotskyist counterrevolutionaries in the Minneapolis context and intervene in the aborted general strike was a result of the “dual unionism” line of the CP and its TUUL in this period, an insistence on separate, red unions and a line of conducting mass work only through the CP’s own organizations.

Our experiment in carrying out the struggle at Shop X by way of a formal NLRB election and affiliation with a state union, rather than forming a new, red union organization, was on the basis of our hypothesis that we would be better enabled to develop contact with other workers by taking advantage of already existing mass organizations, regardless of their revisionist leadership. We believed that this in turn would better equip us to carry out the economic struggle successfully, enable broader influence over a wider section of the class, and put us in touch with advanced elements beyond our narrow set of existing contacts.

In retrospect, we suspect that it was only by our so doing that we were able to successfully organize this struggle at all; had we insisted on the dual unionism path merely in order to develop “independent forms of class organization,” we may have made some advances, but the final result would likely have be our isolation from the struggle and severe losses for the workers.

It should be obvious that our rejection of the left-economist line is not an admonishment of practical work in the economic struggle; any such retreat from the day-to-day battles of the class would, as Marx put it, leave them

“degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”

We also point to the quotation from William Dunne’s introduction to the TUUL document Problems of Strike Strategy which serves as the epigraph for this document:

“[O]ur leadership of the revolutionary struggle of our class can be won only through the capable leadership of struggles for partial demands, through our ability to organize and lead the struggles of mass organizations of workers for partial demands. It is at best extremely doubtful whether any considerable number of workers will believe in our ability “to make a revolution” unless we can organize and lead the smaller but necessary struggles which arise out of rationalization, and in which we must be able to convince workers of the necessity of engaging in higher forms of struggle.”

It is absolutely the case that a retreat from the concrete class struggle in general would leave us isolated from the masses, unable to win their trust or demonstrate our capacity to lead; the antirevisionist trend remains categorically trapped within the problematic laid out by the Gauche Prolétarienne: “to focus exclusively on military strategy and tactics is therefore to assume that the fundamental problem has been resolved; that problem is not knowing how to fight but knowing how to get people to show up for the fight.”

To rectify our trend’s approach to mass work and ensure that our center of gravity remains the political struggle means to to unite the advanced (to lay the groundwork for the construction of the party) rather than to unite all who can be united (the watchword of the United Front). That is, the main task today is that of party-building, and our approach to organizing the masses must be understood according to our position regarding this general line, rather than the reverse.

It is our position that the accomplishment of this task requires, on the one hand, a renewed commitment to political and theoretical struggle (rather than narrow emphasis on practical work), and on the other, a thorough reassessment of our approach to the practical work within which we are engaged.

We propose, provisionally, a line of construction of militant minority groupings within both existing (and therefore revisionist or otherwise politico-organizationally compromised) broad mass organizations and new, independent formations which can unite advanced workers around advanced politics—eg, Maoism—in order to carry the struggles forward while recruiting and training communists for the pre-party organizations and circles.

We have begun to conduct this work – albeit in embryonic form – with our current practice in the labor movement, but this has been largely individualized (in part because of our failure to successfully develop concentrations of our existing cadre within the same plant, shop, or industry); to fully realize it, we must also root out and smash the fear common among our existing mass organizations of being perceived as ‘outside agitators.’ As Lenin put it,

“There has never been too much of such ‘pushing on from outside’; on the contrary, there has so far been all too little of it in our movement, for we have been stewing too assiduously in our own juice; we have bowed far too slavishly to the elementary ‘economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government.’ We professional revolutionaries must and will make it our business to engage in this kind of ‘pushing on’ a hundred times more forcibly than we have done hitherto. But the very fact that you select so hideous a phrase as ‘pushing on from outside’ – a phrase which cannot but rouse in the workers (at least in the workers who are as unenlightened as you yourselves) a sense of distrust towards all who bring them political knowledge and revolutionary experience from outside, which cannot but rouse in them an instinctive desire to resist all such people – proves you to be demagogues, and demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class.”

This, coupled with the continued exchange of theoretical documents by the existing circles which sum up our practical work in the mass struggles and our analyses of the contemporary conjuncture can lay the groundwork for a future congress of anti-revisionist communist forces for further struggle and joint work.

As we put forward in a private exchange with the comrades from the SNELC camp:

“given 1) the objective dispersal of communist forces, 2) the low overall level of ideological development within our trend (how many of our comrades can seriously claim to be Maoist communist militants without a firm grasp of Capital or an elementary understanding of dialectical materialism, for example?), and 3) the serious dearth of meaningful links with the masses, we believe that it follows immediately that we can only lay the groundwork for higher level coordination and national leadership by developing practical work where we are: engaging in experimentation and investigation, and struggling in an open way over our conclusions and political/strategic lines.”