Why Aren't There More Radicals at Work?

by Dollars and Sense

From the (new?) website, radicalsatwork.org:

Works sucks and it's been getting worse in the U.S. for decades.

So why aren't there more radicals at work?

For the first part in a series about radicals and labor today, we asked a dozen radical workplace organizers—teachers, Teamsters, telephone technicians, union organizers, and more—that question. Read what they had to say.

The activists we talked to blamed the American Dream, persistent racism, and a feeling that struggle and collective won't do any good. They also laid some of the blame on radicals themselves, for failing to connect with working people.

It hasn't always been this way. Before World War II, radicals in the United States had much deeper roots in the working class. Employers, the government, and even union officials purged those Reds after the war.

If we want to rebuild those connections, we have to understand the barriers that hold us back.

American Dreams

For over a century, historians and organizers have said that American prosperity—and the hope of getting a slice of the pie—explained why there was "no socialism in America."

Millions of workers still see the path to success through individual hard-work, not collective struggle.

"There's a sense among some—not all—that ‘I got to where I am by hard work, and other people should be able to as well,'" said a telephone technician in New York.

That hope doesn't just apply to people who've "made it" and are living the American Dream.

"Most of the folks that I worked with in the Army, construction and restaurant industries, ended up in those low-wage jobs because of a lack of resources and education," said a union organizer in Pennsylvania. "A good percentage still subscribed to the whole ‘pull your self up by the bootstraps' bit, even though they were clearly struggling with no end in sight."

The same is true for jobs with a lot of prestige—even though many of those jobs are getting worse.

Take college professors. There are way more Ph.D.s looking for work than tenure-track positions. Many are getting by cobbling together part-time adjunct work.

But that doesn't stop many Ph.D.s from hoping. "In grad school TAs think: ‘I don't need a union, I'm going to get a cushy job,'" said a college professor in New York. "That's just not really the reality anymore."

"Then when someone lands a full-time position, they think, ‘I realized my goal and compared to most people I have it good, so no there's no need to rock the boat,'" she said.

American Nightmares

For years, many white workers achieved their own American Dream by keeping workers of color out of "white" jobs, "white" neighborhoods, and "white" schools.

Competition over jobs, housing, and schools has led many white workers to identify as white first, workers second—if at all.

And that's still true today. "A lot of the white folks I work with are really drawn to the Tea Party movement," said a telephone operator in the South. "Part of it is backlash against having a Black president. Part of it is backlash against immigrant workers in their communities."

"White workers often respond to exploitation by pushing others downwards rather than attempting to tear down those at the top," said a union organizer out West.

Today, those fears are played up by the right-wing press. "A lot of my co-workers get almost all of their news of the world from the New York Post or other tabloid papers, supplemented by the local news or CNN," said a telephone technician we interviewed. "There's almost no counter-weight to the conservative B.S. they hear on the radio, the TV news, the tabloid papers," she said.

Historically, many unions have helped to confront working-class racism. Unions formed in the great upsurge of the 1930s brought together workers across the color line, promoted the leadership of workers of color, and challenged white racism.

But historian and activist Bill Fletcher points out that many U.S. unions have followed a different strategy: rather than including all workers, some unions have reserved jobs for white men by excluding workers of color and women.

That practice goes back to the nineteenth century, when craft unions kept Black workers out of skilled trades, and unions promoted legislation to exclude Chinese workers from the U.S. And that's why white males still dominate the construction trades to this day.

We're Getting Our Butts Kicked

It's hard for most workers to imagine an alternative to those individual survival strategies offered by the American Dream and racism. Why?

Being a radical means that you think ordinary people can improve our lives and change the world when we work together. But the organizers we talked to said that most workers feel alone, isolated, and powerless.

"People don't feel empowered in life. Their entire life they've been socialized to defer to authority," said a UPS part-timer in Pennsylvania. "People aren't sure they deserve better. People have never seen collective action."

A big part of that powerlessness is the weakness of the labor movement. Factory closings. Lockouts and permanent replacements. Tough anti-union employers: Organized labor has been getting its butt kicked since the 1980s. Only 12.3 percent of workers in the U.S. were in unions in 2009.

Even when workers are in unions, many don't feel the power.
A New York nurse sums up the problem: "Nurses feel powerless and vulnerable. Management has managed to structure things in a way that reinforces that feeling, and there is no history of recent collective struggle and solidarity to chip away at that overwhelming feeling."

For decades, officials treated their unions like a business—not a social movement. When employers went on the attack in the 1980s, they were caught off guard, and the union movement is still scrambling to respond today.

That's not to say that there isn't fightback on the job. But the barriers to collective action are high: Most workers don't have any experience in fighting back. And most aren't in unions. And many unions have given up challenging "management's right" to run their business—even when workers pay the price.

Sometimes workers who speak out are sidelined—either by the employer, or even by their own union officials: "When anyone speaks out about some injustice on the job, they are called a troublemaker and harassed until they learn their lesson: just do your job and shut up," said a union dissident in the longshore industry.

Given all that, it's no wonder most workers choose individual, not collective, solutions to their problems.

Freaks and Geeks

Even if they are open to alternative ideas, most workers in the United States have never met a radical.

"There is very little exposure to radical culture: arts and literature that is motivated by radical politics, news analysis of the effects of capitalism on our lives, a sense of history of radical struggles, a familiarity of leaders of radical movements," said a former hotel worker on the West Coast.

Many people associate radicals with the mistakes and tragedies of Russia under Stalin. "They think that's Stalin's Russia was real socialism—and that socialism is doomed to failure. Totalitarian Communism couldn't be more different than grassroots, bottom-up socialism," said a web designer in New York.

But without contact with real radicals, most people don't make that distinction.

Even when they have met a radical, that experience isn't always that good. For many, their first experience meeting a radical is someone trying to sell them a newspaper, or getting in an argument with them.

Let's face it—we're partly to blame for our isolation because so often we fail to meet workers where they're at.

All that doesn't mean that people don't have some radical ideas. Here's what one teacher in a small town in the mountain states said: "One reason that people who have left views on a wide range of issues don't identify as radicals is because they don't know what it means to be a radical, or all the self-professed radicals they've met have been off-putting in some way."

"In my case, this was definitely true until I met radicals who seemed smart, relatable and sane," she said. "Once I met them, and they exposed me to more radical ideas and perspectives, I was ready to join!"

Breaking Through the Isolation

Radicals haven't always been so isolated.

Scratch a union struggle before World War II in the United States, and you'd find some Reds. Anarchists at the Haymarket. Socialists in the garment industry. Communists in the auto union. Trotskyists in the Teamsters. Reds inspired and led some of the greatest organizing drives and union battles in our history.

Socialists, Communists, and Trostkyists were on the frontlines of building the CIO during the thirties and helped build big industrial unions in meatpacking, auto, steel, and transportation.

But in the Red Scare after World War II, the union leadership purged these Reds—and since then, most radicals have done a pretty poor job of re-connecting those roots.

Here's what socialist activist and theorist Kim Moody had to say about that:

At no time since the 1950s has the isolation of socialists from the working class been greater. Socialist organizations in the U.S., including Solidarity, remain small and largely populated by people with an educated middle class background. Many socialist groups' connection with the working class is limited to support work for various strikes. The gap between the socialist organizations and the active sections of the working class who are the organizers of much of the resistance to the employers and rebellions within the unions is too great. The gap has many facets: some arise from different class origins, others from the habit of defeat on the left and the proclivity for symbolic actions and campaigns that flows from it. Most of the gap, however, is one of consciousness. The left with its highly theorized, often moralistic politics, and the worker activists with an un-theorized pragmatic outlook are often like trains passing in the night. This can be true even where left groups or individuals work within the unions. (Kim Moody. The Rank-and-File Strategy for Building a Socialist Movement in the United States. Solidarity. 2000)

Some radicals are trying to break through that isolation—including all of the activists we talked to. You'll hear about what they're doing differently in future articles in this series.

Now tell us what you think.

Why do you think that there aren't there more radicals at work? Share your ideas and your stories in the comments.

Visit radicalsatwork.org.

Labels: anarchism, communism, labor, labor movement, Radicals at Work, socialism, workers, workplace democracy

 

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2/09/2010 09:32:00 AM