Trump’s presidency has quickly made things straightforward for everyone. No more room for liberal and progressive rhetoric and tokenism. No more pretending who he’s ruling for. With the cream of the crop of the billionaire class supporting him and a Republican majority in every government branch, Democrats are quietly falling in line. Meanwhile, as Trump’s barrage of executive orders target the working class, trade unions like the Teamsters and the UAW have expressed support for Trump’s protectionist agenda. Their leaders have pledged to work with him and have come out against foreign work visas and in support of tariffs. This turnaround from last year, when they spoke about international labor solidarity and called Trump a “scab,” is evidence of two intertwined factors: the contradictions of America’s imperialist economy and a political strategy dependent on the Democratic Party. Understanding this is paramount to the efforts to organize new sectors of labor and revitalize the labor movement.
In a recent article in Dollars & Sense, “Workers Are Self-Organizing,” Eric Blanc writes that since the pandemic, workers have been unionizing by the hundreds of thousands, even though union leaders are barely supporting any new organizing. “Labor’s coffers are higher than ever, soaring in 2021 to a record-high $13.4 billion in liquid assets,” he writes. Blanc argues for a multibillion-dollar investment in unionization efforts “to test the potential for reversing decades of decline” in union membership. He doesn’t mention, however, that last year alone, major unions in the U.S. spent a historic total of over $250 million in contributions to individual campaigns, PACs, soft money, and outside groups, which overwhelmingly went to the Democrats.
These priorities by the unions aren’t shared by the left-wing spectrum of the working class. Biden and Harris’s efforts to facilitate and justify war and genocide in the Middle East opened divisions between left-wing workers on one side and union leaders and the Biden administration on the other. The ongoing momentum in unionization that Blanc refers to cannot be unpegged from a political shift to the left among critical organizers and unionists within the labor movement. The fact that such views might also have found a wider audience is partially reflected in a lower turnout for Harris in the last elections.
It would be ideal if rescuing the unions were as simple as reallocating financial resources. But this perspective fails to recognize that there is a fundamental problem with the political strategies employed by those who have led the unionization efforts: outside the trade unions, these include groups around DSA and Labor Notes who are influenced by politicians such as Bernie Sanders and the progressive caucus within the Democratic Party. It’s been at least seven years since the uptick in workers’ militancy began in the U.S. — counting the teachers’ strikes in 2018 as the starting point. One metric to measure the outcome of those years is that the rate of unionization to the total workforce has dropped overall despite unionization efforts.
Mainstream unionization has largely been driven by a strategy of reforming the Democratic Party. In a recent interview with Jacobin Radio, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber made the case for this perhaps most clearly:
You cannot hang your hat on changing the Democratic Party. What you can do is fight within it to gain traction for yourself. But you have to use that party to build real organizations of the poor that are independent of that party. If you can do that, then maybe the next electoral cycle we can actually gain some traction. … The Left can reconstitute itself and fight within the party to drag it, kicking and screaming, towards a more populist agenda.
To be clear, what Chibber describes is not a socialist perspective — the socialization of wealth through the abolition of the wage system — but a populist one, as he explicitly states. From that angle, unionization becomes a lever to pressure the Dems into a redistributive populism, which in turn helps build organizations that pressure the Dems more, and so on. Left-wing populism is not particularly new or exclusive to the U.S. — it’s been central, for instance, to the political process in Latin America for decades — but the salient point is that it ties the unions’ success to the fate of the Democratic Party. When people like Sanders and UAW president Shawn Fain claim that the problem is “corporate greed,” they conceal the fact that corporations and government work together. The billionaire class that supports Trump wouldn’t have become so without government funding and contracts, tax credits, institutional research, anti-union legislation, the police, the Bretton Woods institutions that allow them to exploit cheap labor abroad, and the military as the bailiff of their investments overseas — all facilitated during both Democratic and Republican administrations.
There is a structural logic to this. American capitalism suffers from a chronic debilitating condition. Marx explained that as capitalism matures, there’s an innate tendency in the system to lose profitability (even though total profits might keep growing); as the technological weight of the economy grows, total capital invested tends to grow compared to capital spent on wages, which means that less surplus value is produced; therefore the average rate of profit tends to decline over time. In the end, what drives capital is how much profit workers produce compared to how much is paid in wages. This tendency of the average rate of profit to fall is what in principle prompts capital to be exported to other nations in search of higher rates of profit — the basis of Lenin’s classic idea of imperialism. As an economic system, though, imperialism also tries to lift the rate of profit at home, primarily by increasing the rate of labor exploitation, which requires deeper ideological divisions among the workforce and higher levels of concentration of capital and wealth that in turn lead to gaping socioeconomic inequalities. The end of neoliberalism came about as rates of profit in foreign countries fell following massive imperialist investment, which has increased capital’s attention on the extraction of surplus or extra profits domestically.
At the same time, the “conscious and explicit foundation” of every trade union, wrote Marx, is to uphold “the value of labor power” as a commodity for sale. To counteract the fall in the rate of profit, the general tendency of capitalism is “to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit.” This limit is not determined by any human considerations, but by what capital needs. Today’s union leaders accept this premise because they see their fate as pegged to that of the corporations through their political ties to the government. Hence their multimillion-dollar support for the Democratic Party and their willingness to “work” with the new administration. This is not that different from when union tops push sellout contracts on their membership to remain business-responsible and dependable, or when they oppose political demands that jeopardize their relationship with the government. Or when people like Eric Blanc urge you to vote and endorse Democratic imperialism in exchange for a “friendly” NLRB. This is why unions have been under relentless attack for decades. So even if you spend a billion dollars on union organizing efforts, if the premise is to build the governing bastions of an imperialist economic system, the logic of the system itself will ultimately render your efforts counterproductive. It is this conundrum that has led unions to where they are now: “Mostly, they’ve been managing their own decline” for the last 40 years, as the late union organizer Jane McAlevey wrote.
McAlevey also disagreed with the principle of class independence. Instead, her popularity reflected the early stages of the current labor movement; her brand of unionism extended a bridge between labor organizing and pro-Democratic politics. This is in the populist playbook and it is part of the broader strategy Chibber articulates, to tie social and economic struggle to a political goal that is alien to workers via illusions in the state. Thus, McAlevey’s emphasis on electing Democrats to ensure the favors of governments and state agencies also meant playing by the rules to avoid alienating the Democrats; this leads to confusion when the rules suddenly change. The Right is changing the rules as we speak. Trump’s threat of mass layoffs and his illegal offer to buy out federal workers, for instance, is in part an attempt to undermine public unions. As the rules of the game change, progressive business unionism will prove itself to be ever more toothless in the face of mounting attacks by an emboldened capitalist Right. So what’s the alternative?
Every organizer knows how to spot the most heartfelt causes among their coworkers, how to identify “organic leaders,” how to size up the bosses’ strength, and how to effectively mobilize the workforce in favor of workers’ collective interests. So it’s time to put these skills into practice as part of an independent workers’ strategy. New editions of Capital and workers’ study circles have sprung up in the last few years trying to find alternative answers. As Marx argued, “In its merely economic action capital is the stronger side,” therefore, the “necessity of general political action” by labor.
Lenin explored this in a relevant way in What Is to Be Done? When the labor movement is in a stage of “primitiveness” — independent isolated organizing efforts and study circles — economic struggle, political agitation, and long-term strategic political formation cannot be decoupled. Workers’ spontaneous self-organization and successful strikes is what has stoked the fire within labor. To capitalize on this, workers should give their struggle a new political meaning. Socialist workers understand that by withholding their labor, they are encumbering capital itself as a social relation. When workers raise political demands, socialist demands more specifically, they broaden their field of action and struggle. This is the first step in creating political power structures, networks of political work across society.
When socialist workers protest against racist police brutality or ICE deportations, we’re questioning not just the blunt use of state force but also the inherent racism that lets capital extract surplus profits from our class siblings. When we defend abortion rights, we’re indicting a system that wants to put on the shoulders of female workers the costs of social reproduction by excluding them from economic life and politics. It is in this process of self-enriching outreach that labor finds a growing sense of defiance and the organic need to associate in political parties independent of the establishment.
Trump’s presidency will continue to pose this question more often than not. With a real-estate mogul leading the largest reactionary charge since Reagan, it’s no coincidence his protectionist mandate is focused on bringing back investment, i.e., ramping up the price of land through more investment on fixed capital, cutting corporate taxes, and supercharging capitalism’s international tendency toward economic wars and, ultimately, militarism. This will place workers in America at a crossroads. With a contracted global market and restricted access to immigrant and cheap foreign labor, any plans for domestic growth, regardless of how successful they are, will be contingent on higher rates of exploitation. Hence, labor has a choice to make. It can find the silver lining in Trump’s national-chauvinistic protectionism, as Labor Notes suggests; it can peddle the same protectionism that Sanders used to denounce H1B foreign working visas to try to seek a common ground with MAGA; and it can join the union leadership’s protectionist bipartisan effort, as it tries to “rebuild” the Democratic Party while unions continue to dwindle into oblivion. Or the alternative: workers can take the political process into their own hands.
The socioeconomic basis of the bipartisan establishment in the U.S. is no longer the same as it was a decade ago. Protectionism today means brutal fiscal austerity and the costs for workers of potential tariff hikes and regressive tax cuts. It means gutting public education, whatever public health still exists, Medicare and Medicaid, massive layoffs in the state sector, the effective branding of fired workers employed under DEI programs, and so on. This is a blunt assault on the Great Society and post-civil rights movement reforms that remain. And it will not go unnoticed across whole layers of society. Nor will attacks on abortion clinics, trans people, and immigrants. Nor will potential recessionary pressures as trade gets disrupted and the dollar gets overvalued. Nor will class struggle internationally, whether it’s in response to direct imperialist hostilities by the U.S. or to governments who acquiesce and try to pass Trump’s bill to their working populations.
The decomposition of the political class in the U.S. is further ahead than the consolidation of the working class as a viable political alternative. But the conditions of the next several years can speed up the latter as long as organizers, workers, and activists don’t get caught up in ruses like the “dirty break.” Socialist study circles, political debate, and theoretical work go hand in glove with union organizing, collective bargaining, grassroots organization, mutual aid, and political agitation. The emerging and young labor movement, as well as the Marxist Left, have much work to do ahead.
The unions’ continued reliance on Democratic pressure politics is tied to a political strategy that embodies interests that are antagonistic to workers’ efforts to unionize and break free from decades of painful deceit. If this doesn’t change, the labor movement will suffer both every setback and victory that the Democrats have. It is by doing away with the mirage that this is just another electoral cycle, and that pressure politics is the only possible alternative, that workers, organizers, and students can begin coalescing organizationally, politically, and even theoretically, thus advancing a genuine socialist alternative.