This post was co-written by two members of NYC DSA’s Labor Branch, but represents their views alone.
When Resolution 33 passed overwhelmingly at this year’s NYC DSA convention, our chapter voiced a commitment to what’s often called the “Rank and File Strategy”. Specifically, we committed to encourage comrades to get rank-and-file union jobs and pursue their socialist organizing from that position. Now the real work begins: figuring out what it will actually look like to encourage a critical mass of DSA members to join the rank and file of the labor movement, and figuring out a coherent strategy for them to advance once they are there. In that spirit of inquiry and debate, we offer these thoughts and unresolved questions for ongoing consideration.
Fundamental to a rank-and-file strategy as we understand it, and to DSA’s work in and beyond the labor movement, is a commitment to building a democratic socialist movement led by poor and working people, rather than the capitalist and managerial class who might claim to act in the people’s interests. As we embark on our rank-and-file work, we must therefore always keep questions of democracy and worker power at the front of our minds. In part, this means engaging in this work and talking about it with the knowledge that we have lots of questions and very few completely certain answers. Surveying the history of rank and file movements there have been meaningful advances as well as decisive defeats. Assessing the current power of the labor movement, hopeful signs in a semi-resurgent left notwithstanding, we must proceed with the humility that we don’t know the full scope of what it will take to achieve our aims on a wide scale. The last few decades have seen occasional spurts of militant activity and democratic reform, but nothing like the scale that will be necessary to win true freedom and dignity for workers. We’ve never experienced democracy, let alone socialism in this country, in our workplaces, or (with very few exceptions) in our unions.
Under those circumstances, we need to be clear about what we know and what we have yet to learn, in solidarity with those we hope will be our comrades for the struggles ahead. We believe in the power and potential of ordinary people to confront the forces that oppress and exploit us, we believe in the power of ordinary people to understand their circumstances and work together to change them, and we believe in the power of people to transform themselves through struggle and solidarity. But there is a gap between that faith in the capacities of ordinary people, and the comprehensive strategy that must be developed in active dialogue with working people who currently do not identify as socialists if we are to win the fundamental, society-wide transformation we seek. If we proceed with the certainty that we know what’s best for those with whom we want to organize, we’ll approach this work as if we’re dictating terms to the very people who we know must lead our movement for self-emancipation and socialism. In the words of Eugene Debs: “I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.” And so, as we develop our rank-and-file strategy, part of the standard by which we’ll assess this work is whether it moves forward with a concern for democracy, with the spirit of dialogue, curiosity, and sincere questions rather than overconfident assertions at the fore.
While organizing as a rank-and-filer (as opposed to as a paid staffer of a movement organization) provides unique opportunities for building the type of democratic movement we hope to build, calling this approach a fleshed out “strategy” may be premature. On its own, taking rank-and-file jobs is more a method of engaging in labor work than a strategy, which by definition would have clearly defined short-, medium- and long-term goals. In short, the term ‘strategy’ connotes a clarity of vision and goals that we don’t yet have within DSA. What we have is a first step toward building power, to disrupting and ultimately ending oppression and exploitation. Getting rank-and-file jobs, building a cadre layer or ‘militant minority’ to engage in workplace organizing are great tactics, but they do not yet constitute a widely understood, and thus widely actionable, DSA strategy. It is essential that for this strategy to be carried out democratically it be understood, questioned, assessed, and adapted beyond just a small core- particularly one that, in DSA’s current state, is unrepresentative of the broader US working class. It is our hope that this piece and ongoing questioning, conversation, debate, and discussion will move us toward the clarity we need. We feel this clarity- and transparency about what we know and what we don’t — is particularly important given the gravity of life changes that rank-and-file organizing asks of newer comrades, and the dedication of resources that committing to this effort entails. Ultimately for this strategy to be truly arrived at democratically and with the organizational will to carry it out, it is a discussion that will need to be joined on a much wider scale, with DSA members across the country.
In this piece, we will reiterate the importance of rank-and-file organizing, but introduce some questions that we feel are under-examined amidst the current excitement (which we share!) around the potential of a mass socialist presence in the rank and file of the labor movement. In future pieces, we will dive deeper into considerations around what constitute strategic industrial sectors for rank and file organizing, as well as the strengths and weaknesses among DSA’s base of activists that ought to be addressed head-on as we engage in this work.
Why Rank-and File Organizing?
As socialists, we focus on labor and workplace organizing for a lot of reasons. First, our goal as socialists is to galvanize class struggle and to challenge society’s current hierarchy of private profit over human dignity and care. Where better to do this than the workplace, a key site of direct capitalist exploitation? By engaging in workplace conflict as rank-and-filers (and importantly, rather than union or NGO staffers) we locate ourselves within the class struggle, directly opposed to our own bosses and to capital, rather than as actors indirectly orchestrating struggle from outside the worker/boss relationship. Confronting the boss at work is a confrontation with capital and the logic of capital, so direct participation in and encouragement of workplace struggles must be a priority for socialist organizations.
That’s not the only reason the workplace is important, though. The workplace is where most of us spend the majority of our waking lives. We may live in a nominal ‘democracy’ outside of work, but in our workplaces we live in dictatorship that may be benign at best, tyrannical at worst. It’s where we experience much of the alienation and suffering that drives us to resist capitalism and assert a socialist conception of freedom. This alienation and suffering are not unique to the workplace: under capitalism we experience it in our homes, our communities, our points of purchase, even our families and friendships. The misery of work — of compulsory labor — is connected to the misery of the housing market, of privatized health care, of mass incarceration and police repression, of our polluted cities. Our struggles at work are thus connected to other struggles against capitalism, and so our labor organizing can be a great point of connection with other anti-capitalist organizing projects, and unions are well-situated to strengthen struggles outside the workplace. We see this perhaps most clearly at the biennial Labor Notes Conference, an event that embodies the movement that socialists are trying to build: workplace troublemakers come together with environmental activists and LGBTQ organizers and anti-racist leaders and we work together to figure out how we’ll combat the capitalist misery that connects us all.
Rehearsing for Revolution
The Labor Notes Conference is a useful example here because it also highlights the third reason why labor organizing is so important. This conference is, possibly primarily, a site of education. Beyond the workshops and panels, which are obviously educational, the conference always features a rally or protest of some kind. For a couple of hours in the afternoon, conference attendees are ferried to a protest site where we chant and yell and clap our hands in support of whatever campaign happens to coincide with this year’s conference. Why do we do this? It can seem like a sort of pageantry: all the conference attendees will head home on Sunday and the campaign will continue on without them. It can feel like a hollow gesture unless you keep in mind that a purpose of protest, and indeed, a purpose of all organizing, is rehearsal for revolution. At every protest we attend, we are practicing the skills that we’ll need to challenge the forces of capital in the streets, just as at every workshop we attend, we’re learning new skills that we’ll need to use and sharpen when we return to our workplaces. In workplace organizing, in every confrontation where obedience to the boss is replaced with collective action, cooperation, and solidarity, the nature of our hierarchical and exploitative society is exposed. With our coworkers, we flex the muscles of resistance and clarify our vision of another world. Rehearsing for revolution, developing working people’s capacity to analyze power strategically, building skills and knowledge as we build our power, these are essential elements that should be addressed explicitly as we within DSA develop our rank-and-file strategy.
Why is it important to be explicit about this? Despite some exciting signs within and around DSA, we continue to organize in a period where the forces of capitalism and the right are in full ascendancy and the labor left is weak and fragmented. We organize against the backdrop of many decades of labor’s retreat, and its almost complete disarmament. On a wide scale, we lack both knowledge and experience of what’s effective within our unions, since (for the most part) the work socialists have done in unions has failed thus far to meet our loftiest goals. When we enter the workplace as rank-and-filers, we should thus enter with humility, acknowledging that we have as much to learn as the workers (socialist or otherwise) who we’ll be organizing alongside in struggles to come.
Democracy is Power
The rank-and-file strategy DSA seems to be moving towards (based primarily on Kim Moody’s earlier writing on rank-and-file activism, as well as his more recent reflections) rests partly on the idea that labor will be most effective at confronting capital if the forces of labor function democratically. This is a matter of both principle, and pragmatism, and is greatly expanded in Labor Notes’ Democracy is Power. We believe that working people are fit to govern our own affairs, but also that it will take mass participation and mass action on an unprecedented scale to confront capitalists and win, and that expanded democracy is the best vehicle for enabling that mass action. Top-down, undemocratic unions on the other hand are a recipe for a largely passive, de-mobilized membership that will be unlikely to fight the bosses more than episodically, or will overemphasize electoral action while deprioritizing workplace struggle. Since the struggle we’re organizing is for the long term, and must embody the future we hope to win, we must prioritize, at every moment, the support and development of new workplace leaders and organizers. A truly democratic workers’ movement will be led by a broad, diverse array of rank-and-file activists, most of whom will likely (in the near term) have little to no formal affiliation with DSA. Particularly since (in NYC, at least), DSA is an overwhelmingly white organization whose Labor Branch includes many junior workers in their industries, and our membership is actually less unionized than the population of the city as a whole, our role in the short term will often be to support and learn from leaders in struggle, rather than to lead ourselves. If we enter with a posture of certainty, claiming to have a road map for success when, at best, we have some skills in organizing principles and a historical perspective that may prove useful, we risk building a movement whose very foundations are undemocratic, replicating the mistakes of past socialists (in DSA and otherwise) who, in their eagerness to find a shortcut to worker power, bypassed or rejected the messiness and complication of democratic struggle in favor of top-down organization. In the past, the practice of ‘salting’ (joining a workplace with the intent of organizing it) was called ‘colonization’. But if the labor movement is to be democratic, powerful, and representative of the working class as a whole, we must approach as curious comrades, not colonizers.
In much of the discourse around a DSA rank and file strategy, we have seen many arguments for members to take rank and file union jobs that rest on premises and assumptions that we feel make up an overconfident but under-examined foundation. We proceed with the intent of engaging with some of the major areas that need fleshing out, replacing assertions with questions for ongoing consideration. We hope these questions and deeper dialogue will strengthen and support the development of a rank and file strategy that is based on the landscape we currently occupy as a national organization, the resources and strengths we possess (and, on a good day, can organize into a coherent campaign), and a real acknowledgement of the challenges we can expect given that landscape and our position on it.
And so, in the spirit of curiosity and questioning, we hope to continue and deepen this conversation. Some questions we hope to discuss in the future:
- What is the role of the existing rank-and-file (the workers already on the shop floor) in our rank-and-file strategy? How will they participate in the development of and execution of our strategy? How will we proceed with both direction as well as flexibility and the ability to adapt?
- How do we imagine this strategy might alter the composition of DSA, which remains in many places an overwhelmingly white organization? Do we see recruiting workers to DSA as a part of this strategy? If so, how will we succeed at this where other largely white socialist groups have failed? What is the basis for those hopes and expectations?
- How will regional and industrial differences affect the nature of this strategy? For example, is our approach in the South, in Right to Work states, the same as our approach in relatively union-dense places like New York and California?
- How do the demographics of DSA affect our relationships to the workers we’ll be joining on the shop floor? How can we build a strategy that confronts this question directly?
- How will DSA chapters support rank-and-file comrades when they encounter harassment, discipline, and outright violence from supervision, or from other hostile workplace forces? How will chapters support these comrades when they are isolated or threatened at work?
- How does our strategy support engage workers within and without unions? Who makes up the labor movement, and how should we prioritize our activity? How does this differ across regions and labor markets?
We look forward to further engagement with our comrades in NYC and across the country, and welcome responses to this, and future pieces. We have faith in the wisdom and care of working people in dialogue and discussion. Individually, we are limited. Collectively, there is nothing we cannot do.
