Toward a Militant Majority
The most basic unit of worker self-defense against the bosses is the Union. Unions protect workers’ time, workers’ pay, and workers’ basic needs, like healthcare. They fight harassment, discrimination, and bullying. Unions teach us that we are somebody—that we have dignity.
Most importantly unions teach us that when we fight, we win. That it’s not me, but us. That only we can lift ourselves out of our circumstances, together. Unions are not just the training grounds of class struggle, they are the class struggle itself.
The biggest problem with unions in the U.S. today is that there aren’t enough of them. That’s why DSA, like all mass socialist organizations before us, needs a strategy to rebuild the labor movement.
This is no small task. The United States ranks 31st of 36 among OECD countries in Union density. At our peak in 1954, union density only amounted to 35%, unlike Sweden which currently towers at 68% (down from its peak of 85% in 1993!). Socialists, over the last 50 years, have provided ample explanation for why the United States has not been able to match nations abroad in Union organization: Cold War purges of socialists from the labor movement, trade deals that moved essential jobs abroad, an increasingly toothless and anti-union labor law regime, corruption and collaboration from union leaders. But understanding the problem is not the same as fixing it.
Since DSA’s Bernaissance, we have adopted the rank-and-file strategy as our primary orientation to the labor movement. We should continue to wholeheartedly embrace the strategy as broadly outlined at RFS.DSA. However, within DSA there remains some differences in emphasis around tactics.
Some DSA caucuses emphasize the importance of taking rank-and-file jobs in existing unions, others emphasize taking short-term jobs to organize new unions (salting), still others want to emphasize teaching people to organize Unions at the workplaces they’re currently in. This has productively led to the DSA National Labor Committee (NLC) taking an “all of the above” approach to tactics.
Still, there remains much larger disagreement about how DSA members should organize within existing Unions. Some caucuses like the Marxist Unity Group advocate for the formation of explicitly socialist caucuses, while others like Bread and Roses support broad-based reform groups like Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
Lastly, we as an organization have undertheorized what to do when DSA members successfully win election to union leadership. This is not a hypothetical situation. Over the last six years, all across the country DSA members have read Mike Parker and Jane McAlevy, put those lessons into practice, and won! That brings enormous opportunity, but we’ve largely failed to support such successes at any level.
I would like to draw out some broad points of agreement among most DSA tendencies and some advances I believe are necessary for the rapid rebuilding of the labor movement in the United States.
Scaling a Comprehensive Rank-and-File Strategy
While there are some disagreements around what the rank-and-file strategy means in practice, we ought to embrace a few key points of unity across the vast majority of DSA members that can help us move forward with a shared definition:
We must emphasize shop floor organizing and collective struggle against the boss as the primary orientation for re-building the labor movement.
DSA rank-and-file union members should support and organize with big-tent reform organizations in our unions like Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), and the Caucus for Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE).
We recognize that union staff that are not trained in or committed to rank-and-file organizing can be a major obstacle to militant, democratic unionism.
These shared principles can offer us an important framework through which we can approach a diversity of labor tactics. DSA should continue to support a comprehensive approach to the rank-and-file strategy includes many tactics not initially endorsed in Kim Moody’s famous pamphlet. For instance, salting (sending organizers into unorganized jobs for the explicit purpose of starting a union) has become an important part of the NLC labor strategy, though this is not considered an orthodox component of the rank-and-file strategy.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which teaches important organizing skills to the unorganized and connects new organizing committees to existing unions, has become one of our most important, and arguably most successful, labor projects. These successes show why we should not take an overly rigid interpretation of the rank-and-file strategy that would restrict our ability to experiment at this exciting time in the American labor movement.
Regardless of position in the labor movement, what ultimately matters is that our time and effort is spent organizing the rank-and-file–building super-majority support to fight the boss and win concrete improvements in the lives of our members. This will require thousands more socialists to join the labor movement with this vital perspective. DSA, in partnership with the nascent labor-left, is uniquely positioned to recruit, develop and support a generation of young organizers to join the labor movement. Rather than squander our potential by bickering over new organizing versus existing union shops, we should scale our ability to connect organizers to both.
Toward a Militant Majority
Despite adopting the Rank-and-File strategy as our orientation to the labor movement, putting that theory to practice has raised serious obstacles and disagreement even among our rank-and-file union members.
The greatest risk we face in implementing the rank-and-file strategy is a tendency among some socialists toward minoritarianism, by which I mean the tendency to resign oneself to a small group that agrees with you when confronted with the reality that most people do not.
While it is true that any organizing project often starts with a small group, the goal of that group should not be merely to agitate from the sidelines in hopes that the small group will become a big group by virtue of “being right.” Instead, the goal of the militant minority should be to cohere a set of issues that are deeply and broadly felt by the vast majority of members so that we can move into united action against the boss. In other words, to build a militant majority. This can only happen through the slow, painstaking work of organizing through 1-on-1 conversations, identifying and developing leaders, and collectively developing a strategic plan to beat the boss. This is the path to the mass participation strikes we’ve seen at the University of California and Oakland Unified School District.
Spontaneous moments of militance, and even minoritarian action, can be important motivators for rank-and-file members, however there is a tendency to overly romanticize such militant action as a replacement for the more tedious work of deep organizing. Only this sort of majoritarian organizing can truly prepare the working class for its historic role of emancipation.
When We Win, We Fight
We are experiencing an unprecedented shift in labor politics today, with militant strike action popping off all across the country. Long-time reform efforts like Teamsters for a Democratic Union and newly founded reform efforts like Unite All Workers for Democracy are not just fighting, they’re winning control of their international unions. As of March 2023, both international unions now have presidents supported by these respective reform caucuses.
But what do we want when we win? Much of the rank-and-file strategy discourse has centered, rightly, on the struggle to win reform. But when we win, a whole new set of problems arise. How do we staff our unions? How do you manage a sprawling, democratic, member-led organization? How do we maximally use our newly-acquired resources to keep fighting to win for our members and the whole working class?
As we win more and more, DSA needs to bring this conversation to the fore of our strategic debates. Here are some initial thoughts on how to orient toward union reform leadership:
DSA members in Unions where reformists have come to power should be deeply engaged in organizing new leaders and advancing the program of the Union. They should engage in good faith disagreement where it exists, but not needlessly engender factionalism. We should lead through work, not through speeches.
DSA members should avoid caucusing too closely as disciplined socialist fractions. We should avoid unforced, self-marginalizing errors, like running losing “no” campaigns on contract ratifications that do not have wide support.
In addition to taking rank-and-file jobs, DSA members should seriously consider becoming staff at reform-led unions or unions with active reform projects. We need tens of thousands of energized and idealistic staff to help implement militant and democratic union strategy.
DSA, through the National Labor Committee, should explore ways to bring DSA union leadership together to discuss how they can support one-another and how DSA can support them.
DSA should push reform-led unions to increase worker-to-worker new organizing efforts, and bring reform union leadership together to explore joint-new organizing efforts or expanding EWOC.
DSA should explore bringing together reform-led unions behind a fighting, working class, electoral project that can act independently of the Democratic establishment
To quote a former President of the United States, “We’re gonna be winning so much, you’re going to be sick of all the winning we’re gonna do.” Winning is just the beginning, the left should get used to it.