May Day May Have Been Obliterated from US History, But It’s Legacy Continues

By CJ Polychroniou

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886.

May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the US and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since US capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.

Indeed, the US has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most US corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the US has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.

The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the US also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.

Social Darwinism first appeared in US political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the US political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.

Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the US, which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in US politics across time.

The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the US and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.

In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in US political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.

Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the US. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”

Nonetheless, the US labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the US labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the US jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the US were also recorded last year.

So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from US public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.

But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.




CJ Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

How Southern Autoworkers Can Reverse Decades of Job Quality Decline

BY MARC BAYARD - DEV WAKELEY

MAY 3, 2024

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Photo by Victor Sutty

The United Auto Workers recently scored the largest union victory in decades in the South. Their success at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant could be a turning point for labor in a region long known for governmental hostility to unions.

The next test will be a UAW election scheduled for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Alabama, a state that has attracted so much auto investment it has earned the nickname “the Detroit of the South.”

If the roughly 5,000 Mercedes workers vote to unionize, the ripple effects could empower workers nationwide.

For decades, Southern states have pursued “low-road” development strategies, luring investors with massive public subsidies and repressive labor policies. This has pitted workers across the country against each other, undercutting everyone’s ability to secure fair compensation.

Alabama has spent $1.6 billion to woo Mercedes, along with Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda. All these foreign companies’ operations in the South are non-union, in contrast to the unionized Big Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis.

This foreign investment has created thousands of Alabama jobs — but with weak worker protections, the state remains one of the nation’s poorest. And while these companies have enjoyed rising corporate profits, they have left workers behind.

An in-depth report by the nonprofit group Alabama Arise found that inflation-adjusted average pay for the state’s autoworkers has dropped by 11 percent over the past 20 years to $64,682. Meanwhile, CEO pay stands at $13.9 million at Mercedes and $6.9 million at Toyota.

The foreign-owned firms’ payrolls also reflect Alabama’s long history of racial discrimination, with Black and Latino workers earning substantially less than their white counterparts. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute has found that union workers make 10.1 percent more on average than non-union workers.

The benefits are even greater for workers of color. Unionized Black workers make 13.1 percent more than non-union Black workers in comparable jobs — and Latino union members make 18.8 percent more than non-union Latino workers.

Equitable pay practices boost local economies by putting more money in workers’ pockets for groceries, housing, and other goods and services from local businesses. And that’s good for families of every color.

But Alabama Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t see things that way. Before the UAW vote in Tennessee, she joined GOP governors from Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas to discourage VW workers from voting yes with unfounded threats of mass layoffs.

When 73 percent of those autoworkers voted for the UAW, it was a strong rebuke of the region’s low-road, anti-worker model. So corporate lobbyists in the region have enlisted state legislators and cabinet officials in a sustained campaign to blunt organizing momentum.

How will the election turn out in Alabama?

A new poll indicates that 52 percent of residents in this deep-red state support the autoworkers’ union drive, while just 21 percent are opposed. This echoes a 2022 poll commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies in Jefferson County, Alabama, where workers were attempting to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. That survey showed nearly two-thirds support.

While the Alabama Amazon campaign fell short in the face of aggressive anti-union tactics, increased public approval of unions is a testament to many years of community and labor organizing.

The fact that a large majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant signed petitions earlier this year in support of the election is encouraging. We need a New South economic structure based on fairness and equity. Organized labor is an essential partner in that mission.

Marc Bayard directs the Black Worker Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies. Dev Wakeley is Alabama Arise’s worker policy advocate.

In Relay Race to Organize the South,

Volkswagen Workers Pass the Baton to

Mercedes Workers

By Luis Feliz León

May 1, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama are slated to vote in May on whether to join the United Auto Workers. Photo: UA


Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down from his post yesterday, according to a video message that workers were shown.

Göbel had groused in an April captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. His departure is another win for Mercedes-Benz workers, who already scored pay bumps and an end to wage tiers—and they haven’t even voted on the union yet.

The company and Alabama politicians are ramping up their anti-union campaign as an election draws near. The 5,200 Mercedes workers at a factory complex and electric battery plant outside Tuscaloosa will vote May 13-16 on whether to join the United Auto Workers, with a vote count May 17.

They’re following close on the heels of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who notched a historic victory April 19—the first auto plant election win for the UAW in the South since the 1940s.

The VW vote was a blowout: 2,628 yes to 985 no, with 84 percent turnout. The National Labor Relations Board certified the results April 30, meaning VW is legally required to begin bargaining with the union.

BOSSES WAKE UP

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama have been vociferous in their opposition to the UAW’s new drives. Ivey said that unions would attack “the Alabama model for economic success.”

The BCA expresses the will of the state’s most powerful corporations, including Alabama’s biggest utility company, health care provider, and bank, according to an analysis by Derek Seidman for Truthout.

Meanwhile auto workers at Hyundai in Montgomery have signed up 30 percent of their 4,000 co-workers in another ambitious drive to unionize.

“Gov. Ivey has been on the phone with both the leaders of Mercedes and Hyundai, and has said, ‘If there are issues, you need to fix this,’” said Alabama Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair last week on a TV talk show.

She said the union drives have “gotten the attention of all manufacturers across all states. It really is a wakeup to listen to your employees.”

FIGHT TO GATES OF HELL

If the Alabama workers vote yes, workers in South Carolina might stand up next: at Mercedes in Charleston, Volvo in Ridgeville, and BMW in Greer.

The 1,600 workers at that Mercedes plant produce Sprinter vans. At Volvo, 1,500 build S60 sedans and luxury SUVs, including the fully electric Volvo EX90. Volvo is owned by the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely, but it is still run by the Swedes.

The Greer plant is the largest BMW factory in the world, employing 11,000 workers. Workers there assemble the BMW X series and XM SUVs, vehicles, and coupes.

South Carolina also hosts numerous European companies, such as Michelin, which supplies BMW with tires, BASF, a supplier of emissions control technologies, and the world’s largest auto supplier, Bosch, which makes fuel injection systems.

The UAW will face a tough fight in the state, where only 1.7 percent of working people are union members. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said in January, referencing a dispute with dock workers, that he would “fight” unions “to the gates of hell.”

MOMENTUM FROM BIG 3 STRIKES

The UAW is riding a wave of momentum after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers last year. Workers in the South especially paid attention to these lucrative gains.

“We could see what other auto workers were making compared to what we were making,” said Yolanda Peoples, a member of the organizing committee on the Volkswagen engine assembly line.

Production workers at VW were starting at $23 per hour and topping out just above $32, compared to the $43 that UAW production workers at Ford’s nearby Spring Hill assembly plant will make by 2028 under the new contract.

In a vain attempt to head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11 percent to match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. Peoples saw her pay jump from $29 to $32.

The UAW spent $152 million on strike benefits for workers in 2023, compared to the $116 million the entire labor movement spent in 2022, according to union researcher Chris Bohner.

But even in the Stand-Up Strike, the UAW didn’t win everything on its list of demands. Mercedes is leaning into the union’s failure to win pensions. “Is the UAW promising you a pension if you vote for them? They made the same promise at the Big 3 and then failed to deliver,” reads a flyer the company is distributing across the plant.

DENSITY IS DESTINY

In a Facebook Live video on April 23, UAW President Shawn Fain described the union’s dues investment in organizing the South as part of its strategy to keep building power to win those demands next time.

“This ain’t charity; this is power,” he said. “Density is destiny. In 2028, we’re going back to the table with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. If we want the leverage to win back our pensions and retirement health care, we need to organize the unorganized.”

“Their strategy has been to frame the organizing campaign as over a whole industry, not just against individual companies,” said labor organizer and writer Dave Kamper. “This allows them, for example, to have members who work for one automaker go campaign for workers at another company, and their messaging doesn’t try to pit workers from one company against others. It truly is a working-class strategy, appealing to class solidarity over company loyalty.”

The big nonunion automakers are strategic targets for the union. But crucial to the success at VW and the momentum of the other drives so far is that they’re also what organizers call “hot shops”—that is, workers are enthusiastic to organize.

“A top-down campaign can’t conjure the militant desire for a union out of nothing,” said Richard Yeselson, a writer about labor and a former union campaign strategist. This is where he has seen many other “strategic” union drives fall flat. Success “requires a fighting workforce to attract a union campaign—not a union campaign to contrive a fighting workforce.”

MASSIVE ORGANIZING COMMITTEES

At VW, “we didn’t think things would happen so fast,” said worker Victor Vaughn.

The organizing committee recruited 300 co-workers as election captains. “We have well over 90 percent coverage within the plant, every position, every line,” Vaughn said. “At that point we knew, ‘Yes, we’re where we need to be.’”

The workers got support from UAW organizers from the West Coast’s Region 6 in building a highly representative and well-trained committee. The organizers emphasized recruiting a broad range of leaders. They made it easier for workers to get involved—simply by agreeing to speak to their co-workers, sign a public “vote yes” petition with their faces on it, and wear union gear in the plant.

The volunteer organizing committee ran its own meetings, solidifying members’ leadership and confidence. As in the Mercedes campaign, the organizers also shared real-time data as cards came in, so the committee could see where there was support and where there were holes.

Many of the UAW staff organizers came from higher education—a sector where grad workers have recently been unionizing in large numbers, in worker-led campaigns.

The worker-led approach made it tougher for management to convincingly portray the union as an outside “third party.”

PUBLIC CAMPAIGN FROM DAY ONE

Unlike in previous drives, workers boldly showed their union support from day one.

“In 2019, you could have your union flyers, but you had to be hush-hush,” said Renee Berry, a logistics worker on the organizing committee who has worked at the plant for 14 years. “We had to hide flyers in our bag. We couldn’t lay them on the table.”

Both anti-union and pro-union workers had offices in the plant in 2019. “People were too scared to go over to the union office,” said Berry. If management caught her answering a worker’s question about the union on the floor, she was hauled in to HR.

Rather than challenge this culture of fear, UAW organizers back then retreated from direct confrontation. “The people that were pushing for the UAW, it was like we were part of a secret society,” said Peoples. “We didn’t want to get in any trouble with HR because we said the word union. So it was real hard for us to get the word around to our co-workers.”

In the winning drive this year, workers on the volunteer organizing committee were highly visible and confrontational when necessary. “We have VOCs that are really out front passing out handbills,” said Vaughn. “We’re right in the face of everybody—not afraid of anything that’s gonna come down the pike.”

Berry said workers had gotten so fed up they would openly defy management. “They don’t care, to the point that they are tired of being intimidated,” she said. “They are either going to fire me or write me up. You have to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything. You’ve got to say, ‘I gotta keep on going, no matter whatever happens.’”

US VS. THE BILLIONAIRES

While politicians have lined up to oppose the union drives, the organizing committees at VW and Mercedes have striven to make the choice not about Democrats vs. Republicans, but about the working class vs. the billionaires.This idea resonates; workers have good reason to be angry.

“People for the most part are smartening up. And they’re not paying attention to the political crap,” said VW worker Angel Gomez. “The politicians know nothing about blue-collar work. They are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.” Take Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, heir to a family construction business with annual revenues of $220 million in 2019 when he became governor.

“We have a Democrat in the U.S House of Representatives out of Birmingham named Terri Sewell,” said Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at Mercedes. “She’s a corporate Democrat. She will give lip service to workers and the unions, but when it comes down to it, man, she’s bought and paid for by businesses.”

“For centuries, the Southern economy has been a rigged game—a scheme designed to enrich a select few at the expense of the many,” said Fain, rallying with Daimler Truck workers in North Carolina ahead of their April 25 contract expiration.

The wealthy and powerful have “dominated the state governments and written laws to protect their own interest,” Fain said. “They think of the world as divided between those who make the rules and those who are ruled… But now they sense that things are changing.”

On the brink of a strike, the union and Daimler reached a tentative deal, which workers will be voting on. The deal ends wage tiers, boosts wages 25 percent over four years, and adds a cost-of-living adjustment and, for the first time, profit-sharing.

“We set an example for the entire South,” North Carolina UAW Local 3520 President Corey Hill told Reuters. “I hope Mercedes in Tuscaloosa was paying attention to what we’re doing,”

A BOLD APPROACH

If workers have gotten bold on the shop floor, the UAW took the same principle to the national stage when it vowed to organize 150,000 non-union auto workers, especially in the South.

“They didn’t say, ‘Let’s start at one or two plants and see if we can make this work,’” Kamper said. “They targeted All The Plants, all at once, and have committed serious resources to that work. The willingness to invest in the campaign, to brag about investing $40 million, represents a brashness we don’t see enough of.”

“In order to launch these campaigns and move so quickly, the leadership had to relinquish some control and trust workers,” said Stephanie Luce, an author and professor of labor studies at the City University of New York. It goes to show: “We need leadership, investment, risk-taking, and creativity—from the top, and from the rank and file.”

Freedom Under Capitalism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

(RIGHT WING)Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything — including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options, while socialism can liberate us to live as we please.

By Ben Burgis

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Oshawa is a small Canadian city on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. It was also the hometown of the late left-wing Canadian politician Ed Broadbent, who would go on to become the national chairman of the New Democratic Party, or NDP.

In Broadbent’s youth, a major employer in Oshawa was a glass manufacturer called Duplate, Ltd. When the Duplate plant closed in the 1960s, Broadbent was disturbed. Several decades later, in his book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, Broadbent recalled the way the incident influenced his thinking about workers’ rights:

As I recall, there were about 300 workers directly affected by the management’s decision to relocate their Oshawa plant to another part of the province — and when you included their family members and the impact on neighbouring companies, the number of people actually affected by the closure was around 1200 in total. . . . So here you had hundreds of workers, some of whom had invested 30 or 40 years of their lives in Duplate, being profoundly affected by a decision they had played absolutely no part in — and a profitable company that packed up and moved just to make higher profits. . . . Their human dignity was denied outright.

This kind of story is precisely what leads many of us to conclude that capitalism is a profoundly unjust system. Broadbent himself was a practical politician focused on devising progressive reforms within the existing system. But while more immediate reforms like Broadbent’s are good and important, our long-term horizons shouldn’t stop there.

Capitalism is a system under which the means of production can be bought and sold by private individuals, and anyone who can’t afford to start a business of their own has to submit themselves to the domination of those who can if they want to make a living. Workers spend eight out of every sixteen waking hours most days of the week in workplaces that are run like totalitarian dictatorships — and it’s only eight hours, and only most days of the week, because of victories won over generations of workers’ struggles.

If the comparison to totalitarian dictatorships seems hyperbolic, it shouldn’t. In fact, capitalists often regulate far more intimate aspects of workers’ behavior — especially for relatively “unskilled” workers without much bargaining power — than do the laws of a typical totalitarian dictatorship. Employers frequently tell workers, for example, when they have to smile, when they’re allowed to talk to each other, and when they’re allowed to go to the bathroom.

For many libertarians, none of this adds up to a legitimate complaint about capitalism or a reason to want to violate the property rights of big capitalists like Jeff Bezos — by, for example, nationalizing their businesses and putting them under the management of the workers themselves, representatives of the broader community, or some combination of the two. They argue instead that capitalism is already, in the words of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, a “framework of utopias.”

In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argues that the laissez-faire version of capitalism is already the best kind of utopia — a “meta-utopia.” Want a socialist utopia where workers control their own workplaces? No problem, he says. The rules of even a radically deregulated form of capitalism already let you start one up!Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan sums up Nozick’s point in his book Why Not Capitalism? this way:


There is an essential asymmetry in the capitalist and the socialist visions of utopia. Capitalists allow socialism, but socialists forbid capitalism.

Libertarians like Nozick think that this permissiveness is what makes capitalism better. Are they right?

A Framework of Utopias

When Nozick lays out this argument in the final chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he starts from the highly reasonable premise that “people are different.” Therefore no detailed prescription for how people should individually and collectively live their lives will provide the best kind of life for everyone.

That’s true. Different people have wildly varying attitudes toward religion, monogamy, work, play, and damn near everything else, and a good society should allow for wide-ranging pluralism about what people think is the best life and how they want to pursue it. Democratic socialists agree.

Nozick is also right that some utopian writers, such as St Thomas Moore or various pre-Marxist “utopian socialists,” erred in painting pictures of life in the future that didn’t allow for this kind of desirable pluralism. A good society should have room for single-family houses inhabited by big Catholic families who all get up together to go to early-morning mass and polyamorous Wiccan compounds.

But what exactly follows from this about workplaces and the distribution of economic resources?

In a short section of an earlier chapter (“Workers’ Control”), Nozick says that for socialists whose objection to capitalism is that workers have to follow the orders of bosses who aren’t democratically accountable to them, “an easy way to give workers access to the means of production” is for groups of workers to simply “buy machinery, rent space, and so on, just as a private entrepreneur does.” He suggests various means by which capital could be secured, such as through convincing unions to invest their pension funds.

If these businesses were as profitable or more profitable than traditional firms, he suggests, it should be no problem to secure such funding or even funding from more traditional private investors. If they were less profitable, perhaps socially conscious consumers could be induced to support them for political reasons. And if they don’t, Nozick thinks, the failure of a worker-owned sector to flourish can’t be a symptom of any sort of injustice.

Insinuating that this hasn’t happened because workers don’t actually want to democratically control their workplaces, Nozick muses that it’s “illuminating to consider why unions don’t start new businesses, and why workers don’t pool their resources to do so.”

Real Cooperatives and Collective Action Problems

We don’t have to speculate a priori to address the question of worker cooperatives. There are many thousands of them all over the world, and extensive research has been conducted on them. The worker-owned Mondragon Corporation, for example, was founded decades before Nozick wrote those lines, and today it’s the biggest business in the Basque region of Spain. So it’s very far from true that no groups of workers have had this idea.

But the germ of truth in Nozick’s speculation is that, in every actually existing capitalist economy, the worker-cooperative sector is microscopic. Mondragon’s eighty thousand worker-owners make it an imposing behemoth by the standards of other worker co-ops. Still, it’s a rounding error next to the tens of millions of Spaniards employed by traditional capitalist firms.

Many libertarians take this as evidence that workers simply don’t care about having a say in what goes on in their workplaces. If they did, they’d be leaving their current employers in droves to start new cooperatives or join old ones. The libertarian economist Gene Epstein, for example, made great hay of this argument in a series of debates he did with Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, Marxist economist Richard Wolff, and me.

But it’s a strange argument in many ways. For starters, it’s not obvious that the path to establishing a cooperative economy should run through worker co-ops outcompeting capitalist firms. Instead, mechanisms like union organizing at the workplace and building socialist political parties can accomplish socialist objectives much more effectively by democratically conquering political power. These are arguably far smarter strategies for achieving socialist ends than trying to outcompete capitalists.

To grasp this point, consider that the wages of low-wage workers are more likely to be raised by putting a proposition on the ballot in your state to raise the minimum wage than by exhorting people to only buy from companies that pay their lowest-paid workers a good wage, even though voters and consumers are the same people. The former strategy often succeeds, even in red states. The latter has never succeeded and never will.

One of the things libertarians who push these arguments choose to ignore is the existence of collective action problems, especially under capitalism. There are often situations where Option A would benefit everyone in a group if they all opted for it, but where the dynamics of the situation will make it unlikely for everyone to do so individually, and so it might be in the best individual interests of every member of the group to go with Option B instead. A classic example is the Prisoners’ Dilemma, described here.

Our economic lives are governed by capitalist rules that allow for concentrated individual power. Consequently, anyone whose motive for starting a co-op would simply be to have a better life than they would have as an employee has every incentive to shoot the moon and try to become an employer. The infant mortality rate for businesses of all kinds is extremely high, and getting a new enterprise off the ground — whether collectively owned or otherwise — takes an enormous amount of work. Why all do that on the slim hope of having a somewhat better position at a worker co-op instead of holding out for the — perhaps even slimmer, but also much more enticing — hope of having a much better life by building a miniature economic kingdom where you get to be the king?

These problems alone mean that socialist ideologues are much more likely than workers primarily motivated by their own individual interests to be involved in attempts to start co-ops. And socialist ideologues are likely to make the entirely reasonable calculation that their time and effort would have more impact on the overall shape of society if they spent it doing things like organizing unions at large employers, or campaigning for socialist candidates, rather than working ten hours a day to get some local cooperative coffee shop up and running.

Added to these already considerable obstacles, though, there’s a problem with financing. Worker co-ops are by their nature typically going to be started by groups of people with relatively limited means. They can’t reward investors with ongoing ownership shares without, to whatever extent they do this, losing their character as worker co-ops. And groups of working-class people are often a risky bet for loan officers working for banks. There are of course those union pension funds Nozick calls our attention to, but even if they didn’t have a responsibility to look out primarily for good investments for their members’ retirements rather than prioritizing ideological goals, Nozick presumably wasn’t foolish enough to think union pension funds investing in co-ops would be sufficient to create an economy dominated by co-ops.

Worse yet, if you could somehow get an economy where worker-owned firms dominated (but the ground rules of capitalist markets were unchanged), the result wouldn’t automatically be a stable form of market socialism. Even if you asked a magical genie to instantaneously restructure every existing firm to put it under the collective ownership and democratic control of its workforce, without changing anything else about the structure of the economy, the result would be an arrangement that market forces would eventually course-correct back into something recognizable as regular old capitalism.

Whether capitalist or worker-owned, firms inevitably go out of business, and the people who once worked there need new jobs. Co-ops looking to expand operations and increase the income of existing members have an incentive to hire new workers as regular employees rather than co-owners, and people who have been out of work for a while have an incentive to accept this reduced status. And whole co-ops would often be incentivized to move toward reverting to regular capitalist firms by selling ownership stakes to other, more successful co-ops or particularly successful individuals.

This doesn’t mean a democratic form of socialism where workers’ control is the norm isn’t possible or superior. But it does mean that, to realize that vision, we need to use the state to scrap the rules of the capitalist market, where ownership of the means of production is up for sale to the highest bidder, and build new socialist institutions instead.

Lots of socialists have written about what that might look like. Sunkara, for example, lays out how such institutions might work in the first chapter of his book The Socialist Manifesto (“A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”). Socialist economist Mike Beggs dug into the technical details in an article last year for Jacobin. And the three of us are working on a book about it (The Blueprint) for Verso.
The Deeper Problem

When people ask why socialists, if they want workers’ control, don’t just start worker-owned firms — as Epstein likes to say in debates, his voice dripping with derision, if that’s what you want, “go for it” — they’re really saying two things. And the superficial plausibility of their argument comes from the ambiguity.

Their first argument is that if people really wanted workplace democracy, they’d have long ago gotten it by starting worker co-ops and outcompeting capitalists within the rules of regular capitalist markets. But that makes no more sense than saying that if voters in a state that’s passed a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage really wanted it, they’d achieve it in libertarian-approved ways by only buying products from firms that paid high wages.

Their second argument is that starting worker-owned firms within capitalism and trying to outcompete capitalism is the only morally legitimate method of achieving workplace democracy. But why should we believe that?

You can say it’s morally wrong because people are entitled to whatever they can get in a free market, but as an argument against socialism that just begs the question. Socialists believe that what everyone is morally entitled to is a roughly equal share of society’s resources and a say in decisions that profoundly impact their lives.

If you still don’t see why “why don’t you just outcompete capitalists within capitalist markets” is a silly question, think about why abolitionists didn’t just buy up all the slaves and free them, or why small-r republicans in the eighteenth century didn’t just put all their efforts into convincing the heir to the throne to voluntarily give more power to parliament.

Part of the answer is that these wouldn’t have been very effective strategies. But another part of the answer is that early modern republicans didn’t just want more power for parliaments. They disputed kings’ right to rule. Abolitionists didn’t just want more people to be free. They rejected slave owners’ property rights. And socialists don’t just want workers to have power. We fundamentally object to the idea that the means of production should be for sale to whoever can afford them — and thus the power to fundamentally impact the lives of many other people, as in the decision to move the factory from Oshawa that so disturbed a young Ed Broadbent.

Nozick says that while it’s easy to see how worker-owned factories could appear under capitalism, it’s harder to see how “private enterprise” could get a toehold in a “state system” of democratic socialism. But this shouldn’t be hard for him to see. It should be easy. All it would take is convincing most voters to support privatizing a factory or two. It’s illuminating to wonder why Nozick found that prospect so terrifying.
Socialism Is the Real Framework for Utopias

Again, it’s absolutely true that people are different, and the best kind of life for one person isn’t the best kind of life for another. But that doesn’t mean that we need to privatize some large businesses for the sake of people who have a fetish for being told what to do by an oligarch.

Instead, to create a society with the most pluralism possible along the most dimensions possible in practice, we need to meet everyone’s material needs and give everyone a meaningful say over what happens in their workplaces and how revenue is distributed. This would enhance everyone’s practical capacity to live whatever kind of life they want.

It’s all well and good to say that people can live in single-family houses with white picket fences and take their ten children to mass with them every morning or they can live in polyamorous communes. But in a society where people are overworked, overstressed, and have trouble making rent in their cramped apartments — and having ten children is about as practical a possibility for them as buying their own factory — the fact that they aren’t legally prohibited from pursuing any of these visions of a good life doesn’t add up to a much of a framework for utopias.

Libertarianism and socialism both evolved historically from Enlightenment liberalism. The idea that pluralism is desirable and it’s good to let people experiment with whatever forms of life they’d like is in both philosophies’ DNA. The difference is that socialists are realistic enough to know what every graduate student in the sciences knows: that being given permission to run an experiment isn’t worth much if their laboratory isn’t funded.

May Day 2024: There’s No Democracy Without Trade Unions

 By Luc  Triangle

May 2, 2024

Source: Equal Times


Demonstrators take part in an International Workers’ Day rally in Surabaya, Indonesia on 1 May 2023. (Juni Kriswanto/AFP)


This year, in what has been dubbed a historical ‘super election year’, around four billion people will vote in more than 40 countries. But, if we look at the state of democracy around the world, and particularly trade union rights, we see that it is seriously ill and needs care. The world’s largest social movement is the global trade union movement, we are a fundamental part of good democratic systems, and we have the democratic values and experience to stand up ‘For Democracy’.

The deterioration of democracy is clear. It is contracting in every region of the world. Every year since 2018 more countries are experiencing net declines in democratic processes than improvements, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s 2023 Global State of Democracy report.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index gave the world a total score of 5.22 in 2023, down from 5.29 in 2022, as war and conflict worsen existing, negative, anti-democratic trends. It found that while 45.5 per cent of the world’s population live in a democracy of some sort, only 7.8 per cent of people, or fewer than one in ten, live in a “full democracy”, and 39.4 per cent live under authoritarian rule.

This anti-democratic trend corresponds with global attacks on trade union membership. In the 2023 Global Rights Index (GRI), compiled by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), violations of key measures reached new highs: 87 per cent of countries violated the right to strike, while 79 per cent violated the right to collective bargaining. The GRI has tracked the worsening of these figures over ten years.

This rise in violations of trade union rights has been matched by a parallel rise in economic inequality and insecurity. Where countries have high rates of trade union density and collective agreement coverage, wealth and power are distributed more equitably and citizens have more trust in democracy. In 2023, the V-Dem Institute identified Norway – where trade union density is 49 per cent and collective agreement coverage is 72.5 per cent – as the world’s most deliberative and egalitarian democracy. However, researchers have also found that “union density has declined throughout the developed world, and in most countries the union wage premium has fallen as well.”

The rise of new forms of fascism, nationalism, populism and xenophobia have been further fed by capitalism’s austerity policies. A 2022 study of 200 elections in Europe found that austerity policies had led to “a significant increase in the vote share of extreme parties, lower voter turnout and a rise in political fragmentation.” Instead of delivering stronger economies to support a more inclusive social state, profits have been privatised and costs socialised.

This amounts to a betrayal of the electorate’s trust. In history we see that working people inevitably search for alternatives that promise to address their needs and populists exploit this to win elections and then dismantle the elements of democracy that handed them power.

No region of the world remains untouched by this rise in anti-democratic forces, and this is happening as we witness a convergence of global crises. Armed conflict is increasing, the climate emergency is accelerating, the debt crisis can no longer be ignored, and the unregulated growth of technology poses enormous social risks.

It’s time to stand up ‘For Democracy’

To address these trends, we need a truly democratic movement that crosses borders, unites all social groups and has the power and accountability to change the balance of power in every workplace, country and global institution. We are that movement, because democracy is a worker’s project.

It is time that we trade unionists took up our role as the foremost practitioners and defenders of, and fighters for, the democratic values we exercise every day.

That is why the ITUC has launched the For Democracy campaign, to defend the foundations of democracy in three critical arenas: at work, at the national level and globally.

For Democracy at work: Because there is no democracy without trade unions, we assert our right to freedom of association, to organise unions and to strike. We demand collective bargaining and social dialogue, equal treatment for all workers, equal power in decisions that impact our health, safety, environment, and employment prospects, an end to workplace violence and harassment, and democracy and representation in our union structures.

For Democracy at the societal and national level: We assert the right to protest and free speech; a free press is key to this. This World Press Freedom Day, we must defend the role of journalists as part of strong democracies to expose injustices and raise awareness, free from fear of attacks and persecution. We demand true gender equality, just tax systems to fund universal social protection and a Just Transition that supports all workers. We resist the hate-filled, far-right ideologies and the corporate capture of national policy making.

For Democracy at the global level: We demand the reform of international economic structures to create inclusive systems that prioritise public welfare, human rights and labour standards over private profit. We demand the protection and advancement of representative democratic multilateralism, and equitable global cooperation to achieve universal peace and common security.

At the heart of the For Democracy campaign is a New Social Contract; a redesigned global economy centred on workers’ voices and built on the pillars of jobs, rights, wages, social protection, equality and inclusion, to address the convergence of global crises. Only a democratic, participatory approach that allows workers to shape their futures can deliver a New Social Contract, and only a New Social Contract can ensure that democracy is sustainably rebuilt.

This May Day we must remember what trade unions have done for democracy in the past, and harness the collective power of trade unions to defend and rebuild democracy now and in the future. The For Democracy campaign is a clarion call to workers, trade unions and allies worldwide to rally for democratic change. Democracy is not only a political ideal but a lived reality that working people are best equipped to define, defend and advance.


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Luc TriangleX (Twitter)

Luc Triangle is the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.