Marxism, Stalinism, and Queerphobia

A historical survey of Marxism and queer life, from the young Soviet Union to Stalinist homophobia.

Von Marco Helmbrecht and Niko Weber July 17, 2022

For decades, common sense dictated that Marxism focused solely on class antagonisms and ignored other forms of oppression, like the oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, many of those claiming the mantle of Marxism, from those in the Stalinist tradition to the social democratic tradition — including even the present-day Democratic Socialists of America — downplayed the importance of special oppression and maintained an economistic strategy that benefited only the upper strata of the working class. But the reactionary positions of Stalinism and social democracy on sexual and gender oppression do not reflect the legacy of Marxism in the slightest, as a look into the history of the revolutionary workers movement shows. Rather, revolutionary socialism in Russia, with the October Revolution, led the way toward a radical change in the material and ideological foundations of LGBTQ+ discrimination. Reactionary deviations occurred when parties and organizations, despite their socialist self-image, abandoned the revolutionary horizon and tried to come to terms with the capitalist world. This historical insight can help us clarify what kind of politics we need for emancipation today with a new onslaught of attacks on the rights of queer people, particularly in the United States, the world’s most advanced capitalist “democracy.”
The Bolshevik Advance

In the second half of the 19th century, a gay scene formed in Russia’s two most important cities, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. It created places for socializing, such as bathhouses; linguistic codes (tetki, which roughly translates as “auntie,” a word that was applied to homosexual men, both by them and others); elements of a dress code; and, at least in private spaces, cross-dressing. As historian Dan Healey describes in his influential work on the history of homosexuality in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, it would be “heterosexist and nationalist chauvinism to claim that in tsarist Russia or in the USSR, this homosexual subculture was imported from abroad or created by Communist misrule.”1

At the same time, same-sex intercourse between men was illegal under the rules of the Orthodox Church. Until 1917, consensual “sodomy” was punishable by exile to Siberia. But the this threat was unevenly realized. The abolition of the czarist legal codes in 1917 meant the de facto decriminalization of homosexuality, and with the adoption of a new code in 1922, references to “sodomy” disappeared from the official legal texts of the young Soviet state. After revolutionary 18th-century France, the Soviet Union was thus one of the first states in the world to legalize homosexuality. In the Weimar Republic, meanwhile, the infamous paragraph 175 from the Kaiserreich, criminalizing homosexuality, remained in force before it was tightened under fascism and ultimately abolished in the Federal Republic only in 1994 — a lifetime after decriminalization in the Soviet Union.

Women who entered into romantic or sexual relationships with other women had less access to the public sphere in Russia and accordingly found it more difficult to form a cohesive community. Fewer sources exist on this issue, since same-sex intercourse between women was not punishable and therefore does not show up, for instance, in court records. Nevertheless, economically independent women in particular succeeded in forming networks and entering into relationships beyond the traditional heterosexual family. In the military climate of the Civil War years after the October Revolution, many women adopted a masculine style, which on the one hand signaled a loyalty to the Revolution and a willingness to defend it, but on the other hand could also be code for homosexual women to attract other women. The lines to transsexuality were blurry sometimes. In response to a survey on sexuality at Moscow’s Sverdlov University in 1923, one answer was “I want to be a man, I impatiently await scientific discoveries of castration and grafting of male organs (glands).”2 Such operations were indeed performed in the 1920s, even if their success was doubtful owing to still rudimentary methods. Even apart from medical interventions, many took advantage of the opportunity to change their gender identity. They had appropriate identification documents issued, adopted male variants of their old names, and changed their clothing and appearance. This was accompanied by lively scientific debates about the origin and nature of homosexuality and gender, which were widely considered to be closely related. Biologist Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov asserted, “Of course, there is no intermediate sex, but rather an infinite quantity of intermediate sexes.”3

Evgenii Fedorovich M. began to assume a male identity in 1915, when he was 17 years old. During the revolution he had his name changed in the official documents and began to work in the secret service. In 1922, with the new documents, Yevgeny married a woman who, in the sources, is named S. Even after the change of identity became known; a local court case in which the couple stood accused of a “crime against nature” failed, and the marriage persisted. The court ruled the union legal because it was mutually consensual — the gender identity of the spouses was irrelevant. The couple continued to live together as a family for several years with a child that S. gave birth to after an affair with a colleague.4 The revolutionary awakening and the rejection of traditional norms were not only represented by elite Bolsheviks but also allowed people like Yevgeny an unprecedented degree of self-determination.

Bourgeois historical scholarship has occasionally claimed that the Bolsheviks did not intend to legalize homosexuality at all by abolishing the czarist legal codes. Simon Karlinsky, for example, claimed that the October Revolution reversed and negated the advances for gay rights achieved in the revolutions of 1905 and of February 1917, passing over the first decriminalization of “sodomy” as an aside.5 Healey, however, comes to the following, unequivocal conclusion based on the files of the Commissariat of Justice, which became accessible with the opening of the Soviet archives in 1991:


While these documents do not discuss the sodomy statute in detail, they do demonstrate a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922.6

By decriminalizing male homosexuality, the Bolsheviks stood in the long tradition of the labor movement. In 1898, for example, the leader of the German Social Democrats, August Bebel, had been the first politician to call for homosexual emancipation in a parliament. Three years earlier, socialists had defended the famous writer Oscar Wilde when he was put on trial for his homosexuality. Eduard Bernstein sharply criticized the idea that homosexuality deviated from “nature,” proposing instead that it be understood as a deviation from “the firmly maintained fictional norm,” and holding that “there is no reasonable ground why a similar contract between man and man should be criminally punished.”7 Socialists were not the only ones to call for the legalization of homosexuality. After the October Revolution, however, they not only raised the demand but actually put it into practice.

The pamphlet “The Sexual Revolution in Russia,” written in 1923 by the head of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, Dr. Grigorii Batkis, gives an impression of the official position of the Bolsheviks in the first years after the revolution. In it he writes,


[Soviet legislation] declares the absolute noninterference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon. Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality — Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called “natural” intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters.8

Of course, in the young Soviet Union, not all the prejudices were eliminated from one day to the next. They had become ingrained in decades and centuries of tsarist backwardness. Moreover, the legalization policy of the Bolsheviks did not extend to the entire area of the Soviet Union. The code of the Uzbek SSR, for example, which was established in 1926, still contained paragraphs against homosexuality. While in the European center of the country, homosexuality was understood as an innate characteristic of a minority; in the periphery it was conceived of as a widespread phenomenon arising from social conditions. Healey calls this a “contradiction between the Soviet Union’s declared sexual vanguardism and its policies in outlying regions.”9 Furthermore, during the 1920s, access to ballrooms and meeting halls in the urban centers dwindled more and more, which, according to a common interpretation, led to a retreat into the private sphere. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that homosexual men played important public roles in the young Soviet republic. Author Mikhail Kuzmin, who came from an aristocratic background and wrote the first coming-out novel affirming homosexuality, Wings, in 1906, sympathized with the revolution and served as chairman of the Petrograd Artists’ Association. Kuzmin was friends with the openly gay Georgy Chicherin, who served as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a post that was roughly equal to a Soviet foreign minister, from 1918 to 1930.

A few isolated statements by Lenin are often used to argue that the Bolsheviks allegedly took a prudish position on questions of sexuality. In correspondence with the French socialist Inessa Armand in 1915, he defended himself against the demand for a “freedom of love.”10 In a few lines, he argued that freedom from material calculations, religious prejudices, or “from the fetters of the law, the courts and the police” would be poorly expressed by this phrase and could also be understood to mean freedom “from the serious element in love” or “from childbirth,” which he described as a bourgeois demand. Healey, too, infers from these lines (and from similar statements attributed to Lenin after his death by Clara Zetkin11) that Lenin may well have meant to say that those suffering from a “personal abnormality” in their sexual lives should do so in private while devoting themselves to the revolution.12 Sherry Wolf strongly rejects this “rather stilted reading of Lenin’s thoughts” in Sexuality and Socialism, arguing that it conforms to the Cold War caricature of Lenin as a teetotaling ascetic.13 In fact, Lenin’s letters to Armand were not published until 1939 under Stalin to signal, as Healey himself writes in a footnote, that the “changes to family policy in the 1930s had Leninist origins.”14
The Stalinist Rollback

Contrary to the hopes of the Bolsheviks, by 1923, no further socialist states had emerged from the European revolutionary upsurge after World War I. In capitalist encirclement, material deprivation after years of first world and then civil war, and the resulting massive attenuation of the Soviet industrial proletariat, an extensive bureaucracy had taken hold in all areas of administration, attempting to elevate the country’s isolation to the status of theory with “socialism in one country.”

The bureaucracy’s interest in self-preservation, coexisting with the capitalist West, was matched by an increased demand for labor, which led to a policy of increasing the birth rate. Efforts to abolish the family, whose tasks for social reproduction were to be made superfluous through the establishment of public child care, laundry shop, or state canteens, were replaced by the consolidation of traditional family and gender norms. In a trade union newspaper, Aron Solz, who had held leading posts in the Soviet judiciary before being ousted in 1938, wrote: “A Soviet woman has equal rights with a man, but she is not relieved of the great and honorable natural duty: she’s a mother, she gives life.”15

The ideological justification for the renewed criminalization of homosexuality was provided in 1934 by Stalin’s mouthpiece on cultural issues, the author Maxim Gorky. He attributed to homosexuality a corrupting influence on youth and contrasted the myth of Russian “purity” with the decay of the “overcivilized” West, which, supposedly, along with homosexuality, also gave rise to fascism. His utterance culminates in the infamous statement: “Destroy the homosexuals — Fascism will disappear.”16

Just as the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922 had been part of a broader effort to overcome any form of oppression based on gender or sexuality, the counterreforms of the 1930s were also not limited to reintroducing the persecution of homosexuality. Prostitution was also recriminalized, abortions banned, and the women’s section of the party’s Central Committee dissolved. Leon Trotsky described this policy of prohibitions as “the philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”17 This turn toward a cult of motherhood was accompanied by the cruel persecution of any real or imagined political opposition. In her book Bread and Roses, Andrea D’Atri describes, in relation to women’s politics, the discontinuity between the first decrees of the nascent workers’ state and the outrageous later provisions of the bureaucracy. For the bureaucracy, it was clear: “The revolution needed to be opposed with a counterrevolution.”18 This rupture was enforced with the deportation, imprisonment, torture, and murder of countless people.

With the help of the Comintern, which had been stripped of its revolutionary content, the Stalinist bureaucracy, from the mid-1920s onward, carried its reactionary ideology into the Communist Parties in the rest of the world. In revolutionary Cuba, the Communist Party bureaucracy arrested and jailed gay men, forced HIV-positive people into state-run sanatoriums, and expelled thousands of queer people with the Mariel boat lift in 1980. Not until 1986 were all provisions criminalizing homosexuality removed from the legal code. Though homosexuality was not officially prohibited in China until after Mao’s death, men who sought out sexual relations with other men could be charged with “hooliganism,” particularly during the so-called Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao and his allies.

Communist parties around the world thereby exerted a strong conservative influence on the entire Left in the following decades. Thus, for a long time, queer hostility on the left was not limited to Stalinist organizations. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States, for example, also “unofficially” excluded homosexuals and trans people from the organization in the years around the Stonewall Riot, i.e., amid the emergence of a radicalized LGBT liberation movement. The policy of exclusion from its youth organization was even declared publicly, even if it soon turned out to be unenforceable. Even when the organization changed its position in a 1975 pamphlet advocating for gay rights in the U.S., it argued that it was “cultural imperialism” to apply this demand to Cuba, where public displays of homosexuality were banned by the Castro regime. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, however, homosexuality had been legal there. The implication that Cubans were particularly conservative or even all heterosexual was even then nothing more than a racist stereotype.

The SWP was not the only organization in the tradition of Trotskyism to take such positions. In an interview, Ray Goodspeed, who supported the grand strike in the British mines in 1984 with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, known from the film Pride, tells of the attitude of his organization at the time: “‘Militant,’ the group to which I belonged at the time, considered gay rights a bourgeois concern and imagined that the workers would not be able to handle it. However, when I came out, it was only the party hacks who had strange reactions, while the working-class people were quite easygoing.”

Even though the SWP claimed to carry forward the revolutionary legacy of Trotskyism, it held openly reactionary positions on this question. These were not, however, merely an isolated aberration but a consequence of the deviation from the political method of Marxism. This deviation consisted in an increased “objectivism,” that is, the relativization of the role of the political vanguard of the class and the consequent adaptation to the given. Instead of trying to lift the at the time backward consciousness in large parts of the U.S. working class with the help of transitional demands, the SWP adapted to this conservatism. At the same time, its uncritical attitude toward Cuba led it to confound the necessary defense of the achievements of the Cuban Revolution with the defense of the bureaucracy, which not only persecuted homosexuals but also suppressed any form of proletarian democracy.
The Legacy

The contradictions that persisted in Bolshevik policy toward homosexuality after 1917 cannot be understood without placing them in the context of the material shortages and international isolation of the young Soviet state. Today, however, these historically specific circumstances no longer exist, and the considerable development of the productive forces in the wake of the enormous devastation of World War II would put a new socialist attempt in an infinitely better position. Whereas in the young Soviet state, for example, attempts to socialize reproductive labor were bound to fail and the project of abolishing the heteronormative family remained stuck in its infancy, the economic conditions for such a project are incomparably superior today. There is no doubt that the possibilities for liberation from gender and sexual oppression exist.

The legalization of homosexuality in the Soviet Union was not only a milestone in the history of sexual liberation, but also a testament to the power of a Marxism that organizes itself independently of all institutions of the bourgeois state. As Lenin put it in 1902, such a movement is “trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.”19 The reversals of conquests by LGTBTQ people that are now taking place in the United States demonstrate the impossibility of true democracy within the framework of capitalism. A revolutionary socialist struggle that seeks to transform society can win recognition and freedoms for queer people that far surpass what the capitalists’ so-called democracies around the world have acheived.

First published in German on June 19, 2021 in Klasse Gegen Klasse Magazin.

Translated by Marco Helmbrecht

Notes

Notes↑1 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 48.
↑2 Ibid., 63.
↑3 Ibid., 166.
↑4 Ibid., 68–72.
↑5 Simon Karlinsky, “Russia’s Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 357 (New York, 1989).
↑6 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 116.
↑7 Eduard Bernstein, “The Judgement of Abnormal Sexual Intercourse,” Die Neue Zeit 13/2 (1895), 228-233.
↑8 Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Chicago 2009), 91.
↑9 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 162.
↑10 V. I. Lenin to Inessa Armand, January 17, 1915, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 35, (Moscow, 1976), 180–81.
↑11 Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York, 1934).
↑12 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 113.
↑13 Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism, 93.
↑14 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 301.
↑15 Victoria I. Sakevich and Boris P. Denisov, Birth Control in Russia: Overcoming the State System Resistance (Moscow, 2014), 9.
↑16 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 189–90.
↑17 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is it Going? (New York, 1937).
↑18 Andrea D’Atri, Bread and Roses. Gender and Class under Capitalism (London 2021), 96.
↑19 V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement, in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1961),347–30.

What Is Class Struggle Unionism?


Jason Koslowski July 17, 2022

Joe Burns’ new Class Struggle Unionism comes at a key time. That’s because the long-slumbering union movement looks like it could be starting to stir again.

Almost 70% of people approve of unions. That’s the highest number in 50 years. And a wave of unionization is sweeping the US. The last year saw a jump of 57% more petitions sent to the NLRB to form new unions — the highest level in a decade. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won a historic victory at Amazon in Staten Island. Workers are unionizing at Starbucks; over 150 stores have already been unionized and over 300 have filed for elections. The struggle’s being led by young, often queer, organizers, dubbed “Generation U.” Labor Notes — an event where union activists gathered to share ideas and strategies — had its biggest conference in its history this past summer.

But the labor movement is facing huge dangers, too.

First, the bosses are doubling down on union busting. They’re firing organizers at Starbucks and Amazon. Second, the Democrats are looking at the new unions like the ALU and licking their chops. They have been betraying labor for decades — they helped channel workers’ fights into safe, narrow, legal boundaries and have encouraged union leaders to abandon disruptive strikes that would disrupt the profits of the bosses.

Now, though, they want photo-ops with union leaders to make Democrats look good for unions — to channel our energy and power back into “get out the vote” campaigns instead of fighting for ourselves, at work and in the streets. They’re especially desperate now, as they’re facing difficult midterm elections coming up.

That’s where Burns’ new book, Class Struggle Unionism, comes in. Burns, who is director of collective bargaining with the CWA-AFA union, calls for class struggle unions. He blasts the Democratic Party’s constant betrayal of the labor movement. And he calls for unions to put their faith in the working class’s own weapons, like strikes, rather than politicians. These would be unions that strike even when it’s illegal, make strong picket lines that stop scabs, defy injunctions, and link up in their strikes and in the streets, across racial and gender lines, to unite the working class as a whole against the bosses exploiting them.

The book is a reminder we badly need today: yes, we definitely need more unions, but we also need fiercer, more powerful ones that aren’t afraid to fight using strikes — one of the strongest weapons they have —and that reject their false “allies” in the Democratic Party.

Burns’s book has some important limits too. He stops just short of calling for our unions to sever all our ties to the Democratic Party for the political independence we need, even though he’s shown how treacherous the Democratic Party is for workers. And the book misses important changes inside the labor movement, changes we need to take stock of if we’re going to build up real democracy in our unions.

But still, it’s a powerful jog to our memories that better unions are possible — class struggle unions are possible. Workers built those kinds of unions in the past, and we can build them today. We just have to push Burns’ ideas even further than he does.
What Is Class Struggle Unionism?

The first thing to notice is just how different this book is from the vast majority of books on unions that have come out in at least the last 25 years. Chapter 1 points out an idea that’s totally ignored by a more mainstream writer on unions like Jane McAleevey. It’s this basic idea: the source of all the bosses’ profits is us — the working class.

Burns explains it in terms of simple math. Let’s say a boss hires me for $20 an hour. In an eight-hour shift, I get $160. The boss also puts out some money for machines, rent, etc., and maybe some benefits like health insurance for me (probably not). That brings the total amount the boss is spending during my shift to about $500.

But when I’m working — whether I’m making coffees, or shipping boxes in an Amazon warehouse — I’m making far more money than that for the bosses. The boss is spending $500 on me. But in my shift I’m serving enough coffees or packing enough boxes to make the boss $800, $1000, or more. When I was working on a factory line in Reading, PA a few years ago, I was moving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pies in a shift that got me $58 bucks. That difference is the whole point of hiring workers.

Where’s that extra money go, the money that only the workers are creating through our work? “The billionaires call this profit,” Burns writes. “Class struggle unionists call it theft.”1 In other words, the entire foundation of work is this exploitation: we work so bosses don’t have to, and so bosses can get richer. And the bosses will always look for ways to increase their exploitation and kneecap worker power to fight back. Work, in other words, is part of the class struggle: the fight of the billionaire ruling class to exploit the people who have to sell their labor to live.

All of this means a few things. First, we need unions so workers can protect themselves and fight back. That’s why unions exist. And this basic battle between “them” and “us” means there’s no agreement our unions could come to with the bosses to overcome it; there’s no cooperation that could make the bosses our friends. It also means that one of the strongest weapons we have as workers is refusing to work — striking to fight back, to defeat the bosses’ attacks, to get more power over our work, and wring more concessions from bosses. So this “us and them” starting-point, then, that has to be the very foundation of union struggle.

So why isn’t it?

In the early chapters of the book, Burns explains why union leaders have overwhelmingly refused this idea of “us” vs. “them” — mostly abandoning, along with that, the use of real, militant strikes to fight back and win real concessions from bosses.

The main way of running unions in the U.S. for many decades, he points out rightly, has been “business unionism.” It’s the model that dominates most of the AFL-CIO, the country’s biggest union federation. The AFL-CIO is highly bureaucratic and top-down. It doesn’t have much need, then, for rank-and-file struggle or democracy — those things would be too disruptive to power at the top. Burns shows how that approach is driven by union leaders’ links to the Democratic Party. Those leaders mostly refuse to use workers’ most important weapon — the strike — to squeeze the bosses. Instead, they sit on their hands, because they’re counting on Democrats for better laws and busying themselves with “get out the vote” campaigns. Bureaucrats and Democrats, in other words, work together to keep workers in line.

This approach has been a total failure. And that’s because, when workers don’t build power to strike and disrupt the flow of profits, two things happen. Bosses and politicians walk all over unions and workers lose faith in unions, too. And that’s exactly what has happened. Between 1980 and today — the heyday of “business unionism” — strikes plummeted; the ruling class dismantled unions; unionization numbers dipped from 20-30% to about 11% today.

But one of the most interesting, and important, insights Burns has into unions today is regarding the “left-wing” that’s developed inside union bureaucracies — and they ways it has failed, too.

In the 1990s, Burns notes, union leaders developed another (failed) approach. He calls this “labor liberalism.” It was born out of the failures of business unionism, and it’s the model we see, for example, in the SEIU. Labor liberalism tries to fight back against the decline of unions with a wider appeal to things like anti-racism and gender equality. In other words, the goal is to broaden the movement as a way to bolster unions.

It’s crucial for unions to champion those things, but “labor liberalism” uses it as a way to avoid real fights with the ruling class. Instead, it appeals to an abstract “community power,” relies on symbolic actions, pairs up with non-profits that can’t really disrupt the flow of profits, and so on — instead of battles on the shop floor where the exploitation of workers, and the bosses’ weaponizing of racism and sexism, is happening. In so doing, labor liberalism also has little need for building up rank-and-file, bottom-up struggles in the workplace or real rank-and-file, democratic control of union decisions as a whole. And like business unionism, it doesn’t take the fight to the bosses through militant strikes.

Neither of these bureaucratic approaches can help us today, Burns says. And he’s absolutely right. We see proof, for example, in the failure of the RWDSU in organizing an Amazon warehouse. The leaders of the RWDSU look like the textbook version of “labor liberals.” They denounce racism and call for solidarity against discrimination — which is a good thing. But in Alabama we got a glimpse of a labor liberal approach to organizing that couldn’t beat the bosses. From the reports coming out of Alabama at the time, the method looked mostly top-down, lacking deep connections to large-scale, on-the-ground struggle of the workers there.

Burns is reminding us there’s another way to organize in a union. Its golden age was during the roiling mass strikes of the 1930s that terrified the ruling class; Burns calls it class struggle unionism.

It’s rooted in the “us and them” attitude discussed earlier; the workplace is a site of class struggle, of bosses trying to increase the rate of exploitation of workers, and workers trying to fight back. Class struggle unionism has a bottom up approach to building union power because it’s built on rank-and-filers’ own, daily battles with bosses in the workplace. And it’s a kind of unionizing that has to be politically independent, he says; when we kowtow to Democrats and wait for them to save us, we give up our power to fight for ourselves at work and in the streets.

As Burns points out perfectly, striking has to lie at the heart of class struggle unionism. That’s because workers stand at a key chokepoint of capitalism: we produce all profits. So the strike — refusing to produce profit for the bosses — has to be our unions’ key weapon (even though the bureaucratic unions have mostly abandoned it). But building powerful strikes, he reminds us, means doing what unions have avoided for decades: breaking the law. Labor law is designed to keep us from winning. For example: state laws like the Taylor Law in New York forbid public sector strikes. National labor law forbids solidarity strikes — where one union will go on strike to support another union that’s walked off the job. And it forbids militantly stopping scabs from taking over our jobs during strikes. All of these laws aim to gut the power of unions to fight and win. That’s why winning means breaking these laws.

Burns shows that building that kind of strike power means uniting workers across our differences — across the class, inside and outside workplaces. In other words, we need the kind of anti-racist unionism that is also fiercely fights against gender oppression, racial oppression and every other form of oppression too — since racism, sexism, and homophobia divide workers and undermine their collective power. Where labor liberals say that they want that kind of power, the goal of class struggle unionism is to make it a reality: to link across our workplaces to fight all kinds of oppression with strikes. This is a key to increasing the power of both at our own jobs and the fights of our diverse class outside of the workplace.

Burns’ proposals have only become more urgent in recent weeks. We know the ruling class is ramping up its attacks on working-class and oppressed people; not only is union busting at Starbucks and Amazon and elsewhere in full swing, but also in the overturning ofRoe v. Wade since it’s the working class, people of color and the poor who will suffer most from lack of abortion care. Bodily autonomy is at the core of worker rights. Burns is exactly right that we face the urgent task today of moving our unions past the bureaucratic, staid and stately unionism that won’t lift a fighter to really fight oppression — of building fighting unions willing to go to battle in the streets and our workplaces. Our power as workers and in unions comes from the fact that all profits come from us. Shutting off the spigot of profit — striking — is how we use that power.
The Problem of the Democratic Party

But Burns’ important book is also marked by a key contradiction that runs through its length.

On the one hand, Burns points out — relentlessly and in detail — the role that the Democratic Party has played in weakening and betraying the labor movement. In this, too, Class Struggle Unionism is a very different book than most on unions in the last few decades. (There’s nothing even close to this critique in other major books like Lichtenstein’s State of the Union from several years ago, or any of Jane McAlevey’s books. Kim Moody’s works are a key exception.)

For example, Burns points out that union leaders in the U.S. have made it the central plank of their strategy for unions to beg Democrats for better laws, and in return, endorse and donate to Democratic candidates. He shows again and again what a complete disaster this has been for unions. To name just a few examples since World War II: Democrats have been key to passing damaging labor law (like Taft Hartley in 1947, which severely restricted when and how unions can strike). Democrats fought viciously against unions on strike (like against the Chicago Teachers Union in 2012 and 2021). It was Democrats who spearheaded the brutal repression of the anti-racist uprising in the summer of 2020. The Democrats refused to take real steps to codify abortion rights in the last 50 years, and now refuse to fight to reinstate them. The list goes on and on.

In maybe his sharpest critique of the Democratic Party in the book, Burns writes:


Now, one could argue that putting millions of dollars and countless volunteer hours into a party that constantly betrays labor’s interests is a waste, and one could argue that if that were it, while bad, labor could deal with it — after all, we waste money on all kinds of things. But that’s not it; the close reliance on the Democratic Party allows the ideas of the billionaire class into the labor movement. Rather than the class struggle ideas discussed in chapter 2, the alliance with the Democratic party encourages moderation, support of U.S. corporate foreign policy, and cooperation with and a reliance upon the very government that is set up to protect the billionaire class. It is a conservatizing force and offers an alternative to labor militancy. This is far worse than mere wasting of resources on elections, as it sets a wrong direction for labor.2

He continues:


But despite all the evidence to the contrary, the leadership of unions still holds out hope that someday they can elect Democrats and reform labor law. Even though this will never happen, it is a way of avoiding labor’s crises. … Even worse, this alliance with Democrats is used as a kind of outlet valve. When sharp struggle flares up, the business unionists are frequently caught off guard and are not in control. Typically, they try to divert struggles back into the safe haven of electoral politics.3

And Class Struggle Unionism shows exactly why this is no accident or mistake on the part of the Democratic Party. It’s a party of, and for, the ruling elite; when it convinces us to “get out the vote” instead of fighting against our bosses in the workplaces and marching in the streets, it has done its job perfectly.

But this is where the contradiction comes in. Everything in the book points to a key lesson for building up real class-struggle unions: we have to break the hold of the Democrats over our unions.

Even though the entire book points to this lesson, it shies away from it. For example, when Burns lists four tactics unions need to become more militant, a fight for political independence from the Democratic Party doesn’t make the cut (page86 and again on 133) — even though he says that “these tactics would be opposed by Democratic and Republican judges and politicians alike” (89). In between his sharp critiques of the Democratic Party, Burns quotes Bernie Sanders as an authority on class struggle unionism (16). He ends the book with a statement of support for AOC and Bernie, both representatives of the Democratic Party (142-143). In fact, he constantly seems to say Democrats could help us build class struggle unions. At various points, the book seems to try to actually build our faith in the party that it just showed is so harmful to class struggle.

It’s definitely true that Sanders and AOC have helped inspire many leftists in the US. Bernie’s appearance at Labor Notes this year, for example, shows that he’s admired by many of the committed militants fighting in the left wing of the union movement, who are looking to him as a champion of labor. But this situation is full of contradictions, too, and it’s crucial we don’t close our eyes to them.

Whether Bernie and AOC want to or not, they’re serving a key role in the Democratic Party. They’re gathering up the left wing of the labor and social movements and scooping them back into the party — delivering them to party leaders like Biden. They’re helping paper over the Democratic Party’s role as the graveyard of social movements, the constant betrayer of unions.

One example helps show just how deep this problem is when it comes to Burns’ book. It was the Democratic Party in Philadelphia, New York, Minneapolis, and beyond that cracked down on the anti-racist protests in 2020 — a movement led by Black and brown young people, overwhelmingly from the working class. It’s a party that has long championed the racist, murderous police. But amid all this in 2020, Bernie Sanders was a pole of attraction for many activists — in unions and outside them — who wanted a radical change in the United States. Gathering their support, he then did his duty — he endorsed Biden and called for us all to vote for him to solve our problems. That helped coopt the massive energy in the streets and in the workplaces, delivering it to a politician who opposes every one of the major demands of the uprising and has only ever betrayed unions. Biden then turned around and called for more police and a bigger military. Is any of this close to the kind of anti-racist, internationalist, class struggle unionism Burns is calling for?

Why this contradiction in the book, then? Part of the reason has to be Burns’ own contradictory position. He is part of a union’s leadership: he’s “director of collective bargaining” in the flight attendants’ union CWA-AFA (led by Sarah Nelson). That’s one of the more militant and inspiring unions in the United States. But it’s also a union tied to the Democratic Party, too. For instance, it endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2015, and then Biden in 2020. Burns’ book embodies that duality.

There also seems to be something bigger and more important in all this, too. The contradiction in this book seems to register a kind of discontent or development inside organized labor, among the rank-and-file, in recent years.

For example, at the massive 2022 Labor Notes conference, a Left Voice member put the point directly to Sarah Nelson herself — Burns’ boss in the CWA-AFA, who also wrote a blurb at the beginning of the book praising it. The Left Voice comrade called for real independence of our unions from the Democrats. That call was met with mad applause in a huge, overcrowded hall of union activists. But Nelson’s answer was telling. She didn’t defend the Democrats — in fact, in her talk in that panel, she blasted their track record on labor, like Burns does. But she refused to call for a break.

This seems to be a sign of something big developing at the level of the rank and file, causing something of a shift at the top of the union itself — a shift that expresses itself as this contradiction.

But that means that now, more than ever, is the time to fight to cut all political ties between our unions and any capitalist party. Building real class struggle unions demands it.
Transforming our Unions

Burns’ book is also crucial for its championing of union democracy. But here too, we have to take Burns’ ideas further than the book itself does.

Class Struggle Unionism points out, again and again, how hostile unions today tend to be towards real union democracy. Not just the “business unionism” model, but also “labor liberalism” too, have little need for union democracy. That’s because of how dangerous real bottom-up power would be to these models.

The goal of both business unionism and labor liberalism is mostly to avoid the shop-floor, day-to-day battles of the rank and file, which could quickly get out of their control. Instead, the goal is to channel that kind of energy into voting and into the limiting grievance process, dealing with conflict in the narrow confines of labor law, and so on. These kinds of unions are driven, not by the workers themselves, but by an army of bureaucrats.

Burns points out, rightly, that as a result, building class struggle unions has to mean transforming our unions themselves — making them far more democratic — in order to put the power into the hands of rank-and-filers.

One of the key tools for better democracy is running reform slates for better leaders:


Even in its weakened state, the labor movement includes millions of workers, and local and national unions have resources that could be used to take on employers. Having control of the resources of the union would give the platform to implement class struggle politics for these reasons, getting new leaders is a necessary step in moving the struggle forward.4

And yet these kinds of challenges to more bureaucratic union leaders must be paired with strong and militant rank-and-file organs of struggle. Burns insightfully points to the limits of reform slates themselves: “Although union reform sounds radical, it is actually a fairly conservative approach because it is essentially saying the problem is just bad leaders.”5 The problem, however, is deeper — it lies in focusing unions on supporting Democrats and on staying “inside the lines” of the ruling class’s labor laws, instead of fighting to shift the balance of power between bosses and workers. The center of gravity in building class struggle unions must lie in bottom-up struggle against the bosses.

When rank-and-file struggle becomes the foundation, we can “catch the union bureaucrats in the middle” (115). In other words, it’s organizing at the level of rank-and-file battles with bosses that taps the energy and anger of workers being exploited on a day-to-day basis, and can push union leaders into helping mobilize on a wide and militant scale, and into preparing to strike, to break labor law that would rob us of our power, and so on.

In this call for unions based on real union democracy and bottom-up struggle, Burns’ book is an extremely important intervention today. We’ve seen in recent months an upsurge in new unionizing efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and beyond. In this new upsurge of unionizing, the reminder of the need for robust worker control of our unions, to resist the bureaucratizing tendencies at the top of our unions — can’t be underestimated.

At the same time, though, Burns’ book doesn’t wrestle with this question of union democracy fully enough.

In particular, the book doesn’t grapple with major changes in the union bureaucracy in the last forty years and how they undermine union democracy. At one point in the book, Burns says: “With union density at 6 percent in the private sector, we don’t have a powerful labor leadership to critique.”6 But this misses a crucial point: in recent years union bureaucracies have fundamentally changed how they undermine and destroy bottom-up power in unions.

Since about 1980 — as unions have become weaker and weaker under the blows of neoliberal assault — union bureaucracies have become far more massive. They even accelerated their growth dramatically. And they have centralized and concentrated their power at the top, and against rank-and-filers, to a degree we’ve probably never seen before in history. In part, union leaders have done this by using the “human resource management” techniques that corporations use.

This is a big part of why we haven’t just seen a collapse in union membership and strikes since 1980 (collapses that Burns points out). We also see a collapse in the number and size of rank-and-file wildcat actions. In other words, the bureaucracy has become much better at coopting the “militant minority,” making sure rank-and-filers stay inside the tight legal limits set up by the Democrats and Republicans, like the ones that outlaw some public sector strikes; that forbid solidarity strikes, and strikes during the life of a contract; that forbid stopping scabs; and so on.

Not only have there been fewer strikes, but the new bureaucracy that emerged in the 1980s has also honed the art of the highly “professionalized” strike. Strikes, as Kim Moody points out, became more staid and stately affairs after the roiling struggles of the 1940s. But they’ve become even more formulaic and “safe” through the new bureaucracy. This is especially clear in the ideas of the professional organizer Jane McAlevey.

McAlevey is the spokesperson of a new layer of professional unionists that has been growing since about 1980. It’s a layer that recognizes that unions really do need to strike occasionally. So they offer a model of how to do that while staying inside the boundaries of capitalist law: never during a contract; no solidarity strikes; no militant stopping of scabs from crossing picket lines; etc. Her influential books make it clear, too, that this is a model that bends over backwards in order to not disrupt the Democratic Party, even when fighting Democrats (Her books No Shortcuts and A Collective Bargain, for example, are really clear: she sees unions as means to support the Democratic Party and secure it a congressional majority). By staying inside labor law, these “professionalized” strikes offer the minimum of disruption to a Democratic mayor, governor, or president.

But that new bureaucracy isn’t just better at stopping or channeling strike energy, and keeping rank-and-filers in the boundaries of labor law that robs us of our power to strike. Labor unions are also a key tool that links the labor movement to the Democratic Party (as McAlevey makes clear). They’re the ones driving “get out the vote” campaigns, lobbying Democrats, and on and on, endlessly. They’re the main link between unions and the Democratic Party; they’re the political police inside unions trying to force us to toe that political line.

In light of these changes, it’s not enough to call for more union democracy. We need a more radical approach: not just the fight for democracy, but the fight for radical union democracy. That would mean, for example, not only radically limiting the amount bureaucrats are paid, and how long they serve. It would also mean fighting to make the main decision-making body of the union regular mass worker assemblies — truly putting the power of the union in rank-and-filers’ hands. This in turn means not just fighting the bureaucracy of our unions. Building class struggle unions will likely have to mean fighting to dismantle the bureaucracy that limits us, replacing it as far as we possibly can with the mass democratic decisions by the workers themselves.

Our union strategy to build class struggle unions, then, has to have a plan for how to deal with these changes in the bureaucracy. For this, it will be important to take an international perspective. It’s definitely true that we have to learn from the radical unions of the 1930s, during the heyday of the CIO (which,for Burns, is a constant source of inspiration). But more recently, too, Argentina has seen powerful experiments in building class struggle unions we can learn from.

In the 1990s, rank-and-filers at the Zanon ceramics factory in Argentina began a battle with their union bureaucracy, a battle led by Trotskyist militants like Raul Godoy. In that battle, the workers began dismantling the union bureaucracy itself — installing the workers’ assembly as the highest decision-making body of the union rather than union officials, making sure all elected leaders were recallable at any time and setting term limits for them, and so on. One key part of the union statutes that emerged out of this battle was the political independence of the union from all parties of capitalism. As Godoy points out, the workers’ assembly played a key role in the upheavals in Argentina in the years that followed. In 2001, amid a social and economic crisis, the Zanon workers occupied the factory, placing it under worker control, and dubbed it “Fabrica sin Patrones” (Factory without Bosses). In FaSinPat we see the possibility of a class struggle unionism we badly need in the United States.
What Is To Be Done?

Burns is exactly right: we need class struggle unionism. And his book is an inspiring call for fiercer, stronger unions ready to fight the ruling rich.

Still, we’ll need to take Burns’ ideas further than Burns does. For class struggle unions, we’ll have to fight to sever our unions’ ties to the Democratic Party and to any party of the capitalists, and to outmaneuver and dismantle the union bureaucracy that serves the Democrats — all for a real, internationalist class struggle. It’s all the more crucial to have a strategy to build that pole of power, as the Democratic Party tries to woo the new union movement like the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

But it’s also not enough to reject the Democrats. We badly need a rallying cry, a different vision of the world, to build up different kinds of unions — not just a negative message (against the Democrats and bureaucrats) but a positive one of a different, liberating, revolutionary politics.

This is one major reason we need our own political party for the working class and oppressed. It would be a place to help coordinate our own organizing skills, share them, and help build up groups or cores of class struggle union organizers in our unions. And it would be a center of gravity, a pole of attraction away from the parties of the ruling rich, like the Democratic Party.

Burns’ book is inspiring and powerful. The task now is to take his ideas further than he does — and fight for a militant, radically democratic labor movement that severs all ties to any capitalist party, that fights the ruling class itself in the name of the working class and oppressed.

Notes

Notes↑1 Burns, Joe. Class Struggle Unionism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2022 (pp. 9-10).
↑2 Ibid. 79-80. My emphasis.
↑3 Ibid. 81. My emphasis
↑4 Ibid. 114
↑5 Ibid. 115
↑6 Ibid. 102

Jason Koslowski is a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia.

‘A United Labor Movement Can Stop the Far Right’: An Interview with Warren Montag

Warren Montag discusses the rise of the U.S. Far Right, and how the labor movement can help create a unified force capable of stopping it.


Left Voice 

July 29, 2022


Warren Montag is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is also one of the leading specialists in the field of Althusserian studies, editor of the journal Décalages, and author of several books, including Philosophy’s Perpetual War: Althusser and his Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014), written with Mike Hill, among others.

Montag was a member of a collective oriented to the ideas of Ernest Mandel (1976-1978) and then of the organizations Workers Power (1978-1985) and Solidarity (1985-1990), in which he served on the national committee.

Here, he is interviewed by Jimena Vergara of Left Voice and Juan Dal Maso, an Argentinian Marxist and member of the Trotskyist Fraction. His book Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci, and Marxism was published in English last summer by Palgrave Macmillan.

*

In past interviews you raised the idea that the Trumpist Right, with or without Trump, is going to continue playing a role on the American political scene. What is the current situation of the Far Right after the overturning of Roe v. Wade?

The electoral defeat of Trump in November 2020 initially appeared to be a popular repudiation of Trumpism, a result of its embrace of the mass organizations of the Far Right, its commitment to the use of state violence against immigrants and later BLM, while vowing to protect profits, no matter how high the mortality rate from Covid. At the same time, Biden seemed to have reinvented himself as a latter-day FDR poised to implement a 21st-century New Deal that would appeal to employers and landlords, as well as workers and tenants, restoring and extending the nation’s infrastructure while rebuilding the welfare state ravaged by neoliberal reforms. The signs of a reawakening of the labor movement, and for the first time in decades the existence of a mass socialist organization, only confirmed the parallel to the 1930s. It appeared that the U.S. had turned a corner, and Trumpism was revealed as a transient aberration in U.S. history.

While Trump’s rejection of the results of the 2020 election and his decision to mobilize the Stop the Steal movement worried some observers, the integrity of the electoral process as a whole remained beyond question for most of the anti-Trump majority. Trump’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the election results could be dismissed as little more than another demonstration of his narcissism and, as such, unlikely to interfere with politics as usual. The assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, came as a shock, and the fact that the participants did not achieve their goal of halting the transition to a Biden presidency proved far less important than what it revealed: (1) the precariousness of an incoherent electoral system riddled with loopholes that functioned thanks to habit rather than law, (2) the degree to which sections of law enforcement agencies and the military (particularly the army) sympathized with the authoritarian goals of the Far Right, and (3) within little more than two weeks, the capitulation of all but a handful of the Republicans in Congress to the party’s Far Right. These developments created a dynamic that not even the arrests of nearly 10 percent of the participants in the action could stop. In fact, they contributed to the solidification of a united front between the militias (particularly the Oath Keepers) and the white nationalist street-fighting organizations (the Proud Boys, above all) that attracted a new cohort of recruits. These developments also attracted the growing “Christian nationalist” movement, whose presence encouraged the Far Right to prioritize the struggles around abortion and “homosexuality.” The Far Right is now larger, more unified, and more effective than it was before January 6, 2021.

But perhaps the most important change in the Trumpist movement, which now dominates the Republican Party, was its acceptance of the violent mass movement as a legitimate and necessary adjunct to the Stop the Steal campaign, which most party leaders had endorsed by the end of January 2021. Despite the supposed failure of the attack on the Capitol, it revealed to Republicans the weaknesses, both systemic and conjunctural, that opened a road to a dominant position in the major political institutions from which they could be dislodged only with great difficulty and which no longer depended on who voted, but on who controlled the polling places and who counted the votes. It also showed Republicans the degree to which there would be little effective opposition to such an effort and far more open support from various elements in law enforcement and the military than they ever imagined. This convinced a large majority of Republicans in Congress that there was no need to reach out beyond the base of the party. Even if Trump 2020 was a lost cause, there was a clear pathway to the institutionalization of the rule of the Far Right. The GOP’s alliance with the organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers had awakened its primal instincts and showed the party what tens of millions shared with it: racism, misogyny, Christian nationalism, imperialism, the abandonment of the subaltern classes to the gospel of personal responsibility and the sanctity of private property.

Included in this great awakening was the majority of the Supreme Court. After a few tests of the public reaction to decisions blurring the distinction between church and state and later a leak of the Roe v. Wade decision a month before the official announcement, the court allowed states to outlaw abortion, even in the case of rape and even if carrying the fetus to term threatened the mother’s life. Many elected representatives said very openly that the life of the innocent unborn child must take precedence over the life of the mother. Doctors could be charged with murder or for being an accessory to murder for discussing the option of abortion with pregnant women. The court will likely allow state legislatures to prohibit the sale of contraceptives or at least allow individual pharmacists to refuse to sell them. This decision rejects precedent and imposes a decidedly minoritarian religious doctrine on a solid majority of the electorate; this points to the court majority’s commitment to the project of cultural counterrevolution. Other, apparently limited decisions, eclipsed by the denial of a constitutional right to abortion, assert the right of state legislatures to reject federal health and safety regulations for the protection of workers and consumers, environmental protections (including measures to slow climate change) and federal regulation of guns and gun ownership.

Finally, to address the question of Trump: he retains a loyal following of tens of millions of people, despite the evidence gathered by the January 6 Committee. His embrace of the violence of his supporters, including his refusal to denounce their threats to “hang Mike Pence,” are unlikely to alienate more than a small fraction of his movement. In the unlikely event he is charged with a criminal offense, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is if anything more dangerous than Trump, eagerly awaits the chance to take his place. The MAGA movement will not disappear anytime soon.

How do you see the relationship between the Far Right and the GOP? And how do you see the relationship between the Far Right and the police departments?

For those on the Left who, for different and sometimes opposing reasons, sought to minimize the significance of the rise of the Far Right and the growing importance of violence and the threat of violence in U.S. politics, the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, confirmed their analysis: it was the final crisis of Trump’s ragtag army of QAnon supporters, militias, assorted neo-Nazi groups and street-fighting organizations like the Proud Boys, more a collective temper tantrum than a riot, whose participants did little more than break windows and vandalize offices. Because the participants’ average age was around 40, the riot seemed like nothing more than a revolt of the “dads” who could not accept the reality of social progress.

Eighteen months later, it appears that what took place on the steps of the Capitol was merely the first skirmish in a protracted battle. Even though nearly 10 percent of the participants have been arrested, including the leading figures of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keeper militia, both groups have resumed their planned expansion. The Proud Boys, in particular, have grown and spread into new areas of the U.S., and they regularly attack abortion rights protests, Pride marches, and school boards to support with threats and actual violence anti-CRT activists in the campaign to purge local boards of anti-racist members. The Oath Keepers are more security-conscious but have increased their presence along the Southern Border. More importantly, the lead-up to January 6 led the two organizations to cooperate and coordinate their actions.

As I noted earlier, the power of the Far Right, a power that has yet to be openly displayed, but which is palpable, has transformed the Republican Party, just as the connection to the Republican Party has helped unify large sections of the Far Right. In the first case, the GOP no longer pretends to speak for “the silent majority.” Nor is it particularly concerned to win support for its program among a majority of the electorate. Republicans, as the Supreme Court’s recent rulings show, are increasingly willing to embrace political positions rejected by large majorities in the U.S. We can expect that the court, acting in concert with the 30 Republican-controlled state legislatures, will work to overturn federal civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation, with devastating effects on racialized minority groups and the LGTBQ+ community. Far-right organizations serve as the advance guard of the Republican Party, attempting through violence and intimidation to prevent any effective mobilization against measures that target certain communities. We should expect and prepare for a formidable effort (legal, as well as extra-legal) to shut down abortion providers in the states where abortion remains legal. It is likely to include mass mobilizations beyond far-right circles, involving churches and civic groups, as well as individual violence, including bombings, shootings, and assaults.

In 2021 the number of armed demonstrations more than doubled from the previous year. As the Supreme Court decision involving gun laws takes effect, we can expect to see a further increase in armed protests and a corresponding decrease in protests organized by the Left. The demonstrations of far-right power and their effectiveness in demobilizing resistance encourage the rightward movement of the Republican Party. The GOP supports unlimited gun rights not simply because it has an erroneous “originalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment. It does so to ensure that its mass base is armed and can forcibly take over local and state-level institutions. Such developments are made possible by an increasing tendency of law enforcement agencies at every level of government to allow far-right violence. Various organizations have documented the steady decline in police action at demonstrations when far-right groups are involved, even though violence occurs far more frequently when such groups are present.

It is also important to acknowledge that sections of law enforcement and security agencies were prepared to support Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, including elements of the Secret Service who may have attempted to prevent Pence from certifying the election by removing him from the Capitol on false pretexts. It has just now come to light that the Secret Service destroyed the records of its communications from the period January 5–6, 2021, despite having been told before the end of January 2021 to preserve all records relating to the 6th. Within the various branches of the military, especially the army and air force, the influence of the Far Right continues to grow. Republicans recently blocked a congressional investigation of their activities. The Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, has openly refused to implement changes to Trump-era policies concerning the treatment of unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers. Along the border with Mexico, ICE agents work closely with heavily armed militias that, contrary to the law, capture and detain border crossers at will, under conditions that they alone determine.

During the Trump administration, the new Far Right merged or started coordinating with the traditional Far Right led by white supremacist organizations. Even though the so-called Far Right in the U.S. is very heterogeneous, the assault on the Capitol showed their capacity to organize and act together. What does the map of the Far Right look like today? And how would you characterize these groups — given that there is a debate within the international Left about whether these new organizations are strictly fascist or new phenomena?

As I mentioned earlier, there is a tendency to unification, not just in terms of organization, but also politically. Thanks to their cooperation in preparation for January 6, the Oath Keepers militia and the Proud Boys discovered that their differences were minimal. It is now unclear what the distinction is between militia-type organizations (nominally focused on “defending the Constitution”) and the groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front (who function as the squadistri of the MAGA movement). The anti-abortion movement will likely provide further opportunities for joint work and political and strategic convergence, and it will facilitate the integration of what is now called Christian nationalism or white Christian nationalism into the Far Right.

It is extremely difficult to assign this movement, which is still information and whose heterogeneity is such that it could suffer major fractures along a number of different lines, to some preexisting category based on a checklist of characteristics. This approach has led some observers to narrowly define fascism according to the conditions of its emergence in 1920s Italy or Germany. Doing so portrays fascism as unlikely to be repeated, in which case there is no point in looking for it now. In addition to the theoretical and historical questions raised by this position, it tends to be associated in the current conjuncture with strategic and tactical decisions: if the current movement is fascist, then the Left must enter into a popular front–type alliance with all “democratic” forces (i.e., the Democratic Party), which requires putting aside or subordinating the struggles and objectives that would alienate these forces in the face of the overwhelming danger of fascism. The history of the 20th century, however, from the struggle against fascism in Spain to the tragedy of Unidad Popular in Chile, has shown that holding back the workers’ movement and, today, struggles against racism and for reproductive rights, as well as the rights of the LGTBQ+ community, necessarily demobilizes and weakens the forces fighting fascism or dictatorship.

Another persistent theme in this discussion is the notion that because far-right mobilizations cannot be characterized as fascist, we should regard the participants not as “enemies” but as misguided people reacting irrationally to the devastation caused by neoliberal policies in the U.S. Rather than fight them, we should explain to them that their self-interest lies in bringing about socialism. I cannot even begin to discuss the problems with any such position, theoretically and practically. Instead, I will simply ask why this pedagogical model does not apply to participants in fascist movements in the period before the consolidation of a fascist regime. Fascist or not, it may at times be possible to reach part of the Far Right’s periphery, but this can only occur if the balance of forces shifts in favor of the Left, that is, the working class and the popular movements, through their combined struggle. To change what the Far Right thinks, we must first change what they do and what they can do.

The current Far Right, no matter how we characterize it, certainly exhibits some of the characteristics associated with fascism before it came to power, in Italy 1919–21 and Germany 1929–33. The existing Far Right has, very consciously, adopted the strategic repertoire of fascism during these periods: confronting and defeating the Left in the street and taking the struggle to Left strongholds (e.g., Berkeley) to deny it freedom of movement, while establishing the Far Right’s ability to go where it pleases (the Proud Boys have taken the chant associated with the Left and anti-racist movements and made it the slogan of their triumph: “Whose streets? Our streets!”). But it is not yet clear whether this movement will move in the direction of a fascist regime or become a variant of authoritarian (white, Christian) neoliberalism. This will be determined by the power of the resistance to the consolidation of quasi-permanent Republican rule through legal and extra-legal means. In the absence of effective resistance, we should anticipate a period of political violence, much of it carried out by nonstate forces, with the blessing of the state, and an attempt to crush the Left and labor and popular movements. The frequency of armed demonstrations should be understood as a warning, and the court’s decision allowing private individuals to purchase and carry military-grade weapons, if declared legal by state legislatures, further increases the likelihood of political violence. What the Left does over the next two years will be decisive.
You also stated in the past that social movements had to be independent of Biden’s electoral campaign. How is the class struggle today affected by the relationship between social movements, the labor movement, and the Democratic Party?

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the Democratic Party cannot respond to, letting alone stop, the still ongoing offensive waged by the Republican Party, goaded ever further rightward by its mass base and its far-right vanguard, a well as a Supreme Court bent on undoing nearly a century of laws establishing the rights of workers, racialized minority groups, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. Not only have the Democrats failed to pass any of the legislation that formed the bedrock of the 2020 campaign, they cannot even agree to suspend the filibuster, which has become one of the most effective obstacles to democratic decision-making and majority rule. The party leadership appears not to understand the Republican strategy to take and hold power, or to confront the fact that the power of the Far Right continues to grow, and that sections of law enforcement and the military are openly insubordinate. They do understand, however, the threat to their credibility posed by the party’s left wing, having recently decided to primary Rashida Tlaib, one of its leading figures. And while the hearings concerning the conduct of Trump, his cabinet, staff, and chief advisers have revealed some significant facts concerning Trump’s intentions and actions, it is unlikely that he will be prevented from running in 2024, despite his attempts to steal the election and prevent the certification of Biden’s victory.

Nevertheless, there will be enormous pressure on labor and all other movements to prioritize the 2022 and 2024 elections above all else, and postpone the mobilizations that are so badly needed but that are too often regarded as of secondary importance. In fact, it is highly likely that the Democratic Party leadership will insist on downplaying issues it defines as divisive or alienating to the “average voter” (universal healthcare, defunding the police, climate change) while paying a disproportionate amount of attention to Trump and the (admittedly ample) lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, figures like Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. More importantly, however, the November elections coincide with a whole series of battles as draconian anti-abortion laws come before state legislatures, precisely at the moment when mass action is most necessary. Similarly, it is critical that the labor movement maintain the momentum of its organizing campaigns and extend the power of individual unions to strike and to support each other’s struggles. By participating in the struggles of popular movements, the labor movement can help create a unified force that can stop the Far Right and advance the interests of the working class. Increasing the power of the organized working class in an alliance with the diverse organizations of the oppressed is the only way to build a socialist Left that can challenge capitalism’s destruction of the environment, its wars, its disregard for human life, the hatred it fosters, and the violence it feeds.

Germany: The Port Strike and the Fight Against Inflation Pose the Question of Strategy


Striking dockworkers at ports in northern Germany are spearheading the fight against inflation. What strategy is needed to lead them to victory? The answer resonates with impending battles in the United States.

Stefan Schneider July 31, 2022

Dock workers in Hamburg marching on June 23.

 Photo: Axel Heimken/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Images

Two weeks ago, thousands of dockworkers in the ports of northern Germany went on strike for the third time in just a few weeks. The 48-hour strike for wages that would cover the real inflation being felt by these workers was the longest work stoppage in the ports in more than 40 years — reason enough for the bosses in the port, and beyond, to tremble with fear for their profits and attack the right to strike. Some 17 injunctions have been sought in labor courts to stop the strike. Rainer Dulger, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA), went so far as to call for declaring a “national emergency” to make it easier to break strikes in the future.

Even though the leadership of the ver.di union1 denounced these attacks, it ultimately accepted an out-of-court settlement in Hamburg that ruled out further strikes until August 26. This self-gagging was completely unnecessary — after all, the interim injunctions were shot down in other courts, and in the Hamburg case as well, and so the legal avenues were far from exhausted. But it does raise a question: What strategy is needed to actually win the battle in the ports?

The bosses’ attack on the right to strike, along with the caving of the ver.di leadership, has been met with tremendous discontent. This is clear from the several thousand signature collected on a petition in just a few days — many from dockworkers themselves. On top of this, the workers’ showed their willingness to fight with several actions. The day after the out-of-court settlement in Hamburg, for example, 5,000 workers took part in a demonstration and were attacked by the police with pepper spray. A work slowdown in Hamburg the following weekend, at facilities run by terminal operator Eurogate, kept almost all ships from being loaded and unloaded, as workers there told Klasse Gegen Klasse. These initial, progressive reactions show the enormous potential for what could unfold in the dockworkers’ struggle.

There a lot of reasons that explain the workers’ willingness to fight, as Jana Kamischke, shop steward at the Port of Hamburg, said in an interview:

The work is getting more and more intense, and there’s a staff shortage. The norm is 60 hours of overtime, or more, per month. Automation is destroying good-paying jobs and creating more and more precarious jobs. In addition to their permanent employees, the port operations in Bremerhaven and Hamburg include hundreds of nonpermanent employees — modern-day day laborers. Hourly wages range overall between 14 and 28 euros. It’s been a downward spiral for years. But with inflation, we’re not going to put up with it anymore.

The term “nonpermanent workers” is a legal construct that allows port companies to use hundreds and even thousands of workers every day in an ultra-flexible way as temporary workers — or not. Temporary employment has a long tradition in port work. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was the rule in many places. This form of employment was justified by the seasonal fluctuations in shipping and the difficulty of calculating the arrival of ships. Today, these workers are employed by the Gesamthafenbetrieb (GHB), which is nothing other than a temporary employment agency, which lends them out to individual member companies on a daily basis. These workers have an employment contract with vacation benefits and social security, but no guaranteed working hours. They receive a guaranteed wage from the GHB when they do work, but whether they are allowed to work is subject to the whims of the bosses.

As if that were not enough, the bosses are also trying to drive a wedge between workers who are unionized, by introducing wage tiers — as Jana Kamischke also explained:

The employers are offering 12.5 percent over 24 months, which is 6.25 percent over twelve months — and that’s exclusively for workers at the container terminals. But there are also lots of conventional operations and automobile handling there. Wages for the lower groups would rise only by 2.78 percent. That’s unacceptable.

Obviously, such wage increases are far from adequate. After all, the general inflation rate is already close to 8 percent, and price increases for rents, food, electricity and heating are far above that average. Low-income people, students, the unemployed, and welfare recipients are all especially affected by the wave of price increases, forced to spend a particularly large proportion of their income on food, energy, and rent.

Meanwhile, shipping companies are raking in record profits. Hamburg-based shipping line Hapag-Lloyd, for example, posted 4 billion euros in profits in the first quarter of 2022 alone. While transporting roughly the same number of containers as a year ago, Hapag-Lloyd doubled its freight rate. The Hamburg-based company HHLA generated 228.2 million euros in profits in 2021 — an increase of more than 80 percent. Particularly explosive is the fact that the city of Hamburg has a stake in both Hapag-Lloyd and HHLA, in which it holds the majority of shares. HHLA was responsible for 11 of the 17 injunctions against the strike. In Bremen, the logistics group BLG is majority-owned by the state. In other words, the increasing precariousness in the ports and the attacks on the right to strike express not only the profit motive of individual capitalists, but state policy as well.
The Port as a “Strategic Position”

The reason for this is obvious: port logistics are central to capitalist profit — not only those of the port companies themselves, but also of a large component of the capitalists as a whole. The more containers that can be handled, the greater the profit not only for HHLA and others, but also for all capitalists, because their intermediate and end products circulate more quickly. Conversely, supply chain bottlenecks, which have increased significantly since the pandemic and are helping drive inflation, show what happens when logistics falter.

Workers at the ports hold what historian John Womack defines as a strategic position, that is, one that “allows some workers to determine the production of many others, whether within a company or throughout the economy.”2 Although Womack applies this definition only to the relationship between employee and boss, something more general can be derived from it: If the working class holds all the basic strategic positions in production, distribution, and service, it has enormous potential to change the relationship of forces between labor and capital as a whole, and to pose the question of power in the struggle against the capitalists and their state. Of course, “strategic positions” can be used on a purely economic level, but they can also be an enormous force in developing workers’ hegemony in the struggle against the capitalist system as a whole.

Whether this happens, though, is not a foregone conclusion. As a class, the position of the proletariat in the capitalist production process is already a given. Whether it uses its position — for what program and with what strategy — is another matter.

This brings us to the central point of this article. The strikes in the port are strategically significant in several respects. They are being used to negotiate who should pay the costs of the inflationary crisis: the capitalists or the workers. It is particularly important to resist the bosses’ attempts to divide the workers, and so it would be fatal to accept inflation-related compensation only for the higher-wage groups of workers who hold the most important levers at the container terminals, while the precarious sectors at the ports get practically nothing. The point is that the dockworkers who can exert the most pressure through their strike are not only striking for themselves in a corporate sense, but together with the precarious sectors — such as the nonpermanent workers — that capitalism can replace more quickly. But the argument can also be generalized: the dockworkers are faced with the task not only of winning the struggle for inflation compensation themselves, but of joining forces with all sectors of the working class that are already engaged in struggle or will be in the coming months, and of establishing a hegemonic program against inflation, crisis, and war.

The starting point for such a program must be the demand for immediate increases in wages and fixed payments, pensions, and benefits above the level of inflation, and automatic wage adjustments pegged to price increases. At the same time, it must raise the issue of government-imposed price caps, under the control of committees of workers and consumers, as part of the fight against increases in the cost of living. Of necessity, this poses further the question of opening the books of corporations as a way to control where their profits go. Corporations that raise prices or announce layoffs and closures while making profits, for example, must be expropriated without compensation and nationalized under workers’ control.

The looming winter crisis makes these demands more urgent than ever for millions of people. A nationalized energy supply could be planned democratically, making it possible to ensure that no households suffer. Such a perspective could also be generalized to include the nationalization of all key industries and the banking sector under workers’ control.

The worsening of the economic crisis stems from the imperialist escalation in Ukraine and the prospect of further crises and new wars. Standing idly by or limiting the fight only to wages is insufficient. The organizations of the working class must take the lead in the struggle against the war machine, promoting independent mobilization against the rearmament plans, the deployment of arms and troops abroad, the economic war being waged with sanctions, and the reactionary asylum policy that leaves refugees subjected to violence and deprivation. Here, too, the dockworkers hold a strategic position, since they can directly disrupt the logistics of war, putting themselves at the forefront of the struggle against the militaristic escalation that is putting the lives of millions of people at risk. There is already a petition circulating to hold a referendum against the transport and handling of arms through the port of Hamburg. The current labor dispute may provide an opportunity to broaden this initiative.

The starting point for this is promising, since the strikes in the port are part of a more general trend of strikes and other industrial action against inflation and the crisis unfolding in many European countries. This is developing unevenly, though, particularly in Germany. Here, wage strikes have thus far been stifled by the bureaucracy, with deals below the rate of inflation — as happened in the steel industry. Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness that an offensive struggle for higher wages is needed, as is evident in the Lufthansa strike — part of a wave of strikes in air transport throughout Europe — and in the upcoming round of collective bargaining by the IG Metall union, and prospectively in the negotiations for civil servant salaries (TVöD) slated for the winter.3
A Strategy Centered in Class Struggle that Challenges Reformist Mediation

If these early trends toward greater working-class activism and struggle are to be generalized, and if we are to overcome their gagging by the bureaucrats who control the union apparatuses, the discussion of strategy must be raised again, with full force.

The ver.di bureaucracy responded to the attack on the right to strike in the ports — an attack we’ve seen elsewhere, including the attempt by university clinics in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to get a court ban on strikes — by agreeing to an out-of-court settlement without any consultation with the workers or the bargaining committee. This ties the hands of the dockworkers until August 26, as negotiations continue to take place. Thus there is a very significant risk that a deal will be struck that doesn’t reflect the real relationship of forces.

For this reason alone, it is necessary to focus on a strategy of self-organization of the workers that goes beyond a negotiated solution by the union bureaucracy. To counter negotiations behind closed doors, without any rank-and-file influence, what’s needed is to organize open assemblies of all the dockworkers who are engaged in the struggle — unionized and unorganized, permanent and nonpermanent — to decide on the methods of struggle, what comes out of the negotiations, and whether to continue the strike. This includes discussing alternative forms of strikes, such as slowdowns, the challenge to the out-of-court settlement, and the need to unite the largest possible forces in a major organizing and fighting campaign against inflation and the overall effects of the crisis. At issue here is not only a victory at the ports, but how the struggle at the ports can become a beacon for the entire working class in Germany and throughout the world.

The strategic task at hand is not only for the dockworkers to free themselves from the grip of the apparatuses. What is posed is a decision about direction for the entire trade union movement and Left. On the one hand, there is submission to the strategy of the union bureaucracies and the reformist parties, which is aimed at negotiated settlements without major struggles, “concerted action” in partnership with the government, and isolating any real fights. On the other, there is pushing workers’ self-organization in the struggle for a hegemonic program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, starting with uniting the entire union movement and Left in a grand Coordinating Committee aimed at combining the port struggle and every other fight in active solidarity, while imposing on the trade union bureaucracies a unity of action for these demands.

The task of promoting such coordination falls in particular to the Network for Fighting Trade Unions (VKG), which is holding a conference in early October on trade union strategies against wage cuts, social cutbacks, and rearmament, in Frankfurt. Even if support for the port strike cannot wait until then, it must play a central role at the conference.

This coordination is not just about tactical support for this or that strike, but is a central strategic task, as becomes clear from two aspects of the current situation. First, the union bureaucracy’s control over the struggle, and its cooptation to the interests of capital, is enormous — especially in sectors strategic for capital accumulation such as heavy industry and the ports. The fact that we haven’t seen port strikes like those today for 40 years is testament to the fact that the union bureaucracy has pushed through decades of backroom negotiations with the bosses without active struggles by the workers themselves. In fact, one of the current negotiators for the port capitalists is Torben Seebold, former head of ver.di’s own national maritime industry group. It is imperative to organize rank-and-file dockworkers against the bureaucracy, that is, to build an anti-bureaucratic fraction within ver.di that can challenge the bureaucracy and ultimately toss it out.

This also requires a break with the prevailing Left strategy focused on winning elections and grabbing parliamentary seats in an effort to help manage capitalist misery and make it more bearable from atop the bourgeois state. Of course, this is what the Social Democratic Party (SPD) is trying to do today, at the head of the “Dare More Progress” coalition: mitigate the effects of inflation with reformist promises. At the same time, it is implementing the biggest rearmament package in decades and making Germany a first-rank imperialist military power capable of subjugating Eastern Europe and other regions not only economically but also militarily.

This characterization also applies to the Left Party and the organizations of the extra-parliamentary Left that are connected with it either directly or indirectly.4. While throughout Europe we are seeing the beginning of a trend toward heightened class struggle, DIE LINKE is in the deepest crisis in its history and plays no role at all in the current struggles. Instead, it wobbles from one electoral defeat to the next. While Bernd Riexinger, the former party chairman, as well as some local units of its official youth group linksjugend [‘solid], supported the dockworkers collecting signatures in defense of their right to strike, no visible policy has yet emerged from the party. What’s more, DIE LINKE can always be found on the other side of the barricades. To take but one example, the party was part of the Berlin Senate, against which the strikes by hospital workers in that city were ultimately directed. And the Left Party is also part of the government in Bremen, where the city is the majority owner of the logistics company BLG — against which the dockworkers’ actions are directed.

At the time of DIE LINKE’s federal party conference in June, Klasse Gegen Klasse appealed to the militant wings of the party and organizations of the far Left to hold a socialist conference to discuss a balance sheet of the party conference. Following the example of the port strikes, we are now putting this proposal in more concrete terms, and coming together to discuss inflation, the fight against it, and a class-struggle perspective for the Left.

The starting point for any class-struggle perspective must be promoting the self-organization of workers independently of and in struggle against the bureaucracies of their own mass organizations — the trade unions — and against the state. This is possible only by breaking with the reformist strategy of focusing on elections and integration into the bourgeois state.

Leon Trotsky spelled out the alternative in The Lessons of October: “By strategy, we understand the art of conquest, i.e., the seizure of power.” He was all about combining all the elements to take the lead and win. That is, it is about gathering forces that allow us to unite all of them at the right moment to turn them against the ruling class, to break its will and impose the will of the exploited.

Today, the ruling class wants to make us pay for the costs of the pandemic, the economic crisis, and the war in Ukraine. The struggle for wage increases in this or that factory is inseparable from this strategic perspective of enforcing the will of the exploited against the will of the ruling class. This means that the struggle at the ports is, on the one hand, a struggle against the effects of inflation (i.e., for higher wages) and, on the other hand, a struggle for the dockworkers to take matters into their own hands and impose a hegemonic alternative for the exploited and oppressed as a whole.

That is possible only if dockworkers overcome the limits imposed on them by the union bureaucracy. That, in turn, depends on whether the (revolutionary) Left will overcome the lesser-evilism of pacts with the union leaderships and co-management of the capitalist state, and instead situate its strategic center in the class struggle, set out to occupy the strategic positions, and use them in the fight against the bosses and the government.

First published in German on July 27 in Klasse Gegen Klasse.

Translation by Scott Cooper


Notes

Notes↑1 Translator’s note: The Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft [United Services Trade Union] uses the stylized abbreviation ver.di for identification. It is the second-largest trade union in Germany, with around 2 million members.

↑2 John Womack Jr., Posición estratégica y fuerza obrera (Mexico City: FCE, 2007), 50. Translator’s note: The Womack quote is from a translation of a work he wrote originally in English but that is currently unavailable for citation. Thus, the translation here is of German that was translated from Spanish, and the English may not correspond precisely to the wording of the original.

↑3 Translator’s note: The Industriegewerkschaft Metall [Industrial Union of Metalworkers], better known as IG Metall, is Germany’s largest union and Europe’s largest industrial union. It represents workers in many industries, including mining and manufacturing (automobiles, steel, wood, plastics, textiles, and clothing), as well as electrical engineering and information systems. TVöD is a reference to Tarifvertrag im Öffentlichen Dienst [tariffs for German civil service employees], by which salaries for civil servants are determined based on experience and family situation. Civil service employees include teachers at all levels.

↑4 Translator’s note: Die Linke [The Left, usually stylized to DIE LINKE] is a social democratic party in Germany that was founded in 2007 and traces its origins to the ruling party of the former German Democratic Party (GDR).

Stefan Schneider  is an education worker from Berlin and the editor of our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse.