Strategic reflections on the escalation of Israeli intimidation in Lebanon

By Gilbert Achcar

Published 26 September, 2024

First published in Arabic at Al-Quds al-Arabi. Translation from Gilbert Achcar's blog.

Not even an hour had passed after I wrote my article of a week ago (“Lebanon and the Israeli Strategy of Intimidation”, 17/9/2024) when the Israeli intelligence agencies launched a mass terror operation in Lebanon by blowing up individual communication devices in two successive waves over two days, killing more than 40 people and wounding more than 3,500. These two waves of mass terrorism were followed by an escalation in the exchange of shells across the border, between Hezbollah and the Israeli Aggression Forces (aka IDF), preluding to the intense violent bombardment that poured down on Monday on southern Lebanon and other areas where Hezbollah is present, killing nearly 500 people and wounding more than 1,600. The bombardment is still ongoing as these lines are written.

The question that imposed itself on everyone, starting with those targeted in Lebanon, is whether this sudden escalation in what we called the “Israeli strategy of intimidation” is paving the way for a full-scale aggression against Lebanon that would include indiscriminate heavy bombing of all areas where Hezbollah is present, including the densely populated southern suburb of Beirut, with the aim of making it “look like Gaza” in the words of one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s close associates. It is indeed feared that the Zionist state will carry out a brutal aggression on parts of Lebanon, similar to the aggression that targeted the entire Gaza Strip, in line with what one of the overseers of the Israeli aggression on Lebanon in 2006 called the “Dahiya doctrine” (a reference to the southern suburb of Beirut, the Arabic word dahiya meaning “suburb”). This doctrine aims at achieving deterrence against anyone who has the intention of confronting Israel, by threatening to inflict a high level of violence on areas inhabited by the civilian population to which those who nurture that intention belong, like what happened to the southern suburb of Beirut in 2006, which is the main area where Hezbollah’s popular base is concentrated.

It is a fact that the 2006 aggression that followed an operation carried out by Hezbollah fighters across the southern Lebanese border against Israeli soldiers, killing eight of them and capturing two, had a deterrent effect, which was acknowledged by the Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in declaring his regret, when he famously said on television in the aftermath of that war: “If I had known for one percent that this abduction operation would lead to a war of this magnitude, we certainly would not have done it for humanitarian, moral, military, social, security and political reasons.”

What the Western media, which are quick to condemn war crimes when they are committed by the West’s enemies, such as the Russian regime in Ukraine, do not say, is that the “Dahiya doctrine” is not an instance of military genius and a doctrine worthy of being taught in the military colleges of civilized countries, but rather a blatant violation of the laws of war, which consist in the practice of war crimes on a large scale, up to a genocidal level in Gaza, through an explicit intent to target civilians in order to deter combatants. It is, in other words, a terrorist strategy formulated by a terrorist state par excellence, which constitutes a stark confirmation that state terrorism is much more dangerous than the terrorism of non-state groups, as it applies the same logic, i.e. the killing of civilians for a political purpose, but with immeasurably greater potential for lethality and destruction.

Hezbollah learned two lessons from the 33-Day War in 2006. The first translates in that it has since then taken into account what it sees as a red line that, if crossed, would give the Zionist state a new pretext to attack Lebanese civilians. In order to ward off its popular base in the first place, Hezbollah did not carry out any bold operation like the one that sparked the 2006 war – or the one carried out by Hamas about a year ago, igniting the war to destroy Gaza and exterminate its people. The second lesson led Hezbollah to acquire a huge arsenal of missiles that established a counter-deterrent by threatening civilian areas inside the Zionist state, thus achieving what is called in the vocabulary of nuclear deterrence a “balance of terror”.

This equation is what explains Hezbollah’s initiative of starting a limited war of attrition with the Zionist state the day after Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, in response to Hamas’s call for it to join what it had initiated. That call came in a message from the military leader of the Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip, Muhammad al-Deif, broadcast at the start of the operation: “Oh our brothers in the Islamic resistance, in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, this is the day when your resistance will merge with your people in Palestine so that this terrible occupier will understand that the time in which it rampages and assassinates scholars and leaders has ended. The time of plundering your wealth has ended. The almost daily bombing in Syria and Iraq has ended. The time of dividing the nation and scattering its forces in internal conflicts has ended. The time has come for all Arab and Islamic forces to unite to sweep this occupation from our holy sites and our land.”

However, Hezbollah was smarter than to be overcome by euphoria to the point of believing that the day of victory over Israel and liberation of Palestine had come. It decided therefore to enter the battle as a supporter rather than a full participant, a decision that translated into the limited war of attrition. The party wanted to express its solidarity with the people of Gaza, but without exposing its popular base to a fate similar to that of the residents of the Strip. However, this calculation is now backfiring on Hezbollah, as the Zionist aggression army, having finished its intensive large-scale operations in Gaza, is now focusing on its northern front, launching what we called the “strategy of intimidation”, which is a gradual escalation in attacks with a threat to shift to implementing the “Dahiya doctrine”.

This Israeli behaviour demonstrates the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s counter-deterrence, as the Zionist government is forced to be cautious about igniting a full-scale war that it knows will be costly to Israeli society, even if the cost to Hezbollah’s base will be much higher given the great superiority of Israeli military capabilities. The Zionist government hence resorted first to escalation through “asymmetric warfare”, a term that usually describes the actions of an irregular force against a regular army. Here, it is the Zionist state that is dealing a devious and painful blow to Hezbollah and its civilian milieu by blowing up communications devices. This was followed by an escalation of conventional war that began on Monday, constituting a dangerous escalation of pressure on Hezbollah to force it to surrender and accept the conditions set by Washington with the approval of the Zionist government, the most important of which is the withdrawal of the party’s forces to north of the Litani River.

Confronted with this escalating pressure, the party finds itself trapped in mutual, but unequal, deterrence. It does not possess the capabilities of waging “asymmetric warfare” deep inside Israel and cannot strike there in a way that would cause hundreds of deaths, like what the Zionist army inflicted on Lebanon on Monday, for fear that the response would be overwhelming, knowing that Israel is fully capable of responding at a much higher level. The Zionist government is wholly aware of the conditions of the equation. While it wishes to dismantle Hezbollah’s deterrent capacity, it cannot initiate a comprehensive war without ensuring full US participation in it, similar to Washington’s participation in the war on Gaza during several months, the most deadly and destructive months, to the point of countering all calls for a ceasefire. The Zionist government needs such full US complicity in the event of launching a full-scale aggression on Lebanon, the political conditions of which have not yet been met. It is working to achieve them, however, and may well issue a warning with a limited deadline to Hezbollah for that purpose, as we mentioned a week ago.

From all of this, it appears that Netanyahu has begun to fear that his friend Donald Trump might well fail in the upcoming US presidential elections in about a month and a half. It seems that he therefore decided to escalate matters, taking advantage of the last months of presence of his other friend, the “proud Irish-American Zionist” Joe Biden, in the White House. The question now is: will Biden pressure Netanyahu firmly enough to prevent a war that is likely to negatively affect the campaign of his party’s candidate, Kamala Harris, or will he once again go along with his friend’s criminal endeavour, even if accompanied by an expression of regret and resentment meant to deflect the blame in his and his Secretary of State Blinken’s usual hypocritical way?

Israel’s offensive against Lebanon represents an escalation of Netanyahu’s project of death

By Israel Dutra

Published 27 September, 2024

First published in Portuguese at Movimento Revista.

“Significant opportunities, heavy risks”. That was how Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, with his usual dose of sadism and lack of aplomb, defined Zionism’s new offensive in Lebanon. This new phase in Israel’s military operation across the Middle East — which has involved carrying out genocide in Gaza for almost a year— began with an unprecedented terrorist attack against Hezbollah at the start of last week. In two stages over two days, Mossad blew up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanese territory, killing about 40 people and leaving hundreds injured. Following this terrorist attack, Israel carried out a bombing raid on Beirut that hit Hezbollah targets and a school, killing 37 people (including 13 children).

Developing a deeper analysis of the dynamics behind Israel’s offensive in the Middle East is decisive for understanding the immediate future of global geopolitics, its central conflicts and developments. We have contributed to this effort through our contacts and publications, including with the recent interview we published (before the current offensive on Lebanon) with Lebanese Marxist intellectual and Middle East specialist Gilbert Achcar in Movimento Revista.

Right now, given the genocide in Gaza and the terrifying data accompanying it — for example, the fact that it is, proportionally, the largest child genocide in history — we need to understand three key elements: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s real strategy, including it scope and limits; the military and diplomatic relationship of forces at the international level; and the capacity for popular and military resistance of the Palestinian, Lebanese and allied forces. Genocide is being imposed through killings, starvation and the multiplication of diseases such as polio.

Netanyahu is doubling down. Besieged by criticism and mobilisations, including a September 2 general strike and marches of more than 400,000 people on September 7 demanding negotiations to free the hostages, Netanyahu has no choice but to go on the offensive. Despite his rhetorical claims that his military objective is to neutralise Hamas, in reality Netanyahu and his closest allies want to redesign the map of the Middle East, with a new “Greater Israel” becoming a supremacist and colonial reference point for the global far right. Faced with this situation, in which the Palestinian resistance continues to fight, there has been a shift in the axis of focus in recent months: an offensive tied to the use of intelligence (including a series of assassinations, such as that of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and suspected participation in the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi) and expanding the conflict to the whole region. Mossad had already planted the explosives used in the attack in Lebanon about two years ago — before its current offensive began on October 7. As Achcar wrote in his most recent article:

Netanyahu himself has contributed to the beating of the drums for the coming war on Lebanon, through one of his close associates in the Likud Party who attributed to him the intention to launch a war that will make the Beirut suburb “look like Gaza”.

On the other hand, the siege on Jenin corroborates an intensification of attacks in the West Bank. Brutal images have shown Israeli soldiers throwing Palestinians off high-rise buildings as part of this new offensive.

How has the United States — the main guarantor of the genocide in Gaza — responded? On one hand, it has sought to block countless United Nations resolutions calling for a ceasefire and condemning Netanyahu and the State of Israel; on the other, it is seeking to negotiate to avoid a regional war, given the uncertainty surrounding the November 5 presidential elections. President Joe Biden has been worn down, Kamala Harris wants to maintain her commitment to Zionism, and Donald Trump is a key Netanyahu ally when it comes to lending legitimacy to his “final solution”. The US faces a delicate situation, throwing everything it has to hold onto its geopolitical hegemony in the face of growing competition from China and the US capitalist class facing its biggest split in recent history.

The third element is how those fighting back on the ground will respond. Hezbollah has been dealt a heavy blow, both in terms of demoralising its intelligence service and the assassination of two of its main commanders, Ibrahim Aquil and Ahmed Wabbi. Anyone who saw Nasrallah’s statement after the offensive sensed a certain measured response, despite the increase in missile fire that was intercepted by the Israeli defence system. Recep Tayyip Erdogan again spoke out, calling on “Western nations” to avoid the worst, namely an escalation of the war. Iran condemned the offensive, but made no sudden military moves. The Houthis continue their maritime military operation, exchanging fire and consuming Israeli efforts on this front.

Hezbollah is the fruit of the aftermath of the long Lebanese civil war, part of the Shiite and Islamic movements that hegemonised the struggle against Zionism after the weakening of secular and national liberation movements. As one Spanish analyst put it, it is “bigger than a militia, smaller than a state”. The overall response of Lebanese society, fractured by wars and crises, will be decisive in ensuring the fight against the Zionist offensive does not just become a religious struggle in defence of Shiites.

The international response will also be fundamental. Bolstered by public opinion, ranging from UN resolutions to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, movements in solidarity with the Palestinian people must step up their efforts. Partial measures such as the suspension of Britain’s arms trade with Israel help weaken Zionism. This battle is also taking place on the domestic front in Brazil, around the campaign to suspend agreements with Elbit, to break diplomatic ties with Israel and strengthen the BDS campaign.

The offensive in Lebanon is an example of how far Netanyahu’s project of death, neo-colonialism and neo-fascism is willing to go. Solidarity with the Lebanese people is an integral part of our immediate program for stopping the supremacists who want to impose their “final solution” as a new standard for the dehumanisation of the other, thereby naturalising the catastrophe we confront on several fronts.

Israel Dutra is a sociologist, PSOL's Secretary for Social Movements and member of the party's National Directorate, and a member of the Socialist Left Movement (MES/PSOL) National Directorate.

 

Gilbert Achcar: ‘We are witnessing the first genocide in history to be televised and openly supported by the West’

By Gilbert Achcar, Israel Dutra & Victor Gorman

Published 25 September, 2024

First published in Portuguese at Revista Movimento.

Israel’s escalating war, the genocide in Gaza and the opening up of new fronts of Zionist-led violence have once again focused the world’s attention on the Middle East region. To better understand the situation and the challenges that lie ahead, Revista Movimento spoke with Gilbert Achcar, a University of London professor and Lebanese activist affiliated to the Fourth International. In this interview, Achcar provides an overview of the complex political situation in the region, situating it within the context of the political project of the global far right of which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a main exponent. The interview was conducted by Israel Dutra and Victor Gorman on September 16.

After almost a year of aggression, we are facing an impasse in terms of a possible ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government is confronting major protests and an internal political crisis. What are the short-term prospects for the war under the current Zionist government?

It was clear from the beginning that this war was going to last. The Israeli side made it very clear that it will take no less than one year. That is because they intended to seize the opportunity of October 7 to reoccupy the Gaza Strip and completely flatten this very dense concentration of Palestinians in order to create a condition whereby they could control it forever. And that indeed entailed a genocidal intent — the intent, that is, to kill a large part of the population. They have already killed more than 50,000 people, including the dead estimated to be under the rubbles, and it is not over yet. The onslaught is still ongoing.

Within the Israeli power elite, there is no consensus yet on what they will do with the Gaza Strip after the onslaught. There are disagreements about this between the far right and the Zionist mainstream plus, of course, the perspective of the US election, which Netanyahu factors into his calculations. He is certainly hoping that Donald Trump will win. If this happens, Netanyahu will feel that he can do even worse and more than what he has done until now, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against Iran, of course. So, these are the factors that determine the present situation.

How do you view the relationship between the current Israeli government and other expressions of the far right in the world?

Netanyahu has been a key figure of the international far right. He came back to power in 2009 and remained prime minister uninterruptedly for 12 years. After a few months of interruption, he got back in government at the end of 2022. He has thus accumulated an exceptional longevity in power, with a specific, very demagogic style in politics, which has been a source of inspiration for the international far right that developed during those years, in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008.

Netanyahu connected with all the key figures of the global hard right and far right, notwithstanding the antisemitic tradition and current profile of most of them. He befriended antisemites such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Trump. Netanyahu provided the international far right with a cover for their past and/or present antisemitism. He went as far as explaining in a public event that Adolf Hitler had no intention of perpetrating the genocide of the European Jews, and that it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, who inspired him to do that. This was a grotesque falsification of history, of course, and it was vehemently denounced by historians of Nazism and the Holocaust, but it shows to what extent Netanyahu is willing to go to please the far right.

This kind of discourse obviously suits them in that it shifts the blame of antisemitism from the European far right to Palestinians and Muslims. It feeds into Islamophobia, which Netanyahu has made a central part of his discourse, in accordance with today’s international far right that is much more Islamophobic than antisemitic because the migrants into Europe today are mostly Muslims. It is easy to see how this works, for instance with Marine Le Pen in France, who is heir to a long antisemitic political tradition. Such far right currents are now 100% pro-Israel and anti-Palestinians, as well as anti-Muslims. They even claim to be against “antisemitism”, which they attribute to Muslims and even to the left. They now accuse the left of being antisemitic because it criticises Israel. This hypocritical discourse has been buttressed by Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, of which he is a major figure.

Why did the Netanyahu government open up a second front in the West Bank, starting with the siege of Jenin?

The genocide in Gaza has been accompanied from the beginning with an escalation of the Zionist settlers’ violence in the West Bank. This violence had already reached a high level after the inclusion of neo-Nazi ministers in Netanyahu’s latest cabinet, in positions crucial to the operation of the settlers. This has radicalised many young Palestinians, leading to new groups forming and taking up arms in the West Bank to fight back against the colonial settlers. The Israeli army is trying to break the Palestinians’ resistance spirit and prevent the further build-up of a network of armed struggle in the West Bank. They want to terrorise the Palestinians and deter any form of resistance. That is why they launched their recent brutal offensive in the West Bank, turning parts of it into Gaza-like scenes of destruction.

What is your opinion on the involvement of Lebanon and Hezbollah in this conflict? Is an escalation from Lebanon possible? Could you also tell us a bit more about Lebanese domestic politics?

The involvement of Lebanon is essentially the involvement of Hezbollah, because the Lebanese state is not involved as such, and neither are most other Lebanese political parties. Hezbollah, however, is a major military force, stronger than the Lebanese army.

When Hamas launched the October 7 attack, they called on Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and Yemen to join them in the fight against Israel, believing — with a lot of illusions and religious thinking — that October 7 would be the beginning of Palestine’s liberation and Israel’s destruction. Hezbollah faced a dilemma, because they felt a moral obligation to act in solidarity with Gaza, especially in light of the terrible violence of the Israeli onslaught that started immediately after the October 7 attack. But they did not want to take responsibility for a major war in Lebanon, like that of 2006. In that year, Hezbollah launched an attack across the border in South Lebanon, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two. This led to a major Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, which was highly destructive. Thus, Hezbollah did not want to take the responsibility of offering Israel a pretext for a second onslaught, which could be even worse than that of 2006.

The result of these two contradictory pressures has been that Hezbollah decided to launch a limited war, consisting of a limited exchange of bombing with the Israeli side. This led to a population displacement on both sides of the border: close to 100,000 people displaced from South Lebanon and 80,000 people displaced on the Israeli side. This could happen and remain within limits for almost a year now, because the Israeli army was concentrating its effort in Gaza and would have found it difficult to wage war on both fronts at the same time. But the most intensive part of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza is ending, and it is very likely that Israel will now turn against Lebanon, and against Hezbollah specifically.

It will also depend on the outcome of the US elections, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. If Trump wins, a green light to Netanyahu for a new onslaught on Lebanon will become very likely. If Trump is not elected, Netanyahu will increase the pressure on Lebanon and probably give an ultimatum to Hezbollah: either they backtrack and withdraw from the border to north of the Litani River, or they refuse and face a major Israeli onslaught. Whereas there is some disagreement today in Israel between Netanyahu and the opposition about the next phase in Gaza, there is no substantial disagreement about Lebanon. The opposition is even blaming Netanyahu for prolonging the war in Gaza, instead of dealing with Lebanon, which they now see as the priority.

As for Lebanese domestic politics, Hezbollah is in alliance with another Shia sectarian force, Amal, but most other Lebanese political parties are rivals or opponents of Hezbollah and blame it for involving Lebanon in the war. They argue that there is no reason why Lebanon should be involved and pay the price whereas Syria, which is much stronger than Lebanon and an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, is not doing anything. Even Iran, for that matter, is hardly taking any risk. So, that is part of the political equation that Hezbollah must consider.

What about the role of other countries in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan?

Both Egypt and Jordan are part of the US military arc of forces in the region. Both are major recipients of US military aid. Therefore, even though they criticise Israel’s war on Gaza to appease public opinions and they do not like Netanyahu because he is too extreme for them, they will not do anything that could provide real support for the Palestinians. Syria also shares a border with Israel, like Jordan and Egypt, and a major stretch of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights has been occupied and even annexed by Israel since 1967. And yet Syria’s demarcation line is Israel’s quietest border. None of these states are willing to take any risk in defence of the Palestinian people. Egypt and Jordan are rather eager to see its resistance subdued.

The Houthis in Yemen have been targeting ships in the Red Sea, which has impacted on global maritime logistic routes. Why are they doing this, and what have been the impacts of their action?

The Houthis are a very reactionary force from a social and ideological standpoint — closer to the Afghan Taliban than they are to the Iranian regime — but they are linked to Tehran because they belong to a sect related to Shi'ism, the dominant branch of Islam in Iran. They are seen in the region, therefore, as part of a sectarian arc of forces led by Iran and composed of Shias in Lebanon; Alawis, the sect of the ruling elite in Syria; pro-Iran Shia militias in Iraq; and Yemen’s Houthis.

The Houthis started their intervention in the Red Sea as a way for them to gain legitimacy against their opponents in Yemen itself, where there has been a civil war in which the Houthis have confronted the southern half of the country, which is Sunni. By outbidding everyone on the issue of Israel with their action in the Red Sea, the Houthis have been doing a propaganda stunt in the face of their rivals in Yemen, as well as in the face of the Saudis, the main enemies of both the Houthis and Iran. The Saudi rulers are annoyed by the way that the Houthis are outbidding them on Israel.

However, the attacks in the Red Sea are not really harming Israel: the country that is most harmed is Egypt, because of the sharp drop in the use of the Suez Canal, a major source of income for Egypt. China too is harmed, because it is a major user of the Suez Canal, and now needs to ship its exports to Europe around Africa, which increases time and cost. By their action, the Houthis have given further incentive to European countries and the US to develop a way to bypass the Red Sea and the Suez Canal through a transport corridor going from India by sea to the United Arab Emirates, and from there by land to Israel through the Saudi Kingdom and Jordan, and then to Europe via the Mediterranean. This project is also obviously designed to enhance the collaboration between the three Arab countries and Israel.

In your evaluation, what has been the impact of international solidarity in support of Palestine? How has this affected the political fight in the US? What does each sector in the presidential election campaign represent?

We are witnessing the first genocide to happen in front of the eyes of the whole world, directly reported on TV, and openly supported by Western countries. It is therefore a major historical event, as well as a terrible disaster for the Palestinian people, of course. The only ray of hope, however; the only little positive point amid this very gloomy, very dark picture, is the spectacular development of international solidarity with the Palestinian people. The cruelty of the Israeli genocidal war has been such that it led to an awakening of conscience in many countries, and the development of solidarity in the Global North, in Western Europe and in the US.

What happens in the US is crucial for Israel, due to Israel’s dependence on Washington. The movement that has been developing in the US among the youth, particularly among students, is very important for the future of the Palestinian struggle. It has already managed to influence the campaign of the Democrats: Biden was denounced for his complicity and full participation in Israel’s genocidal war and could see that this was going to cost him a lot of votes. He somewhat shifted his position accordingly: after having long opposed the call for a ceasefire, the Biden administration started calling for one. Trump, of course, even called Biden “Palestinian”, as if it were an insult. He is accusing the Democrats of being “against the Jews”.

Kamala Harris has a different tone than that of Biden in recognising Palestinian suffering, but she has not dared until now to take any distance from Biden and she will not as she is still Biden’s vice president. If she gets elected, we shall see whether she will continue the very pro-Israeli policy of Biden or revert to the Obama kind of cold support to Israel, with an attempt to moderate the Israeli attitude. The Democrats, in general, are dedicated to the defence of Israel as they keep saying, however, so we cannot expect them to do what needs to be done, which is for Washington to stop arming Israel and force it to withdraw from the 1967 occupied territories in accordance with what is supposed to be the official position of the US. The only way for anything like this to happen is for the solidarity movement to reach enough force to impose it on the US government.

Lastly, what are your views in terms of the strategy or possibilities for building the radical left in the Arab world?

The radical left in the Arab world has been very much weakened by the defeat of the two successive waves of what has been called the Arab Spring or Arab uprising. The first wave in 2011 saw major uprisings in six Arab countries along with a big rise in social and political protests in most other Arab countries. This created conditions in which the radical left could play an important role in several countries, including Tunisia, where it all started, and Egypt. The second wave in 2019 included four countries. In one of them, Sudan, the radical left played a very important role. Unfortunately, however, the defeats of those uprisings — especially the 2013 coup in Egypt, the 2021 coup in Tunisia, and the civil war among the military that unfolded in Sudan after the 2021 coup — all had a hugely negative impact on the radical left in the Arabic-speaking region.

But the key point to understand is that the social and economic crisis in the region is very deep, and it is this crisis that led to the two successive waves of uprisings in 2011 and 2019. Not only is the crisis not solved, but it is getting worse and worse, year after year. This means that there will inevitably be further social explosions. The key condition for the necessary radical change is that young people manage to find new ways and forms of organisations in order to build a new radical alternative to the existing situation.

Techno-Fascism, Techno-Terrorism, And Global War

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

September 25, 2024

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

Image by David Merrett



The world is moving inexorably towards war. Any imaginary poll of the world’s population would show that nobody wants war. But war will probably break out before the end of the decade. Most countries in the world claim to have democratic regimes, but no party with any electoral significance, from left to right, considers war an imminent danger and takes up the fight for peace as its main banner. Peace doesn’t win votes. War brings dead people and dead people don’t vote. No party can imagine carrying out electoral propaganda in cemeteries or mass graves. Nor does it imagine that without the living there are no parties. All this seems absurd, but absurdity happens when reason sleeps, as Francisco de Goya warned us 225 years ago in his painting El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. We don’t need to go that far back.

The lessons (or illusions) of history

Let’s go back to 1900. England was then the most powerful country in the world. But as every apogee means the beginning of decline, the peaceful competition of the US was beginning to be feared. Economic growth in the US was vertiginous, the latest inventions of the industrial revolution were taking place there and, among the many advantages over Europe, one was particularly precious: the US spent very little money on weapons. According to reports at the time, a country of 75 million inhabitants had an army of 25,000 men and a ridiculous defense budget for a country of that size. On the other hand, the most developed European countries (England, Germany and France) were in increasingly fierce competition with each other over colonial sharing and industrial superiority (Germany was increasingly in the spotlight) and were entering the arms race. In addition, between 1899 and 1902, England was fighting a sordid colonial war against the Boers in South Africa. At stake was the control of gold production and Cecil Rhodes’ imperial dream: from the railroad between Cape Town and Cairo to total control of the world so that “wars would become impossible for the good of mankind”. Imperial capitalist domination demanded war and the arms race, allegedly to make war impossible in the future. Are there any similarities with the current war speeches of the US and the European Union to defeat Russia and China? There are, but there are differences.

In the first decade of the 20th century, two movements were visible: one in public opinion and the other in business. Public opinion was dominated by an apology for peace against the dangers of a war that would be fatally deadly. The 20th century was to be the century of peace, without which the prosperity that was being announced would not be possible. In 1899, the first International Peace Conference was held in The Hague and, the following year, there was the World Peace Congress. From then on, there were many international congresses and meetings on peace. It was deplored that international cooperation was deepening in all areas (postal services, railways, etc.) except politics. Between 1893 and 1912, 25 books were published against the arms race. Who is Who in the Peace Movement was widely published. Recent inventions in war material (smokeless gunpowder, rapid-fire rifles, explosive substances such as lyddite, melinite and nitroglycerine, etc.) were said to make war not only very deadly, but impossible to win for either side in the conflict. War would always end in a stalemate and after much death and devastation. A journalist from the English Echo resigned from the paper so that he wouldn’t have to defend the war against the Boers, and 200 high-profile English intellectuals organized a dinner in his honor. Between 1900 and 1910, more than a thousand pacifist congresses were held: workers, anarchists, socialists, freethinkers, Esperantists, women. The growth of democracy in Europe and the USA was said to be incompatible with war and that the large number of arbitration agreements was the best demonstration of this. The Russian sociologist Jakov Novikov demonstrated that the well-being of the masses had never improved with the wars, quite the opposite. People wrote about “the illusion of war” and the publications sold many thousands of copies.

There was a current of opinion that the real illusion would be the “illusion of peace” if the struggle were not reoriented against capitalism. If this didn’t happen, war would be inevitable. This was the position of socialists, anarchists, and the workers’ movement, which socialists and anarchists sought to control. War was the great obstacle to social revolution. The general strike and the refusal of military service were two of the most frequently mentioned forms of struggle.

But the world of public opinion was one thing and the world of business was another. In the business world, since 1899 the arms race had been advancing at a rapid but discreet pace. At the 1907 International Workers’ Congress in Stuttgart, Karl Liebknecht revealed the extraordinary growth in arms spending, which meant that countries were in fact preparing for war. The profits of the big arms companies reflected this: Krupp in Germany, Vickers-Armstrong in England, Schneider-Creusot in France, Cockerill in Belgium, Skoda in Bohemia and Putilov in Russia. It was clear that the accumulation of weapons would lead to war. In fact, the big companies were beginning to use a new propaganda weapon: paying journalists and newspaper owners to publish fake news about the growing armament of their probable opponents in the coming war in order to justify spending more on weapons. Sounds familiar to today’s ears? Yes, but there are differences and for the worse, much worse.

The socialists were right: the fight is against capitalism

The apogee of US-led global capitalism came in 1991 with the end of the Soviet Bloc. Just like a hundred years before, the apogee of the most powerful power meant the beginning of its decline. And just as before, the most profitable industry in periods of decline is the one that produces goods whose use consists of destroying and being destroyed. Such goods have to be ceaselessly replaced by others for as long as the war lasts. The longer the war lasts, the greater the profits. Eternal war is therefore the most profitable. Now the big arms companies are no longer European, they are American, and the US, unlike a hundred years ago, is by far the country that spends the most on armaments and therefore has the greatest need to use them (that is, to use by destroying and replacing). The US spends a trillion dollars on armaments, but it’s certainly not enough because war entrepreneurs invent disadvantages for the US in relation to its enemies which have to be overcome promptly.

The struggle for peace is now more than ever a struggle against capitalism. Why more than ever? If, in the wake of Immanuel Wallerstein, we take the world as a unit of analysis, we can say that between 1917 and 1991 the world experienced a period of intense transnational civil war. It was a civil war because it took place within a single system – the modern world system. Although globally dominant, capitalism had to contend with another strongly competing economic system, state socialism, whose influence extended far beyond the Soviet Union. This civil war was fought by multiple means, including counter-insurgency, development aid to dependent countries and proxy wars (Korean War, Vietnam War, etc.).

The Second World War was a period of calm in this civil war, since the USA and the USSR were allies against German Nazism. With the end of the Soviet Union and the transformations that had taken place in China in the meantime, which would integrate the Chinese economy into the world capitalist economy, albeit with some specificities (maintaining national control of financial capital), the transnational civil war between capitalism and socialism ended. There was an interregnum, which lasted just over ten years, in which Russia was a capitalist country of intermediate development like any other and China was an economic partner, also of intermediate development, but with strategic value for US multinational companies bent on the monopolistic conquest of the world.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, a new transnational civil war began, this time between the capitalism of US multinationals and the state capitalism of China. In order to neutralize China, it was necessary to block its access to Europe for two reasons: Europe was, alongside the US, the other major affluent consumer in the world; through cooperation with China, Europe could have some claim to escape the increasingly evident decline of the US in the world economy and become an additional factor of competition and weakness for the US. In order to block China’s access to Europe and subject the latter to the US, it was necessary to separate Europe politically and economically from Russia (whose territory is mostly in Europe). Russia, with its thousands of kilometers of borders with China, is not only China’s access route to Europe, but also the strategic territory of Eurasia. The idea that whoever controls Eurasia controls the world has been around for a long time. This has led to a new transnational civil war, the first proxy wars of which are the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war.

This civil war is totally different from the previous one. In the previous one, the struggle was between two economic systems (capitalism versus socialism), while now it is between two versions of the same economic system (multinational capitalism versus state capitalism). Nothing guarantees that this war will be less violent than the previous one. On the contrary, as we have seen, at the beginning of the 20th century, the dispute took place between countries with a long common past located in a small corner of Eurasia. Today, it is a struggle for global domination that extends beyond the planet. Monopoly capitalism was born in 1900 when US financial capital began to expand into railroads and from there into many other sectors and, potentially, into every country in the world.

For monopoly capitalism, the idea of a multipolar world is as threatening as the idea of competition with other economic systems, and the same destructive drive is present in both cases. What’s more, the potential and degree of destruction are now immensely greater than before. I’m not referring to the existence of nuclear weapons, a life-destroying technological innovation that makes the preoccupation of commentators at the beginning of the last century with the warlike inventions of their time ridiculous. I’m talking about the nature of today’s global capitalism and (dis)governance, and the emergence of two of its consequences. We are entering an era in which forms of potentially destructive power without limits are strong enough to neutralize, circumvent or eliminate any democratic process that seeks to put limits on them.

Global techno-fascism: Elon Musk

At the beginning of the 20th century, we saw that the struggle for peace and the peaceful resolution of conflicts saw sovereign states as the units of analysis and the privileged political actors. We know that sovereignty was an abstract good that only the most developed countries could really enjoy, and that much of the world was subject to colonialism or the tutelary influence of Europe. Today, however, technological development, neoliberal globalization and the concentration of wealth mean that the power to control human and non-human life is no longer subject to democratic scrutiny. At the beginning of the 20th century, the illusion of peace was based on the rise and strengthening of democratic governments. After all, democracy was based on replacing enemies to be defeated by war with political opponents to be defeated by voting. Hence the mobilizing capacity of the fight for suffrage. For many, democracy had the capacity not only to promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts, but also to regulate capitalism in order to neutralize its “excesses”.

Today, most national governments consider themselves democratic, but democracy, if it was ever capable of regulating capitalism in any country, is now strictly regulated by it, and is only tolerated insofar as it is functional for the infinite expansion of capitalist accumulation. Undoubtedly, the most powerful national states continue to exercise formal power, but the real power that controls their decisions is concentrated in a very small number of plutocrats, some with their faces blatantly visible, others, the majority, faceless. Real power is enhanced to an extent that is hard to imagine by a toxic fusion of the technological capacity to control the human life of vast populations down to the smallest detail and regardless of their nationality, with the financial capacity to buy, co-opt, blackmail or obliterate any obstacle to its purposes of domination.

This is a new kind of fascist power, a global techno-fascism that knows no national boundaries. Elon Musk is the metaphor for this new type of power. Unlike Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, Musk’s specific personality, although repugnant, is of little importance, since what matters is the power structure that he commands today and that tomorrow may be commanded by another individual. The strength of this new global techno-fascism is well expressed in the worldwide dramatization of the struggle of a relatively powerful national state against a simple foreign individual simply because he is a global techno-fascist. When, on August 31st of this year, the X network was suspended in Brazil by a decision of the Supreme Court because its owner refused to delete accounts on the network that reached millions of people and whose content spread fake news, seriously violated the most basic democratic values and incited hatred, violence and even murder, it was news all over the world. Was it imaginable ten years ago that a lone individual, and a foreigner at that, could afront a sovereign state?

Global techno-terrorism: from the Trojan Horse to killer pagers

On September 18th, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in Lebanon, killing dozens of people (including children) and injuring thousands. These transmitters had been bought by Hezbollah apparently because they are secure devices that allow communications without locating the users. This terrorist act has been attributed to Israel’s secret services and its origin was the implantation of an explosive substance next to the battery, coded to explode by remote control.

The killer pagers are not just a new edition of the Trojan Horse, the huge hollow wooden horse built by the Greeks to enter Troy during the Trojan War. The horse was built by Epeius, a master carpenter and boxer. The Greeks, pretending to abandon the war, sailed to the nearby island of Tenedos, leaving behind the false deserter Sinon, who persuaded the Trojans that the horse was an offering to Athena (goddess of war) that would make Troy impregnable. Despite warnings from Laocoon and Cassandra, the horse was taken inside the city gates. That night, Greek warriors got off the horse and opened the gates to let the Greek army in. The story is told in detail in Book II of the Aeneid.

The similarity between the Trojan Horse and the killer pagers lies only in the fact that the term “Trojan Horse” has come to designate subversion introduced from the outside. The visibility and transparency of the device, embodied in an object that was not in common use, prevented it from being realistically reproduced (if ever) effectively in the future. On the contrary, killer pagers signify a qualitative change in the technology of war and population control. The same technology and the same murderous complicity that insidiously installed explosive material in these devices could tomorrow install in any other electronic device (cell phone or computer) any substance that, instead of killing, might damage the health, create panic or alter the behavior of its user, without any possibility of control by the user. With the development and spread of artificial intelligence, any everyday device can be used for this purpose, whether it’s a car or a microwave.

The international conventions against terrorism, which the Gaza genocide reduced to a dead letter, will no longer even make sense in the future when any citizen not fighting in any war is condemned to live in a society in which the most trivial act of consumption can bring with it, in addition to the guarantee and the expiry date, your death certificate, your certificate of mental insanity or your compulsion to commit a crime.

The international division of the labor of war and Cassandra’s curse

In an environment of global techno-fascism and techno-terrorism, Euro-North American capitalism is actively preparing to move from cold war to hot war. Faced with the blank or revoltingly impotent gaze of its citizens, a strange international division of the work of killing is being prepared: Europe will take care of beating Russia while the US will take care of beating China. At almost the same time, the European Union’s first defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, former prime minister of Lithuania, says that Europe must be prepared for war with Russia in 6-8 years, and a high-ranking US Navy officer declares that the US must be prepared for war with China in 2027.

There is little point in predicting that the war will take place, but that its outcome will be very different from what is imagined by these war entrepreneurs intoxicated by the think tanks financed by arms producers. Cassandra’s curse hangs over the few who dare to see what is obvious.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.  Donate


Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.

The New Labor Organizing Model of EWOC

By Eric Blanc

September 24, 2024

Source: New Labor Forum


Image by Fibonacci Blue, Creative Commons 2.0

Tens of millions of workers in the United States want a union at their workplace, but do not have one.[1] This unfortunate state of affairs is normally blamed on external obstacles such as our country’s broken labor law regime. But there are also significant internal obstacles within the labor movement that prevent it from scaling up to meet the widespread demand for workplace representation.

Unions frequently refuse to lend support to workers who reach out for organizing help in part because labor’s predominant unionization approach is so staff-intensive and expensive—costing up to $3,000 for every new worker organized and generally requiring one staffer for every 100 targeted workers.[2] Instead, they generally only take on workers who are in a big enough workplace to justify the cost of winning and servicing a contract, who are in a locale where the union already has an institutional base, and who have agreed from the outset to unionize, not just fight for immediate demands.[3]

The deeper problem is that labor does so little to proactively reach out to and support the countless people who could initiate organizing campaigns on their own if given the proper encouragement and training tools. With most unions refusing to use their coffers to widely encourage such worker-initiated drives—and to turn those that catch on into ambitious campaigns with a strategic plan to win—it is not surprising that union density continues to drop each year.

Is there a way out of this impasse? I argue that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) provides crucial lessons for how labor can scale up by lowering unionization costs through volunteer organizers, by leaning on digital tools, and by widely spreading the seeds of worker power. Although there are no silver bullets for turning around labor’s decades-long decline, moving in this direction is labor’s best bet to win widely. The fact that many of EWOC’s key strategic innovations have been similarly adopted by other recent bottom-up union campaigns—at Starbucks, in the media, and in auto factories—strongly suggests that the rest of the labor movement should seriously consider adopting a new organizing model.

How EWOC Was Founded

EWOC was an invention of necessity rather than preconceived design. In March 2020, as Covid-19 began sweeping the United States, scores of anxious workers—lacking anywhere else to turn for support—reached out to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign for help in pressuring employers to provide protective equipment and sick pay. In response, a handful of labor organizers, myself included, from the Bernie campaign, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and United Electrical Workers (UE) set up a simple Google form to process the requests. In an ad-hoc manner, we divvied up the workplaces among volunteers with the time to lend guidance to these workers.

To give a sense of what this early pandemic organizing looked like, here is an anecdote from the first group of workers I supported. On March 27, 2020, I connected with a worker I will call Enrique, who worked at the Maid-Rite Specialty Foods meat processing plant in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. “We’re treated like animals, especially the Latinos,” he said in Spanish.

Enrique explained that he and his 200 coworkers had begun organizing themselves via word of mouth and a WhatsApp group. They were afraid to go into work, where the production line obliged them to work virtually shoulder to shoulder, well short of the six feet required for social distancing. A coworker had just tested positive after continuing to come into work, not wanting to lose pay or have a point deducted in the company’s unforgiving assessment system. With help from a labor lawyer I connected him to, Enrique and his coworkers drafted a letter to management insisting that the company start taking serious safety precautions. Enrique and coworkers refused to go into work on March 31. That morning, masked up, he hand-delivered their signed collective letter to management explaining they would not return to work until serious safety measures were taken.

As queries like these kept increasing, our adhoc group started reaching out to an expanding circle of experienced labor leftists willing to volunteer their time to remotely help workers lead workplace fight backs. Most of these volunteers came from DSA and UE, and both organizations granted their official backing early on, as well as sustained volunteers and money, to the nascent effort. Animated by the Bernie campaign’s class-struggle spirit and distributed organizing model, through which digitally connected volunteers run activities normally reserved for staff, EWOC was born.

Committed to teaching the time-tested methods of deep workplace organizing, EWOC’s major innovation has not been in organizing tactics. Rather, its unique contribution has been to build an organizing model that depends on volunteers to do most of the tasks that in unions or nonprofits are generally done by paid full-timers: providing organizing guidance to drives; coordinating other volunteers; responding to workers who reach out, and connecting them with appropriate EWOC organizers; website infrastructure; running communications including social media; holding big organizing trainings; and researching companies and public policy. For precisely this reason, EWOC is scalable, low-cost, and full of lessons for any organization looking to build widespread popular power.

EWOC’s Mission and Impact

Although the initial impetus was to support workers confronting pandemic-related workplace emergencies, EWOC has grown into a larger project aiming to support not only immediate fightbacks, but also worker-initiated unionization. It aims to address the problem identified by Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson: “There are millions of unorganized workers right now who don’t have access to organizing resources, don’t have the support of a traditional union, and don’t know how to take that first step towards building working-class power.” She concludes that “by offering free trainings and organizing guides, and building an army of thousands of volunteers who can offer one-to-one support to any worker in any industry, anywhere in the country, EWOC is playing a crucial role in labor’s revival.”

Similarly wide-ranging support has been given by the best “alt-labor” workers’ centers to some working-class communities in cities across the country. But when it comes to providing organizing guidance, the reach of workers’ centers is limited.[4] Until EWOC was founded, there was no institution in the United States to which any worker—in any industry and in any region—could go to receive organizing support.

Over 5,000 workers have reached out to EWOC since its founding. In 2023 alone, EWOC handed off 65 workplace campaigns representing over 7,000 workers to unions. Over 2,100 workers have participated in our bimonthly, four-part national organizing trainings. And over 1,000 people have become EWOC volunteers, often getting more involved over time via our escalating ladder of engagement, ranging from easy tasks such as texting people about upcoming trainings, to deeply involved tasks such as being an “advanced organizer” guiding new campaigns.

Aiming to help address the organizing vacuum noted by Nelson, EWOC’s process is simple. Any worker in the United States can fill out a short online form and a volunteer organizer will call them back within 72 hours to provide ongoing organizing guidance. In 2020 and the first half of 2021, most of this support went toward direct action campaigns like petitions for personal protective equipment (PPE), paid sick leave, and wage increases. But with the explosion of unionization interest inspired by Starbucks and Amazon in 2022, EWOC’s focus has increasingly turned to helping workers initiate union drives and finding an established union willing to let them affiliate (a task that is sometimes almost as challenging).

EWOC could not function as a largely volunteer-run project without the low-cost coordination, communication, and digital co-presence afforded by new digital tools. A sophisticated digital backend enables EWOC’s volunteers—normally about 250 to 300 are active at a given time—to get onboarded as organizers, to connect with workers who have reached out for support, and to coordinate on the cheap without having to live in the same city or rent out office space. Moreover, digital tools allow EWOC to simultaneously train large numbers of people at once via mass online workshops and extensive organizing materials, rather than having to rely on the labor movement’s traditional approach of expensive in-person trainings for small groups.

Rather than monopolize the significant digital innovations required to manage all these data and coordinate so many campaigns with minimal staff oversight, EWOC has adopted an “open source” spirit, actively sharing its accumulated technological and training know-how with any union or social justice organization looking to adopt a more distributed model. As EWOC’s guiding principles put it, “to build a scalable movement capable of supporting all worker-led organizing efforts . . . we openly share our tools and organizing infrastructure with unions and other allied organizations.”

EWOC’s major limitation is that it is, in the grand scheme, small. Although the project punches above its weight and has expanded every year, relatively few U.S. workers know about it. This reach problem is exacerbated by the fact that it supports the initial steps of organizing, rather than the publicity-garnering final stages coordinated by unions. EWOC’s organizers have taken initiatives to expand its visibility and contacts, for instance by coordinating more with different unions and getting Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and online streamer Hasan Piker to promote the project to their millions of online followers. Even with this help, however, most workers who have reached out to EWOC have been in, or adjacent to, the young radicalized milieus around DSA, Labor Notes, and left unionists across the country.

Expanding this model’s impact to wider layers of working people will require either that larger unions and institutions start lending their support to EWOC or that they adopt its innovations within their own outreach structures. The replicability of this new approach has already been demonstrated by its diffusion to Britain where young labor leftists in summer 2022 teamed up with the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) to found Organise Now!, a project that has consciously imported the entirety of EWOC’s structure and mission—and whose rapid growth has similarly pointed to a vacuum in serious need of being filled.

Lessons from EWOC

Although still limited in reach, EWOC provides a proof of concept for numerous digitally enabled strategic innovations that national unions and allied organizations can incorporate. EWOC’s most important lessons for the broader labor movement are threefold: plant organizing seeds widely; support any worker who wants to organize; and lean as much as possible on volunteers.

Spread Organizing Seeds Widely
Together with similarly bottom-up union campaigns like Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and the reformed UAW’s organizing across Southern automakers, EWOC has demonstrated the viability of a new strategy of seeding unionization efforts, rather than passively waiting for workers to reach out (“hot-shopping”) or exclusively organizing pre-chosen workplaces (“strategic targeting”). Along these lines, Svoboda describes EWOC’s proactive efforts to provide organizing tools to as many workers as possible as “planting seeds of worker power.” She notes that


not everyone who reaches out to us or who comes to a training will be able to [unionize]—some get cold feet or others might stop at a petition—but the more people you give those tools to, the more people will actually make it there.

This seeding strategy is a significant innovation, distinct from both traditional small-scale hot shopping and hyper-concentrated union targeting. From the 1990s onwards, most advocates of strategic union organizing have fought labor’s prevailing reliance on hot shopping, arguing (not without reason) against chasing small pockets of discontent because isolated workers lacked the punch to bring industries to the table and because unions’ limited resources should be concentrated on the most strategic targets. Smart organizing was summed up by Stephen Lerner, lead organizer in the Justice for Janitors campaign: “When a union picks a target instead of letting the target pick the union, workers are more likely to win.”[5 ]This remains the prevailing wisdom today among unions with strong organizing traditions. “Our message to the working class is ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you,’” a researcher from one such union half-jokingly told me. As an alternative to hot shopping, these unions have generally focused on targeting relatively large workplaces, especially when these are vulnerable to political pressure.

I am not arguing for a return to hot shopping, in which unions passively wait for workers to reach out and do nothing to transform initial wins into company-wide or industry-wide campaigns. Nor am I suggesting that unions throw out the tactic of targeting strategic workplaces and companies. Unions should put serious funds into efforts like the Inside Organizer School—a project led by SBWU’s founders—to widely train a new generation of salts capable of initiating campaigns at pivotal workplaces and companies.

But relying only on this approach is a poor fit for our decentralized economy in which a vast majority of workers work in smallish establishments (see Figure 1). Unlike in the 1930s, our economy and cities no longer revolve around massive, centrally located workplaces like auto and steel factories. Some massive factories and warehouses still exist, but these are now geographically dispersed. And almost all large corporations today depend on thousands of relatively small workplaces that are widely spread out.
Figure 1. Total U.S. employment by workplace size, 2022.
Source: Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In today’s geographically decentralized conditions, union targeting has to be supplemented with proactive efforts to lean on and seed worker-initiated drives across the entire economy, in workplaces of all sizes, in all regions.

Seeding worker-initiated drives in this way is a crucial mechanism to dramatically increase the total number of drives and campaigns in the United States—and to significantly lower their costs, by depending more on worker leaders to drive their initial stages with little to no staff support. The 1 to 100 staff-to-worker ratio of traditional strategic unionization is too expensive to scale up. To organize tens of millions, labor needs to find ways to give large numbers of working people the inspiration and tools to start self-organizing.[6]

As the Starbucks Workers United campaign has demonstrated, seeding can be as proactive and ambitious as targeting, albeit more scattershot. While most of the 400-plus unionized cafes were not specifically targeted by SBWU, most of these also would not have begun organizing without the campaign’s seeding efforts over multiple years.

Along similar lines, rather than only targeting pre-determined factories, the new UAW has actively encouraged all non-union auto workers to start organizing. Rather than targeting specific predetermined factories, the union has cast its organizing seeds widely, focusing on providing material support for those plants where fired-up workers have gone the furthest in collecting union authorization cards on their own. Leaning on the momentum generated by its successful strike of the Big 3 automakers in late 2023, as UAW strategist Chris Brooks explained to me, “we didn’t know—and didn’t want to try to predetermine—where the most heat would be, so we’ve tried our best to fan the flames everywhere.”

From EWOC to Starbucks to Southern automakers, some of the most productive seeding techniques include using high-publicity moments like big union elections and strikes to call on (and provide tools to) other workers to start organizing; holding big online trainings; producing viral social media content to generate new leads; posting digital ads or distributing fliers encouraging people to sign up for organizing support; and developing in-depth, easily accessible training materials for workers to start self-organizing, like EWOC’s Unite and Win: The Workplace Organizer’s Handbook.

Compared to EWOC, unions have far more of an ability to seed at scale. They have over $13.4 billion in unused liquid assets, 14.3 million members who could potentially volunteer, and, through decades of electoral campaigning, they have huge lists of contacts.[7] And as the recent UAW experience shows, they can leverage attention-grabbing actions like strikes to call on (and provide tools to) all workers in a region or industry to start organizing.

Although not all organizing seeds will sprout, a well-funded seeding approach is essential for exponentially raising the quantity of union drives in the United States.

Support Any Worker
EWOC defines its mission as follows: “With the goal of rebuilding a powerful, militant, and democratic labor movement in the U.S., EWOC supports any unorganized worker in any industry who wants to organize their workplace—by building a union and/or fighting collectively for immediate demands.”

Since the biggest challenge facing organized labor is how to massively increase the number of unionization efforts nationwide, why shouldn’t national labor unions or labor federations similarly support any worker looking for organizing help? Such an approach of saying yes—even to small shops, even in towns where a given union does not already have a base, even to fights initially limited to immediate concessions—would significantly expand the number of overall workplace fight backs and union drives, especially as word gets out that labor is committing to new organizing.

Making such a radical shift in approach cannot happen without simultaneously finding ways to lower organizing costs by making organizing less staff-intensive. Saying yes to all workers without breaking the bank via staff hires would oblige the development of extensive online trainings as well as detailed, interactive digital materials to support workers without staff-intensive coaching. It would require establishing gradated approaches for when and how to start dedicating resources to a drive that has caught on, such as providing support at drives’ later stages. It might also require building new, legally firewalled structures to protect the parent union from having to take legal responsibility for every risky action taken by workers they are supporting.

Above all, scaling up to say yes to all workers requires finding ways to inspire and lean on large numbers of volunteer worker organizers. In other words, it would require that labor start structuring itself more like a movement.

Lean as Much as Possible on Volunteers
A shoe-string operation that initially functioned with zero paid staff and that now only has a few full-timers, EWOC has shown that many of the tasks normally done by staff can be effectively done by volunteers. EWOC’s seeding strategy would be impossible without donated labor and developing robust trainings as well as apprenticeship processes to skill-up people from a wide range of experience levels. With EWOC support, for example, many workers who first contact us for organizing assistance eventually go on to become volunteers supporting others. To quote Mike Kemmett from the restaurant Barboncino, which in 2023 became New York City’s first standalone unionized pizzeria: “EWOC didn’t just help us win our [union election] vote. Their support helped to turn bussers and line cooks into labor activists ready and eager to organize other restaurants.”

Depending primarily on volunteers more than staff is pivotal for any project aiming to expand rapidly and widely. “What we straddle is being slightly like an organization, slightly like a movement,” Megan explains. “And blending these has meant that EWOC can scale.” Within an established union, taking this approach would primarily require a far better job of tapping existing members.

None of this is meant to suggest that fulltime organizers and union resources are unimportant. Capacity and accumulated experience are crucial, and staff are an essential vehicle to transmit both. The problem is that most unions use this correct general argument to justify their specific (staff heavy) division of labor, without seriously probing the potential to scale up by deploying experienced full-timers and union resources in a new way.

In my forthcoming book on worker-to-worker organizing, We Are the Union (University of California Press, 2025), I detail how Starbucks Workers United, the NewsGuild, and UE’s higher-ed initiatives have recently shown that rank-and-filers—especially those who have recently unionized their own workplaces and who have themselves received serious organizing training—are capable of providing good organizing advice to others. The NewsGuild, for example, has successfully unionized over 10,000 workers since 2017 and won dozens of first contracts through its Member Organizing Program, a worker-to-worker project premised on the idea that workers can and should learn every organizing task normally reserved for staffers.

It is crucial to underscore that getting large numbers of people to volunteer is not only an organizational and technical question. Above all, it is a question of ambition and political vision. The experience of EWOC suggests that most potential volunteers will sacrifice their time for projects that they feel passionately about, that they have ownership over, and that are taking on the systemic injustices of capitalism. It is no accident that EWOC’s volunteers are mostly leftists—and that its institutional backing is from this country’s emblematic left led union (the UE) and its largest socialist organization Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As was the case in the 1930s, a big labor breakthrough requires ambitious strikes and organizing drives capable of tapping young radicalized organizers as well as broader layers of working people.

Whether in the Guild or EWOC, it is important to acknowledge that wagering on worker leadership does come with downsides. Such an approach will, for example, generally translate into a less tightly run ship for union campaigns. But this is a necessary price to pay for involving far more people and organizing more widely. Stephanie Basile from the NewsGuild captures this dynamic:

“The big drawback is that you don’t know what’s going on everywhere and maybe a member is not doing it as perfectly as an experienced staffer. But building a movement is always going to be messy and the strengths far outweigh [the drawbacks]. If we really want as many people as possible out there leading and building power, I shouldn’t know what every member organizer is doing—and we need to have confidence in them.”

Together with like-minded union campaigns, EWOC has demonstrated in practice that a new approach to unionization is possible. If labor as a whole adopted its distributed organizing innovations and lofty, class-struggle ambitions, this would go a long way toward enabling unions to scale up.

But moving in this direction will not be easy for a labor movement deeply weighed down by routine and risk aversion. Even though conditions for new organizing have been exceptionally favorable since 2020, few unions have gone all in to seize the moment. Now is the time.

Notes
1. Thomas A. Kochan, D. Yang, W. T. Kimball, and E. L. Kelly, “Worker Voice in America: Is There a Gap Between What Workers Expect and What They Experience?” ILR Review 72, no. 1 (2019): 3-38.
2. On the high cost of workplace organizing and more scalable alternatives, see Eric Blanc, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025). All quotes in this article, unless otherwise noted, come from interviews done with the author in 2022, 2023, and early 2024 as part of research for this book.
3. Linda Markowitz, Worker Activism after Successful Union Organizing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 93. 3. Linda Markowitz, Worker Activism after Successful Union Organizing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 93.
4. Daniel Galvin, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2024) shows how workers’ centers have effectively expanded their reach by focusing more in recent years on passing and enforcing local and statewide laws.
5. Stephen Lerner, “An Immodest Proposal: Remodeling the House of Labor,” New Labor Forum 12, no. 2 (2003), 20.
6. Eric Blanc, “Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral,” New Labor Forum 33, no. 1 (2024): 77-83.
7. On labor’s funding reserves, see Chris Bohner, Labor’s Fortress of Finance: A Financial Analysis of Organized Labor and Sketches for an Alternative Future: 2010-2021 (Radish Research, 2022), 1.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.Donate

Related PostsCan Distributed Organizing Unionize Millions?
Eric Blanc -- September 13, 2024
Worker-to-Worker Unionism: A Model for Labor to Scale Up
Eric Blanc -- March 25, 2024
Building Global Labor Solidarity: Where We Are Today (Early 2024)
Kim Scipes -- April 16, 2024
Seven Lessons from Starbucks Workers’ Historic Victory
Eric Blanc -- March 03, 2024
Militancy—and Beyond
Bob Master -- April 19, 2024
DonateFacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Eric Blanc

Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025), and an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.