Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Whoever Wins, the Labor Movement Must Break Free From the Two Capitalist Parties


No matter who wins the elections this year, the labor movement needs to break free from both capitalist parties and prepare to fight attacks from the far right and both parties by using our strategic positions as workers.


Olivia Wood 
November 4, 2024
LEFT  VOICE USA

Jason Bergman/SipaUSA/AP

On the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), the party’s attempts to appeal to organized labor were on full display. The presidents of AFSCME, SEIU, LiUNA, IBEW, CWA, and the AFL-CIO all spoke briefly in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid during a joint speaking slot, and UAW president Shawn Fain gave extended remarks later in the program.

Fain gained national fame during the joint “stand up” strikes against Ford, GM, and Stellantis in 2023, and he represents a more progressive and class struggle-oriented sector within UAW. During his speech, he decried the “billionaire class” and its attempts to divide and conquer the working class by blaming economic problems on people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. As an example of ruling-class greed, he called out Cornell University (whose service staff, organized with the UAW, had begun a strike earlier that day), and drew raucous applause when he took off his jacket to reveal a “Donald Trump is a scab” T-shirt. But all these correct critiques of bourgeois tactics and Republican rhetoric were used not to build or wield working-class power, but instead to express organized labor’s support for a Kamala Harris presidency and encourage UAW members to stay in the fold of the Democratic Party.

Fain claimed that Harris is “one of us” and a “fighter for the working class,” that she will “stand with the working class in our fight for justice.” But this is plainly untrue; while the Democrats’ program for workers has important differences from the Republicans’, they are still ultimately a bourgeois party, one that takes a different approach from that of the Republicans to manage class antagonisms in order to contain class struggle in favor of the bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile, the sector of the new Far Right that Trump and J. D. Vance represent has gained in strength in recent years. The former president has a slight edge in the polls, and Republicans are poised to take over the Senate and possibly keep the House of Representatives. Their program includes serious attacks against immigrants, workers, women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and climate change initiatives.

No matter who wins the elections this year, the labor movement needs to break free from both capitalist parties and prepare to fight attacks from both parties of capital using our strategic positions as workers.
Harris, Walz, and the Working Class

To see the futility of organized labor’s alliance with the Democratic Party, we need only look at who else is taking the stage at the DNC: Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, and several Democratic governors, all of whom are the ultimate bosses of public sector workers in their cities and states. J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, even bragged about his own status as an “actual billionaire” during his convention speech on Tuesday. These are the mayors and governors (including Tim Walz) who set the police and National Guard against protesters, who oversee the destruction of the tents and belongings of people living on the street, and who approve the austerity budgets that defund public services and force public sector workers into ever-more difficult working conditions.

Biden came to power with big promises to the working class, promising to be the most pro-labor president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). While Biden’s NLRB appointees have issued more progressive rulings than previous administrations, the Biden administration nonetheless broke the 2022 rail workers’ strike and intervened in the 2024 East Coast longshoremen’s strike to prevent disruptions to the economy. While some have praised the administration for refusing to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to suspend the strike and for urging companies to offer their workers more, the real value of stopping the strike as quickly as possible is to protect the flow of capital and prevent the working class from seeing the extent of our power.

As the political situation stands now, the Harris/Walz campaign has created a Democratic Party with a “tent” big enough to include both labor movement superstar Shawn Fain and the much-loathed former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, who is famous for supporting war, torture, strengthened executive powers, and government surveillance. The Democratic Party, on many key issues such as immigration, is moving further to the right.

Just in the realm of education, the 2024 platform removed language present in the 2020 platform about providing LGBTQ-inclusive sex education; while the 2024 platform does discuss the problem of student debt, it doesn’t promise any further relief beyond what the Biden administration has already announced, which falls far short of the promises in the 2020 platform. The 2020 platform supports providing universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds, while the 2024 platform only discusses four-year-olds. The 2020 platform calls for free tuition at all public colleges and universities for children of families making under $125,000 per year; the 2024 platform discusses free tuition only for community colleges and trade schools.

In a thread posted to the website commonly known as Twitter in August, the UAW praised Tim Walz, claiming that he “has always put the working class first.” But that’s untrue — in May 2023, Governor Walz sided with the Mayo Clinic over the Minnesota Nurses Association, agreeing to a carve-out that would exempt Mayo Clinic patients and nurses from a new safe staffing law.

Mary C. Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association at the time, had this to say:


Nurses denounce Governor Tim Walz for his abdication of good government and acquiescence to anti-democratic and anti-labor corporate bullies. … By siding with the profits and power of corporate executives over the rights and needs of patients and workers, Governor Walz has made clear he will only side with labor when corporate interests concede.

As an individual and former teacher, Walz probably does understand and empathize with many workers’ issues. But as a Democratic politician, his personal goodwill is constrained by political expediency, because the Democratic Party is not a working-class party. It competes with the Republicans for working-class votes, but it is ultimately beholden to the bourgeoisie.

The Democratic Party is not moving to the left, as many people hoped it would given the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Squad, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Uncommitted Campaign. It is retreating on several of its own policy commitments — not only failing to achieve them during the Biden administration, but abandoning them as even stated goals. This is not a party that represents the interests of the working class and the oppressed, even though it continues to court these voters.
Election 2024 and the Fight for the Working Class

Amid the new trends toward greater militancy and new organizing in the US labor movement, such as how the pandemic and the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have inspired new organizing, especially among young people, the 2024 campaign season has included significant attempts to appeal to the working class and organized labor in particular. Both in this year’s polls and in the past two presidential elections, Trump has gained ground among sectors of the working class (defined by pollsters in various ways).

This phenomenon is in part because the US working class is going through a process of political realignment. Jacobin’s summary of several studies on the phenomenon finds that the Democratic Party has “lost somewhere between 20 and 40 points of working-class support to Republicans or to abstention over the course of the past half-century,” and a debate about this “dealignment” in New Left Review notes that different segments of the working class are shifting in different directions (for instance, workers with higher levels of education and higher incomes are gradually becoming more Democratic, while workers with less education and lower incomes are gradually becoming more Republican). The Republican National Convention last month demonstrated the Republicans’ new overtures to workers, such as through appeals to economic populism, references to both “union and non-union workers,” and inviting Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak. The choice of J. D. Vance — known for his memoir Hillbilly Elegy — as the Republican pick for vice president also indicates the party’s attempt to appeal to the working class. While Project 2025 includes all kinds of anti-worker proposals, the policy handbook itself frames these proposals (including reducing overtime protections and strengthening independent contractor status) as pro-worker and pro-family, even though in reality they would make life significantly worse for workers and their families.

In short, Democrats and Republicans are fighting over working-class votes. Each party is attempting to present itself as having the solution to high inflation and the high cost of living, issues that most voters from both parties were “very concerned” about, according to a January Pew Research Center report. Because organized labor has historically aligned itself with the Democratic Party, Harris quickly locked down endorsements from many of the major national unions. At the DNC, the stage featured some of the union presidents in rapid succession, showing off their long-standing relationship with the Dems (and pointing out the Republicans’ relative lack of union support). This makes the argument that workers — and unionized workers in particular — should vote Democrat because the Democrats are their “allies.”

These appeals are especially important now in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and anger from sectors of the labor movement over the United States’ funding and support for Israel. The UAW in particular has expressed support for its members taking part in divestment actions at college campuses, although the extent of that support has varied by location and has serious limitations, falling short of support for strike actions that exceed current labor law. But in the states where UAW members have been especially active in organizing for Palestine, most prominently in California (UAW 4811) and New York (especially graduate student unions at Columbia, New York University, and the New School), it’s Democratic politicians sending the police to arrest students, workers, and allies. In this context, the Democratic Party is also incentivized to strengthen its relationships with labor in order to temper labor’s organizing against the Democratic Party. By pulling segments of organized labor closer, the Democrats can strengthen their chances of winning elections in November while also smoothing over tensions and criticisms.

As one example, Fain’s T-shirt doesn’t just say “Trump is a scab” — it also says “Vote Harris.” Instead of directly fighting for the interests of their members and the working class as a whole, Fain and the other union presidents who spoke at the DNC are subordinating these interests to the interests of the Democratic Party.

On July 22, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) became the first international union to endorse Harris for president. Biden’s withdrawal from the race happened to coincide with the AFT’s biennial convention, at which the union had already planned to vote on a presidential endorsement, and the planned resolution was amended for the new presumptive nominee. In her address to the AFT convention on July 25, Harris thanked AFT president Randi Weingarten for her “long-standing friendship” and for “serving as an adviser to the president and me.” Weingarten spoke on the final night of the DNC, on the same stage as some of the Democratic mayors, governors, and legislators who control funding for the schools that AFT members work in. Where I live, in New York, Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, but our universities — staffed by AFT members — are continually underfunded. Our buildings are perpetually falling apart, and most workers make less than a living wage.

Trading political support for Democratic officials in exchange for (possible) favorable treatment is a common strategy within the labor movement, dating back, as Mike Davis describes in Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, to the days of FDR and the New Deal coalition. In my own union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), which is affiliated with the AFT, several people strongly argued in discussions around whom to endorse in the 2021 Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City that we should endorse based on who we thought was most likely to win rather than whose mayoral platform we supported the most or who would be most likely to give more funding to the City University of New York. In internal political discussions — especially about Palestine, but about other political issues as well — we are frequently told that it would be politically disadvantageous for us to come out in support of Palestinians or in opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza because we would risk alienating our legislative “allies” in city council and the state legislature, and thereby risk getting less funding for the university than we might otherwise have won.

The result of this strategy is that labor is compelled to constrain itself according to its so-called allies’ political wishes, in exchange for merely hoping for something in return. In this devil’s bargain, unions limit their own political activity, the possibilities that members might organize for, and the tactics they might use.

Of the unions whose presidents spoke at the Democratic National Convention, two of them (SEIU and UAW) also signed onto a July 23 letter demanding that the Biden administration halt all military aid to Israel. Given that Harris supports continuing weapons shipments to Israel and ensuring that the US military is the “most lethal fighting force in the world” if she is elected president, there is a clear contradiction between the unions’ political demands and their support of Harris’s candidacy.

PSC-CUNY has endorsed a presidential candidate only twice this century, endorsing John Kerry in 2004 and Bernie Sanders in 2020, with a clause in the latter resolution specifying that the union would support whoever won the Democratic nomination in the general election. The Kerry endorsement resolution specifies that the PSC was offering only critical support to Kerry, in contrast with the AFT’s uncritical endorsement passed at the convention, noting that “John Kerry’s presidential election campaign has taken positions at odds with the stated positions of the PSC on such issues as Iraq, labor policy, NAFTA, and educational policy.”

Much of the rest of the 2004 resolution’s text is dedicated to anti-war policy, including reaffirming the PSC’s “commitment to building labor participation in an independent anti-war movement and to maintain pressure on any presidential candidate or president to shift his position on this and other key issues.” In that clause from 2004, we at least see lip service to political independence, and labor participation in the anti-war movement, in contrast with the PSC leadership’s strong opposition to organizing in the movement against the genocide in Gaza. Neither the PSC as an institution nor its leaders has offered any qualifying statement about the AFT’s Harris endorsement, and the union’s social media accounts are instead celebrating the Harris campaign, even though Harris also holds several policy positions at odds with the official political positions of the PSC. For instance, she opposes Medicare for All, defunding the police, and certain provisions of the Green New Deal, all of which the PSC officially supports. Is that the program of a “champion for the working class?” No.

In contrast with this total lack of criticism from the AFT and many (but not all) of its locals, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) General Executive Board issued a statement on September 13 that offers political support for Harris while acknowledging that “a true political alternative, a labor party that can unite and speak for the working class,” would be better and that “in the long run, merely voting for the lesser of two evils is incapable of producing any kind of positive good for working people.” Even though the UE’s statement does not resolve the contradiction between the logic of lesser evilism while recommending a lesser evil vote, this example highlights just how deep in the Democrats’ pocket unions like the AFT are, in their refusal to make even minor criticisms of the Harris/Walz campaign. It also reveals the horizon that the US labor movement, including more progressive unions like UE, is currently unwilling to approach: actually organizing independently of the Democrats.

But instead of cutting ties and building a party that will actually represent our interests, the leaderships of the US labor movement continues to follow in the Democratic Party’s footsteps, with little in return. Instead of spending time and money organizing for Harris, the labor movement could dedicate itself to building its forces for fighting on behalf of workers and oppressed people regardless of who wins. The International Longshoremen’s Association won annual raises of over 10 percent for six years by shutting down East Coast ports for only three days — a strong sign of their power. If Trump wins — and especially if Republicans take control of Congress — there will undoubtedly be new attacks on our rights and new austerity measures imposed from the federal level. If Harris wins, there may still be new attacks and new austerity measures, but there will certainly be all of the same problems we have now under Biden: our government is funding a genocide; the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 an hour while people struggle to make ends meet even in places with higher minimums; trans rights are highly restricted in more than half the country; many states have imposed abortion bans; police departments across the United States continue to brutalize people and are building new “Cop Cities” — and these are only some of the many serious problems facing everyday people.

Our work is cut out for us — and we need to spend our time preparing for what is to come rather than funneling our time, money, and energy into a political party that does not represent our interests.




Olivia Wood

Olivia is a writer and editor at Left Voice and lecturer in English at the City University of New York (CUNY).

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