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.


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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.


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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.

 Boeing Machinists on Strike Have a Historic Opportunity

Kshama SawantFacebook

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Photo by Thomas Bormans

In a potentially game-changing move, 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Pacific Northwest, unionized with IAM District 751, are on strike after rejecting the company’s initial insulting contract offer. A stunning 96 percent of the rank and file voted to go on strike, marking a sea change for the fight of working people at Boeing. For decades, Boeing’s executives and wealthy shareholders have, with the active help from Democrats and Republicans in Washington state and Washington D.C., enforced a decades-long brutal regime that has thrown both workers and safety standards under the bus in favor of short-term profit maximization for themselves. The strike offers an opening for the company’s workers to win historic gains and begin rebuilding a fighting union with a militant, active rank-and-file membership.

Like workers everywhere, Boeing machinists are fighting for decent wages and benefits in the face of the sky-high cost of living. The workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, which is the bare minimum they need given the ground they have lost in past sell-out contracts from the bosses, combined with historic inflation levels and high living costs in the region. They are angry at Boeing’s shell games, including the attempt to take away their annual employee bonuses (called “AMPP”), which they were promised in return for being forced to accept higher healthcare costs in a past contract. They are also demanding an end to the intolerable regime of mandatory overtime, which is running rampant at Boeing, denying workers the right to a life outside of work. The machinists are also fighting for a restoration of defined benefit pension, and full and retroactive reinstatement of pension for all workers.

The initial contract offer from the Boeing bosses came nowhere close to meeting these demands. What Boeing touted as a 25 percent raise over four years in the contract offer is, in reality, much less. When coupled with the cost of living and the removal of the annual AMPP bonus, the proposed raises don’t even make up for recent and future inflation, much less the severe blows from past contracts. The offer also fails to restore workers’ pensions.

Since the strike began, Boeing has been forced to release a second contract offer, which includes a 30 percent pay increase over the next 4 years, up from 25 percent in the last offer. The strike has also forced Boeing to back down from their attempt to take away workers’ annual bonuses. But this new offer is still far less than what workers have been demanding and what they need, and workers immediately responded both on the picket line and in social media with their strong opposition to this totally inadequate offer, saying they must continue the strike.

The union leadership has now come out with a statement that says as much also, and which condemns the disgraceful way in which Boeing has attempted to undemocratically circumvent the union with this offer. Because of this, they are rejecting this new offer outright.

A Decade of Extorting Workers and Taxpayers

In the Seattle area, a job at Boeing used to be highly sought after — it was a path to decent wages and benefits and relative stability. A common phrase among workers was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” With the attacks over the last 15 years, many new Boeing workers are instead being paid less than the Seattle minimum wage, and the company has had higher and higher turnover. These attacks on the workforce have gone hand-in-hand with the corporation’s major struggles in recent years with safety and quality control.

The strike comes in the wake of the machinists being sold out in a spectacularly shameful deal made over a decade ago in November 2013 by Boeing executives and shareholders with the Democratic Party-dominated Washington State Legislature, and Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee. The defined benefit pension plan, won by the unionized machinists in previous decades, was eliminated in one fell swoop. A defined benefit plan, which is currently accessible only to a small proportion of the workforce in the private sector and which was won through labor struggle, is a plan that guarantees retired workers a decent income for life. This was replaced by Boeing with a far weaker 401(K) retirement system that leaves workers at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market. This dramatically undermines annual retirement income, as well as shifting the risk away from the executives and major shareholders of big corporations like Boeing onto the backs of working people.

The Democratic Party justified this historic attack on both the Boeing machinists and working people statewide by claiming that it was necessary to save jobs. Boeing executives had carried out public extortion, threatening to take away the final assembly of the 777X aircraft out of Washington state, which would eliminate an estimated 10,000 union jobs. State and local Democrats from across the region insisted that the machinists accept the contract, and scandalously told them that if they didn’t, they would be responsible for not only the loss of their own jobs, but also the broader economic repercussions if Boeing were to move future production out of state.

Rather than mobilize the union members and the wider labor movement into a serious strike and fightback, the IAM international leadership echoed the arguments from the Democrats. Disgracefully, even though the rank-and-file members had rejected the contract, the leadership brought the same sell-out contract back for a second vote in order to push it through. This was a highly undemocratic vote, which the union’s leadership held on January 3rd of 2014, while many of the workers were still out of town for the holidays. The contract squeaked by with a 51-49 vote and a much lower turnout than the first vote.

In addition to publicly shaming workers to accept the elimination of their pensions, Washington State Democrats voted to give Boeing an $8.7 billion tax handout in 2013 — the largest tax handout by any state in U.S. history — as an added “incentive” to keep jobs in state.

I rallied in solidarity with Boeing workers after they initially rejected the contract in November 2013. I had just been elected to the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist and working-class representative, using my campaign to launch the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage. In the following year, my office, the 15 NOW movement, and Seattle’s working people made Seattle the first major city to win the $15/hour minimum wage, despite opposition from big business and the Democratic Party. That wage is now at nearly $20/hour, and is the nation’s highest major-city minimum wage.

At the rally, I urged Boeing workers to shut down the company’s profit-making machine until their demands were met. I called Boeing’s threat to cut jobs “economic terrorism,” and warned that there was nothing preventing Boeing executives from pocketing the billions from tax handouts and pension cuts and then moving jobs out of state anyway. I said that if Boeing attempted to carry out their threat to cut jobs, that workers should take the Boeing facilities into democratic public ownership. I said that workers’ control of production was the only solution that could actually protect jobs and working-class taxpayers: “The machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”

The Democrats approved Boeing’s massive tax handout and the company succeeded in robbing workers of their pensions, but predictably, Boeing executives did cut jobs in Washington state: by 2017, they had cut nearly 13,000 jobs, or more than 15 percent of the company’s Washington workforce. And those job losses don’t even account for the tens of thousands of additional layoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Boeing used as a further excuse to attack workers, including early retirements for higher paid and more experienced older workers. This culture of placing little value on the workers who build the planes is a key reason for Boeing’s ongoing safety failures, and is evident throughout company policy. This includes Boeing paying the full cost for children of non-unionized employees like managers and executives to attend a childcare facility across the street from their site in Everett, but union machinists have to pay the full $1,700/month cost out of pocket!

Since that betrayal in 2013, the machinists have faced stagnating wages and untenable increases in the cost of living. In contrast, Boeing made record profits, and engaged in billions in stock buybacks to further enrich wealthy shareholders. Meanwhile, over the same decade, Washington State Democrats and Republicans have systematically underfunded public education, affordable housing, healthcare, and social services.

A Strong Strike: Escalation, Double Strike Pay, Mass Rallies

Last year, UAW auto workers won historic victories through coordinated strike action, including increases of up to 150 percent in starting wages. This lesson — that workers’ demands can be won with a strong strike — appears not to have been absorbed by IAM’s leadership, who so far have not taken a bold, combative approach, including not organizing strong picket lines, rallies, or otherwise building on the strike’s momentum. They instead attempted to avoid striking altogether by insisting that Boeing’s initial offer was the best the workers could get, that it was even “historic,” and warning that there’s no guarantee a strike will win anything. In a statement published the morning after the strike vote, the IAM International leadership refused to even use the word “strike,” referring to it instead as “this challenging time,” hardly a characterization meant to inspire confidence or a fighting spirit.

While pledging to “make every resource available,” there was no mention of how the leadership will mobilize the 600,000-member organization to concretely support the striking members. The machinists know just how inadequate the strike fund currently is. Some have noted that the $250/week, which isn’t available until the third week of the strike, would not even cover rent. Many have reported having to scramble to line up temporary jobs to make sure their bills can be paid during the strike.

A weak strike fund leads to weak picket lines if workers are forced to take on other jobs rather than stay on the picket line. And Boeing workers need the strongest possible picket lines not only to prevent the possibility of strikebreakers from reopening the facilities, but crucially to build momentum, cohesion, and the overall strength of the strike, showing the bosses the strength of the workers in hard numbers.

The UAW’s victory last year shows that Boeing machinists have the potential to win many of their demands, but it will require a strong, united strike. The 96 percent strike approval vote proves that workers are united in their desire to win a good contract, but there is an urgent need to build on that initial vote and escalate the strike. There’s also a crucial need to actively build for strong community support and solidarity from the wider labor movement and community to let the company know that it cannot simply starve them back to work. You can hear the potential to mobilize broad community solidarity every day on the picket lines, from the constant honks of other workers driving by.

Working people from around the region should go to the picket lines to show support, and to send a message to Boeing that they have to contend with not just their own employees, but the wider community as well. Union members should pass solidarity resolutions that include strike fund donations, from tens of thousands of dollars for small unions to millions, or even hundreds of millions, from the biggest unions like UAW, the UFCW, and the Teamsters. This is what strike funds are for — to help win big victories for the working class that can empower the labor movement as a whole. Members of my organization, Workers Strike Back, are bringing such solidarity resolutions in their own unions.

The primary responsibility for a well-resourced strike lies with IAM international leadership, who need to dramatically increase the strike fund immediately so workers can go to the picket lines rather than being forced to work other jobs.

Prioritizing Profits Over Safety

At the time in 2013, Democratic Party politicians and the corporate media sneered at my points at the Boeing rally where I talked about the need for democratic public ownership of Boeing. But the dire necessity of actual democratic oversight has since become clear as day, with short-sighted and selfish Boeing executives having plunged the company into a complete crisis, with one safety disaster after another.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been working in lockstep with Boeing executives to aggressively roll back safety regulations and government oversight over the course of the last decade. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington state chairs the U.S. Senate panel tasked with overseeing the airline industry. The recipient of nearly $200,000 in contributions from Boeing’s executives and political action committee, Cantwell championed legislation rolling back safety requirements for Boeing after the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people!

Testimony in lawsuits and investigations by Congress and Federal regulators has revealed the degree to which the bosses have willfully ignored safety concerns and even punished workers for raising them. One Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover: “We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job…What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide.” Other workers backed this up. One explained: “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said [an] unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.” Another said he told the National Transportation Safety Board that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.” “The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.”

At a recent banking conference, Boeing CFO Brian West claimed that a strike by the machinists would “jeopardize our recovery” from the ongoing safety scandal. This statement is belied by the fact that Boeing’s credit rating was hovering “one notch above junk status” long before the strike, as a fallout from the spate of safety incidents, including the shocking midair blowout of a cabin door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane, forcing an emergency landing.

Instead of deploying resources into addressing urgent safety issues, Boeing executives have prioritized returning maximum profits for shareholders in the near term, exorbitant CEO pay, and shoring up their status as one of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the U.S. They’ve also been actively undermining worker efforts at fighting for quality control and safety measures at Boeing, including targeting workers trying to raise the alarms.

CEO Dave Calhoun was paid $22.6 million in 2022, $33 million in 2023, and another $45 million in stock bonuses upon “stepping down” in August, amid mounting criticism over “mishandled” (i.e., illegally suppressed) safety issues.

Boeing’s major shareholders have, in turn, pocketed a staggering $68 billion in dividends and stock buybacks over the last decade. As economist Marie Christine Duggan found:

In 2017, the year before the first deadly plane crash, Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66% of total spending, while only 9% of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes. In other words, payouts to shareholders were seven times larger than spending on new equipment for manufacturing.

These same major shareholders are also the ones who hire executives and decide their extravagant pay. As comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the logical outcome of a major industry like air travel being run on the basis of private profit rather than in the public interest, with the limited public oversight that used to exist being increasingly unraveled.

Boeing executives’ disregard for safety isn’t just deadly to passengers on their planes but also to workers. Just last month, two Delta airlines workers were killed and a third was gravely injured when the tire on a Boeing plane exploded on the runway. Overall, 15 of the 32 whistleblower complaints filed against the company in the past three years have raised workplace safety concerns as the primary issue. Just this past May, Boeing locked out its own chronically understaffed and underpaid firefighters for three weeks in an effort to avoid raising their pay to be more in line with the industry standard. These workers are responsible for the critical task of responding to fires and medical emergencies at the company’s facilities.

Since the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing has been forced to pay over $3 billion in criminal penalties and related fees for illegally hiding safety concerns from government regulators and attempting to silence worker whistleblowers. Until this strike, dozens of worker whistleblowers have been at the leading edge of the fightback against Boeing’s deadly corporate greed. Though undoubtedly heroic, their vulnerability as individuals could not be more evident. But as an organized force, 33,000 machinists are impossible for Boeing to silence. Their demands correctly include more say over safety and quality control procedures.

Unfortunately, the “seat at the table” of Boeing’s Board of Directors being requested by union leadership is not going to give the workers any say over safety procedures. Workers need actual democratic control and decision-making authority — like democratically elected worker-led quality-assurance committees with real power over policy and budget so  they can aggressively defend Quality Assurance (QA) and other workers from corporate pressure to overlook safety issues in the interests of corporate profits.

Opportunity is Ripe for a Big Win — Labor Must Seize it

The situation is ripe for Boeing workers to win major concessions with a strong strike. Boeing’s public image has been deeply tarnished by the ongoing safety scandals. Because of the close Presidential race, Democrats are sensitive to pressure from the labor movement. This isn’t just wishful thinking. Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a note to clients, “We see it likely Boeing would have to make further concessions and move closer to the IAM’s initial proposal.”

When even Wall Street bankers are talking openly about a company’s weak position relative to workers in a strike, there is no excuse for union leaders not to take advantage of this leverage to win the biggest possible victory for workers.

IAM’s international leadership, with a membership of over 600,000, must immediately concretely prioritize the machinists’ strike by massively strengthening their strike fund. At a minimum, strike pay should be doubled to $500/week and begin immediately, not after 3 weeks. Striking workers need to be out in force at the picket lines to prevent scab labor from restarting production, to build momentum, ensure high morale and a strong public profile, to facilitate ongoing discussion among workers about strike strategy, and to put maximum pressure on Boeing. Unions should organize mass rallies in support of Boeing workers, which could bring out tens of thousands of working people, and maximize pressure on both Boeing and the Democratic Party, which is overseeing mediation and has huge leverage over the company, including billions in government contracts.

A victory in this strike would be a huge boost for the labor movement after a decade of gross profiteering by Boeing on the backs of workers, taxpayers, and public safety. The labor movement as a whole needs to take responsibility for ensuring an adequate strike fund so no worker has to worry about how their bills will be paid during a strike. The elected leaders of major unions nationally have a special responsibility to actively and materially support a historic strike.

Rank-and-file union members everywhere can introduce resolutions in solidarity with IAM 751, calling for their demands to be met in full, pledging large donations to their strike fund. If you’re in the Puget Sound region, mobilize your union’s members to the machinists’ 24/7 picket lines at Boeing Field in South Seattle, Boeing’s Everett Site, and the Boeing Renton Factory.

Workers everywhere, both union and non-union, should do whatever is possible to support this strike, including making trips to the picket line, donating to the strike fund, and helping organize community support rallies. Workers should also publicly demand that Democratic politicians in the state stand with striking Boeing workers and call for Boeing to immediately meet their demands in full.

Boeing Machinists have the opportunity to reset the playing field and reverse the devastating losses from their last contract. Such a shift in the balance of power against Boeing’s ruthless corporate leadership would be a huge victory for working people everywhere. Solidarity with Boeing machinists on strike!

Kshama Sawant is a socialist, a founding member of Workers Strike Back, and a former Seattle City Councilmember who helped win a $15/hour minimum wage and an Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing.