The Cultural Workerist

Amerikan capitalists are warlike. For generations they’ve viciously dismantled our gains and quality of life. We’ve been bombarded with the “if you don’t like it, go work somewhere else” psychological class warfare at every layer of society, backed up with the violent threat of poverty. For generations more and more of us swallowed it, until recently. A sitting U.S. Senator has been so emboldened by that rhetoric that he’s had charges brought against him at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by the United Auto Workers (UAW) for making unlawful threats against strikers.

Of course there’s no evidence that the NLRB (or whatever “Presidential Emergency Boards” are created in future crises) is a serious regulatory agency. The US labor regime reliably tends to save all real repercussions for workers and their representatives. Contrary to the cosmetic changes that have been trumpeted by labor officialdom and Democratic loyalists, when the inevitable counter-offensive against labor’s current resurgence is launched, the feds will do nothing but protect capital. Neither capital nor the state can tolerate a renewed, independent labor movement at this critical moment in history. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when” some variation of Reagan’s 1981 catastrophic mass terminations of striking air traffic controllers is attempted again. The outcome, catastrophic or otherwise, will depend entirely on us.

Capital Strikes Back

I’m not sure which is more likely: that capital is hellbent on returning to the bloody days of the Pinkertons, or that they have enough forward-thinking minds in the room to remember why the New Deal was instituted in the first place: that labor cannot be controlled with blunt force alone.

If the former is the case, a capital strike will likely occur sometime between now and just before the next election in order to torpedo a potential win by Biden. There’s little reason to believe capital has evolved past its preference for Republicans who will swiftly use jail, fines and scabs with badges to put down any resistance to an anti-labor putsch.

If it’s the latter, mass layoffs and shuttered businesses targeting unionized workers will proliferate no later than shortly after the next presidential election, in response to the historic labor renewal we are experiencing. If capital allows the Biden administration to last into 2025, expect it to engage in the same movement-derailing and repressive calming it deployed in late 2020 and 2022.

Starbucks would rather close every last store in Amerika than negotiate a contract if they expect (reasonably) that the federal government will bail them out. Corporate is currently testing the NLRB to see how far they’ll go to enforce the law, and so far General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has said or done nothing to suggest that she will ever escalate to anything that might approach a serious legal confrontation with capital.

Starbucks has racked-up record numbers of sustained Unfair Labor Practice charges, and yet the company is still free to ignore their mandate under federal law to bargain in good faith under “the most pro-union president in history.” Starbucks knows firsthand that only the working class can emancipate itself after several generations of experience with union-busting enabled by the NLRB. We can safely assume they are currently testing the Board to see if they can get away with liquidating Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) entirely. Otherwise, they risk letting the workforce-at-large get hip to that fact, and no layer of the US labor regime wants to reach that tipping point.

The Hotel-Tourism-Restaurant Workers’ Union of Greece held symbolic a protest at Starbucks store in Athens denouncing the intimidations of the multinational against militant workers, the attempts to silence any expression of solidarity with Palestine and to block union organization and action.

The Board is purportedly trying to get the company to re-open twenty-three stores the company closed to try and break the union, a complaint that will not be heard before the Summer at the earliest. In a separate case, according to the New York Times, in July of this year “an administrative judge previously ruled that Starbucks had illegally closed [3] unionized store[s] in Ithaca, N.Y., [in May] and ordered workers reinstated with back pay, but the company has appealed that decision.” The appeal of course is dragging on with motions, counter-motions and rescheduled hearings.

As people who work for a paycheck, we know these time frames are irreconcilable with the lived reality of any actual barista, and do nothing but illustrate what we already know: that the law is simply not for us. If any one of us went into a Starbucks and stole millions of dollars, as the company does to their workers in the form of illegal terminations, we would be jailed on-the-spot. There is no reforming our relationship to capital.

A Republican administration will reliably use heavy-handed Reaganite tactics. Biden of course is also a Reaganite, and let’s be honest, Reaganism is the dominant ideology of the Amerikan Fourth Reich, just as Hitlerism was to the Third. As a bipartisan fascist movement, Reaganism chiefly hinges upon maintenance of the Amerikan status quo, by hook or by crook. In this case, the hook may very well end up being handed by capital to a white nationalist who needs to do any and every thing possible to regain the confidence of the elites if he’s going to avoid dying in prison. He is out for blood.

The crook, we should all know by now, is the accomplice in office who has orchestrated the military and police state seizing virtually all public assets, while very calmly and reassuringly giving the green light to genocide in Palestine. He has granted the violent arm of the power structure broad discretion to re-establish order while he smiles for the cameras and delivers multicultural platitudes. The hook doesn’t know how to do any of that, and capital has taken note.

Likewise, just as he has already sought to divide good protesters and extremist agitators, so too will Biden and his surrogates try to divide good union workers from us judeobolsheviks (or in modern liberal parlance, “white anarchists”). He’s the only one at this point with a proven track record for successfully breaking a (rail) strike in 2022, marshaling labor liberalism to run public relations to whitewash it on his behalf. For that he has the confidence of capital. Nonetheless, after 3 years of the Biden counterinsurgency, labor has entered the chat and we have some words.

The Bar is on the Ground and our Limit is the Sky

Before I arrive at my fucking point, let’s establish one other thing: My mantra is that working class people are the only class of people that contribute a single godamn thing of any actual value to society. White collar, unemployed, disabled, caregivers, industrial proles, the precariat, you name it, we do it. Anyone that’s not a boss, a landlord, a politician, a lawyer, a bureaucrat, a social worker or other parasite, you get the idea.

And as a member of the only class that matters, I don’t mind telling you that we are capable of absolutely anything when we are freed from the dead weight of management. And more to the point, no one can seriously argue that even a badly-run society of stateless communes and industries self-managed by labor, could somehow be worse than how things are being run right now. If we wait much longer we may never see it. We can run entire industries—now, today—better than the ruling class does. In fact, the only thing that is currently keeping our society afloat is that working people bring skill and planning everyday to every workplace across the Fourth Reich of Amerika and its spheres of control globally. We already run this shit, we’re just not paid like it.

But this polemic isn’t about After the Revolution. I told you all that so I can pose to you this: given the balance of power described above, which strategy will we end up using to respond to either Biden’s or Trump’s methods of reinforcing these escalating assaults?

It’s hard to overstate the importance of not throwing away all the work we’ve done the last several years just to save Biden from himself. Autonomous workers’ power and the revitalization of the labor movement for decades seemed like a pipe dream. When push comes to shove, the time will come when millions of working people, broad multitudes, will be confronted with a decision. Will we fall for the same poli-tricks as usual in the name of “having access” to the halls of power, or will we build skyward the House of Labor, stone by stone, on the wide foundation that’s been laid? Contrary to popular sentiment, we cannot “do both” because the power of each threatens the existence of the other.

As the confrontation between labor and capital escalates, Democrat-aligned unionists will undoubtedly launch a counterinsurgency program, akin to the numerous police accountability reforms that have been deployed to siphon abolitionists out of the streets. An extreme example was the way the state tried to sell Cop City as being responsive to demands for better police training. The carrot-and-stick form of government goes something like this: the political class and union bureaucracies will use the carrot of reforms to lure labor militants down the familiar blind alleyways of the legislature and nonprofits, long enough for the police and their sticks to finish mopping up any remnants of resistance in the streets.

“Europe 1916”, an anti-war cartoon by Boardman Robinson, depicting Death enticing an emaciated donkey towards a precipice with a carrot labeled “Victory.”

Phase 1 of this strategy is called the “PRO Act,” a long-forgotten piece of pie-in-the-sky legislative fantasy from 2021, purportedly to overhaul the existing US labor law regime. In actuality it was solely designed to siphon militant workers off the shop floor to be neutralized in the halls of power in the service of capital and the Biden administration, just like Obama’s Employee Free Choice Act before it.

The PRO Act will be dusted-off again shortly. Ironically, the more labor activists lobby for it, the less likely the rebellious conditions necessary for its passage are to come about. Read that again. We know from the National Labor Relations Act that sweeping labor reforms on that scale are passed only when the state is sufficiently concerned with labor unrest, as it was in the 1930s. The opposite scenario—where labor activists spend their time in the halls of power lobbying for it, currying favor with the political class—is exactly when working people ourselves have the least amount of leverage. TL;DR, if you want the PRO Act, ignore it and fight your boss until he begs for mercy. Anyone who insists to the contrary is dangling a carrot in your face.

Pictured: Congressional staffers with no discernible leverage, misled previously into believing that working for a fascist government is somehow “harm reduction,” make a futile plea to their bosses to stop the Palestinian genocide.

Expect that carrot to be coupled with the stick of blacklists, violent scabs with badges, and biological warfare (i.e. eugenicist public health/covid policies). This is the same basic mold of what was inflicted on the movements against police terrorism and environmental destruction between 2011 and 2020, coupled with the carrot dangled in front of anti-capitalist holdouts by the Sanders campaigns.

Under Obama, the police and feds of course were sicced on us by Democratic mayors and federal officials across the country. Senator Sanders never once uttered a word of denunciation against the state terrorism orchestrated against those movements by members of the Party he has always caucused with. That was in spite of owing his sudden political relevance entirely to those battered and betrayed movements. This shell game is the essence of Amerikan electoral fascism, and it is only Amerikan exceptionalism that blinds us to it.

Fuck your carrot.

Union workers occupy the Wisconsin capitol in 2011 for two weeks to protest anti-union legislation. AFL-CIO and Democratic officials defeated a drive toward a general strike by pushing for an ill-fated recall effort.

Strike the Reich

A riot and a strike are two means to the same ends: to inflict economic consequences on capital, while directly redistributing the wealth, without any middle men (or middle people) to mediate on behalf of capital. I remember well being moved to action as a rank and file steward by the sight of burning precincts, and I was not the only one. In 2023, labor has picked up the torch, just as the Floyd rebellion was the vanguard in 2020, and is therefore now public enemy number one. Capital understands the stakes and so should we, otherwise we will fail to anticipate once again the shape of counterinsurgency.

So finally, here’s what I’m driving at: a capital strike can be defeated, but only if labor and the left are prepared. Members of UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) at the Republic Windows and Doors factory declined to wait for the incoming Obama administration to rescue them from recession. Instead, they occupied their shuttered factory and operate it collectively to this day as New Era Windows. Today’s working classes must also seize the moment, and up the ante. The Republic workers were prepared for victory because they were members of a democratic rank-and-file-led union, one of the few at the time who could credibly claim that mantle.

As syndicalists have always demonstrated, rank-and-file democracy is the new world in the shell of the old. It cultivates the abilities of working people to collectively self-govern, in a way that political parties and the state are structurally incapable of. If we continue to teach ourselves how to run our own labor organizations (without union bosses) in our own interests as working people, so too will we run our industries in the service of society and the Earth.

What I’m urging is for the militant labor tendencies of all industries to see the farthest horizons of what is possible when we’re organized and class conscious. To smack the carrot aside and dump the bosses off our backs. Not just to collectivize a coffee shop, or a chain of shops, but to democratically run entire supply chains under direct workers’ control. Nearly twenty years ago, radical Starbucks baristas sought to build ties with coffee harvesters and roasters, planting seeds of solidarity across borders that are now sprouting. For the first time in many generations, we stand to taste the fruits of our labor. Not only for the sake of ‘ethical consumption,’ but to bring us closer to remaking industry in a way that is compatible with all life on Earth.

Teamsters, for example, can mobilize logistics workers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) can do the same for those who build vehicles. The only real barrier to uniting them in a broad economic offensive to eliminate fossil fuels from the transportation industry would be whatever elements of their respective bureaucracies are committed to ‘pure and simple’ (pro-capitalist) trade unionism. Capital and the state have demonstrated they have no intention of averting climate collapse, and so it is on us to rise to the occasion. We need desperately to look beyond what we’ve been told is possible if it means surviving as a civilization.

“We’re not ready” is not a counter-argument. Get ready, because it is happening as you read this. Talk to your coworkers, your neighbors, people at the bus stop, your family and friends. Tell them what is coming and describe what is possible when we are organized: anything. The outcome correlates directly with the farthest horizon of our own imaginations.

The long forgotten syndicalist creed is evergreen. We are seeing a labor renewal driven by, naturally, labor itself. Worker-to-worker organizer training, once limited chiefly to the Industrial Workers of the World, have proliferated widely even among labor liberals. Opposition caucuses have broken the stigma of talking back to the bureaucracy and it will not be easily glued back together. No longer are we “anti-union” for demanding transparency and democracy (although terms like ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘union boss’ are still decried among some old guard labor commentators, who will soon be swept away along with their patrons in the bureaucracy). As more and more workers reject service unionism and assert a worker-led labor movement, so too will we move closer to a worker-run society. Today we are throwing out the union bosses and managing our own organizations and strikes. Tomorrow we will throw out management and run our own places of work. And the day after that, the political class will join them.

To keep us moving forward, in this direction and better ones, we need to bring together the best elements of the labor movement into some kind of organized point of reference(s). I’m uncertain as to whether or not it’s already being built or exists in some form or fashion. What it should include is the following:

• – Nuanced and concise analyses that come directly from rank-and-filers.
• – A multi-tendency anti-fascist orientation that sidesteps electoralism, while leaving room for agitation against the entire political class.
• – A broad following that reaches every union local.

Reformism = Counter-Insurgency

In the event that the capital strike is launched under the Biden administration, it’s not hard to anticipate how he will respond to the ensuing confrontation. In spite of the left’s devotion to labor officialdom, he will have the full cooperation of the union bureaucracy in mobilizing against worker militancy. Business unions like IBT, for example, routinely mobilize their own staffers to ‘hard sell’ tentative agreements to their own members whenever a new contract is up for a vote. That kind of casual conflict-of-interest and top-down mis-use of union staff hours can just as easily be weaponized against us. The danger of this will be greatly heightened around the election, as liberals and reformists of all kinds will pull out all the stops to avoid anything that might destabilize their precious victim-blaming ritual.

A crowd of about 200 rail workers and comrades picketed President Joe Biden’s visit to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Dorchester on Dec. 2, 2022 to protest the breaking of the rail strike. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Earlier this year, such a strategy was soft-launched in the form of McCarthyite red-baiting rhetoric within our own ranks. Labor liberals (Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Labor Notes, McSocialists, etc.) provided the public relations campaign to whitewash federal Democrats breaking the rail strike, and then later to sell the UPS tentative agreement to the Teamster rank-and-file. This trend flowed seamlessly into the next phase of repression when SEIU (the parent union of SBWU) purged their own left-wing Connecticut executive director for taking a stance on Palestine identical to that of SBWU. We should be clear what this has been building up to if we’re going to avoid being the next casualties. Otherwise, Biden and his sycophants will continue accelerating us further and further along the bipartisan fascist agenda of overseeing a calm and orderly climate collapse with as little resistance as possible.

The Democratic Party is accelerating the construction of Fortress Amerika’s border regime, the proliferation of Cop City paramilitary bases, and the purge of the left from all public life. From our ranks a small number of respectable, anticommunist union leaders will once again be hand-picked to be the voice of working people. In exchange they’ll be given extra rations (as our supply chains collapse under the weight of environmental destruction and unmitigated viral infections) while the rest of us duke it out with the cops. The only path forward for us is to reject fascism wherever it appears, whether in the streets or in our own union halls.

Louverture

Don’t get me wrong: I have no illusions that we’re on the cusp of social revolution (if we were, the PRO Act would have been passed already). As a matter of fact we’ve never been closer to losing that possibility forever. We are, however, very much at a stage where large power vacuums will open and be filled very suddenly, and it should go without saying that worker-led organizations must fill them. Another example (aside from occupying shuttered businesses, expropriating them and administrating them under direct workers’ control) would be the likely scenario in which the 2024 election will once again be contested aggressively by both sides: “status quo Reaganism” versus “insurgent Reaganism.” Or how about this: Reagan as he appeared on Amerikan television, versus the Contras. That’s basically where the Overton window is at in the Fourth Reich.

Anyway, the terrain as I see it tells me there has been a very slowly awakening giant in the federal government since January 6^th. It took two years but the upper layers of the police state and political class that remained neutral on that day (for fear of committing too quickly to one side or the other) have finally decided to try and muster up some semblance of a challenge to the Neo-Contras. Indictments have piled up, the mainstream is at least pretending to try and deny Trump ballot access (ha), and most interestingly, Fulton County, Georgia made a very loud political declaration in September. Perhaps the first loud anything in the last thirty years of status quo Reaganism. In one breath the District Attorney declared open season on both the far-right (Trump) and the far-left (Stop Cop City) which is a whole lot of targets to keep track of all at once, especially for a government with the aim of a Stormtrooper.

Not since the Johnson administration has centrism managed to get off the can long enough to say something about the Klan, and we must be clear that in 2023 and 1963 alike, every inch of breathing room we find ourselves with is due (without exception) to the efforts of grassroots militants (nonviolent or otherwise). If not for the sacrifices of anti-fascists in the years leading up to 2021, January 6^th would have gone very, very differently. The (winning) strategy was always to turn the ruling class’s game in on itself by pitting one faction of the police state against another, and we achieved exactly that. We systematically opposed and exposed the threat posed to both the status quo and society at large by the Neo-Contras (both inside and outside of the police state). In so doing, we forced the broader Reaganite power structure to, in some small way, acknowledge that threat.

Such an acknowledgment was taken by the far-right to signal their Fort Sumter moment. Amerika is premised on not only racial mythology but also built on the need for that mythos to be held unflinchingly in the mainstream as sacrosanct. Whenever that begins to change, counterinsurgency goes into high gear as it did under COINTELPRO, following the Ferguson Rebellion, and continuing to this moment.

But rather than pulling our punches for fear of alienating pro-fascist liberals, we doxxed the Neo-Contras, denied them public platforms, and stopped their violent pogroms in their tracks. In so doing, we also denied Trump a street army powerful enough to lynch Congress, and successfully split the ranks of Reaganism (for awhile). The bipartisan colonial project in the Levant of course has helped bring them back together, and the gap may soon close on us again. The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the State of Israel.

In the near future, our many years of battle might again yield an opening in their lines. As the constitutional crisis unfolds (precipitated by a leading candidate facing numerous felonies) anticipate some kind of repeat of January 6^th. The Neo-Contras that populate the lower rungs of the police state (right-wing DHS agents, cops, the prison system, etc.) will likely slug it out with the upper federal bureaucracy and judiciary still loyal to the status quo. While that’s happening, opportunities will again present themselves, not unlike the 1936 fascist coup against the Spanish republic.

In November 2020, the Vermont AFL-CIO resolved to carry out a general strike in the event of the coup that Trump had been openly orchestrating since around June of that year. In response, the president of the national AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, rebuked and threatened any such action by any affiliated union, and opened an “investigation” into rebellion in their ranks. This is the same Trumka who essentially crossed a picket line to meet with Trump in early 2017, eliciting condemnations from across the movement. More recently, Teamster president Sean O’Brien posed for a photo-op with Trump. If there is to be some variety of heightened civil unrest in this country in 2024, the battle lines in the House of Labor have already been drawn.

With so much turmoil and destabilization I think there’s an outside chance that Starbucks might not even have the help of the feds or the police in restraining their own workers. I can imagine a scenario where the NLRB will be targeted violently as “too anti-business” by the Neo-Contras. But even if I’m wrong about any of that, we should still proceed as though our opening to strike a blow without state interference will appear anyway. The truth is we can only win if we believe we’ll win, and failure is not an option.

Scratched Liberals and Bleeding Fascists

The greatest danger we face lies with those in our ranks who see themselves as next-in-line to management. They squint so hard when looking at Biden that they see FDR, and think they’ll be running a Green New Deal project before long. They wear the vintage label of Reuther’s populist UAW and believe it will imbue them with the same power as his top-down political machine, granting them the good Amerikan life. Meanwhile in the background of their middle class fantasy, Black and brown workers continue toiling on the “plant-tation” industrial hellscape as they did following the CIO’s purge of leftists. They are the willing enablers of the Fifth Reich rising from the ashes of Trumpism, just as the Fourth was welcomed by the Cold War liberals who bombed Vietnam.

In the same way that the struggle against white supremacy requires an analysis of race to minimize reproducing racism in our ranks, so too does the class struggle require a class analysis. We know that diverse mayors, diverse cops and diverse capitalists are a white supremacist trap. In that same vain, I’m not fighting management so I can become a manager; neither at work nor in the union hall. That’s my litmus. It’s not purism to expect people, who stand shoulder to shoulder with us against our bosses, to never use us as a ladder to become someone else’s boss. Purism is when the reds are silenced and pushed out in favor of ‘pure and simple unionism.’ Punching left is purism. The ethnic purification campaign in Palestine that the AFL-CIO underwrites is purism. Solidarity is not purism, it’s what I like to call “unionism.”