Editorial Board
In the past two years there has been an increase in strike activity, the deployment or threat of strikes, which has upset the ruling class and emboldened the workers. Following this, revolutionary activists have been increasingly discussing the question.
We wish to present our view on the matter, to discuss the significance of strikes, the two basic world views and how they manifest inside of the workers movement, and how we think revolutionaries should approach the matter of increasing strike activity.
The trend of increased strike activity does not appear on the scene from nowhere; it is forced into existence by economic conditions and their consequences in society, meaning they are the result of the deepening crisis of imperialism. This crisis has been deepening since 2020 and has hit the rest of the world far harder than the US, which still maintains the most favorable economic situation among the imperialist countries, with the money and power to protect itself from any serious harm at home. This fact leads to the relatively low level of working class militancy in the US and the broad appeal of jingoism and “America first” rhetoric among the class. Nonetheless, the conditions are bad enough and every worker has felt the sting economically, generating growing storms among them. This is a good thing.
Objectively, capitalist production provokes strikes, and there is no way out of this fact. However, the capitalist will do everything in their power to first prevent them, then crush them. Their methods include deregulation, bribing sections of the workforce at the expense of others, as well as the police and coercive force.
The vast majority of people in the US are forced to work for someone else, and the largest employers in the US—think Wal-Mart and Amazon—are therefore going to hire the cheapest labor they can afford. The workers for their part are forced to sell their labor-power at the best price they can get. More and more, the diversity of capitalists goes down and the wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, reducing working people’s options and spreading difficulties and increasing poverty among the vast majority. We have seen increased strike activity among the largest employers: UPS, Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing, just to name a few, but also among the medical trades, at large hospitals, and notably among professionals in education. These latter strikes are notable for inspiring strikes in other sectors.
There is no scenario where there is not a struggle going on between workers and employers over wages—regardless if this is organized or not—and the employers have to find ways to keep wages from rising while workers have to find ways to afford surviving. The individualization of contradictions tends to obscure this constant struggle which sometimes flairs up and becomes impossible to ignore. The main purpose of individualizing the problem is to indicate to the worker that she or he can do something about it by themselves. This bourgeois prescription includes: working harder, getting more education, groveling for a raise, cutting costs in one’s personal life, empathizing with the bosses’ predicament and hoping that the employer takes special interest in you, crossing picket lines, putting yourself first, blaming immigrants, etc. This leads to all manner of backward ideas that undermine the actual interests of workers for the interests of employers. On the other hand, understanding the problem as workers and not as individuals means seeing the assaults and insults against oneself and one’s co-workers as part of a whole—it means solidarity, strike action, and the impulse to organize.
The number of working people is not decreasing; it is diversifying and growing. More and more educated people, small business owners and operators are being put out of their former positions in society and thrust into the working class. Those who work for themselves are increasingly forced to work for others. At the same time, the economic crisis has forced the capitalists to increase automation, out-modding still useful machinery for inventiveness in production, an inventiveness that squeezes more profit in fewer hours from fewer workers, and this is how they overcome the crisis of their own invention: by forcing great numbers of workers into precarious positions, or forcing them out of work, so the increase of those forced to sell their labor power combined with the increase of those having difficulty finding or maintaining work forces the wages to go down. This robs individuals of agency as individuals and calls forth storms of collective action.
All of society is affected by this assault on the worker: the rich get more decadent and show clearer signs of their immoral, self-indulgent and rotting nature, while the number of poor increases, substance addiction and mental illness increases and becomes more common among the masses, and the prisons fill up. All of this is connected to driving down wages.
As life becomes increasingly unbearable for workers, they begin to see through the artificial differences imposed on them from above and experiment with ways to fight back. Capitalism forces individual action to burst into collective action. Strikes are a necessary consequence of this fact. In developed capitalist countries legal provisions developed around the right to strike, both as a conquest of the workers’ collective struggles and as a way for the ruling class to limit strikes from boiling over into rebellions.
Strikes continue to represent the very beginning of working class struggles against the social system of capitalist organization and the conditions in which it results. In the process of the strike, the workers who had no leverage as individuals demonstrate, in fact, that they are the ones who can bring things to a standstill, that the necessary or desirable products which they make and distribute can go away when they stop work. The worker learns of their place within this, and gets a glimpse of their great power. The striking workers demonstrate this not only to themselves, but to every other worker. Those who quietly and without complaint showed up to work every day and struggled to put food on the table every night, those who endured the insults of servitude and the misery of working conditions, begin to speak up with a loud voice that resonates with their class siblings. The strike is the first lesson in which the worker sees him or herself not as an individual, but a class.
The employers retaliate with everything they can, and this allows the workers to view them as a class too. More, while the state pretends to be the impartial protector of society, it proves to the worker on strike its real character. Just as the employer is revealed not to be the benevolent custodian of the worker’s rights, the state’s false neutrality comes into question. The strike is and will be a school of war, but it is not war itself, and the ruling class, especially in the most developed (decomposing) capitalist countries, has mastered its techniques of diversion, bribery, and blackmail which are far more effective than batons, handcuffs, or bullets, proving that the school of war desperately requires the most fit instructors.
The first mistake is the common idea that strikes alone can significantly transform the reality of the working class—this idea, even in its most “radical” form of the general strike seizing all means of production from the capitalists, leaves the political power of the ruling class untouched. This mistaken idea is the logic behind every reformist. Nevertheless, one would think that this notion of the reformists would lead them to issue enthusiastic and full support to every strike, and eagerly welcome all potential strikes, but this is not the case. Instead, the strike itself is seen as a “necessary evil”, a last resort, a regrettable skirmish in which the reformist can swoop down and get the most miserable concessions for the workers, with priority to satisfying the employers; in this scenario the reformist has secured his livelihood, which is invariably more comfortable and decadent than the workers he claims to represent, complete with invitations to fine dinners with politicians and employers. The reformist is the main agent among the working class movement whose job is to prevent the workers from marching along the path of their revolutionary interests. The reformer seeks to build a razor wire fence around the workers, between their daily demands for food, housing, shelter, and their demand for political power, for were the workers to seize political power, the reformist would not only be revealed as unnecessary, but also for the collaborators they are.
In order to prolong their flabby existence, the reformist makes an industry out of transforming conquests of the workers’ struggles into evidence of the benevolent masters’ ability to “provide” for his workers, and transforms the class struggle into a question of “respect.” The capitalist understands that certain concessions are needed to continue paying the lowest possible rate for labor and that at times this rate will fluctuate, but that the labor must flow, and that the reformer is a necessary mediator in accomplishing this.
Revolutionaries differ in every way, tactically and strategically, from the reformist-opportunist. Revolutionaries are not opposed to reforms, compromises, and agreements in general which secure a conquest for the working class. For a toiling people, sometimes a crust of bread which falls from the master’s table is nothing to turn one’s nose up at. The real question is what use to make of the reforms, how to understand the significance of the crust of bread and how it fell from the table.
To the reformist, who has now ascended into aristocracy, into the royal halls of union bureaucracy, the crust of bread is everything, and the fight leading up to it is incidental and unfortunate. In this way all reformists use reforms to elevate the aspect of compromise, turning it to capitulation and thereby strengthening the rule of the ruling class. For them, reforms are a way to maintain the old social order and prevent revolutionary ambitions from arising among the people.
The revolutionary worker is the exact opposite; to the revolutionary, the fight is truly everything, and instruction in the fight matters. The reform is understood as a byproduct of class struggle, and not as proof that the employers have a heart or have gained “respect” for the working people, but that with enough force they will come off it, and with enough force they will come off the whole apparatus and the workers who can smash it will conquer and defend political power with a new state and a new social system. For the revolutionary worker, reforms must be understood as conquests which remain under threat and must be treated in ways to strengthen the revolution and spread revolutionary consciousness.
It comes to the skill of revolutionary workers, their creativity and audacity to constantly tear down the reformers’ razor wire fence, to explicitly link the day-to-day demands with the question of the seizure and defense of political power. In this sacred task, the revolutionary faces a barrage of blows, the legal and illegal attacks, the sugar coated bullets of bribery and temptation to retreat into private life, all things oriented toward disorganizing revolutionaries and decommissioning their soldiers. Every general worth their wage knows that fortresses are better taken from the inside, and the counter-revolutionary work of the ruling class follows this too. The revolutionaries must be forged more and more among the workers themselves, in spite of the fact that every expense has been made to prevent this, to sideline the process and stifle their developments.
How has it come to be that the revolutionary forces are so incapable, and the reformist, bureaucratic, and opportunist forces are so domineering?
It is possible to bribe and corrupt the working class for decades; it is possible on the basis of the capitalist country’s development into imperialism, which essentially plunders the wealth of the world and carries out its most heinous acts abroad. It can then afford not only to lose a little more of its table scraps at home, but also to increase compensation to a higher strata of workers, to engorge aristocrats of labor and court the most effective bureaucracies at the top of the legally recognized bodies of workers’ self-organizations.
On top of this, it has an entire apparatus in its hands which can ideologically trap the working masses into the thinking and worldview in alignment with the employers. In all imperialist counties there exist bourgeois labor parties and bourgeois labor unions which carry out their political agendas among workers. They exist as a defensive line for capitalism, as counter-revolutionary apparatuses, adding to a diverse arsenal in the war chest of the ruling class. So the ultra-wealthy—few in number, the owners of banks and finance corporations, etc.—can and do bribe these strata for a long time, while generally crushing the majority of workers as well as unemployed workers, and the poor who have been thrust out of work entirely and are now viewed as un-hirable.
The imperialist ruling class is responsible for the opportunism in the labor movement, as well as the fact that in the imperialist countries it is not uncommon to find that the revisionists and the reformist groups and parties outnumber the revolutionaries. The world revolutionary situation develops unevenly, and class consciousness has come to suffer in the imperialist counties, due not only to the higher living standards rooted in colonialism and imperialism, but also the many mechanism imperialism uses to prevent the workers from fighting.
None of this, given the trajectory of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, can prevent the revolution in the US; it is part of the world revolution. And more, the revolutions in the third world, the storm centers of the world revolution, as well as the tendency of the imperialists toward world war, make conditions here increasingly favorable. The fight must be organized with a good understanding of historical necessity.
On the other hand, there is the mockery of inverting and mirroring the opportunists—that is the posturing which wholesale rejects reforms, which denies conditions and composition of forces, which wants to reject legality altogether and organize the workers for their own moral, political, and military defeat by marching them unarmed into a direct confrontation for which they are never prepared. However, these amateur types are so few and far between that the harm they cause is insignificant compared to the vast number of reformists and right-wing opportunists who are the main danger.
Revolutionaries have been forged, and are being forged daily, first among the higher educated, with greater resources and exposure who come into contact with the theories of Marxism, then among the working people themselves, who come to Marxism by experience, by contact with Marxists, and by audacity in their search for answers to the conditions in which they live. Their post in the fight is to teach everyone able to learn, to teach them that the strike is not the last resort but truly the first, that it is but a taste of what is possible now and of what is necessary to the social development of human beings as a whole, who must come together—not as individuals but as oppressed and exploited classes—under the leadership of the proletariat to end the old order and create a new one, a new society without rich and poor, one of harmony where we can progress side by side without the coercion, threat, and force on which this society relies; and that to get there, we not only have to strike and strike harder, but we have to strike for the throat, in figurative and literal violence.
This is the other reality which capitalism has forced on its subjects, and workers cannot escape it. The old backward violence will be ended through the new forward violence, and we workers will win; there is more of us, and we are not like any class before us—we are the greatest and final class in human history.
image: Workers on strike against Boeing in September 2024, Ryan Berry for the Washington State Standard
