Good Morning, America!

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I long, fitful slumber has lasted for more than a gen­ t’s a sleep that puts Rip Van Winkle to shame. The eration. But the alarm has sounded and the snooze button is wearing out. Sooner or later, the giant that is the American working class will awaken. When that happens, the game will be dramatically altered; the majority, so used to playing defense, will take the offense; the score, so long lopsided, will begin to even up.

What will it look like once that celebrated last straw has been added to the camel’s back? How will we know that the long slumber is over? Oh, we’ll know! Union power The place to focus our attention is on the working class. This is not for abstract, doctrinaire reasons, but because that is where the power lies. It is there that numbers and proximity to production combine to yield a force capable of challenging the 1% for control.

Control of what exactly? The whole works, including which class should be running the country!

When working people finally decide to stop hating their friends and loving their enemies (as Malcolm X put it), the pent-up rage and fire from centuries of de­ ceit and exploitation at the hands of corporate elites will be turned toward forging a new normal. People will insist on painting outside the lines, refusing to be bound by convention as they search for effective answers.

We know that greater organization and labor mili­ tancy correlate directly with stronger social safety nets and public policies that benefit the majority. On the other hand, a weaker labor movement goes hand-in-hand with increased exploitation and income in­ equality. So, as with the rise of the CIO in the 1930s, the end of the current big sleep will be signaled by waves of strikes and other labor battles. New, militant labor leaders will come to the fore and bigger, stron­ ger unions, encompassing an ever-growing percent­ age of the working population, will take root.

In 1933, at the peak of the Great Depression, more than 12.8 million people were out of work. In re­ sponse, crucial labor battles were fought in Min­ neapolis, Toledo, San Francisco, New England, and throughout the South. These were followed by other crucial contests, including the historic Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and the coal miners’ strikes of 1941 and 1943. For the first time in a long while, this wave of labor militancy moved the ball down the field, scor­ ing important points for our team.

Meanwhile, at the height of the most recent reces­ sion (2009), 17.1 million were listed as unemployed— over four million more than at the height of the great depression. While today’s figure represents a smaller percent of the total working population, that distinc­ tion provides little comfort to the millions who have had to scrape by. And still the giant sleeps. House cleaning As with the labor battles of the last century, the battles this time around will be led by socialists and other radical workers who have come to understand the class nature of the playing field. Politicians—in­ cluding Bernie Sanders-type socialists in name only, whose first loyalty is to the capitalist system—will either stand aside or get trampled along with other obstacles that get in the way.

It’s an open secret that the union leadership today is overwhelmingly corrupt, bureaucratic, and ineffec­ tive. But as the working-class torpor comes to an end, so too will the reign of the bureaucrats. We will see more efforts like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Steelworkers FightBack, and Miners for Democracy. The effective, fighting unions of the near future will amplify their strength through rank-and-file democ­ racy.

The outrageous salaries and perks enjoyed by top union officials today—benefits that set them apart from the ranks and make it easy to cozy up to corpo­ rate execs who enjoy similar riches—will no longer be tolerated. More and more, we’ll see rank-and-file movements insisting that:

• Union officials receive no more in compensation than the workers they represent.

• Complete union democracy, from the local to the international level, with the highest authority and fi­ nal word resting with assemblies of the rank-and_file members.

• Open and democratic elections for all officials, with immediate recall of any official not meeting the needs of the ranks.

As this revitalization process unfolds, the new fight­ ing unions will spread to new factories, offices, and shops. Workers never before organized will join or form unions of their own. Even the unemployed will become organized.

At some point, committees may form in factories, shops, offices, and fields, where people gather to discuss their grievances and map out a strategy for fighting back. Both local and national issues would be taken up.

Here, the lack of democratic rights in the workplace could be addressed head-on. The workplace—where people spend most of their waking hours, where all of society’s wealth is produced, where, for centuries, those who do the work have had no say it what is produced or how—will become a hotbed of discus­ sion and rebellion. Everything will be up for debate, from who should be supervising the shop floor to who should be running the enterprise.

These new committees will not be limited to places that are unionized. In some cases, more radical unions will promote the formation of the new committees; in others, the committees may precede formal union or­ ganizing. Yes, it will be an upheaval like no other. But there’s more:

Political power If we were to point to one thing that has held back the U.S. working class more than any other—one in­ gredient that, like an anesthetic, has induced and pro­ longed the big sleep it would be illusions in the Dem­ ocratic and Republican parties. Touted by the union bureaucracy as “friends of labor,” the two corporate parties have proven time and again to be a deadly trap for the working class. Their aim is to tame any dis­ content.

Like Tai Chi masters, the big business parties are ex­ perts at channeling the anger and energy of the work­ ing class back against itself. There will be no awaken­ ing, no end to the current nightmare, without break­ ing decisively with the capitalist politicians and their parties.

For this reason, one of the best indications that a new day has arrived will be the building of a political arm of the labor movement that can take the fight be­ yond the shop floor, out into the streets and to society at large. Such a political arm will be both an organiz­ ing tool and a weapon to fight for political power. That fight will be waged against the very parties that have held society captive for so long, and against the class that pulls their strings.

By constructing a party of its own, the labor move­ ment will for the first time in U.S. history move from begging for crumbs from the slave masters to openly moving to supplant them.

Solidarity While everyone who lives from paycheck to pay­ Thomas Hart Benton: “Coal” / Metropolitian Museum of Art check under capitalism is exploited, some are exploit­ ed more than others. Immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos all face higher rates of unemployment and persecution. Women still earn 79 cents for each dollar earned by men for equivalent work. Classical economist Adam Smith understood that while workers outnumber capitalists, this asym­ metry makes it harder for workers to act collectively.

The key to overcoming this disadvantage is solidar­ ity. The ascendant labor movement will either cham­ pion the struggles of the most oppressed or it will quickly slip back into a coma. Black Lives Matter, im­ migrant rights, Native American rights, and the fights against racism, sexism, and xenophobia in all of their forms are life and death struggles for the labor move­ ment as a whole.

This is not just because each of these causes is mor­ ally right, but because each is used to sow divisions among working people—divisions that, if not over­ come, would prevent building the momentum neces­ sary to change society, thus ceding the advantage to our exploiters.

Learning from the past When the working class rose up in the 1930s, many gains were won. All of the progress attributed to Roos­ evelt’s “New Deal” was a direct result of the militant labor upsurge that forced his hand. Unfortunately, the most effective weapons of the working class, the unions, were captured by reactionary bureaucrats who steered labor toward a century of somnambulis­ tic class-collaboration.

The most militant, conscious leaders were driven out of the labor movement.

The victories achieved were never protected on the political front by breaking with the capitalist parties and launching a labor party. The unelected titans of industry were kept in charge and given ample time to regroup. As a result, all of the gains of past struggles have been constantly under attack, and some have been severely rolled back.

History can repeat itself—but it doesn’t have to. We can learn from the past and avoid making the same mistakes.

Is this image of the coming awakening is overly ide­ alistic? Far from it. We’re not painting a picture of how things might look if we were to turn around the decades-old corporate assault on our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Rather, this is a sober as­ sessment of what we must see if we are to have any possibility of beating back that assault.

Mapping out the path ahead—navigating around multiple obstacles, through difficult terrain—is not utopian. On the contrary, it’s how you win. When the giant reawakens this time around, hold onto your hats. We’ll be in for quite a ride. n SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2017 7