this piece was written with contributions from K. Oliver.
The discourse within leftist circles about the strategic importance of organizing in certain sectors remains a contentious topic. For example, some on the left argue that service workers hold little revolutionary potential, emphasizing instead the power of traditional heavy industry due to its direct influence over production and infrastructure. On the other hand, many advocate for the significant role of service workers, particularly those in precarious positions in the economy, suggesting that their direct confrontation with capitalism’s harshest realities could fuel class struggle.
This ongoing debate is crucial because it shapes our understanding of where class power resides and how it should be mobilized. However, much of this discussion is mired in moralistic and defensive arguments, which can obscure the essential need for a strategy that integrates both sectors. The reality is that both service and heavy industry are vital, and neither can be dismissed.
A foundational premise of this essay is that communist politics are largely unintelligible to the current American working class, not due to a lack of intelligence or access to ideas, but because these politics need to be grounded in tangible class struggle, which is only now re-emerging in the U.S. Moreover, the essay posits that to cultivate class consciousness, we must understand how workers in the remnants of organized labor interact with the broader, often unorganized, working class.
When the Bolsheviks urged “all power to the soviets,” Russian workers had already engaged in significant state conflicts, governance, and prolonged labor struggles. Today’s American workers, however, lack similar experiences and organizational frameworks, making calls for similar political actions challenging in both service and heavy industries, albeit for different reasons. Fundamentally we need to understand that there is no constituency for bolshevism in the US today, and understand one of our current objectives being the construction of such a constituency.
This essay is an attempt at some critical intervention on this topic intended for an audience who have assumed the responsibility of raising revolutionary consciousness, and building a communist party. Referencing firsthand and secondhand experience of work in both fields locally, I am going to first discuss why this debate is important. Second, I want to offer some extremely introductory history regarding the current state of the labor movement. Next, I will paint a broad picture of the labor movement that hopefully is accessible to newer readers. I will then talk about heavy industry, and then the disorganized bulk of our class that is in large part in the service economy. Lastly, I am going to make some general assertions regarding how to proceed.
What is a ‘real’ worker’?
There has been a peculiar debate regarding the formal Marxist definition of labor within the left. Some question whether service workers, particularly in industries like Starbucks, are “real” workers. They argue that these workers do not produce value, thus (allegedly) not fitting traditional Marxist definitions of labor. Others counter this by asserting that this perspective misinterprets Marx’s broader definition of labor, which includes all forms of work that contribute to the economy, even if indirectly or through service provision, and that all wage laborers produce surplus value.
To avoid getting caught in this debate, rather than attempting to resolve it, I am going to attempt to provide some clarity by asking a new question: why is this consequential? This question matters because we as communists need to think about where power within the working class is, and inform our strategy through this lens.
Through a certain lens, it may seem obvious that really only a fairly thin slice of the logistics industry is ‘necessary’ for the working class to wield power. Basically, the concentration of commodity circulation through E-commerce’s creation of a mass demand for just-in-time inventory has meant that something like 5% of the workforce has direct ‘veto’ over the function of the economy. Some carry this to a conclusion that communists should deprioritize the other 95% of workers who hold far less power.
This approach has a certain reason, from an obscured and one sided perspective. In the final analysis, it is undeniably true that there are certain workers with disproportionate power over the economy. It is really hard to imagine a powerful communist movement that isn’t able to wield this concentration of power into so few workers’ hands. However, any strategy to act on this fact as a 1:1 prescription, meaning to de-emphasize other sectors of workers entirely in practical work, gets beat up badly in the details.
This debate over what labor counts as “productive” or properly “proletarian” misses the really key question: how does the communist movement come to wield power through organization in key economic sectors? Before I contribute my thoughts on this question, I want to offer some broader context.
The National Labor Relations Act and the Anti-Communist Purges
Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), unionization is, on paper, much cleaner and structured than it has ever been in history. However, it is far more legally complicated and expensive than it was prior to the NLRA. The NLRA effectively replaced the need for boldness, action, and commitment of workers in unionization campaigns with a need for lawyers, funds, and facilitators of these processes. This has created a massive shift in the quality of our working-class leaders over the last 60 or so years.
We have Democrat lawyers instead of Bill Blizzards in the modern American labor landscape. Instead of taking decisive, bold action, today workers involved in unionization are made to ‘wait in solidarity’ while courts deliberate. This has largely replaced social bonds, solidarity, and commitment with legal obligation. It would be a mistake to neglect this fact in any appraisal of the modern labor landscape or in the creation of revolutionary strategy.
It was the generation of organizers schooled at Blair Mountain, in the Battle of the Running Bulls, and innumerable intense struggles that built the labor movement. The leaders of the working class, in many cases, literally rose from the streets, and with boldness, courage, and often violence, created behemoth organizations capable of waging real struggle. It is the momentum of this era that the existing labor movement is still coasting on. These leaders were radical communists, socialists, or at the very least visionaries.
Through the carrot of legal institutionalization and an easy salary for conservative union leaders, and the stick of anti-communist purges, the US government successfully made US organized labor reliant on legal procedure rather than working-class organized strength. This has all amounted to a serious hollowing out of the content of what it means to be in a union. In the 1930s, being in a union was a life-changing voluntary choice to commit oneself, at least in small part, to struggle as a course of one’s daily life. On the other hand, Being in a union today does not necessitate or even imply a modicum of commitment or organization.
Most unions (leaders and rank-and-file alike) today understand unionization as a process of petitioning the government for an election, then the government enforcing their rules for them. They address violations of these rules in the special labor courts with little actual legal authority. This means most unions we encounter are an anonymous mass of largely passive dues payers, who pay a small cadre of people who facilitate legal activities and political lobbying on their behalf. Occasional strikes are not unheard of and occur in a tightly choreographed arena managed by the government, court injunctions, and mediators. Unions today think about their power largely in terms of legal rights, funding for lawyers, and an ability to participate in elections.
While organized labor today tends to celebrate the NLRA, we communists should recognize it in its political and historical context. To be clear, full abandonment of the NLRA and legal processes by organized labor is clearly not realistic or practical. These conditions are a challenge that need to be at the front of our minds as we go forward, and that we must work to overcome through denser, more active, and larger-scale organization and activity within our class. Fundamentally, we need to recognize that the size of existing unions today is not necessarily reflective of class power, and that our task as communists should be the construction of class power.
The big picture.
The working class is being trampled by the relentless march of capitalism. Everything is commodified; every asset is seized — homes are bought up, rents skyrocket, wages stagnate, and the price of goods soars. In this harsh terrain, only a few bastions remain: old stronghold unionized sectors. Within these fortresses, workers defend their precarious safety from an adversary that threatens to burn everything in its path. Each bargaining session results in further concessions, slowly eroding the walls of these fortresses.
Most union leaders, the commanders of these fortresses, are adept at repairing their crumbling walls: they maintain membership, fend off legislative assaults, and are mired in a backlog of grievances, lawsuits, and mediations spanning decades. Most lack the experience or inclination to lead an offensive beyond their protective walls. Both the workers and their leaders understand that opening the gates to challenge the enemy directly would lead to swift defeat, risking the destruction of these vital “houses of labor.” In most cases, this is not entirely unfounded.
Yet, these fortresses endure because they guard the remaining arsenal of the working class — the ports, warehouses, factories, and infrastructure essential for building and maintaining our cities, and generally maintaining the basic function of society. It is undeniable that the working class needs this arsenal to win any real battles. But that means breaking this siege. To ask these workers to put their arsenal at the disposal of the wider working class, the disorganized mass beyond the walls, will be read as an ask for them to risk everything for a very slim chance of success. To repeat: this is not a fundamentally subjective problem, this is a real problem; they are usually correct in this assessment. The efficacy of bold tactics and the viability of class politics is not proven; it has not been demonstrated in the real world. Before these final standing bastions will even consider risking it all on a struggle for political power, such a struggle will need to appear winnable. Only then is it possible to put revolutionary politics ‘in command’ of these vital working-class arsenals.
Outside these walls, we have a huge population of disorganized workers bearing the brunt of the capitalist assault. Workers who, if armed from these arsenals and given the tools, knowledge, and resources to organize and fight, have a world to gain. But who, for now, have been deprived (in a manner I will discuss later) of the means to fight. This disorganized mass exists within all sectors of US industry — service, heavy, production, logistics, etc. — with an especially large concentration within the service industry.
Our role as communists is to build a fighting movement outside these walls and, in doing so, make it possible for these fortress garrisons to participate in a broad labor offensive, alongside a viable movement with a feasible chance to win. We need to have the influence within these garrisons of labor to win the debate over whether to go on the offensive or not as conditions change. We then need influence within all camps to help lead and bolster a broad labor offensive to put this vile capitalist enemy to the sword once and for all. Put plainly, our task is on one side to create conditions in which broad class struggle can be realistically presented as a more promising vehicle than defensive isolation. This cannot be achieved through lectures; only by organizing beyond the existing walls.
To do this, we need to navigate the real, complicated, and nuanced landscape of the modern working class.
Heavy Industry Fortresses and Their Problems
A broad assertion right now seems to be that communists ought to develop a real presence in strategic heavy industry: energy, logistics, manufacturing, etc. By controlling heavy industry, you can come to ‘hold the keys’ to society. Workers in heavy industry tend to be the most organized and strike-ready. Where they are not, due to their strategic positioning, they are extremely well-positioned to make massive gains for themselves and their coworkers.
A common, and reasonable, disagreement with this theory is that these workers represent a small minority of the class (20% of workers in the US). One factor we need to understand is that our society can, and currently does, accommodate having the unionized (or under threat of being so) groups of these workers relatively highly paid and relatively comfortable.
It would be a mistake to dismiss these workers as ‘labor aristocrats’ who are allies in preserving capitalism. Even though capitalists can afford to have these people comfortable, capitalists hate this situation. As a result, these workers are at constant risk of losing their position of relative stability as capitalists try to break their unions to increase profit. As capitalism and US imperialism contract, reclaiming the ‘lost profits’ these workers are taking for their members increasingly becomes a necessity of capitalism. Because of this constant need to struggle, these workers tend to be the most practiced in the official NLRA-outlined processes of negotiation, strike threats, shows of force, actual strikes, etc. This also means that as the economy contracts, these workers are likely to be (and have been) the first to raise the flag of struggle. It is essential for all these reasons that communists be present in these sectors. However, I want to identify three problems with the idea that communists ought to concentrate only on heavy industry right now.
First, there is a section of these workers who, if there is such a thing, are the only workers who ‘win’ in the current US labor arrangements. These tend to be the highest skill, most senior workers nestled deep in logistics systems, such as the Feeder Drivers within the UPS system, highly skilled craftsmen, etc. These workers must (and do) fight very hard to maintain their stability and peace. They tend to be the most senior and veteran union die-hards, and for that reason they tend to exercise great leadership over the existing labor movement. They recognize the sweet deal they have and are genuinely ready to fight to keep it. But the priorities of this group of workers, who tend to form core constituencies for existing union leadership, often diverge from those of the wider working class. They tend to seek stability and normality, not bold offensives by organized labor.
This gives rise to our second problem: the entrenchment of a siege mentality within many existing, relatively strong unions. Anybody who has had a political conversation with a Utah labor leader has heard some variation on the following: we live in a right-to-work state, we need to prepare to fight like hell to keep the meager ground we hold, class war and the seizure of political power by the working class is a teenage dream. They are correct on all counts — but only if you incorrectly understand present conditions as static.
To return to the fortress metaphor: you wouldn’t tell a garrison of troops constantly occupied with keeping a ravaging enemy from breaching their walls that they need an attitude adjustment. In this, you can conclude that simply having a handful of communists within the walls isn’t worthless, but it won’t be qualitatively decisive in getting this group of workers to go on the offensive. More likely, these communists will be put to work maintaining the crumbling walls, often with great energy and skill, and will find themselves 20 years down the road lecturing communists about how a labor offensive is impossible.
Lastly, there is a problem I am going to call the ‘Trucker’s Paradox’ due to the prevalence of this problem in the trucking industry. This is the systematic isolation of unionization via the leveraging of the immense wealth that workers produce. This is done in many ways. For example, a company that makes $180,000 of profit per year per worker has more resources to fight their workers to the death and drag them through hell before caving to union demands. If the workers win, these capitalists can prevent union expansion into new shops by matching, surpassing, or otherwise obfuscating the modest union wins among non-union workers. In other words, industries with huge profit margins can afford to buy off non-union workers to prevent the spread of class unity, even when unions emerge.
In general, a company that is profitable enough to be forced into providing huge benefits for workers also has a massive pocketbook to act very strategically to prevent union growth and power. This is all putting aside the obvious ability for these companies to influence law and its enforcement to be in their favor. In this way, the immense wealth produced by some workers is not inherently an advantage and can be a disadvantage when viewed from the perspective of organized labor.
None of these problems are raised to dismiss the viability and importance of work in these sectors. But we need to have a plan to overcome them, and simply entering the leadership of unions in these sectors isn’t going to cut it. If we want to see a broad offensive by labor, openings must present themselves ‘beyond the walls’ long enough for those within these fortresses to deliberate and act. It is during periods of deliberation, such as union elections, that militant organization within these fortresses becomes operative to push conservative union leaders out and to raise up a workers movement ready to fight.
The Disorganized Mass Beyond the Walls
Many communists say the poorest, lower working class is key to building a revolutionary movement. Much of the US economy not only refuses to but in fact cannot provide for workers in the same way heavy industry does. Target, for example, brings in around $10,000 a year in profits for every employee, compared to Amazon’s $32,152 per employee. This means companies like Target have an urgent incentive to protect their relatively thin margins. This also means that unlike heavy industrial workers, huge swathes of the American workforce cannot rely on their employer, or the NLRA processes to win a life with dignity and stability, because the employer can’t actually provide it.
Structurally speaking, some might argue this means these workers are much more likely to radicalize. This thinking ironically mirrors the mistake that communists make in attempting to radicalize heavy industry through agitation and propaganda alone. Both assume the problem is in people’s heads and thus conclude that changes in the situation will emerge from changing people’s thinking. In a big way, this lowest rung of workers has the most to lose, because a sudden firing could mean homelessness, perpetual debt, or myriad similar outcomes. We need to understand that people’s thinking is largely reflective of and reproduced by existing real-world relations of power.
The lack of class consciousness in the lowest sections of the US economy reflects a lack of means to ground such beliefs in real-world activity. This is because the current state of US labor law makes it extremely difficult to organize this part of the working class using official legal mechanisms. Despite this, most labor movement leadership insists upon using a strictly legalistic approach in this sector.
I want to illustrate the particulars for those who have never been involved with a unionization campaign before. Even a workplace of 50 workers requires at least a year of behind-the-scenes organizing work to build up a network of reliable leaders, test your structures, etc., These steps are all necessary to enter a union representation vote with confidence. If you do win said union vote, the average time between a successful vote to be represented by a union and negotiating a first contract is over 400 days. For context, the annual turnover rate in the service industry is 74%. This means a resistant employer can and usually will hold up a successful union election in the courts long enough for almost an entire workplace to turn over. One grocery store organizer locally told me that the average turnover rate was 3 months at his store. This means the turnover of union leaders, supporters, etc., is constant in the lowest sections of the service economy, making any real attempt to use the legally sanctioned processes feel like a treadmill.
This produces predictable results. Rather than feeling their power, we have seen workers who fight and win an NLRA vote come out feeling defeated and confused by the experience rather than inspired. It would be a mistake to underestimate the effect this has on the subjectivity of workers in this industry. A worker who can barely survive is unlikely to take particular pride in their role in the economy or view themselves politically as a worker. This is even more true if every attempt to assert oneself as a worker is met with a confusing slog of lawsuits, bullying by management, and ultimately defeat or legal stagnation.
The problem is not that there is no working class consciousness in the service sector. While it is true that this consciousness is rare, it does exist. The problem communists need to work to overcome is that in most cases there is no substantive way for workers to root any of these beliefs in real-world activity. This means class consciousness is largely seen by most workers as subcultural (one is Class Conscious in the same way one would be a Limp Bizkit Fan or a Squish Collector) rather than a choice for a person to make that concretely changes the way they live.
The close relationship with much of the left to ‘New Deal’ type thinking, the Democrats, and broadly speaking legalistic reformism helps reinforce this problem. Much of the reformist progressive movement’s wins can be tied to the creation or utilization of various government institutions, committees, etc. Similarly, most unions today existentially rely on the capitalist state, which itself exists to subdue workers. This has meant that within the ranks of ‘The Left’ there is a majority that cannot imagine political action beyond attempts to manipulate, influence, or bolster bodies like those created by the NLRA. Further, the problematic attachment of huge swathes of American unions to the NLRA and its processes means they are largely ill-equipped to actually address these problems ‘beyond their walls.’ Most unions today insist on centering the NLRA processes, and understand unionization as a 1:1 reading of these processes.
Bring movement to the working class, break the siege on the house of labor.
We need to organize workers ‘outside the walls’ and bring them into the struggle to weaken and break the siege on the house of labor. We need to work within the existing fortresses to transform those workers into battle-ready organizers rather than garrisons that are largely demobilized between attacks. Lastly, we need to at all times be building and exercising an ability for worker power, rather than relying on the legalistic weight of the US government via the NLRA to lead this process. Without all of these factors coming together, the current stagnation within labor will likely persist. Thankfully, this process is evidently underway in many places.
One such direct example of all three of these dynamics coming together is in the modern Teamsters Union and their movement at Amazon. Within the union, there have been decades of work to reform the union and put it on a class-struggle basis, a process principally led by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (a caucus made up of a mix of union militants, activists, communists, and socialists). To make a long story short: over the last decade, there has been an intensified effort to remove Hoffa Jr. and his ilk and turn the Teamsters Union into a fighting body. Doing so requires the building of a nationwide network of campaigners, building countless newsletters, hosting countless parking lot meetings, rallies, etc. This process has been punctuated (though by no means concluded) by the election of Sean O’Brien to the top spot of the union leadership, who ran on the explicit slogan of fighting for members in negotiations and aggressively organizing Amazon.
However, the movement at Amazon has its own genealogy, and Amazon workers produced urgency within the ranks of the Teamsters all on their own. Various, sometimes loose, sometimes organized groups of workers, such as Amazonians United and the Amazon Labor Union, were active and striking blows long before the Teamsters Union was prepared to embrace them. To again make a long story short, these workers, by organizing rallies, press conferences, walkouts, etc., all around the country, created a crucial opening. When the Teamsters were debating whether to exit their fortress and enter this battle, they could already see what was happening beyond their walls: that workers were fighting. This changed the idea of remaining within the walls from a comfortable and safe option into a shameful lost opportunity. This pressure to act was sharper when one recalls the insistence by UPS during the last two rounds of negotiations with Teamsters that UPS must ‘remain competitive’ or fall behind Amazon and other non-union firms. For union leadership to have ignored the movement within Amazon that was growing with zero resources would have been to spit in the face of not only every Amazon worker but also the hundreds of thousands of existing Teamsters in the logistics industry.
Finally, the Teamsters are not relying on the NLRB to win at Amazon. The parlance within union circles is that they are using the “Old Book.” This is largely accurate with some caveats, so much so that we can draw on William Z. Foster’s writing from the 1920s to summarize: “Organization campaigns in American unorganized industries are preparations for strikes. They are a struggle for position between the employers and workers in the big battle that is soon to come, the strike over the establishment of better conditions. It is in this sense that such campaigns must be conceived and carried through.” Amazon has exploited every loophole in the NLRA. Amazon has a mysterious number of workers, though likely in the millions. It is hard to say for sure because Amazon uses a complex maze of subcontractors, temp firms, etc. This all makes the classical NLRA-outlined approach basically impossible. To answer this, Teamsters, much like workers in many public sectors where there is no NLRA, are building a union as a social reality, to hell with what the courts and employer say. They are exercising their power via unfair labor practice strikes, a tool that unions can use almost at will because employers constantly ignore labor law. A win at Amazon will rely on the ability of the workers to use their strength against their employer, not the NLRA.
This is the combination asserting itself in the world today: reform and militant agitation within unions, insurgent and bold activity among the unorganized, and the general assertion of bold tactics and militant strategy as a viable path forward. This is what’s slowly changing the face of the American labor movement. A decade ago, I remember reading articles implying that the Teamsters Union was done for due to the rise of Amazon and other e-commerce giants. Contemporary commentators could not imagine the labor movement rising to meet the occasion. That fever was broken by the bold action of workers facing a life of inhumane labor who chose to stand up. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Teamsters United and other reform caucuses broke the institutional inertia (though certainly there is more to be done) keeping the Teamsters on a leash. Workers are losing their fear.
This process has been repeated in many industries, with another notable example being the United Auto Workers and the election of Shawn Fain, or in the turning of many toothless “Educator Associations” into teacher unions with a demonstrated ability to (often illegally) strike and shut down whole states, such as the teachers in West Virginia. Another notable example is the emerging movement of workers organizing “pre-majority” unions that by necessity must mirror the ‘old book’ tactics and strategies. All of these examples have their problems, but we need to draw the good out from the bad.
Practical Assertions for communists.
Building broad class struggle requires work that goes beyond the purview of any single union. Synthesis is necessary, and this is the fundamental historic role of the communist party. This is accomplished by developing a party organization drawn from across the working class, representing its different immediate areas of struggle. There is no existing communist party in the US. The party will emerge on the basis of effective synthesis, as an organization that acts as a strong center of gravity because of its reflection of workers’ broad struggles and interests.
The Communist Party should be a purely political organization that permeates working-class structures, offering an alternative center of gravity distinct from these other forces. It competes for influence and leadership within the working class to advance a program that addresses both immediate needs and long-term political goals. Crucially, it seeks to persuade the working class to recognize itself as an active agent in history, pushing for a revolutionary transformation from capitalism to communism.
While we currently lack a Communist Party in this country, the primary tasks for communists today should be to establish one. In more immediate practical terms this requires more than talking about communism to workers, ideological struggle is not principally about being a good talker. We need to be struggling at all levels to replace the bad dynamics discussed above with better dynamics that make revolutionary class politics legible. This necessitates an immediate focus on building the (even very small) explicitly communist organizations necessary to begin addressing these challenges. These small organizations should aim towards coalescence around a program constructed principally in the struggle.
There is an immediate need to work to get labor to a place where it can stand as a political force independent of existing political parties and government institutions, which are ultimately antagonistic to our interests. It is the proliferation of militant tactics and strategies as a fact of American social reality, and as a viable path forward for workers that I think communists should ultimately concern themselves with in the current period. We can and should utilize the NLRA, law, elections, etc., to help us whenever possible, but that should be very much auxiliary to, and never at the expense of the power of the workers, and should be seen as a temporary expedient towards the end of independence.
My basic assertion is that to make communist politics legible to millions of working people we need a class-struggle-oriented labor movement with real influence over strategic industries and an intention to stand as an independent political force. I have outlined some challenges we need to overcome. In aiming to do these things, we should avoid essentialism and dogmatism oriented towards specific industries, and weigh the factors discussed earlier when choosing where to go and when against one’s immediate conditions.
For example, are you a 20-year-old communist who has never done any of this before? There are worse things to do than go to a port and get involved with the union. But you should know that it will be at least 15 years before anybody will want to listen to what you have to say. On the other hand, you could go to a Starbucks today and likely be among peers and get real practice at forming a union and running a strike. These are skills you can take, teach broadly, and build organization through. Five years from now, you could enter a port with three to five friends, a plan, and some know-how.
Maybe you live in a city with a massive tourism industry, such as Park City or Las Vegas. In these places, there are logistics chokepoints, of course. But there are also service workers like ski patrol, ski lift maintenance, bartenders, and housekeepers who will have immense political leverage and the ability to shut down the economy. It would be quite foolish to categorically deemphasize service workers in these environments.
Maybe you live in a single-industry town (rare these days, but they do exist, see Smithfield Foods). In these environments, the obvious priority is to build power in this single industry. However, there will also be immense subjective work to be done to break people’s fear about ‘scaring off’ this industry by unionizing. Further, every church, PTA, sports club, etc., will be at least partially made up of workers in this industry, creating an interesting vector to begin or accelerate union activity from.
I could continue, but as communists, I think we need to have our eyes set on certain outcomes and be creative in our approaches to get there. We cannot shy away from doing difficult things. If through concrete analysis of concrete conditions you conclude the best thing to do is work on a loading dock, you should drop out of school and do it. On the other hand, you should be prepared to do the opposite if analysis points you in that direction. With this in mind, we can see that this debate about the definition of workers and about the essentiality of a given industry isn’t exactly pragmatic.
Communists today, being as inexperienced as most of us are need some practice at humility and patience. We should practice being more descriptive than prescriptive. We should act as much as we argue, and be ready to act flexibly.
For those in the Salt Lake Area, there are many emerging opportunities. I can tell you with confidence that through initiatives all over the valley, almost any kind of worker today can plug into the movement. This was not true five years ago. From construction to service, there is work to be done and being done in our city to advance revolutionary goals. This does not mean we have no focus or goals, but one of our focuses and goals is to generally ‘spread the fire.’
In conclusion
The debate over the revolutionary potential of different sectors of the labor force highlights a critical need for a nuanced approach in organizing the working class. the relative strategic importance of different sectors cannot be discovered by quote mining Marx, but needs to instead be deduced through practical activity in building class power. Communists must recognize the unique challenges and opportunities each sector presents: the entrenched, legally bound fortress of heavy industry workers, and the vast, disorganized mass of service workers facing precarious conditions. The key lies not in dismissing one sector over the other but in understanding how to leverage the strengths of each to build a comprehensive, militant labor movement. This requires not only organizing within the existing unions but also fostering class consciousness and action among the lower, and unorganized sectors, where traditional union methods often fail due to high turnover and legal hurdles.
Moving forward, the task for communists is clear: to cultivate a labor movement that is dynamic, bold, and capable of breaking the siege of capitalist oppression. This involves integrating service and heavy industry workers into a unified class struggle, where the power of organized labor extends beyond the confines of legal frameworks like the NLRA into real-world actions. By supporting grassroots movements, engaging in reform within established unions, and promoting the application of militant tactics, communists can help transform the labor landscape into one where workers see themselves not just as participants in an economy but as active agents in a political struggle, and as active agents in the (re)creation of society. Only through this integrated, strategic approach can the working class hope to assert its power, challenge capitalist rule, and ultimately move towards a society where labor is not just a commodity but a cornerstone of political and social change.
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