The Rising Left Can’t Ignore Labor’s Ongoing Crisis

As the Trump administration stumbles from scandal to scandal and worries over artificial intelligence reach a fever pitch, there seems to be little relief in sight for working-class Americans confronting a stubborn cost-of-living crisis. The failure of both Republicans and Democrats to advance real solutions to the affordability crunch has opened the door to hopeful socialist election victories, including Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York last year and several left-wing wins in congressional primaries this summer. Yet organized labor by and large has continued its long retreat, and the prospects of significant national policy change still look remote.

Sam Gindin is one of the most exacting and capacious thinkers on the socialist left today. With decades of experience in the labor movement as research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (which merged in 2013 with the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union to form Unifor, today the largest private sector union in Canada), his political orientation is grounded in the reality of the contemporary state of organized labor. His perspective is also informed by a careful study of the current political-economic conjuncture, evident most notably in his important work with Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism.

Damage magazine editor and frequent Jacobin contributor Benjamin Y. Fong recently interviewed Gindin about the current political moment. They discussed the contemporary crisis of capitalism, the privileged position of organized labor among social movements, and the crucial importance of organizing Amazon today.

Benjamin Y. Fong

How do you understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism? And what do you mean when you say you oppose “crisis-mongering as politics”?

Sam Gindin

There is a crisis today of the legitimacy of political institutions and a crisis for working families, but not a crisis of American economic decline. People are suffering and insecure, but the US economy is growing, the share of profits is at record levels, overall investment is growing, albeit unevenly, and technology and productivity are advancing. There are conflicts with China, but China has neither the interest nor capacity to take over America’s international role. People are frustrated and angry over what the successes of capitalism have wrought but unable to convert the political delegitimation of the United States into a crisis of capitalism. So it’s not a crisis of capitalism but really a crisis of the labor movement and the Left.

Crisis-mongering subordinates serious economic and political analysis to exaggerated warnings of imminent collapse. The hope is that this will spur people into action. It looks to decline to do the heavy lifting for us. This betrays the actual challenges we face and the need for the kind of deep and long-term organizing we actually need. It also fails even as a populist mobilizing tactic; it could just as easily make people feel like, “Well, what’s the point? The world’s going to come to an end soon.” In the end, it undermines the credibility of the Left in repeatedly presenting overblown declarations that don’t come to pass.

Benjamin Y. Fong

The Left today is very electorally focused, and from one angle, that’s a direct way of intervening in this crisis of legitimacy. But from another, you could see this electoralism without first rebuilding the base as a kind of quick fix too.

Sam Gindin

Absolutely. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani deserve credit for affecting political discourse, generating enthusiasm among young people and moving them from protest to politics. But there is a limit to even “left-ish” politics if there is no solid base on the ground. And while social democratic politics can have some impact on that base, the electoral arena is not conducive to building its depth. Elections look for numbers, not the quality of understanding and commitment. They tend to be about quick, door-step exchanges, not the genuine conversations that organizing entails. They also tend to cater to where the polls tell us people are (generally some middle ground) and not to what it might take to change people. It’s the building of a genuine base for social transformation that ultimately makes elections relevant; elections by themselves don’t build the base.

Socialism will come from many streams, and whatever helps is welcome. But what’s needed is not just adding up various movements or making social democrats “better.” We need an appreciation of how profound transforming capitalism is, and we also need an organized orientation to building the kind of social force that can eventually replace it. This is especially so because of a polarization of options today. Decades of capitalist restructuring of workplaces, industries, and communities; of globalization, financialization, and neoliberalism — all alongside the stagnation of labor and the Left — have negated middle of the road responses. Capital and the state have made significant reforms near impossible (“There Is No Alternative”), and in this context, radical politics tends to be the only practical politics.

The Place of Labor

Benjamin Y. Fong

André Gorz once said that the success or failure of a wide variety of progressive causes, from gender equality to immigrant rights, will largely depend on that of the trade union movement. Why does organized labor hold a privileged position here?

Sam Gindin

About a dozen years before he said this, Gorz’s book, Farewell to the Working Class, seemed to write off the radical potential of workers. What you’re referencing is his later, changed view, in which he came to realize that most movements simply can’t — unlike labor — sustain themselves over time. For all the weakness of the American labor movement in the United States, it still has some $35 billion in assets and 14 million unionized members. Most movements don’t have those kinds of resources, and they regularly look to unions for financial assistance.

In saying this, we should not separate unions from movements that address social needs. Workers obviously have lives outside the workplace and care very much about universal healthcare, affordable shelter, adequate transportation, the environment their kids face, etc. What working-class organizations offer is not just financial resources. They also play a role in uniting the interests of workers as workers and in organizing working people as part of society more broadly.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Many would characterize the key issue here as one of restoring labor’s militancy. Is that the key problem?

Sam Gindin

In the absence of resistance/militancy, the conditions of workers can’t be advanced. So yes, restoring militancy is fundamental. But it’s not enough to have militancy, and this was graphically demonstrated in the 1960s. When the postwar boom ended, workers stubbornly resisted lowering their monetary expectations and the unilateral authority of managers. This blocked the restoration of the status quo at their expense and was a factor in the downturn of profits and the rise of inflation, both of which threatened the status of the US dollar.

The labor movement hung on for nearly a decade after that, but without going beyond workplace-by-workplace militancy to broader politicization along class lines, including demanding the democratization of investment decisions and guaranteed full employment, labor’s ultimate defeat was preordained. The eventual response from the state was an engineered recession (near-20-percent interest rates) that weakened and exhausted the unions. Neoliberalism arrived. Capital’s crisis was solved by way of a greater and longer-lasting crisis for the working class. The message of the ’60s is therefore that workplace militancy is essential but not enough.

Benjamin Y. Fong

You also emphasize the importance of socialist organization outside of unions.

Sam Gindin

Absolutely. The kind of politicization I raised above is unlikely without the role of organized socialists with one foot in the workplace and unions and one outside. Unions are particularist organizations, not class organizations: they represent a particular group of workers that happen to be working together. The role of organized socialists is to overcome the fragmentation of workers across workplaces, unions, economic sectors, and communities. It’s also to overcome the separation of individual workers from other dimensions of their lives.

This is all the more important today. In the 1950s and ���60s, unionized workers in auto and steel could win a great deal on their own, but that period is largely over. Given capital’s increased power since then, workers can’t win without thinking in larger terms, i.e., in terms of the class as a whole. That means making connections across workplaces, sectors, and communities. Unions are limited in doing this, and that’s where socialist organizations come in. Building the class into a coherent social force is (or should be) their prime focus.

I’m not making an ideological point. It’s a practical issue to be clear about who your enemy is. Employers are the face of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. What constrains improvement in working conditions is the threat of competition. Employers defend the pressure they put on workers with the claim that competition forces them to do so to survive. Moreover, competition is asymmetrical. As stronger capitalists devour weaker ones, capital becomes stronger as a class. However, for workers, competition undermines their primary strength — solidarity — and so weakens them.

It’s important to raise these points in educational meetings organized by or outside the union. Some people think of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as the place to do this. But DSA is also really fractured.

Benjamin Y. Fong

It could be that the very fragmentation of DSA is a kind of virtue right now. I don’t think it’ll ever be the party organization that some people hope it will be, but it’s a place to meet people.

Sam Gindin

I think that’s true. There seem to be distinct groups which are in essence mini-parties — each has their own analysis, do their own education, take specific positions. Under the banner of DSA, they meet, discuss, and debate strategy. That’s important because premature mergers, even among socialists, can paper over differences, and then the organization disintegrates.

But from afar, I don’t know how sharp the debates are. Sometimes, in the name of unity, the more difficult debates are avoided, but such debates are important for mutual development. It does seem that certain crucial issues like how to relate to the Democratic Party, and at what scale (local/municipal, state, national) electoral contestation should take place, are coming to a head. Splits are likely necessary, but they can be very destructive. It’s worth it, in this context, to examine how Syriza and Momentum went from glory to obliteration, but there’s been too little of such investigations on the Left.

The Amazon Project

Benjamin Y. Fong

You’ve said that unions need a “virtual crusade” to make a dramatic leap forward. Why is that the case, and is the struggle to organize Amazon that crusade?

Sam Gindin

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations sparked a breakthrough in industrial unionism. John Lewis of the United Mine Workers grasped that if steel wasn’t also unionized, the miners would be isolated. So he sent one hundred of his organizers out to support the organizing of the steel industry. That kind of sensibility is especially pertinent today given the expanding imbalance of power between capital and labor, the result of massive economic, social, and political changes over decades that can’t be addressed with marginal tactical changes. This imbalance demands the kind of leap forward that brings submerged frustrations to life and transforms working-class expectations, institutional capacities, and confidence. This amounts to a crusade, both organizationally and culturally.

There are any number of struggles that could act as the catalyst for such a crusade. Amazon is only one such catalyst-in-waiting, but Amazon’s iconic status — the largest private sector employer in the United States, a leader in high tech and artificial intelligence that links some two million businesses with some 300 million consumers — would make its unionization the most important breakthrough in generations.

The labor movement has, however, already lost a step in approaching Amazon as a pie to be split between different unions — warehouses for the Teamsters, Whole Foods for the United Food and Commercial Workers — rather than as a project for the whole labor movement. The catch, of course, is that labor’s extended stagnation has profoundly weakened the very capacities needed to rethink and transform it. It’s still possible for Amazon workers to win significant footholds, and if Amazon continues to stonewall, as it obviously will, then the challenge to the labor movement as a whole will become more pressing. The key test will not only lie in whether labor provides the needed financial support at the requisite moment, but also in the readiness of already unionized workers to disrupt Amazon as needed at ports, in rail and trucking, and in parcel delivery.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Tactically, there’s a lot of emphasis today on salting, or taking a job at Amazon and organizing it from the inside. What do you make of this?

Sam Gindin

Salts are critical. Organizing from a base within the workplace is the most successful way to develop relationships with workers, and also to talk to workers about issues beyond the workplace. But salts also need a supportive structure outside the workplace: trained organizers to follow up on contacts, leaflet, generate support for the struggle across Amazon facilities that don’t yet have salts. They also need resources for meeting spaces, socials, sustaining workers laid off or fired, etc. This demands a union that has your back: an institution that can help strengthen confidence and provide staying power among both the organizers and the workers.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Could you say a bit more about how you situate the Amazon organizing project in the present crisis of labor?

Sam Gindin

Amazon has the possibility of being a spur to the revival of the labor movement. What will labor’s role be in this present conjuncture, in the crisis of legitimacy? Amazon is the test that helps us answer this broader question. Will labor stand up to this challenge, which has the potential to revive the movement, or will it remain too particularist to take advantage of it?

Contrary to what many union leaders and also many on the Left assert, the labor movement is not — in spite of some impressive and courageous struggles — about to “turn the corner” and become a powerful social force again. Some union supporters reject such assessments as counterproductive; what workers need, they say, is inspiration. However being sober about where things are at is never counterproductive. Inspiration is great, but if it isn’t based on concrete achievements, it ends up as a rhetorical substitute for actual organizing.

It’s an interesting moment in terms of language. A lot of language that used to distinguish us is now common language. So when you say we need class formation, everybody nods their heads. We say you have to think in class terms, they nod their heads. When you say that social democracy is limited, they nod their heads. But do they really understand the inevitable rupture when it comes time to govern? If they did, they’d understand that we’re going to need a really deep base. That we’re going to need allies, and that nothing will be easy.

So the Amazon organizing project could also be a way of injecting some reality back into conversations about what it means to reckon with the present crisis.

Benjamin Y. Fong

What would winning the fight at Amazon mean?

Sam Gindin

A specific aspect of Amazon’s model is that it is regionally rooted. Its massive facilities are concentrated at ports and key transportation hubs, with some regions being of much more strategic importance than others. This regional rootedness means that establishing leverage does not have to wait until all of Amazon is unionized; a strategic number of unionized regional facilities can be effective.

Within regions, the company’s fulfillment centers (FCs) are critical. From the perspective of class formation, that’s where most of the workers are. For the company to move these facilities to avoid unions would be difficult, given the high investment costs of FCs.

Amazon’s determined resistance to avoid unions demands a revisiting of tactics that have largely been mothballed by organized labor over the years, and at great cost to their dynamism. Their successful rediscovery, along with other creative organizing innovations, is so vital because they can potentially have explosive implications beyond Amazon, challenging union approaches throughout the labor movement.

Unannounced disruptive tactics carry a special weight. With Amazon’s powerful logistics network, the traditional strike deadlines declared in advance won’t work. Given advance warning, Amazon would simply reorganize its distribution network to neutralize a dated work stoppage. Disciplined, creative, and sporadic disruption are therefore key for workers. The labor movement was born out of work disruptions (sit-downs, wildcats, health and safety refusals, rejection of production speed-ups), but its trajectory has moved away from those earlier tactics.

The revival of the tactic of unannounced disruptions is inseparable from the revival of the labor movement. To take advantage of it, it is also crucial to establish a strong everyday workplace presence, one based on prioritizing work standards, health and safety, and interventions in management authority. This in turn requires not only union majorities but large majorities and deep commitments; a simple majority of union cards is not enough.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Are you optimistic looking ahead?

Sam Gindin

Yes, but soberly so. It’s a really difficult thing to commit to and believe in socialism, but there’s no other option. Is this just pie in the sky? I can see someone doing the same analysis as me and writing it off. The chances of it being pulled off are one in one thousand. And I might not disagree about the odds and all the limits. But my response is, “Well, actually, one in one thousand is pretty good. We’ll take those odds.” What else are you going to do with your life?