3.

Radical Labor Subculture

A Key to Past and Future Insurgencies

Labor radicals have played a key role in the history of the US working-class movement, as in similar movements throughout the world. What are the dynamics that enhance or undermine the effectiveness of these historical actors? The interplay of radical ideologies, broader social and cultural realities, political organizations, social movements, and social change can be illuminated by an analytical concept—radical labor subculture. It can be particularly helpful as we seek to make sense of the dramatic divergence of left-wing activists from the actual working-class movement in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the failures and floundering that afflicted a variety of left-wing currents in the 1970s and 1980s—in stark contrast to more inspiring realities stretching at least from the 1860s through the 1930s (arguably before the American Civil War and after the Second World War). It is also an analytical tool that may be helpful for those who wish to consider future possibilities of class struggle and radicalization.¹

Culture, Class Conflict, and Subcultures

Culture has been described as a distinguishing characteristic of what it means to be human. Raymond Williams tells us that this term is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”² It is worth considering its usage by North American anthropologists—for example, Melville Herskovits described it as “a [conceptual] construct that describes the total body of belief, behavior, sanctions, values, and goals that mark the way of life of any people,” adding that “in the final analysis it comprises the things that people have, the things that they do, and what they think.” Ruth Benedict referred to it as involving “ideas and standards” people have in common—“learned behavior … learned anew from grown people by each new generation.” Clyde Kluckhohn and W. H. Kelly elaborated that “culture in general as a descriptive concept means the accumulated treasury of human creation: books, paintings, buildings and the like; the knowledge of ways of adjusting to our surroundings, both human and physical; language, customs, and systems of etiquette, religion, morals.”³ Such things are built up over time—but one must realize that they are created by people to deal with the often changing realities around them. In the face of social and economic transformations, new meanings are given to “traditional” customs, and sometimes dramatic innovations are embraced. Eleanor Leacock indicated how this concept fits into historical materialism by stressing the importance of “analysis that rejects static a-historical views of culture, and transforms the concept into a tool for examining the role of ideology and consciousness in social process.” Factors involved in culture, she suggested, include the way people conceptualize and express their relations with each other, which are related to the ties they develop with one another in the course of organizing both the labor of production and daily life—grounded in material conditions and social relations.⁴

Twentieth-century Marxism has offered key insights that allow us to deepen our analysis. For revolutionary Marxists, of course, the conception of class is essential for making sense of culture. As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin put it in 1913 (in “Critical Remarks on the National Question”), “There are two nations in every modern nation,” and so “there are two national cultures in every national culture”—capitalist and working class. The dominant element in any modern national culture, he argued, was “the national culture of the bourgeoisie,” which often intertwined with the even more reactionary orientations of the aristocratic landed proprietors and reactionary elements among the clergy. “Aggressive bourgeois nationalism,” he warned, “which drugs the minds of the workers, stultifies and disunites them in order that the bourgeoisie may lead them by the halter—such is the fundamental fact of the times.” Against this capitalist-reactionary culture, Lenin counterposed what he called “the international culture of democracy and the world working-class movement,” which in turn is grounded in the specific experience of workers in all countries. “The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present,” he insisted, “if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism.”⁵

That the complexity of the question is even greater than Lenin suggested was highlighted, ten years later, by Leon Trotsky. “The proletariat is a powerful social unity which manifests its strength fully during the periods of intense revolutionary struggle for the gains of the whole class,” Trotsky wrote in Problems of Everyday Life. “But within this unity we observe a great variety of types. Between the obtuse illiterate village shepherd and the highly qualified engine driver there lie a great many different states of culture and habits of life.” Nor was this simply a problem of “backward Russia,” in Trotsky’s opinion. “One might say that the richer the history of a country, and at the same time of its working class, the greater within it the accumulation of memories, traditions, habits, the larger number of old groupings—the harder it is to achieve a revolutionary unity of the working class.” For Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky, this is one of the problems necessitating the creation of a revolutionary party—to help forge the unity in struggle of a multicultural working class by providing (as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto) an understanding of “the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality” and an “understanding [of] the line of march” that can lead to the triumph of the working-class movement.⁶

But Karl Marx never presumed that it would be possible for would-be revolutionaries to make history just as they pleased. Rather, they would have to make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”⁷ They must engage with the kinds of historically determined cultural realities alluded to by the anthropologists and revolutionaries we have been looking at. The specifics of how this actually works have been traced by some of the most perceptive labor historians. The cultural counterposition of capitalists and workers in England, according to E. P. Thompson, can be traced back to eighteenth-century sociocultural tensions of “the gentry” and “the laboring poor.” Much of this evolving class divide, he tells us, opened wide in reaction against a “modernizing” capitalism: “We can read much eighteenth-century social history as a succession of confrontations between an innovative market economy and the customary moral economy of the plebs,” Thompson tells us. He continues: “In one sense the plebian culture is the people’s own; it is a defense against the intrusions of gentry or clergy; it consolidates those customs which serve their interests; the taverns are their own, the fairs are their own, rough music is among their own means of self-regulation.” This harmonizes with Lenin’s view, as does Thompson’s 1963 generalization, which has become a classic statement among Marxist labor historians:

Class happens when some men [and women], as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which … [people] are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms.⁸

Following in Thompson’s footsteps (and also concerning himself with the sort of issues Trotsky pointed to), US labor historian Herbert Gutman observed: “Men and women who sell their labor to an employer bring more to a new or changing work situation than their physical presence. What they bring to a factory depends, in good part, on their culture of origin, and how they behave is shaped by the interaction between that culture and the particular society into which they enter.” Surveying the evolving US working class from 1815 to 1919, he noted that it “was constantly altered in its composition by infusions, from within and without the nation, of peasants, farmers, skilled artisans, and casual day laborers who brought into industrial society ways of work and other habits and values not associated with industrial necessities and the industrial ethos.” The response to capitalist exploitation and oppression varied: “Some shed these older ways to conform to new imperatives. Others fell victim or fled, moving from place to place. Some sought to extend and adapt older patterns of work and life to a new society. Others challenged the social system through varieties of collective associations.”

This last grouping—those involved in organized challenges to the social system—represented what might be called a “vanguard” layer of the working class reflecting a radical labor subculture. According to Gutman, by the middle of the nineteenth century a proletarian recasting of democratic-republican ideology had become an essential element within US working-class culture, adding: “Their beliefs went beyond the redefinition of eighteenth-century republicanism, and sparked and sustained recurrent collective efforts—in the form of trade unions, strikes, cooperatives, a tart labor press, and local politics—to check the increasing power of the industrial capitalist.”⁹

The Actuality of Labor-Radical Subculture

In the late 1880s, Karl Marx’s bright and perceptive daughter Eleanor, along with her companion Edward Aveling, toured the United States for fifteen weeks, then wrote a fascinating account of The Working-Class Movement in America. The book begins with their listing of close to a hundred genuine working-class newspapers published throughout the United States, reflecting and influencing a vibrant subculture. In discussing the objective socioeconomic factors of working-class experience, they noted that the United States, in contrast to Europe, had “no remnants of old systems, no surviving classes that belonged to these”—instead, “the capitalist system came here as a ready-made article, and with all the force of its inherent, uncompromising brutality.” The condition of the working class in the United States, they argued, was certainly no better than in England. While the overwhelming majority of the people they met had no idea what socialism was, the Marx-Avelings concluded that there was in fact “the prevalence of what we call unconscious Socialism,” since when the actual meaning of socialism was explained (not equal division of property, not blowing up capitalists with dynamite, not anarchy—but social ownership and democratic control of the major economic resources), “in town after town, by hundred upon hundred, declared, ‘Well, if that is Socialism, we are Socialists.’” In fact, hundreds of thousands had flocked to the Knights of Labor, which the couple saw as “the first expression by the American working people of their consciousness of themselves as a class.” In addition, there were the trade unions associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—as they put it, “the result of many years of evolution” and benefiting from “the practical experience especially of the German[-American] Socialists.” The Knights of Labor, the trade unionists, and various labor radicals (including socialists) were joined together, in various cities, in what seemed to be promising labor party efforts that (the two optimists speculated) would “pass through several preliminary stages” that would eventually culminate in the adoption of a socialist program, with “the attainment of supreme political, and then of supreme economic power.”¹⁰

Those familiar with Gutman and other US labor historians are able to identify reasons why the Marx-Aveling forecast was seriously off target. While providing a snapshot of US realities in the late 1880s, the two revolutionary visitors could not adequately factor in enough of the complex and fluid realities, not to mention the dramatic transformations, that would engulf and fragment the US working-class movement. As Lenin warned, disunity of workers along the lines of culture and consciousness (and also the de-radicalizing impact, for some of the more “privileged” skilled workers, of US capitalism’s economic upswings) meant that—more than Eleanor Marx anticipated—the bourgeoisie was able to lead many workers “by the halter.” One can certainly find brutal ethnic hostility, especially a poisonous racism toward nonwhite peoples, permeating much white working-class life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One or another racial or ethnic group was all too often found to be unworthy to belong to one’s union and would be excluded from one’s workplace—and consequently could be used as a source of scabs during a strike, deepening hatred among workers. There were debilitating fissures along gender lines as well. Sometimes these tainted much of the radical labor subculture—although ultimately, the balance tipped increasingly in a more radical, inclusive direction. This was so particularly as various sections of the ethnically and racially diverse US working class experienced, among themselves, the crystallization of radical-proletarian subcultures and consciousness developing in confrontation to aspects of the bourgeois-dominated “national culture.”

The existence of just such a class-conscious layer of the working class is a necessary precondition for creating a genuinely revolutionary party. Workers’ class consciousness involves more than whatever notions happen to be in the minds of various members of the working class at any particular moment. It involves an understanding of the insight that was contained in the constitutional preamble of the AFL from 1886 to 1955: “A struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world, between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer, which grows in intensity from year to year, and will work disastrous results to the toiling millions, if they are not combined for mutual protection and benefit.”¹¹ Not all workers have absorbed this insight into their consciousness, but those who have done so can be said to have at least an elementary class consciousness.

Of course, this was a phenomenon by no means restricted to the United States. Several years after the AFL adopted this preamble, a young Marxist named Vladimir Ulyanov was explaining in far-off Russia that “the workers’ class consciousness means the workers’ understanding that the only way to improve their conditions and to achieve their emancipation is to conduct a struggle against the capitalist and factory-owner class created by the big factories. Further,” he added in the spirit of the Communist Manifesto, “the workers of any particular country are identical, that they constitute one class, separate from all the other classes in society. Finally,” he concluded, “the class-consciousness of the workers means the workers’ understanding that to achieve their aims they have to work to influence the affairs of the state, just as the landlords and capitalists did, and are continuing to do now.”¹²

Such consciousness does not exist automatically in one’s brain simply because we happen to sell our labor-power (our ability to work) for wages or a salary. But in the United States, from the period spanning the end of the Civil War in 1865 down through the Depression decade of the 1930s, a vibrant working-class subculture had developed throughout much of the United States. Often this subculture was more like a network of subcultures with very distinctive ethnic attributes, but these different ethnic currents were at various times connected by left-wing political structures (such as the old Knights of Labor, the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Communist Party, various groups of socialist militants, Trotskyists, anarchists, and others) and also, to an extent, by trade union frameworks—culminating in the 1930s in the remarkable Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). We see it both reflected in and nourished by such class-struggle battles as the mass uprising of 1877; the eight-hour upsurge of 1886; the Homestead steel strike of 1892; the 1909 uprising of the 30,000 in New York City; the Lawrence textile strike of 1913; the momentous 1919 strike wave; the 1934 general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco; the innumerable sit-down strikes of the 1930s; and the nationwide explosion of victorious strikes in 1945–46. Within this context of struggle and organization, inseparable from the radical workers’ subculture, flourished the widespread class consciousness that is essential to the creation of a revolutionary party.¹³

If we examine the decade of what has been called Labor’s Giant Step—the 1930s—we see a variety of intersecting struggles that were inseparable from, reflected in, and nourished by a broad, amazingly rich and vibrant left-wing subculture. In addition to several significant socialist and communist formations, there was an array of organizations formed around a variety of issues—groups and coalitions for labor rights and democracy, against war and militarism, against racism and fascism, against poverty and unemployment, and others. Related to such things were an incredible number of conferences, educational classes and forums, books and pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, novels and short stories, songs and poems, plays and paintings, picnics and socials, marches and rallies—all blending together to create an expanding and deepening pool of ideas and sensibilities, of human relationships and a sense of solidarity, of insight and understanding. It was, in fact, a subculture (involving, as we’ve seen, what Herskovits called a “total body of belief, behavior, sanctions, values, and goals”) that generated and nourished the kind of consciousness necessary for the sustained struggles that brought about a genuine power shift in US society to the benefit of the working-class majority.¹⁴

A historical survey of working-class movements in other countries reveals the same reality. Perhaps the best-known example is provided by the German labor movement—which involved such a rich alternative culture in Germany, that sociologist Max Weber referred to it as a “state within a state.”¹⁵

Based on Italian experience, Antonio Gramsci outlined the creation of a working-class “intellectual-moral bloc,” as he put it (and which appears to be the same thing as the radical working-class subculture), “which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups.” While acknowledging the importance of “traditional intellectuals” who had been won to Marxism, Gramsci stressed the importance of developing “organic intellectuals” who were (and remained) part of the working class, and he emphasized the importance of working “incessantly to raise the intellectual level of the every-growing strata of the populace, to give a personality [a ‘class consciousness’] to the amorphous mass element,” seeking to “stimulate the formation of homogeneous, compact social blocs, which will give birth to their own intellectuals, their own commanders, their own vanguard—who will in turn react upon those blocs in order to develop them.”¹⁶

Trotsky offered a description and theorization in the early 1930s, as he sought to persuade Social Democratic and Communist workers to join together in preventing the imminent Nazi victory in Germany:

Within the framework of bourgeois democracy and parallel to the incessant struggle against it, the elements of proletarian democracy have formed themselves in the course of many decades: political parties, labor press, trade unions, factory committees, clubs, cooperatives, sports societies, etc. The mission of fascism is not so much to complete the destruction of bourgeois democracy as to crush the first outlines of proletarian democracy. As for our mission, it consists in placing those elements of proletarian democracy, already created, at the foundation of the soviet system of the workers’ state. To this end, it is necessary to break the husk of bourgeois democracy and free from it the kernel of workers’ democracy. Therein lies the essence of the proletarian revolution.¹⁷

Of course, one of the highest priorities of the Nazi movement was the thoroughgoing destruction of this subversive counterculture of the German working class, which was quickly and brutally accomplished when Hitler came to power. This is why the Nazis were embraced by Germany’s big business interests and initially by the upper classes throughout Europe. It is worth noting how Gramsci described the similar, earlier fascist onslaught on what he saw as radical-labor organizational “links” in 1920s Italy:

It set out to destroy even that minimum to which the democratic system was reduced in Italy—i.e., the concrete possibility to create an organizational link at the base between workers, and to extend this link gradually until it embraced the great masses in movement…. The strength and capacity for struggle of the workers for the most part derive from the existence of these links, even if they are not in themselves apparent. What is involved is the possibility of meeting, of discussing; of giving these meetings and discussions some regularity; of choosing leaders through them; of laying the basis for an elementary organic formation, a league, a cooperative or a party section. What is involved is the possibility of giving these organic formations a continuous functionality; of making them into the basic framework of an organized movement…. After three years of this kind of [fascist] action, the working class has lost all form and all organicity; it has been reduced to a disconnected, fragmented, scattered mass.¹⁸

Erosion and Decline of Radical Workers’ Subculture

Fascist onslaughts and repression have not been the only means by which such subcultures are destroyed. There was a dramatic break in the continuity of this labor-radical tradition in the United States after 1945, due to the realities that resulted from the Second World War and the social, economic, political, and cultural transformations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Labor-radical Frank Lovell once emphasized that in the history of the twentieth century, “World War II was the great divide, like a chasm caused by an earthquake of unimaginable force.” This global holocaust—which really was a convergence of holocausts that destroyed eighty million human beings in both combat and noncombat contexts—was a combination of several wars. Underlying them all was a set of inter-imperialist rivalries between Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States for global hegemony (which was absolutely won by the United States, setting the stage for what was called the American Century). But also very much coming to the fore was a set of what might be called “people’s wars” involving populations of Europe and Asia fighting against the invasion of their homelands by brutal, racist military machines, in some cases also involving anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. There was also the massive defense of the Soviet Union (in which more than twenty million people in the USSR died and the back of the Nazi war machine was broken). This, combined with the impending triumph of the Chinese Revolution and the expansion of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, set the stage for the decades of Cold War rivalry between the Communist bloc and the so-called Free World coalition led by the United States.¹⁹

“The war changed the world,” Lovell reflects. “It changed almost everything about the world that we had known. It changed class relations among people around the world. And of course it left vast destruction and devastation in its wake.” He goes on to make a key point: “But this was the very condition needed for the recovery and expansion of the capitalist system. Capitalism as a world system gained renewed strength from the process of rebuilding.” Michael Yates describes the impact of the war on his mother’s Western Pennsylvania coal-mining community: “The Second World War brought the mining village out of the Depression. It also helped to assimilate many Italian-Americans into the more conservative American mainstream. After the war, nationalism and anticommunism became much stronger, and individual acquisitiveness began to replace the more communal life of the pre-war era.”²⁰ The reminiscences of Communist stalwart Steve Nelson, who had experience organizing among foreign-born workers, touch on dimensions of the same reality:

It was a fact of life—the older generation was not pulling the younger into the movement. Increasingly, first and second generations [among the immigrant groups originating from Southern and Eastern Europe] not only spoke different languages but opted for different lifestyles…. World War II was a watershed. Sons who went to high school and then served in the armed forces thought in far different terms than their fathers. Daughters who worked in the shipyards and electrical plants were a world away from their mothers’ experiences with domestic service and boarders. Industrial workers after the war were no longer pick and shovel men. Machine tenders who enjoyed the security provided by unions with established channels for collective bargaining could not appreciate the chronic insecurity of the pre-CIO era…. Participation in the labor movement and especially the war effort … eased the process of acceptance [into the “mainstream” of US culture] of the foreign-born and their children.²¹

Essential specifics of workers’ occupations and workday experience underwent fundamental changes. Related to this was the transformation of the global economy (and the dominant US role within that economy), as capitalism profitably rebuilt itself after the devastation of war, at the same time bringing about remarkable innovations in economic organization and productivity, and enhanced by a lucrative economic expansionism securing raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities throughout the world. This combined with the victories of unionization and social reforms in the 1930s, which helped fuel not only economic prosperity but an unprecedented upward swing in working-class living standards. There were virtual revolutions in transportation, and in the communication and entertainment industries, plus new lifestyles generated by suburbanization and consumerism. At the same time, the long stretch of Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union placed a pervasive and conservatizing anti-communism at the very center of the dominant political culture.

The organizations associated with the labor movement were similarly transformed—impacted by a complex combination of assaults, co-optations, corruptions, and erosions. The communities, culture, and consciousness of the working class became so different from the mid-1940s to the 1960s that only faded shreds of the old radical labor subculture remained.²² Even in 1953, as he tried to make sense of the decline of radicalism among US workers, the veteran revolutionary socialist James P. Cannon commented:

It is now sixteen years since the sit-down strikes made the new CIO unions secure by the seniority clause. These sixteen years of union security, and thirteen years of uninterrupted war and postwar prosperity, have wrought a great transformation in the unprivileged workers who made the CIO….The pioneer militants of the CIO unions are sixteen years older than they were in 1937. They are better off than the ragged and hungry sit-down strikers of 1937; and many of them are sixteen times softer and more conservative. This privileged section of the unions, formerly the backbone of the left wing, is today the main social base of the conservative Reuther bureaucracy [in the United Auto Workers union].²³

Studying the de-radicalization process of the 1950s and 1960s, sociologist John C. Leggett wrote that “a new middle class arose which included a large number of young people of working-class background,” noting that many prospering working people had moved out of traditional working-class communities to become homeowners in the suburbs. “The class struggle abated with the end of the post-World War II strikes, although repeated flare-ups between management and workers occurred during and after the Korean War,” he added in his description of the same autoworkers discussed by Cannon.

At the same time, another trend pointed up this harmony. Governmental boards and labor unions often helped minimize class conflict as unions grew more friendly toward companies which were willing to bargain with, and make major concessions to, labor organizations. Prosperity reached almost everyone one. Even working-class minority groups [that is, some African Americans] improved their standard of living and sent sons and daughters into the middle class.²⁴

According to Stanley Aronowitz, such realities also involved tendencies, in his words, “toward the replacement of all the traditional forms of proletarian culture and everyday life—which gave working-class communities their coherence and provided the underpinnings for the traditional forms of proletarian class consciousness—with a new, manipulated consumer culture which for convenience’s sake we can call mass culture.” In 1963, Black autoworker James Boggs commented that “today the working class is so dispersed and transformed by the very nature of the changes in production that it is almost impossible to select out any single bloc of workers as working-class in the old sense.” By this “old sense” he meant class-conscious workers. “The working class is growing, as Marx predicted,” acknowledged Boggs, “but it is not the old working class which the radicals persist in believing will create the revolution and establish control over production. That old working class is the vanishing herd.”²⁵ As Boggs makes clear, it was hardly the working class that was vanishing—but rather the class consciousness that had been essential to building the labor and socialist movements.

All of this was just fine with the bureaucratic leadership of organized labor. “I believe in free, democratic, competitive capitalism,” explained the president of the once-socialist International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Sol Chaikin, in 1979. He elaborated that “managers should manage and then workers should sit down with them to collectively bargain for their share of the results of management efficiency and worker productivity.” Earlier in the decade George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, put things this way: “Our members are basically Americans. They basically believe in the American system, and they have a greater stake in the system now than they had fifteen or twenty years ago, because under the system and under our trade union policy, they have become ‘middle class.’ They have a greater stake.”²⁶

Such views were not inconsistent with the consciousness prevalent among a majority of union members in the post–World War II decades. When the radical upsurge of the 1960s shifted the political center of gravity leftward—with the massive civil rights struggles, the student and youth insurgencies, the profound opposition to the US war in Vietnam, the early stirrings of a new wave of feminism, and more—it was all far less connected to any genuine working-class movement than had been the case with radical upsurges in the 1880s and ’90s, the early 1900s, certainly the 1930s and ’40s. This was so even though a majority of the activists came from backgrounds (and were destined for occupations) in which one made one’s living by selling an ability to work for a paycheck, which is the classical Marxist definition of what it means to be working class. But the activists tended to see themselves—and were certainly portrayed—as middle class, not as part of a self-conscious working class.

As the thinking of the youthful radicals evolved in socialist and Marxist directions, they found themselves—despite their new-found “proletarian” ideology—in a very different place from the actual organized labor movement of their own time. Marxism itself, initially developed in intimate symbiosis with the actual experiences and struggles of embattled radical workers of earlier times, could not have the same meaning for these young activists, could not be understood in the same vibrant way, as had been the case for working-class activists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The organizations these young Marxists sought to build, and the way they sought to build those organizations, clearly showed this to be true—although this was generally not self-evident for the activists themselves. This was to have unhappy consequences for the would-be revolutionaries.

Turning once again to Lenin, we find the revolutionary leader explaining in 1920 the successful experience of Russian Bolshevism to less experienced activists. In “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, he noted that there are three necessary conditions for the success of a revolutionary party. First, there must be a “class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard,” a layer of the working class devoted to the goal of working-class revolution. Many from this layer must be part of the organization. Second, there must be an ability of the organization “to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in a certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people” through real-life struggles. Third, the organization’s Marxist strategy and tactics must be seen as being correct by the broad masses “from their own experience.” He insisted that “correct revolutionary theory … is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.” Lenin went on to emphasize: “Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being a party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved.” He underscored the point with words that stand as a devastating critique to most would-be US Leninists of the 1980s: “Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.”²⁷

New Developments

Historian Warren Van Tine once suggested that the US labor movement has variously been characterized by four different images—“the union as a fraternity, a democracy, an army, and a business.” By the 1920s, he tells us, “the concepts of the union as an army and the union as a business were far more prominent and influential,” with hierarchy, elitism, and bureaucracy displacing notions of the union as a band of brothers and sisters or as representing rule by the people.²⁸ This was especially so with the triumph of the dramatically conservatized and corrupted AFL over the idealistic militants of the IWW. In the 1930s, with the rise of the left-wing–influenced CIO, this trend was temporarily reversed. By the 1950s and ’60s, as we have seen, the model of “business unionism”—encouraged by the general prosperity and working-class gains—became predominant. But this much-lauded approach, considered at the time to be realistic and mature, would prove woefully inadequate in the face of new challenges that were about to arise.

Through a social compromise forged with big business and big government during and after World War II, the leadership of the organized labor movement in our country embraced the rights of the capitalist elite to control the economy, as well as an essentially imperialist foreign policy, in order to secure “the American Dream” for a majority of the US working class. But by the late 1970s, the most powerful of the capitalists—driven by the profit-maximizing dynamics of their own system—had decided on a different approach. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once spoke of trade union struggles as “the labor of Sisyphus”—referring to the mythical being who kept rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down again. That is how capitalism works, and the dynamic reasserted itself with a vengeance.

While the bureaucratic-conservative leadership of organized labor had little interest in maintaining in “their” unions the popular-democratic idealism that had mobilized millions of workers to win the victories of the 1930s and 1940s, it had been these victories that caused important elements among the capitalist power elite to accept a dramatic power shift in the economy. The economic regulations and social programs imposed by a liberal government and the acceptance of organized labor’s existence and influence constituted President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which (with modifications) was more or less accepted by both the Democratic and Republican parties for three decades. But there had always been a financially powerful conservative faction that refused to accept this. It would spend considerable time, resources, and energies to build what would soon prove to be a triumphant counterattack.

With the electoral sweep of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the once-marginal perspectives of the business conservatives of the late 1940s and 1950s became the new political and economic orthodoxy of the United States in the final decades of the twentieth century. The demolition of the assumptions and programmatic vestiges of the New Deal and of the once-powerful labor movement seemed to have been largely a “mission accomplished” even before George W. Bush took office.²⁹ Kim Moody’s summary cannot be improved upon:

The industrial centerpieces of the US economy shrank or reorganized, and the cities, towns, and unions based on them went into decline and/or dramatic changes in make-up. The industrial “heartland” became the rust belt. The “industries” that appeared to replace them were low-wage and mostly nonunion. Technology, “deployed with ferocity” in a more competitive world, as one economist put it, eliminated some jobs and intensified others. The loss of union density turned into an absolute loss of union members. The institution of collective bargaining was turned from a phalanx of advance to a line of retreat. The upward trend in real wages of the previous thirty years reversed into a prolonged downward spiral. The decline in economic inequality that began during World War II stopped and inequality accelerated with each decade. The New Deal liberal consensus that had dominated politics for over three decades was drowned in a sea of money and replaced by an aggressive neoliberalism that called itself conservative. The underpinnings of American labor ideology were invalidated, though union leaders clung tenaciously to the old tenets. Greed became good. Business values took center field. What had been national became global. Globalization, in turn, became the reason or excuse for every move against the working-class majority.³⁰

The fact that class-conscious layers of the old working class of the 1930s were dramatically fading even by the early 1950s hardly means that the working class as such had evaporated. The working class is bigger than ever, but it is not the same working class that once existed. There has been a combined decomposition and recomposition of the working class, and the old labor-radical subculture is long gone. It, too, needs to be recomposed, and within a very different economic, social, and cultural reality than once existed. But the problems Moody pointed to in 2007 indicate the likelihood of growing working-class discontent—something that, if anything, has been exacerbated by the effects of the recent economic downturn of 2008, not to mention the increasingly unpopular US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This discontent is reflected in the fact that a powerful right-wing political machine, dominating the national government since 2000, was dislodged by a Black presidential candidate—one who was falsely but widely accused of being a socialist and who certainly utilized quite radical rhetoric in order to win the election, promising fundamental and “meaningful” change. The growing disillusionment over President Obama’s failure to deliver on radical and hopeful promises raises the possibility of a deepening mass radicalization.

Implications for Activists

The working-class majority is the sector of the population within which such radicalization is taking root.The fact remains that there is no organized working-class movement that seems able or inclined to provide effective leadership in the present period. The incredible weakness of the labor movement during the first decade of the twenty-first century has been the focus of much comment by knowledgeable left-wing labor analysts, and it is worth turning our attention to what they have to say. They wisely avoid utopian blueprints—the details of struggle must be worked out by those who are engaged in actual struggles. Nonetheless, the kinds of points such commentators make—taken together—seem to push in a direction consistent with the conceptualization of the radical labor subculture.

“The hope for the next upsurge,” Kim Moody has written, “is that there is a clearer vision with a wide enough base and an experienced grassroots leadership to push beyond the limits of the ideology, practice, and personnel of business unionism in its old and new forms.” Michael Yates has emphasized: “What organized labor lacks is a working-class ideology, a labor-centered way of thinking and acting based upon the understanding that a capitalist society is not and cannot be a just one. What might motivate workers to become part of a movement is the possibility that the current system can be transcended and a new, democratic, egalitarian society built.” History suggests, however, that this revitalization will not develop simply within the existing unions, causing Dan Clawson to hope that a “fusion of labor and new social movements might combine the best of both worlds—the energy, imagination, media savvy, and militant symbolic actions of the new social movements with the broad outreach, local chapters, face-to-face majoritarian mobilization, deep commitment, and staying power of the labor movement.” In the opinion of Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, “To bring social justice trade unionism into existence, we must change not only the leadership of existing organized labor but also the relationship between the existing trade union movement and other progressive social forces (for example, workers’ centers, independent unions, and progressive social clubs).” They add: “Such change will not happen in the absence of a conscious Left force.”³¹

The need for “a conscious Left”—the existence of theoretically grounded, politically committed organizations of socialists—is matched by the need for broader social movements that in various ways will interpenetrate with unions, and by the need (within the linked social movements and union movement) for the spread of a radical vision, a working-class ideology, “a labor-centered way of thinking and acting,” with organizers and activists and supporters who are energetic and “media savvy,” having a keen sense of imagination and an ability to utilize various forms of symbolism to realize this goal.

These multifaceted, creative, outward-reaching qualities are already in play, and they are influencing the larger culture. There is an increased proliferation of radical books and journals and newsletters, of well-attended left-wing educational conferences, of progressive labor gatherings, of creative performances (including music, poetry slams, plays, art exhibits, independent films and even an occasional big-budget film, even radical television productions such as Howard Zinn’s The People Speak special). Still in its early stages, this embryonic radical subculture reflects and enhances radicalizing consciousness within the working-class majority. As this develops, it can have a powerful influence on social struggles and left-wing organizing efforts.

By itself, this already-recomposing subculture will not bring about the changes that are needed: not the working-class organizations; not the revitalized union movement; not the coming together of a mass-based, genuinely revolutionary party; not the class-struggle actions that will bring us life-giving reforms in the here and now and create the future possibility of a socialist transformation. But history suggests that it is an integral part of the process. It helps to generate and nourish the class consciousness and the fundamental elements of workers’ democracy that experienced Marxists have seen as necessary preconditions for revolutionary transformation. To the extent that Marxist activists understand this process, they will be better able to help advance it. They will also have a greater insight into the tasks and the timing of socialist and working-class organizing.