Episode 179 – Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns

Macro N Cheese – Episode 179
Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns
July 2, 2022

 

[00:00:03.470] – Joe Burns [intro/music]

With only six out of 100 workers in the private sector belonging to unions, we’re at the lowest rate we’ve been in well over 100 years. And even though we have glimmers of hope in these Amazon workers and the Starbucks workers, I think our prospects are far from certain and we need a new strategy.

[00:00:27.090] – Joe Burns [intro/music]

If you look back a hundred years ago, or even less than that, a lot of the radicals and socialists in the labor movement didn’t just plod along in their own little shop and try and be great organizers. They put demands on their national unions and they had bold plans.

[00:01:35.130] – Geoff Ginter [into/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.060] – Steve Grumbine

And yes, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is Joe Burns. He’s a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of several books, including Strike Back, Reviving the Strike, and the current book, which is the subject of our discussion today, Class Struggle Unionism from Haymarket Books. I’m very excited. This is our second interview with Joe, and Joe has worked very closely with Sarah Nelson and our friend Tschaff Reisberg. We’ve got some really great stuff to talk about today. Joe, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:15.950] – Joe Burns

Hey, thanks for having me on, Steve.

[00:02:17.860] – Grumbine

Absolutely. So this is a big week. This past week was Labor Notes and a huge union gathering. Tell us a little bit about that before we dive into the book.

[00:02:27.450] – Burns

Yeah, Labor Notes was founded in the late 70s as a reform group within the labor movement that brings together activists. This last weekend, 4 thousand workers and trade unionists gathered here in Chicago. It was the largest Labor Notes by far. A lot of excitement, a lot of energy. Great panelists, great plenary speakers. Chris Smalls from Amazon Labor Union. We had Bernie Sanders, Sean O’Brien from the Teamsters on the Plenary Friday night. It was very electric.

[00:03:01.710] – Grumbine

Yeah, it’s been neat to watch Christian Smalls getting Amazon unionized, and that has invigorated the nation, that and Starbucks, which is why your book is so important to me. I got the opportunity to read this. Let’s start off with a definition. What is class struggle unionism?

[00:03:22.770] – Burns

Okay, so class struggle unionism, I think it’s easiest to understand if we talk about it in contrast to what we call business unionism. But for well over a century, I think the two main forms of unionism were what we call business unionism or bureaucratic business unionism and class struggle unionism. And the difference is pretty simple, and it really relates to how do you view the employment transaction?

The business unionists view their role as fairly limited and could be summed up by the slogan a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. They try and negotiate with specific employers or maybe even in the industry. But they see their role as fairly narrowly representing those workers and they don’t really challenge the structure of the workplace or the entire economy.

That’s what we call pure and simple trade unionists, as they used to be called. In contrast, the class struggle unionists have a very different view of society and the role of work in society. Their slogan could be summed up to say: labor creates all wealth. And class struggle unionists understand that workers have to work for one employer if not another, and that as a result of the employment transaction, even though workers create all the wealth in society, that wealth gets siphoned off at the end of their work shift in millions and millions of transactions and flows upward to a small group of people.

And that’s how we get these billionaires that have untold wealth. So as class struggle unionists, we see that we can’t separate out our analysis of work from our trade unionism. And the good thing is – we can look at historically, and I do in the book – it leads to a very different form and in my opinion, far more effective form of unionism that from theory to practice to tactics to strategy all flow from that simple difference.

[00:05:18.690] – Grumbine

In your book, you lay out some history and you lay out some strategies by which unions can deploy to embark upon this. I’m interested in understanding what was the impetus for you actually writing this. What are the current conditions that made this book so important?

[00:05:37.110] – Burns

Yeah, so this is the third book that I’ve written and it’s kind of a journey, I guess. The first book I wrote was called Reviving the Strike. And I was trying to identify that even though now everyone’s kind of in the labor movement and supporters are talking about the need to strike, 15 years ago that wasn’t the case. We had virtually abandoned the strike.

So I wrote a book about reviving the strike and why we needed to revive the strike and look at history and the restrictions and law. But I also identified that there had been a shift in labor theory where beginning in the 1980s, we had moved away from it and a lot of activists had adopted a pretty pragmatic view, which is just trying to work within the existing system.

I called them labor pragmatists back then, which wasn’t very catchy, I guess. And then I followed that up with a book on public employees looking at how millions of public workers violated the law. But I think this book builds on those themes but goes a lot deeper because I think with only six out of 100 workers in the private sector belonging to unions, we’re at the lowest rate we’ve been in well over 100 years.

And, even though we have glimmers of hope in these Amazon workers and the Starbucks workers, I think our prospects are far from certain and we need a new strategy. And I think looking back at labor history, you can say, okay, well, what were effective forms of unionism? What was their philosophy? How did they look at society?

And that’s how I come up with class struggle unionism and why I think it’s essential. Because if we don’t fundamentally change what we’re doing in the labor movement, we’re not going to see any qualitative breakthroughs.

[00:07:25.170] – Grumbine

You wrote an article in Jacobin in preparation for the launch of this book and you basically talked about how our economic system has conflict baked into it from the start. Before we even get to the specifics, what is this conflict you’re speaking about?

[00:07:41.070] – Burns

Well, once you look at the employment transaction, like I talked about, where the wealth gets siphoned off from a group of workers, every worker at their shift in whatever the plant, or you could be a barista or a nurse or whatever you are, part of that money, what that really is, it’s the surplus that’s created in society. And I think it’s pretty clear that where you have a society that’s divided into classes, the working class, which is folks who have to sell their labor to survive.

Once you reach a certain age, you graduate high school or even earlier, you’re going to have to go out and get a job if not for one employer then another. So you have the working class. And then on the other hand, we have, I call them in the book the billionaire class but the Occupy movement, I think, coined the great term the 1%.

The classical Marxist would call them the capitalist class because they control the capital in society, which is income-producing wealth. Not like homes and stuff that you use to live in, but the wealth that you can live off. You get rich by living off the labor of others. So baked into that is a struggle between the working class and the owning class.

You can pick an industry and you can look at the real ownership structure in the industry. We often go against the CEOs or the visible heads of the company, but the real powers in society are the big institutional investors and rich folks who own and really dictate the labor policy. So I guess the fundamental point is with this class struggle unionism is we’re locked in a class struggle whether we like it or not.

The rich in society use their resources to constantly attack anything that’s good for working people. They use their influence over the last 100 years in Congress and the courts to shape labor law to their advantage, to make the rules of the game rigged against working people. So class struggle unionism is really just acknowledging a reality that already exists – that we are engaged in a battle, so let’s start acting like it. Let’s call it for what it is.

[00:09:54.990] – Grumbine

I love that. The beginning of your book, you said that all labor creates the wealth. And you talk about how billionaires are created. Is this on the backs of labor? That seems rather silly to even ask, but is that how they’re built? Where does this come from? How are they created?

[00:10:13.180] – Burns

Okay, so it doesn’t matter where you work. You can work in a coffee shop, you can be an auto worker, you can be a nurse, you can be an Amazon worker. But what you have in common is that you go to work each day for your shift or however your work is organized. And the reason that you’re employed is that your labor transforms the materials that you’re giving into something more valuable.

It could be you’re providing services or you’re making goods. At the end of your work shift, you have created a certain amount of value that you’ve added to the products that were there when you went to work. Now, you don’t get to keep all of that. You get a portion of it in the form of wages, which the employers try and drive down to the lowest amount, and the rest of it flows to the owner of industry.

And we just accept that as kind of the natural order. That’s just how society is organized. And we talk about investment and return on investment. But when you think about it, it’s not like the owners actually created the buildings that you’re working in or the coffee beans that you’re brewing, or any of the hospital beds, or any of the inputs that you’re using.

Those were created by other sets of workers similarly. So when we say that workers create all wealth, it’s just really acknowledging that Donald Trump did not build Trump Towers, workers did. But the problem is money flows up and it creates really unimaginable wealth that we don’t really talk about. So if you have a billion dollars, you can spend $10,000 a day for 274 years.

[00:11:57.950] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:11:58.950] – Burns

And three years ago – and I think it’s gone up since then – the average on the Forbes billionaire list top 400 is 8.8 billion. So that means you could spend $10,000 a day for 1600 years or so. Bezos or those guys, and that’s probably 50,000 years or whatever. So you can play around with a lot of those statistics, but I think it’s very clear that this isn’t wealth that’s rewarding people for work or some of them for inventing, which they didn’t even invent these industries, they just assumed control of it.

But it’s really wealth of a different nature that really comes from having power in society. So I think that’s the fundamental issue that we need to face as a labor movement. Because a lot of times the problem is, look at even when unions are strong, like in the 1940s, through the 1970s, we have very strong unions leveled out some of the inequality in society.

And a lot of the business unionists said, okay, society is great. This is going to last forever. But what happened is – what is money? Money is power. Capital is a social relationship, right? So it’s the ability to command others. So these people if they get a billion dollars, that’s really a billion dollars of power that they can use and they can use to influence and corrupt the political system.

We have Bernie Sanders here at Labor Notes talking about in his trademark discussion of the billionaires and the power that they have and funding the parties. So I think we can’t, as a labor movement, ignore that because all that happens is we go about negotiating our day to day life, but they get more and more power. So we have to have a form of unionism that identifies and addresses that.

[00:13:50.310] – Grumbine

I remember our first conversation. One of the things you raised that I feel is very pertinent to this conversation is that there was this type, and you just mentioned that these business unionists, basically the liberal unionists that gets cozy with the managers and they get used to a certain lifestyle, and it separates them from the fight of the regular people.

And ultimately it subsumes that into a weird pragmatism that doesn’t fundamentally change anything. This pragmatism strikes me. If I were to put that on a political spectrum as the standard centrist Democrats that are placing party alliance above class interests, what exactly makes for a business unionist and ultimately this differentiation between this class struggle unionist.

[00:14:49.590] – Burns

So in the book, I identified three separate trends, which I think you’re referring to, which is the classic business unionists. The, I call them labor liberals, and then the class struggle unionists. We’ve already talked a little bit about the business unionist, but just a little bit more is this is probably a lot of the labor movement historically, they’re typified by the American Federation of labor in the early 19 hundreds, which often had allowed exclusionary unions that didn’t allow African American workers into their ranks.

They saw themselves as very narrowly representing skilled workers and refused to organize the millions of mass production workers coming into industries that were forming with industrialization. And they often had a very cozy relationship with management as long as they got their contracts settled, they were often bureaucratic.

To look down at the members is unreasonable, even though they’re supposed to be representing them. And that’s still a big chunk of the labor movement. And you can look today an example would be we’ve had examples where some of the Walmarts will want to open a store in Chicago or some other city, and there’ll be a community coalition trying to raise the wages, and then the construction unions, as long as they get to use their labor to build the buildings, they don’t really care about what happens after that.

So that would be a very narrow view. The second form is one that I’ve identified and coined the term labor Liberals which is in the 1980s we really had a tough time. The employers were using their power and I think we talked about this before when I was on last time to bust unions to break pattern bargaining in industry after industry to essentially de unionize they got us down to 6% of the private sector.

So grouping within the labor movement, a lot of them are staffers or labor education people came together and developed this new form of unionism which had a lot of forms of progressivism. I think they’ll take progressive issues on immigration and a little bit better on foreign policy and race and gender way better than when we think of the business unionist.

Think of George Meany who used to be the head of the AFL-CIO or Lane Kirkland in the 1980s who were just these right wing racist, just horrible trade union leaders. So the labor liberals were better in many ways, but I think as I argue in my book, they were better but they left out like the core elements of class struggle unionism. Many times they gave up on union democracy.

They thought they knew everything because they were the smart middle class leaders of the labor movement. So some unions like SEIU would create these big locals with 100 / 200 thousand members merging all the smaller locals. Well, how can workers have democracy or input into their local union when it stretches from Florida all the way up the east coast?

But they also gave up on key factor which is a lot of them. Like for example, you focus on the fight for 15 which is great, we’re trying to raise the minimum wage. But a core of cluster of unionism is because the workplaces where billionaires are created that’s a very important site of struggle because what happens in the workplace is the employers try and extract as much value as they can out of workers. And how do they do that?

If they can get you to work longer, if they can double the work day or through overtime or longer shifts, if they can make the plant run on weekends, if they can intensify the pace of work through speed up which they’ve done all the surveillance that goes on in the workplace. Think about Amazon workers, auto workers for example. How much downtime do you have on the assembly line?

I think it’s down to like 3 seconds or something like that. Kim Moody has talked about that in his books as opposed to you’d have more free time in the shift where you could catch your breath. So all of those are like key places for class struggle, I think. And I think the labor liberals have let that piece go and I think finally the labor liberals when I talk about Pragmatism, I think they see themselves as being smarter and fighting within this unjust system.

So in many ways they are like kind of the Democrats you know. It’s politics of the possible. They can do one day strikes, rather than open end strikes or corporate campaigns or tactics like this, which on the one hand, yes, they’re good because they protect you a bit more, but they fall short of the transformative tactics that we need.

And a lot of their strategies, I think, are tied into the liberal or left progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So rather than relying on workers, they use strikes to get attention so that they can pass legislation which is really different than the traditional trade union.

[00:19:56.910] – Grumbine

Absolutely. You brought up something that I wanted to tap into and that is unions weren’t always for everybody. In fact, many minorities have been treated rather shabbily and so groups like ADOS in this country, they have a decidedly different view of immigrants. They see immigrants as taking their lunch because in this country we typically see black and brown people bypassed repeatedly.

New Deal politics are sometimes viewed skeptically as well because of that factor. And so class union struggle sounds very much like an inclusive approach to things which is very necessary for a multitude of reasons. The climate crisis that we’re experiencing is going to create a vast number of migrants and refugees as climate starts causing people to leave their homes and move to places that are more hospitable.

And it’s conceivable to see a wave of immigrants in not just US, but around the world. And what could create more division than a scapegoat of immigrants as we try to build this class consciousness and this class struggle? It seems like what you’re talking about might address that. Can you speak a little bit about that?

[00:21:16.960] – Burns

Yeah. So if you look back historically, we talked a bit about the conservative American Federation of labor in the early 19 hundreds under Samuel Gompers who excluded African American workers and attacked immigrants. And in contrast to them, we have the industrial workers of the world who we hear a lot of from the famous strikes that they help lead.

But they offered a very different vision about what union should be and that union should represent all workers and be inclusive and had a long, rich history of doing that, whether it was timber workers in the south, likewise in the 1930s, the militant trade unionists who are around the Communist Party, they combined this very progressive left view on race and fighting lynching and taking up defense of the Scottsboro boys who were framed for alleged rape but very much based on race.

So they use that to build really strong ties with the black community and that was essential to the rise of industrial unionism. So it not only helped fight racism, but it also helped build unity within the working class. That was key to organizing steel and other industries. And they made great inroads in the south too during that period and built a civil rights union.

So those are very different views and the AFL in the 1980s had horrible positions on discrimination and now everyone in the labor movement likes to talk about diversity. But we need to remember that the AFL-CIO, the main labor federation, didn’t clean its own house and the unions didn’t clean their own houses. They were really forced to by Title VII legislation.

And there’s a book out Black Freedom Fighters and Steel which goes through the generation of black workers that really fought racism within their union. So because class struggle unionism sees all workers in a battle with not only the billionaires in this country but a worldwide network of billionaires, they see all workers as involved in the same struggle. So I think that really fundamentally produces a different view that’s really a lot broader and inclusive.

[00:23:32.550] – Grumbine

One of the things that I really enjoyed about your book is I have been calling for a lot of things and I’m not in a position to be in a union in the way that I would like to be and there’s not really a voters union per se. So those of us that are outside the union sphere look to unions to take the lead on some things and they haven’t really done that.

And you’ve talked about reestablishing militancy and I think this is a very important point but it seems like there was even more in the past and you’re talking about reestablishing that. And I think it’s critical because global climate change and climate crisis, the impact of any kind of change that technology might have on labor, whether it be changing from fossil fuels to renewables, whether it be bringing the jobs back home, so to speak and reestablishing industry here in the United States as opposed to the global supply chains which broke apart during the Covid crisis.

I think there’s a lot going on right now that dramatically impacts labor and if we’re not in the moment setting the standard it’s going to be set for us. What are your thoughts on the combination of climate crisis, the impacts of technological changes and something like a Green New Deal politics with this militancy reestablishing that within the union base?

[00:25:01.110] – Burns

I think overall the system is not working for us and I think the business unionism by its nature is very conservative. Folks like established procedures, a grievance procedure, arbitration set negotiations, kind of a way of doing it and they developed these bureaucracies to deal with it that way. But the problem is, as they say, capital is a relentless force, right?

So the society and the economy is constantly changing and employers, as I’ve noted, used their influence to change the rules of the game over the decades and the stable bargaining that might have existed 40, 50 years ago is gone now. We have the added pressure of changes in the economy. The auto workers, there’s an inevitable shift towards electric vehicles.

The question of are those going to be union or not? What sort of jobs are they going to have and so forth. So there’s these big questions and also what is our role? Are we going to allow the corporations to set the policy on climate change which affects working class communities overwhelmingly. When the water becomes scarce or resources, who’s going to be in a better position to protect themselves?

Obviously the billionaires. So I think that class struggle unionism as an approach is really the only philosophy for the labor movement to be able to tackle these big issues both because class struggle unionism by its nature is very broad based. But I think also it provides both practical guidance and a set of ideas that can validate the tactics that we’re going to need as a labor movement to take on capital, which is a whole discussion.

I have a whole chapter discussing class struggle tactics and what would we need for movement to be able to do the bold actions to violate labor law – that we’ve seen glimpses of, right?  We saw the Occupy movement which even though it wasn’t part of the labor movement, it was a working class movement against the 1%. We’ve also seen that with the Wisconsin uprising, where thousands of workers surrounded the state capital in Wisconsin in about 2012. So class struggle unionism is a philosophy that can add to that debate and practically on the strategy.

[00:27:42.550] – Intermission

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[00:28:33.830] – Grumbine

Before we jump into tactics, I’m going to jump to the conclusion of your book for a couple of key quotes that I’m going to read because I think they’re really powerful, but they’re going to help set the stage for some of the coming conversation. You say, “I believe the labor movement is adrift. We have no plans, no prospects, and more importantly, have not really come to grips that we are lost.

But it does not need to be that way. We need to free ourselves from the practical and ideological straitjacket that has been imposed upon us and our unionism. We’re up against a ruthless and uncompromising enemy, one which believes that every sphere of human activity should enrich them as a class and views our unions as one of the few things that can prevent their domination.

The billionaire class views our unions as the enemy, as key institutions of the working class. Like it or not, they are engaged in a class struggle against us.” So when you put it like that – and that’s the way I like to hear it spoken. This is a war, but we’re compassless. A lot of us lack a political theory, a political analysis, a class consciousness. And with this approach you’re trying to provide a framework from which to view things.

And the key takeaway from this. This leaves the walls of one shop and encompasses many shops. Like, for example, during Bernie Sanders run, Nevada Culinary Group decided that they didn’t like the idea of everyone having Medicare for All because they had worked so hard for their health care that they would rather keep it themselves and not let everybody else have it, which did not put unionism in a good light for many progressives.

And what you’re telling me is that there’s an opportunity for us to align common interests that are going to impact labor, that by extension, will impact all of society. Talk about that.

[00:30:41.570] – Burns

Yeah. So I think this last weekend is a good example. We can call it The Tale of Two Cities. Last week, the AFL-CIO met in Philadelphia and really dominated by the heads of the international unions, and they had their convention and passed resolutions and so forth. And my reading of it is they really – which they’ve done for decades – failed to take into account the fundamental crisis that we face.

They came up with the great idea that they were going to organize 100,000 workers per year, which I think if you do the math and you look at the growth of the labor market, it would mean that the percent of workers we represent would actually go down because their “bold, ambitious plans,” in quotes, don’t even match up with the growth of the labor movement, nor the loss of union jobs that you would have to just organize just to be on a treadmill and keep even.

But then at Labor Notes, we have thousands of unionists and just a lot of young people, a lot of energy. It was really exciting. I was pleased because we got a very good reception to the class struggle unionism and the book and the discussions. I think I had a lot of young people coming up and saying, wow, this is really helpful in opening my eyes in terms of how unionism can work.

So I think that on the level of big strategy, we can’t just plod along and we need a set of ideas, I call it class struggle strategy that takes on these bigger issues. One of the things I’ve talked about with folks is if you look back a hundred years ago, or even less than that, a lot of the radicals and socialists in the labor movement, they didn’t just plod along in their own little shop and try and be great organizers.

They put demands on their national unions. And they had bold plans like the AFL conventions up until the 1930s, they debated every year the left of the labor movement would be demanding that they organize industrial workers. And it took them a couple of decades of fighting within the labor movement, and folks formed unions outside of it and did everything they could to do that.

But they had bold plans about how we can take on employers and the employer class. And we don’t really see that much in the labor movement today. We see the business unionists having their heads down. And now that the Democrats are back in office, Biden is in office, I think a lot of them, the DC labor officials are probably happy, right?

They’re getting invited to the White House and being on committees and shit. And their sense of crisis I’m sure, has gone way down; didn’t invite them to the White House. But even for the progressive trade unionists, I think we’ve been a little bit too much focused on because the mainstream unions and the AFL-CIO a lot of these business unionisms sucks so bad. A lot of folks have said, oh, we’re just going to go do it ourselves, right?

We’re going to form worker centers, we’re going to go out and become good organizers and have our little piece of the labor movement. But that really can’t work. We need the resources and the command of the entire labor movement and that requires demanding that our unions and the labor movement in general take a more aggressive approach.

[00:34:07.670] – Grumbine

We had basic tactics with work to the rule. What are the tactics that are meaningful that can be used? We don’t have as much of the same industry as we did previously. We’re not a Eugene V. Debs industrial powerhouse anymore. It seems like that could be coming back. It might be a good time to talk about this.

[00:34:31.130] – Burns

Yes, I think there’s a couple of pieces to this. One is on-the-job tactics. A lot of unions have really given up control of the shop floor, which was a key area of struggle. So back in the1960’s and 70’s and 80’s  a lot of workers, even in the business unionists would control the output of their work and could put pressure on the employer on the shop floor. What happened is there was a deal with the devil.

You take an industry like auto where the UAW in the late 1970s went for these programs like Team Concept which they partnered with the employer in the name of addressing competition. But what they did is they ended up just speeding up the work and giving up control over production standards and control of the workers.

And they would go to these systems where they’d work in a team and if anyone was slow someone would stop the production and then they’d go after the person who’s dragging it down, which is really not dragging it down, just grabbing a breath. So I think fundamentally how do we regain power on the shop floor takes a different form of unionism.

But even beyond that and I talk about this more in Reviving Strike, but I think I have a full discussion in class struggle unionism is we’re at 6% of the private sector and now we can organize Starbucks and Amazon, which are great. But then what we really have to crack is how do we regain bargaining power. How do we gain power to force employers to drastically improve the lives of workers.

And to do that, we have to confront that there’s a repressive set of labor laws which outlaw traditionally effective trade union activity. So one of the things that labor law does is it forces workers to bargain and strike at these even very narrow units. So they’ll be striking or bargaining at one plant of a giant corporation. And that doesn’t work and it never did work.

And it goes against traditional labor union theory where even the business union of 50 to a 100 years ago would say we need to strike the entire industry at once. So if you look at the strikes in the past, 1959, you got 500,000 steel workers striking at once. Well, think of the power you have when you’re able to shut down the national economy. Look at 1946, right after World War II.

We got hundreds of thousands of workers in different industries, mine workers, railroad workers, the auto workers, everyone going out on strike at once. And it really flex the muscle and the power of the working class. So regaining those tools of solidarity isn’t going to be easy because congress isn’t going to amend the law. The courts aren’t going to let us do it.

We’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way, in all likelihood, which is violating law and defying injunctions, the wage transaction. Right now we have a bit of power in the labor movement because of the tighter labor market. So that’s allowed some production workers to go out on strike. But the employer have used injunctions to limit picketing. And this is really a temporary feature, right? You’re the monetary guy, so you know that they’re trying to drive us into a recession.

[00:37:41.790] – Grumbine

Absolutely.

[00:37:42.950] – Burns

So that workers lose their bargaining power. And so you can talk about that’s. A fundamental intervention to change the rules of the game. Workers finally have the ability to go on strike and the billionaire class and their representatives are changing monetary policy to try and drive us into a recession.

[00:38:01.670] – Grumbine

I’m so glad you brought this up because I don’t think most people really truly understand that. They think that the market is just sort of this thing that happens. They don’t realize how integral the government is in establishing markets, much less enabling them. And the laws that control all the facets, whether it be from what’s allowed in labor to how much money is in the system, where the spending starts and flows and they have no idea.

It’s almost too abstract for the average person to get to. But you bring up something and I’m going to read once again directly from your book, and this is in the Class Struggle Tactics. You said “effective unionism strikes at the core of capitalist society. Whereas the predominant set of ideas in society are based on individual profit. Unionism is based on the collective good.

That’s why these class struggle ideas are so important on a very practical level. It would be a mistake to underestimate what we are up against. Once we move past symbolic civil disobedience and move into labor militancy, we rapidly come into sharp conflict with the existing order in a number of ways. By blockading and taking over workplaces, we are directly challenging the property rights of employers.

By disobeying injunctions, we are defying the judiciary and setting our movement up as a parallel force in society but as citizens. This is why labor is so important. By blocking scabs from entering workplaces or defending ourselves against police attacks, we are engaged in actions that will be deemed violent. By interjecting ourselves into the employment relationship, we are directly challenging the process of capital accumulation.

By rooting our struggle in a fight for control of the workplace, we struggle against exploitation at its source and challenge the basic structure of employment. And by utilizing industry wide or general strikes, we engage in overt class wide struggle that breaks free of the notion we live in a classless society. All these actions are deeply destabilizing to the system.

Corporations and the government will attempt to either crush or co op such actions. Combating those employer strategies requires the class struggle idea discussed in the previous chapters.” Powerful stuff, Jim. Talk about that.

[00:40:43.020] – Burns

Yeah, thanks. So I think some of the best writing that I’ve seen on some of this stuff was by its in the news now, critical race studies was at least a few months ago with the right wing attack. But the labor professors in the 1980s and beyond who developed a really critical analysis of labor law and the ideas underlying it.

And what I learned from them is there’s a rich history of James Pope and Tomlins where they analyze the philosophy underlying the judiciary who really play a key role in establishing labor policy in this country. A lot of it is what the AFL used to call judge made law, but it’s very much based on the set of ideas.

And to take one example, you think of the liberal supreme court justices of the 1960s, and I think they were okay with and somewhat protective of workers ability within a plant against their individual employers. But when you go beyond that and you start seeing workers operating as a class, which is what you get when you have strikes that are industry wide or general strikes.

That’s really destabilizing to these folks who claim to support workers because workers are acting as a class and really calling in to question the entire system. And I think that’s a fundamental difference that the mainstream Democrats and policymakers and class struggle unionists have. I think a lot of the traditional labor union theory would see that the government is somewhat misguided.

Maybe they’ve been captured by conservative forces, but generally is or should be a protector of workers rights. And a lot of their policies are let’s get the government more involved in labor relations. Some of the folks are calling for mandatory arbitration of first contracts and these government sectoral bargaining and so forth.

But as class struggle unionists are traditionally very skeptical of that because we see that the role of the government and the courts, their primary role in society is to facilitate this system of exploitation of workers. Like you say, there’s no free market. The government’s very much involved in the policy and our unionism, for that reason, has to be really skeptical of the role that to take.

But also I think we have to have our own counter set of ideas. What do we believe in? Yes, I think the occupied movement had that our streets, these are public squares, those are transformative ideas that run counter to the set of ideas that are in place and drum by the media and the courts and the politicians.

[00:43:29.090] – Grumbine

The concept of private property, you specify that in your book as well with Occupy, this is fundamentally saying you’ve given everything over to the money class. We have public space, this is ours, this is our labor, our rights. And I think bringing that back is very vital. But one of the things that you also said that is important to drive home is that as Biden took office, we’re going to pull Biden to the left.

And a couple of things have happened. He hasn’t been that and this might be the most painful thing. He also provided a false sense of comfort to a great many comfortable people who have since checked out or feel very happy with things as they are and have turned a blind eye to the real problems that are going on.

And this has always been my chief complaint about allowing a person, in my opinion, that is a friend only in name, that doesn’t really provide any support in your key struggles. And now you’re left supporting and defending a guy that’s leaving you hanging once again. How do we take the union class struggle and present that to a political class struggle as well?

Because the two, as you’ve mentioned, they really are hand in hand the laws that are going to directly impact labor. We’re going to end up getting what we always got and that is nothing. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:44:56.650] – Burns

Yeah, so when I was in law school, I went to NYU, which is an elite law school, liberal. You know, love to talk about theory in law school, it seems like that’s all they did. Because they’re training people to become the policy makers. But it was funny because when we were in the first year one l law school, we would have a class of property law.

But when it came to be like, how did private property come to exist in this country which was land of Native Americans and how did it get developed? The whole class developed into like this mysticism  because the really early cases didn’t make any sense right? How do you take what belongs to everybody and then all of a sudden it belongs to a few and by what right?

So I think those are fundamental questions that some of the younger law students were destabilized by this because it didn’t make sense. But to go on to the politics question, I focus mostly on the trade union, straight up stuff. But I think a lot of class struggle unionists and I do talk about it in the book point out that one of the problems that the labor movement has is this symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party.

And that has been going on for decades and decades, from the 1930s and beyond. And the problem with it is we fund the Democrats. They promised to pass the Pro act, these labor legislation, all of our wish list, and then it never happens. They make great promises. They don’t follow through with it. I think Biden is a great example of that.

But the deeper problem is the Democratic Party is a party that’s, as Bernie Sanders repeatedly points out, is primarily funded by the billionaire class who have deep influence over the policies. So to the extent that the labor movement and the labor officials get so tied into that, it’s really an entree into the labor movement from the ideas and the practices and the priorities of the billionaire class.

And that’s fundamentally corrosive. And I think we’ve seen it over time with the international politics to foreign policy to this soft approach on the Democrats when they get in office and not holding their feet to the fire. So I think part of the class struggle approach is that we need to break from that abusive cycle. And I think folks have on the 90s there was an attempt to get the labor party advocates that was led by Tony Masaki from the oil workers.

[00:47:27.650] – Burns

That’s a whole another discussion of the pros and cons of that.

[00:47:31.570] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:47:32.040] – Burns

I think we need to build a militant labor movement that we can rest independent politics on because the labor movement is so screwed up now it can’t anchor a militant party because we’re not a militant labor movement.

[00:47:46.670] – Grumbine

My biggest concern is I’m an environmentalist and I think about the economy and the precarity of life for families in general. This all stems back to my interest in class struggle. And we don’t have time. We’ve got eight years by the IPCC report and no meaningful way to organize those people. We’ve been baked into this Democrat versus Republican constantly.

That’s the beginning and the ending of our understanding of politics largely. And so these issues that you’re raising, they’re just not hearing it because they’ve lost hope because this fecklessness of this neoliberal nonresponsive Democratic Party with that in mind, we go back to sleep when we’ve got a Democrat in office. Are we stronger in power or are we stronger out of power?

Are we more militant when we’re out of power? Are we willing to make bold things happen, or do we need to be in power so we can go back to sleep? The union stuff is the single most important thing. But to your point, if we keep this soft cushy relationship where the Democrats don’t fear us any more than the bosses in these industries fear us, we have nothing. They don’t have to listen to us, do they? If there’s not a credible threat to their power, why in the world would they concede anything?

[00:49:06.830] – Burns

Great analysis there, Steve. The labor movement can play and is a special social movement in society because we deal with where the billionaires come from, and their source of their power in society is from the value that’s created by workers. I think the labor movements always played a special role and that’s why we’re especially feared and hated by the billionaires.

So I think that on my mind. We need to develop a militant labor movement that will be the key to addressing these issues, and part of that is going to be having a position of strength so we can break free from this dependency or codependency or whatever you want to call it on the Democratic Party, which is not helping us. It’s not going to help us. I think you’re right.

There’s a chunk of the labor movement who get very comfortable when the Democrats are in office. Their crisis is over now that Trump’s out of office. But the crisis is still there. The conditions are still there. The underlying conditions of workers haven’t fundamentally changed. So I think that’s another example of why we need fundamentally different labor movement based on my opinion class struggle principles.

[00:50:23.570] – Grumbine

This has been an amazing conversation for me. I really appreciate you sandwiching this in between all your Labor Notes stuff and your flight back. So with that, let me give you an opportunity to close us out. Tell us where we can find your stuff, and also there’s any parting words you have for the audience to help them better understand why this is so important.

[00:50:43.430] – Burns

Yeah. So, Steve, thanks a lot for having me on. I actually really enjoy the conversations I’ve had on here, this one and the previous one. The books available, Haymarket Books has it. One of the interesting thing is a lot of young people in DSA, Democratic Socialist America and young trade unionists are doing study groups with it.

So they’re taking it out with their coworkers and going through chapter by chapter and discussing them, which I think is really cool, but you can buy it online at pretty much anywhere. But Haymarket Books is a publisher. I will be taking this on the road and going around the country as summer proceeds or into fall and talking to groups of workers, which is always very fascinating because you get everyone’s different perspective. So anyway, thanks for having me on and I hope folks will check out the book.

[00:51:32.430] – Grumbine

Absolutely. Folks, this is Steve Grumbine with my guest Joe Burns from Macro and Cheese. We’re out of here.

[00:51:44.970] – End Credits

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