The state of the unions in the U.S.

Our comrade Kim Moody tells us that union coverage in the U.S. is up. This development is only to be welcomed by all self-defined socialists, especially those who still conceive of working-class self-activity, self-education, and self-organization, particularly at the point of production, as indispensable for social revolution. But to celebrate this development too quickly and too easily, without a socially and materially grounded sense of what union membership means, is to miss the forest for a few still maturing saplings.

The reformist left tends to equate union membership with union militancy—as if the first automatically leads to the second. There are contradictions aplenty at play here, of course. One can certainly support electing Democrats and engaging in militant activity at the same time. But, at the end of the day, this equation is the germ of a strategy that submits class struggle to an electoralist strategy. Strikes and other stoppages need not last too long, be organized by rank-and-file workers, or be organized and translated into independent working-class infrastructures of dissent to build an electoralist “movement.” In fact, once absorbed into such a movement, working-class struggle is to be managed, turned on and turned off like a faucet, by those above, and dampened.

Unfortunately, then, there is no straight and easy path from union coverage to labor militancy. In fact, while coverage is up, strikes remain low. How we explain this contradiction, this gap between coverage and militancy, has real consequences for how we respond to it as a socialist organization rooted in the tradition of working-class self-emancipation and socialism from below. In what follows, I’ll go through some flawed analyses, turning to thinkers much smarter than myself to dispute them, talk a little bit about what hasn’t changed, and make some concrete, if not entirely worked out, proposals for how Tempest might respond.

Bad Analyses and Good Rebuttals

Narratives that attempt to explain the decline in both union density and militancy over the last few decades by simply saying that capitalism has changed are legion. We can find them in Brenner’s recent work on “secular stagnation” and in the work of some of his students, particularly Aaron Benenav; in the thought of “left-wing communists” like Josh Clover, who suggests that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based entirely on circulation and that, therefore, struggles at the point of production are subordinate, and should be politically subordinated, to riots that will grow until they explode into some sort of undefined commune; and in recent “techno-feudalist” accounts that claim that capital has transformed into a mode of production based predominately in techno rent-taking. These arguments simply don’t hold up.

It is, of course, obvious that capitalism has changed and continues to change. Capitalism is, in fact, marked by a dynamism and turbulence unseen in other modes of production. And this is because of what Anwar Shaikh describes as its “central regulating mechanism” of “real competition.” However, while dynamic, turbulent, and productive of heterogeneity—among firms, within the working class, between nations, etc.—capital is also a social relation with strict rules of reproduction. Its engine and goal is profitability. It is driven by and dependent on it. This has not changed.

Thinkers have similarly blamed the decline of the labor movement on deindustrialization, noting that, if functional and militant unions were full of industrial workers, our shift to a “service” economy necessitates both union decline and a search for new models of organizing and militant activity no longer tied to the millstones of the strike, stoppage, or slowdown. I won’t go into this here, but, as Michael Roberts notes, globally, the world has not deindustrialized. Nor does the growth of the service sector explain the decline of the labor movement. This sector is not inevitably stagnant or unprofitable, as some claim. It is a poorly defined industry, and one that also includes essential components of production.

The relative growth of the service sector does not signal capital’s retreat or exhaustion but rather its extension. Additionally, as Roberts explains, while industrial employment has dropped in the “mature capitalist economies,” it rose globally, between 1991 and 2012, by 46%. And these drops in the mature capitalist countries cannot be explained without attention to productivity increases imposed by capital and largely accepted, sometimes even embraced under the fiction of labor-management cooperation, by unions.

Along with all of this, more and more people have been thrown onto the labor market the world over. This ongoing process of proletarianization is unsurprising. And it points to the fact that developing organs of working-class struggle, self-organization, and self-education, which have always been helped along in one way or another by socialists, is still crucial.

The working class is not dead, nor is its most important weapon, the strike. Those who claim that the decline of the labor movement in the U.S. is based solely on major shifts in capital’s functioning ultimately turn what is a political issue—the disorganization of a militant layer of the working class and the Left—into an inevitability. This lets those of us on the Left off the hook.

The Necessity of Exploitation, Then and Now

Capital continues to create profit and chase profitability by way of exploitation. This is not a negotiable feature of capitalist social property relations. It is foundational. As Shaikh explains, under capitalist “real competition,” “cost-cutting becomes a central concern.” This is:

because prices are ultimately limited by costs. Costs, in turn, depend on the length and intensity of the working day, the wages paid to workers, and the technology in use. Hence, struggles between capital and labor over wages and working conditions are immanent in the drive for profit. So too is never-ending technical change, whose principal purpose is to reduce costs.

This means that capital is also compelled to respond to crises of profitability by increasing surplus value through raising the rate of exploitation. What generated the recovery that we know of as the neoliberal boom was not only the destruction of inefficient enterprises through bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, and the like, but also the brutal projects of holding down wages, increasing productivity, and lowering expectations in relation to living standards, including offloading social reproduction onto the family. This takes place at the point of production, of course, but it also reaches beyond it. When in the midst of crisis, as we now are and have been for some time, capital and capitalist states also impose austerity.

Those of us in Tempest already know all of this. But given the state of things—capitalism’s long depression, the global rise of the Right, the ever-intensifying attacks on working and oppressed people, and the sharpening of inter-imperial rivalry, to name only a few morbid symptoms—it can be all too easy to lose sight of the functioning of capital as capital. Capital is doing what it does and what it must. It is seeking profit and chasing profitability at the expense of working-class living conditions. What we’re living through, then, is not an aberration. Crises are regular and recurring features of capitalism, and so, too, are authoritarian responses to these crises. As Jeffrey Webber and Todd Gordon put it, “there is an authoritarian disposition at the core of capitalism, a tendency integral to its very nature as a system of exploitation, oppression, and alienation.”

This is why militant working-class struggle remains not only important to resisting capital and the capitalist state’s authoritarian turn but also non-negotiable, a lynchpin of political struggle that cannot be ignored. Trump is a nightmare. But he doesn’t represent as much of a rupture as he seems to. Ultimately, he is the head of a capitalist state that is trying desperately to both leap out of a crisis of profitability and to convince working people that the crisis of social reproduction we face is the fault of other working and oppressed people.  But under Donald Trump, the next president (likely a Democrat), and leaders the world over, whether of the Right or center, workers still work and will still work. We’re compelled to work to survive in a market-dependent world. If anything, the global economic crisis in which we remain mired means more austerity, more work for less, under the rule of right or center. Exploitation will not go away, and it has not gone away.

There has certainly been a full-throated abandonment of the so-called rules-based liberal order—even if, at base, this order was itself always a regulating fiction. Inter-imperial rivalry is, of course, both more intense and therefore more visible. And the rise of the Right the world over is both a central problem for the global Left and the oppressed and the exploited, and a serious obstacle to our organizing.

However, there is a tendency, even on the Left, to treat these phenomena as if they represent a serious departure not just from the capitalist status quo of the past fifty years or more but also from the orthodoxies of capitalism more generally. Terms intended to clarify the unprecedentedness of the Trumpian moment proliferate: neo- and post-fascism, authoritarian nationalism, plain-old fascism proper, political capitalism, U.S. Bonapartism, and so on. It is important, of course, to outline the specificities of our moment as clearly as possible. But there is a temptation built into these debates, I think, and that is to present Trump and the global Right as if they represent a kind of irregularity.

We should remember, though, that:

For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials, and private thugs.

Trump’s is an attempt to reconstitute this tradition of open racism, assaults on the heterogeneous working class, and crackdowns on left-wing activists and movements, immigrants, queer folks, women, and the poor. This reactionary tradition was only buried, to the limited extent that it was, by mass struggles from below.

And it was precisely the gap that developed between the organization of workers as workers, at the point of production and beyond it, and efforts to expand these gains that allowed for something like Trump’s traditionalist return with many twists. This happened not only because of assaults from above but also because of failures from below—namely, the cleaving of workplace struggle and its disciplining on the part of union bureaucrats in league with so-called progressive capitalist and convinced of the efficacy of labor-management cooperation. The largest organ of the organized Left in the U.S.—the Communist Party—took a similar tack as it embraced the Popular Front strategy.

The crisis of working-class militancy, then, is a political one. Therefore, the reconstitution of a militant layer of workers will require a lot of political work. But it also contains within it the germ of revolutionary possibility.
Because capital can only change so much, because it is driven by profitability, the best way to threaten and cajole it, and the states that depend upon and smooth its way, is still to threaten its livelihood, even if only in the short term. Whoever is in office in whatever capitalist state, this holds. That doesn’t mean that we can collapse national and historical specificities into a unilinear march toward revolution. Rather, the realization that it will take a fighting labor movement to compel both meaningful reforms in the here and now and in the future should force us to take stock of specificities, of real obstacles to and opportunities for organization in the U.S. and elsewhere.

New Epoch or Crisis

Responses to crisis matter, of course. But the response by authoritarian nationalists and centrists or liberals has largely been the same. If the first engage in revved up scapegoating, the use of state force, etc., the second do so with a more human face, until the genocide of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli ethno-state is on the table. Then the mask slips off.

The Right, the world over, benefits from the economic crisis and the lack of serious left-wing opposition. But, like the center, it flails in the face of this crisis, even if in more openly cruel and reactionary forms. We shouldn’t collapse all capitalist regimes into one another, of course. There are serious differences. Workers are “better off” in a relative, and very qualified sense, under less right-wing administrations. As Avery Wear argues, in the current climate, the argumentative way forward in the U.S. is not claiming that both parties of capital are simply mirror images. Rather, it is that, whatever the differences, “the Democratic Party… because it is a party dominated by the capitalist class, sabotages our class’s fight against the authoritarian and reactionary tendencies of the Republicans.” Even those of us who fall on the side of what Wear calls the “classic” argument, represented by something like Hal Draper’s “Who’s Going to be the Lesser Evil in 1968?,” should heed Wear’s advice.  Even if in fits and starts, people are moving. There is a nascent but broad resistance constituting itself, however unevenly. And while many of its members are still willing to vote Democrat in order to unseat Trump, they’re also willing to take to the streets against ICE, against Trump’s attempt to further consolidate his power and push at the edges of his authoritarian liberalism.

Even as we work with and in this broad resistance movement, we should never recoil from the project of reorienting these spaces to independent working-class action and mass mobilization, not as opposites but as both integral parts of class struggle that must be united. Therefore, even if they’re real and meaningful, differences between the capitalist parties shouldn’t be fetishized either.  When it comes to working people and the heterogeneous working class, they’re far too similar.

Both parties have responded to the crisis of profitability by displacing it onto immigrant workers, gender minorities, the houseless, the racialized, and the oppressed more generally. The Democrats’ rhetoric of moral superiority has come to equal itself as, well, empty rhetoric in the face of their full-throated support of Israel. Spending on ICE swelled under Democrats, too. Trump did not create these armed goons out of thin air. Nor is mass deportation a Trumpian invention. It was also a bedrock of the Obama and Biden administrations. Trump has certainly adopted it with more public-facing cruelty and authoritarian verve. But what we’re seeing is the intensification of an already-existing (and bipartisan) attack on immigrants.

Just look at the way Harris’s “resounding defeat by voter abstention” was blamed on “whatever marginalized group refused to sufficiently support” her “right-wing, blood-soaked, imperialist presidential bid.” This blame has been extended to immigrants, Latinx voters, trans people (and the Democrats’ supposed courting of them), Arab and Muslim voters, those who refused to support Harris’s gung-ho approach to changing absolutely nothing in the midst of a U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people, and so on.

Harris’s campaign, and its possible if suicidal resumption in 2028, even if simply the product of centrist Democrat delusion, still speaks to the fact that the official opposition in the U.S., whatever their rhetoric, will continue to wage war on working and oppressed people, both in the U.S. and globally.

Even if the Right is openly pursuing imperialist aggression and much more openly attacking working-class and oppressed people than the supposed opposition, we should also avoid the trap of treating these real historical shifts as if they represent the abandonment of capital’s central logic and drive. We should be careful that, in trying to make sense of the dynamism of capitalism, we’re not falling into the traps of thinking of capitalism as progressing through “phases,” each marked by a different logic of accumulation. The authoritarian turn has not veered away from capitalism. It is latent within capitalist social relations themselves.

Even as they mobilize, unions in the U.S. still bank on the Democratic Party and on the capitalist system itself. Mass disruptive struggle may have moved into the realm of possibility with Trump’s assaults on workers, but it is yoked to an unbroken business unionism in the workplace. Struggles are limited, contained within the bounds of collective bargaining, and mainly concerned with wages and benefits rather than with the conditions of work itself.

Toward a Limited Response

Workers are clearly being drawn to unions as defensive organs, not only in relation to attacks on wages, benefits, and the conditions of work but also, importantly, in an attempt to defend themselves and their immigrant colleagues from (some of) the forces of the state, revved up by Trump’s authoritarian nationalism. In the last year, we’ve seen unions and their members take to the streets in LA, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. This is an incredible development. Even unions and locals that had become sclerotic through years of bland business unionism have turned out and have organized members to turn out to No Kings protests. And while what happened in Minneapolis was not a general strike, “it served as a starting line for new organizing efforts that can carry the movement forward on more than just momentum.” Additionally, calls for organizing around May Day 2026 drew serious attention from working-class folks in the U.S. Even if the May Day events were smaller than expected, the character and infrastructure initiated in their planning are significant. These are openings that we can’t dismiss as insufficient, even if they are insufficient. As the Tempest National Committee explains: “We can draw inspiration from the anti-ICE movement and commit to building the kind of sustained, ongoing organizing in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods that will increase our capacity and power.”

Much of this organizing was and is being done by rank-and-file workers. But there is also a schism between these, what we might call, being unfortunately imprecise, politically or outwardly-directed organizing projects, and organizing at the point of production, in the workplace, whether the factory, the schoolhouse, the warehouse, etc. Joe Burns describes this phenomenon as “labor liberalism,” distinguishing it from business unionism, but the two are relatively compatible, especially in times of crisis.

This kind of organizing threatens to replace organizing workers at work and as workers—capable of threatening the capitalist pursuit of profitability by way of conscious stoppage—with organizing members to be mobilized outside the point of production, and at will, turned on and off like a faucet. A personal example: I’m a non-tenure instructor at Howard University. Over the past year, our SEIU local has invited us to national No Kings protests and anti-ICE actions, but they also swooped into our workplace during negotiations, refused to openly bargain, even though it was the will of the majority, and actively impeded our attempts to build solidarity with other university workers. What we won is a contract that, in the midst of crackdowns on academic freedom, ultimately invests the university administration with more power over our work and our jobs more generally.

As socialists grounded in and carrying forward the tradition of socialism from below, we know that to bring about real and meaningful change, we need not only bodies in the streets but also militant workers in all kinds of workplaces. Whatever the administration, whoever the leader, capital and the capitalist state can be compelled when workers threaten to raise costs.

At the national level, Tempest already houses a Labor Working Group (LWG), and local LWGs and Direct Action Working Groups exist in some branches. The national Education Working Group recently completed an education series on multiracial organizing, focusing on both unions and social movements. All of this work is necessary. Much of it is excellent. But we need to develop a more coherent and intentional project of worker education—one that unites Tempest’s national resources and expertise with the embeddedness of many of our members in their own unions and local labor movements more generally.

Some less-than-concrete ideas:

1) The creation of a pool of Tempest members and collaborators willing to write on organizing strategies and tactics and on various forms of disruption. Such writings could take the form of pamphlets, leaflets, or short articles for the website. And they could focus on more abstract or theoretical questions, historical examples of working-class action, or both.

1. A specific series of labor pamphlets, leaflets, or short articles that Tempest members can print, share with their union comrades (electronically or otherwise), hand out, or put up at work, etc. These could be thought of as a kind of Organizing 101 series. Whatever lessons are presented should be drawn out for a non-socialist audience, and there should be a persistent effort to connect past historical examples to present situations.
2. Tempest members who are involved in union struggles should be encouraged to write about their experiences, and those who have been involved in struggles past or who have some historical knowledge of these struggles, why they matter, and what lessons we can draw from them, should be encouraged to share their knowledge.

2) The development of educational materials that Tempest members can use in their unions: These materials could take the form of reading lists or syllabi, perhaps based around specific themes; pre-made but editable presentations or scripts for talks, especially on themes, lessons, or concepts that are applicable across different sectors of work; reading and study questions that Tempest members can use to facilitate reading and discussion groups in their unions; and the like.

3) A series of presentations, presentation scripts, education documents (pamphlets, articles, etc.), or reading/discussion group outlines that take up the hard work of actively building solidarity among working people the world over: These will provide an alternative to the kind of passive or reductive solidarity of the class reductionists, focusing on the necessity of fighting racism, standing up for immigrant workers, and building international solidarity not by ignoring oppression, but by actively fighting it.

4) A series of presentations, documents, etc. on the relationship between social movements and broader struggles against oppression and the labor movement.

5) The development of local labor schools or other educational infrastructures: These could host speakers from the collective as a whole—virtually or in person—even if the unions or sectors involved will differ depending on location, the embeddedness of Tempest members, etc.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras; modified by Tempest.