What role for elected officials in the class struggle?

The recent organizing victory at the Amazon JFK8 facility in New York has led to a number of discussions in the labor left about whether it represents the emergence of a new era of labor activism. It has also put a sharper focus on a lot of the “normal” ways of doing things that the labor movement has pursued for years with little effect. One of these has been the labor movement’s long-standing political strategy of seeking to win its demands by supporting so-called pro-labor politicians, most of them Democrats.

That’s where a recent Jacobin article, reporting on an April rally held before a union-recognition vote at JFK8’s sister facility, LDJ5, in comes in. Author Eric Blanc may not be responsible for Jacobin’s blurb, but its takeaway was clear: “A reborn workers’ movement needs both organized workplace militancy and left-wing politicians that back them. Sunday’s Staten Island Amazon rallies — attended by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other elected officials — featured both.”

For Blanc, who has never made secret his nostalgia for Sanders’ failed campaigns for the presidency, the rally lifted spirits: “After two years of unrelenting working-class defeats and demoralization, hope was back in the air…”Unfortunately, this support from the likes of Sanders, AOC and other labor leaders didn’t pay off for the organization of Amazon LDJ5, which lost its union representation election.

The fact that liberal politicians showed up at a labor rally is hardly a precedent-shattering event. Every second-rate politician running for office (both Democrats and Republicans) knows how to show up at a picket line for a photo op and to repeat some pablum (“I’m behind you 100 percent”) when the news media are there. Several of them even issued statements of support in 2020 for Amazon workers when they first walked out in protest over COVID safety. These included a statement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who, Jacobin insisted during the 2020 presidential primaries, was so much different from the “class struggle” candidate, Sanders.

Blanc offers the following disclaimer:

The point is not that Amazon workers should start relying on politicians, a dead-end approach that has aided organized labor’s decades-long decline. It took systematic, bottom-up worker-to-worker organizing to make possible the victory at JKF8 — and without deepening and spreading this workplace upsurge, including by getting ready to strike to win a first contract, no forward progress will be possible, even with the most dedicated support from state actors.

But it’s clear that he and Jacobin are making a broader historical and strategic point that holds up support from politicians as a key link in the chain to working-class advance. Blanc, well known for “cutting history to fit a model” (as the socialist labor historian and activist Kim Moody put it), is doing it again. In this case, the “model” supports his pro-Democratic Party reformist politics:

Consider the last great US labor upsurge, which won unions for millions in the 1930s. Contrary to simplistic accounts that stress only bottom-up militancy, the most serious histories of this period stress the consistent interaction between shop-floor action and state-level policy. As historian David Brody explains, “Contributions from the political sector probably amounted to a necessary condition for the growth of industrial unionism.”

Without massive, disruptive strikes and risky, militant union drives, labor’s great leap forward would not have been possible. But the emergence and fate of these actions was always inseparable from the raised working-class expectations generated by the New Deal; the Roosevelt government’s 1933 proclamation of labor rights in Section 7(a); the 1935 passage of the pro-union Wagner Act; the refusal by FDR and most Democratic governors to smash strikes through armed repression; the congressional investigations of union busting by the La Follette Committee; and the legal efforts of the left-leaning “Madden Board” NLRB from 1935 through 1938.

Note Blanc’s characterization of accounts of the 1930s that “stress only bottom-up militancy”. They are “simplistic” and not “serious.” The serious understandings of the 1930s, that the quote from mainstream labor historian David Brody is supposed to illustrate, stress the importance of the “political sector” in the organization of labor in that period.

Every socialist interprets the past considering arguments they want to make in the present. But it’s also true that one can’t just “cut history to fit a model,” especially if that history doesn’t even explain the past. So, what can we say about the two-paragraph history of the New Deal and the CIO that Jacobin presents us?

The New Deal and its reforms emerged as part of a program to save a capitalist system facing its greatest crisis ever during the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1933, U.S.industrial production dropped by almost 50 percent. When Roosevelt took office, 25 percent of the working class was out of work.Circumstances forced Roosevelt’s hand. Political and business leaders worried that the country was ripe for upheaval—perhaps even for revolution.

Adolf Berle, a member of FDR’s group of advisers called the “brain trust,” pressed FDR to act boldly because “we may have anything on our hands from a recovery to a revolution. The chance is about even either way. My impression is that the country wants and would gladly support a rather daring program.” It’s clear from this quote why revolutionary socialist Leon Trotsky said the brain trusters weren’t “revolutionists” but “frightened conservatives.” The NIRA initially received the backing of both capital and labor.

FDR garnered labor support with the NIRA’s Clause 7a that recognized workers’ organizations. This was only one piece of a larger bill that whose main purpose was to encourage capitalists to join together to dampen competition between them. Unionists read in Clause 7a support for genuine trade unions. The United Mine Workers of America recruited new members with leaflets announcing, “the president wants you to join a union.”Capitalists, meanwhile, read in Clause 7a government approval for their company union schemes.

For most of the first two years of Roosevelt’s administration, the National Recovery Administration (NRA, the organization that implemented the NIRA) disappointed its working-class supporters. In particular, the emerging labor movement found that NRA administrators consistently sided with companies against unions. Unionists took to calling the NRA “the National Run-Around.”

An industrial upturn in 1933‑34—achieved with very little help from the New Deal fiscal stimulus—brought workers back into the manufacturing plants where they could feel their collective strength, giving them greater confidence to fight back. Powerful movements of industrial workers grew up over the next few years, culminating in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 and a massive strike wave in 1936 and 1937. “There was a virtual uprising of workers for union membership” the American Federation of Labor executive council reported to the AFL’s 1934 convention.

The 1934 strikewave showed that workers were willing to fight for genuine trade unions, with or without government support. The three breakthrough strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco showed common characteristics: mass picketing, self-defense against police and scabs, and radical leadership, as Sharon Smith noted in her Subterranean Fire. All of them had quickly escaped control of the conservative American Federation of Labor union leaders. Indeed, the 1934 strike movement demonstrated the threat to the system that a mass working-class movement from below posed.

The radical labor movement that exploded in 1934 pushed the Roosevelt administration and its friends in Congress to enact the “second New Deal” of labor and social reform in 1935 and 1936. Proponents of reforms like the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act endorsed them as necessary to short-circuit radicalization. Rep. Connery, speaking in 1934 on behalf of the NLRA, warned, “You have seen strikes in Toledo, you have seen Minneapolis, you have seen San Francisco, and you have seen some of the southern textile strikes. . . but you have not yet seen the gates of hell opened, and that is what is going to happen from now on” if the NLRA wasn’t passed.

Roosevelt responded to the pressure of the rising class struggle by legalizing collective bargaining rights for workers who were using the strike weapon to demand them. But he didn’t do so enthusiastically. Liberal Democratic Senator Robert Wagner introduced what became the National Labor Relations Act in 1934. The bill aimed to create a permanent labor relations machinery that would make union recognition and labor relations a matter regulated by the government instead of fought out on the shop floor between workers and bosses. Industry opposition to the bill made FDR withhold his support, causing Wagner’s bill to stall in Congress. But the 1934 strike wave “confirmed Senator Wagner in his conviction that the nation needed a new labor policy.” Wagner reintroduced the bill, which won overwhelming support in Congress in 1935. Roosevelt only belatedly threw his support behind the bill because he saw it as a way to boost workers’ consuming power and because he thought it would rein in strikes like those of 1934. Instead, a strike wave, from late 1935 to early 1937, engulfed the country.

There is a political debate among academics who study this history that starts with the question: Did the New Deal create the movement or did the movement create the New Deal? Those who want to downplay the movement say, look, after the Wagner Act was passed, there were more strikes and more unions recognized than before the Act. Therefore, the New Deal created the movement.

However, this argument misses two key points, scholar Michael Goldfield pointed out: first, the impact of the 1934 upsurge that created the conditions in which the Wagner Act seemed like a staid alternative; second, the fact that most of the union organizing that took place from 1935-1937 didn’t follow the Wagner Act’s provisions. Union leaders worried the Supreme Court would invalidate the Wagner Act, so they forced companies to recognize unions and to sign contracts outside of its specified channels.

And those are the real lessons of history that we should take away from the 1930s. Political reform responded to, and lagged behind, the struggle in the shops and factories. Likewise today. Blanc wrote that unlike much else about the Biden administration, the Biden NLRB has “dramatically exceeded expectations.” But the Biden NLRB’s legal opinion against employer “captive audience” meetings—where employers force workers to assemble to hear anti-union messages—came after the Amazon Labor Union had used these meetings to challenge company propaganda. The successful organization of Amazon JFK8 relied on member-to-member organizing in the plant, and not on good words from politicians.