Towards a Revolutionary Union Movement, Part 13: Conclusions
We draw strategic conclusions from our analysis of revolutionary unionism. There are two immediate priorities: organizing the unorganized and dual carding within the established unions.
This is the twelfth and final entry in our essay series on revolutionary union strategy and tactics. If you have not read the previous entries, you can start at part one here:
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Now that we have a rough blueprint of what a revolutionary union is, what actions do we need to take—collectively and individually—to build a real revolutionary union movement? At present, we have revolutionary unions, but they are small and scattered. We conclude with some general thoughts on where we go from here.
First, we must organize the unorganized. Vast swathes of the industrial landscape lack any union presence at all. The majority of the established labor movement has effectively given up on workers in these parts of the economy, abandoning them to the whims of their employers. This is an opportunity for revolutionary workers to target non-union employers and industries for organization.
Accomplishing this requires honing in on strategic industries first. That does not mean abandoning small or marginal workplaces, of course. Most of the business unions turn down requests for external organizing support from small workplaces because it’s not “worth it” for them from an economic perspective. We don’t want to emulate that. On top of that, at every stage of capitalism, including this one, smaller firms make up the majority of economic activity. That said, large workplaces and employers represent important objectives for a revolutionary workers’ movement to conquer. Taking the example of education, school districts in the US are often some of the biggest employers in a city, county, or even state. While many of these are fully unionized, charter schools, daycares, and preschools are nearly entirely non-union. Alongside these larger non-union education employers are even higher numbers of unorganized small educational facilities. Revolutionary unions must embed salts and gather recruits in as many of the different types of workplaces in as many industries as possible. If possible, this organization should be spread internationally, tying workers together across borders and along international supply chains.
Second, we must persuade the rank-and-file of the established unions to adopt continually more revolutionary strategy and tactics. A revolutionary union movement crosses all boundaries within the working class, including union lines. It is not a question of boring within existing unions or building new unions, but a combination of both. Unions like the IWW should serve as organized cores of revolutionary workers, revolutionary nodes within the broader union ecosystem. One of the advantages of these unions in contrast to the business and labor liberal unions is universal membership transferral—in other words, you take your union membership wherever you go. This allows revolutionary workers to move freely through the working class and the industries, organizing wherever they find themselves. Including within already established moderate unions. Revolutionary unions should strategically coordinate dual carding campaigns to build independent, directly democratic worker power within the broader labor movement. Our analysis of dual carding is heavily informed by fellow worker Johsua Freeze’s excellent pamphlet “The Role of the Dual Carder in the IWW”.
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We must emphasize here that we are not looking to destroy or weaken already established workplace unions. Even with all their problems, these unions have a constructive role to play in nurturing the ecosystem of organization necessary to overthrow capitalism. Dual carding is the proper means to the end of moving the mainstream unions in a more revolutionary direction. IWW militants also “build connections between unions within the same workplace, and between workplaces in the same sector that are covered by different trade union contracts.” Unlike isolated sects like the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Socialist Alternative (SA), we do not practice entryism, which describes the strategy some communist groups use to take over as many leadership roles in more relevant organizations in order to dominate them.
Instead, dual carders tend to distance themselves from union leadership elections entirely and focus on building power among the rank-and-file. This lays the foundation for independent, militant action by union members, allowing them to break out of the confines of narrow trade unionism and fight for the entire working class. During the Solidarity, not Silence! campaign, for example, DMV EWOC organized and marched in the streets alongside rank-and-file members of the NEA and AFT to demand their unions meaningfully fight for a ceasefire in Gaza. In the 2018 Red for Ed strike in West Virginia, IWW militants dual carding in these same unions played an important role in organizing the rank-and-file to take wildcat strike action when their union leaders tried to end the strike before victory was achieved. IWW dual carders have also been involved in an array of union reform caucuses, such as the Virginia Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (VCORE).
Richmond VCORE
Fellow worker Freeze emphasizes that the IWW has much to learn from the established business and labor liberal unions. We think these lessons can be applied to the entire revolutionary union movement as it develops. Dual carders “have learned vital skills that the IWW is in serious need of. For many reasons, most of the IWW’s current membership is not in shops where the IWW has job control. This means members largely do not have the skills of how to run an actual union.” It seems like the situation is similar in some other revolutionary unions, such as the SAC. Freeze identifies eight areas where revolutionary unionists can learn from the established unions when launching campaigns to organize the unorganized: nuts and bolts of running a union; building relationships with coworkers; grievances, arbitration, and problem solving; communication networks; meetings and finances; relations with managers; strikes and other workplace actions; and differences between the IWW and the workplace union. The IWW’s much beloved Organizer Training 101 was partially developed by dual carders, as well.
But revolutionary unionists also have much to teach, especially as we organize more workplaces and gain experience in building large-scale, directly democratic structures to coordinate campaigns at the local, national, regional, and international levels. In the case of the IWW, Freeze argues that even now, wobblies bring new ideas about democracy, militancy, the rejection of electoral politics, class consciousness, and vision to the rank-and-file of the business and labor liberal unions. This would be an effective method of constructing a revolutionary union movement whose boundaries extend past our respective membership lists and workplaces where we have shop floor control. We will never be able to enroll the entire proletariat into our specific unions. And that’s perfectly okay, because a revolutionary union movement can encompass a wide diversity of organizational forms that accurately reflects and empowers every layer of the global proletariat.
Revolutionary unions should also establish formal alliances with organized, but institutionally independent, autonomous formations of proletarians. For example, this would include autonomous worker collectives within unions like CALP, which even has its own small staff. These initiatives of organized autonomy can build real revolutionary power. Plant-based Revolutionary Union Movements—each with their own autonomous newspapers and directly democratic governance structures—composed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The entire League grew from the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) as workers replicated their organizing model in their own factory sites. They immediately faced opposition from the UAW bureaucracy, which shut them out of all leadership roles within the union. Under the pressure of intense repression, including the drafting of League organizers into the Vietnam War, the group collapsed. There was no wider revolutionary union movement to draw organizational and logistical support from to help them weather the repression and successfully scale up. Today, our goal must be to weave a movement fabric with the overall capacity to sustain and connect our local revolutionary projects in a dangerous world.
We should also seek out opportunities to link up with political collectives and organizations, even if on an informal basis, like the CNT has with the FAI. Independent political collectives rooted in specific workplace struggles such as the AngryWorkers, can help us remain grounded in our revolutionary principles while keeping our ranks open to workers of most political affiliations.
By intertwining all of these approaches—organizing the unorganized, dual carding, and fusing with organized autonomy—we would encode revolutionary theory and practice into the DNA of the global workers’ movement. That way, different parts of the movement can flexibly respond to local, regional, and national developments, while having organized cores around which to coordinate internationally. We could successfully “straddle the line between revolution and reform. We have to use our revolutionary ideas to win reforms and use those victories to build support for revolution.” When a revolutionary situation of dual power comes, we would be ready to immediately constitute a “government of the Paris Commune type” that would bring actual democracy. It would be government by collaboration and persuasion through direct action.
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