I was on the street outside the Minneapolis VA Hospital, a truly giant facility that tends to the health of tens of thousands of military veterans each year. The occasion was a demonstration sponsored by the two American Federation of Government Employees locals that represent thousands of workers at the hospital. The motivator for the demo was the intense attacks on Federal workers, TSA workers losing their union, illegal layoffs, and massive downsizing of important Federal agencies. Let me set the scene a little more by describing who was attending. The vast majority of those in attendance were white and older than 40. There were more than a couple of American flags and many were veterans.
I was there not just to support these workers but also to hand out leaflets for an event being organized to discuss how to build for a general strike. At first my thought was this might not be the best audience for the general strike idea. Wrong. Not only was there widespread agreement with the idea of opening up a discussion on how to build toward a universal work stoppage, I had 3 workers ask me for a stack of leaflets to hand out to their coworkers around them and to take back to work.
The point of this story is that, under the pressure of the billionaire offensive, there is a shift going on in the working class. It’s almost like people’s consciousness about themselves as part of a class that is being ravaged by the rich has gelled overnight. It may be an overstatement, but it’s a process I expect will deepen as the attacks become even more intense. For example, I just heard a report that the Federal agency responsible for tracking and treating Black Lung has been defunded and no longer functions. If you are a Trump voting West Virginia coal miner, you might be changing your mind about what you did in the voting booth in November of 2024.
The left overall is ill prepared to take advantage of this shift. There is a deep current in the Democratic Party, and those even further to the left, that hates workers, especially those who just voted for Trump. White, male workers are generally seen as backward, and working class people are generally seen as pawns to be moved across the chessboard. The left tends to orient to white, college-educated, middle-class professionals. The continued prevalence of identity politics on the left is usually not embraced by blue-collar workers who often lack the college credentials of their liberal counterparts.
When you are trying to get workers to join a union, you are looking for the issues that are felt most deeply, those issues that will unite men, women and non-binary people, those issues that will unite workers who come from Somalia, Liberia, African Americans, Latinos and native-born White Americans. If you let them, the company will use this diversity in the workforce to carve you up and destroy your union organizing campaign or your strike. The anti-union human relations department and anti-union lawyers are well practiced at playing one group against another. Historically this kind of divide-and-conquer tactic is well practiced by the rich. Jay Gould, the railway magnate is famously quoted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Of course this means that the internal union organizing committee and the union have to take the concerns of each group seriously. For example, it might be that the company does not take claims of sexual harassment seriously, so the union organizers have to make sure that the internal committee does. If the internal committee is not a friendly place for women, then women workers may not engage or even turn against the union, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
The same thing is true in the working class in general. If you are trying to get workers to join and build a powerful movement to stop the billionaire class, then pronouns (he/him/she/her/they) are not that important. This is not to discount the importance of pronouns for some workers, but purity tests like this can’t be a standard we use to judge the readiness of workers to engage in political and economic struggle.
I recently was at a meeting where a participant said that white workers would not be ready to engage in real struggle until they understood their whiteness and understood what it means to decolonize. If we use these words and standards as a purity test, we will never build a movement populated and led by workers. This is the language of academia. It is not the language meat packers, hospital janitors, baggage handlers or bus drivers use to acknowledge their differences or overcome them.
Nor is this a language that can be imposed on workers. This is fundamentally one of the reasons why Trump won. In job sites across the country you could feel workers’ rejection of the strictures of political correctness and identity politics regardless of their own identities. This brand of politics has done little to nothing to improve the material conditions of workers’ daily lives over the past decade. And they showed their disapproval with their votes or by abstaining from voting.
We need a movement that can threaten the status quo, that can threaten a political or economic crisis or the interruption of profits. This is the only kind of movement that can stop billionaire tyrants like Elon Musk dead in his tracks through mass actions and strikes. A class struggle, working-class movement can be built in this moment but many on the left will be seen as irrelevant and left behind if they don’t understand that the working class is awakening and increasingly ready to go into battle against the bosses.
By Kip H