A recent story in Seattle shows the power of capitalists against progressive politicians. Last month, Amazon stopped construction on its Block 18 tower to protest a $275 per employee tax on major corporations to fund programs for homeless people. The $800 billion company’s capital strike and a business-funded “No Tax on Jobs” campaign pressured the Seattle City Council to repeal the tax after only one month. In a statement, Mayor Jenny Durkan and seven city council members said: “It is clear that the ordinance will lead to a prolonged, expensive political fight over the next five months that will do nothing to tackle our urgent housing and homelessness crisis.” Amazon (whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the richest person in history) and other major corporations functionally vetoed progressive legislation passed unanimously by democratically elected officials.

How does something like this happen? According to the Marxist sociologist Fred Block, the state under capitalism is a site of conflict between three primary actors: “the capitalist class, the managers of the state apparatus, and the working class.” While the state is not dominated by a class-conscious ruling class, and its managers (e.g., elected politicians) have “relative autonomy,” there remain structural barriers that discourage them from pursuing anti-capitalist policies. If managers of the state unilaterally pursue economic reforms, they can provoke a crisis of what Block describes as “business confidence,” or individual capitalists’ concern for their profits. This in turn can lead to a “parallel economic downturn,” with disastrous consequences for both politicians and the working class. So, as our comrades recently wrote in DSA’s national political education newsletter, The Stacks, while elected socialists have “some room to maneuver…they won’t have total freedom to implement the policies they want.”

This is not to argue for despair. “There is another, countervailing structural force: class struggle from below,” our comrades in The Stacks remind us. Even under incredibly difficult circumstances, the working class can win and strengthen their capacity to fight for more. At the Socialism 2018 Conference, for example, a teacher from West Virginia spoke about how she had been transformed by the nine-day statewide education strike earlier this year:

My husband and I were having a discussion during the strike and he said, “You know, Nicole, our labor belongs to us.” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re right. Our labor is ours to withhold or to give.” That seems so simple, but I had never thought of that before.

This lesson was put into practice in an inspiring industrial education strike that included teachers, school staff, and bus drivers. By “creating a crisis,” even in a Republican-controlled state, as labor organizer and sociologist Jane McAlevey wrote for The Nation, teachers and education workers won all five of their major demands, including “a mechanism to fix the health-insurance crisis and a raise big enough to matter.” The strike not only wrested major concessions in a state controlled by right-wing politicians, she continued, but “perhaps most significantly, it restored the dignity of 34,000 workers, rebuilding the pride of West Virginia’s working class and reinforcing one hell of a union that will carry the struggle forward.” As workers left the state capitol following their victory, they chanted, “Who made history? We made history!”