Much the same can be said for many “social movements” in a much more developed form; specific sections of the working class experience conditions of alienation, exploitation and oppression in specific ways that self-organization and activity bring to the fore. When the black struggle both argues for black beauty and asks us to imagine a world without police and prisons, these are socialist ideas, and ones that go beyond “subculture,” intersecting with questions of gender, sexuality and ability. When those movements specifically organize themselves with respect to class antagonisms within the movement, we’d be fools not to pay attention. We could do this conceptual exercise all day, and not just as contained examples but by looking at the way social movements influence each other demanding solidarity and sharper analysis. As a concrete example, the International Women’s Strike saw in the internal push-back to Women’s March organizing, a call for anti-Zionist, anti-racist, pro-trans and pro-sex worker platforms a kernel of that kind of class antagonism and a chance to popularize the strike as a tool for combating sexual harassment, discrimination and cooptation of a resurgent women’s movement by “boss feminism” focused largely on representation and rhetoric. In 2017, that kind of united front socialist intervention was a predictive temperature check on class militancy and organization; our biggest workplace walk outs were district wide teachers’ strikes in red states.

This kind of bubbling of social movement consciousness, reflecting the structured conditions of race, gender and sexuality, is similar and concurrent to the way that Marx describes the development of worker consciousness – critically for Marx, or later Harry Braverman – out of quite particular arrangements and innovations of the labor process itself and the process of always-iterative class antagonism over the control of work, between manual and intellectual labor, between workers and the designation of “management,” between worker power and bosses’ evaluation of the balance between efficiency (and thus profit) and the political and ideological control of work. Rather than see these particular insights arising from specific workplaces and industries as divisive, or too far afield, the Marxist tradition sees in them parts of the whole, the whole being the future of working class actualization as a revolutionary subject. We should regard class antagonism in “social movements” in much the same way.

Perhaps the key SRT insight here is the way in which the labor processes of paid social reproduction by necessity call up questions for workers engaged in struggling over them, larger questions about the reproduction of the entire class, which is why we see class demands and broad strike action emerging among paid workers in education and healthcare. At the same time, we – thinkers in SRT – recognize that the non-waged efforts, increasingly strained, of workers to reproduce themselves as families and communities as themselves a labor process (or set of them) with precisely that kind of potential both for sparking insight, struggle, transgressive action, and connections across the divisions of work, geography, the labor market and more.

A third, maybe distinct, SRT insight is the way in which radical family traditions (those of natal and chosen family), community and organizational traditions can “remember” and valorize precisely the kind of class transgression we need now and have always needed. Oral history, and then history in its written form when done in the voice of workers and subordinate classes, is for anthropologists and historians, itself a process of social reproduction, the only one that gives us memories of previous eras of struggle and of a time before capitalism. History, broadly conceived, is the only proof we have that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that “this way” is always really a kind of opportunist, post-hoc justification expedient to ruling class power, and one that necessarily changes over time. For me, one of those stories which always leaps to mind when the question of transgression arises is, again, one my mother, aunts and cousins tell about my grandparents, both while they were still living and at their funerals and wakes.

Living in a union-dominated refinery town – Port Arthur, Texas – my grandparents counted precisely on their coworkers, neighbors and friends to defend them in the face of red-baiting McCarthyism. A carpetbagging anti-communist lecturer was scheduled to present to all assembled in the high school auditorium an instruction on “how to identify communists” in your community. My grandparents, as the story goes, made a late entrance, wearing a red tie and cummerbund and a red silk evening gown, respectively, walking slowly from the back to take seats in the front of the audience. As lore has it, the speaker got the message and declined to appear. They were safe, in one of the USA’s worst historical climates for socialism, because the red flag they flew was not a pose or a brand; it was backed up with earned leadership, with shop floor organizing, with anti-racist struggle in a local church, with a lived expression of feminism in the physical presence of my grandmother, and her husband’s obvious delight in her power. At my grandmother’s funeral, I met workers who told me and all assembled that she and my grandfather had taught them to read, that they were the first intellectuals these now octogenarians have ever met; apparently their weird artistic inclinations (Ruth wrote fiction in a behind-the-house-shed built for the purpose by Dick, Dick painted landscapes and portraits, and carved), nerdy insistence on arguing every point (tiring even to those who loved them), gender egalitarianism, militant anti-racism (they formed a Unitarian church as the desegregated option under Jim Crow) were precisely the things that made them effective organizers. It might not always be safe to fly our red flags high, but given the period of flying red flags in which we find ourselves, I’d argue this is precisely the content we have to fill in, and the kind of frankly transgressive vision any socialism worthy of the name must embody.

Red Wedge: You were deeply embedded in the teachers struggles this spring, notably in West Virginia, and have written about these struggles extensively. What can you tell us about the role of transgression in these struggles? It would seem that there are three dialectically interacting layers of transgression here – first that of the workers transgressing the logic of the bosses, second that of workers transgressing the logic of the union bureaucracy, and finally, subjects of the American state transgressing bourgeois law. Tell us about the interplay of these struggles.

Kate: Well in the case of public school teachers and support staff, transgressing the logic of the boss and the logic of the state are really one and the same. The logic of the state in this simply became increasingly untenable and self-contradictory from the perspective of teachers employed to educate and care for West Virginia’s children. On the one hand the state has hired them to spend most of their waking hours on this rather blatantly socially necessary task; on the other hand disastrously low pay, high healthcare costs with limited access, and the fundamentally pressed conditions of work made the task increasingly difficult to impossible. Teachers and all public employees—presumably by dint of their social necessity and importance—were banned from striking and even bargaining collectively, rights any other worker still has. Yet austerity thwarted the work and even the self-reproduction of teachers and support staff. It’s a truism that even the most bread and butter strikes really come down to dignity, but in this case the indignity of being trapped in that contradictory “logic” is beyond glaring, and the indignity of poverty among students and in the counties and towns where West Virginia’s educators work and live is especially glaring. Survival, with one’s own perspective and experience intact, is transgressive.

As far as the unions, operating as minority associations in a right to work state; the bureaucracy is also perched on an intersection of logical and material contradiction. Largely deprived of the state-level levers and nodes of bureaucratic business union power in the public sector, in the firm of collective bargaining, leaders had little choice but to move with the initial call to strike; members and the prospect of members being really the sole means of reproducing their position and interests as leaders. It meant that when they were unable to sell a narrow and unsecured deal for teacher raises they had no mechanism to enforce the deal. They didn’t control the strike from the start, which is how it became both an “unlawful” strike and a wildcat, ending when a class demand for across the board public sector raises was met, the workers’ minimum program. So the answer is that these transgressions were not really a matter of interplay; they were simultaneous. From the moment an organized militant minority of workers began to build solidarity across job categories, union affiliation and non-affiliation and to prepare to strike to win, they transgressed all three. I think it’s important to say here that the subcultural transgression of self-identified and aware socialists, activated precisely by the bloom of the socialist idea, and activating lived experience and history of struggle and strike made that possible, not some capitulation to the day-to-day normalcy of a lobster in a boiling pot.

I’d add a fourth transgression: the transgression of the limit of bourgeois politics to elections and the legitimation of a two-party system. It’s possible to see the frequent assertion of teachers especially in early days that the strike was not political as a kind of naïveté or capitulation to Trumpist politics. On the contrary, the strike made direct demands on a state that had imposed austerity under the leadership of both parties and asserted power beyond and extremely in excess of that wielded at the ballot box.

Red Wedge: To focus for one more moment on the issue of union bureaucracy, and to bring it back to the initial critique of transgression. It seems that there is an overlap, tendentially and in practicality, between forces that scoff at the “oddballs” of the Left, posting memes of screaming babies, and forces that doubted, scoffed at, and then later misrepresented the struggles in West Virginia. What does this tell us about the different forces at work within the broader Left?

Kate: Well this gets us into the question of “why can’t we do both?,” where “both” is the prime directive of socialists to potentiate, build, deepen, and support the kind of working class self-activity and possibility of independent organization we saw emerge in teachers strikes as the first tactic and to repurpose, rebuild or realign the Democratic Party as social democratic or working class vehicle as a second one. As you suggest, the union bureaucracy is a key obstacle to the former activity, and is secondarily a hindrance to the latter goal, however otherwise infeasible that one may also be for bigger reasons, precisely because of the nature of the bureaucracy and its role in the Democratic party. (I would argue that NGOs borne of social movements and formally assigned to advancing formal rights of oppressed groups play a similar role with respect to class antagonism within movements that I previously described.)

“Normie” socialism is at its core an assertion of electoral politics, and specifically those within the Democratic Party, as the horizon of the socialist movement today as opposed to direct action and working class self activity. Most of the loudest voices in this vein have little if any direct connection to the labor movement, either in terms of its leaders or its members, but they have at various times over the last couple of years gone out of their way to pay lip service to “real” workers and unions, imagined as that 70s hard-hat cartoon that was even (especially) then an outmoded stereotype. At the same time these pro-normie ideologists dismiss and sneer at actual particular instances of organizing (like workers in higher ed), cast illegal strike action as an ultra-left concept at least until it is well underway as a mass activity, actively oppose mass anti-fascist action and argue that the self organization of particularly marginalized working class people, whether on the job or in the streets, distracts and detracts from “real” class politics.

When teacher strikes broke out, this tendency was late to the ground game – then, once they paid attention, were all-too-eager to declare victory in advance of the workers themselves, or even in advance of any indication that deal had been secured. Finally, once the question could not be glossed over, they were eager to mold the historic strike wave and first real sign of a potential working class upsurge in 20 years exactly if awkwardly into the shape of “angry white (right-wing, genderless) workers,” focused and fighting for basic bread and butter demands and implicitly poised to “turn red states blue.” They presented a kind of rear-guard congratulation to workers once they had already won real demands on their own terms, but actively encouraged them to downplay public socialist identification, to avoid solidarity with other socialists, to settle for the minimum program and negotiate the core demand of the Public Employees Insurance Agency after the fact from a place of much less power, and to “remember in November.” It coincided with national teacher union leaders pushing this same agenda and with their insisting on strategies to stay in control of “(illegal) bargaining” in the states where strikes spread, often pushing for symbolic protest rather than the indefinite shutdown that won in West Virginia. Not coincidentally, the gains in West Virginia represented a highwater-mark for “strike spring” in terms of real gains achieved and consolidated out of teacher struggle.

And in this sense – of being not just a matter of emphasis on elections, specifically of Democrats but of opposition to the strategic deepening and spread of autonomous worker organization and activity by socialists, to the practical unity and struggle utility of a broad and united-in-action socialist movement – the “normie injunction” it is a pretty precise expression of the self-interest of the union bureaucracy. People often present the conflict between direct, mass worker action and Democratic Party politics as something that will happen “down the road,” but it’s always already happening. It’s hard to write about this and not sound abstract or cranky, but to understand the argument it’s important to have a sense of what the response of union bureaucrats has thus far been to the sustained decades long attack not only on the working class as a whole, or even on unionized workers and the terms of workers contracts large and small, but for a long, long time directly on the rights of workers to organize and democratize their workplaces. These attacks are always presented as an emergency and a reason to stick with the defensive program of begging from elected officials, but, to me, they are a reason to exit that framework. The one-sided class war we have all lived through until very recently – when workers started fighting back in 2018, making it more of a fair fight – didn’t start with Trump, or even Bush Senior, but with Reagan, and it didn’t let up in between when Clinton or Obama took the reigns of power. Nevertheless for the period of at least my own nearly four decade lifespan, union leaders have pursued a strategy primarily of getting Democrats elected and appealing to them for nothing more than a slower rate of attack.

This response has been what Kim Moody and others have characterized as an “organized retreat.” At times expressed as old-guard clueless myopathy and at other times expressed through a “militant” approach to concessionary bargaining, using consumer campaigns, “show strikes” and other kinds of shortcut, tactical “leverage,” really anything at all besides concerted preparation to strike-to-win, with of course a handful of notable exceptions. For union officials, and I think it's fair to say particularly for public sector union leadership, their individual and small-group position as leaders – well-paid and protected from the squeeze on the shop floor and in the realm of social reproduction – the hold on that position depends not on winning gains for workers, or even preventing major losses, but on a two-fold grip on control of bargaining and of offering themselves as brokers to the Democratic Party, a source of a solid voter constituency as well as of well trained and reliable election-cycle activists willing to put leather to pavement and phone to ear to get out the vote for the candidates their union endorsed. The process of this death spiral has seen leaders retreat to smaller areas of control, in terms of labor market sectors, in terms of the number and kinds of workplaces, and in terms of political geography, focusing on reliable blue and union one-party cities and states, even as union density, the legal regime and geographic coverage of closed shop and “blue” strongholds have continued to shrink.

Most horrifically in recent memory, this dynamic played out in the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011, when workers took direct action against a legislative assault on public sector workers. Anticipating West Virginia teachers, Wisconsin public sector workers began pushing the logic of the state, their unions and the electoral mode. The protests took the form of occupation of the state house that developed over weeks and culminated in a kind of de facto general strike; union leaders and embattled Democratic Party politicians led a concerted effort to redirected the energy into a failed recall effort for Governor Walker, effectively neutering the power and potential expansion of the direct, mass political strategy, and resulting in total defeat.

The consequences were dire, lending energy to the spread of reactionary policies and power of right-wing politicians across the Midwest. Right-to-work legislation spread, seemingly overnight across what was once the geographical heart of the United States labor movement, to the point where the final blow of the Janus decision is something of an afterthought, approached with a sense of resignation and by many union leaderships as nothing more than a rhetorical talking point, and focus of fundraising appeals, or at best anemic membership drives.

While this defeat certainly hurt labor leaders too, their weak response can't simply be understood as a mistake. When workers’ democracy and organized power begins to exceed the logic of the state, electoral politics and union officialdom, union leaders are caught between a rock and a hard place; they are threatened by the austerity and anti-union assault and the slow demise of their dues base, but they also become extremely vulnerable to ouster by newly organized and angry workers who inevitably begin to criticize and challenge the decades of official union collaboration and capitulation to concession. From the perspective of officials, organized workers in motion are always a more immediate threat to their jobs, no matter how bad things otherwise get.

We see that same model of labor leaders clinging like sharp and dangerous but quite stationary barnacles to rusty the ship of New York State Democratic party machine politics and Governor Cuomo's promises of legislative cover in the face of the Janus decision. Quite concretely this alliance resulted in the blow up of the Working Families Party in the context of the looming New York State governor's race, where union leaders have abandoned WFP, initially organized to both as their vote-counting vehicle and constituency-delivery mechanism, and the face of “progressive” politics in the state. In the face of that party’s democratic decision to back “democratic socialist” underdog Cynthia Nixon over the incumbent, the union leaderships endorsed Cuomo because of his promises for state-level Janus protections and in the hopes of union quotas on state-funded construction projects. Whatever the potential radicalism of the rank-and-file in this exciting political moment, and despite the hints of and on-the-ground efforts at building concrete solidarity between workers and social movements in New York, this race is a clear example of the way that (particularly one-party state style) Democratic party politics converts every expression of militancy and hope for change into a calculation of coalition size and a battle of brands; identity politics in the worst possible sense of the term. Union members and working class people generally now face the choice to buck their unions as individuals at the ballot box, opting between voting “socialist” and voting “worker,” with a side dish of possibly getting to pick a charismatic woman, “the homo, not Cuomo.” I find the slogan (along with Nixon’s transgressive and hilariously bisexual reclamation of being “an unqualified lesbian”, a phrase which was originally coined as an anti-queer dog whistle diss by a standard bearer local gay politician) to be snappy and amusing, but I find the nature of the choice itself deflating and instructive about the very real and immediate limits of “doing both”.

Red Wedge: Tell us about the cultural practices of the strikers in West Virginia. The role of music, chants, apparel, the use of social media, memes, videos and the like? Also, what were the parties like? There’s that great passage in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts where he suddenly effuses about Parisian workmen drinking and smoking and singing. Can you tell us similar stories about these practices in West Virginia and elsewhere?

Kate: I wish I could say I’d been to more parties! One thing about the West Virginia strike was that people traveled every day from all over the state to come to the capital and so that meant that lots of people had long commutes, and people were managing child care and family responsibilities on top of sustaining an ongoing strike, often with multiple family members involved. It’s one reason it was a good strategic decision for the legislature to make its final offer on a Saturday, and something to think about in terms of the overall strategy of these combined occupations and strike as a method – how can we build in more of the movement as an ongoing experience of being together. Often overnight occupations can start to take on that character and that’s something I think worth considering.

But teachers in West Virginia really brought their artistic skills to bear and sensibilities to the state house. I was really majorly impressed with the quality and content of the signs people made, and with t-shirt designs. It shouldn’t be a surprise that teachers are good with visual messaging, with historical context and with funny puns, but it really was inspiring. There were costumes, references to local and movement history and lots of plays on kids’ literature and the classics. Every county and some schools had their own t-shirts, often with particular or just their own favorite slogans, lots of glitter. Music and art teachers and social studies folk really got into it, and bus drivers had some creative bus-related material. The high level and specific content and unique messages also made for great ice-breakers for conversation with strangers, because they are interesting enough to talk about and because people are proud of what they create; something mass-produced placards and identical t-shirts produced and distributed by international unions can’t really reproduce. Later state uprisings still had a lot of this quality, but it was noticeable that the degree of coherent militancy where strikes spread coincided with a dominant and homogeneous image of “red for ed” optics. I’m completely down with “red for ed” but we can’t lose the energy that’s created when strikers feel empowered to produce their own materials, and their own look, and to DIY some of that, together. The visual is completely different – you can see the “parts” of the whole that make up the solidarity in action, you get lots of signage specifically about that; the West Virginia actions were color coded for teachers, support staff and other public sector workers, so you were constantly confronted by an instant reminder that people are in this together but coming from different experiences. It makes it harder to settle for less than victory for everyone who is putting their asses on the line, and for the communities they are representing.