Building a base of production in the socialist movement

As the world stands today, the goal of liberating the working class from capitalism and exploitation seems both more possible, and more daunting than it has in my lifetime. Society is in stasis to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, capitalism has had its infinite growth interrupted, and the whole of our economy has just begun a freefall that is sure to rival, or even to surpass the depths of the Great Depression of 1929 to 1941. At the same time, the electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders, which has lit the spark of class consciousness among the youth and the working people of this country, has ended again in defeat. The working class stands in an untenable position — the necessity for class struggle to ensure our freedom and prosperity is more clear than ever, but there is no obvious way to achieve victory in that struggle.

In the capitalists’ reaction to that struggle, they have numerous advantages that they exploit to keep the status quo. The reaction of the capitalists to our struggle seems to be automatic. While an individual capitalist might put on a show of sympathy for the downtrodden, or might stand still in fear and indecision as to how to fight back, as an organized class they are a foe that acts without external direction, without delay, and without remorse for the consequences that they inflict upon us. They have at their disposal what seems like every weapon they could possibly need to preserve things as they are — with the capitalists and landlords owning every aspect of our lives, from our work to our homes, our democracy to our recreational activities. In this status quo, we work every day to survive. Meanwhile, they thrive without working simply because of what they own.

When we go to work for a capitalist, wealth is generated by our work and taken from us automatically. We create materials, goods, and services from the moment we clock in to the moment we clock out, but when the working day is done the value of what we’ve made does not belong to us. What we’ve produced is taken instead into the ownership of the capitalist who owns our workplace. This might be a single person, in the case of a sole proprietor, or it might be the capitalist class as a whole in the case of a publicly traded company whose ownership is purchased and sold on the stock market, but the result for us is the same. It’s then that the proceeds of our work is divvied up by its owner. A portion of those proceeds goes toward overhead — keeping the wheels turning at work. A second portion of those proceeds goes back to us in the form of wages. And the final portion goes into the pocket of whoever owns our workplace, despite the fact that they may have never even set foot in the workplace where that product was made. This final portion is known to the capitalist as profit, and known to socialists as surplus value.

Once those wages are in our hands, they get returned to the capitalist class. In order to eat, we pay the owner of the farm and the grocery store for our food. In order to sleep, we pay a landlord for a place to rest our heads. What little we have left after taking care of our most basic needs, we can then use as we see fit — but even the production of frivolous things is owned by capitalists who demand payment in order for us to amuse ourselves.

This is the fundamental reality of capitalism, and it’s what makes it so difficult to overcome. In order to survive, we must work to enrich someone else. If we’re offered $20 per hour to work, it’s because an hour of our work is worth at least $21 — but probably more along the lines of $75 or $100. And because they had more money at the start of the process, the owner gets to decide what portion he or she is entitled to. This is how the rich get richer from every worker’s shift — from the blood, sweat, and tears that we have to expend in order to stay alive and to keep society running.

This immense wealth that they take from us every day is then put back into the creation of a class of functionaries that reinforce the capitalist system while the capitalists themselves sleep. These functionaries include consultants, wealth managers, lawyers, bureaucrats, media figures, even politicians who all have to keep working in their roles in order to survive. Their survival and prosperity is wholly dependent upon the capitalist system which keeps them working, which in turn is wholly dependent for its own survival on the work that the functionaries do to reinforce it. The capitalist system, the class of capitalists themselves, and the class of functionaries that do the work of maintaining capitalist power combine to create a perpetual feedback loop. Like a microphone that’s too close to its own speaker, what flows from one part inevitably goes through all the rest and back into the first, and we’re left to deal with the painful shriek of its consequences.

On our side, thousands of us have taken up the fight to interrupt that feedback loop, but nobody has yet found a way to make that interruption permanent. In the United States, that fight takes the form of a few familiar tactics. The most common of these is the trade union movement. In today’s crisis, we’ve already seen some spontaneous outbursts of trade unionism from our fellow workers. These fights against an individual injustice under capitalism are tremendously important, as they push back against the immediate causes of our suffering. Without trade unions, our lives would be like a Dickens novel, but they can’t completely break the cycle of capitalist exploitation. The capitalist always fights back against the trade unions, and there are two inevitable outcomes. Either the capitalist will suppress the union, and the intolerable conditions will continue until the next round of union struggle, or the union will win and force the capitalist to make a concession. After that concession, the members are invigorated for a while by their success and they might make a new demand, but the intolerable conditions that spurred them to create the union in the first place aren’t so intolerable anymore. Eventually, the demand from the union becomes just the continued existence of the union as a balance on the power of the capitalist owner. These trade union struggles can’t be written off by those of us who seek to change the way things are, but it’s clear that trade unionism alone will not break that feedback loop of capitalist power structures.

Many of us have also taken up political fights, myself included. Most would assume that I’d take this opportunity to plug my own profession as an elected legislator, committed to ending capitalism, and say that political actions alone are the road to revolution. That is, unfortunately, not the case. If it was just a matter of getting a majority of voters on board through education, we’d have voted our way out of capitalism long ago.

Just like intolerable conditions in the workplace can motivate workers to spontaneous trade unionism, intolerable laws can motivate working class political campaigns and candidates. I, myself, am a perfect example of this — my career in politics began when I was hurt at work in 2015, and I started looking for ways to fix Virginia’s broken Workers Comp system. From the day I announced I was running, I was pressured from all sides to “go along to get along.” From the advice of more senior politicians to the daily fundraising needed to compete in the next election, it was clear that the easiest way to do this was to stop fighting the status quo — to become one of the functionaries that preserves capitalist power, and if I did that job well enough I might have been given the chance to fix part of the Workers Comp system. If I’d done things that way, though, I would have cashed in on the creation of dozens of new problems in order to fix one. The only thing I would’ve been using my political office for at that point would be maintaining my position in political office. I probably would have lied to myself and said it was better me than someone else who’d willingly pursue the goals of the rich, but deep down I would’ve known that the system changed me and not the other way around.

So much of the working class’s suffering is caused by the capitalist class’s control of the political sphere that it’s clear we can’t just give up the fight on that front. But it’s also clear that spontaneous political action alone won’t break that feedback loop, either.

Each of these types of struggle — the workplace struggle of unionism and the political struggle of an electoral program — requires a constant force pushing in a revolutionary direction, otherwise it will either collapse or it will get sucked into just fighting to keep existing. That constant force must be a commitment to political education within working class’s movements and leadership. We have to constantly educate ourselves on exactly what economic and political power are in our capitalist society, who has them, and how they work. It requires us to always keep our eyes on the goal of dismantling capitalism and creating a world where the working class owns our own workplaces and homes, and possesses all political and economic power, and in which decisions are made democratically for the working class by the working class. It requires that we constantly train ourselves to recognize when the conditions are right for workplace action, when the conditions are right for political action, and how to create more favorable conditions for our movement in each. And it requires us to walk the fine line of making immediate gains to strengthen the working class and improve the conditions of life, without getting sucked into the never-ending cycle of just fighting for the next collective bargaining agreement or the next election.

It’s here that a lot of activists would step in and claim that their organization has the answer! If we just commit to the program of political education laid out by one organization or another (you can call it an activist organization, or a party, or anything you want — they all share the same basic problem which I’ll get to soon), and put its activist members in charge of coordinating the political education of union leaders and politicians, then surely we’ll win the class struggle and be free! Unfortunately, this is a model that has repeatedly tried, and failed, and tried again, and failed again to produce results. These organizations have their basis in spontaneous activism, just like the trade unions have theirs in spontaneous workplace uprisings, and the electoral leaders have theirs in spontaneous political uprisings. And so, the activist organization inevitably faces a similar choice — either it’s destroyed through infighting or external suppression, or it bends to pressure and becomes an irrelevant remnant of its former glory, focusing its efforts on keeping itself alive and telling stories of better days.

None of what I’ve said up until this point should come as a surprise to anyone who’s studied the history and literature of socialist movements from previous generations. The inadequacies of trade union struggles alone, or of political struggles alone were identified long before I was born, by someone far smarter than me. The solution to those inadequacies being political education has also been known far longer than I’ve been alive. And the struggle to maintain an activist organization to do that political education has been felt by every American socialist who has ever tried. The history of the American left is full of organizations and leaders who have tried and failed to keep their organization both intact and focused on that goal of political and economic revolution.

I propose now that the fatal flaw in all of these organizations has been that they had no engine of production behind them. Without a way of producing materials, goods, and services that was all their own, they rely on the spare time and motivation of their activists to fight against capitalism, after a full day of working for a capitalist is done. Even those that manage to collect enough dues to hire full-time staff still rely on the dues to be paid by activists who had to work for capitalists to survive and to pay those dues. Eventually, the organization’s ability to collect membership dues is worn away through burnout, attrition, internal conflict, or state repression, and the organization withers away. Meanwhile, the capitalist has taken their share from those same workers who sustained the activist organization, and a share from every other member of the working class, and funneled some of it towards the class of functionaries that protects them.

The functionaries that I mentioned at the beginning of this article serve the same purpose for the institutions of the capitalist class that the activists serve for the working class’s organizations. The activist advocate pushes for political change and usually gets beaten back by the professional lobbyist. The activist agitator tries to tell the working class what’s happening in the world, and gets shouted down by CNN and the big newspapers. The pro bono lawyer can only work on a case part time, but they’re mired in red tape by staff counsel who are permanently on the payroll of businesses and have nothing else to do but fight against change. In every case, and for every purpose, the activist is outclassed by the functionary for one simple reason: the functionary always has more resources at their disposal, and fewer outside tasks to distract them.

The functionary works for the capitalist. The activist works for the worker, but only after the worker is done working for the capitalist. The activists haven’t been able to break the feedback loop of capitalist power because the system of working class power is open-ended. It requires a tired working class to constantly put in more and more time and effort and resources, and has no way to generate those without also generating resources for the capitalists.

So what do we do about it?

We have to professionalize our revolution. We’ve got to take the workplace under the ownership of the working class and place it under the control of the workers through the establishment of worker cooperatives. While the worker cooperative is not a new concept, we have to go about building a new class of cooperative worker-owners in a way that is strategic, rather than utopian, and that is committed to its own growth by constantly seeking out ways to uplift more members of the working class and transform them into cooperative worker-owners themselves.

Just like the capitalists have organizations like the chamber of commerce and “think tanks” to coordinate their capitalist production and to see to their capitalist political education (they call it “professional development”), our cooperative movement must establish cooperation councils to do the same for worker-owner production and working class political education. Unlike the utopian cooperatives of the past, which focused entirely on meeting the needs of those who were lucky enough to be worker-owners already, our new cooperative movement must also commit to fully funding activists and organizations that fight year-round for the workers in the class struggle against capitalism. Our cooperation councils must establish programs for political education of both workers under capitalism, and worker-owners who have already gotten out of capitalist workplaces. Our cooperation councils must create media outlets with wide circulation to deliver the local news. Our cooperation councils must be places for socialists and worker-owners and trade union representatives to network, to discuss the news and to develop the latest tactics, and to create social networks. And perhaps most importantly, our cooperation councils must push for the passage of laws that make our movement easier to organize and grow.

When our revolutionary cooperative movement owns its own farms and grocery stores, when it can build and repair its own houses, when it can provide healthcare and childcare for its worker-owners, when it can pressure politicians to pass laws that serve the interest of the cooperatives, when it can educate its members on the ultimate goal of defeating capitalism and it can keep its leadership focused on that goal, that will finally be a movement with its own perpetual feedback loop.

Once that feedback loop is closed, any number of tactics become possible. Beyond just building new cooperatives and bringing new worker-owners into the fold of existing ones, it will at that point have the power to divert state contracts and development grants from capitalist enterprises to cooperative ones. It will be able to legislate preferential terms for cooperatives in taxation and state loans. It will be able to implement “right of first refusal” laws that mandate the conversion of capitalist enterprises to cooperative ones whenever ownership is transferred. And ultimately it will enable the class conscious parts of the working class, who are organized into trade unions, to trigger those right of first refusal laws at their own leisure, forcing the conversion of a capitalist workplace to a cooperative one, and transferring ownership from capitalist hands to the newly minted worker-owners.

That final tactic represents the real revolutionary power of the combined working class and worker-owner class engaged in class struggle against the capitalist. After we create this framework, each victory will be more significant in tilting the balance of power between workers and capitalists. Each worker who becomes a worker-owner will no longer produce wealth for the capitalists, but instead produce it for themselves or for the working class and the worker-owner class as a whole. Each workplace that we convert from capitalist ownership and control to cooperative ownership and control removes a brick from the foundation of the capitalist class’s power, and adds to the power of the worker-owner class.

Once the final workplace is liberated from capitalist control, and all of the world’s production is done by worker-owners in cooperatives, we’ll be able to finally declare that the power of capitalism is extinct, and we will have achieved a truly socialist society. It’ll take a lot of work, and more time than we’d like to think, but we’ll get there. Together.