Jane McAlevey

I'm reading Jane McAlevey's NO SHORTCUTS: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.

It is encouraging that McAlevey's ideas are gaining traction. She is a trenchant critic of "business as usual" unionism and electoral politics. She favors a return to the whole worker organizing model of the early CIO. The worker is the leader not chattel and you go to the community where she lives. McAlevey favors a return to the strike as the bedrock of unionism, which, she says, will require an emphasis on class struggle.

To give you a sense of McAlevey's bona fides, take note of this passage from a recent exchange, "A Strategy to Win," she had in Jacobin with Eric Blake:

You said that the Democrats were “almost” as responsible for the budget crisis that we’re in. I’d take out the word almost. The contemporary Democratic Party is just as responsible as the Republicans for the terrible conditions that we’re in locally, statewide, and federally.

This has been the case for my whole lifetime, for as long as I’ve been politically conscious. Beginning with the mid-1970s fiscal crisis, it was really the Democrats who refused to put the question of progressive taxation on the table. In the early 1980s I was starting college at the State University of New York, because I couldn’t afford anything else, and the first Governor Cuomo pushed the single largest tuition increase in history of NY public education, for both CUNY and SUNY.

Ever since, the Democrats have continued to shift their loyalties from the working class to the corporations. This got codified, of course, by Bill Clinton in 1992 and through the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council. Basically they said: fuck the workers, we’re all about the corporate class.

Arizona teachers recently won a 19% pay increase by going out on strike, joining teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma who also won significant pay raises by striking.

McAlevey warms against a creeping “We’ll Remember in November” mantra coming out of these struggles:

If all you’re going to do is shift into “We’ll Remember in November” mode, good luck with that. It ain’t going to work. Look at what happened in Wisconsin 2011, where the movement died by turning into a campaign to recall the governor.

Electoral politics is a piece in our repertoire of struggle. A comprehensive plan to win needs an electoral component. But elections are just one piece of the puzzle. And strikes are a more important piece of the puzzle. To build real power, including on an electoral level, you need to be organized at the workplace.

Simply going into the Democratic Party to support the average Democratic candidate is a losing strategy. They don’t motivate people, they leave a lot to be desired.

The strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona were fights with state legislatures over allocating resources, resources that had been denied for decades, and not just by Republicans. My sense is that there is something redolent of the "Fight for $15" here. Necessary and long overdue but shortly to be superseded by rising housing costs.

What McAlevey is calling for is a return of Marx. Good.