Returning to Industry?

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) is launching a drive to sell a "new" book entitled Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party. It's mostly reprint of an older book first published in 1981 under the title The Changing Face of US Politics, which I reviewed here.

Along with three older pieces from The Militant, the only new content is an introduction by Jack Barnes, which you can read in The Militant here. Since I've read and reviewed the original book (albeit six years ago), this post is only about the new introduction.

The opening paragraphs include this:

The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party is about the working-class program, composition, and course of conduct of the only kind of party worthy of the name “revolutionary” in the imperialist epoch.  ...

This book is about building such a party in the United States and in other capitalist countries around the world. It is about the course the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessors have followed for one hundred years and counting.

The comrades have set a goal to sell over 1000 copies of this book, mostly by going door to door in working class neighborhoods. This seems truly bizarre to me. Perhaps the book is a useful read for comrades and ex-comrades, but it is certainly not a worthy propaganda tool. (Propaganda is the Trotskyist term of art for advertising.) A person loosely attracted to socialism is not even going to find the book readable, much less enlightening. It's all about an esoteric, internal squabble within the Party.

It looks like they are not trying to recruit the masses. They want to find those few individuals who actually read the book and are moved by it. There won't be many (likely none), but those people will join the SWP.

The book is horribly out of date. To begin, the proletariat doesn't even exist anymore--certainly not as Marx and Lenin imagined it. For them, "workers" were an amorphous blob of unskilled labor who had nothing to sell besides their time and muscle power. Today that hardly applies: muscle power is nearly irrelevant, and unskilled labor has a small and ever-shrinking purchase in the market place. Today's employees have skills, which means they have invested in human capital, and accordingly they have something big to lose in a revolution.

The proletariat doesn't even look the same as it did in 1981, as the pictures accompanying Mr. Barnes' introduction reveal. An example is this:

Above, miners hold national protest in Washington, D.C., March 1981, a few weeks before 160,000 began 10-week strike, turning back concession contract demanded by mine bosses.
(Picture & Caption credit: The Militant)

As of 2016 coal mining only employed 50,000 people, and with the advent of fracking that number is surely substantially smaller today. A national strike of coal miners is inconceivable today--much of the industry would just shut down for good.

It's the same story for other industrial unions: UAW, USWA, Teamsters, etc. Manufacturing only accounts for about 12% of US employment. That share is shrinking rapidly because of automation. Because of globalization, supply chains extend around the world. The ability of any American union to shut down production is negligible.

The recent GM strike is an example. The UAW was out for four weeks, and eventually settled for a very mediocre contract. Supposedly it hurt GM, but there was never any shortage of cars in American showrooms. Consumers didn't feel the strike at all. The only thing that might have happened is GM, along with its employees, lost market share to their competitors.

Unlike the days of Marx & Lenin, or even the 1980s, the industrial unions are a shadow of their former selves. The SWP acknowledges that: today they work at Walmart and for Uber (insofar as they're not retired).

Mr. Barnes will accuse me of denying the importance of the class struggle.

Denial of the class struggle is nothing new. There are more than enough grandparents to current “theories” about “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” and so on noisily propagated by young professionals and other upper middle class layers today. In 1940 James P. Cannon polemicized against petty bourgeois currents on the eve of World War II who “rail at our stick-in-the-mud attitude toward the fundamental concepts of Marxism — the class theory of the state, the class criterion in the appraisal of all political questions, the conception of politics, including war, as the expression of class interests, and so forth and so on.

There is much to credit in this paragraph. The Party has firmly rejected "petty bourgeois" campus movements. They truly defend the "deplorables," and as much as they disagree with Trump, they argue rightly that the people who voted for him deserve to have their choice respected. They see impeachment for the sham that it is (only a slight exaggeration to call it a CIA plot). They've sided with Gibson's Bakery against the spoiled brats who attend Oberlin College, along with the kooky faculty who really should know better.

As important, they are sane on the issue of climate change. The rest of the "petty bourgeois" left has gone all in on catastrophism. The Militant, while acknowledging there might be a problem (which even I acknowledge), nevertheless rejects the total and immediate destruction of all civilization as a cure. A ludicrously extreme version of this can be found on the new Socialist Resurgence website. When so-called Marxists argue seriously for a return to subsistence farming and mass poverty, then you know something has gone horribly wrong. The Militant has not fallen into this trap.

But--even if you don't like the word intersectionality--the world really has gotten a lot more complicated. If nothing else, the global working class is much richer than they were 40 or 200 years ago. Rich people are not inclined to throw it all away on the unlikely chance Mr. Barnes is right about world history. Rich people can invest themselves in other ways besides their jobs: family, hobbies, church, sports, etc. They don't define themselves primarily as workers. As Paul Le Blanc puts it, organizing the working class today is very much like herding cats. Most workers just won't be interested in a class-conscious message.

Which brings us back to the propaganda campaign. Mr. Barnes writes (emphasis mine):

SWP members, supporters, and young socialists support picket lines, knock on doors, and stand on porches to talk with working people in cities, towns, and farm country, as we carry out such activity on the job and in the unions.

Standing on porches works for bourgeois politicians. All they want from you is that you go vote in November. It's an easy ask that can convincingly be made from the front porch.

But that's not what the SWP wants. They want to change your life. They ask that you stop whatever you're doing and become a revolutionary socialist worker-Bolshevik. Ain't gonna happen just by standing on somebody's porch. For that kind of ask you need to really get to know somebody: babysit their kids, marry their daughter, root for the same football team, etc.

And this is where the Party made a huge mistake. By forcing comrades to move around every couple of years, they actively prevented them from making those strong connections. And this is why the original Turn to Industry never worked, and why selling a few books that nobody is gonna read won't work either.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• George Novack: Then and Now
• Trotskyism & New Media