The Rank and File Strategy on New Terrain

This was conceived as both reform locals lead by democratic insurgent caucuses, but also, in practice, the left-talking but internally undemocratic and highly top-down “bureaucratically militant” section of the organized labor movement, which would eventually split with the AFL-CIO union federation on the basis of a shared staff-driven organizing model, Change To Win. This practice at the time reflected a deviation from Moody’s opposition to militants accepting staff jobs at top-down unions, but it was nevertheless common as a form of engagement with social movement unionism. While the two strategies were elaborated as diametrically opposed, organizations and groups of socialists didn’t always find them to be mutually exclusive in their practice.

Part of the explicit goal of these transitional organizations was to develop and cohere a minority of unionists who are not only tactically militant but armed with a more comprehensive politics. Transitional organizations build concrete solidarity across unions and industries but also across the segregations of race, nation, gender, sexuality, as well as other divisions within the working class that are expressed as sectoral divides and reinforced by chauvinist policies, attitudes and harassment at the hands of the boss.

As critics have often noted, there was a stagist idea of how to radicalize the proletarians at work here. It was, after all, a strategy rooted in the most organized and often most militant sectors (such as logistics and manufacturing), that have the greatest direct power to disrupt profit through workplace strikes. At the same time, these sectors can be among the more socially conservative sections of the class in terms of receptiveness to hierarchies of nationality, gender, and race. Rather than viewing the working class as always already radicalized and for-itself, merely held back or restrained by false or conservative leadership, the rank and file strategy assumes that the development of consciousness – from trade-union to class, and perhaps from class consciousness to a revolutionary commitment – is the project of organized socialists built through concrete solidarity within overlapping layers of organization.

With this horizon in mind, The Rank and File Strategy laid out why the minority and then-shrinking sector of the already unionized workforce is a crucial arena for socialist intervention on both practical and political grounds. Many of these arguments remain quite convincing to young socialists seeking to commit themselves to a life of organizing and wishing to sustain themselves as an activist and militant without working on the basis of charitable grants or government funding. It is particularly convincing for those who might wish to organize from and toward their own truly held beliefs rather than primarily as a paid staffer beholden to the agenda of their employer, whether union, NGO, or government service provider. The pamphlet was especially sharp on the question of the necessity of workplace action to the achievement of even basic reforms, let alone the advancement toward or achievement of socialism. In the context of the community-heavy and particularistic 1990s that inspired it, it was rarely made and crucial point.

It must be pointed out that The Rank and File Strategy did not assert – in fact explicitly denied – that the workplace is the only or the most important source of workers’ consciousness, and it was this recognition that drove its vision of “social movement unionism.” A lengthy section of the pamphlet rooted the weakness of the U.S. workers’ movement precisely in the history of African slavery and indigenous genocide in building a working class historically divided against itself and often more mobilized in an explicitly political way around its own internal divisions than against capital. The piece saves space for a special interlude on the role of union bureaucracy as a repository of some of the most backward historical forms of workers’ consciousness, as a brake on militancy in moments of upsurge or even simply of militant fightback, and as an engine of anti-communism, meant broadly as the purging of all leftists and radicals from the labor movement. It attempted to synthesize both a non-sectarian assertion of the crucial role of socialists in potentiating, if not activating, rank and file rebellion when the conditions become ripe, and elucidated a compelling set of historical examples that underlie both the urgency of this and some of the recurring obstacles to the full development of a conscious and active class-for-itself: not only rearguard action by the bureaucracy, anti-communism, racism, and other kinds of chauvinism, but also sectarianism among socialists brodaly committed to the strategy.

Moody also briefly mentions some of the limits of the original piece that have become much more salient. He calls these “the missing tasks,” asking if there is a “particularly socialist way to approach union and workplace organizing.” It makes sense that this was less of a focus in the original document, as the socialist movement was then particularly weak. Now, with the growth of the DSA to more than 60,000 new members, the question of the role of socialist organization and the role of the rank and file orientation within broader socialist strategy is much more urgent.  The question today is also what it means to be not only a socialist rank and filer, but a rank and filer who is part of a large socialist organization and of a growing socialist movement. Unfortunately, Moody raises this question in Jacobin, but doesn’t answer it there, instead turning to the welcome but well worn idea that socialist unionists should build militant minorities and fight for worker control in their unions, and build militant minority unions where unions don’t already exist. The next installments of this essay will take up these “missing tasks,” the militant minority, and the end game of the rank and file strategy.