Explanation of the Data and Report

The data used for this presentation is largely based on reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This provides the most credible source of data I could use to establish a nationwide trend of U.S. labor activity beginning in Summer of 2022. Unfortunately, this also means a complete set of statics for the first half of 2024 is not available. In lieu of this I attempt to analyze some work stoppages that occurred during this period in hopes that, by focusing in on particular examples, I might be able to demonstrate the culmination of this wave of labor activity is a movement toward a more progressive consciousness and that the foundations of a militant and, hopefully, revolutionary labor movement are being laid.

The Major Work Stoppage Data itself tracks “major work stoppages” defined as involving 1000 or more workers, rounded to the nearest hundred. The workers involved may or may not be union members. The BLS does not distinguish between lockouts and strikes due to “the complexity of labor-management disputes…” The number of workers included are those who “idled” for one shift or longer in an establishment and includes all workers both involved and unable to work as a result of the stoppage. “Days” are defined as weekdays, Monday through Friday, excluding weekends and federal holidays. The cumulative number of days idled is calculated by multiplying the number of days the workers were idled by the number of workers idled during this period.

A second set of data, a BLS Report on Union Membership in 2023, provides their most up to date information on demographics, salary, and union membership rates broken down by occupation, industry, and state. Unions are defined broadly in this report and include “an employee association similar to a union” as well. BLS gathers this data from the Current Population Survey, which surveys about 60,000 households and obtains data on employment among the civilian noninstitutional population over 16. It also refers to union workers and those who report no union affiliation, but their jobs are covered by a union/employee association, nonetheless. These statistics are compiled annually, so I will be using the data from the full year for 2022 and 2023. I will also be unable to report on this data for 2024.

I also intend to draw upon news articles that report on individual strikes, labor activity trends in the U.S., and a 2022 Littler-Mendelson Labor Day Report regarding trends in U.S. labor. Finally, I will draw connections to Marxist-Humanist theory – specifically Chapter 11 of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom and excerpts from Rosa Luxemburg’s “Mass Strikes, Political Party, and Trade Union” (pulled from Paul Le Blanc’s Marx to Gramsci). The data and contents of this report provide evidence for both of the aforementioned theoretic refutations of vanguardism. Further, this data demonstrates that this persistent, even radical, wave of labor activity – whose origins might be traced to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the UC Santa Cruz COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) Strike of 2020 – is led by workers at the grassroots level and is trending toward progressive consciousness.

Overall Impressions and The National Scene

The United States is at its most politically polarized since the Civil War. The Republican Party, which at this point is largely depleted of its staunchest neocons and Reaganites, is now a Trojan Horse for fascism, more specifically Christian Nationalism, and this party’s presidential candidate, the insurrectionist and convicted felon, Donald Trump, may well win in November. The U.S. Supreme Court leans heavily conservative, with three of the conservative justices appointed by Trump and two more perhaps more right-wing than he is.

Nonetheless, per a 2022 report by Littler-Mendelson, Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has been particularly aggressive in its use of injunctions favoring workers and unions against employers. Some say this is the most pro-union board since 1938. Ongoing legal challenges to the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) brought by corporations like Amazon – despite the Board’s constitutionality being established and reestablished – are particularly worrying given the political leanings of this Supreme Court and how a second Trump administration may attempt to weaken or disempower the Board. A recent, unanimous decision (authored by the impeachable Clarence Thomas) decided by the Roberts Court on June 13^th, 2024, Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, illustrates the dangers the right poses to labor movement, and the complicity of the liberal democrats. This decision severely curtails the power of the NLRB to use injunctions to halt terminations of employees seen as retaliation for unionization efforts.

Despite the growing momentum of the right, the labor movement is also growing in size and power. Not only is the labor movement increasing in size and power, but it also appears to be trending toward more progressive politics. The most recent and notable example is the University of California United Auto Workers (UAW) Strike that was called in solidarity with the students who camped out across UC campuses to protest the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Union membership and activity is not distributed evenly across the country, however. New York and Hawaii (20.6% and 24.1%), two Democratic strongholds, have the highest rates of membership while North and South Carolina (2.7% and 2.3%) have the lowest rates. If broken down by region, southern states have the lowest union membership rates while the Pacific, Mid-Atlantic, and New England regions have higher statewide membership on average (Chart 1).

Overall, labor activity is increasing nationwide. Littler-Mendelson’s 2022 Labor Day Report states that by May of the 2022 fiscal year, the number of union petitions had already surpassed that of the 2021 fiscal year. In total, from June of 2022 to December of 2023, 541,900 workers idled. The cumulative number of days idled as a result of the strikes during this period is 18,202,800. California had the most work stoppages of any state during this period, with 21 work stoppages. The majority of the stoppages were in Southern California, particularly Los Angeles. Next was New York with 6, followed by Washington with 5 and Oregon with 4. Michigan had 3 work stoppages, two of them in Detroit.

This is currently being driven from the bottom-up by the workers themselves rather than some external socialist organization. These organization efforts are occurring organically, and unions such as the Amazon Labor Union (and internal pushes for reform) are being driven by workers at a grassroots level. On a theoretic level, it is such self-organization and grass-roots economic resistance that, according to Dunayevskaya, will create the conditions for the workers to develop a class program of their own – no vanguard can impose one upon them.

2022 & 2023 Union Demographic and Wage Data

Table 1 (Demographics)

When divided into age groups ranging from 16-65 years old, regardless of gender (the BLS only distinguishes between male and female), individuals ages 35 to 64 had higher rates of union membership in every 9-year interval than those 34 and younger, with this peaking from the ages 45-54. When race and ethnicity are also considered, in 2022 Black men had the highest rate of membership at 13% of the total employed Black male population. In 2023, this increased to 13.2%. Asian men had the lowest rate of membership, at 7.6%. In 2022, when considering every other racial and ethnic division, more men were unionized than women. The exception was Asian women, with 9.1% unionized. This reversed in 2023, with the percent of Asian women unionized dropping to 7.8% and the percent of Asian men increasing to 7.9%. The total percent of employed white people unionized in 2022 was 10%, the same as the national average. This dropped to 9.8% in 2023. Black people were more likely to be unionized on average of any racial group, with 11.6% of the employed population unionized in 2022 and 11.8% in 2023. People of a Hispanic or Latino ethnicity had an 8.8% unionization rate in 2022 and an increase to 9% in 2023. In 2022, Hispanic/Latina women had the lowest unionization rates of any women, at 8.5%. In 2023, the percent of Asian women employed and unionized dropped to 7.8% while Hispanic/Latina membership increased to 8.8%. This makes Asian women the least unionized group of the employed population, with Asian people being the least represented by unions in both 2022 and 2023. When comparing full-time and part-time unionization rates, 11% of the former are unionized compared to 5.5% of the latter. In 2022, the total percent of employees in a union was 10.1%. This stayed relatively stable at 10% in 2023. Importantly, the number of workers in unions actually increased by about 150,000. The number of workers increased overall from 2022 to 2023 by nearly 3 million people, per the BLS data.

Table 2 (Wages)

In 2022 and 2023, members of unions or workers represented by unions who are not members have higher median weekly earnings. This is also the case when classifying using other demographics such as age, race, ethnicity, and sex. The exception to this trend was Asian men, whose median weekly earnings were lower for both union members and those represented by unions compared to non-union members.

Work Stoppages: June 2022 – December 2023

Work Stoppages Data

The above table condenses down and simplifies BLS Data regarding work stoppages. To make the data more understandable, I classified a strike (and all corresponding data) as belonging to a six-month period if it began in those months regardless of when it ended. When looking at the table chronologically, comparing the number of workers idled provides a better estimate for the trajectory of the labor movement than the total number of days idled. The total number of days idled for July-Dec 2023 is skewed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Ford Motor Co. Strike. Nonetheless, the number of workers involved in strike activity in each period continues to increase at a rate that anti-labor organizations, such as Littler-Mendelson, are noticing. In fact, this quote from Littler-Mendelson’s 2022 Labor Day Report is quite telling:

Over the last year [FY 2022], there has been a shift in how people are organizing together to petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be represented. And traditional “handbilling” or informational picketing has been replaced by various social media platforms. At the same time, knowing what lawful steps employers can take in response to these activities is becoming less clear.

Taken together, the obvious conclusion is that a worker-led labor movement is growing rapidly in the United States. As I will elaborate upon later, it is the struggles of organizing and the struggles of going on strike for economic relief that will sharpen the revolutionary impulses of the masses. Dunayevskaya and Luxemburg agree: the interplay of economic resistance and organizing will be the soil from which a revolutionary-proletarian platform will emerge. It is from this dance the soviets or workers councils first emerged in 1905 in Russia, and it is from this dialectic that workers in all parts of the world are developing and will continue to develop a revolutionary consciousness.

June – December 2022 Work Stoppage Highlights

During this period, the total number work stoppages was 83,000 and the cumulative number of days idled was 1,542,800. This was driven in large part by a UC Strike, which lasted from 11/14/22-12/23/22. The campuses across the University of California system have been the site of sustained labor activity. During this period 36,000 graduate student workers and 12,000 other academic employees in the University of California system went on strike. This resulted in a cumulative work stoppage of 1,272,000 days. Significant victories include UC concessions to pay for some childcare costs, multiple raises through 2024 resulting in a total 50% increase in base pay, and other benefits like dependent healthcare and transit passes. This strike, which was the largest higher education strike in history, echoed the causes of past strikes. Cost of living, just as in the 2020 UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike, was front and center; additionally, I recognize some common demands with the lecturers who nearly went on strike in Fall of 2021 across UC campuses. Nonetheless, the deal was not what some workers would have hoped for and with graduate student contracts set to expire in 2025, another wave of strikes may pass over the University of California system.

January – June 2023 Work Stoppage Highlights

A total of 114,300 workers were idled due to strike activity from January to June of 2023, resulting in a loss of 1,867,900 workdays. The bulk of the days idled resulted from a Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) strike, which was the largest strike since 1988 and second largest in its history. 1,173,000 workdays were disrupted, beginning 5/2/2023 and ending 9/27/2023. These workers shared many of the same demands as the SAG-AFTRA strike that followed, such as protections against artificial intelligence and wage increases. The writers also demanded an increase to the number of writers working on shows. They won all of these demands.

From 3/29/23-8/25/23, the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) went on strike for four months into contract negotiations. Some 2,300 workers went on strike, resulting in a grand total of 239,200 days idled. The GEO lists several reasons for striking, with obvious economic concerns being the primary catalyst. However, on their website they list other reasons, including, “issues of dignity and safety in the workplace, specifically issues of policing, harassment, and transgender rights.” One specific call was for the University of Michigan to create an “unarmed non-police emergency response” in response to issues affecting their campus and community.  Important victories include pay increases, a $1000 bonus for ratifying the contract, increased benefits, and channels for future negotiations and discussion.

July – December 2023 Work Stoppage Highlights

During this period, 344,600 workers were idled due to strike activity and the total number of workdays lost was 14,792,100. Approximately 13,000,000 of these days idled can be attributed to the SAG-AFTRA strike. The Screen Actors’ Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors went on strike 7/14/2023. The strike ended 11/8/2023. Estimates place the cost to the entertainment industry around $5 billion with some estimates combining the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes costing the Southern Californian economy an estimated of $6.5 billion. Some significant benefits won include a streaming participation bonus, protections against AI encroachments, and a contract valued at over $1 billion including wage and a new benefit planning fund. These strikes took place in California and New York.

Another strike from this period of note was the Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., and Stellantis Strike. It involved just under 50,000 workers across the nation (Statewide: CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, MI, PA, OH, TX, WI; Parts of: KY, MA, MN, MO, NC, NV, OR, TN, VA, WV) resulting in a cumulative 869,200 days idled from 9/15/2023 to 10/30/2023. As of October 12, Reuters reported the strike had cost the big three automakers and related suppliers, retailers, etc. nearly $7.7 billion. This was the first time a union went on strike against Detroit’s Big Three Automakers simultaneously, and the gamble paid off. Workers received around a 25% increase in wages from all three companies. Each company offered specifics, as well. For example, the Stellantis deal included provisions expanding the right to strike while GM’s contained additional benefits for retirees and cost-of-living adjustments. The agreements were reached tentatively in October, but as late as February of 2024 workers were still using all their labor as leverage, such as the 9,000 in Kentucky even threatening to strike over more particularized concerns regarding health and safety.

Theoretic Connection

Chapter 11 of Marxism and Freedom, titled: “Forms of Organization: The Relation of the Spontaneous Self-Organization of the Proletariat to the ‘Vanguard Party’” provides a strong critique of the vanguard party and describes Lenin’s break with his own past theoretic misconceptions. Dunayevskaya begins by outlining the Lasallian nature of vanguardism and traces its roots also to Karl Kautsky and the German Social Democrats (179). Dunayevskaya contends Lenin conformed to this notion that the vanguard party must introduce socialism externally to the masses as early as 1903; however, “The 1905 Revolution smashed to smithereens the monstrous conception of the backwardness of the workers and their inability to reach socialism without the “vanguard”’ (182).

The revitalization of the Russian soviets in 1917 following the overthrow of the Tsarist regime further demonstrates the revolutionary-socialist tendencies of the working class that Dunayevskaya discusses and undermines vanguard party theory. She writes, “Only after the first great outburst do the masses begin to bring their energies and their years of thought to bear upon the problems that face them. Then, day by day… their own class idea and class program rapidly unfold… The working class has not created a new society. But the workers have undermined the old… The ‘vanguard,’ on the other hand, has done nothing” (284).

However, Dunayevskaya does not simply disregard Lenin’s theory in its entirety as Kautsky’s theory applied to Russia. Rather, she identifies an aspect of Lenin’s theory on the vanguard party that is Leninist in a positive sense: “that only he is a member who puts himself ‘under the discipline of a local organization”’ (180). What Lenin borrowed from Kautsky for his theory was elitist. What ideas Lenin himself first developed are far more critical of the petty-bourgeois intellectual. In Russia, the working class had been disciplined by the economic conditions leading up to the revolution while the intellectual had not been. If intellectuals did not want to subject themselves to the discipline of a local organization, Lenin argued they were not just resisting local discipline, they were also resisting the theoretical and political discipline that made a real revolutionary organization possible, which the workers had acquired through their experience in capitalist production.

In excerpts of Luxemburg’s “Mass Strikes, Political Party, and Trade Union” she points to the Soviets in Russia as evident of a “living, dialectical explanation [that] makes the organization arise as a product of the struggle” rather than as the product of a vanguardist plan (Le Blanc 221). If mass strikes are to be effective, they must truly be “people’s movements” made up of the widest sections of the proletariat. Rather than an organization providing support and “troops” to the struggle, Luxemburg theorizes the struggle supplies recruits for an organization and a class platform, both of which arises organically. Furthermore, Luxemburg argues any strategy of class struggle that does not provide for as inclusive cooperation among the working class as is possible or one that is, “based upon the idea of the finely stage-managed march out of the small, well-trained part of the proletariat is foredoomed to be a miserable fiasco” (223). Commenting on the state of the German proletariat and the potential of a mass strike there, as in Russia, Luxemburg believed it would be the least organized workers – such as contemporary miners or the land workers of her time – rather than the best organized who had the greatest capacity for action.

Just as Dunayevskaya and Luxemburg looked to the Russian Revolution of 1905 for direction regarding their own revolutionary context, so, too, can these texts be illuminating regarding the present state of the U.S. working class amidst the rise of Christian Nationalism. Luxemburg believed that through mass economic strikes workers will provide new strength to the political struggle for socialism. In Russia, this economic resistance laid the foundation for the worker-organized soviets to later emerge. A vanguard party acting as the nucleus or brain of the revolution did not inspire the soviets; the workers themselves constructed them, start to finish, through economic resistance to capital. This development radically altered Marxist theory. Likewise, U.S. labor activity today has the potential to develop into radical organizations and schools of thought.

Kim Moody’s “Who put Trump in the White House?” answers the title question in his concluding line: “The Democrats.” He makes a compelling argument, and one that undermines notions that white unionized voters propelled Trump to office. One key point is made by comparing the 2012 and 2016 elections. The Republican share of the union vote rose to 43%, up from 40% in 2012. Trump received nearly 10 million union votes to Hillary Clinton’s almost 12 million. What Moody also notes is that Democratic votes from union households actually fell by 7% in the 2020 election (these voters opted for a third party, refused to answer the question, or didn’t vote and weren’t surveyed). For context, in 1980 the union vote shifted to Carter by 14% – 7% to Reagan and 7% to independent John Anderson. Importantly, union voters composed 26% of the electorate in 1980 compared to 18% in 2016. What union voters may have inadvertently done is dilute the power of their vote as a bloc by not voting or protest voting rather than exalt a demagogue to office by voting. To be sure, some union-voters are racist or sexist and voted for Trump for that reason; however, Republicans have maintained about 40% of the union vote since LBJ. Moody argues many union voters don’t vote because they have nothing to be inspired by, noting the increasing corporatism of Democrats beginning with Clinton. Many non-voters are middle-to-lower income, and these people tend to favor policies such as reducing inequality or increasing government spending. To sum up what Moody argues (in a much less elegant way) is that it is quite possible it was white petty-bourgeois voters who were prioritized by new Democratic campaign strategies (which are failing, empirically) that ended up propelling Trump to power. Moody also cites an Economist article which states the idea that white, lower income workers were attracted to Trump in droves was “a bit of a myth.”

Moody’s argument is strengthened by the fact that, per an NBC poll composite from November 2023 and January 2024, 50% of union voters favored Biden while 41% favor Trump. That missing 9%, based on Moody’s analysis, are not fascists and maybe not even conservative – they simply recognize the Democratic Party has left them behind. Some of them may actually be to the left of Biden. According to the same NBC poll, Biden’s approval rating among union households is 8% above his national approval rating. These voters view Biden more favorably than Trump. (2,000 registered voters surveyed with a margin of error of 2.2%; 412 identified themselves or someone in their household as a current or retired union member with a margin of error of 4.8%). Now, consider the ongoing Amazon Labor Union elections and the recent UAW Wildcat strike in solidarity with student’s occupying UC campuses to protest their involvement.

Connecting Labor Activity in 2024 (So Far) to Theory

What is happening today in the U.S. labor movement also undermines the theory that a vanguard must lead the workers toward revolution. There have been two important post-COVID developments:

1. Per a report from Littler-Mendelson, organization and recruitment are being driven by the rank-and-file members. Social media has democratized organizing and altered the ways in which workers advertise and coordinate with one another. The workers, then, are organizing themselves independent of a vanguard.
2. The workers are increasing in their militancy, demonstrated through the number of workers participating in strikes and the number of days idled as a result. Moreover, they are also turning their attention to progressive causes and standing in solidarity with other workers or groups.

The Amazon Labor Union will hold democratic elections in July, these will be the union’s first election. This effort was driven by grassroot dissatisfaction with their leadership, which was self-appointed. Increasingly, workers felt left out of decision-making and were frustrated the board kept putting off elections. A reform caucus formed and later met with the Teamsters to facilitate the election. Regardless of how the elections go, their desire for greater control of their union and, by extension, a greater input into controlling the means of production is the root cause of this election. A nascent revolutionary consciousness may be developing in this way, that is, through a greater thirst for true democracy. This may develop into a desire for democratic control of the means of production, but I may be getting ahead of myself. Luis Feliz Leon, a labor writer and organizer, has provided interviews with ALU members and organizers here. These interviews indicate worker alienation as a result of a capitalist mode of production drives their desire to be in a union to resist the oppressive mechanism of Amazon. For many, the failure of the labor bureaucracy to negotiate effectively on their behalf and their desire to hold onto power – even illegally – prompted calls for reform.

Now, consider the causes of the UAW Strike across UC Campuses. The leading cause of the strike was the UC made a “unilateral change in free speech policies [regarding Israel-Palestine related issues] and has created an unsafe work environment.” The UC’s sought injunctive relief and eventually found it in conservative Orange County, California, home of UC Irvine. The judge did not rule on the merits of the strike. Rather, the judge believed the UCs had made a significant argument to halt the strikes until a hearing. They got their injunction… and the UAW Labor Bureaucracy capitulated. The UAW maintains their decision to end the strike was an inclusive and democratic decision. Rank-and file members disagree. Some workers claim they were told they would not receive protections if they did not stop the strike. Moreover, the meetings were sparsely attended. Once again, a schism has been demonstrated between the members of unions and their bureaucracy. Many in the union want to resist what they see as an attack on students’ rights and their own. Many want to stand in support of the Palestinians. Parallel to the desire for a more democratic Amazon Labor Union, rank-and-file members of the UAW who went on strike in solidarity with the student encampments and with the Palestinians demonstrate a disconnect with their leadership through a growing progressive consciousness.

I believe Moody’s analysis and these two examples concretize what Dunayevskaya and Luxemburg describe. I believe Moody’s article challenges the notion of the “backwardness” of the U.S. working-class as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, etc. and responsible for propelling Trump to power. Furthermore, the activities of those seeking to bring about democratic elections in the ALU and the political nature of the UAW Wildcat Strike demonstrate that through continuous economic resistance and organizing, class programs and revolutionary ideas can develop. The ALU has been at odds with Amazon since its inception, and this constant resistance has created sufficient resolve in the workers to call out the complacency of the ALU’s self-appointed leadership/bureaucracy and demand democratic elections. Likewise, those who participated in the UAW Wildcat Strike sought to utilize worker-power to protest and resist workplace policies (which are political in nature) and stand in solidarity with students and Palestinians. It is the continued resistance of the workers that generates the idea for the soviets, or the calls for democracy within trade-unions, or a desire to use worker-power to stand up to the dominant powers and take a political stance.

Importantly, the ALU fought for nearly a year after being created to get NLRB recognition of a single warehouse in Staten Island. Amazon has not let up in its union-busting efforts since then, evident through the suits they bring to the Courts attacking the National Labor Relations Board. Just the same, the UC UAW Strike in Solidarity with Palestine did not just happen; I believe it can be traced back to activity in January of 2020 that began with graduate students at UC Santa Cruz going on a wildcat strike for a cost-of-living-adjustment. Significant victories have been won since then, victories that were nonetheless the result of hard-fought and sustained pressure on the UC Regents and on the UAW leadership. Just as Dunayevskaya writes, the continued resistance on the day-to-day allows the working class to realize their class program and moves them toward a revolutionary consciousness. Perhaps the stance unionized UC workers took in solidarity with students in encampments and Palestinians under siege is a development in political consciousness whose beginnings can be found on the dawn of COVID with a COLA strike in Santa Cruz.

Conclusion

 There has been a drastic shift in union organizing post-COVID. Recruitment is being driven at the grassroots-level, demonstrating a bottom-up approach to organizing that undermines the notion the working class must be led by a vanguard party. Dunayevskaya clearly states the elitist notion that a socialist platform must be introduced to the proletariat by a vanguard party – as postulated by Kautsky and elaborated upon by Lenin – ignores them as a living and self-developing subject and is, therefore, incorrect. What is happening in the U.S. labor movement today illustrates what Dunayevskaya and Luxemburg wrote about, that the workers will develop their own revolutionary platform and consciousness through sustained militancy in economic resistance.

Today, we see the number of workers and strikes increasing and the economic costs reflect their power to disrupt the flow of capital. Just as comforting is the turn on the part of some in the working-class to use their strike power for political causes. The University of Michigan strike expressly stated a desire to support their transgender comrades and across the University of California campuses graduate workers have risen up in solidarity with the radical students who set up encampments in solidarity with Palestinians. In organizations such as the Amazon Labor Union, which has consistently been at odds with Amazon, are the sites of a democratic movement to unseat a dictatorial labor bureaucracy and choose the direction of their union. Even if not expressly politically, large-scale strikes such as the SAG-AFTRA and national strikes such Ford Motor Co. Strike demonstrate a labor movement growing in its power and its boldness. Specifically, workers at a Ford factory in Kentucky are not satisfied with an improvement of their economic conditions, and they demanded more than what the labor bureaucracy negotiated, such as improvements to the safety conditions to protect their help. The workers know what they need. But where does this leave the U.S. petty-bourgeois intellectual today? Where does this leave the IMHO? Returning to Lenin’s emphasis on being under the discipline of a local organization, how might the intellectuals who are a part of the International Marxist Humanist Organization apply this aspect of Lenin’s theory? I would like to draw on my own personal experience to answer this question, in part.

Last convention, I authored a report where I interviewed four workers, two worked as baristas at Starbucks, two for Amazon (one at a warehouse and one at a Whole Foods). I largely allowed them to tell me what they wanted, and I found their frustration mirrored the alienation Marx theorized. I shared Marxist-Humanist theory in these conversations, and I found fertile ground. Prior to that, when I interacted with lecturers who were striking in 2021, some expressed an affinity for anti-capitalist theory, even Marxism (before the name was introduced). Since then, as this report demonstrates, the working class has only grown in its militancy and has begun to trend toward progressive causes in certain instances. I am of the opinion that, given the further deterioration of the economic conditions and the increased activity of the proletariat, the ground will be even more fertile now. So how do we strike and maximize our potential to spread our theories of revolution to the masses while the iron is hot?

The most obvious, but far from the easiest, action is to establish a sustained presence at the sight of these strikes. What we are seeing in the labor movement right now, the increased self-activity of the working-class, is laying the foundations for U.S. socialism. To be sure, we are still a long way away. Dunayevskaya argues that capitalist production disciplined the Russian worker, but not the intellectual, as early as 1894 and began laying the foundations of the coming Russian Revolution (180). Are Dunayevskaya and Lenin telling us that, in order to truly reach ideological discipline, we as theoreticians must join the working class on the job? Perhaps. When I was first introduced to Marxist theory in earnest I was working at a coffee-shop. My experience on the job paralleled the theory we discussed in class. My experience brought Marxist theory to life… and here I am three years later.

Alternatively, I would like to harken back to Lenin’s emphasis on discipline. If we are to take advantage of the growing militancy and potential for radicalism, we must do so physically. We may not need to be an employee, but we need to be at the strike. This way, revolutionary ideas can be spread in a pre-revolutionary atmosphere. The workers, in my experience, have been receptive. Therefore, the burden lies on us so-called revolutionaries. When there is a nearby strike, the IMHO must have a presence. Members must attend and make sacrifices if the IMHO and the movement is to grow. The workers have demonstrated immense discipline these last two years through their sustained activity. Have we been as disciplined in our organization? If not, are we lacking because as individuals and as an organization we are not actively working with the exploitation working class and, therefore, lack the ideological discipline? Or are we simply failing to make strong connections for a revolutionary network to disperse its ideas?