Dear fellow Caucus members,

anonymous

It seems we have reached another checkpoint in our activity with the resolution of the recent blue collar union strike that shook the city for over a week and now it is time to reflect on the progress of our activity deeply and critically. I feel the need to thoroughly explain my position out of respect to the organization, the membership and myself in light of the Discord debate that I kicked off a few weeks ago in which I was called patronizing and defeatist. I think I understand why these labels were put on me and I may have deserved them, but I still stand by the central point I was trying to make: that it should be taken into consideration how the strike activity generally, and our Caucus’ activity specifically may or may not contribute to the reproduction of the status quo and fuel a cycle of regression in which we are left to simply react in a defensive way to periodic shake ups in capitalist politics. I think it is important to struggle against the surface level notion that this critique is defeatist or demoralizing as it is not my intention to demoralize or demobilize anyone from their activity, rather, I hope that writing this letter to you all will spark a much needed debate about our Caucus’ role in the City and in history more generally so that our activity can address our stated goals effectively. In order to exit the cycles we are caught in, we must hold fast to a clear eyed historical memory so that we may move beyond them through conscious activity. In my few years observing this caucus, it has occurred to me that the main obstacle to it is itself: there exists an ideological culture of left progressivism that imposes a prefigured narrative on unfolding events and sabotages a reckoning with reality as such which keeps the organization static despite apparent growth. There does seem to be some awareness of this problem already, but there also seems to be a tendency to shut down debate when the topic is broached. This is not anyone’s fault, but is the burden of our history weighing down on us.

I joined Unity in 2022 when discontent in my workplace was dawning on me, so I came up with the novel idea to unionize. I was connected to this Caucus through two channels: one was a contact I had in the DSA who made his impatience with my inactivity plainly known; another was through a former Caucus member that worked at the same yard as me. At first, I romanticized the organization as the home I have been looking for since I first declared myself a gay, emo, and incoherently ultra-radical anarcho-communist at the too young age of 13 years old. I was overjoyed. Here was a leftist organization that directly addressed itself to my life as an alienated worker and I didn’t have to go out of my way to volunteer my time and energy with the pyramid scheme hustlers of the DSA. (I don’t mean to pick on DSA too much here; from my understanding, the same can be said of any leftist sectarian organization. Don’t worry, I still don’t think this applies to Unity.) Although my effort to unionize never got past the very beginning stages of fact-finding and mapping, we learned a lot about my workplace as an organization and how it fits into the overall power structure of the city government, and I was happy to have like minded people to support me in this. I won the admiration of the circle of the Caucus’ founders and was praised for my brave efforts so much that I was invited to serve (inactively) on the previous iteration of the Steering Committee for almost 2 years. I also gained a dear and lasting friend in K who, although we may not align now as much as we once did, I have unbounded affection and respect for as an intelligent, thoughtful person and an extremely capable organizer that I could only dream of becoming.

All of this is to say that I identify with the Caucus and with you all as members, and that I know something of the social alienation and discontent which leads downwardly mobile children of the middle class to embrace radical left wing or otherwise progressive ideologies and to go in search of a home. This Caucus still has a spark of life in it and I don’t want to see it die due to avoidable mistakes. Our leadership has wisely steered this caucus in an independent direction away from reliance on politicians and union bureaucrats so I think that there is still potential to do more good with it. In this spirit, I address myself to you all as a peer that has finally had a moment of stability to read more widely and think more deeply about my perspective as well as our task generally. I hope that this will lead to a much needed debate around the function of our Caucus and where it is going.

Clinging to False Hope

During the recent strike, many of our members were on the picket line with the union at large. Our members in the White Collar union from the library went on strike anyway, in defiance of their union, and their efforts succeeded in closing many branches in solidarity with the Blue Collar union. I would never argue that this kind of activity is somehow not worth it or that it didn’t contribute to the overall strike in some way. The question is not whether to act or not, but whether our Caucus will be an instrument for the broad mass of city workers to communicate and organize independently of authorized supervision or be content to remain an enclave of self-selecting leftist sentiment relegated to a minor support role for forces beyond its control.

In my (admittedly not very well articulated) attempt to warn members away from being blinded by passion and ideology on Discord, many mistook my objections to the celebration of the strike activity for defeatism and an attempt to demobilize people, which was not my intention. During this exchange, those that resisted my objections cited hopeful signs of worker militancy and an apparent shift in public opinion such as the fact that the picket lines were held for a week with very little planning or manpower and that public opinion favored the union against the administration. One commenter even said that highlighting these things was to ward off despair! I think this was one of the most honest remarks made during that whole exchange but it is an error. Working class life is desperate and any attempt to productively ameliorate or overcome that condition will have to wrangle with despair. Unity will not be able to advance in its task if the membership is willing to cling to false hope by citing automatic social phenomena outside of the worker’s conscious control in order to avoid experiencing despair.

The above circumstances certainly do point to opportunities for organizing but they are not hopeful in themselves and are largely outside of anyone’s control. It would be a mistake to ascribe an awakening consciousness among the workers to what was really sporadic outrage at their bad treatment by the administration egged on by the leadership of their conservative union. Without anyone else to lead the strike, it couldn’t amount to anything more than an outburst of frustration to be instrumentalized in whatever political maneuvers the union leadership were making behind closed doors with the administration. At some level, you know this to be true: I see a lot of you railing against the weakness and complicity of the union’s leadership all the time. Don’t forget how the Blue Collar union leadership foreshadowed the outcome of this strike back in November when they called a strike authorization vote, the membership approved it, mobilized a PR campaign with union reps on local radio to drum up public support, and then called it off as soon as the administration agreed to come to the table. It was a cunning political move but it showed how willing they were to instrumentalize the outrage of the membership for their objectives. Consider the lessons that the city administration is learning: the union’s bark is worse than its bite and if they can allocate funding and resources to city or semi-city agencies outside of the union, then they could be in an even stronger position to outlast the union in a future strike situation. The temp workers outside the union were nowhere near getting the trash situation under control but they did just enough to undermine confidence in the necessity of union trash collectors. How will this situation be addressed? If it isn’t, the union and its members can be taken less seriously and relegated to a situation in which discontent can be safely siloed with little threat to the administration.

In the case of this Caucus, if most of our membership is in the library and other clerical offices, this is easy to corral into ineffectiveness despite how radical we sound. The radicalism of library workers could even be perceived as another incentive to starve it of resources. I say this not to discourage anyone’s activity but to discourage the clinging to false hope and being lulled into complacency by the dignity of activity for its own sake. And if we can’t appeal to city workers more broadly, then we will have no other recourse than to rely on our networks within the political establishment and hope we can influence those actors that condescend to listen.

An Unnecessarily Alienating Culture

The Left has a fundamental problem because of its lack of a working class social base. This is debilitating given that part of being a leftist historically means seeing the working class as the agent of change in the capitalist age. The continuous series of defeats of the Left over the last century have broken the trust between the socialist intellectuals and the working class. Thus, the working class vents its frustration through directionless, spontaneous outbursts; and the intellectuals drift weightlessly through the wind without a motor or ground beneath their feet. Another way of saying this is that the link between theory and practice has been severed.

In the wake of this, the current Left copes with this problem through two main tendencies, both of which are diminished echoes of formations borne out of past defeats: one tendency is content to campaign for the most progressive candidates for capitalist political office and, if their candidate wins, retroactively claim that it was due to some submerged leftist consciousness among the working class that they were spearheading with their efforts. They base their claims on surface level observations that don’t hold water with the passage of time. The other tendency looks abroad to Russia, China, or elsewhere in the Third World for hope in leading humanity to a Socialist future. This tendency conflates working class power with failed, repressive political formations that are themselves products of defeat. Both tendencies want to have it both ways with the working class: they betray their mistrust by the way they cling to hope in other corridors, and yet, they both still want to claim a historical legacy of representing workers’ “real” interests. But, by attending to favored parties within the capitalist political domain, they affirm reality as it is rather than as it ought to be. The working class doesn’t engage with our baggage. To the extent that they do, it is with the expectation that we will leave them high and dry once our petty objectives are achieved. And we do it over and over again.

Our Caucus inherits these dynamics as a progressive union caucus dominated by self-avowed leftists. The insular, self-referential culture of the progressive left reigns here and will be an obstacle to achieving our mission to activate and raise the consciousness of the lowest, most beaten down workers in the city. This is a worthy mission and I have no doubt that our Caucus has developed some capacity to influence union politics in small ways, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this influence is almost entirely confined to the library or otherwise administrative roles. These are the sectors of employment where progressive left politics have purchase in society more generally. We frustrated children of the middle class land where we think we can do the most good with our petty bourgeois sense of righteousness. In our caucus, we enforce a culture in which using chosen gender pronouns are taken for granted, the police and like coercive institutions should be defunded and phased out, that certain political figures are fascist and evil, immigrants’ rights should be protected, Palestine should be supported against Israeli mass murder, etc. If one is to be taken seriously in our milieu, they must pay affirmative lip service to these positions. I am not here making any value judgments about whether these positions are right or wrong, but I think it is important to acknowledge that these are issues that divide the working class unnecessarily or else leave them to equivocate. That’s not to say that individuals can’t change their minds eventually, but to prefigure these attitudes in the Caucus’ culture is to alienate the very workers that we want to represent. So we have to decide whether upholding these cultural norms is more important than appealing to workers. If the Caucus continues on its current path, I fear that it will become nothing more than a support group for déclassé malcontents to bond over shared values and activities promoted by the organization.

So how should we proceed?

Many of you will read the preceding arguments and might even agree with a lot of it but still conclude that it's neither here nor there because we have a duty to continue the fight or “continue the struggle” so we just have to hang in there and keep plugging away with the same activity that we have thus far been committed to. This kind of entreaty is the leftist equivalent of telling each other to “man up” and power through with brute force instead of confronting obstacles critically and thinking them through. I, for one, don’t think anyone should give up on organizing but I do think it should be separated from our petty bourgeois intellectual angst. I don’t want you all to man up and power through; I want us to face our fractured and confused position so that what capacity this Caucus has built can be put to better use.

Unions are liberal institutions. By “liberal,” I don’t mean Democratic Party-ist but, rather, that they are based on the values that all modern people take for granted: that individuals are entitled to the fruits of their labor, that they have a right to determine their own lives and, in so doing, should be free to express themselves, associate with whoever they choose, hold whatever beliefs they feel are right for them, and should not be arbitrarily punished or dictated to by higher authority without just cause. In theory, a union is an association of workers tasked with struggling for these rights for its members in the context of the workplace. On the level of liberalism, a good union movement has the self interest of its workers at its core and never sacrifices this to take a line on political issues that are outside that purview. It may come to pass that a political issue does affect the self-interest of union workers. In this case, a sober accounting of this self-interest will have to be reckoned with without partisan bias. An effective union movement would make its political alliances a question and would have to open itself up to working strategically with any party, progressive or conservative, that compliments this self-interest. Thus, it would be able to play the various political factions off of each other for its own gain.

But what about Socialism? Many of you want to be socialists (including me) so how can we organize as such? The truth is that we can’t at this moment in history because we don’t have a socialist movement based in the working class as our object, so we have no material to work with in a struggle for Socialism. That struggle is no more. It existed at one time but it died many decades ago. All we have left are a smattering of sectarian organizations that cling to fragments of the shattered legacy of proletarian socialism. They are like the Looney Toons characters that run a distance off of a cliff before they realize that they have no ground beneath their feet. These are not organizations that can be used as a foundation.

The struggle for Socialism does not continue, but it can be rebuilt anew. It would be impossible for me to lay down a program for how to achieve this but I do have an idea about how we can plant a seed with what we have in this Caucus. Basically, I think we should have two organizations: one liberal and one socialist which will reflect the separation of theory and practice. Our Caucus as it exists currently should remain structurally as it is in its practical capacity. Our leaders have wisely steered the organization away from dependence on the political establishment in the city government and the unions, thus, it can be a haven of independent action and communication between all city workers without oversight from authority. Let the workers take it over. Some of them will hold attitudes that can reasonably be called racist, sexist or homophobic that will not be changed by scolding. But they still must be allowed to develop a capacity for self-government. We must tap into our higher, socialist consciousness to face these attitudes with equanimity so that our efforts can stay on the task of advancing the workers’ immediate interests. If our Caucus is successful in this, these interests will expand with time, care and much relationship building. To do this, however, this Caucus will have to be vacated of its unnecessarily alienating ideological culture. This is what the second organization is for; let it be where we aspiring socialists offload our hopes and fears, look for personal support among comrades and debate ideas (maybe even heatedly) while respecting the pureness of each other’s motives. There can be a bulletin where members can post pickets, rallies or other events of interest but let there be no practical goal other than to work through the issues that need to be worked through among those that would be part of a potential Left. To be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone should leave this Caucus for this new organization, only that those with ideological and/or intellectual preoccupations save them for this group and this group only. These two groups would represent theory and practice in their broken state but if we are successful in our mission, the trust between workers and intellectuals can be restored and the link between theory and practice reforged.