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editorial2019
LSJXXX10.1177/0160449X19832711Labor Studies JournalEditorial
Editorial
Labor Studies Journal
2019, Vol. 44(1) 5–7
Introduction to Special © 2019 UALE
Article reuse guidelines:
Conference Issue on sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0160449X19832711
https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X19832711
Socialism and Labor: journals.sagepub.com/home/lsj
worker organizations were the vanguard of the left wing of US social democracy (the
New Deal) from the mid-1930s to approximately 1950.”
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that because socialist party membership was
relatively small, a left ideology never flourished within the American labor movement,
Devinatz notes that SPA and CPUSA members and their supporters attained “signifi-
cant influence in US trade unions and related workers’ organizations, circa 1930 to
1950.” His piece utilizes and reviews several recently published volumes of union and
worker organizations to demonstrate how it was “necessary for left-wing political
radicals to work through the trade unions and other worker organizations in order to
serve as the vanguard in the efforts to defend the New Deal and push it to the left.”
The absence of mass-worker parties in the United States is not merely an historical
curiosity. Sanders did not represent the inevitable ascendancy of Karl Marx’s revolu-
tionary party, but his presidency would have advocated for more protections for work-
ing-class people than any provided since the 1930s. It’s a head scratcher why so much
of organized labor made the choice it did in 2016. But every four years there’s another
presidential election. Devinatz thinks that socialism still offers a better path: “While
the connection between socialism and labor might be more tenuous than in the early to
mid-20th century, this relationship has not been severed and still exists as a possibility
for reviving trade union movements at the start of the 21st century’s third decade.”
If socialism writ large is unlikely, then perhaps something more modest can inspire
radical labor movement change. A second article co-authored by Micah Uetricht and
Barry Eidlin offers an intriguing thesis that what’s missing is not a revolutionary party
(although that would be helpful) but the need for more worker collective action at
work. Worker activism, they point out, has never relied on a mass-worker party.
Instead, it has historically been the job of a “militant minority” of workplace activists
(often leftists) who inspired union militancy. Their article, “United States Union
Revitalization and the Missing ‘Militant Minority,’” focuses a lens on how labor
inspired social movements in the United States were based in the “workplace, relying
on workers’ ability to join together, withhold their labor, and forcibly extract conces-
sions from corporations and governments.”
Uetricht and Eidlin make the invaluable point that workers’ resistance “sustained
the union as a vital, ongoing presence.” And most importantly, the core of that resis-
tance was a small layer of workplace activists (“militant minority”) who were strongly
influenced by left-wing ideologies. Who made up this minority of workers with a
“vision and a strategy for how to organize, fight, and win”? They were workers who
helped transform their fellow workers from a class in itself to a class for itself.
It seems that Marxist critiques of capitalism have been essential to building the
American labor movement. Why then, according to the authors, does today’s labor
movement largely lack a militant minority? The authors survey the reasons and con-
clude that rebuilding militancy is central to labor’s revival. But like the conclusion
reached by Devinatz’s, that militancy likely won’t happen without socialist and other
leftists inspiring union activism.
Our final article examines the consciousness-raising impact of Socialist teaching on
workers in Canada. At the beginning of Jordan House and Paul Christopher Gray’s
Editorial 7
Robert Bruno
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA