Introduction Part I

My reckoning with failure.

Portrait of Karl Marx by Gaston Vuillier

“[Th]e emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” Karl Marx, opening words of the constitution of the International Workingmen’s Association.¹

My failure

Since the 2008 Great Recession, workers have shook the world with the largest demonstrations, street rebellions and strikes of recorded history.² A new society beyond capitalism is a pressing urgency, and yet it is the forces of reaction in the form of a populist and authoritarian right who are the main social force to benefit from this unrest. In my twenty years as an active unionist, the social, political and economic position of workers has deteriorated and reaction has ascended. As a union leader, I have failed. This failure, of course, is not mine alone and it is not for want of trying.

Others have already seen this coming. In 1970, radical educator Paolo Freire wrote that populism “as a style of political action” coincides with “the emergence of the oppressed”.³ This occurs in a situation where the anger and suffering of those outside the elite is both a readily recognised social reality, and the people have not sufficiently organised themselves. We live in a world where authoritarian populist leaders act as intermediaries between “the oligarchical elites” and the people, carrying out the interests of these elites while pretending to serve the people with “paternalism”.⁴

This newsletter contrasts the experiences of the Australian, UK and US labour movements to provide insight into organising strategy free from infatuation with individual leaders. Australia has, to date, authoritarianism without a populist leader. The Australian experience is of neoliberal capitalism without a Thatcher or a Reagan figure, and extinguished political hope without the elites smothering a Corbyn or a Sanders.

From this I draw not a fatalism that history inevitably ends up in the same place regardless of the actions of a figurehead but rather that change is produced through the actions of a wider group of subjects. No one need passively wait for the next transformative leader or autocrat to determine the field of possibilities. This is not to deny the importance of leadership but to caution against abdicating it to a single figurehead. A committed group of comrades can exercise such leadership. True leadership produces organisation and organisation enriches leadership.

Neither reform nor revolution (as least as conventionally understood)

Gradual reform and violent insurrection are in their own ways both strategies of change that in turn abdicate responsibility to a single figurehead to run the state albeit with radically different means of capturing government.

The strategy of gradual reform cannot work in the present context. We have neither time nor space. With news of the world already surpassing 1.5℃ of warming breaking in early 2024, ongoing genocide in Palestine, multiple, simultaneous conflict zones emerging globally, and the ongoing march of fascism, time is not on workers’ side.⁵

Further, gradual reform, known as the Fabian strategy, presupposes a stable social base from which to support an ongoing campaign of indirect and gradual encroachment on the privileges of capital.⁶ This is not a luxury that the social and economic elites have afforded to the workers’ movement in the Anglophone world since the neoliberal reaction of the 1980s onwards. A stable base of relations of solidarity must be rebuilt for workers to exercise power.

Conversely, while the labour movement has been robbed of the time and space necessary to support a gradualist campaign for universal dignity and respect, a direct and violent insurrectionary rupture with capital feels both far-fetched and foolish.

Workers remain overwhelmingly unorganised, insecure and atomised. There are some mass based struggles for change but only limited organising for a world beyond capitalism and insufficient worker-led structures committed to struggle for a new system. An immediate insurrectionary push by a small group would amount to nothing more than an expression of impotent rage that invites further suffering.

Faced with such choices is it any wonder that people retreat into base survivalism, the comfort of conspiracies or the hedonism of the present? A constructive resolution to this impasse comes through the authentic organisation of the people. The solidarity wedge is a strategy to achieve the required level of worker organisation through a revived and radically different labour movement.

This newsletter represents the distillation of my twenty years as a unionist actively organising with workers. As a work of strategy, my intention is not to define the limits of what workers may achieve. Who am I to declare that which workers cannot do?

Rather, what I set out here are proposals through which the labour movement in the Anglophone world can restore, once again, a sense of possibility in the power of the working-class. It is from this very confidence in themselves and what they can do together that workers can build a free, equal and democratic future. If workers as a class, once again, dare to struggle then this sense of possibility punches a hole through capital’s domination, opening up the time and space necessary to overcome ongoing ecological and social breakdowns.

Unions and workers cooperatives, being the main institutional forms where workers exercise power within the system as part of their daily work to earn a living, have a vital role to play in this strategy. They are organisational forms in which workers can work away at their own emancipation while struggling to live in a capitalist system.

Institutional forms, however, are mere dead instruments without active cooperation between workers. The solidarity wedge is a proposal for how workers can use unions and worker cooperatives to better relate to each other and the world around them in order to exercise power.

Starbucks Workers United

It was the example of Starbucks workers organising themselves into a union in the United States which sparked my strategic thinking for this work. In late 2021, Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York voted to unionise. This sparked off the militant and hard-fought Starbucks Workers United movement that, at the time of writing, has drawn in 11,000 Starbucks workers across 500 stores in over 40 states. This has resulted in one of the most anti-union corporations in the world agreeing in late February 2024 to an overall unionisation framework with its workforce. It is a globally significant breakthrough.

It was not just the demographics of the workers organising – being young, insecure and diverse service workers standing up – but the manner in which Starbucks workers were organising that grabbed my attention as a union leader. Starbucks Workers United grew into an organic movement through its use of worker-to-worker organising.⁷ This is a method of worker-led organising where it is the workers themselves who not only lead the organising in their shop but also take the lead in training and developing other workers to lead organising efforts in their own shops.

The Starbucks breakthrough should not, however, be read as a spontaneous event devoid of considered leadership even as it has rewritten organising strategy. It is a fight where Workers United leadership (an affiliate with the Services Employees International Union) exercised swift initiative in switching from a campaign predominantly focused on organising cafes in upstate New York to a nationwide Starbucks organising effort based on worker interest.

Worker-to-worker organising also takes significant resources even as workplace leaders take on many of the functions of paid organisers. There is still a need for organising mentoring and development, legal, communications and other specialist support.

While there was a sophisticated communications and social media element to the Starbucks campaign, critically it was built on, and not a replacement for, workers organising. Such workers faced hundreds of their co-workers being dismissed, the closure of many stores, the active changing of the conditions of employment so that they would be materially worse off than non-union stores in the short-term.

In the face of such hostility they took visible solidarity actions and conducted strikes together, and critically new groups of workers at new stores kept unionising. This active cooperation of Starbucks workers built the necessary power to win. The campaign was a living demonstration of the source of worker power.

The terrain of strategic possibilities, therefore, is shaped by the activities, capacities and relationships of workers themselves. Both in actuality and in potential.

This post is part of an ongoing series. Part II can be found here.

1. Thanks to Don Sutherland for kindly providing me the exact quote. Full document can be accessed here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_First_International.pdf (as at 4 August 2025).

2. See Vincent Bevans, If We Burn (2023). This history of radical mobilisations in the 2010s presents a stark setting out of the strategic dilemma for both the union movement, and the broader Left.

3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), p. 123. Freire’s account of authoritarian populism in the developing world in the 1960s, is in many ways, a sobering reminder that we are living through the breakdown of a capitalist order in the 2020s.

4. Ibid.

5. Union leaders of my generation will need to reckon with our participation in networks of patronage that facilitate and enable ongoing genocide and ecocide.

6. The Fabian strategy was named after Roman dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus’ refusal to engage Hannibal’s Carthaginian army in direct combat on the Italian peninsula in the Second Punic War, using the strategic base of Rome and its surrounding territory to support its army in engaging in ongoing hit and run engagements with Hannibal.

7. Eric Blanc, We are the Union (2025). This work provides a really useful account of both the Starbucks campaign but other concrete examples of worker-to-worker organising.