Introduction Part III
On Power, Radical Education and Automation.
This post is part of an ongoing series. Part II can be found here.
Before beginning to articulate the solidarity wedge as a strategic framework, it is first necessary to make explicit the central observations and assumptions underpinning the strategy. For reasoning is only as good as its starting point and in being explicit about where I begin, hopefully this ensures that this work, even in its errors and omissions, is a useful tool in a process of ongoing collective dialogue and critique.
Power and Workers
The solidarity wedge rests on Hannah Arendt’s conception of power as sketched out in her essay Civil Disobedience (1970). Power, in this sense, is not a set of legal permissions from the state, or the physical force that one could bring to bear on a situation. Instead, power refers to a set of group capabilities that emerge from ongoing activity and cooperation between people. In this vein, I conceive of unionism primarily not as a legal institution or a bundle of permissions from the state but an ongoing and active relationship between workers.1 Registered trade unions themselves are, of course, legal institutions exercising state-sanctioned permissions but formulating strategy solely or primarily on this basis is to make trade union strategy divorced from unionism.
Power is what workers may achieve through acting together. I have made my best efforts in the rest of the work to distinguish power from other forms of shaping the world such as force, control, and authority. This is necessary, in my view, to preserve as much as possible strategic clarity. The confusion of power with control and authority often leads to failure and dead-ends in the union movement. It also leads to the perpetuation of relationships of domination within the labour movement, which in turn strangles the very capacity of a union to engage in the process of nurturing worker power.
Power is what workers may achieve through acting together.
Using such an approach, democracy is a means through which to cultivate relationships of mutual trust and collective action between workers. It is an effective strategy with which to build worker power.
This understanding of power gives rise to the possibility that a renaissance of worker organisation may take place, at least partially, beyond the auspices of registered trade unions. Jane Holgate’s Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence (2021), in fact, discusses the role of newly-founded and small independent unions in resparking the United Kingdom trade union movement.
Radical education
The solidarity wedge is a mass radical education campaign sparked by and manifesting in various forms of workplace and social organising. There is a strategic truth to the 19th century slogan, “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. Transformational change emerges from and is sustained by ongoing critical education.
Most unions, however, rarely prioritise or even fund such educational work. The sums unions spend on education would pale in comparison to political donations, industrial case management or traditional collective bargaining, and that which is spent is not necessarily about workers and delegates engaging in an ongoing critical understanding of the world and its oppressive systems based on their own experience. Mostly it is training and not critical education.
This is a pity, for if power emerges from cooperation between workers it is contingent upon workers themselves organising, which in turn is dependent on workers learning how to organise. Critical education creates space for workers to self-reflect and enter into dialogue with each other, and thereby overcome what Freire termed “the populist pitfall”.2
There can be no revival of worker organisation without mass critical education. This is both a mathematical and relational reality. Mathematically speaking, there is neither sufficient paid staff within the labour movement to do the work on behalf of workers or enough money to hire the requisite numbers. The labour movement will never be able to out hire capital. Even if this were mathematically possible, it would not create the power relations necessary to achieve revolutionary or even just meaningful change. An uncritical embrace of professionalisation and specialisation within the labour movement tends towards worker passivity – it teaches workers to ask what the union office is doing for them, and thereby precludes the nurturing of class power.
The labour movement will never be able to out hire capital.
Worker-to-worker organising, however, demands that workers learn from and organise with each other. In this model, union organisers and various specialists become educators and agents of the workers themselves while also learning from workers. Freire wrote of the idea of picking apart the teacher/student dichotomy and replacing it with teacher-student and student-teacher relations. In this regard, my work in this newsletter is also not as teacher but as fellow sufferer providing notes on my own failure to overcome the capitalist condition and some sketched out thoughts of things that might work.
The solidarity wedge, in turn, demands the replacement of the organiser/worker dichotomy with organiser-worker and worker-organiser. This opens the possibility that the millions of already existing union members, particularly the relatively strong bases within public sector education across the Anglophone world, can act as a cohort with which to initiate the critical education and dialogue necessary within the broader working class. This work borrows from and is highly influenced by radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire even as it is not necessarily about radical education itself but rather a labour movement strategy that is both dependent upon and perpetuates such education.
Automation
In my Union’s Sydney office there is a collection of black and white blown up photographs depicting workers and their actions through the twentieth century. One of the photographs is of a man from the 1950s holding up a painted sign that reads “my job was taken by a robot”. Whenever I read breathless predictions about the redundancy of workers, I think of that photograph. For in my experience, while automation has very real consequences for workers, the wholesale redundancy of workers as a class has yet to be one of them.
For all the excitement around automation’s impact, there is a need to maintain workplace organising in the face of really existing automation. Automation is not a neutral progression of technical capacity but a reflection of capital’s response to both the cost of labour and its ongoing quest to further control labour. As science-fiction and technology writer Cory Doctorow often writes, “we’re nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we’re certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job”.
Automation is quite capable of making the lives of workers worse through algorithms that monitor and police workers as they go about their lives – whether inside or outside the workplace. Automation can intensify the workload of workers, just ask an Amazon warehouse worker running around picking orders under constant surveillance while ambulances wait outside their warehouse waiting for the next worker to drop. Automation has and can disrupt the business models and livelihoods of specific occupational groups, just ask a journalist who has been made redundant. What it does not do is replace the need for workers.
The reality of automation is a technologically-advanced exterior masking a manual and dangerous interior.
Automation offers the promise of saving labour but what it delivers is a degradation of working conditions — the speeding up of work, deskilling, lower wages and outsourcing. The truth of automation is well-depicted in Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer. It is in the slick and technologically-advanced engine car that Chris Evans’ revolutionary protagonist, Curtis, finds slave children working manually under the floorboards keeping the train running, and by extension the system itself. The reality of automation is a technologically-advanced exterior masking a manual and dangerous interior.
Technological development, including automation, is a contingent process. From a strategic perspective, the variability of social struggle over time, as well as the political conditions of labour, means the overall workplace struggle must be agnostic with respect to the pace and reach of automation. Workers’ own success influences outcomes and developments in automation. My proposal, the solidarity wedge; a strategy for maximising class unity of action — even as sector, industry and corporate specific organising campaigns are taking place — provides the basis for maximum worker power even as different groups of workers may face the prospect of technological redundancy or degradation over time. This rests on a central strategic assumption that I think holds well enough — automation cannot replace the working class as a whole.
There is some overlap here with how Australian historian Liam Byrne defines unions as “emotional communities”. See Liam Byrne, No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia (2025).
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).
Thanks for this. I’m fully with you on the education stuff. We need to do a lot more to provide broader political-economy education for workers. Organisations like the Communist Party used to provide this, and since its demise - whatever you think of it - there has been a big absence. We as a union movement have tended to slip into a routine of providing training on various things, but that’s not the same as education.
On technology and automation, I think there will be a lot of job loss as a result of AI. But you are right that there will not be any dissolution of the working class as such. What the most important effect will likely be, in fact, is the increasing proletarianisation of work that was previously seen, particularly by those performing it, as different to “ordinary” working class work. This is typically called “white collar” work, performed in offices (or, increasingly, homes), with some level of autonomy, with relatively low levels of routine and non-manual, intellectual skills. Those performing this work until now have tended to see themselves as more middle class than working class, using a definition of class that is more based on cultural criteria than a relationship to the means of production. AI, I think, is likely to render large numbers of these jobs redundant, or to transform them in ways that reduce the autonomy of those performing them, the level of intellectual skill required and, ultimately, levels of job satisfaction. In sum, these workers, who until now have seen themselves as a step or two above the proletariat will be transformed into a white collar proletariat. The effect of this could go a couple of ways. One might be a heightened level of resentment and disengagement that expresses itself in the kind of right-wing politics that we are seeing all around the world currently (remembering that fascism’s historic support base was amongst the petit bourgeoisie threatened by large-scale economic change). The other, more hopeful direction, might be a growing class consciousness of white collar workers and a growing willingness to build better alliances with blue collar workers. This would lead to a much more powerful working class movement. But it will require white collar unions to very strongly intervene in workplaces over automation, to make control over it central to bargaining strategies, to demand reductions in working hours without loss of pay so that workers reap some of the benefits of the process, and to channel discontent towards the owners of technology, not fellow workers.