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The overall strategy – the solidarity wedge
In formulating strategy, it is necessary to have some feel of the entire field of activity for otherwise opportunities and threats are missed. This can be difficult as we all exist within and depend on a capitalist system, and yet efforts must be made to see the limits and contours of a system we live and breathe on a daily basis.
A critical stance towards capitalism, and a confidence in a worker-led system beyond it, provides a foundation for good collective strategy. This exists on two levels. First, an idea of the totality of the system provides insight into the various ways in which the system depends on workers and yet otherwise limits their life chances. Pathways forward for workers are impossible to map out unless one can see how the sovereignty of capital harms workers on a systematic basis (over and above examples of various agents of capital becoming bad actors). Second, being able to envisage the limits of capitalism provides a basis on which to realise both overall progress towards such points, and to work through realising various post-capitalist and democratic practices in the present.
While a robust critique of capitalism provides a starting point for good strategy, it is merely a starting point. As Wolfgang Streeck has written, capitalism “will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself… as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way”.1 While I disagree with Streeck’s pessimism, I do share his view that capitalism will not disappear without struggle. What I put forward with the solidarity wedge is a strategy for workers to build the power necessary to regain the confidence to win a future where labour exercises power over capital. This newsletter grapples with how to restart history, not determine it.
This newsletter grapples with how to restart history, not determine it.
In overall terms, there is nothing conceptually difficult about the solidarity first approach I put forward here. It is in many ways a return to the ways of working that built up the power of workers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The art is in critically adapting that work to the regime of worker control that has been instituted in the neoliberal era.
First, the dominant union strategic paradigm divides work between the industrial and political fields, or work between employers and the capitalist state.2 What I put forward is a conception of the strategic formation of union struggle on a wedge or three pointed basis with the primary point being the industrial or workplace struggle, and the supporting flanks consisting of worker ownership and political organising. Moreover, all three points are underpinned by a commitment to mass radical education as a means to nurture solidarity.
Worker ownership, as far as I use the phrase, refers to workers owning and managing enterprises on a one worker, one vote basis. In this sense, even as worker cooperatives remain bound by capitalist relations and the broader profit imperative, internally workers collectively direct the management of their enterprise. Worker ownership, thus, becomes a window into the microeconomics of a democratic socialist future even as it is limited by broader relations of capital.
Of course, this contradiction between the internal and external curtails the ability of worker ownership to transcend capitalism in the absence of organised struggle. It is, however, the way in which worker ownership can aid workers acting together that forms the focus of this work. Worker ownership changes relationships of authority and power within an enterprise, and the changed nature of this relationship, one where workplaces are actively run on the basis of worker solidarity, can be used for broader social impacts. Worker ownership can support the emergence of a new culture of solidarity.3
The substantive suggestions that make up the solidarity wedge are in no way original. Solidarity bargaining is itself a synthesis of the 19th century concept of collective bargaining and its early twentieth century syndicalist critique. It is a form of bargaining that seeks to link up the working class as a whole while building a deeper layer of rank-and-file delegates so that the movement has the capacity to actually achieve this. It is a means through which to seek to reclaim the labour movement as a class-wide vehicle to progress workers’ interests.
The substantive suggestions that make up the solidarity wedge are in no way original.
Even worker ownership, in so far as it might appear that I am seeking to introduce a new point in the struggle, has its roots in the organising of unionists in the 19th century. It has only receded from Anglophone union movement memory due to the professionalisation of both unions and consumer cooperatives, and the relative but temporary success of expanding the state. I have called this revived form of activity organising for ownership. Further, the political component of the strategy I outline goes back to ancient Athenian traditions of direct democracy.4
The throughline between each of the three points are the fostering of relations of solidarity between workers through mass radical education. From this will grow not only an awareness of shared interests but a sense of commonality and unity necessary for workers to collectively act together. Solidarity bargaining rests on fostering relationships of solidarity between workers in different workplaces and industries. Organising for ownership not only seeks to build up a prefigurative sector of the economy run under solidaristic and democratic principles (the solidarity economy) but structure that sector in a relation of conscious solidarity with workers organising in the rest of society. Moreover, union workers calling the shots in the political organising work of their union can provide the foundation for organising in broader society on a specifically solidaristic basis. It is worth remarking, however, that my advocacy for the strategy of direct democracy when it comes to unions engaging in political organising is not done from a basis of idealising workers.
To the extent that there is any originality to my work, it is based on thinking through how such pre-existing and well-proven means of building worker power might be implemented in a social and legal context designed to deter and undermine relations of solidarity.
The solidarity wedge poses an unsolvable three-body problem for the elite
There is method in my chaos. My wife, writer and poet Chloe Wilson, introduced me to Bolshevik leadership rival to Lenin, early 20th century science-fiction writer and medical researcher Alexander Bogdanov via her poem Bloodwork.5 Bogdanov had a uniquely socialist model of scientific practice and knowledge expansion known as substitution. It was designed in reaction to capitalist specialisation through the active practice of substituting findings and knowledge from one area of specialisation into another.6
There is method in my chaos.
Substitution is useful for thinking through labour movement struggle. Engaging in the act of substitution itself at a minimum generates a change of perspective on the struggle, and this parallax view provides for new creative insight.
The substitution method has led me on a journey of applying the insights of physics to the labour struggle over the years.7 Applying Arendt’s definition of power as capacity generated from active cooperation between people, the social impact of worker power can be thought of as exercising a pull on broader society like gravity on the physical universe — it’s a weak force at a micro-level but at scale it makes the world turn.
Just as capitalism is a monster forever moving and mutating, so too the movement to transcend it must be in motion, and unpredictably so. An effective labour movement is both in motion and unpredictable to the capitalist elite (while remaining a source of stability and solidarity in the lives of workers).
This has led me to thinking of the concept of the three-body problem as a strategic framework, which in turn has given rise to the solidarity wedge. Three celestial bodies in a linked gravitational orbit can defy the prediction of a closed-form expression. They are, in other words, intimately connected but defy prediction in their chaos.
Applying the three-body problem, therefore, to the labour movement struggle opens up at least the theoretical possibility of an organised workers’ movement that defies the capitalist system’s incredible capacity to adapt to, co-opt and eventually feed-off resistance. Workers undergoing mass dialogical education are the centre of mass between the three bodies. These subjects drive the movements and diverse connections between the three bodies being workplace organising, organising for ownership and political organising. Without the problem solving capacities of workers geared towards further activity, these three points become lifeless, fixed and strategically useless.
The seasons of this newsletter
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that I have grouped this newsletter into three seasons. These three points, however, are not the points of the solidarity wedge themselves but rather three different views on solidaristic relations between workers — solidarity as an overall strategy, solidarity within wage labour, and solidarity beyond wage labour (from the gaze of existing wage labour relations). The first part grapples with how solidarity persists within relations of extraction and alienation inherent to the capitalist economy. The second part then goes to strategies for building up relations of solidarity between workers at work across the class, and the third part is focused on cultivating relationships of solidarity between workers beyond the capitalist workplace.
If there is one point that I wish to remain with the reader it is this — solidarity and democracy are vital strategies for nurturing the relations we need to make our world a better place.
This concludes the introduction, and the next post will shift to the next part — solidarity as strategy. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.
For this purpose of analysis I have classed legal and electoral work as occupying the same point. Both forms of work involve unions, usually mediated by a candidate or legal team, attempting to modify the rules of working within the capitalist state. This holds for whether there is a functional separation of state powers or not in a given regime. Strategically speaking they are the same flank in the struggle.
This is also why I have not classed workers capital arrangements such as union pension funds or industry superannuation funds as a type of worker ownership for this strategic purpose. These funds, while each having their own particular opportunities for democratic pressure and intervention, nonetheless remained engaged with the broader capitalist market on a one dollar, one vote basis. This does not change the shopfloor material relation. As such when I discuss worker ownership in this newsletter, what I am getting at is those arrangements where workers exercise ownership on a democratic one worker, one vote basis. For more on cultures of solidarity see Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (1989).
I take an expansive view of political organising in this newsletter so as to incorporate what some might see as community organising, and other forms of building social power outside of the workplace.
For more about Bloodwork check here, and for more about Chloe’s writing check here.
For a good outline of Bogdanov and specialisation see Mackenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2015).
See my previous essays The Housing Black Hole and Schrödinger’s worker.