New Working-Class Organization and the Social Movement Left

New organizations are seeking to build power and organization from sectors of the working class previously relegated to the side stage of history. In these organizations, working-class African American, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities are at the centre alongside working-class women, young people, queer and transgender people as well as organized white working-class communities. The constituencies of these organizations include service workers, bicycle messengers and fast food workers; informal workers including street vendors, day labourers and sex workers; unemployed workers and welfare recipients; people who have immigrated to the United States and people who are incarcerated; people fighting police brutality and home foreclosures and those fighting against the toxification of neighbourhoods in pursuit of clean and safe environments. These organizations are developing leaders who will be positioned to forge the development of a broader anti-capitalist bloc inside the United States. From the San Francisco Bay Area to rural Mississippi, the efforts to organize working-class people in reaction to the immeasurable human and planetary suffering inflicted by the ruling class might appear as little more than mere resistance struggles, but closer examination reveals important potential. Each of these experiments is historically important in its own right, and together they represent a critical opening to expanding and sharpening class struggle guided by a vision of an alternative future, based on human development, ecological renewal and global solidarity. Of particular interest is the critical role that a small number of social movement leftists have played in sharpening the outlook, demands and practice of many of these organizations. Socialists looking to build an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist bloc should pay close attention to these efforts as the questions that they are grappling with ‘and the practices they are innovating’ will be critical in any effort to fight for an uncharted socialist future. This essay is one attempt to shed light on a small but growing number of important organizing efforts which are attempting to take up the challenge to transform the terrain on which struggles take place