Political Openings: Class Struggle During and After the Pandemic

Introduction

There is a crisis in capitalism. The crisis lies not with the system’s ability to make profit for its stockholders, reward executives handsomely, and penetrate every corner of life and of the globe. It is rather the conditions and consequences of capitalism’s successes in these terms—the sustained failures of capitalism to address popular needs, hopes, and fears as it commodifies nature and human activity—that defines the crisis as one that is not primarily economic but a matter of social legitimacy. ¹

As the responses from parties and states to the rising discontent proved wanting, the crisis of legitimacy grew into a political crisis. Alongside popular anger with policies like free trade and austerity has come a loss of confidence and faith in state institutions ranging from social agencies to the judiciary and the police, along with disenchantment and alienation with mainstream political parties. It is on the terrain of social delegitimation and such political instability that capitalism’s vulnerability lies.

Strategic Dilemmas, Political Openings

The pandemic, it is now commonly noted, further highlighted capitalism’s social irrationalities. This was especially so in the United States with its stunted (though very expensive) health system and in Trump’s crass response to the relative weight of commercial versus health concerns.

To this opening for building a radical opposition was added the environmental connection. Though largely pushed to the side during the pandemic, Covid-19 served as the canary-in-the-mine for capitalism’s general unpreparedness for not only future health pandemics but also the infinitely greater environmental crisis already enveloping us. Unlike health pandemics, the environmental crisis can’t be resolved through lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccines. It demands a radical restructuring of how society is organized, what we value, and how we relate to each other—issues that dwarf the already traumatic experiences with Covid-19.

How, for example, will we respond if a worsening environment forces people in the global south off their land and brings mass migration to the more developed world? Do we even have the planning capacity to deal with internal mass migration if floods and droughts start occurring within our own borders? Can we really expect that people would heed calls for consumption restraint when the excess consumption of the rich so clearly translates into starvation for the poor and lower-income groups? The health pandemic gave states emergency powers, but they were, in general, only moderately applied; what kind of emergency powers would environmental collapse require and how could this be balanced by democratic checks?

A third opening broaches the pandemic’s potential impact on class formation. Nothing is more important than breakthroughs at this level, since creating the social power to actually change circumstances takes us beyond lamenting unfairness, expressing moral outrage, or sinking into a debilitating fatalism. In this regard, the combination of frontline workers facing intensified health risks, and the unique degree of public empathy for their work, has raised the prospect of a new militancy erupting within unions alongside a surge in new unionization in key sectors, each reinforcing the other.

The protests with the highest profile by far during the pandemic (and which were only partially an outcome of the pandemic) were those that erupted against police abuse and murder of Black people. The size of these protests, their energy, and widespread support from Whites pose the question of whether this might now contribute to a broader left politics, one no longer haunted and diverted by racial divisions.

Adolph Reed Jr. has long argued ² that the way forward lies in expanding the frame of Black politics to incorporate

the kinds of social and economic policies that address Black people as workers, students, parents, taxpayers, citizens, people in need of decent jobs, housing, and healthcare, or concerned with foreign policy [rather than] homogenize them under a monolithic racial classification.

But something more than race is going on. The incarceration rate of American Whites is itself generally more than double that of other rich countries, and in absolute numbers, police shoot and kill almost twice as many non-Hispanic Whites ⁴ —very few of whom are bankers or business execs—than Blacks (from 2017 through mid-2020, 1441 Whites were killed by police and 778 Blacks). There is a policing problem in the United States that stinks of racism but is also a broader class issue and one particular to the United States.

Similarly, it is understandable that Black activists point to the higher poverty rates in Black communities and the wealth gap between working-class Blacks and working-class Whites. But it would be a betrayal of the spirit of social justice that pervaded the protests if its ambitions were limited to “raising” the conditions of poor Blacks to the levels of poor Whites, be they struggling single White mothers, Whites coping with opioid addiction, or White workers laid off along with their Black brothers and sisters. Limited, as well, would be calling for working-class Blacks to match the wealth of working-class Whites when sitting over both are the 10 percent of households that control over 70–75 percent of all wealth (sources vary).

The big question—the historic question given how impressive the June protests were—is whether a pivot will occur within this emerging movement toward creating the multi-issue Black-White working-class alliances without which Blacks (and Whites) simply cannot win.

Strategic Demands

What kinds of demands and campaigns might then contribute to building and spreading the understandings, networks, commitments, struggles, and structures that can realize the potentials flagged by life under the pandemic? We can expect the emergence of a wide range of mobilizations, based on differing demographics, regions, constituencies, and interests. But can we also identify a short and focused set of demands—not a wish list or a comprehensive program for a socialist government, but strategic demands that go beyond particularist concerns to contribute to the construction of a nationwide movement to fundamentally challenge capitalist power?

Specific demands can only emerge out of widespread discussions. The demand for universal healthcare, its crucial importance all the more revealed through the pandemic, seems an obvious, common sense one. Yet the Democratic Party and some leaders of key unions have rejected it. This signals one arena of struggle that will undoubtedly occur within the broad left itself (never mind extending it to pharmacare and dental care and ending private control over the research and manufacture of drugs and protective equipment). To that, three demands, each strategically related to the new openings posed above, might be added.

One is the demand for a one-time emergency wealth tax. This is an unashamedly populist demand, intended to appeal to a broad swath of the population without addressing more fundamental issues of democratic economic control. A second is economic conversion, an unashamedly radical demand that moves beyond the generalities of the Green New Deal and the vagueness of a “just transition” to engage workers in struggles that link the maintenance of a livable planet to the democratically planned restructuring of the economy.

Third, we need a push for greater unionization. The promise here lies not only in shifting the balance of power between specific groups of workers and their employers but also in unleashing a long-awaited union upsurge with the potential to transform a working class consisting of fragmented and demoralized workers into a coherent social agent capable of winning and sustaining social change.

One-Time Emergency Wealth Tax

In the late 1980s, the distribution of household wealth in the United States (net worth minus debts) was already stunningly unequal, with the wealth of the top 10 percent of households having more than one-and-a-half times that of the combined wealth of the rest. By 2020, the top 10 percent increased their share to double that of all other U.S. households. The shift was even greater for the 1 percent at the top of the American pyramid: at the start of 2020, 1.6 million American families had as much wealth as the 144 million households constituting the bottom 90 percent (see Federal Reserve ⁵ and Pew Research Center ⁶ ).

Such astonishing inequalities contradict any substantive notion of democracy. It perpetuates, through intergenerational transfer, future inequalities that are even less defendable. Rationalizing such inequality as the necessary “price” of our rising standard of living has always been a feeble defense. It is especially so today, after three decades in which the top 10 percent grabbed 70 percent of the total increase in U.S. household wealth at the same time as the quality of life for most Americans stagnated or deteriorated.

During the Depression, the top tax rate in the United States went from 25 percent in 1931 to 70 percent at the end of the 1930s. At the beginning of Second World War, it was increased to 81 percent, and in light of the war emergency and sacrifices ordinary people were called on to make, it was raised to 94 percent and an excess profit tax was introduced. (Today, by contrast, the top rate is just 37 percent.) In that same spirit, the current moment of crisis, with its special sensitivity to inequalities and the massive and unwarranted affluence of the rich, calls for a decisive and radical reversal in the distribution of wealth.

To get a sense of the fiscal potentials of a one-time emergency wealth tax to offset the costs of the pandemic, consider the following example. If the top 1 percent were kept to their share of wealth at the end of the 1980s (one quarter of all wealth)—that is, if their wealth increased at only the rate of the total increase in wealth since 1989—this would justify a one-time average tax on their current wealth of 23 percent or some $7.5 trillion (which might be phased in over a few years to accommodate the process of cashing in some locked-up wealth so as to pay the tax).

This would, because of the overall growth in inflation-adjusted wealth, still leave the average household in the top 1 percent with more than triple the wealth they had in 1989 and the average wealth of someone in that top category some eighty-nine times the average wealth of those in the bottom 90 percent (if an emergency one-time wealth tax of just 1 percent were levied on the rest of the top 10 percent, which would generate another $4 trillion).

To put this in perspective, the latest government estimates ⁷ suggest a “pandemic deficit” of some $6 trillion (i.e., the $4 trillion increase projected in the fiscal deficits in 2020 and 2021 over the prepandemic year 2019 plus an assumption of continued emergency spending while tax revenues lag). Or to use another comparison, Biden’s largest proposed budgetary item, the Green New Deal, is costed at $7 trillion over seven years. These are only illustrative, but they point to a significant one-time emergency wealth tax going a long way to overcoming the fiscal space lost in coping with the pandemic or for addressing essential programs.

No less important is the organizing significance of placing such an emergency tax on the public agenda. It would keep the inequalities in U.S. capitalism in the public eye and those at the top of the pyramid on the defensive. It would also position the left regarding future debates over “getting the fiscal deficit in order”; if we were in the midst of exposing wealth inequalities and discussing how far to go with a new tax on wealth, elites might be in a bit of a bind arguing that the deficit is “unaffordable,” and there is “nothing to do” but cut social programs and wages. And as argued earlier (see also Mat Bruenig’s convincing case ⁸ in Jacobin), highlighting the class distribution of wealth shifts the understanding of a “Black–White wealth gap” into a “race-inflected class gap.”

There is, however, a limit to relying only on a wealth tax. As with simply printing money we cannot pretend that just taxing the wealth of the richest households will provide all the revenue we need. Middle income workers will also have to see their taxes raised. First, because there isn’t enough superrich to finance all our expectations on an on-going basis. Second, because environmental pressures demand limits on the growth of private consumption, and taxes are a mechanism for limiting individual spending and channeling the funds toward collective services that are kinder to the environment, like education, healthcare, and public spaces.

Third, winning workers over to accepting a greater weight to public (collective) consumption is not just an environmental concern but a socialist one. Public consumption can further economic equality and involves a cultural change that speaks not so much to consuming less, but to consuming differently and, one would hope, better. Think, for example, of taxes securing better healthcare, water supplies, schools, libraries, public transit, parks, recreation centers, cultural activities, an end to poverty, and that myriad of universal services that would make it easier to look to more time off work as productivity increases.

Winning the working class to high taxes will not be easy, but it will be impossible without an especially high tax on the rich. Wealth taxes, such as an emergency one-time wealth tax, are therefore a condition of gaining broad acceptance for the taxes needed to pay for what we want from governments. Wealth taxes are doubly egalitarian: They take more from the rich (from each according to ability to pay) and, if distributed properly (to each according to need), the pool of taxes collected from both workers and the rich will disproportionately benefit the working class.

Conversion

The environmentalist movement has impressively raised environmental consciousness, and the Green New Deal has effectively placed the issue of massive environment-oriented infrastructural investments on the public agenda. Yet the call for a “just transition” for those threatened with job loss generally has limited resonance among workers. Without the power to deliver on the promises, the demands come across as slogans rather than actual possibilities. And without linking the call for a fair transition to concrete struggles in specific workplaces and communities, the promise of a just transition is too vague to engage workers.

The dilemma we face is that, on one hand, the urgency of the environmental crisis tends to push us to develop a mass base as quickly as possible. On the other hand, emphasizing that environmental advance will mean introducing comprehensive planning and taking on the property rights of corporations (you can’t plan what you don’t control) is something that risks limiting the base in the short run because of its radicalism and would, in any case, not be won except over an extended period of time. There is no short cut here; there is no way forward other than telling the truth, winning workers over to its implications, and developing a movement able to replace capitalism.

Directly related, popular demands are often too vague to engage workers; missing are concrete links to everyday struggles: the loss of jobs, the loss of the community’s productive capacities, and addressing the potential of alternative production for social use (see the exemplary work of Green Jobs Oshawa ⁹ ). Without such engagement, it is near impossible to overcome the impact of accumulated defeats over decades that have not only lowered expectations of what can be achieved but even erased just thinking about alternatives.

The significance of a strategic emphasis on “conversion” ¹⁰ is that it links environmental issues to retaining and developing the productive capacities we will need for the environmentally sensitive transformation of everything related to how we work, travel, live, and play. It shifts the focus from the trap of looking to private corporations competing for global profits, to inward development, where possible, and applying our skills and resources to planning for social use. And it is only in engaging in struggles and campaigns that are both immediately concrete and national (and international) in scope, that it becomes possible to develop confidence in genuine possibilities.

The political demands this raises require new capacities largely undeveloped in the state’s historical record of coping with administration of a capitalist economy. Specific institutional proposals would include (a) the creation of a National Conversion Agency to monitor closures and the rundown of investment to the aim of placing productive facilities that corporations no longer find profitable enough into public ownership and retooling them for social use; (b) identification of markets for environmentally-friendly products and service through government procurement of the products; (c) the creation of decentralized (regional) environment-techno hubs staffed by hundreds of young engineers exploring unmet community needs and mobilizing or developing the capabilities of addressing them; and (d) establishment of elected community conversion boards to oversee the local economic transformations.

This brings to the fore again the question of financing. One dimension of a response is a levy on financial institutions for a fund to address environmental restructuring. Having bailed finance out in desperate times, such a levy is a reasonable quid pro quo. Yet if capital—especially highly mobile finance capital—is left with the right to move whenever it is unhappy, it also retains the blackmailing power to undermine democratically determined goals. Capital controls are, therefore, both a defense of basic democratic principles and a practical necessity.

Taking the questions of democratic participation and engagement seriously would mean mobilizing workers in their community or through their collective organizations. Labor councils would be encouraged to actively participate on the community environmental boards, and locals would be called on to establish conversion committees in workplaces, supported by research and funds from the national unions. These workplace committees would monitor the productive state of their workplaces, address what they were producing and what products they might produce, act as early-warning whistleblowers to check corporate environmental failures and inadequate investment plans, and use the mandate of the newly constituted National Conversion Agency to disrupt production when the social interest is at stake.

Unionization

Protests may surface via all kinds of struggles—student movements, fights for gender equality, antiracist demands, immigrant rights, and so on—but as Andre Gorz famously noted (see Leo Panitch’s discussion of Gorz ¹¹ ), the trade-union movement still carries, in spite of its weaknesses, “a particular responsibility; on it will largely depend the success or failure of all the other elements in this social movement.”

The “card check” has been the main legislative change emphasized by unions: if a majority of workers sign up for the union, it must be automatically (legally) recognized. More radical steps would include banning any corporate attempt to influence workers’ decisions on unionization; banning, as well, the use of scabs to undermine workers on strike, a particularly critical measure in first contracts when unions have not yet had a chance to consolidate a solid membership base; and, given the general imbalance in employer–worker power, removing the prohibition against worker refusals to handle or work on goods shipped from a struck plant (“hot cargo”).

The present moment could not be more favorable for pushing Biden and the Democratic Party to defend unionization and prioritize legislating the card check. The link between rising inequality and the decline in union density has been well documented, and various social movements have indirectly laid vital ground for unionization. This was the case with Occupy, which highlighted popular anger over how extreme income inequality had become. This was soon followed by the fight-for-fifteen, revealing widespread support for lower-paid workers.

That struggle was endorsed by unions, who insisted that even if the demand was met through legislation, unionization remained essential: to extend the monetary improvements to workplace rights and to block employers from recouping by other means what the law forced them to do regarding wages. The pandemic qualitatively increased the potential support for unionization to a new level, as empathy for frontline workers grew on matters of both pay for their special risks and the failures of employers to do everything possible to provide proper equipment and the safest possible work environment.

There is skepticism on whether Biden will come through on the card check, which he had also endorsed as part of the Obama-Biden ticket but then reneged on. But there is also a question about the extent to which higher union density, in itself, would result in greater class-consciousness or even effective unions. Canada currently has more than double the union density of the United States, yet the labor energy is greater in the United States. Sixty years ago, the share of the U.S. workforce in unions was almost triple its roughly 10 percent today. Yet unions weren’t able to block or even significantly moderate the subsequent context in which they operated (slower growth, more mobile capital, more international competition, more aggressive corporations, hostile governments).

The crisis in American unions lies in their general failure to effectively come to grips with those changes. What they now confront is not just the need to add members but also the need for transforming union structures and aspirations to the end of overturning the incapacitating context they confront. This does not negate the importance of legislation sympathetic to unionization—it is absolutely crucial—but it poses the hope that a legislative breakthrough (as opposed to various minor reforms) might be seized on by unions as a once-in-a-union-lifetime chance to reverse labor’s death by a thousand cuts.

In the 1930s, the United Mineworkers, fearing that if Big Steel weren’t unionized the miners would be isolated, sent some hundred organizers out to organize steelworkers into their own union. It is that kind of foresight and boldness that needs to surface once again. Only a virtual crusade could lead to the kind of dramatic leap forward essential to making unions into a confident and leading social force. Only through the ferment of an explosion in unionization might we see a reordering of union priorities and structures, the engagement of rank-and-file members in the struggle for unionization, and the emergence of new leaders and new blood. And if this leads unions to penetrate Amazon warehouses and Walmart distribution centers with all their disruptive power and bring workers as far apart as personal care workers and Google programmers into the organized working class, then the class as a whole will be strengthened.

It is fundamental that, if union leaderships do come to enthusiastically embrace the spread of unions, they do not ignore their own members. If they don’t first get their own members on their side, the shift in resources and attention outward will be resented and undermined. If leaderships ignore the working conditions of their own members, especially in regard to workplace health and safety (which has gained such prominence since the pandemic) and unrelentless speedup, the drive to increased unionization will falter. Leadership must get and retain support from their members for moving on to organize other workers, with the added benefit that such high-profile struggles uniquely demonstrate to nonunion workers that unionization really matters.

Buoyed by new enthusiasm and power, a revived labor movement could lead an upsurge against the social rot ¹² at the heart of the American empire: appalling inequality, permanent working-class insecurity, denial of the most basic needs like universal health coverage, stunted lives, punishing austerity, decaying infrastructure, and, finally, the contrast between the liberating promise of technology and the confining reality of daily life. And it is that kind of example that can inspire young people—Black, White, Hispanic, Asian—to view labor struggle, once again, as where the action is. From there, unions could ambitiously move on to confront and reverse the economic context that underpinned their years of defeat: “free” capital movements, corporate driven “free trade,” the prioritization of “competitiveness” over all else, and the distancing of life below from decisions made above.

From a “Class-Focused” to a “Class-Rooted” Politics

Capitalism has, by and large, been successful in making the kind of working class it needs: one that is fragmented, particularist, employer-dependent, pressured by its circumstances to be oriented to the short-term, and too overwhelmed to seriously contemplate another world. The challenge confronting the left is whether it can take advantage of the spaces capitalism has not completely conquered and the contradictions of life under capitalism that have blocked the full integration of working people, to remake the working class into one that has the interest, will, confidence, and capacity to lead a challenge to capitalism.

This is primarily an organizational task. Policies matter, of course—there is no organizing without fighting for reforms—but the choice of policies to focus on, and the forms the struggle for those reforms takes, must be especially attuned to their potentials for organizational advance. The above emphasis on a wealth tax, for example, is based on keeping inequality in the forefront, and thus creating fertile ground for mobilizing anger and raising more fundamental questions. The emphasis on conversion points to the necessity of radical economic and state transformations if we are to address our most critical needs. As well, it emphasizes the centrality of engaging workers in ways that can develop their understandings and capacities. The emphasis on unionization is closest to a policy directly addressing working-class power, but it too locates policy primarily in terms of it serving as a catalyst for transforming unions, not just “growing” them, and so leads on to expanding future strategic options.

For the socialist left (See Searching for Socialism ¹³ and The Socialist Challenge Today ¹⁴ ), in a context in which the only viable option for the time being seems to be to operate within existing political parties, the foremost task is how to maneuver through the institutional morass these parties inhabit and use the openings to support the most promising workplace and community struggles; restore a degree of historical memory to the working class; and contribute, through campaigns and discussions of lessons learned, to developing the individual and collective class capacities to analyze, organize, and act.

Out of this comes the most difficult undertaking: the project—cultural as well as organizational and political—of creating a new politics that, as Andrew Murray so clearly puts it, ¹⁵ is not only “class-focused” but is also “class rooted.” That is, the invention of a left agenda that is not just engaged in periodic working-class struggles but is also genuinely embedded in workers’ daily lives and committed to nurturing the best of the working class’s historic potentials.