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- [00:01]
Matt
Yeah, well, look, I wish she'd waited, too. I wish she waited a lot longer, but she didn't. And we are recording this within days of the passing of Jane McAlevy after hearing about her entering hospice care, some of us took up books we'd read before and some books we hadn't read yet by this woman who's been hugely influential, I think, on the American left,
- [00:28]
Nathan
a sustained influence that's actually quite impressive.
- [00:30]
Matt
Yeah. Yeah.
- [00:31]
Nathan
In terms of its breadth on the, I think, contemporary American left, just a wildly impressive woman.
- [00:35]
Matt
And so she deserves a memorial podcast from us at the very, very excruciatingly leaps. So we picked up her memoir. We also picked up North Shortcuts and want to talk about it with you because they're worth reflecting now that there's not going to be any more. And I think the best way to do it is to take her intellectual contribution seriously, to talk about the concepts that were at the heart of what she took her major innovation or intervention to be. And I think I've boiled them down to three. There are concepts embedded in those three, but there are three buckets, and true to form, they're rather straightforward. And they are, on the one hand, organizing, which she opposes to mobilizing, which she opposes to advocacy, organizing, the concept of organizing. The second is her concept of power. Maybe we'll have something to say about how Marxist that is, but she has a key concept, and she calls it power. And the third is structure. Sometimes she refers to structure tests, but she's interested in the way in which unions, workplaces, whole societies are structured. And it is in an analysis of those structures that unions in particular can come to beneficial and ultimately winning strategies. What do you think about that as a. As a little glossary of her terms?
- [02:12]
Nathan
I think that that is very useful. I think we can perhaps go about this episode slightly anachronistically or what have you, because these key concepts, which are articulated in her book no Shortcuts and are the component lessons in the Organizing for Power series that she put on originally, I believe, as an adjacent DSA program and now is part of the Rosa Luxembourg Institute. When you take those classes, as at least Matthew and I have, like you were saying, these are distributed to you and taught to you as valuable skills, for sure, but also as proven, essentially correct methods. There are, in other words, when you take the class, there are right and wrong answers to how one goes about engaging in a successful organizing campaign in the toolkit that you would use. So, like you were saying, these aren't Suggestions. She believes that these are best practices. The way she arrives at them is through a relatively tumultuous course in the labor movement, which is something I think we should talk about afterwards. A. Because the genesis in lineages of some of these ideas, I think are going to be interesting to us and specifically how related they are to the question of communism in the labor movement. But also because she herself is slightly coy on the question of where they come.
- [03:48]
Matt
Where they come. But you think I want to actually, like, just expand upon something you just said because you think they're canonical. So you refer to a class and that it's DSA adjacent, and then it's associated with the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. And these are the sorts of things that organizers today, people on the left today, they take for granted. This is part of the Bible of the contemporary left. Is that right? Are we talking about a canonical figure and not a polemical figure?
- [04:07]
Nathan
I think it's. I mean, there are critics, and we will. I'm sure we will end up probably not citing these critics by name, but the nature of their criticisms will come organically out of this conversation. For some of the loose criticisms I would share, but I would absolutely say that it's as close, as damn near close to canonical as you as a figure as exists right now in the contemporary American left.
- [04:30]
Ethan
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think a lot of these concepts have become part of the everyday vocabulary and the way to self evaluate as an organizer in the labor movement or in the left more broadly. And I think one of the things that she does really well, we should probably start diving into these concepts, but just as an overview of them in general, she's really explicit that she is distilling past lessons that were handed down to her from mentors in many cases. Or she often cites the heyday of American labor and the cio. And so she's distilling, distilling kind of forgotten lessons for today's labor movement and more broadly, whether or not she does this explicitly, she suggests that the labor movement is only one in a series of social movement organizations that need to build power. These are inherited lessons from mentors. But also, we should point out, I think probably every listener knows this, but she was a heroic, accomplished organizer herself. And so she has her own. In no shortcuts, she goes through case studies she wasn't involved in. But part of what made the memoir, which is called Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, so gripping is that you can see how those lessons are also derived from her own experiences and her own really hard nosed look at the ultimate failures of some of those projects.
- [05:51]
Nathan
I also agree that we should. Yeah, let's get down and look at the concepts here in a second. But just a quick direct point that I wanted to Matt is correct in saying that Jane, while she does formulate these in, let's say, her own terms in her own language or she comes up with the best pet concepts to describe these phenomena, she's very clear that she is inheriting lessons from a previously robust era of trade union organizing and that she's sort of restoring them. But that story about why these were again, like you're saying, sort of common sense or they were just, yeah, they were the common sense tactics of the labor movement in a certain phase and in certain institutions and now we're restoring them back to that place. The story of how that disappears is one that is a very important political story and that gets tied into our
- [06:39]
Matt
first concept because our first concept is organizing. And it's inextricable from the narrative that you just mentioned. So her narrative is pretty simple. It's that back in the good old 30s, in the middle 30s when the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations is founded, it distinguishes itself, that is the CIO distinguishes itself from the afl, the American Federation of Labor, by virtue of its willingness to organize all employees who are themselves organized as employees by the same employer, but not to divide workers on the basis of skill or really anything else, certainly not on the basis of race. So she's taking those tactics which she thinks were destroyed by, by McCarthyism and replaced, and this is the key here, replaced by a kind of social movement, new left Saul Alinsky inspired mobilizing strategy for the labor movement. And you know, and therefore I would argue that she herself would conceive of her position as polemical vis a vis the labor movement. So while the spaces that, you know, the three of us run in, filled with, you know, young hopefuls out of the Sanders campaign or perhaps from an earlier moment in the American left, while they are all Jane fans, I think that if you polled most large union rank and file or large union leadership, you wouldn't find Jane on there on their at the top of the reading list.
- [08:05]
Ethan
Well, and part of what she says that might be antithetical or at least deviate from business as usual in the unions is a subset of organizing, which is she refers to it as whole worker organizing. And this concept is extremely important to her. And the idea behind this is that it isn't just that organizing can't solely be Concerned with a narrow set of interests that can be neatly relegated to the workplace. That workers also are concerned with clean drinking water in their communities, their kids getting to school. That a lot of the power that's built. And whether or not she delineates this completely clearly or not, but she obviously believes that the reason that the labor movement is also part of other social movements is that, for example, just classically talking about wealth inequality and fighting for higher wages simply doesn't. That can't be the primary or the sole concern of organizing. And that organizers, many of the organic leaders, are also organic leaders in their communities. And that kind of bifurcating people into the people who clock in at work and the people outside of work. And it doesn't split that neatly. And that doesn't do any service to organizers or organizations.
- [09:24]
Matt
Yeah, no, that's right. In fact, let's actually make explicit what she means by organizing as opposed to mobilizing. I think the key difference, and correct me if you have a different view, is that organizing is primarily oriented to the unorganized. That its endeavor is to take people who are not predisposed to join a union, who are more prone to sit on their grievances or deal with those grievances individually than they are to organize in order to take power in their workplace and to change their lives and to convince them that in fact a union is in their best interests. That kind of strategy lends itself to building organizations that have more permanence as the ebb and flow of the political moments wash over history. And that mobilizing is primarily oriented to getting people who are already predisposed to social, maybe to unionism, maybe to the left. Maybe they've read Marx. God knows if they've, if they're a graduate student, they've pretended to read Marx. And that's the worst kind and most easily mobilized force. Maybe the point is that orientation toward the self selecting leftist ultimately undercuts the endeavor strategically. And she is primarily interested in strategy strategically in order to get gains that are not lasting and that in fact have a horizon of possibility, those demands much lower than an organizing strategy.
- [10:54]
Nathan
Yeah, I think the key word there is permanence. What you see what mobilization does is it suggests that there is a time and a place for everything. Whereas the organizing model is about permanently embedding and transforming people's political conceptions of themselves through types of collective organizations or collective struggles. So that we aren't just, as the title of her book would say, raising expectations, but we're also raising skills that we're raising the capacities of the class to eventually, obviously we would hope to become self governing. And those are simply the kinds of things that, again, your point is correct, especially her memoir is very polemical against the existing labor unions. And I think this point is one that while she is clear on in terms of its sort of its stakes for successful organizing campaigns, she's less clear on in terms of its political character and how it needs to be politically combated. So on one hand, it is not just that the contemporary labor unions have a mobilizing approach while she has an organizing approach, it's that they are principally disinterested in the organizing approach. Jane's big problem that I think is really interesting in the book is that she has this. And she says that this is like a moment of clarity for her. Like this is a mistake that she made that she thought, hey, look, I've demonstrated that these techniques, this style of organizing, whole worker organizing, this has a demonstrated record of success. Therefore I'm going to keep getting a wonderful campaign sent my way, et cetera, et cetera, where in fact, the strategy of business unionism does not actually desire these types of unions. And the solution for that, while I agree that these techniques are extremely useful in all sorts of campaigns in all sorts of settings, I think we need to be a little bit more,
- [12:49]
Matt
A
- [12:50]
Nathan
little bit more explicit about how we politically combat an orientation.
- [12:54]
Matt
Does that get us to the concept of power? Have we gotten.
- [12:57]
Nathan
I think it gets us pretty close.
- [12:58]
Matt
That gets us close. Can we segue to the concept of power? So, because, I mean, look, it's all well and good to distinguish between mobilizing and organizing. And I think everyone, when presented with the distinction, finds it immediately intuitive and understands that the organizing strategy is obviously going to be more successful. Successful at doing what? Is an interesting question when the answer is building power. And she advocates that her concept of power is essential in strategizing because you have to make a power structure analysis of whatever organization you're trying to organize, let's say a firm with employees. You have to decide not only, you know, who the major players are within the firm, but also their own role within the community, right? How the landlords are connected to the donors, connected to the political parties, connected to the bosses, how there is a whole in society, a structure in which power asserts itself. Now, what's interesting to me about her concept of power is that it's. Well, first of all, it just rings of Foucault in a way that just bothers me, but it's not Foucaultian. Actually, actually it's, it's Fabelin. She's getting it from left wing, liberal, left liberal bourgeois sociology. So that's at least an orange flag. And the reason why I think that orange flag is serious is because I'm not entirely sure what the exercise of power, that is the maximal exercise of power by organized workers practically looks like. Or is it, I mean, would the firm survive as a firm if workers maximally asserted the kind of power that their structure analysis led them to disassemble? And if they were to successfully disassemble the power structure that they correctly analyze, what version of power, what organized version of power would replace it? Those are all questions that sort of flow right out of that.
- [14:54]
Ethan
Yeah, I think, I think that's right. And I think we should be moving towards kind of evaluating this and seeing where, where we might, where we might differ or where we as Marxists might see some kind of suspect silences here. But we might as well throw, because it's already been alluded to the, the third member of the triumvirate in there because we've been talking also about structure. And I think what Nathan said about permanence is especially applicable when it comes to structure, when it comes to building organizations that can be lasting, that can be replicable, and that can be constructed to grow. And part of building these structures is also properly evaluating and formalizing the structures that exist. When she talks about leader identification, she also takes great pains to make a distinction between finding the actual organic leader and say, the person who might have the most immediate and enthusiasm about being part of a union or something like that. The grad student who's pretended to read Marx might not be the one who can actually persuade very reticent co workers. And so it's about identifying and mapping the structures that exist and then formalizing those in a way that can, in a way that they can grow and that really organization building and organizations that function from the bottom up, as she's very insistent on saying, that's the way to wield power. Now, whether or not, whether or not her insistence that these concepts all apply outside of the workplace is fully fleshed out in her own analysis.
- [16:30]
Matt
Well, let me give you an example. So I mean, the power that one asserts in, you know, over one's co workers, if one is the most trusted nurse on that shift, you know, I mean, you know, you want the nurse that other nurses come to for advice, you want the nurse who's absolutely great at their job, who's commanded, in fact, trust. And trust is a form of power. But that's different from the kind of power that say, the big donors have over the Democratic Party. You know, that's not a relationship of trust. The Disney donors, you know, are not creating trust in the Democratic Party. They're asserting power in a different way. And the power that the boss has over the workers is different again than the, than the previous two examples. And so I think part of the reason why power isn't to be found in capital is that it's too blousy of a concept to be ultimately useful. Even if her recommendations are salubrious.
- [17:36]
Nathan
Jane is very concerned with a specific type of struggle, a sort of zero sum struggle. It's not for nothing that her third book is called a collective bargain. She takes as given situations in which conflicts between two institutional actors exist. And therefore what she's trying to do is using the trade union as her specific site, figure out ways in which you can generate leverage and collective strength in order undergoing these specific structure tests to essentially force employers to yield to demands to give workers better quality of life and more say, in the workplace and et cetera. So I mean, in that sense it is about almost. It almost hearkens back to the sort of classic Bolshevik sense where the unions are the schools of revolution, where we teach people about the notion of collective strength and struggle and we instill in them the idea that together through organizations, they have greater capacities than when they are disunited and that the employer is specifically interested in disuniting them. That it is an antagonistic class force that will only yield demands when it is shown to have superior, when the working class is shown to wield superior strength. Right? On the other hand, I am struck by this notion. I agree that, okay, perhaps power is a blousy concept. Not to speak for him, but if our comrade and former co host Jason, or on the podcast, he would, this would be at the point in which his definition of the party, which we will get to in a bit, would come in handy. Where he would say a party is there's only one thing that defines a party, that is it contests for power. So that again introduces this notion of, okay, we are talking about power in the workplace. We are talking about workers who have economic power, or they can perhaps generate power by virtue of their position in the economic structure, but it's also a social power. And Jane hints at this when she hints at the various other struggles that are included sort of under the umbrella of whole worker organizing and community struggles. But I think one of the things that's missing is how that notion of social power that the class ultimately has to contest for, what does that look like? What is the ultimate objective in this. Yeah. What does the seizure of power look like at the end of this road? And what kind of mechanisms would be necessary to achieve it? Now, to her, I mean, I take it that she is actually disinterested in that question in a practical sense, in which she's like, I am concerned to create strong institutions of working class power in the form of trade unions. And insofar as I'm able to do that, I'm obviously contributing to some, contributing to the good cause. But I think we should perhaps take a moment and ask whether or not, I mean, typically the concept that we call the whole worker, the thing that organizes you when you're in your workplace is your trade union. And she's very big on churches. There are other social institutions, but historically there is another institutional mechanism that was meant to bridge this particular dilemma of what actually allows the transition to working class power to take a social form and not just.
- [20:59]
Matt
That's right, corporate form. It was called the Illuminati. No, it's called the party. Obviously, she doesn't talk about the party. And that may be our transition. Now that we have. Now we've gotten all the way through our glossary. Now that we've talked about power, we've talked about organizing, and we've talked about her concept of structure. We've also, I think, said enough. And I want to. Before we, before we say too much more, I just want to underline that the core strategic insights for winning vis a vis the mobilizing and advocacy strategies, I take them to be all correct. And I think everyone on the podcast believes that the organizing, I'm sorry, the mobilizing and advocacy strategies for the labor union are self discrediting.
- [21:46]
Nathan
Yeah. And I want to say the very concrete notion when she talks about charting and the structure analysis within sort of like, let's say in the trade units, also say wings and units of the union, but in a political organization could easily be, you know, chapters or, you know, regions and et cetera. I take that all to be extremely helpful. I mean, concretely, the strategic. I don't know if I would even call it that. The strategy tactical toolkit that she deploys is. Is excellent. Yeah. It's just a question of how necessary is it to wed it to a specific kind of political horizon. And if we. Is it actually possible to extract these lessons, you know, and compile them in this way without recourse at some point to the conceptual repertoire of Marxism or communism.
- [22:40]
Matt
That's right. In fact, there's a kind of political gap here. And it's a gap that you can read in one of two ways. Because when I was reading this, especially, you know, right after her genuinely untimely death, I was reading very charitably, and I kept thinking to myself that no shortcuts is just a kind of gateway drug for people who don't know that they're Communists yet. Because once they understand the full implications of what it means to organize rather than mobilize, they will then understand that the labor movement must have a political wing. In fact, at one moment, she says that after the successful Chicago Teachers Union strike, that the leader of that organization, you know, could have been mayor of the city. Now, she doesn't say anything else about it. Right. She doesn't say anything how. Anything about how the working class might organize itself politically in order to contest for power at the level of the state, but perhaps even, you know, militant military strategy. She doesn't. There's no Liebknecht. There's no, you know, there's no liebknecht in Jane McAlevy. But I think that there's nothing in Jane McAlevy that prevents us from going there if there is where we want to go.
- [23:52]
Ethan
Yeah. I think what's really interesting in looking at her as this. This amazing once in a generation figure who accomplished so much, but who also didn't make that kind of leap, or who. That was kind of a. We could say, a blind spot or just a lack of concern for her. What's interesting is that she never addresses it, despite talking very favorably, as we've said, about the CIO and even by name, William Z. Foster, and talking about inheriting these lessons from explicit Communists who derived these strategies from the fact that they were Communists who understood the world and the structures of power in that way. But then in her memoir, she talks about working with organizers, and it would be very rare she explicitly says that she met a communist or a Marxist that she found worthwhile to work with as an organizer. So rare that it was worth noting when that did happen. Now, it's interesting that that's the case where there's this span of time that just kind of isn't addressed. And I think the reason for that is the same reason that these lessons kind of needed to be excavated and redistilled by somebody like her. And it's the same reason that when we would walk into a left organization early in our time. There would be people two decades older than Jane McAlevy and people our age and nobody in between. There's just been this. This vacuum of the left. And I think that for somebody like her, who wants to be where the people are, who's a heroic organizer, that's the little mermaid. There we go. Who. Yeah, but who's a heroic organizer, kind of makes sense that this would be her blind spot. And part of the purpose of a robust left is to correct the blind spots of figures like this and to, you know, persuade. To be there to persuade somebody in the labor movement that actually the Communist party is the place to be. But there wasn't that.
- [25:56]
Matt
Maybe it's because I'm. I'm like, maybe just coming out of like reading far too much gay literature where the like just the suggestion is enough to get that overwhelming sense of solidarity and being where a pun will make me think that someone is ready to die for me. You know, maybe it comes out of that. But like the moment I saw those. Yeah, those quotations from William Zebulon Foster, I thought to myself, this woman is a communist. And she's talking to me. She can see me. And she knows that when. She knows that when I read CIO strategy, what I really ought to read is communist strategy. And. But. But I take it I'm. I'm not.
- [26:36]
Nathan
I'm.
- [26:36]
Matt
Am I alone in reading it that way?
- [26:37]
Nathan
I certainly don't read it that way, although I wouldn't call. I don't think that she is, you know, so called anti communist. I take it that Matt is correct when the reason that she became. Why she's explicitly somewhat disinterested in questions that obviously she would pillory as theoretical, which we wouldn't want to use that as a slur or even suggest that that's exactly what we're talking about, but is because of this deterioration of the tradition. And so of course that's part of, you know, that's our own fault saying that in terms of the collective way of the communist left. And so, you know, I don't necessarily blame her. I'm not necessarily lobbying an accusation. I am simply making a wager, which is a deeply unpopular one. But I still think it turns out that to be the case that when we look at, yes, the communist CIO tactics that she is extracting from the experience, it's almost like, oh, these people had really great ideas. Incidentally, they happened to be communists, but we can take their tactics and then redeploy them, absent that sort of historical mission and political and ideological cement. That was the socialist project. And we can sort of reverse engineer it, or like you're saying, we can go about doing it with a wink and a nod if we say we're doing it at all. And I basically think that that's impossible, as everyone on the podcast knows, and probably many people who listen to it also know that I don't think it's incidental, that I think the tactical repertoire has to be, and in fact was only generated by virtue of the fact that it was wedded at the hip at its genesis to a project that's about the overturning of the capitalist order in an intensely political project that took a different organizational form than the one that Jane sets out for.
- [28:28]
Matt
Here's another way of putting the same. I don't want to call it a. What do I want to call it? Here's another way of articulating the same suspicion, which is to say. Which is to ask, is Jane an economist? An economist, you know, is she interested? Does she think that.
- [28:46]
Nathan
Is this a version of economism in the classical.
- [28:48]
Matt
Is this economism in the classical sense?
- [28:50]
Ethan
Exactly.
- [28:50]
Nathan
It is economism in the classical sense.
- [28:52]
Matt
Well, so I think that these.
- [28:53]
Nathan
Which, you know, is not the worst thing to be called, to be clear. No, but.
- [28:56]
Matt
No, no, no.
- [28:58]
Nathan
It is a distinct tendency of the workers movement, and I think it's definitely here.
- [29:02]
Matt
But the economistic Marxist that. That Lenin pitted himself against knew that what they were arguing about was political strategy. Whereas for, you know, in the parameters of this book, these are just things about which she is silent. And I think there's just a. There's just a different thing there. So, for example, if one were to, say, follow up on her references, if one were to pick up the Zebulon Foster, which I got to tell you is out of print, you can't order on Amazon. You got to go to a library. Okay. She doesn't. Archive.org she doesn't reprint it at the end of. At the end of the book or anything. She doesn't point you to where you could read this. But if you pick up a book like Strike Strategy, if you pick up a book like Foster's, you're gonna. I mean, it's gonna be really difficult for you not to notice the context in which these books were written. And once you do that, it will be difficult for you not to have renewed respect for the tradition and curiosity about their political commitments. She remains silent about them.
- [29:57]
Nathan
No complaints. I mean, it's not for nothing that the Organizing for Power series is taking place at the Rosa Luxembourg Institute.
- [30:02]
Matt
Well, precisely.
- [30:03]
Nathan
It started in the dsa. I understand there to be a natural affinity.
- [30:06]
Matt
That's right. And Rosa was wrong about value theory. So, I mean, God knows.
- [30:10]
Ethan
And I mean, I think, I think in terms of, you know, kind of the, the crudest possible variety of economism. She's obviously not that because she does constantly counterpose what she wants against just wealth inequality or against just the idea, just wage gains, that, that just wage gains will build the kind of power she's talking about, or that it should all take place solely inside even a labor union. But what is interesting is that she's extremely clear and precise about what she means by power up to a point after which she does still mean something, but it's never articulated what that is. And that's what's kind of puzzling. When she's talking about power in one's community or in one's union, she's talking about the way that the workday looks, the way that your community looks. She's talking about not just pitting a fight against the boss, but creating an organization that's so robust that you and your fellow workers are the ones who show up to negotiate on your behalf. What power looks like there is extremely concrete, but it does become important but unfleshed out when it gets beyond that. She talks about workers power more broadly, but it's never.
- [31:27]
Matt
She doesn't talk about capitalism, for example. I mean, and by the way, if you really are going to be serious, okay, here's the little. The devil on the shoulder.
- [31:36]
Ethan
I've turned.
- [31:37]
Matt
I've turned my head. If you really want to be serious about the difference between class struggle and class snuggle, then you have to answer about, you know, once you've gotten to a collective bargain, do you then snuggle is. I mean, at what point is the collective bargain so good, the win so great that it's snuggle time again? Because she never articulates a moment when, when the struggle is meant to, to be over. And, you know, I take it that, that at some point that's got to be true. Although she does mention capitalism in a different context. I was struck by this kind of brutal critique of Occupy Wall Street. I just gotta read this quotation. She says, this is about structure analysis. An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street. And I, you know, one feels, well, maybe just us, but one feels owed the actual way to bring down Wall street, which she does not say anything about.
- [32:47]
Nathan
Yeah. And again, Jane has a very specific set of concerns. And insofar as she teaches us things about that specific set of concerns, it is enormously valuable. And I would never want to chide her for being insufficiently communist or what, what have you. I just recognize that aporia and acknowledge it as such. Certainly it's a very common one. I wanted to follow up on what Matt was saying about. Yes, this notion of power, which is invoked a lot but occasionally can become very fuzzy. One way that she does this, very concretely, this returns to the notion of what we would call business unionism, which is not a set of misplaced or bad tactics, but is in fact a antagonistic political orientation of class collaboration, or what she would call acutely class snuggle, which is. She is very critical. The book is filled with asides, critical asides of Robert Michael's Law of Oligarchy, which, you know. And she's critical of it for the same reason we would be, because we actually want to believe that there can be huge democratic institutions, mass institutions of the class, that don't devolve and deform themselves once they reach a certain. Certain size. On the other hand, when she is called upon to explain why the Andy Stearns, who is sort of her primary antagonist, former head of seiu, why, you know, these. Why him and his apparatchiks are, you know, so unreceptive to Jane and the more radical leaning, she falls back on this notion of bureaucratic privileges, essentially that, well, you know, they're up at the top and they hoard their status and et cetera, which, you know, is something that sounds like would be part of, like, you're saying, a Veblen bureaucratic power structure analysis. But I think we have to pose it differently. We have to say that it's not just the hoarding of bureaucratic posts. It's that Andy Stern has a different political conception of what the world should look like and what sorts of social transformations we should and should not be building towards. And that is simply. It's an insufficient criticism to suggest that, oh, he's also bad at, like, you know, he's also, it turns out, he's bad at his job in general. But, you know, at the same time, Jane has a part at one point where she goes, you know, one of the first principles that makes a huge difference is what you think the union Is for.
- [35:05]
Ethan
Yeah.
- [35:05]
Nathan
And what you think the union for turns out to be a question. You know, to me, there's a further question. You know, I agree with that. But when we can also say, yeah, what is the union for? What is the social world that we are trying to build and how can we generate. She says we owe that horizon at
- [35:17]
Matt
one point, what is the union for? Colon, class struggle. And one thinks to oneself, okay, well, what happens if the struggle is victorious on the side of the workers? What then?
- [35:27]
Nathan
It is a classic syndicalist model, in a sense, not syndicalist in the sense that. Not explicitly. So I don't think she ever goes so far.
- [35:35]
Matt
Because she doesn't go there.
- [35:36]
Nathan
Because she doesn't go there. But it does seem to suggest, I mean, again, to what extent we are owed by our leaders a political vision that allows us to orient ourselves in concrete struggles by giving us a specific horizon. And to what extent that is outdated, and even to ask for it is ridiculous. You know, that's a debate that, you know, we can have and that listeners on the podcast may have a different view, but it does seem that it's syndicalist insofar as it's based on the idea that, look, in very concrete instances, we will take institutions as they exist, we will build them under the framework of our bourgeois society, and we will constantly introduce into the working class the notion that it has greater strength and greater resolve than it knows itself to have and that we can teach and allow those capacities to flourish, and eventually then the world will be better. Now, I don't know that it goes quite so neatly, but, you know, it's. It would be. It would be nice if it were true, obviously. But it's, you know, that insofar as that's the model, I think that's her. Her political.
- [36:36]
Matt
It would be nice if she, at the end of this, said, oh, you know, and socialism is the goal. I might not know what the contours of socialism are, but the socialists have got it right. Or said something about Marx, really, anything about Marx pro or anti, and something about capitalism, something about how we might organize society, such as Glass struggle is unnecessary. There is a. I mean, I dare I say it this way, I'm really turning toward that devil now. I mean, there's a capitalist realism that haunts this book, which is unfortunate because
- [37:10]
Nathan
we don't want all workers to have one big union. But we also think there's another way to be organized. I would say every person needs to be a member of a political Organization that used to be a primary, primary directive that we understood as a necessity in order to reconstruct the world. And I think that we also need
- [37:25]
Matt
the organizing the unemployed, of course, but that leaving, leaving all that aside and just on her own terms for a minute, she's interested in winning. Now, I think winning, by the way, is as blousy a concept as power. But even if you're concerned with the specifics of a, of a bargain, for example, some, some contract, well, maintaining that contract with the ebb and flow of left versus rightward swings of the pendulum. And we're recording this at a time when pendulum looks like it's moving. Well, in order to protect your wins, you're going to have to care about the political context under which those wins were gained. I mean, if McCarthyism, which was political and not that is, it wasn't a single boss, Walt Disney didn't invent McCarthyism. It was a state project at the level of the country as a whole, if that was able to defeat not only those specific organizations, but the whole strategy that underwrote all their gains, then don't you just have to be by her own lights now because she cares about winning? If you care about winning like she does, don't you have to care about the political context?
- [38:30]
Ethan
Well, I think that's totally right, but I think the alternate history that tugs at my heartstrings more, that I would have liked to see even more isn't just that she kind of formulated this, formulated the idea of power and the necessity of a party and this kind of organization better, but that when she was writing her book Raising Expectations, which by the way, people are going to probably implore most of us to read no Shortcuts, which is a great book, but it does come out of academia and it feels that way. It's got the structure of a dissertation. I would recommend Raising Expectations. All the lessons are there. It's very raw and inspiring and invigorating and written just in the wake of her and healthcare workers building something extremely robust and beautiful and it being destroyed by exactly what she hates about labor, and it ends with that. And the alternate history, I imagine, is that instead of her then going into academia, which makes sense, given the options at hand, and writing no Shortcuts, somebody who's this heroic of an organizer who gets burned by their very own labor movement, looks around and realizes that the strong, robust Communist party is the one with the right labor strategy and they go there instead of the academy.
- [39:50]
Matt
Yeah, one wishes that Jane McAlevy had had gone into the CPUSA.
- [39:55]
Ethan
A good CPUSA, thrown out.
- [39:56]
Matt
Well. And created a better one. Right. That. That she chosen an organization to reform and done that. I don't think that there's anything in Jane that will disabuse you of Marxist communism. I think that that's still true because
- [40:14]
Nathan
100% and it's extremely silent about. Yeah. And it's a very strong contribution. The organizing for our trainings I found to be very helpful. Shout out to Ethan Earle, by the way, the guy, the comrade who runs those extremely well.
- [40:31]
Matt
So, you know, I think that it's up to us to sort of append to her project a political vision. Certainly more theoretical analysis, you know, an understanding of capitalism, an understanding of the history of these movements. Absolutely. Let me just say one last thing. Just because I'm personally tied to academia, I gotta tell you. Well, while it might seem to many leftists, and this isn't wrong, but it might seem to many leftists that her entering the university was a kind of personal concession. I don't know of a way to do this better. That is years of practical experience. And as a result, you've distilled some insights you want to bring to as wide an audience as possible. And then you use the university as a launching point to get a. I think this is Oxford, right? To get a major book deal that is widely, widely disseminated and marketed, that allows you to do book promotion tours.
- [41:29]
Nathan
I mean, as an agitator, almost unparalleled. I mean, it is what we call an intervention that is enormously successful and hugely successful and she massive credit to that. More people need interventions.
- [41:40]
Matt
I do not think there's any evidence and no shortcuts. Even though it has the structure of dissertation. There are all these case studies after theoretical chapter. It's the way they kind of teach you how to write one of these things. Even so, you know, there are only worse ways to go to grad school, you know, and she definitely uses the university. She never intellectually subordinates herself.
- [42:03]
Ethan
Definitely not.
- [42:06]
Matt
Anyway, cheers. We're going to pour one out for our good comrade Jane, who. Who never dies. Because one can never kill an idea.
- [42:15]
Ethan
To Jane.