Socialism is cool, right? Because we want socialism as soon as possible, K-State YDSA sent a contingent to YDSA WinterCon, a gathering of 400-ish young socialists from across the country, to train our people on the best ways to do socialism. YDSA has two annual in-person meetings. The first is convention, which I wrote an article about back in October. At the convention, we decide on legislation that will lead the org in the next year. At the conference, those priorities are expanded into programming to help the chapter implement those goals.
Convention is where the political differences of the organization are discussed. For the conference, those differences are smoothed over because one sect (whoever has control of the NCC) is running all the programming. This year was no different. The main tactical strategy proposed had to do with May Day 2028. For those unaware, several large unions in America are aligning their contract expiration dates for May 1, 2008, so that they can go on strike at the same time. This seems great! What an interesting way of getting around American labor law, which prohibits general strikes. However, this is not a socialist project, so how are we going to turn the politically neutral (pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist) unions into a stepping stone towards socialism?
The answer proposed to this is salting. Salting is getting a job in a key industry with the purpose of unionizing that job. I, and almost everyone I talked to about this, had reservations about this. I think this stems from a misunderstanding about what the working class is. This manifests in a further misunderstanding of what a key industry might be, whether the Y/DSA can organize any industry, and if this will get us where we want to go (socialism).
The working class is anyone who lives off wages gained through their own labor. This is most people in the world. This is not only the Amazon driver, but also the healthcare workers and teachers, who seem to be the only working-class jobs anyone at the conference can think of. It also includes myself, who has worked as a cashier, salesperson, prep cook, and lifeguard, as well in my current position at two museums. All those jobs were working-class jobs, yet no one mentioned retail work at the conference, despite it being un-unionized. In fact, no one mentioned a job they had worked, unless they had unionized it. It seems that unionizing your workplace is a fun hobby for some of these people, another example of slumming it, and not a thing people do because they are fed up with their working conditions.
If the goal of a general strike is to stop the country, we need to unionize with the goal to stop ALL business in this country. Remember how pissed people were when they couldn’t go to restaurants or shopping during COVID? Those industries seemed pretty essential at that time, yet in our picture of the socialist general strike, they are absent. Instead, we are talking about half a dozen other industries, including logistics, healthcare, and education.
What actually holds these “key industries” together? Delivery drivers, nurses, and teachers, while essential to the operation of society like all jobs, also happen to be the site of current union struggles or are mostly unionized. By choosing these industries, YDSA shows its hand. It wants to piggyback on someone else’s work instead of doing its own.
Industries that are not currently being unionized, upon further inspection, are working class and ready for unionization. Food service and retail are some of the biggest industries in the country and yet very few people are interested in unionizing them. But the people who work these jobs deserve better! Having benefits or a salary is not standard in these industries. They are both physically and emotionally draining because you have to be on your feet all day and pretend like you like it as well. Y/DSA has not considered what it would look like to build a union from the ground up, in our new political climate. I raised this possibility and was shot down with “it would be too hard.” But what is harder? Building our own system? Or trying to change the old, tired, coopted institutions that have shown time and time again that they do not want us?
People also kept referring to the working class in the third person, which gave the distinct impression that the speakers were not working class themselves. This might not be the case. I sincerely doubt that most of the YDSA leadership are actually small business owners, though I am wary of everyone who attends a private university. If so, they need to start acting like it. Being working class is not about which job you have, how hard that job is, or how much you get paid. It’s about your relationship to the means of production. Once we acknowledge that the working class encompasses almost everyone, then we can also realize that YDSA members can organize any workplace they are in, not just “strategic” industries. In fact, members are uniquely bad at organizing these industries for several reasons.
For one, it is unlikely that they will be hired as they are overqualified for these jobs. That’s why salting proponents claim “we know there won’t be social mobility for us anyway,” before encouraging privileged college students to unionize the shop floor at Amazon warehouses. For another, workers are unlikely to trust people they do not see as one of them, and you are going to need a lot of trust to unionize any workplace. ANY whiff of an idea that someone is coming in from on high and condescending to people will be suspicious. Thirdly, I don’t want to. I went to college so that I wouldn’t have to work low wage high effort jobs. Is this a moral failing on my part? I don’t think so, but if you want to see it that way, sure. I’m not going to change my career path for someone else’s flawed plan. This is not to say I am not committed to socialism, but no one has proven that this will get us anywhere close to socialism. I think many comrades feel the same way.
I could be convinced, of course. I would like to see some numbers. I want to know how many Y/DSA members are in the union and are actively organizing. Who are these people? How are we helping them? How many union locals can be traced back to the efforts of DSA chapters? Is this a strategy that has ever been attempted in literally any other time or place? No one has presented me with any examples of this succeeding in any way, so I am incredibly skeptical. It’s strategies like this that remind me that Y/DSA is an organization of amateurs. We all have a common goal and are passionate about it, but there is no instruction manual for how to get there. However, we need to remember that many people have walked a similar road. We do not need to reinvent the wheel in this case. We only need to adapt it to our conditions. This strategy seems divorced from the material reality of the working class.
This may be because the Y/DSA itself is divorced from the working class. As a self-selecting organization, it attracted a more educated, wealthier, and whiter membership than the general population. We are beginning to change this approach, especially in the YDSA but we are only just beginning. YDSA is aware of this problem and is trying to correct it, but they are starting from faulty premises by thinking that we are totally separate. Yes, we are divided, but our interests are the same as the rest of our class. Because capitalism finds it useful to divide us, it is hard to organically cross wealth lines, but it can be done. The Y/DSA should be the place where that happens.
Instead of salting, the Y/DSA should do several things simultaneously. First, we should target recruitment to the lower classes to diversify our base. This is already happening as the org grows, but every chapter should be concerned about this. A proposal from a member at the conference was that we need to create and support more high school chapters, which I support whole-heartedly. Second, YDSA members should prepare to unionize whatever field they go into. Thirdly, we should acknowledge that the old methods of class power– the unions– are not working as well as they used to. We will not return to the fifties. We have to adapt, whether that is illegal unions, or tenants’ unions, or whatever we find that works to tie communities ripped apart by capitalism closer together.
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