To Defeat the Far Right, We Must Build From the Bottom Up
The movement to defeat the Far Right must include immigrant workers and members of other oppressed groups, working through their own independent and durable mass organizations rooted in workplaces and neighborhoods.
We leave our home in the morning,
We kiss our children good-bye,
While we slave for the bosses,
Our children scream and cry.
And when we draw our money,
Our grocery bills to pay,
Not a cent to spend for clothing,
Not a cent to lay away…
It is for our little children,
That seem to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.
But understand, all workers,
Our union they do fear,
Let’s stand together, workers,
And have a union here.
—Ella May Wiggins, “Mill Mother’s Lament”
Around 2007, I worked at a large Target warehouse in Queens, New York. I clocked in at 7:30 p.m. and left at 5:30 a.m., if I was lucky. I was often unlucky, putting in 14 hours, stacking boxes on pallets, unstuffing boxes, climbing up ladders to reach the highest shelves. The company had made sure we used space efficiently, meaning all the available space from the lowest shelf cranny to the highest. The end result was a flurry of hands and feet moving at a dizzyingly fast pace in a swiftly orchestrated mobilization of labor. From the top of a ladder, as I stuffed Christmas ornaments ahead of the holiday shopping bonanza, I marveled at how we zigzagged across the floor—each of us performing the functions that ensured the store was always stocked, feedback fed into scanners we wielded like the batons of an unseen symphony of working-class conductors in khakis and red T-shirts. We made our labor appear to the would-be customer as a mere conjuring trick, making stacked shelves appear as if by sleight of hand.
The workforce was largely Latino, Black, and West African. The Latino and Black workers came from the Queens neighborhoods of Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Jamaica, and LeFrak City. The West Africans came from the Tremont and Kingsbridge sections of the Bronx. One of the lead workers was from the West African country of Togo. He commanded respect from everyone because he always took the extra overtime and helped other workers by slipping them pain pills or an energy drink when their bodies crashed. I remember him always wearing an orange lifting belt for back support as he zipped around the warehouse floor in a forklift.
At the time, I had another job at a lounge restaurant in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, not far from William Cullen Bryant, the public high school that I had graduated from a few years earlier, before enrolling at LaGuardia Community College, a two-year school made up of converted factory buildings that educates the city’s working-class majority who speak 97 languages. My cousin and I worked for a cleaning company that paid us off the books and misclassified us as independent contractors. On a typical day, I’d get on my knees and scrape gum from the floor with a spatula. My cousin would stand on a ladder dusting the spider webs off the light fixtures. While I lifted the chairs onto the tables inside, he dragged the bar mats outside, hosed all the bottle caps off, and laid the mats to dry against a parking-lot fence. The workforce was largely Latinos, with Colombians as waiters, Mexicans as dishwashers and busboys, and Dominicans as the clean-up crew. The owners and managers were Greek.
When I think about challenges the labor movement will face in 2024 and beyond, I return to these experiences to grapple with a question and issue an exhortation, bending the question of how we build mass, independent working-class organization in unions and communities into an exclamation point. My twin concerns—working-class organization and stopping the rise of a consolidated far-right movement—revolve on the hope of building a powerful multiracial working-class movement.
We need a multiracial working-class movement, which brings together all who toil in grinding poverty for a shitty paycheck while barely affording high rents, childcare, healthcare, and groceries, because the bosses have all the power, and they maintain it by keeping us divided by differences. They seek to instill fear in us because they want to immobilize us, lest we come together and topple their social hierarchies, replacing them with bonds of solidarity and equality. They confuse us by claiming systems of oppression are natural, like the air we breathe. We are pinched between state violence and obscene wealth accumulation at the top and misery and despair at the bottom.
There is money for the masters of war in Israel, money to fund death machines abroad and police repression on our streets. The belts tighten at state and federal levels when we demand money to repair the crumbling infrastructure of our schools, debt forgiveness for students saddled with crushing debt loads, stable housing for homeless people across the country, asylum for those fleeing violence, and reproductive health access.
In 2022, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion; the ruling fell hardest on those least likely to have resources to travel for care. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among wealthy nations. Meanwhile, billionaires are bankrolling anti-transgender advocacy groups, fueling violent attacks against transgender and gender non-conforming people.
To make their billionaire economy and society ours again, we need to take back the power.
The independent organizations necessary to wield power and defeat the Far Right must be rooted in neighborhoods and workplaces. The primary locus must be at the point of production on the job, beginning with the class power that flows from strategic locations in key industries. The second needs to be in mass neighborhood organizations that can act as tribunes for a working class drawing together to face off against the bosses and scab politicians like Donald Trump. We are poor because they are rich. We don’t have health care because they buy the politicians who make the laws. They put company men in elected office to rule us not only at work but in society. They hurt us from on high and on the shop floor. But their social distance from us doesn’t diminish our anguish; it only grows our yearning for a better tomorrow. That’s why we must stand together because an injury to one is an injury to all.
Our solidarity doesn’t take root and grow unless we rub elbows with each other in the same institutions we help co-create, from working-class sports clubs to labor unions.
On the job
While the percentage of workers belonging to a union continues to decline, last year’s uptick in union membership was driven by workers of color and young people. Black workers, whose 13% unionization rate is the highest of any major ethnic or racial group, accounted for the entire numerical increase, according to a January report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Millions of Black and Latino workers toil at nonunion jobs in the logistics sector, at Target, Walmart, and Amazon. Amazon has clustered its facilities in metropolitan areas, so workers can flit more easily in and out of delivery stations to reach customers more quickly. These tight supply chains were central to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful union drive at the company’s fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York in 2022, argued logistics experts Charmaine Chua and Spencer Cox in The Socialist Register last year.