A Review of Labor Power and Strategy

Intended as a “back pocket reference and discussion tool” to help a new generation of labor organizers run smart, strategic, effective campaigns, Labor Power and Strategy revolves around an interview with John Womack, the Harvard historian best known for his pathbreaking book, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1968). The interview, conducted by the book’s editors, long-time labor organizers Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, is a provocative read for union members, labor-friendly scholars and fellow travelers on the left.

In the interview, Womack develops a number of important points for those of us in and around the labor movement. The following captures both the tone of the conversation and Womack’s key point about strategic power:

Labor Power and Strategy by Peter Olney, Glenn Perušek, and John Womack Jr. (PM Press, 2023, 190 pages).

[T]his question of strategic technical and industrial positions is critical. No matter what
workers are mad about, unhappy about, indignant about, feel abused about, it doesn’t
matter until they can actually get real leverage over production, the leverage to make
their struggle effective. You don’t get this leverage just by feelings. You get it by
holding the power to cut off capitalist’s revenue. And without that material power your
struggle won’t get you very far for very long. (17)

For Womack, then, certain workers are better positioned than others to gain real power by disrupting capitalism in ways that will benefit all working people. This suggests, at least implicitly if not explicitly, that significant chunks of the labor movement’s organizational resources should be focused on those workers who occupy strategically key “choke points” in which industries or even entire economies are vulnerable. Disrupting these choke points poses a real threat to the capitalist class, which is precisely why workers who are in position to play this disruptive role are so important. This also indicates that we, including scholars in and around the labor movement, need to spend time determining where the key “choke points” or critical junctions are located within particular industries/economies—the places where things connect, and are weakest and most vulnerable to working-class disruption.

On the surface, much of this, at least for an older generation of labor organizers, may seem like common sense, even if Womack’s contribution lies not only in the reminder that we need to be strategic, but how to do so. Indeed, the labor movement has been making similar distinctions for decades in terms of where (and where not) to allocate human and financial resources. At the same time, however, Womack’s insistence on the importance of technically strategic power and the critical role played by those workers who are best located to mobilize that power, is not simple, straightforward, or uncontroversial. This becomes clear in the section of the book that follows the interview, which consists of ten critical responses from experienced labor leaders. Like the interview itself, these contributions are short, readable and tend to raise as many questions as they answer. They are also quite useful for thinking through the past, present and future of the labor movement.

Contributors to the volume had little problem with the abstract idea that some workers occupy more strategic locations than others. For the most part, they accepted this idea, in theory. What some pointed out, however, is that (a) in an incredibly complex and changing economy it is not always straightforward to determine which workers are “strategic” (and which are not) and (b) whether it is practical or even smart to focus resources so heavily on “strategic” workers. Bill Fletcher Jr, a long time labor leader and prolific author, speaks perhaps most forcefully to this latter point. For Fletcher, Womack’s discussion is a bit too abstract and removed from particular political contexts. We cannot decide which workers are—in an objective/abstract sense—best positioned to blunt the power of capital, and then simply target our efforts there. As Fletcher suggests, such a determination needs to be made in conjunction with a set of political questions and analysis tied to a particular place and time.

We must determine, for example, where “the people” are politically at any given moment, meet them there and work from where the political energy is—regardless of whether these workers and their struggles are directly tied to production or are strategically located at choke points. As Fletcher points out, unless we examine the broader political questions in conjunction with the strategic questions, we may find ourselves trying to organize strategic workers who are not politicized or are simply looking out for their own interests. Relatedly, a number of other contributors, including labor organizers and authors Jane McAlevey and Katy Fox-Hoddess, emphasize that without a broader movement, one capable of creating a favorable political climate, even strategic workers who are relatively militant will have trouble exerting power for very long—a point Womack no doubt agrees with. We cannot simply focus on strategic workers.

Likewise, as labor educator Jack Metzgar emphasizes, when workers are ready to move, ready to challenge authority, we have to think long and hard before suggesting they should hold off or give up because they are not deemed strategic; no organizer knows when efforts by nonstrategic workers might win something important or even spur future organizing. Womack no doubt recognizes this as well, though it would have been illuminating had he been pushed more on this question in the interview.

All of this makes for an interesting and productive conversation. In many ways, the book’s value for both organizers and scholars lies in Womack’s willingness to raise and think through a series of strategic questions that often receive too little attention—in part because organizers are so overwhelmed with putting out fires in the short term that they often do not have the time to think/act strategically; and in part because discussions about the relative strategic importance of some workers (over others) can be uncomfortable.

In the end, however, Womack’s point about “strategic” workers is not so much about which workers should be prioritized, or that workers in nonstrategic occupations do not deserve our attention (something he never suggests). What he is focusing our attention on is less about who is or is not the “most oppressed,” or even who is located at key choke points, than it is on building workers’ capacity to disrupt production, distribution, and the broader economy—to threaten capital’s profits. It is that disruptive capacity that deserves our attention and that we must work to build for workers.

To be sure, Womack is arguing, at least implicitly, that certain groups of workers “have” to be organized because they occupy such important sectors of the economy. At an earlier moment and time, General Motors and U.S. Steel had to be organized or the whole lot of labor would be in trouble. Likewise, in today’s economy, until the Walmarts and Amazons are organized it is going to be a tough haul for working people in general—even if it will take a broader movement to make such organizing successful.

Likewise, Womack is not suggesting that whole swaths of workers are not worth organizing. But he is suggesting that it is not as simple as going wherever the political energy takes us. The labor movement needs to think strategically because we have limited resources, because some of those paths could be dead-ends and (most importantly) because we need to gain real leverage to make our struggles effective.

Womack’s central challenge, then, is his insistence that we think about workers’ power in terms of the capacity to disrupt key sectors of the economy and capital’s ability to profit, regardless of whether we are talking about workers in auto plants, Amazon warehouses, schools
or hospitals.

Steve Striffler is Director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston where he writes and teaches about labor, migration and the left in Latin America and the United States.  His last book, Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights, explores the history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the 2000s.  He is also co-editor (with Aviva Chomsky) of Organizing for Power: Building a Twenty-First Labor Movement in Boston and (with Nick Juravich) the forthcoming The Pandemic and the Working Class: How the US Labor Movement Navigated COVID-19.