Labor’s Partisans is a retrospective on the evolution of the labor movement, as it has evolved through the pages of Dissent, the venerable socialist magazine. This is an important time to evaluate the history of the movement, as a new and vibrant generation of young people have come to see the unions as a vehicle through which many of their most radical aspirations can be realized, so a reflection on our shared history, especially one taken from a socialist perspective, is both timely and useful. 

 

One thing startled and surprised me when I reread Dissent’s labor reportage from the 1950s through the 1980s. Dissent writers largely moved from a sharp critique to something close to an apology when it came to their evaluation of the unions in those years. In 1954, when Dissent was founded, most of its writers had come of age in the Depression years, and they judged the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, and the other million-member unions of that era by a radical yardstick that took the 1930s sit-down strikes, mass demonstrations, and the quest for both workers’ control and a labor party as the measure by which the postwar labor movement was to be evaluated. Dissent socialists offered organized labor no celebration of its size and potency during this mid-twentieth-century era, the years of its greatest historical success.  

 

All that changed by the 1970s when labor faced far more difficult headwinds. Even as the unions became more stolid—with the AFL-CIO itself supportive of the Vietnam war and hostile to a new generation of multiracial rank and file militants—Dissent writers softened their critique. Michael Harrington was the most influential writer of this sort. By the 1970s he was recognized as the nation’s leading socialist spokesperson and he defended the idea that the American working class was a social formation, Black, white, and brown, blue collar or not, that still resembled that which Marx had identified a century before. The working class was under attack, but in its defense, Harrington gave the labor movement itself a fulsome pass, ignoring the undemocratic structure of many unions and arguing that the Democratic Party, then moving sharply to the right, was the most appropriate home for labor political action. On points, Harrington may have won the argument, especially with the New Leftists then beginning to take posts within the unions, but his perspective also demobilized a generation of young militants.  

 

And that’s still a problem. Today, it is hard to even dream about an independent party based on the unions, and most labor organizations throw themselves into support of the Democrats every two years, a necessary but defensive engagement seeking to forestall GOP authoritarianism and outright union-busting reaction. But as we saw in the 2024 election, that strategy serves to demobilize many potential voters, in unions or out. On the left, a defense of the status quo is no recipe for electoral victory.   

 

That has put the union movement, certainly in its more radical and oppositional guise, back in the headlines and also into the consciousness of many American progressives. In recent years Dissent labor writers have offered more words to the organization of baristas, home health care workers, and university teaching assistants than to autoworkers and construction workers. Faced with intransigent hostility from virtually all corporate managers, the unions have failed to actually grow as a proportion of the entire workforce, but that has not been an obstacle to the remarkable new popularity of the union idea, especially among America’s service sector youth.  

 

Some progressives disdain any kind of organization—union, party, or otherwise—as putting a wet blanket over the militant upsurges that periodically shake the polity. Upheavals like A Day without Immigrants in 2006, Occupy in 2011, the Women’s March of 2017, and Black Lives Matter engage millions of activists. Pundits and politicians take notice, and such manifestations can each create a new generation of activists. Trade unionists can only envy the energy unleashed in these movements. 

 

But consciousness is episodic; it rises and falls and gets distorted. While Dissent writers cheered on these episodes of social movement activism, they also understood something fundamental: that consciousness and organization each sustain the other and thereby create a powerful counterweight to the elites that rule economy and politics. And that is something unique to the unions, which may be why people in power are almost always hostile to organized labor. It is only by seeing where we started from that we can tell how far we’ve come.