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      This collection focuses above all on the organized working class in the United States. While I have written much about global capitalism and labor internationalism in the past, these essays attempt to analyze the problems and responses in the labor movement with which I am most familiar. Some of these were written for political publications or organizations. Several of the more recent essays are in academic form, for which I apologize to the reader. Whatever the format of the original publication of the essays in this collection, my objective has always been the same: to explore how the existing organs of class struggle can be improved, and in that process how can socialists connect their ideas and strategies to the living working class.

      The great problem facing socialists for many decades in the United States, and perhaps to a lesser degree elsewhere, has been the separation of socialist ideas and organization from the day-to-day life of those who, at least in the Marxist view, are the necessary carriers of socialist revolution and human liberation. Outsider propaganda has been a manifest failure. Like all social movements, a socialist movement based in the working class will require human agency and direct day-to-day contact. There are, of course, more socialists of various kinds active in US unions today than one might imagine from the behavior of most union leaders, and this book, it is hoped, will help them by providing analysis and ideas about perspectives and strategies. But since the number of socialists in unions is limited and organizationally fragmented, this collection is also meant to encourage activists from the newer movements confronting capitalism in one way or another—occupying, fighting home foreclosures, or breaking down barriers to society’s excluded and oppressed—to take a critical look at the labor movement for the potential allies within.

      To some, the emphasis on unions and unionized workers will seem strange or even pointless. Aren’t America’s labor unions continuing their long journey to oblivion? Haven’t they lost millions of members to capital’s relentless attacks on working-class people of all races and ethnicities, as several of the essays in this collection show? Of course they have.Yet, with nearly fifteen million members, unions remain the largest and most diverse working-class organizations in the United States. As the workforce has changed in the last several decades, so has organized labor. Women now compose 46 percent of all union members, while African Americans, Latinos, and Asians account for 30 percent, percentages that closely reflect the US population.1 Union organization remains arguably the potentially most powerful way in which working-class resistance expresses itself within the problematic political culture of America.

      Whether in growth or crisis, capital—and the “one percent” who most embody it—has undermined and destroyed the lives of millions the world around. Resistance is now evident across the globe and there is no reason to doubt that sooner or later, in one form or another, it will sweep the shores of the United States. We can see this resistance in recent uprisings from Egypt to Europe. It is in such resistance that people are transformed, their minds opened, and new possibilities created. It is there, I believe, that socialists need to be.

      “The Union” Isn’t Always What It Seems

      Commentators, journalists, academics, socialists, and even this writer frequently refer to “the union” as though it were one thing. But what is this “thing” we call “the union”? As Sheila Cohen has argued, the union is, in fact, at least two contradictory things: the union as institution and the union as movement or membership.2 The leadership is bound to protect the institution, a role that breeds caution. Furthermore, the leadership, in its role as negotiator, is placed in a position somewhere between the employers and the union’s members, far removed from the workplace and the daily experience of the members. At the same time, “the union” is a social movement meant to reflect the needs and aspirations of the membership. The need to fight for these and, indeed, the existence of unions in the first place are rooted in the contradictions of the capital-labor relationship, that is, in the reality of exploitation that originates in the workplace and in capital’s constant push for increased relative surplus value. Thus, in good times and bad, there is a tension between the union as institution and as movement. This is not to say that all union officials are the same or even that all members are always ahead of their leaders. Sometimes the leaders are to the “left” of their members on many issues. Nor do the officials always get their way, since the active members are also actors in this social dialectic. Nevertheless, at crucial times the leaders are pulled toward defending the institution, which can mean avoiding strikes, staying within the law, and abiding by the contract even as management bends or breaks it. It’s not simply a question of betrayals or sellouts, but of the contradictory role of the high-level union official as both a leader of workers and a mediator between labor and capital.

      As David McNally reminds us, following Marx, much in the way capitalism works is invisible yet real. We do not see markets or the circuits of capital—only the results. Yet they are all too real.3 For example, let’s look at Marx’s concept of the commodity. “The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing.”4 As he investigates the commodity, Marx finds that its value consists

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