Anarchists in the Labor Movement: An Interview with an Academic Worker

The Black Rose Anarchist Federation presents the first in a series of interviews with anarchists involved in the labor movement.

This is the first installment in a new series of serialized interviews that we are calling Anarchists in the Labor Movement.

As the title suggests, this series engages with anarchists who are active in workplace organizing. Some of those we speak to are building a militant minority within the rank-and-file of their existing union, others are organizing the unorganized through new union campaigns, while others still are finding ways to build the capacity to win shop floor fights in contexts where union support is not available.

In part, the aim of this series is simply to shine a spotlight on the presence of anarchist militants in the U.S. labor movement. More substantively, we ask participants to critically reflect on their experiences, including both successes and failures, to draw out generalizable lessons.

Some, but not all of those interviewed in this series are members of Black Rose / Rosa Negra.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

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June – Academic Worker

BRRN: How would you summarize your politics in one sentence?

June: Anarchism. Popular and direct democratic control of our communities.

BRRN: Share background about the campaign you are working on. 

June: I am organizing with a university graduate worker union in an East Coast city with a bargaining unit of about four thousand members. The campaign started in the mid-2010s by a core of communist-leaning graduate students forming an organizing committee. After a few years and a series of problems and reversals (including disaffiliating from a large, well-known parent union that was being very unsupportive, and reaffiliating with a different one), we called a union election and won.

BRRN: Are you working with an established union or going independent? 

June: We are working with an established parent union. We chose that route because they had a number of resources (full time paid staff, a lawyer, and the promise of independent funding) to offer. Some founders of our organization were not happy about this decision. The fully-independent option was, overall, too daunting for us, as we felt we would have to spread ourselves too thin with technical aspects of internal data management, IT for our website, fundraising, labor law, etc.

BRRN: How do you see your anarchist politics as relating to organizing for power with coworkers? 

June: My anarchist politics have a high level of correspondence with the key organizers in my union. We all want to use popular power to build worker control, equality, and dignity in the workplace. We have also seen that governments and union bureaucracies are a dead end of history, and these methods cannot be used to achieve our goals.

Many union members are in the vaguely socialist/libertarian socialist politics space, and most of them are either familiar with the politics of existing organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), International Socialist Organization (ISO), or were themselves former members of such organizations. Many of them burned out from this socialist party-centric organizing and turned to direct labor organizing as a way to act on their political principles.

BRRN: Do you ever talk about your anarchist politics with coworkers? Do you talk “politics” (world events, local power structures) with your coworkers at all? 

June: We talk frequently about world events and “political” topics because of our similar class background (we all work in the same job, after all) and the fact that we live in a socially liberal East Coast city. Maybe because their average age skews pretty young, most of them feel a justified distaste of capitalism. We have a high degree of agreement on hating landlords, bosses, and cops, and on wanting to live in a better, more equal, less violent world.

The biggest disagreement we’ve seen in our union is that a vocal minority (no more than 5%) of our rank-and-file seems to be supporters of Zionism, which has caused strife with our organizers and union reps, who all are anti-Zionist.

BRRN: Does your campaign include others who see themselves as ‘political’, but are part of a different political tradition or political organization?

June: Amazingly we have no strong presence of people who see themselves as “political” in a different tradition or organization. Our members who were previously in ISO or PSL have broken with those organizations and now disagree with their authoritarian positions (an ex-PSL member now helps run our Libertarian Socialist Reading Group), and our members who are also members of DSA do not have any contradictions with our union’s goals, values, or activities. The only exception is that Socialist Alternative and PSL have reached out to us and offered support, but we voted to reject their advances, as many of us have come to believe that state communist parties are reactionary, parasitic, and historically obsolete political formations, with very little to offer the labor movement.

BRRN: Does organizing in unions fit into your vision for transforming society or for revolution? 

June: We hope that organizing in unions will assist with advancing the goals of social revolution because it teaches workers to fight together, to count on each other, and to identify and hate the class enemy. However, unions in the U.S. and their parent labor federations are probably hopelessly integrated with the capitalist state and bourgeois political parties and will need to be either transcended, dissolved, or left behind in the movement forward toward a revolution and a new society. Although I do not speak for all my fellow workers, some of us see unions as a preparation for skill-building, making social connections, and devising new political understandings, which is a precursor for forming the kind of *new” revolutionary organizations when the time is at hand for a serious rupture within society.

BRRN: What resources have helped you most as you’ve organized?

June: Labor Notes has been an amazing resource. Shout out to LN for all their help. Also we read “Contradictions of Paid Staff in the Labor Movement” by Roger Williams, “Class Struggle Unionism” by Joe Burns, and “Ready for Revolution: The CNT defense committees in Barcelona, 1933-1938” by Agustín Guillamón.

BRRN: What advice can you share with anarchists looking to organize a union? What do you wish you had known when you started?

June: Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers constantly, every day of your life. Get used to it and get good at it if you’re not very social. Also, something I wish I had known when I started: meet people where they are, be empathetic, and also be genuine about your beliefs (if not too direct about how much you want strikes, ruptures, and revolutions).

I don’t always say the word anarchism around my coworkers, but they know I want workers and regular people to be in the driver’s seat in society, and they know I hate the government and cops, and I think society should be run as a participatory direct democracy instead. Surprisingly, people can and do totally understand that and respect it. Even the liberals in the union who disagree with the radicals—including us anarchists—can’t doubt our honesty, our conviction, and the success of our methods.

If you enjoyed this interview, we also recommend this interview with a Rutgers University adjunct faculty member on their 2023 strike.