Labor history and 21st century revolutionary possibilities
By Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman
The trade union movement in the 19th and 20th centuries consisted of working-class organizations – and some, but not all, represented all wage workers and their working-class communities. Organizers included radicals and socialists, though the union leadership was often not aligned with these politics and with workers’ demands. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was the first major labor organization in the United States. The Knights included radical and militant organizers who brought together craft workers and industrial workers, skilled and unskilled workers, and workers of all races and genders across the breadth of the multiracial working class throughout the country, including the South.
In contrast, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), organized seventeen years later in 1886, concentrated on organizing skilled craft workers who were white and male – known as the “aristocracy of labor.” The Knights declined in numbers and power with the founding of the AFL and with U.S. government attacks on socialists in the labor movement.
With U.S. industry rapidly expanding in the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. government passed New Deal legislation to address the desperate realities and poverty of the working class and to contain and secure the political loyalty of U.S. workers during the Great Depression in the 1930s in the aftermath of the Russian – Bolshevik – Revolution in 1917. In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) – legalizing for workers in the private sector the right to organize, to engage in collective bargaining and to strike. Significantly, the NLRA excluded agricultural and domestic labor where a huge section of the working class was located – especially Black workers and women workers.
Despite passage of this federal labor legislation, the AFL was unable to make significant gains in organizing industrial workers and autoworkers in particular. In 1935 John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW) led the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization within the AFL to organize U.S. workers, skilled and unskilled, along industry lines. The CIO, with the support of the UMW, launched an organizing drive with the United Auto Workers (UAW) also founded in 1935.
The CIO – renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations – split from the AFL in 1938 and continued to organize labor along industrial lines. During World War II, U.S. workers and industry concentrated on war production and Black workers and women workers entered jobs and industries where they had not worked before the war. Unions also agreed to a no-strike clause during the war.
When the war ended, the U.S. trade union movement confronted shifts in the U.S. and global economy and political terrain – the rising Black Freedom struggle challenging Jim Crow laws and terror in the U.S. South and white supremacy throughout the country, and changes in federal and state labor law. This was the environment when the CIO launched Operation Dixie in 1946 to organize workers in the South in textile and other industries.
In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act amending the NLRA and enshrined in federal law major constraints on union organizing. It outlawed closed shops, political strikes and union support for economic boycotts. It authorized passage of state-level “right-to-work” laws and allowed for “cooling off” periods for strikes. Where states adopted right-to-work laws, workplaces which voted to unionize could not require all workers to join the union and pay union dues – adversely impacting union membership, working conditions and protections for workers. By the end of the 1950s, most Southern states had passed right-to-work laws legalizing closed shops. Today roughly half of the states have right-to-work laws. The reality for Black workers was ongoing super-exploitation and racial oppression.
The CIO’s Operation Dixie confronted white supremacy and anti-labor laws in the South, but their organizing model could not overcome these realities and Operation Dixie ended in failure in 1953. This left the South with low unionization and a hostile political system. It was a huge challenge for the trade union movement nationally as Southern workers lived and worked in conditions similar to those of colonial workers. (Honey, 1999).
At the time, the anti-communist purges and mandatory loyalty oaths to the United States gutted the trade union movement, blunted working-class struggle, and intensified division based on race and nationality within the working class and all working-class organizations. The trade union leadership also agreed to represent only their members rather than the working class as a whole.
Struggles continue within the trade union movement around organizing craft versus industrial workers; skilled versus unskilled workers and how to represent the interests of working-class communities. Similarly, white supremacy and racism, nationalism and sexism throughout society and within the trade union movement is a reality that continues to this day and has to be fought.
In 1955 the CIO re-merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO. This period marked the height of the trade union movement when union membership in the private and public sectors peaked at 33 to 35 percent of the labor force.
In 1972, Black workers formed the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) as a nonprofit organization and member of the AFL-CIO. The CBTU has 50 chapters in the United States and includes representatives of 50 national and international trade unions.
Federal and state policy and practice in the post-World War II period combined with McCarthyism, class collaboration within the trade union moment, corporate anti-union campaigns and the technological revolution created the conditions for the declining rate of unionization among U.S. workers into the late 20th and 21st centuries. In 1983 unionization fell to 20 percent of the labor force. By 2025, only 10 to 11 percent of all workers were union members.
REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS TODAY
Artificial intelligence (A.I.), in the hands of the capitalists, especially the fascists, is a threat to humanity and the earth. Working-class forces cannot allow this to happen. The crises of capitalism are rapidly escalating. Today’s technological revolution, multiple crises, and rising movement are creating the conditions for the end of capitalism and for revolutionary transformation, for the necessity of ruling-class motion toward fascism, and for working-class motion toward revolution. Working-class forces must take the offensive against capital on the path to working-class power.
The economic, social and political revolution are stages of the revolutionary process. The economic revolution from an industrial to a digital base, disrupts the capitalist system. The digital revolution of computers, robots, automation, and A.I. took off in the 1970s and 1980s and became an objective material force in our lives. Digital technology speeds up jobs, drives down wages and eliminates jobs across all sectors including knowledge work and social reproduction.
The social revolution in defense of life includes destruction of social relations and institutions as well as resistance and rebellion. The political revolution is the struggle for power between the ruling class and the working class. The class struggle also plays out within both classes.
Global capitalism, markets, and wage labor are being irreversibly disrupted. Low-wage, contingent and unemployed workers require distribution of the abundance of the basic necessities of life that digital technology makes possible based on need, not on the ability to pay in the market.
Within the ruling class the struggle is over whether bourgeois democracy is sufficient to maintain the capitalist system and control over society, and about the speed of the motion toward the consolidation of fascist rule. Within the working class the struggle is around how to stop fascism and move toward the socialist reconstruction of society in the interests of humanity and the planet.
Ruling class motion toward fascism is intensifying as a reaction to working-class unity and revolution. How much power will the working class have when robots and A.I. are dominant in the production process? Today’s movement must develop vision, strategy and theoretical education for our political struggle.
WORKING CLASS IN MOTION
As these rights are being lost, the economic crisis and ecological crises have deepened and political repression has intensified. Working class forces are developing class consciousness, protesting, resisting, and organizing.
The trade unions are moving from representing not just union members but the interests of the working class as a whole. That is a significant change in policy over the past 50 years. The United Auto Workers (UAW) led the way during the 2023 strike wave, with UAW president Shawn Fain saying clearly at every picket line that the UAW represents the working class as a whole – not just its members. The UAW Executive Board called on trade unions to coordinate their contract endings on or before May Day (May 1), 2028 to set the basis for a nationwide general strike.
The one-day general strike in Minnesota on January 23, 2026 offered a powerful example for what is possible. The protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and resistance to the military occupation of the state and to the murder of Renée Good drew on networks formed during the George Floyd rebellion in 2020. The Minnesota Federation of Educators (MFE Local 59 – an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers) was an important part of the strike mobilization.
The U.S. and global organizing efforts of Amazon workers are opening a new and critical front in labor and trade union organizing. Workers are in struggle with Amazon, one of the largest and wealthiest corporations in the world. In the United States, Amazon workers – many of whom are Black and immigrant – are confronting labor conditions that challenge union organizing. Their daily reality is deadly health and safety conditions, workers competing with robots, rapid labor turnover, and a hostile anti-union political environment.
Working-class forces are protesting and organizing at the workplace, in the streets and in the federal, state and local halls of power at the federal, state and local levels We are engaging the electoral process by supporting or running as candidates to shape public policy.
NEXT STEPS
Going from the defensive to the offensive means more than protecting what we have and fighting for what we had and lost. We decide when and where the fight is – how it is going to happen and how long it will last. Bourgeois democracy, at best, was not democracy for huge swaths of the working class. Taking the offensive is struggling for a cooperative, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable world.
This moment requires the American people to deeply understand today’s capitalist crises.
First, as conscious revolutionaries, our task is to study theory – collectively if possible – to understand the world as it is, the revolutionary process and the class struggle. Second, the U.S. South is a strategic battleground in the class war. Winning in the South is key to the well-being of people and the planet. Third, working-class unity in understanding the world and collectivity in political practice are essential.
We must gather the revolutionaries among the working class to forge a revolutionary organization rooted in the sections of the working class which are in motion and which can be united. One in which revolutionaries think and struggle together as a fighting force which can realize our vision for the future and win and hold our victory.
Published on September 14, 2026.
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