On Political Organising

Trade unions in Australia, like much of the labour movement internationally, face a seemingly intractable political entanglement – a Gordian knot that appears impossible to solve. This dilemma presents itself across two clashing vectors.

First, there is the perceived need to use state authority to supplement and boost worker power. Second, there is the fact that state authority is not neutral but is embedded within the capitalist system and exists in a relation of mutual dependence with the broader capitalist market. It is a capitalist institution even if it is not simply irreducible to brute capitalist logic. This means that over time even fierce comrades and leaders within the parliamentary system will feel the pull of capitalist governing logic and norms.

This entanglement in a context of relative worker atomisation and disorganisation can lead to a problematic feedback loop – that is union leaders turn to the parliamentary system to attempt to secure material outcomes in the absence of shop floor worker power but as workers remain atomised such outcomes are not won and recede further from reach. The result is that workers remain unorganised, and even where the claims are won they do not encourage workers to restart building power together, so the cycle continues. With each cycle, however, workers grow more alienated from the labour movement their ancestors built.

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Untangling the trade union and political party institutional forms

Much like Alexander the Great slicing the Gordian knot with his sword, the answer to reversing this feedback loop is simple - untangle trade unions from parliamentary control.

One must first keep in mind that trade unions and political parties are distinct organisational forms. Moreover, this is a work specifically on trade union strategy. What this means is there is necessarily a gap between a radical union approach to political organising, and an overall radical left political strategy. The former is a necessary component of the latter but not a replacement for the question of mass political parties and other forms of organising within civil society. Moreover, the successful implementation of this radical union approach does not substitute for an effective overall left political strategy. A reader looking for the latter will find my work is full of gaps and partial suggestions. The solidarity wedge is not a total left strategy but a strategy to heighten the capacity of workers to write their own history.

A trade union is not the same thing as a mass political party, and attempts to turn it into one usually erodes the basis of social and autonomous cooperation between workers. Workers organised within a political party align on the basis of a shared set of ideological concepts or values whereas workers act in union on the basis of shared material interests.

The difference between the two forms is evident in the difference between which the collective can expel individual members. In a political party, individual members can be expelled for not publicly supporting a given policy objective or line. In a union, however, members can, and often do, have a diversity of opinions about social and political questions. Unity in a union is dependent not on abstract policy questions but concrete workplace actions.

Members face expulsion most commonly where they do not support an approved collective action. This diversity of social opinions that workers can hold while being union is one of the form’s strengths. Workers learn lessons for themselves based on their struggle for dignity and respect in the workplace. Workers can approach the union form without directly challenge socially accepted common sense but through their own actions come to understand how their own good sense maps onto broader social relations. This builds emancipatory openings for new policies and those organising in the political party form. This is not a slight against either institutional form but rather an observation of their respective differences.

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Parliamentary politics has consistently failed to increase worker power

Furthermore, the prioritisation of parliamentary processes over and above building direct workplace organisation has consistently failed to restore worker power on a mass basis. This appears to hold across multiple union engagement strategies within the political field.

In the Australian context, this goes to the utility of ongoing union affiliation and support for the Labor Party. In the American context, however, this goes to dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, and in some quarters a desire to establish an independent party of labour. Whereas the collapse of the Corbyn project within UK Labour highlights the system’s defences that act to destabilise ongoing radical leadership of a major party of government even before it has the chance to win government. As Marxist geographer and political theorist Perry Anderson has written:

“[i]f a parliamentary road to socialism has yet to be seen, Italian and German experience between the wars is a reminder that there is a parliamentary road to fascism”.1

It is an uncomfortable truth of our times that the parliamentary road to fascism is well-travelled.

A union’s mission in slicing this Gordian knot, therefore, should not be conceived in predominantly electoral or parliamentary terms – it is one necessary field of struggle but for a union of workers it should be viewed as firmly secondary to the workplace struggle in the sense that it must emerge from and remain nourished by workplace solidarity.

Take the sight of Joe Biden in Michigan in September 2023 as the first sitting US President to walk a picket line. The President was there in support of the United Auto Workers stand-up strike against the big three American automobile companies – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). This was a union with a new reforming national leadership that deliberately held back from endorsing a US Presidential candidate while it undertook the work of reorganising its industrial membership base, and worked through a collective bargaining strategy to win, that is seeking to bargain with and strike all three companies at once.

The strategy can be read as a form of solidarity bargaining for the American automobile industry, which in turn has set up a potential solidarity bargaining cycle for the broader American trade union movement. The UAW has won a 30th April 2028 expiry date, and issued an open invitation to union workers across the economy to join in a mass strike action from 1 May 2028. With its stunning contract wins across the big three, reversing a generational trend of concessions, the UAW demonstrated the quality of its workplace organising strategy, and it’s from this that it won a political opening in this electoral cycle and for the 2028 Presidential election. May Day 2028 will be a consequential date for American democracy.

For unions, therefore, politics should be chronologically secondary – build a coherent and successful workplace organising strategy first for this must be the basis on which workers acting in union engage with the broader political field. This is not to marginalise the work of activists engaged in radical political organising generally but advise on ordering work within the trade union form. A solidarity bargaining strategy that is gathering momentum towards a living wage for all while educating a new generation of workers to exercise their strike muscle will go a long way to slicing through the Gordian knot that is the present social, political and industrial impasse.

Political organising, however, remains a critical point in the solidarity wedge, and the rest of the posts in this chapter will work through how this organising can be reconstituted away from the stifling limitations of electoral politics.

This post is the first post of chapter eight which is the last chapter in part three of the overall project. Part Three is Solidarity beyond Wage Labour and examines building transformational solidarity beyond the constraints of the wage labour relation. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.