A Spooky Status Report

October proved to be a significant month for us. We’d been catching up on our reading and writing since getting laid off in August. We always enjoy these periods of study and introspection, but an adventure to disrupt the monotony is always welcome as well. We got one such opportunity for adventure when we were sent as an alternate delegate to the Maine AFL-CIO biennial convention on October 23-24. We were quite excited after having attended the Maine AFL-CIO’s summer institute in August. While there are usually many helpful workshops and group discussions on the agenda of such events, we find that the table discussions and the discussions that take place between agenda items to be the thing we enjoy most at such events.

After keeping a low profile and meeting new people at the summer institute—many of whom recognized us at the biennial convention—we felt much more comfortable, and were able to speak in greater depth with some key people.

On the first day of the convention, we had the pleasure of shaking hands with United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. We were unaware that he would be addressing the convention until we arrived and saw it on the agenda, and then assumed he would deliver the address via webcam. But then we spotted him in person at a nearby table ahead of us. So at the recess just before his address, we approached him, shook his hand, and thanked him for using his national platform to be a consistent messenger on the importance of working class internationalism. We kept things brief and didn’t mention that we had just published an article which spoke positively about UAW, but we found him to be very easy to talk to. He told us that his journey in the trades actually began with IBEW, which we had not previously been aware of, since our knowledge of him was limited to his work since becoming president of UAW.

Graham Platner also made a brief appearance on the first day of the convention, not to campaign, but simply to attend. We once again chose not to introduce ourselves, but did once again come within inches of him. The hallways of the venue were quite narrow, so we had to cut between Platner and someone he was talking to in order to get to the hotel elevator. Our only words to Platner were a brief “excuse me, coming through.” It was interesting for us because we had published two critiques of Platner since the last time we shared space with him, the second of which got us criticized by name by the co-chair of Maine DSA— who sat next to us on the first day of the convention—a few days after the convention.

The most exciting moment for us came on the second day of the convention during a full group discussion about artificial intelligence. We’ve been meaning to write something about a.i. for months now, but continue to be sidetracked by more pressing matters. But we cannot help but see the parallels between the introduction of a.i. and the past introduction of technology such as the computer and steam engine. It was exciting, therefore, to see a room full of union leaders discussing the significance of the a.i. revolution and how the working class should orient itself to this revolution. Simultaneously, the conversation was slightly underwhelming in the way that many Marxists might expect from a group discussion about a.i. consisting of American trade unionists.

We normally prefer not to draw attention to ourselves, especially since we were eager to hear from some of our comrades in the room, but after several people had addressed the room, we concluded that we needed to voice our perspective. Luckily for us, the facilitators decided to pass the microphone to a couple additional people. When it was our turn, we said the following:

“I just wanted to make a couple brief remarks about what I’m not hearing in this conversation right now. For those of us in the electrical trade, artificial intelligence isn’t just a labor issue, it’s a solidarity issue. The massive data-centers running the software for a.i. employ many electrical workers in their construction, and the energy demands of these data centers is spurring the construction of new power plants to meet those demands, and this also employs many electrical workers. We need the work. We haven’t had a new job-call in our [IBEW] local for a long time. But when we build this infrastructure for a.i., we’re building technology that’s being used as a weapon against the working class to displace workers and suppress wages. It’s a shame because I think that everyone [in the room] that’s had a chance to speak so far can actually think of ways in which a.i. could actually be a helpful tool which makes their job easier, but it isn’t being used in that way because working people are not in control of how this technology is being implemented.”

While nobody in the room really expressed any luddite sentiments, we felt compelled to dissuade anyone from even thinking anything of the sort. We wanted to stress the point that the technology is not the problem and draw attention to how technology becomes weaponized in class struggle. Simultaneously, we did not want to be overbearing in our exposition of the problem. We are reminded time and time again that a good argument isn’t enough by itself to change people’s minds, and that we must find ways to make people arrive at our conclusions themselves. We’ve repeatedly witnessed vulgar socialists clumsily try to shoehorn demands for socialism into group discussion and did not want to create such an episode at such a critical moment. So instead of beating people over the head with a marxist analysis of technology, we did our best to smuggle the solution to the problem (seizure of the means of production by the working class through its collective mass action) into our statement of the problem (the bourgeoisie weaponizing the increasing sophistication of the means of production against the working class). We know we got through to at least a couple people because we were complimented for our contribution to the discussion after it concluded.

We were also wearing a keffiye on the second day of the convention, which led to us being approached by a member of the Maine A. Philip Randolph Institute about potentially doing some labor-related Palestine solidarity work in the future. This is a great excitement to us, as our disillusionment with and exit from the Maine Coalition for Palestine resulted from our frustration with that organization’s inability to articulate that Israeli apartheid is a labor issue, and we did not have the ability to do labor organizing for Palestine ourselves as long as we were showing up to the Coalition’s meetings and events.

We enter the final months of 2025 feeling like we have established ourselves as a valuable peripheral member of the labor movement in Maine. We intend to continue moving methodically in all of our activities, but we are excited to move onto even bigger and better things as we continue to bring our perspective to the labor movement in Maine.

Bluebird I,

November, 2025