- What is Socialism?
- What is Marxism?
- The Healthcare Fallout
- Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement
- Alabama Communist Party
- Ending Vaccine Apartheid
- Hiroshima & Nagasaki
- Immigration Enforcement
- School Privatization
- DC Budget 101
- Reconstruction & Democracy
- Mutual Aid + Policy Advocacy
- Uber & the Gig Economy
- Ecosocialism
- US-China 'Cold War'
- The Anticommunist Crusades
- Palestine and BDS
- Police Abolition
- Responding to COVID
- Repression of Dissent
- Right-to-Work: Virginia
- Neoliberalism
- The Labor Movement
- Rent Strike
- Social Reproduction
- Sanctions As War
- A Radical History of the Young Lords
- Ending the War in Yemen
- Police, Police Unions and Racial Capitalism
- Work, Love and Capitalism
- A New Deal Experiment in Social Housing
- Eugene Debs and American Socialism
- What is Socialism?
- What is Marxism?
- The Healthcare Fallout
- Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement
- Alabama Communist Party
- Hiroshima & Nagasaki
- Immigration Enforcement
- School Privatization
- DC Budget 101
- Reconstruction & Democracy
- Uber & the Gig Economy
- Ecosocialism
- US-China ‘Cold War’
- The Anticommunist Crusades
- Police Abolition
- Responding to COVID
- Repression of Dissent
- Right-to-Work: Virginia
- Neoliberalism
- The Labor Movement
- Rent Strike
- Social Reproduction
- Sanctions As War
- A Radical History of the Young Lords
Socialists and the Labor Movement
After decades of retreat for both the left and the labor movement, we are currently experiencing a resurgence of both labor militancy and a renewed interest in socialism. But what in the relationship between socialism and unions? In this Night School Session, we will be covering the history of leftists in the US trade union movement, their influence, the various ways they saw unions as a tool (and a hindrance) to furthering socialism. We will then go into how socialists interact with unions today, and discuss ways to renew a visible and vocal socialist union movement today.
The session will be led by Sam Nelson, MDC DSA Labor Working Group coordinator and a member of the Communications Workers of America
Below, you will find a recording of the session and a recommended reading list.
Reading List
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age | Jane F. McAlevey |
Strike! | Jeremy Brecher |
Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-twentieth-century South | Robert Rodgers Korstad |
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression | Robin D. G. Kelley |
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution | Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin |
Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, | Peter Cole, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer |
Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide | Lane Windham |
New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism | Immanuel Ness |