Advocacy of GND in educational settings is crucial to raise class consciousness for a widespread workers movements. The state isn’t the endpoint of our politics, but it’s a crucial stop along the way

(Keith Brower Brown is co-chair of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a PhD student in geography at UC Berkeley. Jeremy Gong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in California’s East Bay. Matt Huber is assistant professor of geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. , 3-21)

Strike Where Class Struggle Is Hot The last four decades saw a huge decline in the power, organization, and political unity of working people in this country. Starting with increasingly aggressive austerity measures in the 1970s and an assault on unions in the 1980s, workers in 2017 were less organized than they had been in nearly a century, with only 10 percent in unions. Most major existing unions are still hopelessly tied to a self-defeating survival strategy that chains them to the corporate-funded Democratic Party elite, without giving unions or their members much say in the party’s direction. The sharp drop of worker militancy since the 1950s tells a grim story of labor’s receding and now historically low level of power. Without the power to mobilize millions of workers to disrupt business as usual, and without their own political organization independent of the Democratic Party, workers are unable to force the collective interests of the working class into the political consciousness of mainstream culture and the political elite alike. While many labor-oriented environmentalists have rightly decried the rifts between the environmental movement and organized labor, the official labor movement has become so weakened that its participation would likely not be enough to win something as ambitious as a GND. Even with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress in 2009, and after President Obama had campaigned on the AFL-CIO’s chief federal demand, the Employee Free Choice Act, organized labor was too weak to push Democrats they’d helped to elect to pass this relatively modest labor reform. Luckily, 2018 saw the beginnings of a renewed working-class movement at mass scale. Led by the teachers’ strike wave, the numbers of workers who went on strike soared to 487,000 last year. This was the highest level of strike activity in thirty-two years. If we are going to win a GND, we need this working-class movement to grow to at least the dimensions of the insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1934, 1.5 million workers went on strike; today, with 200 million more people in the US, a comparable level would mean over 4 million workers on strike. The GND won’t be won as a single issue, but must be one among many popular working-class demands like Medicare for All, living wages, and taxing the rich. The key strategy is to situate the GND within the expansion of a broader working-class movement. Today, there are three major sites where socialists can intervene to push forward this growth. The most pressing and profound of these opportunities is the teacher strike wave, which has already involved millions of people in conscious struggle against corporations and political elites. Teachers and other school-workers, often without the support of union officials, have used their links with students and their families to unite their surrounding working-class communities in “bargaining for the common good.” Los Angeles teachers went on strike in January, and united fifty thousand working-class Angelenos in the streets and on picket lines — despite the worst rain of the winter. They won their greatest victory in recent memory: major increases in teacher pay and student services, along with commitments to halve standardized testing, improve green space for students, and advance a charter school moratorium. In many of these battles, education workers have openly confronted fossil fuel interests, and proved how their ability to stop work means leverage to combat these powerful corporations and actually win. Oklahoma teachers won a higher tax on fossil fuel extraction. West Virginia teachers, through their mass strike and community organizing, made a gas severance tax the most popular proposal in the state for how to cover rising health costs for education workers. With the mere threat of a strike, Baton Rouge, Louisiana teachers were able to force local politicians to abandon their plans to give a huge new tax exemption to ExxonMobil. While teachers are only a part of the awakening worker movement, their strikes are central to rebuilding a more militant labor movement in general. Health care workers, especially nurses, have also emerged as a powerful front for labor and political struggle across many states in the last two decades. Health and education, and other forms of care work, should be central to the politics of the GND; they are not only centers of rising labor militancy, but they are also inherently low-carbon “green jobs” that should be expanded in a worker-centered GND. Second, we must bring the fight for a GND to the newly Democratic House majority. Confronting political elites with this demand helps popularize it further, and also helps raise consciousness about what it will take to win. Forcing the Democratic Party establishment to reveal its opposition to popular demands shows working people they can’t expect this establishment to deliver. It is to the great credit of Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement that they have opened this confrontational strategy for a GND. Now socialists and a broader working-class movement must be brought together to bring the disruption of politics as usual to new heights. Like the old New Deal, mass disruption is what can force the state to cave to popular working-class demands. While the old New Deal relied on support from capital-intensive sectors of capital that could withstand higher wages and more powerful unions, the GND movement will need to fracture the capitalist class between the carbon-intensive (fossil fuel, steel, chemicals, etc.), and less carbon-intensive sectors (e.g., technology, health care, services). Mass disruption is what will convince some capitalists that compromise is necessary. Finally, we have the brightest opportunity in many decades to build independent socialist political organization that makes a lasting electoral threat to elites. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign is a crucial opportunity to rally millions for a GND and an end to corporate control of our government. If Bernie wins, his record and platform makes it clear he would push for a working-class GND more than any other candidate. No matter the resistance from Congress, a President Sanders would have enormous executive powers to put federal agencies and regulations to work towards essential GND goals. His long-standing support of striking workers and independent, working-class movement building shows how his presidency would be far better at stoking the fires of class struggle from below than any other contender. Beyond Bernie, the mass popularity of Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib shows a widespread hunger for working-class champions to challenge far-right Republicans and the Democratic establishment alike. Even where they do not win, credible working-class electoral challenges can build the unity of working people for militant action and systemic political change. Across the country, socialists should work to build working-class coalitions and independent electoral organizing infrastructure that can promise an end to the careers of federal legislators who oppose a GND. Even as these challenges often use the Democratic primary and ballot line to begin with, we should be clear from the beginning that this activity is leading towards a working-class party that is independent of neoliberal Democrats and their billionaire donors. Socialists have a key role to play in pushing progressives towards this perspective and away from the notion that workers can accomplish their goals through a Democratic Party under irredeemable corporate control. By helping facilitate the deepening of working-class revolt led by militant teachers, using popular class-struggle demands to politicize a mass audience, and supporting class-struggle electoral challenges and building workers’ independent political infrastructure, socialists can help build the confidence and capacity of the working class to organize and fight back. While these sites of class struggle aren’t climate solutions in themselves, this confidence and capacity will be the essential leverage to win a GND. Without this leverage, climate activists have little social power that doesn’t rely on the goodwill of Democratic legislators and the largesse of benevolent billionaires — two groups we know will not support a working-class climate solution. The potentially transformative political capacity of the working class is the only force capable of saving us from climate catastrophe.