Socialists Believe in Workers Liberating Themselves
That workers must liberate themselves rather than rely on top-down liberation is one of the few rules for socialist organizing that Marx and Engels ever laid down. It’s nonnegotiable: socialists believe in workers freeing themselves through class struggle.
Workers engaged in a sit-down strike at a Fisher auto body plant in Flint, Michigan, on January 1, 1937. (Dick Sheldon / Library of Congress)
In the last two months, thousands of American workers walked off the job, sometimes without official permission from their union leaderships. That’s the big story of 2021 — not just what didn’t happen in the halls of power in Washington, DC, but what happened in workplaces in Iowa and Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
These strikes should hearten socialists. After all, a militant working class is at the heart of our theory of social change. But they should also make us think about how we can better connect the socialist movement to these kinds of working-class fights.
Today’s socialist movement is still getting its sea legs. Our ideas about socialist strategy are hazy at best. Our leaders and politicians struggle to articulate a full explanation of how we get from capitalism to socialism, or even what socialism is. All of that is understandable — after decades of dormancy, we’re just getting started. But if we want to link up the nascent American socialist movement with the brewing movement of the working class, we need to get our act together.
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