For an Aggressive Left

Many liberals have refused to entertain the possibility of confronting antidemocratic, elite institutions like the Supreme Court for fear that we could quickly descend into right-wing tyranny if their check on the executive should be undermined. It is past time to accept that we are already living in the world many have feared would come to pass. International, constitutional, and criminal law have been compromised by the open corruption and willful ignorance of political actors in both parties. They have been further shredded by the lack of accountability for the types of self-dealing and insider trading endemic among holders of public office.

The lion’s share of this moral criminality has been in service to the health care, pharmaceutical, weapons, and petrochemical industries, to name just a few. In many cases, like that of the Sackler family’s self-enrichment from the opioid epidemic, their crimes have gone past legal negligence and into the realm of what Friedrich Engels dubbed “social murder.” Yet corporate leaders flaunt the freedom their wealth affords them while many ordinary Americans get sicker, more addicted, more indebted, and more endangered by natural and unnatural disasters. These crises provide an enormous opportunity for the political left, but one that it has so far failed to capitalize on.

Nearly ten years after the first Bernie Sanders campaign, we can more confidently diagnose its failures. Given the choice between a faltering status quo and an effort to remake the country to benefit people over corporations, the Democratic Party chose the former as the safest bet to defeat Trump’s right-wing populist message. As a door-knocker for the Sanders campaign myself, the common theme among the voters I visited in Idaho and Arizona and the especially consequential nonvoters the campaign relied on to turn out (a majority of whom agreed with the campaign’s objectives in principle) was that they simply did not believe that Sanders could achieve any of the objectives he ran on, if he could win at all. This is not to say they believed he was a fraud, but that they sensibly intuited that structural and legal barriers would stymie any attempt to execute the will of the majority.

Sanders remains one of the most popular politicians in the country, and many planks of his platform have widespread support from the populace — as evidenced by the persistent popularity of policies like Medicare for All. But transforming that popularity into power at the national level has eluded both him and other left-wing contenders with large platforms. Sanders and fellow progressive policymakers felt themselves to have some grasp on the ear of the White House during Joe Biden’s presidency and understandably feared what a second Trump administration would mean for working people. But it led them to carry water for an unpopular president’s disastrous foreign policy and half-baked economic agenda.

For socialists to take hold of the real levers of power, we must convince the public that we will carry out a forward-looking, ambitious platform and evince an eagerness to go to the mat with any who try to stand in the way. Should those opponents include institutional power brokers in the Democratic Party or elsewhere, left-wing leaders cannot be afraid to name them for what they are: enemies of the working class.

Trump’s transparent attempts to punish immigrants, academics, and trans service workers for elite failures have sway with voters in part because the opposition refuses to acknowledge their failures at all. Should a left-wing presidential candidate run on not only holding unscrupulous, corporate-bought actors in both parties to account but also advancing a radical transformation of American workers’ living standards, we may be able to build a coalition powerful enough to seize the wheel and prevent us from plunging further into the abyss of reactionary violence and authoritarianism.

The State of Labor

This agenda, which I call “Labor Maximalism,” would guarantee jobs for every worker in America, dramatically improving the leverage of organized and unorganized labor across industries and restoring the political and economic agency of the working people who created the mountains of wealth on which the ultrarich currently sit. To understand how to get there, however, we first need a brief accounting of how American labor, organized or otherwise, has come to find itself in such a dire position.

In recent decades, politicians have overlooked the potential of working-class power, tending instead to take cues from the wealthy donors that finance their campaigns. No servant, public or otherwise, can serve two masters, and the gradual capture of the political class by the robber barons at the heights of the economy has led to predictable results. On the whole, workers are finding fewer and fewer reasons to participate in the US electoral system, and whatever new energy there is among this group can be found mostly on the Right, on account of Trump’s promises to break the system responsible for their discontent and alienation.

Since 2016, both parties have made promises to restore the wealth of working people, if not their place in the political system. Trump and Biden’s efforts to onshore manufacturing or reindustrialize are rooted in a nostalgia for the era of the labor peace, in which many factory workers received decent pay for a hard day’s work on the line — enough to afford private homes, cars, and college degrees for their children. The labor may have been just as alienating and physically demanding as any job today, but these (primarily white and male) workers could see and touch the value they were relatively well-compensated for creating.

Even if we wanted to return to this era, however, it would not be possible without an extraordinarily painful and protracted metamorphosis. Any historian will tell you that industrialization is no picnic for those having to undergo it, and no country has ever reindustrialized after transitioning to an economy whose growth is based primarily around services, finance, and intellectual property. For American goods to be competitive in global or domestic markets, either wages or employment would have to fall substantially. Workers manufacturing sneakers and garments would be subjected to sweatshop-like conditions, while those manning server farms or chip lines would be little more than fleshy addenda to automated machines, with many more millions subjected to unemployment as purchasing power deteriorated.

The unfair and unsatisfactory distribution of labor and income is at the root of much of what ails the United States today. By the same token, restoring the power and security of working people could be a skeleton key to curing the myriad social diseases afflicting America. We do not have to deny the realities of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia to see that they draw a large amount of their power from the felt sense of economic precarity that most Americans labor under.

Most Americans feel lucky to work at a job they hate for a boss they can’t stand, because they can sense how little distance there is between them and a young person whiling their prime years away in their parents’ basement or the homeless person sleeping on the subway. Small business owners, whose grievances provide the fuel for Trump’s nativism and authoritarian populism, feel an acute fear of becoming proletarianized as prices for inputs rise alongside household and small business debt. And why shouldn’t they, when so few waged positions are well-compensated or well-protected?

What’s at stake is not merely a question of economic growth, but of the health — physical, spiritual, and social — of the American body politic. The next few years may be the last, best opportunity to renew the commitment to personal virtue and civic-minded spirit that are in such low stock at present. Only a Left that is committed to a political program aimed at restoring the confidence and agency of the working class is capable of doing so.

A Real Program for Labor

The centerpiece of the program would be a brand new Department of Public Development (DPD). With the potential to be created just as easily as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, this agency could be given wide-ranging authority to restore and expand America’s infrastructure at a far more ambitious scale than the meek, pro-corporate attempts of Biden’s industrial policy.

Over the last half-century, private capitalists have failed to invest the historic wealth accumulated over the course of the American century toward socially productive ends, especially in comparison to much less wealthy nations like China. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, our ruling class has frittered away its surplus capital in speculative technologies, rent-seeking schemes, and superyachts, while the Chinese ruling class has built nearly 25,000 miles of high-speed rail, planted 500,000 square kilometers of trees, and managed to foster a technology sector that is competitive with the United States on every meaningful metric. Only the federal government is capable of marshaling and employing the resources necessary to fix our failing economic model, and the path to doing so lies in tapping our underutilized reserves of labor power.

Countering the threats posed by climate change and generalized social dysfunction means treating these problems with the same seriousness that countries do when preparing for war. Early efforts by the DPD would focus first on fast-tracking the substantial backlog of development projects that exists at all levels of government but would move as quickly as possible into a wide variety of public investment in order to ensure a constant demand for labor. Expansion of green energy capacity, retrofitting and rehabilitating already existing construction, planning and building climate resiliency projects, programs for river dredging, wildfire, and wildlife management — all of these are component parts of a multidecade pivot toward preserving and expanding prosperity.

Workers at DPD could be incentivized by GI Bill–style benefits like housing, health care, and education, while the immigrants this demand for labor would attract could be offered citizenship in exchange for their contributions to the national project. For their part, the young people entering the workforce with abnormally high levels of ennui about their place in the world would have a social mission to take part in with other young people from all across the country (in much the same way our military currently does, but with their efforts going toward socially constructive rather than destructive ends).

With the alternative of attractive public employment, those workers who remain in private industry or elsewhere would suddenly find their bargaining power significantly improved, compelling private capitalists to rethink their investment strategies to plan for the medium and long term. As worker pay, benefits, and even control over production increase with their leverage, workers could use their increased bargaining power to push firms to prioritize values like product longevity and quality and worker satisfaction — rather than just profits.

Most good-faith arguments against such an agenda have little to do with the prospective benefits, which would be substantial for not only for current American workers but also for immigrant labor, future workers, the international working class, and all who would prefer that they or their loved ones not perish in climate change disasters or bridge collapses. Instead, opponents tend to focus on the perceived impracticality of such a program, which they have inherited from a pre-Trump political education. Undoubtedly, these policies would be subject to severe pushback from donor-bought congressional representatives, countless court challenges, and persistent negative media coverage from both Democratic and Republican sources. What Trump has illustrated, however, is that these institutions have little popular legitimacy and little spine to stand against an executive willing to exercise force to undermine them.

Grim as our political environment might seem, the constituent elements of a durable political coalition are there for the taking. The central problem at the heart of US politics is that working-class organization is no longer a meaningful part of either of the two major parties’ coalitions, making it very difficult to imagine any administration willing to carry these priorities out in the parties’ current form. Labor Maximalism is a call for a political movement flying under the banner of guaranteed, well-paid jobs in socially useful fields, which advocates for public accountability for bad actors in government and the private sector — all in service of a forward-looking economy that tightens the labor market and restores workers’ voice.

Such a project would confront no shortage of political enemies and obstacles. But if Trump is capable of turning prevailing political logic on its head, then there is reason to hope that motivated, committed partisans of the working class can do the same.