A New Workers Movement in the US: A proposal for a refoundation through the intermediate level

This was posted to recompositions here. It’s a tired truism that the workers movement in the US is floundering without a real base or path forward. A new generation of experimentation, struggle, and militants emerged from the ashes of the union’s most recent collaborationist strategy of labor-management partnership, contractualism, and labor’s historical parochialism of our-jobs-for-us. Workers centers, alternative unions, covert independent organizing, networks within corporations, and rank-and-file direct action tendencies within unions have arisen to try and build a new workers movement from the ground up. There have been attempts to unite independent unions, build new ones, link up with existing militant unions overseas and collaborate, and to drive a militant direct action class struggle line within the organizing unions. Many, if not most, of these tactics have been pursued in the past, and have met some gains with some broader limitations. At this time, the promised new workers movement has failed to arise.