SPRING 2026
ISSUE 06

The plant operated on an incentive pay system: Each job was time-rated for the machine on which it was to be performed, and the operator received a bonus for all he managed to produce above the nominal eight-hour norm. Jobs varied, but the bonus could account for as much as half a worker’s total wage.

In order to be fair to the employees on the bonus system (and the Company was nothing if not fair) it was necessary to make allowance for circumstances outside of direct production, such as time spent sharpening tools, loading parts on the machine (and waiting for the crane when it was occupied elsewhere), filling the coolant tank, and so forth. This was done through a system of red-colored cards, each computer coded for a special account, which were punched into the clock when it was necessary to take an allowance. When I first started on the job, one of the veteran operators called me aside and explained the system to me.

“You see those red cards?” he asked, pointing at the rack where they were stacked. “If the company won’t give you a raise, you take those red cards and give yourself a raise. That’s what they’re for.”

I took his advice and studied hard and soon became sufficiently creative in using the red cards to assure myself several hours bonus most days. I remember a discussion which took place after I had been there a while, in which one of my fellow machinists asked me what I considered to be the most valuable tool in my box. In response, I held up a pencil.

Across the aisle in the same department, the Company installed a new tape-controlled milling machine, able to do more or less the same work as the horizontal boring mill in about half the time. As soon as it was set up, the management began routing the jobs to the new machine, assigning to the horizontal mill only the overflow and the special large jobs that wouldn’t fit on the work-bed of the new one. They also retimed the jobs to fit the performance rating of the new machine, making it impossible for the horizontal mill operators to make any bonus.

There were three of us on the horizontal mill, one on each shift. (As the newest man I was assigned the graveyard turn, midnight to eight in the morning.) When we saw what was going on, we petitioned for a return to the old rates on jobs that were sent to our machine. When our petition was denied, we slowed down. Since the most we could hope to turn out, even with intense effort and smooth operation, was about six hours production – not enough to make bonus – we opted for a collapse, and began turning in under an hour’s nominal output each day. As we saw it, there was no point in straining ourselves to make the same hourly rate we could make by coasting.

Here is the most amazing part of the whole business: To the best of my recollection this little strike on the job was set in motion without a single meeting among the three of us (because of our different shifts we were never all together, although each of us saw the other two daily), much less the intervention of any of the union officials. One of us – I no longer remember who – simply announced one day to the operator coming onto the shift after him, “I’m fed up with this shit. I gave them an hour and a half tonight and that’s all I’m doing from now on.” The next man followed suit and after a few weeks we had established our own production norm – somewhere around three quarters of an hour each shift. It became standard practice, on reporting for work, to inquire of the departing operator how much he had turned out on his shift, and then do the same or less if possible.

Of course the Company didn’t like what was going on. But short of assigning a foreman full time to observe each of us, how could they know when a tool burned up and needed replacing, or when the tool crib was out of the required item and it was necessary to wait while one was ground (and how long the operator had to wait in the tool grinding department), or when the coolant in the machine needed replenishing, or – any of the mysteries of a machine operator’s life, each faithfully recorded on a red card punched through the computer that never lies?

Things went along in this fashion for a while, with us pretending to work and the Company pretending to pay us, until one day the foreman came to me and announced that, since efficiency on the horizontal mill was so low, they had decided to eliminate one of the three operators. Since I had the least seniority, it was on me the axe would fall. I had a choice: I could take a layoff, or I could retrain on the tape-controlled machine, which at the time was idle on one shift.

I chose the latter course and was soon installed as the third shift operator of the tape controlled milling machine. Shortly afterwards, the other two horizontal mill operators, who had continued their slowdown without me, were transferred to another department and the machine was sold off for a fraction of its cost to a merchant who dealt in used machine tools.

The three of us destroyed that horizontal boring mill, which originally sold for somewhere around one hundred thousand dollars, just as effectively as if we’d taken a torch and sledgehammer to it. Although it remained intact and capable of performing the task for which it was designed, it had ceased to exist as capital, the only form of value in contemporary society.

In the opening lines of the Manifesto of the Communist League Marx declares, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” That is one of the most familiar lines in Marx. It is also one of the least understood. History is the history of class struggle. It is not the history of the domination of one class by another; it is the history of struggle between classes. It is that struggle between classes – not the domination of one class by another – that changes society. The anecdote recounted above is an example of what Marx described. 

International Harvester needed to impose the new system as a condition for being able to sell the plant to an independent producer when it was no longer valuable to the parent company. As a result of its failure to get its way with the workers, IH was unable to sell the plant and was forced to shut it down completely.

Let me return to the example I began with, the struggle of piece rates on the horizontal mill. Neither side achieved what it wanted in that battle: The Company failed to restore its control over the machine; we, the workers, failed to restore our previous bonus rate. The result was something different from what either side intended.

A few lines after those quoted earlier, Marx comments that the struggle “each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The common ruin of the contending classes – isn’t that what occurred in the case I recount? The workers succeeded in destroying a portion of capital – and their own jobs.

This is what was taking place throughout American industry in the years I spent there, particularly in the old, well-established industries which were for many years the backbone of the US economy – auto, steel, mining, rubber – that is, those industries where the working class had been able to develop confidence in itself and its ability to resist the domination of capital. It was this unceasing battle, in which neither side was able to win a decisive victory or impose its will on the other, that led the country to the crisis of today, in which the old industries are being closed down and moved off to Korea, Brazil, and other places where capital hopes to find a more compliant work force than the one it is leaving behind.

From 1968 to 1971 I worked at the Tractor Workers of the International Harvester Company. The plant was steeped in tradition – right across the street from the original plant of the Harvester chain, the McCormick Reaper Works, scene of the eight-hour-day battles of 1886 that led to the establishment of May 1 as the international workers’ holiday. In 1940, when the CIO finally succeeded in forcing IH to recognize it as the sole bargaining agent for the workers, Lucy Parsons, labor organizer and widow of Albert Parsons, martyred in 1886, declared to a multitude of assembled workers, “Now I know my husband didn’t die in vain.”

One anecdote should serve to indicate the extent to which the plant had, by the time I worked there, gotten completely out of the control of management. The Company decided that, in order to regain the ability to plan production, it had to reassert control over the work schedules. As a means of accomplishing this they decided to dismiss some of the worst offenders on the score of absenteeism. They called in the chairman of the union grievance committee and showed him a list of dates from the record of one man who had been particularly flagrant in flouting the rules of attendance. There were seventeen dates on the list, covering a year’s span.

“Why you bastards,” yelled the union committeeman, “you want to fire this guy and he’s only missed seventeen days in a year, and you don’t even know what kind of family problems he’s been having . . .” and so on with the tone of righteousness outraged. 

“Hold on, Bill,” replied the Company representative. “These aren’t the days he missed. These are the days he came to work last year.” 

What everyone in the plant knew, but which was not allowed to emerge at the hearings, was that the man in question had started up a small business – an ice cream parlor, or something of the sort – and was spending all his time there, meanwhile being unwilling to relinquish the security of his job at Harvester until he was sure how his entrepreneurial venture turned out; hence the token appearances at work, just enough to keep the man and his family on the rolls for health insurance, etc. The result of the meeting with the union was that IH was unable to dismiss the man: The best they could get was a 30-day suspension!

That story may throw light on the stubbornness of both sides when, a few years later, attempting to take advantage of the downturn in the nation’s economy, IH again sought to assert its right to manage its plants. This time the issue was compulsory overtime, which was standard in many industries but had never been allowed to creep into Harvester. The Company demanded the right to schedule a certain number of Saturdays on which designated workers would be compelled to attend; the union refused. The result was a five-month strike, at the end of which IH lay in ruins, its management discredited in business circles, still without the right to schedule overtime work with the certainty that anyone would show up to do it; as for the workers, they emerged from the fray heads bloody but unbowed.

That five-month strike, which took place in 1979, was a watershed in recent labor–management relations. Out of that experience US capital learned that the workers, solidly organized in the mass production industries, could not be defeated in toe-to-toe battle. From that point the strategy of capital became that of shutting down the basic industries, strongholds of proletarian strength. 

Let me underscore this point: It was the inability of capital to subdue the American workers that created the present economic crisis and drive to restructure the economy. Official analysts point to the introduction of new production techniques, low wages in the Third World combined with the mastery of modern production there as the reasons for the permanent structural unemployment and destruction of capacity that besets US industry. Nothing I say denies the reality of these factors; but they could come into play only because of the refusal of American workers to accept work patterns and living conditions beneath what they deem an acceptable level. Consider for a moment: If American steel workers agreed to put out twice the work they do now for half the money they now receive, would there be a flight of capital from the US steel industry to motel chains, food processing plants, real estate, and Brazil?

I remember once, not too long after I started work in the mill, the foreman coming into a shanty where a bunch of us were sitting around, some snoozing, some drinking coffee, some playing cards, and asked two of the men to go out and see about a certain piece of equipment that was broken.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” came the reply of one man who was gathering the cards for the next deal.

“We’ll get it when the rain stops,” conceded his partner.

The foreman left, apparently satisfied that he had got the most he could out of that particular group at that moment; after all, he had to live with those guys the next day.

I once asked a co-worker why there were so few wildcat strikes in the steel industry compared to, say, auto. She replied without hesitating, “It’s because the people around here are always on strike.”

Her answer, which I thought was right on target, stood in contrast to the attitude of one of the more well-known and experienced of the “progressive” trade unionists in the area, an official in his steel local, whom I visited shortly after beginning work in the mill. I asked him about the movement of workers in the industry.

“What movement?” he replied. “There is no movement.”

“Well, in the very mill you represent,” I suggested, “the workers in some departments make their rate in half a shift and then sit across the street in the tavern until it’s time to punch out.”

“That’s not a movement,” he answered. “It doesn’t mean anything. They’ve been doing that for years. So what?”

To him “movement” meant the number of workers who attended union meetings, voted for resolutions introduced by his caucus, and supported his slate at election time; the accumulation of shop-floor battles that had succeeded in ripping half the work day out of the hands of capital did not constitute part of the category of class struggle as it existed in his mind. Perhaps Marx, who devoted a chapter in Capital to the struggle over the length of the work day, would have recognized it.

The pace of work in an enterprise is the result of thousands, millions of such daily encounters. Where the workers are well organized it is they who break in the new employees, initiating them into the patterns established over decades of invisible struggle. The recent wave of plant shutdowns is an attempt on the part of capital to break the continuity of the workers’ movement, in order to recover the power to train the next generation of workers. The importance of the project to the capitalists can be measured by the vast amounts of plant and equipment they are willing to scuttle in its pursuit.

Moreover the “moral element” has a national and even regional component: For example, French workers would riot in the streets were they forced to swallow the garbage that US workers routinely shovel down their gullets in the name of nutriment, yet can easily make do with an old small-screen black-and-white television set that even the poorest American worker would give away to the Salvation Army.

In any case, the historical and moral element, once established, is very difficult to dislodge. Anyone who has observed workers over a period of time knows that there is a certain minimum wage they will accept as consistent with their dignity. Among them it is considered acceptable to refuse a job that falls below that minimum, even if the refusal entails unemployment and some hardship. This common ethos, which workers hold in defiance of the editorial swill about the dignity of honest labor at any wage, is an important part of their defense of their living standards.

It is enforced by a consensual process, whose operation reaches far into the sphere of culture. Twenty years ago there circulated in the factories of Chicago the legend of the Slavic immigrant – the so-called DP – who arrived in America with nothing, ate black bread and cabbage soup and lived in a cellar, and after five years bought a three-flat, and a few years later another, and eventually escaped from the factory – to continue living in a cellar, now as the janitor of his own building. The myth was based on a certain reality; there were a few cases like that. But they were ridiculed by the masses of workers, who thus showed their contempt for someone who would voluntarily renounce the few pleasures available to a proletarian in pursuit of a dream made of ashes. By their ridicule of such exaggerated thrift, the workers were enforcing discipline within their own ranks in order to prevent the value of labor power in Chicago from falling to the level of the rural districts of eastern Europe. 

Capital is in the first place not machinery and raw materials, not even a relation between owners of means of production and sellers of labor power, but the contradiction contained in germ form within the single commodity – between the worker as wage laborer and as producer. The unfolding of this antagonism makes capitalism revolutionary; and its character is not expressed merely in the invention of new techniques of production but in the history of two social classes, each of which continually creates weapons, ideas, and forms of organization to cope with a new situation which is itself the outcome of previous cycles of struggle.

An example from production: At the beginning of the last century, machines were introduced into the factories. The workers, recognizing this as an attack on their position, reacted by breaking the machines. Capital stepped up its police powers. Workers shifted to another form of struggle: resistance to production. Capital responded by the widespread introduction of piecework. Workers fought this through craft union job control. Capital sought to undermine this form of workers’ strength by the assembly line and “scientific” task evaluation. The workers answered with the unionization of the mass production industries. Capitalists then sought to legitimate the new unions and incorporate them into the apparatus of management. The workers’ answer to this was the wildcat strike . . . and so forth. So long as capitalism exists this struggle will continue; it can be ended only by the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or the common ruin of the contending classes.

The accumulation of struggles taking place both on the terrain of production and in the sphere of civil society leads to new stages in the development of the capitalist system. 

There is an overwhelming drive to collectivism which can be felt in every aspect of modern life. The last Depression finished forever with the days when the state stood relatively aloof from economic affairs, which were in private hands. The operation of the capitalist system could no longer be left to chance, or the free market, or individual whim; the state must intervene, on pain of death. 

The form of the intervention differed from country to country, but the trend everywhere – Germany, Britain, Italy, the United States, Russia – was toward greater state regulation of production. World War II grew out of that trend and carried it further, as every country faced the need to mobilize armies of millions, equip them and train them, and ship them around the world to kill each other.

In this country the drive toward collectivism was most clearly expressed in the birth of the CIO, which represented a stage beyond the old collective bargaining. While they rarely expressed it in these terms, workers showed by their actions that they perceived the CIO as a means of establishing social power over the giants of industry that had previously ruled unhindered.

The capitalist class was faced with two alternatives: to attempt to beat the workers into submission, utilizing the traditional methods; or to come to terms with the new union movement, and make the best of it. 

While we now know which of these two alternatives was ultimately chosen, it was by no means a closed question at the time: Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, remarked years later that at the president’s first inauguration several designated cabinet members carried under their arms copies of the works of Giovanni Gentile, leading theoretician of Italian fascism. It is quite likely that the great strikes of 1934, in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, swayed the governing circles of the country away from the path of confrontation toward that of accommodation. 

This is not the place for a history of that era, but it should be noted that it was some time before the question of which course to take was settled. In 1937 U.S. Steel, wishing to avoid factory occupations like those that occurred in the automobile industry, recognized the union without a strike; shortly after, the other steel employers, grouped under the heading “Little Steel,” shot down ten workers in South Chicago in the “Memorial Day Massacre,” in a temporarily successful effort to keep the union out of their plants. One could argue that the matter wasn’t definitively settled until Ford, the last holdout in the automobile industry, came into the union fold, with a contract that granted, for the first time, dues checkoff and paid time for union officials, in a significant recognition of the new role to be accorded the union.

The process of incorporating the working-class upsurge into a changed capitalist state advanced further during the War, when union officials sat on war planning bodies and took part in allocating physical resources and labor power, when “clear it with Sidney” became the watchword of the 1944 Democratic Convention.

The extent to which the role of the unions had changed was perhaps most clearly revealed in the 1952 negotiations between the United Mine Workers and the coal companies. In those negotiations the UMW led the way in modernizing the mines, facilitating the introduction of mechanized equipment, assisting the large mines to squeeze out the small ones that were incapable of utilizing the new equipment profitably, and slashing the labor force in the industry. 

Later on more or less the same thing transpired between the west-coast stevedore companies and the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union regarding the introduction of containerization on the docks. 

These examples represent a whole stage beyond traditional business unionism, which was concerned solely with negotiating terms for the sale of labor power while leaving the operation of the capitalist system to the capitalists. In the coal and longshore industries, the unions performed functions which could not have been carried out by the coal operators and stevedore companies themselves. This is not merely a matter of disciplining the labor force; it is far beyond anything previously recognized as class collaboration; it is the assumption by the union of the principal role in the process of restructuring capital.

Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. 

What is that mode of production which has sprung up and flourished along with and under the monopoly of capital? It is none other than the socialist society.

The production of steel is carried out continuously; it is considered wasteful to bank the furnaces at the end of each day’s work and fire them up again the following morning. Although some other system would make more sense, state labor laws and the union contract demand that the standard shift be eight hours. Workers, therefore, rotate among three shifts, which is hard on the body and ruinous to family life. Standard practice, when a worker fails to report for his scheduled turn, is to ask the one he is to replace to stay on for another eight hours.

In one mill I know of, the workers have devised a scheme to turn the system to their advantage. Several dozen have organized themselves to take turns calling in sick; they do it sequentially so that the absences appear to follow no pattern. The arrangement allows each worker to shorten his work week slightly one week, more than making up his loss of pay by the premium he earns in a following week when his turn comes to be “compelled” to work overtime. The actions of those workers point the way to a more rational solution to the problem of continuous production than the rules currently in force. Of course, management constantly tries to repress the workers’ strivings to organize the work week to suit themselves; but they appear again at every opportunity.

In one of the mills I worked in, people used the free time created by the production process and their own efforts to hold collective cook-ins, card games, and chess tournaments, and to organize and administer a lending library. On one occasion a group of workers cooperated to repair my outboard motor, which one of the foremen had been kind enough to transport into the mill, taking advantage of his car-entry privileges to do so. Those people chose not to wait for the coming to power of the proper socialist government before taking steps to overcome the alienation of labor characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. 

A Black woman I worked with told me that when she first started in the plant as a crane operator she got no help from the white men who made up the rest of her department. They always managed, when making a hook-up, to place the hook so it was hard for her to position it properly, and in general did what they could to make her job tough. Each day at the beginning of the shift they were waiting at the time clock to see if she’d make it in to work.

After a few weeks of this, she called them all together and told them off, in more or less the following terms: “Listen, you motherfuckers, I don’t care what you do, you’re not running me out of here. I’ve got babies to feed, rent to pay, and heating bills just like you have. I’m not asking for any special consideration as a woman, simply to be respected as a crane operator. So you can forget about waiting for me at the clock every day, because I’ll be there.”

According to her, the attitude of the men in her department turned around completely following that confrontation: They became courteous, friendly, and helpful.

The person who told me that story was able, in that situation, to impose her will on those around her. Let no one think that her victory was purely personal, or that what was involved was a struggle against “racism” or “sexism” within the framework of capitalism. She is a person of great moral force, but what stood behind her was the accumulated strength of the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under the monopoly of capital.

In the years 1943 to 1945 the working class in every one of the advanced countries gave notice to all who could see that it intended to bring about big changes after the War. In Italy the workers set up soviets in the north, in the wake of the retreating German Army. (They were dismantled under the influence of the Italian Communist Party.) By 1948 the membership of the PCI had reached two and a half million. Two and a half million souls! That means that every politically active proletarian had declared his or her commitment to the cause of communism. France witnessed a similar growth in the party which the French workers regarded as the best hope for overturning the power of capital. In Britain, before the end of the War, the workers ousted Churchill and placed the Labour Party in power, with a mandate to proceed to the construction of socialism. In the United States, 1946 saw the greatest strike wave since the Civil War. Even in the countries which were defeated and occupied, Japan and Germany itself, workers gave evidence of their strivings for the socialist society. (In the latter country, the Western powers combined efforts with the Soviet Union to make sure that no indigenous proletarian authority emerged from the wreckage of fascism.)

None of these movements were able to fulfill their potentials, although none of them were crushed. In every case, the organization on which the workers placed reliance served instead to contain and repress their efforts.

The workers were thrown back into passivity. Especially in Europe the idea gained sway that the peoples could have no say in determining their futures, which would be decided between Washington and Moscow. Political life there consisted of battles between the United States and Russia. Each had its party in the local chamber of deputies; each side mobilized its forces against the other, but the workers of France and Italy had no party.

What changed this situation? It was the great upsurge of the peoples of Asia and Africa that restored to the French and Italian workers a sense of themselves as a force that could make a difference. Neutralism, far from being a passive commitment, demonstrated to the workers of Europe that it was possible to oppose US domination without falling under Russian tanks, that it was possible to resist Russian tyranny without becoming a catspaw for the United States. The call to independent action was sounded in Algiers, Điện Biên Phủ, and Nairobi, and was heard in Turin, Paris, and Brussels.

The gentlemen of the Second International envisioned the class struggle as something that proceeded by means of peaceful strikes and parliamentary elections; consequently they were unable to appreciate the significance of events in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where the struggles more often took (and take) the form of bloody massacres and clandestine armed actions. It is ironic that now there exists a tendency in Marxism to see class struggle only in its “Asiatic” form and to attach no importance to events in the industrialized world. Consider the following record:

1953. Strikes and riots in East Germany, suppressed by Russian tanks
1956. Proletarian revolution in Hungary, suppressed by Russian tanks, followed by month-long general strike
1960. General strike in Belgium
1965–76. Wave of strikes in Greece, ended by military coup
1968. General strike and factory occupation in France
1969. Italian “hot autumn,” fifteen million on strike
1970. Strikes and food riots in Poland, Gomulka toppled
1972. General strike in Quebec
1973. Miners’ strike in Britain, Tory government toppled
1974. Military uprising in Portugal, old regime toppled, followed by universal establishment of factory committees
1974–75. Strike wave in Spain
1975. Repeat of 1970 in Poland, workers’ organizations win de facto legality

Since that time the focus of struggles in the West has shifted in response to the capitalist project of restructuring industry. In Eastern Europe, however, the workers gave birth to Solidarność, which at its peak probably involved a greater absolute number of people than took part in the Chinese Red Army during the War of Liberation.

I am aware of the omission of the United States from the list above. I point out only that two of the most significant events on my list – the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the French General Strike of 1968 – were preceded in this country by mass struggles of international impact: the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and the Detroit riots of 1967, the latter of which amounted to a general strike. 

We are witnessing in the industrialized countries not isolated battles of an episodic character but a period of experimentation by a proletariat searching for new forms through which to express itself.