"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Struck by Jane McAlevey quote from 2021:
"Winning a new New Deal will require the same level of power to create a real crisis for the elite in 2021 and 2022—just as workers did from 1933 to 1935."
Profoundly disingenuous reading of history.
In the prior five years, unemployment had gone from 3% to 25%. The Harlan County War had been 1931; the Anti-Injunction Law passed in 1932*; yet union membership was at a nadir.
* The result of what McAlevey calls "advocacy"—rather than "organizing".
1/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Challenge ain't that mobilizer's bubbles are "self-selected". Rather, while "people can make radical changes in how they think about and see the world", such changes start with shared political values.
Absent that, solidarity is best we can work for. Hoovervilles—like homeless camps today—are solidarity as infrastructure. Unemployed Councils were communists & socialists organizing marches and direct action in solidarity with the starving and housing insecure.
More work than a union vote.
8/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Wagner Act opened the Second New Deal. The New Deal era won us a strong labor movement, not, as McAlevey suggests, the other way round.
This goes to McAlevey's critique of the Progressive movement (what Ezra Klein misconstrues as "the left")—hers is perspective of making "things better in the workplace".
While not entirely "self-selected", when she's given "a list of…a thousand employees", she's nonetheless "engaging a…crowd of people who exist in some bubble"—namely, a shared workplace.
5/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
These are not "people who have no shared political values whatsoever". Any setting where folk come together has politics. Such politics are, for those within that bubble, shared, even for those on opposite sides of any given issue within those politics.
A shared workplace entails shared values about the work done therein, the energy one puts into that work, the affective benefits derived from doing such work skillfully, the obstacles and that impede that work and frustrate its realization.
6/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
When McAlvey, as a labor organizer, has to "figure out how to build to 90 percent or greater unity with unbreakable solidarity and a tight, effective structure", this is within very sort of bubble she discounts as the domain of activist mobilizers.
Note the confounding here of unity and solidarity. That 90% unity threshold speaks to the extent of shared values within the bubble of a shared workplace. Solidarity is usually about common objectives even especially despite disunity of values.
7/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Having shrunk by 40% in the prior decade, union membership represented only 2⅓% of national population.
As a reminder, rule of thumb threshold for political change is 3.5% of population visible in sustained action:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112726427399684432
For further comparison, union membership dropped from 5⅔% to 4⅓% of Usian population since 2000.
1933's NIRA §7(a) did lead to twice as many strikes—tripling number of strikers. Yet even a national general strike wouldn't have moved needle for change.
2/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Needless to say, there was no millions-strong general strike. In 1934, the San Francisco general strike mobilized 150,000; the Minneapolis general strike, including funeral procession for striker Henry Ness, perhaps as many.
But with 2½ million Dust Bowl migrants, evictee Hoovervilles in hundreds of cities, Hunger Marches and Unemployed Councils seizing food supplies & blocking evictions, the "crisis in the elite" was sustained visible expansion of ranks of #disaccommodation #classposture.
3/8
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
No longer a matter of anti-Black vagrancy laws and moral panic about hobos, no amount of then existing #FifthEstate power cloud sweep away 15 million unemployed and their families.
1934 saw only 10% more strikes than the year before, with 1.4 million strikers—or 1% of national population. Labor activity only really took off with the Wagner Act of, notably, 1935. Non-agriculture union membership, alone, would then quadruple in the next decade, climbing from 3% to ~9% of national population.
4/8
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