In the U.S. today, most workers have never met a socialist and don’t consider collective struggle as a solution to their problems. Too many socialists are isolated and even out of touch with workers’ struggles.

That hasn’t always been the case—even in the United States. And that’s the topic of a new study group that just came together for its first meeting in New York today.

From Struggle to Socialism

OK, OK. Our real name isn’t Secrets of Socialist Success. I suggested it and everyone else shot it down.

We’re calling our study group “From Struggle to Socialism.” We’re a group of activists, organizers, and workers who want to start having some success in the U.S. Many of us, not all, are in the socialist, anti-racist, feminist group Solidarity (full disclosure: that includes me; click here to see the New York Solidarity website).

We’re coming together for a year to study places where workers’ struggles and socialist organization have “fused,” and where a significant minority of workers have embraced socialist ideas and built socialist organizations. And we’re not just looking at the usual subjects, like Germany and Russia—our study will take us from Turin to Johannesburg to Seoul.

Of course, we’re looking for lessons for today. So we’ll wrap up the study group by looking at works of people like Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci. And in our last session, we’ll explore different strategies that contemporary U.S. socialist have tried out.

Today’s Discussion

Today we started out by looking at Western Europe from 1890 (that’s the year the German government repealed the Anti-Socialist Law and the German Social Democratic Party started legal organizing again) to the start of World War One.

For the reading, we read an essay by Harvey Mitchell called “Labor and the Origins of Social Democracy in Britain, France, and Germany, 1890-1914.” (Download part one and part two of the reading).

One of our members kicked us off with an epic presentation on the strike waves that hit Europe in 1889 – 1894, 1905 – 1907, and 1912 – 1914.

Here’s how he summarized his approach (I’m paraphrasing): “When I learned the history of the Second International, I was taught it as a series of ideological debates. The root cause of reformism was seen as ideological.

“This is not a fruitful approach. We need a social, material, and historical analysis of how a significant militant minority was created, and of the development of reformism.”

He argued that these strike waves created a militant minority of workers who embraced socialist ideas and organization.

But because the strike waves were episodic, active workers created unions and parties to keep the struggle going in quiet times.

The full-time staff of these organizations provided the social basis for reformist politics and the ultimate betrayal of socialism during World War One.

It was a really great presentation. No kidding: The participants actually burst into applause at the end, even though we were all just huddled around a table. (We’ll try to get the talk up on RadicalsAtWork soon).

Our Approach

We all really liked the approach our speaker outlined in his kick-off talk.

Our goal in the study group is to beyond the ideological debates and look at why workers become socialists.

That got us talking about how we want to handle the study group as a whole.

A few issues came up:

• This process of fusion between worker militants and socialist organization didn’t just happen in Western Europe before World War One. We’re going to be looking at other examples where struggle at the workplace created a militant, socialist minority of workers—places like Turin, Brazil, South Africa, and Korea.
• When we look at new case studies, we need to look at how the employers and the state shaped workers’ struggles.
• We need to spend some time on the U.S., where socialist organizing has always been at a lower level than in other parts of the world. Specifically, we’re going to have one session on how race and ethnicity shaped working class struggle, and how radicals responded.
• We’re looking for lessons for today. But it’s hard to find times when workers were as disorganized as they are today. One time period we’re going to study is the “nonunion” era of U.S. capitalism, in the 1920s.

Next month, we’re going to be looking at the German Social Democratic Party. Most histories of the SPD focus on the big ideological debates between Left and Right. We’re going to be reading an essay by Mary Nolan that goes beyond debates to look at who were the workers on the ground who supported the Left wing, and what were their reasons for doing so.

I’ll keep you in the loop about what we find out.