“What’s the difference between a radical and a good organizer?”

I got that question twice in one week—from two organizers I respect a lot.

I was stumped. I couldn’t answer the question. So I asked a dozen workers and labor activists: Does the labor movement really need radicals and our politics?

Here’s what these nurses, teachers, UPS part-timers and union organizers had to say.

“Of course!” “Absolutely.” “F*** yeah!”

Every organizer and worker I talked to agreed that labor does need radicals. And they gave me six good reasons: we help link up workers with lessons from past fights; we challenge business as usual; we take on racism and sexism when other activists are afraid to address it; and a lot more.

Most important, the best of us are long distance runners, who stay with the movement—and keep it going—through good times and bad.

1. A Good Memory

There’s a not a lot of fight in the U.S. working class today.

Struggles are small and isolated. Most workers who take part are doing so for the first time.

Our last big fight was back in the 1970s. Workers in the 1970s led big strikes (some official, some not), took on out-of-touch leaders, and made life for management hell on the job. But now, the vast majority of those workers are dead, retired, or out of the picture.

What do radicals bring to this picture? We remember how to fight. We remember the lessons from past defeats and past victories: what works, what doesn’t, and how to get the job done. And we remember that victory is even possible.

Maybe not personally, but being connected to radical organizations and politics links us up with decades of history of struggles, from the U.S. and beyond.

“When workers first start to fight, it can be hard to figure out what to do next,” said a telephone operator in Kentucky. “We study the past. We link up with veterans from past fights. And we talk over our problems and solutions with other radicals.”

2. Nurturing New Leaders

The main problem is not that we have bad leaders in the workers’ movement.

There are plenty of bad leaders. But our main problem is that there aren’t enough leaders among workers themselves.

Good radicals don’t solve other workers’ problems. They give workers the tools to solve those problems on their own: how to analyze a problem, assess their own strengths and weaknesses, make a plan, and carry it out—how to be leaders.

“A good organizer is at the front of the march, building leaders, planning rallies, crafting the most effective message,” said a union organizer in Philly. “The best radicals do all that too, but with a vision of shifting the power relationship between workers and their boss and workers and their union.” Our politics tell us to push from the back, rather than always stand at the front.

The raw material is already there. Most people are already leaders in other parts of their life: as parents, or in their church, or in their informal social networks at work. But most workers do not have the experience of being a leader on the job.

When more workers know how to lead fights and mobilize other workers, they have the confidence to take on the boss and to take on leaders who don’t want to fight. At our very best, we help workers become a voice that union leaders can’t ignore. The workers become the leaders, and the officials have to follow or get out of the way.

3. Challenging Business (Unionism) as Usual

At one time or another, every radical I spoke has run into a situation where workers wanted to fight, but their union officials stood in the way.

Here’s what a school teacher and union activist in the Mountain States had to say: “In the past year, a leader in my union who is a good organizer, a great person, and very committed to social justice, has adopted many reactionary positions on issues within the union such as contract negotiations and other strategic issues. He does this because he’s trying to show the employer that he’s ‘reasonable’ and ‘willing to compromise,’” she said.

“He’s a good organizer and leader, but not a radical. He has a strong desire to be taken seriously by management, and treated as their equal, and this often over-shadows his commitment to social justice.”

Our job is to help steer workers and our organizations away from this trap—and provide an alternative.

Sure, we file grievances. But we also help workers organize, agitate, and take direct action to put pressure on the boss.

“A few years back, the power went out at our hub," explained a UPS Teamster in the Midwest. "But management forced us to keep working, in unsafe conditions. Ten or twelve of us started marching around the building, demanding to see our steward. When we finally found him, he told us there was nothing we could do and to go back to work. One year later, we organized and voted him out.”

And in some unions, we help workers sustain direct action by building independent rank-and-file networks or caucuses that educate and connect up isolated groups of workers so that they learn from each other, coordinate direct action against the boss, and hold union officials accountable. The best example is Teamsters for a Democratic Union, but today rank-and-file caucuses are also growing in the ILA, in many teachers’ locals, and more.

4. Challenging Oppression/Building Power

Applying our principles goes beyond just taking on the boss. It also means taking on racism, sexism, and homophobia.

And while the boss is sometimes the problem, just as often it’s coming from other workers.

Challenging bigotry isn’t easy. It’s not enough to tell people their ideas and attitudes are wrong—they usually have to experience that it’s wrong themselves.

That can mean walking a tight-rope with workers who hold bigoted opinions and benefit from oppression. On the one hand, you have to establish that you disagree completely with their attitudes. On the other, you have to sustain a relationship with them—otherwise, you’ll never be able to help convince them change.

“A while ago I started working with some white workers. They were new to union organizing but they had fire in their belly and they were fed up with the harassment they were experiencing at work and their do-nothing union officials,” said a dissident organizer in the East Coast longshore union.

“At the same time, they held all kinds of wrong assumptions about some of their Latino co-workers. But they stuck with organizing and started to work with the Latino members. Over time, I saw their definition of ‘us’ expand to include their Latino/a sisters and brothers.” We don’t write people off (at least at first). Instead, we work with them patiently, develop relationships, and help them learn through experience that bigotry and oppression holds back our movement.

But our job isn’t just to promote unity. Many non-radical organizers do that.

It’s about promoting the independent leadership of workers of color in the workplace, and in the unions.

“In my union, the fight for member control is also the fight for black representation in the union,” said the longshore organizer. “Ten years ago, when the state of South Carolina framed five longshore workers for picketing—four black, one white—the ILA’s top brass stood by and watched. Today, black workers have won a voice and have power in the union because they organized and fought for it.”

[If you haven’t seen it, check out the documentary “Finally Got the News” about black radicals who organized in the auto factories of Detroit. Here’s a clip.]

5. Do the Right Thing

We bring more than just good tactics. We bring principles. “A radical sees the current struggle from the perspective of the long view of history, sees the limits of the labor bureaucracy's goals and modes of struggle, and sees the need for rank and file control,” said a nurse in New York.

Here’s what Karl Marx had to say about what radicals bring to the workers’ movement:

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."

We know where we’re trying to go and what we want to achieve. But there’s no roadmap to get there—but we have a compass: our politics.

And to get there, we have to start where workers are at right now, and stay just one step ahead of them.

[There’s a lot more to say about putting our politics into practice. We’ll take a more in-depth look at radical politics in the next part in this series.]

6. Long Distance Runners

Building a revolutionary movement in the U.S. isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon.

Radicals keep educating and organizing in down times, holding down the fort and keeping building workers’ organizations and radical organizations and institutions, so that when new fights happen, we don’t have to start from nothing.

“I realized if we really want to win, we have to be patient and gain the respect of the people we’re working with,” said a union organizer in the Pacific Northwest.

Even when workers do decide to fight, they often lose. Workers can lose hope that collective action works. As radicals, we stick around and help workers keep their organizing efforts going, learn from their defeat, and figure out what to do next.

Radical organizers help turn failures into what scholar Eve Weinbaum calls “successful failures”: we didn’t win the fight, but our organization is stronger and more workers have learned how to fight.

“Sometimes activists have worked for years to build rank-and-file activism in situations that seem hopeless and stagnant, until one day things changed and people were in a position to help move a more progressive program forward,” said a telephone technician in New York.

We need to be there when those attitudes change.

“Have You Bought the Latest Issue of Revolutionary Proletarian Vanguard (M-L)?”

Hold up, you’re probably by saying by now: what about all those annoying radicals who are terrible organizers?

The point is obvious: being a radical doesn’t automatically make you a good organizer.

In fact, it seems that for many people, being a radical is the reason they’re a bad organizer. There are too many radicals who put building their own socialist group, or selling their newspaper, or winning an argument before building up workers’ capacity to fight.

I’m not saying socialist organization is bad. I’m in one.

But here’s the problem: there’s not a mass base for socialist or radical ideas in the working class today [see the first article in this series]. Good arguments and socialist newspapers aren’t going to change that.

What will? Struggle. Taking on the boss. Finding out that we can win when we come together. When workers are fighting—and winning—they’re more likely to pay attention to socialist ideas.

Now what do you think? What is the difference between a radical and a good organizer? Share your stories and ideas in the comments below.

This article is the second in a series about radicals, work, and the workers’ movement. Dan H. is an organizer in New York.