Class Matters Transcript – Episode 15

Class Matters Podcast, Episode 15: “When Compromises Come Home to Roost”

With Adolph Reed, Jr. and Mark Dudzic

August 2024

Katherine Isaac

Welcome to class matters, the podcast where we ask the question, “What would our country look like if it were governed by and for the working class?” Class matters is a project of the Debs Jones Douglas Institute. I’m Katherine Isaac, executive director. As the Democrats get ready to convene in Chicago, there’s a lot of buzz about why the Democratic Party has lost so much working-class support. After all, employment is low by historical standards, and wages for many have been increasing. Some have written off the white working class as hopelessly racist and holding deplorable views on gender, guns and human rights.

In Episode 15, “When Compromises Come Home to Roost,” we look at how anti-worker policies of the last 40 plus years have led to working-class frustration and anger that includes a general distrust of government, as well as dissatisfaction with both political parties. That worker frustration and anger fueled the effort in the 1990s and early 2000s to create a viable independent working-class politics in the form of a Labor Party. Mark Dudzic and Adolph Reed Jr are here to talk about all that and what the Labor Party experience might tell us about the 2024 election. Welcome back, Adolph and Mark.

Let’s get started with introductions. Adolph Reed Jr has been involved in working class politics for more than half a century and served on the Labor Party National Council. He’s professor emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include American and Afro American politics and political thought, urban politics and American political development. He serves on the board of the Debs Jones Douglas Institute, and is the author of several books, including “The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives,” and his latest, “No Politics but Class Politics” with Walter Ben Michaels. His column, Class Notes, appears in The Nation magazine.

Mark Dudzic served as president of Local 8-149 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, as well as president of OCAW District 8 Council. Dudzic was a founding member of Labor Party Advocates and succeeded Tony Mazzocchi as the Labor Party’s national organizer in 2009. Dudzic co-founded the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare and served as its national coordinator until 2022. He also serves on the board of the Debs Jones Douglas Institute.

So, let’s start today with a frequent warning from Labor Party founder Tony Mazzocchi. Mazzocchi, of course, was a long-time member and leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. He was instrumental in the movement that led to the creation of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He was the founding national organizer of the Labor Party. As Adolph has written, he was, quote, one of the very brightest lights of a serious working-class politics in the post-World War II era until his death in 2002 end quote. So, what was Tony Mazzocchi’s warning? He frequently cautioned that the anti-worker neoliberal policies of both the Republican and Democratic parties were creating a dangerous moment politically. And if the labor movement and its allies didn’t fill this political void with real solutions for working people, then something much uglier, like reactionary and dangerous forces, would capture the anger of the working class. Mazzocchi would not have wanted, of course, for his warning to be correct, but here we are. We could very well be on the verge of an authoritarian takeover of our government by dangerous political forces who are on a mission to destroy every bit of social protection the working class has won in more than a century.

Working-class voters, of course, have been the backbone of the Democratic Party since the New Deal but, in recent years, the Republican Party has made significant inroads with promises of bringing back good paying jobs, taming woke culture, bashing the federal government, and also by acknowledging that worker anger, with only 22% of Americans say they trust our government. That’s in contrast to a high of 77% way back in 1964. An increasing number of voters have lost faith in either political party: 43% of voters now identify as independent. And although voter turnout was higher in 2020 than in 2016, 34% of eligible voters still did not cast a ballot.

Working-class disillusionment with the Democratic Party didn’t start with Donald Trump. When the Labor Party was founded in 1996, the Democratic Party had just pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, a massive anti-worker trade deal, but the writing was on the wall even earlier. All three of us were involved in the Labor Party effort: I was on staff; Adolph, you served on the National Council; and Mark you were the second national organizer. But Mark, you were also a local union president in New Jersey in the 80s and 90s. Can you talk a little bit about that experience, and particularly about concessionary bargaining and its impact?

Mark Dudzic

Sure, Katherine, yeah. So, I was president of what we called an amalgamated local. We had between 20 and 30 small plants in my local union, mostly chemical and pharmaceutical plants. So, there was a lot of bargaining that always was going on and other activity. And you know, the first thing that stands out about what began to happen in the ‘80s, is how much more precarious the situation of workers became during that period of time. My local lost half of its members due to plant closings and mass layoffs in the first few years of the 1980s when we kind of reorganized, organized new workers. And we lost half again after the passage of NAFTA at the end of the 1990s and, you know, people were very much aware that their plant could close, or they could get permanently laid off with little or no notice.

I mean, these things would happen, you know, once, the corporate manager told me at a freaking Christmas party that he was closing the plant the next week. With no anticipation or understanding of why that was even going to happen. And in addition to the precariousness is that this is happening throughout the entire job market. So when a worker lost his or her job in a, you know, decent union plant the likelihood was that they were not ever going to get a job like that again. They were going to have to work in some other precarious job on a race to the bottom. And so with the stakes were very much, very much higher.

We also experienced a real general erosion of standards and expectations; you know that UAW was forced into negotiating the first major concessionary contract in 1978 because of the Chrysler bankruptcy. And those kinds of concessions began to spread. The expectation, even in plants that were doing quite well, was that concessions were on the table. The standards also were eroding around things like healthcare, where the increased commodification of healthcare industry led to an explosion in the cost of healthcare. And you know, it became a major issue at the bargaining table to have to fight just to maintain basic healthcare coverage. Pensions were being replaced by defined contribution plans during this period of time. So holding on to a pension, much less even improving it, became increasingly difficult.

And the rules of the game were changed during this whole period of time. A series of court and Labor Board decisions made it virtually impossible to bargain with an employer over the decision to close a plant or move production somewhere. I mean, there were some ways you could do it under certain circumstances, but you couldn’t really bargain over that. You couldn’t bargain over the benefits that retirees got from an employer. All of these rules were changed and the permanent replacement of workers in strikes, which is really the only weapon that workers have against a lot of these changes became a standard tool in the employer toolbox.

You know, there had been this weird anomaly in labor law from the 1930s that said that you can’t be fired for striking, but you can be permanently replaced. It was very rarely invoked until Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981 and then it became a regular threat in almost every bargaining that moved towards a strike situation: the threat of permanent replacement was always looming over you. In fact, you know certain employers, more and more employers, basically dared you to strike because they saw a strike as an opportunity to destroy the union in the workplace. They could permanently replace people, and then within a year later, they could vote the union out and have the scabs be allowed to vote against the union.

So those were the kind of pressures we were under. And you know that made workers feel increasingly powerless, and it really destroyed the culture of solidarity that sustains unions on the shop floor. When you see other workers cross a picket line to steal your job, when you have a two-tier system in a plant where some workers are getting less pay and benefits for doing the same jobs that other workers are doing, when you have disparities in health care and all of these other things, you know that culture that can build the strength of working people began to really seriously erode.

So, when you look at those things, if you think about that and what 20 years of wage stagnation and lack of advances for the working class, what that does to people’s consciousness, you can understand why workers now, who haven’t had a serious wage increase in decades, start blaming the government when their taxes go up and, you know, don’t want to pay for public goods and services. Because they haven’t achieved any improvements in their lives in this period of time, and how they begin to look at immigrants as their enemy rather than as your fellow workers, and how they begin to resent elites who don’t seem to have share of the same kind of suffering and background that they’ve shared. So I think that you know what workers experienced, and you know organized workers, at least, had the capacity to fight back, unorganized workers, the vast majority of the working class didn’t even have the structures that unions might provide to provide basic defenses, but that really made people so susceptible to this, this current politics of resentment and the appeal that a strong man can come in and finally straighten things out for people, I think that those experiences really helped shape the quandary that we’re in today.

Katherine Isaac

Thanks, Mark. Go back, if you will, to the early 1990s and how that worker frustration got aimed at the Democratic Party.

Mark Dudzic

In ‘92 when we elected Bill Clinton president, the labor movement and other social movements you know, had been fighting what we were calling Reaganism back in those days. Now, I guess it’s neoliberalism, looking as a historic era, but we called it Reaganism back then. For 12 years, we were fighting it, and we were blaming basically, the hard right Republican Party for these problems, the anti-unionism, economic decline of working people. And we elected this guy, Bill Clinton, and he was, you know, a Democrat, gave lip service to working class issues and concerns, and the problems actually, in many ways, intensified under Clinton, the promise of labor law reform.

We wanted a simple reform in the labor law to prevent them from permanently replacing workers who went on strike. And he never put any political capital into that promise. You know, he attacked poor people, eliminated the right to social benefits and relief for poor people, and forced them into these situations where they had to work for substandard wages, undermining wages for all working people.  He botched health care reform by embracing a market-based solution to health care reform.

Now the topper of all toppers was he pushed through the NAFTA agreement, which was a free trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada, which set the basis for the complete erosion of protections that workers had to allow capital to move completely unrestrained to wherever labor was cheapest, wherever the conditions that working people faced were the most precarious. And this is something that capital had been trying to achieve for decades and could only have achieved it under a Democratic administration, and it completely set up a whole series of new attacks on working people and disempowerment.

Katherine Isaac

So, talk a little bit about the anger and frustration that you saw among union members and the rest of the working class.

Mark Dudzic

At the time, the passage of NAFTA was viewed as this extreme betrayal by Clinton and the Democrats. I still remember that debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot. Well, Al Gore at his smarmy best, was like, not that Ross Perot was a great advocate of the working class or anything, but, you know, at his smarmy best was just sort of contemptuously dismissing the concerns that were being expressed about people’s economic security and long-term access to decent jobs. And this was like a personal, personal betrayal by the Democrats of the one thing that they could do, among all others, to undermine the U.S. working class. You know, this was really seen as the epitome of that, and it really sparked a real questioning within the whole labor movement about how we do our politics, and what’s happened to the Democratic Party, and opened up a whole, a whole broad debate about what our future ought to be.

Katherine Isaac

The Labor Party was a response to that anger and to that frustration, but to be clear, it was not a third-party effort. Can you each speak a bit about what the Labor Party effort was trying to accomplish and about its strategy. Let’s go with Adolph and then Mark.

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Yeah. I mean, I like the slogan that we had back in the day, that the bosses have two parties, we should have at least one of our own. And we definitely were not intending to function as a third-party force in American politics. What we saw was that the Labor Party was an expression. We were trying to build an expression of an independent working-class center of new political perspective, and around a program and around an organizing model of politics where the idea was to build a movement.

This is maybe going a little bit ahead of things, but one, from my perspective anyway, I think others may have shared it, one facet of the Labor Party experience was kind of coming to grips with how many people on our side, as it were, had come to narrow their political vision to electing somebody to office, and one of our internal struggles, and I know you guys recall every bit as well as I do, if not even more, was trying to hold the line against premature running of candidates for offices to make what seem like a moral expression or something when, well, when the whole idea was to try to organize the broad working class around the program that would challenge at some point, whether through the electoral realm or not, the agendas of both the corporate-dominated parties. I’ll turn to Mark from here.

Mark Dudzic

Yeah, I think what really excited me about the Labor Party, especially in retrospect, looking back at politics of the last 30 years, was how organic it was, that it really came out of the organizations of working people. I mean, these were people who actually represented people in particular, the ones who were in the trenches, trying to find ways to fight under these the conditions that I just described. They really came together with an urgency and understanding of what needed to be done, and an understanding of what a party like this ought to stand for: a program that we forged together and a serious, as Adolph said, organizing approach to politics. It’s a serious approach. We don’t want to just be a spoiler, because there’s too much at stake for working people. You can’t just pull out of engagement in politics and spend the next 20 years wandering in the wilderness when you know the working people have real day to day life concerns that have to be addressed immediately in politics. So, it’s very difficult to think about how you do that in a real way when you represent real constituencies. And that was probably the most dynamic and exciting discussions and debates we had in the Labor Party. Is how we can begin to do that.

And, you know, had the labor movement continued to expand, as it briefly was doing in the mid-1990s when we launched this thing, with the new leadership of the AFL-CIO at the time saying we’re going to organize a million new workers a year. There was a sense that if we were part of an organizing, militant labor movement, that we could find the solutions to these issues and really build an independent working class politics that was very organic. You look at some of the stuff that’s come after it, and it’s all sort of much more where the working class or the other constituencies are sort of seen as a marionette that’s being manipulated by other people who are telling them what their program ought to be. So, it was very, very different kind of internal culture that we tried to create in a Labor Party.

Katherine Isaac

We’ve often joked that the Bernie Sanders campaign stole the Labor Party platform but, in truth, it was remarkably similar. Just this week, Senator Sanders commented that the Democratic Party candidates could win in 2024 but only by campaigning on, quote, an agenda that takes on the greed and power of the oligarchs and addresses the needs of the long-ignored working class of our country, the vast majority of voters, end quote. So, I’d like each of you to comment a little bit about the Bernie Sanders campaigns and how that echoed what we were trying to achieve with the Labor Party, and what were some of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Adolph, you want to start with that?

Adolph Reed, Jr.

One of the things that most impressed me about the Sanders campaigns was that, and I don’t know how much this was in his conscious mind as the ultimate purpose, but he used the medium of a national presidential campaign as a vehicle, partly to try to kick start the kind of grassroots organizing that we’d been trying to do another way, right, 20 plus years earlier, and it didn’t quite stick. I mean, like, he got endorsements from a number of unions, seven unions, I think, in 2016 the bulk of which were, in fact, former Labor Party affiliates. And one that wasn’t could have been. But anyway, it didn’t quite stick after 2016 but he pushed again in 2020. I don’t know, I mean this is one of those “could have been a contender” moments, but I think that had it not been for the intervention of the pandemic and the shutdown right after the 2020 primaries, it felt to me like more of those efforts to work on the ground were sticking, and that’ll include ours in South Carolina, but we weren’t alone. So that was an innovation, and struck me, it was a useful innovation in a context in which left of center political forces were completely demobilized.

Republicans had a sort of similar conflict, but they found a way to resolve this after 2020. After the election, it seemed for a minute like January 6, at a minimum, had kind of sent enough of a shockwave through the elites in a Democratic Party that Biden was inclined to make more gestures to appeal to the needs of the working class broadly. And he has, he’s done stuff. I found it just as interesting that he hid his light under the bushel, which a lot of people in the communications world complain about, because I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s been the Biden administration trying to navigate its contradiction, because if they say too much or draw too much attention to what they’ve done for working people, then the Wall Street element goes batshit crazy, right?

And they think, you know, just think of [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel and those people right now. And they’re so drunk on their own power now that like anything, right, like asking them to put money in a parking meter prompts them to start complaining about being on a forced march to Auschwitz. So, I mean, that’s a problem, and I wasn’t sure the question was whether Biden was going to make gestures and expect that passing gestures would placate the working-class voters or do something serious, and the administration’s kind of has kind of split the difference and done more serious stuff than probably most of us had hoped for or would have imagined.

Now, with Harris on the ticket, the question is going to be how the party comes together around her, and the persona that it crafts around her and the policy focus that it crafts around her. I thought that the speech that she gave in Milwaukee was maybe like an interesting sign where she spoke directly to workers having to have the right to join a union and to restoring what they call the middle class, which, which we all know, is really the working class. So, I mean, we’ll see. I mean, I think it’s a mistake, but I think there are also ways that a Harris or the Harris thing is like the Obama thing was, and a lot of the enthusiasm that’s generated around her is going to be more about persona and identity-oriented narratives that promise to help liberals feel good about America again. And we can expect that is to say, yeah, like it might move, or the need to appeal firmly to what working class voters now, which I think, frankly, is the only way she can really win. But the need to appeal to working class voters now may nudge a Harris administration a couple of notches closer to pursuing real policy initiatives that help working people. But it may just as easily be like another version of that thing we got with Clinton and I think we got with Obama. Point is that even if, if what electing Harris means is just kicking the can of confronting, you know, the danger down the road for four years, like we need to have those four years.

Because what we really need to turn the tide in American politics is the same thing that we needed in June of 1996 which is the creation and development and spread of a working class-based political movement that is directed toward first changing the terms of political debate in this country. And I’ve been saying this so much now, it just feels like part of a litany, right, like in a novena. But I think it helps us to look at the electoral realm as the domain of consolidating institutionally victories that have already been won on the plane of social movement organizing, right? I mean, the Civil Rights Movement didn’t come from passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1964 Civil Rights Act came from the Civil Rights Movement. And I think that’s something else that’s been lost in American politics over the last 30 years, like the focus on electing somebody to make the change, just to read the history backward. And I think that’s another lesson to take from the sensibility that brought to and developed within the Labor Party.

Katherine Isaac

Those are great points. Adolph, I know you’re working on a new book and that the working title is “When Compromises Come Home to Roost.” So, can you talk about a few of those compromises, in addition to the ones Mark mentioned, that led to the alienation of working-class voters from the Democratic Party?

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Oh, sure. I mean, that’s all that’s on my mind these days anyway, but yeah, how far back you want to go? I start out the book in 1944 which is like the apex of that sort of New Deal, CIO, black labor liberal coalition that had formed in the mid-30s and had developed and advanced both the labor rights agenda and the civil rights agenda. 1945 for instance, there was a real full employment bill that actually passed the U.S. Senate, and it was a bill that mandated that the executive branch and Congress make pursuit of a full employment economy the cornerstone of national economic policy and would have required the executive branch to set targets, including broad public service employment spending and public service investment, to bring unemployment down to a manageable threshold, which was generally considered between 2 and 3% that actually passed the US Senate, as I said, it was defeated in the House, and was defeated in the House as part of the corporate conservative backlash against that labor New Deal, CIO, black, liberal left coalition that had come together in the 30s, and that was like an opening salvo in a battle that basically defeated that alliance. By the end of the 1940s the Murray-Wagner-Dingle bill would have basically turned what would have expanded Social Security, basically to be a national healthcare program.

And by the way, people often say especially about academics, ask why what we don’t have, or why the US never had the kind of secure, solidaristic, political and social like institutions as developed in western Central Europe. Well, the reality is, and most of the answers have to deal with stuff like culture. That’s not who we are, racism, right? Whatever, whatever. But the reality is that until 1945 the US and most of western and central Europe were about on par with respect to welfare state institutions. The real difference is that the capitalist classes in Europe came out of the war weakened because the economies were weakened and discredited by their association with fascism. The US capitalist class came out on the warpath and forced a series of compromises onto both the labor movement and, for instance, the civil rights movement. That sort of altered the nature of the game, a turn away from pursuit of socialized housing right or non-market-based housing was one direction things might have gone into.

What we get instead was expansion of programs of access to home ownership. That was really more of a payoff to the real estate industry than it was part of an effort to pursue decent housing for all Americans, as FDR had pledged himself committed to. We see the same thing with healthcare, right? So we get branch benefits and the phenomenon of employer-provided health care as an alternative to a national health care system. And Mark and everyone else who’s ever had to deal with this, like inside the union structure, knows the weaknesses of employer-provided health care.

But also, as we move ahead, what we think of as neoliberalism now was actually, I’ve often said, the zygote or the embryo was formed in the Kennedy administration, because between the late 40s and the early 60s, the sort of de facto terms in which class struggle was conducted was fighting for points on a continuum between the priority of full employment versus the priority of fighting inflation or currency when I mean stability. And the Kennedy administration was the first I mean Democratic one, and even Eisenhower kind of went back and forth on this to come down absolutely in favor of currency stability over full employment. So what the Kennedy economists did was define full employment in a way, or as the level of unemployment that would keep inflation low, right? But I mean more, more and more, and there’s more and more of that under Clinton too.

So it’s probably the worst question you could ask me to answer, because I don’t know when to stop. Since the Clinton administration, Democrats haven’t really had anything to offer working people on a daily basis as workers that addresses the actual concerns and insecurities that people experience in their daily lives. And as Tony said, many, many times, if our side doesn’t have plausible explanations to offer people, and just as importantly, plausible seeming approaches to making their lives better than these other dangerous forces out there are going to swoop in and use the sort of scapegoating tactics and demonization lies that those forces have always used to get their way in politics, because they’re dependent, right? If we had an open discussion, right, between what the real agenda is and whether or not it addresses the things that workers are concerned about, we’d win every time, right?

But the point is that that other agenda is built on, you know, deception, and I’ve been describing it often as, as like a pickpockets dodge. Now they said point and say, hey, look, there’s somebody over there trying to take your job. Well, they’re putting their hands in your pockets, basically. And that’s why, I mean, I forget the exact percentage now, but Larry Sabato, like at UVA, who did the best work on Trump voters, like in 2016 found out a significant percentage of people who voted for Trump then had voted for Bernie in a primary and for Obama in either 2008 or 2012 or both. And we’ve all seen enough anecdotal evidence right from people who were ready to accept the promises. It didn’t matter what color Obama was, right? So betrayed, and unless our side and what, whether it’s a Democrats or whatever, start to address the things that what working people are actually concerned about and spread about in ways that are plausible and comprehensible to them, then the danger is going to be there.

Mark Dudzic

Yeah, I would just illustrate that, in 2016, right after Trump was elected, I went up to visit this picket line in upstate New York, this big chemical plant about an hour north of Albany, used to be owned by GE and then it was owned by a series of vulture capitalists who were just gutting the plant, the resources, and cutting benefits and screwing the workers. And they finally were pushed out on strike. They were in this desperate strike in the winter of 2016 into 2017, union leadership was very, you know, sophisticated. They were big Bernie supporters and stuff. But, you know, I’m walking the picket line with these guys, mostly guys, and people are saying, if only Trump knew what was happening to us, he would be down here and he would straighten this guy out. You know, we got to find a way to get Trump to intervene in this case.

And it was this belief that, you know, given how powerless people felt. I mean, these guys have been getting their ass kicked for 20 years, since GE sold it and ran away from the business. They were so powerless that the only thing that they could see that could, you know, give them more control was some strong figure who could somehow act as their substitute to force this company to treat them fairly. And I think that you know that that’s really what you know people are backed into when they know, progress from collective action. And you know, that’s the genius of neoliberalism, right, is there is no alternative, you gotta just surrender to these forces, because you can’t do anything else.

And they see that, and suddenly somebody like Trump shows up, or, you know, Ormond in Hungary, or you know, all of these demagogues, and they create the illusion that they can personally intervene in the market in ways that will make life more secure for people. I think that’s why people embrace it. They appeal to the basest qualities in people. You look for scapegoats, all of those things that you know when movements don’t exist that can provide a comprehensive narrative to people about how the world works. That’s how people, what people begin to look to was these sorts of conspiracies and different groups that are doing these things to them. And so, you know, I think this is what really builds and grows these things.

And, you know, I believe that we haven’t lost those people that we have to, you know, find ways to give them hope. I think that it’s really tied up in dynamic and growing labor movement, because it rebuilds a culture of solidarity that’s so essential for working people. But I think that is the essential issue that we’re facing right now, and why we’ve lost so many people to these kinds of politics. And, you know, on the other side, we’ve lost people to the politics of the issues that aren’t fundamental to their life. You know, whether it’s guns or people’s how, what pronouns people use, what bathrooms people use, all of these kinds of issues that aren’t really going to change anything for themselves and their families, but because they don’t even think that they can deal with the big weight that’s pushing them down. You know, they become motivated. Some people become motivated by these incidental issues.

Katherine Isaac

Well said, Mark. So, on Class Matters, we always ask some variation of the question, “What would our country look like if it were governed by and for the working class?” Mark, do you want to take a stab at that?

Mark Dudzic

Well, I would like to maybe change it for this discussion and say, “What would smart working class politics look like in the context of this year’s 2024, election cycle?” And I would say that we are facing a situation where it’s extremely possible that mega authoritarianism can take control of all three branches of government. The Supreme Court is a lost cause. And you know, unless we figure out how to reform that court, it’s going to be years before we can think about changing the Supreme Court their intent on repealing, you know, all of the social reforms of the 20th century, and they may very well succeed on that level. The Senate is almost a lost cause. At best case scenario, there’ll be a 50/50 split, which means you need a Democratic vice president even to provide, break the tie in the Senate to prevent it from doing horrendous things. And then the House, if the Democrats don’t take back the house the agenda that the House has and without the Senate being able to stop it, you know, is just horrid.

And then you have a guy who says he’s going to be a dictator, at least on day one. And one thing I think we’ve learned about dictators in modern history is they don’t voluntarily relinquish their power after day one, they stay dictators until they’re forced to stop dictating. So, this is a huge crisis for the working class and really for all people. It’s a major crisis in democracy. So, what, what would politics look like right now? Number one, we’ve got to stop the takeover of our government by a mega right wing, authoritarian government which is going to crush the institutions that sustain the working class and other people in this country. And I don’t think you’re going to do that by just pointing out what a monster Trump is. And I think that that’s the instinct of the Democratic Party operatives to do that.

And I think because, like I told you about these striking chemical workers, that people, you know that sometimes goes past people, and you know, they’re just looking for a solution, a strong solution, to their problems. But I think you can do it by beginning to appeal to the felt concerns that working class people have in this country. And I think it’s up to us. When I say us, I mean the labor movement and all of those who identify with a working-class politics, it’s up to us to make that happen in this election, that we really need to mobilize like we’ve never mobilized before, engage in one-on-one conversations with working class Americans to talk about the real stakes of this election and what their aspirations are and how we can proceed. And we’ve got to figure out a way to do that. We’ve got to mobilize a massive get out the vote operation here, and we’ve got to begin to have these discussions which we can then carry on beyond the election, to move politics forward and to end this crisis that we’d be facing with the possible sweep of all three branches of government.

Katherine Isaac

Well said, thank you. Adolph?

Adolph Reed Jr.

I agree with every jot, line and title of Mark’s analysis. And the good news, I think, is that nobody mobilizes votes like the labor movement does, and that’s a big advantage that our side has. But the one thing I’d add is just in anticipation of progressives, anxieties, I suppose, or whatever, or fixations. I mean, I know, like I was big into Aesop’s fables, like when I was a little kid, and one of them was the boy who cried wolf. And I know like a lot of us have been complaining, or some of us have been complaining, that every four years, going back at least to Bill Clinton, the Democrats have been saying to us that this election is more important than any election ever. If the Republicans win, it’s the end of civilization. And mainly it’s been exaggerated or bullshit, like 2000, right, Al Gore and George W Bush. But the moral, part of the moral of the boy who cried wolf is that eventually there is a wolf at the door. And guess what the wolf is at the door. So, this is like the most important thing for us to do. It’s a necessary precondition for us to fight, to be able to fight for anything else after January 20, 2025.

Katherine Isaac

Well said. Well put. Thank you and thank you, Mark and Adolph. You’ve been listening to Episode 15 of the Class Matters podcast with Adolph Reed Jr and Mark Dudzic. Our podcast engineer is Jimmy Wirt. Subscribe to Class Matters wherever you listen to podcasts, and, if you can, support us on Patreon and thank you for listening to class matters.