Jul 19, 2021
“Don’t Moan, Organize”: Lessons from On New Terrain by Kim Moody
By Vince Carducci
Labor activist, writer, and Labor Notes co-founder Kim Moody’s book On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War offers a trenchant analysis of how the working class might use the vulnerabilities of a restructured capitalism to gain power.
A mega-container ship interrupting the international flow of commercial shipping traffic for almost a week after having run aground in the Suez Canal. Acres of vehicles at American automobile assembly plants that can’t be finished due to a shortage of microchips for their onboard computers. Bloomberg estimated the former to cost the global economy $9.6 billion in lost revenue for each day that canal traffic was stalled. The latter is expected to cost the US automobile industry $110 billion in 2021 according to consulting firm AlixPartners. Then there is the recent reporting on the “Great Resignation,” workers quitting or refusing to return to their jobs as the pandemic begins to lift, in some cases forcing employers to raise their pay.
These episodes reveal vulnerabilities in the global capitalist system to disruptions in the flow of goods and services and their potential impact on profits. How these vulnerabilities and other developments might be used by the working class to gain power against the forces of capital is the subject of labor activist, writer, and Labor Notes co-founder Kim Moody’s book On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket, 2017).
Moody examines three aspects of what he terms “the new terrain,” which are then synthesized to outline opportunities for and threats to a reinvigorated class politics. The discussion focuses primarily on the United States, using in-depth analysis of governmental statistics and a wide range of other sources, but in broad strokes its lessons can be applied to other developed economies.
One is the changing composition of the US working class since the beginning in the 1980s of what has come to be known as neoliberalism, a system that relies upon lean production, new technology, and an increasing need for working-class social reproduction and capital maintenance. Another is US capitalism’s restructuring in the wake of consolidation and centralization driven by recent mergers and acquisitions and the rise of supply-chain integration and coordination as part of the “logistics revolution.” The third is the shifting American political landscape, including the increased importance of state and local politics and the reshaping of the Democratic Party.
The Remaking of the US Working Class
Among the major changes of the US working class are its demographics and occupational distribution. The working class has become proportionally more diversified with immigrants joining native-born African American, Latinx, and women workers primarily in lower-paid jobs where productivity tends to be lower and the need for labor higher. Where Blacks, Latinxs, and Asians, including immigrants, made up approximately 15 percent of private-sector workers employed in production, transportation, material moving, and service occupations in 1981, they now make up nearly 40 percent of those broad categories.
At the same time, the distribution of working-class occupations has also changed. The industrial core has shrunk whereas the proportion of workers involved in transportation, warehousing, and information processing has grown. A growing number of workers are also employed to simply maintain capital’s physical assets, including housekeeping and maintenance for factories, warehouses, office buildings, transportation hubs, hospitals, schools, etc. Gender segregation remains, however, with women, who now make up nearly half of the workforce, mainly employed in service, sales, and office work.
Using US Census Bureau statistics, Moody calculates the working class as constituting 63 percent of the US class structure with the capitalist class (somewhat arbitrarily defined as those with $2 million or more in financial assets) as the vaunted 1 percent. The remaining 36 percent are identified as middle class, consisting of managers and professionals, about a third of the latter who are being “proletarianized,” including teachers, nurses, and others, such as contingent professionals, who more and more are being subjected to working-class conditions. Teachers and nurses especially, Moody notes, have increasingly demonstrated class consciousness, successfully organizing constituents, and using strikes and other time-honored methods to advance their cause.
Capital Restructured and Reorganized
As the makeup of the working class has changed, so has the terrain upon which they must now maneuver. The rise in international and domestic competition, along with the effects of deregulation and globalization, have sparked an intense wave of mergers and acquisitions that has consolidated and centralized the operations of capital since the early 1980s. Whereas the trend of mergers and acquisitions of the 1960s and 1970s was toward conglomeration, involving companies from different industry segments being brought together to ensure a revenue stream through diversification, the recent activity of the 1990s and 2000s has been more strategically oriented within specific industries to increase market share, and thereby profits, in the core business.
A classic example of the former is General Electric, a legacy conglomerate that operates across aviation, healthcare, financial services, and digital technology and once operated major consumer goods and transportation divisions, since divested. An example of the latter is the Walt Disney Company (or as employees dub it, “Mousewitz”), which operates a vertically integrated media and entertainment empire that encompasses the conception and production of content through to its delivery in all channels, including movie and TV production, broadcast TV and cable subscriptions, publishing, video games, theme parks, product branding, and more.
The trend toward consolidation cuts a wide swath across the US economy. Major consolidations have occurred in the auto parts segment where the number of supplier firms declined 80 percent between 1990 and 2010 according to the Original Equipment Suppliers Association (OESA). By 2011, the top four companies in meat production and processing controlled some 75 percent of the market. Similar consolidations have affected steel production, healthcare systems, hotels, retail, and others.
The consolidation of the logistics network, what Marx in volume I of Capital presciently identifies as “the means of communication and transport” and Moody terms “capital’s supply chain gang,” is particularly relevant to the prospects for exerting worker power. The production and distribution of goods and services under lean production and technological innovation relies on a tightly interlocking system of linkages, making them vulnerable to disruption along many points of the chain. Reflecting on these vulnerabilities, Moody observes: “It is fair to say that these logistics workers have at least as much leverage in the economy today as autoworkers did in the 1970s.”
A key attribute of the reorganized supply chains is their geographic concentration into nodes and clusters of transportation hubs, massive warehouses, and distribution centers. These nodes and clusters bring together tens of thousands of workers, mostly in or near large urban metropolitan areas, and constitute an enormous capital investment. This infrastructure — highways, bridges and tunnels, air and railroad lines, entry ports, buildings, utility grids, etc. — is not easily moved and hence resistant to capital mobility. Each of these sites is a potential pressure point that can be leveraged on behalf of worker power.
The metropolitan areas where these nodes and clusters are located is also home to large numbers of under- and unemployed workers stuck in place by racial segregation and severely diminished economic opportunity. They constitute the classic “reserve army” available for low-wage labor and susceptible to other forms of exploitation. They are also ripe for organizing.
(See this interview with co-founder of the International Labour and Logistics Research Network Katy Fox-Hodess on mobilizing these workers.)
In addition to the investment in infrastructure, is the investment in fixed assets such as robots, computer systems, fiber optic networks, tracking devices, and other technologies to increase per-worker productivity as business units are combined and their operations consolidated, providing the capacity to squeeze more work, for example, from individual workers left standing after a downsizing. The increased amount of capital per worker is subject to greater return on investment imperatives in order to justify its investment. Capital sitting idle is capital wasted as Marx’s General Formula of Capital M-C-MI holds. (That is, money is invested in commodities in order to generate more money and thus profit, which starts the cycle anew.) These fixed investments are another place where direct action on the part of workers can be brought to bear. As New School for Social Research economist Anwar Shaikh, cited in On New Terrain, observes: “Capital-intensive industries will also tend to have high levels of fixed costs which will make them more susceptible to the effects of slowdowns and strikes.”
Opportunities and Threats
The changing demographics and occupational distribution of the working class, coupled with the consolidated, integrated, and intensified restructuring of capital, now offer opportunities for resistance and organization that can be mustered in service of working-class power. As noted above, the tight integration of just-in-time supply chains makes them vulnerable to disruption at many points along the way, using the primary tool of workers: withholding their labor. The fixed costs of consolidated capital make many organizations vulnerable to similar disruptions, threatening to diminish returns on investment and profits, as well as opening them up to unionization along industry lines as vertical integration has brought operations together. Then there is the opportunity to organize workers across all sectors, particularly women and people of color, as the rate of exploitation has intensified under neoliberalism, sending inequality and worker discontent soaring.
Serious impediments remain, however. Race, ethnic, and gender divisions continue to plague working-class solidarity. The stunning wealth of the capitalist class, accumulated during some four decades of neoliberalism, provides an almost daunting capacity to sustain a war of attrition against workers. There is also the capitalist class’s virtual control over American party politics, which is the third aspect of the new terrain that Moody surveys.
The American Political Landscape
Moody devotes nearly half of On New Terrain’s main text to a discussion of the current American political scene and its implications for the working class. First is the fact that, regardless of the talking points offered up by “Lunch Bucket” Joe Biden during his campaign and now as President, the Democratic Party in the main long ago abandoned working-class concerns, instead supporting free trade, cutting aid to cities, and distancing itself from unions. (It was Democrat Bill Clinton who three decades ago “ended welfare as we know it,” declared that “the age of big government is over,” and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law.)
What’s more, in addition to capitalizing on racial prejudice and class resentment, Republicans have understood, far sooner than Democrats, the value of capturing government at the state and local levels, funneling financial and organizational resources downstream even as they have paralyzed politics at the federal level. The electoral successes of the Democratic Party, such as they have been, owe more to the fact that African American and Latinx voters have rebuffed Republican appeals to bigotry and the nostalgia for a homogenized America that never really existed to show up at the polls and make their voices heard. (Although the 2020 election cycle showed Republicans making some inroads even among these constituencies.)
An obvious trend has been the enormous amounts of money, lobbying, and influence devoted to party organization and elections, particularly in the wake of Citizens United. Big money has infiltrated the Democratic Party and favored purchased forms of campaigning, such as attack ads, robocalls, mailers, social media microtargeting, polling, and the like. It has “professionalized” politics, moving it away from the grassroots. The amount of business money and funds from wealthy donors that pours into Democratic coffers, though not necessarily at levels typically enjoyed by Republicans, is substantial. The price tag for electoral campaigns continues to rise from cycle to cycle. Labor money is paltry by comparison. The advent of crowdfunding would seem to go against this rising tide, but as Moody argues it has instead simply raised the ante in the bidding war.
Moody is circumspect, at best, about recent attempts to move the Democratic Party to the left. The influence of moneyed interests, the recalcitrance of the party apparatus from the national down to the local levels, and the perception on the part of voters that “there is no alternative” have stymied similar efforts going back to the New Deal. The Democratic machine’s thwarting of Bernie Sanders in the last two Presidential primaries is an indication of the prospects for realignment of the party at large.
The last primary election also saw Democrats put up party hacks against DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Detroit’s own Rashida Tlaib. Those attempts failed but are further evidence of the party’s hostility towards a leftist agenda. Overwhelming voter support for Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib demonstrates the appeal of socialist programs for the grassroots. And it is from the bottom up that the potential exists for a socialist electoral politics to break through what Moody terms the “American Scheme” of the capitalist-dominated party system.
What Is to be Done?
For Moody, the place to begin is where some level of grassroots organization is already in place, such as union locals, activist social movements, and community groups, particularly those in major metropolitan areas. Of these, the workplace is the most significant site for organizing collective social power. Even with its persistent inequalities, the workplace is likely the most demographically diverse site of opportunity. In particular, the giant logistics clusters, which tend to be located near urban communities of color from which their workers are typically drawn and some of which are already organized, are especially opportune.
A workplace-based movement needs to reach out to local communities and connect with their movements and organizations, bringing together rank-and-file efforts for union democracy with advocates for more and better schools and affordable housing, Medicaid expansion, racial, economic, and environmental justice, carceral abolition, police demilitarization, etc. These are issues that have traction with many working-class people and can begin to be acted upon at the local and state levels where the barriers to entry into the political process are lower.
But, Moody cautions, while electoral politics can help pave the way for the transition to socialism, it cannot be achieved through that mechanism alone. Paraphrasing Marx, he states: “[T]he emancipation of the working class remains the task of the working class itself” (emphasis original). Political action is one aspect of how consciousness for such an undertaking can be cultivated. The advance toward socialism becomes more feasible with an organized working class leveraging the vulnerabilities of a reconfigured capital in combination with social movement and community-based activism, starting at the local level and working upwards.
Success is not a foregone conclusion. But without the effort of (small “d”) democratically organized grassroots action, movements, and networks, failure surely is. The answer is not to bemoan the difficult road ahead, but to get organized for the journey.
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