Labor Power and Strategy

* Book: Labor Power and Strategy. Edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek.

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Review

Benjamin Fong:

"Labor Power and Strategy, the new book edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, officially aims to provide “rational, radical, experience-based perspectives that help target and run smart, strategic, effective campaigns in the working class.” But by the end of it, it is difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Olney and Perušek have a different goal: to make clear just how far organized labor is from having a strategic conversation about its present impasse.

The book is organized around an interview with economist and historian John Womack about the twin needs for an analysis of the weak points (or “choke points”) in contemporary industrial technologies and for the labor movement to exploit that analysis to cause disruption and gain leverage. Womack supports the struggles of all workers to organize for better conditions, but he also believes the labor movement should focus not on raising the floor for the “most oppressed” groups of workers but rather on workers and industries where it is possible to gain the kind of leverage to bring the capitalist class to heel. In his words, labor “needs to know where the crucial industrial and technical connections are, the junctions, the intersections in space and time, to see how much workers in supply or transformation can interrupt, disrupt, where and when in their struggles they can stop the most capitalist expropriation of surplus value.” To do this effectively, he urges continual network analysis, or “grubbing,” to reveal the vulnerable seams in the fabric of modern supply chains — the places where ports and rail and warehouses meet, and thus where production and distribution can be effectively blocked."

(https://catalyst-journal.com/2023/12/john-womack-labor-power-and-strategy-review)