Recovering Our Power

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Karl Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to be. Production is stopped, profit is threatened.

For the Left, this is much more than a story about making bottles or the manufacturing process. It’s more than a story about workers and strikes and capitalism. It’s a story about the power ordinary people have. And the reason ordinary people have that power is not because they are producing bottles or even socially necessary goods. It’s that the people with power, capitalists, and the system those people of power depend on, capitalism, is actually dependent upon the people with little individual power cooperating to use that little independent power they have to create something that capital and the capitalist need.

From the very beginning of its history, in the eighteenth century, the Left has had a dream, the dream of finding and wielding that one lever of power that can bring the social organism to a stop because it is a lever of power that the people at the top need. Whatever that organism may be — the monarchy of Louis XVI, the family under patriarchy, the factory under capitalism, and so on.

For many decades, the dream of that power lay in the strike. But as our sense of workers and unions has declined, the strike and its larger significance have receded from our muscles and our memory. It may live on in the imagination — every day or so, someone on social media is calling for a general strike — but very few people in contemporary America have any experience of a strike and what it entails. The calls ring ever more hollow.

This is the predicament we find ourselves in today: not that there is no opposition or resistance, not that there is no message or narrative, not that the Right has all the power. It’s the sense that the Left lacks that lever it once wielded. The massive rallies and marches that once felt disruptive and threatening to a society customized to conformity and compliance, now just seem like another event in another city on another day.

When Elon Musk and his minions seize the access passwords or the keys to the office, we see them wielding a material kind of power we not only wish we had but that we used to have. We experience a frustration and sense of loss, the sense that once upon a time, in the sit-down strikes or the Greensboro sit-ins, in the consciousness-raising sessions or the Stonewall riots, it was we on the Left who had found those levers of power that could bring society to a stop. But now it is the other side that has those levers of power. Once upon a time, it was we who illegally barged our way into offices and factories, intruded upon meetings of experts, where we were not supposed to be; now it’s they who do that, with full impunity it seems.

But the thing about left politics, as Frances Fox Piven reminds us in her amazing book Challenging Authority, is what those levers of power are is not set in advance; we don’t know what it is that will prove a strike, what it is that will bring society to a halt, until we do it. Sometimes, we just stumble upon it. Often, we find it through trial and error. The important thing is to get organized, stay alert, start trying, and keep looking. But above all else, get organized. As Marx understood, social cooperation is the key to everything, in capitalism and beyond.

Source: https://jacobin.com/2025/04/left-politics-strike-unions-capitalism/