Genuine social movements arise when a social formation can no longer realize its aspirations for the good life in the prevailing system and are prepared to travel the arduous path of social transformation.1 Historically, movements that cease to expand and improve and under adverse economic and political conditions are likely to stagnate and decline. Samuel Gompers’s “More” may have served the AFL’s craft union members adequately for the first decades of the twentieth century, but neither he nor his comrades in leadership considered the aspirations of the industrial workers or the possibility that changing economic, technological, and political conditions might affect the crafts. In the 1930s, industrial workers were inspired by the idea that the union was a way to achieve industrial citizenship—that workers could get off their knees and out from under an imperial ownership that watched and controlled them on and off the job and dictated the terms and conditions of their employment and their lives. These workers sought to take their fate into their own hands. Just as workers had at the turn of the twentieth century, they brandished their desire for dignity in every strike, workplace occupation, and march through city streets. Their vision was not typically anticapitalist, but industrial unionism was a movement of a class that aspired to power over their own labor in the factory and other workplaces at least, and in many instances also in their cities and towns. Union members ran for city council, were elected to school boards, and made their voices heard on a wide range of public policies.

Today, U.S. unions have lost any semblance of this radical imagination, and so are generally unable to inspire working-class passion. They have been passive in the face of dramatic changes in the economy, which have visited hardship on a considerable portion of the workers, and accepted the indifference of the political class to their problems. Their explicit commitment to the existing setup, particularly to the capitalist economic system, and to a perverse version of class peace, have put most of them in a dependent and defensive position. Specifically, they have no tools for any analysis that would help workers evaluate the state of their own affairs and those of the country at large. Dimly, unions recognize that we live in an age when national borders no longer define the economy, but they are still tied to conceptions of reform that this new age has outmoded. More egregiously, instead of acting for themselves, they have fixed their hopes on a series of political “saviors” who either ignore the needs of their labor allies or else pay them lip service and then proceed to betray their trust at almost every turn.