By Eugene Watts

This testimony comes from one individual within the Working People’s Association and does not reflect the unity of the organization.

The Working People’s Association of Charlotte (WPA) was formed almost two years ago, born from the ashes of previous revolutionary organizations in the city and a wave of new activists and young workers. Today, it exists as a revolutionary and class-conscious labor organization that serves the goal of constructing a new independent, combative, and class-conscious current within the labor movement. To get there, the organization has had to go through a constant struggle against right opportunist, economist, tailist, and liquidationist political lines, which sought to transform the organization into a mere funnel into the state unions and labor bureaucracy. In the past year, since putting into place a revolutionary line, the WPA has been able to develop shop units and organizing efforts in various industries across Charlotte but has also committed errors from which the organization continues to learn.

In September of 2022, the WPA was founded out of a desire to advance the labor struggle in Charlotte, where the establishment class-collaborationist labor movement is in an even more pitiful state than it is in other parts of the country. In North Carolina, only 2% of workers are in a union. Charlotte workers also experience some of the worst working conditions of any major city, with a 2015 study showing that Charlotte workers work the third highest number of hours per week of any major American city. This year the Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that Charlotte workers make 4 dollars less per hour than the national average. This means that in Charlotte, workers work longer hours and are paid less than nearly anywhere else in the country. The WPA was established with the goal of combating the backwards state of the labor movement in Charlotte and building political power for the working class. While this was a principled and noble goal on paper, the WPA in it’s original state was nothing different than the mountain of organizations set up by so-called progressives, revisionists, and state unions themselves which do nothing to materially build power for the working class.

This expressed itself in the organization’s lack of a clear political line on what the ultimate solution for the working class is, and its practice would’ve made even William Z. Foster, the father of the boring-from-within labor organizing strategy, shudder. This was directly tied to the dogmatic and arrogant manner in which the organization was founded. As many graduated former university students and self-proclaimed “radicals” do, the WPA was founded on a whim without any investigation into the conditions of local workers nor the history of the labor movement or its current state. The original leadership of the WPA had little understanding of the labor movement and most wouldn’t have even been able to describe what the AFL-CIO is. The leadership of the organization overwhelmingly petite bourgeois and directed a small group of retail and service workers.

Due to their lack of investigation and petit bourgeois class orientation, this leadership was unable to identify what the advanced elements of the working class were. They incorrectly saw the labor bureaucracy and the few workers who support it as advanced. This led to the practice of the organization being nothing more than following around whatever the local labor bureaucrats were doing and attempting to befriend them. From this, the WPA would host “educational” events that regurgitated the exact lines and strategies of these bureaucrats, just with a spin that was more critical of the Democratic Party. When workers within the organization pushed revolutionary lines or were critical of the sell-out leadership of the establishment labor movement, they were labeled “sectarian,” “ultra-leftist,” and “left opportunist” and told in Trotskyite fashion to disguise their true politics behind a more liberal-friendly line, otherwise they would “scare off the workers” who were in fact just a handful of union bureaucrats. Tied to the abysmal understanding of the local conditions, in the rare instances where the organization attempted to organize workers, it would put forward pitiful campaigns that essentially were copied and pasted from the sorts of class collaborationist organizations it claimed to be opposed to. For instance, there was a pitiful Starbucks organizing “campaign” which saw the organization pass out a few flyers to Starbucks workers once and then never return.

In December and January, the small group of workers within the WPA accompanied by sympathetic activists began pushing for the organization to engage in more work and investigation among the working class. The WPA organized outings to speak with transportation workers who had voted yes to a strike authorization vote and an investigation into the recent death of a construction worker. These investigations were a spark that saw a push within the organization for it to re-orientate itself away from the labor bureaucracy and to the working class. The core group of WPA members began to do the work that the WPA never did: investigating the state of the establishment labor movement along with the conditions of local workers, studying the history of the labor movement, and analyzing their own workplaces and experiences with the state union leadership. Through this and joint work with the Southern New England Labor Council, this group came to understand the need to establish an independent, combative, and class-conscious current within the labor movement.

By this time, typical of many “radicals” coming out of the petty bourgeoisie, much of the petite bourgeois leadership had grown tired of doing political work and had vanished. Those who remained, unable to critically analyze their own practice and lines on the labor movement, had come to the line that the failures of the organization were not due to its petite bourgeois class orientation and tailing of the state unions, but to the baffling conclusion that “only paid full-time labor bureaucrats” are able to organize workers at the workplace. Completely disregarding Marxism and over a century of history of independent labor organizations, they moved to completely liquidate the organization on this basis. This utterly revisionist line was vehemently struggled against and crushed by the workers within the organization, with those who held it resigning after their attempt to liquidate the organization failed.

With the left of the organization now in command, the WPA began the process of transforming itself into a revolutionary and class-conscious labor organization. This started with turning the organization into one that was based among the working class and workplaces, and the WPA formed its first shop units. In June of 2023, the WPA formed the Working People’s Press (WPP), a worker’s newspaper inspired by the Inner City Voice, Southern Worker, Labor Unity, Daily Worker, and other historical publications of the labor movement. The WPA’s goal is to use this newspaper as a way to build contacts with workers, investigate local conditions, develop workers correspondents, and raise class consciousness. In contrast to the organization’s former positions, the first few articles of the newly formed WPP issued sharp critiques of state unions, drawing the ire of local union bureaucrats who had grown accustomed to the WPA under its old leadership being their cheerleaders.

However, the publication of the WPP also exposed the existing errors in the WPA’s political line, as due to the organization’s lack of a political line on what the ultimate solution is for the working class, the WPP put forward economistic articles. These articles focused almost entirely on the day-to-day demands of the working class, and when discussing what the answer was for workers, it could only put forth the vague position of workers needing to “get organized.” This stance was a holdover from the founding of the WPA and the Trotskyite strategy of disguising its politics in order to appease more backward elements within the working class. In August through self-critique and from studying critiques received of the WPP, the WPA put into place a revolutionary line that the only solution for the working class is the forceful overthrow of capitalism.

During the Fall, the WPA began to have some small successes in getting individual workers interested in organizing their workplaces, but also had seen shop units stagnating and one of its activists was fired for their organizing. Continuing to study the history of the labor movement and analyzing its own successes and failures within various workplaces, the WPA put forward its shop unit guide that the Southern New England Labor Council later further developed, hoping to take from the lessons it had learned throughout the year. In November, the WPA began its worker mass meetings with the intention of further putting its shop unit strategy into practice, connecting workers across industries, raising class consciousness, and pushing for the development of independent labor organizations. These are bi-weekly meetings of workers across various industries where workers discuss workplace grievances and study articles from the New Labor Press along with other class-conscious labor organizations internationally.

Throughout the Winter and Spring the workers’ circle meetings developed an admittedly small but steady attendance, and several workers who attended them began organizing at their own workplace. There remains a constant struggle, however, with the workers’ meetings against economism. Without guidance, it can become easy for these discussions of workplace grievances to never elevate past immediate demands within the confines of capitalist wage-labor. It is, of course, natural within capitalist society for workers to want to discuss the innumerable hardships they face at their job, and this often is the first building block for where conversations about collective action and the roots of these hardships begin. However, if they never shift from mere conversations over grievances, then the process of building workplace organizations and raising political consciousness never begins. The WPA has not crafted the perfect formula to combat this; however, asking questions and having discussions afterward which are directly related to organizing are methods it is attempting among others.

Over the past few years, an incredibly positive trend has emerged in the revolutionary movement in the United States. For the first time since the Revolutionary Communist Party’s short-lived “National Workers Organization,” revolutionaries from all corners of the country are attempting to organize workers at the point of production. This trend has led to another extremely positive development, that being an increase in line struggle over the labor question and the strategies Marxists should take within the labor movement. Through this, the Southern New England Labor Council has produced the state unionism line which is the basic line that should be guiding aspiring US revolutionaries right now in the trade union struggle.

The WPA is inspired by and continues to analyze the work being done by revolutionaries engaged in the trade union struggle, using this alongside its own experiences and the history of the international proletariat to analyze and correct errors within its own work. Over the past month, the organization has focused on reorganizing itself to better be able to support the growth and development of local shop work and industrial organizations. The WPA remains committed to the ongoing dialogue and sharing of experiences, with the goal of forging unity among those working to construct a new independent, combative, and class-conscious current within the labor movement.

For a Revolutionary Labor Movement!