Labor Network for Sustainability

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

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Can a Trump tyranny be impeded, rolled back, and eliminated? Or are we on the road to a long-lasting autocracy as many in the MAGA movement intend? The answer hangs in the balance. This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut.[1]

On Nov. 9, 2024, Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets today to make clear that we will fight to protect our immigrant neighbors from mass deportations, denounce bigotry even when it comes from the White House, and work harder to make New York City a place where safety & affordability are a reality for all of us. Photo credit: @AnaMariaforNY, X.com.

Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters now control the presidency, the Congress, the administrative agencies of the federal government, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak, feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination can ever be overcome?

There is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?

Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable or acquiesce in it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.

But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:

• Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election.
• Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate the large numbers and willingness to act of those who share their views.
• Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action.
• People power: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or “social strike.”

There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end. Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.

While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it also poses enormous vulnerabilities for its perpetrators. By making almost every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught, it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole – on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on earth depends.

The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and wellbeing, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group, but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society. We the people – society — need to defend ourselves against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”

The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle against the authoritarian regime in Poland forty years ago. In the midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work. Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they aimed to fight “political, religious and ideological persecution”; to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend “human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted, and nurtured many of the networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in the gigantic Solidarity union – and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.[2]

Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life together on earth possible. It includes the protection of the human rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our earth and its climate that make human life on earth possible; the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.

In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted, but to our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people – as members of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s backs.

Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense. But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists themselves to sell each other out.

Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and policy agendas, but also as a unified – and therefore unifying — common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs. Right. It is a frame that can help unify those who should be acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.

[1] For the LNS report Defending Society Against MAGA Tyranny: a Prospectus for Action see https://labor4sustainability.org/files/MAGATyranny.pdf

[2]  Stephen R. Burant, Reviewer, “KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976–1981” by Jan Józef Lipski. The Polish Review, Vol. 31, No. 2/3 (1986), pp. 204-205, University of Illinois Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25778216

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Each issue of Making a Living on a Living Planet we feature a member of the LNS network. This time it’s LNS’ new Young Worker Organizer Martina Manicastri. Martina writes:

I am excited to be joining the LNS team as a Young Worker Organizer and I am dedicated to helping young workers build foundational knowledge on political economy, climate justice, and the labor movement to encourage them to lead organizing initiatives that prioritize a healthy planet and a just transition.

Prior to joining LNS, I was a Communications Specialist and Labor Organizer for CWA Local 1036 where I primarily worked with membership in the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. I’ve been a community organizer since 2018 and am currently Co-Chair of my local DSA chapter. I have helped organize robust mutual aid programs, community political education sessions, and have been in the fight for a free Palestine for many years.

As a New Jersey resident, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Sandy and Ida, as well as the effects of increasingly harsh winters and summers on agricultural workers and unhoused members of my community. Like many young workers, my climate activism is shaped by the looming and deeply felt threat of global warming to the lives and futures of the working class, and I am committed to organizing for a sustainable planet run and shaped by workers.

The post LNS Spotlight: Martina Manicastri first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo Credit: @chuchumbe CommUNITY Fire Brigade Team #5 Volunteering alongside Day Laborers, Immigrants & LA lovers @pasadenajobcenter for Recovery effort’s in Pasadena & Altadena

Excerpts from an LNS Statement on the fires in Los Angeles:

The Labor Network for Sustainability mourns the catastrophic loss of life and homes in California.

The science is clear: Fossil fuels have driven the climate crisis and are fueling these fires.

The greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California. “Emissions from the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel companies are responsible for 37% of the cumulative area burned by forest fires in the western US and south-western Canada between 1986 and 2021.”

We need a system that protects us, NOT causes fatal disasters. The Labor Network for Sustainability is committed to building a world that takes the climate crisis seriously. We are part of movements that are pushing our governments to invest in the renewable energy transition necessary to mitigate further climate catastrophe. We are in solidarity with the labor movement that is fighting for fully funded services that can handle the disasters we can no longer prevent – thanks to decades of putting corporate profit over workers and our planet. We know this work needs to be well-trained and well-paid — not forced on the most vulnerable people in our society for little or no pay. We uplift those organizations racing to meet the immediate needs of destroyed communities, but we need more than distribution systems for aid.

Join LNS in building a society where the work we do nourishes and protects our planet and all who live on it.

For full statement: https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/the-labor-network-for-sustainability-mourns-the-catastrophic-loss-of-life-and-homes-in-california/

The post Building a Society Where the Work We Do Nourishes and Protects Our Planet and All Who Live on It first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

According to a statement on the Los Angeles fires by the Labor Network for Sustainability, “The fires are not a natural disaster.”

Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Climate scientists told Yale E360 that with climate change, California’s dry season has extended into early winter when the Santa Ana winds – which bring hot, dry air from the mountains out to sea during the winter months – typically form. The scientist said that this, “is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.” As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.

According to meteorologist Eric Holthaus writing in The Guardian, the ingredients for these “infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought,” foretell “an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.”

These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance.

For full statement: https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/the-labor-network-for-sustainability-mourns-the-catastrophic-loss-of-life-and-homes-in-california/

The post The Los Angeles Fires Are the New Face of Climate Change first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Sacramento City Unified School District employees and supporters rally at Rosemont High School, on Monday, March 28, 2022. Photo Credit: Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

By LNS California Organizer Veronica Wilson

Mass mutual aid operations, demands for disaster preparedness, and calls for climate readiness are just a few examples of the working class responding to the climate catastrophe brought by the extreme Santa Ana windstorm and devastating wildfires on January 7th in Los Angeles.

As first responders fought gigantic blazes in Altadena, an historic Black neighborhood, and the Pacific Palisades and more fires flared up, threatening areas of  Hollywood and the Valley, next level solidarity and worker-led action was mobilizing. LA labor leaders, worker centers, community organizations and their networks mounted massive operations of assistance, care, and support as fire spread, taking lives and structures, and forcing people to evacuate and businesses to shutter.

Workers and organizers rallied thousands of volunteers to help at distribution centers, providing basic goods and services for those who lost loved ones, homes, schools, and jobs. Labor and Community Services, a nonprofit partner of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, with sixty years of experience mobilizing support for unionists in times of disaster, stood up an enormous distribution center. At the LA Labor annual MLK breakfast, only days after fires broke out, organizers added donation drop-offs to the event, attended by more than 1,300. The Pasadena Job Center, a mile and a half from the fire perimeter in Altadena, operated by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (@daylaborernetwork), deployed second responders to safely clear debris covering residential streets in disaster areas and surrounding neighborhoods, managing thousands of volunteers who came to sort and distribute donations to local residents.

Following United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) unified response to demand that the Los Angeles Unified School District temporarily close worksites without loss of compensation, union vice president Julie Van Winkle laid out reasons for planning ahead in the reality of intensifying climate crisis, making the case for climate-ready schools.

Into the months and years ahead, workers and communities will need to stick together in intermediate and longer term economic recovery, prioritizing work that strengthens climate preparedness, adaptation, and resilience.

The post Workers Rally to Protect California Communities first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo Credit: AFP

Unions such as the Los Angeles Federation of Labor and the California Teachers Association are providing resources to impacted communities. We applaud UTLA’s leadership in the unified response from united unions in the LA Unified School District to protect children and their families during this ongoing tragedy.

There are several ways to help support and make donations to victims of the wildfires. LA’s Mask Bloc has a form for people to request masks or offer volunteer time. As a means of survival, some displaced Black families, formerly of Altadena, have resorted to the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to rebuild through financial support as the fires continue to ravage L.A. Be advised that any rent increases above 10% are considered price gouging which can be reported anywhere in the country, and by calling LA 311 at 213-473-3231 or by reporting it to the LA County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs if you live in Los Angeles.

 

• Black LA Relief & Recovery Fund – www.pledge.to/BlackLA
• Inclusive Action for the City – Outdoor Worker Fund – bit.ly/workeraid-donate
• Domestic Workers Relief Fund – domesticworkers.org
• NDLON https://linktr.ee/ndlon
• CHIRLA iRelief: https://chirla.org/irelief
• LA Unity & Solidarity Fund: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/california-wildfires

The post Ways to Help Workers and Communities Affected by the LA Fires first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

The Labor Network for Sustainability issued a report January 1st titled Defending Society Against MAGA Tyranny: A Prospectus for Action. The report, authored by labor historian and LNS co-founder and senior strategic advisor Jeremy Brecher, says:

“There is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?

“Gandhi once wrote, ‘Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.’ A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable or acquiesce in it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.

“But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:

• Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election.
• Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate the large numbers and willingness to act of those who share their views.
• Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action.
• Social strikes: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or ‘people power’.”

For full report: https://labor4sustainability.org/files/MAGATyranny.pdf

The post Social Self-Defense for the New MAGA Era first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo Credit: Colette Pichon Battle. From left to right, LNS Board members Colette Pichon Battle, Nayyirah Shariff, Liz Ratzloff, and Jacqui Patterson

By LNS Co-Executive Director Liz Ratzloff

This past December, I had the privilege of traveling to four incredible cities across the globe to discuss how we can build the power necessary to challenge the fossil fuel industry, strengthen worker power, and protect our planet. Each stop underscored the urgency of our mission and the shared struggles we face in this fight.

My first stop was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city with a deep labor history rooted in its industrial past. We talked about the importance of a just transition—and how we can better plan for ending fossil fuel extraction in a way that supports workers and communities. Pittsburgh’s legacy of generating energy and denigrating the environment provided a rich backdrop for these discussions.

Next, I traveled to Washington, D.C., where we met with allies in the climate movement to emphasize the importance of labor and collective action in countering corporate power and navigating the dangers posed by the new administration. The conversations were dynamic, and the timing was fitting—my next stop would provide a striking real-world example of the power of organized labor.

In Seoul, South Korea, I witnessed history as labor unions staged a massive strike in response to the president’s abuse of power, culminating in his impeachment. This extraordinary display of working-class solidarity mirrored the very principles we had been discussing with our allies in D.C. It was a humbling reminder of the strength of collective action.

Finally, I spoke at a just transition conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Like Pittsburgh, Kaohsiung has an industrial legacy marked by environmental degradation. We explored ways to build coalitions between communities, environmental justice movements, and labor unions to forge a sustainable and just future.

People all over the world want an ecologically sustainable and economically just future.

We just need to get organized.

The post Traveling for Labor and Climate Justice first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

The day after newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed executive orders promoting mass deportations and the rolling back of immigrants’ rights, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued a statement that said in part:

“The executive orders President Donald Trump signed amount to an unprecedented attack on immigrant workers and their families that will weaken our economy and our country. While Trump and extremist Republican leaders propagate divisive rhetoric about immigrants to stoke fear, working people know that our fellow workers aren’t the problem—the real threat is billionaires like Trump and Elon Musk who seek to distract and divide us so they can seize even more power and make ever greater profits off of our labor. The bottom line: An immigrant doesn’t stand between you and a good job—a billionaire does.

“Joining together as workers and unions is how we stand up to abusive bosses, hold greedy corporations accountable, and build an economy that works for working people. An injury to one is an injury to all. The labor movement stands proudly in solidarity with the millions of valued members of our workforce, our communities and our unions who are targeted by Monday’s announcements. Deporting people whose labor helps our country prosper and cutting off pathways into the United States is not only a betrayal of our values—it is also a recipe for economic disaster.

“Our unions will fight to defend and preserve fundamental rights for all working families, including access to education and health care, as well as the birthright citizenship protections enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. We will join community allies to counter Trump’s unfair and unconstitutional attacks, so together we can ensure that everyone is safe on the job and can continue to build an economy that supports working families, not corporate billionaires.”

Source: https://aflcio.org/press/releases/afl-cio-president-trumps-unprecedented-attack-immigrant-workers-and-their-families

The post AFL-CIO Says, “Working people know that our fellow workers aren’t the problem—the real threat is billionaires” first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.