Samuel Gompers: Now. I want to talk about what is happening in the present day, because this is not an abstract disagreement about labor tactics from a hundred years ago. Freddie deBoer -- and anyone who has spent time with his collected writings knows this argument well -- makes the case that Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the movement against sexual violence all failed because they built organizations, hired staff, cultivated donors, and then those organizations did exactly what organizations do. They moderated. The demands softened. The tactics became respectable. And the material conditions those movements were built to change -- police violence, economic inequality, the treatment of women in workplaces -- remained essentially unchanged. Now. I want to ask Miss Luxemburg something directly. Those movements failed. What does she propose they should have done differently?
Rosa Luxemburg: They should not have incorporated. They should not have hired executive directors. They should not have accepted money from the foundations and universities and corporations whose practices they were challenging. They should have remained what they were at their most powerful -- a mass expression of genuine fury, pressing specific material demands, without giving any organization the authority to negotiate those demands away on their behalf.
Samuel Gompers: And when the police cracked down? When the encampments were cleared? When the news cycle moved on and the crowd went home?
Rosa Luxemburg: Then the next moment would have come. And the capacity for the next moment would have been preserved, because the class would not have been taught to defer to professional organizers who had mortgages and donor relationships to protect. The moment that passes is not the movement. The movement is the capacity of the class to generate moments. Every time you convert that capacity into an organizational chart, you have traded a weapon for a filing cabinet.
Samuel Gompers: And I will tell you what I see when I look at those movements. I see exactly what I saw with the Knights of Labor and with every purely spontaneous uprising I watched in forty years of labor organizing. I see enormous energy, genuine moral clarity, and absolutely no mechanism for converting that clarity into enforceable change. You cannot shame a legislature into passing a law. You cannot inspire a police department into reform. You need something they have to respond to -- a contract, a seat at the table, an institution with enough standing that ignoring it has a cost. The movements she is describing had moral authority. They did not have leverage. And moral authority without leverage is a very beautiful thing that accomplishes nothing.
Rosa Luxemburg: The movements you are describing also had leverage. In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in American history put millions of people into the streets of every major city in this country. That is leverage. Raw, genuine, unmistakable leverage. And what happened to it? Organizations formed. Donors wrote checks. Executive directors were hired. Spokespeople were named. And the leverage was managed -- by professionals, into channels the system had already prepared for it. Committees were formed. Reports were commissioned. Language was changed in corporate handbooks. The leverage was converted into process. And process is where leverage goes to die.
Samuel Gompers: I will grant her this much -- and I mean it, because I am not in the business of denying what is in front of my face -- I was never in favor of accepting money from the corporations you are protesting against in order to fund the protest. That is not pure and simple unionism. That is something considerably less pure and considerably less simple. The movements she is describing did not fail because they built institutions. They failed because they built the wrong kind of institutions. A union survives because its members pay dues. A nonprofit survives because its donors write checks. Those are two completely different accountability structures. One answers to the people it serves. The other answers to the people who fund it. You cannot blame me for what the second model produces.
Rosa Luxemburg: That is a more interesting answer than I expected from you.
Samuel Gompers: I told you I was warming up.
Rosa Luxemburg: But your distinction does not save your argument. Because the accountability dynamic is the same. The membership organization moderates itself to retain members who are risk-averse. The nonprofit moderates itself to retain donors who are risk-averse. In both cases the institution's survival requires it to make peace with the system it claims to oppose. The AFL in 1919 opposed the formation of an independent labor party. The labor movement in the 1950s cooperated with the purge of union leaders whose politics made the institution uncomfortable. The AFL under your successors became precisely the bureaucratic apparatus I described. Your accountability structure did not protect you from the dynamic. It only delayed it.
Samuel Gompers: I will not defend every decision made by men who came after me and who are not here to defend themselves. I will defend the decisions I made while I was alive. And the decision I made was this: I chose to build something that could still be standing when the excitement faded. Because the excitement always fades. Every single time. The question of what movement you want is also the question of what is left when the excitement is gone. And I would rather have a contract than a memory.
Rosa Luxemburg: And when the institution is gone -- which it will be, as yours ultimately was -- there is nothing left at all. Because the capacity for spontaneous mass action has been systematically trained out of the working class by decades of being told to let the professionals handle it. You did not just build an institution, Mister Gompers. You taught an entire class to be dependent on it. That is the crime I hold against you. Not the eight-hour day. Not the contract. The dependency.
Samuel Gompers: And you taught an entire generation that the only honorable action was the action that risked everything. And a great many of them died for that lesson with nothing secured and no one left to carry it forward. That is the crime I hold against you. I hold it with considerably more evidence.
Rosa Luxemburg: EVIDENCE! You call a contract with a railroad company evidence of liberation!
Samuel Gompers: I CALL IT A RESULT! Something you have remarkable little experience producing!
Rosa Luxemburg: THE RESULT WAS A BRIBE TO PREVENT THE WORKING CLASS FROM DEMANDING WHAT IT WAS OWED!
Samuel Gompers: AND WHAT WAS IT OWED? EVERYTHING? IN ONE MORNING? BY SPONTANEOUSLY WALKING INTO THE STREET?
Rosa Luxemburg: IT WAS OWED THE END OF THE SYSTEM THAT STOLE ITS LABOR! NOT A NICKEL-AN-HOUR IMPROVEMENT IN THE TERMS OF THE THEFT!
Samuel Gompers: BEAUTIFUL! INSPIRING! AND COMPLETELY USELESS TO THE MAN WHO CANNOT PAY HIS RENT!
Rosa Luxemburg: YOUR MAN STILL CANNOT PAY HIS RENT! A HUNDRED YEARS LATER! HOW IS THAT CONTRACT WORKING OUT?
Samuel Gompers: HE HAS A WEEKEND! HE HAS SUNDAY! WHICH IS MORE THAN YOUR REVOLUTION EVER GAVE ANYBODY!
Rosa Luxemburg: HE HAS A SUNDAY SO HE CAN REST AND GO BACK AND MAKE MONEY FOR THE SAME MAN WHO WAS EXPLOITING HIM ON MONDAY!
Samuel Gompers: THAT IS CALLED LIVING! WHICH IS AN IMPROVEMENT OVER THE ALTERNATIVE YOUR STRATEGY CONSISTENTLY PRODUCED!
Rosa Luxemburg: SHAME ON YOU!
Samuel Gompers: SHAME ON ME? I BUILT SOMETHING! WHAT DID YOU BUILD?
Rosa Luxemburg: I BUILT A CASE! ONE THAT HISTORY HAS PROVEN CORRECT!
Samuel Gompers: HISTORY HAS PROVEN YOU DEAD AND ME RIGHT! IN THAT ORDER!
Rosa Luxemburg: YOU SMUG, CIGAR-ROLLING, CONTRACT-SIGNING EXCUSE FOR A LABOR LEADER!
Samuel Gompers: YOU MAGNIFICENT, BEAUTIFUL, COMPLETELY UNBUILDABLE THEORIST!
Samuel Gompers: Well. Now that we have aired that out. I want to ask every working man and woman watching this -- and a few of the bosses too, because they watch, I know they do -- to like this video and subscribe to this channel. Because this is exactly the kind of argument that needs to be had in public, by people who have actually thought about it, rather than in nonprofit conference rooms by professionals who are getting paid to avoid conclusions. Like the woman next to me, who has spent this entire conversation explaining why building things is a form of betrayal, without once explaining what her alternative produced beyond a very moving funeral.
Rosa Luxemburg: Subscribe. And then, once you have subscribed, go outside and organize something. Not a task force. Not a working group. Something with actual stakes. Unlike the organization built by the man sitting next to me, which spent four decades carefully ensuring that nothing ever had stakes high enough to frighten the people writing the membership cards -- or threaten the leadership that was cashing them.
Samuel Gompers: She has opinions about how to organize. She also has, for anyone paying attention, a track record that consists primarily of losing and calling it heroic. But I will say this -- I mean it -- she is the most formidable person I have argued with in my entire life, living or dead. If she had spent half the energy building things that she spent describing why built things are corrupt, we might have actually gotten somewhere together. Like this video. Subscribe.
Rosa Luxemburg: And if he had spent half the time he spent making peace with the ruling class imagining a world without it, he might have amounted to something more than history's most effective argument for why the working class should ask politely. Like this video. Subscribe. Read something that was not written by someone who has already made his peace with the people doing the exploiting. This debate is brought to you by AITalkerApp.com -- create your own animated conversations. Link in the description.
