Labor Must Learn Again to Oppose Capital; Portland DSA Labor Responds to the AFL-CIO

DSA members who are in labor unions should call for open debate in their locals to pass resolutions against the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee statement opposing the Green New Deal.

In their statement, the Energy Committee says the Green New Deal will threaten “family sustaining, middle-class union jobs.” To be clear, there is a threat to our families and our standard of living, and it has a name: Capitalism. Capitalism prioritizes profit over everything, including potable water and breathable air. The insatiable drive of market growth has given us a world where every resource is extracted, monetized, and sold back to the laborer who pulled it out of the earth. Here, the Energy Committee of the AFL-CIO is advocating for fossil fuel giants, not the workers who are compelled to generate their wealth.

Labor once conceived of itself as an opposing force to Capital. The McCarthyist postwar era saw the end of a militant, independently organized working class in the US. What was left was a decline in union density and a decline in union power. This statement from the AFL-CIO Energy Committee is a study in powerlessness.

Labor must learn again to oppose Capital.

Every worker, not just members of the AFL-CIO, should come together in Union. Living wage, union jobs do not have to be scarce. We could and should live in a better world where no one’s labor is exploited. So long as conciliatory union leaders do the bidding of the bosses, we will not have a labor movement worth a damn. A powerful labor movement would champion a Green New Deal — and it will. Otherwise, our species will be poisoned, burned, and drowned, along with all of those “family-sustaining, middle-class union jobs.”

-Portland DSA Labor WG Leadership

Co-signed by

-Co-chairs of Portland DSA Ecosocialist Caucus