New Labor Forum

With the key institution of working class power effectively liquidated, the prospects for the American working class and for any kind of left liberal advance, let alone a socialist one, will be bleak.

Chris Brooks is the author of an essay for the journal New Labor Forum earlier this year entitled Is Labor at the Point of No Return? Brooks is our guest today for a wide-ranging conversation about the argument he makes in that piece and, and about the U.S.

labor movement as a whole.

He's interviewed by my guest host, Micah Utrecht, Micah being Jacobin's editor and also editor at large of New Labor Forum.

Brooks served until recently as chief of staff to United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who was elected in 2023 on a slate that overthrew the UAW establishment, pledging reform and a militant class struggle in the wake of a deeply embarrassing corruption scandal.

Later that year, the UAW took on the Big Three automakers in a combative, strategically innovative stand-up strike widely hailed as a giant success for the union.

That success against the Big Three led to a mini boom in UAW organizing throughout the country, a boom which Brooks assesses in another New Labor Forum piece entitled Seizing the Moment: Lessons from the Frontline of the UAW's Fight to Scale Up.

Brooks argues that some of the essential organizing lessons articulated by the late great Jane McAlevey, lessons that have become gospel for many of today's organizers, need some rethinking depending upon the terrain that organizers find themselves navigating.