By Farooque Chowdhury, Michael D. Yates
MRonline
The emancipation of labor is one of the foremost questions in all exploitative societies and societies in transition. Labor itself demands looking at this issue deeply, not simply in an abstract way but concretely in all of its aspects, from the nature of work to the efforts by workers to end their exploitation alongside those who seek to prevent labor’s emancipation. Michael D. Yates, Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, has been involved with labor struggles, mainly in the United States, for more than five decades: helping to organize workers, supporting organizing efforts, working for a labor union, arbitrating labor disputes, teaching workers for many years, and writing books and essays for working people. He has tried to help workers in the United States understand not just U.S. labor history and the role of worker struggles, including armed resistance at times, but also the imperial role of the United States in the world. In his work, Professor Yates, whose area of study was labor economics, has encountered issues intricately related to the struggle between labor and capital and the efforts to radicalize the labor movement. He has pushed in his own small ways for a radical change in the capitalist mode of production, including its dominating ideology and politics. This, he believes, is an inescapable task for any radical.
This interview searches for the lessons learned from Yates’s activism, with special focus on the issue of class, so that his experience might be helpful to future organizers also aiming for a radical change of society. Instead of discussing abstract issues and issues in abstract form, Yates discusses functional questions related to labor’s struggle in concrete form based upon his own experiences, which, of course, have always been informed by those of others, especially his comrades worldwide who have been associated with Monthly Review, for which he has written many books and articles on labor activism. This interview, hopefully, is going to be a kind of manual for radical labor organizers and labor education-workers.
It is a long interview, broken into four parts, done by Farooque Chowdhury, a regular contributor to a number of media outlets and author of a few books related to aspects of people’s politics. Hopefully, this interview will generate debate on working-class issues related to radicalizing labor. Opinions and observations on the topics covered in the interview are welcome, with the hope that discussions on labor and labor’s politics will increasingly focus on real issues instead of desktop discussions having no relation to practical work among the exploited masses. What follows is the first part of the interview that spanned weeks in the later part of 2023.
Read More »
Journal of People 