The electoral left keeps winning and the labor movement keeps retreating. Benjamin Y. Fong put that gap to Sam Gindin — research director of the Canadian Auto Workers for decades, co-author with Leo Panitch of The Making of Global Capitalism — and got an argument built to be uncomfortable for socialists rather than for conservatives.

Gindin’s starting move is to refuse the crisis framing. Yes, political institutions have lost legitimacy and working families are hurting. But there is no crisis of American economic decline:

  • The economy is growing, profit shares are at record levels, investment is expanding, productivity is advancing.
  • China neither wants nor is able to take over America’s international role.
  • So the crisis “is not a crisis of capitalism but really a crisis of the labor movement and the Left.”

He is equally blunt about “crisis-mongering as politics” — warnings of imminent collapse that substitute for organizing, and that make people conclude there’s no point trying.

On elections, he credits Sanders and Mamdani for moving young people from protest into politics, then says the electoral arena can’t build depth. Elections want numbers, not commitment; they cater to where the polls put the middle.

His reading of the 1960s is the sharpest part of the interview. Workers resisted hard — and lost anyway, because militancy stayed workplace-by-workplace and never became class politicization around demands like democratized investment and full employment. The state answered with an engineered recession and near-20-percent interest rates. “Capital’s crisis was solved by way of a greater and longer-lasting crisis for the working class.”

  • Unions are particularist, not class organizations: they represent the workers who happen to work together. That’s why organized socialists have to exist with one foot inside the workplace and one outside.
  • Labor still holds roughly $35 billion in assets and 14 million members — resources no other movement has.
  • Employers are the face of the enemy, not the enemy. Competition is what constrains working conditions, and it’s asymmetrical: it strengthens capital as a class and destroys workers’ main strength, solidarity.
  • Amazon is the test. It’s regionally rooted — fulfillment centers at ports and transport hubs can’t be relocated cheaply — so a strategic number of unionized facilities could give real leverage without unionizing the whole company.
  • Announced strike deadlines don’t work against Amazon’s logistics network; unannounced, sporadic disruption of the kind that built the labor movement has to be revived.
  • Labor has already lost a step by treating Amazon as a pie to split between the Teamsters and the UFCW instead of a project of the whole movement.

He mentions the CIO precedent — John Lewis sending a hundred of his own organizers to unionize steel because isolated miners would lose — as the model for the “virtual crusade” he thinks the moment requires.

Asked whether he’s optimistic, Gindin puts the odds of pulling socialism off at one in a thousand, then says that’s good enough: “We’ll take those odds. What else are you going to do with your life?”