On Friday, December 20th, New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) walked the picket line with striking Amazon workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island. My emotional reaction upon arriving at the Staten Island facility centered on its size. The facility is enormous, and for the four hours I was there massive freight trucks arrived and departed, moving packages in and out. I could see them moving continually across a conveyor belt, each one representing a bit of profit for Amazon. The size of the operation, running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, reminded me of what Marx said in Capital, about “the personification of things and the thing-ification of persons.”
Starting the day before, NYC-DSA was also on the line at their DBK4 facility in Maspeth, Queens. In addition to Amazon, NYC-DSA organized solidarity pickets for striking Starbucks workers in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Long Island DSA organized pickets at locations outside the City. At JFK8, our chartered buses from Queens and Brooklyn totaled about 70 people. Including those who drove in carpools to Staten Island, the DSA presence was around a hundred people at the picket that Friday night, in addition to comrades who picketed the following day. Amazon and Starbucks strikes throughout the country, in California, Illinois, and elsewhere, all had DSA presence on the line.
NYC-DSA arrived at around 9 PM and walked to the JFK8 facility at 10. We picketed and chanted for about two hours before the Amazon workers walked off their jobs at the shift change at midnight. We marched with the workers for about two hours before leaving at 2 AM back for Queens and Brooklyn.
Walking back to the bus a comrade asked if the Amazon strike was successful, considering only a minority of workers walked off their shift. I couldn’t tell if there was disappointment in the question, and I didn’t have a perfect answer for whether this Amazon strike was “successful” or not. Now, I’m thinking of something Hal Draper wrote in ‘Marxism and Trade Unions:’
The class as a whole begins on a much lower level than the Marxist program itself, but the Marxist program says that this is revolutionary to begin with. From the beginning Marx puts the stress upon the basic goal – that the primary aim was to get the class as a whole moving, and that any such movement of the class as a whole was in itself and of itself progressive and revolutionary in its implications, because the class was. And this is true even if that class, as it begins moving, moves on a basis far from satisfactory to the Marxists or revolutionaries. That is the conception of the class struggle held by Marx and Engels in a completely thought-out and consistent way, and by very few others.
In this country, the trade unions are the only class organizations of the proletariat. Trade unions are class organizations par excellence because they organize only the members of a class and they organize them for the sole reason that they belong to that class. The class character of an organization does not depend on its ideas; it depends on its objective role and function in society.
Seeing the workers walk off their shift at midnight, and standing with Starbucks workers in the freezing cold in front of a shuttered store, was an incipient revolutionary act because it was the working class struggling for power for themselves in an organization by and for itself. When unions are led and controlled by the rank-and-file, they can be expressions of pure working-class power. Striking against Amazon, the second largest employer in America after Walmart, and Starbucks, a company with 361,000 employees, is a huge step forward in the movement of class struggle. The challenge of this moment is not only to maintain it, but how to merge it with a larger political revolutionary struggle, not imported from the outside, but emerging from the working class itself.
DSA committed serious resources to make strike solidarity for Amazon a reality. Chartering a bus and organizing hundreds of cadre labor activists to the picket line was the first stress test for larger actions leading to May Day 2028. Given an Amazon worker was arrested in the Maspeth facility, the incoming Trump administration, and the general anti-left tenor of the Eric Adams administration, NYC-DSA should hold trainings with the Red Rabbits on information security, marshaling, and jail support. Overall, the socialist movement and DSA specifically will need to grow substantially to move from being a supporting player to an actual organizer, both in political and logistical terms, of a mass strike at Amazon or Starbucks.
On the picket line outside of the Staten Island facility, I felt like a powerless thing on the side of the road yelling at passing trucks, while this massive inhuman building—with millions of moving parts and packages and a wall-sized American flag—was a fortress of power, protected by rings of fences and a police presence, immutable to human demands. What is required to break that logic will need an organized working class in the millions.