Cuervo Jones

April 1^st, 2025 GATT special online-only issue

At the end of a three-month study group focused on William Foster’s The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons, communist Jimmy Higgins decided to drop out of grad school and get a job at an auto factory, where he wears a hard hat and joined a union. A few years later, Higgins had talked to a lot of his co-workers about “the bosses” and the struggle for higher wages, but never about revolution. He got a position within his union local and made a habit of introducing himself to everyone he meets as “Jimmy Higgins, shop steward, local 218,” which increasingly elicited eyerolls from his friends, especially after they had heard him talk about a coming general strike that never materialized year after year. Beyond changing Higgins’ self-conception, however, strategically positioning himself at the point of production did lead to considerable material change. Higgins saved up enough money from his industrial working-class job to buy a small house and was finally able to pay off the mounting student debt he had begun to acquire as an undergrad labor studies major—debt that had only grown bigger after entering a PhD program in political economy.

Higgins confessed to GATT journal that his life conditions had improved since joining the ranks of the industrial working class: “In grad school, I was scraping together a living from teaching classes about the labor movement as an adjunct professor and picking up shifts as a barista at a local hipster coffeeshop, making far less than $25 per hour at both gigs and never knowing how many shifts I’d get a week or how many classes I’d be able to teach each semester. Since going blue collar, I have a stable schedule, guaranteed shifts, paid breaks, good hourly pay, and health insurance. I even have a retirement savings account, something I never dreamed of while working in the service industry and being part of the downwardy mobile intellectual class.” After those candid comments, Higgins corrected himself: “Since life conditions are not a properly Marxist category, the title of a famous book by Friedrich Engels notwithstanding, I think it’s more important to define my class position in relation to production, and based on that, I’m a lot more proletarian now, despite being a homeowner with a growing bank account.”

Although he constantly rails against “the bosses,” Higgins’ main hardship of late has not been his employment—sure, his job involves physical labor, but he can rest it off after his shift ends, so long as the union meetings he dutifully attends don’t go too late. Instead, it’s criticisms from some of his erstwhile comrades that he has joined the labor aristocracy that have been giving Higgins grief. While many of those leveling the “labor aristocracy” accusation are as equally reductionist and mechanical in their class analysis as Higgins is, just from the opposite end of the same stupidity, Higgins nonetheless felt compelled to answer their accusation. After all, maintaining appearances on Leftist social media is still of the utmost importance to him even after joining the ranks of the industrial working class (in fact, adding his occupation and union position to his social media profile was one of Higgins’ prime motivations for going blue collar). To answer those accusations, Higgins spent his four weeks paid vacation this year scouring Lenin’s writings for justifications for his job choice. He found a quote from Lenin that said the labor aristocracy is but a small portion of the working class, and figured that if Lenin said that about Europe a hundred years ago, it must also be true about the imperialist country Higgins lives in today. Otherwise, how would Jimmy Higgins live out his nostalgic fantasy of re-enacting the 1930s?