Today, a reinvigorated, militant labor movement has set its sights on Amazon. Amazonians United 1 , Bessemer workers organizing with RWDSU 2 , the Amazon Labor Union 3 , CAUSE 4 , Southern Workers Assembly 5 , the Teamsters, and worker centers in the Athena 6 network have built the foundation for an unprecedented level of Amazon worker activity.
The Teamsters launched a dedicated Amazon Division in 2022 7 to secure “more workplace protections in the warehouse and logistics industry,” and the UPS Teamsters historic and standard–elevating contract 8 is reverberating across the economy.
Amazon Studios is also under pressure, as striking workers with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) urge 9 antitrust regulators to investigate Hollywood mergers, which enable media conglomerates to depress workers’ wages and imperil their futures.
Organizers have long understood that the law is a tool of power. As the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon demonstrates: “Organize, and the law will follow 10 .”
After all, as labor economist Brian Callaci notes 11 , “markets do not arise spontaneously from nature, but rather sit atop legal rules, regulatory infrastructures, and informal norms and power relationships that structure them.”
A leftist vision and practice of antimonopoly aims to dismantle the oppressive social and economic systems that give rise to concentrated corporate power in the first place. Through this lens, we see the law, the state, or the market as constructions of human hands — not naturally emerging or neutral things.
Antimonopoly activism must foster democratic and collaborative practices that keep law and policy in dialogue and in solidarity with emancipatory social movements.
By pursuing non-reformist reforms 12 that modify power relations, we move beyond the narrow question of what is possible in a current political moment and pursue solutions to build “new centers of democratic power 13 .” Then, we can radically reconfigure our political economy.
Antimonopoly can be a transformative tool that supports grassroots organizing movements. By reorienting its previously narrow focus on “efficiency” and “competition,” we can use it to democratize relations of political and economic power — and usher in an economy and a politics of abundance.
This essay builds on Liberation in a Generation’s newest report “From Big Business to a Liberation Economy: A Racial Justice Agenda for Reining in Monopoly Power.” 14
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org 15 and was authored by Azza Altriraifi – Sasha Hammad.