I spent 10 minutes trying to come up with a witty take but there's too much going on here :agony-acid:
Yes, the capitalist bits of china are bad and that's going to generally be the most effective CIA propaganda(while conveniently omitting the part where capitalism is the source of the problem) .
TBH I don't form opinions on anything in China without reading like eight sources with at least some being Chinese themselves. NPR etc are often incorrect, regardless of how much of that we chalk up to incompetence vs. malice.
Not that it's a bastion for independent unions.
Historically independent unions and other such groups are extremely vulnerable/open to interference and foreign funding to distrupt the country and try to spur on color revolutions.
I get it, and I see it in my country as well. But we gotta find a better alternative cuz when the approved union sells you out to your bosses and or whoever is in government that sucks. The dude was a gig worker, and gig work fucking sucks.
Yeah its an incredibly shitty situation and I hope it gets better, I don't know enough about internal stuff like this but I really hope gig work is one of those things that gets cracked down on soon.
even though it was terrible and they got hella CIA help. I have to say those Poles did a pretty amazing job organizing one big union and getting like all of society behind it. I read some anarchist papers coming out of Solidarność printing presses and stuff, and they were extolling just how amazing it was that the whole Polish working class was pulling together. Bakers were still making bread and handing it off to Solidarność truck drivers to deliver to the longshoremen, so that everyone could stay fed even though everyone was on strike. Of course that was all just to turn poland into the EU's fascist backwater so it loses some charm now.
I once met a dude with a socialist pfp whose parents were heavily involved in Solidarnosc and then deeply ashamed, but he also told me his grandparents were nobles. lol
Well by a point in Polish history like a quarter of the country were nobles. They had a very democratic type of nobility, was pretty unique.
like all the nobles in the country got together in a big chamber and voted on stuff. The king was very very weak. Eventually just one noble could veto anything so literally nothing got done after a certain point. Poor people were kept out and serfs were still treated like shit but since the requirements to be considered a noble were so loose a lot of middle class merchant types snuck in too. Poland would later be one of the hotbeds of republican revolution during the Napoleonic wars.
people like to whip this one out at Sankara fans as well. In a command economy (or economies with a lot of planning eg china) you need to integrate the actual workers into the plan through the state trade unions. Having uniform workplace rules and regulations is important in preventing disputes and abuse. Europe basically does this with sectoral bargaining and bribing all the union officials. The only reason to make a independent trade union in that case is to cause trouble, which I mean you can if you want but the state is going to try to stop you. Our glorious American union system only exists because America got away with just shooting the trade unionists. Some of Boris Yeltsin's core supporters were coal miners in an independent trade union.
The only reason to make a independent trade union in that case is to cause trouble
Uhhh... what about to bargain for a better deal? You can't pretend that having a command economy simply addresses all legitimate worker grievances.
Uhhh… what about to bargain for a better deal?
Ideally yes, that would be their function. However, imperialism has made this incredibly hard to carry out in practice since any time an independent trade union has popped up in a socialist country, the CIA has swooped in pretty quickly to try and use said trade union as a weapon to cripple or destroy the socialist system. Others have already brought this up, but Poland and Chile are the two biggest examples of places where this has happened.
If we get to a point where socialism in the dominant world system and there's no longer the threat of capitalist imperialism being able to destroy it, then I don't see a reason why independent trade unions couldn't be allowed to exist. But until we get to that point, independent trade unions are going to be used as a weapon by capitalists against socialism, just as socialists use them as a weapon against capitalism. So for now, any competent socialist government is going to suppress them, while hopefully also addressing the grievances that would cause workers to try and form independent trade unions in the first place.
Hindering the efforts of workers to organize against their capitalist bosses is literally the opposite of what a communist party is supposed to do.
There's been at least one time where Chinese workers straight up kidnapped their bosses and held them hostage for a week over a labor dispute, and the CPC explicitly said that it wouldn't intervene, which was effectively them siding with the workers in that scenario. So I don't think that the CPC has a problem with workers fighting back against their bosses so much as they have a problem with organizations forming inside of China that can wield political/economic power independently of (and thus potentially against) the CPC.
Also, from a bit of research, it seems like there have been plenty of well organized strikes among Chinese workers in the past, even without official unions. Maybe things have changed since then, but it would seem like the guy the article is about shouldn't get jailed just for trying to organize workers against their bosses.
Arguments in this thread against independent trade unions are atrocious lol. Banning them solves nothing other than fail to respond the worker grievances and fails to integrate them into decision making. Especially when they come from leftist workers (as virtually all independent organizing attempts in China come from).
On the post, yeah independent labor organizing in China is hard and will get you arrested. A group of Maoist students got the book thrown at them for trying to organize a Shenzhen metal fabrication plant a couple years ago.
Good podcast on that recently: https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/the-class-struggle-in-contemporary-china-w-yueran-zhang
AFL-CIO has entered the chat
Also, it's one of those things where we know what a capitalist takeover of socialism looks like. It's happened a lot. It's always followed by insane amounts of death and poverty as well as destruction of the communist party and industrial unions/soviets in favor of no organization or company/trade unions with no teeth.
I don't think we've really seen that trend in China yet and they are absolutely not a country that would be allowed to have workers above the poverty line due to the fact that their greatest resource is and always will be their labor.
Every time i have heared an open and shut case for china bad it has been wrong. I don't know enojgh to make a judgment and there are only a few sources I would trust for info and the lamestream media isnt one of them.
