Join an org, by the way! I’m just fantasizing here about what could have been. Organizing with DSA or PSL or whoever is really important and can help the proletarian cause a lot!
Where’s the genuine dual power organizations, the revolutionary party groups? Why is everyone here focusing on local elections (not that they aren’t important, they are) and sectarian issues? There’s so much cool shit we could be doing as organizations but my local DSA chapter just does electoral stuff and my local PSL and even more left-leaning organizations just seem to sort of be doing absolutely nothing? I could be wrong, I haven’t checked the news or anything, but I feel like every time I see an event for an org it’s always just a social meeting, an electoral-politics related protest or canvassing session, a protest for a serious issue like abortion rights or Palestine but nothing further, or a regular meet.
A lot of this could be due to a lack of resources, but our cause(s) aren’t just milquetoast liberalism, why are there no attempts to secure funding through illegal or unhinged means? Why are there no networks of power being built? Surely we’re more creative than this. Where are the armies of communist prostitutes spending their free time procuring money for their org? Where are the lefty organizations doing insane Ponzi schemes? It feels like everyone in every org is just running their wheels and doing basically nothing. Why? Surely there’s better ways to procure worker power than trying to protest to get specific bills passed? I mean, it isn’t useless by any means, but there has to be more?
But also a counter-trend: a disproportionate amount of immigrants and racialized people in unions. Less so in the staff, but commonly active and networked/informally organized in the rank and file.
Unfortunately that is not a counter-trend to imperialism. Unionized "defense" workers have drawn from those communities for a long time and it works in their favor, as they are more exploitable. Despite some expectations that those facing oppression would be more likely to fight against an employer that, say, makes the bombs that kill their families back home or people that are part of a diaspora with which they identify, the trend is in the opposite direction: there's basically zero anti-imperialist work in these unions.
It would be theoretically nice to work in that direction, but having personally tried to get such things going, including with the rank and file, it's extremely difficult to get people to organize themselves out of a job if they're not already ideologically committed to the point that they'll make themselves and their families suffer to achieve it. That's very, very few people, including a number of self-proclaimed socialists I found working at these companies. You can get them to go to a BLM march but never consider a slowdown due to genocide in Palestine. There is a disconnect.
Hell I knew a Palestinian refugee that went to work for a Zionist doing Zionist things for a pay cut because they were bored with their previous job. We can't expect coherence, we have to fight hard for whatever we can get and need to build up trust and knowledge from scratch within our communities, and that goes double for anti-imperialism because it is unintuitive for most people. We are very privileged in our exposure to relatively coherent political theory and history and have to approach folks living in an entirely different bubble.
I dont know about the defense industry, but transport/logistics/shipping is nothing like that. Folks are militant, tired of bullshit, and willing to fight over any issue that comes up, from wages to palestine. Since you raised some anecdotes: my shop steward is a transfem communist who keeps taking sick days to do DA at local arms manufacturers. Sorry your industry sucks I guess, but it's not like that everywhere.
Oh yes you can definitely get truck drivers and so on in certain locales. It's not a cakewalk in the US to get them to do anything for Palestine, but it is actually conceivable and there have been a few examples here and there.
Luckily I'm not in a MIC industry or adjacent to one, I just do a lot of organizing.
I know a lot of radicals in unions, but I don't think it's the imperial core unions or union jobs that radicalize people, generally speaking. I think lefties are drawn to unions/union jobs and see them as their natural homes. But as institutions, they are fundamentally flawed, usually only capable of representing localized worker or national industry interests, and can be easily turned against the working class as a whole, particularly internationally. MIC unions are just the most blatant and obvious example of this, as they literally make the brown-people-destroying machines. Realistically, many industries have less obvious versions of these elements even when they have organized labor (tech, academia, resource extraction, agriculture). Communists have historically learned this in direct and unpleasant ways, where they must butt heads with the trade unionists, even outlaw them as they exist, as part of achieving or protecting revolution. Despite having members in the trade unions, despite attempts to build support for revolution via worker power, the successful revolutions tended to notice that the trade unions and union workers, when it came time to make the big changes (e.g. nationalization) were being mollified by and fighting on behalf of only their localized economic interests and confrontation was necessary. We are obviously not at that point, but we do have to deal with, say, the actions of the AFL-CIA.
Anyways I think I keep writing overly long messages, sorry about that. I just really want folks to take a critical and proactive approach to trade unions. They can really backfire on us and I want our folks to be as safe and strategic as possible. I've seen folks that call themselves socialist but are clearly unconcerned about imperialism enjoy widespread uncritical support for their work in the MIC. I've also seen socialists enter union spaces assuming they were left spaces (e.g. calling people comrades when nobody else was using that language) and eventually realize how reactionary the space really is, and even get hounded out of it by the reactionaries. Unions, as social institutions, are very little more and very little less than organizing shops against management. They can create that very limited form of class consciousness. Anything more requires deliberate and intensive organizing by people who are already radical. We should be in them and we should engage very strategically with them, understanding their limits and what we hope to achieve through a relationship.