The idea that workers in wealthy countries like the United States are part of a “labor aristocracy” bought off with the fruits of imperialism is nonsense. The best way to build a movement against US imperialism is to build the labor movement domestically.
Final point: I've never seen a class conscious union in the United States, anywhere. Socialism is an extreme minority position, most self-described "socialists" in the US are just social democrats that want socialized healthcare and don't care about our military or financial devastation of those abroad.
This ends up meaning that all of these people romanticizing the labor movement and its capacity are fundamentally out of touch with the actual goings-on at unions here right now today. Even though many work at them, they come in thinking they'll be able to have basic class conscious conversations and to push them left, only to find that their only political interest is on "social issues" and which Democrats to support, with no long-term strategy or consistency. Socialists run head-long into the colonizer union machine and burn themselves out on 80 hour weeks "for the working class" just to watch their union boss cut a deal to decrease wages with the boss or a politician because the union itself is weak, has no class consciousness, and the rank and file are checked out. All of these amount to the same thing, really.
And then, once a socialist has overinvested themselves in the capacity of colonizers to run a class conscious union, they start telling themselves stories about how actually if you read this academic who can't even read Lenin for comprehension, you can squint and look at it from this other angle and now all the unions you helped build that disappoint and alienate their workers and cozy up to bourgeois political parties are still actually building socialism rather than acting a lightning rod for burning out comrades. And to do that, you need to reject the obvious explanations for why workers see themselves as powerless, for why even when empowered they can't imagine a better world, or why the unionized defense contractor workers aren't going to be anti-war. You need to see the revolutionary potential in retail workers who don't even join their own pickets and rely on a socialist party to do all of the work for them. In other words, you need to invent a new religion for imperial core socialism.
I was looking at the latest rail union contract vote and I think less than 60% of the membership bothered to cast a ballot. That level of apathy blew my mind. Is there any hope in these independent unions popping up like Amazon and Starbucks? I know Taft-Hartley has badly kneecapped the labor movement, but I didn't realize how badly.
The Starbucks unions are done on a store-by-store basis and corporate finds ways to fire or move around the radicals, so usually they will be around for the vote but won't actually remain at the store without an unfair labor practices win or a pressure campaign like The Memphis 7. Buffalo is pretty good. But random stores, for the most part, are good on social issues but not class conscious nor do they actually organize coherently.
Amazon warehouses are similar in that they are warehouse-by-warehouse. Amazon is more effective at union busting at them and they're not particularly class conscious. They are missed opportunities because American union organizers and lefties don't really have a plan for how to make a union class conscious, they just think if you use the organizer model things will work themselves out or maybe you can co-opt them a bit.
Jane McAlevey is about as good as it gets in the US, and she still pushes a Bernie version of class consciousness.
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These are both excellent points. I'm a bit I'll at the moment and my vocabulary is failing me, but my basic idea is that the are some additional difficult realities we have to contend with.
For the first point, I agree that it's necessary to build ground-up unions in order to have a labor base of power. I would also say that there are many ways for those to fail as well and tons of organizer model unions are... in precarious situations. I'm talking about unions where only 1/100 or 1/1000 workers are doing anything for the union... in a union using the organizer model. The workers at these places still don't see the relevance of the union, even though there are socialists in leadership calling each other comrades and patting each other on the back. Basically... shit is even worse than most unions being top-down and run by class traitors.
For the second point, I'd say that I have at times had a similar belief. That the nascent class consciousness of "workers vs. the bosses" would be enough to build from. In my experience, it is not. You build from a radical core that can command respect - or just dictate from a position of power. That's the only lever that's really available in America, and it's why capitalists pull it to great effect with class traitors. This is because rank and file engagement is truly dismal. There is no fighting spirit, many folks don't even know they're in a union or what they'd vote for in one or do in one. So many people say, "this is so important, but I can't afford the dues". People making $90k say that.
The battle is much harder and deeper than that, and Lenin inherited a situation that was already much more radical and class conscious. He's not wrong, he just had different conditions. And he wonin the periphery, whereas movements in the imperial core failed, were murdered, were taken over be fascists, we're mollified with socdemery.
This isn't doomerposting. We just need to know where our fight is and what the prospects are. It is much more valuable for the socialist project to join a socialist org and recruit 2 people than to form a union. Not that the union formation can't be important and beautiful, but its capacity to build socialism is a delusion that will suck up your time and has dubious prospects without being much more disciplined, not unlike electoralism.
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