the_dunk_tank

Yeah American unions have become pathetic. Too much Cold War brainworms combined with Reaganism caused them to hand over all of their power.

this is ignoring and erasing the savage impact of the red scares and mcarthyism which led to that. These weren't just media propaganda that 'communism bad' but also violent waves of events over a century, with some of their worst waves in the 1900s-1930s and the 1950s-1970s, which literally made it illegal to be a communist both in law and practice; with full scale outing/'doxxing' and forced-purges of every single communist, anarchist, socialist, any militant at all from all of the rank-and-file and leadership positions of unions and workers associations, from every board of civil rights and community organizations, every school board and faculty from the university level all the way down to even middle school teachers being threatened with criminal prosecution if they didn't quit, every level of governance and civil service, etc. On top of COINTELPRO style surveillance, sabotage, frameups, jailings, torture, murder, etc. of any suspected or even suspected of having sympathies.

Any who didn't comply had every method at the state's disposal arrayed against them to crush them, repress them, criminally charge them, blacklist and sanction them and pressure others to not deal with them, and discredit and malign them in the public and provoke stochastic terror and repressions against them, if not just killed by the cops and pinkertons themselves etc. Even speaking positively about communism let alone being a party member if overheard and reported would be made to end your career and social comfort and safety and possibly freedom or life, by any means they could. It's from all of this that you still in the USA on government forms and immigration forms and military forms have to disclose if you are or have ever been a member of a communist party. You can be denied citizenship over it.

But all this left behind only anti-communist liberals, as everyone who didn't abide by the purges was destroyed. It broke and smote all militancy in these unions and organizations which is what led to this complacency and class-collaboration and corruption (which then in the 1950s opened the door to their dealings with organized crime; whose mobsters had plenty of their own government crooks in their service too

a legacy of things like prohibition meaning government figures and bootleggers working together to make off like bandits behind the charade of fighting 'the war on alcohol.') and this is what all paved the way for the criticisms and disdain for unions we see today; half of which isn't even wrong but is applied to organized labor in general instead of these specific corrupt, bloated, class-collaborationist reactionary unions that were all that were left in the wake of anti-communist purges amounting to bureaucratized white terror.

There has indeed been a rediscovery however. IWW has seen a big resurgence in the last decade though; and never gave up their principles even when they, and anyone else who tried to organize the broad masses together on real revolutionary lines were smashed into irrelevancy. For them it's constitutionally verboten to ever sign a contract with a no-strike clause for instance (which amounts to handing over all power and leverage completely), and nobody with hiring or firing power is allowed in the union, nor any cops, etc. Class collaboration is explicitly condemned and they understand and teach that labor law is a (flawed) shield but direct action is the sword and the primary tool of the working class. They also allow dual-carding to connect unions together. Their all-industrial unionism is as opposed to collaborationist and worker-vs-worker competition-between-unions which only benefits the capitalists; and is an exceptional way in my mind for regular working masses to develop working class consciousness and solidarity-in-struggle to build revolutionary mindsets and motivations; with which a little bit (of a good deal) of Lenin would create an actual revolutionary capability among them to fear. Plus their preamble goes hard as hell.

Wow that’s interesting I have definitely met many of those kinds of folks.

In general it just feels like the whole NLRB certification process serves teach American Union members that the legitimacy of their political power is handed down to them by the state as opposed to being self evident and independent from state power.