I’m reposting a comment I made to open up a broader discussion now that it looks like Burgerland is about to go full McCarthy again…
So what are we supposed to do? If elections are useless and lead to state violence, and organizing leads to state violence, and doing nothing just means the Fascists win by default… I hear the doom-and-gloom but we need solutions. How did the Bosheviks survive? Heck, how did left organizers survive the McCarthy era?
I don’t want to die on their terms.
I also don’t want to regret my life when I look back on what I could have done.
IDK… I feel like we’re in a sort of “checkmate” situation. Fascists have figured it all out and there doesn’t appear to be a path forward for the left that doesn’t end in tragedy. OTOH the kinds of fascist death squad actions that are “expected” for impoverished “third world” countries will yield a very different reaction in the core of Capitalism. Instability in burgerland affects the whole world and the entire non-China global economy can crumble if people went on strike en-masse.
We need a serious labor movement. If workers are not willing and able to hinder production then the left will never accomplish anything. Union density is much lower now than it was when the left was effective and union density in the largest employers is even lower than it was back then (and the unions are even worse too).
If the left ever wants to be effective it needs workers to leverage their economic power. Nothing else (maybe with the exception of armed struggle) will work.
I hear you, I just see that as a non-starter to ask most people to put their only way to pay bills on the line. The answer there is mutual aid & strike funds, but hard to make it work when we’re all poor to begin with 🙃
The problem is that all the money gets dumped into elections that really won’t change anything. If even a tenth of the money unions and left wing organizations spend on elections went into actually organizing workers and building permanent institutions for them it would far exceed what is being spent on organizing now and would drastically change the political playing field (including making elections easier for progressives).
If only there were some sort of precedence.🤷
https://hexbear.net/post/164752
Organized labor is important but so is a critical lens towards how we build and leverage it. Unions have numerous and important petty bourgeois contradictions, we can’t expect them to do more than they did historically, and that means many may be anti-communist. We should move forward with the understanding that even an anti-communist union has angles by which it can be valuable, that being in a union has some value even if the union itself is not particularly left. In addition, in the imperial core, many unions are tied directly to imperialism and national chauvinism. UAW speaks of outsourcing in chauvinist terms, for example. Various Boeing workers are covered by a union and they build and maintain the planes that do genocide on Palestine. Will they be the natural allies of a socialist workers’ movement? Their jobs depend on an alignment with reaction and the bourgeois state, is it even conceivable they could have contradictions built so high that they support any kind of revolution, esp. socialist?
I recommend entering labor from the angle of an organization that wants to achieve a particular longer-term goal via labor. Be in the org first, then do the labor work. Emphasizing a strategy makes a world of difference.