Unions, or No Unions?

Social groups, like clubs maybe? The functions of unions can change over time.

Unions have been out-played and defanged by neoliberalism. The standard tactics of collective bargaining are no longer enough. Democratic leadership must be reclaimed, the Team Concept needs to be destroyed utterly, and the threat of workplace takeover must become the norm.

This is hearsay but supposedly there's some talk about if the few GOOD parts of Taft-Harley get taken away, might as well just fucking ignore the whole thing.
So we might be about to see a mass return of wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes, and the ever romanticized general strike.

Not unions, One BIG union,

Yes to unions.

Yes to genuinely democratic workers' unions, where representatives are paid an average workers' wage, where members gather in regular caucuses and discuss not just their work-related issues as they relate to themselves, but to the whole workforce, and where the ideas of socialist organization are ripe in the workers' minds.

Yes to the unions, as a vehicle for mass action of the working classes. Yes to general strikes by an organized working class, and to the building of class conscious and the precedent for genuine revolution.

Yes to the unions.

...

it's almost impossible to get people to even sign up for bourgeois unions when they hate their workplace, how hard do you think it's going to be to get ideology filled proles to actually do anything close to as radical as you suggest

If we unionize everyone, can't we start to push the unions further and further to the left by gaining more and more power and dues until we own the means of production or shut down the entire economy?

(btw I hate anarchists)

Everyone gets anime eyes

I actually like this

yes

imo a general strike is a better way than some barricade revolution fantasy

We need to pick our battles in all honesty.

Yes, without unions, workers would likely more restless and closer to revolution but unions do offer a way of exerting worker control within the workplace. The trick is to make sure governments don't try and water down union power so we can achieve this . Of course though the watering down is already happening (in the US at least) and we might be heading towards the scenario you describe but regardless, unions are (were) a positive thing in their own right.

it depends on the Union. This is a lot like asking "parties or no parties?" I would say most large established unions are basically succdem groups that serve to appease the workers. I believe Herman Gorter in "an Open Letter to Comrade Lenin" spoke about how explicitly revolutionary, small rank-and-file movements would generally be more effective and participating in these larger unions is a waste of energy.

There is an opposition often between the short-term interests of the workers and the long-term interests of the workers which has often given way to opportunism and reformism. If we are concerned with revolution, then I would say

I am not saying "throw away the 8 hour workday and minimum wage" or any of that other shit that people have been implying in this thread must come with a rejection of big unions, but rather class-consciousness, and revolution should be the main goal. That does not mean we will be dealing with an unregulated capitalism in the mean time. Many of the reforms which we attribute to union action were enacted in large part because they were necessary for the economy and the state to function properly (reproduction of capitalism, as well as preventing secular stagnation as I believe Keynes called it, where essentially, aggregate demand falls and with it aggregate supply falls and you get into a sort of temporary downward spiral that can be fixed fairly quickly with government programs). Also I would imagine that in the face of growing revolutionary groups, the state and capitalists would be hesitant to make working conditions harsher. In fact, if I remember correctly, the New Deal was in large part an attempt to calm growing revolutionary sentiments in the U.S.

That is to say I think in many cases especially with large unions, they tend to focus on short-term interests and thus we get into these slow battles that don't lead anywhere and eventually the unions become a tool of Capital. If we had smaller groups which were all explicitly revolutionary and rank-and-file, I think we would perhaps be able to sufficiently serve the need for short-term reforms, while preparing more effectively for revolution in the long-term.

lol forgot what I was going to say there

Most unions are glorified mafia organizations. They're not what they used to be. I am in the UFCW btw.

In the usuadw here in UK. The rmt and unite are vilified by the right wing media, I live in a very conservative town, old people are driving living standards down for younger people and families. Corbyn won't be elected, Europed March to the right continues

obvious american believing manager rhetoric lol

as soon as union power starts to even come close to threatening bourgeois interests it is stopped. this happened in the 70s-90s in the USA.

It went all the way to the president (Reagan, Bush, Clinton) and canada (mulroney, cretien) to make sure jobs could be outsourced and unions destroyed.

Just like as soon as Ho Chi Minh was a danger to the bourgeoisie america was willing to let a few million of their citizens die to maintain capitalist hegemony

zapatista is never touched b/c they pose no threat

Unions are the fundamental building block of communism, stacked up in hierarchical syndicates. Communism without unions isn't communism.

All power to the soviets!

We mean the collective bargaining kind of union.Labor union. It won't be necessary to negotiate with the boss because the workers already are the boss.

Soviets are councils, not unions.

Yes