Honestly is there even a point to this in the imperial core? Oh yes let’s organize the labor aristocracy so they can get a slightly larger cut of the treat horde!
I think there was a point to it when manufacturing and dirty industries were the primary base of the left pre-globalisation. The IWW were a real force back in the day.
It is very hard to look at things since and attempt to justify it as a method that will somehow lead to revolution some day. They reorganised society and eliminated this tactic by exporting a lot of the jobs that were creating truly revolutionary people.
That’s not to say that some of those jobs don’t exist anymore. We see it in the trains, we see it in the dockworkers, and we see it a small amount in the remaining manufacturing. We’ve seen a sort of revival in the growth of Amazon warehouses too, which I think have conditions that are so bad that they are producing electrified workers susceptible to revolutionary rhetoric again.
But is it enough people for a revolution? I don’t think it is. More are needed.
Proletarianization is coming for service workers just like everyone else. There is nothing more agitating about running a forklift vs. making coffee. The key is for workers to see that management doesn’t think of them as people, is fucking them over personally, and that unified direct action can win against management.
We’re seeing trends that increase all of this. The myth of the American Dream is laid bare, infinite land speculation for the majority is gone. Real wages deflating, workforce shrinking, no sense that hard work or following “the plan” will ensure healthcare, housing, and retirement. Vague anti-capitalism is trendy among younger people and as they age - and stall out - they start to take organizing seriously if you show them the blueprint.
If anything, I would say that the population, particularly people under 40, is ripe for radicalization but socialists are far too quiet and incompetent, unable to grow because they are not strategic or serious in their work. What we really need is people that seriously build socialist programs that can grow orgs without sacrificing quality of theory. Be among the people, agitate by identifying community needs and building to meet them, build lists, raise funds, recruit members into a training program, build connections with other orgs by being present at events and talking to them, etc etc. I am in awe of how many people in so many orgs just kinda fumble around without identifying goals or a strategy or even having a half-decent reading group. Luckily I think some of this is sorting itself out as the people who know how to organize get frustrated and join better orgs.
Having worked both environments I find it very difficult to say they are both the same. It might be possible to equally radicalise the store worker (we’re certainly seeing success and growth in this where I am) but in terms of which one is easier? From experience it is massively easier to radicalise the workers on the manufacturing line or the workers doing heavier labour.
Understanding that one is easier than the other and acknowledging it plays a material role in what has happened in the material core as a result of exporting those jobs to the periphery is still important and valid.
Luckily I think some of this is sorting itself out as the people who know how to organize get frustrated and join better orgs.
My experience is not that people do not know how to organise but that it is a lot of work, and the reason so many of them are marxists is that they do too much work for capitalism and are so so tired as a result. The problem is that we need many more full-time organisers, or full-time revolutionaries as Lenin would have said. It takes a very unique kind of person to both work for capitalists and also entirely sacrifice the remainder of their time and energy for organising on top of their work for capitalists. In many cases this is a person that enjoys organising as well, which is a rare gem of a trait that exists in a very small number of people.
Gotta disagree on the differences in how easy it is to unionize or radicalize these different workplaces. It’s not about a job simply being harder or easier, but about the forces that combat collective action, often intimidation but also mobility and power of capital vs. workers.
Example: organizing a restaurant can be difficult not because it’s inherently harder for workers (front or back of house) to see class conflict, but because of the efficacy of the union busting playbook, intimidation of back of house that is often undocumented immigrants, and being forced to work directly alongside management 24/7. If that restaurant is a centrally-owned chain, even worse, as they’ll just shut the whole thing down using some flimsy excuse. This can be harder to do for other industries that are less mobile and have fewer of these countervailing forces, e.g. longshoremen.
Example: unionizing Amazon is actually going very poorly. They have all of the hard labor things you might be thinking of and ALU sucks so they aren’t getting anywhere. Amazon is, of course, in a very powerful monopoly position and gladly cycles through staff and does an effective job at union busting, but the issue here is poor organizing skills and a poor approach to the union overall. The Chris Smalls Show is fun to watch but terrible at actually doing the work.
In both cases, we need both things: a good understanding of workers’ social relations to production (and therefore management) and competent and knowledgeable organizers that will run militant campaigns based on that understanding.
In my experience the vast majority of self-proclaimed socialists, including those interested in labor, don’t have even basic organizing skills, let alone realistic strategy meetings or campaigns that are in any way serious. They have some enthusiasm and they like labor aesthetics. Some don’t commit the effort or time, yes, but many actually throw themselves into it and get nothing done because they don’t amplify their impact by doing the basics of organizing, choosing to take on activities that can be supported by 2 or 3 individuals that don’t know what they’re doing rather than 10 people ready to fight and distribute work. Or worse, just spend their time talking about what’s happening and what take to publish about it in a newsletter.
I do see and know many folks like you’re talking about. Borderline or actually burned out because when they try to organize, it ends up being a ton of work on them. While it’s true that organizing does take a significant time commitment, it is also my experience that these are folks that failed to train anyone to be their comrades-in-arms, and thus still have some skills to learn. Or, very commonly, they’re in an org that has a toxic culture where people don’t really want to do organizing, they just want to play at it and pretend, so it feels like you’ve got no support.
When folks find an org where it’s 100% experienced organizers, it’s like a breath of fresh air where things happen rapidly and competently because they know the patterns and distribute the work. What I’m describing is basically the cadre model, though I usually avoid that term because it feels larpy.
I understand you don’t mean it this way, but “labor aristocracy” is also a term used by wobs to critique business unions. Besides that, even Settlers posits that some people have proletarian spirit in the imperial core, even if those people are only the colonized. Even besides that, what else are left-leaning people supposed to do in the imperial core? Just give up?
Where is the integration of the changes in the global financial system and the labor market of the USA over the past several decades into the conversation here?
The portion of Americans I’d call the labor aristocracy can’t be that difficult to define. Finance, insurance, military, law enforcement, military contractors, real estate, management, tech workers, hi-end journalists, designers & entertainment workers. They can’t live entirely off financial assets but they’re weren’t drowning in debt to the same extent as the US poor until they really got hooked on the jetskis and 24/7 treats, and they put their retirement savings into funds which blackmail entire nations along with the IMF.
The people who have a high position in these industries like the Washington Post workers lmao striking are a clear example of who not to give a shit about.
Many have no worker participation to speak of that would breed class consciousness. If anything those unions make workers anti-union. They go on strike when the leadership says so, but usually they don’t because leadership is friendly with management.
Even in unions with good participation, there’s a limit. They learn the class consciousness against their own upper management but not against the class. Or they think of themselves as PMC-ascendant and not really in need of a union in the first place. I’ve had so many conversations with people who have a union and then look down on janitors.
Unions can be a vehicle for class consciousness but only through militancy, political education, and an org willing to push those things.
Yeah sure my point is just that what they’re organizing isn’t a labor force consisting entirely of bourgeois workers who make their money off third world labor and finance.
There are lots of shit unions and unions which are only organizing bourgeois workers though, or worse, fucking cops
The idea of labor aristocracy goes back to pre-Marx, where it was used to explain why the English trade unions failed to radicalize and could in fact be pretty reactionary and imperialist. The idea was that while they are proletarian in their relationship to production (the labor part), they receive so much gain from imperialism (along with social status) that they fail to become globally class conscious. Instead, they support their country’s imperialist wars that bring home the loot they split with their bourgeoisie.
This is reminiscent of US labor that was “bought off” by similar means a century ago and many of the remaining industrial unions in the US. Those for military contractors are the most obvious, but a lack of global class consciousness can be found in almost every union here. Knee-jerk support for other unions kicks in, so you’ll see Teamsters and SEIU and UAW supporting Boeing workers next year despite the latter making the tech that eventually spies on Gazans and bombs kids. And in only one of the above is there a subculture that I’d call class consciousness (UAW via UAWD). Try having conversations about socialism in these unions and you’ll have to scrounge for even basic class consciousness and might get hounded out by staff. The classism I mentioned earlier is rife in two of those big unions.
This is something we have to recognize if we want to rely on a labor strategy as socialists in the imperial core. I’ve seen a lot of socialists with very little labor experience but rose-tinted glasses about labor militancy from the late 1800s run head-first into union organizing and then becoming dismayed at what they find when they stop looking for the “corrupt union bosses” as the only ill. And those socialists that are anti-imperialist will quickly find that labor-focused socialists tend to be imperialist, as their efforts do tend to be in support of the conditions of a better-off subset of the imperialist working class. Try telling them to have a slightly critical approach to the Teamsters, who are both militant and reactionary. They’ll start to get scared they’ll lose what little labor connections they have (not a false fear).
Anyways, that’s the old-school concept of labor aristocracy and also more or less the same concept used by MLs and Maoists when they want to look at this problem. It’s an attempt to provide a material interest rationale for why the imperial core trade unionists almost always suck at class consciousness, especially anti-imperialism.
I’m just trying to do my part to add Capital Vol 2 & 3 to our understanding of the labor market in the US. Rents and debts etc.
Not to say that having all your Lockheed superwages sucked up by the aforementioned jetski castle villa with 3 SUVs & credit card debt makes you a proletarian lmfao
Yes 100%! I really need to start prefacing my long comments with context do people know my intent lol. You got it but I feel like sometimes it just comes across as criticism but I think we’re very close on this stuff.
I’m simultaneously very tired of imperialist labor people and also active in radical-ish labor stuff
Of course there’s a point. Workers en masse will only increase their class consciousness by acting in their class interests. It’s dialectical. When people fight for their class interests in a union, they realize they’re the working class. With the right political influences (this is where orgs like communist parties and the IWW come in) they will hopefully realize “oh shit those guys over there are also the working class”. With no class consciousness, what you call the labor aristocracy can’t do anything at all, domestic or international.
Yes if you marry it to a socialist org or the right demo because you can use them as a vehicle to fight for your other things.
The Starbucks union is full of younger folks that made frequent contact with socialists and they put out a better pro-Palestine statement than most socialist orgs lol. Their parent union has shit takes but the SB kids are killing it.
Gotta take a critical view but still try to find an angle for power and expansion. Any opportunity to recruit and to structure test and to accomplish tasks.
This will almost certainly lead you into a difficult but interesting category of worker organizing, which is in industries of the precariat, small businesses that no big union will help unionize, gig workers, and undocumented immigrants.
Honestly is there even a point to this in the imperial core? Oh yes let’s organize the labor aristocracy so they can get a slightly larger cut of the treat horde!
Do you seriously buy into the Infrared-tier meme that Starbucks workers are the labor aristocracy?
deleted by creator
I think there was a point to it when manufacturing and dirty industries were the primary base of the left pre-globalisation. The IWW were a real force back in the day.
It is very hard to look at things since and attempt to justify it as a method that will somehow lead to revolution some day. They reorganised society and eliminated this tactic by exporting a lot of the jobs that were creating truly revolutionary people.
That’s not to say that some of those jobs don’t exist anymore. We see it in the trains, we see it in the dockworkers, and we see it a small amount in the remaining manufacturing. We’ve seen a sort of revival in the growth of Amazon warehouses too, which I think have conditions that are so bad that they are producing electrified workers susceptible to revolutionary rhetoric again.
But is it enough people for a revolution? I don’t think it is. More are needed.
Proletarianization is coming for service workers just like everyone else. There is nothing more agitating about running a forklift vs. making coffee. The key is for workers to see that management doesn’t think of them as people, is fucking them over personally, and that unified direct action can win against management.
We’re seeing trends that increase all of this. The myth of the American Dream is laid bare, infinite land speculation for the majority is gone. Real wages deflating, workforce shrinking, no sense that hard work or following “the plan” will ensure healthcare, housing, and retirement. Vague anti-capitalism is trendy among younger people and as they age - and stall out - they start to take organizing seriously if you show them the blueprint.
If anything, I would say that the population, particularly people under 40, is ripe for radicalization but socialists are far too quiet and incompetent, unable to grow because they are not strategic or serious in their work. What we really need is people that seriously build socialist programs that can grow orgs without sacrificing quality of theory. Be among the people, agitate by identifying community needs and building to meet them, build lists, raise funds, recruit members into a training program, build connections with other orgs by being present at events and talking to them, etc etc. I am in awe of how many people in so many orgs just kinda fumble around without identifying goals or a strategy or even having a half-decent reading group. Luckily I think some of this is sorting itself out as the people who know how to organize get frustrated and join better orgs.
Having worked both environments I find it very difficult to say they are both the same. It might be possible to equally radicalise the store worker (we’re certainly seeing success and growth in this where I am) but in terms of which one is easier? From experience it is massively easier to radicalise the workers on the manufacturing line or the workers doing heavier labour.
Understanding that one is easier than the other and acknowledging it plays a material role in what has happened in the material core as a result of exporting those jobs to the periphery is still important and valid.
My experience is not that people do not know how to organise but that it is a lot of work, and the reason so many of them are marxists is that they do too much work for capitalism and are so so tired as a result. The problem is that we need many more full-time organisers, or full-time revolutionaries as Lenin would have said. It takes a very unique kind of person to both work for capitalists and also entirely sacrifice the remainder of their time and energy for organising on top of their work for capitalists. In many cases this is a person that enjoys organising as well, which is a rare gem of a trait that exists in a very small number of people.
Gotta disagree on the differences in how easy it is to unionize or radicalize these different workplaces. It’s not about a job simply being harder or easier, but about the forces that combat collective action, often intimidation but also mobility and power of capital vs. workers.
Example: organizing a restaurant can be difficult not because it’s inherently harder for workers (front or back of house) to see class conflict, but because of the efficacy of the union busting playbook, intimidation of back of house that is often undocumented immigrants, and being forced to work directly alongside management 24/7. If that restaurant is a centrally-owned chain, even worse, as they’ll just shut the whole thing down using some flimsy excuse. This can be harder to do for other industries that are less mobile and have fewer of these countervailing forces, e.g. longshoremen.
Example: unionizing Amazon is actually going very poorly. They have all of the hard labor things you might be thinking of and ALU sucks so they aren’t getting anywhere. Amazon is, of course, in a very powerful monopoly position and gladly cycles through staff and does an effective job at union busting, but the issue here is poor organizing skills and a poor approach to the union overall. The Chris Smalls Show is fun to watch but terrible at actually doing the work.
In both cases, we need both things: a good understanding of workers’ social relations to production (and therefore management) and competent and knowledgeable organizers that will run militant campaigns based on that understanding.
In my experience the vast majority of self-proclaimed socialists, including those interested in labor, don’t have even basic organizing skills, let alone realistic strategy meetings or campaigns that are in any way serious. They have some enthusiasm and they like labor aesthetics. Some don’t commit the effort or time, yes, but many actually throw themselves into it and get nothing done because they don’t amplify their impact by doing the basics of organizing, choosing to take on activities that can be supported by 2 or 3 individuals that don’t know what they’re doing rather than 10 people ready to fight and distribute work. Or worse, just spend their time talking about what’s happening and what take to publish about it in a newsletter.
I do see and know many folks like you’re talking about. Borderline or actually burned out because when they try to organize, it ends up being a ton of work on them. While it’s true that organizing does take a significant time commitment, it is also my experience that these are folks that failed to train anyone to be their comrades-in-arms, and thus still have some skills to learn. Or, very commonly, they’re in an org that has a toxic culture where people don’t really want to do organizing, they just want to play at it and pretend, so it feels like you’ve got no support.
When folks find an org where it’s 100% experienced organizers, it’s like a breath of fresh air where things happen rapidly and competently because they know the patterns and distribute the work. What I’m describing is basically the cadre model, though I usually avoid that term because it feels larpy.
omg i made the wrong reply again ignore this
I understand you don’t mean it this way, but “labor aristocracy” is also a term used by wobs to critique business unions. Besides that, even Settlers posits that some people have proletarian spirit in the imperial core, even if those people are only the colonized. Even besides that, what else are left-leaning people supposed to do in the imperial core? Just give up?
Where is the integration of the changes in the global financial system and the labor market of the USA over the past several decades into the conversation here?
The portion of Americans I’d call the labor aristocracy can’t be that difficult to define. Finance, insurance, military, law enforcement, military contractors, real estate, management, tech workers, hi-end journalists, designers & entertainment workers. They can’t live entirely off financial assets but they’re weren’t drowning in debt to the same extent as the US poor until they really got hooked on the jetskis and 24/7 treats, and they put their retirement savings into funds which blackmail entire nations along with the IMF.
The people who have a high position in these industries like the Washington Post workers lmao striking are a clear example of who not to give a shit about.
Unions don’t necessarily do that.
Many have no worker participation to speak of that would breed class consciousness. If anything those unions make workers anti-union. They go on strike when the leadership says so, but usually they don’t because leadership is friendly with management.
Even in unions with good participation, there’s a limit. They learn the class consciousness against their own upper management but not against the class. Or they think of themselves as PMC-ascendant and not really in need of a union in the first place. I’ve had so many conversations with people who have a union and then look down on janitors.
Unions can be a vehicle for class consciousness but only through militancy, political education, and an org willing to push those things.
Yeah sure my point is just that what they’re organizing isn’t a labor force consisting entirely of bourgeois workers who make their money off third world labor and finance.
There are lots of shit unions and unions which are only organizing bourgeois workers though, or worse, fucking cops
The idea of labor aristocracy goes back to pre-Marx, where it was used to explain why the English trade unions failed to radicalize and could in fact be pretty reactionary and imperialist. The idea was that while they are proletarian in their relationship to production (the labor part), they receive so much gain from imperialism (along with social status) that they fail to become globally class conscious. Instead, they support their country’s imperialist wars that bring home the loot they split with their bourgeoisie.
This is reminiscent of US labor that was “bought off” by similar means a century ago and many of the remaining industrial unions in the US. Those for military contractors are the most obvious, but a lack of global class consciousness can be found in almost every union here. Knee-jerk support for other unions kicks in, so you’ll see Teamsters and SEIU and UAW supporting Boeing workers next year despite the latter making the tech that eventually spies on Gazans and bombs kids. And in only one of the above is there a subculture that I’d call class consciousness (UAW via UAWD). Try having conversations about socialism in these unions and you’ll have to scrounge for even basic class consciousness and might get hounded out by staff. The classism I mentioned earlier is rife in two of those big unions.
This is something we have to recognize if we want to rely on a labor strategy as socialists in the imperial core. I’ve seen a lot of socialists with very little labor experience but rose-tinted glasses about labor militancy from the late 1800s run head-first into union organizing and then becoming dismayed at what they find when they stop looking for the “corrupt union bosses” as the only ill. And those socialists that are anti-imperialist will quickly find that labor-focused socialists tend to be imperialist, as their efforts do tend to be in support of the conditions of a better-off subset of the imperialist working class. Try telling them to have a slightly critical approach to the Teamsters, who are both militant and reactionary. They’ll start to get scared they’ll lose what little labor connections they have (not a false fear).
Anyways, that’s the old-school concept of labor aristocracy and also more or less the same concept used by MLs and Maoists when they want to look at this problem. It’s an attempt to provide a material interest rationale for why the imperial core trade unionists almost always suck at class consciousness, especially anti-imperialism.
💯💯💯💯💯
I’m just trying to do my part to add Capital Vol 2 & 3 to our understanding of the labor market in the US. Rents and debts etc.
Not to say that having all your Lockheed superwages sucked up by the aforementioned jetski castle villa with 3 SUVs & credit card debt makes you a proletarian lmfao
Yes 100%! I really need to start prefacing my long comments with context do people know my intent lol. You got it but I feel like sometimes it just comes across as criticism but I think we’re very close on this stuff.
I’m simultaneously very tired of imperialist labor people and also active in radical-ish labor stuff
Of course there’s a point. Workers en masse will only increase their class consciousness by acting in their class interests. It’s dialectical. When people fight for their class interests in a union, they realize they’re the working class. With the right political influences (this is where orgs like communist parties and the IWW come in) they will hopefully realize “oh shit those guys over there are also the working class”. With no class consciousness, what you call the labor aristocracy can’t do anything at all, domestic or international.
Yes if you marry it to a socialist org or the right demo because you can use them as a vehicle to fight for your other things.
The Starbucks union is full of younger folks that made frequent contact with socialists and they put out a better pro-Palestine statement than most socialist orgs lol. Their parent union has shit takes but the SB kids are killing it.
Gotta take a critical view but still try to find an angle for power and expansion. Any opportunity to recruit and to structure test and to accomplish tasks.
This will almost certainly lead you into a difficult but interesting category of worker organizing, which is in industries of the precariat, small businesses that no big union will help unionize, gig workers, and undocumented immigrants.