Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> Organizing a labor union however is vilified in American society as it directly challenges the inherent class structure of capitalism. Workers in the past have been beaten, murdered, and imprisoned not because they sought better pay and more amicable working hours, but because they dared to challenge the success and profit of the classes above them.

This is unabashedly revisionist. Look at what labor unions did throughout the first half of the 20th century. They went to great lengths to ensure that their members could access the privileges of the upper capitalist classes by explicitly oppressing other groups of people - black workers, east Asians, south Asians, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. They fought to deport legal immigrants and migrant works. They fought to inter (poor) Japanese-Americans in camps in order to free up jobs for their relatively well-off, white members. After the war, they fought to prevent Japanese-Americans from returning to their homes. The immigration quotas that people oftentimes complain about on Hacker News? Those quotas were originally written to appease labor unions in the first place. The disaster in Puerto Rico? Labor unions opposed allowing foreign relief ships to temporarily service Puerto Rico, which has been standard practice for every single hurricane since Katrina, because they wanted to protect US members' paychecks.

If you want to cherry-pick some good things labor unions have fought for, fine, but don't portray them as the antagonist of capitalist class structure. Labor unions have always thrived on class inequality; their goal is simply to make sure that their members are on the "right" side of it.

That depends entirely on which unions you're looking at, the wobblies were organizing across racial lines and across industries. The pullman porters were black. And, yeah, unions very much are a class antagonist, they were conceived as precisely that. I'd even go so far as to say that actually your comment is the revisionist one. Note how you start the history at "the first half of the 20th century" leaving out arguably the most violent and repressive period of union struggle. Google The Battle of Blair mountain.

> That depends entirely on which unions you're looking at, the wobblies were organizing across racial lines and across industries. The pullman porters were black.

I'm looking at the unions that were the strongest, the most powerful, and the most influential. The IWW was never particularly strong after WWI, and that was at the peak of their membership. AFL- and CIO-affiliated unions were the strongest - and, more importantly, remain so to this day.

It's funny you mention the porters' union - they were the first to receive recognition by the AFL. Why is that unusual? Well, they were special not because they were a union that represented black members, but because they were the first union of black members that the AFL didn't deny membership to based on race, after decades of explicitly prohibiting black unions from joining their federation. (Even after that, they refused to recognize most unions that accepted black or Japanese workers as members).

> I'd even go so far as to say that actually your comment is the revisionist one.

No, it's not "revisionist" to point out counterexamples to OP's claim, especially when those counterexamples include the largest group of unions for the last 100 years.

Yes, sometimes it's convenient for labor unions to leverage rhetoric that flirts with socialism or communism, but in reality, their source of power is dependent on both capitalism and class hierarchy, which is why the largest and most influential ones have fought so hard to preserve it.

You also neatly sidestepped my point about the origin of these unions, by starting in the "early 20th". You also ignored the Blair Mountain reference, and other deeply capital-hostile examples of union struggle. Unions started as an instrument of class struggle and remain precisely that, the fact that that is even slightly controversial is more representative of the ideological climate of today and specifically this website. Also, if unions are not a direct, full frontal attack on capital and hierarchy, why are they facing constant attack from organs of ruling class consciousness, like, say, the WSJ, the Financial Times, or even other less explicit papers like the New York Times? Why are teachers unions treated like the scum of the earth everywhere? Its downright weird that this is even questionable.

EDIT Also worth pointing out, there is an anti-union case being argued before the supreme court today. Its been widely acknowledged as an attempt to "kneecap" public-sector unions. If unions are not hostile to capital, are not an element of class struggle, where do these battles come from? Why are unions perpetually on the defensive, not merely from specific owners of specific companies facing individual actions, but across the board from class conscious (from above) institutions and people who have no individual stake in any given organizing struggle.

>Also, if unions are not a direct, full frontal attack on capital and hierarchy, why are they facing constant attack from organs of ruling class consciousness, like, say, the WSJ, the Financial Times, or even other less explicit papers like the New York Times?

The fact that the capitalist class doesn't appreciate tactics that complicate or reduce the effectiveness of their preferred business practices doesn't mean that those tactics represent an attack on capitalism itself. Corporations violently oppose taxes and regulations, too, but neither threatens capitalism or its fundamental class structure.

>Unions started as an instrument of class struggle and remain precisely that, the fact that that is even slightly controversial is more representative of the ideological climate of today and specifically this website.

It's hardly peculiar to the 'climate of today'. Karl Marx, 1865:

At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”

And in regards to unions specifically:

Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

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