Is labor organizing in the imperial core regressive?

Recently finished the book "Rebel Cities: from the right to the city, to the urban revolution" by David Harvey.

One thing he mentions is that real labour organizing includes the unemployed, and ideally extends beyond the workplace into the communities people live, adding a geographical component to organizing.

Organizing will always help the workers who are organized, but to have a leftist labour movement, one in which the power balance is tilted in favour of the workers and is class conscious, a different type of labour organizing is required.

Edit: So to actually answer the question:

It could be (pigs for example), and it might be indirectly regressive when companies try and recoup profits through greater exploitation.

But it need not be regressive, like in my original text.

I really had to think about this when the longshoreman’s union went on strike but continued to move equipment for the military.

Would I support the Nazi German Dockworkers Union going on strike but continuing to move Zyklon B? No, I’d hope every one of those Nazi fucks who ever touched one of those boxes ends up in a hole. Why would the sane not apply here?

All labor organizing has a risk to further trade consciousness at the expense of class consciousness. Cool labor organizing happened in the imperial core (IWW), shit labor organizing can happen outside of it (CTM)

Lockheed Martin workers are unionized. Undocumented farm workers are not. It seems pretty obvious to me that any socialist should want it to be the other way around and it's gonna take labor organizing (+ serious political struggle) to make it so. So it's just like any other thing, the contradictions are fluid and constantly in motion, therefore you have to evaluate how things relate to the primary contradiction at any given time and make your decisions based on that. There is no blanket answer.

I've always had really mixed feelings about these kinds of ideas, I hope if I'm ignorant someone will correct me but here's my view(I hope this doesn't come across as too aggressive as I generally like your posts) (I also want to start by saying fuck those dockworkers, I hope their strike fails. Refusing to deliver anything other than genocide is the most disgusting stance they could have):

This is from the USDA's website

Eight percent of American households are feeding their kids shitty diets due to monetary concerns, in 1% the kids are missing meals.

There are a lot of people struggling economically in the US, the idea that they aren't has always felt asinine to me. Go to a government subsided housing unit and tell the people there that they're labor aristocrats.

That's not to say there aren't a lot of very comfortable people who don't need more, but organizing customer service workers is different from organizing computer programmers.

There are a lot of people making insufficient money to pay for housing, food, utilities and transportation to work. They might like to have some treats too, everyone enjoys treats, but they need more just to make ends meet

There are also people, who make enough money that they don't necessarily need more but who's working conditions are atrocious. I'm primarily aware of this in the context of call centers where even if you make a living wage, a typical worker's job duties include absorbing hate and shocking amounts abuse from a companies customers. A union that stopped a company from instituting rules that required you to stay on the phone while someone screams curses into your ear would not be "helping labor aristocrats get better access to tasty treats."

A union preventing companies from working outdoor laborers incessantly in the heat so that they don't die isn't "helping labor aristocrats get better access to tasty treats."

A union insisting that rail workers have a right to go to the doctor when they're sick isn't "helping labor aristocrats get better access to tasty treats."

I believe debourgeousification is an inevitable outcome of the decline of the US empire, and this can be seen in more and more unions endorsing BDS and supporting an arms embargo on Israel.

Unfortunately they're still ballot-brained so they think they need to endorse Harris's genocide to stop Trump. This is less a factor of artisticracy and more a factor of political illiteracy among the US population, though.

My simplest kick back would be "what other options are there to somewhat improve things?".

Even if all organising labor in the imperial core achieved was giving workers better access to tasty treats (and that really isn't the limits of what it achieves) - That's still deconstructing the power imbalance and giving workers more of a say, politically and economically, and less resources left for bourgeois imperialism and propagandism. That's good progress.

The reality is that workers in the imperial core really aren't doing well, and to call them 'labor aristocrats' is a bit wild to me. Many are in povertous, sub-human conditions. They're mostly eating edible-foodlike-products that aren't food, they're increasingly dosed on medicines to make them better proles, they're having all the mental will to live sapped out of them at every turn, and are increasingly compelled to spend every waking hour (and sleeping hour honestly) working or in other form of service to the capitalist class. Even the goal of most treat consumption is to give any leftover money back to the bourgeois class, instead of actually being a pleasant time or connecting with peers.

Organised labor does more than "me have stuff", I would argue half the point is to build new systems that give people communal alternatives to the capitalist's insisted way of life.

So yes, I'd argue organising labour is a very obviously and powerful force for good anywhere. But even if you didn't accept that, there is no alternative. Other than to sit there and let the bourgeois class have full control - And you truly are confused if you think that is anything but the literal worst option.

Why is it everyone thinks you need to pick a lane between understanding neocolonialism and recogniIng the effects that expenses have on US workers? No, people are not going into debt just to buy treats, people are not "reentering the labor market" they are getting a second job. You are being purposefully misled.

The portion of the US labor force that does benefit from imperialism consists of those with marginal benefits from retirement packages and those who were able to store wealth in the property market (read: white people because banks love them so much), people employed in upper management, insurance, medical, tech, entertainment, journalism, academia, finance, military and military contracting, things of that nature. People who directly benefit from the affluence in the few industries the west maintains a high tier monopoly on, or benefit from the impoverishment of most Americans. I would say the proportion of US workers who believe imperialism helps them is much higher than the proportion who really benefit. After all, does someone with a house and a 401k really benefit from deluding himself into thinking he is an investor and real estate magnate?

This situation has accelerated massively since the 90s, 4/5 americans work in the SERVICE INDUSTRY. They work at MCDONALDS. Your parents are "treat brained" because YOUR FAMILY HAS MONEY.

In the next episode I will explain the colonial comprador class in peripheral countries, how they benefit from imperialism, and how they are being peeled away from the west by its aggression despite their servile attitude and determination to beggar their countrymen and those of neighboring counties.

Unions at their core are just all of the workers in a workplace. Sure workers in the US can be reactionary as hell so how do we change that? Well, Lenin talked about unions being schools for communism. They're where the average person can start to gain organizational skills, political training and ultimately state building skills. These are skills no other school in the US will teach you. You take these skills to address the material conditions of the workplace and then you can broaden that to outside the workplace. As socialists we don't get power from capital, we get it from people. If we want any chance of meaningful power in the imperial core, then we need to meet people where they're at in the struggle. Lots of those people are workers struggling in workplaces and unions are the tool we can use to address that.

The big unions are all corrupt as fuck and absurdly top-down and undemocratic. This is because they've been shaped that way since FDR. The NLRA was designed to turn unions into state sanctioned and controlled institutions and then they were purged of anyone who had ideological commitments to democracy or socialism. From there they were allowed to collect dues from employees working under their contracts even if those employees were not members of the union which meant there was no material reason for them to actually do anything more than win an NLRB run election and a single shitty contract. Then they could embed themselves like ticks in job sites.

Today most unions are sitting on billions of dollars in pension and insurance funds. Union officials regularly make six figure salaries for nothing while their members make poverty wages. They are blatantly undemocratic institutions in which the members have so little say that the federal government consistently intervenes in elections. The unions do not have any obligation to recruit, educate, agitate, or organize their members. Most of the unions are only interested in getting Democrats elected primarily to fight right to work so that they can continue to extract dues from non-members. The unions also frequently suppress the self activity of their members and make it harder for them to organize and will even collaborate with management to remove problematic workers. When strikes or other actions do happen they happen at the whim of union leadership, not the members. They have been shaped this way by decades of opportunism and US government interference.

Unions do not have to be this way though. There's no actual obligation to go through the NLRA process. There's no obligation to work under the boots of the big unions. We should aim for strategic militancy not timid super-majorities. We should exercise working class power and democracy, not legalistic state power. We should fight like guerillas, not like liberals. Communists in the US should focus more on workers and sow our roots deeper into job sites, but among the 90% of American workers that are not organized in any sort of union who are generally the most proletarian workers, not among the 10% who are in unions. We should not seek to join bigger unions that will stamp us out. We and should replicate the successes of the CIO ninety years ago. If we are in the big unions already we should be organizing within them as communists, forming caucuses along our political orientations and tactically supporting reform efforts.

I mean depends on the list of demands innit?

lib-brained hypothetical starbucks strike demanding "fair" coffee has clearly progressive goals in their sights. demanding self-management or reduced worker hours is also generally progressive as raising class consciousness, regardless of anything else.

Wanting flat higher salary if you dependent on the global south for your work might be more in the social fascism territory, cause you don't show solidarity or worker consciousness. At the same, if we take something like a grocery store, they don't have margins to afford higher prices for products, you simply can't win that demand, but you can ask for different management scheme or salary.

Librarians/teachers/leisure workers are very iffily connected to global south exploitation, something like dock workers (or iam, curse their name) are more directly.

*Don't forget, what you mainly see on the internet is top 20/40 percent comfie american aristocrats, bottom 2 quintiles are struggling, but they aren't posting on the internet on 15k a year

Capital, the main enemy, is going to squeeze people wherever it can. The squeezing is not performed by people selling their labor in a specific context.

Labor organizing in the imperial core does not necessarily intertwine with a liberatory horizon, but in and of itself it puts pressure on the capitalist and gives gains to the worker. A tool can be used in many ways, and the outcome of the tool depends on how it is used.

Not organising labour in the imperial core is certainly not going to do the periphery any good, or do imperial core workers any good either. Organised labour has the power to force concessions from the bourgeoisie who depends on their labour. They can't really apply pressure to the periphery, only the bourgeoisie has that ability. And even if organised labour in the core wanted more imperialism the bourgeoisie is already robbing the periphery as much as humanly possible so it would be hard to see how it could get any worse.

This doesn't mean that unions in the imperial core can't have really atrocious politics. Many of them do and are perfectly happy to throw the periphery, the lumpen, minorities and even other unions under the bus to get something for themselves. Plenty of critique can and should be directed against "moderate" unions in the core who have forgotten their radical roots and has become part of the machinery maintaining the capitalist order rather than an opposition to it.

But the thing is that bad unions are arguably better than no unions. A bad union has a membership and an organisational structure that can be radicalised by changing material conditions and just buy existing they reproduce the idea of organised labour even being a thing to begin with. Having to build all of that from scratch takes an enormous amount of time, effort and blood.

Really depends on the union, workplace, etc.. But there is definitely a kind of imperialist tendency baked into the Western economy, and that does emerge in labor organizing. For example, it would benefit a union of textile workers for the US to put tarrifs on say Bangladeshi textiles which would give a greater competitive advantage to US textile firms. So what's the problem here? Well Bangladesh will continue to produce Textiles, but the wealth from that production is split even thinner between the state, factory and workers. This would hurt the QOL of Bangladeshi textile workers. This creates a situation in which it appears to be advantageous to an American worker to look out for themselves, but of course that isn't exactly the case. The additional tarrifs don't really bring back production to the US or increase US wages, the US state pockets a larger share of Bangladeshi capital, and prices rise in the US anyway. This example is loosely remembered from John Smiths Imperialism in the 21st century. Really recommend the first chapter. (he has weird China takes tho).

Another example, unions in the US (likely) understand that a strong American state on a global scale (I.e. One which can push other countries around at will) benefits them in the long run. So they may be supportive of policies which help bolster that position instead of challenge it. Most brits were not happy about the whole fall of the British Empire, which is likely the best parallel for the dominance of the American state today (but in a slightly different way).

I made a throwaway post in the mega today after looking at a post in r/union, and tbh it was just a bunch of drivel about how Trump will weaken America and take pressure off of China. But like, it was pretty mask off.

While this book is old, has its problems (you can skip about half of the book tbh lol), and is a bit more of a tangent from this post, Reichs Mass Psychology of Fascism has some good bits on the psychology of imperialism embedded within the "middle" and working class. Even though it was written right at the point Hitler seized power, I think it still has explanatory power today tho even if I think some of its conclusions miss the mark. I forgive him though, he was a very early Marxist-Psychoanalysis guy.

All that said, unions are good. Organize your workplace, or if you are already unionized, get elected to important positions within it.

There are definitely strong contradictions between the interest of the working class of an Imperial core country and the global proletariat, but that shouldnt steer people in the core away from labor organizing. Just be aware of this and push back when you can. Even getting your union on a stronger anti-war position is helpful on a global scale. This isn't even to mention the contradictory interests within the unions as well, between a boomer class with cushy pensions (who helped decimated unionism in the Imperial core and are the biggest annoyance when organizing) and the younger workers who have limited protection/pension/benefits etc. For example, if your union owns real estate as part of its pension or invests in real estate investment firms, they are profiting from a mass inability (including workers they represent) to buy a house or pay less the half your income in rent. Explaining this to them generally falls on deaf boomer landlord ears tho. For them unionism remains an individualist affair, and if it is not based on collective power it can just be HR by a different name.

And none of this really touches the way in which social programs in the imeprial core are funded, which is a whole other bag of worms that the MMT people like to overlook.

Not necessarily