It’s no accident that, at the height of American labor organizing and unionization (during the brief period of American social democracy), not only was the labor movement more radically leftist but also aligned with independent third parties and leftist-run media outlets, both locally and internationally. Since labor declined, the major US labor unions have become extensions of, not challenges to, corporate capitalism and party machines. This resulted from an internal labor conflict, between left and right wings of the labor movement, that ended with the defeat of combative unionism (revolutionary unionism, class struggle unionism, rank-and-file unionism, social unionism, etc) and the victory of business unionism or mainstream unionism that, in lacking leftist solidarity, has been easily blown about by the fickle winds of the neoliberal DNC elite caught in the sails of labor liberalism. Though to be fair, an earlier generation of labor liberals had been more open to radical leftism and some hope that it might one day return (Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism), a dream of a left-liberal alliance that could be inspiring, if far from present socio-political realities.
Business unionism, in having grown cozy within capitalist realism, is modeled on the hierarchical and bureaucratic structure of corporatocratic big biz and plutocratic cronyism. There is the rub. It’s not only a failure of organization and strategy but also of morality and radical imagination. Those in power listen to money, no matter where that money comes from. The labor aristocracy, who hobnob with plutocratic and corporate elites, are the ones who control the money spigot of labor unions, not the dues-paying members from which the money comes. That is why there is decades of history, as outlined by leftists, of union leadership betraying or undermining the best interests of workers. It’s similar to the reason corporate-funded-and-aligned US politicians are disconnected from their own constituents, not realizing or pretending to not know how far left is the American public. Those political elites use the wealth and resources of the public, the people they’re supposedly representing, to harm the interests of the public. Such is how corruption operates in the US, across party lines, in the public and private sectors, among both corporate and union leadership.
Union bosses, Congressional politicians, or any other category of the wealthy and/or powerful will act according to plutocratic and corporatocratic incentives that are built into the entire socioeconomic order when plutocratic and corporate interests own and control the economic system, political system, deep state (i.e., permanent bureaucracy that is unelected, bipartisan, and continues across administrations without democratic transparency, oversight, and accountability), major institutions, mainstream media, platforms of speech, and various other levers of power, control, manipulation, and influence. In a society that is soft fascist or inverted totalitarian, or some combination of the two, even unions become co-opted by the same corporate interests. It’s the same process by which happens corporate capture of regulatory agencies. The supposed solution becomes part of the problem.
This is precisely the kind of corruption that is absolute and undeniable proof of this being a banana republic. Actual functioning democracy, in countries like the Scandinavian social democracies, have legal protections against such corruption such as limiting or entirely eliminating big money and dark money in politics that otherwise operates as legalized bribery. But the reason we don’t see such democratic and progressive reforms in the US is because most major politicians at present realize that, if we ever did get democracy, they’d never again win another election and would be permanently removed from power. The currently ruling union big wigs surely likewise understand they’d lose position and power if unions operated democratically where majority vote and active participation determined decision-making.
American corporate capitalism, as capitalist realism run by legalized and organized crime syndicates (i.e., transnational corporations), is corrupt. And we are forced to admit that labor unions are inseparable from the moral failure of that economic system. Unions donating money to the Democratic Party doesn’t change that. Political democracy is only possible when there is a democratic economy and democratic culture, an entire democratic society in all areas and at all levels. Unions, as they’ve been captured and co-opted, are constrained by the corrupt system itself. Early labor organizing, instead, challenged and defied the corrupt system, even to the point of illegal strikes and armed resistance, not by asking permission from the corporate elites and corporatocratic politicians. But present American unions operate within the legal system created by the very crony capitalists and monied interests that theoretically they are supposed to be protecting their members against.
Of course, the problem of unions is relative. The main concentration of wealth and power (corporations, the capitalist ownership class, federal government, politicians, party machines, etc) are vastly more corrupt than the worst labor union. But labor unions are so weak and compromised as to have no autonomous power in acting independently of that corrupt power structure. So, it’s not really to blame unions per se, and certainly not to dismiss labor organizing. But it is to suggest that, as long as labor unions operate within anti-democratic systems and are beholden to anti-democratic elites, they will inevitably act according to and promote corruption by default. Then after corrupting union leadership, the corrupt corporate management and crony politicians use labor unions as a scapegoat. Still, it’s less about the unions being directly corrupt than being complicit in the larger corrupt society, if it’s basically the same difference.
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This post is an answer in response to some comments at an r/AskALiberal subreddit discussion thread: Was 2000 a “stolen election”? It’s somewhat frustrating how little defense there is of democracy on the pseudo-liberal ‘Left’. But our thoughts above were an articulation about a specific problem that has plagued mainstream partisan politics. And there is a personal context for our criticalness.
We were a dues-paying member of the AFSCME union for almost a quarter century. But we lost faith in AFSCME when they officially backed plutocratic, corporatocratic, and neoliberal Hillary Clinton in 2016. This was a betrayal of AFSCME members, most having supported Bernie Sanders for president. If a union doesn’t represent union members, then who do they represent when they throw their weight behind the monied interests of a capitalist political machine? What are the dues paying for and where is the money going?
The commenter that brought on our response said that AFSCME had no other choice than to fall in line, presumably under the threat of the powers that be. It was the same response, interestingly, as other commenters gave for Gore’s conceding the stolen election, that he had no choice. That kind of rationalization sounds awfully like the capitalist realism of Margaret Thatcher, that There Is No Alternative (TINA). Such apathetic fear, cynicism, defeatism, or fatalism is what has long fueled the lesser evilism that, with every election, inevitably and predictably worsens political evil.
By the way, AFSCME, in our local government workplace, has almost no effective power at present in having willingly given up the right to strike. Unsurprisingly, all that we describe here and much else has corresponded with a weakening and decline of the the labor Left and rest of the Left with it. Below are more than a few resources to explain what has gone wrong and what were the other alternatives, the other choices that were denied, suppressed, erased, and forgotten. There is always another choice. As one anti-Nazi freedom fighter once said, when the oppressors only offer two choices, always pick the third option.
An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism
by Kim Moody
U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below
by Kim Moody
Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States
by Kim Moody
Ramparts of Resistance: How Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get it Back
by Sheila Cohen
Reviving the Strike
by Joe Burns
Strike Back
by Joe Burns
Class Struggle Unionism
by Joe Burns
We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing
by Dana L. Cloud
Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise Hardcover
by Robert Fitch
Solidarity for Sale: Corruption in Labor Unions
by Steve Inskeep
Labor: Mind Your Assumptions
interview with Joe Burns by Stephan Kimmerle
We Need a Labor Movement Willing to Challenge the Status Quo
interview of Joe Burns by Truthout’s Left Voice
Author Joe Burns wants you to take a more radical, militant ‘Class Struggle’ approach to labor organizing
by Guy Oron
Class Struggle Unionism: A Specter to Haunt the Billionaire Class
by Alex Riccio
The return of the fighting union
by Robert Ovetz
How can we build class struggle unionism?
by Peter Hogarth
What Is Class Struggle Unionism?
by Jason Koslowski
When Labor Fought for Civil Rights
by Rich Yeselson
To Win Social Justice, We Must Win the Class War
by Susan Rosenthal
Unions, Democrats, and Working-Class Interests
by John Russo
Labor on the Ropes
by Traven Leyshon
To Renew Working-Class Resistance, the Labor Movement Must Be Democratized
by Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, Leo Panitch, & Donald Swartz
To Deepen Democracy, Give Workers More Say
by Desmond Serrette
Anarchism and the American Labor Movement
by Jeff Stein
Marxism, unions, and class struggle
by Sharon Smith
Beyond Labor Liberalism Towards Building Class Struggle Unionism
by Ken Nash & Mimi Rosenberg
Two Conceptions of Unionism
by Jon Bekken
Business Unionism vs. Revolutionary Unionism
by Dave Neal
Why Does the Union Bureaucracy Exist?
by Tom Wetzel
A “New Labor Movement” in the Shell of the Old?
by Jeremy Brecher & Tim Costello
Labour in Need of Revolutionary Vision
by Jim Selby
Now More than Ever, the Working Class Needs Independent, Democratic Unions
by James Dennis Hoff & Luigi Morris
The Rank and File Strategy
by Kim Moody
The Rank-and-File Strategy is Political
by Jeremy Gong
Answering the Bosses’ Lies About Unions
from Socialist Alternative
Marmalade 