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the existing union structures have been more or less crippled by the rearrangement of manufacturing that's happened over the past 30 years or so. this was and remains intertwined with the development and collapse of neoliberalism, which opposes all forms of organization outside the military and other instruments of repression, and which advocated a radical narrowing of the field of political action.
what's been amazing about it is the extent to which the ideological correlates of neoliberalism have become part of the cognitive apparatus of so many americans, who are not persuaded that being powerless and atomized is somehow preferable to being organized and taking power from capital through local conflict/interaction with capital.
the present situation of american trade-unions is also intertwined with the particular history of the union movement in the united states, which was about attempting to make unions as non-political as possible by developing a sector-monopoly model. fear, always fear, was a primary motive--fear of pluralism translating fear of evil marxist language translating as fear of the left.
you reap what you sow.
i think unions represent an important tool for self-organization on the part of folk who sell their labor power for a wage. i think that anything which encourages that organization is good--but i wonder if american union activists will find themselves boxed in by the history of the american union movement, taking it as not a particular history but as a necessary and inevitable part of union organization in general. this would follow from parochialism, from a lack of awareness of transnational history, which enables folk to relativize american history as a particular model full of consequences following from choices that were not and are not necessary and which produced a situation in the context of which the union movement in the states could have been crippled by neoliberalism because the unions came to be duplicates of an older, outmoded organizational model and could not adapt to what we call globalizing capitalism.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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