Labor Fest: ART IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE; an evening of performance and discussion

does not view unions as for the people. the very idea of a union is of great concern to us as this would deny us ultimate control of our destinies. we have free will and we will use it! we will go where we please when we please. and we do not respect the unions attempt to control us! down with centralized control!

If you think unions are a "central control," you haven't studied economics or history. This is not to say that unions as we know them are not a flawed model. They are. But "central"!?! Give me a break. The very reason they are weak is that they are scattered and divided.

As for free will, don't be silly. We have no free will. That's a bourgeois fantasy. We are prisoners of of our our economy and of the society it imposes on us. If you want to be truly free, unite, not as practitioners of single trades, but as workers, across trade lines.

UNIONS ARE ONE OF THE MOST DIRECT FORMS CONTROL. that is why they are supported in comunist countries, they keep the masses in line!
UNIONS intimidate their members into "voting the party line" those who don't vote with the party well they have all kinds of problems. (jimmy hoffa)

as for free will go to china and practice FREE SPEACH.. and see what happens.

the vast majority of the world has very few freedoms

hey "informed" anarchist,
"the vast majority of the world has very few freedoms"?

that seems to me to be just as naive as those pro-american slobs who say "oh yeah? go protest in [insert whatever country] and see if you can protest there!"

it's naive, american-centric thinking. the majority of the rest of the world have rights of protest and speech just as we do. in fact, in many countries in europe they probably have more rights with respect to speech right now.

america is not the center of freedom. get out and travel once in a while.

it has nothing to do with anarchism, either. This guy is no anarchist. He's a troll. Anybody that says anarchists oppose the self orginization of working people is either incredibly stupod, incredibly ignorant or (in this case) lying. if you doubt it, go look up the histpry of the eight hour day.

self orginization of working people
since when does this have anything to do with unions? if you go to work for ford you are under union control weather you want to be or not, there is no individual choice. as with most unions. you can "opt out" but you still pay the equivalent of dues and the union does as it wishes. the individual has little or no say in what effects him. you seem to have a real love affair going with unions, too bad they aren't what you portray them to be.

have you ever got that right, unions suck!
I have been in several and they all suck!
I have always hated paying the union bosses, it is kind of like paying the mafia so you can keep working for them

Some are and some aren't. Are you familiar with the IWW, or the history of the CNT?

A boss is a boss is a boss. A union boss is just a glorified labor broker. But the boss is not the union. The rank and file is the union.

Unions lost their potential when they let bosses take over. Take back control from the bosses, and unite across trade lines, and unions will become the most revolutionary force on the planet. But this cannot be done in a single trade union, or even a single country, as Solidarnosc proved conclusively. It can only be done on a global basis. Capitalism is global, and so to must be our resistance.

(I hope I'm not posting this twice; I tried earlier and it doesn't appear to have gone through...)

Hey, it's good to see some discussion of the pro-capitalist role that the development of capitalist society has compelled all labor unions to take on.

The CNT didn't make a libertarian communist revolution when the chance was there in July 1936; the CNT gave away every gain taken by the revolutionary movement, and essentially handed power back to the bourgeosie and the Stalinists.

Check out the docs on the 'Love and Treason' web site, at:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html

For example, on the union question:

"...The class struggle is the key liberatory force of our time. Class struggle isn’t only our fight as wage-workers against our employers. The class war includes all the individual and collective struggles of exploited and propertyless people all over the world against all aspects of our exploitation and impoverishment. It encompasses our fights against racism, sexism and homophobia, but not as separate reformist issues. Class warfare involves fights for less work, for more pay, for less oppressive living and working conditions -- and the fight for our power outside of and against capitalist social relations.

Trade unions are capitalist labor brokerages. They exist to negotiate the sale of their members’ labor power to employers, to keep working people in line, and limit the scale of our actions against employers. Unions divert the discontent of union members into harmless channels, transforming wage workers’ struggles into a form of interest group activity. They help us to remain passive spectators in the events that most affect our lives.

At their best, unions were once defensive organizations, attempting to obtain the highest possible price for the labor power of union members. From the 1930’s onward in the US, a vast array of labor legislation helped transform the unions into mechanisms of social control. Unions have ideologically and politically integrated unionized workers into the capitalist system, selling them the bosses’ agenda during times of peace and war. And in more recent years, as their strength and membership numbers have declined, unions in the US have openly advertised themselves as partners of management, protecting the profit requirements of capitalists against the needs of wage earners.

Unions often help employers reduce working people’s living standards through give-back contracts. Unions undercut wage earners’ power in labor disputes. Unions prevent strikes from happening, they prevent strikes from spreading, and prevent strikers from using the hardball tactics that are necessary to make employers cave in to our demands. Unions often use goon squads to keep strikers in line and halt actions that can break the back of a struck company. And when strikers who have been defeated by union maneuvers return to work under worse conditions than they endured before the strike, unions and their leftist camp followers frequently describe their defeat as a "victory." From the worthless perspective of unions and leftists anything short of everybody being fired and jailed is a victory, as long as the union apparatus remains in business. Economists, politicians, union officials and most intelligent business leaders all recognize the inherently conservative and capitalistic function of unions. Union bureaucrats occasionally use combative jargon, but this has no bearing on the unions’ real function as labor brokerages for capital. Democratic societies create a marvelous variety of false oppositions to help maintain the status quo, and unions have played their role well in these terms.

Anarcho-syndicalism proved to be a dead-end in France in 1914, in the Mexican Revolution, in Italy in 1920, and, in history’s greatest missed opportunity, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Unions with an ostensibly revolutionary ideology and a heroic past, like the contemporary IWW, are the empty organizational shell of a long-gone social movement. Today they are impoverished versions of mainstream unions, and their militants often do grunt-work for the bigger labor brokerages. The content of supposedly revolutionary union activity is no more revolutionary than that of any other form of union activity. History proves that syndicalism cannot break with a world defined by wage labor. This has also been the case with new unions in places like Poland, the former USSR, Mexico and the Philippines.

Social struggles often give rise to anti-hierarchical, collective forms of action and organization, like strike committees outside of and against the control of the unions, or mass public assemblies: these can be forms of real working class power. But any permanent formal organization of the working class outside of a context of mass action will end up becoming part of the bosses’ political apparatus, and get in the way of our fight for a better life.

In taking action in the workplace, and in extending actions beyond the workplace, wage workers have to fight outside of and against all unions and unionist ideologies. Our only way forward will be to create new forms of wildcat action and self-organization that won’t be limited to a single job category or industry, or limited to the workplace itself. We will have to do an end-run around the unions and the anti-working class labor laws they serve. This perspective has to become present in even the most limited and immediate struggles. It has to include strategies for large-scale action against employers and governments across regional and national boundaries...."