/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Maybe, but you need to outline a workable alternative to the reactionary nature of trade unions if this is the case

You are right. This is why in the the internationalist communists reject the bureaucrat-reformist or "tricolor" unions, which forbids strikes
and instead go for the rank-and-file class unions.

agree but you get rid of them and the neoliberal incursion becomes an avalanche

>>2883153
Neoliberalism is overhated. The biggest crime of neoliberalism, like Keynesianism before it, is that its inability to resolve its own structural contradictions invariably leads to a collapse, but unlike Keynesianism before it what it is collapsing into is naked barbarism absent any merit whatsoever. (Where else can you go from a blundered "Just let people do things" program?)
The second biggest crime is that its biggest and most prominent proponent figures like Thatcher, Reagan, Hayek and to a slightly lesser degree Friedman were all psychotic weirdos. The economists offered some genuine insight, but the politicians would endorse any ideology that let them hurt people. This unfortunately muddies the waters compared to the general humanism of Keynesian softies.

Unions are something of a red herring in terms of "things neoliberalism ruined". The most strongly anti-union neoliberals were generally also those who most effectively blundered the doctrine the most. (e.g. Thatcher actively smashed unions, but most of her privatisations were fake and her centralising agenda and general tendency has actively lead to Britain becoming a more regulated, less market oriented society.) Britain nevertheless has a higher unionisation rate than Australia, which had a much softer approach where unions voluntarily initiated the structural changes that lead to an implosion of membership numbers. While the Scandi countries maintain high unionisation rates within a nevertheless neoliberal framework.

To answer your question in broad strokes: unions are part of the apparatus for administering capitalism and disciplining or at least structuring labour. They will normalise climbdowns and act as mules for SocDem parties that are well past their prime. This, I agree with. The only thing I would critique is the idea that (in non-Scandi countries, at least) they're relevant enough to have a structurally legitimating position, rather than being half vestigial organ, one quarter extension of HR, and one quarter marginally effective political fundraising tool by the public sector, for the public sector.

No, Anons, this analysis does not mean I "am" a neoliberal, nor am I trying to "convert" you to neoliberalism. All I want is for you to give neoliberalism as fair a hearing as Keynesianism gets, understanding what it got right and which of its internal contradictions made it inevitable it would collapse, which most socialists and communists are capable of doing without compromising their opposition to capitalism.

>>2883249
Unlikely. What you must understand about neoliberalism is that it is spent and has been spent for a long time. We are already in the early to early-middle period of "post neoliberalism."

>>2883242
That text is not contextually relevant and very outdated.

This is more appropriate:
https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/REPORTS/UnionQue/74ClassUnionsRiseAgain.htm
>1) The trade unions after the Second World War, in all advanced capitalist countries, are ‘tricolour’ trade unions, i.e. organisations that put the defence of workers’ economic conditions and daily lives after the defence of the interests of the national economy, the capitalist state, democracy and social peace between classes. That is, they are unsuitable and inadequate bodies even for the mere defence of the immediate needs of the proletariat. Of these unions, however they are labelled, the proletarians have nothing to defend and nothing to save.

>2) The dynamics of these ‘tricolour’ organisations continue to unfold in the sense of their ever more complete insertion into the gears of the bourgeois state, even in the formal organisational and legal sense. This trajectory of theirs, which will lead them to become even formally mere appendages of the state machine, unfolds to varying degrees in different countries, and is irreversible unless the proletariat’s class struggle is resumed.

>3) Faced with this observation, not of today, but of twenty-five years ago, not based on contingent events, but on a correct Marxist analysis of the capitalist becoming, which today’s events only confirm, the Party does not draw the inference to abandon work in these organisms. In these organisations and outside them, the Party’s task is to put forward to the proletariat the need for the resurgence of class economic associations, i.e. workers’ bodies for the conduct of economic struggles that are free from state and bourgeois influence.
> This resurrection will be the result of the class returning to the terrain of defending at least its most basic economic interests, with the method of class struggle, against the pressure of capital.
> It could be expressed in two senses: either in the reconquest, ‘perhaps with a beating’, of the present trade unions, a reconquest which must not only mean a change of leadership, but a decisive overthrow of the whole of the present policy in all fields of activity and of the same organisational form of the trade unions; or ex novo, that is through the reconstitution by the struggling proletarians of economic organisations for the immediate struggle (outside of and against the present organisations). These two possibilities cannot be determined a priori: the prevalence of one rather than the other, or of both at the same time, depends on the actual course of the class struggle and not on voluntarist exercises.

>4) One of the elements which distinguishes the class Party from all the endless circles and small groups is the prospect of the resurgence of class economic organisations, stemming from the resurgence of the proletarian struggle and acting as a necessary and indispensable ground, not only for the conduct by the Party of the revolutionary struggle for power, but also for any notable strengthening of the Party’s influence on the proletarian masses. Without the widespread emergence of class-based economic bodies, not only will there be no revolution and no conquest of power, but neither will there be the real, necessary strengthening in an autonomous way of the Party and its influence on the class.

>5) This is what all our texts have said for the past 25 years. This is what we have always told the proletariat. Those who do not agree with this perspective, those who dream of traumas that would, by some unknown magic, lead the working class to the revolutionary assault directly, with a strong Party at the head of the masses and the conquest of power; those who, worst of all, affirm that the forms of the future class revival cannot be foreseen are naturally ‘free to follow any path that diverges from ours’. It is enough that they do not refer to the tradition of the Communist Left and the International Communist Party, that they do not distort, in the Stalinist manner, our texts, that they do not falsify what the Party has always affirmed: for the revolutionary struggle to be resumed, for the Party to be able to strengthen its influence over the proletarian class, and to come to lead it in the final battle; for the workers themselves to be able to effectively defend their living conditions against the bosses, the bourgeois state and their opportunist lackeys, the resumption of struggles on the economic and social terrain and the rebirth of the class unions is necessary!

bump

>>2883153
Yes, trade unions that don't have the explicit demand for the immediate abolition of wage-slavery is reformist, but that isn't necessarily bad otherwise we wouldn't have the 40 hour work week or such things as weekends among other things and no one leftist in their right mind would be against such things.

>>2887001
Why are your dialectics idealist?
>in this historical moment is legitimization of the exploitation of labor-power and normalizing neoliberal incursions into rights which the working class
OP didn't stutter. If you can't grasp the nuance of the topic due to lack of investigation you can change that before replying by consulting hismat on the transformation of the labor union struggle within the last 120 years, see: >>2883303 (me). Replies directly subsequent to the OP even would've aided you here, as they provided such analysis (materialist dialectics). Instead you immediately applied idealist dialectics.
I hope my critical engagement with your post aided in constructive reflection.
Best regards, comrade.

>>2887012
I don't understand how they mutually exclude eachother. It is capitalism itself that creates the crises that spur the proletariat into action, if that is reformism during times of relative stability then that is what prevails at that moment. Capitalism needs unions to operate harmoniously, not necessarily as militant organisations but atleast their threat on paper because they're the material coercion that corrects unrestrained competition, it is only when capitalism cannot and will not provide the necessities for the proletariat to replicate itself comfortably that they become militant, if not through mainstream then through autonomously formed orgs.