My question with cooperatives or other solidarity economy initiatives was always if they are just filling in the gaps of capitalism and prolonging worsening conditions that would lead to revolution. But I guess your argument is that the right initiatives could build alternative power to eventually challenge capitalism. Interesting!
They certainly can just prolong things, but this can happen with pretty much anything. Unions are a great example, and in many ways traditional sector ones have less potential that newer ones because of the history of class compromise. This kinda goes back to the class reform and revolution debate, and Luxemberg is very clear. The point is that immediate steps which are not the revolution can help to build power toward it, but it's about the political manner in which its structured. Free healthcare can be used to justfiy capitalism, it can also be used to argue capital needs to be abolished. This is mainly my point, we have to look at policies/institutions/strategies that we employ not purely as ends/means, but as articulated in a wider strategy of building hegemony. I should write something else about Gramci's idea of "war of position" which is kinda apt here.
Yeah but unions, workers federations or even parties don't just mitigate low wages, but also push against capital, forcing wages to go up, which lowers the limit for the replacement of living labour by death labour, developing the productive forces, class struggle has a direct impact on the development of socialism even in it's more immediate form.
I don't see the same when I look upon cooperatives, or communes, all I see is the inability to impose on capital the conditions for our reproduction under normal circumstances. I would not reject them. They carry upon them a palliative task, and allow capital to not have to pay a part of the labour force that it uses. In that sense I would even go so far as calling them "reactionary".
I don't think that would be the case. Because without them a portion of the working class would be unable to reproduce themselves, but they are more of a sign of weakness rather of strength of the working class, at least in the present, and as each day the amount of capital need it to push through the threshold in order to became a "normal capital" is bigger and bigger the dream of building working class coops seems more unfeasible.
I don't agree with this categorization. First, cooperatives or communes can increase overall wages and mitigate lower ones, and in fact if they are confederated they can do that more through distributing social surplus (just as does a corporation). The rising demands of the standard of living have to do with total social conditions, not merely those in the given firm. Therefore, the problem with unions in general is they are only focused on one firm, which can be a problem.
Second, this assumes we are trying to build institutions that immediately compete with capital. This is why working within and outside the state is important. We are not saying that we want communes to just be collectively run capitals, we want them to negate capital.
Third, this is all about building capacity and political consciousness. The capitalist in capitalism have the firm, they have a source of constant revenue, an institution that connects them. Why wouldn't the working class do the same? Yes, unions can also play a role, but there are limits, and the problem is unions often remain in the role of defense. Again, cooperatives can be the same, that's why it's all about how thigns are articulated.
They can if they have the sufficient capacity to go over the threshold and become a medium capital. In a lot of cases they tend to have low profits due to their small scale, and they tend to compensate for that by paying lower wages. And as capitals grow biggers, the amount needed to surpass that threshold becomes larger.
Also I don't think that working outside the state building paralel structures is a good thing. Capital by it's very nature develops the conditions that lead to it's own abolition, and by forcing the state to impose certain regulations, it forces capital to it's limit.
I agree with your third point, we have to articulate an independent political movement, because otherwise our interests will be hijacked. But I think that they have to take the form of unions or political parties.
I think the revolutionary function of cooperatives is on socializing workers to engage in self management of their workplaces and build up that expertise
So-called "workers cooperatives" under capitalism are nothing more than a middle-class delusion that has long ago been proven to be dead ends and utterly useless or worse for the working class, going back to the failed experiments of Robert Owen in the 19th century.
Once capitalism is overthrown there can be many forms of cooperatives and collectives as transitional forms of solidarity eventually leading towards superior nationalized state property. That depends on the specific history, level of social and political development and consciousness of a given socio-historic formation in a given country.
One example was the transitory establishment of sugarcane workers cooperatives in Cuba after the initial expropriation of the capitalist sugar barons. Between June 1960 and mid-1961, the Cuban revolutionary government established approximately 600 sugarcane cooperatives across more than 800,000 hectares of expropriated land. These were formed to prevent a drop in agricultural production following the nationalization of former U.S.-owned and capitalist-owned sugar estates. It was necessary given the level of consciousness, organization and experience at that time, but were later voluntarily transformed into state property in response to an appeal by Fidel Castro in 1962 (his speech on these cooperatives is quite an interesting read). As Fidel pointed out cooperative property forms are inevitably "sectarian" and partial, which undercut working class consciousness and solidarity, inculcating a negative petit-bourgeois mentality, as opposed to state property that belongs to all the working class.
But how to bridge the gap in consciousness between the abstract state property of the class as a whole vs. the immediate more tangible forms of proprietary petit-bourgeois mentality?
The great challenge of developing socialist and communist consciousness was best addressed by Che Guevara in the "Great Debate" against the Stalinist insistence on using capitalist tools to supposedly build "socialism." Naturally as Che very clearly argued the oppose was true. The USSR was building capitalist consciousness with the Law of Value and led to its inevitable destruction.
This debate on consciousness at the center of a planned economy, not market mechanisms, remains the essence of the central question for the construction of socialist societies.
Some forms of cooperatives and collectives can be anticipated to persist long into the development of socialist societies (restaurants, etc.)
I agree with the larger point, and I don’t mean to talk simply about cooperatives. But as with all institutions, they are complicated and there are ways of organizing them to strengthen, not increase, individualism
> Socialist institutions are those actively working to create alternative relations of production which break the domination of capital in the reproduction of human social relations.
I think worker coops do this to some extent. Since the voting stock is in the worker's control, the control of the firm remains in hand of the workers. People might object that to function it (often) needs to raise funds by selling stock (e.g. to capitalists), but these stocks can be the *non-voting* kind (and many investors are fine with that, especially retail investors). So even if more dividends go to capitalist-investors than in a hypothetical socialist utopia, the control of the firm is firmly in the hands of the workers. This distinction between voting and non-voting stocks is precisely the reason why I don't think equating coops with giving workers stock-options (as I've seen both socialists *and* capitalist do) is accurate: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/isnt-it-harmful-if-worker-co-ops
I also don't think workers coops, at least in their current form, are the endgame of society. But it should be noted that institutions that would dominate a utopia, might not even survive today. By way of comparison: modern limited liability companies straight up could not exist under feudalism, for many different reasons, least of which is that the monarch would straight up seize them. But proto-capitalist firms, like e.g. mercantile guilds, *could* exist under feudalism and slowly start to displace feudal structures. This created the value system/institutional-design we see today, even though those institutions that created the conditions for it can no longer survive in today's environment (feel free to draw an analogy with evolutionary development for ecological niches).
Workers cooperatives *can* work/survive today. In fact, research indicate they're more productive than traditional capitalist firms ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/if-worker-coops-are-so-productive ), likely because workers are more motivated, have higher social synergy/cooperation, and because coops are more resilient in economic downturns ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/how-worker-co-ops-can-help-restore ). So they can be to capitalism what the mercantile guilds were to feudalism: a way to gradually supplant what's there, while changing/preparing the soil for the new institutions of the future.
agree on all counts pretty much, it’s the same way that abolishing private property would get you killed, but you could use cooperatives, communes and other public institutions (I differentiate state and public) to build the relations and political hegemony needed to challenge capital more
No. There is absolutely no way for the proletariat to build workers cooperatives under XXI Century capitalism. The issues that Marx and Engels addressed have long since been historically resolved. Capitalism has indeed penetrated every pore of all human societies. There are no longer any pre-capitalist forms of any meaningful type.
These "cooperatives" are nothing more than middle-class schemes by baristas and the like. They propagate illusions as to what can be accomplished under capitalism, undermine class consciousness and militancy, and frankly are a petty distraction that has nothing to do with the main battalions of the working class.
I have plenty of experience in Latin America with cooperatives (mostly by farmers and poor peasants) and their strengths and weaknesses. Invariably they all fail under capitalism.
Only having taken political and economic power from the capitalists can any kinds of coooeratives have any broader social purpose.
In the imperialist countries they are useless, except in the case of poor working farmers, and even there they rapidly degenerate, with the better off rising while the rest founder, and class inequalities reimpose themselves.
There a a gazillion capitalist "cooperatives" in the United States of all sorts.
For the working class the primary task at this moment is building union movements, consciousness and militancy. It's hard to exaggerate just how abysmal the present unions are right now. I was a union member and activist for decades. It can be safely asserted that present class consciousness and militancy is the lowest in the history of capitalism and the working class.
Now there are meny very concrete reasons for the present debacle, and I could write a book about that but right now that is where we need to focus our efforts on overcoming the present disaster.
We don't need to organize baristas or more Chris Smalls, we need working class movements.
The middle class can have their fake granola cooperatives.
coops aside, are baristas and amazon workers middle class/not working class to you, or do you mean their campaigns/unions have a middle class character to them?
Baristas and such are part of the service economy, and they are part of a lefty middle-class milue more so than most service workers. The coffeeshop college kid vibe is not really part of organizing the working class. Certainly I support their efforts to organize but that is most definitely not the center of the class struggle or my attention. In some ways it's a middle-class distraction from actual union drives aimed at the important sectors of the working class.
By contrast none of these middle-class labor "activists" gets excited about trying to organize workers at McDonald's or any of the major fast food chains (largely all non-union) where the real working class happens to labor, and where real fights and union organizing needs to take place.
The campaigns like the California Fast Food Workers Union (CAFFWU), backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have been very ineffectual. And there have been no efforts to break the "franchise" anti union framework. And it's basically a government run-scam. There are no contracts with the capitalists. It's run by a state board the state-mandated California Fast Food Council. This regulatory body includes union representatives, workers, and franchise owners. Frankly that's closer the fascist "unions" than to actual unions. It's really an anti-union masquerading as a union. Members don't meet, only carried out fake one-day "strikes."
And neither the baristas or Amazon workers are part of the industrial working class, which despite all claims to the contrary are the heart of value producing and capitalism. And it's where union organizing has been weakest and is the most decisive.
Take for example the United Farmworkers Union (UFW). Today they represent barely 5,000 workers out of a labor force of 2.4 to 3 million farmworkers and ranch hands! What an absolute disaster!
That's down from the 80,000 members the UFW had in the 1970s. The Democrats, the AFL-CIO and the rotten Chávez leadership and their stupid "boycott grapes" campaigns aimed at consumers not organizing workers killed the union.
really appreciate this reply. not doxxing myself but a decent amount of this tracks w my experience salting in one of those jobs. don’t have a secure position on it, but just wanted to see what you had to say because i thought we’d agree on a good bit of it, especially on the union leadership position, that shit is black-pilling.
The fifty-year union retreat and degeneration is something really without precedent in modern history.
The basis was laid with the US victory in WWII when it emerged as world hegemon earning unimaginable imperialist rents. Between 1945–1970, U.S. GNP grew nearly 250%. This allowed the capitalist rulers to concede significant concessions to the working class, which fostered a conservatizing mindset of passivity and facilitated the consolidation of a corrupt pro-company union bureaucracy that overturned the fighting union leadership of the Great Depression.
The largest strike wave in U.S. history was in 1946 with 4,985 total work stoppages recorded in the by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That year marked the peak of the "Great Strike Wave of 1946." This reflected all the pent up rage over FDR's WWII wage freezes against the working class.
But by the 1970s it was down to 350 to 400 major work stoppages (involving 1,000 or more workers) a year in average. And in 2025, there were only 30 major work stoppages, and they were all pitiful and brief!
The turning point was in 1977 under Jimmy Carter when he opened up the first major attacks on unions since the Great Depression, attacking the coal miners' union (he threatened to use the National Guard and cut all federal programs to the miners families), auto, steel and airline industry unions, etc. Carter demanded concessions, breaking contracts, weakening union unity, attacking union pension funds.
It's a bold-faced lie by the Democrats and their union shills that it was all Reagan. It started under Carter and the Democrats and then Reagan followed up.
Just like it was Biden and the Democrats who used the Railway Labor Act to block the 2022 railroad strike, busted the railroad unions, which could have been the most important strike in decades. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a majority of "the Squad" voted in favor of the measure to invoke the Railway Labor Act and block the national rail strike. So much for the DSA "friends of labor".)
So we face the challenge of taking back our unions from the bureaucrats and the Democrat Party bosses, in order to begin to create democratic unions that actually fight for the working class. I have no doubt that the corrupt union bureaucrats would prefer to destroy the unions before letting the members take them back. I've seen them intentionally sabotage strike after strike, stabbing the workers in the back.
We just saw how the UFCW bureaucrats sabotaged their own strike by 4,000 meatpacking workers in Local 7 Greeley, Colorado against JBS, by not calling out more locals at JBS worksites, and by not really mobilizing the members.
I was a meatpacker and member of UFCW Local 400. The level of corruption and bureaucracy by the union officials was mind boggling. I also worked in the garment industry in the ILGWU and ACTWU, which merged in 1995 to form UNITE.
But we can't turn our back on the existing unions. We have to fight to mobilize the members and take them back.
Unfortunately there are a number of leftist outfits that have sought to colonize the union bureaucracy (Teamsters for a Democratic Union - TDU, etc.) but they have only reinforced the bureaucrats and weakened the rank-and-file workers.
Eventually something will pop, as it did in the Great Depression in 1934, and the working class will begin to fight. That will make many things possible that are presently not happening.
But there's no denying that this interregnum has gone on far longer than anyone could have anticipated, and it's led to some really bad things far beyond workplaces and the union movement.
I found this thought provoking and important! You revealed to me the limitations of my own thinking (seeing cooperatives as an end, not a means) Thanks for putting your thoughts down.
My question with cooperatives or other solidarity economy initiatives was always if they are just filling in the gaps of capitalism and prolonging worsening conditions that would lead to revolution. But I guess your argument is that the right initiatives could build alternative power to eventually challenge capitalism. Interesting!
They certainly can just prolong things, but this can happen with pretty much anything. Unions are a great example, and in many ways traditional sector ones have less potential that newer ones because of the history of class compromise. This kinda goes back to the class reform and revolution debate, and Luxemberg is very clear. The point is that immediate steps which are not the revolution can help to build power toward it, but it's about the political manner in which its structured. Free healthcare can be used to justfiy capitalism, it can also be used to argue capital needs to be abolished. This is mainly my point, we have to look at policies/institutions/strategies that we employ not purely as ends/means, but as articulated in a wider strategy of building hegemony. I should write something else about Gramci's idea of "war of position" which is kinda apt here.
Yeah but unions, workers federations or even parties don't just mitigate low wages, but also push against capital, forcing wages to go up, which lowers the limit for the replacement of living labour by death labour, developing the productive forces, class struggle has a direct impact on the development of socialism even in it's more immediate form.
I don't see the same when I look upon cooperatives, or communes, all I see is the inability to impose on capital the conditions for our reproduction under normal circumstances. I would not reject them. They carry upon them a palliative task, and allow capital to not have to pay a part of the labour force that it uses. In that sense I would even go so far as calling them "reactionary".
I don't think that would be the case. Because without them a portion of the working class would be unable to reproduce themselves, but they are more of a sign of weakness rather of strength of the working class, at least in the present, and as each day the amount of capital need it to push through the threshold in order to became a "normal capital" is bigger and bigger the dream of building working class coops seems more unfeasible.
I don't agree with this categorization. First, cooperatives or communes can increase overall wages and mitigate lower ones, and in fact if they are confederated they can do that more through distributing social surplus (just as does a corporation). The rising demands of the standard of living have to do with total social conditions, not merely those in the given firm. Therefore, the problem with unions in general is they are only focused on one firm, which can be a problem.
Second, this assumes we are trying to build institutions that immediately compete with capital. This is why working within and outside the state is important. We are not saying that we want communes to just be collectively run capitals, we want them to negate capital.
Third, this is all about building capacity and political consciousness. The capitalist in capitalism have the firm, they have a source of constant revenue, an institution that connects them. Why wouldn't the working class do the same? Yes, unions can also play a role, but there are limits, and the problem is unions often remain in the role of defense. Again, cooperatives can be the same, that's why it's all about how thigns are articulated.
They can if they have the sufficient capacity to go over the threshold and become a medium capital. In a lot of cases they tend to have low profits due to their small scale, and they tend to compensate for that by paying lower wages. And as capitals grow biggers, the amount needed to surpass that threshold becomes larger.
Also I don't think that working outside the state building paralel structures is a good thing. Capital by it's very nature develops the conditions that lead to it's own abolition, and by forcing the state to impose certain regulations, it forces capital to it's limit.
I agree with your third point, we have to articulate an independent political movement, because otherwise our interests will be hijacked. But I think that they have to take the form of unions or political parties.
I think the revolutionary function of cooperatives is on socializing workers to engage in self management of their workplaces and build up that expertise
Thank you for sharing!
So-called "workers cooperatives" under capitalism are nothing more than a middle-class delusion that has long ago been proven to be dead ends and utterly useless or worse for the working class, going back to the failed experiments of Robert Owen in the 19th century.
Once capitalism is overthrown there can be many forms of cooperatives and collectives as transitional forms of solidarity eventually leading towards superior nationalized state property. That depends on the specific history, level of social and political development and consciousness of a given socio-historic formation in a given country.
One example was the transitory establishment of sugarcane workers cooperatives in Cuba after the initial expropriation of the capitalist sugar barons. Between June 1960 and mid-1961, the Cuban revolutionary government established approximately 600 sugarcane cooperatives across more than 800,000 hectares of expropriated land. These were formed to prevent a drop in agricultural production following the nationalization of former U.S.-owned and capitalist-owned sugar estates. It was necessary given the level of consciousness, organization and experience at that time, but were later voluntarily transformed into state property in response to an appeal by Fidel Castro in 1962 (his speech on these cooperatives is quite an interesting read). As Fidel pointed out cooperative property forms are inevitably "sectarian" and partial, which undercut working class consciousness and solidarity, inculcating a negative petit-bourgeois mentality, as opposed to state property that belongs to all the working class.
But how to bridge the gap in consciousness between the abstract state property of the class as a whole vs. the immediate more tangible forms of proprietary petit-bourgeois mentality?
The great challenge of developing socialist and communist consciousness was best addressed by Che Guevara in the "Great Debate" against the Stalinist insistence on using capitalist tools to supposedly build "socialism." Naturally as Che very clearly argued the oppose was true. The USSR was building capitalist consciousness with the Law of Value and led to its inevitable destruction.
This debate on consciousness at the center of a planned economy, not market mechanisms, remains the essence of the central question for the construction of socialist societies.
Some forms of cooperatives and collectives can be anticipated to persist long into the development of socialist societies (restaurants, etc.)
I agree with the larger point, and I don’t mean to talk simply about cooperatives. But as with all institutions, they are complicated and there are ways of organizing them to strengthen, not increase, individualism
> Socialist institutions are those actively working to create alternative relations of production which break the domination of capital in the reproduction of human social relations.
I think worker coops do this to some extent. Since the voting stock is in the worker's control, the control of the firm remains in hand of the workers. People might object that to function it (often) needs to raise funds by selling stock (e.g. to capitalists), but these stocks can be the *non-voting* kind (and many investors are fine with that, especially retail investors). So even if more dividends go to capitalist-investors than in a hypothetical socialist utopia, the control of the firm is firmly in the hands of the workers. This distinction between voting and non-voting stocks is precisely the reason why I don't think equating coops with giving workers stock-options (as I've seen both socialists *and* capitalist do) is accurate: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/isnt-it-harmful-if-worker-co-ops
I also don't think workers coops, at least in their current form, are the endgame of society. But it should be noted that institutions that would dominate a utopia, might not even survive today. By way of comparison: modern limited liability companies straight up could not exist under feudalism, for many different reasons, least of which is that the monarch would straight up seize them. But proto-capitalist firms, like e.g. mercantile guilds, *could* exist under feudalism and slowly start to displace feudal structures. This created the value system/institutional-design we see today, even though those institutions that created the conditions for it can no longer survive in today's environment (feel free to draw an analogy with evolutionary development for ecological niches).
Workers cooperatives *can* work/survive today. In fact, research indicate they're more productive than traditional capitalist firms ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/if-worker-coops-are-so-productive ), likely because workers are more motivated, have higher social synergy/cooperation, and because coops are more resilient in economic downturns ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/how-worker-co-ops-can-help-restore ). So they can be to capitalism what the mercantile guilds were to feudalism: a way to gradually supplant what's there, while changing/preparing the soil for the new institutions of the future.
agree on all counts pretty much, it’s the same way that abolishing private property would get you killed, but you could use cooperatives, communes and other public institutions (I differentiate state and public) to build the relations and political hegemony needed to challenge capital more
No. There is absolutely no way for the proletariat to build workers cooperatives under XXI Century capitalism. The issues that Marx and Engels addressed have long since been historically resolved. Capitalism has indeed penetrated every pore of all human societies. There are no longer any pre-capitalist forms of any meaningful type.
These "cooperatives" are nothing more than middle-class schemes by baristas and the like. They propagate illusions as to what can be accomplished under capitalism, undermine class consciousness and militancy, and frankly are a petty distraction that has nothing to do with the main battalions of the working class.
I have plenty of experience in Latin America with cooperatives (mostly by farmers and poor peasants) and their strengths and weaknesses. Invariably they all fail under capitalism.
Only having taken political and economic power from the capitalists can any kinds of coooeratives have any broader social purpose.
In the imperialist countries they are useless, except in the case of poor working farmers, and even there they rapidly degenerate, with the better off rising while the rest founder, and class inequalities reimpose themselves.
There a a gazillion capitalist "cooperatives" in the United States of all sorts.
For the working class the primary task at this moment is building union movements, consciousness and militancy. It's hard to exaggerate just how abysmal the present unions are right now. I was a union member and activist for decades. It can be safely asserted that present class consciousness and militancy is the lowest in the history of capitalism and the working class.
Now there are meny very concrete reasons for the present debacle, and I could write a book about that but right now that is where we need to focus our efforts on overcoming the present disaster.
We don't need to organize baristas or more Chris Smalls, we need working class movements.
The middle class can have their fake granola cooperatives.
Regards.
coops aside, are baristas and amazon workers middle class/not working class to you, or do you mean their campaigns/unions have a middle class character to them?
Good question.
Amazon workers are most definitely workers.
Baristas and such are part of the service economy, and they are part of a lefty middle-class milue more so than most service workers. The coffeeshop college kid vibe is not really part of organizing the working class. Certainly I support their efforts to organize but that is most definitely not the center of the class struggle or my attention. In some ways it's a middle-class distraction from actual union drives aimed at the important sectors of the working class.
By contrast none of these middle-class labor "activists" gets excited about trying to organize workers at McDonald's or any of the major fast food chains (largely all non-union) where the real working class happens to labor, and where real fights and union organizing needs to take place.
The campaigns like the California Fast Food Workers Union (CAFFWU), backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have been very ineffectual. And there have been no efforts to break the "franchise" anti union framework. And it's basically a government run-scam. There are no contracts with the capitalists. It's run by a state board the state-mandated California Fast Food Council. This regulatory body includes union representatives, workers, and franchise owners. Frankly that's closer the fascist "unions" than to actual unions. It's really an anti-union masquerading as a union. Members don't meet, only carried out fake one-day "strikes."
And neither the baristas or Amazon workers are part of the industrial working class, which despite all claims to the contrary are the heart of value producing and capitalism. And it's where union organizing has been weakest and is the most decisive.
Take for example the United Farmworkers Union (UFW). Today they represent barely 5,000 workers out of a labor force of 2.4 to 3 million farmworkers and ranch hands! What an absolute disaster!
That's down from the 80,000 members the UFW had in the 1970s. The Democrats, the AFL-CIO and the rotten Chávez leadership and their stupid "boycott grapes" campaigns aimed at consumers not organizing workers killed the union.
So we face some serious challenges.
Regards.
really appreciate this reply. not doxxing myself but a decent amount of this tracks w my experience salting in one of those jobs. don’t have a secure position on it, but just wanted to see what you had to say because i thought we’d agree on a good bit of it, especially on the union leadership position, that shit is black-pilling.
The fifty-year union retreat and degeneration is something really without precedent in modern history.
The basis was laid with the US victory in WWII when it emerged as world hegemon earning unimaginable imperialist rents. Between 1945–1970, U.S. GNP grew nearly 250%. This allowed the capitalist rulers to concede significant concessions to the working class, which fostered a conservatizing mindset of passivity and facilitated the consolidation of a corrupt pro-company union bureaucracy that overturned the fighting union leadership of the Great Depression.
The largest strike wave in U.S. history was in 1946 with 4,985 total work stoppages recorded in the by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That year marked the peak of the "Great Strike Wave of 1946." This reflected all the pent up rage over FDR's WWII wage freezes against the working class.
But by the 1970s it was down to 350 to 400 major work stoppages (involving 1,000 or more workers) a year in average. And in 2025, there were only 30 major work stoppages, and they were all pitiful and brief!
The turning point was in 1977 under Jimmy Carter when he opened up the first major attacks on unions since the Great Depression, attacking the coal miners' union (he threatened to use the National Guard and cut all federal programs to the miners families), auto, steel and airline industry unions, etc. Carter demanded concessions, breaking contracts, weakening union unity, attacking union pension funds.
It's a bold-faced lie by the Democrats and their union shills that it was all Reagan. It started under Carter and the Democrats and then Reagan followed up.
Just like it was Biden and the Democrats who used the Railway Labor Act to block the 2022 railroad strike, busted the railroad unions, which could have been the most important strike in decades. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a majority of "the Squad" voted in favor of the measure to invoke the Railway Labor Act and block the national rail strike. So much for the DSA "friends of labor".)
So we face the challenge of taking back our unions from the bureaucrats and the Democrat Party bosses, in order to begin to create democratic unions that actually fight for the working class. I have no doubt that the corrupt union bureaucrats would prefer to destroy the unions before letting the members take them back. I've seen them intentionally sabotage strike after strike, stabbing the workers in the back.
We just saw how the UFCW bureaucrats sabotaged their own strike by 4,000 meatpacking workers in Local 7 Greeley, Colorado against JBS, by not calling out more locals at JBS worksites, and by not really mobilizing the members.
I was a meatpacker and member of UFCW Local 400. The level of corruption and bureaucracy by the union officials was mind boggling. I also worked in the garment industry in the ILGWU and ACTWU, which merged in 1995 to form UNITE.
But we can't turn our back on the existing unions. We have to fight to mobilize the members and take them back.
Unfortunately there are a number of leftist outfits that have sought to colonize the union bureaucracy (Teamsters for a Democratic Union - TDU, etc.) but they have only reinforced the bureaucrats and weakened the rank-and-file workers.
Eventually something will pop, as it did in the Great Depression in 1934, and the working class will begin to fight. That will make many things possible that are presently not happening.
But there's no denying that this interregnum has gone on far longer than anyone could have anticipated, and it's led to some really bad things far beyond workplaces and the union movement.
Regards.
I found this thought provoking and important! You revealed to me the limitations of my own thinking (seeing cooperatives as an end, not a means) Thanks for putting your thoughts down.
thank you! I will try to get better at just posting thoughts like this on the fly.
Oh no! Richard Wolff’s reification of capital!