Another Way To Be Union

From Marxism-Leninism Today:

There is a kind of institutionalization of class collaboration, facilitated by the capitalist state (e.g., through the NLRB) channeling workers' complaints into grooves that help misdirect the entire class. When the AFL-CIO's misnamed "Solidarity Center," with ample U.S. government funds, "educates" unionists from around the world (many of whom come to the 47-acre suburban campus of the National Labor College near Washington, DC for this purpose), it infects other peoples, through a sort of globalized disorientation process, with the ways of the yellow- and CIA-oriented unionism long entrenched in this country.

The working class and its allies fight valiantly in Wisconsin and other states to preserve the right to collective bargaining. As it were, they're fighting to keep their chains. Collective bargaining, as it exists in the U.S., objectively restricts workers' struggles, thereby limiting them to manageable proportions.  Thereby, the opportunity for Communists in the trade unions to build class and revolutionary consciousness is minimized. Admittedly, the present collective bargaining system represents "chains" less painful to the workers than the actual handcuffs with which extremist state and federal legislators aim to shackle unionists in Wisconsin and elsewhere, when they resist the abolition of public sector collective bargaining.

 

The mistake is to assume the present inadequate form of collective bargaining is forever. Not so. It developed under concrete historical circumstances. It can change. The workers' movement therefore must go beyond merely reaffirming collective bargaining rights won in the mid-20th century. Regrettably, for now, many leaders of U.S. trade unions, given their economism (i.e., the confining of struggle to mere economic demands), seem unable to give adequate answers to the questions raised by Wisconsin, except recall petitions.

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