The Social Drift That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Research Time, 15/06/2018

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of convergence between research for my philosophical writing and the political activism work I’ve been doing. Here’s an example.

As you can tell from my Twitter feed, I spent the last month working a contract for the New Democratic Party in Ontario on a district campaign in the provincial election. We lost that race by a respectably small margin, but there were some promising and troubling signs of future directions in how people engaged with state politics in this part of Canada.

On a province-wide level, the New Democrats had a remarkable success, nearly doubling their seats in the legislature, showing a strong performance province-wide, and breaking into victories in areas that hadn’t supported them in some time or ever.

When I was searching for artistic images of Ontario Premier Doug
Ford, I ended up discovering that there's a whimsical visual artist
in Auckland, New Zealand who is also named Doug Ford. One
of his ongoing projects is painting amusing or pastoral scenes on
traffic light control boxes.

The New Democrats swept most of urban Toronto, and even into the metro suburbs like Scarborough and Brampton. They gained seats in Kingston and central Ottawa, as well as growing and consolidating support in and around Windsor, Hamilton, Niagara, Thunder Bay, the lesser London, Peterborough, Sudbury, and Kitchener. But the rural-urban divide in support was stark and disturbing.

The only rural seats that went New Democrat were Indigenous-dominated populations in the far north of the province and the area around Sudbury. Two smaller cities with very working-class backgrounds went to the Conservatives: Sarnia and Sault Ste Marie. A major Sault Ste Marie Steelworkers union endorsed the Conservative candidate after its members demanded it. It was probably a major factor in his slim victory.

Sault Ste Marie offered the most troubling story for an organizer in progressive politics. The New Democrats have historically been a very pro-union party, traditionally linked to the concerns of working-class citizens.* This is especially true in Ontario, with its powerful government, higher education, and manufacturing unions.

* I mean, the New Democratic Party was literally created from the merger of Canada’s federal socialist party and the country’s largest association of trade unions.

But many union members are turning away from the New Democrats, even though that party’s policies are generally the best for people in that sector and class. I want to do some investigations about this, but my hypothesis is that the socially conservative, pro-white sentiment among many working class people are driving them to support a party that dog-whistles sufficiently to let folks know their stance.

He's a symbol and a voice. A voice that does speak for far too many
people out there.

Yes, Doug. That’s what “I’m taking care of our own first” means.

One of the most insightful popular analyses of this problem I found last year, written by Erik Loomis, a historian at University of Rhode Island. American union leadership and membership has taken the side of heavily-polluting oil companies against environmentalists and Indigenous people. Throughout the country’s history, American trade unions have supported openly racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and supported Donald Trump’s economic isolationism.

During the campaign, a Meet-and-Greet I was organizing fell apart. It was with a group of strong NDP supporters, all of whom had spent their entire lives in Toronto’s manufacturing and construction sectors, all of whom were dedicated union activists. My contact in the group even told me why.

Late in the campaign, the Liberal and Conservative parties began blanket messaging of opposition research on different New Democrat candidates around the province. I didn’t consider any of these issues a dealbreaker. In fact, I considered these additional reasons to endorse those candidates. But I can understand why many Ontarians who aren’t me found these people’s activism disgusting.

Gurratan Singh, running in the same Brampton riding his brother left to become federal NDP leader, once held a sign at an anti-violence protest reading “Fuck the Police.” Jessica Bell, running in central Toronto, once got herded into a police wagon and arrested at the protests against Stephen Harper’s G20 summit that saw Toronto’s entire financial district occupied by the Canadian military.

Erica Kelly, running in central Etobicoke, once said on social media that gun owners disgusted her after a blitz of post-Stoneman Douglas NRA ads made her blood boil. Laura Kaminker, a candidate in central Mississauga, refuses to wear a poppy leading up to our Remembrance Day because of how the symbol has been turned from a sign of mourning to one of patriotic jingoism.

Because the government of Tony Blair brought nothing but justice
and prosperity to Britain and the wider world. People got a little
disappointed about this, and more than a little angry.

We also ran a young trans woman in the Vanier suburb of Ottawa. She lost. So did Kelly and Kaminker. Singh and Bell won, though.

What reason did my contact give for his community turning down our campaign event? They were all disgusted by Kaminker, Singh, Bell, Kelly, and the other candidates slammed as ‘radical activists.’ They all threw their support to the Conservatives.

Jeremy Gilbert describes a parallel problem happening in Britain in the late 1990s. After Tony Blair led Labour to an electoral victory in 1997, the British labour movement of union activists and organizers largely shut down for several years. They presumed that, with the unionists’ party having taken government, there was no need for them to advocate. They had won.

You never win. The Labour Party won the 1997 election, so the popular movement for social justice in Britain was complete. I couldn’t finish writing that sentence without laughing. I’m not sure how much I should trust Gilbert on this assessment. It sounds a lot like hyperbole.

But I can’t deny that when one sector associates themselves with a political party so much, you can identify the party’s electoral victory with your own.

If the NDP ever wins government in Ontario again, I’ll be among the first to criticize its policies if they fall short of what we want to do and what we can do. Even if they’re giving me another job. My principles will never take a back seat to any party loyalty.

It seems the union folks abandoning the New Democrats think the same.

Under the Paving Stones I: Sadly High Probability, A History Boy, 12/03/2018

I’m Canadian, not French. So Utopias isn’t going to wade into all the different interpretations, causes, conditions, effects, and affects of the Paris revolutionary riots of May 1968. But I have to bring in a little history.

Because my own political thinking uses a lot of the concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in the 1970s, May ’68 is a touchstone, a material condition. Anti-Œdipus was a product of the Paris popular uprising, so the social dynamics that brought it about conditioned the creation of the book and its concepts.

Paris’ May uprising was a unique event. Its uniqueness was in how remarkably unlikely the movement’s coalition was – not only the radical communist activists, but also business management students and all the factory workers in the city.

Growing up in Canada, the American narrative of 1960s protests
dominated cultural discussion of that era. The cultures of Europe
were so different that they didn't get much airtime.

That massive improbability was a product of unique and complex conditions that are practically unrepeatable in their exact form. Activists – a primer in two parts on how to learn from history.
• • •
I first learned about May ’68 in an undergraduate political science course – specifically about political behaviour, an introduction to how political scientists investigate how people vote, protest, and get involved with government. It was introduced to me entirely in its dimension as a student movement.

At the time, I worked for a campus newspaper. So part of my job was to report on the activities of the university student union. I found the whole institution* a mess of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

* Yes, that is seriously still their website. It's really sad.

I couldn’t take seriously the idea that a student movement could organize anything sanely, let alone offer up a genuinely inspirational new form of politics. Here was the environment where I was building my first fully self-conscious political conscience, at least regarding student movements.

It’s 2003, 2004. The Iraq War has mobilized a lot of people to fight the myopic imperialism of the W Bush Administration. Among my student union is a sizeable plurality of folks who are dedicated social activists, for whom the campus activists of the 1960s – Abbie Hoffmann, Angela Davis, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – were role models.

Unfortunately, the sudden end of the oil boom three years ago returned
austerity politics to the governance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuition rose again, as rural Newfoundland returned to mass
unemployment, making those CFS messages about increasingly
inaccessible education or unsustainable student debt levels
finally relevant to people's real concerns there. Not exactly how
I would have liked to see the CFS and Newfoundland harmonize.

They worked to put the student union on the progressive side of a revolution against empire and militarism. They did organize some quality anti-war activism. But most of their economic activism was hamstrung by having to stick to a strict script provided by the Canadian Federation of Students – “Students are hurting from high tuition rates! Grants, not loans! Lower tuition!”

Fine for Ontario, reeling from public service cuts after a decade of Mike Harris’ austerity policies. Ridiculous in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland was kicking into an oil-driven economic boom, and Roger Grimes’ governing Liberal Party was reversing its own austerity policies from the Brian Tobin years. My tuition rates went down 25% in the first three years of the century and stayed frozen for a decade.

Social conditions like this couldn’t even unify a students’ union. The dedicated revolutionaries were a vocal minority in a union dominated by residence hall party planners, and middle-of-the-road nerds who wanted to make sure the food court and convenience store kept running smoothly. Plus a couple of man-children and one or two hyper-conservative extremists.

This taught me that there was nothing special about the student movement. So I thought that the paradigm Student Movements™ – France’s May ’68 and the USA’s protests against the Vietnam War – were similar chaotic messes and failures.

The idea of “the student movement” in popular culture is that universities are inherently subversive spaces originates from the Paris Uprising and Antiwar Movement’s model example in Western culture today.

But in real life, the circumstances that made those remarkable movements possible were unique and improbable processes.

The Paris Uprisings of 1968, for example, were made possible by the Algerian War. Ian Buchanan taught me that.

How Can We Teach What Folks Have to Learn? Jamming, 02/02/2018

It's been a few kind of rough days, and that’s okay. But I wanted to take a break from the more hardcore philosophy I’ve been on for the last few days and apply some of these concepts to some of our contemporary situations.

This is a conversation about the labour movement. What there is of it today, anyway. Let me start with my own material position on this issue – I’ll lay my cards on the table.

I’m a district association vice-president in the New Democratic Party here in Canada. I chair our policy committee, which makes me a kind of central coordinating philosopher, if I can be pretentious about it.

When I was watching the Ontario college instructors' strike last Fall,
I saw dedicated activists wasting their time when the government
understood that defeating them was a matter of waiting them out.
When enough students became frustrated with the strike, they
blamed the unions for choosing to strike instead of the government
for refusing to compromise. It seemed no one in OPSEU
understood that this was a possibility, when it's exactly what's
been happening at York University for decades now.

If you know the history of the New Democratic Party, you know that the NDP is, in many essential aspects of its development, the party of the labour movement. Now, the NDP is much more than the party of the labour movement alone these days, but those organizational tensions are for another day.

I'm an ally and a friend of the labour movement – but the movement has to adjust to two new realities if it’s going to thrive as it did a century ago. 1) The working class is too diverse for any necessary solidarity to develop. 2) Anti-union interests know exactly how to defeat the old union methods of bargaining and strikes.

See, while I’m not a marxist, I work in the political party and write Utopias embedded in a tradition of thought where Karl Marx’s works are important and influential. The theorists most influential on my own political thinking were Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Antonio Negri. Their works are positioned clearly in the marxist tradition.

That said, none of them are what you’d call orthodox marxists. If you want a summary of the fundamental premises of orthodox marxism, read the last two posts from earlier this week.

The key lesson you can take from there is that the world is fundamentally contingent – so the processes that were driving your social movement aren’t necessary. New technologies that never existed in Marx’s time and were barely imaginable transformed every aspect of human civilization.

One of those changes that computer, internet, and robotics technology did was fragment the nature of labour. Many different categories of worker exist now – factory floors and mine shafts, the home offices and Slack forums, the smartphone notifications delivering $8 shawarma.

Have you ever tried to get any of these people to talk to each other? Yes, they can all agree that their jobs stink. But they have nothing in common in their personalities.

We in the New Democrats have a beautiful attitude toward Tommy
Douglas, the founder of our party in bringing together the
farmers' socialist movement with the Canadian Labour Congress
and their supporters. But we can't let ourselves be limited by what
we've inherited when the world has changed so radically.

Here’s an example of the working person’s solidarity. When I was on strike in 2009 as a teaching assistant at McMaster, I spoke to a contract electrician who was driving through one of our picket lines. He said he had a son, so I told him one thing we were on strike to secure was more coverage in our benefits plan for parents of small children.

And he told me to go fuck myself because he never had a benefits plan in his life, already a decade longer than mine.

On top of that, look at the example of the big college instructors’ strike in Ontario last year. It was a failure on so many fronts, and I can’t help but blame the instructors’ union itself. Not in the sense most people mean by this, that their claims were unreasonable. No, the instructors’ concerns were valid, important, and vital.

I blame the instructors’ union in the sense that I’m incredulous that they walked into such an obvious trap! It was amateurish.

The union made their first offer to the provincial government months before the Fall semester started. The government didn’t respond until classes were well underway. They made such unreasonable proposals to the union that refusal was the only rational response.

At this point, a union official in Toronto – where the union-administration battles of York University have become legendary over the century – should see that he’s being set up. Yet OPSEU walked right into this trap, filling their public relations messaging that expected solidarity from everyone – especially the students.

We’re working people on strike! Of course the people will support us!

Nonsense. The strike was broken by the first student union coming out to say that instructors should back down and take what management will give them.

The people are too fragmented for solidarity to come through the old-fashioned vectors. Singing “Solidarity forever” only reminds people outside the local that your solidarity is not for them.

Now let’s look this problem in the face and deal with it.

Recognize People’s Real Power, Research Time, 15/12/2016

You know, back when I started this blog, I knew a lot of its posts would follow the research I was doing for Utopias. And one of the first declarations I made in my historical research was that, even though I knew I’d engage with some works in the marxist tradition, I was no marxist.

Reading Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the landmark 1980s work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I’m even more convinced of my non-marxism.

Here's an idea that was really prominent in the history of marxism. Not just the academic marxist scholarship – I’m talking about the early 20th century, when the biggest demographic of marxism was political activists and revolutionary radicals.

People's demands can change their whole society. It's called politics.

This is the idea they criticize pretty robustly: That capital totally dominates labour conditions. In other words, the people, organizations, and broader social forces that own, control, and express a society’s sources of wealth controls its labour conditions too.

The concept is connected with traditional marxism’s social, political, and economic determinism. The macro-level structure of society entirely determines all the conditions and movements that are part of it. Society’s superstructure is its only agency.

Labour, meanwhile, isn’t an activity. That would imply that it has agency. Work, according to the tradition, is a commodity – labour-power. You can negotiate the value of your work as a wage, but work’s only feature is its applications, what a boss sends you to do.

Laclau and Mouffe rip this concept apart, and they do it as part of a sustained attack on the entire marxist tradition – both in the theory and in the activism, which until only the last few decades were two sides of the same movement. That attack is uncovering and tearing down a recurring error in marxist thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the world.

The tradition ignores the contingency of history – sees only the logical necessity of theoretical argument and is blind to the messy dynamism of life.

In this context, the tradition ignores how it wasn’t just capitalist society’s superstructure changing according to abstract internal laws of motion that determines labour conditions. Labour conditions are the product of dynamic struggle between working people and the large conglomerates and elite business leaders who employ them.

In 19th century Europe, the children’s rights movement took kids out of dangerous, dehumanizing factory work. In the early 20th century, the union movement won restrictions on the working day’s and week’s length.

Ernesto Laclau and his partner Chantal Mouffe were two figures in the
group that brought ecological ways of thinking to the philosophical
tradition in complex, multidimensional ways. Their academic roots in
marxist studies made them two of the most explicitly political in that
movement.

Today, workers are changing the conditions of labour through activism again. Business leaders aim to casualize and destabilize all employment through models like the gig economy and the sharing economy. So workers are building organizations that network among each other to pool financial and knowledge resources – essentially a union of contractors.

Organizations like the Urban Worker Project in Ontario, which is developing to look a bit more like a medieval guild than a modern labour union.

Where business leaders want to drive their labour costs lower and lower, workers are organizing to keep their wages fair. And that fairness is in reference to the actual cost of living in their cities. The continent-wide Fight For $15 movement is the spearhead organization here.

These are political movements that have the power to condition and entirely remake economic relationships in society. Recognizing their real power in the world is a fatal critique of traditionally orthodox marxist thinking.

These arguments are all so simple when you think about them that I find it weird that there are orthodox marxists left anymore.

How Unions Fossilized in the Global Economy, Research Time, 10/02/2016

Right now, I’m the acting President of my electoral district’s New Democratic Party Association. I originally was the Vice-President, then President T-Boz got a contract working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire. 

So congratulations on the primary victory, T-Boz! Now, get back to Toronto and make me the Vice-President again.

But I want to talk today about an issue that’s very important to me as an NDP official: the slow, grinding crisis of labour unions as institutions. Canada’s big unions and their leadership are still powerful influences and voices in the NDP. That has its drawbacks (any old guard ossifies) and its benefits (activists aren’t allowed to forget the needs of working people).

Now, the strong influence that the union movement has had on the NDP has waned in recent years. Major union figures like Buzz Hargrove don’t have as much direct hold over NDP policy. The 2012 leadership convention was the first conducted by a one-member-one-vote system, and unions no longer had a block share of the vote. And the old guard candidate Brian Topp lost.

Violent clashes during the 2012 general strikes in Greece
against the government of the time and its austerity
policies. Not much has changed, as Greek people are
still victims of priorities that put corporate profits and
credit ratings above ordinary people.

Also, the party’s tent has had to widen, as the progressive left has expanded into ecological activism, anti-racism, and the movement for the liberation of indigenous people. 

Beyond their shrinking dominance in the party itself, the wider union movement has faced an existential problem from globalization. Unions have historically been able to win their victories by a hostage strategy. 

A strike and threats of a strike are, essentially, workers taking a business hostage. Normal production will return when our demands are met, at least in part. A general strike does the same to all the industries of a country.

But the effectiveness of strikes and labour action depends on one stable factor, which the globalization of the economy has completely disrupted: territory. The factory floor. The city streets. The national state. 

The Earth itself is now the terrain of the business world. This is why union movements are so easily neutered: workers can no longer hold a company hostage. If they take control of a factory floor, the company can simply move the factory to another city whose workers will take the deal on offer.

And the unionizing workers will find themselves wandering around a gutted, idle factory in a ghost town. 

Corporate power today surpasses state jurisdiction. Just as union action has become impotent, so have anti-trust laws. Although international governance institutions have grown over the last century, they aren’t nearly so powerful as sovereign states were a hundred years ago to break up trusts and cartels.

Most of the international organizations that come closest to being governments are either toothless to enforce workers’ rights, or are easily co-opted by oligarchic interests. I’m talking about organizations like the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, as well as treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

So what’s happening here? Antonio Negri describes the process very well. Transnational corporations, international organizations, and treaties overcome territorially-defined state governments, but they don’t literally overcome governance. They become the structure of governance itself.

Organizations like unions are left behind because their activity still relies on a strictly defined territory to be effective. Governance in our era has been deterritorialized. The sphere of politics as a place autonomous from authority – the places where people can organize themselves and their movements – has disappeared.

The only place where it exists now is on the internet. As such, it can be everywhere, because the speed and interactivity of internet communication can make you think it’s a space without territory. Cyberspace. 

But we should never forget that our online political organizing does have a place. Idle No More, Occupy, and the Arab Spring didn’t just happen in the neighbourhoods of Canada, Zuccotti Park, and Tahrir Square. 

They all happened in the same place, the same territory. A server farm in Cupertino, California. A fragile place.

Collective as a Collection of Individuals, Composing, 17/03/2015

Here was an idea that I came across in Friedrich Hayek over the weekend. It helped me get a serious grip of how my next major book project in philosophy, Utopias, will deal with the most politically successful social ideology of the last 50 years: neoliberalism, the right-wing libertarian philosophy that justifies the place of the powerful.

I hit on the core idea in which I could genuinely say that all this talk of economic and political freedom misses an important element of a healthy human life. To be fair, the philosophy of new liberalism made great social progress when it was first developed, when Hayek published Road to Serfdom in 1944. 

Charlie Chaplin gets some work done
on the core code of his company
server's OS. Hoping to fix a bug or
seven.

The Cold War was kicking into gear, as the Western left had become obsessively focussed with building government bureaucracies to manage whole economies. The most deluded were the ones who believed that Stalin’s and Krushchev’s Soviet Union had achieved such collective justice through state control. But the error was the same. An inescapably bureaucratic life made us into cogs in machines, creatures whose only possible act is to obey.

Libertarian philosophy has a noble goal in this context. But the heritage of Hayek has been to grow paranoid and hostile to any organization that attempts a collective movement. 

Since first learning about Hayek’s political views, what mystified me was his hatred and fear of the trade union movement. Donald Gutstein described Hayek as irrationally angry at the mere existence of unions. I knew a core value of trade unionism is that a group of workers would join forces to bargain for a fair deal as a community with their employer. 

Not all of them lived up to the ideal. In my case, I encountered unions who justified creating a privileged class for their members over working for the overall prosperity of all the workers in their sector. It becomes a desperate move for survival in the face of a nearly-victorious political movement against unions, the last hypocritical jerks of a social movement in its death throes.

But a chapter of Road to Serfdom with the deliciously paranoid title, “The Totalitarians In Our Midst,” explained why Hayek, and so the libertarian social movement he inspired, despise unions so much. An international trade union or federation of such unions, he says, is an institution that organizes an industry monopolistically.

In the case of unions, they organize a monopoly of labour. In this sense, Hayek considers trade unions just as dangerous as groups of the richest men in a nation’s business world, who wish to run a cartel of state-backed monopoly corporations that controls an entire industry of the country. Dangerous in exactly the same way: monopoly organization.

Hayek, and so many libertarians who uncritically accept all of his analysis as truth,* don’t understand the importance of network organizing for political purposes. These are individuals who freely form associations with different purposes, based on contacting other individuals who believe similarly and wish to act on that belief. The physical infrastructure that we need the state to maintain must still exist; otherwise our physical means of global networked communication collapses.

I have some friends on strike at University of Toronto
right now, and I hope their collective (if frustrating)
organization finds a solid solution for its members.
But ultimately, the entire system has to change.

* And there are many more such people than we think. Just because the Austrian school of economics is not exactly in the mainstream of most university departments, universities themselves do not make the loudest philosophical voices influencing the governments and political organizations of our world. The Mt Pelerin Society, which Hayek formed with other Nobel prize winning economists of similar perspectives, educated the founders of private think tanks and government ministers of many political parties in many countries throughout the West.

The individuals never disappear in a collective of conformity. Each of us in such organizations remain active in our own lives. That’s why we shouldn’t expect permanence from these organizations, only flexibility. People organize for a particular purpose, and when the purpose is achieved, only friendship is left behind. That friendship, which can occur across a whole planet in real time in gigantic numbers for the first time in human history, is the foundation of international peace.

Sometimes, overcoming a set of ideas arises from a simple analysis. There are other people making similar insights all over the world, and trying to live it out in their own way. A community garden, a place on the internet where people can share personal stories, a neighbourhood association helping the less fortunate, a continent-wide indigenous social-environmentalist protest movement.

I’m writing that set of ideas in a book that I hope to publish sometime in the early 2020s (realistically speaking) and contribute to an intellectual climate that helps change a few minds. Heading into humanity’s ecological crisis, it’s the least I can do.

Solidarity for Who? Part II: One Theory of the Union Movement’s Downfall, A History Boy, 15/08/2014

Would Bakunin have liked Rage
Against the Machine?

Bakunin’s writings about the politics of the First International and the conflicts among the trade union movements in 1860s-70s Europe also carry some important lessons for the modern era. They have a lot to do with the limits of solidarity, and intersect quite a lot with my own most formative union experiences. 

Here’s how deep union solidarity goes in my family. When I came back to visit St. John’s after being out on the one and only strike I’ve so far gone through in my life (McMaster University Teaching Assistants CUPE local 3906 in Fall 2009), my aunt and uncle, both pushing 70 at the time, played me old school British union anthems from the 1960s. It was a wonderfully strange moment of family solidarity, especially as I had to inform them that we spent most of the strike listening to Dead Prez and Rage Against the Machine. That’s generation shifts for you.

But for my part, whenever I’ve heard union chants of “Solidarity!” among my own generation, I’ve tended to feel more excluded than included, even when I’ve been a union member. Here’s an example of the corrosion of solidarity that Bakunin identifies as a key means in which a union movement self-destructs, as workers with different interests turn against each other. 

The union leadership of CUPE 3906 when we were on strike came almost exclusively from humanities and social science faculties, where TAs legitimately are overworked, often having to read and correct assignments and papers for 35-50 students while also attending lectures and familiarizing themselves with the course material enough for them to correct them effectively. 

There was almost no outreach to the engineering and science faculty TAs, whose correction labour mostly consisted in making sure the Scantron cards were properly collated and stored without bending. An entire faculty worth of TAs thought the union’s claims of overwork were bullshit because they had never actually been told what humanities and social science TAs had to do for their work. No wonder we accepted the administration’s terms when the entire union membership actually came out to vote. Our union couldn’t even maintain solidarity in a single local.

Bakunin also describes a macro-economic way to break worker solidarity. Since he was writing in the context of the First International, the first attempt among the European trade union / socialist / revolutionary communist movements to network all the different local groups into one organization for mutual support and knowledge sharing, continent-sized processes were important for his thinking. It has to do with the fact that every local situation is different.

Union demonstrations no longer face violence, but they
also rarely achieve the transformative political power that
they used to wield.

So some regions or industries would successfully unionize before others. In that case, if you’re a venture capitalist opposed to union organization, it doesn’t really make sense to combat that unionized sector directly. I mean, people did. That’s what the Pinkertons and other private security forces were for in the early 20th century. But there was a much less violent, more morally and politically legitimate, and insidious way to break organized labour. Citing greater efficiency accruing to lower labour costs, you could divest your investments in a unionized sector and instead plough your capital into non-unionized sectors or regions. I think this is analogous to the pressure between American states with unionized manufacturing sectors and right-to-work policies.

If enough venture capitalists do this, then you’ll break a union movement through simple impoverishment. A manufacturing industry without any investment capital grinds to a halt. You can’t work in an industry whose investors have all pulled up stakes and financial obligations and gone to right-to-work or militarily-ruled pastures. They could then pressure unionized workers to move to these greener pastures if they wanted work: after all, better a poorly-paid job than no job at all.

This, says Bakunin, is why an international network of communication and mutual support among workers’ organizations is so important. It would build connections of solidarity across regions so that people in right-to-work states or the 19th century equivalent would see the change for what it was: a means to break unionization movements in more progressive regions. Such networks of communication would let workers learn more about the struggles of other areas, and better understand the global economic system in which they were embedded.

When I was on strike in 2009, I spoke to an independent contractor who was driving onto campus to do some electrical work. He asked me what some of the issues were that we were striking for. I told him that one issue close to me was that we wanted improved benefits for graduate students with children, because several of my colleagues had kids and they struggled to stay on their feet financially on their TA incomes and stipends. 

His response was that I could go fuck myself because he’d been working as a journeyman electrician for years and he never came anywhere near getting employment benefits at all, and he slammed his truck through our picket line. 

When I was looking for entry-level sessional work teaching in universities in my area on a per-course basis, I spoke to several department heads and adjunct union officials, and relatives also inquired on my behalf at unions in other regions. I had supported the unionization of per-course faculty as a student, but once I became an academic labourer, those unions actively worked against me. A sessional faculty union's first priority is to institute seniority as the major or only criteria for hiring, guaranteeing jobs to those who have already taught courses in their unit.

One department head told me that he actually had no control over who was hired for a per-course position; he requested one from the union and the union named the professor. The head of one per-course union openly told my relative that the purpose of his job was to prevent better-qualified new PhD graduates from being able to compete with his members for work.

Maybe if, instead of simply looking out for their own members, union locals spent more time networking with other labourers in their industries and their communities who were outside union locals to educate each other about all their different struggles, the Western workers’ movement would be in somewhat better shape. It's not as if these networks aren't being made. But there aren't nearly enough of them to be effective, and too many leaders and executives of individual locals are too willing to deny the rights of outside workers in the name of protecting their own.