maybe this essay is 'simplistic' (like hamilton says) but i suspect that the most basic fact in here still escapes people: you are the working class. it doesn't matter if you're an 'online platform contractor' or a 'sandwich artist' or a 'knowledge worker' — you work for a living and your economic adversaries do not.
thinking that your labor isn't legitimate enough to need protection, or that your work isn't 'specialized' enough to give you leverage, or that you're better off bargaining with ownership by yourself: these are all thoughts designed by others to keep you weak and isolated. every time you think some pathetic shit like this, mitt romney strokes his nipples.
look, it would certainly be easier to recognize this fact if we were all beefy dudes with a bunch of stickers on our hard hats, but that's not how it is. the idlers who own this country have determined that profits are best maximized by having us do all kinds of weird, vague shit instead of 'honest labor.' this situation means we need class solidarity and unions *even more*, not less.
Here’s my worry: I’m a contractor, pretty much the least protected class of workers (well, maybe second-to after those workers who can’t legally work), and my family lives and eats and is housed as a result of my work. We can be fired or simply “not called” for any reason or no reason, and I need to put food on the table. How does one survive with the inevitable unemployment that follows union stirrings?
Due to hostile US labor law contractors cannot legally unionize. So you would not be part of any direct union campaign. But you can always become involved in the labor movement itself.
I think you've distilled the essence of something I've been saying for a number of years: The only war worth fighting is a CLASS WAR. Politicians on the right distract us with hate and politicians on the left distract us with outrage. It's a vicious circle that only benefits the ownership class.
I wish leftists would STOP SPEWING 19th century Marxist jargon. Frankly, if you've ever uttered the word "praxis" in conversation, you're probably a twat.
Oh man, even for someone like me who was told by a neuropsych doctor that I have way above average intelligence, Marx is hard to read. Mainly because it's just so tedious. It's incredibly inaccessible for the masses, which is ironic. I just picked up about 20 or so modern socialist books at the Marxism Festival and will be recommending any that I think are easier for the busy, modern reader here on Substack.
If our cause is going to be widely taken up, it's really important to meer people where they are and not be intellectual snobs, so I really appreciate this piece. Holier than thou Leftists being condescending is partly the reason it took me longer to really come around and embrace full-on socialism. I'm trying to be very mindful of that as I try to talk to others. It's hard sometimes though!
I know how you feel. I am a confident reader. I know anyone can, with patience, understand anything in the humanities. But the academic Marxists are usually dull and opaque.
David Harvey's book Companion to Marx's Capital is a good way read Capital indirectly. It's easier than Marx's writing itself, but you'll still have to you re-read and think. The thing to remember is Marx wasn't a "Marxist." Marx was analyzing and describing capitalism. "Marxism" is something invented by people who intended, or wanted, to accomplish something in the real world, but mostly ended up becoming Scholastics arguing about how many workers can dance on the head of a pin.
Still, it's worth your time to understand his analysis of capitalism, in spite of a few mistakes he makes (which are clearly explained in Steve Keen's two articles from March 1993 and September 1993 in the Journal of History of Economic Thought).
One thing is certain, North American and Western European academic Marxists have accomplished very little in material terms for the last hundred years. But unions have.
I have a few messy and imperfect thoughts to add, so bear with me...
I am a small business owner. A consultant that helps small food businesses not kill their customers with their food. My biggest competition is land grant universities that use my tax dollars to compete against me.
I am also a clinical vet in a private equity backed consolidator.
I am having a tough time at my job because of practice culture reasons...it is a culture of end runs and it is very disorienting.
I am 10000% pro union. But what do we do in places where we have docs like me that make a ton of $$ (which is going to pay off business debt) and my support staff end runs me when I ask them to do their job. Which, incidentally, I can do nothing to improve, even though I have the skills, having been told by management and HR this week that my job is to "diagnose, prescribe and treat".
Very specific situation but part of me is considering getting out of this situation by buying a clinic. I actually have thoughts about a co-op clinic but wow do I not know how to make that a reality.
All that said...in class warfare where do small business owners fit in? I am qualitatively different from a PE company. I have run a biz on debt to family and consumer debt and revenues from clients.
I have time, talent and treasure to make a difference but I am not sure what would be helpful.
One thing to keep in mind is that unions do not need to be antagonistic to small businesses---a good union with a good owner can combine to make a small business better and bring it as close to a coop as possible without actually being a coop. So even as a small business owner you can have a small staff union and if you work well together it can help both sides. In the larger sense small businesses like the one you're talking about are probably not the most important battlefield for organized labor so just be a good employer and treat people as you'd want to be treated and work with a staff union if it comes. Also you can always be an ally and supporter of the labor movement whether or not you have a union yourself. It's good to have business owners who are not anti-labor.
If you haven't yet learned about starting a cooperative, you can go to Project Equity.org. They are a non-profit dedicated to creating worker/employee-owned businesses. Many states also have a cooperative development center, often housed in a college or university. Or just message me directly. I work with small businesses—lending, training, advising—and know some people in the cooperative development world.
From one point of view, a cooperative is just the ultimate version of a union: The employees ARE the owners.
The only downside of class war I see is the emotions it sometimes generates. People are being manipulated by bad actors through their emotions and the ones that generally lead them to dumb ass demagogues and simple pointless cul de sacs tend to be the hostile suspicious emotions. Fascism plays on the same emotions, with more vivid targets (whatever ones will preserve the corporations; it's just easier to hate real people like ethnic and racial minorities) which is why it it is always used as a foil for leftism.
Not like I don't have these emotions--how can you not be suck with fury at what cruelty is allowed to happen in our system--but what we might also need as a counter is what unions provide which isn't just anger at the system but solidarity and love for the people getting screwed, a sense of our own worth and that of other people. We need a motive to build something too, concern for the people, not just a motive to destroy something. Otherwise, it's easy to be taken advantage of.
Just getting to this now after reading your book, The Hammer, which was excellent.
The sad thing is that the investor class has fooled a huge swath of workers to side with them. Basically, anybody who gets a salary (or, obviously, a gig worker) is part of labor. But cops, firemen, sanitation, and knowledge workers all earning $50K, $60K, even $150K++ don't think of themselves as "labor" because they are making "a good living". They get sucked into the culture wars and are led to believe that "illegals" are taking their jobs and "their tax money is going to pay for lazy people on unemployment."
No matter how much $ you make in salary you are Labor. Because when business slows down and the stock price drops the fastest way to cut costs is to lay people off. And the investor class does not like stock prices dropping. At my company I watched 800 people lose their jobs because of a business downturn and the cuts went from warehouse workers making $40K to vice presidents making over $150K.
As an actual union activist, fuck you and your childish "frame." What you have is an ideology that blinds you to complexity. I'm in the trenches and I know just as well as you that economic inequality is at the root of our national disease. But if you don't give a shit about national politics and its consequences - in this year alone, loss of bodily autonomy for women, education access for students of color, aid forgiveness for indebted students, the constant assault on voting rights, and on, and on - if you think that labor power alone can overcome this - in short, if you're not holding your nose and voting Democrat, then you and Jill Green and Cornel West and Chris Hedges and the rest of you truly unempathetic assholes who get off on your own self-righteousness can fuck all the way off.
As an actual human, you're an asshole. You came to someone else's party and said to the host, "fuck you, I don't like your party theme."
Nolan needs no defending from me. He's a grown man. But even though I'm reading this a year later I gotta say something.
1. Mind your own damned business about who other people vote for. You want them to vote the same way as you? Here's a tip. Don't start by telling them the way they think is childish.
2. Nolan was an "actual union activist" and organizer too. Your indignant moral trump card is negated.
3. Everyone has a frame, including you. The class war frame touches everything. Do you have a better frame? You could have told us but you're such a full-of-yourself asshole you chose not to add to the conversation.
4. I've read essays like this by plenty of black people. This frame you hate so much was essentially the frame used by Cesar Chavez with farmworkers. This was part of the frame used by MLK in the march for jobs and freedom. A lot people forget about the jobs part of that march. King was assassinated in Memphis. Why was he there? In support of a strike by unionized sanitation workers.
5. My god, all the black women I work with would agree with this framing completely. I know because when we talk politics, this comes up frequently.
And because two hours later I still find myself seething about the entitled class Spartacus Hamilton fucking Nolan, let me add one more observation. The only person who writes an essay like this is a white man. Show me a woman, much less a progressive woman, who writes this ignorant shit. No, they understand what happens when abortion rights are dead and gone. My god, show me a black woman who would write this pabulum.
I feel ya though I think he just sounds very young...classism, sexism, racism..they are intertwined, but it takes a little more seasoning to fully see that. Class is easiest to focus on for many becuae it appears to be race and gender agnostic. But one of the possible (I am no acrivist just read some right to work arguments) reasons unions appeared to have died is because many (but not all) white men were convinced that they were just one promotion away from being management or being the owner. And they allowed themselves to believe if they just separated from the undeserving (ie " the Blacks, Women and long hair hippies comunists marixsts"), they too could be the next CEO power player. As Marco Rubio supposedly said "we are not a nation of have and have-nots, we are a nation of haves and soon to haves"...I can't imagine any Black woman no matter how Socialist/Marxist she may be falling for that bs line.
But he is writing a larger book so maybe he can better touch on those topics in long form!
The guy is in his forties and actually started a union in a former workplace.
Sounds seasoned to me.
As for why "unions appear to have died", I don't even know where to start with you. That you wrote that tells me you know effectively nothing about labor history, union history, and the political fights connected to unions and labor.
So, try knowing something before you write such empty nonsense.
maybe this essay is 'simplistic' (like hamilton says) but i suspect that the most basic fact in here still escapes people: you are the working class. it doesn't matter if you're an 'online platform contractor' or a 'sandwich artist' or a 'knowledge worker' — you work for a living and your economic adversaries do not.
thinking that your labor isn't legitimate enough to need protection, or that your work isn't 'specialized' enough to give you leverage, or that you're better off bargaining with ownership by yourself: these are all thoughts designed by others to keep you weak and isolated. every time you think some pathetic shit like this, mitt romney strokes his nipples.
look, it would certainly be easier to recognize this fact if we were all beefy dudes with a bunch of stickers on our hard hats, but that's not how it is. the idlers who own this country have determined that profits are best maximized by having us do all kinds of weird, vague shit instead of 'honest labor.' this situation means we need class solidarity and unions *even more*, not less.
"Give the class war a shot. Think about politics as the outcome of this fight, rather than as its cause."
brilliant
Here’s my worry: I’m a contractor, pretty much the least protected class of workers (well, maybe second-to after those workers who can’t legally work), and my family lives and eats and is housed as a result of my work. We can be fired or simply “not called” for any reason or no reason, and I need to put food on the table. How does one survive with the inevitable unemployment that follows union stirrings?
Due to hostile US labor law contractors cannot legally unionize. So you would not be part of any direct union campaign. But you can always become involved in the labor movement itself.
I think you've distilled the essence of something I've been saying for a number of years: The only war worth fighting is a CLASS WAR. Politicians on the right distract us with hate and politicians on the left distract us with outrage. It's a vicious circle that only benefits the ownership class.
I wish leftists would STOP SPEWING 19th century Marxist jargon. Frankly, if you've ever uttered the word "praxis" in conversation, you're probably a twat.
1.5 marks. Woulda been 2 marks if you'd excised that "probably".
Carry on, carry on.
ROFL!!!
Can we add “superstructure” and “class consciousness” to the list of Marxist twat words?
Oh man, even for someone like me who was told by a neuropsych doctor that I have way above average intelligence, Marx is hard to read. Mainly because it's just so tedious. It's incredibly inaccessible for the masses, which is ironic. I just picked up about 20 or so modern socialist books at the Marxism Festival and will be recommending any that I think are easier for the busy, modern reader here on Substack.
If our cause is going to be widely taken up, it's really important to meer people where they are and not be intellectual snobs, so I really appreciate this piece. Holier than thou Leftists being condescending is partly the reason it took me longer to really come around and embrace full-on socialism. I'm trying to be very mindful of that as I try to talk to others. It's hard sometimes though!
100% spot on
the concepts themselves are VERY easy to understand in human terms...Because in the end it is about human needs and human flourishing and fairness...
I know how you feel. I am a confident reader. I know anyone can, with patience, understand anything in the humanities. But the academic Marxists are usually dull and opaque.
David Harvey's book Companion to Marx's Capital is a good way read Capital indirectly. It's easier than Marx's writing itself, but you'll still have to you re-read and think. The thing to remember is Marx wasn't a "Marxist." Marx was analyzing and describing capitalism. "Marxism" is something invented by people who intended, or wanted, to accomplish something in the real world, but mostly ended up becoming Scholastics arguing about how many workers can dance on the head of a pin.
Still, it's worth your time to understand his analysis of capitalism, in spite of a few mistakes he makes (which are clearly explained in Steve Keen's two articles from March 1993 and September 1993 in the Journal of History of Economic Thought).
One thing is certain, North American and Western European academic Marxists have accomplished very little in material terms for the last hundred years. But unions have.
I have a few messy and imperfect thoughts to add, so bear with me...
I am a small business owner. A consultant that helps small food businesses not kill their customers with their food. My biggest competition is land grant universities that use my tax dollars to compete against me.
I am also a clinical vet in a private equity backed consolidator.
I am having a tough time at my job because of practice culture reasons...it is a culture of end runs and it is very disorienting.
I am 10000% pro union. But what do we do in places where we have docs like me that make a ton of $$ (which is going to pay off business debt) and my support staff end runs me when I ask them to do their job. Which, incidentally, I can do nothing to improve, even though I have the skills, having been told by management and HR this week that my job is to "diagnose, prescribe and treat".
Very specific situation but part of me is considering getting out of this situation by buying a clinic. I actually have thoughts about a co-op clinic but wow do I not know how to make that a reality.
All that said...in class warfare where do small business owners fit in? I am qualitatively different from a PE company. I have run a biz on debt to family and consumer debt and revenues from clients.
I have time, talent and treasure to make a difference but I am not sure what would be helpful.
One thing to keep in mind is that unions do not need to be antagonistic to small businesses---a good union with a good owner can combine to make a small business better and bring it as close to a coop as possible without actually being a coop. So even as a small business owner you can have a small staff union and if you work well together it can help both sides. In the larger sense small businesses like the one you're talking about are probably not the most important battlefield for organized labor so just be a good employer and treat people as you'd want to be treated and work with a staff union if it comes. Also you can always be an ally and supporter of the labor movement whether or not you have a union yourself. It's good to have business owners who are not anti-labor.
If you haven't yet learned about starting a cooperative, you can go to Project Equity.org. They are a non-profit dedicated to creating worker/employee-owned businesses. Many states also have a cooperative development center, often housed in a college or university. Or just message me directly. I work with small businesses—lending, training, advising—and know some people in the cooperative development world.
From one point of view, a cooperative is just the ultimate version of a union: The employees ARE the owners.
Looking forward to a book!
The only downside of class war I see is the emotions it sometimes generates. People are being manipulated by bad actors through their emotions and the ones that generally lead them to dumb ass demagogues and simple pointless cul de sacs tend to be the hostile suspicious emotions. Fascism plays on the same emotions, with more vivid targets (whatever ones will preserve the corporations; it's just easier to hate real people like ethnic and racial minorities) which is why it it is always used as a foil for leftism.
Not like I don't have these emotions--how can you not be suck with fury at what cruelty is allowed to happen in our system--but what we might also need as a counter is what unions provide which isn't just anger at the system but solidarity and love for the people getting screwed, a sense of our own worth and that of other people. We need a motive to build something too, concern for the people, not just a motive to destroy something. Otherwise, it's easy to be taken advantage of.
I have been thinking a lot this week on a quote...
Safety is not the absense of threat, but the presence of connection- Gabor Maté
At its best a union provides positive connections while reducing threat. But positive connections between humans are really hard right now it seems.
Just getting to this now after reading your book, The Hammer, which was excellent.
The sad thing is that the investor class has fooled a huge swath of workers to side with them. Basically, anybody who gets a salary (or, obviously, a gig worker) is part of labor. But cops, firemen, sanitation, and knowledge workers all earning $50K, $60K, even $150K++ don't think of themselves as "labor" because they are making "a good living". They get sucked into the culture wars and are led to believe that "illegals" are taking their jobs and "their tax money is going to pay for lazy people on unemployment."
No matter how much $ you make in salary you are Labor. Because when business slows down and the stock price drops the fastest way to cut costs is to lay people off. And the investor class does not like stock prices dropping. At my company I watched 800 people lose their jobs because of a business downturn and the cuts went from warehouse workers making $40K to vice presidents making over $150K.
#hotlaborsummer
As an actual union activist, fuck you and your childish "frame." What you have is an ideology that blinds you to complexity. I'm in the trenches and I know just as well as you that economic inequality is at the root of our national disease. But if you don't give a shit about national politics and its consequences - in this year alone, loss of bodily autonomy for women, education access for students of color, aid forgiveness for indebted students, the constant assault on voting rights, and on, and on - if you think that labor power alone can overcome this - in short, if you're not holding your nose and voting Democrat, then you and Jill Green and Cornel West and Chris Hedges and the rest of you truly unempathetic assholes who get off on your own self-righteousness can fuck all the way off.
As an actual human, you're an asshole. You came to someone else's party and said to the host, "fuck you, I don't like your party theme."
Nolan needs no defending from me. He's a grown man. But even though I'm reading this a year later I gotta say something.
1. Mind your own damned business about who other people vote for. You want them to vote the same way as you? Here's a tip. Don't start by telling them the way they think is childish.
2. Nolan was an "actual union activist" and organizer too. Your indignant moral trump card is negated.
3. Everyone has a frame, including you. The class war frame touches everything. Do you have a better frame? You could have told us but you're such a full-of-yourself asshole you chose not to add to the conversation.
4. I've read essays like this by plenty of black people. This frame you hate so much was essentially the frame used by Cesar Chavez with farmworkers. This was part of the frame used by MLK in the march for jobs and freedom. A lot people forget about the jobs part of that march. King was assassinated in Memphis. Why was he there? In support of a strike by unionized sanitation workers.
5. My god, all the black women I work with would agree with this framing completely. I know because when we talk politics, this comes up frequently.
And because two hours later I still find myself seething about the entitled class Spartacus Hamilton fucking Nolan, let me add one more observation. The only person who writes an essay like this is a white man. Show me a woman, much less a progressive woman, who writes this ignorant shit. No, they understand what happens when abortion rights are dead and gone. My god, show me a black woman who would write this pabulum.
I feel ya though I think he just sounds very young...classism, sexism, racism..they are intertwined, but it takes a little more seasoning to fully see that. Class is easiest to focus on for many becuae it appears to be race and gender agnostic. But one of the possible (I am no acrivist just read some right to work arguments) reasons unions appeared to have died is because many (but not all) white men were convinced that they were just one promotion away from being management or being the owner. And they allowed themselves to believe if they just separated from the undeserving (ie " the Blacks, Women and long hair hippies comunists marixsts"), they too could be the next CEO power player. As Marco Rubio supposedly said "we are not a nation of have and have-nots, we are a nation of haves and soon to haves"...I can't imagine any Black woman no matter how Socialist/Marxist she may be falling for that bs line.
But he is writing a larger book so maybe he can better touch on those topics in long form!
The guy is in his forties and actually started a union in a former workplace.
Sounds seasoned to me.
As for why "unions appear to have died", I don't even know where to start with you. That you wrote that tells me you know effectively nothing about labor history, union history, and the political fights connected to unions and labor.
So, try knowing something before you write such empty nonsense.
Bless your heart!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations?wprov=sfti1