I’ve been thinking about trying to pull together a union at my workplace for a while, but too many coworkers trying to get into fights or rat each other out to management, so screw Unioning that. If nothing else I don’t have the emotional stability to try to unionize my workplace.

While I was brooding at home after work (ruining the rest of my day) I realize that this whole thing is a really optimal scenario for the boss. In fact if I was a boss, I’d specifically try to hire aggressive-ish employees.

What do socialist countries do about this? It’s not like they lock up all their aggressive coworkers the way America tries to. In America we lock up a lot of people but then they’re still lots of aggressive people.

  • @knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
    13•2 years ago

    I haven’t thought much about this yet personally, but my hot momentary take is that it has to do with class consciousness. I’m going to ignore the volume of anti-labour/anti-communist propaganda in capitalist nations for a moment as I’m not sure that’s as important to this. I also just read the essay "Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” which was pretty hot on lemmygrad a month ago which has definitely changed my perspective.

    People in the west do not have class consciousness, or even the sense that class struggle exists and is happening. I think if you’d ask random people on the street they’d tell you that class is basically just income brackets.

    Capitalism forces all of us to be selfish to an extent, so without a base level of class awareness and active class consciousness we often choose the path of highest rewar and lowest risk for ourselves. When the going gets tough in a union building situation for example, we can cash out as it were, and rat on management, thus turning the situation positive for ourselves.

    Whereas in socialist countries, there is a common sense of class consciousness. Even if the thing your union or workplace or municipality is doing in this moment may not benefit you directly in this moment, you have been given the tools to see how it will be beneficial for your community, your class, and thus for you in the future. Or maybe it’s not beneficial to you personally at all, but again with that class consciousness in mind you still work towards that goal or at least step aside to allow others to do what they need to do to for the advancement of the cause.

    I also question this idea of leftist infighting. I see a lot of it simply coming from the fact that a lot of self-proclaimed leftists aren’t leftists at all, and they get in to fights with radical anti-capitalists such as MLs. There’s not going to be any unity there without breaking the ideology to the point where it’s useless.