This speaks more to a broader societal problem than people want to admit.
There’s this perspective that unions in the 19th-20th century were viewed as terrorist organizations because the state/capitalist regimes of the world were incorrect in their assessment of unions, and they wisened up to their benefits for the common person, giving them state backing and “proper” channels to interface with capitalists. This isn’t accurate.
States and capitalists well understood what unions fought for and provided, and it was antithetical to the goals of capitalism. Labor is a commodity to be bought and sold, and as division of labor+automation increased, so too did market saturation, bringing down the cost of labor while simultaneously allowing each worker to provide more value to society (and more importantly, money for capitalists).
Sidebar: this is one of the primary contradictions of capitalism, workers can be provided tools to perform better, but those same performance improvements/output increases actually deteriorate conditions for workers. This is because the goal isn’t to better the lives of humans, it’s to allow capitalists to effectively allocate capital to produce more capital.
Anyway, states and capitalists (correctly) saw unions as an effective tool for fighting back against these tendencies of capitalism. Workers are the backbone of society, when they collectively demand something it must be brought to fruition or the system stops. Allowing workers to inflict this kind of terror upon capitalists is obviously a form of terrorism from a state/capitalist perspective, they could demand anything and capitalists wouldn’t have the tools to fight back.
The problem with this designation though is it makes unions and union members martyrs. They’re fighting for the good of the common man, against evil corporations. This encourages people to join the cause and fight in solidarity against capitalism. Class consciousness around this time was insanely high, and despite the attempted violent suppression of these union terrorist organizations, they were growing and demanding more as time went on.
So the state had to intervene here. The interests of the capitalists were not being adequately cared for in these negotiations. So the state decided it would handle the management of unions, use propaganda to convince workers that the state has grown/learn and wants to help workers, but must also obviously balance the interests of the workers with the interests of capitalists (the liberal framing is usually towards “small business/entrepreneur” to make this more palpable).
In the end, you end up with the co-opting of what it really means to be a union. Workers lost the language to describe those organizations that we had that demanded everything we wanted without the regulation and mediation of the state. Those organizations didn’t need to worry about or concede demands of the capitalists so long as the workers had resources. Those organizations couldn’t be shutdown by “pro-union” presidents/prime ministers and forced to not strike or end strikes early before demands were met.
Those organizations were called unions, but they don’t exist anymore. Instead we have state-“backed” unions, that balance the interests of capitalists and workers, because demands like seeing the full fruits of our labor, full access to shelter unrestricted by land leeches, healthcare (in the case of America and some other less fortunate countries) seeing automation reduce working hours, etc. are all far too radical for a capitalist “democracy”.
This speaks more to a broader societal problem than people want to admit.
There’s this perspective that unions in the 19th-20th century were viewed as terrorist organizations because the state/capitalist regimes of the world were incorrect in their assessment of unions, and they wisened up to their benefits for the common person, giving them state backing and “proper” channels to interface with capitalists. This isn’t accurate.
States and capitalists well understood what unions fought for and provided, and it was antithetical to the goals of capitalism. Labor is a commodity to be bought and sold, and as division of labor+automation increased, so too did market saturation, bringing down the cost of labor while simultaneously allowing each worker to provide more value to society (and more importantly, money for capitalists).
Sidebar: this is one of the primary contradictions of capitalism, workers can be provided tools to perform better, but those same performance improvements/output increases actually deteriorate conditions for workers. This is because the goal isn’t to better the lives of humans, it’s to allow capitalists to effectively allocate capital to produce more capital.
Anyway, states and capitalists (correctly) saw unions as an effective tool for fighting back against these tendencies of capitalism. Workers are the backbone of society, when they collectively demand something it must be brought to fruition or the system stops. Allowing workers to inflict this kind of terror upon capitalists is obviously a form of terrorism from a state/capitalist perspective, they could demand anything and capitalists wouldn’t have the tools to fight back.
The problem with this designation though is it makes unions and union members martyrs. They’re fighting for the good of the common man, against evil corporations. This encourages people to join the cause and fight in solidarity against capitalism. Class consciousness around this time was insanely high, and despite the attempted violent suppression of these union terrorist organizations, they were growing and demanding more as time went on.
So the state had to intervene here. The interests of the capitalists were not being adequately cared for in these negotiations. So the state decided it would handle the management of unions, use propaganda to convince workers that the state has grown/learn and wants to help workers, but must also obviously balance the interests of the workers with the interests of capitalists (the liberal framing is usually towards “small business/entrepreneur” to make this more palpable).
In the end, you end up with the co-opting of what it really means to be a union. Workers lost the language to describe those organizations that we had that demanded everything we wanted without the regulation and mediation of the state. Those organizations didn’t need to worry about or concede demands of the capitalists so long as the workers had resources. Those organizations couldn’t be shutdown by “pro-union” presidents/prime ministers and forced to not strike or end strikes early before demands were met.
Those organizations were called unions, but they don’t exist anymore. Instead we have state-“backed” unions, that balance the interests of capitalists and workers, because demands like seeing the full fruits of our labor, full access to shelter unrestricted by land leeches, healthcare (in the case of America and some other less fortunate countries) seeing automation reduce working hours, etc. are all far too radical for a capitalist “democracy”.