> Well, no. It's not that simple. There's little doubt that union
> busting helped drive down real hourly wages in the U.S. between 1973
> and 1995. Unions almost certainly narrow the gender and racial gaps
> between white men and all other workers. If unions were so
> ineffectual, why do the bosses spend so much time and money fighting
> them?
Well, the bosses experienced the classical authoritarian paradigm shift. They figured out once again that is make more sense to co-opt the opposition (via the AFL-CIO and Teamsters) than it was to kill them. Capitalism requires workers to function, so the boss strategy of legitimizing the moderate unions was a smart move.
Then they did the next important thing, after WW2, and that was to give workers lots of consumer goods to keep them distracted and isolated.
This authoritarian paradigm shift took place in the U.S. police in the ealry 70s, when they dropped their practice of beating activist heads in favor of strategies that promoted activists policing themselves.
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"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
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