On 2012-01-13, at 10:28 PM, Sean Andrews wrote:
> When you don't fight unions and capitalists equally, you let the
> capitalists win.
I assume this means you would fight a union organizing drive in your workplace or would work to decertify it if it were already there. Why wouldn't you?
Since you're "equally" an anti-capitalist, I expect you'd instead encourage your fellow workers to fight their employer in other ways. Exactly what ways?
And please be concrete - drawing on your understanding and experience of workplaces in which you've been employed. I don't think you'll find the answer in the abstractions of Hardt and Negri, or by pointing to wildcat strikes and factory occupations in other times and places which have little, if any, bearing on contemporary workplace conditions and worker consciousness in the US.
Also, about those wildcat strikers and factory occupiers…they were the most militant of trade unionists, typically trying to form unions where they worked, or rank-and-file leaders of ones which were already established. In each case, they were at the farthest remove from those who subscribe to what is, IMO, the utterly reactionary proposition that the working class has to "fight unions and capitalists equally". That's instead been the historic cry of small propertyholders (and their romantic intellectual admirers) simultaneously fearful of both Big Capital and "Big Labour".