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How to organize under Fascist crackdowns?
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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We need a serious labor movement. If workers are not willing and able to hinder production then the left will never accomplish anything. Union density is much lower now than it was when the left was effective and union density in the largest employers is even lower than it was back then (and the unions are even worse too).
If the left ever wants to be effective it needs workers to leverage their economic power. Nothing else (maybe with the exception of armed struggle) will work.
I hear you, I just see that as a non-starter to ask most people to put their only way to pay bills on the line. The answer there is mutual aid & strike funds, but hard to make it work when we're all poor to begin with 🙃
If only there were some sort of precedence.🤷
https://hexbear.net/post/164752
The problem is that all the money gets dumped into elections that really won't change anything. If even a tenth of the money unions and left wing organizations spend on elections went into actually organizing workers and building permanent institutions for them it would far exceed what is being spent on organizing now and would drastically change the political playing field (including making elections easier for progressives).
Organized labor is important but so is a critical lens towards how we build and leverage it. Unions have numerous and important petty bourgeois contradictions, we can't expect them to do more than they did historically, and that means many may be anti-communist. We should move forward with the understanding that even an anti-communist union has angles by which it can be valuable, that being in a union has some value even if the union itself is not particularly left. In addition, in the imperial core, many unions are tied directly to imperialism and national chauvinism. UAW speaks of outsourcing in chauvinist terms, for example. Various Boeing workers are covered by a union and they build and maintain the planes that do genocide on Palestine. Will they be the natural allies of a socialist workers' movement? Their jobs depend on an alignment with reaction and the bourgeois state, is it even conceivable they could have contradictions built so high that they support any kind of revolution, esp. socialist?
I recommend entering labor from the angle of an organization that wants to achieve a particular longer-term goal via labor. Be in the org first, then do the labor work. Emphasizing a strategy makes a world of difference.