"'...these days the unions are political organizations as well, tied in with government like Siamese twin octopuses. You let them steer those funds, and you are letting government itself into your business.'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise of the Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT Prologue, Y minus 9, p. 15.
Someone else:
"There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world - it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.
"Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command.
"[The unions] have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions - insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie, on positions of adapting themselves to private property - to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation."
-Leon Trotsky, "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay."
Trotsky argues that workers should be represented by democratic unions independent of government.
30 comments:
Of course, the first thing Trotsky et. al. did when in power was destroy trade unions as independent organizations and make them agents of the Party-State.
Note that Leninists don't object to monopolistic concentration of power, they just want to be the ones on top.
I agree that's what they did. I am more interested in some of what they said earlier than what they did later. It is always possible for people to organize differently in future. I am thinking of what is happening in British trade unions right now so the discussion is not merely historical or hypothetical.
Kaor, Paul!
I care nothing for what monsters like Lenin and Trotsky said before they grabbed power! All that gooeey gooeey nicey nice stuff they poured out was just lying propaganda to delude the gullible before seizing power.
My sympathies remains with Nicholas van Rijn! And I do not share your optimism about "organizing differently," whatever that means, in the future.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The meaning is clear enough. Some of us can aim to democratize the unions: a real uphill struggle against full time professional bureaucrats. Being retired, I no longer have any active role in a trade union and am really glad to be out of it! Age has its advantages provided we have an adequate pension which somehow or other I managed to do despite being totally unorganized and directionless earlier in life.
Paul.
Any large organization is going to be run by full-time bureaucrats; specialists beat amateurs. This isn't a problem that can be solved, it's a condition that has to be -managed-, at best.
Sean: Trotsky and Lenin were historically significant figures, and very smart. Studying their thoughts is valuable.
Paul: after the above, a warning to note that -character- strongly influences -analysis-.
That is, the reason guys like Lenin and Trotsky were so taken with analyzing power is precisely that they wanted power so badly.
Which is a big reason they used it so viciously when they had it. They couldn't conceive of not killing their political opponents when they had the chance, and interpreted any reluctance to do so by anyone else as evidence of either stupidity or weakness.
I believe the psychological term is "projection", the human tendency to interpret others by ourselves, and other environments by the one we're familiar with.
Stalin once said that he started taking Hitler seriously after the "Night of the Long Knives", the lethal purge of the SA.
One of the stronger points of hereditary monarchy is precisely that it distributes power by, essentially, a lottery.
Whereas in any -competitive- system, you're most likely to see political power in the hands of those who want it badly enough to shape their whole lives in pursuit of it.
For example, studying the life (and writings) of Marcus Aurelius gives you a strong sense that he never -wanted- to be emperor; he'd have preferred to spend his life studying philosophy.
(He was adopted as a teenager, part of a complex interaction Antoninus Pius and his predecessor Hadrian.)
It was his sense of duty that kept him grinding away at a job he didn't like.
I do acknowledge the scale of these problems, having experienced a lot of behaviour in organizations.
Paul: it's important to realize the distinction between problems and conditions, though.
You can solve a problem; you can't solve a condition. Trying to is usually a disaster, sometimes well beyond mere waste of resources and attention.
But we have changed some of the conditions of life on Earth. We have electric light at night and so on. Change what can be changed. Accept what can't.
Paul: that's a -technological- change. Changing human beings is much more difficult. And even if you do, they have a tendency to snap back to the 'default' condition when the pressure is relieved.
I know only too well. I have met potential dictators. I think that the human race is coming to a stage where it has to change more fundamentally or go under but it might do the latter.
Well, the only way to -fundamentally- change human beings would be genetic engineering. That's a bit drastic, and eugenics is out of fashion... 8-).
I -like- human beings. I like them just the way they are, find them endlessly fascinating, and have no desire to change them even if I could.
I think that human beings as they are are adaptable to a wide range of cultural arrangements, values, presuppositions etc and might adapt even more of necessity. But they have to do it. I cannot lay down how it should be done. Some of us try to do something about ourselves as individuals through meditative practices but that can only be on an entirely voluntary basis. Anyone who sees no point in meditation doesn't do it.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: No, unions, like all large organizations, like it or not, are going to need bureaucracies to advance the goals of those organizations. Moreover, it's also my belief unions are esp. likely to be corrupt, bullying, or violent. They are tolerable as long as they are content to be merely "honest greedy" as Old Nick put it!
While I would not quite go as far as Stirling did in liking/preferring humans as they actually are, I agree with him in opposing impossible attempts at changing humans from what we are: flawed, corruptible, prone to violence, conflict, quarrelsomeness, etc.
Mr. Stirling: I have to agree, criminals like Lenin and Trotsky can have interesting and shrewd things to say about power and how to gain it. I reacted the way I did from the anger and disgust I feel from seeing their names.
I have a copy of Hitler's MEIN KAMPF, but I have not felt able to read more than small bits of it due to reacting to Hitler as I do to Lenin or Trotsky. I do understand that Hitler too had shrewd comments about politics and power as well as the garbage about race and Jews.
Ad astra! Sean
Unions will most of the time be bureaucratic but we can struggle with them and there are times when the membership becomes more active, questioning the leadership.
Kaor, Paul!
Reformers can temporarily clean up some union--but are soon enough replaced by corrupt hacks. A pattern seen over and over in the US!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course because the overall conditions have remained the same.
Paul.
Paul: a union's power depends on getting a large group of people to act in unison. Hence the name.
This is possible, but not consistently.
In fact, it's usually difficult without (often illegal) coercion of some sort, because some individuals or factions will either not want to sacrifice their individual interests, or will be tempted to 'cut a deal' to their own advantage.
Governments and analogous institutions can do this better because they can use coercion and punishment "at the edges", policing the boundaries and preventing splits.
People will maintain a group effort, but only if they don't see others "at the edges" getting the benefits without making the sacrifices, or acting against their interests. If that happens, group solidarity will unravel quickly because nobody likes being a sucker or chump.
You can temporarily counteract this with appeals to emotion, but as a Prime Minister of Trinidad once said, that "buys no yams".
I'll give you an example.
My wife was Irish-American and came from a small Massachusetts town called Milford.
In the early 20th century, Milford's economy was dominated by a large foundry making castings for a number of other industries. The labor force was mostly Irish-American, and the owners were old-stock Yankees. Needless to say, they didn't like each other much.
The workers organized a union and went on strike.
One of the family who owned the foundry was a diplomat in Italy at the time. He plastered the villages of Apulia with posters saying good jobs at high pay were available in Milford.
The Italian peasants, who neither knew or (quite understandably) cared about Irish-Americans, and whose definition of "high pay" was set in a context where having a chicken for dinner was a rare treat enjoyed once or twice a year if times were good, swarmed in and broke the strike.
As a result, Milford has two large Catholic churches -- one gray-stone Norman, one yellow-brick Italian, glowering at each other from about a block apart.
Mrs. McGill, my wife's foster-mother, once said in her hearing that those "black Eye-talians" just wanted to "get our beautiful white Irish girls".
Her son married a girl whose maiden name was Maria Bianci, and her foster-son (my brother-in-law) made a similar match.
Now both the Irish and Italians in Milford loathe the Puerto Ricans.
So it goes, so it goes...
Kaor, Paul!
No, not "overall conditions," there are no real changes because human beings have not changed and are not going to change in the ways you would like them to. Stirling's comments above bears out what I have been trying to say.
Ad astra! Sean
That does summarize a lot of the problems with trade unions.
Our pre-human ancestors changed their environment with hands and brain and changed themselves (into us) in the process. Change, not anything unchanging, is our essence. We cannot say what will not change in the future. I have taken on board that some features of human beings cannot be changed quickly but we are each responsible for our own immediate future and can change how we behave.
If you look at how much society has changed since the Industrial Revolution and how much it is going to have to change to survive, then we need to look at what can be done, not just say what can't be done. Some immediate changes and then, hopefully, an indefinite future with massive potential on and off Earth.
Paul: all animals change.
They usually don't change very -quickly-, though, unless humans do selective breeding.
Selective breeding of human beings is theoretically possible ("eugenics") but has never really worked; for one thing, we have long generations and human plans don't last that long, and for another people resist it. Effectively it's impossible to control human breeding for the necessary number of generations.
Human beings haven't changed much since the breakthrough to full behavioral modernity, about 80,000 years ago(*).
You could take an infant from now, exchange it with one from then, and they'd both fit in perfectly in their environment. In terms of instinctual behaviors, they'd be substantially identical, or to be more precise they'd be within the same range of variation.
The only notable difference between people then and now is the overbite.
Cultural change can be very quick; but it operates within limits.
The genetic inheritance sets the limits.
That changes too... but very very slowly, in human terms.
(*) that involved a substantial drop in human male testosterone levels. This probably made full human-style social cooperation possible.
And in fact since cultural modernity came along, human beings have changed/evolved -less-. We're behaviorally plastic enough that -cultural- change can enable us to survive in any environment we've encountered so far.
That removes the sort of consistent evolutionary pressure which produces fundamental changes.
Since then, evolution has been limited to things like disease resistance. Which is why we still have some Neanderthal genes, by the way.
Kaor, Paul!
Besides what Stirling wrote above I would add that while humans can cooperate in the face of dangerous crises, that kind of unity is unlikely to last once the pressure imposed by a crisis is removed. Then you will see humans reverting to the default normal so familiar to us!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I have accepted the point that some changes are slow. They are still there, of course. Basically, the world changes. But time-scales matter for individual and social change. We can and do differ a great deal culturally with behaviour regarded as normal in some circles regarded as outrageous or insane in others.
Paul.
"Selective breeding of human beings is theoretically possible ("eugenics") but has never really worked; for one thing, we have long generations and human plans don't last that long, and for another people resist it. Effectively it's impossible to control human breeding for the necessary number of generations."
To make it something that people could accept doing the way Heinlein had the society of "Beyond This Horizon" would work to some extent. Ie: the parents choose which of their genes go into their child.
Some things you could get general agreement on. Eg: parents would choose to make sure their child doesn't have cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. It would be harder to get agreement on some other traits.
Kaor, Jim!
I can see the strictly medical use of genetic engineering becoming accepted and fairly widely used. And that is mentioned as having happened in THE GAME OF EMPIRE.
But, in that same book, Anderson has most humans resisting the use of genetic engineering for creating a race of "supermen," the Zacharians. And refusing to accept Zacharians as their "natural leaders."
I discussed this in greater detail in my article "Was the Domination Inspired by Merseia?" I fancifully hypothesized Stirling's Draka were inspired by the Zacharians and Merseians!
Laughably nerdy, of course!
Ad astra! Sean
It would be much easier to get people to agree that trait X would be a good thing to put in their children, than to get them to agree that *other* peoples children should rule theirs because those others have trait X.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree, that was basically what I was saying as well.
Ad astra! Sean
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