Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy: I have no problem in principle with unions in a free market. In historical practice though unions have often tended to be dominated by out and out socialists.

What Holmes said.

Also, you need to distinguish at least three different kinds of socialists within organized labor. Early on, there were the electoral socialists (such as Eugene Debs or the ST&LA), on the one hand, and the anti-statist socialists (such as Benjamin Tucker, the International Working People’s Association, and the Wobblies), on the other. Both of them were considered the radical opposition (from different directions) of the mainline conservative unionism and “state capitalism” endorsed by Gompers and his cronies. But while it’s clear that there are objections from libertarian principle against the social democrats, it’s not nearly so clear that there are against the anarchists. (It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.)

After the Bolshevik conquest of international socialism, and the State colonization of the labor movement through the Wagner Act, the main ideological debate within leadership ended up between “anti-socialist” corporatist union bosses backed by Washington, and communist union bosses backed by Moscow. So much the worse for the labor movement, and the world, but there’s no reason to do these bandits the honor of giving them a monopoly on the names “socialism” or “unions,” any more than the rampant Mussolinism of the owning class over the past 70 years justifies giving them a monopoly on “markets” or “business.”