Me: It’s also not…
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.
Stalin made it clear enough for me.
Kennedy, I’m no export in labor history, but the general impression that I got is that the Stalinist influence on Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) and the ST&LA (1895-1899) was pretty minimal.
In any case, the “at this point” is a clear reference to the later paragraph in which I distinguish the period in which the dominant force among American state socialists in the labor movement were electioneering Social Democrats, and the later period in which they were Communists in the direct service of Moscow. You can complain that even “social democracy” means a steadily growing and increasingly ravenous State, and that the SDs paved the way for echt Bolshevism in the statist Left, and that’d be fair, but if you’re basing your complaints on the more resolute versions of statism that came after, then it would be just as far to cite Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo as the end result of nativist, war-mongerng state capitalism of the sort practiced by “anti-socialist” statist labor “conservatives.”
Maybe we shouldn’t invest too much in picking sides in spats between warring statists.
Unionism is based on violence. It’s a criminal activity, which only exists because of the State. This exists in both theory and fact.
The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869, predating the Wagner Act (1935) by six and a half decades. Given that half of organized labor’s history in the United States was carried on without any grant of government recognition or privileges, and in fact in the face of massive police and military violence against organizers, strikers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong crowd at the wrong time, I conclude that your claim that “Unionism … only exists because of the State” is what we colloquially call “making shit up.”
Anticopyright.