Brandon,

I guess that explains why radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World made active efforts to organize all workers, and fiercely criticized folks like the American Separation of Labor for their exclusionist organizing models, right?

Or perhaps not all unions are actively described by an economic model that was designed to explain the behavior of one specific tendency within a labor movement that used to be very diverse and used to have very vigorous internal debates over tactics, strategy, vision, etc. before the government got involved.

In a free market, exclusionist unions create market opportunities for their own competitors. One source of competition is the non-unionized labor market. But another source of competition is more inclusive unions which have goals other than shoring up the collective bargaining power of the aristocracy of labor. Thus the active alliance between big business, big government, and the establishment labor unions to destroy the IWW and similar unions, especially during crises such as World War I. Sometimes by passing extensive labor regulations that favor conservative, centralized unions; sometimes by sending out the goon squad to shoot or deport them.

As far as unions acting against their own interests goes, I expect what she’s referring to is the fact that when unions act to benefit one limited sector of the working class, at the expense of the rest of the working class, they undermine the long-term interests of all workers, including their own. The idea is that short-term gains are usually bought at the expense of destroying potential allies and making the fortunes of the union dependent on appeasing the powers that be. Since destroying potential allies strengthens the hand of your establishment patrons, it’s likely that eventually they will decide they don’t need you any more.

Judging what’s happened lately to big establishment unions (take the UAW—please!) over the past 40 years or so, I’d say that that claim is probably well-supported by the empirical evidence.

Maia,

Thanks for this post. It’s an important topic that all too often gets ignored or whitewashed in labor history.

In America, at least, there are two really distinct periods of history to consider — the labor movement up to the establishment of government-sponsored unionism by the Wagner Act in 1935, and then the labor movement after the establishment of government sponsorship. Before 1935 there were many different strands of the labor movement, who were often vigorously competing with one another over the vision of organized labor — conservative unions, especially those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, either actively excluded workers on the basis of sex, race, nationality, and class, or else tolerated and supported their union brothers [sic] who did so. Their strategy was, generally, to shore up the bargaining power of male, white, American-born, skilled tradesmen within the system of Gilded Age state capitalism, by shoving women, blacks, Asians, immigrants, and industrial workers out of the labor market. But other unions, especially radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, explicitly aimed at inclusion of all workers and worked actively to organize across lines of sex, race, nationality, class, etc. They aimed not to shore up the position of unionized workers within the state capitalist system, but rather to organize against the state capitalist system as such and replace it with worker ownership of the means of production. The conservative unions thus effectively became the junior partners of the bosses in trying to protect capitalist labor relations from the organizing of the radical unionists; meanwhile the radical unionists gained strength by organizing precisely those workers who were excluded by the conservative unions.

What happened in 1935 is that the Wagner Act created an extensive system of government privileges for unions that met the conditions for government recognition. Not surprisingly, the system was designed to favor the conservative unions’ organizing models and to focus union energies as much as possible on collective bargaining over wages and conditions with the sitting boss. Thus the explosive growth of the American Separation of Labor and its younger cousin, the CIO, through the new government-sponsored privileges, which “subversive organizations” like the IWW had no access to. The big union bosses flourished as they were inducted into the establishment alongside Big Government and Big Business. The bosses screamed bloody murder but then happily settled down to business with compliant, easy-to-coopt unions. The politicians celebrated their success in incorporating a new organized “base” into the system of political patronage and vote-buying. The radical unions dwindled in membership, or else were bought off by the other new big player in town — the Communist Party and its financial backers in Stalinist Russia. And the privileged, educated professionals who fancied themselves “Progressives” shouted “Hallelujah” and passed off the evisceration of domestic labor radicalism as the great triumph of labor history.

What’s happening now is that, with neither Soviet Communism nor autonomous domestic labor radicalism being considered a serious threat to the stability of the state capitalist system, Big Business and Big Government no longer have as much need for keeping Big Labor at the table. With less of a perceived threat, there is less of a perceived need for co-opting a buffer against that threat. It has served its purpose and now can be scaled back like any other obsolete resource. Thus, the current situation and the decaying prospects of the establishment unions. And since the establishment unions have spent the last half century selling out workers at large in order to protect the short-term interests of their own membership and especially their own union bosses, they have nobody but themselves to blame for that situation.

Anonymous,

I have no objection to a government protecting you from injustice, if you willingly pay for it to do that on your behalf. I do have an objection to a government forcing me to subscribe to its protection, if I would prefer to make arrangements with a different agency, or to fend for myself. Any government which forcibly suppresses responsible and non-aggressive competitors is initiating force against innocent people, and thus illegitimate on the Objectivist theory of justice. Any “government” which does not suppress responsible and non-aggressive competitors has forfeited any claim to sovereign authority over the legitimate use of force, and thus has ceased to be a government in Rand’s sense of the word. For more, cf. Roy Childs’ “Open Letter to Ayn Rand.”

I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse! —Edmund Burke (1757): A Vindication of Natural Society

Here as elsewhere, half of decent political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight.

Sheldon,

Thanks for this series. I’m sorry that being out of town for a while has kept me from taking much note of it until now.

The conversation reminded me a lot of the controversy between the disunionist abolitionists and the Liberty Party faction in the mid-1840s, when folks such as James Birney, Salmon Chase, and Alvan Stewart were arguing that the Constitution already forbade slavery, if you read the right clauses in the right way. Here’s a paragraph from Henry Mayer’s excellent biography All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, on the Liberator circle’s take on the controversy (boldface added):

‘Such readings Garrison dismissed as naive wordplay or deceptive political contrivance. He insisted that the courts and the public had so uniformly accepted the proslavery protections of the Constitution for half a century that individuals could not dextrously conjure them out of existence. Frederick Douglass made a keen summary of the argument: “They looked at slavery as a creature of law; we regarded it as a creature of public opinion.” Even if the document could be read as the Liberty men suggested, Garrison stressed, “such construction is not to be tolerated against the wishes of either party.” Certainly the South would never agree that the three-fifths clause had to defer to some vague emanations that the preamble embraced anti-slavery philosophy, and the Prigg and Latimer [fugitive slave] cases demonstrated that stern New England jurists would not substitute natural law for a strict construction of the fugitive slave clause. Political realism, he insisted, required people to recognize the Constitution as a corrupt “bargain and compromise” of which “no just or honest use … can be made, in opposition to the plain intention of its framers, except to declare the contract at an end, and to refuse to serve under it.”’ —Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, p. 326.

Those who want to end a legalized injustice would be better off challenging the climate of acceptance that sustains it, not the textual or procedural mumbo-jumbo that formalizes it. And that is far better achieved by appealing to conscience and common morality than it is by pseudo-legalistic grandstanding in the futile attempt to out-lawyer the whole American judicial-regulatory apparatus and the authors of the United States tax code.

Dean,

I don’t think that Sheldon objected to “massive non-compliance” with tax laws, at least not in this series of articles. What he objected to is the idea that tax protesters can get away with non-compliance by means of sophisticated lawyering.

I can’t speak for Sheldon, but as far as I’m concerned, anyway, there is absolutely nothing wrong with evading or openly defying an unjust law. But if that’s what you choose to do, your choice should be grounded in principles of civil disobedience, not by trying to conjure up a Constitutional or statutory proof-text for your convictions. If you choose to be a tax evader or a tax resister, you should do so with a clear knowledge and an informed acceptance of the fact that you’re putting your person and property at risk, and that no government court is going to let you off the hook if you get caught.

The arguments that right-legalist tax protesters use are specious (as Sheldon demonstrates), and in general it is stupid to pretend that some esoteric legal incantation is going to save you from government reprisals when you defy tyrannical laws. That pretense obscures the real issue (which is moral, not legal), and also gulls people into taking serious risks without a full knowledge of the likely consequences.

It really says something about this Iraqi government, how they treat the condemned.

Well, sure. But I think the fact that they kill them is rather worse than the fact that some of the hangmen taunt them first.

There’s no right way to commit judicial murder.

This time last year the ACLU were running full page ad propaganda war against the NSA and the Patriot Act. … They are still beating the dead horse over the NSA program.

Another thing is to elect people who will appoint Constitutionalist judges. …

So, which article or amendment of the Constitution should those “Constitutionalist judges” turn to, in order to find the part that authorizes secret spy agencies to eavesdrop on people’s telephone calls without any warrant issued on probable cause?

Just out of curiosity.