Unions against Revolution
This zine—compiled in 2010—features reprints of two classic critiques of labor unions: “Unions against Revolution” by G. Munis and “Organized Labor versus ‘The Revolt against Work’” by John Zerzan. The two essays are accompanied by a critical introduction that explains their relevancy some 35 years after their initial publishing. The essays provide strong arguments against unions, primarily focusing on the ways in which unions have acted to limit class struggle by managing workers and allying with capitalists. While originally written in the 1970s, unions have only become less relevant over time and these essays provide an excellent critique of unions as “false opposition.”
Excerpt
Attempts to give unions a revolutionary content, through the use of internal oppositional caucuses or even by creating completely new unions, are doomed to failure. The only result of such “tactics” is to demoralize the revolutionary experience of those who attempt it or to turn them into simple bureaucrats. Unions bring to bear all the powerful, deformative forces of capitalist society which constantly eat away at men [sic], changing and destroying even the best of them. There is about as much possibility of “changing” unions in a revolutionary direction as there is of “changing” capitalist society in general; unions use men [sic] for their own particular ends but men will never be able to make unions serve a revolutionary goal; they must destroy them.
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