posts from @Video-Game-King tagged #marxism-leninism

also:

MOKKA
@MOKKA

Yeah, just have five commercially successful companies declare themselves to be the mouthpiece for all indie game developers out there and pretend that Game Pass is a universally good deal that definitely won't turn bad within the next three years.

Also raising my eyebrows at a Union being a fan of monopoly capitalism.


Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

There's a train of thought stretching from Gramsci to Lenin and even Marx himself detailing the limitations unions face in enacting broader social change. To summarize, unions can only carry out economic struggles within their industry at best: higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions etc. As necessary as those gains are (and they are necessary), what unions cannot do is lead a political struggle that would call into question why civil society/the law is structured in such a way that leaves the masses no choice but to submit to grueling labor for subsistence wages. Worst case scenario: union leadership grows closer to management at the same rate it grows distant from the workers themselves, and the unions fight alongside the bosses against social change that would be detrimental to their shared interests.

In terms of the political struggle, any movement that begins with the unions as its basis more or less has to accept this set of limitations. This was the substance of Lenin's critique against the economists, but personally, I find this quote from One Dimensional Man puts it best:

In the United States, one notices the collusion and alliance between business and organized labor; in Labor Looks at Labor: A Conversation, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1963, we are told that: "What has happened is that the union has become almost indistinguishable in its own eyes from the corporation. We see the phenomenon today of unions and corporations faintly lobbying. The union is not going to be able to convince missile workers that the company they work for is a fink outfit when both the union and the corporation are out lobbying for bigger missile contracts and trying to get other defense industries into the area, or when they jointly appear before Congress and jointly ask that missiles instead of bombers should be built or bombs instead of missiles, depending on what contract they happen to hold."