In preparation for a revolution, it is valuable in your opposition to a ruling class to maintain congruity within an organized community.
Of course it's no coincidence that Porky wants the dissolution unions for multiple reasons - aside from the obvious fact of workers acting in the favor of the collective interest, unions provide a sense of community with which ideas can be shared and events coordinated with an efficacy that can only be realized in the worker's movement in a system which permits strong unions.
All of us in modern society are hemmed in by a dense network of rules and regulations. We are at the mercy of large organizations such as corporations, governments, labor unions, universities, churches, and political parties, and consequently we are powerless. As a result of the servitude, the powerlessness, and the other indignities that the System inflicts on us, there is widespread frustration, which leads to an impulse to rebel. And this is where the System plays its neatest trick: Through a brilliant sleight of hand, it turns rebellion to its own advantage.
Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know that they want to rebel, but they don't know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the System is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, women's issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of "activist" issues.
Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System's work for it. In spite of this, they imagine that they are rebelling against the System. How is this possible?
Abolish schools tbhfam. They do way more harm than good in their current form. They have fuck all to do with learning knowledge. They're prole/prisoner training centers.
Carson Green
The bourgeoisie: Also the bourgeoisie:
Hmmmmmm
Kevin Nguyen
Are you sure about liberals being against unions? I can effortlessly picture them being Indifferent about labor agitation, but I would find outright hostility surprising. Many American unions are connected to the Dems, which makes sense since they're pretty much all bourgeois unions except the IWW. Reminder that the AFL-CIO which is the dominant union since the '60s were rabid anticommunists, supported the Vietnam war and were hesitant about allowing black workers in.
Both of these. Craft unions have been openly racist and chauvinistic from the AFL and Knights of Labor days. The AFL and CIO have been anti-communist since the days of Samuel Gompers, who called the police and army on IWW organizers and Socialist Party members. The AFL-CIO merger was designed to crush the CPUSA's successful unionization of everywhere in the 1940's and early 1950's. For example, the AFL-CIO famously created not one, but *two* unions (IUE and IBEW) to crush and destabilize the "subversive" UE (IUE is now the CWA). The AFL-CIO went so far as to encourage their goons to union bust at places where UE was organized to the point that only GE in Erie, PA was the only major UE plant in under two decades. In the 1960's, the AFL-CIO under George Meany attempted to sabotage the UAW, because of the latter's closeness with the SDS and New Left 9remember the Port Huron agreement was drafted during a UAW retreat). Into the anti-war era, Meany encouraged union members to physically disrupt rallies and intimidate protesters, regardless of their origins. Hell, the AFL-CIO locals in the SOuth rallies around George Wallace. Anyone who says that Marxism broke with the working-class in the US is ill-informed at best. Frankly, the opposite is true.
Jeremiah Morales
this is just a shitpost right
Jackson Thomas
Nixon single handedly destroyed american unions. So I'd say liberals are against them.
Logan Phillips
The core of the problem is that the larger American unions had become borderline luddite in the mid 60s. In particular longshoremen, whose entire occupation was replaced by the intermodal container. If you look at the strikes of the mid 70s they were over ridiculous wants like requiring containers to be unloaded using 5-man gangs, all of which had to be on a full payroll. These days it's done by a single crane operator, and ports are trying to figure out how to do it remotely allowing for varying degrees of automation. Ditto for the car industry, new technological advances in robotics were largely ignored because Unions had their worker quotas. Organizationally, Unions were not interested in educating their members in their trade or self-perpetuating the Union. This brings us into the mid-80s.
It's unsurprising that liberals turned on them so quick after HW Bush was out of office. Clinton didn't need to give a shit about what he perceived was a dying, twentieth-century phenomenon. Unions would go the same route of the Soviet Union and just stop existing, while future elections would be dominated by gentrified white collar voters who'd have all their stuff made by machines in other countries. In the same time, we went from PCs being the size of a bedroom to fitting in your pocket. It was easy to justify the destruction of labor because all these cool japanese imports could do better things than union-made American products.
At the same time, the civil rights movement happened and expanded with gay then trans rights. Liberals started caring more about social issues than economic ones, because it's much easier to ban or allow something than it is to introduce a new tax or service. LBJ's war on poverty quietly failed in the mid 70s, while in the mid 80s all mental asylums were cast as homophobic and largely dismantled causing our present mental healthcare crisis. Obamacare's goal was to give poor urban blacks healthcare, paid from taxes applied to Union "cadillac" plans, a meme which persists because Obama directly encouraged it.
Hunter Perry
liberals are more acquiescence than antipathy to unions
The ultimate perversion of social life caused by capitalism is the fact that workers end up having to fight against technology that would require less work to be done.
Dominic Miller
u wot m8? I know desinstitutionalization was poorly carried out but there were problems with asylums — and that had nothing to do with homophobia.
Isaac Russell
To expand on this point: figure that most Union apprenticeship programs were usually formalities. They'd only be offered if there was a net demand for labor and the apprenticeship would end when the license (determined by a third party licensing board) was obtained. After actually getting into the Union, the worker's main job was strictly maintaining it's affairs and maintaining their pensions. This is perfectly fine, but it creates a situation where over time the average age of the Union goes past 40 once the basic amount of workers needed is obtained. Everyone gradually becomes a grumpy old man whose kids move to some big city to go to school and take a nonunion white collar job. At the very most some workers opt to become Professional Engineers, but that process is rarely handled by the Union.
Not much was done, or is being done, to expand what a Union itself is. For example, Unions could have required members to attend education lectures or acquire new skills that could expand their skillset, effectively requiring all of them to become PEs. As part of that process Union workers would have naturally been a major force inside colleges, giving Unions a major foothold in academia (which in real life is largely hostile to them) and thus new members. Teachers Unions in particular could have had their members learn trades and then teach trades in schools, which would have contained the influence of the exam-heavy NCLB and Common Core (two things that aim to replace teachers with min wage tutors).
Instead it didn't self-perpetuate. To a child a Union represented their grandparents, or all the union-made stuff they threw out when they died. By comparison corporate cronyism represented action, it represented new products from asia, fast cars, slick computers and video games. To adults Unions represented endless bureaucracy and middling wages, while nonunion work offered a means to become an assistant manager or investor through stock options.
Mason Hughes
this could literally be a boomer minion meme
Nolan Myers
In the 60s it was just bad Union leadership. Union leaders shouldn't have tried to fight containerization head on, such an impossible task would have been like the pony express trying to stop the telegraph. A better option would have been to retrain or educate affected workers into different roles but this is where solidarity ends and every other union would have protested an influx of new labor into them. Everything broke down and it's little wonder that by the mid 80s Reagan was able to get away with firing the Air Traffic Controllers, an industry which will probably be privatized into nonunion work over the next decade.
Gays were sent to mental institutions because being gay was considered a mental illness. This was one of the big reasons for opposing asylums from the left, and why most of the left was fine when asylums were gradually closed and dismantled even though it created a massive healthcare deficit.
Michael Myers
I've suggested they should do both.
Just look at most CAD (Computed Aided Drafting) people these days: most of them are socially inept retards right out of community college and not the actual workers who want to use the software. This creates an administrative problem where the tradesmen who most benefit from CAD have to rely on people who have the smallest understanding of trades.
In both cases, workers are missing needed skills (CAD operators trades, tradesmen CAD operation) which hurts the business as a whole. Except for the manager above them who can split their wage between two workers rather than giving both a living wage.
Lincoln Young
What? Homosexuals were a minority (at best) of asylum inmates. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest encapsulates the deinstitutionalisation zeitgeist for liberals - asylums weren't holding mentally-ill individuals, they were holding pens for people that were "too eccentric" for staid WASP civil society. Thomas Szasz was one of the central figures in this, arguing that "mental illness" was just another form of social control, and "mentally ill" was a convenient label to dismiss/incarcerate people with dissident worldviews.
Deinstitutionalisation happened long before the '80s, anyway. It was pretty much over by the end of the '70s.
Cooper Gonzalez
Notice how a large amount of "eccentric" people also happened to be gay or at least bisexual.
Thomas Allen
It was a convenient excuse to cut services, now they treat everything with pills instead. Funnily enough, the Greeks and Arabs knew that rehabilitating a person by taking them out of the environment that caused their symptoms in the first place was the way to go. The Arabs created the first mental health hospitals.
I can’t help but think a lot of mentally ill people (who are often poor) would be much better off in a clean and healthy asylum then grinding through poverty conditions on the street with just a handful of pills to keep their condition from worsening.
Jace Jones
Seems more likely that there’s a correlation between homosexuality and mental illness then there is a big ole conspiracy to get Spencer.
Samuel Jenkins
Reactionary fuck off
Hunter Morales
Sure you aren't liberals. But the real leftists are an endangered species and you should be very concerned about that. Right now the political spectrum is neo-liberals who like feminism, LGBTs, racial minorities, Muslims and Jews vs. neo-liberals who like Jews
Lucas Rogers
Also a lot of "reactionaries" sense that the system is rigged against them. But because leftists, including Zig Forums, have a holier than thou view of "reactionaries", it is just easier for the "reactionary" to scapegoat illegal immigrants, Muslims, refugees and Jews instead of acknowledging that capitalism is the problem.
Jim Profit and myself are based anti-capitalist reactionaries. We trigger both 4chan and reddit simultaneously.
Noah Thomas
fuck off
Brandon Morgan
you see anti-semitism in everything. This is why leftism is dead. Your holier than thou puritanism pushes everyone away and your movement is going nowhere. Am I lying? Is it not true that both the Republicans and Democrats stand by Jews and Wars for Israel?
Nolan Anderson
Except that the idea of homosexuality as a medical disorder was long in decline (in practice).
Homosexuality was removed from the DSM long after homosexuality was grounds for treatment in an asylum.
The problem was that there was a mismatch between the old way mental illness was treated (i.e. state-run asylums) and the new federal system of mental health treatment promoted by Kennedy. NIMH was more focused on preventing mental illness than treating it, and there was little in the way of organisation or funding for the community mental health clinics it proposed.
And a major problem with those community mental health clinics was that they ran on the assumption that the mentally ill (or their carers/relatives) would keep them in treatment, like an honor system.
Unfortunately due to the mismatch between state/federal treatment policies what actually happened was that the asylums were emptied (in part as you said to reduce state budgets), while many of those released didn't enter the federal program (or dropped out).
Jacob Walker
you're equating all jews with israeli jews and implying that israel's actions are supported or understood by all jews. as it is "standing by jews" is extremely vague phrasing meant to paint that user as a overenthusiastic supporter of jews. there would be nothing inherently bad about "standing by jews" against discrimination in the US if pograms were to break out, for example.
Jews and Israel are not the same entity. You'll find plenty of Jews who are critical of the Israeli government just like you'll find plenty of Americans who are critical of the US government. The very conflation of Jews and Israel as if they formed an Israelite Hivemind of sorts, combined with the belief that all politicians make sure to "stand by" all of Jewry is antisemitic tripe, yes — and you would realize it if your skull was not crammed full of JPG artefacts.
