Are Unions Obsolete (or, If they are not, should they be)?

The relevance of trades-unions is not really a subject to be addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Their hands are not clean. Both the political parties represent first and foremost the interests of the business class - Wall Street and international capital.

These elites have shown their intentions: the class war in the US against unions began in blood shed and continues right to this hour against workers who may work full-time work and be starving.

In fact, that we keep talking in terms of just these two parties, with all the problems we have and the problems building up in front of us on the horizon, would alert an elementary school child.

This toy is broken; and that toy is broken; so I want a new toy. Why are we wondering if Hilary is running in 2016?

But we have become too sophisticated to think with such elementary logic, so we keep turning to these two political parties and a very broken system while our workers and our communities, not by accident but by design, are made less and less viable.

But back to unions. I address this question of their obsolescence to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), Solidarity Federation, Workers Solidarity Alliance, and their "types" and supporters. These unions maintain, at least rhetorically, a militancy and a vibrant pro-worker history. All of them, except the IWW openly embrace anarcho-syndicalism.

For this militancy these unions have - again right to this hour - faced repression and harassment. Note Spain's conservative government and its hounding of CNT organizers.

If you're not familiar with any of these unions you should be. They are not the business unions you are familiar with. Business unions, like the Teamsters, AFL-CIO, etc., cuddle up to the two pro-business political parties.

In an of themselves these business unions are a motivation to put unions in the dustbin of history and end this essay.

Because to whatever extent trades unions ally themselves with elites, with the nation-state, with kings and presidents and corporations, they should be obsolete. They have no use to workers: this is not dogma, but something borne out in fact. Wall Street rallies, workers gets screwed.

The AFL-CIO is not a trades-union of tradition. It and its kind are booster clubs for the Democratic Party, rallying the downtrodden to add legitimacy to corporate elections which make us more downtrodden.

But whether it is a militant trades-union or a business union, they share a similar problem.

The conundrum with trades-unions generally is they organize themselves around workplaces - factories or stores in most cases; or broadly by trades. Historic reasons exist for this.

But our workplaces and our trades are not today what they were in earlier times when trades-unions were organizing. An average worker may change careers - to use that word loosely - four or five times in his or her lifetime.

Added to this conundrum is that throughout modern history elites have so degraded what it means to work that it means nothing at all.

Work today is a task done for a paycheck. That task is rarely open to scrutiny by even militant trades-unions, who are interested in wages and health and safety issues. This is best seen in urban areas, where the chambers of commerce designate as work anything which supports the bottom line - viz, office support staff for the importation of produce from outside areas, other states, or foreign countries.

Not validated are the tasks which would make notoriously unproductive cities less unproductive, more self-sufficient and aligned with the natural world - like reclaiming land to grow food, water reclamation, and meaningful tasks the indigenous populations did for thousands of years without harming the landbase.

But opening up for question an urban metropolis challenges the validity if not viability of our cities. Can our trades-unions do this?

Meaningful work does exist, but it rarely gets done. Can a trades-union, actively organizing a workforce, at the same time open for question the very work that is being done?

Our trades-unions, even our militant ones, seem stuck in an old paradigm where: a worker in a factory is automatically deemed a social benefit; and it is assumed that this worker is employed with some longevity so he or she would have a sustained interest in making improvements.

Both presumptions are false.

Can a movement centered on debauched tasks and unsteady employment, where we move from job to job and care less and less what we do but will it make ends meet, ever be an effective movement?

Or do we need now a broader, social movement, a militant, avowedly anarchist [-syndicalist, -primitivist, -communist, etc] organizing, above and below ground,  of whole communities and across communities?

This is where our work needs to be focused.