Biden’s task force on unionization: A corporatist agenda for austerity and war

Eighty-two years ago, Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionary Marxist and leader of the Fourth International, noted (in an essay, “Trade unions in the epoch of imperialist decay” that “there is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.”

Writing shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky explained, “Democratic unions in the old sense of the terms, bodies where in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist.”

Trotsky was writing shortly after the eruption of the semi-insurrectionary struggles, including the seizure of factories in sit-down strikes, that led to the formation of the mass industrial unions in the US. However, his analysis of the tendency toward the “growing together” of the unions, the state and the corporations was extraordinarily prescient. This process continued throughout the post-World War II period, including through the purging of the socialists and militant workers from the unions prior to and after the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955.

Commenting on the transformations that have taken place since Trotsky’s analysis, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North noted that “the process of global economic integration and transnational production deprived the trade unions of a national framework within which they could apply pressure for limited social reforms. No room was left for even the most moderate resort to the methods of class struggle to achieve minimal gains. The unions, rather than extracting concessions from the corporations, were transformed into adjuncts of the state and corporations that serve to extract concessions from the workers.”

Reference to the AFL-CIO and its affiliate organizations as “unions” is a historical anachronism. These discredited and hated organizations only exist due to the good graces of the employers and the state.

Facing an intractable economic and political crisis, one faction of the ruling class, led by Trump, has responded with the promotion of fascistic conspiracies to overturn the Constitution. Another faction, led by Biden and the Democrats, seeks to strengthen a type of tripartite government-business-union structure first pioneered in Mussolini’s Italy.

[wsws.org]

I'll argue that what we are witnessing today is basically the incoming of the same conditions we left behind in Central and South America colonized countries where union leaders and those who support them are killed from paramilitary night time raids. While we are obviously far away from that extreme, hopefully, a socialized silencing within MSCM support, just as our foreign policies, manufactured information erasing the worker elements are seemingly coming.

White House seeks to fabricate lower COVID-19 hospitalization numbers

[wsws.org]

{Regardless of the total falsehood of Trump’s claim, it has been embraced by the Biden administration, with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky downplaying the surge in hospitalizations of children in December by claiming, absurdly, “Many of them are actually coming in for another reason. But they happen to be tested when they come in and they’re found incidentally to have COVID.” The White House’s claim that the Omicron variant has somehow made Trump’s lies true is simply absurd.

In other words, the conclusion of the House coronavirus subcommittee that the Trump administration made “deliberate efforts to undermine the nation’s coronavirus response” fully applies to the Biden administration.}

When science constantly becomes changeable for perception need, a society lives unprotected.