Workers Unite! But Look Before You Leap

Most of my self-described "communist" friends, one of them a proud former Bolshevik Ball debutante, re-energize the batteries of their social justice mission from the vantage point of the luxurious battlements of their amenity-fortified primary residences. They are freethinkers who await their marching orders for protests in the field or focus groups on the quad.

They don't get to practice their activist faith much in their gated communities where visitors must run a gauntlet of redundant security checks, after which white-gloved doormen, standing ramrod straight, usher them into lobbies filled with chandeliers and beaming concierges. 

They uphold the dignity of labor by taking ownership of the label of "worker." Most detectors of their duplicity are too intimidated to dispute that honorary title.

Communists know the Joe McCarthy playbook by rote and heart, and put it to effective use, not expecting to be called out or embarrassed by the paradox.

They hire top-shelf asset managers to shelter every nickel of their own windfall of prosperity from the redistribution of wealth that they deem the government's duty and moral imperative to confiscate from struggling middle-class workers. They will seize every tax liberty, dilate every loophole, engage every portfolio protection refuge and suck upon every available teat of systemic privilege, no less than do the reactionary corporatists and anti-collectivists they hypocritically condemn.

They have laid the groundwork and seen to it that if the next ten generations of their posterity chose to be unemployed from cushy birth to coddled death, they will have the means to pursue every entry in the encyclopedia of guilty pleasures. 

Communism is no less compatible with idealism than are other ideologies, but as a pragmatic framework for promoting, guaranteeing, or even identifying economic justice and the nature of equity, it is woefully ill-equipped and mismanaged. 

And communists feel and practice compassion for humankind no more, and conceivably less, than anybody else 

Not being an economist, philosopher or historian, I could easily be outmatched in any debate about its theoretical viability. I also have a disturbingly insatiable desire to believe in its efficacy. 

But even autohypnosis will not convince me that Marxism by any other name or label, is the solution to the asymmetrical power ratio of management to worker. Nor is it an ideological anti-racism killshot.

Its principles, when stripped of doublespeak, could help mitigate the obscene imbalance in people's fortunes, but that's also true of other ideologies. In their purest uncompromised forms, both communism and capitalism are despicable. 

They need to share their foundational DNA to survive. They must be as environmentally adaptable as rats. 

Communism, unlike human nature, is not immutable.  Its broad doctrines are still serviceable as literary and cinematic themes, but they fizzle pathetically not only on the world stage, but in our workplaces. 

Globally, the Peoples Republic of China and Vietnam are communist nations that have made strides improving the standard of living and quality of life of their populations, but this is due to their partial surrender to the feasibility of capitalist and world market economic principles. 

Cuba, North Korea and until recently Venezuela, are flagrant contrasts. Human rights are not stifled there; they are strangled. 

Everybody knows that democracy and communism are mutually exclusive, but diplomats must still refer, with a straight face, to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. 

"Democratic" is a word that is nobody's intellectual property. 

It can be used without copyright, sincerity, or accuracy by anyone who chooses to countermand its original meaning to suit their own agenda.  An example is when dissident union members who are disgruntled with leadership, become insurgents in the name of democratic reform, though the leadership they target does, in fact, reflect the democratically determined mandate of its membership more than they do.

We must work with all countries and economic and political systems, regardless of affinities and alliances. Compatible interests are always discoverable or can even be manufactured to taste.

It's ridiculous that we have a trade embargo that treats the importation of Cohiba cigars as though they were contraband. Being stuck in the mud of loathing is such a waste of an opportunity for reconciliation.

Communism, as an economic system, maintains its luster and glamor for unschooled youth and for calcified academics whose vocation is reclaiming their choleric salad days of youth, when they rebelled against the same obstinacy and haughtiness of authority that they now exemplify.

It is a washout on both macro and micro levels. In labor relations, outcomes will be decided by market forces, social dynamics, political pressures and legal constraints.

Communists think that they have a monopoly on insight into worker consciousness, the labor movement, social justice and every other societal phenomenon since at least the Industrial Revolution. They fixate upon the perpetual and ruthless duel between the exploited and the exploiters. 

Of course they have a point. 

But it's what they do with that point that frustrates their own goals.  They must tone down the rhetoric, be more inclusive of alternate mindsets, and stop using Marxist frames of reference when they are poor fits for the challenges of reality.   

And refrain from commandeering language and repurposing the meaning of words, such as "resistance" and "authoritarianism" and even "genocide" to suit their dogma.  Also, the pressure to rigidly conform to the communist perspective on every issue, not limited to labor relations, belies their professed tolerance of diversity of thought. 

Would any Marxist-oriented website publish an op-ed in which there was an unequivocal expression of empathy for the Israeli children who were slaughtered on Oct. 7, prior to any alleged atrocities by their government?  Maybe with an asterisk and an appeal for readers that would mitigate the sting and the conclusion.

     The labor movement is neither optimally robust, nor in tatters. 

Strikes are sometimes viable options, but general strikes, like the one in England a hundred years ago, are doomed to backfire, even if we chant, block traffic and hold our banners high. 

There are as many reasons to rule them out as there are notes in a Chopin nocturne.

It's true that there is strength in numbers, and that alliances among unions can't hurt, as a rule. But there is no mystical bond among all workers, and sometimes the priorities and convictions of their rank in file may be dissimilar and even counter to each other  

Solidarity means nothing without readiness to sacrifice one's own security for the sake of one's brothers and sisters. It's too much to ask workers who are reasonably content with their status quo, to take the risks of consolidating with comrades who reflexively seek to smash it on principle.    

Unity is episodic. Loyalty is ephemeral. 

Before long, and usually at the worst moment, there is desertion from those without aligned self-interests, and common cause flames out.

Communism's heyday in the labor movement, roughly coincided with the era of vaudeville, like democratic socialism is yearning to dominate in the epoch of YouTube.  

Communists, like creationists, are among the most irksome absolutists. That's especially true when they act like penthouse-prone armchair generals who catapult real soldiers into actual battlefields. 

Workers should deafen themselves to the likes of lecture hall pontificators, community organizers, strategists and coordinators who are inured to their fail-safe lives, like the elite radicals in my lede paragraph.

Militancy can be creditable and credible, but it must be pragmatic and not merely be driven by ideology, Marxist-Leninist, or otherwise.

Workers must unite. But only after looking before they leap.