A friendly reminder: US factory jobs only became synonymous with middle-class prosperity because of mass unionization

Trump's mirage of a re-industrialized America covers up this central fact People forget that factories jobs in the US were despotic hellholes until union drives in the 1930s & 1940s introduced some security, safety, & industrial democracy

Saying you're pro-factory doesn't mean you're pro-worker

Trump's executive order tonight has illegally cancelled union contracts for 67% of the federal workforce & 75% of unionized federal employees — roughly 700,000 union workers

This may be the single biggest attack on the labor movement in American history Trump's egregious union-busting order rests on very shaky legal ground and will certainly be vigorously contested in court

Last week @davidshor made headlines by claiming young people have become "one of the most conservative" generations in history

Research published in the NYT today debunks the claim 🧵 Contrary to what Shor suggests, young people have NOT begun to identify more as conservatives

Musk’s attacks on federal workers pose an existential threat to the whole labor movement, all workers, and the broad Left

It’s alarming that most people don’t yet understand the stakes 🧵 If Musk illegally busts federal employee unions with little public outcry or broad labor fightback, every employer will take note & try to copycat

Remember: Reagan’s 1981 firing of federal PATCO airtraffic controllers sparked an employer offensive in all industries vs all unions

One thing Musk's power grab suggests is that IT systems are *the* central chokepoint in contemporary capitalism — and that tech workers have potentially huge disruptive leverage, in both the federal government and within corporate America Tech workers at the heart of IT systems are probably the closest thing we have in today's conditions to the small crews of skilled workers who in the 1930's could paralyze entire factories and supply chains just by refusing to work

An overlooked dynamic of @UAW's Mercedes drive is how it has effectively overcome workers' extreme geographic dispersal

After decades of boss-driven economic decentralization, workers have innovated new techniques to unite across large distances 🧵 Corporations for the past 70 years have not only moved to low-union areas like the South, they've spread their new plants out as far from each other—& from big urban centers—as possible

Workers no longer usually live in dense neighborhoods walking distance from their factories

Leftists & union organizers tend to underestimate how much economic decentralization has upended the organizing terrain since the 1930s

The shift from hard industry to services is actually just the tip of the iceberg 🧵 In the 1930s, GM’s 69 plants employed 3,478 workers on average & US Steel’s 121 plants averaged 2,159

But big companies no longer generally depend on big workplaces 👇

Is the current labor uptick more hype than reality?

No.

Though union density continues to decline, there's compelling data that things really are changing — & that unions should immediately make a major turn to new organizing 🧵 Google searches asking “How do I form a union?” shot up in 2022

This is one of the best workplace organizing guides I've read in a long time DMs Open is full of practical tips for how to combine in-person and digital organizing

A common Leninist criticism of my new book is that because Finland's 1917-18 revolution was crushed, this shows that the democratic socialist ("revolutionary social democratic") strategy of Finnish socialist leaders is bad & that Leninism is good

Here's why that's wrong 🧵 Finland's Revolution was crushed because the combined military might of the German & White armies were far too much for the Reds, who never received a large degree of military support from the Bolsheviks

It's idealism to assume the "correct line" would've made up for so few arms

One of the things I show in my new book — based on 10 years of archival research in 8 languages — is that both Marxism-Leninism & Trotskyism are based on myths & falsehoods about Bolshevism as well the Russian Revolution 1/12 🧵 If you look at the Tsarist Empire at the whole, rather than just central Russia, it's impossible to hold to the theory that the Bolsheviks (pre-1918) broke from the strategy of "orthodox" Second International Marxism — aka revolutionary social democracy or "Kautskyism"

It's a well-known problem that Left parties worldwide have become representatives of the college educated

What's often overlooked is that organized labor is also now over-represented by college-educated workers 👇 (1/4) This shift to the college educated is a major problem for organized labor (as for Left parties) — it represents a growing disconnect from the majority of the working class that doesn't have a college degree (2/4)