Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg
- Thread starter RiverDelta
- Start date
I'm quite surprised by the radical social egalitarianism many syndicalists show, IMO a pretty big chunk of their trade unions would oppose these things and actually end up being pretty conservative.
tbh since Trotsky won the power struggle TTL and not Stalin, pretty much anyone following Lenin's "democratic centralism" crap would probably call themselves Trotskyist.
...why would you get that idea? Historically most of the people involved with, for example, Red American politics were actively egalitarian and anti-racist, and the IWW (vanguard of the revolution in America, and much stronger than OTL due to a much less internally destructive '20s) was FOUNDED on the idea of inter-ethnic cooperation against capitalist attempts at ethnic and racial divide et impera.
I was thinking more along the lines of being surprised at the degree of gay rights and gender equality they can achieve by the standards of the time period, but you are right, I was probably partially thinking of OTL communist governments.
The USSR OTL co-opted Russian nationalism pretty fast, and even then, de jure women had equal rights from pretty early on.
Only thing was, the USSR didn't do diddly squat about chauvinism in Russian society, so women got stuck doing all the chores and crap after work while their lazy husbands took the evening off.
The Commonwealth et al. probably do something similar, realize they have more work to do, and start pumping out propaganda and such as a social engineering attempt. Progress is slow, but when you're not a dictator trying to justify your rule, you can deal with that.
That is not the only reason of cource. I am not suggesting that you are saying this, but not everone who does not support a radical left idea is a far righter.
Somepeople think that Synicatism is airbrushed to look far better than (in thier opion) it should be.
The ww1 german unions opposed women in the factorys
All of the people I've seen complaining the Syndies are airbrushed use the OTL USSR as an example of why they think the Syndies are airbrushed, which is like using Adolf Hitler as an example of why John McCain's beliefs are evil. The ideologies only bear the faintest similarity and disagree on literally every specific, just as while McCain and Hitler were both on the right wing of politics, their actual ideologies were completely different in every way. It's just horrible logic.
And don't even get me started on the memes and "jokes" on the Reddit page about "removing" the "dirty syndie scum".
Agree r.e. USSR comparison being not the greatest - I prefer to think of the post war conseous unions having even more power - which is still bad IMO, but still. I think some people want to fight Stawman socailist.
I also think that the mod just went "Britain and France are both under a socailist regium which has never been tried and it works perfectly and even is really socially liberal" can be annoying(I do know that synicatism as a basis, but still).
The ideolgies are not different in everyway, of cource. They are both anti-bougeroius and revolutionary for example?
What's bad about the unions having more power? Gilded Age showed just how bad unregulated capitalism can get. You only need to look at modern Bangladesh or China to see the same. Or the American video-game industry. Corporations are driven by short-term profit, and employees are just another resource to be tapped.
Plus, as stated above, most far-left groups, including the blocs that are key elements in KR and became powerful leftist movements in our world, were very socially egalitarian. Annie Kenney? Suffragette and leftist. The IWW? Emphatically and explicitly anti-racist. This is just a logical consequence of those people and groups getting power.
Yes, the ideologies bear some gross similarities, but you can also say that John McCain wanted to defend his country and protect the traditional values of that country, as did Adolf Hitler, and that desire formed a key part of both men's ideologies. The difference is that one was a humble civil servant who went out of his way to shoot down conspiracy theories about his opponent that could have benefited him in the polls, and the other was a psychopathic mass murderer who ran a totalitarian regime and attempted to murder a religion and multiple ethnic groups he didn't like. In the same way, both the WW2 USSR and KR's Commonwealth of America hold that capitalism is bad and exploitation of the poor by the rich needs to end, but the one held that the only way to fix that is obedience to Stalin and a command economy where striking was illegal, and the other holds that the only way to fix society is by delivering as much power as possible to the people, ensuring democratic leadership of business and the state, and decreasing the power of the executive office so as to avoid consolidation of power into one pair of hands. The two just straight-up aren't comparable.
Aguement for another place maybe?
The Question then is why would worker in thier unions electe someone who wants to increase compettion for their jobs?
They are, just no more then any two ideolgies are comparable.
1. Sure.
2. Easy. "We bring people here, they will need stuff. We make stuff. You guys buy our stuff. The more people working here, the more people buying our stuff, the more money we make." Not to mention, the union is looking out for the workers, not for some executive's pocketbook, so there won't be any layoffs or outsourcing or shipping in cheap labor while firing the old. The old guys will still be there, only now there'll be a bunch more people working there, too, so they can make even more crap to sell.
Keep in mind, IRL it's common in unregulated industries for employees to be fired while a company is making money. I.e. not just to cut costs because of a profit crunch, but because the company is making record profits and wants to advertise to investors that it's "slimming down" for "efficiency" (i.e. wringing every last dollar out of the human resource before leaving it by the wayside and looking for more suckers to hire and fleece). EA did it earlier this month IIRC. So did Activision (which is also an Orwellian hellhole where the company is pressuring its employees to use health tracking apps so it can fire people before it needs to pay workers' comp).
3. ...your point being?
2. Easy. "We bring people here, they will need stuff. We make stuff. You guys buy our stuff. The more people working here, the more people buying our stuff, the more money we make." Not to mention, the union is looking out for the workers, not for some executive's pocketbook, so there won't be any layoffs or outsourcing or shipping in cheap labor while firing the old. The old guys will still be there, only now there'll be a bunch more people working there, too, so they can make even more crap to sell.
Keep in mind, IRL it's common in unregulated industries for employees to be fired while a company is making money. I.e. not just to cut costs because of a profit crunch, but because the company is making record profits and wants to advertise to investors that it's "slimming down" for "efficiency" (i.e. wringing every last dollar out of the human resource before leaving it by the wayside and looking for more suckers to hire and fleece). EA did it earlier this month IIRC. So did Activision (which is also an Orwellian hellhole where the company is pressuring its employees to use health tracking apps so it can fire people before it needs to pay workers' comp).
3. ...your point being?
Perhaps, but with women having the right to vote that won't be a concern. Also, it's hard to see the pressures favoring a two income household for the poor going away so quickly even under syndicalism.
3. Is nit picking really helpful to this debate?
Uhh, aren't they more Leninists/Bolshevists in general? Trotsky didn't really get that much time in the sun, in this TL. Neither did Stalin, obviously.
No. The Jacobins were basically founded by Trotsky during his exile, and (as in OTL with CPUSA) during Trotsky's visit to NYC he laid the foundation of the American Vanguardist Movement entirely. Even if he didn't have as much time to expand on his school of thought, Trotsky still had differences in thought with Lenin.
Most of Trotsky's OTL differences in thinking were ways to distance himself from Stalinist orthodoxy. And even then, he did a lot of call back to the spirit of Lenin's actions. I didn't know he was the founder of follow up movements though, I thought he disappeared earlier than that. In any way, "Trotskyist" refers to something specific built around an idealized Trotsky as a not-Stalin, more than the man's real thought anyway so describing them as such is probably misleading.
That probably makes the Jacobins worse than the idealized version of Lenin and Trotsky of OTL Trotskyists. Expect a lot of purges, sham union democracy and an economy run like a military.
@Worffan101
What many people mean when they say that Syndicalists are airbrushed is that the transition to a union-run state and economy is seemingly seamless (no pun intended) and bloodless, and that the unions don't suffer from similar issues of corruption, complacency, etc. that ended up plaguing unions IOTL once they became more powerful.
What many people mean when they say that Syndicalists are airbrushed is that the transition to a union-run state and economy is seemingly seamless (no pun intended) and bloodless, and that the unions don't suffer from similar issues of corruption, complacency, etc. that ended up plaguing unions IOTL once they became more powerful.