actually, i completely disagree. well, let me clarify what i disagree about.

this article has been written a thousand times over the last ten years. it's not that the ideas haven't been tried, it's that they haven't worked. i like naomi klein on an idealistic level, but she's hopelessly wrong on this point. well, except that if you read between the lines you see quickly that she's being sarcastic, ironic and more or less just putting workers on. what naomi klein is really saying is that the union movement is a horrendous failure, in a way that allows the listener/reader to construct it themselves.

we need to realize that malatesta was right: unions are and forever will be horrifically co-opted by capital. the climate crisis isn't just an indictment of capitalism, it ought to also be the last nail in the coffin for centralized labour.

i agree that the nature of production needs to change. this is obvious. i don't agree that there's any hope at all that workers will stimulate that change, and think the left should stop wasting it's time with fantasies that they will.

meaning, naomi klein is right - once you cut through her haze of sardonic cheekiness and get to what she's actually saying.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/

dave
Lol, everytime I follow one of those Jacobin links, it leaves me shaking my head. Fortunately, I would never be alive to live under their ideas.

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generally, i find them sort of refreshing, especially regarding their perception of work (and i do agree with the general crux of the article that ecology + technology is where to place effort for the future of urban civilization) but they share a general problem on the left of being far too attached to theory. it's a fairly quick process to realize that marx actually doesn't make any sense, except under conditions where capitalism is basically reduced to feudalism. you can apply marx reasonably to current conditions in bangladesh or china, for example - it's not "like" slavery, it *is* slavery and there's consequently a breaking point of revolt. but as soon as you get the slightest veneer of comfort, the whole thing falls apart. to think that the luxury of advanced capitalism will lead to increasing levels of revolt is just incoherent. and all the anarchists, from bakunin on, all realized how blatantly obvious that is, to the point of realizing that not realizing it is just really sort of stupid. why there are so many marxists, today, 150 years later, i don't understand.

when bakunin was like "ok, but it's going to be the starving unemployed that are going to organize, not the well-fed employed" that was a correction that should have been made central to all further socialist thought. and to the early socialists' credit, they did try. but then this cult of personality developed, and his writings became canonized and blah blah.....

on some level, it's easy to understand. if you realize the obvious truth that workers must behave in the interests of capital, rather than work against it, it makes sense to think that they'd collaborate with their bosses in order to keep wages high for themselves. and fuck everybody else.

but i don't understand why the academics, with no motives to not be objective, haven't understood this. i know there's a tradition towards turning every canonical text into a new bible, but that's a weak explanation to me. it just leaves me scratching my head.