Counter-Currents
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I was recently asked to participate in a panel with other white advocates who at one time or another were on “the Left.” Labor Day seems like a good opportunity to share these labor-related musings.
Before children, my husband and I were active organizers in the communist labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World and served as Secretary and Treasurer for the Seattle branch. Having a baby stole our attention somewhat, and although I carried our little girl in the baby sling to meetings, I had little time left for intellectual development. But the University of Washington hosted a lecture on Wages for Housework by Global Women’s Strike, and I attended. The speaker was Selma James, the Jewish ex-wife of the late black Trotskyite writer and activist C. L. R. James. James argued that raising children is the most important of all labors and that outsourcing this labor so a mother could work away at something else just to pay for the labor required to raise her children was absurd. At this point, communists still generally acknowledged the validity of the nuclear family. (This is no longer the case.)
At the end of the talk, one of the attendees asked, “What do you think about intersectionality?” Intersectionality was the fashionable new idea that people are categorized by their persecuted traits and that these categories intersect with class. I.e., if you’re a black lesbian in a wheelchair, you’re the most oppressed and therefore the most important.
James answered, “It doesn’t make sense to me. We’re supposed to unite the working class. Why would you divide it even further?”
This stuck with me: diversity is a deadly weakness for any kind of organized society whether it be a union, a social club, or a functioning nation.
Introducing diversity as a union-busting tactic is well recognized by employers. In a 2020 article, Business Insider exposed Whole Foods’ “heat map” which identified stores at risk of unionization. One key metric is lack of diversity. The more ethnically homogeneous a store, the more at risk it is to unionize.
As late as the 2000s, the labor movement in the US recognized this and was outwardly nationalist simply as a matter of fact. It was universally understood that foreign labor brought down wages of the native working class. (This only changed under years of pressure from unions that represented service workers that were largely comprised of illegal aliens.)
Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from the United Kingdom, led the American Federation of Labor to support every law that would restrict immigration. This policy shifted only after his death and with the merger of AFL with the communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955.
On February 7th, 1979, the New York Times ran a piece reporting that third-generation Mexican labor leader Caesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers set up a “100-mile line of military-style tents to halt the flow of illegal aliens threatening to take the jobs of striking melon farmers.” Despite being mostly Hispanic, the UFW was opposed to immigration. They lobbied fanatically against the Bracero Program (a diplomatic agreement between the US and Mexico during and after WWII, whereby Mexicans were allowed to live and work as farm laborers in America). The program was terminated in 1964 under pressure from the UFW.
More recently, farm workers struck at a Washington State berry farm in 2014. The owners threatened to ship in Mexican workers, using H2A visas to replace other striking Mexican farmworkers already living in the US. (The berries will rot in the fields!) Using H2A’s as strikebreakers is illegal, but the Sakuma family nearly did so until public scrutiny prevented them.
One notorious example of the destructive effect of immigration on American workers was dramatized 1990 film, American Dream. Filmmakers documented the famous Hormel Spam Factory strike in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985. These workers raised families and bought homes on an assembly line salary. None had, nor required, college degrees. But the strike ended in disaster for the union—80% of the workforce was replaced, permanently, by Mexicans (otherwise the Spam would rot in the fields!).
These replacement workers were easily exploited compared to the native workers they replaced. Language barriers and immigration status made it difficult to organize for basic protections. In 2011, Mother Jones published an exposé on this same Spam factory. Now, workers dealt with debilitating neurological disorders caused by the inhalation of vaporized pig-brain matter. Most of these workers were illegal aliens, largely from the same village in Mexico, and their names were changed by Mother Jones to protect them from ICE.
This is not an argument for organized labor but a recognition that a disorganized, individualistic workforce, and society more broadly, can’t withstand predation from an outside group.
Whether that group is big business that cares little for the conditions of its employees, China eyeing a destabilized West, or an organized ethnic group pushing for involvement in foreign wars, whites who see themselves as individuals will be exploited. Whites should draw inspiration from the old labor movement and recognize that we too need to see ourselves as a group with valid group interests. We need to organize for these interests, or we will disappear.
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19 comments
Happy Labor Day. Make some leftie heads spin by mentioning the Nazis installed Labor Day in Germany, not the Social Democrats before them or the Communists after them. Here’s to socialism sans class war.
In the Left, there’s a general belief that working conditions are only improved via bottom-up organizing. Hitler’s economic policies prove that a top-down strategy also works when leaders promote a class-neutral national interest to improve the quality of life for working people. Real wages after taxes increased 14% between 1932 – 1938 and benefits included subsidized tourism, cultural activities like theater and music performances, and better safety conditions. In contrast, America’s economy didn’t recover from the Great Depression until we began to prep for war.
In John Toland’s biography of Hitler: “No objective observer of the German scene could deny Hitler’s considerable exploits … If Hitler had died in 1937 on the fourth anniversary of his coming to power … he undoubtedly would have gone down as one of the greatest figures in German history.”
Cyan,
There are innumerable factors which play into whether ordinary workers are being made net-better off in a given era.
(I dislike terms like “working class” as they are a) derived from leftist analysis, and b) vague and with constantly shifting memberships, especially in dynamic capitalist societies. At best, “working class” had application under feudalism, and perhaps to a lesser extent, in countries like late 19th century Russia that were still feudalistic or only recently emancipated from such status at the time of Marx’s writing. OTOH, evil communist regimes brutally established true “working classes”: they had their Party nomenklatura, who were the new feudal masters. and everyone not in the Party, who were the new serfs, in fact, slaves. I would argue, following generations of brilliant conservatives and libertarians before me, that communism always leads to such genuine class tyranny.)
Governments rarely help ordinary workers (except for their public sector parasites, especially the ones in Democrat dominated unions, like SEIU), though their leftist policies certainly harm them. To increase the economic well-being of average persons in a just manner – and this is especially the case in the US today – requires two sets of policies, broadly described as “restoring laissez-faire capitalism” and “halting mass immigration”, or, at least, a reorientation of our immigrant admissions towards skilled ones, as opposed to the mostly unskilled ones, legal and illegal, we admit en masse now (ideally, I would support masses of white immigrants and no nonwhite ones; secondarily, no immigrants at all; tertiarily, high-skilled and economically valuable immigrants regardless of race).
Restoring capitalism (ie, massive, full-spectrum deregulation; huge Federal spending reductions, especially for those expenditures wasted on minority “uplift” and welfare measures, as well as fighting either non-existent or irremediable “climate change”; I would argue for business and investment tax abolition, but at least, huge and permanent rate reductions; Federal tax code simplification; privatization of Federal assets, with monies raised earmarked exclusively for National Debt reduction, to reduce government costs as well as to inject private sector efficiencies into moribund or wasteful socialist entities; caps on jury damages awards to discourage excessive, economically wasteful litigation, and ultimately, reduce the number of parasitic lawyers; and finally, either Federal Reserve Board abolition, and restoration of a 100% commodity money standard, or, at least, replacement of the “dual mandate” with a single mandate to maintain price stability) as the only way to promote new economic growth, when combined with restricting immigration (ie, halting the Big Government liberal program of artificially expanding the low-wage labor – and new Democrat voter – supply via foreign population importation), would dramatically improve the economic condition of average folks, most of whom work in the private sector (this is particularly true for working class whites). We actually saw empirically a tiny bit of this very projected effect during the middle years of the Trump Admin (pre-Covid), when wages for the economic bottom half of the population expanded at a faster clip than for the top half – this apparently for the first time since the 60s.
My proposals would have a disproportionately positive effect on middle and poorer whites, and especially conservative ones – the very people we most wish to help (our people, IOWs). Socialist proposals, OTOH and especially in America, ALWAYS disproportionately benefit liberals (the statist ruling class) and nonwhites. I assert that this is inevitably so.
Hitler, in his writings and speeches, was opposed to social class distinctions and divisions. His vision was of a unified people unpoisoned by artificial social condition based on money and status. According to National Socialism, working-class Germans (like Germans of any social class) were Germans first and foremost. Capitalism would put them through a shredder to maintain lavish lifestyles. National Socialism valued them as a precious resource and part of a people. They were not disposable rags to wipe the floor with.
Sadly, almost all modern labor advocates are left wing, which is to say they don’t have any regard for or loyalty to Whites. They don’t have a populist bone in their bodies, but spew absurd liberal poison that the White working class is understandably alienated by. Labor historian Jeffrey B. Perry agrees with the idea (at 2:39 in below video) that “…White Supremacism…[is] the major retardant to class consciousness….”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8ScgrzlpM
So there you have it. It’s not like outrageous black behavior is a major retardant to class consciousness in America. It’s “White Supremacy.” I’m sure this is something that filmmaker Michael Moore would agree with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QCGGYI3OPM
Hitler later said that the National Socialists had managed to get rid of the class struggle from the left but not from the right. But sure, it was better than free capitalism.
p.s, Toland the expert did not even speak german.
Unlike Neitzsche, who was difficult to translate from the original German, Hitler was not writing poetry.
Also, contrary to popular belief, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was a lower-middle-class movement (think Dr. Goebbels or Albert Speer) and not truly a working-class movement.
But there is simply no basis for the notion that Hitler was the “bloody assassin of the workers.”
Labor issues in Nazi Germany were handled by eliminating the Marxist trades unions entirely and then having the interests of workers respresented by the German Labor Front, which had an equal place at the bargaining table with industrial management and the government.
This is a basic “Fascist” principle. Each of the interests or classes is no better than any others, and the wellbeing of the organic whole or “race” is the primary public interest of the Nation-State itself.
In the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Communist infiltration of Labor was not as severe as in Europe, so the Unions were not outlawed. But the “Magna Charta of Labor,” the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, where each collective bargaining unit was now certified by the government’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in accordance with a majority election of a bargaining unit’s shop workers.
A “closed shop” was then able to be represented by a labor organization in order to bargain collectively with management, and such things like a forty-hour workweek and employer-paid healthcare insurance soon became normalized elsewhere and sometimes became the law.
In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act made it a state preference whether closed shops could exist ─ or if those who did not pay dues to the Union could be included in the collective bargaining unit, or if workers would have to join the Union before they could be hired by the employer.
The states without closed shops were then called Right-to-Work states ─ and they are typically lower-wage states in the South or the Mountain West. For example, Washington state on the Left Coast is NOT a RTW state, which is why the heavily-Unionized wages there are much higher than in RTW states like Idaho or Arizona.
Collective Bargaining Units simply don’t work unless all the workers in the bargaining unit are united in solidarity behind the Union. So while it seems nice to have the option of whether to join the Union or not ─ and thus pay dues to the Union ─ it is very tough in Right-to Work-states then for a unionized collective bargaining unit to so gain benefits for their workers. Employers frequently resort to illegal divide-and-conquer strategies in order to avoid the Unionization of their shops. The less the unionization of workers, the lower their wages.
This is why in recent times with increased Globalization that allows employers to outsource or to send entire factories overseas on a whim, Unions in the United States have tended recently to not even try to negotiate for raising wages and improving benefits any longer ─ but instead to deliver Multikulti “fluff” that is mainly of interest to minorities and non-Whites.
Also, collective bargaining doesn’t work very well with small family-owned businesses. The inability of many of these employers to provide basic health insurance for their employees is one of the primary problems with healthcare in the United States.
I understand how this works because I used to be a Shop Steward with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in Idaho when I was a broadcast engineer another lifetime ago.
The workers (who were almost all White) tended to somewhat support collective bargaining ─ whereas the prima donnas, i.e., the top status news anchors, tended to not support collective bargaining at all.
By expressly throwing the little people under the bus in RTW states, the “labor elites” (higher-paid and higher-status workers) are able to get bigger compensation packages for themselves.
In 1937, Hitler dismissed Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht because the latter was unwilling to risk some slight German inflation in order to maintain a robust rearmaments program. This was important to maintain because all German foreign negotiations depended upon hostile nations believing that Germany had regained its former military strength. Marxist historians make much of this.
🙂
“The workers (who were almost all White) tended to somewhat support collective bargaining ─ whereas the prima donnas, i.e., the top status news anchors, tended to not support collective bargaining at all.”
The majority of backers supporting Trump are middle class and poor white families extending from Appalachia to the southern Bible belt, and west to the California fault line. If we inadvertently support a wealthy elite program like project 2025, (affecting directly and indirectly medicare, medicaid, available pharmaceuticals, pensions, Unions, social security, etc.) do we further hamstring the economic balance of white middle class America and perhaps bite the hand that feeds us?
“Also, collective bargaining doesn’t work very well with small family-owned businesses. The inability of many of these employers to provide basic health insurance for their employees is one of the primary problems with healthcare in the United States.”
For lack of a national health care system as exhibited in all the other western nations and allies. During my service in Europe, American military servicemen and women and their adjoining civilian family members (over 200,000) were provided very basic medical services within the U.S. Base clinics. But, for the more complex medical services we were directed towards the host nation hospitals and doctors downtown who accepted us without pay. Never has our media ever made mention of the fact that our most highly respected American military communities are to a great degree also being treated by a socialized medical system. The fact being that, if it is good enough for our hero’s why isn’t good enough for the rest of us in the continental United States?
As for dismantled and compounded laws since the 1930’s regarding controls of business, The question would then be — does this problem affect all businesses in the same way? (Exxon /Amazon/ big Defense contractors versus Tony’s Pizzeria) Well how would we know if we have no laws (that actually work) regulating or evaluating individual corporate profit or profit margins (CEO, Directory boards, and stock caps) for the sake of maintaining balance,, and reinvestment percentages from profits required for maintaining healthy business survival in our economic system? (As opposed to the allowed “skimming”, embezzling, and outright global outsourcing and shutdowns)
I was stationed for some time at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho years back.
Happy Labor Day to you, Mrs. Quinn. Your report shows that some of our best race-thinkers are former liberals.
You’re so kind. Thank you!
Interesting background. Were you a communist because you’re a socialist and an atheist? Are you still these things? WRT socialism, it sounds like you still are one, but have replaced communism with nationalism.
I would say that diversity can be good or bad depending upon how one defines it. Both evolutionary biology and history suggest that ethnic and racial diversity are net ‘bads’ for societies – especially white societies. OTOH, socialism tends to promote conformity in thought and personality, which I think is or would be a huge loss for white societies. One of our race’s glories, as well as sources of power, is the diversity of character types we produce – and the fact that we celebrate the individual and his rights and possibilities. I don’t believe white preservation requires homogenizing socialist conformism (something which also leads to loss of liberty, loss of national economic dynamism and thus prosperity and thus military power, and loss of morality, as socialism rewards and enhances envy and other vices at the expense of the civilized virtues of the Western bourgeoisie).
I oppose diversitism and wokeness more than socialism. But once the Ethnostate has been established, I would fight the socialists with everything I had.
In my mind one of the clearest lessons of recent years is that unchecked capitalism can erode liberties every bit as much as communism. Almost all of the censorship we face comes from business, not government. Capitalism doesn’t actually care for the individual at all – it reduces him to a “human resource.” And capitalism has eroded morality at least as much as socialism ever did – where today are you seeing the bourgeois values you mention? Certainly the modern bourgeoisie has their value system, but it’s precisely the “diversitism and wokeness” you disdain.
“In America today the forces that drive our present government, have taken the initiative to end nuclear arms control agreements. We are now on a hyper spending spree to increase defense spending despite our increasing debt and danger. We are incapable — or refuse to advance peace talks, provide all classes of citizens with basic securities in every social field, defend our ecology, and we now capitalize on the politics and priorities of individual rights over community, as we capitalize and profit on their many resulting problems now out of control. With each new problem is created a new market with a new expense to deal with it. Our media now has honed in on specific words used to program public thought in the old “game of blame” and distraction, and the polarized sides use the same shock designations on each other. Our medias daily word of choice today is Fascism,, just as in the 1950’s it was Communism. One can only contemplate through deep reflective thinking, how primal, barbaric and futile our actions can be when we use and vent our frustration on past demonized ideologies or every perceived evil of the past while ignoring the fact that in “present real time” it is we that now direct our actions and destiny and not deceased figures of history and foreign systems of past government. To blame our present day mistakes, malice and indifference on anything beyond ourselves and our present system of government, rests on the verge of lunacy (but this selfish irresponsible behavior is repeatedly evidenced historically and is evidently in our nature. As for perceived evils versus what is or was good, history shows that there are no absolutes).
“It can be said that EVERY form of historical government has always been run with a “capitalist nature” by a minority of controlling individuals, almost identically.” – Antonio Gramsci
And yet the present destructive powers of libertarianism and uncontrolled capitalism and their oligarchical products, which are now the sole existing powers profoundly directing modern government [hence society] and have been for decades, are still allowed to continue their attritional destructive path — regardless what we label them, while supporting them directly and indirectly. Perhaps what we are dealing with is simply unmanaged selfish greed regardless the acronyms and many political party titles. Any steps to mitigate this growing selfishness and irresponsibility by deed and rule of law are immediately found repulsive, by all of us. Perhaps it is human nature alone that will decide the fate of humanity. – (Reflection)
“And while Fascism comes with the danger of falling into excess, the excesses of liberal democracy and unfettered capitalism have proven to be far worse, both in probability and magnitude.” (T.S)
You are completely brainwashed. I mean, about everything, from how an economy works, to how capitalism is the natural system of free men, to the rank evil of communism, both inherently and historically. Have you read anything? Do you know any actual businessmen?
You need to read and ponder the great classical liberals and modern libertarians, from Adam Smith and Lord Acton up to Mises and Hayek.
The issue for modern prowhites is to integrate all that generations of conservatives and libertarians have discovered about the workings of the economy, the modern world and the free society with what we understand about racial differentiation, hereditarianism, and the disharmonies that arise from state-imposed “diversity”.
If the nationalist movement heads in this ignorant and despicable direction, moving the focus from the RACE WAR that the leftist hegemonic Deep State has declared against whites worldwide, to embracing easily theoretically and empirically refutable socialist mythology, then I for one will go back to my paleoconservative brethren – and the valuable insights of prowhites will continue to fail to gain wider currency within the broader Right.
Yes indeed. It´s senseless to talk about mass immigration without taking a look at whom it profits — big business, the well-to-do, the economy in the short term.
The elites need mass immigration not only because of economical reasons. Yes, the immigrants are cheaper labour. But they are also better subjects, as they do not have any concept of individual rights and freedoms, and the idea of freedom itself does not belong to their tradition, they will easily obey to their masters without questions.
I agree with this.
Modern multi-national corporations easily do as much central planning and social engineering and propaganda (Marxist or otherwise) as does any government ─ the difference being that they also want to maximize their profits, whereas a Nation-State might have many priorities.
As President Coolidge quipped to the press in 1925, “the business of America [i.e., its government] is Business.”
That is a big reason why there is so much corporate “Woke” and “DEI” today ─ even if a positive effect on their bottom line is questionable.
Who do corporations really answer to? Their investors, sure ─ but who do regulatory officials and whole governments primarily answer to if not these same monied interests?
Some multinational corporations today are larger and more powerful than whole Nation-States. In fact, few Nation-States that are not actually superpowers could stand up to them if they were at war. These monied interests will simply move like migrating geese to wherever the best labor costs and rules and resources and markets can be found. This is called Globalism, a nirvana shared by both Capitalists and international-Socialists. And a major feature of both is class-warfare.
International Finance Capital has zero ethical considerations that goes beyond their own bottom line, and their own propaganda agendas and corporate public relations. This applies to many billionaires as well.
Corporations are certified at the state level. One way to change the above would be to require corporations to be chartered on a national level and to have public review boards that are empowered to decertify articles of incorporaton and even to confiscate the property and assets of offenders.
When General Motors (and others) moved their plants to Mexico where the labor was cheaper in the 1980s, the proper remedy to the devastation of Flint, Michigan would have been to decertify their corporate charter, confiscate some of their corporate booty, and possibly to put some of their officials themselves like Roger Smith into jail ─ rather than to impotently make stupid films like Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989), where he tries in vain to locate and petition the elusive General Motors CEO on behalf of Moore’s hometown (where underemployed White people had been reduced to raising non-Kosher rabbits to sell for pets and for food).
A corporation works by separating professional management from joint-stock ownership, and limiting the founder’s personal financial liability. Inventors are not usually the best business managers or industrialists, and it usually always takes a lot of money to make money. A modern corporation is a good way to economically rationalize the means of production and to increase investor dividends.
But corporations must serve the national interest if they should be tolerated to exist at all. Always.
If they cannot truly serve the public interest, then they need to be busted in part or destroyed in whole. What is good for Wall Street or the multi-national banks, is not necessarily good for America.
Hitler applied the same principle to banking. In other words, the Reichsbank existed to serve Germany and not just to make money (especially for foreigners).
This is also why Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had the National government buy up the Revolutionary War debt from the States ─ whether delinquent or otherwise ─ and thus any U.S. Bonds were now offered to the financial market with the “full faith and credit of the United States” and its power under the new Constitution to raise tax revenues and to make it so. The regulation of interstate commerce and taxation itself had been hit and miss under the Articles of Confederation.
This is how the Continental currency became sound during the Washington Administration. Anyone holding a U.S. government debt or a Continental note now had a confident expectation to be paid ─ and the holders of fiat bills therefore had an assurance that U.S. currency was worth more than the paper that it was printed upon.
🙂
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Lord Shang! I was never an atheist, but anarcho-communism appealed to me because I wanted to believe we could solve homelessness through wealth and power redistribution. This belief requires three delusions: 1) There is no such thing as scarcity of resources. 2) Everyone just wants everybody else to live a comfortable and fulfilling life. If they don’t, it must be due to greed or ignorance or both. And 3) Everyone is equally capable of governing themselves and their community (and desires to).
I thought organizing society through workers councils as described by Anton Pannekoek could achieve this. The only problem was that all these means of implementing workers control were, uh, violent revolution and interim dictators.
Ultimately, most people prefer a mix of free market and redistributive economic systems that provide a balance of creativity and freedom and a social safety net. While I think forms of collective ownership work well for small businesses (actual ownership or profit sharing), unions can be a necessary check on the free market race to the bottom in behemoth corporations.
When you say “socialism tends to promote conformity in thought and personality,” I tend to think it’s the other way around. People create more capitalist or socialist systems out of their genetic propensity toward individualism or collectivism.
Even among whites, we vary on preference. The English are significantly more individualistic than Scandinavians. And Mayflower Americans are descended from the most individualistic of these people.
I agree with you that an ethnostate can figure these things out on its own, and to ignore demographic collapse to fight about economics like TPUSA is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The class problem is really a race problem. In a society which is nominally all of one race different sets of genes will cluster in the separate classes. The problem is then how to equitably manage the differing genetic interests of the members of each class while the race as a whole is following an upward path ( as per Cosmotheism).
Whenever I hear that dumb word ‘intersectionality’ I’m reminded of the Tom Selleck/Kevin Kline scene in In and Out-“Oh, this is my Peter. Friend, Peter! We just ran into each other here at the intersexual. Homosection! Intersection!” This is not an argument for organized labor but a recognition that a disorganized, individualistic workforce, and society more broadly, can’t withstand predation from an outside group. Hence, the attraction to fascist tendencies with explicit ‘we-feeling’ racialist undertones against inner traitors and outer enemies.
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