The death throes of trade unionism

As a teenager in the 1970s I read something of Lenin's where he asserted that trade unionism's focus on economic rather than political issues made it ultimately futile. At the time that idea struck me as incredible, given the success of the labor movement in America and the willingness of capital to compromise with labor for the greater good of both. Similarly, Marx's descriptions of mid-19th century English factories seemed utterly irrelevant; the modern American workplace was nothing like them at all.

But I'm starting to think that Marx and Lenin may have been right after all. Lenin's problems were that he jumped the gun in 1917, creating a socialist state long before capitalism's existential crisis, and in a place with scant experience of capitalism; and that he died too soon, leaving the new state to be subverted by his successors and Marx and himself to be discredited by what followed.

And at least one aspect of Marxist theory I find unimaginable: the notion that the replacement of capitalism by socialism could ever lead to a communist utopia. History never ends, and no social or political order is immune from corruption.

I also question Lenin's assertion of the need for a violent overthrow of the capitalist state, and his claim that you can't make a revolution without executions. It is not, after all, people that need killing, but a mentality, the idea that if we just leave the rich alone, they will make the world a better place for all of us. That has never been true in all of human history.

Trade unionism does seem utterly impotent in the face of modern multinational capital. It's dead, Jim, and the only recourse for the working man and woman today is politics...just as Lenin said.