> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers

Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that things are more interconnected and more fragile than we expected. That fragility is also opportunity.

I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.

American unions avoid Mexican unions like the plague.

Mexican unions are very corrupt, and even being near them would expose American unions to insane legal liability.

I see the same problem with regards to Africa. Corruption is … an issue.

Seems that the old one "Divide them to conquer separately" always works.

Its because often unity is worse than division.

Unity allows easy spreading of disease and corruption, cancer cannot spread between different people. If a union in one country is corrupt, it won't automatically affect the unions in another country.

China was a united entity against the mongol invasion, didn't work out very well, because you take out the center, the rest collapses.

Europe was deeply divided, and just because your neighbouring castle surrendered, doesn't mean you will. Because you are the local noble who owns the land, rather than some bureaucrat employed by a distant emperor.

> China was a united entity against the mongol invasion, didn't work out very well, because you take out the center, the rest collapses

I am sorry, is this like troll logic?

The entire history of war is large and powerfull empires bullying smaller ones.

This is so silly I am not even sure how you can argue this. Like did USA fight world war 2 as 50 seperate armies, one for every state?

I'm not sure what 'entire history of war' you are reading. Did you only read 19th century history or something? If large empires always had an advantage, then you would see endless snowballing, and only end up with mega-empire-blobs, and one-world-government.

That is not the case. You have period of imperial blobbing, and also period of intense fracturing. Europe fractured after Rome, because smaller polities were much easier to maintain, with fewer layers of bureaucracy to feed. The small Frank kingdom (that only owned half of France) was able to fend off the great Jihad from the Umayyads that had crushed the Visigothic Spain. Whereas if you took out Rome, or the Chang-An of China, the rest of the empire would be paralyzed and unable to act.

I don't know what re-unionizing in the face of a corrupt union entails, but presumably if you can pay people's salary while they strike you're at least part of the way there?

Even casting off the yoke of a union that no longer represents you is hard in the US:

https://freebeacon.com/policy/labor-leaders-say-illinois-fir...

https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/New-Haven-firefighte...

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

I don't think I'd care to imagine fighting a corrupt union entails.

Mexico has both employer-controlled sham unions and real unions. While there is certainly tension between US and Mexican workers you overstate the situation.

US unions would like Mexico to have strong unions both out of sympathy and self-interest. The more protections Mexican workers have the less attractive it is to move jobs from the US to Mexico.

US unions successfully fought to include pro-union provisions in the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA "renegotiation"). They're using those provisions to help Mexican workers form real unions and defeat the sham employer unions. We don't yet have much experience with how these provisions will work out, but there have been limited early successes.

See for ex https://apnews.com/article/biden-labor-unions-united-states-...

I was thinking more of this: https://jacobin.com/2016/08/mexico-teacher-union-strikes-oax...

Describing the prosecution of the head of the teachers union in 2013:

> Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she had used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States. Juan Díaz de la Torre, who was a loyal member of her union caucus, became head of the union.

> While Gordillo was very likely guilty of the embezzlement of which she was accused, such practices are common in the Mexican labor bureaucracy. The motive for jailing her was political: first she had betrayed the PRI, and then she had opposed Peña Nieto.

The part about “such practices are common in the labor bureaucracy” is telling.

Corruption is so common, that any prosecution can (accurately!) be labeled political is one of the best signs of a corrupt system.

This isn’t about an employer controlled union. The union is heavily autonomous.

But if Mexican leaders wanted to get rid of unions, all they would have to do is enforce the law.

Guiliani did something similar when mayor of NY. He announced sweeping investigations into union corruption, then negotiated very favorable contracts while prosecution was hanging over union leaders heads, then called off the investigations when he got the terms he wanted.

Maybe I was wrong to focus on employer controlled vs real unions. That's certainly a problem, but as you point out it's not the only problem.

Here's the broader point I was trying to make: Mexico has a problem with corrupt unions. But US unions are trying to help Mexicans solve that problem, not abandoning cooperation with anyone in the country.

I'm not sure if the US teachers union specifically is involved. They'd have less incentive to be because you can't replace a US teacher with a Mexican one.

Why would tech workers pay miners to strike (Lets ignore the insane difficulty of organising that for now)?

Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers. Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware, in the same way car companies benefit from cheaper oil. Car workers don't get paid better because oil prices go up, they get laid off.

Also, most rare earth minerals are mined in China, China does not look kindly to foreign 'interference', such as labour organisation.

This is an interesting idea. I honestly hadn’t considered that we could contribute to strike funds in these countries. Seems like a thing worth organizing

I feel like a network of that sort would have applications all over the place.

Perhaps this is a petty example, but whenever I'm asked to input a tip in a place where tipping isn't appropriate (like a drive-through fast-food restaurant), I'd like to tip $0.05 as a hint that I've contributed $5 to their strike fund (which they could use an app to later verify).

Why not just boycott the places with abusive labor practices instead of some convoluted scheme that only signals your virtuous nature to the exploited employees.

You know, like back in the day when people boycotted goods produced in Apartheid South Africa.

Today, unless there’s an app for that…

Abusive labor practices are the norm in the food industry.

It's not about virtue signaling, do you think that giving them strings-attached money is going to make them like me? It's kind of a jerk move.

It's about establishing communication directly with the workers so that you can circumvent potentially corrupt unions.

As for general purpose boycotts, I don't think they're as effective as they used to be. Modern supply chains are too convoluted.

It's easy to see somebody doing something that you don't like and engage with them directly about how you can help them stop. Mapping an evil to a change in your spending habits that prevents it... I'm sure there are cases where that's still possible, but I don't think it's the majority of them.

I believe there are some Nigerian princes who would be willing to help you set up such a fund.

IWW is the organization that has been promoting the "One Big Union" mentality historically, and tries to work across borders.

It's not exactly a major player, though, and hasn't been for many decades now.

I'd happily earn less knowing that the people working in literal mines to support my success felt less soul destroyed.

Well yes, there are altruistic reasons too. I'd like to say the same for myself, but it's not like I've put in the effort to find out how to actually help such people--and presumably those ways exist.

But it even makes sense according to a colder, less human logic (which, regrettably, is often what matters). Like maybe I want to pressure the makers of a VR headset into letting me root it so that I can prevent it from streaming biometrics to the vendor. If I can delay the release of the latest headset versionin a way that causes the news about the delay to focus on how poorly certain workers are treated, I can later threaten to do it again if they don't give me what I want.

How much less? 10% 50% 80%?

That would depend on my absolute income and my overall situation at any given time.

Well it wouldn't be any old mine, it would be chosen in a way that deferentially impacts the operations of the company that you want to harm. Yeah, it's a negative sum game, but that's how threats usually work. Even though it might hurt their hand, people sometime punch other people if they're convinced that it'll hurt their target more than it hurts them.

Income disparity would also be part of the calculation:

1) If there are V people with W average income each willing to pay X% of their their income to support Y other people while they strike and forgo their income of Z, then maybe you get more disruption for your buck by targeting part of the supply chain in a country where wages are lower.

2) If you're looking to make your target look scummy, targeting a more direct dependency might not be the right thing. You'd want to be funding a strike that should've happened anyway if only the people could afford it, not one that isn't justified.

As for the "China does not look kindly" thing... don't get caught? We're disrupting here, of course we're going to upset people. That's the point.

Lets just say you need to understand a bit more about the difficulties about 'organizing people'

You are sounding like those businessmen who think building a facebook or programmer just requires hiring some contracted programmer for a few months.

And organizing people across national/linguistic borders is instantly 10x harder. Across long causality chains, 1000x harder. Its like trying to build an app that can run on hardware from the 90s to modern iOS to windows XP. The only company on the planet that can do that is Palantir, and they aren't very profitable.

I'm not saying I can pull it off, I'm just saying that "solidarity between these groups will never happen" is hard to justify.

We've only been doing this whole widespread-global-communication thing for a few decades, who knows what'll happen in the next few.

> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.

Global solidarity has more benefits than drawbacks. Plus strikes only last so long, then if successful the workers get better pay. But this is unlikely to lead to higher hardware costs - instead it will just be lower profits for the capital owners. The cost of raw materials is not determined by labor costs, but by global markets - owners just collect the difference between costs and prices for themselves.

> Why would tech workers pay miners to strike (Lets ignore the insane difficulty of organizing that for now)?

Why would anyone donate to help anyone else? I've contributed to strike and organized labor funds because it can help others improve and make meaningful changes in their lives.

> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.

I doubt many people are pro-miner brutality and exploitation because it might make electronics a bit cheaper.

> Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware

No they don't? For a start hardware is a miniscule cost at most software companies, but even asides from that, its not like programmers would be paid more if that cost was lower. They are paid exactly as little as the boss can get away with. If the company you or I work for literally doubled its profits we'd walk away with like a small bonus at most, maybe some small improvement in options if you're lucky enough to get those

Why not?

Language barriers. Cultural differences. Exploitative history. Low trust. Geographic distances.

I think words like Never and Any are too strong, but I don't think we'll see high enough levels of solidarity to form an international labor union for at least 30 years. We seem closer to commercial nuclear fusion power plant.s.

>I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.

I don't think you've considered the logistical difficulties of what you're describing. It's not like Panasonic has a list of all of the cobalt miners that were part of their supply chain. They themselves have no idea where their cobalt comes from, as they get it through several layers of middlemen. At the root of this supply chain are people like an man who feeds orphans, but forces them to collect peculiar-looking rocks, which he sells to the local warlord's nephew for $2 per hundred pounds. It's not exactly a place that's ripe for unionization. Even could pay somebody to strike, they really have no incentive to do so, as they'd rather earn even more money by not striking and you have no way to keep any individual person accountable.

> won't even be any solidarity between Indian and African workers. China in particular violently suppresses unions

How are these two points related?

> because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing

Oh dear, no.

In particular English speaking westerners really struggle to assign correct motivations, they. struggle to imagine different thinking processes.

Opressive governments like China and Russia has three properties

One - any act of spontaneous self organisation by the population is dangerous. In Russia the police raaids chess clubs and charities that plant trees. Why? Because fuck em, some weirdos organising by themselves, without approval, how dare they.

two - they are paranoid - what if this organisation X is actually a front, organised by my political enemy? Remember, we are deeppy cynical here, noone organises for a common good, people only organise if someone is concocting a plan for gain or profit

three - any civil motion os percieved as disorder. If you are a governor in a opr3ssive regime, and you dont want to interveine in manufacturing dispute, you will have people above you calling you, asking why do you have a mess in your region. Why cant you do your job.

So if you run a genuine charity in Russia, you get raided by police immediately -you might be seen as a threat. But if you run a fake charity, and in fact just steal all the donations, then police doesn't really care.

The throughts about 'our manufacturing is not competitive if we allow strikes' is not the top concern

It is absolutely true that China hates unions because it is form a organisation outside of the parties control. It hates organised religion, NGOs, or even apartment strata/bylaw level organisations.

However, they also do hate labour regulations. They only accepted 5 day weeks because of the WTO, and they absolutely no not enforce it. The CCP genenuiely believes that harsh working conditions and hours is critical to China's success.

So they hate the same things as Peter Thiel

Okay, but party in this case is the Party of Thiel.

It's always interesting to find out what billionaires hate once they become billionaires.

Yep. China is quite capitalist. The largest thing that's left of communism there is the absolute centralized power.

China doesn't hate labor regulations so much as rule of law simply isn't really a thing there, especially when you compare it to the west. Labor, conditions have dramatically improved in China, though it's motivated by a sense of Confucian noblesse oblige rather than regulation.

> Oh dear, no.

Maybe you had a point to make, but this condescension turned me off.

Be better than this.

The International Workers of the World beg to differ.

The Wobblies are such a joke that there was talk about taking them over around 20 years ago by just getting enough people with your similar mindset to join.

Like the 4chan raiders before the 4chan raiders.

I forget the amount of people it would have taken but it was laughably low.

The IWW is much less marginal today than it was 20 years ago.

It’s still quite small as umbrella unions go, though.

Speaking as a member, in terms of actual unionized workplaces affiliated with it, it's still extremely marginal. In terms of membership in general, it has grown considerably in the past few years, but most of the new members are those who were (further) radicalized by the contemporary US politics and seeking like-minded folk in general, not specifically to organize.

Thing is, people who try to organize generally expect some immediate gains out of it, which generally favors large established unions who "play by the rules". IWW is a strongly ideological union and has things like an explicit ban on no-strike clauses in its constitution, which makes it much harder to write a collective bargaining agreement for a workshop that employers are willing to accept. Burgerville Workers Union is a recent example of an IWW success story that broke down over this issue.

Your grasp of history is a bit weak. What do you think caused the cold war? You think the communist bloc happened on a backdrop of happy workers? Why you think Germany had and still has strong pro labor conditions? Because there was legitimate fear of German workers choosing communism

> the communist bloc happened on a backdrop of happy workers

Were workers happy in those countries? Likely no. Was it their populations that chose Communism? No. It was mainly imposed upon countries by Russian imperialism. The cold war was a power struggle, not a struggle between different peoples who chose different ideologies. You can see that in how quickly the Warsaw pact disintegrated after the Soviet Union lost their grasp on those countries, and in how much many of the ex-SU / Warsaw Pact peoples now hate Russia, except for the countries that were taken over by authoritarians.

There were many attempted communist revolutions around Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In most cases, large parts of the working class had decided that their own country was the enemy that had to be destroyed. They had no loyalty to the state, but they found natural allies in revolutionary communists in other countries.

You are talking about much later events.

Emphasis on attempted. We also had a wave of red terrorism around the world in the 70s, which led to nothing but grief. Ultimately, what improved workers' rights in the West was a democratic process. In Latin American countries you get governments swinging from populists on the left and on the right constantly. But either way, I don't see any communist revolution coming about anytime soon, even in very undeveloped countries, many of which already lived under some sort of communist dictatorship in the past, or at least live close enough to one to know it didn't do any good.

Democratic process had little to do with it.

Many of those attempted revolutions turned into civil wars. Communists won some of them. Some of the emerging communist states were defeated by foreign military interventions. It was a bloody and confusing era in European history.

The turning point was when capitalists realized that it was not possible to defeat communism by fighting the communists. They gave in and started supporting some of the goals of social democrats and moderate socialists. That deradicalized enough people that even revolutionary communists had to start working within the system.

Revolutions are pretty common around the world. The recent ones have not been motivated by communism or anything similar, but that could change. The world is unpredictable, and major changes happen once in a while.

> Were workers happy in those countries? Likely no.

But that's not the point. :)

Was there solidarity among workers internationally? Yes. Because they're in the same class in society.

> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers

If you're a US worker you have an interest in workers in other countries being well paid, so that that they do not undercut you on price.

> China in particular violently suppresses unions

True

> because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing

I suspect the main reason is that independent unions would represent a separate locus of power, which would be a threat to the Communist party's rule.

'Global revolution' was very unlikely in 1870 mostly due to communication speed/bandwidth (telegraph), was made unlikely in 1970 by CIA, United Fruit Company, and various other similar organizations with murderous leaders across the world.

However, global revolution in 2070 is almost a certainty, too many things are getting aligned, to name some:

- climate change: water wars have already started, but they are not yet visible [1] [2], once we get past 2 degrees warmer world we will have unprecedented weather all day, all night. What kind of "border patrol" can stop 3 billion 'immigrants' [3]? A murderous one, sure.

- good-enough statistical learning to automate 99.99% of jobs (from the current 3.32 billion jobs, by 2070, very hard to say what is not automate-able, but let's say around 300,000 people (1.5 Microsofts) continue to have jobs looking after the robots that make robots that make robots).

- ridiculous biotech advancements: from forgetting cancer ever existed to limb regeneration [4], it's all on the pipeline for the next 20-30 years.

- even greater financial consolidation: we will see the $10 trillion company in the next 5-7 years (probably Microsoft), meanwhile BlackRock, Vanguard, and friends will get even bigger, soaring past $100 trillion AUM in 10-12 years (currently at ~$20 trillion, BlackRock + Vanguard + State Street). Are there really any borders if everything is owned/controlled by one company?

The future, as it was in 1870, and in 1970, no matter how many veins Ronald Reagan and acolytes burst, will always be socialism or barbarism. Don't get me wrong, I 100% bet on barbarism, your species doesn't deserve socialism. Nevertheless, the global revolution will come, too little, too late, but just in time to leave this planet in the arms of a better caretaker, one without 4 billion years of history caring only for the local glucose gradient.

[1] "2021, Syria Water Crisis: Up to 40% less drinking water after 10 years of war", https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syria-wate...

[2] "April 2023, Utah’s Great Salt Lake risked disappearing. Unprecedented weather is bringing it back", https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/15/utah-great-s...

[3] "January 2023, A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/30/world/global-warming-crit...

[4] "2022, Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis", https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164

are you an alien?

Sure, yes. Stuck in a tailless primate's proteins and ion gradients, but refusing to adhere to the traditions, reflex behaviours, and societal constructs of said primate, granting for myself, sine licentia, mental freedom to think in a future where morphogenetic freedom frees one from being stuck in a tailless primate.

All the revolutions so far have failed because there is only one revolution to be made: the post-human turn of the political [1].

[1] "2017, Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory", an overview, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/147892991772043...

Basically everything that lives has the right to do so and have representation in doing so?

It's not a problem of "life", "rights", "representation". These ontic objects are deeply flawed, as can be seen in the present state of the political. Even taking it in ridicule: what is one to do, fight for the right to representation of every paramecium and amoeba?

It's more about seating the political in a realm of the inconsolable (fundamentally every political decision is the bad one), uprooting the current games of bad faith and energy poverty which have constituted the political since the first gathering of hominids. The inconsolable, which at the limit is death itself (of a self, of a society, of a territory, of a universe), is binded to an ever greater cone of care, at the same time bringing closer the post-human and the post-human increasing the cone of care. The lesser-known, brilliant nonetheless, thinker Vladimir Jankélévitch [1] has some more thoughts along these lines in 1971, L 'Imprescriptible and 1974, L'Irréversible et la nostalgie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Jank%C3%A9l%C3%A9vitc...

what is "cone of care"?

A combination of Michael Levin's cognitive light cone [1] from the "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds" paper and the Heideggerian care (Sorge) [3] [4].

[1] What are Cognitive Light Cones? (Michael Levin Interview), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnObwxJZpZc

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.7682...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Care_...

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#Car

You seem like the type of lizard who doesn't like opinions that differs from their species.

> Please stop fantasizing about 'global revolutions'.

why? we are on a prominent site in an industry that likes to speak of “changing the world.” Or is that just a euphemism for “I want to make myself rich”?

> But there will never be any solidarity between say ...

There is international solidarity between people, because they understand each other, are in the same classes or have the same ideas/ideologies.

Between far-right people, across Europe and US and Russia and everywhere.

Between workers, whatever their political taste, because they are in the same class in society.

Between white-collars all around the globe (they even meet a lot).

And on and on.

Be assured that if there's a working promise to unite a group of people worldwide, that aligns with their respective interests, whatever that is, and they have the means to coordinate, why would they refrain?

That's even the whole basic premise of the United Nations, for peace.

> If AI is to [...] This fact alone crushes any sympathy across borders.

But who will power, own and regulate AI in your opinion?

If AI is to have any impact on society, it's just a tech, it will just move the lines, people will move with them, and solidarity likewise.

> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers

You'd be surprised - dock workers across the Western World started to refuse to offload Russia-originated cargo after they invaded Ukraine. Cross-national action is difficult, but not impossible.

Obviously this is a different situation, but it shows cooperation at that scale can happen.