Dancing on Labor’s Grave
The National Review bootlickers were at it again.
What the National Review declares buried is not labor itself, but a failed model of labor. The power to resist still remains in the hands and minds of workers everywhere. It is simply waiting to be rediscovered, armed with new tactics suited to the fragile and globalized economy of today.
On Labor Day 2025, the National Review published a giddy obituary for unions. The magazine was practically danced on labor’s grave, bragging that America’s workers had freely chosen to abandon solidarity for individualism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their celebration was not analysis but propaganda, a weapon of class war that exists to crush imagination and reinforce the boss’s power. It tells workers that they do not need unions because they were never truly workers if they had one. It replaces lived history with myth and insists that submission is freedom.
The decline of unions was not a natural choice made by free individuals. It was the result of a coordinated war waged by capital with the full support of the state. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 crippled the most potent tools of labor by outlawing sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts. Before this attack, a strike in one workplace could ripple through an entire industry as other workers refused to handle scab materials. This mutual aid was the root of labor power. Taft-Hartley shattered it deliberately. Afterward came right-to-work laws, hostile court rulings, and consistent sabotage by government labor boards. These cumulative blows transformed organizing into a dangerous and exhausting legal maze. Union membership declined because workers were forced to fight alone, locked into isolated battles against corporations backed by the full weight of the law. To call this decline a matter of worker preference is grotesque. It is like calling a prisoner’s compliance a choice.
To justify this lie, the National Review invents a fantasy figure, the so-called “authentic worker.” This imaginary worker loves rugged individualism and hates collective power. Anyone who acts otherwise is cast out as fraudulent. Teachers, nurses, journalists, logistics workers, and anyone who organizes are dismissed as parasites. In reality, the only monopoly in the workplace is the boss. The employer commands, disciplines, and holds the power to strip a person of their livelihood at will. This is a government-backed monopoly sustained by property law, contract enforcement, and the police state. Workers have only the fragile right to join together. Yet when they do, they are accused of being manipulated by third parties. It is a cynical trick to erase the fact that a union is simply the workers themselves seeking their personal self-interest.
This is why the eventual collapse of twentieth‑century unions should be understood less as a sudden defeat than as the unraveling of an arrangement that had been compromised from the beginning. The bureaucratic model born out of the New Deal was designed from the start to contain and pacify labor, trading away the disruptive tactics that once gave workers real power. Before the New Deal, worker struggle was far more militant and creative. Slowdowns, sick-ins, and work-to-rule tactics disrupted production without waiting for legal recognition or official permission. Bosses feared this unpredictability and demanded stability. The New Deal gave them just that. The Wagner Act offered unions legal rights, but only if they agreed to renounce disruptive tactics. It brought unions into a legal framework that pacified them. Once unions accepted the deal, they became bureaucratic machines, enforcing contracts rather than leading strikes. They were transformed into organizations that managed discontent instead of fighting it.
By the 1970s capital no longer even needed this truce. Globalization gave corporations the ability to flee abroad and financialization gave them new ways to concentrate wealth. When bosses decided the truce was over they broke it with ease, armed with Taft-Hartley and professional union-busting consultants. Unions, still clinging to electoral politics and lobbying, were helpless. They had traded away their weapons decades earlier, and when employers overturned the table, union leaders had nothing left but confusion because they had mistaken a truce for victory. The National Review now celebrates the failure of this mollified form of unionism as if the struggle has permanently concluded.
Yet this is not the end of labor. It is a chance for rebirth. The collapse of bureaucratic unionism clears the ground for workers to rediscover their real strength. The true power of the working class was never in paperwork or government mediation. It was in the shop floor itself, in the ability to halt production, withdraw cooperation, and choke the flow of profit. Modern workplaces depend not only on machines but on the tacit knowledge of workers: the tricks, shortcuts, and improvisations that keep things running despite management’s mistakes. That knowledge cannot be replaced overnight. When workers withdraw it in a coordinated way, production collapses. The just-in-time economic model is a far more fragile system making it more vulnerable than ever to disruption from even a small group of workers at a critical node.
What workers must rediscover is the art of asymmetric warfare. Declared strikes that last months and drain strike funds are less effective than strategic disruption that happens while workers remain on the job. Slowdowns, strict work-to-rule campaigns, rolling sick-ins, “good work” strikes that cut into profit margins, and leaks of damaging company financial information are the real arsenal. These tactics turn the ordinary rhythms of the workplace into weapons. They confuse bosses, deny them profit, and leave them unable to strike back without revealing their own weakness. A small crew of organized workers can cause nationwide consequences if they hold the right position in a supply chain.
The path forward cannot rely on a unionism that seeks an alliance with the National Labor Relations Board or any other state institution. These are traps designed to drain energy, waste time, and turn militant campaigns into paperwork disputes. Organizing must begin clandestinely, with workers building committees that gather intelligence on their workplace, identify choke points, and cultivate solidarity through small escalating actions. Only after this foundation of power exists should the question of formal recognition even be considered. Organization is not a static noun. It is a verb, a living process of building strength.
The National Review insistence that history is over and that capital’s victory over labor is permanent is a fantasy. As long as capitalism exists, exploitation exists. As long as exploitation exists, workers will resist. They will not resist out of abstract ideology, but because survival demands it. Struggle will mutate into new forms, just as it always has. The decline of bureaucratic unions is not the end of labor. It is the opening for something militant, democratic, and uncontrollable to emerge.
Solidarity forever.