The Propaganda of Victory
Fuck the National Review Bootlickers
The celebratory obituary for organized labor published by the National Review on Labor Day 2025 must not be engaged on its own terms. To do so, to debate its statistical manipulations or its ideological pronouncements on worker preference, is to step willingly into a prepared kill-zone. This article is not an analysis of labor’s decline, but rather an artifact of class warfare, a weaponized narrative deployed to neutralize the very possibility of collective working-class solidarity. Its function is to pathologize resistance, to frame solidarity as a predatory pathology inflicted upon an otherwise contented workforce. A correct strategic response does not refute the weapon; it dissects its mechanism to render it inert. This requires that we abandon their bourgeois frame, whereby they sublimate material antagonism into a polite ideological debate, and instead handle the text as a site for strategic unmaking. The objective is not to win a debate but to expose the operational logic of the ideological machinery it represents. The article’s power is derived from its appeal to a series of fraudulent universals: the sovereign individual, the inherent evil of monopoly, the organic wisdom of the market. Our task is to demonstrate that these are not timeless truths but highly specific, domain-restricted logical protocols whose coherence disintegrates upon contact with concrete material reality. The argument is a sophisticated exercise in ideological purification, a desperate attempt to maintain the integrity of a formal system against the onslaught of lived experience. We are here not to argue with the prison guard, but to validate the reality of the world outside the cage and recognize it as the negation of a fraudulent order. This is not an argument to be answered but a weapon to be broken.
The core of the article is a monstrous lie: that the statistical decline of union membership is a reflection of worker preference, a free choice made by enlightened individuals. This is a convenient historical amnesia as a form of class warfare. The current state of labor is not the result of a democratic referendum; it is the calculated outcome of a brutal, decades-long war waged by capital, with the active collusion of the state. This was a war fought with legal and political weapons designed to systematically disarm the working class. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was a crucial blow, a legislative bomb that shattered labor’s most powerful tactics. It outlawed the sympathy strike and the secondary boycott, the very actions that allowed workers to wield their collective power on an industrial scale. Before this act, the power of a strike had a multiplier effect; a walkout at a single, critical parts supplier could bring an entire industry to its knees, as workers up and down the supply chain refused to handle scab materials. This interconnectedness was the source of labor’s strength. Taft-Hartley was designed with intent and precision to sever collective mutual aid, to atomize the working class, and to isolate each workplace as a separate, contained battlefield. It forced workers to fight alone against national and multinational corporations. Subsequent court decisions, right-to-work laws, and the deliberate administrative sabotage of labor boards completed the encirclement, creating a legal labyrinth where organizing is a perilous and often futile exercise. NOTE: here would be a good place to point out the necessity of the large bureaucratic union. Without it unionism could not function under the legal framework that it is currently subordinated too. The decline in union density is a direct measurement of the success of this campaign of coercion. It reflects not a lack of interest, but a terrain so heavily fortified by the enemy that only the most determined and sophisticated forms of militant unionism can succeed. To call this a “choice” is like calling a prisoner’s compliance with his guard a “preference” for confinement. It is a grotesque inversion of reality, a celebration of a victory won through systematic repression.
To sustain this lie, the article manufactures fraudulent definitions of its key terms. It invents the archetype of the “authentic worker,” a rugged individualist in the private sector who intuitively grasps the supposed evils of collective action. This figure is a ghost, a pure ideological abstraction created for the sole purpose of rendering millions of actual workers illegitimate. The public sector employee, the teacher, the journalist, the academic, the logistics worker or anyone who dares to organize is excluded from the “real” workforce and recast as a parasitic or misguided outsider. Having thus purified their definition of the worker, the article proceeds to pathologize the union itself. It is not an instrument, however flawed, for the assertion of collective power, but a predatory “third party” and a “government-backed monopoly.” This is a masterstroke of projection. The true monopoly in any workplace is the absolute power of the boss, the power to command, to discipline, to set the terms of survival, and to fire at will. This managerial despotism is the quintessential government-backed monopoly, underwritten by property law, contract enforcement, and the armed protection of the police state. The power to grant or deny a person their livelihood is the ultimate monopoly, a power of life and death in a society where survival depends on a wage. The corporation enjoys a cornucopia of state privileges and protections, while workers possess only the fragile, heavily regulated right to associate. The accusation is a cynical feint, designed to distract from the raw power imbalance that defines the wage-labor relation and to frame the workers’ attempt to correct that imbalance as an act of aggression. The “third party” narrative is a further insult, an attempt to erase the workers from their own organization and portray their collective will as a political imposition.
The bitter irony is that the very form of unionism the National Review now gleefully buries was itself a product of a corporate strategy to contain a more dangerous form of labor insurgency. Before the New Deal, labor struggle was a far more chaotic and effective affair, a form of asymmetric warfare waged directly on the shop floor. The Wobblies called it “direct action on the job,” a British radical paper called it “staying in on strike.” It consisted of slowdowns, sick-ins, working to rule, and the conscious withdrawal of efficiency forms of sabotage that crippled the boss’s profits while workers continued to collect their wages. This was a strategy that mercilessly exploited the enemy’s weak points, recognizing that management’s control over the production process was an illusion sustained only by the willing cooperation of the workforce. The corporate backers of the New Deal, particularly those in capital-intensive industries with long planning horizons and complex technical processes, were terrified of this unpredictability. They begged for a system of enforceable labor contracts that could guarantee them social peace. The Wagner Act was the answer, a scheme of capital designed to pacify the workforce. It offered legal recognition and a formal collective bargaining process in exchange for labor’s total disarmament on the shop floor. The state offered to referee the fight, but only if workers agreed to come out from behind the rocks, put on bright red targets, and march in parade-ground formation. Union bureaucracies were created, and their primary function under this new order was to enforce the contract on their own members, becoming the new foremen tasked with suppressing the very wildcat actions that had made labor powerful in the first place.
This New Deal labor accord was a truce, not a surrender by capital. And when the bosses decided, around 1970, that the truce had outlived its usefulness, they broke it without hesitation. The rise of globalization and financialization gave them an escape route; capital could now flee the country in search of cheaper, more pliable labor forces. The corporate offensive began in earnest, armed with a new generation of union-busting consultants and the full legal arsenal provided by Taft-Hartley. But the official labor movement, trapped in the gilded cage it had helped to build, forgot how to fight a real war. It had traded its most effective weapons for a seat at the table, and when the bosses kicked the table over, the union leaders could only look on in confusion. Their entire strategy was predicated on a national political arrangement that capital had simply abandoned. They had become managers of discontent, not leaders of a struggle. They continued to pour their members’ dues into lobbying and electoral politics, believing they could win back through supplication what they had lost in open conflict. They stuck to the rules of a game that was explicitly rigged to ensure their defeat. They continued to wear their bright red targets and march in neat lines, and they got massacred in every engagement. The National Review is not just celebrating the decline of this pacified form of union membership; it is dancing on the graves of an army that was convinced to disarm itself and then methodically slaughtered. It is a celebration of a successful, long-term corporate strategy of pacification followed by annihilation.
Therefore, the decay and delegitimization of this old, ossified form of business unionism is not the tragedy its enemies proclaim it to be. It is not the end of the labor movement; it is a strategic opportunity to be seized. It is the collapse of a failed model, a model that chose collaboration over conflict and bureaucracy over rank-and-file power. This collapse clears the ground for the emergence of a more agile, more potent, and more dangerous organizational model, one that returns to the source of workers’ real power. The primary reason for the effectiveness of a strike was never the forcible exclusion of scabs, a right-wing libertarian fantasy. It was always the immense transaction costs involved in hiring and training replacement workers, and the catastrophic loss of productivity entailed in the disruption of human capital, institutional memory, and tacit knowledge. An experienced, coordinated workforce is a complex living system that cannot be easily unplugged and replaced. Tacit knowledge is the collective intelligence of the shop floor the thousands of informal workarounds, adjustments, and acts of cooperation that make the system function despite management’s flawed plans. It is the difference between the instruction manual and the humming of the machine. This collective intelligence is a massive, unpriced asset that belongs entirely to the workers, and its withdrawal is devastating. That power is the power to bring the entire process of production to a grinding halt through collective inaction or deliberate inefficiency. This power has been dormant, not destroyed. It lies waiting in every workplace, ready to be rediscovered by a new generation that has no illusions about partnerships with capital or the benevolence of the state. The task is not to mourn the dead, but to learn from their mistakes and reclaim the weapons they were forced to lay down.
We must relearn the art of asymmetric warfare, the tactics of fighting on our own terms. Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss’s profits while continuing to collect their wages, they can cripple the enterprise without giving some scab the opportunity to take their job. The meticulously organized slowdown, where every task is performed with painstaking, infuriating slowness, is a weapon of immense power. It is a silent, coordinated act of collective will that drives managers to madness because they cannot pinpoint who to punish. The work-to-rule, where every single safety and procedural rule in the book is followed to the letter, is a form of malicious compliance that can bring the most efficient operation to a standstill, using the boss’s own regulations as a weapon against him. The rolling sick-in that creates chaos in scheduling, the “good work” strike where service workers provide such excellent service at the boss’s expense that it bankrupts him, the open-mouth sabotage of leaking embarrassing company information to the press, are all the tactics of an intelligent, disciplined and merciless struggle. They mercilessly exploit the enemy’s weak points by seizing control over the rhythm and process of the workplace itself. In today’s hyper-optimized, just-in-time economy, with its fragile supply chains and nonexistent inventories, these forms of disruption have the potential to be more devastating than they have ever been. A small group of organized workers at a key logistical node can create cascading failures throughout an entire system. It is time to abandon the costly and ineffective ritual of the declared strike and embrace the full spectrum of disruptive power that lies waiting on the job.
This requires a fundamental reorientation of strategy, a complete break with the failed practices of the past. The path forward is to abandon the legalistic swamp of the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB process is a trap, a bureaucratic black hole designed to absorb energy, bleed momentum, and transform a militant campaign into a years-long legal dispute adjudicated by the enemy’s agents. The real fight is not in the courtroom or the hearing room; it is on the shop floor, the warehouse floor, and in the server room. The first step is not to collect signatures on authorization cards, but to clandestinely build an organizing committee. This committee must be a fighting unit, a secret army inside the walls. Its job is to map the labor process, to conduct the intelligence gathering necessary to identify the chokepoints and vulnerabilities. It must assess the social networks of the workplace to identify natural leaders and potential collaborators. It must then begin running a series of small actions, escalating tests of strength, that build solidarity, test discipline, and give workers a taste of their own power. The goal is not a paper charter that professionalizes defeat, but the construction of a durable, rank-and-file-controlled organization that functions as a shadow power structure that can act with speed and discipline when the moment is right, entirely bypassing the legalistic death trap of the state-sanctioned union. This is the only path to reclaiming what was lost and building a movement that can actually win. The statistics the National Review celebrates will only be reversed when workers stop asking for permission and start taking power.
[! Note] Even on its own chosen terrain of selective data, the piece engages in deliberate cherry-picking. It fastidiously ignores the sectors where unionization is actually rising, such as digital media, higher education, and parts of the service industry. It ignores the demonstrable fact that union density can and does increase when the legal and political balance of forces shifts, however temporarily. Most importantly, it ignores the material spillover effects of successful collective action, where a militant strike in one company can effectively reset wage and benefit standards for non-union competitors who are forced to raise their own standards to prevent their workforce from organizing. The editorial’s analysis is not just flawed; it is strategically dishonest, designed to produce a single, predetermined conclusion. The correct analytical approach refuses the trap of its abstract universal (“Americans don’t like unions”) and does not waste energy substituting a mirror-image slogan. The negative materialist approach asks a ruthlessly practical question: under what specific, observable material conditions do concrete individuals find it rational and advantageous to organize? The answer has nothing to do with ideology or national character. Workers organize when their wages stagnate while productivity, profits, and rents soar; when their schedules are algorithmically generated chaos; when discipline is arbitrary and humiliating; and when they can identify small, winnable targets for direct action. This is why the most dynamic organizing today is not happening in national headquarters but store by store, warehouse by warehouse, shift by shift. It is a direct, pragmatic response to immediate material pain.
[! Note] From this critique, a practical, actionable synthesis emerges. It is not a grand strategy for revolution but a series of immediate, tactical protocols grounded in the material conditions of the present. The first protocol is to abandon the fetish of formal recognition and build power before seeking paperwork. The initial step is always the formation of worker committees, clandestine Unions of Egoists organized around specific, immediate demands. The work is to map the social and technical relations of the workplace, identify key points of leverage, and secure concrete commitments from a supermajority of the crew. Only after this material foundation of solidarity and power has been built should the tactical question of formal unionization, minority unionism, or coordinated direct action be considered. The organization must be a weapon forged for a specific fight, not a bureaucratic institution to be joined. This is the principle of fostering horizontal complementarity, of weaving together diverse skills and social positions into a resilient, adaptive network capable of collective action. This approach treats organization as a verb, a continuous process of building capacity, rather than a noun representing a static, external entity.
[! Note] The editorial declares that history is over, that the conflict has been settled in favor of capital. This is a classic teleological fantasy, the desperate wish of a victor to believe the war is permanently won. Historical materialism, in its most rigorous and unsentimental form, tells us the opposite. There is no end to history. Capital is a system of relentless, expansionary logic; it will continue to centralize power and commodify every aspect of existence. In response, individuals will continue to find reasons to resist, not out of ideological conviction, but out of the sheer necessity of survival and the egoistic drive for autonomy. The forms of this resistance will constantly mutate, adapting to changes in the technological and political composition of the system itself. The task is not to mourn the decline of the lumbering, bureaucratic unionism of the twentieth century, nor is it to celebrate this decline with the gleeful ignorance of our enemies. The task is to supersede it, to discard the failed tactics of the past and to develop new organizational weapons adequate to the brutal realities of the present: militant, democratic, adaptable, and rooted in the concrete material conditions of the workplace. The balance of forces is not a theoretical concept; it is a material reality. Where that balance shifts through disciplined, intelligent, and ruthless action, the statistics will eventually follow.
[! Note] The editorial, in its celebration of closure, reveals its ultimate function. It is a superstructural command to cease struggling, an ideological anesthetic designed to numb the pain of exploitation and make submission seem like a rational, natural choice. It seeks to lock its readers into a conceptual prison where the only available options are the ones presented by the ruling class. The framework of negative materialism provides the tools to break out of this prison. It rejects the false binary of victory and defeat, optimism and pessimism, and instead embraces the open-ended, non-final nature of the struggle. The goal is not to reach a distant utopia but to engage in a continuous, practical process of expanding immediate, tangible capacities: more oxygen, more calories, more fresh water, more encrypted bandwidth, more communal solidarity. It is the process of building resilient networks of mutual aid and defense that can withstand the inevitable shocks of a collapsing system. The editorial is a map to a dead end. Our task is to throw away that map and begin the difficult work of drawing our own, a tactical chart of the real material world, a world of conflict, contingency, and the permanent possibility of creating pockets of autonomy in the ruins of the old order.