Power exists when recognized
Laws exist when enforced
You can "have power" in title or constitution but if you aren't recognized by others when you try to enforce the paper that gives you power then it's meaningless and nothing happens.
This is how the State works but at also how power and structures in general work. Someone can write down that you "are in charge of X and can fire people" but if you try to fire someone and get just keep coming to work and getting paid then you have no power
Understanding this, the different between de jure and de facto, can allow this dynamic to be unversed. You can refuse to recognize power. Will that accomplish anything? Depends. But if one day you all decided not to listen to your boss; including the bureaucrats and accountant managing revenue and payroll; well then he wouldn't be the boss anymore.
The boss "owns" the means of production in so much as there is, maybe, a piece of paper ascribing it to be his property. But that relation is also a construct. If there are police who will enforce this ownership (such as by considering fired employees to be trespasser and arresting them) then the ownership is real. Unionizing often works because when nobody will work the relation of "ownership" is the only weight the boss still has, he is helpless before those who actual act out production
If police as agents of property owners were abolished and replaced by some kind of community safety system like many that have been proposed (there's a Rolling Stones article about it if you're interested) then there would be nobody to enforce ownership and the workers, if they agreed to act together, could fire the boss and run the company collectively. In this matter I could see why loyalty to a unionizing effort would matter.
However prior to some such act of power inversal, the boss has been collecting some of the salary himself. Even if the accountants refuse to comply with his directives in how to manage company funds, he still owns a sum of the construct Money, which could use to hire private security to combat unionizers. Unless a stronger force could enforce a law against this, there is nothing stopping the boss from using hired thugs.
So how to counter the use of hired thugs? I get stuck here a lot when I think through this. "Have bigger guns" isn't a scalable solution and becomes a problem if you are trying to create a new more peaceful society (in the sense of positive peace not just negative piece.) Peace enforced through threat of violence is a risky endeavor.
Presently, unions often wield the power of Bad Press. To control the narrative will affect the company's business under capitalism. But only to an extent
@shel bad press was THE ONLY reason my employer eventually recognized our union. They were steadfastly against it until the articles started rolling in.
@srol mmhmmm!! When the dining common workers unionized at my alma mater it was also bad press that did it. The image and narrative of the progressive college was affected strongly by being seen as anti-union
@shel Yeah it only really works if the company or organization has a conscience to be shamed.
@srol and it's more damaging to some companies than others to get bad press. Apple's bad press about their factory conditions didn't really change anything because it didn't affect their sales and the violence was invisible/abroad. While it can make a different locally, at a larger scale the individual choices of consumers starts to lose weight.
In that sense the ability to unionize is linked to the values held by society and culture. Which is connected to media; which shapes narratives and influences thoughts. But will media change the economy? No. It is just another tool, like laws, by which to selectively exert power and affect the recognition of power. I don't believe media representation will bring a change to capitalism. It's still matters though. You want the media on your side.
Anyway I'm done talking out my ass about what I think about when I consider power and worker uprising. I'm a pragmatist so I just think about the logistics usually.
And I didn't even get into how settler colonialism plays into it all :V
Oh also someone I know (just goes by Emmanuel... not very googable) wrote this really interesting dissertation about how IRL laws are enforced by recognition and enforcement but in modern society we also have Computer Law which has the ability to enforce itself. There's nothing I can do about Halcy owning the server I'm on. Cyberspace is controlled much more directly than irl. With Open Source we're able to have more control over the laws imposed on us by software but not all infrastructure is
And so if Halcy banned my account, sure, I could make my own instance or something thanks to decentralization, but there's no such thing as seizing Mastodon.social from gargron or anything like that. It requires migration and building your own stuff (or forking) and that requires the irl resources to finance running a server etc. and in a centralized system like Twitter there is no users seizing control. Twitter algorithms control media and you can't seize how they enforce that like in meatspace
I mean there's hacking I guess but I don't know enough about that.
If anyone is interested I could try to track down his dissertation. He's a bit hidden behind all sorts of cryto shit it'd take some doing but I know it's out there and it's really good
@shel I think economic power is the other strand. if labour and community organisations can generate and pool resources (like strike funds), they can prolong struggles against capital and reduce the participation risk for individual workers/activists
@aeonofdiscord absolutely! Money is a very important construct heavily enforced by society. It is very much something that can be used as force to enforce recognition of power. You're spot on there.
@shel police work for the owners, and if they ever stopped, they'd simply hire new ones
@YOLO_STALIN I mean, yes, but that depends on the idea that the ones who stopped would turn over power just because they were "fired." They're the ones who have the guns. Police generally are power respecting bastards so it doesn't seem likely that we'd get some kind of pro-worker police coup but the system functions such that like... I mean they could... it's just unlikely.
So what if the police refused to enforce ownership? Ownership ceases to exist and the employees could fire the boss. Would the police refuse to enforce ownership?
It then begs the question what if the police were "forbidden" to intervene in unionizing or enforcement of trespassing. Would the police find other ways to do it? If a power was recognized to fire them if they did, then would they not? What if there were no police, and they were replaced with another safety system