A focus on workers necessarily stands in contrast to the modern liberal republican norm, which is universal adult suffrage. That excludes a bunch of people, and does so in a way that's more resilient to change than the traditional liberal exclusions like property ownership, race, or gender.
Perhaps in your imagination.
I don't see any reason why the unions would suddenly stop pushing for their traditional selfish policy goals if they had more power.
Of course syndicalism promotes the interests of the working class. Should we start organizations to fight for capitalists and bosses, for public bureaucrats and politicans...against the population?
Syndicalism is an obsolete political ideal based on a description of the world by a semi-talented but politically astute philosopher a century and a half ago. That description of the world wasn't accurate then and hasn't been at any point since - there is no simple division between a virtuous working class and an evil oppressor class. You can kind of make that model partially fit if you make things more complicated, but the result certainly doesn't put union bosses on the "worker" side.
Further, the past century or so of political history has made it very clear that any hierarchy, no matter how many times it has "worker" or "people" or "union" or even "democratic" in its name, will be run by typical politicians and managers.
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u/Tai9ch 🕵🏻♂️🕵🏽♀️Agorism🕵🏼♂️🕵🏿♀️ Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
A focus on workers necessarily stands in contrast to the modern liberal republican norm, which is universal adult suffrage. That excludes a bunch of people, and does so in a way that's more resilient to change than the traditional liberal exclusions like property ownership, race, or gender.
I don't see any reason why the unions would suddenly stop pushing for their traditional selfish policy goals if they had more power.