a few more or less random thoughts:
i've been coming more and more to the conclusion that anarcho-syndicalism was conceived of at a time when it was still possible to consider working legally within the framework of capitalist democracy, but since the conflict between capitalism and democracy has been resolved in the favour of plutocracy (which conceals itself by assuming the forms and language of democracy and invokes democratic ideals at the same moment it destroys them), i'm not sure that's true any longer.
the existence of plutocracy implies open class rule with associated ideologically-driven illusions to keep us confused with the idea that we're still living in a democracy. the unions have become totally incorporated into the system of control and thwart the pursuit of workers' rights while maintaining the pretense that they aid it.
i wonder if the open class rule being developed now is simply the conditions of the social democratic class compromise being reinvented under a different guise—the pacification of the working class through the incorporation of unions into the welfare state is being replaced with the incorporation of the working class into empire through an intensification of ideological controls with the vital help of the union bureaucracies.
maybe it's no longer really feasable to strike for improvements in the rate of exploitation (as if it ever was), and the situation demands self-activity designed more or less explicitly in terms of revolutionary gymnastics and pitched to others at the level of a refusal of the reification of our labour power at the expense of the spectrum of our entire personality, ie in the manner of lukacs.
