Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Unions. From my recent experience, unions can't help you keep remote work they way they work here today. I work(ed) at a unionized German company and when management call everyone back to the office after the Covid vaccination was done, it wasn't protested by the unions and everyone sowed up at the office without protest, and remote work was kept as "in case of emergency" perk you can get every now and then if you g…
In the orthodox Marxism still practiced by some Trotskyites, the factory worker is seen as a uniquely revolutionary class because of (1) the discipline that comes from factory work and (2) the factory as itself as a nexus of revolution: workers can organize there and ultimately seize control of the means of production. A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communic…
Workers can try to seize the means of production, but without state support, the police or the military will come shoot and arrest you, like it happened many times in recent history. You need populace and political support for such movements, otherwise you're a terrorist/criminal.
>A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
Knowledge workers have the balance of power in their favor, despite not having ways to physically seize the means of production, but as soon as the individual's knowledge becomes obsolete, commoditized or easily found elsewhere for cheaper, then those workers are shit out of luck if they don't keep up and adapt to a new hot thing.
>Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Unfortunately, we can't have a well functioning society where everyone is a remote worker. Someone still needs to fix your toilet, teach your kids, drive the train, build new houses, manufacture the stuf you use in your daily life like food and medical supplies.
Sure, you can have all your stuff manufactured offshore and import it, until your manufacturing trading partner has the upper hand and gives you the middle finger because he needs that stuff more urgently or he found a richer buyer, and now you're left wihtout stuff and with a bunch of laptop workers who can't manufacture the stuff you need because that knowledge is not open-source and you since lost all that knowledge over decades of deindustrialization when you gave it to your manufacturing trading partner in exchange for cheap stuff and access to his domestic market.