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The original was posted on /r/thedeprogram by /u/aussiecomrade01 on 2025-09-04 04:12:14+00:00.

First of all, I want to say that I’m not trying to stir drama with this post, I’m generally a fan of Badempanada’s content, but this recent video is strange.

It is true that first-world unions tend to support imperialism. However, the solution is not to tell the proletariat in the imperial core to not join unions at all or only join ones that are “anti-imperialist”. Unions are still useful for agitation, Lenin himself argued as much. In fact, even outside the imperial core unions tend to be reactionary (Lenin said that they limited ideology to “economism”, i.e immediate goals like small reforms instead of revolution), so the focus on the first world here particularly doesn’t even make much sense. The reactionary tendency of Unions applied in Russia as well but it was still necessary for the bolsheviks to engage with them.

Sure, we as socialists should always try to push the proletariat away from reactionary unions into more progressive ones, and more importantly away from economism and incremental reforms in general, but if this attitude were held during the russian revolution it may not have happened at all.