last vestiges of institutional socialism were broken through vigorous union-busting over the last few decades.
please. have you ever worked for a union? the dinosaurs at the top broke themselves. I hopped between SEIU and UFCW for a few years doing internal and field rep, though it didn't take more than one to realize how nepotistic and backwards they are at the top.
I kid you not, my first time working at UFCW, I was an intern at the international in DC, and I was one of two interns who wasn't a relative of someone in management, the other five were. And jesus christ, everyone at the top's head is still back in the 1960s in terms of strategy. I don't worry about corporation's union-busting away, because the big unions would've done it to themselves anyway.
I would say LiUna is the ONLY union in the last few decades which comes close to having its head on its shoulders as to how the workplace and communication is different in the 21st century.
The development of more and more highways over the last 50 years, the globalization of industries such that certain countries are now mainly knowledge and service economies, exponential use of automation - all of which are (whether you like their implementation or not) fundamentially inevitable - these have all been seismic shifts in the nature of the workplace.
Unions have not adapted while the ground shifts underneath them. And farther left on the right, socialism and new marxism hasn't really either. Except a re-emphasis on "international worker solidarity," or worse, spiraling into postmodern naval-gazing or its half-hearted cousin: adorno and his miserable band of cultural-critics.
But the radical left blames the propaganda, blames the "system" weighing them down, all their problems are everyone else's problems. This does not convince anyone because it does not fundamentally respond to the two problems that the radical left has been unable to answer to: 1. that after 160+ years, there is still no cogent, overwhelmingly shared answer of how a non-central-planning form of communism or socialism would practically work. 2. that central planning does not work.
There are a couple shining (probably better to call them declining, though) stars on the left: CEPR, EPI, Richard Wolff.