The Scandinavian social democracies which most American leftists so admire are highly exploitative as well – they just mask it better. Most of them rely heavily on State subsidized oil industries in the North Sea and heavy coal mining in the mountains, and many of them are deeply involved in African neocolonialism.
Unions, too, are almost always authoritarian and implicitly supportive of the status n quo – Chris Smalls meeting Biden signals that the new wave of unionization in the United States will play ball with the Democratic Party and not seek any truly radical change.
Recommended reading: Paul Mattick, Marx & Keynes: The Limits Of The Mixed Economy.
On Soviet State capitalism:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/ch20.htm
On unions:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1975/lebel.htm
Long before it became an obvious fact, it was clear to Pannekoek that the old labour movement was a historical product of the rising capitalism, bound to this particular stage of development, wherein the question of revolution and socialism could only be raised but not answered. At such a time, these labour organisations were destined to degenerate into tools of capitalism. Socialism depended now on the rise of a new labour movement, able to create the preconditions for proletarian self-rule. If the workers were to take over the production process and determine the distribution of their products, they needed, even prior to this revolutionary transformation, to function and to organise themselves in an entirely different manner than in the past. In both forms of organisation, the parliamentary parties and the trade unions, the workers delegate their power to special groups of leaders and organisers, who are supposed to act on their behalf, but actually only foster their own separate interests. The workers lost control over their own organisations. But even if this had not been so, these organisations were totally unfit to serve as instruments for either the proletarian revolution or the construction of socialism. Parliamentary parties were a product of bourgeois society, an expression of the political democracy of laissez-faire capitalism and only meaningful within this context. They have no place in socialism, which is supposed to end political strife by ending special interests and social class relations. As there is no room, nor need for political parties in a socialist society, their future superfluity already explains their ineffectiveness as an instrument of revolutionary change. Trade unions, too, have no functions in socialism, which does not know of wage relations and which organises its production not with regard to specific trades and industries but in accordance with social needs. As the emancipation of the working class can only be brought about by the workers themselves, they have to organize themselves as a class, in order to take and to hold power. Regarding present conditions, however, which are not as yet of a revolutionary nature, the council form of working-class activities does not directly betray its wider-reaching revolutionary potentialities, but is a mere expression of the accomplished integration of the traditional labour organisations into the capitalist system. Parliamentary parties and trade unions lose their limited effectiveness when it is no longer possible to combine an improvement of workers’ living standards with a progressive expansion of capital.