Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
It is the Communists who are flexible and pragmatic. It is the Communists who can free the market. It is capitalists who shoot themselves in the foot over pride in 'principles' and 'ideals', a great irony when no country on this earth today is 'purely' capitalist. They misunderstand Marxism, which is the doctrine that capitalism itself is revolutionary as it develops into its own opposite, that communism and capitalism are two stages of the same course of development.
The state that one-sidedly 'threw away' the baggage of communism was the USSR, and we all know how that went. Any China scholar could tell you that China was already implementing market reforms before Deng, and that their controlled transition, managed by a strong party-state, is the grounds for their success. China is still a country operated on the basis of five-year plans. China is still a country governed by a Communist party adhering to democratic centralism. China is still a country where the state owns all land. China is still a country where capital is not allowed to usurp the public interest. And the judge of that is not any logical syllogism of 'definitions' of capitalism or socialism that exist in your head but do not premise the actual world. It is outcomes, observations of material reality. In this, the reforms of Deng and the continued path of Xi are simply the highest synthesis of communism, in the Chinese context. They are the most faithful to Marxism, which has never preached any kind of static dogma, especially as it relates to economic policy.
I appreciate your frankness, and I am not an idealist who is proposing that the market 'should' be this way or that way for purely moral reasons. But the topic at hand is unionization. An aspect you neglect in this post is that another way to raise wages (or 'total compensation') is via collective bargaining. If tech workers really do care, and have a collective interest, and are able to overcome countervailing forces, this is an inevitability. No longer will the ball be purely in your court as an employer to solely determine the value of labor.
They may have a moral sentiment and so too do employees - but the market is the ultimate condition for any moral sentiment to survive. You have no company, you no longer 'satisfy' customers. I am not referring to a moral idea, but a cold reality of business.
The aim of the worker is not usually to kill the firm, I assumed that went without saying, as that would ultimately 'minimize' their wages. But the reason to work in a society where one needs money is to receive a wage, as maximal as possible. These incentives will always contradict whatever real but necessary need there is for 'genuine interest' or 'social tendencies'. Constantly businesses attempt to harness this value, (which is the source of revolutions in productivity beyond the daily rote labor) through trying to present the relationship as anything but transactional. But as their interest in this value is ultimately a monetary interest, what the worker returns to them will be done on a transactional basis. An inhuman force rules over all.
The primary power of a union is the capacity to collectively bargain. It doesn't matter if you personally can't think of anything that you'd like to use that power for. If unionization is right for tech, others will. In the abstract debate it will always be abstract answers. Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers.
And yet you still turn a profit at the end of the day, i.e., money that's not going to 'overhead'. Let's not kid ourselves. Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
This would be all well and good except that society is not actually constructed by neutral arbiters outside the world, as much as certain parties have their pretensions to that -- they are created by the interactions of interested parties. In other words: class struggle.
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
Criticize to what end? Overturning the entire order? Questioning the legitimacy of the state? That is not allowed. But the ideological diversity within the CPC is broader than US Democrats and Republicans combined. And if you actually had a chance to challenge the real legitimacy of the US state, you would quickly find all your rights disappearing as well. No state actually tolerates that. The US just allows a facade of 'discourse'.