THE TRADE UNIONS: PILLARS OF CAPITALISM
Introduction
Naturally, our positions have
evolved as a result of the insights that we gained from our theoretical
efforts. Yet our adherence to what used to be called the basic 'class lines'
remains unchanged: we still believe in the necessity and possibility of a
global hum an community without oppression and exploitation, we still think
that it can only be realized by the struggle of the working class for its class
interests; we still believe this struggle must be self organized, that it must
reject the leadership of parties and other specialists who want to substitute
themselves for the class as a whole, yet we continue to insist on the vital
role of the organized political minority in the development of revolutionary
class consciousness; we continue to fight nationalism and any other ideology
that opposes the need for the international working class to unite; we keep
opposing all illusions that capitalism can be reformed or that socialism can be
realized on something less than a global scale; we still see capitalism today
as state capitalist, in which private capital, the state and civil society have
merged and in which ail social institutions, including the trade unions, are
integrated.
Yet we used to base these positions,
in particular on trade unionism, parliamentarism and 'national liberation', on
a version of the concept of capitalist decadence which we have come to reject.
Both our factual analysis of the history of capitalism and our theoretical
investigation of the roots of capitalist crisis convinced us that this concept,
in which 'decadence' means a halt or stagnation of the development of the
productive forces, and therefore an objective impossibility for capitalism to
grant reforms, improve workers' living standards or create new national
development, is deeply mistaken. That means either that the concept of
decadence itself is useless, or that it has to be redefined. In our opinion,
the concept of decadence remains a valid analytical tool because something
really has fundamentally changed in capitalism since the early 20th century.
This change has not halted the growth of the productive forces --at times quite
the opposite, since the threat of a falling profit-rate and cutthroat
competition are powerful incentives for technological development-- but the
productivity unleashed in decadence is also a productivity of death. In the
20th century, the fundamental contradictions of capital reached a point of
maturation on a global scale that placed the choice between global war and
global revolution on the agenda. Despite the manifest development of the
capacity to produce use-values, to meet economic needs, with each economic
cycle, capital's contradictions re-emerged on a larger scale, creating deep
global crises and making capitalism's survival dependent on ever greater
destruction. No longer was there any harmony of interests possible between
exploiters and exploited, no longer did it make any sense for the proletariat
to support any faction of the ruling class or any part of its system. We have
developed a new concept of capitalist decadence in several texts in IP, even as
we recognize that it needs to be deepened further. We also realize that it is
not the catchall explanation that answers ail questions. Other historical
changes, in particular the transition from the formal to the real domination of
capital, have to be factored in to understand the challenges and stakes of the
class struggle today.
Not surprisingly, the same issues
came up in the discussions of the internationalist discussion network. ln the
Francophone wing of the network, the discussion also started with a critique of
a concept of decadence that ignores the real developments of capitalism and
moved to a re-examination of the union-question and other positions that for
many participants were linked to the theory of decadence. In the Anglophone
wing, the discussion started with a more practical question: is the traditional
left communist position "outside and against" the unions not too
rigid? Does it not cut off revolutionaries from the mass of the workers? That
discussion led, on the one hand, to a reaffirmation of the
counter-revolutionary role of the unions, supported by a lot of factual
arguments, some from the participants own experience, and, on the other hand,
the claim by some that, since the pressure of capitalism on the working class
is permanent, there is also a need for permanent forms of resistance to it.
IP participated in the
discussion in both wings of the network. What follows are some of our
interventions in the discussion in the Anglophone wing. It might have
been preferable to also publish interventions by other participants in order to
Tender the richness of the debate and reflect the nuances of the various
positions. We don't have the space or the time to do this and have to refer
readers to the archives of the network. However useful it would be to present
the debate as a whole, our purpose here is more limited: to explain why we think
that our positions on the 'class lines', and on the unions in particular,
remain valid, even though some of the arguments on which they were based are
not.
Internationalist Perspective
HOW THE
UNIONS BECAME ENEMIES OF THE WORKING CLASS
Most of us agree that the unions are
an integral part of the capitalist system. Not just the corrupt ones and those
with a heavy bureaucratic apparatus but also those who profess a belief in
"grass roots democracy" or even in "revolution". The
arguments given for that position have been mostly empirical. Indeed, time and
time again, the unions have screwed the workers, contained and defanged their
struggle, have spread capitalist ideology in the working class and acted as
capital's police on the shop floor. But empirical arguments are not enough.
Indeed, on the basis of past experience alone, one could very well conclude
that global revolution is impossible, as Paul wrote. Some have argued that it's
the union's function within the capitalist economy -to manage the sale of
labour-power which inevitably tics it to the system and hence opposes it to the
class whose fundamental interests are irreconcilable with those of that system.
That is true but it's Hot sufficient either. One could argue that as long as
the goals of the struggle don't go beyond obtaining better wages and working
conditions, or preventing their deterioration, and as long as those goals are
achievable within capitalism, the irreconcilability is Hot immediate and the
existence of permanent institutions to negotiate a better price for variable
capital remains in the interests of the workers. ln short one could argue, as
does Adam (Buick), that despite the empirical evidence and despite the
integration of the unions in the structure of the capitalist economy, the
existing unions are bad but unionism is good.
Moreover, despite the widespread
disillusion, man y workers still sec the unions as their (imperfect)
organisations, and sometimes the most combative workers are active in them. And
sometimes capitalists fight the unions and try to get rid of them. When the y
attack a union and the workers rise up to defend "their"
organisation, should revolutionaries who understand the real role of the union
tell them Hot to wage that fight, even though the attack is clearly meant to
defeat the workers and have a free hand to impose more exploitation? What to do
when the workers most willing to fight are shop stewards and others who
ardently defend the unions - not the leadership but the organisation? Should we
simply call upon workers to leave the unions? And what do we offer as
alternative, Hot just in limes of open struggle but also when the conditions
for collective struggle aren't ripe while the pressure from capital continues?
Is the 'outside and against' directive more than an empty slogan when the only
meetings where workers gather are those organised by the unions?
To answer those and many other
questions pertaining to the practical aspects of class struggle and the defense
of workers' immediate interests, the question why unions are not just
counter-revolutionary but against the working class in their daily practice,
must be answered first.
The answer is not that obvious.
After all, it is a logical reaction of workers, who are utterly powerless as
individuals towards their employers who seek to exploit them as much as
possible, to band together in permanent organisations to defend the price of
their labour power. The first unions were clearly created by the working class
even though many did bear the corporatist imprints of the guilds (professional
organisations from the pre-capitalist era). Their existence as permanent
organisations was a necessity, not only because of the permanency of capitalist
pressure, but also because of the need of permanent preparation for
confrontations with the capitalists, confrontations which often took the form
of wars of attrition which the workers were doomed to lose without this
preparation (the build-up of strike funds etc). Likewise, the growth of unions
into bigger organisations, operating on a national scale, reflected the need of
workers to increase their power by extending their class solidarity. So the
growth of the unions reflected and stimulated class consciousness. Capitalists
feared and loathed them and fought them bitterly.
Yet very soon, the permanency of
these large organisations posed a problem. The class struggle goes through ups
and clowns which reflect the contradictory tendencies to which the workers, as
an exploited class, are subjected. The conditions of exploitation push the
workers to fight collectively and thereby to assert itself as a class with
interests separate and opposed to those of capital; but those same conditions
also create competition among workers, atomisation, alienation, passivity,
receptiveness to the ideology of the dominant class. Those two tendencies do
not neutralize each other but give the class struggle a very non-linear
character, with sudden advances and retreats, moments of rising class
consciousness and stretches of 'social peace', as one or the other of those
tendencies dominate. During those periods of no collective struggle, when
atomisation and alienation prevail, these big permanent organisations cannot
express what isn't there, a class collectively fighting. It does not mean they
immediately become bourgeois but they inevitably acquire an autonomy from the
class they are supposed to represent. As autonomous institutions they
inevitably develop hierarchical, authoritarian attitudes and relations and come
to have interests which are distinct from those of the class as a whole. Thus the
source of conflict of interests between the working class and the unions is
already potentially present in the permanence of unions as social institutions.
I write 'potentially' because from
this does not yet follow that these institutions must side with capital against
the workers. For this to happen, these institutions must first become part of
capital, absorbed into the social fabric weaved by the law of value. This did
not happen immediately because the extension of the law of value throughout
society was a slow, gradual process. In the early stages of this process, the
domination of capital over society was only 'formal'. The work process itself
was at first not Jet intrinsically capitalist, capitalism only squeezed as much
surplus value as possible from it by making the working clay as long as
possible and keeping the wages as measly as possible. It look a long time for a
specifically capitalist method of production (based on machinism, which
reversed the relation worker-technology: the tool was an extension of the
worker's hand but now the worker became an appendage of the machine) to develop
and become dominant. The giant leaps in productivity which technology-based
production unleashed created mass production and set the stage for capitalism
to transform the totality of society in its own image, which meant that the law
of value came to determine social relations not just in the sphere of
production but also in distribution, education, entertainment, culture, media
and every other aspect of human life.
But before that process (called the
transition to real domination of capital) amassed critical weight, there
remained a large space within society that was not yet penetrated by the law of
value. Therein, not only expressions of pre-capitalist classes survived but
organisations of the fledging working class too could maintain a relative
autonomy. Unions were not the only permanent workers organisations that
flourished in that space: there were workers' cooperatives, mutual aid
societies, political mass parties, cultural organisations, newspapers, etc.
that were genuine expressions of the working class. The modest size of the
bourgeois state apparatus also reflected the merely formal control of capital
over society. The fact that the state's policy towards the unions was largely
repressive shows that capital had not Jet developed the means to organically
integrate them; the unions were still by and large standing outside the state.
As the real domination of capital
progressed and the complexity, technification and interwovenness of the
capitalist economy developed, the state gradually fused with the economy and
its tentacles spread over civil society. l1's striking how this transformation
of the economy and the integration of the unions into the structure if
capitalist society went hand in hand, in particular towards the end of the 1
9th and the beginning of the 20th century.
The test of that integration came
when the interests of capitalism and those of the working class (and humanity)
became diametrically opposed as never before. What was at issue was not the
price of variable capital but its survival or destruction. In the first world
war, many millions of proletarians were slaughtered and it happened with the
active collaboration of the unions. This epochal event signalled a new paradigm
in which both crisis and war meant something different than before: they became
both catastrophic and global in nature as well as essential to the continuation
of capitalist accumulation.
Today more than ever, there cannot
exist any large permanent institution outside of the fabric of capital. That is
true not just for unions but also for churches, political parties, cultural
institutions and so on. The market either absorbs them, accords them a
specialized function within its overall operating structure, a niche according
to what they can do for the valorisation of capital, or marginalizes them,
makes them disappear. When the class struggle heats ur, the market shifts, a
demand is created for a company of management of 'human resources' that has a
more radical market image, which is quickly filled, either by a new union or by
a radicalisation of the existing ones. Neither represents a gain for the
working class. Today, there are no longer any progressive factions of capital.
The unions' interests are inextricably bound to those of capital, to those of
the nation. The logic of capital makes them complicit in trying to impose the
worst possible fate on the working class. ln the revolutionary struggle, which
is a defensive struggle, the working class will have to take on the entire
capitalist machinery, including the unions.
It is true that this does not mean
that every act or every word of the unions are opposed to the immediate
interests of the working class. The productivity-increases made possible by the
progress of capital's real domination allowed capital to accord improvements of
the living standards and to increase exploitation ( increase the portion of the
labor clay that is unpaid) at the same time, at least in period of expansion.
It doesn't like to do this, of course, since every wage gain is a profit loss,
but over lime it came 10 realize that this can be in its own interests. The
main reason is that the production process under real domination, with its huge
assembly lines and increased specialisation and thus interdependency, became
more vulnerable to interruptions, to class struggle. That was a powerful incentive,
especially in the post-world war two period, to grant better wages and to give
the unions a bigger say in the management of the economy.
The unions have their own particular
interests. As companies that manage the sale and the smooth exploitation of
variable capital, they compete among themselves and have a market image to
defend, both in regard to the workers the y seek to represent and in regard to
the enterprises with whom they seek to negotiate. Their credibility is their
most valuable asset and if ifs necessary to protect it, they can sometimes
drive a hard bargain with the buyers of labour power. The most intelligent
capitalists realize that unions can only fulfil their capitalist function if
they have some credibility as defenders of the workers and must do what they
have to do to maintain it.
The international waves of class
struggle in the '60's and °70's which repeatedly broke through the dykes of
unionism and did great damage to capitalist profits and to the myth of unions
as defenders of the working class, was a powerful stimulant to the
restructuring of the capitalist economy that followed it. The 'post-Fordism' in
which it resulted, with its increased automation, the computerization of labour,
the decentralisation of production, the explosion of outsourcing,
subcontracting and temp work, the increased mobility of capital (vastly
expanding the use layoffs and closings, and the threat thereof, as social
weapons) decreased the vulnerability of production to industrial action
considerably. By decreasing that vulnerability, capital also decreased its
dependence on the unions. This allowed for more anti-unionism among
capitalists, and led to a marked increase of 'union-busting'. But this also
helped the unions to shore up. their credibility in the eyes of the workers
somewhat, because the enemy of your enemy can seem to be your friend.
The unions resisted the post-Fordist
trend, in part to maintain their credibility in the eyes of the workers and in
part because it was and is a threat to their own power. But since the trend
reflected not a mere policy choice but the direction in which capitalism, of
which they are a part, was going, their resistance was doomed to be
ineffective. The alternative of the unions to this trend is conservative, to
resist changes in capitalism. As this is impossible, they end up almost
invariably defending 'capitalism lite', layouts, but less layoffs than the
bosses are demanding, wage cuts, but with a percentage and a half shaved off.
But ,they need a culprit, a scapegoat for the worker's anger, and since the y
are tied to national capital, the scapegoat is usually foreign competition
(foreign workers really). That makes the unions the most ardent defenders of
protectionism. As an economic recipe that is plain stupid and sometimes really
annoying to other factions of capital, but politically it is very useful to
capital because it makes them work tirelessly to spread the nationalist poison
into the working class.
Sander
THE
ROLE OF UNIONS TODAY: THE DISCIPLINE AND CONTROL OF THE WORKING CLASS
It seems to me that the discussion
of unions that is taking place on the Anglophone list is, in fact, two
separate, though related discussions. One concerns the role of unions today:
are they enemies of the working class; an integral part of the
politico-economic and ideological apparatus of capital. The other concerns the
problem of how revolutionaries are to forge links with the working class,
involve themselves in its struggles, become active factors in the battles waged
by workers. These two questions should not be confused. Even if we conclude, as
I believe we must, that unions are today formidable obstacles to the unfolding
of the class struggle, institutions of the class enemy, the issue of how
revolutionaries are to forge links with the working class must be confronted.
At the same time, the need to forge links with the working class must not lead
revolutionaries to conclude that -- in some fashion or other -- they must work
within the unions, because that is where the workers are. Our conclusion as to
the role of unions today, should not be driven by the need – understandable
though it is -- to physically engage in class struggle. Rather, the mode of our
intervention in the class struggle should – in large part – be shaped by the
conclusions we draw as to the role that unions play in the present epoch of the
real domination of capital.
One more point before I turn to the
issue of the role of unions today: I am deliberately not using the language of
the class “nature” of unions, or speaking of their “essence.” That is because I
believe that the role of determinate institutions, such as unions, is shaped by
historical development, and is not reducible to a fixed nature or essence.
Marxism is a genetic or genealogical theory; it analyzes and explains the
historical role of determinate institutions, the historical trajectory of
social relations – with a view to revolutionary intervention. Thus, in the case
of unions, for example, the focus must be on the role they play in the
historical unfolding of the class struggle, and their relation to the
reproduction of the dominant social relations; a role that changes as
capitalism undergoes its transition from the formal to the real subsumption of
labour to capital. While such a genealogy of the unions is necessary, this text
can do no more than indicate the broad outlines of the development of unions
over the past century; a more thorough genetic account remains to be written.
If we turn back to the first decade
of the twentieth century, the social landscape included two distinct types of
unions – each of them organs of the working class, instruments of its struggle.
There were the trade unions, exemplified by the AFL in the
Over the course of the first three
decades of the twentieth century, both types of unions were incorporated into
the politico-economic and ideological apparatus of capital – a process
integrally linked to the transition from the formal to the real domination of
capital (see the text of Sander, “How The Unions Became Our Enemies,” for a
more through analysis of this process). This transformation of the unions did
not occur from one day to the next (with the outbreak of World War I), but
filled an era that spanned several decades. In the case of revolutionary
syndicalism, the IWW, for example, played a vital role in the
However, by the end of the 1920’s
(with perhaps a last gasp in Spain with the decision of the CNT to support the
Republic in the civil war in Spain in 1936) syndicalist unions either became
revolutionary political organizations, as opposed to mass unions (this
was the case with the KAUD in Germany in the early 1930’s with its few hundred
members), or became mass industrial unions, like the French CGT, in which case
they were incorporated into the apparatus of capital (in the case of the CGT,
as the organ of the Stalinist party). The quintessential industrial union of
this epoch, the CIO, in the US, the model for industrial unions in the Fordist
era of capitalism, was from its very inception an organ of capital – and this
despite the bitter opposition of a part of the capitalist class to the
unionization of the industrial working class that the organizing struggles of
the CIO produced. If Henry Ford and the steel barons originally fought the CIO,
the
The result was the emergence of
industrial unions whose role was the discipline and control of
the working class. That is the reality of unions in the present epoch, whether
their origins are to be found in the craft unions of the AFL, the revolutionary
syndicalist unions of the CGT, or the mass industrial unions of the CIO; a
reality that manifests itself in a multiplicity of ways, economic, political,
and ideological.
The need to discipline and control
the working class has of course always been a problem for capital. In the epoch
of its formal domination, capital could rely on traditional means of
ideological control, such as the church and patriarchal social relations,
together with the brutal violence of its Pinkerton’s and company police to
control its labor force. In the epoch of its real domination, with the dramatic
shift in the organic composition of capital attendant on the growing weight of
technology in the productive process, more sophisticated means of discipline
and control have become necessary. External forces (Church or goons) cannot be
depended on to assure the needed level of discipline and control; instead, internal
means, the way the worker is “constructed” as a subject, ideologically interpellated
(subjectivated by capital), become the veritable basis for capital to
discipline and control the working class. The unions have become vital factors
in this process, the arm of capital within the physical ranks of the working
class. This can be seen in the economic, political, juridical, and ideological
domains. Economically, unions have become an important factor in the management
of capitalist enterprises (co-management, for example, in Germany, where union
representatives sit on the boards of the largest corporations), and important
shareholders in the firms that employ “their” members (in Sweden, for example,
the unions are among the biggest shareholders in the largest companies, thanks
to legally mandated investments by the union pension funds). Politically, the
unions, through the political parties of the left in which they play a
preponderant role, have entered the government in most liberal-democratic
regimes, thereby shaping policy, especially with respect to labour issues
(imposition of austerity on the working class during periods of economic
crisis; mobilization for the army during war). Juridically, the labour
contract, negotiated and enforced by the unions, has become the guarantee of
“labour peace” for its duration, incorporating the unions directly into the
legal apparatus of the capitalist state. Ideologically, the unions have become
a privileged vehicle for the subjectivation of the worker as citizen of
the democratic state, loyal to its constitution, devoted to the nation.
Indeed, the unions, as institutions, are congenitally tied to the nation, and
to nationalism, the two most formidable obstacles to the class struggle.
In an epoch where the perpetuation
of the capitalist mode of production, threatens the whole of the human species
with catastrophe, the unions must be judged on the basis of their incorporation
into the apparatus of capital, the role they play in the discipline and control
of the working class, not on the basis of their capacity to deliver a better
contract to a diminishing portion of the global working class – and that in
exchange for the “labor peace” that permits capital to continue to ravage the
planet. In an epoch when only autonomous class struggle, with the
potential for extension, constitutes the basis for the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalism, the unions must be recognized for what they have
historically – though now irretrievably – become: organs of capital, enemies of
the working class. Without clarity on this point, it seems to me that
revolutionaries have nothing to offer workers by way of intervention in the
class struggle – and therein lies the enormous importance of the present
discussion of the role of unions.
Mac Intosh
THE
FORMAL AND REAL DOMINATION OF CAPITAL AND THE UNIONS
In a series of posts that are part
of an ongoing discussion on the role of unions today, we have linked our claim
that unions in the present epoch constitute agents of capital, powerful weapons
of the capitalist class and state, to the transition from the formal to the
real domination of capital. Adam (Buick) has responded by asserting that,
according to Marx, the transition from formal to the real domination of capital
is simply “the replacement of manufacture by machinofacture,” that this process
was already complete by the 1840’s (long before we claim that the unions were
transformed into agents of capital), and that in applying the terms formal and
real domination of capital to domains of society other than the economy, we are
speaking of a different phenomenon than the one he (and Marx) are referring to:
the phenomenon of “culture,” which pertains to a very different transition than
that from the formal to the real domination of capital. We believe that Adam is
mistaken on all these points, and that his mistakes have profound implications
for how revolutionaries understand the role of unions today, and for their
intervention in the class struggle. Let us explain.
When, in the manuscripts of Capital,
Marx speaks of the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor
to capital (the transition from a virtually total reliance on the extraction of
absolute surplus-value to an increasing reliance on the extraction of relative
surplus-value in the English textile mills of the 1850’s-1860’s), he is
providing a theory of a process that was only at its very inception in
historical actuality. What Marx articulated was a tendency in the production of
capital that would only seize hold of the actuality of capitalist production on
a broad scale over many decades; a tendency that would only come to fruition
globally in the course of the twentieth century (even as the extraction of
absolute surplus-value would never completely disappear while capital reigned
supreme, and under determinate conditions would even experience a renewal).
Marx’s theorization constitutes a genealogy of capital, a theory of the
immanent tendencies of the production of capital, not an account of a process
that was already complete. This distinction between theory and historical
actuality, between the production of theory by Marx (or by Marxists) and the
production of capital in historical actuality, is crucial to the task at hand.
The latter cannot be reduced to the former, as Adam seems to do, so that, for
him, Marx’s theoretical account of the transition from the formal to the real
subsumption of labor to capital becomes tantamount to the actualization of that
tendency in historical time and space.
That what Marx designated as the
transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor to capital (or the
transition from the formal to the real domination of capital) was only at its
very inception in historical actuality in the mid-nineteenth century – however
prescient was Marx’s theorization of that phenomenon – is clear to economic
historians (bourgeois or Marxist). A few citations should suffice. Thus,
according to A.E. Musson: “Even as late as 1870 about half the total steam
horsepower in manufacturing was in textiles …. In many trades power-driven
mechanization had as yet made comparatively little impact. The great majority
of industrial workers in 1851 and perhaps in 1871 were not in large-scale
factory industry but were still craftsmen in small workshops. The massive
application of steam power did not occur until after 1870.” (Musson,
“Technological Change and manpower,” History 67, p.240) R. Cameron, in
his Economic History of the World, points out that “Agriculture was
still the largest employer of labour until as late as 1921, with domestic
service second. The textile industries accounted [in 1851] for less than 8
percent of the labor force. Blacksmiths outnumbered workers in the primary iron
industry; shoemakers were more numerous than coalminers.” (p.226) Here both
Musson and Cameron are speaking of
Beyond the very limited extent to
which the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital had
progressed at the time that Marx published volume I (1867), it is necessary to
add that Marx’s analysis in that volume was focused on the production of
capital, ignoring its circulation, as well as the process of accumulation in
its totality. Yet despite what Adam seems to think, the transition from formal
to real domination was never conceived by Marx to be limited to industrial
production alone. Indeed, if one studies all the manuscripts for Capital,
including the crucial 1861-1863 manuscript, only recently published and
translated in it entirety, as well as the Grundrisse (the first draft of
Capital, 1857), and the "Results of the Immediate Process of
Production" (perhaps not completed until 1866), it is clear that Marx
envisaged the transition from formal to real domination to encompass the whole
of the economy, and not just industrial production.
To limit the phenomenon of the real
domination of capital to industrial production, or even to the whole of the
economy, constitutes a denial of the depth and scope of the transformation of
the human and natural world wrought by capitalism and the operation of the law
of value. We are asserting that, beyond capital’s real domination of the
economy (the historical actualization of which shaped the twentieth century,
and is still not complete even today), it is no less important for Marxists to
provide a theoretical account, and genealogical analysis, of the transition
from the formal to the real domination of capital in all the other domains of
human existence (politics, law, art, science, ideology (not conceived simply as
false consciousness), the symbolic realm, and the very “construction of the
human subject. While Marx provides important theoretical insights in these
domains, this is a task that has only begun to be addressed by revolutionaries.
Adam, however, relegates all that to the “cultural” domain, implicitly
reproducing the disastrous base/superstructure model of the economic
determinist version of Marxism; the version of Marxism that came to dominate
the Second International, as well as the Third and Fourth, and from which
Marxist revolutionaries must extricate themselves under pain of falling into
theoretical sterility and political irrelevance.
For us, the real domination of
capital entails not just the penetration of the law of value and machinism into
every facet of the cycle of the accumulation process, but also into the once
autonomous realms of culture, civil, society, and private life. Indeed, this is
the same transformation that has occurred in the economic domain, but which
does not cease there. The development of capital necessitates its domination
and control not just of the economy, but of all of society. It makes no sense
to separate these several aspects of the same process, as does Adam. Indeed, it
is the reconstitution of the productive and industrial process by machinism that
constitutes the veritable basis for the penetration of the law of value into
the politico-cultural domains. Indeed, this latter is the continuation of the
processes of quantification, instrumentalization, commodification, abstraction,
and the universal reign of the exchange mechanism and the market, that was
first instantiated by the triumph of machinism in the industrial and productive
process. And the seizure of the political, cultural, and symbolic realms has
become a lynchpin for the real domination of capital, the site for the
extension of the domination and control by capital over the totality of human
life. These extra-economic facets of working class existence, no less than the
point of production in the narrow sense of the word, becomes the locus of the
class battles of the present epoch. It is here that the link between the real
domination of capital and the unions must be forged.
It is not surprising that Adam wants
to separate these processes and limit the transition to real domination to just
industry (and if we were to take his assertion that that transition had been
completed by the 1840’s seriously, that would mean basically only the English
textile industry) and reduce the analysis of the wider implications to a mere
“cultural critique” that has nothing to do with the transformation of
capitalism at its industrial core. The understanding of the transition to real
domination as a much wider and deeper phenomenon leads to conclusions he cannot
accept: that the penetration in depth of the law of value establishes an
intrinsic capitalist modus operandi not only in industry, but in all sectors of
the economy, and that means everywhere, since it also integrates all sectors
that were standing outside of it, into the economy. In other words, it means that
the unions, mass parties and all other institutions that once enjoyed a
relative autonomy in a civil society that was only formally controlled by
capital, have all become, irreversibly, part and parcel of capitalism.
Adam seems to believe that unions and
probably also electoral politics, are a terrain that is neither intrinsically
capitalist or proletarian, part of a civil society that can be used by both. If
that were the case, obviously revolutionaries would have to be in those arenas
and try to use them for the defense of the workers’ immediate interests as well
as for revolutionary propaganda. That is a variation upon a main theme of
capitalist propaganda: that “democracy” creates a “marketplace of ideas” in
which all viewpoints can freely compete. The part that is true in that claim is
that “civil society” is indeed a market. It operates according to market
mechanisms, i.e. the law of value, which determines how it does and does not
function. Like every market, it is part of a wider web, the global market, the
fabric of capitalist society. So when the unions scheme against the workers,
they do not betray their class, they act in self-defense, as an intrinsic part
of capital. There is a terrain in which both the working class and the
capitalist class are acting. But it is not the unions or electoral politics, it
is the working class struggle in which capital acts through the unions.
But what about the claim that the
workers need permanent mass organizations to help stave off the downward
pressure on wages, since that pressure is permanent too? That claim rests on
the dubious assumption that unions really do help stave off the downward
pressure on wages. They may do so when their credibility is at stake but in the
end they are part of the capitalist system that they help to manage, and when
capital needs wage cuts, they are the ones that coat the bitter bill and make
the workers swallow it. They are the ones who dress up our defeats as
victories.
But what about the good unions,
those yet to be founded? The claim that we need unions, old or new, to defend
our working conditions outside of periods of open collective struggle assumes
that it is possible for workers to defend themselves without open struggle. We
think that is a big mistake. When there is no open struggle and no threat
thereof, there is nothing that stops capital from imposing what it wants. And
when there is no danger of open struggle, because workers are scared or
demoralized or confused or for whatever reason, that is certainly not the time at
which the unions feel a great need to defend them. It is only when the workers
want to struggle, that the unions adopt a combative camouflage.
But what about the money collected
by the unions, isn’t that an essential weapon to win strikes? Naturally, that
is the workers’ money, coming out of their dues, they have a right to it. But
that doesn’t make the unions “their” organizations, any more than the insurance
companies that provide them with health care are really theirs. Besides, as
Eric has already pointed out, money is not the decisive factor in struggles
today. If a struggle becomes a battle of attrition, going on and on thanks to
the union’s deep pockets, it almost always ends in a crushing defeat. The
capitalist wins because he can count on the solidarity of his class, on the
state, its courts, its police, on bank loans, on whatever it takes. It is not
the puny sums the workers can obtain to avoid starvation while striking that
can decide the outcome of the struggle. It is because their struggle shows
their determination and is pushed by the active participation of the mass of
workers, and because they are reaching out to other workers, because their
struggle has a real echo in the class and implicitly or explicitly carries the
seed of extension, that workers sometimes can resist that downward pressure on
their wages and working conditions. That kind of struggle is not be waged by
unions, by permanent mass organizations, integrated into the politico-juridical
system of the capitalist state. It is waged despite them, by the workers
collectively. The self-organisation of the workers struggle manifests itself in
general assemblies, in elected and revocable strike committees. Such organs of
the working class either dissolve when that struggle ceases, to be reconstituted
again when the struggle erupts, or become the embryos of workers’ councils if
and when the class struggle assumes a revolutionary form. There is no other
way. It would be nice to have permanent institutions that contain that pressure
on wages in our place. But it would be foolish to think that we have them or
could have them, just because that would be nice. Indeed, the historical
trajectory of the past century provides abundant evidence, theoretical and
empirical, to show that unions have become an integral part of the real
domination of capital.
Mac Intosh and Sander
IT'S
NOT JUST A FEW BAD APPLES
Adam (Buick) points to the
"faults" committed by existing unions: corporatism, class
collaboration, being undemocratic, hierarchical, bureaucratic. I don't believe
that these are "faults," which implies that they are transient and/or
correctible, but rather integral to the role that unions play under the
conditions of the real domination of capital and its political forms. The hope
that unions can become democratic, internationalist, militant, is one of the
bases for enrolling workers in the struggle to reform the unions. But the
characteristics to which Adam points are not transient or incidental features
of the union form today, but necessary features, linked to the economic,
political, juridical, and ideological structure of capitalism. That structure
is not the same as the one prevailing when Marx wrote Capital -- though Capital
provides the basis for understanding the change in the structure of capitalism
that has taken place, and therewith the genealogy of unions as organs of
capital.
Adam insists that unions today can
"resist downward pressures and arbitrary actions from employers." By
contrast, it seems to me that the primary role of unions today is to insure
that capital and the state will be able to discipline and control the working
class. The issue revolves around which of these two roles, overall, defines the
unions in the present epoch.
Adam says that he is in a union,
"not as a revolutionary," but as "a worker selling my
labour-power." In fact, most workers are in unions because they are
legally obliged to be: union or closed shops in liberal-democratic regimes; the
legal obligation of ail workers to belong to the union in Stalinist or fascist
regimes in the past. The fact of legally obligatory unionization should in
itself tell us volumes about the bond that exists in the present epoch between
unions and the state. That said, the distinction between what we do as
revolutionaries and what we do as workers who must sell our labor-power is,
indeed, crucial. Our involvement in political activity, indicates that we are
acting -- in this respect -- as revolutionaries. And it is as revolutionaries
that we need to evaluate the unions: not arc the y revolutionary organs, but
are they or are they not obstacles to revolution; are they or are they not a
barrier to the kind of class struggle that contains the potential to escape the
control of capital, to develop in the direction of revolution. If unions are
such a barrier, such an obstacle, as I believe, then they must be recognized as
enemies of the working class.
Does that mean the by virtue of the
fact that a worker is in the union he/she is an agent of capital? Not at ail!
Because I shout for a cop when I am being mugged does not make me an agent of
capital. Because I take my unemployment check when l am out of work does not
make me an agent of capital. And because I take my union benefits does not make
me an agent of capital. However, that does not change the fact that the police,
unemployment compensation, and unions, are agencies of capital; the means by
which the operation of the law of values is imposed upon the social world.
What then, of the class struggle?
History, I believe, has demonstrated that in the present epoch it is through
elected and revocable strike committees, the embryo of workers councils, that
the class struggle can be prosecuted -whether this ultimately leads to an
insurrectionary situation or just to a vigorous defense against the imposition
of savage austerity While such strike committees are not inherently
revolutionary, they do possess that potential.
And because they disappear when the
conditions of struggle that gave birth to
them are no longer present, they cannot be incorporated into the
apparatus of discipline and control that the operation of the law of value
requires.
Finally, the last thing that one can
say about unions today is that they are "irrelevant," as Adam claims
revolutionaries often say. They are, rather, essential to the operation of the
law of value, necessary to the
domination of the working class by capital. My claim is not that unions are
irrelevant, but that they arc among the most formidable weapons that capital
has in its arsenal to use against the working class.
Mac Intosh
INTERVENING
'OUTSIDE AND AGAINST' THE UNIONS
It would be a huge mistake for
revolutionaries to fight for more democratic, more radical or more
revolutionary unions or to join solidarity campaigns for unions under threat
such as the ILWU in the US (yes to solidarity with the dockworkers of course,
but let's not blur that line). If we have the opportunity to intervene in open,
collective struggles, we should not focus primarily on the theoretical
denunciation of the unions, but on how to make the struggle as effective as
possible. Despite the unions overwhelming advantage in propagandistic means
etc, we have the advantage that there is no contradiction between what is
needed to make a struggle for immediate workers' interests more powerful and
what is needed to fight capitalism, while the unions are boxed in the
contradiction that they must pretend to fight something of which they are a
part. The strength of a workers struggle clearly depends on the number of
workers that join it and on their active participation. The more workers do
away with all the divisions imposed on them (between union and non union
workers, workers of different trades and qualifications, workers of different
races, men and women, immigrant and non-immigrant workers, ‘blue collar' and
‘white collar', workers of different companies, sectors, nations...) and the
more they take the struggle into their own hands instead of passively relying
on leaders and specialists, the more firepower a struggle acquires. It's not necessary
that workers understand the true nature of unions or the need to fight the
capitalist system for them to sec the need to organize their struggle
effectively, the need for general meetings in which they are not just
'informed' by union leaders but in which they discuss collectively on how to
rush the struggle forward, the need for strike committees whose members are
elected and revocable by ail instead of manned by union specialists, the need
for roving pickets, mass delegations to other workplaces, aggressive
demonstrations and collective self defense that don't fold in the face of court
orders and other legalistic attacks, instead of the appeals to the media and
the Democrats and the left wing of capital and the petitions, boycotts of
products, media-campaigns and other ineffective forms of pseudo-struggle the
unions propose.
Real solidarity rather than
theoretical insight is where such tactics and organizational forms originate.
The expression of real solidarity in struggle implicitly opens the possibility
of revolution, because the revolution is nothing else but solidarity taken to
its logical conclusion and that is what unions are trying to block. There's
another angle from which to look at this. One can describe the
post-revolutionary society in glowing terms and exalt how 'democratic' it will
be and so on. But the organizational structures of power in that society,
whether called workers councils or any other name, will not fall from the sky
after capitalism is defeated. They cannot exist if they are not created in the
struggle and they cannot arise in the revolutionary phase of the struggle if
they are not being developed in the lab of the struggle for more narrow,
immediate interests that precedes it. Despite the interruptions, cons and
flows, it is one process of the proletariat asserting itself as an autonomous
class, freeing itself from its shackles, of which unionism is one of the
heaviest and most insidious.
As for the question of how to deal
with the unions when there is no open struggle, I’m not sure what the problem
is. Revolutionaries cannot do much more in their workplaces at such times than
having individual discussions, in which of course it's important to be honest
and forthright. Whether they want to be a member of the union so they can use
the services it provides or not, is not an issue.
At a meeting Loren talked about what
to say in response to the position that revolutionaries ought to agitate in the
unions "because that's where the workers arc'", and said that
revolutionaries ought to de fend unionization in some cases. The example he
gave was of a small chic ken processing plant in
All this harks back to the post of
Paul that launched the union-discussion, in which he criticized the
"outside and against the unions” position as too schematic It indeed risks
becoming so, if the 'outside' aspect is taken too literally. If it is really
true that there is an opportunity for a revolutionary to "agitate"
within a union, I suppose he/she would be foolish not to take it. But I assume
'agitating” means to discuss with other workers and defend, honestly and as
clearly as possible, one's views on the future that capitalism has in store, on
the need for workers struggle and ifs obstacles, including the unions. Few, if
any unions will allow that kind of agitation. Furtherrnore, outside the open
struggle or the build-up to it it's simply not true that the union-apparatus is
the place 'where the workers are", and if its true before and during a
struggle (to the degree that union holds meetings, etc), it is because it fears
and wants to contain the self-activity of the workers. So that makes it ail the
more important to state clearly what the union's role really is. In intervening
in the strike of the fire-fighters in the
How can we make it stronger? That
would also imply pointing out the real function of the union and warning
against its manipulations. As indeed left communists in the
"However, the unions stand
between the workers anger and the bosses and act as a buffer. The current
militancy in the base of the unions forces the leaders to be radical, to keep
the support of, and so control over, the rank and file. The unofficial action
in 20
The FBU leadership has to make
compromising deals and postpone action when negotiating with the government in
order to maintain their own role as mediator, and therefore their own union
jobs and the whole existence of the union. If workers just look action
themselves the legitimacy and existence of the unions would be threatened. They
play the game with the bosses, as much as try to 'lead' the workers. This has
led to the recuperation of workers' dissatisfaction into union-boss deals over
and over again in recent years, or 'selling out'. The basic contradiction of
exploitation is thug smoothed out and 'managed' by the unions, but they also
act as a focal point for struggle. This contradictory position can lead to the
recuperation of anger into smoother exploitation or to wildcat strikes and
workers' self- organization."
Adam's question, "Do you really
think a national strike could be organized by some ad hoc unofficial strike
committee?" seems to imply that organizing a strike on a national scale is
beyond the capacity of the working class’s self-activity; that for this it
needs the help and protection of the union apparatus. But if the idea of
workers organizing a strike autonomously on a national scale stretches
credibility, who came up with that wild and crazy idea of workers organizing
their own revolution? Won't it need a state or party organizing it in their
place? And, by the way, we never said that a mass strike can or should be
organized by a committee, whether union or non-union. It is in the workers'
immediate interests as wel1 as in the fundamental interests of humankind that a
mass strike is waged and organized by the mass of workers. The reason that the
unions are an obstacle to this, is not just their authoritarianism but that
they are part and parcel of capitalism. For Adam, they are not and neither are
they "organs of the working class". They are simply "instruments
that the workers can sometimes use (...) and that revolutionaries can
join". We would have to repeat what we have stated in earlier posts on
this list to explain why, in the era of capital's real domination, there are no
longer such instruments, large permanent institutions that retain an autonomy
from capital, that the workers can use for their own class interests.
They don't exist anymore. But that
does not mean that membership of the unions cannot have, in certain instances,
specifies benefits for workers. The unions provide certain services, like other
institutions do, and help en force regulations. It is in their interest, as
"companies" which grow through the expansion of their membership, to
tic certain benefits to that membership n provided those are no threat to
capital, to the wider fabric of which they are an integral part. The capitalist
class is a unified class only when its class interests are threatened by a
common danger. Otherwise, it is divided by competition. Small capitals compete
against big capitals and the only way they can obtain the same rate of profit
is by imposing lower wages and worse working conditions. lt is then in the
larger capitals' interests that collective bargaining agreements are imposed on
the sector as a whole. So it's often the smaller capitals who are the most
anti-union.
The unions have their own specifies
interests. As companies, their capacity to grow or even just to survive depends
on their market image towards capitalists, as smooth managers of exploitation,
but also on their market image towards workers, whose membership they need.
This position makes the practice of the unions sometimes seemingly
contradictory. I am not saying that there are no instances in which workers can
obtain something from the union's need to maintain its buffer position even
when this requires it to “radicalize". But I’m saying that revolutionaries
who understand the function of unions always should wan against any illusions
in them, any "faith" or confidence that they can be used as organs of
anti-capitalist struggle.
Because when it counts, they are
always on the class enemy's side. To come back to Loren's chicken-processing
plant in
The trouble is that these illusions
can only be shattered by experience. But that is no reason for revolutionaries
to hold their tongues. Our articulation of what may be only a vague suspicion,
can only help to clarify what experience will teach.
Sander
[From Internationalist
Perspective # 41 (Spring 2003)]