Labor Needs Socialists and Socialists Need Labor

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Jack Ben, contributing Editor-Kale Brooks, and I'm here as always with Vivek Chipper, a Professor of Sociology at NYU, in the Editor of Catalyst, the Journal of Theory and Strategy. How's it going Vivek? - Going very well, Kale. Good to be here. Good to see you. - So because this episode is coming out pretty close to Labor Day, I was hoping we could talk about the relationship between socialist politics and unions. - Yeah, you know, we've danced around the issue a lot, but I don't think we've ever addressed it directly, and Labor Day is a great time to do it. - Of course, if you're a long time confronting capitalism listener, then you've probably already heard us talk about the importance of the labor movement and labor history. But today, I was hoping we could focus more on why unions are unique organizations and how socialists should engage with them. - Yeah, I think it's an absolutely central question because as we've said so many times in the show, unions are the lifeblood of the socialist movement. An organizing labor is the one essential pre-condition for a revitalized left. So going into that in more depth, I think is definitely called for. - So starting broad, in terms of density, power, and industrial distribution, what's the state of American unions in 2026? - Really awful. The term union density is a technical term that refers to the proportion of the labor force that is actually members, do's paying members of unions. So when we talk about union density, but we're asking is how much of the working class is actually organized? And that number is at a historic low right now. The overall union density is at around I think 11%, but that masks the fact that in the parts of the economy where labor's power really matters, which is in the private sector, which is where profits and value are created, there it's at a historic low, it's close to actually 6%, which just to be clear is lower than it was when unions were illegal in the United States. Why is it overall higher? It's because public sector unions have managed not only survive, but actually to grow somewhat since the 1980s, public sector union density that is membership in unions for people who work at state, federal or local governments, that's at around 33% I think, or in the low 30s, low to mid 30s. That's what's keeping the overall union density in the double digits, otherwise it would be even worse than it is now. So in terms of just raw coverage of the union movement, it is terrible. Naturally, that also means that the vast majority of the labor force is entirely at the mercy of their employers. They have no way of bargaining effectively for themselves around wages, around work conditions, around health and safety issues, around pensions. They're left the tender mercies of their employers, who of course main interest is not in the workers' welfare, but in profits, which typically come at the expense of those workers. So right now in the United States, the union movement is basically flat on its back, and despite calls and efforts for years on the part of the left, and many union leaders to revitalize it, the trend continues to be downward. - So if workers on their own are at the employers' mercy, by virtue of the class society of capitalism, what is it about unions that allow them to fight back? - Well, what unions do is change the conditions on which employees bargain with their employers around the conditions of work. By that, I mean the wages that they get, the hours that they work, the pace, the intensity, is the union that allows them to bargain better. Now the question is why? Here, the classical economists from Adam Smith, down to Ricardo, down to Marx, were pretty clear. The reason is that in that bargain, there is a basic inequality of power, and that inequality of power comes from the fact that one party is already in possession of money in wealth and all kinds of resources. That's the employer. The other party is desperate because it lacks all of those things. As we've said many times on the show, what makes somebody a worker is not that they choose to work, but they have to work. Why do they have to work? Well, it's because they don't have those things that could enable them to get economic independence. They don't have land of their own. They don't own their own means of production. They don't have their own factories or their own restaurants or own hotels. All they have is their capacity to work. So they have to go out and use that capacity to work in order to get the money that they need to survive. Now, without the job, without having some kind of employment, most workers can't last even a couple of weeks much less a month. So when they are out looking for a job, they come to the employer. The employer offers them some kind of conditions, some kind of wage, some kind of terms for employment. They're not in a position to say no. Employers, on the other hand, are in a position to say no to the employee. Why? Because there's a lot of people looking for work, way more people looking for work than there are jobs. So if one employee doesn't take the conditions that the employer is offering them, they can just close the door and wait for the next person to come who'll be as or even more desperate. This makes it look like the basic problem is a numbers one. That there's not very many employers and there's a lot of employees. Now, there's sections of neoclassical economics that have started to realize that there's a bargaining asymmetry. But they focus on the numbers. But they say is that because there are a few employers to have what's called monopsony power. And that monopsony power means that there's the only buyers of a good. It's the opposite of a monopoly, right? Monopoly is when there's only one seller of a good. Monopsied is when there's only one buyer of a good. So the idea is because there's not that many employers and there are lots of employees, employees end up having to form a queue outside the employer's door and employers are in a position to pick and choose as they want. The implication is that if you had way more employers, it would wipe out that bargaining inequality between the worker and the employer. Now, there's an element of that, that's definitely true. When there's lots of jobs going around, when there's lots of firms hiring, it is true that workers can get better terms for themselves. But it masks an underlying reality, which is that the inequality in bargaining isn't really driven by the difference in numbers. It's driven by the difference in wealth. And one way to get your mind around that is imagine that there's only one employer and one employee on earth. Now, each one needs the other. Each one has the ability to say no, and you could think that each one is kind of a monopsiness, right? Each one needs the other. But Adam Smith acknowledged and recognized this. Even if there was only one worker and one capitalist, one employer, they would still be an inequality. And the reason is this, as Smith said, if they come to a standoff and they can't come to an agreement, and neither one is able to utilize the other services, the worker will always give in first. And the simple reason is if the capitalist doesn't have the labor that he needs, he still has his assets and his wealth to fall back on, which he can use to buy his food, to pay for his rent, to buy whatever necessities he needs. Push comes to shop, he can liquidate his assets and get the money for it. - And he has more time on his side. - Because of this, he has more time on his side. That's the point. He has more time on his side, because if he cannot find workers, he can still survive, as Adam Smith said, for months, maybe even a year. A worker, on the other hand, can't survive more than a week or two, a month at the most. That means it's not a numbers game. It is what Marx recognized. It is an inequality that stems from the property relations, from the fact that one group of people owns assets and the key means of production and the other one does not. So this means the inequality in bargaining cannot be changed as long as you're in capitalism. As long as there's one group of people who has way more wealth and assets, than the group of people who coming to bargain with them, the inequality in assets will show up as an inequality in bargaining power. And that has all the consequences we know about. In fact, if you could summarize the evils of capitalism in one sentence, this is it. Most everything else we know about capitalism flows from this. The inequality in assets generates the inequality in power, which then generates inequality in income, and all the other consequences of power and balances that we see in society today. So then what does the union do specifically? So what the union does is, it makes it easier for the workers to hold out when they're bargaining with the employer. Remember, what makes the worker vulnerable to his employer is that A, he's easily replaced and B, he doesn't have the means to survive a long standoff, like when there's a strike or something like that or when he's unemployed or something like that. So if he refuses to take a job, it means he's gonna be out on the street desperate. What unions do is they change this situation a bit. First of all, they make it more costly and harder for the employers to fire employees and to replace them. It's easy to fire one person and to replace them with somebody standing outside the door. But if you fire 100 people, now you have to find 100 replacements. If you fire a thousand people, you have to find a thousand replacements and so on. So unions, because they enabled. workers to bargain with their employers collectively, not as individuals, force the employer to make concessions, which they wouldn't otherwise make, because they make it costly for the employers to be jerks, essentially. The second thing that they do is that they enable workers to survive when there's a stand-off. Unions have what's called strike funds. They sometimes provide insurance to workers. They have health benefits, things like that. So when a worker is without a job, being a member of the union means that union resources can tide them over in between jobs, and when they're unemployed. That reduces the fear of unemployment, in which in turn reduces the fear of standing up to the boss. So notice, there are two things that make workers weak, right? One is that they're desperate for jobs, and even when there's just one worker versus one employer, they can't last without that job. Unions change both of these equations. They don't neutralize the imbalance, what they do is they reduce it, and that makes a big difference in workers' lives. So the function of a union for workers is that they reduce their weakness vis-a-vis their employer. They don't get rid of it. They don't erase it, but they do reduce it. So in other words, what the union is doing is helping workers get a better price for their services, their labor services. Does that mean that unions are inherently political institutions? Well, let's just define political. What we mean by political is that they don't just haggle over the terms of a trade, but they're trying to change the power balance between the people who are engaged in the trade. So once you're trying to change power and power balances, we call that politics, right? Now, so are unions inherently political? Well, there is a, I think, intrinsically political component to what unions are doing. Because for sure, when unions bargain for better wage, when unions bargain for better work conditions for the pace and the duration of work or for things like pensions and benefits, they are not just changing the price for which they're working, they're also changing the power balance between them and the employer. When unions make it a rule that you can't just fire them at will, or that you have to give them certain wages, that you have to give them pensions and things like that. When you have to negotiate with them over the pace of work, you are taking some of the unilateral power that employers have away from them. Now, that, you can say, is a political act. Now, that said, you can do all of these things without really touching the deep sources of power that employers have. Because what unions do is they don't question the wage bargain itself. They don't question the fact that one person's strong, the other is weak, one person has all the power, the other doesn't. They don't question the fact that this is built into the system. They take the system for granted, they take the actual social relations for granted, and they're just saying, let's make it so that we are not as weak and as miserable as we would otherwise be without the union. Now, in the lexicon of left politics, Lenin coined a term called "economism." What he said was that there are two kinds of struggles that the left, the social democratic left and the socialist left needs to take up. One is a struggle around the everyday conditions of work that the working class faces. The other is a struggle over the very fact that one group of people has to work for another group of people. That cannot be changed without deep structural changes within capitalism, without taking away some of the underlying unilateral power that employers have over work and over wages. At some point, you actually have to start addressing the fact that employers should not have this kind of power at all. Okay. That he called a political struggle. Now what unions do is that there is a very strong logic to focus on just the economic facts, what's called "economism," and that generates a kind of conservatism. The conservatism is that you just narrowly focus all your attention on these very day-to-day material concerns that workers have, and it's possible to just engage in that, focus on that, and be pretty good at it without ever questioning the fact of capitalism itself. Not the degree of power that employers have, but the very fact that employers have such a power and nobody should have that kind of power. The essence of the socialist movement has always been to say it's not that employers treat their employees badly and we want to fix it, it's that nobody should have the power to treat people badly in this way at all. Unions do not of their own logic question the system. What they question is the terms on which workers are treated in the system. What that does then is that it makes them essentially economic institutions, and it requires a partnership with more political entities like political parties to bring their focus away from the purely economic and to join in what's called a political struggle. So there's no automatic slippery slope from the economist to the political struggle that has to be activated. No, and we've got 150 years of experience now to show this. It's very, very rare when unions on their own come to inherently political demands. They tend to focus on economic demands. Someone might argue that this makes the union sound kind of tame. Why would employers hate this? Well, because as I said, even though unions don't question the basic logic of capitalism, what they do is put limits on the unilateral power of employers and employers for good reason hate that because what the employers do is they look out at the world and they say, look, it's a cutthroat competitive market out there, and what I need is the maximum flexibility over my labor force, over my venue of employment, over what I do there, how I pay them, how much I pay them, how I make them work, and a union ties my hands. Not only is it time I hands, it raises my costs. When I'm forced to pay higher wages, when I'm forced to pay into a pension fund, my costs go up. And if I want to recoup those costs and make the rate of return that's worth my while, I'm going to have to do something, either raise my prices, which makes me uncompetitive or eat the losses that come from the higher costs, which may not make me uncompetitive, but it does make me go out of business sooner or later. So they see the union as doing two things, raising their costs. And secondly, they reduce their flexibility moving forward. That's unlike any other kind of organization. Employers don't care of workers form a social club, if they're in a roadery club, even if they have something like tenants associations, that kind of thing, they don't care. What they care about is one specific organization, which is that organization, which gets in the way of their profit maximization and in the conditions that they think are essential for profit maximization, like their flexibility at work, right? So whenever they see even a whiff of a union coming around, the first thing they do is try to eradicate it, fire the person who's doing the organizing, figure out ways of making unions harder to organize, try to craft laws that makes it more difficult to organize them and more difficult to sustain them once they're organized, you don't see this kind of single minded hatred of any other kind of organization on the part of employers. And so even though from the kind of a socialist standpoint, unions fall short in some ways, they get you only part of the way, not the whole way where you'd like to be. From the employer standpoint, they tend to be disastrous. And while they can't find ways of living with them, they would always and everywhere before a world in which those unions didn't exist. Right. It reminds me of a line I like in volume two of capital where Mark says that if it were in the capacity of capitalists to raise their prices and tuck away a greater profit whenever workers pushed for higher wages, then they would never oppose unions and never wait for those wage demands to raise their prices. So do you think union gains in wages and other working conditions always come at the expense of capitalist profits? In the short run, yeah, unions, in fact, as I said, because they raised the price of labor in direct and indirect ways, either directly through wages or indirectly through forcing capitalists to buy better machinery, that's less dangerous, scrap the machinery when it's starting to break down and create injuries, pay into pensions and into unemployment insurance, all these things raised the cost of business for employers. Now that's a short run thing over the middle to long run, employers can adjust. What they do is once they know that there's no other way around it and they're going to have to live with the union, it forces them to become more productive to buy better machinery to reduce their unit costs even though their overall costs have gone up, which comes through raising productivity. So they manage in some ways to figure it out, but this is why they prefer a world in which they didn't have to. So sometimes you see progressive economists or social scientists trying to make a case that, look, you're going to have unions without having them injure profits, but the fact of the matter is the immediate impact of a union is going to be to injure firms' profits and labor militants have to understand that, and indeed, sometimes you want that. So there's lots of employers who are going to tell you that, look, even if there's a 10% increase in wages, we're going to go under. Well, one of the things that the union movement everywhere always said was, those employers, those venues of employment shouldn't exist. If a venue of employment requires paying people substandard wages, wages below what's needed for a minimal standard of living, they should not exist. Now it's obvious that's easier said than done because when you say that such a venue shouldn't exist, what you're also saying is that people are going to lose their jobs. and a union movement has to be very cognizant of that. So there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that it shows you that a union movement on its own is going to be really hamstrung. Unions are in the business of improving their members' lives by getting them better conditions of work. That necessarily means raising the costs of business for employers. That means a successful union movement is actually going to create some degree of job loss in the short run. Now, that doesn't have to be terminal. Precisely because unions force employers to become more efficient, more productive, to recoup those losses. Those gains in efficiency also generate economic growth overall. And that overall economic growth means that there's also jobs expanding. We talked about this when I talked about productivity and AI, and I had said that new innovations do create job loss. But if you just let it play out a bit, people usually find new employment because new technology also means faster economic growth. One of the things unions do interestingly is that because they shut down what's called the low road, that is to say they make it hard for employers to just go on paying really low wages with really bad work conditions because they shut it down and they put a floor on what employers are paying people, they force employers to become more productive so that they can afford those higher wages, so that they can afford those better work conditions. That is a social good. The society as a whole in the working class has a whole benefits from this. That higher productivity, the faster pace of growth also means that people being laid off are gonna find new jobs. Now, economists love to talk about this, but there's a catch, which is you don't know how long it's gonna take for the faster growth to come about from productivity increases. There are instances in which a lot of people fall through the cracks even when there's growth. So on a human side, even if people are gonna find new jobs, that can mean weeks, sometimes months of transition from one job to the other. And that's workers bearing all the costs of that. Now, this has an interesting effect. Unions on their own are very, very hesitant to just give a green light to technological change and are hesitant to make demands which they know might result in some layoffs because they feel a responsibility to their constituency. So on the one hand, it makes union somewhat conservative. On the other hand, however, there's a real positive aspect to it, which is that everybody's benefiting from higher productivity. So what you want is institutions that enable society to benefit from technological change, but shield workers who are in those venues who are gonna get laid off from those negative effects. This is one of the things that European social democrats worked out. They had labor market policies where unions and governmental institutions would work together to funnel workers into the expanding sectors of the economy, sometimes to retrain them, sometimes give them new skills. None of that eradicates the costs of technological change. But what it does do is that it enables unions to insist that employers pay decent wages and have decent conditions of work without worrying about the unemployment effects of that. Quite as much as they would have to, if they didn't have the institutions working with them. And if you want to see an example of that, this was the tragedy of the American labor movement. American unions, especially like the auto workers knew that if they make really ambitious wage demands, it will result in job loss for some of their members. And the problem was they didn't have any assurance or any kind of institutions to try to funnel workers who were being laid off into new employment. And that made them hold back on some of their demands and other employers. If you look the Scandinavian countries, this is the big difference. They were able to make much more ambitious demands on their employers because they had social institutions which helped funnel workers from the industry shedding labor and venues which couldn't afford to pay labor the kind of wages they needed and got them jobs in the expanding sectors and in the firms that were making the higher profits. So the lesson here is precisely because unions do raise the costs for employers, unions need to be surrounded by other institutions, labor market institutions, fiscal institutions, which work in a complimentary fashion because if they don't, unions themselves will have a lot of pressure to hold back on their demands. And as one of the chief strategists for the UAW set in the 1970s, if we don't make the demands for decent wages, we are rewarding employers for being jerks for essentially taking the low road and benefiting in a way that actually ends up harming the workers much more. Hey listeners, we'll be right back with the conversation. But I wanted to let you know that you can subscribe to Catalyst Journal for half off and get a full year of issues for only $20 by using the code, confronting capitalism all one word and checkout. Catalyst Journal provides essential insights and analysis on contemporary politics by leading scholars and thinkers. The new issue looks at how we got social democracy and why it is now suffering. Once again, use the code, confronting capitalism all one word in the checkout and enjoy reading. Link is also in the description. Now back to the show. So let's not go back in history. When did socialists in unions first come in contact? And what were these relationships like? They were present at the birth. Whichever country you look in, you find that socialists were involved in the formation of the trade union movement just about everywhere. Now it wasn't always Marxists. And in many countries, Marxists actually were in a minority or sometimes even absent from the formation of trade unions. But the left more broadly was a pillar, not only once the movement's got going, but in forming the trade unions at all. And there's a reason for that. Which is that, as I said, forming a trade union is difficult and it's difficult because employers hate them. Employers don't want to have anything to do with them. Most workers therefore tend to be hesitant. And when they do come together, it's over very mundane, very short-term demands. It took a certain kind of intellectual orientation on the part of either intellectuals or some workers. And in Europe, this was the more skilled workers who had some kind of intellectual ambitions who read a lot, who were reading pamphlets who were around the left. It took a kind of intellectual orientation and a moral orientation to say, we know it's risky, we know it's gonna be hard. But if we're able and willing to bear the risks and the costs of bringing these people together, they're gonna be immediate payoffs. It's gonna be better for all of us. And so it took a certain kind of horizon, a certain kind of outlook to be willing to do the. RG was a hard worker bringing people together in the unions and it was the left that did that. Now, it wasn't always like pointy headed intellectuals. A lot of these people who were socialists who started the union movements were themselves workers, more skilled workers. But there was a very noticeable participation on the part of journalists and intellectuals as well, who essentially committed class suicide and who devoted their lives to forming unions. And they were all on the left. So it was the answer to your question and is that right at the beginning, the left was essential to the rise of unions. - We often talk about what socialist gain from the institution of unions. What do unions stand again from socialist being a part of their movement? That's a very good question. Historically, if you look, what socialists did was point unions away from pure short-term and purely sectional demands into class-wide demands, which had deeper and more lasting benefits for the working class. So let me just go into both of these. Because of all the risks involved in forming a union, the inclination of every worker is to opt for fighting on their own individually, as subtly as they can without getting caught. And kind of stay away from the more dangerous tactic of lining up with other of their peers to form a union. Because the moment they start doing that, it becomes visible. And the moment it becomes visible, they risk being fired. So that's the first obstacle. Workers tend to kind of avoid these risky strategies, right? These risky actions. But when they do form unions, it is also the case. That employers are going to be lined up against them. And the more ambitious they're demands, the more employers are going to be resisting. So the first instinct is to make demands that are easier to achieve. Okay, then there's a second problem, which is that organizing workers is hard. Organizing workers who are of different ethnicities, different races, who don't trust each other, don't have a history together is even harder. Now, because it's harder, it means it's even riskier. And it gives employers even more opportunities to smash and to undermine the organizing strategies. When workers are of different ethnicities, employers can play them off against each other. When they don't have the same language and the same history, it's harder to build bonds of trust, which means that when there's a strike or a job action, it's harder for them to stay together because they don't have a camaraderie that comes naturally from being of the same culture and the same ethnicity. All of these things actually make the material cost union organizing and union struggles higher and therefore harder. That being the case, under what conditions will people undertake the more arduous, the more risky, the more cost-bearing strategies? Well, it's when they have a kind of moral commitment to it. They're not going to ask workers to be altruists, to become saints, to ignore all these risks, to ignore all the costs, but their own moral commitments as organizers will incline them to look for strategies that will work in the face of these costs. If you don't look hard, you're not going to find them. And what we saw historically was that the unions that had a real commitment to interracial organizing unions that had a real commitment to making militant demands, to take bigger risks, to find solutions for workers so that they were able to envision a kind of union that was over time engaging in more far-reaching and more militant strategies. Those were always leftists. Those were always socialists because of their outlook. It was the socialists who led the movement away from craft unionism to industrial unionism, from ethnically segmented unions to interracial and multicultural unions. It was a socialist because they were the ones who were ideologically committed to figuring solutions to very costly ventures. Had it not been for the socialists, the union movement would probably have remained much more sectional, short-termist, and ethnically and racially segmented. So it basically comes down to this. The secret to capitalism is that the structures of the employment relation make it much more appealing to either avoid organizing altogether or do the kind of organizing that's the least risky and the easiest to achieve. And the least risky and easiest to achieve strategies are always the ones that do the least for workers. It helps them keep their heads above water, but it doesn't question employer power very much and it doesn't give workers the more far-reaching gains that they would like to have. Because of that, it takes an ideological and moral commitment to find ways around all of those costs, all of those risks, and that moral commitment has historically come from people with the outlook and the orientation of the socialist left. So we've talked in a previous episode about how the American labor movement reached its apex of its power shortly after World War II when approximately one in three workers was a part of a union. We just talked about the role of socialist and union organizing. What other social ingredients made that moment possible? It's really hard to say. When we look back, we can see that there are some aspects of the workplace and the wider environment that made organizing easier than it is today. So one obvious one was that workplaces were large. They're very big. So imagine two scenarios, one in which you have five workplaces in a city that employed just about everyone. They're quite large. That means that if you are a group of people who want organized unions, you know they have five places to go to. Now imagine a situation in which there are five hundred venues in which people work in a city. Now you have to have an army of people going into each of those five hundred venues to try to organize them. Each one is going to have different groups of people, sometimes with different ethnicities, sometimes with different conditions of work. So when you have fewer work venues, bringing lots of people together, there are ways in which organizers can enjoy economies of scale. You're at one place and you can with the same strategy bring in lots and lots of people. The second thing is that you also had a very close connection between workplaces and communities. Workers lived in slums and ghettos that were very close to the place where they worked, which means that the people you're working with are also the people you see when you go home and you go out to a bar or you're having your social engagements, marriage circles, things like that. So social ties and class ties overlap tremendously. That's very different from the world today when a lot of workers live in suburbs and drive to work and when they go back home, they don't see anybody who they're working with, right now. A third factor that was really important. When the union movement got going, much of the working class didn't have political rights at all, which means that they didn't have the right to vote. And lacking the right to vote also meant that you were treated like second-class citizens in a variety of different ways. And that created a kind of social identity. It's not just that I'm an employee who's being treated badly by my boss. I also am disenfranchised because of my boss. The boss is the one who gets to vote. I don't. Boss is living outside the ghettos in a decent neighborhood where I live in a place where I don't have sewage. I don't have basic garbage collection. I'm treated really badly, not just in the workplace, but also outside the workplace. All of these things made a class identity much easier to achieve because your class oppression overlaps all kinds of social oppressions. Now, by the 1940s and 50s, what do we see? Workers that have democratic rights. You start to see the rise of suburbs. There's a separation of work from home much, much bigger than there used to be. There's the invention of mass media, which means that capitalists and workers share in the same culture way more than they use to the 19 teens, the 1920s, all of which then is accentuated by the fact that the workplace becomes a lot more fragmented. Smaller workplaces inside the workplace, all kinds of strategies involved, which separate workers and atomize them in the service sector. You're working in cubicles where you don't talk to the next person. Even in factories today, rules are that you are not allowed to talk to the person next to you because cameras catch you doing it, which means even though I'm standing right next to you, I don't even know your name. When I was in Delhi, last year, there's a school that we hold for workers and for union organizers. One of the most amazing stories we heard from somebody who works in an auto factory was that the pace of work is so intense and the rules around talking to your coworker are so egregious that there was a worker who fainted in the production line and the people standing next to him did not know for I forget it might have been for an hour or two hours or the person had fainted next to him because they couldn't avert their eyes from the production line where they were working. This stuff didn't exist in the 1920s and so it means that not just the workplace is different. It's not just that the rhythm and the internal regime of work is different. Everything about it is different. Now that doesn't mean that we're an unresolvable situation. If you looked in the 1920s and 30s, a lot of unionists were saying we can't win this because the modern factory was so different from the small shops of the 1880s and 1890s where the union movement was born and the new environment of the 30s was one in which a lot of unionists said this is going to be hard to navigate. It's only after they saw all the problems that we were able to come in as intellectuals as academics theorize it and say, "Ah, that's why it worked." So it looks simple in the aftermath. My guess is that because this is capitalism, because profit-making still relies on workers, on workers showing up and because there's still all kinds of vulnerabilities in the capillaries of the system, we just need to find the new ones. We just need to figure out how this particular instance of capitalism is vulnerable in its own way, know how to work those vulnerabilities. And 30 years from now, when people look back, they'll say, "Oh, well, that was pretty easy to do because once you've done it, of course, it looks easy to do." It's just said right now where that as the saying goes, it's darkest before the dawn. We're in that moment right now where we just haven't figured it out. Once we do, it'll seem a lot simpler than it does right now. And underneath all this was a further enabling condition. The period from, say, the late 1920s, right after the great depression, into the 1960s, was the most rapid economic growth the world has ever seen. That rapid economic growth was really kind of the hidden source to the growth of the union movement. Because as long as profits were high, the economy was expanding, it was, first of all, as I said earlier, it was easier to take risks because you could find another job. But the second thing is because profits were going up, employers could afford to give workers all those great things that the unions were demanding. What starts from the 80s is you still have growth, but it's much lower. You have expansion, but it's less rapid. And that means then that employers are going to fight a lot harder against a union than they would have in the 1930s and 40s. So what you have in your lifetime in mind is a capitalism in which the kind of conditions of work and work in home have changed enormously. And the left hasn't figured out how to get beyond them, how to find the weaknesses. And it's a much more slow growing capitalism, which means employer resistance is just so much greater. Now there's other stuff I haven't mentioned like outsourcing and globalization all that. And that all figures into it as well. I just was trying to be illustrative of the ways in which capitalism then and capitalism now is different. And the way it's connected to social and political institutions is different. There's all kinds of ways in which this difference has made created a lot more difficult to organize now. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that profitability is really the deep underlying constraint to all this. And again, that doesn't mean that it's gonna be impossible. But it does mean that the strategy for A, organizing workers and B, maintaining those unions is gonna have to be different. Because any union movement that comes up now is gonna have to figure out a way of getting growth going again. And in my opinion, they can't rely on private capital to do it. There's gonna be a very important role for the state in getting growth going again as a precondition for maintaining the union movement itself. - So you've been talking about the kinds of forces that push unions towards conservatism. But what are the forces within a union that make it effective at fighting for its members? - Well, I mean, there are a couple of things that are really important. You have to remember a union, when it's functioning right, it's a fighting organization. So it has to be seen not just as a representative organization, but a fighting organization, which means that whatever is going on inside the union has to better enable it, not just to represent the workers and articulate their interests, but to fight for them effectively. So there are a few things that feed into this, which are really important. And again, it was the left that recognized this. And this is why it's not just the unions have been important for the socialist project, but socialists have been the lifeblood of the union movement. So one key thing is unions ask their members to undertake risks. They make demands that employers don't want to agree to, which means that there's always a danger that the employer is gonna dig in his heels and there's gonna have to be a strike or some kind of job action. Now, no worker wants to see that. And depending on the demand you're making, the battle against the employer will be more or less arduous. And as I said, the more ambitious demands are the ones that'll be harder to effectuate, right? That'll be harder to achieve. So how do you get people to buy into that? Well, if you simply order them like an army, because an army is a fighting institution too, right? So if you just order them do this or else, it's not gonna work. And the reason it's not gonna work is, and an army, if somebody doesn't follow your orders, you can court-martial them, maybe you can execute them. There's all kinds of bad consequences. Unions can't do that to their members. So they can only achieve some kind of success on the voluntary sacrifices that the union members are willing to make. Now, in order for me to undertake any kind of action that involves some degree of risk, if somebody just orders me from on high to do it, and I'm gonna do it, I'll be like, "No, I wasn't part of this. I didn't say I wanna do this." So you're just telling me to do it. So how do you get around that? Well, if everybody's part of the decision-making process, then we all collectively come up with the idea that we're gonna take job action X or job action Y, then I feel that yeah, it's risky, but I agree to it. And because I agree to it, I have something of an obligation not to reneg. I still might reneg, but at least now I feel like I have an obligation to do it. So one way to bring that about is to have a healthy internal culture of debate, discussion, what do you call democracy? A second thing is that you need to have some kind of internal identity of the union, but we call some kind of internal culture. So that you as another member of the union are not just somebody I know from a kind of formal affiliation, but I know you. We hang out together, we go to the bars together, we see movies, our kids go to the summer camp, or something like that. Okay, so that means that unions are more effective when they're kind of internal social life and internal not just democratic culture, but internal interpersonal culture that people have towards each other. A third thing is that people who are organizing unions have to understand that while you can reasonably ask people to undertake some kind of risks, you cannot ask them to be saints and altruists. You can't ask them to commit suicide. You can't ask them to take up demands that are looking great on paper as super radical, super militant, but they're gonna fail. Because once the union members paint you as someone who can't be trusted, then they'll never follow you again, which means that there has to be a realism about what you can do and cannot do. Once you make demands that are achievable, people see that they have real power. And the next round, you might be able to make more ambitious demands. When you win those, more ambitious demands again. And each cycle deepens the feeling of solidarity, of commitment, of trust, of mutuality, and a confidence in yourself. So there's these three things that are very important. Internal democracy, a healthy culture of people identifying with each other and being committed to each other, and thirdly, realism on the part of the leadership. And that sense of realism will be more and more robust if there's democracy because people aren't fools. If you're asking them to do things that are crazy, they will tell you and they'll vote it down. These three things are important. - That sounds very nice. But there's a critique that comes from the radical left that says the main threat to that kind of democratic, solidaristic culture within the union is coming from the leaders of the union themselves in a kind of power grab or self preservation, looking out for their own interests against the members. Do you think that there is a conflict of interest between the leadership and the members? - I think that there is a real danger for a divergence of interests between union leaders and their members. And that divergence of interest comes from the fact that being a union leader can be an awfully cushy job. There's lots of unions in which the union leaders make way more money than the union members in which the terms are very long, in which they are sitting on top of huge pools of money over which they have discretionary authority. And once you have that kind of power, I mean, if you're a worker who gets elected off the shop floor, off the everyday conditions of work into a very cushy position, there's a tendency to not to wanna give it up for sure. And since you don't wanna give it up, you're not gonna be wild about elections. You're not gonna be wild about opening up decisions to debate and discussion. And so you're gonna subtly in all sorts of ways start shutting down normal avenues of deliberation, debate, and interaction within the union. We've seen that in country after country after country. So there's no doubt about that. Now, that said, there is a tendency on the left to underestimate the difficulty of creating a culture of democracy and debate inside the union. So whenever they see that it isn't where they'd like it to be, the automatic assumption is that the leaders are shutting it down. But even well-intentioned leaders face a problem in any union, which is that coming to meetings, being in debates and discussions, following events, having an opinion on what to do, takes time and takes effort. And there is a tendency on the part of union members to say to the leaders, hey, look, we elected you to do this work, you do the research, you figure out what's right, you figure out which strategy works, and when you need a vote, we'll come in and vote, and we'll give you the benefit of the doubt. And we'll give you the authority to do what you wanna do. There is sometimes a tendency on the left to think that ordinary workers are dying to be in meetings, to have long debates, to be on top of everything. But the fact is, most people work eight, 10 hour days and they wanna go home, and they want to then do all sorts of other things, socialize, be with their family, be with their friends. And if you are around unions, even very left wing unions, one of the things that union leaders, the militants will tell you is it's really hard getting people to come out, getting them to pay attention, getting them to come to meetings. And so you have kind of two images on the left, both of which are correct. One is an image in which union leaders kind of usurp authority and shut down debate discussion, et cetera, because they fear losing power. That's true, it happens. The other one though is also true, which is that union leaders work their butts off to try to get the union members to come in, to participate, and it's really hard to do. And in this case, what's happening is, they're not usurping authority, the authorities being seated to them. Both of them are true. And I don't know if there is a solution to the problem of seating authority. I don't know what it is other than exhortation and volunteerism and getting people to come in. There are solutions to oligarchy and bureaucratization. So if it were true that ordinary workers are bubbling over with enthusiasm, but these dastardly leaders outmaneuver them and usurp power, now you can kind of devise solutions to that, right? Put roadblocks in the way of people taking power for themselves. But it's a, I think, it's actually a lot harder when people see authority to leaders. And in so doing, open the door to further kind of malfeasance on the part of the leaders to then take advantage of what they've been given. Both things are true. And I think that a union movement that's effective needs to be cognizant that bureaucrats do sometimes become oligarchs, but a lot of the bureaucracists Inside a union comes from the fact that you can't rely on volunteerism. You have to create offices. You have to create new tasks. People have to be paid to do it because otherwise they won't do it. And that's a real, real dilemma inside the union movement. If you don't understand this, you run into the problem that every time there is a kind of a rank and file movement, a desire to democratize the union and they win, you have this bizarre pattern that after winning, they continue with the bureaucracy or they have power that you didn't think they ought to have. And it's a mystery to you as to why it's happening. They sold out. And so one of the things that left wing unions find themselves doing is every time a left wing, rank of alcoca squins, you find that they sell out. Well, if people are selling out over and over and over again, it means that probably it isn't selling out as structural pressures and you got to figure out what those pressures are. One such pressure is free writing. People just would rather have the officers do all the work than do with themselves and the officers have no choice but to create new offices and that makes the bureaucracy proliferate. Yeah. Without naming names, it seems like many of the unions that are guilty of what you're talking about are some of these giant legacy organizations that have been around for near the century or more. Is the solution actually just to scrap them and start new unions? I don't think so. First of all, the legwork it takes to start a new union is so enormous. Now, in the United States, it's these days almost impossible to start a new union. Labor law is written in such a way that employers have so many advantages to block unionization efforts that if your strategy is to just do an end run around the existing ones and create new ones from scratch, you're setting yourself up failure. Now is it happens when you only have six percent union density? You basically have to start new ones anyway. But it is a fact that these existing unions do still cover a lot of workers and they are sitting on huge pools of money that can be used to extend organizing drives and to actually get into parts of the economy that pure volunteerism won't allow you to do. But a second problem is this, if there are deep structural forces that push unions towards conservatism and bureaucracy, unless you analyze why it happens, what those forces are and figure out ways of actually undermining them and neutralizing them, creating new unions won't solve anything. In a few years, they're going to be the bureaucratic, the more conservative, the more plotting unions, just like these ones are. So for both of these reasons, I think you have to start with the unions or you have to try to reform them, democratize them, make them fighting organizations again, utilize their resources to start new organizing drives and figure out what kinds of organizing drives work and then just throw money at it, make it inefficient if it has to be, have the failures. But right now, unless existing unions really pour money and resources into new organizing, I don't see how we're going to get more unions. And that's secondly, of course, if you don't have an analysis of what's behind the conservatism of the unions, you're just condemning yourself to repeating those same things over and over. So my view is that wherever there are any institutions of the working class, even if they're moribund, even if they're corrupt, you go in there and you fix them. And then when there's no other choice, you try to create new ones. But why would you willingly give up on existing resources when you could better utilize them? And one might think that this would actually be a fairly popular idea because when you look at opinion polling, unions have the highest approval rating since the 1950s, well into the majority of Americans support unions. Does that support actually matter? It matters a lot because one of the things that weakened union organizing efforts the last 30 to 40 years was this feeling that the general public wouldn't support them and they were isolated and therefore were a sectional interest. And now we understand that most of the American population sees unions as a good thing. And what that means is then we have to focus on the one factor that accounts for the absence of unions, which is employers, their hostility, and the unrelenting class war that they've been waging on working people. Once people who are working for living understand that they have the community support, the population support, the broad cultural support, it helps them overcome the kind of feeling of dejection and the feeling of hopelessness, which a lot of union members have felt after the onset of the neoliberal era. So we've talked a lot about the role unions have played for the left historically, but we're in a situation where they're flat on their back, as you said. Do we think unions are still going to play a key role in the future for either rebuilding social democracy or something more ambitious? My view is either the union movement is revived or there is no future for the left. It's a pretty straightforward view. The reason for that is you can win elections, the way Mamdani has and other people have, and you can pass a lot of progressive legislation without the unions. That's great. But if our analysis of the state is correct, that states basically are beholden to the wealthy and that states are even more deeply constrained by the investment decision and capitalism as a system, then it is the case that without a union movement, the legislation you're going to be able to pass is the legislation that capitalists are okay with. But social democracy, we know, has many components to it, which will come up against employer resistance. When you do come up against employer resistance, the question is, how are you going to overcome it? And as your policies become more ambitious, as they become more pro-worker, that resistance and the animosity on the part of the wealthy and employers is going to only increase. So how are you going to get around it without some kind of power of your own? Now, I might be wrong. We'll find out because the near term future is a future without labor. You know that. Maybe we'll find that a Sanders or a Mamdani can pass all kinds of great legislation without any real support from an organized labor movement. I hope that's true. I would love to be wrong because what I'm asking for is something very hard, which is rebuilding a labor movement in an era where we haven't figured out how to do it. But in my view, if social democracy gets off the ground, that means it's going to have to take up policies that employers oppose. And I don't know any way around it. We've never seen anywhere around it, anywhere in any capitalist country without an organized labor movement. So my view is that it's great to see the culture shifting. It's great to see people winning elections on a democratic socialist ticket. But all of this right now is hanging in midair because none of it is with the assistance of a labor movement. And it's no surprise where 10 years into the Sanders era, we really have not seen the needle move in policies at all. We've seen the needle move in electoral outcomes, but people should be aware nothing has been achieved yet. There's no lasting achievement yet of the Sanders era, nothing on class issues. And I think that is utterly predictable. So I think for people inside the left, the DSA, they have to understand, use the elections for the best of your ability, win office, but once you have office, unless you do everything you can to build a labor movement, I don't think you're going to get beyond certain social measures and certain very useful, but very teapid economic measures. This is the first time I've ever seen a journalist, a journal of theory and strategy, and published by Jack of Immaxi. Connor Gilles is our audio editor. Our music is provided by Zonkey. Thanks for listening.