This paper deals with the reformist and revolutionary roles that a trade union movement ("organized labor") and the working class can take on under capitalism. Looking back, this paper could probably use major editing but I am posting it as is to reflect evolution of writing ability and written expression.

1. Prof. Stephanie Luce Stephen Cheng
Labor 605: Second paper October 30, 2011
1) Make your case for the role of labor movements – either in the U.S., or in a
country of your choosing. You can argue in support of or against one or more of
the theorists. Support your argument with material from assigned reading. You
are welcome to use outside material as well, including other writings by labor
theorists, but you must also use class readings.
Introduction
While the labor movement certainly must think about securing immediate
material interests via means including union organizing, worker centers, collective
bargaining, and legislation, it also needs to critically analyze the evolving economic
framework that businesses, unions and workers alike all operate within. In short, the role
of the labor movement is to defend its own material interests while understanding its
place within capitalist society. In terms of the history of the twentieth century United
States, the period of “industrial peace” between trade unions and corporations within the
first two decades after World War II led organized labor to consider its role as more a
collaborator than an opponent of the capitalist class. But the socioeconomic context for
“industrial peace,” a Keynesian mixed economic form of capitalism, no longer exists.
Instead since the 1970s a neoliberal variant of capitalism took the place of the Keynesian
one.
For the working population in the US, neoliberalism meant, among other things, a
drastic reduction in unionization among workers in the private sector. A critical analysis
by the labor movement of the altered framework will need to take into account the work
of various thinkers. While most of these theorists were and/or are revolutionaries and
radicals in political orientation, others were of a mainstream persuasion or of a reformist
persuasion.
In this paper, I begin with a discussion of left theoretical perspectives on the
working class, starting with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I note the evolution of the
assumption that the working class has a revolutionary role to one in which the working
class does not necessarily hold such a role in light of specific political, historical, social
and/or economic conditions. In light of the latter, the working class may actually have
something in common with the capitalist class that it supposedly opposes such as being of
the same race or sharing the profits, or “super-profits,” that originate from colonies in the
underdeveloped parts of the world. In turn, labor theorists who are not on the left and/or
on the right affirm the idea that workers and capitalists alike are actors within the
economy.
While such a notion may seem general, I argue that it is fundamentally important
since there appears to be an implied acknowledgement that the working class and the
labor movement that represents it are not automatically anti-capitalist. If that is the case,
then the thesis of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848) on the
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2. historically determined role of the working class is not accurate. However the later
insights of Marx in works such as volume one of Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy (1865) provide a different perspective that is also critical of capitalism and
which accounts for the aforementioned implicit acknowledgement. Furthermore, it allows
the labor movement to understand its role within capitalist society.
Criticisms of Karl Marx’s perspective on class struggle and their commonalities
The main concept that many people associate with Marxist political and economic
thought is the notion of class struggle. According to Marx and Engels in The Communist
Manifesto, class struggle is a fundamental social force in human history that, in terms of
the current capitalist era, will lead to socialism as a result of the victory of the working
class over the capitalist class.1
Although the perspective of class struggle has long been a
left political perspective, it was not immune from criticisms within the political left.
By heavily emphasizing class Marx and subsequent Marxists neglected other
social categories such as gender and race and therefore did not have an adequate
intersectional approach. In terms of class and race, Steve Martinot argued that the
construction of racism in North America, specifically with regard to the US, led to the
development of two separate working classes distinguishable by race. According to
Martinot, racism in the North American colonies contributed to a corporate state-
governed “double economy, comprised of two qualitatively different systems of political
economy, overlaid upon each other.”2
Within this double economy two racially distinct
working classes came to exist. This differentiation between the working classes arose not
because racism existed as a tool for dividing workers but instead because racism was the
fundamental cause for differentiation to begin with.3
Continuing with the argument that the origins of two racially distinct and separate
working classes were from the racist foundations of the colonial North American
socioeconomic system, Martinot writes that the white working class in the United States
is part of a social system that is essentially a double economy in which the white
capitalist class rules over the white working class and both of these classes dominate as a
bloc over the black working class.4
Accordingly he doubts the relevance of Marx’s vision
of the revolutionary purpose of the working class in the US, “Perhaps this explains why
the Marxist sense of a historical destiny or ‘role’ for the working class to end class
society has never made sense to the white working class in the United States.”5
The lack
of relevance is due to the unequal footing between white and black working classes.
Manning Marable attributes this inequality to the tendency of US capitalism to
underdevelop black people. He writes, “Capitalist development has occurred not in spite
of the exclusion of Blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of Blacks as workers
1
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto, Part I,” Theories of the Labor Movement,
ed. Simeon Larson and Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 28.
2
Steve Martinot, “The Racialized Construction of Class in the United States,” Social Justice Spring 2000:
10.
3
Martinot 6.
4
Martinot 10.
5
Martinot 10.
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3. and consumers. Blacks have never been equal partners in the American Social Contract,
because the system exists not to develop, but to underdevelop Black people.”6
Marable’s
use of the concept of underdevelopment leads to the second criticism.
The second criticism of Marx, that his analysis became outdated with the
transformation of capitalism from its competitive stage to its monopoly stage, became a
central foundation for the theory of monopoly capitalism that many Marxists came to
uphold. During the 1900s and 1910s when fierce competition among rival advanced
capitalist nation-states led to World War I and revolutions occurred in Mexico, China,
Ireland, and Russia, Vladimir Lenin made the theory of monopoly capitalism the
centerpiece of his arguments on imperialism, the labor aristocracy, trade union
consciousness, etc. In the 1960s and 1970s, monopoly capitalism continued to be a major
theoretical point of reference on the New Left. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, associated
with the journal Monthly Review, published a book titled Monopoly Capital: An Essay on
the American Economic and Social Order in which they applied the concept to a post-
World War II US context. Likewise, the term appears in writings by Andre Gorz and
Stanley Aronowitz.
Lenin, who referred to imperialism as the “highest stage” of capitalism, argued
that in terms of political consciousness the working class can at best merely achieve a
“trade union consciousness,” which is to say that it can only think and act in reformist
economic terms such as organizing unions, collectively bargaining for new contracts,
establishing minimum wage laws and achieving other social democratic reforms.7
He also
adds that through the export of capital from the advanced capitalist nation-states to the
colonized and underdeveloped regions of the world, the capitalist classes receive “super-
profits” that support fractions of the working classes. These economically privileged
groups of workers are the “labor aristocracies.”8
The sharing of “super-profits” that
originate from colonial capitalist enterprises enables the capitalist class to co-opt parts of
the working class. This project of co-option would extend beyond the early twentieth
century.
For thinkers on the New Left, the effects of monopoly capitalism remain visible in
the mid-to-late 1900s. Gorz writes that as of the 1960s as opposed to the 1920s and
1930s, economic struggles were neither necessarily nor fundamentally revolutionary but
instead occurred in a relatively benign way within capitalism’s confines and therefore
working class and trade unions did not have a guaranteed anti-capitalist revolutionary
role but instead a reformist one.9
Instead, both can exist without being at odds within a
social framework based on capitalist accumulation. Similarly, Aronowitz writes that trade
6
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political
Economy, and Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1983, 2000) 2.
7
Thomas Taylor Hammond, “Lenin on Trade Unions,” Theories of the Labor Movement, ed. Simeon
Larson and Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 60-61.
8
Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York:
International Publishers, 1939, 1993) 107.
9
André Gorz, “Strategy for Labor,” Theories of the Labor Movement, ed. Simeon Larson and Bruce
Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 107.
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4. unions collaborate with the capitalist class via collective bargaining for contracts.10
Class
collaboration is a way to co-opt the working class, thus making the latter a harmless
feature of capitalism rather than a revolutionary force against capitalism.
While the former criticism holds that Marx was overly reductionist, the latter
holds that his analysis was outdated. Both criticisms point to the underlying implication
that while Marx was not wrong, he nonetheless had at best an incomplete grasp on labor
in capitalist society. Although these criticisms appear to be distinct, they do share some
commonalities.
One common characteristic is that they call into question the revolutionary role
that Marx attributes to the working class by pointing out that in differing contexts, the
historically and currently existing working classes, whether in part or in whole, have been
recipients of relative privileges due to race and/or “super-profits” and therefore co-
existed with the capitalist classes. Since key sections of the working class, if not the
entire working class, can become part of capitalism rather than opposed to capitalism,
then Marx’s notion in The Communist Manifesto of the revolutionary role of the working
class runs into some difficulties. Yet if the working class, like the capitalist class, is an
integral part of the capitalist system then a different critique of capitalism is necessary.
Instead, there can be a critique of capitalism as a totality, including the working class. In
terms of such a critique, turning to Marx’s later work is important.
For Marx, but which Marx?
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx begins with a trans-historical conception of
class struggle. Yet in later works such as Capital Marx uses a different starting point: the
commodity. According to Marx, the commodity is the “economic cell-form” of capitalist
society and “[t]he wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails
appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as
its elementary form.”11
The commodity is a product of a human being’s ability to work,
or labor power.12
The latter under capitalism is wage labor, also a commodity.13
Since
capitalism is dependent on the production and exchange of commodities (i.e., goods and
services), wage labor is a central feature of capitalism. The working class exists to make
commodity production and exchange possible.
This critique of capitalism makes Marx, albeit the later Marx, currently relevant.
Although working-class consciousness and labor movements have weakened, the need to
find employment, or to convert one’s labor power into wage labor, remains. Additionally,
Marx’s later critique is a good counterpoint to the theories of institutionalist economic
thinkers like John Commons and conservative critics of organized labor such as Milton
and Rose Friedman. None of these thinkers consider the labor movement, or the entire
working class, to be fundamentally revolutionary but instead to be part of the capitalist
10
Stanley Aronowitz, “Trade Unionism: Illusion and Reality,” Theories of the Labor Movement, ed.
Simeon Larson and Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 119.
11
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (volume one) (Penguin Books, 1990) 90, 125.
12
Marx 127-128.
13
Marx 270-280.
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5. system. In the case of Commons, if the “wage-earning class,” or working class, “accepts
the existing order [of capitalism]” and thus seeks “better wage bargains” through
collective bargaining, then it is only conscious of wages while maintaining a business-
like relationship with the capitalist class.14
As for the Friedmans, they write that they have
no problems with trade unions per se and that they acknowledge the benefits of union
membership yet accuse unions of openly collusion with employers and in the process
contribute to an unjust job market.15
More over, the Friedmans and the other neoclassical
economists consider human labor power a commodity like any other.16
Relevance to the labor movement
This critique is important for the labor movement so that it can understand its role
and place within society. By understanding that labor power under capitalism is wage
labor, a commodity, the labor movement can understand that its role, historically and
currently, has been to secure satisfactory conditions (i.e. workplace safety, the eight-hour
working day, vacation and sick days) and compensation (i.e. wages, benefits) within the
capitalist framework. The class struggle is an essential means of forcing the capitalist
class to make concessions. Like social democracy, unionization, and collective
bargaining, class struggle occurs within the capitalist system and does not oppose it.
Furthermore, racial privileges and income from imperialist “super-profits,” while
certainly binding the working class to the capitalist class, are concrete examples of
Marx’s abstract approach in the beginning of Capital.
Whether or not the labor movement should be content with such a role is subject
to debate among the members within. For those of a “business union” orientation, this
role may be good enough. But for those who seek a revolutionary role, they will have to
understand that the working class has no inherent anti-capitalist purpose because, like the
capitalist class, it exists to keep the capitalist system functioning. The question of
abolishing capitalism in favor of socialism, then, will not find its answer in working class
victory and domination, or the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” However, one crucial part
of the answer lies in the abolition of wage labor, which effectively means the self-
abolition of the working class which means the abolition of wage labor and in turn the
abolition of commodity production and exchange, of the capitalist class, and of capitalism
itself.17
The labor movement thus has two roles. It needs to establish unions and worker
centers; represent workers at contract negotiations; advocate for legislation that assists
working people; coordinate strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and other forms of
dissident activity; and ensure the minimum wage, workplace safety, employment
security, and the eight-hour working day. Simultaneously, it must understand that it has
14
John R. Commons, “American Labour History,” Theories of the Labor Movement, ed. Simeon Larson
and Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 139.
15
Milton and Rose Friedman, “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement,” Theories of the Labor Movement,
ed. Simeon Larson and Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) 298, 301-302.
16
Notes from the class session on November 7, 2011.
17
G.M. Tamás, “Telling the Truth about Class,” Socialist Register 2006: Telling the Truth, ed. Leo
Panitch and Colin Leys (London: The Merlin Press, 2005) 228-235.
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6. revolutionary potential by calling for the decommodification of labor power. Yet in doing
so it risks dissolving itself, but given the recent and ongoing crisis of capitalism such a
consequence may be worth the decision to free humankind from a system that is anything
but humane.
Bibliography
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7. Larson, Simeon and Bruce Nissen (ed.) Theories of the Labor Movement. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1987. Print.
Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. New
York: International Publishers, 1939, 1993. Print.
Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race,
Political Economy, and Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1983,
2000. Print.
Martinot, Steve. “The Racialized Construction of Class in the United States.” Social
Justice v27 i1 (Spring 2000). Print.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (volume one). Penguin Books,
1990. Print.
Panitch, Leo and Colin Leys (ed.). Socialist Register 2006: Telling the Truth. London:
The Merlin Press, 2005. Print.
All citations are in Modern Language Association format.
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