The concept of an industrial union implies a condition of wage-slavery. When workers organize in unions, they are carrying out a defensive strategy—exerting pressure on their employers (the owners of capital) to increase wages and improve working conditions. By doing this they hope to counteract the continuous tendency on the part of the capitalist class to keep wages down. Employers want to maximize profits, and the way they do that is to exploit the working class as much as possible. Employers deploy a battery of pressures to keep wages down (and profits high)—pressures ranging all the way from lockouts to death squads—that workers resist by organizing into unions.
Unions—a tool of resistance
Before capitalism trade unions did not exist. No one had ever heard of one, and no one had ever formed one. Artisans had formed guilds to regulate standards (although they also wanted to keep out unwanted competition); peasants and slaves had risen up in insurrectionat intervals. But only wage-laborers, those possessing nothing but their own working abilities, could experiment doggedly with what the bourgeoisie once liked to style “combinations against trade” until they had fashioned a tool of resistance to use against the owners of capital.
Wage-earners have in principle no other means of survival than selling their working abilities to some employer for a wage or salary—no means, at least, recognized by what passes for economic “science.” This alone suffices to make employment slavery; but the whole reason for employing anyone is that, by reducing the bulk of the population to depending for its survival on employment, capital can accumulate itself by maximizing the difference between wages and the total value of the product reaching the market (surplus value or profit). [1]
Empirically speaking, people are compelled to pay to stay alive via this system of legalized robbery. Most people have considerable difficulty obtaining the money to pay with. Only in this context do unions (trade or industrial) make sense. The very notion of a union assumes a condition of wage-slavery—of employment—whether or not the union itself aims to eliminate production for profit.
The only “mission” of unions is to improve the conditions of wage-slavery within the capitalist system. To accomplish this, unions need only be anti-capital. Nothing requires them to be anti-capitalist; and ordinarily they aren’t. Workers may be anti-employer some or all of the time—but the most compelling argument for unions is that they enable workers to sell their labor-power on the market at its value. One way or the other, unions promote employment (which, again, is slavery). In system terms, they favor the continuation of a system that requires poverty to be the lot of the majority. Daniel De Leon’s notion that “the mission ofUnionism is to organize and drill the Working Class for final victory” [2] in the class struggle between workers and capitalists has little basis in history and no basis in fact.
Economic organization
Resistance to capital, furthermore, can take innumerable forms that don’t need to originate in the workplace. It can appear as political action, as social protest or as some combination of the two. While these are in the main reformist initiatives intended merely to improve the functioning of a bad system, they foreshadow the growing importance political action will assume as the number of socialist workers grows worldwide. If anything, the role of unions in the class struggles of late capitalism faces an uncertain future. As the “economic organization of the working class,” they do not bid fair to “organize and drill” it for anything but short-term resistance.
The need for unions implies the poverty of a class-divided society; their persistence into a classless society is in any case unlikely, since common ownership is grounded in free access to abundantly available goods and services. What differentiates socialism from capitalism is precisely that no one can conveniently “accumulate” the usefulness of goods and services, and no one can be denied the use of what they need. Abundance cannot coexist (as a basis for organizing society) with employment and poverty—with exploitation, the very condition whose intensification, at the dawn of capitalism, gave rise to the need for unions in the first place. A world of abundance will require no defense against exploitation. (Unions might very well on the other hand—after the revolution—serve as a good point of departure for organizing the production and distribution of wealth.)
Reorganizing production
The free associations of workers that under socialism will replace capitalism’s companies and enterprises (as we know them today) will take forms that must remain hidden from our eyes even at this late date; for the working class as a whole has yet to put the same originality into experimenting with ways of reorganizing production as it had earlier demonstrated in learning to resist capital—transforming the wild, inchoate rebellion of individuals into a socialized, organized resistance. Not until such experimenting has reached a fairly advanced stage on a fairly large scale will we be able to make intelligent guesses as to how society may organize the production and distribution of wealth after capitalism. Such experiments (under capitalism) could even, to take a hypothetical instance, assume the form of organized labor “taking and holding” the function of capital investment in a reactionary effort to save the system from revolution.
Without faulting De Leon’s Marxism, his “socialist” industrial unions seem more explicitly designed to fit into this hypothetically described scenario than to cultivate a socialist majority determined to replace capitalism entirely with common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole of society. His theory does not give workers an adequate basis for uniting to cast off the chains of wage-slavery.
[1] Workers who don’t actually produce wealth—and these are in the majority nowadays—have the dubious privilege of suffering their employers to preserve the surplus value the latter have scooped up at the point of sale. The same pressure tactics work just as well, and for the same reason: cheaper workers mean a higher return on invested capital.
[2] Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World.
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