A friend emails me to take me to task for my comments on trade unionism.
I thought you were a little harsh on trade unionism. Maybe I’m confusing levels here or misunderstanding your argument, but do you think it’s one thing to talk about “not of their own making,” and another to say things like “*experienced* as the real thing.” If trade unionism isn’t part of the “real thing,” then where does that put class conflict? But I also wonder if the classic “vulgar” marxist dynamics of class (and union) formation are going to work in the 3rd world if’/when the structural shift occurs.
Well, I certainly don’t subscribe to class conflict in the Hegelian horizon-of-history sense. But beyond that, I don’t think a base-superstructure explanation discounts class conflict. After all, early 20th c. industrial workers did face guns from private armed forces hired by factory and mine owners (who, too, were pawns of history yet fully culpable for their actions). In saying this conflict was “experienced as real”, I’m merely emphasizing the phenomenological, subjective reality of it, not implying that the struggle wasn’t real (just as the civil rights struggle was very real). But what wasn’t objectively real was the historical causation that people ascribe to the struggle - it wasn’t, as many would naturally perceive, simply one of the triumph of volunteerist action, moreover an action that can be replicated with the same effect in other contexts. If there’s a supremely useful insight in Marxism it’s to ask “why when?” There was something about the transition from early industrial to monopoly industrial capitalism that not only allowed trade unionism success but in effect required its existence. And it’s telling that what emerged from trade unionism was not the organization of workers as a whole, but rather industry-specific organization as counterpart to the oligopolistic nature of the major industries (US Steelworkers, UAW, Longshoremen, etc.), and that conflict over means of production gave way to an ongoing splitting of the windfall from monopoly and productivity gains.
As for the Third World, there of course are a number of national cultures and contexts at issue, and I know next to squat about them. But I should be clear I’m not against the rise of trade unionism in the Third World. I’m just against First World attempts to halt trade and trade liberalization in order to insist on unionized standards first. The folks behind those attempts tend to have a volunteerist concept of historical change - if we only have trade unions, relations of productions will change - whereas I insist on a structural concept: we are more likely to encourage trade unionism and worker wellbeing in the Third World by unleashing transformative economic forces on their economies, even if in the short run these forces run counter to the ideals of worker protection that the First World has so well protected.
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