*Updated 1/23/23*
For some reason, Twitter thinks I want to read tweets about how coffee chains are unionizing.
Or about how the major unions in France are out in the streets to protest Macron’s raising the age of retirement.
I don’t want to see this any more than I want to take a ride in a zeppelin or go to a dentist who hasn’t updated their anaesthetization methods since 1940.
Like a zeppelin and like the doctor still using rum as an anesthetic, the union is antiquated. It was never meant to be an end goal of the working class.
The neoliberal revolution happened and the left has got it in their mind that, had it not occurred, unions would remain an everlasting feature carried into socialism, and later, as some transformative tool towards communism.
Here has been the trend thus far:
I’m going to lay out a few reasons why unions are, especially in 2023, no concern to communists.
1.) The collapse of wage labor already happened
According to the U.S. Department of Labor:
“Labor unions improve wages and working conditions for all workers, whether they are union members or not. Unions help reduce wage gaps for women workers and workers of color. Union members have better job safety protections and better paid leave than non-union workers, and are more secure exercising their rights in the workplace.”
Source
That’s nice.
Only, wage labor already imploded 94 years ago. The Great Depression—and the political reactions to it that ensued—ensured wages could never express the value of labor power ever again. The Polish Marxist economist, Henryk Grossman, in his seminal work, “The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System,” concluded that:
“There is a growing shortage of surplus value and, under the given conditions, a continuous overaccumulation. The only alternative is to violate the conditions postulated. Wages have to be cut in order to push the rate of surplus value even higher. This cut in wages would not be a purely temporary phenomenon that vanishes once equilibrium is re-established; it will have to be continuous. After year 36 either wages have to be cut continually and periodically or a reserve army must come into being.” [my emphasis]
Source
In order to cut wages in such a continuous fashion, all the state had to do was sever wages from commodity-money (gold). Which is exactly what FDR and his administration did with Executive Order 6102. It required all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates to be delivered (confiscated) to the government. In a penultimate blow to wages, FDR unilaterally raised the “price” of gold from $20.67/oz to $32.32/oz, in 1933. In doing so, wages were devalued ~36%. This effectively allowed the state and private enterprises to accomplish the very thing Grossman had predicted they would have to do: sell labor-power below its value to prop up profits (surplus value). You could now buy two labor-powers for the value of 1.5 or so.
(Marx also made this prediction, although he did not fully elaborate on it, when he claimed that one way to offset the falling rate of profit would be through “DEPRESSION OF WAGES BELOW THE VALUE OF LABOUR-POWER.”)
By 1971, when Nixon officially abandoned the Bretton Woods system, wages had crossed the 36 year threshold predicted by Grossman, and their complete severance from the commodity base meant wages could never again be regulated by the social necessity of the laboring day precisely because the exchange value that expressed the value of labor power had fallen below the socially necessary labor time to produce it.
Wages would continue to collapse and the crises of the Great Depression would never disappear from production but extended to greater and greater levels, until it had become a fully global phenomenon.
The decline in unions was just another way to break any attempts to challenge the official standard of the minimum wage floor imposed by the state. While you could argue that a union would at least confront this base figure, which has obviously artificially suppressed wages compared to any index of financial assets in the same time frame; this still overlooks that the monetary sovereign—the state—would be in control over even “unionized wages,” and could devalue and debauch those wages at any point in time. It is not as if Starbucks unions are going to be immune to the loss in purchasing power that is exogenously waged against them in form of inflation. After all, nominal wages have exploded over the past 100 years:
But real wages—i.e. wages measured in the commodity-money, gold—have cratered:
It now takes you 7 to 8 times longer to produce a dollar-unit than it did 60 year ago. This means the minimum wage should be at least $50.75/hr (7.25×7). Unless they add 7 additional days to the official workweek, wages will never catch up with inflation. Baristas are currently making 12/hr on average. This means, they’d have to have enough bargaining power to increase their wages 4-fold, just to be able to say they were not working any longer than what it took to reproduce the value of their wages. Thus far, Starbucks have unionized 250 stores across the United States…out of 15,791 that exist in the territorial U.S. That is less than 2% of all stores. So not only has wage labor already materially collapsed, and not only is the hourly wages they have bargained for over 300% less ($15/hr) than what the minimum wage should be, in gold terms, but it might take them the rest of their natural born lives to unionize the rest of the stores at the rate they’re unionizing them.
Unions are trying to protect their wages and have bargaining power for something they no longer have any control over. The state is the sole issuer of wages, being the monetary sovereign. And Congress is the sole arbiter of what the minimum wage is. The development of capital and labor productivity has exposed labor-power as the naked utility it always was: as mere use-value to expand capital. Just as money has been stripped of its function within the circulation of commodities which are no longer determined by their exchange values, leaving us valueless fiat as the expression of the use value of capital. With what we know about the devaluation of wage labor since the Great Depression, we are working for free no less than 87% of the workweek, and more likely somewhere between 90-95%, when you factor in the actual socially necessary labor time required to reproduce labor power versus the superfluous labor time required to produce and reproduce the conditions of surplus value. There isn’t a labor organization—whether it be the so called “dictatorship of the proletariat” nor an “international worker’s organization”—that can close this gap through wage and salary arbitration, or even so-called “seizing the means of production.”
2.) You Can Achieve Higher Wages Through Reducing The Workweek
A reduction in hours of labor, insomuch that it dose not elongate the labor time necessary for production of the value of wages, should not have any implications on the material subsistence of the working class. With a reduction in the working day, more labor power is called forth in an attempt to make up for lost profits. Smaller capitals can no longer compete and the larger capitals will absorb the bulk of the previously released labor power from other branches of industry.
Wages rise not only because there is more demand; wages rise because we must look at the total labor power of society in their reproduction of wages. So if, for example, it was true that 1000 workers working 4 hours a day produce as much value as 500 workers working 8 hours a day, what matters is that the wages of of those 1000 workers is twice as much as the 500 workers. The workers are no longer spending x-amount of their day producing surplus value and have circumscribed their workday to no more than what is socially necessary to reproduce their material lives through the present value of wages.
More crucially, this form of action is entirely different than unions’ chief tactics of bargaining or strikes. Whereas the latter is but a temporary halt on production of use values and value; the former is an all out assault on profit itself. The 1000 workers working 4 hours results not in less material wealth but in reducing the surplus value of a given employed capital to zero.
Reducing hours of labor would also appear to be exponentially faster than trying to unionize tens of thousands of stores (for just one chain of stores) across the nation. Moreover, it is more consonant with what Marx actually said about how to kill off the capitalists:
“As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour … takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.”
Source
Most communists have it their heads that the working class kills off capital. But according to this passage from Marx, it is the capitalists who do this to one another. Reducing hours of labor brings them and their capital into direct conflict with one another while unionizing forces them to only deal with the workers themselves—whom have no real impact on the movement of capital. Furthermore, we are not seeking some legal charter or bureaucratic acceptance from the National Labor Relations Board; the social producers do not require this unnecessary step in order to consciously decide the length and scope of the working day.
3.) Association, Not Unions, Best Represent The Proletariatian Character
Every communist is familiar with this passage from “The Communist Manifesto,” seemingly lending credence to the continuing validity of unions:
“Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.”
Source
What should be pointed out is this: this was already achieved without a union. The “world” is already communicating with itself as ideas and different points and spaces are unified in a kind of “absolute space-time.” The “different localities” might have had some meaning towards communist ends, and thus necessitated a union to help bring commonality to them in the 19th century, but here, in the 21st century, the proletariat already comprises the “great masses.” The “centralization” of the struggle, as you might recall from my recent blog, is now exclusive to the U.S. state. The U.S., for all intents and purposes, has breached the national struggle and has become the epicenter of a global one. Unionizing a bakery in Buffalo ignores first the global character of the present struggle situated in Washington D.C. alone. And then it ignores the true nature of the proletariat, which is not a class, and cannot act as a class, but as individuals:
“It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the communal relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, only insofar as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class — a relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class. With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it.“
Source
The union is seen as a vehicle for mass labor organization, just as “the proletariat revolution” envisions itself as a kind of “class solidarity.” However, what Marx and Engels seem to be suggesting is quite the opposite. Whereas the bourgeoisie had a class interest to assert over the many now-extinct classes of the feudal period, and now, all of labor, the proletariat is the byproduct of the bourgeoisie themselves. We are an outcome of bourgeois social relations, as its substrate material foundations.
Whereas the bourgeoisie find their interests expressed through the state—(i.e. “…The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie“)—the proletariat, in order to put an end to classes altogether, cannot, by definition, find their interests expressed through a state of any kind, never mind a union (no matter how great in size and no matter how well-organized). Whereas other classes take rule through the state, the proletariat cannot utilize such social organization to manage their affairs.
This is actually why I find Infared’s essay, “The Rise Of MAGACOMMUNISM,” both interesting and confusing. On the one hand, it correctly claims the current state (the bourgeois state) can never represent the the inherent individual and particularities that make up the proletariat when it explains:
“We the people, and the universal statehood implicit in it, is a purported intention – a conceit. It does not claim to actually know or represent every individual person, it is the purport of a state which seeks to act as a universal people – and thus, an inherently abstracted form of the people, the people in the institutional purport of their sovereignty, i.e. if a state will act as the people it can only do so as a pure form which knows no distinction in content (i.e. between persons).”
Source
But in the next breath, it goes on to form an argument that the proletariat themselves can express the universal form that the bourgeois state attempts, albeit in in “conceited reality”:
“The universal or bourgeois state knows no distinctions among the people. But it also knows no distinction between itself and its own, actual reality. And here lies the basic germ which eventually culminates in modern class distinction, between the purport of the universal form of the people, and the reality of its universal content. The proletariat is not like a ‘fat trans disabled indigenous woman.’ It is not something excluded from the universal state, it is the universal state in its own actual, rather than conceited reality – i.e. the meat-grinder of universal exchange value – the confrontation between universal form of exchange and its own antecedent premises in labor.”
Ibid
This character, according to the essay, is found in the accumulation of dissidents known as MAGA, in the tradition of the so-called partisan:
“The partisan goes down to the people, repeating the origin of modern statehood by returning it to its real (rather than formal) premises.”
Ibid
What is fascinating to me is how this analysis is the only communist essay that touches upon the individualistic nature of the proletariat, and how the “partisan” must necessarily come into direct conflict with the establishment (the state), but then can’t escape the temptation to assign a class interest based on regionality and other subjective “values” that stand opposed to overarching ones (so-called “globalist values”):
“MAGA is… in the first place, essentially defined by being the American form of counter-hegemonic partisan politics, attempting to reground politics on the basis of the terrestrial homeland of the American working class rather than the ‘values’ of the globalist ‘open society.’”
Ibid
What MAGACOMMUNISM has in common with the unionists is that they believe they still have interests to assert that form the basis of a “true” “working class movement.” Both, in order to believe this, must reject that all political battles are lost from the outset, since the proletariat cannot move and act as a class. If MAGA loses, it is not because they aren’t class conscious enough or George Soros or the “RINOs” have thwarted them. They lose because MAGA cannot prevail in a common way, no matter how hard they vote or how many MAGA people they elect to Congress. If unions lose, it not because of the Koch Bros. or Bezos sending in union busters; it is because their self-organization is insufficient at the level of politics and bargaining, and, even in some ideal formation of a “workers’ state,” it would only result in the exploitation of labor all the same (since this is what every state does and how all politics asserts itself within the framework of an action or interest achieving independent existence over the individual).
An association does no such thing, however. It recognizes the individual, recognizes the absence of class interest in the proletariat, and is the logical outcome of individuals (proletariats) whose position in society is poised to overthrow the state and class politics in one motion. And, unlike many unions, is a voluntary act.
Simply put, a union cannot express the actual character of the proletariat because it posits a relationship—much like a definitive “workers’ state”—that ultimately ends up standing-in for the individual and thus stands over and above its constitutive members—i.e. dominates them. It, like politics itself, is a roadblock to the proletariat overturning the state once and for all.
Conclusion
Unions might have served a purpose in Marx’s day—even leading up to the Great Depression—and, I’d argue, they would’ve served as a bulwark towards this catastrophic loss for the working class at the hands of the state, or rather, might have put them in a position to confront the state on the spot. After all, the Great Depression was not a local event and had there been heavily organized labor parties and union strongholds in the UK, Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States during the 1930s, perhaps the fascists would not have enjoyed their hundred years reign as comfortably as they have.
But that wasn’t the case.
Yes, unions had their little postwar renaissance…but it was never going to last (it was nothing but a peace offering from the fascists and union collaborators in the first place).
They are outdated and antithetical to our aims—which is the total abolition of such structures which both uphold labor and assert interests against it.
Wage labor is DEAD and unions, proletarian dictatorships—any kind of “social formation” which doesn’t recognize the reality of wage labor’s mortal demise and which detours the proletariat’s march towards toppling the state—is pure social and economic necromancy. It is exploitation by other means.
It is fascism.
***
In Part II I will touch upon the problem with the proletariat being individuals and how this affects not just social messaging but our understanding of how to organize without taking power, without utilizing the fascist state, and without that organization becoming an impediment in of itself (like Occupy Wall Street).
Zer0 H0urs 
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