ABSTRACT

Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the fi nal emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (Marx, Value 62)

Karl Marx made the above assertion in 1865, as a rebuttal to John Weston’s allegation that trade unions are harmful to industry (Marx, Value 5). To date, trade unions, particularly those in the United States, continue to resist “encroachments of capital” through representation and collective bargaining, but they make no attempt to change the existing economic system under which they labor. Many social theorists, union activists as well as union adversaries, unquestioningly accept the unions’ role as representative. And indeed, U.S. unions have been successful as worker representatives in obtaining higher wages, more fringe benefi ts, and greater job security than nonunion workers have attained (AFL-CIO, “Union Difference”). But these successes address only the ‘effects’ of capitalism, they do not address the larger picture; they fall short of advocating a change in the economic process that would include a dissolution of the social theft of the fruits of workers’ labor. According to Marx:

They [unions] ought not to forget that they are fi ghting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. (Value 61)

As a result of the many failures they have encountered over the last thirty years, unions seem content to accept a very limited role as worker representatives. Their lack of confi dence and vision has likely exacerbated the crisis

that U.S. unions currently face, and it may well compromise their position as “organized forces.”