ABSTRACT
Understanding labor’s past, present, and its future revitalization requires a critical analysis that has to do with the nature of wage labor vis-à-vis capital, along with the corresponding labor organizations around the globe. One such approach is provided by the social relations school, which looks upon capitalism in terms of a historically defined mode of accumulation based on wage labor, rather than a natural or randomly given system of direct and transparent relations. Capitalism is a global social relation based on the antagonism between capital and labor, which is contingent on the subsumption and subordination of the latter by the former. The control and domination of labor by capital is the inner developmental force of capital as an inescapable social form. 1 This is accomplished through material production and its accompanied ideological reinforcement that puts the world of technological change at the center of socioeconomic life, rendering the use of education and skills accumulated by workers redundant and reducing the value of labor power—the socially necessary labor time (per unit of output)—on an ever increasing universal scale. Trade unions emerged as a challenge to capital as a social relation, and play a pivotal role in the struggle against the effects of subsumption and subordination of labor under capital.
