A ‘Fatiguing Climb’: Capitalist Competition and Working-Class Formation
The most vexing political challenge for socialists lies in the ‘really existing’ working class becoming a coherent social force – one with the cultural, material and strategic independence to lead the struggle for transformative social change. In 1993, Howard Botwinick, a long-time labour and political activist, put on his scholarly hat and explored a critical aspect of this dilemma in his important book, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition (re-issued by Haymarket in 2017). He looked beyond the well-plowed inequalities between capital and workers and argued that it was the persistent inequalities inside the working class that were “one of the key stumbling blocks of the development of a unified labour movement in the United States.”
Coming to grips with this meant beginning with the appreciation that competition is and remains constitutive of capitalism. Capitalism’s trajectory is to intensified competition, not monopolization. This competition among capitalists, also structures and reproduces the fragmentation of the working class. Together with an expanded version of Marx’s “reserve army of the unemployed,” this frames a political economy of capitalist labour markets.
As Botwinick moves to the conclusion of his crucial intervention, he addresses the question that has come to both haunt and inspire a young generation of current activists. “How,” he asks, “do we rebuild both the left and the labour movement so they can work in tandem to rebuild those [militant unions] and other class-based institutions that will finally allow us to regroup and ultimately move beyond capitalism?”
Revolutionary Action
The result is a work resonant with both theoretical and political insights. In his 1996 review of Persistent Inequalities, Michael Yates presented a particularly clear summary of Botwinick’s arguments and stressed the book’s profound importance. The 2017 edition, with a new afterward extending the analysis into the first part of the 21st century, likewise received a rich and incisive review from the well-known labour writer-activist Kim Moody. Yet in spite of such enthusiasm and praise, the book remained on the margins of left political economy.
For many activists, a focus on the “political economy of labour markets” seems a rather dry and technical ordeal. But as Marx noted of the radical left in his own time, such sensibilities can be debilitating. An indispensable corollary of revolutionary action, Marx noted in his preface to the 1872 edition of Capital, was hard study, pointedly asserting that “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
Beyond the Dual Market
Socialists have long asserted that there is no great mystery in labour market inequalities. It is the uneven development of capitalism that leads to two distinct labour markets. The primary market is made up of relatively stable jobs requiring more education and training and offers better compensation and working conditions. It tends to accompany large, capital intensive firms with monopoly power and a degree of unionization.
The secondary market – with its overrepresentation of women and racial minorities – consists of part time and precarious jobs done by relatively unskilled workers facing oppressive conditions and often holding another similar job. It inclines to smaller, labour-intensive, highly competitive firms that are largely union-free.
There seems little need to parse the details further. But Botwinick insists that whatever validity such narratives include, they are seriously flawed. Corporations commonly designated as ‘monopolies’, like Amazon and Walmart, don’t necessarily pay higher wages. And some sectors with small and highly competitive firms like construction, longshoremen and for a time the garment industry, have above-average labour compensation.
Nor is this apparent anomaly explained by the absence or presence of unions. Even monopolies with unions no longer seem to fit the template. The wages of autoworkers for example have not only stagnated for well over a decade, but their collective agreements now include union ‘sisters and brothers’ who are paid less for doing the same work and excluded from the defined-benefit pension plans.
Against the case made in dual market theory, there’s no wall separating the top and bottom rungs of the labour market – those in the higher rungs today may find themselves in the secondary labour market tomorrow. The conditions of the class are better described as gradations of a general working-class precarity. Something far more complex than dual labour markets is involved here, Botwinick argues, and the key lies in a richer understanding of two central features of capitalism: pervasive competition and pools of unemployed workers.
Creative Destruction
In a pathbreaking 1977 article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Jim Clifton challenged the notion that early capitalism was characterized by intense competition, with ‘monopolization’ only to come later, through a process of concentration (the expansion of units of capital in size) and centralization (fewer units of capital in each sector). In fact, Clifton asserted, the reverse was the case. The early competition was largely localized; full-blown competition across firms, sectors and regions only materialized alongside capitalism’s later development.
At issue wasn’t the reality of the concentration and centralization of capital, and the consequent creation of corporate institutions with great economic, social and political power. Botwinick labeled these corporations “regulating capitals” because of their influence on sectoral standards for productivity, prices, and wages. But like Clifton, he saw that this development intensified, rather than eroded, capitalist competition.
Capitalist competition – the consequence of the socio-economic structures that drive capital to innovate, move in search of more favorable conditions for accumulation, and increase its share of universal profits – is based on the fluidity and mobility of capital, not the number of firms in an industry. As firms grew in size, so did their technical, administrative and financial capacities to restructure their own operations, enter other industries, and expand geographically – that is, to compete. Globalization universalizes this competition. Financialization, because it is relatively unmoored from physical roots, has accelerated it further.
In more recent decades, corporations came and went at an accelerating pace. Of the ten largest US corporations listed by Fortune in 1995, only one remained in 2020. Names that led their field not so long ago – Blockbuster in rental video, Compaq in computer manufacturing – are gone and other former goliaths like General Electric, General Motors, and IBM have flirted with bankruptcy.
Through this process, sector boundaries blurred. The largest corporations in the aluminum industry competed with Big Steel to source automotive components. Google’s supremacy in search engines and Facebook’s in social media didn’t prevent them from robust competition for the advertising dollar. IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft might be deemed ‘monopolies’ in their own areas of focus but are determined competitors in establishing advantage in Cloud computing. Amazon drivers compete with Fed Ex, UPS and the post office.
Marx grasped the ever-changing, aggressive and unending process of this competition: “the old struggle must begin again, and it is all the more violent the more powerful the means of production already invented are.” Of the multiple socio-economic and ideological implications of this violence, Botwinick was most concerned with its negative bearing on working-class formation.
Asymmetrical Dependencies
Capitalism brings workers into competition with each other. But what especially fragments the working class is the unevenness of capitalist development across workplaces and regions.
This unevenness runs across a range of corporate circumstances: levels of technology and worker skills; the labour intensity of the operation and the costs of potential disruption; the pools of labour available; the proportion of part-time vs full-time workers; the specifics of the product, capacity of workers to resist, and corporate decisions on whether that resistance calls for greater aggressiveness or degrees of accommodation.
Furthermore, though workers share a common experience of exploitation, their dependence on the success of their workplace inclines a good many of them to identify with their employer as much or more than other workers – even if they at the same time despise their boss. This is compounded by ambiguities over who the enemy is: the employer squeezing them for more profits, or the incessant pressures from nebulous markets that link workers and employers in the demand to compete or die.
This question has resonance because competition does lead to many companies disappearing. This, of course, obscures a crucial asymmetry. That the most effective capitalists survive and take over the capital of the weaker ones, strengthens capitalists as a class. For workers, competition fragments the class and undermines their most important weapon, class solidarity, weakening their potential class power.
Bringing public sector workers into the picture adds divisions internal to the working class. They can be resented by private sector workers because, standing outside direct market pressures and generally having greater security and better standards. After all, it is the taxes of those often lower-paid private sector workers that helps pay public sector wages and benefits.
The working class that emerges through all this is not a coherent class, but a fragmented one – an amalgam of individualized or sub-groups of workers trying to survive. Though this includes resistance and contradictions for capital as well, the challenge is how a class so shaped and deformed by capitalism can come to remake itself.
The Reserve Army of Labour
A special dimension of competition’s impact on working-class fragmentation and the capital-labour power imbalance is Marx’s “reserve army of labour.” These pools of labour are systematically reproduced by layoffs among both workplaces that lose out in the competitive race and among those whose success is linked to worker-replacing productivity improvements via machinery, technology, work reorganization, and speed-up.
These especially desperate workers reduce pressures on employers having to bid workers away from other jobs and serves as a disciplinary warning to all workers of what awaits them should they get out of line. Botwinick expands the extent of the reserve army beyond the unemployed to include those still working, but in the most oppressive conditions. So even when, as in the pre-pandemic United States, unemployment falls to historic lows, the disciplinary pressure on workers persists.
The persistence of this bottom rung of the labour market is based on some workers being particularly disadvantaged in competing for jobs, and especially to sections of capital that find their competitive niche in “super-exploiting” this segment of the workforce. The disproportionate number of black Americans and Latinos found in these jobs has led to demands to correct this racist imbalance, which extends beyond the labour market to, for example, discrimination in housing, education, and access to healthcare.
Ending racism is a given on the Left, fundamental in itself and in building class unity. Botwinick stresses however (following Adolph Reed and Mark Dudzic), that the focus on populating the lower rungs of the labour market ‘fairly’, with as many whites as blacks and Latinos in them, represents the worst of identitarian-neoliberal politics. The primary goal must be to end the creation of such reprehensible conditions for all workers.
Calls to raise the minimum wage are clearly a positive step. But given the extreme imbalance of power involved, it leaves open the likelihood of employers finding other ways to get the higher wages back: lowering other benefits, still greater speed-up, or simply ignoring the law because absent unionization, these workers have little enforcement power. It is far better, Botwinick argues, to extend the intent of minimum wages – giving everyone access to basic necessities – to far broader needs and through universal programs like healthcare, adequate housing, access to education, child-care, pensions and community safety. This would not only be particularly beneficial to those at the bottom, but also lay the strategic ground for building the kind of class alliances that could actually win such programs.
In this spirit of guaranteeing the essentials of life even within capitalism, another demand follows: replacing capital as the “employer of last resort” with state guaranteed employment in jobs that provide socially useful products/services, are unionized, and meet workplace and social standards. This proposal, setting a floor on the conditions of work and so effectively forcing even the most unscrupulous employers to at least match these standards to attract workers goes back to the 1963 march for Jobs and Freedom and even further to the 1946 Employment Act.
Significantly, the 1963 march on Washington, organized by A. Philip Randolph of the Porters’ Union and Bayard Rustin, and memorialized in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” linked the cause of civil rights to the cause to the labour movement, and can be said to have even lead the labour movement in moving to decent jobs for all.
Class Perspectives
One of the many strengths of Persistent Inequalities is Botwinick’s balanced take on the most organized section of the working class, the unions. Botwinick fully appreciates their centrality to progressive change but doesn’t shy away from their existing limits.
In addressing the impasse in the working class, it is no answer to turn to aggressive corporations, hostile governments, economic restructuring, globalization. All this reinforced rather than caused labour’s weakness; it was, after-all, the pre-existing limits of the trade union movement that allowed for these developments. As Botwinick notes, once the movement was confronted with the harsher attacks, “participatory democracy and class-wide solidarity were distant memories, and they no longer knew how to effectively mobilize their members.”
The complex reality is that, though unions emerge out of the working class, they are not class but particularist organizations, representing specific groups of workers who happen to find themselves in the same workplace. During the heady postwar decades this was far less of a problem – workers could make gains on their own that inspired gains elsewhere. But that era, largely because of its success and capital’s reaction, is long over.
It’s not that capital has escaped its contradictions. The very tactics capital used to lower costs have produced openings for greater worker disruption of supply chains and distribution networks and healthcare and education workers now represent the kind of strategic power that industrial workers had in the 1930s. But these are only potential openings. Taking advantage of this demands a radical shift – a transformation in unions – to class perspectives. That is, not only to looking to allies among other workers, but addressing other dimensions of workers” lives and to the deepest development and engagement of unions” own members as conditional on building the class.
Consider: Organizing inspired by the lure of dues or even narrow orientation to self-defence has not reversed languishing union density rates. In the 1930s, the Mineworkers, recognizing the dangers of being isolated, sent hundreds of organizers out to organize steelworkers. It is that spirit of a crusade to build the class, starting with your own members and of overcoming cross union chauvinism by doing the unthinkable and co-operating across unions, that is so essential to realize dramatic breakthroughs.
In public sector bargaining, it is now generally recognized that to avoid isolation, unions must be linked to a larger community interest (which in fact isn’t ‘others’, but different dimensions of working-class lives). But this cannot be limited to PR campaigns; it means reconsidering bargaining priorities and structures, the allocation of union funds, the nature of staff and cadre training, and convincing members to fully support this – without which a backlash is always a risk.
And in the private sector, the general acceptance of both corporate property rights and of hyper-competitiveness powerfully contains the gains of workers. No union, or even unions collectively, can overcome this constraint without political struggles based on clear class orientations.
Beyond Competition
In addressing capitalism’s constrained democracy, the Left generally raises the power of capital but rarely addresses the authoritarian nature of capitalism’s competition-driven markets – a context that Botwinick places at the center of his analysis.
For example, for all the politically valuable contributions in the programs of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, they largely ignored the iron cage of competitiveness. Their focus was instead on worker representatives getting seats on corporate boards and workers sharing in the distribution of stocks. To this they added the need to break up ‘monopolies’ and the largest banks – i.e., to increase competition.
Aside from misunderstanding the layers of power in these institutions that minority board seats and worker shares won’t overcome, the underestimation of capitalism’s pressures to compete also underestimates the possibilities of radically reversing the corporate ship. It risks workers being integrated into corporate worldviews instead of challenging them. As for anti-trust restructuring, this has historically amplified the burdens and insecurities of workers. And breaking up the banks seems a recipe for intensifying competition for more paper ‘innovation’ that does little for working people while likely magnifying overall economic instability.
Any working-class strategy must start with an understanding that ‘competitiveness’ is not a goal that workers share with capital, but rather a real-world constraint that workers must stretch and limit as part of eventually moving toward a society which replaces it with democratic planning for egalitarian social use. Since we cannot, for now, do away with competition and since trying to regulate markets that retain private property rights has at best brought mixed results a strategic alternative for limiting the debilitating impact of competition would be to fight for carving out certain spaces within capitalism where non-profit, non-market criteria can take over.
Consider the environmental crisis as an example. Since addressing it necessitates transforming everything about how we work, travel, and live, is involves extensive terrain where we can credibly and popularly argue that private interests, competing to achieve their own narrow objectives, cannot overcome the scope of the emergency. Addressing the environment must be planned, and planning requires some control over what is to be planned. This demands seconding manufacturing facilities to make the material goods needed for environmental planning and involve creating institutions to prevent the closure of potentially useful but not privately profitable facilities and their conversion to social use.
Alongside such expansions of spaces standing outside the competitive/profit nexus, we should also deepen decommodification of those public spaces that already stand ostensibly outside the competitive economy. The hegemony of the private economy limits funds to this sector, pushes it to be run on commercial terms, and corporations (and states) are constantly hungry for privatizations as new sites for accumulation. Could we not fight for not only the expansion of such services but also their becoming models of democratic administration that benefits both the workers involved and those who receive the services – demonstrating in the process that there are alternatives to private ownership and that these should be expanded?
Such attempts to move beyond competitiveness are inseparable from limiting the disciplinary hold financial markets have on the economy. Though we’re in no position yet to socialize finance, calls have been made for public banks to not only address the environment but rebuild eroded infrastructures. But if this too is to escape the dominant logic of competition, such banks cannot be sent out to compete with the rest of the financial system. They will need an unambiguous social mandate and an independent source of funding to meet it. An obvious source of such funding is a levy on every financial institution, a partial payback for the riches the public has bestowed on them.
These are not in themselves revolutionary demands. Rather, they look to build on the strategic significance of Botwinick’s emphasis on the centrality of capitalist competition in limiting working-class progress. They look to linking immediate needs to shifting the context in which workers” struggles take place, and through that process carry intimations of a socialist alternative.
The Party Question Can’t Be Avoided
In his afterword, Botwinick returns to his main concern: overcoming the structured material and cultural gulf among workers, ending the especially corrosive ‘reserve army’ that weakens all workers and building a confident, coherent, solidaristic working class with the analytic and strategic capacity to lead the transformation of society. He knows that unions are inadequate to this task, though at their best they can take on a class perspective and educate their members on how capitalism works, perhaps opening the doors to some discussions on socialism.
Going further requires a socialist party, an organization specifically focussed on the task of the making of such a class. Botwinick acknowledges the Left’s impasse in this regard; such a party cannot just be ‘announced’. Yet the urgency of the environmental crisis has convinced him of the immediate need for an unspecified organization that can start taking on the attributes of such a party.
There are two reasons for supplementing Botwinick’s insistence. First, unless socialists can penetrate the working class, with one foot in and the other out of unions, it is difficult to imagine a revival of unions as the class-rooted and class-oriented institutions we long for. Second in the move from protest to politics of recent decades and especially in the rise of Momentum and the Democratic Socialists of America, there has been an exciting revival of socialist ideas. Yet without some independent continuing structures, the fear of all this fading away is all too real.
We can’t strategize without fully understanding what we’re fighting, and we can’t win without the creation of a social force and agency to lead the struggle. Persistent Inequalities doesn’t try to explain everything nor lay out the unambiguous road to the “luminous summits.” But for anyone who sees capitalism as the enemy and believes that the working class has an indispensable role in the “fatiguing climb” to end it and build something new, this impressive and nuanced book offers crucial clues and insights. •
An earlier version of this article published on the Jacobin website.
