state to take their side against capital, since the state is itself dependent on

capital.
Any movement to change the distribution of income, time, and
freedoms will fail unless it can overcome resistance from capital and its
henchmen in the state. What makes the working class special is its ability to
do just this. First of all, the modern workplace already organizes workers to
some extent. The nature of work in modern economies is such that it brings
workers together in fairly large numbers under the same roof. They see one
another every day and coordinate their actions in producing whatever good
they are selling. This places them in a kind of organized and disciplined
relation to one another, which is already the essence of what they want to
achieve if they wish to create an organization. They already cooperate and
work together on a daily basis at work. What they now have to do is to
build on this infrastructure and create an organization of their own that
fights for their own needs, not the needs of their employer.
But even more importantly, when workers do organize collectively, they
have the unique ability to strike at the very foundation of capital’s power—
profits. In the normal course of things, employers wield power over their
workers because they can throw them out of a job, and thereby deprive the
worker of a livelihood. Now, this potentially also has a cost for the
employer, because even though the worker lost something he needed—his
job—so too did the employer by losing a unit of labor power—someone
who was carrying out a necessary task for him. Just as the fired employee
needs to now find a new job, so too the employer needs to replace his labor
power with a new one, another employee. In normal times, this isn’t a
problem for the employer. There are dozens of people eager to replace the
person he fired—and this is why he can lord it over the employee, because
the employee knows that it’s far easier to find a replacement for him than it
is for him to find a new job.
But in certain conditions, the worker can use this situation to his
advantage. Because while it’s fairly easy for his boss to find one or two, or
even ten replacements, it generally gets harder as the number of lost
workers increases. In other words, the cost of finding replacements goes up
in direct proportion to the numbers. If they can coordinate with one another,
so that they withdraw their labor power collectively, then the employees can
turn the tables on the boss—because now he can’t run his operations at all.
They can stop the flow of profits. Even more, in a competitive market, the
temporary stop in his operations can potentially have long-term
consequences, since competitor firms can now walk away with his
customers. So while one worker fears the prospect of withdrawing his labor
power, the collective of workers can use it as a weapon.
In normal business conditions, when profits are flowing in, nothing is
more devastating to a capitalist than the disruption of that flow. And
nothing brings him to the table, and makes him take seriously the concerns
of his employees, like the threat of such a disruption. Whereas under
normal conditions he can safely ignore most demands coming from his
workers, job actions by his labor force make it costly for him to ignore
those very demands. With every passing day, he loses the profits that would
have been flowing into his office, and he sees customers either walking
away to rival firms or switching to other products. This ability to impose
devastating costs on capital gives labor a special place in the power
constellation of capitalism. An unorganized working class is largely at the
mercy of capital. But once organized, it is also the only force that can bring
capital to heel.
An organized and mobilized labor movement changes the social balance
of political power. First and most obviously, workers get more control over
the basic conditions of their lives. Achieving higher wages translates into
better access to necessities; shorter and more regulated work schedules
means more free time at home, to pursue other ends; curbing managerial
despotism at the workplace means a better and healthier work environment;
and all these things add up to more control over the details of their own
lives—more autonomy. And if this happens at a large scale, across large
sections of the economy, it means, by definition, a massive improvement in
the quality of life for the vast majority of the population, since this majority
consists of workers.
But just as importantly, as labor achieves more power against capital, it
also loosens capital’s grip on the state. As we explained in chapter 2, if
employers feel that they have to make real concessions to labor, if they truly
fear the threat of economic disruption, then they also make concessions in
the realm of state policy. A mobilized labor movement doesn’t change the
basic fact of the state’s dependence on capital. But because it changes
capital’s preferences—in making capitalists more willing to concede to their
demands—these changed preferences create more room for a progressive
policy agenda. Policies that state managers knew would not have been
tolerated by their patrons before become palatable to those same patrons.
Even right-wing governments have to acknowledge labor’s power in these
situations, because these governments want to avoid economic disruption as
much as their corporate funders do.
So an appropriately organized working class, with real power, and with
the ability to significantly disrupt the flow of profits, changes the power
balance in society more profoundly than any other social group. No other
group offers the combination of being in the numerical majority, having an
interest in progressive change, and also having the capacity to bring it
about.

From Resistance to Transformation

The fact that workers have an interest in organizing themselves, and are
also pretty well positioned to carry it out, led innumerable commentators
over the past 150 years to predict that capitalism’s days were numbered.
The most famous such pronouncement came from Karl Marx, who declared
in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 that, in bringing masses of workers
together this way, capitalism creates “its own gravediggers.” Marx wasn’t
alone in this prognosis. It’s fair to say that in the first third of the twentieth
century, there was a wide sentiment among political observers that the
system was under attack and could very well be in danger, and they weren’t
so far from the truth. There was a workers’ revolution in Russia in 1905,
and then again in 1917, massive labor uprisings in Germany and Austria in
1918, in Italian factories in 1920, then again in Germany in 1923, Shanghai
in 1927–28, and then, after the Great Depression, another massive wave of
strikes and organizing all over the Western world, culminating in the
Spanish Civil War in 1936. This quarter-century or so witnessed a steady
wave of political explosions in the working class, concentrated in Europe
and North America but spreading in a giant arc around the globe. The
gravediggers seemed to be working overtime!
Two things happened that tempered the optimism of these early decades
—the first was that, in the most advanced countries, which were supposed
to have been the sharp end of class struggle, workers were unable to tear
down capitalism. In some cases, they weren’t even inclined to try. So in
Germany, England, and the United States unions made gains, and even
rattled the walls a bit, but capitalism survived. This seemed to go against
the predictions of Marx and other socialists after him. The second
development was that, by the 1970s, it was starting to look like even
workers’ capacity or desire to be the gravediggers of capitalism was
dissipating. In the United States and England, labor unions actually suffered
a very quick and dramatic slide in strength, while in other advanced
countries, they only managed to hold their ground and then to seek out a
peaceful coexistence with employers. The decades of the 1980s onward
witnessed a reversal of fortune for labor, compared with the first thirty years
of the century. The result was that supporters of the labor movement began
to wonder if maybe they had been overly optimistic about how simple or
inevitable it might be for workers to take advantage of their position in
capitalism and organize to advance their interests.
What kind of conclusions should we draw from the experience of the
past century? Nobody doubts that the early socialists’ expectations
regarding the working class were much too optimistic. But it would also be
foolish to join the chorus of later intellectuals who have written off the
labor movement. What the decades of historical experience points to is this
—Marx was right in his judgment that the best way for workers to defend
their well-being was by banding together in collective organizations; but he
underestimated, or at least failed to adequately describe, the hurdles that
workers have to overcome when they set out to organize themselves. And
these hurdles are steep. No account of labor’s political interests can be
complete unless we have a fuller understanding of these obstacles. So it is
not enough to lay out all the reasons why workers might want to organize
themselves and all the conditions that enable them to do so. We have to
balance the story with an account of the conditions that pull in the opposite
direction, and which undermine the possibility of collective organization.
This will allow us to understand both of the relevant issues—why it makes
sense for workers to organize themselves, and how they might overcome
the obstacles preventing it.

Individual versus Collective Resistance

It is important to recognize that workers don’t automatically turn to

workplace organizing to improve their situation. In fact, the most natural
strategy is to find ways to improve their condition individually. This is so
because, as we will see shortly, trying to do it collectively takes lots of hard
work and has its own added risks. For workers who are on their own,
without union protection, the instinct is to adopt individualistic strategies.
This is their baseline situation, the one that they are naturally slotted into
unless some special conditions enable them to bargain collectively. We
should note that it is also the strategy that bosses want their employees to
use, and which they work very hard to maintain as the only possible one
available.
How can a worker defend herself, or better her condition, individually?
One way is by using what is called an “exit option”—by threatening to quit.
The threat to quit is an ultimatum, to the effect that unless her demands are
met, she will take her skills elsewhere, perhaps to one of her employer’s
competitors. What makes it effective is that it could impose two costs on the
employer: the direct cost of replacing this particular employee, which
amounts to the revenue that goes into screening new applicants and then the
time it takes to train them; and the indirect costs of all the advantages she
will give his competitor if she starts working for him. It’s these costs that
make her employer stand up and maybe listen to her demands.
Of course, the threat only works if the employee is hard to replace. And
that will happen only if she happens to be very skilled at her job or have
some kind of highly technical knowledge about the product. As it happens,
in those cases where particular workers are in fact very highly skilled or
really do have very specialized knowledge, they are usually able to
command a pretty hefty premium for their services. The problem is that this
is a bargaining strategy that is open to only a small proportion of the labor
force. Most workers don’t have scarce skills and therefore can’t really
impose serious replacement costs on their employer. Even “skilled” workers
can be replaced, if the knowledge that enables them to be counted as skilled
is widely available—such as having a college degree. The ones that are
really at an advantage, that really do have scarce talents, are ones with
product-specific training, not general training. Replacing one college
graduate with another isn’t all that hard. But replacing someone who has
been trained in a particular programming technique, or a particular
software, usually is.
Since the vast majority of workers aren’t hard to replace, the boss can
handle a difficult employee by just firing him. For the boss, this carries a