20 Unions

Jensen Suther

As Marx pointed out in the 1860s, unions are integral to the successful reproduction of capital: while they ensure that the price of labor power does not fall below its value, they presuppose the extraction of surplus value, which they leave untouched.

A century later, in a little-known English-language text recently published on nonsite, Horkheimer theorizes unions under late capitalism as “rackets” that “try to fix [labor’s] price as high as possible […] for as great a share as possible of the surplus value.”

The antinomian nature of unions, as theorized by Marx, Lenin, and Horkheimer, among others, is largely repressed by the contemporary Left, which romanticizes unionization as a common-sense solution to capitalism unbound.

As Horkheimer knew, the fate of unions divorced from the struggle for socialism and taken as ends in themselves is to become just another monopolistic racket - the racket of labor itself.

Jensen Suther (twitter thread)

Nonsite.org: Max Horkheimer and The Sociology of Class Relations