“As for the concrete policy of national socialism towards the working class during the rise of fascism, it has to be recognized that from 1928, although it attacked the political organizations, it spared the trade unions.” So writes Nicos Poulantzas in Fascism and Dictatorship. And why did the fascists spare the trade unions, even supporting major strikes until it dissolved the “free” trade unions when they came to power in May 1933? For one, the trade unions were, in Poulantzas’s Althusserian perspective, ideological state apparatuses, non-repressive organs of the ruling class. But more specifically, the unions were also content in this period to fight solely for economic gains:

… the economic aspect prevailed in these struggles…. [T]he working class placed more and more confidence in ‘legal forms’ of struggle, such as government arbitration. In 1930, although it was a year of open crisis, the only notable big strikes, initiated by the RGO (the communist ‘revolutionary trade-union opposition’) in the Mansfeld region, and in the metallurgical industries of the Rhine and Berlin, were solely against wage cuts (though 130,000 workers were on strike for two weeks). It was as if the RGO itself, at the instigation of the KPD, was trying to by-pass the passivity of the social-democratic trade-union leaderships simply by bidding higher on the wages front alone.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. recalled this anecdote in an episode of Reinventing Solidarity, the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies’ excellent podcast, as a way of pointing up the faults of trade unions and the Left when focused narrowly on economic demands. In Fletcher’s words,

In the lead-up to the victory of fascism in Italy and Germany, the trade union movement became quite militant, but its demands were almost entirely economic. It was not an anti-fascist labor movement. The scope of the movement had really narrowed. And I deeply worry about that repeating itself in the United States when I look at some of the challenges that are going on within today’s trade union movement, and frankly some of the cowardice of many leaders, who don’t want to take on the issue of the far right. 

These comments were made in the context of a discussion of Labor Power and Strategy, the new book edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, which is organized around an interview with the historian John Womack. I recently reviewed this book here, but briefly: Womack argues that the labor movement must focus its effort on strategic chokepoints that can “wound” capital, and that without utilizing this leverage, which exists today in the vulnerable seams of our logistical economy, it will be impossible to reverse the decades-long decline of union membership and density that we’d all like to see.

Fletcher and others authored critical responses to Womack that are included in the book, and summarizing their basic critique, episode host and CUNY sociologist Stephanie Luce says, “Just because you’re in a strategic chokepoint doesn’t mean you’re wanting to organize or are able to be organized around useful demands.” This is, as she also notes, a new articulation of Lenin’s concern with the limitations of “trade-union consciousness,” the kind of narrowly “economistic” consciousness that develops among working people seeking material gains through the building of trade unions without the consciousness-raising efforts of the revolutionary Left.

From one angle, trade unions undoubtedly can be limited and contradictory vehicles for working-class aspiration. They exist, according to labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, to cut a deal. Sometimes they fall prey to Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” and become very top-down institutions, serving only its leaders’ pocketbooks. But even in the best instances, there are sometimes real tradeoffs between servicing member demands and resourcing new organizing, between traditional political involvement and organizational experimentation. Thus the traditional left worry about the development of a “trade-union consciousness” that not only stops well short of social transformation but actively serves as an impediment to that social transformation.

It’s worth noting, of course, that left political organizations and parties, not to speak of left media outlets and individual commentators, can also be limited and contradictory vehicles for working-class aspiration. In addition to being prone to the kind of utopian flights of fancy that have long plagued left thinking, today’s Left also often bears a concerning class composition, putting it sometimes in the position of middle-class critic of working-class regressiveness. If we can find issue with “trade-union consciousness,” we should be no less willing to do the same for “left-critic consciousness,” one that is perpetually critical of working people’s organizations for insufficiently fighting for the things that they “ought” to fight for.

The issue with left-critic consciousness boils down to a simple question: who decides what this “ought” consists of? One answer to this question is that the Left does, whether from a superior understanding of revolutionary theory or a more realistic picture of what escalating climate disasters await us or even a gritty reckoning with imminent fascism. “We understand, and that is the source of critique.” As Matt Huber demonstrated recently in these pages, this kind of thinking often leads to a caricaturing of unions’ actual positions, which today are arguably more rooted in climate science and more familiar with the reality of the clean energy industry than are those of the green Left. But even when direct caricature is not at work, the complexity and difficulty of the labor movement’s situation—where today even treading water takes tremendous work—are easily obscured in this version of left-critic consciousness, which is ultimately one external to the labor movement. An external standard of judgment and set of goals are posited (“social justice,” perhaps), and the unions are found affirmable or wanting according to it.

A second version of left-critic consciousness is more internal: it is not that unions are failing the cause of anti-fascism, anti-racism, climate justice, etc., but that they are failing their own workers. This is the source of the great investment in the rank-and-file strategy: to fight against the bureaucratizing tendencies inherent in all unions, and against the conservative reflexes of union leadership, a militant minority must stir the membership toward greater union democracy and toward more ambitious union campaigns and demands. 

In both cases (and I separate these out for analytic purposes, not because they delimit different camps of critics), left-critic consciousness can be perfectly astute. The German trade unions in Poulantzas’s example were obviously 100% wrong not to oppose the growing Nazi threat. Unions quite often grow into corrupt, undemocratic institutions that can strike their members as merely dues-collecting agencies. But the vocational hazards of the left critic are also many and varied. I’ve mentioned a few just now: a tendency to caricature unions’ actual positions, an unwillingness to reckon with the complexity of union politics, a categorical dismissal of union leadership as somewhere between backward and ultimately unimportant. 

Perhaps the most difficult hazard comes when the second version fails to absorb the blow of the first: that is, when the blinkered orientation of unions cannot be solely pinned on an autocratic or stolid leadership. In those cases, the workers themselves are understood, in Luce’s words, as not being organizable “around useful demands.” There have been many ways in which those workers that can, in the opinion of the Left, be organized around useful demands have been conceptualized today: the “new working class,” “care workers,” “mission-driven workers,” etc. In a sociological sense, some of these terms are meant simply to capture marked demographic and sectoral shifts in the American economy, but it’s nonetheless difficult to avoid the feeling that they’re meant to delimit a right kind of worker for the Left to focus on, one that is not so narrowly “economistic” in orientation and less likely to be politically right-wing. 

Again, there are plenty of instances where a critique of a narrow economism may be legitimate. But it’s also important to recognize that this tendency has a way of de-prioritizing certain sectors of workers (and perhaps certain sectors that potentially bear a great deal of structural power) according to the preferences of the left critic. Sometimes these preferences are misguided from a strategic perspective. But more generally, one has to wonder about the utility of expressing a preference at all. 

All workers should be in unions, and once there, all should be encouraged to participate in the life of their unions. Some are in structurally more important positions, and others are more mobilizable around progressive demands. But to take either of these assertions as the basis for claiming that some workers are “useful” as such and other workers are not risks contributing to the kinds of divisions we would want to overcome. A balanced perspective on unions would concern itself with “left-critic consciousness” just as much as with “trade-union consciousness,” as the latter is not the only way to participate in the logic of the ruling class.

Benjamin Y. Fong is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso, 2023) and the producer/host of Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO. You can find his other work at benfong.com.