Asymmetrical Obstacles

“Two Logics” can be read as an extended critique of the economist Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action. Olson had argued that in many situations, cooperation between even people who shared interests was much harder to achieve than people assumed.

Though he made his arguments in the language of neoclassical economics, Olson’s logic is simple enough. In many cases, people who would benefit from cooperating toward some end will benefit from that cooperation whether or not they personally take part in it. If the cooperation is even minimally costly in terms of time, effort, or money, it will generally be rational for each individual to attempt to free ride on others, and hope that enough still do cooperate to achieve the desired end.

The result, of course, is that no one cooperates, even though all would benefit by doing so. Olson used his results to argue that class conflict of the sort Karl Marx described, between organized workers and organized capitalists, would actually be unlikely, given the incentives for both workers and capitalists to free ride.

Offe and Wiesenthal’s response to Olson didn’t deny the reality of the free rider problem. Indeed, anyone who has ever tried to organize anything, from a student walkout to a strike picket line, can attest to the reality of what Olson described. Instead, Offe and Wiesenthal argued that there were two logics of collective action: one for workers and one for capitalists. While capitalists are only minimally handicapped by collective action problems, they are devastating to workers and require special conditions to be overcome.

Offe and Wiesenthal’s first point is that capitalists don’t actually need to organize. The class power of capitalists consists fundamentally of the power to exclude workers from use of their property. In other words, their property rights are the source of their power. Simply by virtue of owning their firm, capitalists are able to fire workers, denying them their livelihood. This is one of the most powerful forms of coercion in our society, and capitalists are able to exercise it on a purely individual basis. No organizing is necessary in order to fire a worker (which is why, in the United States, one in five union elections features retaliatory firing of workers). In order to exercise power over their employees, all a capitalist has to do is write an email.

Workers, by contrast, need to organize in order to be able to exercise any kind of similar power against their employer. To win a union election and thus mandate collective bargaining under US labor law, they need to organize a unionization campaign among their coworkers. Similarly, in order to strike, they need to organize their coworkers to strike. These undertakings are potentially costly, exposing both the organizers and the organized to retaliation.

At the same time, the collective action problem described by Olson is also in full force. All workers in a workplace would benefit from a union contract, regardless of whether they personally take part in the campaign. The rational thing to do is let someone else take the risk of organizing. The incentive for every worker is thus not to participate in the campaign. In other words, collective action problems hobble workers from disciplining capital but pose no such obstacle to capitalists seeking to discipline their workers.

Offe and Wiesenthal’s second point is that capitalists can easily aggregate themselves, while workers cannot. Capitalists can merge their firms, such that two managerial bureaucracies and sets of owners are replaced by one. And when firms get bigger, their ability to discipline their workers doesn’t diminish. It isn’t any more difficult for a large firm to fire an employee than a small firm (assuming both are nonunion).

For workers, by contrast, bigger organizations are actually more unwieldy. While large unions have more staff and resources that can advantage workers, they also must harmonize the interests of a larger group of workers, who may all want different things. A larger union is more likely to be politically heterogeneous, hampering political action. It’s also more likely to have more bureaucratic layers between union leadership and workers, hampering the ability to activate members.

The Dialogical Dilemma

Finally, Offe and Wiesenthal make the point that, while workers and capitalists are in an interdependent relationship, that interdependency is asymmetric. They need each other equally in the abstract, but workers need particular capitalists more than capitalists need particular workers.

While capitalists can generally pick and choose who they want to hire in a given moment, or even decide not to hire at all, most workers have to take whatever job they’re offered. This point is perhaps obvious to anyone who has ever had a job interview, where the power asymmetry is palpable at every point in the process.

But Offe and Wiesenthal draw out an implication of this asymmetry that is less obvious. As they put it, “The collectivity of all workers must be, paradoxically, more concerned with the well-being and prosperity of capitalists than the capitalists are with the well-being of the working class.” Workers have to consider how their actions will affect things like the pace of investment or the financial viability of their firm, lest they find their militancy renders them unemployed.

Capitalists require no such solicitude for their workers’ interests. While low unemployment levels may leave capitalists scrambling to try and attract workers, most of the time what Marx called the industrial reserve army of the unemployed guarantees that there will always be someone desperate enough for a job that they will submit to whatever poor treatment capitalists are prepared to dish out. Moreover, capitalists facing a labor shortage have the option of reducing their dependency on workers even further by automating part of the labor process.

The fact that workers need to consider capital’s interests, even when organizing against capital, adds a new dynamic to the first few points, which concern the necessity and achievability of collective organizing. Organizing is always a process of collective interest formation. Individual workers have a wide variety of interests they would like to see addressed by collective organization.

Older workers, for example, may be most concerned with pension and retirement benefits, while younger workers may prioritize more generous childcare leave, and so on. One major task of a union is to take these various individual interests and forge them into a collective interest that a large majority of the membership can agree on. This is obviously a difficult process, and the fact that workers also need to be thinking about capital’s interests while they’re doing it only makes it more difficult.

Offe and Wiesenthal call this kind of organizational logic “dialogical,” and they contrast it with what they call “monological” collective action, in which “debates about the proper objectives of the organization occur only at the leadership level, if at all.” This latter mode is what business organizations tend to adopt. While they may poll their members for their opinion, the actual decision-making process occurs only among the group’s leadership. Unions, if they are to have any chance of succeeding and establishing a secure existence, must adopt the dialogical mode of organization and assume all of the burdens it entails.

Once unions are established as organizations, they have a choice. They can adopt a more monological mode of organization, relying on a small leadership body to make decisions on behalf of a largely passive membership. There is no shortage of examples from the past and present of the American labor movement of unions that operate in this manner. For Offe and Wiesenthal, this is the essence of opportunism in the labor movement, long the bane of socialists everywhere.

Yet this opportunism isn’t simply a betrayal or a case of leaders having different interests from their members. The power unions establish is inherently unstable. On the one hand, it depends, in the last instance, on their ability to mobilize their membership in order to strike. On the other, however, it also depends on their ability to credibly restrain their members once an agreement is reached. A union that can’t guarantee that its members will go back to work and adhere to the contract once it is signed is not one that employers have any interest in reaching an agreement with in the first place. Working-class power thus depends on both mobilization and demobilization simultaneously.

In this context, opportunism is “the only transformation that neither threatens the survival of the organization nor interferes with its chances for success.” Far from the product of “labor fakirs” or “misleaders,” as the various polemicists of the socialist movement have named union leaders with whom they disagree, the evolution toward monological modes of action is inherent in the dilemmas of working-class collective action.

Even as it provides a solution to these dilemmas, however, the monological mode of action undermines its ability to do so. Eventually, a bureaucratized union with a passive membership will find itself unable to compel concessions from employers because it no longer has the ability to mobilize the members. This is arguably the situation of most unions in the United States today, whose power has atrophied so thoroughly that they are effectively back at the beginning of the process, when only the dialogical process of deep member engagement can bring organizational success.

Offe and Wiesenthal didn’t provide any kind of decisive intellectual solution to these dilemmas. In politics, such things don’t exist. But in so thoroughly mapping the lines of power that structure working-class organizing, and the very real dilemmas that such organizations confront, they made a vital contribution to the endeavor of overcoming the problems they describe.

In honor of Offe’s passing, and because of its contributions, “Two Logics” deserves a place on any socialist reading list.