Howard Botwinick came to political economy through a union victory that turned into a defeat: after workers organized an electronics plant, the employer shut it down. In this interview with Stephen Maher, he explains how Anwar Shaikh’s reading of Marx helped him understand both capitalism’s persistent wage inequalities and the possibilities for fighting them.
- Inequality is not just a market malfunction. Firms with different costs and profit rates exert different pressures on wages; desperate job seekers keep poorly paid workplaces supplied with labor.
- Large firms do not stop competing. Their fixed investments and need to expand can intensify the struggle over market share rather than eliminate it.
- The CIO offers a strategic lesson. Botwinick argues that the industrial unions of the 1930s organized the efficient firms setting competitive standards, raising labor costs across industries instead of simply sharing monopoly profits.
- Take wages and safety out of competition. Employers can compete on products and technology without being allowed to win by pushing workers harder for less pay — if unions have the collective power to enforce that boundary.
- Solidarity has to cross borders. Access to unorganized, lower-wage workforces eventually constrains gains elsewhere; international organizing is not an optional moral supplement.
The useful shift is from asking whether an employer is generous enough to share its success to asking where workers can impose common standards. A hospital anchored to its patients and an assembly plant that can cheaply relocate require different strategies; solidarity needs an accurate map of those differences.
Botwinick’s account is an argument within Marxist economics, not a settled verdict on every competing theory. But its organizing lesson is clear: understanding structural constraints need not mean accepting defeat. It can identify where democratic, militant unions have more leverage than the familiar story about powerless workers in competitive markets allows.