A Labor Day episode of Jacobin’s Confronting Capitalism podcast has NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber arguing that the fate of unions and the Left are one: unions supply the mass base that socialist politics needs, and socialists supply the anti-capitalist horizon that unions lack.

The starting point is how weak American labor has become:

  • Overall union density is just below 11%; private-sector density is around 6% — lower than when unions were illegal
  • Public-sector unions (~33% density) are the only reason the number stays in double digits
  • Union approval is at record highs even as membership craters — so the obstacle isn’t culture, it’s employer hostility and “unrelenting class war”

The core theory runs straight through Adam Smith and Marx:

  • Bargaining inequality isn’t a numbers problem (monopsony), it’s a property problem — even one worker against one capitalist, the worker gives in first, because they can’t survive a standoff more than a week or two
  • Unions don’t erase that weakness, they reduce it: acting collectively makes replacement costly, and strike funds let workers hold out
  • But unions are economic institutions by their own logic (Lenin’s “economism”) — the political struggle, questioning that anyone should hold that power at all, has to be carried in from outside by socialists

Why socialists have always been the lifeblood of unionism:

  • They were present at the birth of unions in country after country, absorbing the costs and risks of organizing workers who distrusted each other
  • It was socialists who pushed craft unions toward industrial unionism and ethnically segmented unions toward interracial, multicultural organizing
  • Chibber ties this to technology: unions close the “low road” of poverty wages and force employers onto a higher-productivity path — which is exactly why they need complementary labor-market institutions (the Scandinavian model) to catch workers displaced by change, something the American movement tragically lacked

The blunt conclusion: “either the union movement is revived or there is no future for the Left.” Ten years into the Sanders era, electoral wins are “hanging in midair” with no lasting class legislation to show — because without organized labor, you only get the legislation capitalists are okay with. The task: reform existing unions rather than scrapping them, rebuild internal democracy, and pour resources into new organizing.