Hi Mark, Thanks — this is precisely the kind of criticism the argument needs. You caught several places where I was sliding too quickly from one distinction to another.
On the union numbers: you’re right that the wording needs tightening. The BLS figures are based on wage and salary workers, excluding the self-employed. In 2025, union density was 10.0% overall, with 5.9% density in the private sector and 32.9% in the public sector. By number of union members, public and private were actually very close: about 7.3 million public-sector union members and 7.4 million private-sector union members. Public-sector workers are more densely unionized, while total union membership is nearly equal between public and private sectors. Your point about wage and salary workers is also important. “Wage and salary” is a statistical category, not a Marxist class category. Musk or Bezos drawing a salary does not make them proletarians. The issue is not whether money arrives as wages, salary, options, dividends, or bonuses. The issue is whether one is dependent on selling labor power in order to live or whether one controls capital and the labor of others. That distinction needs to be made more carefully. On the PMC question, I largely agree with you. “PMC” is often a mushy category—politically useful sometimes, analytically sloppy often. Your Finland example makes the problem clear: the same labor process can be unionized in one country and nonunion in another without changing the person’s basic class relation. So I should probably avoid treating the PMC as a separate class. It is better to speak of a coordinating, supervisory, credentialed, or managerial stratum inside wage labor, with contradictory relations to capital and labor. That also means I agree that subsumption, deskilling, and the division of labor under capital may explain more than PMC theory does. Capital produces elaborate hierarchies: supervisors, engineers, schedulers, logistics coordinators, HR staff, technical specialists, project managers, compliance people, etc. Some exercise authority over workers; others are themselves tightly controlled. There is no clean line where “working class” ends and “PMC” begins. The line is not ontological. It is political and functional. On productive and unproductive labor, I think your criticism is basically right: the distinction may matter for value theory, but it does not by itself tell us where working-class power lies. A claims adjuster in private health insurance may produce surplus value while doing socially destructive work; a public-school teacher may not produce surplus value but may have far greater associational and political power. So productive/unproductive labor cannot be used as a proxy for class membership, militancy, or strategic importance. The logistics point is especially well taken. Marx’s own treatment of transport complicates any simple claim that circulation workers are “unproductive.” Dockworkers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, forklift operators, and railroad workers are often part of the real production and realization of value. Even when some of their labor is formally located in circulation, their structural power can be enormous because capital must move commodities, not merely produce them. No circulation, no realization; no realization, no accumulation. Capital can die of a blocked artery as easily as a stopped heart. Your PATCO example also sharpens the argument. Air traffic controllers did not produce surplus value in the narrow sense, but their strike threatened enormous economic disruption. That suggests structural power is not reducible to productive labor. It depends on location in the reproduction of capital and social life. In that sense, teachers, transit workers, nurses, air traffic controllers, utility workers, and logistics workers all have different kinds of power, but the productive/unproductive distinction does not rank them adequately. I also agree that my formulation about the decline of union power made capital’s attack sound too intentional and not structural enough. Taft-Hartley, PATCO, strikebreaking, legal restrictions, offshoring, subcontracting, and financialization were deliberate attacks. But they also worked through the ordinary movement of capital toward higher returns: deindustrialization, relocation, environmental arbitrage, global labor-cost arbitrage, and the shift from industrial expansion to finance, real estate, tech, and logistics. So yes, the attack on labor was not just a conspiracy by capitalists twirling their mustaches in a boardroom—though some of them do seem to enjoy the genre. It was the political form of capital’s restructuring. I would also revise the conclusion. I overstated the claim that organized labor now directs its efforts against the state rather than capital. More precisely, a ** large and strategically important part of organized labor now fights through the state and against state austerity, while important concentrations of private-sector labor still confront capital directly—especially in logistics, energy, utilities, healthcare, construction, and transport *.* The problem is that many of these private-sector choke points are weakly organized, while many public-sector unions are densely organized but politically integrated into the Democratic Party system. And yes, public-sector strikes are not simply “for society” or “for legitimacy.” They are also ordinary labor struggles over wages, staffing, benefits, safety, workload, and control over work. Their political significance comes from the fact that the employer is the state and the service is socially necessary. A teachers’ strike is both a workplace struggle and a public crisis. That is why it can become explosive. So where does that leave the concrete question? I would say the task is not simply “revive unions" but rebuild the mediating institutions that can turn scattered class locations into class power. That means: * building rank-and-file networks in strategic sectors — logistics, ports, rail, trucking, utilities, energy, healthcare, education, municipal services, data infrastructure, and major supply chains; * linking public-sector labor struggles to anti-austerity demands instead of letting them remain trapped as Democratic Party bargaining chips; * organizing private-sector choke points where workers can interrupt accumulation directly; * developing cross-union and cross-sector caucuses capable of solidarity action, including preparation for illegal or semi-legal action where labor law blocks effective struggle; * rebuilding socialist political organization outside simple electoralism—party, program, cadre, education, publications, workplace cells, tenant links, and strike support; * treating union work, electoral work, tenant work, antiwar work, and social movements as partial fronts of a broader class project rather than separate activist silos. So I would put the matter this way: the working class exists structurally, but it does not yet exist as an organized political subject. Productive labor, public-sector work, logistics, managerial strata, and union density all matter, but none of them alone solves the problem. The strategic question is how to create the forms that mediate among them. That is where I think the argument should go next. Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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