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WHY THE DECK IS STACKED AGAINST WORKERS UNDER CAPITALISM  
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Paul Heideman
October 10, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Workers must organize for power, while capitalists wield it
individually through property rights. This fundamental asymmetry,
creates a chain of obstacles that make working-class collective action
uniquely difficult. _

Claus Offe made many contributions to questions of the balance of
power between labor and capital, from participating in debates about
the capitalist state to providing penetrating analysis of the
structure of the labor market., Poklekowski / ullstein bild via Getty
Images

 

The death of German sociologist Claus Offe on October 1 marked the
passing of one of the last postwar European socialist intellectuals.
Famous for his analysis of the contradictions of advanced capitalist
societies in the 1960s and 1970s, he came from a cohort of thinkers
who took as their horizon of thought questions concerning the balance
of power between labor and capital, the possibilities and limits of
reforms in capitalist society, and the evolving political economy of
capitalism.

Offe made many contributions on these fronts, from participating in
debates about the capitalist state to providing penetrating analysis
of the structure of the labor market. His most significant
contribution, however, is a little harder to classify. His essay
[[link removed]] “Two Logics of
Collective Action: Theoretical Notes on Social Class and
Organizational Form,” coauthored with Helmut Wiesenthal, encompasses
everything from the nature of capitalist class power to the phenomenon
of opportunism in the labor movement. First published in 1982, it
remains a foundational work for anyone seeking to advance the
socialist project.

To contextualize “Two Logics,” a few words on Offe’s
intellectual background are in order. Offe was a product of the
Frankfurt School, the renowned group of theorists first convened in
the 1920s, whose analyses of capitalism and modernity would serve as
touchstones for various thinkers over the next century. Many of its
theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert
Marcuse, would go into exile with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
While they were able to return to West Germany after the war, the
division of Germany and the American occupation carved an intellectual
canyon dividing the school’s prewar and postwar work. As Offe would
later recall of his days at Frankfurt in the mid-1960s,

Neither the famous journal _Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung_
[_Journal of Social Research_] nor _Dialektik der Aufklärung_
[_Dialectic of Enlightenment_] were accessible. . . . This was true
until the late 1960s, early 1970s. This absurdity was due to the fact
that the Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute for Social Research]
was licensed and supported by the American occupation forces. So the
two senior persons, Adorno and Horkheimer, were terribly afraid that
their theorizing could be used for political purposes which would
annoy the Americans in the context of the incipient Cold War.

Offe wrote his PhD under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas, himself
the student of Adorno and Horkheimer. Later he would write about what
he called the “parochialism” of West German intellectual life in
those years, during which the work of major anglophone social
theorists of the day like Talcott Parsons, Seymour Martin Lipset, and
C. Wright Mills remained unavailable. Offe set out to escape this
intellectual isolation, and would engage widely with English language
theorists over the next few decades.

Offe’s intellectual hybridity, conversant with both the deeply
rooted philosophical inquiry of Habermas and the more empirically
grounded critique of Mills, provided the foundation for “Two Logics
of Collective Action.”

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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
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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.

Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers
University–Newark.

_Jacobin_‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link
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