Worker organisation in precarious times: Abandoning trade union fetishism, rediscovering class

Abstract

One of the core areas of labour studies in which this call for visibility is probably most needed concerns the forms of workers’ organisation and representation. There is evidence of increasing precarity and informality, which also “reveals how realms of social reproduction co-constitute the dynamics of exploitation observed in production” (Mezzadri, 2020: 157), and the existence of signals to a “return to merchant capital” (Van der Linden and Bremen, 2020), a pre-industrial form of capitalist development. Against all this, working-class representation continues to be largely framed in the trade union form. I argue, paraphrasing Marx and as a way of provoking discussions, that the dependency of research on the trade union as the par excellence form of organisation is creating a fetish of the union form, an interest in the form itself that hides from view broader processes of struggle and collective formation and of working-class mobilisations outside/in parallel/alternative to the union form currently occurring in the underworld of precariousness, the contemporary hidden abode of production.