Why have workers — the majority class within capitalism and indispensable to its functioning — found it so hard to unite and challenge the system that exploits them?

In 1993, Howard Botwinick, a longtime labor activist, explored a crucial aspect of this question in the recently reissued Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition. He looked beyond inequalities between capital and workers and argued that the persistent inequalities inside the working class were also “key stumbling blocks in the development of a unified labour movement within the United States.”

Coming to grips with this meant reversing the popular understanding of the historical relationship between competition and monopolization. Rather than capitalism’s trajectory undermining competition and replacing it with monopolization, Botwinick argued that the current era of capitalism is characterized by intensified competition. It’s this capitalist competition that primarily structures and reproduces working-class fragmentation. This, along with pressure from unemployed workers desperate for work, frames a political economy of capitalist labor markets.