Structural domination in the labor market

Introduction

In June 2016, in a little-known town called Normal, Illinois in the United States, Mitsubishi Motors shut its doors as the last of the plant’s 1200 workers finished their shifts. One hundred and seventy people signed their final paperwork (see Chicago Tribune, 2016). According to the Chicago Tribune (Yarick and Cancino, 2015), Mitsubishi had been lured to Normal in 1988 with US$249 million in state and local subsidies. In 2004, Mitsubishi laid off a prior group of 1200 workers as it went from two working shifts to one. Over the next 10 years, Mitsubishi phased out production at the plant, saying that the cause was declining sales in the North American market and under-utilization of their production capacity. In an effort to retain 1200 jobs, the state pledged US$30 million in tax incentives over 10 years, plus vouchers and employee training funds. The citizens of Illinois had paid for the work, and then the work left. The Tribune reports asking the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity if it would recoup the incentives. The department said it was “premature” to comment.

The Mitsubishi plant closure in Normal is a familiar story in the auto industry. As such, it offers a useful starting point for a discussion on the issue of structural domination because it is about something, well, normal. Scholars do not agree about whether this all-too-ordinary situation is one of domination or why. In recent years, there has been much debate about the neo-republican principle of non-domination. Neo-republicans and their critics would disagree about whether Mitsubishi had the capacity to dominate the people of Illinois, who depended on it for jobs. Neo-republicans favor a strong state and regulated markets, but deny that, in principle, markets are a source of domination. As they define it, domination must be a capacity to use arbitrary power to intentionally interfere in someone’s life, and capitalist markets need not grant such a capacity if they are sufficiently regulated. On the other hand, critics have the strong intuition that no individual need have had such a capacity for Mitsubishi to make the decisions that it did. Rather, social structures, like markets, produce and reproduce injustice unintentionally. In aggregate, many individual decisions can lead to unintended consequences that make some people vulnerable to domination. The worry is that the situation is an instance of a social structure reproducing domination, and despite its normalcy, it may not fit into the paradigm of domination that neo-republicans describe.

In this article, I will focus on capitalism’s labor process and its labor market. I argue that critics are correct to think that the neo-republican principle of non-domination has an insufficient scope, but an alternative account of structural domination must be agential to avoid mystifying the social processes that reproduce it. What is needed is to explain how the labor process creates incentives for agents to intentionally produce structures that have unintended, yet dominating effects, and in turn, how the intentions of agents are conditioned by their social positions. Domination is thus agential and structural. My view has much in common with the labor republican position revived recently by Alex Gourevitch (2011, 2013, 2015), but I go beyond it by clarifying how capitalism inhibits collective action as a constitutive part of structural domination.

Freedom as non-domination and the market

Neo-republicans define domination in relation to their concept of freedom. Freedom is the absence of someone having the capacity to arbitrarily and intentionally interfere in one’s life. For republicans, someone is dominated if another person has the capacity to arbitrarily interfere in their life, even if the other does not exercise the power that capacity grants them. Interference can result from negligence, manipulation, or creating unreasonable obstruction costs for someone to make a choice. If one has the ability to exercise arbitrary power in someone else’s life, then one need not take the needs and desires of that person into account. One can thus subject others to one’s will in a capricious way. Domination is also intentional. Pettit (2012: 52–53) explains domination by contrasting it to natural accidents, brute accidents, or accidents of fortune:

The worsening that interference involves always has to be more or less intentional in character: it cannot occur by accident, for example as when I fall in your path or happen to compete with you for scarce goods; it must be at least the sort of action in the doing of which we can sensibly allege negligence. Were non-intentional forms of obstruction also to count as interference, that would be to lose the distinction between securing people against the natural effects of chance and incapacity and scarcity and securing them against things that they may try to do to one another.

In Pettit’s view, the intentionality condition provides criteria to use in judging moral responsibility. Morally responsible agents can be individual persons or groups of persons, but structures cannot hang above individual agents to perpetuate domination. Structures cannot have joint intentions and beliefs, so they cannot intend to dominate in the same way that some groups and all individuals can. Ultimately, the problem with holding structures responsible for domination is that we risk losing the distinction between accident and intention that makes domination a serious moral harm.

Neo-republicans argue that the arbitrary and intentional interference conditions make their idea of freedom different from the liberal principle of non-interference. They argue that the principle of non-domination contributes a unique set of expectations for political institutions. The neo-republican non-domination principle sees freedom in terms of a free society that actively discourages domination, whereas the liberal non-interference principle sees freedom more narrowly in terms of rights possessed by individuals. Neo-republicans claim that their principle of non-domination entails removing incentives and opportunities for individuals to interfere with others by having institutions and norms that guard against interference, whereas the liberal concept of non-interference only goes so far to protect people from interferences as they occur. The neo-republican position purports to be an alternative, more stringent set of restrictions on domination than its liberal counterpart. Neo-republicans use the example of the benevolent slave master to explain the difference between their idea of freedom and the liberal one. Slavery is a state of dependence, servitude, and therefore domination, even if the slave master is a benevolent one who does not coerce the slaves to do anything that they do not want to do. According to Quentin Skinner (1984), the primary problem with slavery is not just coercion or the active interference of the master in the life of the slave, as a liberal argument might claim, but rather the uncertainty of depending on the good will of someone else to exercise one’s capacities. Thus, the problem with slavery is that the slave master could exercise arbitrary power over the slave even if they choose not to exercise that power.

The master-slave scenario is the paradigmatic example of what it means to lack republican freedom because of its intuitive force and its implicit connection to the state as the guarantor of freedom. One is unlikely to challenge the claim that slaves with benevolent masters are unfree despite not having been interfered with. In a society where the state allows inequality of political status, the state creates incentives and opportunities to interfere in the lives of those that it deems unequal. The state creates these incentives whether individuals decide to take advantage of these incentives or not. The master-slave scenario does not have this immediate connection to other kinds of social inequality, like wealth inequality. Not all wealth inequality arises from inequalities of political status. Thus, wealth inequality is not necessarily domination.

When it comes to inequalities in wealth, Pettit (2006: 141–144) argues that a free state may admit such inequality. Unlike guaranteeing equal political status, guaranteeing material equality is not a good in itself because wealth, on its own, is not necessarily a tool of domination. Lording wealth over less fortunate people does not entail taking steps to dominate them in a political sense, which would mean intentionally interfering in someone’s life because one does not have to bother with taking their interests into account. Indeed, equality of political status is compatible with inequality of wealth in today’s market economy. Pettit (2006: 139) argues that if we start with the assumption that the market does not license or issue from any form of domination, then the market economy cannot be a source of domination on its own terms. He claims that if we make that assumption, then a property regime allowing inequality:

can have the aspect of an environment akin to the natural environment … [I]t will not be a source of domination so far as it is the cumulative, unintended effect of people’s mutual adjustments, where that history of adjustments may or may not have begun in government initiatives. (Pettit, 2006: 139)

Other writers who are sympathetic with the neo-republican concept of freedom also argue that the neo-republican view suggests a more critical attitude toward markets than its liberal counterpart. Gerald Gaus (2003: 63–64) argues that markets are not inherently unfree and immoral, but the principle of non-domination entails curtailing the extent to which markets encourage pursuing private interests at the expense of public goods. If market power or richness becomes a determining factor in political spheres, then republicans have good reason to argue for curtailing their reach. Importantly, Gaus (2003: 63–64) argues that these criteria for curtailing the reach of markets provide the basis for an alternative “post-socialist” critique of markets on the basis of ensuring equal citizenship, not on the basis of traditional socialist concerns about markets failing to produce prosperity or being chaotic and wasteful. As socialism has not been proven to work better, it is a superior strategy to reject market societies, but not markets themselves. In sum, Gaus argues that republicans accept markets because they work, but republicans do not accept societies overrun by market cultures that discourage effective political citizenship. Richard Dagger (2006: 157–161) follows Gaus’ argument and claims that republicans in the classical tradition, like Rousseau, have long valued private property as a means of securing material independence, but they recognize that market power and market culture can spill over into other areas of life. Thus, republicans should favor a constrained market economy so that the market is governed with an eye to the public good and so that state can promote effective political citizenship.

In general, republicans argue that it is important to constrain markets to ensure that free states govern themselves with values that are not dictated by market demands. Central to the neo-republican position is the idea that free states are grounded on equality of political status, but equality is not measured in terms of wealth. Wealth inequality may arise accidentally, but it only restricts social freedom if it places constraints on acting with an equal political status with other citizens.

Critiques of the principle of non-domination

Critics of the principle of non-domination argue that the neo-republican view is too limited in scope to support a theory of how social structures reproduce domination. One group of critics (McCormick, 2003; MacGilvray, 2011; Maddox, 2002; Wood, 2008) argues that the principle of non-domination fails to take social domination seriously. They maintain that social domination cannot be reduced to discrete instances of intentional, arbitrary interferences on the part of individuals. Rather, social domination is a relational, historical process that has more to do with how structures position individuals vis-a-vis others (see Young, 2011: 56–59). Another group of critics (Artiga, 2012; Coffee, 2015; Krause, 2013) argues that the neo-republican definition of domination loses the plot entirely when it comes to the defining feature of social domination in general, which is its unintentional nature. This supports the claims that neo-republicanism is more conservative than it first appears as a contrast to its liberal counterpart.

Beginning with the first group of critics, many argue that the principle of non-domination is insufficient because it fails to guard against social domination. Social domination is irreducible to political domination because its sources go beyond the scope of status-based inequalities that are formally codified in political and legal institutions. The latter type of inequality grants capacities for domination to individuals who have a privileged political status. Social domination has its source in social structures that exceed the scope of such status-based inequality because political and legal equality can exist where social equality does not. Social domination may actually underlie conditions of political equality and undermine them. A case in point is that slave societies codify inequality with legal status, but other kinds of social servitude need not take this form. Capitalism does not always do so, which is a characteristic outcome of its institutional separation between polity and economy. Indeed, Wood (2008) criticizes Skinner for focusing on the master-slave scenario and ignoring the social conditions under which republican debates about freedom took up that example as the quintessential instance of domination. Classical republican debates were often focused on grappling with the transition to capitalist economies, which is the process in which the modern institutional separation between the state and the economy developed. When neo-republicans zoom in on the master-slave relationship, they lose sight of its historical conditions.

MacGilvray (2011: 110–111) concludes that although neo-republicans do not admit as much, they fail to consider the breadth of what domination entails because they think that social power is distributed primarily through political institutions. This is a limited perspective. For instance, in a colonial context, the work discipline that arises between masters and slaves has a political and economic goal. As Markell (2008: 25–27) points out, such goals include highly rational and controlled attempts to subject land, resources, labor, and bodies to new methods of production. In sum, the scope of domination gets reduced when legal inequality is equated with inequality arising from divisions within society itself (see McCormick, 2003: 629–636). Further, one might conclude that because neo-republicans fail to articulate differences between political and social freedom, what the neo-republicans really have in mind is a procedural notion of justice and not a robust vision of social freedom (see Maddox, 2002: 421–425).

Among the second group of critics are those that draw attention to the issue of intentionality in the neo-republican theory. For Pettit, domination is a capacity to intentionally interfere with arbitrary power. Others argue that there is such a thing as unintentional, but socially produced, forms of domination. Critics like Artiga (2012) and Coffee (2015) point out social domination may have no intentional agent that we can identify as exerting domination in the relevant republican sense (Artiga, 2012: 40–42). For example, there may be “background influences” that enable political domination to take place (Coffee, 2015: 55). Background influences could be demographic characteristics that affect people statistically, not individually. Such influences can include race, gender, ethnicity, disability, and age. In these cases, domination is impersonal, not interpersonal. Krause (2013: 192–195) calls attention to the fact that power can be exercised unintentionally. Agents often hold power unconsciously, yet they constrain the freedom of others by perpetuating the negative effects of complex, large-scale social dynamics. For instance, white people often perpetuate racial stigmas of people of color without full awareness of what they are doing. The problem is that neo-republicans assume that agents exercise power through a dyadic model in which one sovereign agent controls another. In reality, power and agency are more dispersed. ¹

To take a case in point, someone who is physically disabled in New York City experiences oppression due to lack of access to public transportation. It would be odd to argue that they are being dominated by the public employees who run the buses and trains or who make the budget for transportation construction. Instead, it is more likely the case that it was pinching pennies over budget constraints on the part of the original designers of the subway infrastructure that led to a problem that city managers today may not be able to control. In New York, the transit authority budget is constrained because it is deeply in debt to the private sector. Individuals with physical disabilities are caught in the crosshairs of a structure that makes it more difficult for them to get to work, run their errands, and visit their family than for everyone else. This result is morally relevant for considering the scope of social freedom and it is unlikely to have resulted from a discrete someone(s) exercising a capacity to intentionally interfere in the lives of disabled people. Rather, domination here is an aggregate consequence of human action carried out by agents who do not fully understand that consequence.

These criticisms of freedom as non-domination are compelling; in one way or another, they all attempt to identify the implicit, but unjustified, social theory within the neo-republican framework. In my view, the set of concerns that each set of critics identifies is a cumulative strike against non-domination being an adequate criterium with which to address the particular issues of social domination at stake in capitalist markets. In the first place, neo-republicans lack a theory of how social structures reproduce conditions for domination. They assume that it is possible to separate someone’s capacity to intentionally interfere with arbitrary power from their social position. In other words, neo-republicans assume that if markets are highly regulated, then individuals (i.e. managers, capitalists) lose their capacity to dominate.

The neo-republican position on non-domination ends up implicitly accepting much of the social theory of the liberal view that it criticizes. Neo-republicans may challenge the liberal principle of noninterference, but they do not challenge the set of liberal assumptions that social power is primarily rooted in political institutions, that the state is a neutral institution that can arrange a just social order without being significantly modified in a process of changing the social structure, and that wealth itself can be understood independently of the historical process from which it originates. Pettit’s view that markets need not produce domination neglects precisely the kinds of social processes that would lead us to doubt the salience of all three of those positions (i.e. slavery, colonialism, capitalist displacement). Young (1979, 1990: 96–116) critiques this implicit social theory along the same lines by claiming that both republicans and liberals problematically distinguish between public and private spheres of social freedom by arbitrarily classifying the public sphere as properly political and the private sphere as non-political. Capacities to dominate may be inherent in one’s social position, not just granted by the state. At best, neo-republican non-domination is detached from historical reality. At worst, it is inherently conservative due to its privileging of the state and its neglect of domination produced by capitalist markets. What is needed is an alternative account of structural domination.

Toward an alternative

Critics successfully make the point that, by failing to give a theory of structural domination, neo-republicans adopt much of the liberal social theory whose idea of freedom they criticize. It is not, therefore, an adequately robust alternative to that view. In this section, I will critically assess some of the proposals that have been put forward for a theory of structural domination as they pertain to capitalist labor markets. I argue that while critics of the neo-republican principle of domination are correct to try to expand the scope of what counts as domination, they have not yet developed a convincing definition of structural domination. Structural domination within capitalist labor markets remains a black box for these critics because they leave how human agents reproduce it unclear.

I consider two approaches to describing and explaining structural domination. The first argues against the neo-republican definition of domination by focusing on how the aggregate result of many individual actions produces unintended consequences. The second approach attempts to carve out conceptual space for structural domination alongside, or within, the neo-republican framework.

The first approach appears in the work of Coffee and Artiga. They contest the neo-republican position by arguing that domination is the unintended consequence of many individual acts that are not reducible to intentional attempts at arbitrary interference. What Coffee and Artiga have in common is that they assert that it cannot be true that all of those who contribute to structural domination have the capacity to enact the harms that individuals produce in aggregate. These theorists defend their position—that the scope of freedom as non-domination is too narrow—by relying on an intuition that the relevant social processes affect individuals statistically and impersonally. After all, the results are accidental. This observation is important for pointing out an issue that neo-republicans do not consider deeply enough. However, I believe it to be the wrong emphasis for explaining structural domination in the labor market.

Privileging the accidental, aggregate nature of structural domination leaves a would-be alternative open to an important objection. Neo-republicans claim that the principle of non-domination also aims to remove capacities to dominate others, including capacities to neglect others’ needs or to create unfair obstruction costs for others, as in the case of neglecting the disabled subway rider. An ideal neo-republican subway system for New York is one that is well-funded enough so that it does not create incentives for city managers to borrow from the private sector and then become beholden to anyone’s needs aside from those of subway riders. Indeed, Pettit could say the same thing about Mitsubishi; the state was too weak to withstand pressure from private interests. Pettit could insist that domination is a capacity within capitalist markets that must and can be removed. If critics cannot show why such a capacity is a constitutive feature of social relationships within the market, then there is little reason to believe that accidental outcomes, or outcomes that differ from what one intends, are necessarily a result of domination. An accident may be just that—an (unfortunate) accident that results from otherwise non-dominating market exchanges. There is no necessary connection between social positions within markets and unfortunate, unintended outcomes.

Moreover, almost all of the social actions that humans perform can lead to unintended consequences, and not all of these actions lead to domination. Much like telling a lie to one’s friend to spare their feelings and finding out later that they are worse off for their ignorance, a structurally conditioned action intends one goal and may result in another depending on how others respond. In the end, it may be arbitrary to claim that the subway rider is structurally dominated and that one’s friend is not. Of course, the intuition guiding the concerns about intentionality were that these two situations are not similar at all. One is a structural problem and the other is probably not. The problem here is that throwing a spotlight on the unintentional way that social structures reproduce domination can actually mystify the social processes that lead to it. The emphasis on unintended consequences leaves the social process that might shed light on these questions a black box because it mistakes causes for effects. That the effects of a structure seem to affect people statistically and impersonally does not entail that the process of reproducing domination is also statistical and impersonal.

One must do more than argue that non-domination is unintentional, or accidental. An account of structural domination should explain how a capacity to dominate results from the social relationships that shape the capacities that individuals have for domination. What motivates people in certain social positions within certain relationships to consistently act as they do? What do individuals actually want to accomplish, such that their actions, taken together, have certain unintended consequences? Pace Krause, I think that answering such questions requires a more relational and dynamic understanding of agency.

The second approach to structural domination involves attempts to expand the scope of non-domination by creating conceptual space for structural domination in addition to other types (Azmanova, 2016; Rahman, 2016; Thompson, 2015). Their focus is also on describing the kinds of domination that emerge in capitalist societies. For instance, Rahman (2016: 47–48) argues that there is a difference between “dyadic” and the diffused, decentralized domination typical of market societies. The former is likely to be intentional and take place in discrete instances between two individuals. In comparison, markets are a form of diffused, decentralized, and often invisible domination because they lack coherent intentionality. Azmanova (2016: 469–471) distinguishes between systematic and relational kinds of domination. She defines relational domination as the unequal distribution of resources amongst actors that entails an unequal distribution of power. Systematic domination, on the other hand, is the model of well-being within which power is distributed among actors, like the type of social reproduction that takes place, dominant social values, or how life chances are allocated statistically. For Azmanova (2016: 472), motivations within core power relations shape the “constitutive logic” of the model of well-being through which societies construct social and political status. Thompson (2015: 44–64) argues that “extractive” domination differs from “constitutive” domination. The former derives surplus from one group in the service of another and the latter is the norms, institutions, and community values that shape subjects. Extractive domination motivates people to place their personal, particular interests over and above the concerns of the community as a whole. Thompson (2013) gives a functionalist argument that constitutive domination keeps extractive domination in place because dominant values and norms orient subjective actions toward elite interests. Otherwise, dominant individuals would have to resort to force to maintain power in modern societies.

I find Rahman’s approach least convincing because it accepts the neo-republican premise that capitalist markets are too diffuse to speak of intentional action that leads to domination. Capitalist markets are ubiquitous, but we ought to doubt the claim that the incentives that drive market mechanisms are so diffuse and invisible. It may seem that way to those of us who have little control over them, but I suspect that the bankers and capitalists of this world find their rules of engagement less opaque. It is important to avoid thinning one’s ability to critique markets by not identifying the motivations of those who benefit the most from them and the incentives that guide those motivations. Otherwise, the grounds for identifying markets as a type of domination are unclear. If something is so diffuse, then one probably cannot control it. Consequently, one has less motivation to try to change it. Leaving structural domination within the market to the winds of the diffuse and the ubiquitous once again makes it a black box for critique.

The approaches of Thompson and Azmanova are more convincing because they draw attention to structural incentives and social positioning in capitalist markets. They do not focus on unintended consequences but rather on how specific social relations between groups of people produce patterned outcomes. Azmanova’s framework is more abstract than Thompson’s, but they both articulate the point that we should not attribute unequal distribution in resources and power in market societies to accidental outcomes. There are social relationships that position people differently and thus produce incentives to maintain social power and control. Thompson is explicit that the goal of the advantaged is to extract a surplus from other groups of people. These are helpful contributions because they disambiguate what is at stake when discussing structural domination in capitalist markets: historically specific social relationships, positions within a social structure, and what people have to do to maintain those positions.

In my view, however, broadening the scope of domination by re-classifying it also relies on a statistical and impersonal notion of structural domination. Azmanova’s strategy for conceptual framing fails to articulate the relationship between the levels of domination that she describes; the social relationships that determine social positions are on one level and their patterned outcomes are on another. My concern is that describing various levels and layers to capitalist domination simply results in levelling up the forms of human agency that reproduce domination in structural ways without clarifying them further, and Thompson’s functionalism assumes too much to fill this gap. One ought to be more skeptical of the idea that domination is structural simply because it is locked in place by ingrained value orientations. I do not doubt that value orientations play a causal role in keeping structural domination intact, but it can also be true that such values are not consistently upheld by those who are subject to domination.

One should not simply assume that dominated people see their domination as legitimate. When it comes to interacting with capitalist markets, there are other reasons why individuals may choose not to challenge structural domination that include, but are not limited to, fear, intimidation, or lack of an avenue for collective action. The functionalist argument presumes too much about what dominated people think because it does not close the gap between individual agency and the structures that influence it. Even if one accepts Thompson’s conceptual schema, the functional claim is not a reliable starting point for connecting social positions and outcomes either. It leaves the relationships within the labor market inside a black box, outside the reach of explanation and critique. The result is no less mystifying than that of the first approach. A better theory of structural domination will open the black box by explaining how social relationships within labor markets beget capacities for domination. In other words, it will be an agential, but also structural theory of domination.

Opening the “black box” of structural domination

Here I will look more closely at Alex Gourevitch’s labor republican account of structural domination in capitalist markets in order to develop an agential theory that does not share the limitations of the neo-republican view. Labor republicans base their view of domination on the conditions of labor and the idea that freedom requires being independent of wage labor (see Sandel, 1996). This alternative within the republican tradition focuses on altogether different aspects of domination than the classical figures like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Montesquieu on which Pettit and Skinner draw, which focused only on the correct exercise of political power within the state.

In the previous section, I identified several issues with the strategies that others have used to understand structural domination. Critics of structural domination fail to explain how agents reproduce domination within capitalist markets. In this section, I deepen the insights of labor and workplace republicans by explaining how employers dominate workers in the capitalist labor process. I also go beyond the labor republican view by explaining how capitalist labor markets inhibit collective action, which is a constitutive aspect of structural domination.

Gourevitch (2011: 436) maintains that the labor republican tradition had a way of explaining structural domination through a critique of market-dependent labor. Capitalism distributes private property unequally, which creates a whole class of market-dependent people who do not control the conditions of their labor. To make sense of the tendency toward domination in capitalist workplaces, labor republicans analyzed structural incentives to control the labor of market-dependent workers. Structural is the appropriate word because it was a form of domination arising from the background structure of property ownership and because the compulsion they felt did not force them to work for a specific individual. It is not that “structure” was somehow an “agent,” nor that there were no dominating agents. There were, in this case, many dominating agents—all those who defended property distributions that left the majority propertyless. Through human design and institutions, workers were left with no reasonable alternative but to sell their labor (Gourevitch, 2015: 109).

Labor republicans (Gourevitch, 2015: 103–109) argued that market dependency is coercive in one important way—workers have to go out looking for capitalists to work for because they do not own property. Workers are dependent on employers for access to the labor market and the means of subsistence. On the other end, employers have incentives to defend their control over social property relations. Labor republicans (Gourevitch, 2013: 602) thought that capitalist property relations lead to domination because of the interests that these relations set in motion; employers must be committed to defending these relations. Employers intentionally produce a structure, which, in turn, constrains the option set of workers in dominating ways by furthering their dependence on the labor market.

In my view, the latter is a core insight into the nature of structural domination because it shifts one’s critical focus away from unintended consequences and toward the intentions that, in aggregate, produce those consequences. With Young (2011) and Giddens (1979), labor republicans point out that when individuals act, they try to bring about a state of affairs that they intend as well as reproducing the social relationships upon which they draw for their actions. It is par for the course that the outcomes of many such actions might be different than what one intends on an individual basis.

There is, however, another aspect of structural domination that the labor republican view does not capture, which is how capitalism inhibits collective action. Consider a possible neo-republican objection to the labor republican notion of structural domination to see why the labor republican view is incomplete. A neo-republican might object that the agency of workers is an important qualification to the labor republican position. The constraints on them are not so great that they cannot organize themselves. In fact, they have often done so. So long as the state ensures that employers cannot arbitrarily interfere in workers’ affairs to obstruct them from organizing, then structural domination can be resolved through the self-organization of workers in capitalist firms, even if state intervention is alone insufficient. The market need not, in principle, prevent workers from garnering enough power to act effectively as equal citizens in political life because workers can organize to establish equality of legal status.

The labor republicans would not do well in developing a response to the collective action objection. Labor republicans argued for solidarity among workers to confront structural domination but did not see constraints on solidarity as a constitutive part of that domination. This shortcoming led to racist and xenophobic moralism. Gourevitch (2015: 161–163) explains that, according to labor republicans, competition among workers undermines the collective interest of all workers. Solidarity is the antidote to competition. Solidarity is a virtue that one cultivates, with a rational basis in self-interest, and a habit that comes with identifying one’s own good (self-interest) with the universal, shared good of all workers (collective self-determination). Gourevitch (2015: 164) writes that, “Solidarity cast off the mentality of dependence by making visible to each his power as a potential agent.” Solidarity could only develop if individual workers participated in specific institutional practices of self-organization, i.e. labor unions. Labor unions are virtue-cultivating environments that promote an ethos that runs against the grain of industrial competition.

Once solidarity is understood as a virtue, however, it becomes easy to conclude that individuals who do not live up to its expectations are more servile and less noble by nature. It is not a far leap to then connect servility to having an inferior nature with racial and ethnic differences (Gourevitch, 2015: 169). Indeed, it is at this point that labor republicanism may intersect with other 19th-century pro-slavery republicans in the United States who thought that Black oppression was a result of slavishness rather than slavery (Roediger, 2000: 19–36). Moralism toward oppressed groups results in explaining oppression through the psychological dispositions of individuals, not by the constraints that they face as members of those groups. For all their insight into the nature of structural domination, the tendency toward moralism by the labor republican movement is a rather anti-climactic decline into individualism at the expense of understanding collective constraints.

Answering the collective action objection and avoiding moralism toward oppressed groups requires accounting for an additional aspect of structural domination. This aspect is how the intentions of dominating agents arise from their social positions. Social relationships can position people in a way that shapes the kinds of intentions that an individual is likely to have and the ends they are likely to pursue. One can use Pettit’s intentional psychology against his neo-republicanism to explain why. Pettit (1993: 11) defines an intentional agent as a “system” embedded in “a distinct, surrounding context,” who is subject to perceptual input within that environment and responds to those inputs under the control of certain rational expectations which drive them. These expectations are “regularities” based on what one can anticipate from others, which an agent exhibits if they are minimally rational in theoretical and practical matters. Regularities supervene on, but do not override, the intentional capacity of individual agents. Pettit (1993: 171–173) also admits that there are “aggregate regularities” that develop in social life. If an agent believes that p, then belief p is embedded in other intentional states that are shared, in aggregate, by other individuals.

As Ann Cudd, who endorses Pettit’s view, recognizes, aggregate regularities can be social constraints. Cudd (2006: 41) writes that social constraints are:

… [F]acts that one does or ought to rationally consider in deciding how to act or how to plan one’s life, or facts that shape beliefs and attitudes about other persons. They are the facts that must be modeled in rational choice explanations of actions, as the preferences, choices, common beliefs, strategies, and payoffs that agents consider in making decisions or as the default assumptions that agents use when they act on intentions that are not fully or rationally considered.

To answer the possible neo-republican objection that workers can attain equality in political status through unobstructed collective action, the market, seen from the perspective of the labor process, is less static and more conflict-ridden than neo-republicans allow. It is a social relationship whose contours are determined by a history of struggle by intentional agents trying to influence the contexts in which they are able to act. It is true that organizing together through collective action can significantly alter the balance of power between workers and employers. It is also true that workers have challenged their own exclusion from political life in this way. However, the objection looks at the issue upside down. Imagining a desirable result, it obscures tendencies against that result in the relationship between employers and workers, as well as among workers. For collective action to be successful, it must constantly militate against persisting imperatives toward competition on both levels. If collective action is what is needed, but there are structural imperatives against it, then those imperatives are a constitutive feature of structural domination.

Market dependency and competition create imperatives for employers and are central constraints in capitalist markets. Employers are faced with imperatives to maintain control over the conditions of work. From the perspective of employers, market-dependent competition is about maintaining (or gaining) market shares and turning over a profit. From the production side, competition creates standards of efficiency and process that employers must seek to excel. The consequences of not doing so are possible losses of market shares and loss of position within the sphere of competitors. In this process, employers have great responsibility. They must realize the full usefulness of the work that others perform for them (see Braverman, 1974). The economic historian Robert Brenner (1977) makes the helpful point that when one can expect individuals and families to adapt certain economic strategies in aggregate, they become like “rules of reproduction.” In other words, one cannot alter these strategies on an individual basis. Employers must seek to control labor because they can expect other competitive employers to do the same.

I raise the issue of competition and responsibility for realizing the full usefulness of work because this dynamic leads to important imperatives that are inherent in employers’ competitive position in a capitalist market. These imperatives go deeper than the fact that employers have default legal advantages in decision making about the labor process at work, which has also been a target of critique. Anderson (2015: 50, 64–65) and Hsieh (2008: 81–82, 89–90) note that labor contracts, which set the terms for employment, are circumscribed within a production process that exceeds their boundaries. The labor contract leaves out normatively critical features of contemporary workplaces because anything that it does not specify is left up to the decision-making power of employers and management. The existing legal framework takes for granted that the labor contract is an “open-ended agreement to follow orders” for what falls outside of its explicit terms. In most cases, what goes unspecified includes important issues like the duration, intensity, and speed of work. Consequently, workers implicitly relinquish control over decision-making along with the right to contest decision-making by managers and bosses. Capitalist property relations confer owners and management the power to govern workers by fiat. Therefore, there are myriad ways for employers to take advantage of the implicit bias of laws in their favor to arbitrarily interfere in the lives of those over whom they have a structural advantage without considering their interests.

Beyond default legal advantages, I argue that employers not only take advantage of implicit biases of the laws in their favor, but that they have incentives to maintain and regain control over the conditions of work and militate against incursions on their ability to do so successfully. As Anderson argues, the institutional context in which capitalist production takes place gives employers de facto rights to control all of the decisions about how they use the property that they own, which includes raw materials, circulation and distribution centers, factories, and technology. What I add here is that it is important for employers’ ability to compete on the market that they do not lose control over how these resources are used. Not only do laws assume that employers have the right to control labor, but management seeks to dictate to workers “the precise manner in which work is to be performed” (Braverman, 1974). The system of scientific management devised by Frederick Taylor during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution is a case in point. The Taylor system broke each industrial job down into its individual motions, decided which were essential, timed workers performing those jobs, and then paid them piecemeal for their output to incentivize productivity. The goal was to increase efficiency and decrease wasted time, which includes worker resistance through work stoppages that were made possible by workers having specialized knowledge of the job. If workers’ control over their work entailed greater bargaining power, then management should break it down (see Braverman, 1974).

At the very least, any attempts to regulate this dynamic through the state will remain a point of struggle because this struggle is inherent in the imperatives within the labor process, which employers intentionally struggle to reproduce. Just-in-time production methods are another example of how this struggle has evolved in recent decades. Just-in-time production keeps inventory stocks low to ensure that there is no lapse in time between producing and circulating goods. To make these tight connections, 21st-century workers are encouraged to identify inefficiencies in the labor process themselves. In fact, they must. Otherwise, they cannot keep up. These examples are those of highly productive workplaces with high levels of capital investment in technology. Industries with lower levels of labor productivity, like service work, invest less in labor-saving technology, but it is not negligible. Moreover, there are different methods of control available that involve self-enforced sales goals, commission, and so on.

Workers must respond to this ongoing conflict by individual competition or through collective action. Structural imperatives privilege the former. Marx (1990) first noticed that capitalism has a contradictory tendency to both pull workers together in the labor process and to pull them apart through labor market competition. Consider, for instance, an individual’s decision to join a trade union organizing drive. Along with the labor republicans, one might think membership is in the interest of individual workers since it provides them with an institutional mechanism to act collectively to advocate for better living standards. However, there is often a surprising amount of resistance to unionizing efforts in societies without strong histories of working-class organization. The benefits of collective bargaining have not been demonstrated in the experience of workers, and therefore the economic strategy that they adopt tends toward their perceived best chances of security. The strategy with the best chance of security is an individual one: competition with other workers and winning the favor of the boss on an individual basis. In contrast, joining a union organization drive involves a substantial, indefinite risk. The default condition of individual competition is a hurdle that any workplace organizers who want to demonstrate the power of collective action must overcome. Unfortunately, the burden of doing so falls on those who are least capable because they are also dependent on the labor market. This is not a small burden, especially when one considers that workers have few resources for organizing at their disposal (see Offe, 1985).

Competitive strategies for social reproduction are not restricted to individual strategies. There are also internal pressures toward group differentiation within capitalist labor markets. The imperatives for employers to defend their control over the labor process leads to competition among workers not only in one workplace or one industry, but across industries and throughout the labor market. Technological innovation and increasing levels of mechanization are central to competitive strategies, which puts downward pressure on the labor supply. As mechanization increases, workers are thrown back into the labor market toward more labor intensive industries with lower productivity and lower wages. This situation incentivizes strategies for resource closure by groups of workers along lines of similar job classifications, skill, and seniority, as well as race, gender, or ethnicity, to protect relative privileges.

Consider an instance at the intersection of market dependency and gender oppression. Feminist theorists of capitalist social reproduction (Arruzza, 2016; Bezanson et al., 2006; Bhattacharya et al., 2017; Brenner and Laslett, 1991; Ferguson, 1999; Laslett and Brenner, 1989) point out that people who can become pregnant are dependent on the labor market, but in different ways to those who cannot. Pregnancy creates a more volatile relationship with the labor market due to needing time away for childbirth and the historical role that women have played in raising children. All things being equal, it becomes easier to hire women with lower wages and more difficult for women to get promoted. Indeed, women are still kept out of many skilled industries that require extensive and ongoing job training.

Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas (2000: 19–25) give an interesting historical example showing how the unique relationship of women to the labor market could create incentives that tug away from solidarity that might promote equality within the market. They detail a 19th-century trade union in Britain where unionists chose to exclude women workers from their ranks. They explain that a sexist policy of this kind is a strategy responding to conflicting pressures on whole working-class families who are dependent on access to the labor market. The strategy ostensibly protects higher wages for men and enables women to stay at home with the children. More women in the workforce would mean that their families would now rely on two sets of lower wages instead of one higher wage, which would also entail an increase in childrearing costs because women must leave the home. Thus, childcare and schooling become an issue where they were not before. Considering these pressures on the household, women themselves supported their own exclusion to prevent destabilizing changes in their ability to raise their families. The decision made sense, but it kept the threat of bringing women into the workplace to drive down male wages alive for decades to come. Nonetheless, the pressures against the kind of solidarity for women’s equality within the workplace were quite strong. Not only were they strong, but the chosen strategy reinforced the threat of competition that workers were fighting against.

The question of the relative priority of market constraints versus social group membership is complex. My claim here is simply that there are structural pressures against the social solidarity required for collective action. The tendency to either create or reinforce social divisions is especially sharp when one considers that what is needed to overcome them is a real far-sighted appraisal of common interests on the part of workers. For those who are dependent on access to the labor market to survive, such far-sightedness is not to be taken for granted. For these reasons, it is not wise to attribute either historical or imagined success on the part of workers over and against market competition to the transience of its imperatives. Where it happens, success should be attributed to the tenacity of ordinary people who overcame social divisions against great odds. Their successes were not, and are not, inevitable.

The approach I am proposing attempts to overcome the moralism of the labor republican view. For his part, Gourevitch cautions against a one-sided appraisal of labor republicanism on the basis of its moralism. One must also understand the constraints that the labor republican movement was up against in their attempt to organize themselves. I agree with Gourevitch on this point. A multi-sided perspective on the limitations of labor republicanism is probably more interesting for the purposes of theorizing how capitalism reproduces certain conditions for domination than a one-sided dismissal of its ideas. For these reasons, I have argued that the main insights of the labor republican view contribute to a better, agential understanding of structural domination in capitalist markets than other strategies. Nonetheless, the moralism of labor republicanism shows that labor republicans did not accurately understand the constraints that they faced. As the example of women in the labor market makes clear, pressures toward social group differentiation and resource closure are constraints on the labor movement. If critiques of structural domination are to be effective in the 21st century, they need to take up the issues of social group difference within the labor market head on. These issues include oppressions due to race, gender, immigration status, ability, and so on. If they fail to do so, the incentives against solidarity will reproduce the conditions for structural domination for generations to come. The analysis offered here only provides a place to begin.

Conclusion

I began this article by considering the neo-republican principle of non-domination and its critics. Many have argued that freedom, as the neo-republicans understand it, is too narrow to make sense of how social structures reproduce domination. Neo-republicans focus on equality of legal status within political institutions, which they assume is the primary guarantor of freedom. It is central to their view that domination is a capacity to arbitrarily and intentionally interfere in the choices of others. Domination is a capacity that political institutions enable in some way by permitting inequalities of status. Although neo-republicans rarely call the structure they describe “capitalism,” they endorse free markets. Their caveat is that free markets must not be allowed to create inequalities in political status, which would lead to domination.

Numerous critics have rightly criticized the underlying social theory that neglects the structural nature of domination, which creates conditions for political inequality. But the strategies deployed to develop an alternative, structural account of domination have not been adequate. I argued for an agential, yet structural theory of domination in the labor market by explaining how employers intentionally produce a structure that has dominating effects, as well as by explaining why competition between firms and among workers tends to re-produce the conditions for structural domination. An important part of re-producing the conditions for structural domination is that the labor market tends to inhibit collective action.

A benefit of thinking about domination in both structural and agential terms is simply that it avoids construing the capitalist labor process and its markets as either mysterious or all-encompassing. Radical critiques of capitalist markets often appeal to how complex, obscure, or all-encompassing they are in trying to identify the problems with a social structure that people depend on yet do not control. But in my view the dynamic history of capitalism reveals the opposite point—that despite such intuitions, and against the odds, working people have consistently de-mystified this social process and fought back time and again. By placing human agents and their struggles at the center of the analysis, one can better understand how they come to fight not only for bread, but also for roses. ²