Class Power and Union Capacities: A Research Note on the Power Resources Approach

Arguably, the power resources approach (PRA) is the most elaborate and most significant attempt to establish a methodology for labour studies in recent years. It provides a toolkit for identifying sources of workers’ power in capitalist societies. In my view, it has two particular strengths. First of all, it enables labour scholars to conduct strategic research that can help labour activists and trade unionists in their day-to-day-struggles. Second, it is a low-threshold approach that is easy to grasp and use. A significant number of students in the German programme of the Global Labour University, most of whom are closely aligned with organised labour, employ it when they write coursework or MA dissertations. Consequently, Stefan Schmalz, Carmen Ludwig and Edward Webster are right to argue in the Introduction to the recent Special Issue of the Global Labour Journal (2018: 113) that the PRA crosses the divide between academia and labour activism. Nevertheless, the approach is marked by certain theoretical shortcomings, which need to be addressed – not least because they have important political implications. In this short research note, I focus on just one theoretical issue (the implicit transformation of class power as a relation into compartmentalised capacities of workers and workers’ organisations) and one contribution to the debate (the Introduction by Schmalz et al.). A more detailed, critical assessment of the PRA can be found in a separate article (Gallas, 2016). Schmalz et al. (2018: 115) start from the following assumption: “The PRA is founded on the basic premise that the workforce can successfully defend its interests by collective mobilisation of power resources in the structurally asymmetric and antagonistic relation between capital and labour”. This quote shows that for Schmalz et al. the PRA is informed by a Marxian understanding of class as a structurally conditioned relation of power and conflict: class power is exercised by workers mobilising their resources together while facing capital as an antagonist. The existence of this antagonist suggests that the relationship of forces between both sides impacts how resources can be mobilised, and what kind of strategic choices are available for labour. Crucially, Schmalz et al. implicitly transform this relational notion of power into a compartmentalising one through how they understand power resources. They speak of “levels of