Trade Unions and the Shaping of Public Opinion in Mass Democracy

Democracy’s transformation into mass politics has always gone hand-in-hand with new forms of political communication and media. From the early American republic to fin de siècle Europe, the expansion of suffrage created a mass voting public whose attention became the currency of politics. Unlike ancient Athenian democracy—with its lotteries and assembled citizenry—modern democracy quickly became a rowdy arena of journalists, campaign managers, and hucksters competing, often unscrupulously, for public attention. In our digital mass democracy, that rowdiness has only intensified with the explosion of competing sources of political information and appeals.

Moments of mass democracy, including our own, hold out a participatory promise while presenting risks of manipulation. For one, election cycles and expanding media can generate widely available, trustworthy information that makes possible citizens’ informed debate over vital issues of public concern. Public opinion can become a body that thinks and acts—even if only slowly or, at times, reactively. Yet the media-driven election campaign can also present new opportunities for elites to employ disinformation and deception to shape public opinion. To counter these risks, political thinkers and activists have long sought to design institutions that enable ordinary citizens to form considered opinions and take organized, intentional political action.

Trade unions were once understood as uniquely well-suited to this task. At the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, reformist socialists argued that unions were not only economic-bargaining organizations but also rhetorical and media institutions. Through their leaders, newspapers, and protests, unions engaged in far-ranging publicity work that generated and sustained public support for the goal of cooperative comanagement in the economy.

In this tradition, unions served two important publicity- and identity-formation functions in mass democracy. First, organic working-class leaders helped to construct internal union public spheres that developed workers’ democratic agency and identity. For many reformists, these leaders’ distinctive oratory and journalism was central to this internal publicity work: It inspired workers to embrace democratic, inclusivist modes of being with others—similar to what Andrew Sabl has labeled a “humanism of friendliness.” Second, unionists’ disciplined mass strikes, coupled with union newspaper reporting about them, were mechanisms of external publicity. By putting workers’ cooperation and collective self-sacrifice on public display, strikes sought to spur the wider citizenry—especially shopkeepers, peasants, and lower bureaucrats—to recognize their latent interest in cooperation. Strikes were thus a vehicle for citizens’ identity transformation and conversion to the cause of comanagement.

Revisiting this tradition introduces new perspectives into recent theoretical and political debates about organizing, working-class empowerment, and civil/uncivil protest. Most importantly, it underscores that unions are not simply institutions that can improve citizens’ material conditions and epistemic habits. Rather, they are organizations that can transform both their members and other citizens’ political identities such that they embrace cooperative, instead of authoritarian, practices in the economy and politics. In an age of networked, algorithmic propaganda and populist strongmen, this tradition suggests trade unions can play an essential role in freeing workers—and public opinion more broadly—from demagogic manipulation.

Reconsidering Socialist Unionism at the Fin de Siècle

In the fin de siècle France and Germany, reformist socialists developed an account of unions’ distinctive role in mass democracy in light of a common problem: rule by a reactionary oligarchy in the capitalist economy and state. For reformists, many landowners and industrialists were feudal-like rentiers who relied upon protectionist tariffs to artificially sustain their unproductive enterprises. These businessmen were less concerned with profitmaking than preserving their absolute authority in the economic and political domains. They deployed a militarist-nationalist rhetoric in their enterprises and their boulevard press to foster working-class subservience.

Militarist-nationalist rhetoric had three components. It involved (a) theatrical boasting about national heroes, (b) insults and threats directed toward the nation’s internal enemies, and (c) direct commands. At the level of the shopfloor, reactionary oligarchs’ foremen disseminated this rhetoric: They would extol the boss as a national hero, insult workers who challenged his authority as internal enemies, and order workers to intimidate their noncompliant peers. At the level of the press, oligarchs employed boulevard journalists to sell penny papers that apotheosized them and condemned socialists as national enemies.

The reformists argued that saturation with this rhetoric prompted two kinds of response among workers and the wider citizenry. First, many workers and other citizens eagerly placed themselves within this rhetoric’s narrative arc, which meant that they came to conceive of themselves as loyal patriots in the conquest against internal enemies. In some of its audience, then, this rhetoric fashioned an authoritarian self-identity. Second, many workers and other citizens feared becoming the direct target of such campaigns—or, at least, suffering from their socioeconomic collateral damage. They were thus cowed into quietism and indifference. Importantly, reformists interpreted this quietism as an asocial identity: Fearful individuals withdrew from collective life and became suspicious of peers. For the reformists, militarist rhetoric’s fashioning of authoritarian and asocial identities was a fundamental obstacle to the socialist movement’s progress. These identities deterred workers from joining unions and alienated the broader bourgeois citizenry from the movement.

Unions’ internal and external publicity work, the reformists maintained, addressed this problem by helping to construct democratic, cooperative identities among workers and citizens. For internal publicity, the reformists argued that organic leaders employed a distinctive socialist rhetoric of hope in union meetings and newspapers. This rhetoric had an informative and affective dimension: While it clarified exploitative workplace practices and defended reforms to address them in the immediate future, it also sought to cultivate a hopeful, emotive state through which workers could reflectively endorse socialist cooperation’s value. It achieved this latter aim by presenting workers with an enthusiastic vision of the socialist horizon—one in which work would become collaborative, meaningful, and democratically managed. This speech’s enthusiastic form was meant to prefigure the socialist future’s joyous content.

Indeed, by evoking vivid images of a cooperative future, this rhetoric invited workers to imagine themselves within it and participate enthusiastically in its construction. For this reason, union leaders’ speech—whether delivered in meetings or circulated through the union press—was akin to religious preaching: It aimed to foster a conversion experience, drawing workers out of indifference and encouraging them to develop socialist consciousness and commitment. In this way, the reformists believed that emotional activation deepened rather than displaced workers’ rational appreciation of the socialist movement’s goals.

The reformists viewed union mass strikes as vehicles for external publicity. When properly conducted, such street actions were meant not only to secure material gains but also to reshape public opinion to embrace the ideal of democratic comanagement in industry. In this view, the strike could only have this effect when it appeared as a public, dramatic performance of workers’ cooperative capacity and composed peacefulness.

While the reformists did not think strikes could convert their most hardened opponents, they did suggest such street actions could unsettle citizens whose authoritarian identities had been shaped by militarist rhetoric. For those citizens accustomed to militarist narratives against the socialist enemy, the disciplined, peaceful strike undermined these narratives: It revealed socialist unionists as agents of prudence and ordered progress. At the same time, reformists also believed that strike performances could inspire those citizens who had withdrawn into asocial indifference. Like union leaders’ rhetoric, the cooperative strike prefigured a joyful, collaborative socialist future, inviting indifferent observers to imagine themselves as participating in and benefiting from it. Songs, banners, and other expressive elements reinforced this affective appeal, while also spurring observers’ reflective endorsement of the socialist vision.

In this way, unions’ publicity functions helped workers and other citizens recognize their common interest in combatting an oligarchy committed to preserving a system of fixed hierarchy in the polity.

Lessons from the Fin de Siècle

The reformist approach emphasizes that rebuilding contemporary labor movements depends less upon episodic mobilizations than on long-term, worker-led publicity work that cultivates cooperative political identities among citizens.

Central to this tradition is the claim that organic working-class leaders play a decisive role in expanding a union’s membership. At a time when many American unions have delegated organizing work to professional advocacy groups, it underscores the importance of identifying workers who are key members of their workplace and hence possess the reservoir of trust necessary to influence their peers. Further, it indicates that organic leaders’ oratory and journalism are the core means by which unions can shape workers’ political identities in a democratic direction.

Indeed, understanding union leaders as akin to preachers engaged in identity-oriented appeals has significant consequences for our view of union organizing. Effective union leaders do not simply seek to mobilize workers’ negative emotions—such as anger—against material inequalities. Instead, they appeal to their peers in a more positive manner by providing them with relatable and realistic images of a future of collaborative work. Because identity-forming appeals require durable communication infrastructures, a public voucher system for media funding would be indispensable for this approach. Such a system would enable the emergence of independent, union-based media platforms that could serve as the vehicle for organic leaders’ positive messaging. With this policy in place, union newspapers can once again become a central part of our democratic landscape.

The reformist vision also suggests that unions should treat strikes not only as instruments for securing immediate material gains but as occasions for shaping the broader citizenry’s self-understanding as democratic cooperators. From this perspective, the organizational form and aesthetic presentation of strikes are politically significant. Strikes that appear chaotic risk activating militarist narratives that now saturate our digital media environment—narratives that push citizens to view democracy as a struggle between patriotic defenders of national harmony and internal enemies. For this reason, the reformists would caution against the claim that rioting is a desirable form of political protest in our digital mass democracy, even if such street action can be empowering for participants or effective in other contexts. Crucially, their analysis underscores that where picketing involves coercion against strikebreakers, unions must publicly frame such practices as part of a disciplined, collective effort to secure peaceful workplace comanagement.

Finally, this tradition offers a distinctive approach to working-class representation. Democratic theory has shown renewed interest in lottocratic institutions, including proposals for class-based tribunates. The reformists, however, point us in a different direction. Through their publicity efforts aimed at fostering cooperation within diverse, often conflictual, workforces, union leaders develop practical and rhetorical expertise. This enables them to publicly articulate a reform program that shows how workers’ financial participation and control rights in firms can generate positive-sum gains for the economy and democracy. It also equips them to act as exemplars of tough negotiation and principled compromise in state institutions. Lottocratic bodies can certainly complement electoral democracy, but they should not crowd out the rhetorical function of union leaders as builders of democratic identities and coalitions.

Long condemned as uninspired accommodationists to capitalism, the reformists developed original insights into unions’ role in transforming capitalism under conditions of mass democracy. In an age of oligarchic stratification and media-driven demagogy, they invite us to see unions as sites of democratic friendliness and schools of antiauthoritarian leadership.