Defensive workers’ institutions can be co-opted to enforce subordination.

Evidence

When these subordinated classes are not strong or sufficiently organized to represent a “counter-hegemonic” force to the existing order, their own corporate structures and institutions can be used, by the dominant structure (hegemonized), as a means of enforcing their continued subordination. The trade unions, which arise as a defensive set of institutions in the working class, can nevertheless be used to provide a structure which perpetuates the corporateness of that class, confining its opposition within limits which the system can contain (e.g., “economism”). … However, for Gramsci, this does not represent the total disappearance of a subordinate class into the culture of a hegemonic bloc, but the achieved complementarity between hegemonic and subordinate classes and their cultures. This complementarity—Gramsci calls it an unstable equilibrium—is the one moment of the class struggle which never disappears; but it can be more or less open, more or less contained, more or less oppositional. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 905

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates and shapes theories of co-optation and economism; connects to Piven-Cloward and organized-labor debates the learner likely knows. — connects to: Labor subordination is enforced by lack of alternatives, not contracts — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 604
• DEFINE: Defines the containment mechanism of trade union economism within a hegemonic order.