Also, I think my own research on the faux “political economy” of anti-trade union reactionary rhetoric is relevant to this discussion. The argument was deeply entrenched in popularizations of classical political economy that the aims of trade unionism were contrary to the immutable natural principles of the self-adjusting market. More specifically, the pursuit of higher wages or shorter hours through collective action was held to contravene the workings of the wages-fund doctrine, which was itself “formed from the facts of a perfectly exceptional time, and on the strengths of two truths misapplied, the doctrine of Malthus (on Population) in its most unripe form, and of Ricardo (on Value) in its most abstract.”

After 1869, when John Stuart Mill recanted the wages-fund doctrine, reactionary anti-union rhetoric simply pivoted on the doctrinal reversal. Where previously union demands had been alleged to contravene the inviolable wages-fund doctrine, the revised claim was that they were based on the kindred and equally fallacious assumption of a “fixed work-fund.”

In terms of strategies for labor struggle, I would definitely like to mention my own proposal for Labor Commons Unionism, based in part on Elinor Ostrom’s notion of common pool resources, and for a social accounting framework that explicitly treats disposable time as the wealth it is. I’ve outlined that proposal in “Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society.”