No Fun

Capitalism vs Fun

It seems appropriate that this next section should fall on a holiday, not only because we associate holidays with fun but also because this is part of my fun, something I can't do at work. We live in a culture that tries to engineer employee attitudes with various kinds of workplace "fun"--from the chants at the beginning of the Wal-Mart day, to employee retreats, casual Fridays and birthday celebrations. But none of these things make up for the fact that we are laboring for an abstraction that we half suspect, until we actually learn it, will be used against us.

I struggle with this contradiction as a teacher. The saving grace is that I can actually teach a tool I know, at least to the best of my abilities. But the school setting is not "fun," and most efforts to make it more "fun" are simply distractions from the reminders that we are working in a school setting. Part of why there's a sense of "no fun" hanging over every school hour is the rightful sense, on the part of students, that this institutionalized form of education is probably not the best way to learn anything, that it's a hoop to jump to get out into the real world and really learn a thing or two. Part of why there's a sense of "no fun" is that the teacher has to be delusional not to recognize the truth in that perception. Part of why there's a sense of "no fun" is that both teacher and student know the hoop jumping that's being done guarantees nothing out in a work world where the worker's labor power is being driven down to zero.

So, instead of pretending to have fun, I try to opt for realism and the best parts of humanity--compassion and respect, two things I am not paid to offer my students. But these two things actually do offer me (and I hope my students) some sense of fun in the classroom because acknowledging the ugly realities and the myths of education allows us to conspire in subversive behavior. No doubt, as Lebowitz describes below, the system will conspire to take this wiggle room out of the equation. I can already see where the potential for such honesty will diminish with the online classroom, where every comment is put down in writing.

How do you see the trends Lebowitz describes here where you work or in places where you have worked?

Lebowitz writes:

Why producing under capitalism isn’t fun

54. In other words, it’s not an accident that most of us find the workplace a place of misery—the process of capitalist production cripples us as human beings. But, why can’t workers simply struggle against this? Why can’t they turn the capitalist production process into a place consistent with human development?

55. Again, remember the logic of capital: if human development made profits for capital, it would have introduced changes that supported it. But capital isn’t interested in whether the technology chosen permits producers to grow or to find any pleasure and satisfaction in their work. Nor does it care what happens to people who are displaced when new technology and new machines are introduced. If your skills are destroyed, if your job disappears, so be it. Capital gains, you lose. Marx’s comment was that “within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker.” The logic of capital is the enemy of all-round human development.

56. So, if workers do succeed in making gains here (and elsewhere) through their struggles, capital finds ways to respond. And, it has the weapons it needs. Through its ownership of the means of production, its control of production, and its power to decide the nature and direction of investment, capital ultimately can do what it needs to do in order to increase the degree of exploitation of workers and expand the production of surplus value. While it may face opposition from workers, capital drives beyond barriers to its growth in the sphere of production. Capital rules in the sphere of production.

Deformity

Fetishizing Our Lives Away

As of today, the first paragraph under festishism in Wikipedia reads, "A fetish...is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent value or powers to an object."

One of the fundamental deformities Marx talks about is the way we've made money (accumulated capital) into a fetish. In a sense, we see our own power as something alien to us. Lebowitz explores various aspects of this here.

Lebowitz writes:

How capitalist production deforms workers

50. Think about the situation of workers in capitalism. As we have seen, the goals and authority of capital rule the process of production. Further, workers produce products which are the property of capital. But, workers don’t recognize those products as the result of the activity of working people. On the contrary, machinery, technology, all “the general productive forces of the social brain”, appear to workers as capital and as the contribution of the capitalist. Those products, further, are turned against workers and dominate them—they become the power of capital. What has happened? Simply, Marx explained, because the worker has sold his creative power to the capitalist, that power now “establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him.”

I remember this older woman working at a McDonald's one day who was joking (half-joking) that the managers were setting up the security camera so that, if she were robbed, they'd get some nice film of her but nothing of her robbers. Of course, her managers were more concerned that she'd take money from the till than they were anyone was going to rob her, right? That was the point of her joke.

That camera itself is a product of the collective work of laborers just like that woman, and that product is being trained on other workers for ensuring that every penny the capitalist makes stays under the control of the capitalist.

On one hand, this idea of the worker being alienated from what her hands have made takes the form of the dangerous machine that takes workers lives in Stephen King's "The Mangler." In a more overtly political way, the anti-riot personnel carriers and weapons used to put down worker demonstrations are all products actually made by workers. On another level, this alienation of the product from the labor explains why a worker can be fined a million dollars for file sharing despite the fact that her actual contribution to wealth may be abstractly counted as millions of dollars of social labor for which she is unpaid--the amount of money she is underpaid on her job, the support services she offers for her family that allow her to work, the incalculable services she provides to her neighborhood and community on a daily basis. Capitalism turns virtually everything we do into the private property of those who cut our checks. And even if it is not threatened, capitalism will turn those products into weapons to be used against us.

51. The world of wealth, that world created by human activity, faces the worker “as an alien world dominating him.” For workers in capitalism, producing is a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.” And what is the result of this “emptying-out,” this impoverishment in the process of producing? We try to fill the vacuum of our lives with things—we are driven to consume (consumerism). How else can we do this but with money, the real alienated need that capitalism creates?

Money is a commodity that symbolizes a certain value for labor at any given time, and most of us work all the time for precious little of it. We like to have things to show for our money as well, so we collect stuff--I-Pods, Kindles, DVDs, whatever. When we have nice things, we look like, and may even feel like, we're doing all right, even though we're less than two paychecks from the street. Ironically, when Americans hear the term "private property" in relation to capitalism, they think of this list of personal property that stands as our concession prizes for not having a stake in the system. We tend to be bribed to a comfort level where we won't resist the system in large numbers, which may be the greatest genius of the capitalist system.

Other ways that capitalist production deforms people

52. But that drive to “consume, consume!” is only one way that capitalism deforms people. In Capital,Marx described the mutilation, the impoverishment, and the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation” which occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. Did the development of machinery rescue workers under capitalism? No, Marx stressed, it completes the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labor.” “In this situation, head and hand become separate and hostile,” “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.

There's a Springsteen song called "Youngstown," about a steelworker more or less singing to his blast furnace. He tells her he's "sinking down," but he takes pride in his work at the same time, seeing himself in the next life, working the "fiery pits of hell." I think, in many ways, it's a song about the struggle involved in the "emptying out" described above.

53. But, why does this happen? Remember that the technology and techniques of production that capital introduces are oriented to only one thing—profits. Since workers have their own goals and struggle for them, the logic of capital points to the selection of techniques that will divide workers from one another and permit easier surveillance and monitoring of their performance. The specific productive forces introduced by capital are not neutral—they do not empower workers and allow them to develop all their capabilities (mental and manual). On the contrary, “all means for the development of production,” as Marx stressed about capitalism, “distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him” and “alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process.”

I was just joking with a co-worker earlier today about how, since I've taken a job in my school that allows me to pursue more of the social justice concerns I have, I've in many ways been deprived of my personal strengths--because of the dynamics in my relationships with co-workers in the new department, because of the cultural climate of our institution that becomes more entrenched with every attempt to change it, because of the way the very creation of this job places the person trying to change the institution outside of the role in which real change can be made. It's almost funny to me to see that reflected in Lebowitz's comments about the nature of the system and its effect on our capabilities.

I think it's important, crucial to recognize that capitalism is not neutral. It is a system organized around taking the power of workers and turning it into tools to be used against them. It works because it makes a religion people refuse to question. We wind up worshiping wealth, i.e. stolen labor. This, in turn, shapes every aspect of our lives and virtually every detail of the environment in which we try to work.

That's some kind of deformity.

While I Was Sleeping.....

We received two important posts from Isaac on the previous section of Lebowitz. He raises some important questions that I think we should address before we move forward. I'd love to hear some commentary from others who are following this blog, and I promise to get rolling at a more constant pace very soon.

Summer's been tough, but I'm finding my way.

Danny

Beyond A Rigged Game

Overcoming Divide and Conquer Strategies

Lebowitz writes:

The reserve army of labor

45. If productivity increases dropped from the sky, the falling cost of producing commodities could permit workers to buy more with their existing money wages; in this case, workers could be the principal beneficiaries of productivity gains. But, they don’t drop from the sky; to the extent that productivity increases are the result of changes initiated by capital, the effect is to increase the degree of separation among workers and thus to weaken workers. For example, every worker displaced by the introduction of machinery adds to the reserve army of labor; the unemployed worker competes with the employed worker. Not only does the existence of this reserve army of unemployed workers permit capital to exert discipline within the workplace but it also keeps wages within limits consistent with profitable capitalist production. Displaced workers, for example, may find jobs—but at much lower wages.

This last line is an important principle in Marx, a point he argued over and over again. In capitalist society, people believe this myth that the loss of a job is an opportunity for something else out there. And, certainly, that kind of luck can happen for individual people. But the nature of the system is that people are not going to be laid off to increase profits and then find they are, as a group, even the majority of the group, going to make more money in their new jobs. As a class of people's positions are devalued by the system, their new toeholds in the system are, in the main, going to be of less value.

I've seen this illustrated over and over again, admittedly anecdotally, in my experience. For every person I know who lost a job and found something better, I can list a dozen others who are either not fully employed or who have had to adjust to a lowered standard of living. Of course, as we've seen the loss of industry in the Rust Belt and in Southern California, in particular, we've seen lots of high dollar jobs disappear. The service industry work that has taken its place has been generally at lower wages with less security. At some point, the evidence of recent history outweighs (and validates) all the proofs Marx could muster.

46. The same thing is true when capital moves to other countries or regions to escape workers who are organized—it expands the reserve army and ensures that even those workers who do organize and struggle do not succeed in keeping real wages rising as rapidly as productivity. The rate of exploitation, Marx believed, would continue to rise. Even with rising real wages, the “abyss between the life-situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.”

This is some acknowledgment of the points Isaac made in his last post. Not only have nationalist union slogans failed workers worldwide, but it's clear that Lebowitz recognizes that the worldwide market for capital ensures that organized labor (as it exists) cannot win in the long run. And note that he quotes Marx--"the life-situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening." This is why Marx saw capitalism collapsing and, ultimately, a need for revolution beyond a moral choice regarding the exploitation of the worker.

The next session takes this point even further and deals with the point more explicitly. And this is not simply Lebowitz's updating of Marx. It is Marxist theory as opposed to the doctrine of another era or the program of a political party from some past era.

Exploitation is not the main problem

This concept rallied workers to build trade unions and gain reforms, but the deeper issues become more clear every day.

47. It is a big mistake, though, to think that the main problem with capitalism is inequitable income distribution—i.e., that the basic reason that capitalism is bad is that workers receive less income than they produce. If this were the only problem, the obvious answer would be to focus upon changing the distribution of income in favor of workers, e.g., strengthen trade unions, regulate capital through state legislation, follow a full employment policy (that reduces the effect of the reserve army)—all such measures of reform would shift the balance of power toward workers.

Again, as I noted in my response to Isaac's post on the previous section, these were adequate strategies for an era of expanding economy. Today, as worldwide globalization begins to find its limits and as once prosperous economies begin to collapse, none of this reform has any leverage. Some say there are no more reforms left in the system. It's easy to see that there aren't enough reforms left to get at the hemmorhaging of jobs and the value of labor being driven down to zero. (I'm not saying it's there yet; I'm not saying we'll ever be so labor free as to get there; I am saying that's the direction.)

48. But only for the moment. Because it is essential to understand that capital never sleeps. It never stops trying to undermine any gains that workers have made either through their direct economic actions or through political activity. It never stops trying to divide workers, to turn them against each other, to intensify work, to drive wages down. Even when workers have had the strength to make gains (as in the period after the Second World War), capital looks upon those gains as temporary barriers to go beyond. It uses its essential power to decide how to invest and where to invest in order to regain the offensive (as it did in the so-called Golden Age). That inherent power of capital put an end to the “welfare state” and the “import-substitution” models that were introduced in many countries as a basis for economic development.

Again, this analysis is classic Marxism, and it further underscores why the trade union movement is inadequate to face the new era. Many of us may still be in unions (I certainly am), and I will not quit fighting for what ground we are able to hold on that front. At the same time, I have to go outside of my union structure and work with others--adjuncts, part-timers, the unemployed, students, etc.--to explore the potential for new organizational structures. And whatever my union does, it will strategically only be on the right side of history if it keeps these potential alliances in mind. My guess is that it will eventually end up very clearly on the wrong side of history, and then I'll have to cast my lot with those it's fighting instead of the real power trying to divide and conquer.

As far as I'm concerned, this is when the analysis begins to get really interesting--when we are forced to talk about strategy for dealing with new conditions in the context of this history and theory.

49. The problem is not that gains in reducing inequality and exploitation are only temporary. Whether workers’ wages are high or low is not the issue—any more than whether the rations of slaves are high or low. Rather, we need to look at the process of capitalist production itself—to see the nature of the workers that capitalism produces.

What I like that Lebowitz is doing here is that he is establishing the necessity of this analysis for understanding just what we are up against and what we must do.

To sum up--

For most of us, the loss of a job will lead to a lower income and less job security;

Globalization only means that the gap will continue to rise between those workers who continue to be employed and the handful of people running things;

Capital tirelessly (systematically, not even consciously) organizes offensively against workers--to pit them against each other and to turn each worker victory into a "temporary barrier" before it regains its offensive;

None of this can be changed by simply reforming the system.

As we move through this, I find myself wishing that we were digging into more of the math that drew these conclusions. Much has been done over the past 150 years or so, but one thing we can continue to do is offer our own perspectives, experiences and anecdotes that validate and/or challenge these conclusions. Eventually, I'd like to take this discussion into the methodology itself, but maybe we get some of the way there by simply talking about our experiences and insights.

Your thoughts?

Unity Versus Divisiveness

Unity of Labor versus the Division of Labor

This section does two things. It sums up much of what we've talked about before, but more importantly it uses that summary to show even more examples of how capitalism is, ultimately, at war with human development. While all the members of a band play their most powerful music when the individual parts express unique perspectives while serving the whole--by finding the nodal point where individuality and unity join forces, capitalism's chief strategy is to strip the worker of individuality, even dignity, alienate her from the work and divide her from her sisters and brothers in the work. A balance of individual reflection, creativity and social communion are essential to human development. Maximum exploitation of labor for the sake of global competitiveness is essential to capitalist survival. These two drives have no choice but an ultimate showdown.

And one of the saddest aspects of this, as I've mentioned before, is that the nature of the capitalist workplace is that we are always in conflict with those we are trying to serve. We are in competition with our peers and we are in a state of antagonism with our customers/students/patrons, whoever is relying on our service. For me, it means that I am generally most lonely during my workday. I overcome that loneliness, almost without exception, by breaking or bending the rules (social, cultural, sometimes institutional) in some way.

Can the rest of you sympathize with this?

Lebowitz writes:

Unity and separation among workers—unity is the strategy of workers

38. The answer is struggle: what happens to wages and hours of work depends upon the relative strength of the two sides. For workers in capitalism to make gains in terms of their workdays, their wages, and their ability to satisfy their needs, they need to unite against capital; they need to overcome the divisions and competition among workers. When workers are divided, they are weak. When workers compete against each other, they are not struggling against capital; and, the result is the tendency for wages to be driven down to their minimum and the workday to be extended to its maximum. That was and is the point of trade unions—to end divisions and strengthen workers in their struggle within capitalism.

The strategy of capital—divide workers

39. How does capital respond? By doing everything it can to increase the degree of separation among workers. Capitalists may bring in people to compete for work by working for less—e.g., immigrants or impoverished people from the countryside. They may use the state to outlaw or destroy unions or shut down operations and move to parts of the world where people are poor and unions are banned. From the perspective of capital, all this is logical. It’s logical for capital to do everything possible to turn workers against each other, including promoting racism and sexism. Marx described the hostility in the nineteenth century between English and Irish workers in England as the source of their weakness: “It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.”

40. So, while it is logical for workers to want a little security in their lives, to be able to plan their future and raise families without being in a state of constant uncertainty, the logic of capital points in the opposite direction. In fact, the more precarious the existence of a worker, the greater is her dependence upon capital. Capital prefers the worker who is always worried that capital will abandon her, leaving her without a job and with an uncertain future. Capital, wherever possible, prefers the occasional, part-time, precarious worker, the one with no benefits, the one who will accept lower wages and more intense work.

41. The struggle between capitalists and workers, thus, revolves around a struggle over the degree of separation among workers.

Productivity increases

42. Precisely because workers do resist wages being driven to an absolute minimum and the workday to an absolute maximum, capitalists look for other ways for capital to grow; they introduce machinery, which can increase productivity. If productivity rises, then less hours of labor would be necessary for workers to reproduce themselves at that same real wage. By increasing productivity relative to the real wage, they lower necessary labor and increase the rate of exploitation.

43. In the struggle between capital and labor, accordingly, capitalists are driven to revolutionize the production process. That could be good news for everyone: with the incorporation of science and the products of the social brain into production, it means that significant productivity increases are possible. So, there is the obvious potential to eliminate poverty in the world and to make possible a substantially reduced workday (one that can provide time for human development). Yet, remember, those are not the goals of the capitalist. That is not why capital introduces these changes in the mode of production. Rather than a reduced workday, what capital wants is reduced necessary labor; it wants to maximize surplus labor and the rate of exploitation.

44. But, what prevents workers from being the beneficiaries of increased productivity—through rising real wages as the costs of production of commodities fall? How does capital ensure that it and not workers will benefit?

Of course, Lebowitz plans to answer these questions in the sections ahead, but we can certainly speculate on our answers now, based on our everyday, repeated experience.

Also, what keeps the unity of the workers from overcoming the power of capital? Why are we so convinced, as a society, that we are powerless in the face of the system? What can we do to change this way of thinking? What is the cost if we don't?

The Dangerous Illogic of Capital

The Logic of Capital Versus the Logic of Human Development

Lebowitz starts this section by saying "there are many examples of how the logic of capital and the logic of human development are opposed." Isaac's comments after the last blog about the opposition between capital's focus on the nuclear family (really a concept of family based upon the source of income) and the need to focus on the larger, human family is one such example. The many ways in which our individual, personal development actually runs into contradiction with our long hours and often very constricting job parameters is another.

But Lebowitz chooses to focus on the conflict between capitalism and nature. If we see human development as something that should be in harmony with nature, then it is fairly obvious that the competitive drive to take over the globe for the sake of profit does not meet that need. The current turn toward the green economy seems disingenous at best. Celebrities buying green indulgences to make up for their travel emissions may be taken as an innocent enough gesture, but it's not doing anything to turn around the rapid destruction of our environment on every front. Neither, as the latest Progressive argues, is the rush to build more hybrid cars, which leads to more "guilt free" driving and arguably more carbon emissions in the long run. And then there's Obama on TV every hour or so arguing for the concept of "clean coal." Would we hear that argument from that man if he didn't run a country driven by profits?

I grew up in an oil town, and 35 years ago, we were concerned about the oil crisis. Manufactured or not, we knew it had real roots. My father would explain to me that his company was researching alternative fuels because these petrochemicals wouldn't last forever. Of course, he also confided that his company was not going to stop pushing fossil fuels until it became more profitable to sell renewable resources. All these years later, we're building speculative capital out of such schemes, but what good it will do is unclear, and any such measures may already be too late.

In a sane world, wouldn't we take the reins on this global environmental crisis by focusing on alternative sources of energy and letting the oil companies go by the wayside? Wouldn't we stop clearcutting the majority of our forests today and start looking at ways to make better use of all of the materials we have at hand?

The logic of the day--on every front I can think of--demands that we put human (including environmental needs) above those of industry. This system simply won't allow it. In terms of what we need for our development, the tail is definitely wagging the dog.

That's no way to run a world, and if we can't figure out a way to do better, then the choice may be taken right out of our hands. I choose to believe there's still time.

Lebowitz writes:

The logic of capital versus the logic of human development


36. There are many examples of how the logic of capital and the logic of human development are opposed. Think, for example, about nature and the environment. Human beings need a healthy environment and need to live with nature as the condition for the maintenance of life. For capital, though, nature—just like human beings—is a means for making profits. Treating the earth and nature rationally (from the perspective of human beings), Marx noted, is inconsistent with “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit.” Capitalism thus develops while “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”


37. The logic of capital, in fact, is the enemy of the logic of human development. Standing opposite capital’s goal is “the worker’s own need for development.” But, if capital and workers are pressing in the opposite direction in capitalism, what determines the outcome?

The Exploitation of the Family

Friedrich Engels' The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State is an important book on many levels, but particularly because it raises the questions of feminism in terms of how the exploitation of women is built into the capitalist system's blueprint for family relationships. Whether today's family is traditional, a "Mr. Mom" home or something much more egalitarian in terms of the couple, the system still depends on exploitation of the family's resources. In this seciton, Lebowitz sketches the nature of that exploitation.

Lebowitz writes:

Necessary labor within the household

32. Capital, we have argued, wants the lowest possible necessary labor. But, there is one kind of necessary labor that capital would like to expand—unpaid necessary labor. So far, we have only talked about the necessary labor in the things that workers buy. Marx did not ignore the fact, though, that people need to convert those things they buy in order to consume them; he talked about activities “absolutely necessary to consume things”—like cooking the food purchased. Indeed, Marx pointed out that the greater the “expenditure of labor in the house,” the less money you need to purchase things outside the house.

The most obvious example of this, "cooking food," is given in the example. Of course, there are plenty of other examples that come to mind--from home assembly of that furniture that you buy at Wal-Mart to the gas that is required to distribute things from the store to the home, generally a cost added to the consumer by shipping and handling or taken on by the consumer altogether.

Anyone who's ever lived in a poor neighborhood knows the irony of ghetto prices and distribution--there are no stores within a half hour's walking distance that have even halfway decent prices. So, you either live out of the Stop and Shop, or you find a way to make the mile-long journey to get what you need. Plenty of walking going on, which is yet more unpaid labor on the distribution end. What other examples come to mind of ways in which labor necessary for the consumption of commodities goes unpaid? It's amazing how many corners are cut that we don't even think about as corners to cut.

On top of that question, we might also consider the irony that people are increasingly moving to on-line shopping and, for a long time now, fast food eating. How and why does the price of fast food outweigh the cost-savings (for corporations) of providing food that people will cook at home? Also, how are these corporations making more money out of on-line distribution? (Cutting out the middle man?)

33. But this labor performed in the household is invisible. Why? Because capital does not have to pay for it. We know, too, that the majority of this work is done by women; and it is work that is generally not recognized or valued. Yet, without this labor within the household (which Article 88 of the Bolivarian Constitution recognizes as “economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth”), workers would not be available for capital in the labor market.

This certainly suggests the motherload of answers to the questions posed by paragraph 32. What has traditionally been characterized as "women's work," all of the things that go into running a household, raising children and even knitting the social fabric in which the family functions and the children are raised--all of those things that contribute to the workers' lives and guarantee generation after generation of reliable wokers--that's all work that no one pays for.

The primary wage earner in the household, in a sense, pays for this help out of his or her paycheck by supporting the person and/or people that do this work, but the corporation does not accept responsibility for this work. I would suggest that this is why what we know of as a women's movement in this country has primarily made gains for people with different genitalia in the capitalist workplace while ignoring feminine values and the value of what has traditionally been labeled "women's work" to the social fabric.

[A historian friend of mine has an operating thesis that the women's movement of the 19th and early 20th century actually had a much more feminine-centered agenda than the second wave of feminism we all identify with the 1970s. As she would admit, a lot of it was reactionary to a fault, but it was still genuinely about family values as opposed to corporate priorities, ranging from abolitionism to the many temperance unions, and an end to long working hourse for women and children, etc.)]

To the extent these issues are addressed, they get called "family values," and the assumption is no one should have to be paid to do the right thing by their family and their children. Of course, no one knows how to argue in response. But there is a response. If this society gave a flying flip about social justice in terms of family values, then we'd find a way to put the cash on the barrelhead to make sure all family work is some way monetarily supported by the society as a whole. You pay for what you see as important; family work is not a commodity within the corporate system, so it is not important as anything more than an idea and a guilt trip to coax people into accepting the status quo.

34. While capital does not pay for this invisible labor, it benefits. The more work that is done free in the household, the less the wage has to be. The more free time that men have as a result of women’s work in the household, the more capital can intensify the capitalist workday. As the purchaser of labor power, capital is in a position to gain from the unpaid labor of women within the household. And the more intense and lengthy that work in the household, the more capital can gain. And, it works the other way, too: the more capital drives down wages and intensifies the workday for both male and female wage-laborers, the greater the burden placed on the household to maintain workers.

This is good stuff, the logical extension of paragraphs 32 and 33. Capital depends upon exploiting the labor of women (and sometimes men) who work 70 to 80 hours a week maintaining a household (even women who work full time jobs still tend to spend something like 57 more hours a week working on the home--men, considerably less).

When you start adding these things together, the thievery that is the modus operandi of capitalism borders on mind-boggling. The worker is paid a wage that is only worth a portion of the output of his or her day's work; that's one way the corporation steals from the worker.

Secondly, the corporation works the employee harder with each passing year in order to increase profits, profits never proportionately shared with the employee.

As Isaac pointed out, corporations offer benefits as a lure to employees and then let many of those workers go before they can claim those benefits--this is not to mention the many ways that benefits don't necessarily translate into all that is promised when the worker tries to collect on them.

Then there is the other excellent point Isaac made that workers are paid more for overtime hours because the profits that come with not having to increase the workforce to cover these additional hours yield much more into the corporate coffers than the rate of overtime pay.

Add to all of that the ways in which corporations take advantage of all of the domestic work that keeps employees coming in to work, reasonably happy, healthy, presentable and mentally sound, and the calculations of the ways capital exploits the common person's capacity for labor become overwhelming.

Yet another list we might generate would be other, so far unmentioned forms of unpaid labor that the corporation counts on in its exploitation of the employee. What comes to mind? Again, as Isaac said, there is no easy way to get such ideas over to the average American, but beyond simple activism (which I know from experience can lock itself into a deadend mindset that teaches people nothing), I think it's terribly important that we prepare ourselves for each of these conversations as they might come up.

35. How could we deny that the logic of capital is contrary to the need for the development of women?

In part, of course, this is about the double burden handed women in our society. If she takes on a career, it must be balanced with this concept of being a home-maker, and when the corporations are only set up to cover the labor capacity of the employee, that home-maker job necessarily gets short shrift.

But I would add to this the way in which, maybe not women as a whole, but feminine perspectives, ideas, ideals and values get short shrift by the system. What kind of world would we live in if we did not prioritize such feminine values as the care and nurturing of children, family systems and community? The one we live in? The one driven by war, dog-eat-dog competition and austerity programs that throw 650,000 people out of work each month with very few social services to support their families?

I'm all for a much more feminine society, one in which masculine values are on an equal playing filled with feminine values. Capitalism ensures that masculine values take first priority, and that's got us locked into endless war and an ongoing cheapening of life and all of the qualities of life that make it worth living.

Your thoughts?

The Struggle for Human Development

This section of Lebowitz addresses the power of the human spirit to resist the system. It's dear to my heart because it's about that place our music and art comes from. It's about love and family and friendship. It's about what gives me a reason to believe and keep on keeping on......

Lebowitz writes:

Class struggle

29. In other words, within the framework of capitalist relations, while capital pushes to increase the workday both in length and intensity and to drive down wages, workers struggle to reduce the workday and to increase wages. Just as there is struggle from the side of capital, so also is there class struggle from the side of the worker. Why? Take the struggle over the workday, for example. Why do the workers want more time for themselves? Time, Marx noted, is “the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden.”

This is one of many ways I certainly count myself lucky. My job gives me a great deal of satisfaction, even if I do largely see it as a tangential means to an end in terms of my own development. But part of the reason it gives me satisfaction is that I see the gains around the edges. If I just do the job I'm supposed to do, as a "professional" credentialing my students for certain systematic titles, the job isn't necessarily that tough. It's a testament to the human spirit that I think most teachers try to rise above this one way or another, but the basic job responsibility is to provide some opportunity for those most trainable to capture their credentials and to make sure the unprepared folks don't slip through. That's not the hard part of the job. The hard part is trying to think of ways to engage students; the hard part is spending those extra hours with students going over their papers and ideas after class or on-line; the hard part is trying to make sure they genuinely succeed. Fortunately, that's also where the soul is rewarded.

30. What about the struggle for higher wages? Of course, workers have physical requirements to survive. But they need much more than this. The worker’s social needs, Marx commented at the time, include “the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc.” All of this relates to what he called “the worker’s own need for development.”

Again, all the things that nourish me and keep me going....

31. But the needs of workers for more time and energy for themselves and to be able to satisfy socially generated needs don’t concern capital as the buyer of labor-power and ruler within production. It’s obvious why—lowering the workday and raising wages mean less surplus labor, less surplus value, and lower profits.

This is why service jobs are more dispiriting than ever. If there's one thing I can easily get my students to agree upon, it's the way they feel constricted by the limits of their jobs. Recently, one student told me he got in trouble for saying the wrong goodbye phrase at work. He was supposed to say something like "Have a nice day" instead of "Thanks," some meaningless distinction at that level.

And then people work so long, sometimes at two or three jobs (I once had five) that there really is no room for creativity. People still find ways to create. My wife spends every free minute of her day painting; she can switch from socializing or doing chores to painting a picture in a ten second turnaround. Myself, I've developed terrible habits to do the things I love to do. I spent most of my life staying up until the early hours of the morning and getting up hours before I had to go to work just so I would have that private time and space to think. I'm writing this right now because it's storming outside (tornado weather and torrential downpours), and I can't leave where I am to run an errand before the next task I have to do.

Part of our creativity in this capitalist society is the way we find spaces in the gaps and exploit them. But we need to think about that. We need to contemplate the ways in which our successes are putting one over on the system. I have to convince my employers that I can't do any more work than I'm doing (we do that collectively through negotiations and by the way we manage our daily affairs--not taking excess students, etcetera) so that I can hold onto that little bit of time to express myself freely. The only ones who care about us having that extra time are ourselves and those who love us (simply for the sake of our own sanity), certainly not the CEO's that run our companies, not the ones trying to drive this year's excellent numbers (in the good years) to a higher, more competitive level.

I'm sure I could think of other examples, but what are some of the ways others reading this blog find time for their own development? I bet we have a long list of ways we make time out of thin air.

Capital's Laws of Motion

Speaking of alienation of labor, the police assault on ten-year-old Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, one of the stars of Slumdog Millionaire, and the ongoing difficulties of all of those child stars, really underscore the many ways the worker is separated from the production and the profits from the production under our system. Anyone who's seen that movie knows, without those three kids, that movie would not have been the hit that it was. Of course, under capitalism, any three cute workers will do as well as any other three cute workers. Anyway, they make $200 million dollars worldwide for Celador, Warner Bros., and Fox Searchlight, and they continue to live in poverty. I know, I know, Danny Boyle's set up a trust fund, but poverty kills, minute-by-minute.

Anyway, I have a lot of experience working with people in various forms of entertainment who do the job (for next to no money, this would include myself) because it gives us a sense of belonging to something, perhaps while we feel alienated from our day labor. I'm a fine mix of contradictions in this area. My point is, as things are, those children are very nearly exploited at a level undreamed of by their thuggish pimp in the movie--all of this while the whole world watches. This is central to the accepted morality of capitalism. We can all sigh and say why that's the way it is, but we don't get around to collectively discussing the possibilities. Some people think that this is the best we can do, but I think that's a cop out. I have to dream of a future when people will see the way we rationalize injustice today as clearly as we can look back at the evil groupthink that rationalized the slave trade.

Now, Lebowitz moves into the direction of capitalism, what I think is the most useful part of this kind of analysis fo the world we live in today.

Lebowitz writes:

Capital’s laws of motion

25. So, you can be certain that the capitalist will do everything possible to increase the ratio between surplus labor and necessary labor, the rate of exploitation (or, in its monetary form, the rate of surplus value).

Again, in the real world (not Frank Capra movies), this is how people stay in business.

26. If the workday is equal to the level of necessary labor (e.g., that six-hour workday in our example), there is no surplus labor. So, what can the capitalist do in order to achieve his goal of surplus value (profits)? One option is to reduce what he pays the worker. By driving down the real wage (for example, reducing it by one-third), then the hours of labor necessary to produce that wage will fall. Instead of six hours of necessary labor, only four hours would be required now. The result is that two hours of the six-hour workday now would be surplus labor for the capitalist—the basis for production of surplus value.

The muddiness of some of Lebowitz's set up to this really makes me appreciate the clarity of Marx (and Adam Smith, for that matter). This is one reason I'd really like to use this blog as a discussion to fuel a clearer, more succinct explanation and illustration of the ideas discussed here. At this point, it should be clear that the capitalists' profits absolutely depend on these kinds of negotiations. Workers have to be paid less than they are really worth in terms of what they produce, and that's determined by the competition between multinational corporations, producers and distributors. We live in a world of Wal-Marts, where every penny we save is taken out of someone else's hide, and that's not going to change if we get rid of Wal-Mart. It will only change (IMnotsoHO) if we uproot the system.

27. Another option is for the capitalist to use his control over production to increase the work that the laborer performs. Extend the workday, make the workday as long as possible. A ten-hour workday? Fine, that would mean now four hours of necessary labor and six hours of surplus labor. A twelve-hour workday? Better. The worker will perform more work for the capitalist over and above the wage, and capital will grow. Another way of extracting more work from the worker is by intensifying the workday—making workers work harder and faster in a given time period and making sure there is no wasted motion, no slack time. Every moment workers rest is time they are not working for capital.

Again, this is just competitive sense. Efficiency works us harder for the sake of company profits. In the world of the information revolution, along with robotic housekeepers and automatic checkout, capitalists need less and less workers to be competitive. This has led to a situation where, as a recent Monthly Review column illustrated, almost a fourth of the U.S. employment-age population is not fully employed--which has something to do with why over three times as many people are in jail today as were during the employment boom after World War II.

28. That is the inherent logic of capital. The inherent tendency of capital is to increase the exploitation of workers. In the one case; the real wage is falling; in the other, the workday is increasing. In both cases, surplus labor and the rate of exploitation are driven upward. Marx commented that “the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum.” He continued, however, saying “while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

And it's obvious who's going to win in that game, as long as it is the same game we've been playing. The capitalist, whoever pays our wages, will only give when times are good. The expansion of capital allowed for a steady increase in employee gains throughout most of the latter twentieth century, which was strategically and/or systematically tied to the destruction of unions as well as the overt and covert censorship of exactly the kind of conversation we are trying to initiate on this blog.

Today, times are not good. I work for a wealthy county community college, and our union's managed to negotiate something close to the status quo, while we've actually lost benefits (supposedly because of a new legal understanding of how our retirement should be funded). We're doing very, very good next to most people.

We're at an interesting point in history, and a scary one. All of the seams are showing, and the threads are starting to tear. What will it take for average people to see that their future does not depend on maintaining the current system?

One thing we might do is brainstorm a few examples of what would help illustrate these points for a more general audience? This list seems very familiar with most of these ideas, and I would guess most Americans (my focus on Americans, although everyone on this list may not self-identify as such, is that Americans have been so indoctrinated not to even contemplate the possibilities) actually have anecdotal evidence of all of these ideas but haven't made the connections.

So, what is some of that evidence? How do companies try to lengthen the workday? How do they make us work harder for the same pay? How else do they drive down pay?

The Name of the Game? Exploitation

Today's post bring us a fourth of the way through Lebowitz's article, the point where I think we start digging into the more challenging ideas. I am certainly going to try to pick up momentum. Sorry for the many delays....

Lebowitz writes:

Exploitation of wage-laborers

22. What happens, then, in the sphere of capitalist production? It all follows logically from the nature of capitalist relations of production. Since the capitalist’s goal is surplus value, he only purchases labor-power to the extent that it will generate that surplus value. After all, he’s not in the business of charity.

You know, one reason "A Christmas Carol" still stands up for me, despite people seeing it as sentimental and so forth, is that it so clearly portrays (at least from my perspective) the core capitalist mentality. All of those things Scrooge says are what's called good business sense, and his social fixes (work houses, prisons) have become more popular than ever in this country and the world it is shaping over the past three decades. As capitalism hits its limits.

23. In order to understand the generation of surplus value, think about what workers normally buy—in other words, what they need to maintain themselves at their existing standard of living, i.e., the average real wage. Based upon the general level of productivity in the society, we can calculate how many hours of daily labor are required to produce that real wage. For example, at a given point, the daily wage might embody 6 hours of average labor—6 hours of “necessary labor”; it means that on average, it takes 6 hours of work to produce the equivalent of that wage.

This is a tough section. As Marx described it, "socially necessary labor" is that which is necessary, using the best tools and methods, anywhere in society. That minimum amount of labor will drive the competitors towards its level. I'm not sure where Lebowitz is going with the 6 hours number, at least in this paragraph, but I think it is important to keep in mind that the wage is going to be determined by the minimum amount of labor required for the worker to get the job done--and to keep the labor coming to work.

24. Of course, the capitalist has no interest in a situation in which workers work only long enough to get their equivalent. What the capitalist wants is that workers perform surplus labor—i.e., that the labor performed by workers (the capitalist workday) exceeds the level of necessary labor. The necessary condition for generation of surplus value is the performance of surplus labor—i.e., more labor than the labor contained in what the capitalist pays as wages. The capitalist, through the combination of his control of production and his ownership of the product of labor, will act to ensure that workers add more value in production than the capitalist has paid them. The difference between the total labor they perform and the labor equivalent in their wage (in other words, a difference which is their unpaid labor) is exploitation.

I suppose this gives a clue to the 6 hour number. Lebowitiz is suggesting, for instance, that employers want 2 more hours of work out of a laborer for every 6 hours actually needed to get the job done. Of course, there are many ways workers are squeezed. My brother, who works as a supervisor, has talked about the imperative from above, every year, on his job. If his workers kick ass and do a terrific job, making higher profits than ever before, the mandate is that they raise that number by some percentage next year. They can work faster, the equivalent of 12 hours in 6 hours, or they can work longer for less pay. But what we've established here, the guiding principle, is that a capitalist (an employer) is in the business of getting the most bang for his buck. This means the capitalist's job is to make as much money as possible out of a worker while paying that worker only enough to keep her coming back in to work--somewhat well fed, somewhat healthy, somewhat satisfied. As the Monopoly board of multinational businesses becomes more competitive, the worker will deal with less satisfaction, worse health and worse nutrition because we are not in control of the game.

Workers Without Property Rights

The dialogue's very important to me, so please let me know if I miss comments you've made on past points.

Onward--

Workers without property rights

21. The second characteristic of capitalist production is that workers have no property rights in the product that results from their activity. They have no claim. They have sold to the capitalist the only thing that might have given them a claim, the capacity to perform labor. It’s not like producers in a cooperative who benefit from their own efforts because they have property rights to the products they produce. When workers work harder or more productively in the capitalist firm, they increase the value of the capitalist’sproperty. Unlike a cooperative (which is not characterized by capitalist relations of production), in the capitalist firm all the fruits of the worker’s productive activity belong to the capitalist. This is why the sale of labor-power is so central as a distinguishing characteristic of capitalism.

This is one way of getting at the concept of the alienation of the worker. Part of the division of labor in capital is that the worker's labor is abstracted, countless times, from the market value of the item being sold. No matter how many morale-boosting seminars our employers fund, we cannot be convinced that we are getting anything out of boosting company profits. The harder and longer we work, the harder and longer we are expected to work. The more students I can teach a semester, the more students I will be expected to teach a semester. This is precisely why faculty has fought hard for a cap on how many students can sit in our classrooms and why we can't budge that number (at least in my program) as a favor to a particular student. The more work teachers show themselves as capable of doing, the more they will be asked to do, and the quality of attention gets lost in the process. I know my best classes would have about 10 people; 15 is a generally agreed upon number, and those are both workable. But the less students I have, the more I am able to focus my attention on individual students' questions and needs. Right now, for a writing intensive course, we've fought hard and managed to maintain a cap at 26. This day will no doubt pass, as it already has with some online instruction.

The point is that white collar and blue collar workers have this in common. Even those folks who work down at HyVee and have a profit-sharing plan have no way to trace their actual labor to the amount of profits they are individually making for the company. Since that formula is unknown, I think we can all agree that it's very likely that the average employee contributes much more to the ability of the company to make profits than he or she ever sees in a paycheck. That's simply what is known as good business. Business people pay no more than they have to for their resources, and of course that includes each employee's capacity to produce.

Make sense? What am I missing?

Whose Market Is It Anyway?

Workers Controlled By Capital

Lebowitz continues:

The logic of capital in the sphere of production—workers controlled by capital

19. Two central characteristics typically occur in the process of production that takes place under capitalist relations. First, the worker works under the direction, supervision, and control of the capitalist. The goals of the capitalist (i.e., the search for profits) determine the nature and purpose of production. Directions and orders in the production process come to workers from above. There is no market here. There is a vertical relation between the one who has power and the one who does not. It is a command system, the despotism of the capitalist workplace.

20. And why does the capitalist have this power over workers here? Because he purchased the right to dispose of their ability to perform labor. That was the property right he purchased. It was the property right that the worker sold and had to sell because it was the only option available if she was to survive.

This first characteristic deals with the heart of politics--the question of control. Although we may be asked for input, and we may form committees to help make decisions, workers do not have any real control over our workplace.

Once you've been hired, you're out of the market, like getting married. You may be just brave (or crazy) enough to quit your job for something else, but the same fundamental truth will be clear wherever you go. The free market system works on behalf of the CEO's and shareholders. Whatever freedom you or I have in that system is whatever their hopefully benevolent dictatorship allows.

This is one of two characteristics of the free market that Americans are particularly innoculated against contemplating--it's fundamentally, as Lebowitz writes, despotic, and the market itself is anarchic, driven by the forces that drive capital, namely profits. While nobody's ultimately in control, the capitalist has what freedom and control there is over most of the hours of our day.

And that leads to another concept in the second paragraph. While most of us engaged in this dialogue have side jobs, we know it's a constant struggle to give those side jobs (usually our passions, our vocations, the ship we're building to someplace better) the attention they deserve. Why? Because making good use of his or her dollar, our despotic rulers pay us for what they think is our full productive capacity in a 24 hour period. And I've had plenty of jobs (including the one I'm currently in) where they were really close to having that formula about right. I haven't written on this blog in a week for a couple of reasons--

First, I have written, a little, in response to some feedback on our first couple of posts. You may want to check those out. That led me to think we may be moving forward too quickly.

Second, I'm spent by the end of each day. I go to workout and spend a little time with my family, and I'm done in. I suppose most people working something like 9 to 5 feel that way. Thankfully, the early reformers of the late 19th century helped get our days down to some reasonable amount, but the capitalist still has us right where we need to be to maximize our productive capacity.

Of course this is further complicated by the fact that the overall jobless rate in this country (if we include both genders, part-time workers, people on disability and folks in prison) is at about 25%. What I know about part-time workers, for instance, is that they all tend to have more than one part-time job (for the first 5 years after I got my MA, I had 5 jobs). And even full time workers are often married (as I am) to overtime pay. We've all but lost the gains we once had when at least a 10th of our workforce was somewhat organized. Our workplaces have led the way to our acceptance of a fascist state. For at least 8 hours a day, what does living in a free country mean? How do we make up for it in the 8 when we aren't sleeping?

Other implications I'm missing?

Other thoughts?

The Market Exchange Between Capital and Workers

Selling Out? It's Called Survival

Lebowitz continues:

The market exchange between capital and workers

17. We now have the basis for an exchange between two parties in the market, the owner of money, and the owner of labor power. The worker needs money, and the capitalist needs the worker’s power. Each of them wants what the other has; it looks like each will get something out of that exchange. It looks like a free transaction. Many people look at the transactions that take place in the market and declare, “we see freedom.” After all, no one forces you to engage in a particular exchange; you could freely choose to starve instead.

I wish Lebowitz wouldn't go oblique here and engage in sarcasm. The point needs to be vivid. The owner needs the worker's labor (at least until it can be automated away), and the worker needs a paycheck. This is nowhere near an equal relationship. The owner buys the labor of many workers, and it is easy for the owner to trade one worker for another. The worker is in competition with every other worker who shares roughly the same skills. The worker sells herself at a price to beat the competition, and the market, as a whole, rarely works in her favor. The market is more or less controlled by owners, even though the actual individual capitalists have limited control. I'd like to see an image as strong as a slave on an auction block in this transaction. The difference being the worker is trying to sell herself rather than another person. Of course, we have many more individual freedoms than slaves, and we have to be treated, more or less, as human beings. But, bottom line, we have to use most of our energy keeping our main commodity, our labor power, competitive in the marketplace.

18. What makes this market transaction different from the sale of any commodity? True, the worker has no alternative but to sell what she has, but that is often true of a peasant or craftsman too. What is different is what happens next; something very interesting happens to each of the two parties to that transaction. Marx commented, “He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” And where are they going? They are entering the workplace; they are entering the place where the capitalist now has the opportunity to use that property right which he has purchased.

I'm beginning to get impatient with Lebowitz's approach. Marx takes his time in Capital, but in a work of this length, he would not meander around in this much abstraction. The difference is that the real marketplace, the capitalist marketplace is one where those who own our days (our employers, capitalists) use our labor as their assets. Unlike the slave, we are not literally sold as people, but our potential to produce becomes someone else's wealth. And that's going to be key to the picture we are drawing. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer because the capitalist system, particularly in the industrial and post-industrial era (in which many workers produce for one employer), redistributes wealth (the value of labor) from the poor to the rich. It's abstract, so we can't see it without breaking in it down the way we plan to do here, but it's this simple. Capitalism robs from the poor to give to the rich--even the "best" capitalists do this. And we can and will prove it.

For all of us who have to work to pay the rent, there is no long term alternative.

What Do You Have To Sell?

Pretty Much All You Got?

Discussion's dropped off, and I'm not sure about the usefulness of this if we don't talk about it, but I'll keep going for a while longer. Hell, I'll probably see it through, just as I plan to see my Capital blog through after I finish with this because, rough and tumble as it is, sometimes I feel like my being "out" with my convictions and my grasp of the theory behind those convictions is the most important work I do (you know, outside of being a husband and a dad and all that). If you all have any tips on how I can make the discussion more inviting, I'd appreciate it.

This italics below present the next section in Lebowitz. I've interrupted him in regular type after each paragraph. Is this a helpful approach?

The Sale of Labor Power

14. But the separation of the means of production from producers is not enough for labor-power to be sold. If workers are separated from the means of production, there remain two possibilities: (1) workers sell their labor-power to the owners of means of production or (2) workers rent means of production from those owners. As we will see below, only the first case creates the conditions for capitalist production.

Let me interrupt here. I'm not sure I get that first sentence, the transition. There seems to be a distinction in these two possibilities between a more or less feudal economy (2), and the one we live in (1). At least that's how I read it. Straighten me out of if you think I'm reading it wrong.

I had the good fortune today of getting to teach The Communist Manifesto in two classes (thanks DC), and one of the most exciting parts of both of those discussions was to look at what Marx was talking about when he said industrial capitalism had created a polarity that never existed before. While we've had all kinds of caste systems, various levels of royalty and clergy for instance, in the past, capitalism creates a polarity and, eventually, everyone winds up gravitating toward one pole or the other. Either you are an owner of the means of production--in the big business, multinational sense of the concept, say one of the 340 people who have owned half of the world's wealth for the past two decades--or you are someone who sells your productivity for a salary or wage. The majority of small business owners (all for all intents and purposes), as Marx predicted, become anomalies at best, and in the main, they fold and become part of the wage labor force.

We talked about Marx's concept of the wage laborer, the proletariat, and how it was different 150 or even 50 years ago than the way we can see it today. I told the students in these classes that it was very clear to me that, no matter what kind of subjective professional class I supposedly belong to in academia, my real job is much like that of the factory worker. I receive 100 students per semester who I am expected to move from one level of education to another. I am a paper grader, and if students pass my quality check, I get to stamp them with approval and move them on to the next person on the assembly line of education. I may be a white collar salaried employee, but it is perfectly clear that I am a wage laborer in terms of Marx's description. The heart of our labor battles in education, at least the minority of us who are full time and organized to fight those battles, revolve around how many students we can process in a given week and in a given semester. In that fundamental sense, our job is as alienating and dehumanizing as any proletariat job. The more students I take on, and the more I help them, the more the industry I work in will want to give me, and the quality of the work I do, and the happiness I associate with that work will decrease.

Is it different with what you do?

15. Who decides? Who decides which of the two possibilities it will be? The owners of the means of production, the capitalists decide. Owning the means of production ensures that you have the power to decide. The capitalists can decide how to use their property to achieve their goal. If they choose to take possession of production themselves, then the only way that workers can survive is by selling their capacity.

Though the fundamental corporate power and state power that runs the school where I work is not going to change in any fundamental way until we change the system. I am excited about the school board elections tomorrow because of the candidacy of Miguel Morales, a student who works in our library, someone who does not represent the big-monied interests, but who represents the students and the people who are last considered in our educational process, those with less money, those who do not represent our majority demographics. Will Miguel be able to change the fundamental dynamics of the system? No, but that doesn't mean I don't think we should fight for his perspective and the reforms it may allow.

I don't understand the last sentence in paragraph #15. Maybe someone can help me out. What choice is there for capitalists other than to take control of the means of production? My understanding is that that's what defines them as capitalists! Workers are defined by the fact that they have to sell their labor..... Perhaps this has a special significance in Venezeula that I don't appreciate? Let me know what I'm missing if you have any insight.

16. But, why does the capitalist decide to buy labor-power? The capitalist buys the right to dispose of the worker’s capacity to perform labor precisely because it is a means to achieve his goal, profits. Only the growth of his capital interests him as a capitalist. Once the capitalist has purchased the worker’s capacity, he is in the position to compel the worker to produce profits.

This last paragraph seems like the kind of reverse syntax Marx is known for, only it's even more hard to read. The capitalist makes profits by buying labor power (my capacity to work) and paying me only as much as will keep me on the job while maximizing profits. If someone else can make more money for my business owner in the same amount of time I can, in a given 24 hour period, I am out of work and that person is employed. If a machine can do it, then one cashier can moniter 4 automatic cash registers instead of employing 4 cashiers. If one teacher can teach 100 students on line or in an auditorium, then why employ 4 teachers to teach classes of 25, or what's argued to be the optimal amount, 15. Personally, I think I'd probably be a much better teacher if I taught maybe 3 classes with 10 people in them each, something like the load of the university professor. But look what's happening in our economy today--universities are cutting tenured positions and folks at community colleges, like where I work, are getting more and more students and are being pushed to take on greater workload. And 97 out of 27 in my department are teaching part-time with no benefits. That's the way of capitalism, as Lebowitz says, because the capitalist "is in the position to compel the worker to produce profits."

What about where you work? Does my experience reflect yours? Do you work overtime or overload? Do you work as much as you can possibly imagine working in a 24 hour period? Have you ever had a job where it seems like you were so wiped out that all you could do is go to sleep in time to go back to work again? Have you ever had a job that wasn't like that? Did you ever party or push yourself anyway, sacrificing sleep, so you could live a little before you had to go back to work in the morning, though you knew you'd pay with the way you felt?

Do you think that's the best way for you to work? Do you think that's best for your quality of life?

This blog is a priority for me, but I literally haven't been able to get to it in three days. Right now, I'm writing on it at 10:59 on Monday night although I need to read an entire book by Wednesday, and I need to read four short stories and respond to 25 student journal entries by 6:00 tomorrow night. I also have a full day of administrative work to try to manage (and probably ignore) tomorrow. This is relatively normal for me. Is it good? Do I have to tell you what I think? Nah.

The Interests of Capitalism versus Human Development

Where Are Your Interests?

Because the conversation has been pretty quiet, and because I fear losing what momentum we have unless we get to the crux of things, I'm going to skip a section here and go straight to a sequence of ideas that ought to get us talking.

Paragraphs 8, 9, and 10 in Lebowitz deal with the fact that the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999 was an attempt to support capitalist institutions while aiming for higher goals of human development. He suggests that was appropriate for the time the document was written, but then raises questions about whether human development and capitalism are ultimately compatible.

The next three paragraphs deal with a basic breakdown between what Friedrich Engels called "two new classes" of the industrial era that were busy "swallowing up all of the others." These two classes are essentially those who own industry and those who sell themselves to industry. Though much has changed in the last century and a half, if anything, this polarity has become more vivid, with yet another class coming into view (a class both Marx and Engels actually did anticipate), a class that is losing its place within the system. Today, it is more clear than ever that the employed and unemployed have common interests that are different than those who own the dwindling number of companies running the world.

But I don't mean to get ahead of where we are. Let's look at this basic analysis. Can we agree that these two classes Lebowitz describes are "swallowing up all of the others"?

The logic of capital

11. Think about capitalism. In capitalism, the logic of capital dominates; and that logic goes counter to the needs of human beings for their own development. In capitalism, the goals of production are the goals of capital for profits. For capital, human beings and nature are just means to that goal.

Capitalists and workers

12. Consider the nature of capitalist relations of production. There are two central aspects—the side of capitalists and the side of workers. On the one hand, there are capitalists—the owners of wealth, the owners of material means of production. And their orientation is toward the growth of their wealth. Capitalists purchase commodities with the goal of gaining more money, additional value, surplus value. And that’s the point, profits. As capitalists, all that matters for them is the growth of their capital.

13. On the other hand, we have workers—people who do not own the material means of producing the things they need for themselves. Without those means of production, they can’t produce commodities to sell in the market to exchange. So, how do they get the things they need? By selling the only thing they do have available to sell, their ability to work. They can sell it to whomever they choose, but they cannot choose whether or not to sell their power to perform labor if they are to survive. Capitalism requires people who must sell their power to produce in order to get the money to buy the things they need.

First, the logic of capital is so familiar to us we have several cliched expressions that sum up what's being said here. "Money makes the world go round" being just one of them. Is it true that the goal of profits is in direct conflict with human development? How and why?

Second, where do you exist in relation to these two classes? Would you say you own the means of production for our society or would you say you sell your ability to work to get what you need? What other classes are there, and are they in fact being swallowed by these classes?

I'll leave the first point to you all, but I'll answer the second based on my perspective. I'm in the teaching profession, part of academia, which has often seen itself as separated from the old dichotomy of owners versus workers. But is it? We have a union, even if we like to call it a "faculty association." And we are increasingly seeing situations where teachers' jobs are being cut, even tenured faculty positions are on the line.

For many reasons, I think it's pretty obvious that I'm a white collar worker. My job is to process students through two levels of our academic credentialing system. I have classroom management skills, and I know how to grade papers, and my own academic credentialing says that I can approve or disapprove of student work based on the laws of the system. But that separates me very little from a quality check person in a factory or a line supervisor. As we face issues of increased workload (class size) and budget cutbacks at all levels of the state education system (we barely have a Federal education system), it becomes more and more apparent that college teachers need some political consciousness to face the challenges ahead.

It is also terribly obvious that our interests lie with the partially employed who are our colleagues (97 English teachers in my department are part-time temporary while 27 are full time), and that we ultimately have more in common politically with our students and the unemployed in our community than the politicians and CEO's who are trying to cut their losses (including people who work for them) in order to maintain what control they currently have.

Unfortunately, I think most teachers are a long way from that kind of class consciousness. This is one reason I think a discussion like this is so important.

Your thoughts?

The Individual and the Collective

The Individual and the Collective

Lebowitz's next section takes these same themes and shows how they are endorsed by the Venezuelan Constitution. I don't want to get too hung up on studying Venezuela here, although I do think looking at the Constitution (a link for which I've posted at the end) may be helpful in seeing at least what this government is about on paper.

What tends to confound Americans about socialized governments is that the government calls upon the individual to be responsible to the collective. Americans tend to think that means those people in socialized countires are not truly free. But there are at least two things to consider here. One, is that there is no such thing as an individual life that is not interdependent on social relationships--that's delusional or dysfunctional at best (and it could be argued the American character suffers greatly from such delusions and dysfunctions).

Second, which is the point Lebowitz is making, the flowering of the individual personality depends on social relationships and some form of social responsibility. Of course, Americans, in the main, believe this about our own society. But those of us in particular who find ourselves alienated by the system may grow very uncomfortable with any concept of the individual having her or his individuality dependent on a relationship with any governmental system.

The key to any kind of social revolution, I tend to think, has to do with people genuinely, subjectively, coming to understand that their freedom, their individual personalities and their desires are in fact dependent on a new relationship with one another and a new system. That's why articles like this are written, and even why we write Constitutions--to win people's minds as much as their hearts over to a new way of thinking.

I don't have any preset prompts for this one. I'll just paste this section below, and we might want to comment on how well Lebowitz and/or the writers of the Venezuelan Constitution make their case.

The common sense of the Bolivarian Revolution

5. Every Venezuelan should recognize these ideas—they are at the center of the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela. In its explicit recognition (in Article 299) that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development,” in the declaration of Article 20 that “everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality,” and in the focus of Article 102 upon “developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society”—the theme of human development pervades the Constitution.

6. Further, the Constitution also focuses upon the question of how people develop their capacities and capabilities—i.e., how overall human development occurs. Article 62 of the Constitution declares that participation by people in “forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective.” The necessary way—practice, protagonism.

7. And, the same emphasis upon a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic society is present in the economic sphere, which is why Article 70 stresses “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms” and why the goal of Article 102, “developing the creative potential of every human being,” emphasizes “active, conscious and joint participation.”

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/constitution

Any thoughts?

The third paragraph really sums up the first two, though there may be claims here worth discussion, so I wanted to include the fourth paragraph today as well. Feel free to comment on any of the questions raised by either one.

Lebowitz writes:

A society that stresses the opportunity to develop our potential

3. The idea of a society that would allow for the full development of human potential has always been the goal of socialists. In his early draft of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels asked, “What is the aim of the Communists?” He answered, “To organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” Marx summed it all up in the final version of the Manifesto by saying that the goal is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Our goal, in short, cannot be a society in which some people are able to develop their capabilities and others are not; we are interdependent, we are all members of a human family. The full development of all human potential is our goal.
Where does human development come from?

4. Human development, though, doesn’t drop from the sky. It doesn’t come as the result of a gift from above. It occurs through the activity of people themselves—through what Marx called revolutionary practice—“the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change.” We change ourselves through our activity—through our struggles and through everything we do. The way we produce (in the workplace, in the community, and in the home), the way we relate to others in our activity, the way we govern ourselves (or are governed by others)—all these make us the people that we are. We are, in short, the product of all our activities.

In the first paragraph (3), does the logic of our interdependence and the need for everyone to win if any of us are to win make sense? Other questions and/or comments about the role of socialism and communism in all of this? Any thoughts about why the general American public almost always refer to socialist ideas as the opposite of individual development?

What about the idea in 4 that we develop based on the sum total of all of our activities? To what extent can we see the truth in this, based upon our own experience? What are the implications of this? What does it mean for us to be engaged in "revolutionary practice"? By the way, if I notified you about this blog, I think of you as engaged in "revolutionary practice." Does that impression make sense to you?

[This idea, the relationship between theory and practice, is core to Marx, and I hope we go into it some here and keep that thread going later in the discussion.]

I may leave this post a little longer before moving forward to encourage discussion. There's a lot of room here to testify to our own versions of "revolutionary practice" and to consider and talk about how we learn what we learn. How much of what we know comes from our activity?

Maybe I can start things off by saying I know I am only as good a teacher as I am (however good that is) because of the writing I have been doing--about music, about social issues, about politics--throughout my experience as a teacher. At the same time, my writing is enormously informed by my conversations with 200 students a year over a 20 year period.

When I write, my sense of voice and audience comes out of those experiences. And though I don't overtly talk politics in the classroom (often), I do find I learn a lot about political issues by encouraging my students to discuss these topics, by reading their papers and by thinking about the questions that need to be asked to get them to look deeper into the questions they tackle. At the same time, they teach me a great deal about the questions I need to be tackling.

One of my great writing teachers is a pop music writer who told me long ago two things that might seem contradictory. First, I should never underestimate my audience's ability to follow any argument I want to make. Second, I should think about casting a very wide net when I write. What I learned is that, most of the time, the contradiction there is only in our minds. A wide audience is capable of grasping sophisticated ideas, if we give that audience a chance.

That's a political sensibility that is far too rare; I certainly don't hear it from our elected officials. However, I've always heard it in the fiction, music and movies I most love. And what this writer did was teach me to think about the contradiction and apply it in the work I do. It's served me well in my "revolutionary practice." There's more to what I do in terms of activism, but I don't know that there's anything more important.

What about you?

What Do We Need for Our Development?

From Lebowitz:

What do we need for our development?

2. There are two points, though, that we need to stress. First, if we are going to talk about the possibility of human development, we have to recognize that a precondition for that development is sufficient food, good health, education, and the opportunity to make decisions for ourselves. How can we possibly develop all our potential if we are hungry, in bad health, poorly educated, or dominated by others? Secondly, since we are not identical, what we need for our own self-development obviously differs for everyone.

I'm not going to write too much today, because I'm most interested in the responses, and the dialogue we have there. Two comments before we go on. First, I apologize if folks had a hard time making comments on the first day. I didn't have it set up for as open of access as I should have (my own ignorance), but I think I've fixed that. Second, if you are just taking your first look at the blog today, take a look at yesterday's blog and the comments that followed it. This is meant to be a conversation, and though I see it going in all kinds of directions at once, it is following a coherent path.

Finally, Lebowitz calls this "two points," but there are, of course, several points contained in each one. The first is obviously that the path to human development depends upon some basic human rights--pretty much the ones the U.N. agreed to in its 1948 declaration. The second is that we have to nurture individuality.

On this second point, it's funny because it reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend of mine from Russia the other day. We were talking about how much the stereotypes of the Soviet Union sprung from many different elements in Russian history and culture as well as the pecularities of Stalinism. What it reminded me of was the way the 1950s horror movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is so often talked about as a critique of communism when, in fact, director Don Siegel has said he saw it as a spoof of American mass culture, suggesting that one of the ironies of the Cold War was that the two empires mirrored each other's flaws, irrespective of ideology or economic system.

The point is, from my perspective, can't we imagine a world where we can do these two things at the same time--take care of everyone's needs and nurture our individuality? Honestly, don't they go hand in hand?

Why This? Why Now?

Why This? Why Now?

When I was getting out of my car an hour ago, a story was playing about the escalating popularity of Fox News, and some right wing nut was saying, "So if you really want socialism, all we're asking is that you be honest about it."

But despite the Right's inflammatory rhetoric about the Obama administration, it's fairly obvious that Barack Obama couldn't even bring about socialist change if he wanted it. His job is to save the capitalist economy, and no one has happy answers to that problem.

I think we can all tell we are facing a major fork in the road. Like the efforts to solve the environmental crises without fundamentally changing the way the world exploits the environment and like the efforts to stop terrorism without getting at the root causes of unrest, we all must at least sense with ever increasing certainty that we are going to have to come to a point of reckoning in our near future. The world is changing dramatically, and the chance for that change to turn positive is getting slimmer every day.

In the U.S., we've had over 600,ooo first time job losses for three months in a row. At this rate, that will be over 7 million newly-unemployed people by the end of the year. Modest projections suggest over 20 million job losses worldwide this year. This is like nothing we've ever seen before.

Alongside the many manufacturing jobs that are being lost, the recently expanding service sector has begun contracting. And of course people in real estate and banking are in trouble. My friends in journalism have less and less options as they face unemployment, and even those in the ivory tower, tenured professors, are beginning to lose their jobs.

One of my neighbors, an old vet who waves the flag proudly every day, joked to me recently, "Give me a bail out!" We've all heard that one. But within that joke, within the anger at the rich CEO's who are getting bonuses while the rest of us wonder how long we'll keep paying rent, there's an opening to a new kind of thinking. If we have a government by the people and for the people, what's its responsibility to the people when the economy goes in the crapper? Do we really live in a society where you can be too big to fail, meaning you can also be small enough that failure is acceptable? Is that really the society we want to live in?

This is genuinely a blog. I'm just throwing these ideas down to get some discussion going, and my only interest in doing this is if we actually do have a discussion. I promise not to always be so long winded. I want to get a talk going that I feel is long overdue by people coming from all kinds of perspectives in our society.

I know nothing about Michael A. Lebowitz, except that he is a Canadian economics professor. But what I do know is that he wrote an article for Monthly Review that is meant to kickstart just such a discussion. As he explains in his preface, he wrote the article for "educational and political discussions in Venezuela," but he was thinking of how an American audience might use it as well. He points out that it was written, not for the "individual passive reader" but to "encourage collective struggle....to fight for a society which permits the full development of [everyone]."

We still live in the shadow of the Cold War, in which Marxist thought was effectively propagandized as anti-American. And that has left us with a great hole in our public debate. I believe deeply that we need to understand what Marx was saying about our system, the course of its development and its ultimate self destructiveness, if we are going to be prepared to deal with the choices that lie ahead.

None of this is easy stuff. But Lebowitz has tried to develop an explanation of Marxist methodology applied to our 21st Century situation. I think he may be missing some crucial stuff, that will no doubt come up over the course of our conversation, but I think he's done a tremendous job of laying the bricks for the construction of many more arguments that need to happen.

For almost two decades now, I've been convinced that the choice between "socialism and barbarism," the choice Lebowitz says we have to make, lies ahead of us. In fact, I think it's practically upon us, and the forces for barbarism are growing stronger all the time. That's why I want to have this piece-by-piece discussion of his article with as diverse a group as people I count as friends and allies as I can.

I would encourage you read ahead through the whole article at any point. It is available at http://www.monthlyreview.org/090223lebowitz.php. If, at some point, it is not available, please let me know, and I will get you a copy. As Lebowitz says, "Monthly Review's policy of placing articles online will make it possible for organizations to make whatever use of "The Path" they think may help the struggle." I'm taking him at his word.

So, without further stalling, I'm going to skip past the introduction, though I encourage you to read it, and start simple, with the opening paragraph.

Lebowitz writes:

1. What do we all want? We want to be all that we can be. And we want this not only for ourselves. We want our families and our loved ones to be able to develop all of their potential—that we all get what we need for our development. To each according to her need for development.

It seems self evident, but I feel like we should take a few minutes just to look at this and make some of our initial responses.

Is this true for you? Do you want this for your families and loved ones? Do we live in a society where "we all get what we need"? Why or why not?

I'll move forward tomorrow, with the longer paragraph #2. And we may tackle larger sections at a time later, although the material grows more complex. If I print a paragraph a day, this will take us 115 days, but in my opinion, it will be four months well spent.

Do not feel you have to only talk about what's in the paragraph. For instance, today, I've written a number of other thoughts, and I've left many more out about how and why I've reached the conclusions I have. We can each testify at whatever length based on our own perspectives, or we can have as many side arguments as we might want to have at a time. For now, as long as we don't get people simply running interference, I am going to leave this a completely open blog, in the interest of as much open communication as possible. I know this might better serve a list serve or some other format, but it makes sense to me to stick to the overall coherence of Lebowitz's article, and I'm happy to leave a written record of what we've done out here on the web for blog hoppers to discover. I would also encourage you to share this link with friends who you think might be interested.

But enough of that. I promise not to ramble this long very often, if ever again.

Back to the question:

Do we want a society where we all get what we need?

Do we have one?

Can we imagine one?

Other thoughts?