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?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
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?
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?
Saturday, May 16, 2009
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 household32. 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?
Friday, May 15, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
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?
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?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, May 4, 2009
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?
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?
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