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.