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?
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This is the difficult section of Marxist theory in practice. The distinction has been made between unity and divisiveness, and the most unity we get within the capitalist system is through labor unions. As the pro-capitalist forces will say, labor unions are contrary to capitalist development. From my experience though, labor unions are in a compromised state in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. From my perspective, the purpose of the union is to protect workers from exploitation under the system. I would like to argue that that purpose has shifted during the 20th century. It seems that companies allowing for unionized labor have shifted the interests of the labor union. In Marx and Lebowitz terms, the interest of the union today would be the unity of the workforce. Now I think the interest of the union has become less centered on the unity of the workforce than the individual worker. I can think of one example of how capital-union relations have discouraged unity and encouraged divisiveness by offering employees pensions and health-care plans. I've stressed this before, but I think these are ways that capitalists not only entice workers to keep an alienating job, but keep unions and their workers divided as well, since workers are competing for their benefits. As Lebowitz said, the aim of the capitalist is to keep workers divided so that capitalists can carry out their actions without much resistance. I think that by capitalising the unions by selling them health, pension, and retirement programs, the capitalists have successfully divided their workers, while maintaining good relations with the unions that represent them. I think this allows for the continuing of exploitation.
ReplyDeleteYes, for all intents and purposes, unions--as they currently exist--are done. That doesn't mean we shouldn't look for new ways to build unity among working (and unemployed) people worldwide, but it does mean that unions tend to play into the divide and conquer strategies of capital.
ReplyDeleteMarx was writing about Capital at a time of expansion, and for nearly 100 years after his writing, unions did serve to fight for workers' interests in a context of expanding capitalism.
Many things fell apart over time though. First, the concept of worldwide unity among the working class was replaced by nationalist protectionism. And, then, I guess most fundamentally, since unions were able to gain from the expansion of capital for so long, they soon became an extension of capital.
Whether or not Lebowitz has the vision to see the difference in the doctrine necessary in Marx's time and our time (and it may not be as different in Venezuela), I think it's useful for us to recognize the validity of the principles.
Marx even talked about a growing new class of workers that would be cast out of the system, who would lose their jobs. That's the world we live in today--over 650,000 first time job losses a month.
You are right, Isaac, so right, that unions do not represent those people, and they will not. This has been the downfall of the Labor Party, which I helped found, but which also never could rise above trade union politics to even live up to its own program to represent the unemployed and underemployed.
But I have worked with people who have had a union vision that stood well outside of the trade union movement. Some of those were founders of the Labor Party as well who found their voices eventually lost in the mix. Years ago, there was an organization called the Union of the Homeless that upped the ante on trade union ideas, and out of that movement have grown several groups still going strong, still aligned under the banner of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, pulling together similar organizations in at least 40 states and uniting with similar groups worldwide.
There's a new organization of unity that is waiting to be built, and it will come about one way or another. My main goal is to be there to lend a hand when that begins to take shape.
One thing we should think about from here out is the difference in Marx's theory and the doctrine that gets called Marxism. The theory, the broad outlines of capital and its direction for the future, even the broad strokes about how to fight it, still remain fundamentally true. I first realized this when I read Engels' Utopian versus Scientific Socialism over a decade ago.
But the doctrine, the application to the conditions in the world around us, of course needs to be revised. We now live in a world where automation, for instance, is replacing the basis of value in our society (agreed upon by Smith and Marx), labor power, with laborless power. With no labor going into the work, without that human element that suggests the cycle of give and take that is supposed to keep the capitalist machine running, the cost of production is being driven down to zero.
That means unions have no way of fighting for better working conditions in a world where labor hemorrhages value on a daily basis. One reason we need to have this kind of discussion is to talk about a new doctrine for a new revolution--from an industrial society to what some call the information society, what might be best understood as an electronics revolution.
Even that name seems dated when microchips can be grown in petri dishes. We live in a post-industrial world, and with that, a new class is emerging that needs to find a new political doctrine for unity and survival and what Marx liked to call the true beginning of human history.