István Mészáros
This article by István Mészáros will appear in two
issues of iran bulletin. Part I: The
‘Globalisation’ of Unemployment and Part II: The myth of “flexibility”:
downward equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation appears in this
issue. Part III: From the tyranny of “necessary labour time” to emancipation
through “disposable time” will be printed in iran bulletin no 28.
Istvan Mészáros is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Political Theory, University of Sussex (UK) and author of a number of books including Beyond Capital and Marxist Theory of Alienation; the Works of Sartre; Search for Freedom; Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science; The Power of Ideology. His interviews with M Keshavarz and with the Persian quarterly Naghd (Kritik) can be read in iran bulletin issues 21-26
Foreword
I have chosen this subject
for our discussion for two main reasons. First,
because the issue concerns all shades
of the left. For in our time no section of the workforce can consider itself
immune to the dehumanising hardship of unemployment and casualisation. In fact
“casualisation” is more appropriately called in some languages “precarisation”,
although it is in general tendentiously misrepresented as desirable “flexible
employment”. A few months ago some 25.000 employees of Westminster Bank had to
face the prospect of redundancy; today the workers of the Rover car company – a
bankrupt part of the proud BMW transnational corporation – are thrown to the
wolves of total insecurity. The question is not whether unemployment or “flexible casualisation” is going to
threaten the people still in employment but when
are they going to share the predicament of enforced precarisation.
The second main reason why we must concern
ourselves with this issue is because it represents an insurmountable structural
problem for capital. Thus it is unthinkable that the left could work out a
viable strategy for the future without giving a central place to the vital
issue of unemployment and casualisation.
Today I intend to consider three principal
aspects of what is at stake.
1.
The “globalization” of unemployment and
casualisation, affecting even the capitalistically most developed parts of the
world.
2.
The myth of “flexibility” with which the
bitter pill is sugar-coated. For what we are talking about is in fact the grave
socioeconomic trend of the downward
equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation.
3.
The only feasible solution to the problems we
face is to move from regulating socioeconomic interchanges by submitting to the
tyranny of “necessary labour time”
(also called “necessary labour”) to emancipation through “disposable time” as the positive alternative to capital’s mode of
social metabolic reproduction.
As our point of departure, we may consider
the question of reducing the working week to 35 hours which, not by accident,
came to the fore in recent times.
1. The “globalization” of unemployment
Socialists in several
European countries – as well as in North and South America – are fighting for
the objective of reducing labour time to 35 hours per week without loss of pay.
This important strategic demand is by no means free from its difficulties. For
it highlights both the pressing problem of unemployment all over the world, and
the contradictions of the socioeconomic system which by its own perverse
necessity imposes on countless millions the hardship and suffering that goes
with unemployment.
Thus the fight for “35 Hours Work” cannot
be a traditional trade unionist demand, confined to the long established
machinery of wage negotiations. On the contrary, it has to be fully aware not
only of the magnitude of the task and the long-term implications of the issues
at stake, but also of the unavoidably tenacious resistance of the soioeconomic
order which must follow its own imperatives in order to nullify whatever
concession might be made in the legal/political sphere under conditions
temporarily favourable to trade unions and to their left-wing political
representatives. Understandably, therefore, in Italy for instance, the party of
Rifondazione in its way of raising
the issue simultaneously underlines the concern with increased employment and
improved conditions of living (“per l’occupazione
& per migliorare la vita”) and the necessity of changing society (“per cambiare la società”) in order to secure the
envisaged objective of shortened working time on a viable social foundation.
For lasting success in this matter is feasible only through a sustained
interchange – a dialectical reciprocity – between the fight for the immediate
objective of significantly reduced labour-time and the progressive
transformation of the established social order which cannot help resisting and
nullifying all such demands.
Those who deny the legitimacy of these
demands, extolling instead the virtues of their cherished system, continue to
idealise the US model for solving the unemployment problem as well as all
social evils inseparable from it. Yet even a cursory examination of the actual
state of affairs reveals that the reassurances idealising the US belong to the
realm of fantasy. For, as an Editorial of The
Nation stressed it:
The poverty rate last year, 13.7 percent, was higher than in 1989, despite seven years of nearly uninterrupted growth. Approximately 50 million Americans – 19 percent of the population – live below the national poverty line. Those in poverty include one in four children under the age of 18, one in five senior citizens and three of every five single parent households. In constant dollars, average weekly earnings for workers went from a high of $315 in 1973 down to $256 in 1996, a decline of 19 percent. Last year the poorest fifth of families saw their income decline by $210, while the richest 5 percent gained an average of $6,440 (not counting their capital gains). … The number of Americans without health insurance stood at 40.6 million in 1995, an increase of 41 percent since the mid-seventies. In 1995, almost 80 percent of the uninsured were in families where the head of household held a job.1
This is how rosy the
American model really looks once you are willing to open your eyes. We may also
add here a most significant figure supplied recently by the Budget Office of
the US Congress, unobjectionable even to capital’s worst apologists. It tells
us that the income of the richest one
percent of the population is equivalent to that of the bottom forty percent. And even more
importantly, it also transpires that this appalling figure has actually doubled in the last two decades, as the
consequence of capital’s structural
crisis. Thus no amount of cynical camouflage of the deteriorating
conditions of work, no matter how eagerly misrepresented as blessed
“flexibility”, can hide the serious implications of this trend for the future
of capital-expansion and accumulation.
Naturally, unemployment statistics can be
fiddled with, or quite arbitrarily defined and redefined, not only in America,
but in every single country of so-called “advanced capitalism”. In Britain, for
instance, even the professional apologists of the capital system – the editors
of the London Economist – had to
admit that the unemployment figures have been 33 times “revised” by the
government in order to make them look better. Not to mention the fact that
anybody who works for 16 hours per week in Britain counts as enjoying full time employment. And even more
strikingly in Japan – a country until recently hailed as a paradigm case of
“dynamic advanced capitalism” – “anybody who works for wages for over one hour in the last week of the month is not included in the unemployment
statistics”.2 But who can be fooled by such devices of economic and
political manipulation? For no matter how concerted and devious the
misrepresentation of the existing state of affairs, the potentially very grave
challenge of unemployment cannot be avoided in any one of even the
capitalistically most advanced countries. Thus, whatever the apologetic
statistical figures might suggest, it is now no longer possible to conceal
alarm about the constantly rising record of unemployment in Japan and the
deepening economic recession that goes with it.
In reality the dramatic rise in
unemployment in the capitalistically advanced countries is not a recent phenomenon.
It appeared on the horizon – after two and a half decades of relatively
undisturbed postwar capital-expansion – with the onset of the structural crisis of the capital system
as a whole. It appeared as the necessary and ever-worsening feature of this structural
crisis. Accordingly, I argued way back in 1971 that under the unfolding
conditions of unemployment
The problem is no longer just the plight of unskilled labourers but also that of large numbers of highly skilled workers who are now chasing, in addition to the earlier pool of unemployed, the depressingly few available jobs. Also, the trend of “rationalising” amputation is no longer confined to the “peripheral branches of ageing industry” but embraces some of the most developed and modernised sectors of production – from ship-building and aviation to electronics, and from engineering to space technology. Thus we are no longer concerned with the “normal”, and willingly accepted, by-products of “growth and development”, but with their driving to a halt; nor indeed with the peripheral problems of “pockets of underdevelopment” but with a fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production as a whole which turns even the latest achievements of “development”, “rationalisation” and “modernisation” into paralysing burdens of chronic underdevelopment. And most important of it all, the human agency which finds itself at the receiving end is no longer the socially powerless, apathetic and fragmented multitude of “underprivileged” people but all categories of skilled and unskilled labour: i.e., objectively the total labour force of society.3
Since the time when these
lines were written we have witnessed a tenfold increase in unemployment in
Britain and elsewhere. As things stand today, even according to the official –
grossly understated – figures, there are more than 40 million unemployed in the industrially most developed countries.
Of this figure, Europe accounts for more than 20 million, and Germany – once eulogised for producing the “German
miracle” – has passed the 5 million
mark. As to a country like India – highly praised in the traditional organs of
economic wisdom for its achievements as a healthily developing country – it has
no less than 336 million people on
its unemployment register,4 and many more millions without proper
work who should be counted but are not registered. Moreover, IMF intervention
in “developing” countries, true to the organisation’s US dictated mandate,
worsens the plight of the unemployed while pretending to improve the economic
conditions of the countries concerned. As another Editorial of The Nation had put it:
Mexico’s economy may appear to be great, but its people are hurting. Since the IMF bailout, the middle class has been crushed; 25,000 small businesses have gone belly up; 2 million workers have lost their jobs over the same time. In dollar terms, wages have plummeted 40 percent. The IMF had to destroy the domestic economy in order to save it.5
At the same time, the former
post-capitalist countries belonging to the Soviet type system, from Russia to
Hungary – which in the past did not suffer unemployment, though they had run
their economies with high levels of underemployment had to accommodate
themselves, often under direct IMF pressure, to the dehumanising conditions of
massive unemployment. Hungary, for instance, has been congratulated by the IMF6
for “stabilising” unemployment at about 500.000. In reality the figure is
considerably higher, and still increasing. But even 500.000, in terms of the
relatively small Hungarian population, is equivalent to having 6.5 million
unemployed in Britain or Italy, and something approaching not 5 but 8 million
in Germany. In the Russian Federation the situation is just as bad, and getting
all the time worse, including such outrages as not paying the wages of miners
and other workers for many months. Vietnam presents a particularly tragic
example. For after the heroic victory of its people over the long and
devastating interventionist war of US imperialism, the peace is being lost under
the pressure of capitalist restoration.7 And even China is no
exception to the general rule of rising unemployment, despite the very special
way in which its economy is politically controlled. A confidential but leaked
report prepared by its Ministry of Labour warns the Chinese government that
within a few years unemployment in the country is bound to reach the staggering
figure of 268 million – pointing also
to the danger of major social explosions to go with it – unless appropriate
(but not specified) measures are adopted to counter the present trend.8
This is how we have reached a point in
historical development at which unemployment is a dominant feature of the
capital system as a whole. In its new modality, it constitutes a close network
of interrelations and interdeterminations whereby it is now impossible to find
partial remedies and solutions to the unemployment problem in limited areas, in
sharp contrast to the postwar decades of development of a few privileged
countries where liberal politicians could speak about Full Employment in a Free Society.9
In recent years there has been a great deal
of talk propagandising the universally beneficial virtues of “globalisation”,
misrepresenting the trend of capital’s global expansion and integration as a
radically new phenomenon destined to resolve all our problems. The great irony
of the real trend of development – inherent in capital’s logic from the first
constitution of its system centuries ago, reaching its maturity in our own time
in a form inextricably tied up with the system’s structural crisis – is that
the productive advancement of this antagonistic mode of controlling the social
metabolism throws an ever-increasing portion of humanity into the category of superfluous labour. Already in 1848, in
the Communist Manifesto Marx insisted
that
In order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. … [But] the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.10
Ironically, thus, the
development of by far the most dynamic productive system in history culminates
by rendering an ever growing number of human beings superfluous to its
machinery of production, although –
true to the system’s incorrigibly contradictory character -- far from
superfluous as consumers. The
historical novelty of the type of unemployment in the globally completed system
is that the contradictions of any specific part complicates and aggravates the problem
in other parts and, consequently, in the whole. For the need for
unemployment-producing “downsizing”, etc., necessarily arises from the
antagonistic profit- and accumulation-seeking productive imperatives of capital
which it cannot conceivably renounce, so as to restrain itself in accordance
with rational and humanly gratifying principles. Capital either maintains its
inexorable drive toward its self-expansionary targets, no matter how
devastating the consequences, or it ceases to be capable of controlling the
social metabolism of reproduction. There can be no half-way house or even the
slightest attention paid to human considerations. This is why the first time
ever in history a dynamic – and in its ultimate implications dynamically
destructive – system of self-expansionary social metabolic control arises which
ruthlessly ejects, if necessary, the overwhelming majority of humankind from
the labour process. This is the deeply disturbing meaning of “globalisation”.
When capital reaches this stage of
development, it has no way of addressing the causes of its structural crisis; it can only fiddle with effects
and surface manifestations. Accordingly, since capital “cannot feed its slave
any longer”, the “personifications” of its system (to use Marx’s expression)
try to resolve the problem by clawing back even the limited benefits conceded
to labour in the form of the “Welfare State” – during the postwar period of
undisturbed capital-expansion – by attacking and abolishing the “Welfare
State”. Thus in the US, the unemployed are compelled to submit to the dictates
of “work-fare”, if they want to
receive any social benefits. And true to form, in Britain the same shift is
being attempted from “Welfare” to
“work-fare” by the government of a party which once considered itself
socialist. Accordingly, when an eight column headline of a British liberal
newspaper (which happens to be very friendly to the government of “New Labour”)
announces: “Jobless told: join Army or lose benefit”,11 that
headline gives a foretaste of the measures in store for the unemployed youth.
This, again, underlines the fact, just like the other aspects of our problem
mentioned so far, that the now fully accomplished globalisation of unemployment
and casualisation cannot be redressed without the radical supersession of the
capital system itself. Not so many years ago it was confidently anticipated
that all known social evils, even in the most “underdeveloped” parts of the
world, will be overcome by universal “modernisation”, in conformity to the US
model. Characteristically, however, we are now confronted by the diametrical
opposite of the projected rosy picture. For the conditions once confined, in
the tales of “developmental theory” and governmental wisdom, to the allegedly
temporary difficulties of “underdevelopment” are now becoming clearly visible
even in the capitalistically most developed countries.
2. The myth of “flexibility”: downward equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation
On May 19, 1998 the French
Parliament passed a law reducing the working week to 35 hours. Similar
legislation is expected also in Italy in the not too distant future. It would
be very naïve, however, to think that this is the end of the story. For in
Paris the move was immediately “described by many economists and business
leaders as economic suicide”,12 and
in Italy even before any legislative move the leader of the Confederation of
Italian Industry (Confindustria), Giorgio
Fossa made absolutely clear the intention of his organisation to nullify all
such legislation.13 Moreover, Confindustria President Fossa (whose
name in Italian means, most appropriately, “grave”) also unashamedly declared
(as if it should not be obvious to everyone who knows his organisation) that
they intend to bury the law, if enacted in Parliament, with the help of a
“grand coalition” which would include the supporters of even the extreme
right-wing parties.14 And true to its customary cynicism, the London
Economist pontificated about the
proposed law like this:
So who really wants Lionel Jospin’s 35-hour working week? Certainly not France’s employers, who claim it will increase labour costs and reduce their competitiveness. Nor the taxpayer, who suspects he will have to pay higher taxes to finance the scheme. Nor, increasingly, the unions, who fear it will lead to lower wages and fewer workers’ rights. Nor even the workers, most of whom expect to continue working as much as before, but with more awkward shifts and unsocial hours. Even the unemployed, the scheme’s supposed beneficiaries, are wondering how many jobs, if any, it will actually create. … Mr Jospin finds himself saddled with a scheme not even he – it is whispered – believes in.15
Apparently, then, the law in
question represented a mystery all round. This we were assured by The Economist on the authority of the
mysterious well-informed whisperers.
Naturally, there are serious difficulties
that must be faced by the labour movement in its struggle for a real reduction
in the working week without loss of pay. But they are of a very different order
as compared with the frightening tales devised by The Economist and by other spokesmen of the ruling order. The real
obstacles confronting labour in the present and in the near future can be
summed up with two words: “flexibility”
and “deregulation”: two of the most
cherished slogans of capital’s personifications today in business as well as in
politics. They are meant to sound very attractive and progressive. In truth,
though, they encapsulate the most aggressive anti-labour aspirations and
policies of neo-liberalism, claimed to be as commendable to every rational
being as motherhood and apple-pie. For “flexibility” with regard to labour
practices – to be facilitated and enforced through various kinds of
“deregulation” – amounts in reality to the ruthless casualisation of the labour force. It is often coupled with
authoritarian anti-labour legislation – from Reagan’s suppression of the US air
controllers to Margaret Thatcher’s long series of vicious anti-labour laws:
characteristically retained by Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government. And the
same people who call the diffusion of the most precarious labour conditions of
casualisation universally beneficial “flexibility”
also have the nerve to call the practice of authoritarian anti-labour
legislation “democracy”.
“Flexibility” is expected to take care of
the concession of 35 hours, if for the sake of political contingency it becomes
unavoidable, as seems to be the case in France and Italy. Thus in France “some
ministers talk of making the labour market more
flexible, notably by letting employers vary the working week in accordance
with seasonal demand, so that the number of hours worked weekly would be
calculated as an average over the year.”16 The same ploy is expected
to do the trick in Italy. At the time of its introduction Italy’s Prime
Minister Prodi – later rewarded with the Presidency of the European Commission
– reassured his critics that appropriate “flexibility” should be able to
counter the negative effects of the law.
The real concern of the personifications of
capital is to promote “labour flexibility” and to fight in every possible way
against “rigid labour markets”. Thus a prominent article in the Financial Times insists that “In both
Japan and Europe, companies are gearing up to shed jobs faster than rigid
labour markets can create them”, indicating approvingly that “deregulation may force the pace” and
adding for the sake of propagandistic reassurance that “Optimists believe
deregulation will eventually lead to the creation of sufficient jobs in new
markets to absorb much of the excess labour. But for this to happen, Japan will
need the kind of labour mobility that
operates in the US.”17 (The story of Renault’s takeover of Nissan,
bringing with it the sacking of 30.000 Nissan workers, must please the
advocates of such remedies, in that it shows that Japan is moving in the “right
direction”.) Similarly, an IMF staff paper – enthusiastically reviewed by The Economist – asserts that “studies
suggest that in Europe real wages are only half
as flexible as those in America, and that Europe’s workers are much less
likely to move around in search of
work than American ones.” This they say while blissfully forgetful of John
Kenneth Galbraith’s complaint many years earlier that workers in the US can
only blame themselves for their unemployment because they refuse to “move
around” as a result of their “homing instinct”, which ties them to the place of
their upbringing. Nothing seems to change over decades either in diagnosis or
in remedial wisdom. And to complete the priceless self-serving reasoning, the
authors of the IMF staff paper present their far from reflexive but, rather,
automatic Pavlovian reflex solution in the form of neoliberal capital’s wishful
“should be” projections:
Suppose, for instance, that a government cuts unemployment benefits. Workers now have a sharper incentive to seek work and so unemployment should fall. An increase in the number of job seekers will also put downward pressure on wages. Lower wage costs should, in turn, boost employment.18
Naturally, as a result of
this wonderful shrinking of the wage bill, we shall live happily ever after.
And on the other hand, if – despite the very real sacrifices of the workers
(described in our quote with the words “now have” and “will”) – the fictitious
expectations of “should be” do not materialise, that could in no way invalidate
the shared theory of the IMF and The
Economist. It would only reveal that the proverbial pigs of the well-known
English adage stubbornly refuse to grow wings, to look like giant bumble-bees,
in order to fly toward capital’s wishfully projected “optimistic” future.
In the meantime, the real savagery of the
system continues unabated, not only in ejecting more and more people from the
labour process but, with a characteristic contradiction, also lengthening the time of work, wherever
capital can get away with it. To mention a very important example, in Japan the
government has recently introduced a parliamentary bill “to raise the upper
limits of the working day, from 9 hours
to 10, and the work week, from 48 to
52 hours. Such a provision will allow a company to compel employees to work
longer hours when the company is busy as long as the total hours worked in a
year do not exceed the fixed limit”,19 just like the “flexibility
merchants” propose it in France, Italy and elsewhere. Moreover, the same bill
also intends to extend so-called “discretionary
work schedules” in order to “allow a company to pay its white-collar workers for just 8-hours work even though they
may have worked longer”.20 Some frightening examples of the inhuman
destructive effects of such “discretionary work” are reported from the fields
where they are already operative, now to be extended. For instance a young
computer programmer died of heavy overwork, according to the judgement of the
Tokyo District Court. We read that “his average annual working time was over
3,000 hours. In the three months just before his death, he worked 300 hours a
month. At that time he was engaged in developing a computer software system for
banks.”21 Another young man who died of heart failure due to gross
overwork, “in the two weeks prior to his death worked on average 16 hours and 19 minutes a day”.22
In the words of another Japanese journal even today
employers impose strict quotas on workers, which means long working hours and unpaid work put upon the shoulders of the workers. … A train conductor, for example, working for East Japan Railways Co., Japan’s biggest railroad company, actually performed his duties for 14 hours and 5 minutes while he was kept in the workplace for 24 hours and 13 minutes, and the company did not pay him for the rest of the 10 hours and 8 minutes, saying that these hours are “neither working hours nor rest periods”.23
Significantly, in the age of
capital’s structural crisis even this level of exploitation is not enough. It
must be extended as far as the labour movement can put up with. In Japan the
present bill before parliament “is the biggest
attack in the postwar period against workers’ rights.”24 No
wonder, therefore, that some Trade Unions are envisaging for themselves a much
more directly political role in the future, compared to their traditional line
in the past. To quote Kanemichi Kumagai, secretary general of the Japanese
National Confederation of Trade Unions: “This year’s spring struggle will not
just follow what has been done in the past but will aim to change the trends of politics and the labour movement, including
how Japan’s policies and economy should be. For this we attach greater
importance to achieving workers and trade
unions taking actions to have influence over society”.25
Japan is a particularly important example,
because we are not talking about a so-called “Third World” country about which
even the most callous and ruthlessly exploitative labour practices were always
taken for granted as a matter of course. On the contrary, Japan represents the
second most powerful economy in the world: a paradigm of capitalistic
advancements. And now even in such a country unemployment is perilously rising
and the conditions of work must be made worse than ever under the long period
of postwar development and capital-expansion, including not only the great
intensification of exploitative work-schedules in the name of “flexibility”,
but also the – to many people quite incomprehensible – imperative of a longer
working week.
At the roots of this baffling and in some
ways self-contradictory advocacy of “flexibility”, coupled with rigid authoritarian labour legislation,
we find the vitally important tendential law of the downward equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation,
which becomes sharply pronounced through capital’s ever more destructive
globalisation in the period of the system’s structural crisis. This is why I wrote in 1971 that
the working classes of some of the most developed “post-industrial” societies are getting a foretaste of the real viciousness of “liberal” capital. … Thus, the real nature of the capitalist production relations: the ruthless domination of labour by capital is becoming increasingly more evident as a global phenomenon. … The understanding of the development and self-reproduction of capital’s mode of production is quite impossible without the concept of total social capital … Similarly, it is quite impossible to understand the manifold and thorny problems of nationally varying as well as socially stratified labour without constantly keeping in mind the necessary framework of a proper assessment, namely the irreconcilable antagonism between total social capital and the totality of labour.
This fundamental antagonism is inevitably modified in accordance with (1) the local socio-economic circumstances; (2) the respective positions of particular countries in the global framework of capital production; and (3) the relative maturity of the global socio-historical development. Accordingly, at different periods of time the system as a whole reveals the workings of a complex set of objective differences of interest on both sides of the social antagonism. The objective reality of different rates of exploitation – both within a given country and in the world system of capital – is as unquestionable as are the objective differences in the rates of profit at any particular time … All the same, the reality of the different rates of exploitation and profit does not alter the fundamental law itself: i.e., the growing equalisation of the differential rates of exploitation as the global trend of development of world capital.
To be sure, this law of equalisation is a long-term trend as far as the global system of capital is concerned. ... Let it now suffice to stress that “total social capital” should not be confused with “total national capital”. When the latter is being affected by a relative weakening of its position within the global system, it will inevitably try to compensate for its losses by increasing its specific rate of exploitation over against the labour force under its direct control – or else its competitive position is further weakened within the global framework of “total social capital”. … there can be no way out, other than the intensification of the specific rates of exploitation, which can only lead, both locally and in global terms, to an explosive intensification of the fundamental social antagonism in the long run. Those who have been talking about the “integration” of the working class – depicting “organised capitalism” as a system which succeeded in radically mastering its social contradictions – have hopelessly misidentified the manipulative success of the differential rates of exploitation (which prevailed in the relatively “disturbance-free” historic phase of postwar reconstruction and expansion) as a basic structural remedy.26
As a necessary concomitant
of the ongoing globalisation of productive and distributive relations, the
downward equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation affects every
single capitalistically advanced country, even the richest ones. There can be
no more room for paternalistically manipulated labour relations, however
“traditional” and “deeply rooted” they are supposed to be, nor indeed for
permanently avoiding the severe negative impact of the ubiquitous structural
crisis through relative trade and technological advantages. Indeed, as an
Appeal by some distinguished intellectuals in an Italian newspaper stressed it,
what makes the situation grave is that casualisation and insecurity (“la
precarietà e l’insicurezza”) grow everywhere in the world of labour:
“unsafeguarded and underpaid work is spreading like pools of oil, while even
the most stable work undergoes a pressure toward an intensification without
precedent of its performance, and toward full availability to a submission to
the most diversified working hours.”27
To put it in another way, here we have to
face an extremely significant and far-reaching tendency: the return of absolute surplus-value, to an increasing
extent, in the societies of “advanced capitalism” in the last few decades.
Professor Augusto Graziani spoke most eloquently in February 1998, at the
Convegno of Rifondazione in Milan dedicated to the issue of the 35 hours week,
about the labour conditions of the “Mezzogiorno” in general and about the
frightful exploitation of female labour in Calabria in particular. His
intervention is most relevant to the question of “absolute surplus-value” in a
capitalistically advanced country, like Italy, in that some of the highly
exploitative labour practices can be identified also in the industrially most
developed North of the country. In England, at the same time, a recent TV
documentary illustrated the widespread diffusion of child labour, although it is clearly against the law. Naturally, the law is not in the least enforced.
On the contrary, all kinds of phoney arguments are promoted in order to
indirectly justify such unlawful practices. Thus, business interests conduct a
vociferous campaign against the minimum wage in general, with the excuse that
its introduction would make the employment of young people much worse. Another
way of manipulating the same issue, by the Confederation of British Industry,
by the Institute of Directors, and by the various “Think Tank” organisations of
business, is to press for the “exemption of the young” from the minimum wage
legislation, or the concession of much lower minimum wage. Moreover, the
worsening labour conditions of people of all ages in countless “sweatshops” –
legal or illegal immigrants as well as a far from negligible portion of the
English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish labour force – speak loud enough about the
reappearance of the drive for absolute surplus-value, as a most retrograde
tendency in the 20th century development of capital, in one of the
most privileged “advanced capitalist” countries. Needless to say, both the
ruthless pursuit of absolute surplus-value in general and its particularly
obnoxious manifestation in the form of child labour were always prominent (and, of course, so they remain today) in ‘Third
World’ countries.
Paradoxically, the global crisis of
capital-accumulation in the age of advanced globalisation creates some major
new difficulties, instead of solving the long contested iniquities of the
system, as the “optimistic” spokesmen of unproblematical “globalisation” want
us to believe. For the margins of
capital’s productive viability are diminishing (hence the drive also for
absolute surplus-value), despite all efforts of the capitalist states –
individually or in concert, like the G7/G8 jamborees – to expand, or to keep
steady at least, the system’s productive margins. In actuality there can be
only one way for attempting to enlarge the shrinking
margins of capital-accumulation: at the expense of labour. This is a strategy actively promoted by the state – indeed,
because of this need the interventionist
role of the state has never been greater28 than in our own time,
despite all neoliberal mythology to the contrary – and the strategy is
objectively underpinned in our time by the tendency for the downward
equalisation of the differential rate of exploitation. In the end, however, the
now pursued strategy is bound to fail, provided that the labour movement
succeeds in radically rearticulating its own strategies and forms of
organisation, to be oriented toward the creation of a genuine mass movement, in
order to face up to the historical challenge. For not even the most
“optimistic” theorists of the IMF and of the other generously funded organs of
capital-apologetics have managed to invent so far, nor are they likely to do so
in the future, a device through which it would be possible to squeeze out the
required ever-increasing purchasing power and the corresponding
capital-accumulation from the ever-worsening economic conditions and
“casualized wage packets” of the labour force.
Part 3: From the tyranny of “necessary labour time” to emancipation through
“disposable time” will appear in the next issue
Notes
1 “Underground Economy”, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 3.
2 Japan Press Weekly, 16 May 1998.
3 István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control, Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 26 January 1971. Merlin Press, London, 1971, pp. 54-55; reprinted in Mészáros, Beyond Capital, Merlin Press, London 1995 and Monthly Review Press, New York 1996. Quotation is from pp.889-890.
4 “While the total number of unemployed persons registered with employment exchanges stood at 336 million in 1993, the number of employed persons in the same year according to the Planning Commission stood at only 307.6 million, which means that the number of registered unemployed persons is higher than the number of persons employed. And the rate of percentage increase of employment is almost negligible.” Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India: History of the Emergence and Movement 1830-1990. With an Overview up to 1995, K.P. Bagchi & Co., Calcutta 1997, p. 554.
5 “Waterloo in Asia?”, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 4.
US interests are cynically pursued and imposed wherever the opportunity permits. Thus “American officials, who effectively vetoed the creation of an Asian Regional Fund independent of the IMF, and therefore of Washington, have also made it known – most recently in the case of Korea – that no US direct aid will be forthcoming until the ailing countries acquiesce in IMF demands. So far, Thai authorities have agreed to remove all limits on foreign ownership of financial firms and are pushing ahead with legislation to allow foreigners to own land, long a taboo. Even before it sought help from the IMF, Jakarta abolished its restrictions on foreign ownership of publicly traded stock, a move replicated by Seoul when it granted foreign investors access to the $64 billion long-term, guaranteed corporate bond market, access they had been seeking for years.” Walden Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle”, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 19.
6 IMF congratulations, to be sure, mean very little, if anything, even in their own terms of reference. Characteristically, “when the Thai economy was headed for trouble, the IMF was still praising the government’s ‘consistent record of sound macroeconomic management policies’.” Walden Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle”, loc. cit., p. 16. Similarly, in the few months since the IMF “rescued” the South Korean economy, unemployment has actually doubled in the country.
See also an insightful article by János Jemnitz, “A review of Hungarian politics 1994-1997”, Contemporary Politics, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1997, pp. 401-406.
7 See Gabriel Kolko’s fine book, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. See also Nhu T. Le’s passionate rejoinder in his review of Kolko’s book in The Nation, “Screaming Souls”, 3 November 1997.
8 Anthony Kuhn, “268 million Chinese will be out of jobs in a decade”, The Sunday Times, 21 August 1994.
9 See Lord Beveridge’s book of the same title and his important role in the establishment of the British “Welfare State”.
10 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 44. See Marshall Berman’s deeply appreciative article on the 150th Anniversary of the Manifesto, “Unchained Melody”, The Nation, 11 May 1998, pp. 11-16.
11 “Jobless told: join Army or lose benefit” by Stephen Castle (Political Editor), Independent on Sunday, 10 May 1998. Another headline on the same page reports on reactions to the miserable level at which the minimum wage has been introduced by the British “New Labour” government under the title: “Union fury as Labour sets minimum wage at £3.60.”
12 Susan Bell, “Paris pass law on 35-hour week”, The Times, 20 May 1998.
13 “Neither resigned nor softened on the question of 35 hours, the industrialists’ President is more determined than ever to promote a repealing referendum.” (“Né rassegnato, né ammorbidito sul tema delle 35 ore, il presidente degli industriali è più deciso che mai a promuovere un referendum abrogativo.”) Vittorio Sivo, “Referendum sulle 35 ore”, La Repubblica, 22 April 1998.
14 Ibid.
15 “The working week: Fewer hours, more jobs?”, The Economist, 4 April 1998, p. 50.
16 Ibid., p.51.
17 Michiyo Nakamoto, “Revolution coming, ready or not”, Financial Times, 24 October 1997. See in the same issue of the Financial Times an article by John Plender, “When capital collides with labour”, written in the same spirit.
18 “Policy Complementation: The Case for Fundamental Labour Market Reform”, by David Coe and Dennis Snower. IMF Staff Paper Volume 44, No. 1, 1997. Reviewed in The Economist, 15 November 1997, p. 118. Tellingly, the title of the review article is “All or nothing: Piecemeal labour-market reforms will not cure Europe’s unemployment problem. Governments need to go the whole way.”
19 Japan
Press Weekly, 14 February 1998, p. 25. In another issue of Japan Press Weekly we read: “The main
objectives of the bill are to increase the application of discretionary work
schedules, to ease restrictions on the existing system of varied (flexible)
working hours and to make short-term employment contracts legal.” 18 April
1998.
20 Japan Press Weekly, 14 February 1998.
21 Japan Press Weekly, 28 March 1998.
22 Japan Press Weekly, 4 April 1998.
23 Akira Inukai, “Attack against workers’ rights”, Dateline Tokyo, No. 58, April 1998, p.3.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 4.
26 The Necessity of Social Control, pp. 56-59, and Beyond Capital, 890-892.
27 “il lavoro
sottotutelato e sottopagato si allarga a macchia d’olio, mentre anche il lavoro
più stabile subisce la pressione verso una intensificazione senza precedenti
della sua prestazione lavorativa e verso una piena disponibilità alla sottomissione
ai più diversificati tempi di lavoro.” In: “Trentacinque ore della nostra
vita”, an Appeal of intellectuals signed by Mario Agostinelli, Pierpaolo
Baretta, Heinz Birnbaum, Carla Casalini, Marcello Cini, Giorgio Cremaschi,
Pietro Ingrao, Oskar Negt, Paolo Nerozzi, Valentino Parlato, Marco Revelli,
Rossana Rossanda, Claudio Sabattini and Arno Teutsch; Il Manifesto, 13 February 1998, p. 5.
28 The interventionist role of the state is in
evidence both on the economic and on the political plane. In the economic
domain the funds generously dished out to major capitalist enterprises are
measured in hundreds of millions of pounds. Thus British Aerospace, for
instance, is going to receive nearly £600 millions for one of its ongoing
ventures, in addition to countless millions semi-fraudulently obtained from the
state in the not too distant past, also on an occasion when the company was
pretending to put on sound economic footing the now again bankrupt Rover
enterprise. As to the latter, the massive funds needed to save Rover today are
expected again to be provided by the state – and no one seems to hail right now
the miraculous virtues of private
enterprise – while leaving the profits, of course, to the capitalist part
of the so-called “Private Public Partnerships” so much favoured by New Labour.
Equally if not more important is the role of state intervention on behalf of
capital on the political plane. For the capital system badly needs the
authoritarian anti-labour legislation – obligingly introduced by Conservative
and social democratic governments alike (indeed, most tellingly about the
gravity of the system’s structural crisis, even by some governments presided
over by former communist parties, as in Italy) – in order to maintain its
“neo-liberal” rule over society at the present stage of historical development.