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.