István Mészáros
The first part of this article appeared in iran bulletin no 27. 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 appears in this issue.
3.
From
the tyranny of “necessary labour time” to emancipation through “disposable time”
How
can labour – the structural antagonist of capital – counter the deteriorating
trend inseparable from the narrowing margin of capital’s productive viability?
This question takes us back to the third element of Rifondazione’s quest for securing the 35 hours working week quoted
at the beginning of this lecture: “changing
society” (“per cambiare la società”). For today – as a result of capital’s
need to unceremoniously claw back29 even its past concessions,
rather than consenting to new ones – it is quite impossible to realize even the
most immediate and limited objectives of traditional trade unionism without
embarking on the road that leads to a fundamental social transformation. The
radical reconstitution of the socialist movement is a vitally important part of
this process.30
Some of capital’s more intelligent representatives, like Dean Witter –
the chief economist and director of global economics for Morgan Stanley – are
willing to confess that the ongoing trends are more problematical than usually
depicted in the propaganda organs of neoliberalism. In an article published in
the Sunday New York Times, entitled
“The Worker Backlash”, he rejects the explanation that recent successes were
the result of “deregulation and increasing productivity”. His own, far more
conflict-conscious and less reassuring explanation is that there has been
a
dramatic realignment of the nation’s
economic pie, with a much larger
slice going to capital and a smaller one going to labour. Call it a labour-crunch recovery, one that
flourished only because corporate America
puts unrelenting pressure on its work force.31
In truth, not only corporate America puts
unrelenting pressure on its work force but the personifications of capital everywhere do so. For the reformist
achievements of the past were premissed on the continuing growth of the pie – which appeared under favourable economic
conditions as capital’s concessions, although there could never be a question of “realigning the pie in favour of labour”,
since capital must always appropriate the lion’s share for itself. Now, due to
capital’s structural crisis and to the narrowing margin of the system’s
productive viability, it becomes absolutely necessary to “realign the nation’s economic pie” more than ever in capital’s
favour, so as to secure a “labour-crunch
recovery”, thanks to the passivity and resignation of the labour force. But
what happens when labour refuses to go along with such a ruthless realignment
of the economic pie, because it can no longer afford to do so, as a result of
the increasing hardship imposed by the traditional or newly invented forms of
“labour-crunch economy”? The possibilities of “realigning” even a stationary
pie, let alone a shrinking one, have their well definable limits. Not to forget
the fact that the resignatory inactivity of the labour movement cannot be
simply taken for granted forever in any country, as a matter of natural
necessity. Not even in the capitalistically most advanced ones. No wonder,
therefore, that today even the chief economist of Morgan Stanley has to speak
about “The Worker Backlash” in the US, voicing his worries about a possible
“raw power struggle between capital and labour”, and adding that “gone are the
days of a docile labour force that once acquiesced to slash-and-burn corporate
restructuring”.32
Naturally, from capital’s standpoint there can be no answers to the
question: what kind of alternative to the “labour-crunch economy” should be
pursued in order to avoid the “raw power struggle between capital and labour”.
Whatever his misgivings and worries might be, the chief economist of Morgan
Stanley must continue to advise his firm about the best ways of exploiting the
opportunities of “globalized” financial speculation, or else he will be quickly
dispatched to more restful pastures with a forceful golden handshake. From the
standpoint of capital there can be truly “no alternative” to “crunching labour”
as much as possible – and more so in situations of emergency –, even if one
perceives some of the dangers implicit in the pursued socioeconomic course. For
in the end there is always the lure of authoritarian solutions, not only in the
US client country of General Suharto, but also in the “advanced capitalist
democracies” of the West which helped to put Suharto in power in the first
place, supporting him in every possible way for 32 years, including his savage
military repression of the people, and trying to save his wretched regime with
massive IMF funds even in the last minute before his demise.
The general promise of solving the crying iniquities and contradictions
of the system has been for a long time – and on the whole remains today –, that
through the benefits of ever-increasing and globally integrated “free trade”
the condition of workers will greatly improve all over the world, thanks to the
return of the economy to a situation of undisturbed capital-expansion, free
from the defects of the postwar decades which ended in inflation and
stagnation. The actual signs and economic indicators, however, point in the
opposite direction, a fact at times acknowledged even by “mainstream”
economists who retain their belief in the insuperable virtues of the capital
system. Thus, to quote an article reviewing a recent book by such an economist:
Rodrick
argues that trade in general, not just low-wage imports, worsens income
distribution. Increased international competition, he writes, translates into
greater “elasticity” of the domestic demand for labour. In lay terms, this
means that a worker is now competing with a much larger labour supply. As a
result, a small shift in foreign workers’ wages or in the global demand for a
product or service can cause big shifts in the domestic demand for workers.
Labour’s greater vulnerability to market fluctuations undercuts its bargaining
position vis-à-vis capital. Therefore, concludes Rodrik, “The first-order
effect of trade appears to have been a redistribution of the enterprise surplus
toward employers rather than the enlargement of the surplus.” The evidence,
therefore, tells us that the critics of free trade have been right; trade is
not enlarging wealth, but redistributing it upward.33
And yet, when it comes to the question of
alternatives, we get from Rodrick only pious preaching. Thus, to continue our
quote:
Rodrick’s
politics are at best naïve. He lectures labour and government to be more responsible,
but has nothing to say to multinational corporate business. … Rodrick writes,
“Labour should advocate a global economy that carries a more human face”, but
he is silent about the fiercely organized efforts of multinational business and
finance to prevent humane policies from even being considered by the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and
other rule setters for the global marketplace. This suggests a point of view
that is, to put it mildly, out of touch with the realities of the global
political economy.34
Indeed, adopting the standpoint of capital
– not only in its blindly uncritical and most aggressive neoliberal form, but
also in its wishfully liberal reformist varieties – has meant for a very long
time “losing touch with the realities of the global political economy”.
The radical novelty of our time is that the capital system is no longer
in a position of conceding to labour anything whatsoever, in contrast to the
reformist acquisitions of the past. The depressing accommodation, and even
wholesale capitulation, of some former working class parties to the demands of
big business interests – for instance in Britain and in several European
countries, but by no means in Europe alone –: a capitulation to the extent of
not only retaining the authoritarian anti-labour legislation of the last few
decades but also giving key cabinet posts in “New Labour”, in the Italian
“Democratic Left” governments and elsewhere to prominent representatives of
corporate capital, speak unequivocally on this score. (Lord Simon, Lord
Sainsbury, Geoffrey Robinson, etc. in Britain, and similar figures in Germany,
France and Italy.) This is why in the present historical period even the limited and modest objectives of labour
– like the 35 hours working week – can only be realized by “changing society”,
since objectively they contest the
established socioeconomic and political order (in other words: the whole system
of decision making) under which “the nation’s economic pie” is produced and
distributed. Under the conditions of capital’s structural crisis this is the
objectively unavoidable nature of the socioeconomic contestation, even if for
the time being many representatives of labour do not conceptualize or
articulate it in such terms. And this is also the reason why liberal and social
democratic reformism, which once upon a time had a powerful ally in capital’s
expansionary dynamism, is now condemned to the futility of pious preaching –
from Professor John Kenneth Galbraith’s sermons about “The Culture of
Contentment” (quickly echoed, without the slightest remedial effect, by Bishops
and Archbishops in the Church of England) to the notion of a “labour and
government-inspired global economy with a human face” quoted a minute ago. A preaching
to which the personifications of capital cannot possibly listen.
The demand for a significant reduction of the working week has a
fundamental strategic importance. Not only because the underlying issue
profoundly affects and therefore directly concerns every single worker, manual
and intellectual alike, whatever might be the colour of their collars. Equally,
because the issue of facing up to this challenge is not going to fade away. On
the contrary, it is growing in importance with the passing of every day, and
the imperative to do something meaningful about it cannot be legislated out of
existence by capital’s parliamentary personifications in the capitalistically
advanced countries, nor indeed repressed by naked force on the “periphery” of capital’s
global order. In other words, this is a vital strategic demand for labour
because it is “non-negotiable”: i.e., it cannot be integrated into the
manipulated pseudo-concessions of the existing order. For it directly concerns
the question of control – an alternative system of social metabolic
control – to which capital is and must be inimically opposed.
Naturally, the 35 hours working week – even if it could be genuinely
conceded and not deviously nullified in many different ways, as it is cynically
planned or practiced already – could not resolve the monumental and
ever-increasing, as well as socio-economically grave, unemployment problem.
Thus the question that legitimately arises: why 35 and not 25 or 20 hours per
week, which would make a major difference in this respect? That is the question
that takes us to the heart of the matter.
The radical incompatibilities between the existing social order and the
one in which human beings are in control of their life-activity, including
their “liberated time”, to be set free by a significant reduction of the
working week, was graphically and painfully illustrated in Britain through the
destruction of the mining industry. In 1984 the British coal miners waged a
heroic struggle, not for money but in defense of their jobs: a one year long
strike that was defeated through the combined efforts of the government of Mrs
Thatcher – who called the miners “the enemy within” – and Neal Kinnock’s Labour
Party which stabbed them in the back. As a result, the miners’ workforce, which
at the time was over 150.000, has been decimated, to the present figure of less
than 10.000, and the towns and villages of many mining communities have been
turned into the wasteland of dehumanized unemployment. At the time of the miners’
strike the coal mines were still “nationalized”, which meant being run with the
most ruthless capitalist criteria of “efficiency” and authoritarian control by
the National Coal Board, becoming subsequently “privatized” in a fraction of
their original size. What was highly characteristic of the Coal Board’s way of
dealing with the problem of “greater efficiency”, while talking about the
absolute need for “rationalizing” the work requirements of the coal industry,
was the fact that the state-run Board imposed on the miners an almost insane seven days work schedule at the same
time when it was savagely cutting the labour force under its control. For
capital is quite incapable of human considerations. It knows only one way of
managing work-time: by maximally exploiting
the “necessary labour time” of the workforce in employment, totally
ignoring the available “disposable time”
in society at large, because it cannot squeeze profit out of it.
This is what sets insurmountable limits to capital in its way of addressing
the unemployment problem. There is something rather paradoxical, indeed
profoundly contradictory about this. For capital’s productive system de facto creates “superfluous time” in society as a whole, on an ever-increasing
scale. Yet it cannot conceivably acknowledge the de jure existence (i.e., the legitimacy) of such socially produced
surplus-time as the potentially most creative disposable time we all have, which could be used in our society for
the satisfaction of so much of the now cruelly denied human needs, from
education and health service requirements to the elimination of famine and
malnutrition all over the world. On the contrary, capital must assume a negative/destructive/dehumanizing
attitude towards it. Indeed, capital must callously disregard the fact that the
concept of “superfluous labour”, with its “superfluous time”, in reality refers
to living human beings and possessors
of socially useful – even if capitalistically redundant or
inapplicable – productive capacities.
The concept of disposable time, taken in its positive and liberating
sense, as an aspiration of socialists, appeared well before Marx, in an
anonymous pamphlet entitled The Source
and Remedy of the National Difficulties, published in London almost 50
years before Marx’s Capital, in 1821.
In some passages quoted by Marx this pamphlet offered a remarkable dialectical
grasp of both the nature of the capitalistic productive process and – by
focusing attention on the vitally important categories of “disposable time”,
“surplus labour”, and “shortened working day” – the possibilities of escaping
from its contradictions. To quote:
Wealth is disposable time
and nothing more. … If the whole labour of a country were sufficient only to
raise the support of the whole population, there would be no surplus labour, consequently nothing
that can be allowed to accumulate as
capital. … Truly wealthy a nation,
if there is no interest or if the working
day is 6 hours rather than 12.35
We are slowly catching up with demanding,
as our ancestors did in 1821, the 6 hours working day, but we are still very
far from organizing society on the basis of the immeasurably greater
wealth-producing potential of disposable
time. Without the latter, there can be no question of emancipating the
working individuals from the tyranny of fetishistic determinations and crying
iniquities. The realization of even our limited objectives will require mass mobilization36 of the
employed and unemployed people,
guided by solidarity with the
problems we are all bound to share, if not today then tomorrow. The strategic
longer term perspective, which makes feasible also the realization of the
immediate demands, is inseparable from our awareness of the viability and
indeed the ultimate necessity of adopting the mode of controlling our social
metabolic reproduction on the basis of disposable
time. This is the objective to which our resources need to be dedicated if
we care about the unemployment problem. Only a radical socialist mass movement
can adopt the strategic alternative of regulating social metabolic reproduction
– an absolute must for the future – on the basis of disposable time. For due to
the insurmountable constraints and contradictions of the capital system, any
attempt at introducing disposable time as the regulator of social and economic
interchanges – which would have to mean putting at the disposal of the
individuals great amounts of free time,
liberated through the reduction of work-time well beyond the limits of even a
20 hours working week – would act as social
dynamite, blowing the established reproductive order sky high. For capital
is totally incompatible with free time autonomously and meaningfully utilized
by the freely associated social individuals.
Notes
29
As Marshall Berman had put it in his article quoted in note 10, “crass cruelty
calls itself liberalism (we are kicking you and your kids off welfare for your
own good)” and you are “laid off or fired – or deskilled, outsourced, downsized. (It is fascinating how many of
these crushing words are quite new.)” The
Nation, 11 May 1998, p. 16.
30
See a powerful chapter on the challenges facing the labour movement: “Beyond
Labour and Leisure”, in Daniel Singer’s book, Whose Millennium?, published by Monthly Review Press, New York,
Spring 1999.
31
Dean Witter, “The Worker Backlash”, Sunday
New York Times, quoted in a letter sent to the readers and supporters of Monthly Review by its Editors in October
1997.
32
Ibid.
33
Jeff Faux, “Hedging the neoliberal bet”, (a review of Dani Rodrick’s book, Has Globalizaion Gone Too Far?,
Institute for Internaional Economics, Washington D.C., 1997), in Dissent, Fall 1997, p. 120.
34
Ibid.
35
Quoted in Marx’s Grundrisse, Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 397.
36
The Appeal quoted in Note 27 rightly speaks of the need to “promote a mass mobilization in favour of the 35
hours week, to affect both the world of work as that of politics, and culture
as much as the world of associations.” (“promuovere una mobilitazione di massa a favore delle 35 ore che tocchi il mondo
del lavoro cosi come quello della politica, quello della cultura come quello
delle associazioni.”)
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 21-24 and his article: Capital's misplaced triumphalism in iran bulletin 25-26
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