To Work or Not to Work? Is that the Question?

I was just re-reading this and i think its a pretty interesting piece. Good stuff to think about re: work. http://troploin0.free.fr/biblio/lovlabuk/index.php?page=contents.php

Dauve goes on through a historical review of the problem of the relationship of workers and "workers organizations" towards work in various revolutions and major social movements (a mostly-European review, but I think his basic points hold anyway.)

He basically argues that the first moves of most workers in a revolutin is not to 'take control of production', but to stop working. Then again, Dauve makes the valuable point that 'work' as an activity separate from the whole of social life, as taking place in an economic sphere, in a separate workplace, etc. is pretty much peculiar to capital.

He also makes a side note, which I would like to see him develop, that councils largely corresponded to a particular phase of capital, but do not largely survive into the Taylorized, unskilled, mass production ("Fordist", for shorthand) world. I think this is an interesting point and one worth considering.

he then draws some conclusions, also interesting.

A few highlights I like:

"We’d be mistaken to think no-one cared about a theoretical critique of work before the 1960’s. In the 1840’s, Marx and others (Stirner for example) defined communism as the abolition of classes, of the State and of work. "

"One cannot envisage managing a labour process that has been fragmented inside the plant as between geographically separate production units. When a car or a toothbrush comprises components from two or three continents, no collective worker is able to regard it as his own. Totality is split. Work loses its unity. Workers are no longer unified by the content of tasks, nor by the globality of production. One can only wish to (self)manage what one masters.

Taylorized workers (like those in the US in the 1930s) did not form councils. The collective organ of struggle was not at the same time a potential collective management organ. The strike and occupation committee was only an aggregate instrument of solidarity, and provided the leadership of that specific movement: it was not a body that would represent or incarnate labour for other tasks (particularly the running of the firm). The Taylorized workplace leaves little room for managerial aspirations."

" Short as it is, our historical scan casts the shadow of a doubt on the thesis that the (undeniable) self-identification of the proletarian with a producer would be the decisive cause of our defeats. When did the workers really try to shoulder economic growth ? When did they rival with old time bourgeois owners or modern directors for the management of the companies ? In that matter at least, there’s no coincidence between political platforms and proletarian practices. Workers’ movements don’t boil down to an affirmation of labour. The attempts to resume production were often enough a makeshift solution, an effort to fill a gap caused by the absence or incompetence of the boss. In that case, occupying the premises and restarting the work process did not mean an affirmation of the workers as workers. It was a means of survival, as in other circumstances the buy-out of a bankrupt company by its personnel. At the end of 2001, when the Bruckman textile factory in Argentina was threatened with closure, the workers took over and kept it going, with no prospect of transforming capitalism into socialism, even within the limits of a single firm. Then this became the case of dozens of Argentinian companies. Such behaviour occurs when the proletarians think they have no chance of changing the world."

"Wage-labour is not a phenomenon imposed from outside, but the social relationship that structures our society: practical and collective adherence to work is built into the framework of that relationship."

" But, because of that very process, because the wage-earner sells his labour power, he lives inside capital, he makes capital as much as he is made by it, to a far higher degree than the peasant depended on his master and the craftsman on the merchant. Because he lives (and resists, and fights) inside capital, he produces and shares its essentials, including consumption and democracy. Because selling his life force is necessary to him, he can only despise and reject his work, in reality and in his mind, by rejecting what makes him exist as a wage-earner, i.e. by rejecting capital. In other words, if it’s got to be more than everyday resistance, refusal of work is only possible through an acute social crisis.'

"The ideology of labour power is the necessary ideology of the proletarian within capital. That commodity is the prime reality of billions of men and women. The proletarian is never reduced to what capital turns him into, yet he feels a need to be recognized and socially enhanced, and that need is based on his only asset: work. He has to have this positive image of himself, if only to be able to sell himself on good terms. In an interview, the job seeker will not devalue himself. If he did, he would submit to the common prejudice that debases the competence of a simple order-taker."

" Determinism revisits history to locate the obstacle to revolution, and discovers it in the form of the social space that the workers supposedly wished to occupy inside capitalism. Then that option is said to be closed now: such a social space does not exist any more because in fully real domination capitalism is everywhere. The reasons for past failures give the reasons for tomorrow’s success, and provide the inevitability of communist revolution, as the obstacle is cleared away by the completion of what is described as capital’s quasi natural life cycle.

In other words, the revolutionary crisis is no longer perceived as a breaking up and superseding of the social conditions that create it. It is only conceived of as the conclusion of a pre-ordained evolution.

The methological flaw is to believe in a privileged vantage point that enables the observer to grasp the totality (and the whole meaning) of past, present and near future human history.

In short, the causes of our previous shortcomings are not sought in the practical deeds of the proletarians. The dynamic element, the decisive one, is supposed to be the movement of capital. The mutual involvement of capital and labour is reduced to a one-way relation of cause and effect. History gets frozen.

We would prefer to say that there is no other limit to the life-span of capital than the conscious activity of the proletarians. Otherwise, no crisis, however deep it might be, will be enough to produce such a result. And any deep crisis (a crisis of the system, not just in it) could be the last if the proletarians took advantage of it. But there’ll never be a day of reckoning, a final un-mediated showdown, as if at long last the proletarians were directly facing capital and therefore attacking it.

« The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the breakdown of capitalism », as Pannekoek wrote in the last sentence of his essay on The Theory of the Breakdown of Capitalism (1934). It’s significant this should come as the conclusion of a discussion on capital’s cycles and reproduction models (Marx’s, Luxemburg’s and H.Grossmann’s). The communist movement cannot be understood through models similar to those of the reproduction of capital -- unless we regard communism as the last logical ( = as inevitable as any previous crisis) step in the course of capital. If this were the case, the communist revolution would be as « natural » as the growing up and ageing of living beings, the succession of seasons and the gravitation of planets, and just like them scientifically predictable.

1789 might have happened forty years later or sooner, without a Robespierre and a Bonaparte, but a bourgeois revolution was bound to happen in France in the XVIIIth or XIXth century.

Who could argue that communism is bound to happen ? The communist revolution is not the ultimate stage of capitalism."

cheers,

chris