Читать книгу In Solidarity - Kim Moody - Страница 5

1

Marx’s Theory of Class and the World Today

Kim Moody

In 1978, the late E. P. Thompson wrote of class, “No historical category has been more misunderstood, tormented, transfixed, and de-historicized than the category of social class.”1 This critique referred mainly to Althusser, but also to “bourgeois sociology,” both of which have reduced “class, ideology, social formations, and almost everything else, to categorical status.”2 Thompson’s concern was with the absence of human self-activity and historical process in these theories. Since most of the essays in this collection deal with the labor movement and, hence, class, it seems appropriate to lay out the theory of social classes that underlies the thinking and analysis in this book, with the understanding, of course, that my thinking and understanding have evolved over time. First I will look at Marx’s theory of class and class formation, then, later, at what it means today.

Marx’s view of the development of the major classes of capitalist society was not a theory of stratification or a head count of the new classes. The two major classes that arise with capitalism do so in relation to one another, and that relation is characterized by conflict from the start. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

The separate individuals form a class only in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over and against the individuals.3

In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx puts the question of the mutual development of the two classes and their conflict even more sharply. He wrote:

In proportion as the bourgeoisie develops, it develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat: it develops a struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeois class, a struggle which, before it is felt, perceived, appreciated, comprehended, avowed and loudly proclaimed by the two sides, only manifests itself previously by partial and momentary conflicts, by subversive acts.4

In this work, for the first time, Marx talks about the actual struggles of the working class, its trade union or “combinations,” and Chartism.

Some of these formulations have led a number of Marxists to believe that the working class only has an existence if it is conscious and organized. Ralph Miliband, for example, wrote that “for Marx, the working class is not truly a class unless it acquires the capacity to organize itself politically” and “when it acquires consciousness.”5 Clearly, there must be a material social formation before acquiring and, indeed, in order to acquire these capacities. And that is what Marx believed when he wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy, “The domination of capital has created for this mass of people a common situation with common interests. This mass is already a class, as opposed to capital, but not yet for itself.”6

To some readers this formulation will bring to mind the well-known duality of a class “in itself” versus one “for itself.”7 Although familiar, the “in itself” phrase is not Marx’s.8 His formulation, “a class, as opposed to capital” is far more dynamic and typical of the relational concept of class Marx developed. Any simple duality of this sort violates Marx’s view of capitalism and the social formation that characterizes it as a historical process that arises, as Thompson put it, “at the intersection of determination and self-activity.”9 That is, class formation is determined both by the development of capital itself and by the self-activity of the working class in creating its organizations and consciousness through struggle. That Marx saw no such simple duality is clear from the fact that he eventually dropped the term “for itself,” with its Hegelian overtones, as Hal Draper pointed out.10

The Communist Manifesto, penned by Marx and Engels in 1848, presented the most familiar picture of the development of the working class: “With the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more.” At the same time, the conditions of the working class pushed down wages, obliterated differences within the class, and drove the workers to “form combinations against the bourgeoisie.” In the end, the bourgeoisie had produced “its own grave-diggers.” 11 The story was as compressed as it was inspiring.

When, two years later, the dust had settled on revolutionary Europe, the specter of communism had not yet taken on flesh and blood. Reaction ruled; Marx was forced to admit that “the proletariat passes into the background of the revolutionary stage”12 and to take a more long-range view. To those among his comrades who wanted to provoke revolution by an act of will, Marx had to caution, “We tell the workers: If you want to change the conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war.”13 The idea that the working class had to prepare itself for power through prolonged struggle is key to understanding the uneven formation of class consciousness. It is a process that has had to be repeated over and over, under changing historical circumstances, as wars, moments of relative prosperity, and whole or partial defeats that characterize the class struggle undo the progress of years.

In the long period of relatively low levels of class conflict that followed the revolutions of 1848 to 1850, Marx’s conception of class was deepened (though never codified in a single presentation) and made more complex. While the defining point of origin of capital and labor as social classes remained their relations at the point of production, the parameters of working-class life were spelled out in greater detail and depth in Capital, Volume I. Essentially, there are three major conditions here that define the social position of the working class. Providing the context, Marx wrote: “The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process; i.e., a process of reproduction not only of commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself, on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.”14

The first of the three conditions, historically as well as logically, is the need to sell one’s labor power in order to live. Here Marx somewhat ironically notes that the workers are “free” “in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasants.” 15 The sale is for “a definite period of time” at the value of the worker’s labor power, which is composed of “the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner,” which in turn is determined by “the level of civilization attained in a country” and contains “a historical and moral element.”16 In other words, “subsistence” is not mere existence or absolute poverty. It is in the labor market that the worker faces competition from other workers. At the same time, here “the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the workers.”17

The second condition, in many ways the very heart of Marx’s analysis of class, is exploitation. He spells this out briefly in Capital:

The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labor-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labor-power belongs to him. On the one hand the daily subsistence of labor-power costs only half a day’s labor, while on the other hand the very same labor-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use.18

Put simply, the worker produces more value than he or she requires to reproduce his or her labor-power by working longer than it takes to create that value. Facing competition and the need to expand his business, the capitalist, as we shall see, naturally does everything possible to reduce the labor time necessary for the worker’s subsistence and increase the rate of exploitation.

To enforce and aggrandize exploitation, the capitalist must discipline the workers. Thus the process of valorization, of creating an expanding surplus value, “in form . . . is purely despotic.” To administer this despotism as the scale of production grows, Marx writes,

He [the capitalist] hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labor. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers, etc.), who command during the labor process.19

Thus the working class is defined not by income layers or education or status but by its conflict-ridden relation to capital and the three major conditions it faces. These conditions of working-class life are important not only as a way to define who is and isn’t working class, but also in terms of the more complex and ongoing process of proletarianization that affects people once thought of as “middle” class.

Three additional points are needed to fill out our understanding of the working class. The first is that “it is the collective worker, formed from the combination of the many specialized workers,” or “labor-power socially combined,” that produces surplus value. 20 Second is that the working class obviously also includes the family and other dependents. Marx writes, “The value of labor-power was determined, not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult worker, but also by that necessary to maintain his family.”21 This is, of course, a nineteenth-century formulation of the patriarchal “family wage” idea that scarcely prevails anymore, but the point is that the class is more than its employed members.

The third condition is that “it is capital accumulation itself that constantly produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population; i.e., a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.”22 This is not only the “reserve army” of the unemployed but also the human basis for an expanding service sector, some of which will produce yet more surplus value. Those who are unemployed, part of the reserve army, are also part of the working class, since directly or indirectly (unemployment insurance, welfare, etc.) they are “paid” out of the value created by labor power.

Marx made a distinction between productive labor and unproductive (of surplus value) labor. On this I agree with Anwar Shaikh and Ahmet Tonac, who argue that the definition of exploitation lies in “the ratio of surplus labor time to necessary labor time. This concept applies to all capitalistically employed wage labor, whether it is productive or not.”23 As the production of goods and services becomes more extended and complex, more workers whose labor is necessary to the process but who do not directly produce surplus value are required. Hence workers who don’t produce surplus value directly, but who conform to the conditions spelled out above, are part of the working class.

Class Formation: A Never-Ending Process

The working class, however, is not a fixed “thing.” Like capital itself, the working class necessarily changes as capital expands, enters new lines of production, and changes the methods of production. As Marx wrote in The Results of the Immediate Process of Production:

But capital is in itself indifferent to the particular nature of every sphere of production. Where it is invested, how it is invested and to what extent it is transferred from one sphere of production to another or redistributed among various spheres of production—all this is determined only by the greater ease or difficulty of selling the commodities manufactured.24

This, in turn, “constantly calls new branches of industry into being,” thus “capitalist production has a tendency to take over all branches of industry not yet acquired.” 25 In Labor and Monopoly Capital Harry Braverman argued that “the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital.”26 Capital’s thirst for new ways to make a profit is unquenchable.

Naturally, the work in these new branches of industry will be different, and the workers employed appear to be different as well. In the United States and most other industrial nations, one symbol of this change has been the longstanding shift from the production of goods to that of services, which have become commodities themselves. Today, of course, this process is global. So, on the one hand, we see a shift of manufacturing from the United States and other Western nations to the industrializing BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations, especially China. On the other hand, we have seen the rise of an intermodal “logistics” industry across the world that moves not only final commodities but production inputs as well. In other words, it is made necessary by the globalization of markets and production. Thus, while manufacturing jobs in the United States have contracted, employment in transportation and warehousing, the heart of “logistics,” has risen from 3.5 million in 1990 to 4.2 million in 2010 despite many advances in technology. The number of warehouse workers alone has increased from 407,000 to 628,000 over those years, a growth of more than 50 percent.27 These workers are now part of what amounts to a global assembly line in which transport and storage are essential parts of the chain of value creation.

Manufacturing jobs in the United States have been disappearing for a long time. From 1990 to 2010 the number of these core jobs fell from 17.7 million to 11.5 million, a loss of more than 6 million goods-producing jobs.28 As mentioned above, many of these are accounted for by the shift of manufacturing to China, India, and elsewhere. But there is another reason for this decline that is built into capitalism. It is found in the concept of relative surplus value, the reduction of the time it takes to create the subsistence of the worker. In the Grundrisse, Marx’s notebooks for the writing of Capital, he said:

In the second form of surplus value, however, as relative surplus value, which appears as the development of the workers’ productive power, as the reduction of the necessary labor time relative to the working day,and as the reduction of the working population relative to the population, in this form there directly appears the industrial and distinguishing historic character of the mode of production founded on capital.29

This is a remarkable piece of analysis, one which virtually undoes the optimistic view of an ever-growing industrial proletariat we saw in the Manifesto. Yet it is a central piece of Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, indeed, the “distinguishing historic character” of capitalism. The class sees its composition inevitably change precisely to the degree to which capitalism increases the productivity of labor, which under competition it must do.

The class has changed in other ways as well. Thompson’s famous statement that “the working class made itself as much as it was made” had a certain validity when this class was being born in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with its self-organized “trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organizations, periodicals.”30 The same was true of the American working class later in the nineteenth century with similar institutions, including the network of independent local and national labor newspapers that so impressed Eleanor Marx when she toured the United States in 1886.31

The expansion of capital into the life of society Braverman described above, however, has meant that many of the functions of the voluntary organizations of the early working class have been commodified (insurance, credit cards, etc.) or taken on by the state (welfare, Social Security). Ironically, the very successes of labor in the class struggle have undermined some of its older forms of organization. There are still various kinds of working-class community organizations—for example, immigrant-based workers’ centers—but today unions are virtually the only organizations that cut across the class. Hence their centrality to socialist strategy, even though they compose only a minority of the class almost everywhere.

Proletarianization and Further Class Change

American labor leaders never tire of referring to their members as “middle class,” part of the great washed masses between the “dirt poor” and the “filthy rich.” This is, of course, nonsense that separates better-off workers from their poorer brothers and sisters—and to some extent white from Black and brown. There is, however, an actual middle class, not between the rich and poor but between capital and labor. There can be no clear definition of this middle class or even of where it begins and ends in relation to the working class. As Marx noted in his very brief and unfinished section in Capital, Volume III, entitled simply “Classes,” “It is undeniably in England that this modern society and its economic articulation is most widely and classically developed. Even here, though, this class articulation does not emerge in pure form. Here, too, middle and transitional levels always conceal the boundaries.”32 In a society constantly changing under the pressures of capital accumulation, it can hardly be otherwise.

The word “transitional” is particularly interesting, as it would appear to refer to groups moving from one class to another, most commonly a process of proletarianization. While Marx’s prediction that the petit-bourgeoisie and other middle layers would disappear has proven to be wrong, there has been an undeniable tendency for formerly middle-class occupations to take on more and more of the characteristics of working-class labor and life. The “autonomy” of many professions has been eroded as capital pushes them for greater output and longer hours and directs their work more closely: that is, becomes “purely despotic.” Not surprisingly, more professionals have been joining unions. An outstanding example of this, covered elsewhere in this collection, is nurses, who have been joining unions and striking at higher rates than any other group.33

Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

The ever-expanding nature of capitalism leads it to draw in more and more human material from the rural periphery of the world. The US working class has seen a dramatic shift in its racial and ethnic composition, due heavily to increased immigration. The number of Latino/as in the civilian workforce, for example, has jumped from a little over six million in 1980 to almost twenty-three million by 2010. This inevitably rubs up against the pre-existing forms of racial and ethnic prejudice and hierarchy bred by slavery, nationalism, and imperialism. Viewing the working class in Britain in his day, Marx wrote to friends, “Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.”34

In the United States, of course, racial and ethnic divisions are far more prevalent, as the workforce has long been more diverse than that of nineteenth-century Britain and racism more deeply embedded in the institutional structure of American society. We know now that more than economic competition is involved in the constant reproduction not only of racial attitudes but of the evolving forms of institutional racism. Racial hierarchy and competition exist not only in the labor market but in every aspect of life in the United States, notably housing, education, public resources, credit. Massive immigration in recent years has collided with this pre-existing racial hierarchy to the detriment of immigrants, who are perceived as a threat by many working-class whites not only in terms of jobs but in all the areas just listed.

Women have always been more or less half of the working class, but their place in that class and in society has changed dramatically since Marx could talk about the value of the worker’s labor power supporting “his family.” While there have always been women in employment, from the 1950s they have entered the US labor force in growing numbers. Since 1970, the number of women in the workforce has increased from about thirty-two million to seventy-two million in 2010 to become 47 percent of the workforce. By 2010 the workforce participation rate of married women almost equaled that of unmarried women.35 On the other hand, full-time women workers still earned only 80 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings, and that due largely to the fall in male earnings. In addition, far more women than men worked in lower-paying part-time employment and held multiple jobs.36 Nevertheless, the value of the labor power of women, whether married or not, was now a major source of the “subsistence” of the working class as a whole.While this has not brought an end to sexism or patriarchy, it has given women a more prominent place in daily affairs and in the labor movement, where women went from 25 percent of all members in the 1970s to 45 percent in 2012.

While organized labor in the United States is far from free of racism or sexism, it is nonetheless the most integrated institution in American society. Below is a table with the racial and gender composition of US unions in 2012.

The “Real Class Organization”

It was Engels who, in his 1844 Conditions of the Working-Class in England, first pointed to unions, or “combinations” as they were then called, as the major means of resisting the aggression of capital. Strikes were, he wrote, “the military school of the workingmen in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided,” adding that “as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled.”38 Later, in his 1875 critique of the Gotha program of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD by its German initials), Engels denounced the absence of trade unions in the program, calling them “the real class organization of the proletariat.”39 Similarly, in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote that it was through strikes and unions that “the proletarians effect their organization as a class.” Their battles he termed “a veritable civil war.”40 In fact, Marx and Engels were the first socialists to see unions as central to the class struggle and hence to the fight for socialism.

As Draper pointed out, Marx and Engels would become critical of the conservatism of British trade unions. Nevertheless, unions remained central to their view of building class organization and consciousness. Unions were, of course, key to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association.41 It is not just that class conflict of this sort is an unexcelled school of war; unions are the basis for the political movement of the class. Writing to a friend in 1871, Marx said: “The political movement of the working class has as its ultimate object, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles.”42 This did not mean that every trade union struggle or every strike wave becomes political in the sense in which Marx uses the term here. But it does give a certain priority to economics—in the form of union organization—and to the possibility that economic struggle leads to political struggle—here he gives the example of the fight for an eight-hour working-day law.

That this process is not inevitable has been all too well demonstrated by the history of the US labor movement. This is precisely why trade union work by socialists is so essential to drawing out the meaning of the daily conditions and conflict as well as that of the high points of struggle. Elsewhere in this collection, various essays address this topic from different angles, particularly “The Rank-and-File Strategy” and its “Update,” so I won’t attempt to develop this perspective here.

Class and the World Today

In its 2008/09 Global Wage Report, the International Labour Office (ILO) of the United Nations revealed that nearly half the world’s “employed” workforce worked for wages or salaries, rising from 43 percent in 1996 to 47 percent in 2006. This meant a shift of millions from either self-employment (peasants, independent artisans, peddlers, and others) or toward exclusion from the workforce. While not all waged workers are working class in the sense discussed above, most are. If we include dependents and the “reserve army” of labor (which would include many working as “self-employed”) this might well amount to a majority for the first time in history. This shift is uneven. As the ILO described it, “Paid employment appears to be growing everywhere (with the exception of Latin America) and has been expanding particularly rapidly in East Asia.”43

Thus, capital’s drive to expand and take in more and more types of labor and commodities continues to draw in more of the world’s rural population to the creation of surplus value and the conditions described above. What is more, this shift conforms to Marx’s argument in Capital that even as the mass of labor’s subsistence grows, “in relative terms, i.e., in comparison with surplus value, the value of labor-power would keep falling, and thus the abyss between the life situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.” 44 Thus the relative shift of value, and hence income and wealth, from the working class to capital prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008 is a reality. The ILO states:

We show that over the period 1995–2007 average wages lagged behind the growth in GDP per capita, which we interpret as an indication that increases in productivity have failed to translate fully into higher wages. We also show that the recent period, characterized by growing economic integration, has seen a decline in the share of GDP distributed to wages. 45

The rate of exploitation, therefore, has increased on a global scale.

This shift is apparent not only worldwide but also in the heartland of capitalism. In the seventeen leading countries of the OECD, capital’s share in GDP rose from 25 percent in 1975 to 33 percent in 2005.46 Looking somewhat more narrowly at the US corporate sector, capital’s share of US national income rose from 18.8 percent in 1979 to 26.2 percent in 2010.47 This has not been simply a matter of some economic trend, but the result of a class struggle in which capital has had the upper hand for some time—and all too often labor has fought with one hand tied behind its back. In the case of the United States, this is addressed in some detail in subsequent chapters in this collection. Here it is worth mentioning that this overall trend in capitalist development has produced increased worker resistance, perhaps most notably in China.48

It is always tempting at this point in such an essay to predict the next working-class upsurge. One thing Marxism is not so good at, however, is predicting the future. One reason is that socialist predictions are often in practice just economic predictions, and those not always on the mark—like the comrade who has predicted six of the last three recessions. Marxism, however, analyzes history as a process that is in large part guided by class conflict in its various forms; the outcome of such struggles is almost always indeterminate. We can, to a certain extent, analyze and predict trends to provide guidance for action, but outcomes are another matter. This is because class struggle itself depends in large part on the state of organization, consciousness, leadership, and analysis of the contending forces on the part of both sides. Marxism provides many tools to approach these problems, but all require organized human intervention. In the final analysis, therefore, the task is not to predict the future but to prepare for it.