Contents

• Foreword
• 1. The ‘Globalization’ of Unemployment
• 2. The myth of flexibility: downward equalization of the differential rate of exploitation
• 3. From the tyranny of necessary labour time to emancipation through disposable time
• Notes

[By István Mészáros, speech given to seminar organised by Workers Left Unity-Iran, 18 March 2000.]

 Part-1 

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 dehumanizing hardship of unemployment and casualization. In fact casualization is more appropriately called in some languages precarization, although it is in general tendentiously misrepresented as desirable flexible employmnent. 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 casualization is going to threaten the people still in employment but when are they going to share the predicament of enforced precarization.

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 casualization.

Today I intend to consider three principal aspects of what is at stake.

1. The globalization of unemployment and casualization, 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 equalization 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.

Isvan Meszaros is one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals working today. He is professor emeritus of the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of Philosophy for fifteen years. His boo include Marx’s Theory of Alienation for which he was awarded the Issac Deutscher Price. The work of Sartre: Search for Freedom; The Power of Ideology; and Beyond Capital.

Part 2:  The globalization of unemployment

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