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 organization 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 organization) 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 casualization 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 casualization 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 materialize, 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 judgment 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 equalization of the differential rate of exploitation, which becomes sharply pronounced through capital’s ever more destructive globalization 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 equalization of the differential rates of exploitation as the global trend of development of world capital.

To be sure, this law of equalization 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 organized 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 globalization of productive and distributive relations, the downward equalization 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 casualization 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 performace, 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 pratices. 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 organizations 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 globalization creates some major new difficulties, instead of solving the long contested iniquities of the system, as the optimistic spokesmen of unproblematical globalization 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 objetively underpinned in our time by the tendency for the downward equalization 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 organization, 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. 4

3. From the tyranny of necessary labour time to emancipation through disposable time 

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