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 socialdemocratic 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 practised already—could not resolve the monumental and ever-increasing, as well as socioeconomically 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 defence 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, consquently 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.

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

Notes

1 Underground Economy, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 3.

2 Japan Press Weekly, 16 May 1998.

3 István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control, Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 26 January 1971. Merlin Press, London, 1971, pp. 54-55; reprinted in Mészáros, Beyond Capital, Merlin Press, London 1995 and Monthly Review Press, New York 1996. Quotation is from pp.889-890.

4 While the total number of unemployed persons registered with employment exchanges stood at 336 million in 1993, the number of employed persons in the same year according to the Planning Commission stood at only 307.6 million, which means that the number of registered unemployed persons is higher than the number of persons employed. And the rate of percentage increase of employment is almost negligible. Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India: History of the Emergence and Movement 1830-1990. With an Overview up to 1995, K.P. Bagchi & Co., Calcutta 1997, p. 554.

5 Waterloo in Asia?, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 4.

US interests are cynically pursued and imposed wherever the opportunity permits. Thus American officials, who effectively vetoed the creation of an Asian Regional Fund independent of the IMF, and therefore of Washington, have also made it known—most recently in the case of Korea—that no US direct aid will be forthcoming until the ailing countries acquiesce in IMF demands. So far, Thai authorities have agreed to remove all limits on foreign ownership of financial firms and are pushing ahead with legislation to allow foreigners to own land, long a taboo. Even before it sought help from the IMF, Jakarta abolished its restrictions on foreign ownership of publicly traded stock, a move replicated by Seoul when it granted foreign investors access to the $64 billion long-term, guaranteed corporate bond market, access they had been seeking for years. Walden Bello, The End of the Asian Miracle, The Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 19.

6 IMF congratulations, to be sure, mean very little, if anything, even in their own terms of reference. Characteristically, when the Thai economy was headed for trouble, the IMF was still praising the government’s ‘consistent record of sound macroeconomic management policies’. Walden Bello, The End of the Asian Miracle, loc. cit., p. 16. Similarly, in the few months since the IMF rescued the South Korean economy, unemployment has actually doubled in the country.

See also an insightful article by János Jemnitz, A review of Hungarian politics 1994-1997, Contemporary Politics, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1997, pp. 401-406.

7 See Gabriel Kolko’s fine book, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. See also Nhu T. Le’s passionate rejoinder in his review of Kolko’s book in The Nation, Screaming Souls, 3 November 1997.

8 Anthony Kuhn, 268 million Chinese will be out of jobs in a decade, The Sunday Times, 21 August 1994.

9 See Lord Beveridge’s book of the same title and his important role in the establishment of the British Welfare State.

10 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 44. See Marshall Berman’s deeply appreciative article on the 150th Anniversary of the Manifesto, Unchained Melody, The Nation, 11 May 1998, pp. 11-16.

11 Jobless told: join Army or lose benefit by Stephen Castle (Political Editor), Independent on Sunday, 10 May 1998. Another headline on the same page reports on reactions to the miserable level at which the minimum wage has been introduced by the British New Labour government under the title: Union fury as Labour sets minimum wage at £3.60.

12 Susan Bell, Paris pass law on 35-hour week, The Times, 20 May 1998.

13 Neither resigned nor softened on the question of 35 hours, the industrialists’ President is more determined than ever to promote a repealing referendum. (Né rassegnato, né ammorbidito sul tema delle 35 ore, il presidente degli industriali è più deciso che mai a promuovere un referendum abrogativo.) Vittorio Sivo, Referendum sulle 35 ore, La Repubblica, 22 April 1998.

14 Ibid.

15 The working week: Fewer hours, more jobs?, The Economist, 4 April 1998, p. 50.

16 Ibid., p.51.

17 Michiyo Nakamoto, Revolution coming, ready or not, Financial Times, 24 October 1997. See in the same issue of the Financial Times an article by John Plender, When capital collides with labour, written in the same spirit.

18 Policy Complementation: The Case for Fundamental Labour Market Reform, by David Coe and Dennis Snower. IMF Staff Paper Volume 44, No. 1, 1997. Reviewed in The Economist, 15 November 1997, p. 118. Tellingly, the title of the review article is All or nothing: Piecemeal labour-market reforms will not cure Europe’s unemployment problem. Governments need to go the whole way.

19 Japan Press Weekly, 14 February 1998, p. 25. In another issue of Japan Press Weekly we read: The main objectives of the bill are to increase the application of discretionary work schedules, to ease restrictions on the existing system of varied (flexible) working hours and to make short-term employment contracts legal. 18 April 1998.

20 Japan Press Weekly, 14 February 1998.

21 Japan Press Weekly, 28 March 1998.

22 Japan Press Weekly, 4 April 1998.

23 Akira Inukai, Attack against workers’ rights, Dateline Tokyo, No. 58, April 1998, p.3.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., p. 4.

26 The Necessity of Social Control, pp. 56-59, and Beyond Capital, 890-892.

27 il lavoro sottotutelato e sottopagato si allarga a macchia d’olio, mentre anche il lavoro più stabile subisce la pressione verso una intensificazione senza precedenti della sua prestazione lavorativa e verso una piena disponibilità alla sottomissione ai più diversificati tempi di lavoro. In: Trentacinque ore della nostra vita, an Appeal of intellectuals signed by Mario Agostinelli, Pierpaolo Baretta, Heinz Birnbaum, Carla Casalini, Marcello Cini, Giorgio Cremaschi, Pietro Ingrao, Oskar Negt, Paolo Nerozzi, Valentino Parlato, Marco Revelli, Rossana Rossanda, Claudio Sabattini and Arno Teutsch; Il Manifesto, 13 February 1998, p. 5.

28 The interventionist role of the state is in evidence both on the economic and on the political plane. In the economic domain the funds generously dished out to major capitalist enterprises are measured in hundreds of millions of pounds. Thus British Aerospace, for instance, is going to receive nearly £600 millions for one of its ongoing ventures, in addition to countless millions semi-fraudulently obtained from the state in the not too distant past, also on an occasion when the company was pretending to put on sound economic footing the now again bankrupt Rover enterprise. As to the latter, the massive funds needed to save Rover today are expected again to be provided by the state—and no one seems to hail right now the miraculous virtues of private enterprise—while leaving the profits, of course, to the capitalist part of the so-called Private Public Partnerships so much favoured by New Labour. Equally if not more important is the role of state intervention on behalf of capital on the political plane. For the capital system badly needs the authoritarian anti-labour legislation—obligingly introduced by Conservative and socialdemocratic governments alike (indeed, most tellingly about the gravity of the system’s structural crisis, even by some governments presided over by former communist parties, as in Italy)—in order to maintain its neo-liberal rule over society at the present stage of historical development.

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.)

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.  The above speech appeared in in two parts on   iran bulletin no 27 &28

Sources:

URL: www.iran-bulletin.org/marxism/mezaros27_Ib.pdf

www.iran-bulletin.org/marxism/mezaros28_II.pdf