II. The collective worker

 Marx envisioned a clear alternative – a society of associated producers,

one in which social wealth, rather than accruing to the purchasers of

labour-power, is employed by freely associated individuals who produce

in accordance with ‘communal purposes and communal needs’ (Marx,

1973: 158–9, 171–2).

 

Consider the two propositions introduced in

Chapter 5 as part of the political economy of the working class as well as

a third from Marx’s Inaugural Address for the International:

 

1. Any cooperation and combination of labour in production generates

a combined, social productivity of labour that exceeds the

sum of individual, isolated productivities.

 

2. In any society, separation and division in social relations among

producers allow those who mediate among the producers to

capture the fruits of cooperation in production.

 

3. ‘Social production controlled by social foresight…forms the

political economy of the working class’ (Marx, 1864: 11).

 

When we talk here about producers working together within a particular

workplace or producing differing use-values corresponding to social

requirements (the division of labour within society), we are describing

the collective worker within society.3 This collective or aggregate worker

is composed of many different limbs and organs: ‘some work better with

their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist,

etc., the other as overseer, the third as manager or even drudge’

(Marx, 1977: 1040). The collective worker is not, however, simply the

sum of these parts – it is the articulation of them into a productive

organism. The cooperation of these parts of the productive organism

results in ‘the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically

a collective one’ (Marx, 1977: 443).

 

As we have seen, in capitalism, this ‘association of the workers –

the cooperation and division of labour as fundamental conditions of

the productivity of labour – appears as the productive power of capital. The

collective power of labour, its character as social labour, is therefore

the collective power of capital’ (Marx, 1973: 585). Within capitalism, capital

as such articulates various parts of the collective worker (although

never all of it) and mediates among those parts. Accordingly, capital is

able to capture the benefits arising from cooperation in the form of surplus

value; and it does so, as we’ve seen, as the result (and to the extent)

of its ability to divide and separate workers.

 

Within capitalism, the association of the producers who comprise the

collective worker is wholly external, mediated by their particular connections

to capital. ‘The worker actually treats the social character of his

work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a

power that is alien to him; the conditions in which this combination is

realized are for him the property of another’ (Marx, 1981b: 178). In contrast,

with the removal of capital as the mediator and the development

of the collective worker for itself, that producer composed of differing

limbs and organs expends its ‘many different forms of labour-power in

full self-awareness as one single social labour force’ (Marx, 1977: 171).

 

What kind of society is implied by the political economy of the working

class? In contrast to the political economy of capital, the political

economy of the working class encompasses more than just the labour

mediated by capital – just as the workday for workers is longer than the

capitalist workday. This political economy includes the labour where the

mediator among workers is the state (which provides ‘that which is

needed for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health

services, etc’), and it includes the labour ‘absolutely necessary in order to

consume things’ – that is, that labour unproductive for capital that Marx

included under the costs of consumption. All this is part of the collective

worker – even if the particular cooperation is not mediated by capital.

 

From the perspective of the political economy of the working class, the

divisions within the collective worker that strengthen capital can be

seen as artificial constructs of a society in which capital rules (and of its

corresponding political economy). Recognition of the interdependence

of all limbs of the collective worker (as well as the interdependence of

the wealth of human beings and Nature) is at the core of the political

economy of the working class.

 

In this political economy, all products and activities are acknowledged

as mere moments in a process of producing human beings; this is what

the productive organism comprised of the collective worker yields as its

real result:

 

When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole,

then the final result of the process of social production always

appears as the society itself, i.e., the human being itself in its social

relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product, etc

appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement

(Marx, 1973: 712).

 

For combating mystification within capitalism, these theoretical

insights – recognition of the necessary interdependence of producers

and the understanding that human beings in their social relations are

the premise and result of all activity – are critical. In the society of the

collective worker for itself, however, that which is apparent to the analyst

becomes ‘self-evident natural law’ for all members of the society.

 

Human beings in their social relations are the explicit goal of production

in this society of free and associated producers. Understood as

a connected whole, the various limbs and organs of the collective worker

combine ‘in full self-awareness’ to produce that collective worker.

Accordingly, in this ‘association, in which the free development of each

is the condition for the free development of all’, the human community

is presupposed as the basis of production (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 506).

Characteristic of the social relation among the producers in this structure

is that they recognize their unity as members of the human family and

act upon this basis to ensure the well-being of others within this family.

 

Solidarity, in short, is at the very core of the social relation. In the

cooperative society based upon common ownership of the means of production

that Marx envisioned, the productive activity of people flows

from a unity and solidarity based upon recognition of their differences.

The critique of the political economy of capital is completed only by

the realization of the political economy of the working class – a communist

society. As long as producers are not their own mediator, the

mystification of everyday life and the alienation of human beings from

their own powers continue:

 

The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social lifeprocess,

i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production

by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious

and planned control (Marx, 1977: 173).

 

In this society of associated producers, the cooperation of the collective

worker and the absence of an alien mediator demonstrate that ‘to

bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of

dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself’

(Marx, 1864: 11).4 Rather, the worker now ‘treats the social character of

his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal’,

as his power. This is the creation of a social form that corresponds to social

production – social production subordinated to the association of free

and equal producers. ‘Social production controlled by social foresight…

forms the political economy of the working class.’

NEXT:

III. The worker’s own need for development