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Title: Getting Rid Of Work Author: Gilles Dauvé Date: March 2018 Language: en Topics: communization, anti-work Source: Retrieved on March 12, 2018 from https://ediciones-ineditos.com/2018/03/08/getting-rid-of-work/ Notes: Here you will find a lightly modified chapter 3 from the book “From Crisis to Communization” published in 2017 by Editions Entremonde. Translated by EDICIONES INÉDITOS
What follows is a long essay by the French communization theorist,
Gilles Dauvé. It is a long read, a read which varies in content and tone
but a text which masterfully summarizes the communist critique of work.
The original can be found here at Troploin. He also dutifully notes that
without the abolition of work there can be no communist revolution or
communism. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed
translating it. ¡A la chingada con el trabajo! </example>
In 1997, in the French department of Sarthe, some 20 workers were
constructing a section of highway under the direction of an engineer
employed by a large company, BTP. After two months the engineer was
arrested: no one had ordered the work that was partially done, which
with an initial financing, the false construction site manager had
successfully hoodwinked both banks and public organizations. Between
1983 and 1996, Philippe Berre had been convicted 14 times for ordering
false construction sites. In 2009, “The Beginning,” a film inspired by
this whole adventure was released, displaying a population struck by
unemployment which briefly found work and hope. Phillippe Berre was not
motivated by personal gain, but rather by the need to do, to be of use,
to reanimate a group of workers. In 2010, once again, he took on this
role while helping those affected by Cyclone Xynthia.
We all know “rogue bosses.” Philippe Berre is a fictitious boss, an
anti-hero for our times; at once a “manipulator of symbols,” an agile
manager of human resources, at a crossroads between the automobile and
the BTP (presented as the two principal employers within modern
countries), wandering as a nomad on the highways, as mobile as the
activities which he preyed upon, living on the ephemeral dreams that his
dynamism created around him, an illustration of a fluidity without
markers or attachments, where money flows but is not wasted, where
success has no future, where one builds worthless things, where all
appears as communication and virtuality. But is not a sense of reality
which Philippe Berre is lacking, rather he lacks respect.
When a crook brings work, revenue, and thus some “meaning” to a
community in perdition, even if it is a provisional and false meaning,
this raises the question – what does production and work mean? The
unemployed at Sarthe trusted Philippe Berre because he brought them some
socializing, a role, a status, a sense of being recognized. What is
useful? Useless? Fictitious? Real? What is profitable or not? Was this
piece of highway more or less absurd than any “real” highway? What work
is worthy of being qualified as “a waste”? Beyond the hard reality of
work (it creates objects, creates profit and is generally onerous), what
is the truth?
Marx has left us the most powerful synthesis of communism, one with the
deepest theoretical breakthroughs and also the most acute
contradictions. Capital and the The Critique of the Gotha Program
notably, along with the Grundrisse, manuscripts from 1857-58, which have
since renewed our approach towards capitalism and communism, and whose
first publication in French almost coincided with May 1968. Though we
have personally cited these pages more than a few times, we now find
reason to bear a critique.[1]
Marx is particularly necessary to return to since his analysis of work
places front and center the question of time.
Capital does not begin with a definition of capitalism, but rather the
way in which it “presents itself”: “an immense accumulation of
commodities.” This point of departure relays a certain choice of
perspective. If work is at the heart of the problem, why not begin with
the the division of labor? While not writing a history book, why would
Marx start with the encounter between private producers exchanging on
the market and not with the meeting of the wage laborer and the
capitalist? The first chapter of Capital considers work (not waged
labor, but work, whatever kind it may be) as being both abstract and
concrete: in other words, use-value and exchange-value are presented as
arising with the dawn of humanity and within almost every society.
To naturalize work is to eternalize it.
Section 1.4 will return to Marx and his definitions of work. That which
Capital affirms, at any rate, is that work, in the past, before value
(or value-less, as it would be under communism), work without a labor
market, is both positive and necessary. Capital considers productive
activity and work as one in the same.
Here Marx announces an essential trait which Marxism would embody: the
worker ceases to be proletarian (= a wage laborer exploited by a boss)
when everyone becomes a proletarian, since bosses would have been
replaced by a community of laborers. The solution to this social problem
would be to generalize labor. But which kind? Waged labor? Marx reasons
as though the answer were self-evident: as soon as we all join in on a
community working without capitalists, the question of the wage-laborer
will be resolved. The overcoming of capitalism will not consist of the
abolishment of the Capital-labor relation but rather to rescue work from
Capital.
For Marx it is the arrival of use-value on the market (a “natural”
product of labor) which gives use-value its character as an
exchange-value. When Marx talks about labor time, it is squarely about
production, but at that point value only has a potential existence,
before finding its reality on the market. It would be as though value is
not born of production, but, after the productive moment, it comes to
impose itself on labor as a constraint, which would thus need to be
liberated from the worker. In reading Marx, as long as there is no
sale/purchase, labor time acts as a neutral given, which capitalism in
its own way takes advantage of, and which communism would also use but
in a totally different way.
The filigree-legible communism in Capital looks like a world without
money based on communitarian labor. However, work is more than the
meeting of cooperative humans within a workshop making objects. To work
is to count the time, to economize, which implies that we quantify the
socially-necessary labor time to produce this or that: exactly what Marx
rightly calls value.
Marx’s distrust of any utopian description for a post-revolutionary
future is well-known. Thus it is even more meaningful that one of the
rare appearances on this subject seems to propose labor vouchers for the
“lower phase” of communism (Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875),
because, such as he makes them out to be, what are these labor vouchers
but value without money?
“Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free
individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in
common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is
consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community (…)
The total product of our community is a social product. One portion
serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another
portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence (…) We will
assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of
commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of
subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that
case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a
definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the
different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the
community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion
of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the
part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The
social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their
labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and
intelligible,with regard not only to production but also to
distribution.” (Capital, Vol. 1, Chp. 1, iv)
If Marx assumes a regulation of production by labor time “to put this
state of affairs in parallel with commodity production,” it is because
the opposite supposition for him is almost unthinkable. His perspective
lies in replacing the separation between producers, great and small,
with a production-commune, and replacing capitalist disorder with
planification done by all.
Further, politically the State will no longer be a State when everyone
will take on its functions: shared by everyone, political power will
lose its oppressive character; so writes Engels: “Insofar as the anarchy
of social production disappears, the political authority of the State
goes to sleep. Men, finally masters of their own way of life in society,
thereby become masters of nature, masters of themselves, and thus are
free.”[2]
Such as Marx sketches it out, communism is marked by transparency and
self-understanding: men become at last conscious of whom they are.
Associated producers are naturally assumed to be the best people to know
the socially-necessary labor time of what they produce.
In 1845, Marx defined it as such:
“ ‘Labor’ is the living base of private property, as it is the only
source of private property. Private property is nothing more than
materialized labor. If you would want to deal it a lethal blow, we would
need to attack private property not only as an objective state; we must
also attack it as an activity, as labor. To speak of free, human, social
labor, of labor without private property, is one of the greatest
misunderstandings that exist. ‘Labor’ is by nature an enslaved activity,
inhumane, antisocial, determined by private property and created by
private property. Consequently, the abolition of private property only
becomes a reality if we conceive of it as the abolition of ‘labor’; an
abolition which naturally is only possible when done by labor itself,
which is a way of saying the by the material activity of society and not
just the substitution of one category for another.”[3]
In 1846, in The German Ideology speaks of “the division of labor” : This
is what is impossible without a community. (…) Up until now, all
revolutions have left intact this mode of activity; what changed was
only the distribution of this activity, a new apportionment of labor
between persons. On the other hand, communist revolution, standing up
against this traditional mode of activity, gets rid of labor and
abolishes the domination of all classes by abolishing classes
themselves; this revolution being the work of the class who, within
society, no longer has any ranking as a class and is no longer
recognized as such: from then on out, communist revolution marks the
dissolution of all classes, of all nationalities, etc. at the very heart
of present society.”[4]
Communist theory does not equate man with homo faber, nor as a “maker of
tools,” as Benjamin Franklin thought of man.
On the other hand, in 1867, work is defined as “the existential and
indispensable condition of man, the mediator of organic exchanges
between nature and man.”[5]
From a radical position that was unacceptable at the time (and remains
so to this day), Marx was moving toward a definition of work that is
practically applicable to any society.
Let’s quote then The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875): “At a higher
phase of communist society, when enslaved subordination of individuals
to the division of labor would have been disappeared, and with it, the
opposition between the intellectual and the manual labor; when work will
not only be a means to live, but will become the primary vital need;
when along with the manifold development of individuals, the productive
forces will have been so developed and when all sources of collective
wealth abundantly overflow – and only then (…) society will be able to
write on its banners: From each according to their ability, to each
according to their needs!.”[6]
According to Capital, “In all social states, the time necessary to
produce the means of consumption have interested mankind, albeit
unequally, in accordance with their diverse degrees of civilization.”[7]
The 1857-58 manuscripts (Grundrisse) have an exceptionally visionary
force. What they express does not however contradict Capital as much on
labor as on labor time, two themes which complement each other.
“The real economy, savings, consists of economizing labor time (as well
as reducing the costs of production). But, inseparable from the
development of the productive forces, this economy is in no way a
renunciation of joy. Growth in strength and in the means of production
condition the faculties which render the individual apt to enjoy their
existence, an aptitude which goes hand in hand with productive power.
The economy of labor time means the augmentation of free time for the
full blossoming of the individual (…)” (For the Grundrisse we use the
edition by Maximilien Rubel, Œuvres, Gallimard, II, 1968. p. 310)
“(…) it is clear that immediate labor time cannot always be abstractly
opposed to free time, as is the case in the bourgeois economic system.
Work cannot become a game, as Fourier wants, whom had the great merit of
having proclaimed the ultimate goal of transcendence, in a superior
form, not of distribution but of production.” (p. 311)
That life, particularly a productive one, “demands practical
manipulation and free movement,” (p. 311) and implies effort, is
self-evident and it is useful to recall that against the myth of a
liberating automation; but it does not follow that we must then reason
with the opposition of work/play, categories which themselves are
historical and open to critique. Across the same pages, Marx prolongs
his critique of political economy.
Of course not everything is play. But just because one has to exert
effort does not mean that what you are doing must be work. And it is not
necessarily less enjoyable to cook as it is to eat. And what about the
dishes? It only becomes a chore through the routine of household chores
(which are still 80% done by housewives) performed under the dual
constraint of time saving and the pressure of family life. The
reappropriation of our living conditions, and along with it its
upheaval, involves other relations such as man/woman, parents/children,
adults/children, which implies another kind of living situation, another
kind of education, etc.
The perspective set forth in the Grundrisse is as profound as it is
ambiguous:
“Adopting labor time as the standard for wealth, is to found this wealth
on poverty; it is reduction of all time to labor time and to degrade the
individual to the exclusive role of being a worker, an instrument of
work.” (p. 308)
“Capital is contradiction in action: it tends to reduce to a minimum
labor time, all the while making it the sole source and measure of
wealth.” (p. 306)
“The reduction of socially-necessary labor time, and not solely
diminished in favor of surplus labor, will allow us to free up the
blossoming of the individual. In fact, thanks to free time and the means
opened up to all, the reduction of labor time to the minimum
socially-necessary will favor the artistic, scientific, etc. development
of everyone.” (p. 306)
“True wealth being the full productive power of all individuals, the
yardstick employed will not be labor time, but rather the time
available.” (p. 308)
By definition, available time being not employed (or at least not yet ),
and thus representing but a potentiality, is then impossible to measure:
there thus seems to be a rupture with value and capitalism. But does
this available time become the totality of time, or is it added to an
ever-present labor time, which is essential albeit reduced to a few
hours a day?
Marx posed the question of the accounting of time (crucial in
understanding labor), but could not resolve this problem because he
treated time as a given, not as a category also open to critique.
In 1930, Dutch council communists of the GIC [Group of International
Communists] had the enormous merit of having concretely posed the
question of communism based on the question of value, but had done so,
in our opinion, based on a bad premise.[8]
In 1966, the principal editor of the project, Jan Appel (1890-1985)
summed up this premise: workers’ councils will make of “the hourly unit
of average labor time [the] measure of production time and of all the
needs and services at once found within production and distribution.”[9]
The error here is in wanting to place Marxian theory of value at the
service of the management of communism. The notion of socially-average
labor time, and further its whole calculus, are not useful instruments
at the same level as a wheelbarrow or a milling machine: they are the
substance of capitalism and their use is inseparable from their function
which they demand. A society cannot be organized on the direct calculus
of average labor time without sooner or later a general equivalence
materializing, giving birth to some variant of money. Everyone knows
that despite some of its friendly aspects, barter is based on an
implicit accounting, an exchange of invisible money (nobody swaps a
motorcycle in running condition for some random swimsuit). For as long
as a product has a double existence, one as a determined object and
another as an exchange value serving as a base for comparison and
exchange, we will have not left behind the world of the
commodity-society and capitalism. A direct accounting of labor time will
create an invisible general equivalency: it will bring about measured
products just like commodities, though they will not circulate like
commodities, and there will be workers that will consume based on their
work without receiving a wage. One would soon see the re-emergence of
the classic forms of capitalism whose foundations never disappeared,
since only a market where businesses clash is able to sanction this
calculus of production time.
It is obvious that there is nothing intrinsically in common between a
head of lettuce and a skirt, except the quantity of primary materials
and energy necessary to obtain one or the other. But is within commodity
exchange, and further within capitalism, which find the need to
synthesize all the components of production so as to reduce lettuce and
skirts as commensurable: the necessary labor time.
That which escaped the G.I.C. was that the evaluation of resources (both
human and otherwise) necessary for all activity take on different
meanings depending on the society. Sewing clothes and planting salad
greens do not require the same effort or the same material elements, and
communism will take this into account: but it will not need to start
from abstraction (even calculated directly without money) of comparable
energy expenditure contained in these two activities. Communism will
count and compare quantities and any eventual losses and waste will be
much lower than those imposed by the calculus of a kind of universal
production time.
“The theory of measuring goods or forecasting investments [in communism]
by the amount of work done is incorrect. (…) This not a question
regarding a quarrel of method but a fundamental problem which concerns
the very nature of communism. The measurement of work remains economist.
This sort of measurement desires the end of the law of value but does
not see all that it implies. (…) The mistake is not in continuing to
take into account need, sacrifice or production in the new society. The
mistake is in packaging all this and to stick on it a label that reads
“labor time” in an effort to reduce labor time and to globally oppose it
to free time.”[10]
No matter the goal of this calculus or its method, a society founded on
labor time supposes that work remains distinct from non-work, and thus
separated from the rest of all activities: if not then how or why would
you measure it?
On the other hand, if Marx implicitly kept the firm as a value-chain led
by the collective worker, the G.I.C. puts it explicitly at the center as
an economic unit. The partisans of this project did not ignore that
certain firms, and certain workers within such firms, would inevitably
be more productive than others: they foresaw a way of a way of
correcting this inequality with a complex weighing method. We have
rarely gone so far in a program that preserves the foundations of
capitalism while placing them under the complete control of workers.
Bordiga was a bit off when he saw here an “entrepreneurial socialism,”
but his councilist error arose from an essential preoccupation which he
misunderstood: the desire for the emancipation of workers is a task set
aside for the workers themselves. As Jan Appel noted, the real reason
behind this plan was not so much a question of technics but rather of
politics: to make it so that every worker participates in their
management.
The G.I.C.’s plan owns a lot to the era after the crisis of 1929 where
capitalism was seen as on the way towards concentration, nationalization
and planification: this was an opinion shared by different people such
as Otto Rühle, Bruno Rizzi, the Trostkyist dissidents Burhnham and
Schactman, the councilists, Socialism or Barbarism, Karl Kosch in 1950
and even held by non-Marxists like A. Berle, G. Means and Schumpeter
(Bordiga was one of rare few who did not share in this opinion.)[11]
Russia served as a counter-model: it was necessary to avoid repeating
what happened after October 1917. The calculation of labor time would
allow them to maintain control over firms and of the economy. The
accounting of labor time is at once a condition and a guarantor of real
and efficacious worker management: no one could know better than
workers’ collectives how much time was exactly necessary to produce this
or that and to thus determine the contribution of each within the common
effort.
With their desire to present communism as a superior mode of production
and to provide supporting figures that “this could work,” the Dutch
comrades left behind a critique of work (let us remember that 1930 was
the most favorable time to bring the question of work into the light… ).
If we raise the project of the G.I.C. along side our commentary of the
Grundrisse in the last paragraph, we see that the councilists are
faithful to Marx, as well (unbeknown to them) as faithful to the
Grundrisse, which they could have not have known of in the 1930s:
communism for them was collective administration made possible by the
experienced gained through a phase of transition, which would finally
serve as a school for rational management.
This question may surprise. Nonetheless, if the Grundrisse has had such
a grand influence the past 40 years, it is because its reading allows
for diverse interpretations and among those interpretations includes the
notion of a capitalism forced to overcome itself.
In 1857-58, anticipating the future of capitalism, and commenting on the
first automated machines by Charles Babbage, forerunner of the computer,
Marx wrote:
“(…) immediate work ceases to be as such the base for production; since
on one hand work is transformed from an activity under surveillance and
management, and on the other hand, the product [of work] ceases to be
the result of isolated and direct work: it is the combination of social
activity which appears as such as the producer.” (p. 308)
“While in its immediate form, labor ceases to be the grand source of
wealth, labor time will cease to be, and should cease to be, the measure
of labor, just as exchange-value will cease to be the measure of
use-value. The surplus-labor of masses of humans will cease to be the
condition of development of general wealth. (…) From then, production
founded on exchange-value will collapse (…).” (p. 306)
In other terms, from this moment on it will be impossible to identify
what the individual worker brings into the creation of wealth, value (by
which we mean the regulation of production and the redistribution of
goods by the measure of socially-necessary labor time) would become
incompatible with the expansion of production and absurd within
capitalism itself.
Let’s think about what Marx thought around the same time:
“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces
of a society enter into contradiction with the existing productive
relations. (…) So then opens up an era of social revolution.” (Preface
to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).
Although this preface later affirms that it is the proletariat which
forms the principal of the productive forces, Marx did not share in the
confidence of historical “progress” common to his time: for him
capitalist development leads to communism. In the same way that merchant
power had shattered the feudal framework and replaced it with
aristocratic domination, he saw that economic socialization, the
concentration of the masses of workers would prove incompatible with
private property and bourgeois management of society. Suffice to say
that proletarian revolution was conceived in much the same way as the
model for bourgeois democratic revolution.
Marx cannot be reduced to this position, but it there is enough within
his work to justify such a program, since capitalism ends up negating
itself:
“In the same way that the bourgeois economic system develops bit by bit,
likewise, so the ultimate result of this system gradually develops its
own negation.” (Grundrisse, p. 311)
Many theorists (their names are legion) then applied themselves in the
demonstration of how the “law of value” tends towards its own abolition
(the word law demonstrates the transformation of critique into a
science, that is to say it became a knowledge independent of proletarian
practice).
Said in another way, capitalism will set into motion change at a
revolutionary scale…but without revolution. For the social question
resolves itself if there is a threshold where the wage laborer finds
themselves obsolete, socially-average labor time becomes an inadequate
measure and the inoperative regulator of a very socialized production
will not last long before tearing apart wage laborers like a seam sown
too tight.
To underline what separates communist Marx from his non-revolutionary
posterity, many, us included, have tried to make it so that Marx would
be the best critic of Marxism.[12] The intention is laudable but the
argument is flawed.
How does Marx conclude Capital?
“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from
individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a
process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the
transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically
resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the
former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few
usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by
the mass of the people”.[13]
Is capitalism already a “collective mode of production”? Since the end
of the 19th c., the socialist movement has exploited these lines (and
others in the same way) to explain why a capitalism organized into firms
ever more globally-interdependent would sooner or later escape both
private property and the anarchy of production: it would therefore be
enough to replaces bourgeois bosses with worker representatives and
socialism would come along on its own, without revolution, its arrival
being a quasi-natural phenomenon.
It is not unreasonable for Marxists to seek in Marx a theory of
capitalist socialization that would ultimately prevent capitalism from
perpetuating itself. Here’s a good definition of “Marxism”: the
replacement of proletarian action for gradual evolution, or with a
beneficial catastrophe, which in both cases would appear to be
comparable to the process of mutation among natural species. At the end
of the 19th c. the manuscripts for Capital Vol. 2 and 3, published after
the death of Marx, were read as the theory of the inexorable
contradiction between bourgeois private property and the huge growth in
the productive forces which even trusts and cartels would be unable to
control.
100 years later, the 1857-58 manuscripts now available were interpreted
as theorizing [Capital’s] unparalleled and yet irresistible structural
limit. It is the very sources and forms of contemporary wealth which
would call for a supersession [of Capital] which we need only put into
effect. Toni Negri would not be the last to read into these lines of the
Grundrisse that value (the regulation of production by labor-time and by
finding the minimum production cost) has already ceased to govern
contemporary society: it would thus only be a question of realizing this
and to draw its consequences so that society radically changes. The
world now resting on a collective intelligence, if this general
intellect were to become aware of itself, would lead to us liberating
ourselves. Briefly, in 1900 as in the 21st c., the production forces are
presented as evading the control of those who control them and further,
evading the logic of valorization and of wage laborers. With a
difference only in size: the historical subject is no longer labor,
definitely not the worker, but rather it is all of us, since the
lecturer, just as the mingong, contributes to the world’s wealth.
Such an interpretation is partial and biased but can claim the letter
and the spirit of Marxian works.
We need not oppose a young Marx to an old Marx, since these
contradictions traverse and animate his texts from 1840 until the end of
his life.[14]
Marx led a continuous and discontinuous project, from his first
unpublished texts to his manuscripts written late in age(which are not
yet all published). From the moment he showed his intuitions in the
Grundrisse, he was in preparation for a grand voyage never fulfilled,
Capital, a title revealing its priority: to go into the depths of
capitalism to thus understand its possible overthrow. The means became
the end: to comprehend that which was historically novel in the
proletariat he sunk 20 years of study into capitalism. Moreover, in the
later volumes of Capital foreseen by Marx – economic theories, the world
market, classes, the State – none were to be devoted to the proletariat.
Communism was thought of as coming from capitalism.
Undoubtedly, it is thanks to Marx that we can critique him and one of
the most illuminating commentaries of him was that by Bordiga, writing
more than a half century later, that we must read the ensemble of the
Marxian oeuvre as a “description of characters in a communist society.”
But today, on pain of behaving like an heir, we must see what dominated
Marx. His dazzling intuitions, still in manuscript form, mix the
supersession of the economy with the project of a communitarian economy.
Marx is more a critic of value (the commodity, money) than of work
(time, productivity). If Marxist thought allowed for the communist
revival of the mir to be accorded a minor place compared to the
industrialization of the world, it is because capitalist progress was
accompanied by a worker’s movement that Marx saw as the true mainspring.
To understand Marx is also to distinguish Marx from Marxism without
denying the link between the two. If not we run the risk of rewriting a
Marx set to everyone’s taste or to the latest fashion.
With such a subject so vast and abundantly documented, we will confine
ourselves here to Engels and Lafargue.
That which Marx sketched out, Engels systematized, often stripping Marx
of his profound ambiguities. For Engels, the passage from the ape to the
human being was brought about by labor and language.[15] Work, which
“started with the making of tools,” is described as natural, useful and
conscious, its birth accompanied by language. Like Marx, but more
straightforward, Engels identified productive activity and work.
The dominant interpretation of The Right To Be Lazy (a text largely
distributed since its first edition in 1880, from social-democract to
anarchist milieus) finds within it a program that results from taking
what is good in capitalism (production in abundance) and removing what
is bad (exploitation of the producer). Paul Lafargue, this “redeemer of
humanity,” explains that by dividing productive tasks among all instead
of concentrating them in the hands of a few, thus forcing others to
employment, socialism would reduce the work day to 3 hours thanks to the
to suppression of useless production. Coincidentally, it is also a
3-hour workday which Keynes in 1930 promised would come to pass by the
end of the 20th c.[16]
Aristotle remains famous for his justification for slavery due to the
need to produce food and useful objects so that a privileged minority
could indulge in much more noble tasks: the Greek philosopher added that
there would be no more slaves “if weaver’s looms weaved all by
themselves” : it was Lafargue who proclaimed this day had come.
Social-democrats and Stalinists had little trouble in “recuperating” The
Right To Be Lazy: for them socialism was an extension of industrial
development oriented until now for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, an
extension supposedly done in the interests of the masses.
According to The Right To Be Lazy, work would hardly be work at all. A
century later with automation, the myth of a post-industrial society,
and more recently, the illusion of a new digital age, has lead some to
believe that the 3-hour day announced by Lafargue did not seem so bad at
all: work and leisure, manufacturing and creation would become one.
Finally reconciling the homo faber with the homo ludens and thus work
would cease to be work.
In 2009, Taillander published a collection of writings by Lafargue
titled Laziness and Revolution. In the past the association of these two
words would make for a provocative title, even an anarchist or
situationist one. (“Ne travaillez jamais”). By the start of the 21st c.,
redemption by machines is passé, but paradoxically, the omnipotence of
work allows a certain “criticism of work” to enter into social
morays.[17]
But what do we generally have against work? Above all, we see it is a
constraint, an alienation, an impoverisher of both the worker and of
nature.[18]
It’s certainly all of those things, but such a critique does not engage
with wage-laborers themselves (purchase-sale of human activity), nor
work as separation (to make one’s living by producing to later consume
thanks to the money gained).
We will only deal here with societies where the constitutive features of
work exist, knowing that they have only been fully developed in the last
few centuries.
Every social analysis which implicates a definition of what is specific
to human beings, for as long as this definition is explicit, at its bare
minimum says: the human contributes in the production of their nature,
which they are the co-creator of. The human does not model itself at
will, but further becomes evolved by changing what surrounds them. In
producing their material living conditions, human beings do more than
this: to produce means to act in society, to speak, to travel … human
beings produce themselves and take their activity along with the
activity of other human beings as an object: the human is a subject and
has a history. The human sets themselves apart from themselves (and can
even become alien to themselves). This implies a choice, this implies
freedom (and its eventual loss).
This objectification contains the possibility of work.
So that this potentiality becomes realized, there needs to be a surplus
and this surplus would need to be more than a simple reserve (of food,
notably): a useful surplus is necessary to liberate a member of society
from the obligation of producing for themselves, thus allowing this
member to produce for other members. Work is a form of human activity
taken when work creates a surplus which escapes it. Work is a relation
between necessary work and surplus labor : there is a separation between
the expenditure of energy necessary to maintain the worker, and the
expenditure of energy beyond this maintenance, which creates a surplus.
Workers only exist for as long as a non-worker is making them labor for
their benefit. Work, an activity whose product recurs to others, implies
(and maintains) the division of groups within a society with opposed
interests. Society is divided among workers and non-workers, where
non-workers are reaping the production of workers. The worker may
maintain some control of their means of production and organize them
themselves, but the result of his labor does not belong to them. Work is
a class relation.
Human activity begins to take the form of work when humanity, over
thousands of years and in places which we will never know, arrives at
certain practices, few in number at the beginning, which have ceased to
be lived and received in such a way that each can have and produce what
they specifically need, e.g. flour or fabric. From that moment on, that
flour or fabric had begun to exist, above all, by and for their capacity
to be able to be exchanged one for the other, and have been treated ever
since in light of what they have in common: being both different results
but comparable within the same practice known as work, now susceptible
to be reduced to a universal and quantifiable given, the humanly
necessary average amount of effort needed to make that flour or fabric.
From then on these two objects have been produced for what they have in
common, this substance known as value.
Then came a decisive change, the passage of the exchange of one
commodity for another (flour/fabric), looking to satisfy two needs that
meet, an exchange aiming to obtain not a particular useful object, flour
or fabric, but the money destined to buy any kind of object, or to be
saved or invested.
Crystallized labor, money gave value a material form.
Money is not the result of practical necessity, for example to
facilitate barter or as a convenient means of exchanging a sack of flour
for a length of fabric so that those in this barter don’t “lose
anything.” Credit and debt precede money and as a proof we have the
masses of ancient peasants who were in debt before the invention of
money.
Whatever their origins, work and money have become inseparable. Even
under their immaterial forms of credit card chips and lines of credit,
they materialize the way in which activities and human being relate to
each other, and lastly how classes relate to each other.
If value reveals and manifests exchange, its source lies within work and
money serves to link up that which the division of labor separates.
As the history of the longue durée Fernand Braudel said one day: “The
misfortune is that the market exists and then you do not get to see what
goes on underneath.”
With wage laborers, work is not just activity done for money: it also an
activity which is bought and sold.
With the generalized sale-purchase of labor power, for the first time in
history, social classes distinctly distinguish themselves from their
respective place (bourgeois or proletariat) occupied by each within
production. The relation between necessary work and surplus labor
structures the world. No society can survive without productive
activity, but modern society is the first to live under the domination
of (waged) work.
This crucial fact is doubly obscured. First, there’s the general
tendency of making everyone need a wage and thus “everyone works,” even
the CEO, blurring the opposition between the worker and the non-worker.
Then, there’s two or three thousand proletarians without work or some
who are semi-proletarianized who stand outside the class of wage
laborers which they nonetheless form a part of.
This generalization of a class of wage laborers creates a completely
novel situation, even for those condemned to total or partial
unemployment. The slave, the serf and the sharecropper shared the
historical perspective that they need only get rid of the domination of
the master, the lord of the landowner to be able to work freely. Today,
the computer assembler or the palm oil wage laborer can only free
themselves by putting an end to their own existence as a bearer of labor
power, this commodity which potentially contains all other commodities.
Only commodified work can get rid of work. The program is no longer one
of liberating work, but to liberate ourselves from work. Work is that
which transforms activity into salable labor power and which only
recognizes the whole of human capacities as labor power.
Work is the form taken by the production of the material conditions
necessary for life when that productive activity has become detached
from the rest of activities, in varying degrees and forms. The
modern-day workforce cuts up their time between work, homelife, school,
hobbies, vacations, etc. and the space between places to earn money,
live, shop, be entertained and so on.
The space-time of non-work is not a capitalist creation: it has
coexisted with the space-time of work ever since the appearance of work.
The capitalist novelty lies in pushing this separation to the extreme,
accentuating the split between that which is productive and
non-productive of value.
Organized into a series of competitive firms, where each is a
value-chain in search of optimal growth, capitalism logically tends to
increase surplus labor at the expense of necessary labor. Work brings
along with it productivity and normalization, with a permanent search
for ever more efficient methods of diminishing the cost of renewing
manufacturing processes: the famous “development of productive forces.”
Work and value – one cannot go without the other – implying production
for production’s sake – for the accumulation of value – and with it
“productivism” and planned obsolescence.
Today we constantly measure things against each other, compare and
exchange them according to the average labor-time they require or are
supposed to require, which also leads us to evaluate acts and people.
The augmentation in productivity (the growth of surplus labor which
creates new value in relation to the necessary labor compared to the
simple reproduction of labor power) is essential to all which we have
recounted here. If the search for productivity is an irresistible force,
with such destructive effects for humanity and nature, it is because the
race for ever more profitability is the engine of capitalism; this race
is its power and also the cause of its crises. So as to become more
profitable than their competitors, each firm is led by an
intensification of work, a development of mechanization and the growth
of capital invested in equipment, tools, robots, etc., increasing its
mass of value and ending up suffering diminishing returns.
If human societies have over the last few centuries moved towards the
evermore precise and rigorous measure of time, it is so that they may
economize it so that production time may be reduced. The obsession with
“winning” time and the fear of “losing” it are integral to capitalism.
To work is to struggle against time.
On the contrary, human beings for whom the frantic search for
productivity is not an imperative, have no need to measure everything by
the seconds and minutes as they produce.
The best way to render energy-use in the most productive way possible is
to measure it by time so as to shorten it. For this reason the
separation between work and the rest of life is essential to the
accounting of time which finds itself at the core of value: one cannot
measure a moment and the effort expended in that moment unless that
segment of time is detached from all others.
We know how much to pay for a housekeeper: we cannot know the “worth” of
what a housewife does in their own home. Even if the two accomplished
the same tasks between 9AM and noon, those 180 minutes do not have the
same meaning for the employee who came to perform a three-hour task and
for the housewife who is busy at home performing various tasks.
Even the “by piece” wage of a single worker alone at his machine will be
calculated according to the number of seconds need to make each piece.
Indeed, one cannot really reduce labor time, because labor time, by its
socially-average definition, is not calculable for each task or for each
object. A worker’s wage at their machine will be the price of a work
whose value cannot be calculated, the specific contribution of this
worker to all the value created in the firm. Money really is
crystallized labor, only existing as an instrument within the
circulation of goods under the condition that these commodities also set
in motion other commodities and not by the calculation of the quantity
of labor each carries within it. A specific loaf of bread and a teapot
can be comparable in weight and not by the energy expenditure need to
produce either of them. Whatever Taylor may have believed, no scientific
method will ever quantify the new value added by a specific work task
within a workshop or an office.
“Rational madness,” Taylorism is none the less consistent with the
necessities of Capital.[19] As soon as a computer mousepad plant begins
to use equipment which requires the worker to produce more but at the
same wage, management ignores the precise resulting increase of value,
meanwhile it knows exactly how much it will pay the worker, how many
mousepads the worker is supposed to make within a given time and how
much they will sell each mousepad for. What is important here is that
the introduction of new equipment forces the worker to be more
productive. All the bourgeois knows, and which they count, are the
prices, first the wages and the profits and although economists speak of
value and creation of value, they openly consider “value” to be a
metaphysical speculation.
The capitalist struggle against time bears the effect of a planned
permanent obsolescence of commodities. Another consequence is the
obsession with saving time in everyday life. These two phenomena have
accelerated in the last twenty and thirty years, giving rise to a
denunciation of speed and “the dictatorship of immediacy”; we see
eulogies to slowness, slow food…reactions with little impact because
they do not ascend to recover labor time.
30 years ago, a study by Barbara Garson showed how computers are
transforming the office of the future into the factory of the past.[20]
The wage worker charged with taking airline ticket reservations by phone
sees their work cut up into four mandatory phrases, timed and monitored.
“To control everything, that’s the goal of the system,” declared one
employee. It’s not simply that “the system” knows everything done at
each moment but that for this end “the system” decomposes each gesture
to such a degree that the work becomes more and more incomprehensible
for those who do it (at the very moment where the operation of our daily
objects become infinitely more mysterious to us than the motor in the
fridge).
In 1966 when an MIT researcher came up with the ELIZA program, an
automated therapist who responded without human intervention to medical
questions, this expert system found widespread approval, many
considering it already a human therapist “as an information processor
and decision-taker.”If this shortening of human skills was possible, it
was because knowledge and social relations have already previously been
reduced to mechanics, to the quantifiable.
Computerization is not the cause: a machine does not create a social
relation. Capitalism privileges the result (the product) over the
process, the (measurable) object over relations and privileges the
decomposable and quantifiable tasks over the continuity of the ensemble.
But why bother to reduce the cost of labor which remains a small part of
the cost of production? According to official statistics, around 1980,
in the metal industry, direct work accounted for 10% of total costs. 30
years later, a pair of Nike Air Pegasus would sell for $70 in the United
States, which includes a $3 wage for Asian workers, $16 for raw
materials and $16 for design and advertising which adds up to $35. In
summary, $3 in labor, a production cost of $35 for a sale price of
$70.[21]
This is so because the game is not played from an accounting point of
view. It is about controlling the direct workers who, unlike executives,
advertisers and machines, are likely to resist or strike. “That’s why,”
concluded B. Garson,” any large mass of workers that can be automated
will be. Automated does not necessarily mean that robots will replace
them, but that their work is organized so as to become controllable at
all times. At least in theory, because it is always the one who execute
the work that will be best able to control the work. As the old worker
at Renault said: “Your boss pays you for your work, not for the way you
do the work.” At the beginning of the 20th century, counters were
installed on typewriters to check the number of keystrokes: some typists
responded by leaving wider spaces, by not hitting the space bar one
time, but two, three, four, even five times.
Our order of presentation is not chronological: we did not go back to
the origin of work, knowing that in real history these elements related
to work did not take on the same importance at the same time. It has
taken millenia before there was an exchange of equivalents, that is to
say, an exchange based on the more or less rigorous estimates of
necessary labor time and that “the law of value” would come and equalize
private work. Moreover, “money,” as the means to count in terms of value
and production and to circulate goods according to an exchange of
equivalents indeed precedes currency as we know it: there were not
instruments specifically reserved for the function of money (which also
did not have other uses, whether everyday or ritualistic). The arrival
of coinage is late (7th. Century B.C.).
In the world in which we live, each of the aspects which we have
conveniently distinguished in the exposition are the conditions for all
the others. For example, to force humans to “make a living” via the
wage, it was necessary to deprive them of autonomous means of existence
(§2.1). Further, measuring work supposes that it is separated from all
other activities (§2.4). It is only modern capitalism which has fully
developed the constitutive elements of work.
Despite the fact that only a minority of the world’s population receive
a wage and that even smaller minority benefits from a good labor
contract (with fixed & duly paid wages, labor rights, social security
contributions and union dues), the wage-employment nonetheless
dominates.
Capitalist forms determine pre-capitalist forms. A 9 year old Turkish
girl shepherding her parent’s herd of goats contributes to the family’s
income. Meanwhile, one of her brothers lives by working odd jobs in a
neighboring city, and the eldest brother works in a factory in Germany,
where in 10 years maybe the young Turkish girl may work as a cleaning
lady. This family is integrated into the global reproduction of the
Capital/labor relation. The global market brings in more and more people
into its logic, a minority of Earthlings today live on a purely “economy
of subsistence” and work and money penetrate into the heart of slums.
It all depends on the point of view. For a sociologist or an
anthropologist the activity of the young girl remains “entrenched” in
precapitalist relations and he would describe how her kinship ties are
saturated with archaisms, since, for example, her family has destined
her to an arranged marriage. The anthropologist is not wrong. But for
those who want to understand the nature of work, the method consists in
finding what is in common between the young Turkish girl and a worker of
Maruti Suzuki, or with a Bolivian bank employee (which is not to say
that the three would have the same impact on the course of history).
The dominant social relation (wage labor) is not the sole one, but it
determines all the others, including any sort of benevolent activity
(which is labor indirectly remunerated), as well as including slavery
(forced unpaid labor with absolute boss control over the worker,
estimated at between 20 and 30million worldwide). And while we may read
that the informal economy makes up 40% (made up of mostly women) of the
so-called active world population, this statistic utilizes a category
produced by the existence of wage-laborers which distinctly classifies
that which does not enter its strict framework (labor contract) of
work.[22]
Let us not confuse work with employment. The undeniable fact that there
are and will be fewer hires than the unemployed in the world does not
prevent productive work from remaining the center of the world today.
What is called “social security” refers to the place of work: the money
paid (or not) to the student, the unemployed, the sick, to families, to
the elderly, the disabled is granted to categories that either cannot,
cannot yet or cannot any longer work. Although public opinion denounces
king-money (and more subtle theoreticians denounce the domination of
value), it would be more accurate to say that we live under the reign of
work, that is to say, wage labor.[23]
§2 sought out to identify six characteristics which altogether
constitute work: necessary work/surplus-labor and class divisions;
value; commidification; separation; productivity and accounting; and
time. Our ambition was not to construct a theoretical machine which
would cease to function as soon as you remove one piece, as though,
missing three of these six components, work would only partially
continue to exist: only abstraction requires the separation into
categories that which in reality is nested.
To comprehend the possible link between capitalism and a revolution
which would abolish work, instead of taking these six elements
separately, let’s consider them next as a whole.
“Production” is often assimilated into artisanal or industrial
fabrication of objects. It would seem to be more apropos to consider, as
Alain Testart, does that there is production “whenever the means of work
are applied to raw material to turn it into a consumable product in a
form in which it was not before.”[24] Hunter, harvester and fisher,
unlike predators, make use of weapons and knowledge. By producing, the
human also produces instruments and means of production, for example a
bow for hunting. With agriculture, the human modifies nature with the
intentional sowing of nutritional plants: from hunter-gather, the human
becomes a “producer.”
But production is not synonymous with economy.
The difficulty lies in understanding that the production of the material
conditions for existence has become a reality we call economy,
progressively more autonomous from the rest of life, to the point where
in the modern era it is a distinct sphere, with a separation between the
time-space consecrated to making a living (work) and all other
activities.
There is no “economic history,” because economy is a historical fact
that has not reigned at all times and everywhere. For example, the
noting of “per capita income” or “of households” only has any meaning
when there exists individual persons or nuclear households.[25]
Malthus attributed the possible crisis of capitalism to a growth of
population that goes over the growth of resources, particularly food.
Ecologists explain history by the capacity or the incapacity for
societies to adjust to the environment to their needs. Rejuvenated by
its taking into account of natural resources and the need to renew these
resources, economic thought is nonetheless economic: it’s number one
problem is the creation of a balance between means and ends. It’s a
morality based on accounting.
Gregory Clark wrote in a well-documented book: “during the Malthusian
era economic laws governing human society are the same as those
governing all animal societies.”[26] The driving thread within history
would be the evolution of the relationship between available resources
and the population, whether human or animal: the same reasoning was
applied to the residents Charleville-Mézières, as the deer of the nearby
Ardennes [forests].
Nonetheless, far from being an apologist for progress, Gregory Clark
argues, with backing figures, that hunter-gathers spent between 4 and 5
hours a day gathering food; that in 1800 the average Earthling did not
live better than those who lived 100,000 years before Christ; that in
Asia the conditions were even worse, and that the so-called primitive
“produced” more calories per hour of “work” than the civilized did in
England. These facts are sobering, but what these figures show is a
desire to reduce everything to measurability, as if the Amazonian and
the Yorkshire laborer lived the same social relationship, separated only
by different degrees on a scape of production and consumption.
The dominant mental schema has changed little since [Henri de]
Saint-Simon’s time: “the production of useful things is the sole
reasonable, and positive goal that political societies can propose for
themselves.” The ideal would then be a society where “all men work. This
obligation is imposed on all to constantly give their personal efforts
toward a useful direction for society.” (L’Industrie, 1811-1812). For
Saint-Simon, the merchant or farmer are as much “producers” as the
worker or the industrialist (For him socialism would mean the
suppression of the merchant and to meld the worker and the industrialist
into one figure).
Under economic thought, society relies on the production and the
allotment of resources. The socialist economist also brings into the
fold the criterion of utility and of justice; the ecological economist
brings the obligation of harmony with nature; but it is still a question
of administrating a surplus: the relation between necessary labor and
surplus labor become thought of as self-evident: it is a matter of
producing something to eat, somewhere to live, somewhere to heal
oneself…then finally arrive to the spice of life. Utility before what is
pleasant. Soup before the concert. We must first be ants to then become
a cicada.
To retain the relationship between necessary labor and surplus-labor is
to retain work itself.
The fundamental mistake is to make everything about meeting the need to
satisfy basic needs. Without food, I die: this self-evident statement
only makes sense if it is connected to the fact that human existence is
social. I don’t eat first so I can then be in society. Hunger is always
lived and treated in function to the conditions imposed upon by human
beings (whether they’re in Alaska or Tahiti) and their social
organization. Hunger does not further intervene: both play at the same
time: the cold is not more the cause of social life of the Inuit than
the tropical humidity is the cause of the Tahitians. No vital necessity
takes precedence over social links: between the two there is a
simultaneity. The same is true under capitalism. Likewise in revolution.
Similarly in communism. Except that production will no longer play the
same role.
It is not a question of how do human beings produce themselves?; nor,
what do they produce? (whether education software or assault weapons)
But rather: what place do they take within the production of human life.
According to a widespread idea in the radical milieu, the objective will
not be to “produce just to produce,” but rather to create the minimum
abundance necessary without which human emancipation will not be
possible.
Alfred Rosemer wrote in 1923: “Communism supposes and demands abundance
because the distribution of products should be simple and easy.”[27]
The real motive of this imperative for production is to not allow
overconsumption: Rosmer prioritizes abundance because he sees in it the
necessary condition for a just distribution.
Inversely, others make of a frugal moderation the condition of a free
and solidarity-based community. In The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
(1974), on the planet Anarres owes much of its rather libertarian[28]
way of life to its harsh climates, which lends itself to favor mutual
aid and also makes accumulation difficult.
Whether one prefers abundance or a soberness in production, in both
visions, the priority is economic. This what we must criticize.
A frequent criticism of capitalism is that it fabricates goods without
taking care of real needs, and then goes on to sell its wares on the
market: the satisfaction of needs is but a side consequence. This
conception then leads some to do the opposite: to start off based on
needs, but this time based on supposed real needs which are decided upon
collectively; a conception which desires to satisfy these needs through
adequate production and equitable distribution, without the mediation of
the market, thanks to a communitarian, democratic and self-organized
organization.
This ignores that needs also make up an economic category.
Let’s observe that needs are almost always defined in the negative: to
not die of hunger, of cold or of sickness; to not be forced to sleep in
the rain, etc. When we speak of needs, we speak of a lack.
It is self-evident that human beings have basic necessities, such as to
eat and to sleep, just as it is imperative to match these with existing
resources. That which is untrue is the idea that human life consists of,
above all, satisfying these needs. The only way we satisfy these needs,
or fail in doing so, is by way of social interrelations. It is only
under exceptional circumstances that we eat just so that we will not
die. For human beings, to eat will always be more than just eating.
Generally, we eat in the company of others, chosen or not, or we choose
to eat alone, or we are forced to eat alone, which is also itself a
social situation. Often we follow a diet, either dietary or not.[29]
Sometimes we have to skip a meal so as to not eat or drink too much. The
same is true of all our other vital activities. As Marx wrote in The
German Ideology, meeting vital needs also creates new needs, and “this
production of new needs is the first historical fact.”
Contrary to a common error, the “materialist conception of history” does
not say that “the economy” leads the world. This is often the way that
the first part of The German Ideology is read, although Marx intended
something else altogether. Firstly, social relations depend on how we
produce our material conditions for life and not what our ideas are of
the world. Secondly, we produced these material conditions in relation
with other human beings, and in class societies, we create them through
class relations. The “materialist conception” does not make “the
economy” the motor of human evolution, but it can explain how the
current domination of the economy over our world is a historical
phenomena; a phenomena that was unknown in pre-history and one which was
less important in Athens 500b.c. than in Athens 2015; and it is a
phenomena which will disappear with communism.
Without developing what is said within From Crisis to Communization, let
us say here that our problem lies not in inventing a new society which
will put in parallel our needs and resources (as the economists may
want), or transform artificial and extravagant needs into reasonable
needs so as to attain a sufficient frugality (as the ecologists may
want). It is rather a matter of understanding what our basic needs truly
are. The first human need, wrote Marx, is the need for the other. We
would say: the need to feed ourselves is indissoluble from the need of
the other, and the two are satisfied (or not) at the same time. We must
eat, that much is self-evident, and social relations do not fill empty
stomachs, but we eat within those social relations.
All of this is verified during revolutionary periods: “without
reserves,” the proletarian having neither money or food, or arms (at
first), find their only strength is their acting with other
proletarians.
Admittedly, at first the pressure of circumstances (internal conflicts,
armed struggle, shortages…) will sometimes lead the insurgents to share
and distribute as justly as possible (in both sense of the word), so,
whether it they like it or not, they must ration. But the revolution
would be damned if it proved incapable of distinguishing a social
emergency from the rest of its fundamental “program,” it would be damned
if it were to allow social emergency to determine its base.
We will not ask ourselves: “How many roof tiles are necessary for that
house?” but rather: “how many could it house?” Starting from there, we
will then figure out how many x tiles are necessary by how many y
squared meters for the roof: to suppress accounting does not mean we
will renounce the use of measurements.
The communizing motor of action will not be the search for the best or
the most equal way of distributing goods, but rather the human relations
and activities found therein: within communization, activity is more
important than its productive result because this result depends on an
activity and of ties that could and would strengthen bonds among the
insurgents. That which stirs the proletarian to act is not the need to
eat, it is the need to create among other proletarians a social
relation, which among other things will also feed them.
The need to create food, to cultivate carrots for example, will be
satisfied by way of social relations which, among other activities, will
cultivate beans, which will not mean that each minute or hour of
horticulture will be lived as a kind of a joy without cloudy skies.
Counter-revolution will of course exploit our inevitable disarray and
local shortages. The revolution will not respond by bringing back to
life an even-more productive industry, nor will it do away with
bourgeois armies by creating an even stronger army. “Realism” is to be
found where you least expect it. It is the bureaucrats whom of course
will try to pass themselves as “practical,” explaining that after
insurrectionary spontaneism must follow productive organization, which
solely could resolve the most vital and urgent problems. Through means
of some large and small transformations, the ideology of “common sense”
(a hammer or computer are neutral, they will tell us, and that they’re
neither capitalist nor communist) will promote a concern for efficiency
which, despite a shift in discourse, will contain all the traits of
productivity. However, work and productivity are linked. Work normalizes
things. Keeping track of time during production demands that we separate
it from the rest of the day, thus we detach it from life by distinctly
calling it work. Revolution cannot make time-saving one of its
priorities.
The division of labor will neither be overcome by a simple permanent
sharing of duties. A varied form of work remains work. Working
cooperatively is also work: collective work is also work. Working two
hours a day is also work. The replacement of private producers with
communitarian production, or the systematic re-distribution of tasks,
only makes communist sense if the products are not compared – and thus
incomparable – among each other (nor the activities which have produced
them) by way of some calculus (implicit or not) of the real or supposed
average labor time to make them. Because if we count, if social life
revolves around this measure, whatever the mode of association, sooner
or later value will reappear, even in a community with the most
fraternal intentions.[30]
This text started with a fictitious boss who offered illusory
employment. In the so-called real world, many of our contemporaries
“make a living” by making up marketing campaigns, which others print,
then are deposited into mailboxes, which then are recovered at the dump
to make into recycled paper, on which will be printed new prospectus,
while experts are hired to analyze it all and intellectuals are hired to
deplore them. The surrealists asked themselves if we suffered either too
little or too much from reality… At any rate, the “absurdity” of work
will never be enough to do away with it. We will need nothing less than
a revolution. We do not ignore that “there is something ridiculous in
talking about revolution”: “But the whole rest of it is even more
ridiculous, since it is that which exists, along with the various forms
its accepted.”[31]
[1] A curious destiny was set for these reading notes commonly called
the Grundrisse which were only published in Moscow in German during the
maelstrom that was World War II. There were almost unknown until their
second edition in German in 1953, the text was not available in French
until 1967-68, and it was even later when they were published in other
European languages (English in 1973).
[2] Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1873, Section 3, Chp. 2
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm
[3] Notes sur F. List,Œuvres, Gallimard, III, 1982, pp. 1418-1451.
[4] Ibid., pp. 1111 et 1123.
[5] Capital, Vol. I, Œuvres, Gallimard, I, 1963, p.570.
[6] Ibid., p. 1420
[7] Ibid., p. 605.
[8] Groupe des Communistes Internationalistes de Hollande (GICH),
Principes fondamentaux de la production et de la distribution
communistes : http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article1308
[9] Short biography of J. Appel (in French) :
http://www.collectif-smolny.org/article.php3?id_article=676collectif-smilny.org.
[10] OJTR,Un Monde sans argent : le communisme, Chap. V, Ed. du Sandre,
2013.
[11] In 1932, Berle and Means were among the first to theorize a
capitalism of managers in Property and control within the large
enterprise. Bruno Rizzi (1901-1977) publie en 1939 La bureaucratisation
du monde. Pour un compte-rendu par Pierre Souyri de la réédition du
livre chez Champ Libre en 1976 :
http://www.persee.fr/doc/ahess_03952649_1979_num_34_4_294092_t1_0894_0000_002
Sur la critique de la thèse d’un capitalisme « bureaucratique » ou «
d’Etat » par Bordiga, voir entre autres : La Doctrine du diable au
corps, 1951 :
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bordiga_amedeo/doctrine_diable_au_corps/doctrine_diable_au_corps.html
Et ses Thèses sur la Russie, 1952 :
https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/documents-historiques/1952-theses-sur-la-russie-bordiga/
[12] Maximilien Rubel, Marx critique du marxisme (1974 et 1983),
Entremonde, 2011 : http://entremonde.net/IMG/pdf/CAHIERS04-Livre.pdf
[13] Œuvres, I, Gallimard, p. 1240.
[14] “Let’s not idealize the 1840 years as proof of an authentic
communism which was then abandoned. The Principals of Communism by
Engels in 1847 prefigure that which would become the socialist program a
few decades later: “(…) to concentrate more and more within the hands of
the State all of Capital, agriculture and industry, transportation and
exchanges. (…) These measures (…) will become ever more centralized
along with the growth of the productive forces thanks to the work of the
proletariat. Finally, when the whole of Capital, production and
exchanges are concentrated in the hands of the State, private property
would also fall, money would become superfluous (…).”
https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/47-pdc.htm A good history book on
this time period:Alain Maillard, La Communauté des Égaux. Le communisme
néo-babouviste dans la France des années 1840, Kimé, 1999.
[15] Le Rôle du travail du travail dans la transformation du singe en
homme, 1876 : https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/76-rotra.htm
[16] Perspectives économique pour nos petits-enfants :
http://s182403251.onlinehome.fr/IMG/pdf/keynes_essais_de_persuasion.pdf
[17] In their Manifest contre le travail (1999), Krisis describes work
as no longer necessary under capitalism, which on the one hand becomes
less and less necessary and that the little work it retains is
completely devoid of meaning.
[18] Bob Black sums up the dominant perception to found in radical
milieus: “My definition of work is forced labor, obligatory production.
These two parameters are essential. (…) Work violates freedom.”
(Abolition of work, 1985)
[19]
B. Doray, Le Taylorisme, une folie rationnelle ?, Dunod, 1981.
[20] The Electronic Sweatshop. How Computers are Transforming the Office
of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Penguin, 1988.
[21]
D. Cohen, Trois leçons sur la société post-industrielle, Seuil, 2006.
[22]
B. Lautier, L’Economie informelle dans le tiers-monde, Repères, 2004.
[23] G.D., La boulangère & le théoricien (sur la théorie de la
forme-valeur), 2014 : https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?s=forme-valeur
[24] Avant l’histoire, Gallimard, 2012.
[25] This is not stopped Thomas Piketty from measuring the relationship
between the return on capital (from patrimonial wealth ) and the rate of
growth of the last 2,000 years as though these realities had similar
worth in ancient Rome as they do in contemporary New York.
[26] A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World,
Princeton UP, 2007.
[27] L’Humanité, 3 février 1923, cité dans Ch. Gras, Alfred Rosmer
(1877-1964) et le mouvement révolutionnaire international, Maspéro,
1971.
[28] Translator’s note: here ‘libertarian’ is closer to ‘anarchist’ than
those who, in the English-speaking world, have taken on this term as a
way to align with small gov’t and free-market capitalism.
[29] Translator’s note: in French the word for “diet” is “régime” which
can mean either a diet taken on for health reasons (‘dietary’) or just a
diet that we follow on custom (‘or not’).
[30] To learn more on what would make a communist revolution, see
chapter 5 (« L’Insurrection créatrice ») of this book, which this is an
excerpt of : De la Crise à la communisation, Entremonde, 2017.
[31] Internationale Situationniste, n°6, 1961 :
https://www.larevuedesressources.org/IMG/pdf/internationale_situationniste_6.pdf