Who is a worker?
Doug Henwood interviews Rutgers’ historian Donna Murch here. Great piece, as always.
The following is a raw side note on an issue alluded to in the interview: the exclusion of care wage workers from the working class.
Donna mentions the racist element in this exclusion. That makes sense to me. But I believe that there is yet another key element in this exclusion. This element has a broader base and is rooted in a conceptualization of the working class that goes back to the late 19th century, perhaps reinforced and baked into various socialist traditions in the early 20th century. This is a conceptual pet peeve of mine, so I will explain myself.
I am trusting my memory here, without checking sources, but in some instances (I believe) some rank-and-file care wage workers were not only excluded from the working class but categorized as petty bourgeois. As far as I can trace this back (I’m not a historian), some 2nd International Marxists — see, for example, E Bernstein’s (1899) Evolutionary Socialism — were already thinking of the working class in very narrow terms, including in it only those workers involved in conventionally defined primary and secondary activities (including transport), mainly under private capitalist control.
It is clear that 3rd International Marxists, especially under the influence of Zinoviev, excluded care wage labor from “industrial” wage labor and the output of such labor was excluded from material production. This may be the starting point of the modern “Marxist-Leninist” mythology of the narrowly conceived industrial working class as the agent of revolution, which has given pabulum to the notions that Marx was wrong in picking the agent of historical change.
In the Soviet national accounts, for example, teaching, the provision of medical and child care, etc. were counted as forms of “social consumption,” to be subtracted rather than added to material output. I don’t think this was a Stalinist prejudice. Ernest Mandel (1962’s Marxist Economic Theory) also seemed to have had a narrow notion of the working class. More recently, Shaikh and Tonak (1994’s, Measuring the Wealth of Nations) looked again into these concepts. I don’t think they got them right.
Since I have their book handy, I can tell that Shaikh & Tonak introduced an idiosyncratic notion of “distribution.” In the classical political economy tradition, distribution was about the distribution of the material product (which superficially appeared as what we now call the distribution of monetary income) among the social classes and groups thereof — which, as Marx quipped, is ultimately determined by the distribution of wealth ownership or ownership over the conditions of production.
Yet, to Shaikh & Tonak, distribution referred to the transfer of “objects of social use” to their ultimate users or consumers, an activity that (strangely) they distinguished from transportation. Also, they deemed it unproductive of use value — and, therefore, one could surmise, of value and surplus value. They did admit that distribution as they conceived it involved labor, but not of a productive type.
Also, under Shaikh & Tonak’s conceptualization, consumption is viewed as an activity that (strangely) excludes labor altogether!
Now, in Marx, all transportation (of things and people) is a branch of production. In fact, Marx noted that all production involved transportation. Of course! Every conceivable form of production involves a physical transformation of objects and all physical transformation is ultimately physical motion in some form, i.e. displacement over time (or some form of mechanics, even if elementary-particle mechanics), and therefore involving the expenditure of energy. Now, in Marx, there is a broad and a narrower definition of production. Neither excludes labor.
In the broader sense, production is the totality of activities (all of them involving purposeful human activity or labor) that redound ultimately in our own making as humans. We are the ultimate “material product,” and since the activity must recur it is effectively “material reproduction.” Clearly, this notion of production is in the last analysis production of ourselves (in and through our association or cooperation), and so it includes what we conventionally view as “personal consumption” as one of its modalities, part of it involving household production activities such as food preparation at home, child rearing, elderly and sick family care, etc.
Even much of what we call affection or love between spouses, partners, friends, etc. as long as it manifests itself as an activity — including sex — falls under this broader Marxist category of material production “guided and regulated” by labor — as Marx puts it. And, of course, under this broader definition, medical care, schooling, personal care in general, etc. provided in or outside of the household, are forms of material production in Marx’s sense.
Therefore, all the workers who perform these activities, regardless of the particular form of their employment (by private capital, the state, as partners in some cooperative arrangement, discharging family roles, etc.), if excluded from significant wealth ownership (inclusive of political power or any other form of social power), they are (in Marx’s sense) fully deserving members of the working class broadly understood. Furthermore, insofar as these people (a large majority of it) live in a capitalist society and are not members of the capitalist class (i.e. they do not own sufficient capital to live off “property income” or surplus value under any of its forms during most of their lifetimes), these workers are all subordinated or exploited by capital, directly or indirectly — via some mediating process.
Clearly, in the broad sense, the labor that goes into all care activities is always and everywhere productive labor in the most strict (Marxist) sense of the term — again, whether or not its performance is mediated by the labor market, whether the laborer is under some employment contract or not.
What about the narrower sense of the category of material production? Well, it is material production in the broader sense minus the last link of chain, namely the one we conventionally view as direct personal consumption. Now, can we in any way say, with Shaikh & Tonak (sorry, I don’t mean to put them on the spot, but it’s their book I have handy), that consumption involves no labor? Clearly, consumption is a human activity. But, is consumption regulated by our autonomic nervous system so we can just proceed on it by default? I cannot think of any recognizable form of modern human personal consumption! There are cable channels entirely devoted to food preparation for gosh sake! Even the human sleeping activity involves nowadays a tremendous amount of thinking (even scientific thinking) – mindful planning and careful execution.
To sum things up, material production, in Marx’s sense, is not a narrow slice of human activity at the exclusion of other human activities. Labor is largely what all human activity is about. Yes, its social form is messed up — antagonistic. The social form that envelops the material production of ourselves is contradictory, largely misdirected, etc. Who decides what is useful and what is not? In our society, largely, capital decides. So, the material production that exists only offers the possibility of human freedom, though tangled with the impending risk of human self destruction. Yet, content is indeed material production broadly conceived as “individuals materially reproducing themselves in and through their association.”
I should add that, obviously, not all human activity should be viewed as productive of value and surplus value (and, therefore, of capital). Well, in a sense, yes, all of it is at the end of the day productive of capital. Why? Because even the most subversive of our activities is so far failing to entirely get rid of capital. So for as long as capital persists and continues to rule the bulk of our lives, all human activities are in this sense activities that reproduce capital.
However, there is hope. This is, of course, hard to measure precisely but measure we can. All the labor we put into uniting and organizing ourselves as members of this large and dispossessed mass or humanity, crushed by capital but yet not fully compliant or demoralized — all that labor, whether it goes to small or large political undertakings, whether it is fully enlightened or still gropes in the dark, by the sheer act of resisting and fighting, we are already carving out a space of freedom, reproducing wealth for ourselves, recreating humanity for humanity’s sake. That part of our activity is labor, productive labor, but of the free kind.
To be clear, as can be verified in Engels’ Anti-Dühring (which Marx roughly approved of) and other works, Marx and Engels had a nuanced view of how workers as a result of their working and living under different conditions (technical and social) were disposed to develop differentiated forms of ideology, political consciousness, social identity, etc. Socialism is still about the unity of the workers in the concrete struggle. So, revolutionary potential is entirely a different ball game. Given social complexity, I can only say here that historical conditions — the evolution of technology, economic trends, culture, politics, and sheer contingency — play a role in assigning revolutionary historical roles to different groups of workers in different contexts.
Marx and Engels were, of course, right about this. A “white collar” worker, working at a computer, receiving a hefty pay and doing less strenuous physical exertion (or, perhaps one should say, exerting themselves physically but in a different way), exposed to different social interactions in and outside the workplace, will have a different perspective on their relation to their employer or on their connection to the capitalist social order in general by comparison to a factory floor or farm worker. Similarly, the views of the world of a cop and a public-park janitor could diverge substantially.
However, in my view, if one is to follow Marx’s general conceptualization in Gründrisse and Capital, and more importantly if one is to learn from the history of our struggles, then everybody mindfully involved in material production in the broadest sense of the concept are, to that extent, workers or immediate producers. To the extent they are subordinated to the capital, they are members of the working class proper. So, in my view, not every worker should be viewed as part of the working class — the modern proletariat. Some workers work because they want to, not because they have to. These are workers with sufficient capital to be part of the capitalist class. Also, not all of the members of the working class are wage workers proper, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this — politically or morally. Finally, not all wage workers proper are involved in capitalist production proper, which is again neither here not there in terms of their deserving to be regarded as members of the working class and its wage segment.
To be perhaps a bit clearer, if one is “employed” by a large corporation as a CEO, CFO, or even mid manager, receiving a huge salary plus bonuses and perks, she or he is fully in the bourgeois side of the class divide. Same if she or he is a senator or Supreme Court justice. The totality of benefits and rewards that accompany these positions place that person in the proverbial 1%. Finally, as unlikely as it may be, a person need not be a member of the working class to be radical socialists. Cf. Engels.
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Brief update 5/3/2021: Another conceptual pet peeve of mine has been dispelling the ridiculous idea that there exist “ideal goods,” “immaterial goods,” “perfect nonrivalrous goods,” etc. No such thing can exist in this physical universe we inhabit and are part of.
Marx was correct in viewing all commodities (i.e. all objects that can be possessed and owned) as physical or material objects. It is not possible to produce anything, and therefore it is not possible to own or hold anything, but material objects.
What about “services”? Service is the benefit that a physical or material good, use value, or piece of wealth yield when used or consumed, which is an activity that takes place over time. Why do people, in the national accounts, mix up “goods and services”?
Because, as our ancestors in farming societies did, we people today continue to measure economic activity in the period of time it takes our planet to go around the sun (or some fraction thereof), and in that period there will be many durable goods that we will use but won’t be able to fully consume. It takes more than a year to finish using up some goods.
If we used up buildings and trucks within a year period, just like we devour food within a year, then perhaps we would count these buildings and trucks as goods consumed during the period, rather than counting them as housing services or as truck transportation services consumed during the year. Etc.
This absurd notion of ideal goods is connected to the illusions that MMT and Bitcoin advocates hold. As I’ve said before, and I don’t mean to offend anybody, but I view MMT and BTC as twin manifestations of one and the same illusion of the epoch. One fetishizes the state and the other the abstract symbol of ownership. Both ignore what makes them both possible: fragmented social labor.
Ideas cannot exist but in physical or material media. How could they? What effect would they have in the world if they didn’t have a physical presence? Products, from the first object a human ever produced to today’s products, have always been and are human designs or ideas or abstractions or concepts under some material form.
What modern (very-physical) interconnected computers (the Internet) have done is to make the sharing of ideas — their storage, processing, retrieval, etc. — much less costly in social labor terms. But, other than that important quantitative change, there’s no qualitative change in the fundamental nature of products or labor compared to the way things were before modern computers appeared. Anybody who says otherwise is hyping modern technology or just confused.
