Paolo Carpignano , "U.S. Class Composition in the Sixties," Zerowork, #1, December 1975.
The Main Point
The basic argument of this article is that a combination of unwaged and waged worker struggles repeatedly undermined post-WWII capitalist policy initiatives aimed at social control, profits and growth. As a result the "Sixties" ended with a crisis of those policies and of capitalist accumulation more generally --provoking yet another change in capitalist strategy and policies.
Summary
The article begins by juxtaposing the 1950s and 1960s in terms of a change in capitalist strategy at both the macro and micro levels. By capitalist strategy is meant that of the government and of business to contain and harness workers’ demands for higher wages, better working conditions, and so on.
The 1950s:
Macroeconomic policy was mainly counter-cyclical and while avoiding major downturns did not succeed in generating much growth. Collective bargaining structured labor-management relations in big industry, e.g., steel, auto, coal, but despite contracts and the use of Taft-Hartly, there was alienation of rank and file workers from union bureaucrats and wildcat strikes. In short business and the state were faced with endemic conflict that they managed only at the cost of slow growth. The growing black labor force moving into the big northern cities, meanwhile, was integrated into the lowest wage levels and ghettoized.
The 1960s:
With the new Kennedy Administration government policy moves from correction to pro-growth strategies that involve, on the one hand, a crack down on unions to slow wage growth and on the other more active government intervention to stabilize wage-productivity-profit relationships. Development is a strategy for making workers’ struggles the motor force of accumulation and capitalist growth. So wages are treated as both demand (positive) and cost (negative) and explicit "incomes policies" are formulated to balance these two perspectives and achieve growth.
"The Negro Problem" and the Dynamics of Class Recomposition
Black labor could not be smoothly incorporated but became increasingly a "mass movement" making political and economic demands. "The "negro" of the 1960's was a different sociological figure, with needs and demands that went beyond the mere cry for legal justice." Black struggles would lead the working class struggles of the second half of the 1960s and would turn around work, not civil rights. A shift in government policy from a general goal of growth to specific policies for dealing with blacks was prompted by the central city uprisings, such as Watts, Newark, etc.The result was the "Great Society" program of the Johnson Adminstration and a novel effort to create an institutional structure for controlling the black community:
Under the ideology of "poor people's participation in decision making", several federal programs attempted to build a network of controls through the formation of a new breed of local political organizers. Their role was to guarantee the management of social pressure. In other words, it was an outright attempt to unionize the ghetto, so that the struggles could be chanelled into a practice of collective bargaining. Sargent Shriver was right when, in 1966, he suggested that the Economic Opportunity Act was "for the poor what the National Relation Act was for the unions [. . .]
But the institutional structure this approach favored became a vehicle for the struggles of the black community rather than an effective means of control. "The Welfare Movement was not just an aspect of capitalist initiative but primarily a mode of expression of a new cycle of working class struggle."
The Separation of Income and Work
Carpignano argues that what made the black movement key was not its size
but how its evolution led that of the workers more generally as it became
first "an active subjectof struggle over income."
And then, " From the struggle for work they moved to the struggle against work." Because this was characteristic of workers demands more generally blacks led a process of "political recomposition" of class relations.
The black struggles demonstrated that the wageless were part of the working class. They unveiled the factory-like organization of society where ghettos, unemployment and poverty were not a byproduct of the system nor a transitory malfunction, but a necessary element in the social reproduction of capital. Most importantly, they brought working class struggle to the society at large, and at that level they forced its recomposition. By recomposition we do not mean only the extension and the massification of the struggle but primarily the homogenization of its subjective contents. In this sense these struggles connected welfare, reappropriation, and armed struggle with the factory. To use traditional terms, they united the factory and the community.
Doing so soon led to the recognition that such diverse terrains of conflict as gender, prisons and schools were also parts of the capitalist "social factory." The success of welfare struggles in gaining income without any obvious tie to work is interpreted by Carpignano as "the single most significant element in this cycle of struggles" –and increasingly present in factories as well as communities.
The Circulation of Working Class Autonomy
From the streets to the factories, this process of recomposition circulated.The autonomy of black struggle led the autonomy of workers struggles, increasingly delinked from capitalist objectives of accumulation and growth.
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"The "extremist" demands (large wage increases and drastic reduction of work time) brought forward by these groups summarize quite well the new quality of the struggle. These demands best exemplify what can be called workers' autonomy. Autonomy means that the struggles are waged outside and often against the unions and that the objectives of the struggles are themselves autonomous. The size and the quality of the demands are measured only in terms of the workers' own needs and are ultimately aimed at achieving a subjective recomposition of the working class."
Carpignano sketches the spreading grassroots rebellion, both in industry and in the communities, against business, the state, and mediating insitutions (like unions) and claims that at the heart of the rebellion is the "refusal of work."
Lordstown [sabotage and absenteeism] is the latest example, perhaps the most striking, of a trend that has characterized the entire cycle. Refusal to work is the present connotation of working class self-activity. It is the element which defines class relationship in an advanced capitalist country. It must necessarily be the content of any organizational proposal.
Capital's Counter-Attack: "Guaranteed Income and Social Efficiency"
In 1969 and 1970 capital responds to the detachment of wage growth from productivity growth with a planned recession that fails to slow wage growth. The result: August 15, 1971 when Nixon unhooks the dollar from gold and freezes wages and prices. "The rules of economics had best be suspended until someone could figure out why they were not working" –i.e., could figure out how to regain control over workers, wages and profits. The policies to do this began with money but soon moved towards the dismantling of the anti-poverty programs that had underwritten the struggles of the poor and of workers more generally. That attack used an ideology of removing "dependency" but the aim was removing institutional sources of unwaged income unlinked to work. In terms of programs Nixon moved toward a kind of "negative income tax" designed to make subsistence possible only with work.
"Industrial Efficiency" and the Union
"The increase in productivity in the Nixonian phase is obtained through stricter work discipline, increase overtime, and intensification of speed-up." –enforced by increased unemployment and the threat it posed. Nixon’s Pay Board aimed less at reestablishing a wage-productivity link than at breaking the power of the rank and file in the most powerful sectors of the unionized labor force. In this process the union bureaucrats, Carpignano claims, were essentially incorporated into the state and international union headquarters intervened more directly in local conflicts. The sociology of work expands dramatically to cope with rank and file resistance to work, critiques of Fordism and the human relations approach to managing workers lead to experimental "job design" to find new ways to harness and channel workers’ energy. The new union role in such "design" is aimed at using the union structures to control workers –not produce "workers’ control" as some have desired.