Labour as a particular kind of human activity
Labour as useful labor - production of use-values
(independent of social form)
Work - humans and nature are both participants
Humans (active) act on Nature (passive) and change both, Nature in humanity.
Humans workers unique in Nature as having conscious will, work as one
kind of fulfillment of humans actively being in the world.
Labour Process:
1. work - one kind of activity of living human
2. raw materials - that which is worked upon
3. tools, instruments of work
Under capitalism:
1. worker works under control of capital, not for self.
2. the product is the property of the capitalist
which is used against worker to dominate.
Labour as capitalist labor
Labour as abstract labor
- production of surplus value/surplus labor time
- distinct through its extension in time
Historical:
A. formal subsumption of labor to capital
B. real subsumption of labor to capital (change in structure of labor
process)
Capitalist concern is with labor time, not production as such; with exchange-value/value rather than with use-value
Value of product = C = value of means of production
(labor time embodied)+
V = value of labor power (labor time necessary to produce MS)+
S = surplus value, surplus labor time
New labor time in the labor process makes up both V and S, problem of capital is to make sure labor time not limited to V.
All of these measures of labor time must be SNLT - socially necessary labor time, only that which is required on the average. This is necessary so we can ignore qualitative variations in labor and focus only on how long workers are forced to work.
So, production of commodities = unity of
1. labor process
2. value creation
capitalist production of commodities = unity:
1. labor process
2. valorization process (realizations of surplus value)
This chapter opens Part Three of Volume I of Capital. It is the first of a long series of chapters dealing with the sphere of production - that sphere in which people are put to work for capital producing commodities. This chapter resolves the problem set out in Part Two: the source of surplus value in the circuit of capital M-C-M'. At the same time this chapter renews several themes opened as early as chapter 1. It further develops the distinction between useful labor and abstract labor, between use-value and value. Moreover it delves into some of the most central and important issues raised by Marx's whole analysis: the meaning of work, what is central and determining in capitalism, the relation between human kind and nature, the social relations of work and domination. So far in Capital Marx has been using the term labor or work without much effort at critical definition. This chapter provides that definition.
He begins by juxtaposing humanity with nature.(1) Humans he says, "confront" nature as one of its own forces and proceed to shape it and transform it into forms adapted to their own needs. This confrontation and transformation is stated to be a peculiarly human quality and Marx contrasts this with the activities of other animals, e.g., spiders or bees. What is the difference? In the case of other animals, he argues, activity is performed instinctually without thought or intent, whereas humans act with forethought and purpose, with a conscious will:
"But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees
is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax." p. 284.
We have here two issues of considerable import: the relationship between humans and nature in general and the question of what distinguishes humans from other species - what is "human nature." With respect to the first, the relationship appears here as one of opposition, of antagonistic contradictions: Humans versus Nature, Humans conquer Nature. But there is no real opposition because Nature appears here without any independent consciousness or will, and thus as a collection of "things" on which humans act. This contrast seems to follow Hegel's in the Philosophy of Right chapters on "property" where "free mind" - an attribute of human beings - is distinguished from and counterpoised to "the external pure and simple, a thing, something not free, not personal, without rights." (paragraph 42) This is also similar to Jean-Paul Sartre's distinction between being in-itself and being for-itself (human being) in which only the latter has the power of self-transformation, of change, and the former is frozen into sameness, unless acted upon by some outside force. This distinction also exists in Marx's discussion of class in- and for-itself, where in the case of the working class we have working class in-itself when it exists only as factor of production for capital, and we have working class for-itself when it acts as subject in its own interest against capital.
Marx held this vision of humanity as active being, juxtaposed to the rest of Nature as passive existence, in one form or another, from a very early period and it was a position in which he was clearly influenced by Hegel. We find this analysis central to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: "The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is realized, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces." (Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 273) Yet Marx presses beyond the theme of Humans against Nature even though they are part of it, one of its forces. In the Manuscripts and in Capital we find evidence of the way in which Marx saw humans transforming nature and giving it meaning only as a moment of humanity's own existence - a reversal of "humans in nature" to "nature in humanity." In the Manuscripts we find Marx defining the being of the human species as lying in its self-conscious treatment of itself "as a universal and therefore a free being." (p. 275, CW, 3) This free being appropriates all of nature and can subordinate it because it is unfree: "The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasmuch as nature is 1) his direct means of life, and 2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity." (CW, 3, p. 276) Thus the oft repeated aim of some Eastern religions that humans should seek oneness with nature becomes nature's oneness with humankind. In Capital as we progress through the three volumes of the book we find an increasing appropriation of nature by humans within capitalism. In the chapters on machinery and modern industry, for example, humans appropriate the forces of nature (wind, water, steam, etc.) to drive machinery. In Vol. III on ground rent we find the problem that arises when the land has been so worked up that it becomes impossible to distinguish the productivity of the incorporated capital investment from the "natural" productivity of that soil -thus a conflict between capitalist farmer and landlord.
But as we will see, this oneness of nature within humanity is no smooth, integrated process of development. It is one fraught with contradictions - contradictions directly related to the class contradiction. The subordination of nature under capitalism becomes not source of fulfillment to human beings' active creativity, but rather an element in the social control of the working class. Thus the rape of nature depicted in section 10 of chapter 15 on agriculture.
The second issue: what distinguishes humans from other species can now be seen to be a subset of the first issue. If humans are unique by their self-consciousness and will, then other animals must be simply parts of the "things" - without will and freedom - that constitute nature. "The animal," Marx says in the Manuscripts "is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man [on the other hand] makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity." (CW, 3, p. 276) Compare to Hegel who says in the Encyclopaedia (paragraph 468): "the animal on the other hand, because it does not think is also incapable of possessing a will."
There are two comments I would make about this argument. First, it is obviously very anthropocentric. Hegel and Marx assert - on the basis of what little they know about other species - that those species do not think or have a will. Research since their time throws this into sharp question. Work with gorillas that have developed vocabularies of hundreds of words/symbols and who compose sentences with them, work with whales and porpoises whose brains are as complicated and as big as human brains, etc. suggests that both self-consciousness and will are present in other species - though perhaps neither the form nor the content of their consciousness resembles that of humanity. If this is true then some other differentiating characteristic, or characteristics, will have to be found to indicate what is specifically human about humans. Perhaps what differentiates humanity is simply the greater or lesser amounts of, and particular combination of characteristics which we share with many other species. There is one further issue which Marx raises and to which I will return momentarily: humans' tool making and using activity.
The second comment is that the above issue is not determining for what follows. Even if other species are conscious and have wills, humans still can be so characterized and analysed. This chapter deals with the labor process, with a particular kind of interaction with the world. The central issue is the character of that interaction. That other animals might share this quality is secondary to its analysis within the human context.
In what follows it is important to remember that labor, or work, as Marx defines it, is only one kind of possible activity for humans. It is a process in which humans reach out, take possession of some aspect of nature and transform it, usually with tools. There are obviously other ways of being. Swimming in the sea, hiking a forest trail or climbing a mountain are both intensive interactions with nature but they involve no transformation per se.(2) The same is true with contemplation - sitting on a hill and feeling the wind and watching clouds - or gymnastics, or running, etc. In all of these activities there is no tool building, no transformation, yet there is an intensive interaction with the environment. The labor process as Marx defines and analyses it is a very particular process.
So. What is this labor process? It has, Marx says, three elements: the workers, their tools, and the material on which they work. Here the human worker is the active element, the objects to be transformed and the tools for that transformation are passive - hence a particular interaction between willful humans and will-less nature. Here Marx reinforces his suggestions of how humans make nature part of themselves: "nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs" (Capital, p. 285). And again vis à vis other species: "The use and construction of instruments of labor although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labor process, and Franklin therefore defines man as 'a tool-making animal'." (Capital, p. 286) In the Manuscripts Marx dealt with this distinction at greater length: an animal, he says, only produces what it needs, "It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom." (CW, 3, pp. 276-277).
Given the concept of humans acting upon passive nature with their will, labor appears as a kind of activity in which humans by transforming nature (say the raw material through the use of tools) impress their ideas (and thus themselves) upon it. [This is Hegel's second form of taking possession of a thing: by forming it - see paragraph 54-56 in the Philosophy of Right] In Capital Marx describes this process:
"In the labor process, therefore, man's activity, via the instruments of labor, effects an alteration in the object of labor which was intended from the outset . . . the product is a use-value . . . Labour has become bound up in its object: labor has been objectified, the object has been worked on. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest [Unruhe] now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being [Sein], as a fixed immobile characteristic." (Capital, p. 287)In other words, in the kind of human activity Marx calls labor or work, humans translate their ideas into objects, create those objects and by so doing externalize themselves in those objects. But these objects, even though created by humans, are again but things, fixed and immobile. The robot is one advanced example of humans putting themselves into things - creating a machine that performs many of their own actions. (In the case of an android they create the machine in their own image.) But hence also the fear of creating a self-acting, thinking robot that could have a will of its own. Thus Isaac Asimov's Three Rules of Robotics so that they never become a threat (read his "robot" novels).
As nature transformed by humans, use-values appear even more closely to be an element of humankind's "inorganic body"; they embody the will of humans, their creation is a fulfillment of that will, they are thus an extension of their creators. Here humans do not dominate nature because it has no will, they merely shape it, and transform it in their own image. Here we have moved behind that fetishism of commodities that Marx discussed in part 4 of chapter 1: "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things." (Capital, p. 164-5). What this chapter should remind us of, and show us how, is that commodities, as use-values are but the objectified results of human activity. They are not things-in-themselves, they are things-for-us that we have created. Furthermore, they have been created within certain social conditions and bear their stamp. But we will come to this anon.
So, from one point of view we have labor power in action as work, and on the other we have the passive things: tools and raw materials and intermediary goods which together constitute the means of production. To emphasize and sharpen this distinction between the active element: workers working, and the passive element: means of production, Marx uses a vivid metaphor: that of necromancy:
"Living labor must seize upon these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labor, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy..." (Capital. p. 289)We can almost see Dr. Frankenstein hovering over his chunk of dead flesh infusing it with energy, bringing it to life. This image is certainly consistent with the view of the human/nature relationship as one of active/passive. Only here it becomes living/dead. This is a powerful metaphor and one to which Marx returns with many variations. As we will see, he finds this process malevolent only when it falls under the control of capital - only then does Dr. Frankenstein's creation become a monster. At this stage, on the contrary, it is a life-giving process alone. Humans give life to unfree, passive things by incorporating them into the human world. Human life, at least from the view of humans (Marx) is the only true life. Obviously animals like sheep, cows and pigs are alive in the biological sense, but they become alive for humankind only in so far as they become the object of its labor. Hegel is explicit about this and Marx undoubtedly agrees: "What I do to the organic does not remain external to it but is assimilated by it. Examples are the tilling of the soil, the cultivation of plants, the taming and feeding of animals . . ." (Philosophy of Right, para. 56)
It should be obvious at this point why Marx used the example of religion in his discussion of fetishism in Chapter 1. Whereas, for him, humans embue other things with life through their labor, he can only see the Judeo-Christian tradition of a "God" creating humankind as an idealistic projection of this quality that humans themselves possess. The same would be true with respect to other "creation myths" such as the Mayan myth that the Oldest Gods created the Mayan people from corn, thus they call themselves "the people of the corn". One can imagine Marx commenting: "What's really going on here is that the Mayan people recreate themselves, day by day, year after year, through their milpas [plots of corn] that they have produced and from which they live. They have merely projected this fundamental aspect of their own lives, their own creativity, in an idealized form."
Now, if it is true that other species are endowed with consciousness and will, then truly humans have been involved in interspecial slavery and murder in their domination of other species, their genocides, and their consumption of animal flesh. The view that humans alone have a will, and impart life to other things is clearly one not limited to Marx and is a central feature and justification for much of our way of life. To believe, or to discover, otherwise would have the most profound ramifications. Ecologists and vegetarians push this kind of thinking: demanding that we find ways of living that do not kill off other species, either because they view the species as complementary to each other in an ecological balance or for simpler moral reasons: you don't murder other sentient beings.
Marx then discusses the labor process not only as production but as consumption - consumption of the means of production. Here again he is drawing on the previous discussion of this in the "introduction" to the Contribution to the Critique (see Grundrisse, pp. 90-94) In Capital he limits himself to the distinction between labor as productive consumption of the means of production; and individual consumption which reproduces the individual. This is a distinction which becomes more complicated in capitalism where capital reaches beyond the factory to insure that all individual consumption is productive consumption within its own self-reproduction, e.g., that workers' consumption reproduces them as workers and not simply as human beings. In the general case Marx is discussing here where humans are making nature part of their world, part of themselves, it might even seem that productive consumption (i.e., labor process) is subordinated to and ultimately a part of individual consumption! Labor creates products but only as an extension of itself. From the point of view of the individual worker this is clearly less so than for human workers in general because of the division of labor. Workers ultimately produce things for each other, for the species as a whole in an interconnected pattern and not simply for themselves as individuals. But directly or indirectly, productive consumption is but a moment in the reproduction of both the individual and of the species, and thus part of its consumption of nature, individually and collectively.
It is in this sense that Marx speaks, in the Manuscripts of humans as "species-beings." "In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being." (CW, 3, p. 276) In other words, humans act together as a species as they create things out of inorganic nature, as they transform the world in which they live for themselves. As they treat their own species as their own essential being -they act for themselves rather than for something else, or for someone else. Labor here is simply one form of "spontaneous, free activity" - that form which involves the transformation of nature. "The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man's species-life: for he duplicates himself . . . he sees himself in a world that he has created." (CW, 3, p. 277) It is free activity, free expression of life precisely because as we have seen humans act according to their will: being a conscious being means that humans' own lives are objectsworkworkwork for them. "Only because of that is . . . activity free activity." (CW, 3, p. 276)
When Marx does discuss the specificities of labour in capitalism, his primary concern is valorisation or the extraction of surplus labour from the workers.
In Engels' footnote, he argues that the term 'work' should be used to designate labour in general, while the term 'labour' be reserved for work under capitalism.
In both texts we can see a similar distinction between a generic concept of labour (work for Engels) and a more specific labour-in-capitalism. Even in Marx's earlier writing, such as the 1844 Manuscripts, there was a distinction between alienated labour (in capitalism) versus some other kind(s) of un-alienated labour .
In making these distinctions I think both men were making a mistake, and violating a fundamental tenet of Marx's own methodology to boot. The mistake and violation lay in the conceptualisation of a generic or transhistorical concept of work (or labour) that could be applied retrospectively throughout history and, by implication, projected forward into the future. The retrospective application meant looking back at a vast array of human activities in diverse cultures in terms of 'work', e.g. studying bygone tools as a key to understanding bygone labour processes and the societies within which they occurred. The forward projection meant thinking about postcapitalist society in terms of post-capitalist work or unalienated work or communist work, or some such:
Freedom, in this sphere [of necessity], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. (Capital, Volume 111, chapter 48, The Trinity Formula)
The methodological tenet being violated was the one spelled out in what is now known as the "Introduction" to the Grundrisse. In that introduction, written for, but not published with, his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx discussed the historical character of concepts and made two interrelated arguments. First, he argued that modern concepts can provide "insights" into previous social forms:
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up (author's emphasis). (This and the next few quotes are all from the section on "The Method of Political EconomySecond, he warned against applying those concepts developed in one period to the phenomena of other periods in any simple-minded way. His example was 'ground rent', a concept that as developed within capitalist society refers to the part of surplus-value generated by labour that accrues to the owner of land used in the production process. It would be a mistake, Marx argues, to look backwards at the medieval phenomenon of 'tithe' and try to understand it in terms of the modern concept of 'rent' even though there may be superficial similarities between the two:
The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them.Now I think this latter argument makes sense generally, essentially it outlaws transhistorical categories, and applies specifically to the category 'work' even though Marx clearly disagrees. For him, although the intellectual grasp of 'labour-in-general' only came with capitalism and its generalised imposition of work, he claims that:
the conception of labour in this general form -as labour as such - is also immeasurably old... The simplest abstraction, then, [labour as such]... expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society...He does not, however, provide any evidence for this claim, whatsoever. Yet, unless he can show that the concept really has been around forever but only given full meaning today (something he argues more persuasively with respect to 'money'), then the most he can claim is his earlier suggestion that knowledge of current forms (labour) can provide 'insights' into previous forms, while those insights must be leavened with the recognition that the concepts are not really appropriate and others, more specific to the time, are required.
Without going into a lot of etymology and philology, I think it is true that prior to capitalism most societies had no generic concept of work. People were engaged in a wide variety of activities but it never occurred to anyone to refer to all these activities collectively as 'work'. Some people raised animals or tended crops, others made barrels or ships or silver dishes and so on. But they were referred to as shepherds or farmers, coopers or shipwrights or silversmiths rather than 'workers'. Different kinds of activities were just that and those who performed them were associated with particular castes, or subcultures or status groups. Members of exploited classes were often viewed as individuals representative of their social position, e.g. slaves or vassals or serfs, but again, not as 'workers'.
Marx took the concept of work or labour from both the philosophy and the political economy of his times. It seems to me that the reasons why the use of such a concept makes sense in capitalism - but not necessarily in any other period - are two. First, as Marx argued:
when it is economically conceived in this simplicity [labour as such], 'labour' is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction ....Indifference toward any specific kind of labour, presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant.Second, the real indifference toward any specific kind of labour is not that of the workers, who may have very distinct preferences, but is that of capital. In commodity-producing, profit-generating, reinvesting capitalism the particular characteristics of commodity producing activities are entirely secondary. It does not matter what people are put to doing as long as they produce commodities that make possible the realisation of a profit that can be used to put them to work all over again, preferably on an expanded scale. Under such circumstances it is reasonable to refer to all of these diverse activities under one rubric: work (or labour) that refers not to the specificity of the activity but to its central role in maintaining order. It is this social dimension of work that is designated, at least in a part, by what Marx calls the 'substance of value' or 'abstract labour', is measured by socially necessary labour time and has the form of exchange. Thus value is the conceptual tool for analysing human activities incorporated into capital as work.
Moreover, I think all this is reinforced by looking more closely at Marx's analysis of the 'work process'. Of his three elements of work, only one is active and the other two are completely passive. The human agents play the active role, imagining their project, the methods of its execution and its achievement. The tools these agents use and the nature upon which they work are the passive elements. While most people would probably concede the notion that human-made 'tools' are passive, growing numbers of people who have been focusing on ecological issues these last few decades are unwilling to accept the notion that of all of nature, only human beings can be viewed as active.10 This vision of work as involving active, imaginative humans creatively reaching out and transforming passive nonhuman nature is one Marx took over from Hegel and is a very anthropomorphic, enlightenment vision common to the times, but neither common to, nor appropriate to, other times and places, past and future.
Given capital's shaping working class consumption so as to make sure that it results in the production of labor power, and thus is productive for capital, we must ask ourselves if Marx's analysis of the labor process is also applicable to the work of producing and reproducing labor power. His analysis was developed primarily with respect to the factory, to the production of commodities that capital would sell with the objective of making a profit, reinvesting and beginning the whole process over again. In that context his analysis of the labor process as consisting of the three elements labor, tools and raw materials seems fairly straightforward - at least in capitalism. But are these elements also present in the activities that produce labor power? If they are then it would make sense to treat that production as also involving "labor processes" and to analyze them much as Marx does work in the factory.
With respect to the first of these elements, labor, it can be tempting to see such things as procreation, gestation, child rearing, teaching, training, disciplining or retraining as involving labor or work, as transforming activities carried out intentionally. But is that all that is going on? Or, is that the central aspect of what is going on? Does it make sense to treat making love, having babies, caring for them and teaching them mainly as work? What of the second element, tools? Well, here again at least some elements of all these activities, such as the equipment of invitro fertilization, the surgical tools used in cesarian sections, baby bottles and formula, toys, cribs, school desks and textbooks, computers and laboratory equipment, paddles, canes and rooms of detention can all be seen as "tools" that are used by mothers, fathers, teachers, and employers in the formation of the ability and willingness to work. But what of the bodies of the father and mother, their sperm and ovum involved in procreation, of the mother's body involved in gestation, birthing and breast feeding? Are these reasonably viewed as tools? And what of the third element, the "raw material"? In as much as labor power is embodied in human beings, is crafted as part of that being, is it reasonable to view ourselves as passive "raw material"?
Given the common capitalist ideologies of love, the family and education, one's most immediate reaction, it seems to me, is a virulent "No!" We are not passive objects objects open to manipulation by some external subject. Our relationships of friendship, of marriage, of parent and child are surely more profound and meaningful than simple relations of labor! We are active, willing human beings, interacting with each other in hopefully creative, mutually fulfilling ways, no? Even when we fail, we are still involved in human relationships far more complex than mere work!
However... when we consider the character of labor power, that within capitalism it is the ability and willingness to work for capital, according to its bidding and its designs, and for its profit, we begin to see that the applicability of Marx's categories of analysis may be all too appropriate. For as we will see in the next section, the production of labor power is the production of people who are willing and able to set aside their own humanity to become the pawns of their employers, objects to be used, and abused/exploited, to set aside their own wills and objectives and to become the instruments/tools of their employers' wills. So the activities of reproduction, or those activities which produce and reproduce labor power is very much labor that not only treats people as things, but tends to surpress their will, their subjectivity, to make them passive, to convert any and all self-activity into activity-for-capital. In short, the labor of reproduction, the various activities that are involved, are those which dehumanize the person whose labor power is being formed.
Some examples. 1) We would like to view procreation, gestation, birthing and child rearing as the activities of loving spouses and parents, but to the degree that women are used as brood mares by their husbands, families or the state to produce the next generation of the labor force, both the activities and the offspring take on the character of pure work. Not surprisingly women caught in such situations are sometimes resentful and abusive/neglectful of their children. 2) The children, on the other hand, regardless of the love and care of their parents, find themselves doomed to years of hard labor (whether in the fields, at a loom, in a brothel, or in a school) designed to turn them into productive workers. 3) Wives who are expected, and pressured (sometimes verbally, sometimes physically) to do the work of cooking for, and serving meals to, of cleaning up after, of nursing when ill, of satisfying the sexual appetites of, and of being the objects of abuse by frustrated, tired husbands who work at, and are beaten down by, waged jobs are essentially reproducing their husbands' labor power for capital. When they aren't doing that, in what little time and energy they have left over, they must reproduce their own ability to keep doing this kind of work. 4) Teachers who might like to help children learn but who find themselves forced to impose fixed curriculum and standardized tests in classrooms of too many children for any individual attention, and therefore filled with resentful students who have to be disciplined find themselves doing the hard, and sometimes dangerous, work of hammering lives into labor power.
The implication of recognizing the applicability of Marx's analysis of the labor process to the work of reproduction is that just as he explores the concrete forms of the labor process in the sphere of production, in the factory, so must we explore the various concrete forms of the labor process in the sphere of reproduction, in the home, the school and community. We don't need to do that here, any more than Marx does with respect to factory work, but as we study the chapters where he carries out such exploration, e.g., in his analysis of co-operation (chapter 13), of the division of labor (chapter 14) and of technological change (chapter 15) so too should we examine the parallels between factory and home as well as the differences and the peculiarities of the various labor processes involved in the production and reproduction of labor power.
"The general character of the labour process is evidently not changed by the fact that the worker works for the capitalist instead of for himself; moreover, the particular methods and operations employed . . . are not immediately altered . . . The transformation of the mode of production itself which results from the subordination of labour to capital can only occur later on, and we shall therefore deal with it in a later chapter." (Capital, p. 291)This distinction Marx later develops (in chapters 14-15 and in the Appendix [Vintage/Penguin Ed.]) is the distinction between the "formal subsumption of labor to capital" and the "real subsumption of labor to capital." In the former the labor process is unmodified, in the later it is transformed within the dynamic of the class relations of production. This distinction is emphasized in Capital by the division between Part 3, on Absolute Surplus Value where the focus is on "how long" workers work) and Part 4, on Relative Surplus Value where the focus is on the transformation of the labor process. Therefore if the labor process is at first untransformed then what changes when capital takes over?
Marx's first suggestion at the end of part 1 of this chapter is twofold: First, "the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labor belongs". Second, the "product is the property of the capitalist." (Capital. pp. 291-2) What changes? The worker's activity of work is no longer free but is subordinated to and controlled by the capital, who by owning the labor-power-set-in-motion also owns the product. Thus the product is no longer the property of the worker but belongs to the capitalist. This part is entitled "The Valorization Process" because it considers the labor process from the point of view of value, both qualitatively and quantitatively, from the point of view of the goals and intentions of the capitalist - the realization of an increase in value or a surplus value, the prime in M - C - M'.
Here we discover that labor as value is subordinated to surplus labor or surplus value, and to understand value we must restudy it from the capitalist optic of surplus value. From the point of view of the labor process we had actual labor and means of production. From the point of view of surplus value (work) what counts is the labor embodied in the means of production and the new, living labor, or the embodied value and the new value. As Marx makes clear what interests the capitalist is that the new value, the new labor expended in the labor process be of sufficient quantity to cover the costs of the labor power and leave something left over as a surplus. As Marx develops in chapter 8, the value of the product embodies the value of the means of production (in the buying of which the capitalist has invested constant capital - constant because this value does not change) and value newly incorporated in the new product. This new value must contain sufficient value (labor time) to cover the costs of reproducing the workers' capacity to work or labor power (in the buying of which the capitalist has invested variable capital - variable because the amount of work the worker can do varies) and a surplus value over and above this. Symbolically:
where C = value (or socially necessary labor time) embodied in the means of production and V + S = newly produced value (labor time expended in this labor process) of which V = the amount necessary to reproduce the workers and S = surplus labor or surplus value. Since V + S or the total amount of time the workers may work is, or must be for capital to continue with production, greater than V the time necessary for the production of their means of subsistence, "Therefore the value of labour power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes in the labour process are two entirely different magnitudes," (Capital, p. 300) Since what the capitalist is concerned with here is surplus labor time, what is essential is the length of the labor process. This issue: the length of the working day is the central subject of chapters 7-10 and its determination will be seen to occur within the class struggle.
There is an important interaction here between qualitative and quantitative factors, central to the understanding of "capitalist" production. If the workers work only so long as is necessary to reproduce themselves (this may happen directly in agriculture if they are paid part of the crop, indirectly in manufacturing) then the capitalist obtains no surplus value, and fails qua capitalist. In order to retain control over labor the capitalist must extract surplus value - both to survive (if not earning a wage through work), and to invest on a larger scale. The imposition of work must be quantitatively sufficient to result in surplus work or surplus value.
This is vital to his whole discussion - that the major qualitative determination of what is peculiar to capitalist control of the labor process is the amount of work imposed! What we have here is a central feature of capitalism: its tendency to continuously expand the amount of work it imposes, its tendency to expand investment (via reinvestment of surplus value), to expand its hold on human life, on the number of humans brought under its control. The creation of surplus value is the creation of surplus work - surplus over and above that needed to produce the workers as labor-power. The purpose of labor in the labor process in which the laborer controlled the process was the transformation of nature to meet workers' needs and to satisfy and fulfill their being through activity tout court. The purpose of labor under capital is simply more labor than the workers would perform for themselves - surplus labor. For the moment Marx does not question or analyse the reasons for this unending quest by capital for more labor. We can see the imposition of labor as the imposition of a certain kind of social control, but why does this expand? Why the quest for more and more control over more people, over more hours. This is not answered here. Marx simply notes that this is the case and goes on to analyse the implications of this for other aspects of the labor process and the role of humans within it.
A major result of this control by capital, besides forcing more work, is to transform the meaning of work for humans. Because the capitalist controls the labor process the workers work for the capitalist not for themselves. Because the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker it appears as something outside and indeed menacing. It is the capitalist who now brings living labor and dead labor together, the subjective element of the worker and the objectified labor of the means of production. It is the capitalist that orders the worker to infuse life into the dead. But now this necromancy has turned malevolent. The dead flesh endowed with life becomes "an animated monster" who, turning against its creator, slowly strangles the worker.
Why? Because it is owned by the capitalist and stands alongside the capitalist opposed to the worker. If the product is a machine then it is the capitalist machine which the capitalist will use to enslave the worker. If the product is a means of subsistence then the worker will only have access to it to the degree that he accepts the despotism of the capitalist over his life by working for him. The worker's labor is no longer simply one form of life activity in which there is human interaction with nature of a particular sort, it is now the means by which the worker is controlled and dominated. Where in the case of the free human, work would appear as one "free manifestation of life, hence as an enjoyment of life" (CW3, p. 228), now this particular kind of interaction with nature has become "an alienation of life." Whereas for the free human this kind of activity would be one way of affirming
"the specific nature of my individuality", an exteriorization of myself in things, under capital this work process in which my own being and talents are embodied in a product is one in which the product is alien to me, owned by the capitalist and used against me. ". . .it is a forced activity and one imposed on me" only through "an external [capitalist] fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one." (CW, 3, p. 228)
This theme of the "alienation" of work and of the products of work was elaborated by Marx in the 1840s and remains in his analysis even through Capital. It was particularly present and developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 [pdf file] (and in his "Comments on James Mill"). The "alienation" of work means that under capitalism with the capitalists in control of the work process, work is no longer the autonomous means of self-expression and fulfillment to workers but is rather an alien force imposed on them, dominating them. The "alienation" of the product of labor means that the product, rather than being a fulfilling objectification of the worker's personality becomes a weapon for controlling the worker.
Work as a form of life is "alienated" above all because it is forced from the outside, imposed by capital:
"His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague . . . it [labor] is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another . . . . it is the loss of his self" (CW, 3, p. 274)
There are two elements here: first that the labor is forced, second that the worker feels it as such and shuns it. That the first of these is true is the main point, whether the second is true is secondary. It may well be that a worker feels that work is pleasant or enjoyable even though the work is being done for capital - certainly much of capitalist schooling and ideology is designed to instill the "work ethic" of enjoying work, including work for capital. Therefore whether or not workers like (subjectively) their work is secondary to the objective fact that it is imposed on them. It may be that, as Marx says: "The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working . . ." (CW, 3, p. 274) But then the worker may also have decided, consciously or not, to "make the best of a bad situation" and learned to enjoy working. The issue, it seems to me, is secondary.
However secondary it may be, it should be recognized that dislike for work is indeed pervasive in capitalist society. We are surrounded with cultural manifestations of people's resentment of work: from bumper stickers which say "Work Sucks, But I Need the Bucks" or "I'm in No Hurry, I'm On My Way to Work" through desk and office signs announcing "Work May Not Hurt You, But Why Take The Chance" or "I Love My Job, It's The Work I Hate" or "Work Is A Four-letter Word" to popular music of all sorts. In the previous treatment of primitive accumulation we discussed Bob Dylan's protest song "Maggie's Farm" from the 1960s with the refrain "Ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more". There are many such from all decades. Another, from the Austin punk era of the early 1980s is just as frank:
I Won't Go Back To Work
They tell me everyone has to do it
They say everyone has just got to make it
No, I won't go back
If I don't dress just right, you'll have to excuse it
No, I won't go back
The Explosives, Record Title, 19__ |
During the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, the term "alienation" came to be used quite broadly to refer to all feelings of estrangement in society. Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 coupled with Capital can provide a theoretical weapon to understand not only alienation in work but of the experience of alienation throughout life once we recognize how capitalism has succeeded in subordinating so much of life to imposed work . The following two songs from the 1960s express such feelings of alienations, the first, The Sound of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel from the point of view of the alienated individual and the second by John Lennon and Paul McCartney as a commentary on the isolation of others.
In the first of these songs, the singer wanders the streets alone amidst thousands of equally isolated individuals talking and talking but never connecting - precisely the experience of the alienation of worker from worker, of person from person when all are merely workers-for-capital instead of being involved with each other as a result of their own self-activity.
The Sound of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend
In restless dreams I walked alone
And in the naked light I saw
"Fools," I said,"oh you do not know
And the people bowed and prayed
Simon & Garfunkel, "Sound of Silence", 1965, in
Collected Works,
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In the second song, the evocation of "all the lonely people" is generalized in the chorus but focused on Elenor Rigby who dies alone and Father McKenzie who buries her alone.
Elenor RigbyElenor Rigby picks up
(chorus)
Father McKenzie
(repeat chorus) Elenor Rigby
(repeat chorus) McCartney/Lennon/Saka
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These songs gave voice to the individual experiences and feelings of alienation within mass urbanized society and resonated in the emotions of millions. They are not intellectual essays on alienation, like Marx's texts, they are poetic evocations of daily pain and their favorable reception (measured by record sales) demonstrated just how widespread that pain was (and is).
"something alien, as a power independent of the producer . . . . Under these economic conditions [capital] this realization of labour appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. . . . the greater this product, the less is he himself . . . the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien." (CW, 3, p. 272)As property of the capitalist, as either means of production or means of subsistence, the product of labor becomes the means of forcing laborers to labor, it becomes capital. The alien in this horror movie is capital. The worker has imbued dead, objectified means of production with life, created something new, but then this product raised from the dead turns monster and dominates its creator.
This is a complete reversal of the labor process described in the first part of chapter 7. There humans are god-like, mobilizing passive or dead things, and endowing them with life. Here capital, by using dead things (MP, MS) as moments of itself, mobilizes and dominates living labor. It subordinates work as one kind of life activity to itself, the worker "is lost to himself" and has the misfortune to be "a living capital." Here the worker appears as a zombie - the living dead, human life suspended and used by death. Instead of working to live, we have living to work -the ideal of the capitalist work ethic. Humans become as Marx says "nothing more than workers" (CW, 3, p. 283) Or again in the Grundrisse (p. 708): "the positing of an individual's entire time as labor time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labor." Instead of work being one form of being for humans, all forms of human being are eliminated except for work through the use of the products of labor to dominate labor, to force it to work, to produce ever more surplus value. Thus, under capital, alienation takes four forms:
2. The alienation of workers from their product: the products humans create become alien to them. Owned by the capitalists they are separated from them and then used for dominating and controlling them.
3. The alienation of workers from each other: the stripping away of their self-realization within their species means the "estrangement of man from man . . . . What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his work, and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man . . ." (CW, 3, p. 277) Thus capital ruptures the interactions between people and forces them to exist and to act only for capital. First, the domination of their lives by work means that they have, effectively, very little time and energy available for relationships with teach other. Thus they are alienated from each other in the simplest sense: being separated. Second, the capitalist imposition of competition and hierarchy pits them against one another, estranges them from one from another precisely in so far as their lives are defined only in terms of their relation to capital and not in terms of unmediated relationships between one another - thus the loneliness and separateness of life in capitalist society portrayed in the songs above.
4. The alienation of workers from their "species-being": therefore work, which was one means of human interaction, one way of fulfilling human specie's-being as a collectivity, becomes merely a means to insure individual existence. "In tearing away from [humans] the object of [their] production [the product] estranged labor tears away from [them their] species-life, [their] real objectivity as a member of the species." (CW, 3, p. 277)
Gone are the positive phenomena associated with the interaction of humans with each other in their work and in the sharing of their products such as Marx imagined existing in some society free of capitalist domination:
"In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species . . . in the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature." (CW,3, p. 228)Thus capital is seen as undermining not only the individual human's self-realization through the transformation of nature, but also the mutual interactions of individuals each carrying on these activities communally.
In Capital all of this discussion is left out. Marx does not insert this long discussion of the Manuscripts into Capital which he wrote years later. This has led some interpreters to see a sharp rupture between the "young" Marx of the 1840s and the "mature" Marx of the 1860s. Yet, there are clearly important elements of this analysis which persist, indeed are amplified, in Capital.
The product produced by workers for capital does become a "monster" (Capital, p. 302) Later, in Chapter 10, we find this monster is pictured by Marx as a Vampire! "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." (Capital, p. 342) The evocation, of course, is not of the vampire who kills quickly at one feeding, but who returns again and again to slowly sap the life force of its victim. The dead labor is precisely the products produced by workers, products that have become alien objects, part of capital, and are used to dominate workers. The expression "sucking living labor" clearly means forcing humans to work, and the more they are forced to work the more products are produced, the more surplus value, the more capital thrives. Still further (Capital, p. 353) he speaks of capital's "were-wolf hunger for surplus labor", again the alien monster seeking ever to impose more work. And then in Chapter 11 we find in somewhat less picturesque language:
"It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value." (Capital, p. 425).Further, in the chapters on machinery and modern industry there is a whole discussion about how under capital the worker comes to serve the machine rather than visa versa. Clearly the core of the analysis of alienation is very much alive in Capital in so far as it concerns the way capital distorts humans' relationship with themselves and with each other. Humans become the tools of capital, of things, rather than being their creator, rather than creating them as extensions of self, individual and collective. What is missing, it seems, is the way Marx in the early writings spoke freely of the "feelings" of workers. Then he could discourse freely about workers "enjoying" activity, or finding it "hateful", of "feeling at home" or of "feeling outside", etc. In short what is absent in Capital is any extended discussion of working class consciousness and its relationship to their situation. Marx is concerned here with the dynamics of capitalist domination or with working class struggle against it (e.g., chap. 10) but he no longer spends time exploring the relationship between what is going on and what workers think or feel about it. He examines their subjectivity in their actions rather than in their minds.
Let us examine, one after another, to what degree Marx's four aspects of alienation as he finds them within the sphere of production are also present within the sphere of reproduction and whatever differences there may be between the two spheres.
The first form of alienation is that of the workers from their labor, i.e., because the labor processes in which they engage are defined for them by their employers their work activities are not free expressions of their own will and creativity. In section 1 above I mentioned "procreation, gestation, child rearing, teaching, training, disciplining or retraining" as examples of the work of reproduction. Now each of these may include a variety of different, concrete labor processes but the key issue vis a vis alienation are the ways and the degree to which those processes are dictated by capital and those performing them are stripped of their control and ability to exercise their own will/creativity autonomously.
At first glance it would appear that in some of the workspaces where such labor processes are carried out - such as the home - individuals have considerable freedom over what they do and how they do it. No overseer or manager is standing over those doing the work telling them what to do and how to do it. In other spaces this is obviously much less true, e.g., training classes within an enterprise, or a technical school, may well have teachers serving as overseers and students' work kept strictly regulated. In turn, the work of those teachers may well be the imposition of standardized curriculum, tests and rules of behavior over which they have little control and thus little scope for individual creativity. Such working conditions more often obtain in elementary and secondary schools than in colleges and universities but they are not unknown even in those work spaces.
Clearly, the sub-spheres of reproduction where there is the least direct control by capital pose the greatest challenge to the relevance of Marx's analysis of the alienation of workers from their labor. So, let's examine what many feel is the freest such sub-sphere: the home. The home and family have often been considered as free of capitalist relations, indeed as refuges from those relations that dominate most waged and salaried jobs. At the end of the working day, do not many flee the office or factory and seek the sanctuary of one's home, free of the boss's oversight and demands? Certainly the daily evening rush hour traffic is jambed with exhausted workers seeking relief, relaxation, friendly faces, dinner and sleep in the private haven of their apartments and houses.
Unfortunately, throughout the 20th Century (and even before, though in not so comprehensive a fashion) capital has been intervening in the home, as it has in other unwaged spaces such as schools, to shape, and adjust and dictate what does and does not go on in that supposed sanctuary. The institutions of that intervention have been both private and public. Beginning in 1910 the well-known Robber Baron John Rockefeller set up the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and the General Education Board (GEB) with the goal of transforming the Southern labor force from a low-productivity, mainly agrarian, and often sickly, bunch of workers into a more useable, higher productivity and more profitable-to-employ collection of workers. While the Sanitary Commission worked through the state and public health to eliminate hookworm - a parasite that debilitated vast numbers of southern workers - the GEB worked to engineer changes in both schooling and the family that were expected to improve the quality of the labor force. Among other things the GEB hired lobbyists to push for a generalization of public schooling and helped launch home economics by setting up a network of girls canning clubs to teach modern methods of food preparation and preservation. The avowed purpose was to transform the character of the family by transforming the tasks that were performed within it. (See picture of a girl's canning class to the lower right.)
Similar programs were being implemented to shape the huge flow of largely peasant immigrants flowing into the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Here too, agents both private and public were working to adapt people who came to the US with rural habits to the demands of industry for a labor force with habits that fit its needs. Again such programs were aimed at both the habits of waged work, e.g., working by the clock instead of by the sun, and those of unwaged work, e.g., in the home.
Beyond such programs the success of workers in fighting for less work and higher wages was widening the demand for consumer goods and business not only increased and diversified production to meet such demand, but shaped both products and their advertising to cultivate modes of consumption and behavior that were compatible with business' ideas about the nature of a proper work force. When labor laws to protect, and sometimes to exclude, women and children in/from production were finally enacted in the 20th Century so that more women were spending more time in the home, consumer goods designed for the home were often peddled with screeds preaching their proper use, and thus the proper modes of labor in the home. Similarly, and I return to this in my comments on piece work in chapter 21, along with the production of soaps, washing machines, dishwashers, vaccuum cleaners, carpet cleaners etc. came ever increasing standards of "cleanliness" such that not only did the machines regulate the work of cleaning but the standards dictated more such work as well.
In schools, of course, the early work of the GEB soon became regular courses on home economics where children, mainly girl children, were trained in the various skills of "homemaking" - cooking, sewing and so on - such that instead of mothers passing along their particular, and often ethnically distinct, skills to their children, all of those children were being taught the same skills by identical institutions.
At the same time, the state, acting primarily in the interests of business was also regulating the legal structures of the family through property laws, marriage laws, child protection laws, tax laws and so on. So, although the ideology of capitalism held the family and home up as the quintessential "private sphere" in fact the state was busy implementing regulations and specifying what could, and what could not, go on there both with respect to the relationships among adults and between adults and children. Those laws and regulations, of course, were, and are, only as effective as their enforcement so the police and judiciary also played increasingly important roles in structuring family life. Laws might forbid a man to beat his wife if she didn't do her work properly (according to his accessment) or to rape her if she wasn't compliant with his sexual desires but if the police would not arrest him, or the courts not convict him, then such laws would be meaningless.
In all of these ways, and many more, capital has shaped family life and the behavior of people within the home. What at first glance seems private and protected from the pressures of the work-a-day world, upon closer examination turns out to be determined, sometimes to an amazingly detailed degree by capital through a wide variety of mechanisms. And when people are reared within such institutions and accustomed to their structures they often internalize the behaviors they have experienced while remaining blind to the forces that have shaped them - a blindness which helps, of course, perpetuate the myth of the home-as-sanctuary.
Turning to the second form of alienation - the alienation of workers from their product - we can also query the relevance of this to the sphere of reproduction. Well, the product of the work of reproduction is labor power and labor power is a willingness and ability to work that will generally be sold to some capitalist employer. In all those cases, the alienation of the product is inherent in the product itself. One trains children (as a parent or teacher) or trains/disciplines oneself, to work long and hard in order to be able to get a job. Moreover, as with other products, once sold to the capitalist the product labor power is then employed by the capitalist against the workers who sold it; the capitalist structures their work both to control them immediately on the job but also to exploit and alienate them in ways mentioned above.
But what of those whose labor power does not wind up being sold to capitalists? What of, say, the unemployed who strive fruitlessly to prostitute themselves on the labor market? What of children, mostly girls, who are trained for housework and who wind up spending their lives working in the home rather than selling their labor power in the market? In neither case are they alienated and exploited directly by a capitalist and therefore it might be denied that their product, their labor power has been alienated.
In the case of the unemployed their search for jobs is clearly work for capital - it is what makes the labor market function and as Marx discusses in chapter 25 helps keep down others' wages - and since the 1940s in the United States that work has even been paid, in the form of unemployment compensation. (To obtain such compensation in most states workers must provide proof of job-search interviews with prospective employers.) Such workers are not working for wages, per se, but they are undertaking a labor vital to the functioning of the capitalist labor market and thus of every market and the system as a whole. Moreover, the "products" of their labor, namely the opportunities they provide capitalists to reorganize their labor force through firing and hiring and the downward pressure on current employee wages are surely not things which belong to them; they are services provided to capital who uses them against them and all their class.
In the case of children who are trained in housework and who go on to become houseworkers, mostly housewives, and who therefore do not sell their labor power in the labor market, we have already seen that as housewives they will be doing the work of producing labor power for capital. So whether they are producing their own labor power, or later producing that of others as well (spouses or children), they are in both cases working for capital. In as much as their "product" is for-capital and will be used by it for its own purposes, then that product - the commodity labor power - is every bit as much alienated from them as the commodities produced by factory or office workers.
With respect to the third form of alienation - of worker from worker - we must ask if this too can be found within the home, within the family unit or in any other sphere of reproduction. The last thirty years or so have given a resounding, and very public, YES! to this question in the form of youth and feminist revolt in the 1960s and 1970s and more generally "the crisis of the family" that has haunted capitalist policy makers and their hired strategists in academia ever since.
The youth revolt of the 1960s was a revolt against virtually every aspect of modern capitalist society but three dimensions were particularly evident: a revolt against parental authority that grew rapidly from its origins in the 1950s, a revolt against school - especially against the imposition of curriculum determined from above, a revolt against societal injustice of many forms, from civil rights to imperialist war. All of these revolts took place mainly within the sphere of reproduction: within the family, the school and the community rather than the waged job place. They were all engendered by revulsion against a life (and possible death) structured and organized by capital in all of the alienated ways mentioned above.
Within the home the rebellion of children against parental authority was reinforced, and perhaps sometimes a spin-off from, that of women against the patriarchal authority of their husbands and fathers. The feminist movement was formed by women fleeing the isolation of the home and the assumption that it was their lot to remain there forever, for the public sphere of collective action and struggle.
The division of labor within the nuclear family that had emerged in the 20th Century wherein husbands worked at waged jobs and women worked at unwaged housework had involved, most often, an hierachical power relationship in which the men who commanded the wage and the property it could buy were also in a position to command their wives. That command was the most immediate manifestation and concrete form of the capitalist shaping of the family and home and of women's lives. Women revolted against that command and broke out of the hierarchy, the home and the family to seek better working conditions and better pay - whether those conditions were within or outside the home and whether the pay was a formal wage or a better share of family income.
Women also revolted against the perpetuation of patriarchal power within various social movements that challenged this or that aspect of capitalist society. Whether in the anti-war or black power or student rights movements young men, no doubt following the pattern of their fathers, often sought to lead and get their fellow female rebels to follow that lead - to make the coffee and clean up the mess after meetings. But young women increasingly would have none of it, spoke up and spoke out and soon formed their own autonomous organizations - vital steps in the emergence of militant wings of the feminist movement.
In all these cases we find young men and women, and then often older men and women following the lead of the young, revolting against what they saw as intolerable conditions of alienation in the home, in the school and in the community. As students they were sick of being pitted against each other in a highly competitive educational system in which only a few were permoted to higher education and many were discarded/dropped-out along the way. They sought co-operation and collective action as a substitute for competition and a dog-eat-dog scrabble for grades and scholarships. They wanted to control their curriculum and they fought for Black Studies, radical economics, insurgent sociology, women's studies, Chicano studies etc. in the universities. They also fought against the imposition of too much work so they would have time to learn on their own, both in libraries and in the streets. Professors and administrators came under pressure, grading became easier; grade "inflation" was born, and whole new programs of study were created on the basis of militant student desires.
Blurring the distinction between private and public life they experimented - often openly and to the horror of the ideologs of the capitalist family - with new family structures: open marriages, communal living arrangements, homosexual and lesbian partnerships and so on. The "crisis of the family" was not just born, it was created by such innovating rebels.
Finally, with respect to the fourth form of alienation - that of workers from their species-being - because this involves the substitution of the capitalist will for that of workers, both individually and collectively, then to the degree that capital has succeeded in shaping the sphere of reproduction such that we do what it wants/needs, the way it wants and needs us to do them, we are stripped of our humanity every bit as much as we are in the factory or office.
When parents become truant officers enforcing capitalist hours on learning, or drill sargeants ferociously imposing the arduous work of competitive sports, on their children, then neither parents nor children are living autonomously but are both playing pre-designated roles in the capitalist machine. When parents expect and husbands demand that young women become broodmares to perpetuate the family (i.e., the labor force) and either set aside their own dreams and autonomous plans or take them up only as a second job along side their "primary" one within the home, then both the women and those imposing these standards are, once again, playing pre-designated roles within capitalist accumulation and have effectively given up the free exercise of their own wills.
That some people have sometimes consciously embraced the capitalist values and roles of such institutions, doesn't obviate their loss of autonomy, and thus of their humanity. Given Marx's theory of human species-being as the exercise of the will, we must conclude that a human or a group of humans, can, after all, choose to be less than human by giving up the exercise of their free will. And this is true whether we are dealing with the sphere of production or that of reproduction. It is also true whether we are dealing with workers or capitalists.
Richard Cory
They say that Richard Cory owns one half
(chorus)
The papers print his picture almost
(repeat chorus) He freely gave to charity,
(repeat chorus) Simon & Garfunkel, "Sounds of Silence", 1965
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For some analysis of the original version of "Richard Cory" see the comments on this work by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935).
abstract labor labor process being in-itself being for-itself c + v + s formal subsumption of labor |
capital as vampire alienation valorization productive consumption species-being real subsumption of labor |
*1. Explain the difference between labor and the labor process and why it is important for Marx.
*2. Explain the connection between Chapter Seven and Chapter One, especially section two of Chapter One.
3. Discuss and critique Marx's comments on the relation between human beings and the rest of nature. What is particular about humans that distinguishes them from other animals for Marx and Hegel? In what sense are their views species-centric?
4. What are the three elements of the labor process and what are their relationships to each other? How do these relationships change under capitalism?
5. Compare Marx's concepts of class in-itself and for-itself with Sartre's concepts of being in-itself and being for-itself.
6. Compare Marx's concepts of class in-itself and for-itself with Sartre's concepts of being in-itself and being for-itself.
7. What does Marx mean by species-being? How does it relate to labor and production and how to the relations among human beings?
*8. Under what circumstances can labor be one form of "spontaneous, free activity" with the potential of being fulfilling for human beings.
9. What is valorization? Explain it in terms of its usual meaning and in terms of Marx's analysis.
10. Distinguish between the formal and the real subsumption of labor to capital and explain the relationship between this distinction and primitive accumulation.
11. Why is it that in order to understand value in Marx, we must also understand surplus value?
12. Explain the meaning of C = c + v + s. How central is s in understanding valorization and wherein lies the struggle between the workers and capital in this equation?
*13. What does Marx mean by "alienation"? Describe all the various aspects of work and life that fall under this rubric for Marx.
*14. Explain the following comment in social/class terms: "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
15. From your reading of Chapter Seven, how much truth do you feel there
is in the assertion that in this chapter Marx focuses more on the processes
of alienation than he does on how workers feel about it.
(1) In Capital Marx, like most writers in his day, used the term "Man"
to designate the human species. I will use non-sexist alternatives such
as humanity.
(2) That is to say intentional transformation is neither the intent nor
primary characteristic of the activity. Obviously, swimmers may leave
suntan lotion in the sea, transforming its chemical make-up and that may
have further effects, too many hikers (or mountain bikers) may cause erosion
and mountain climbers can pound so many pitons into cracks that they widen
them, or leave their waste and discarded junk on the mountain to such a degree
as to have an impact on the local ecology. But these, as in many other
activities are unintended (un-willed) side effects and not the defining
characteristic of the activity - at least not from the point of view of the
human actors.
(3) This was the position of French Communist Party philosopher Louis
Althusser and his co-author Etienne Balibar in their book Reading Capital
in which they argued the existence of an "epistemological break" between
the "young" Marx of the Manuscripts and the "mature" Marx of Capital.