Dear All
I have read so many analyses just like the one on this list under this
heading which treat capitalism as an 'objective' system 'out there' doing
all these terrible things to us. Indeed for a long period in the 70s that
is just how I conceived it. Workers, it seemed, were simply the 'blind
beasts of revolt', forced into a reaction by the terrible effects of the
system. Indeed it became necessary to show just how terrible capitalism was
in order simply to have any revolutionary outlook at all.
But this picture never conformed to my lived experience. All through the
70s I worked on the railways in this country and I counted amongst my
friends people who worked in engineering factories, shipyards and so on.
All 'blue collar', proletarian jobs you might say. And all through this
period when the Left was outside our places of work urging us to fight, or
'up the ante' with wage demands and so on, all we ever wanted to do was get
out of 'work' and enjoy ourselves. Which, because there was relative full
employment - we did.
Today everyone of those people is now out of 'productive work', no longer
part of that mass working class which was so confident. In some cases the
actual plants where they worked have completely disappeared. The posting
touched on this slightly but did not account for it in my view in any
satisfactory sense. It was only when I recently met up again with my old
mate Brian, who had been a shop steward at Ford's here on Merseyside in the
period I was talking about, and who had arrived at what I believe to be a
better understanding, that I found a way of looking at my life experience
that made some kind of sense of it.
What follows is his [unfinished] work, and is part of our ongoing
discussions around the Liverpool docks dispute . . . . .
Gra
Brian - on 'Autonomist Marxism'
This paper is written from an autonomist marxist perspective. This
tradition has at its core the self activity of the working class. We have
no time for 'great leaders', rather we look to the collective intelligence
of the class to take us forward. The era we are in is one of great change,
of distinctive capitalist development. Computers and telecommunications,
the information technologies are central to this.
Artificial intelligence is being counter posed to the history and
intelligence of the working class. The last twenty years have seen
unprecedented levels of automation, global financial and industrial
mobility and societal surveillance; this coupled with the Thatcherite
policies of the state has resulted in the DEFEAT of the working class.
However, autonomists view the developing technologies as potential weapons
for the new working class that is being born in this period. We believe
that there are distinct phases in the development of capitalism that
produce distinct compositions of the working class. The period up to the
1920s saw a class that had as its vanguard the skilled craftsmen and
technicians, who formed the nucleus of the Bolsheviks, the German Workers
Councils and the Shop Stewards movement in Clydeside and other areas in
this country. That working class was attacked and broken up - DECOMPOSED,
by capital.
The working class that followed it was the class of the giant factories,
the workers of the Fordist production lines. What we call the 'mass
worker'. That class is the one that has been attacked over the last 20
years. It has been decomposed, although that process has not yet been
completed. Overlapping this old class is the emerging new one, the diffused
class of the new technologies, that is struggling to find its mechanisms
for recomposition.
Working class history is a history of struggle. And that history affirms
not the power of capital but that of labour. The class is not some passive
object but the ACTIVE SUBJECT of production, the source of the skills and
abilities that capital must draw on. Not only is the working class active,
it is also ANTAGONISTIC. At the same time that capital is attempting to
maximise exploitation, either absolutely [by extending the working day] or
relatively [by increasing the productivity of labour], the workers in their
daily practice and organised struggles, attempt to start a very different
project.
We are not mere labour power, factory fodder, but seekers after a better,
more fulfilling life. This struggle - the class struggle - against
capitalist logic seeks to force up rates of pay and / or lower the duration
and intensity of the working day. These are not just economic, they attack
capital's political command over labour power. They indicate a splitting of
labour from capital. The working class is potentially autonomous, we don't
need capital - BUT CAPITAL NEEDS US.
From this flows the proposition that it is workers struggle which provides
the DYNAMIC of capitalist development. Capital does not develop
technologies and organisations on a whim, but is driven by an inner
antagonism. It is driven by that 'other' which it needs, but which is at
the same time, inimical to its existence - the working class. The need to
control and defeat working class desires and power, forces capital to
develop and perfect itself.
Technological development therefore is not an objective, progressive
tendency, it is rather a WEAPON used against the working class. Capital's
tendency to increase the proportion of dead or 'constant' capital as
against living or 'variable' capital in the production process arises
precisely from the fact that the latter is a potentially insurgent element
which MUST be controlled, fragmented, reduced or even destroyed. The Left
has a tendency to be complicit in this process of technological
rationalisation, ignoring the fact that what is being confirmed in this
process is CAPITALIST RATIONALITY. We are not saying that technological
change cannot open up potentially subversive opportunities for the working
class, but we are saying that such technology is not AUTOMATICALLY
emancipatory.
From our perspective, the spread of information technologies is not a
linear and universal development but a MOMENT in the cycle of class
struggle. And to work out the relative strengths of the protagonists, we
use the concept of class composition,
'a gauge of each sides internal unity, resources and will, determined not
merely by the technical and social division of labour, but also by cultural
milieu, organisational forms and political direction.'
[Cleaver/Negri]
As the cohesion of the working class develops, capital is forced to respond
with offensive restructurations using economic, technological and state
power to decompose its opponent's organisation. But capital is dependent on
collective labour as the well of surplus value and so cannot completely
destroy its enemy.
So, each attempt to restructure sets in motion the process of working class
recomposition. This recomposition produces new stratas of the class, with
new potentialities for struggle and organisation.
The working class is not made once and for all but is made over and over
again in a dynamic of continual change, with class recomposition and
capitalist restructuration locked in a spiral of increasing conflict.
An understanding of the importance of the information revolution needs a
historical perspective in regard to this spiral. One turn of the spiral was
that of the struggle of the highly skilled craftsmen and technicians who
provided the nucleus of Bolshevism and German Council Communism. Faced with
the revolutionary threat of these movements and other major problems posed
by skilled workers around the world, capital reacted. A drastic reshaping
of the production process took place. The major elements in the project
were the Taylorist organisation of the work process, the working day and
the wage à la Henry Ford, a Keynesian economic policy and a state form that
we autonomists call the 'planner state'.
This produced governmental welfare policies and economic and industrial
strategies that were aimed at comprehensive social management. These
measures contained internal dissent and helped set the scene for the post
war 'golden age' of accumulation.
But this process of restructuration produced a new working class subject,
the inhabiter of the new mass production factories, the mass worker. This
insurgent element was involved in the struggles for union recognition in
the 1920s and 30s. It was to provide the vanguard in the major arenas of
class struggle during the 1960s and 70s.
It was the refusal of this group to restrain its demands within the bounds
of Keynesian development policies or to tolerate the inhuman conditions of
the production line factories which caused problems for capital. This
refusal manifested itself in widespread outbreaks of strikes, sabotage and
absenteeism; thereby throwing into question the ability of the system to
absorb the insurgent thrusts of the 'enemy within' - [Thatcher's phrase].
As a response to the increasing militancy of these years, capital undertook
yet another restructuration of the system. Under the guise of Thatcherism
and Reganism, the attack involved a number of elements. The 'Crisis State'
replaced the 'Planner State' as the social wage provisions embodied in the
Welfare State were and are dismantled and replaced by control through
austerity. Monetary policy took a central role in the driving down of real
wages. A sustained attack on organised labour was instigated and continues
to this day. While all this was going on, capital was reorganising the
process of value extraction and the cycle of accumulation.
Production was decentralised and dispersed away from the giant factories of
the mass worker. There was a highly driven development of the service
sectors of the economy, and capital sought complete geographical mobility
and temporal fluidity as ways around working class rigidity and resistance.
Information technologies played a central role in the process of
decomposition. They went to the heart of the mass worker power base, the
large factory, and posed the possibility of the worker-less factory.
Telecommunications allowed the dispersion on a local and international
level of work, according to the availability of a cheap and compliant
workforce. Capitalist use of technology allowed not only the break up of
working class power in the industrial arena but allowed the complete
reorganisation of 'office' work. This bringing with it intense levels of
exploitation. Behind the façade of bright, clean work environments, lies
the real motivation for change, control over and reduction in the costs of
labour.
Brian Ashton
May 1997
Words 1379
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