From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
The cooperative form of labor vs. abstract labor
EDITOR'S NOTE
As part of our ongoing discussion of Marx's critique of
capitalist production, we publish here for the first time anywhere
Dunayevskaya's essay, "The Cooperative Form of Labor Vs. Abstract
Labor," which she wrote on March 2, 1951 as part of her work on what
ultimately became MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY. All boldfaces are
in the original. The piece has been slightly edited.
* * *
"'If,' dreamed Aristotle, the greatest
thinker of antiquity, 'if every tool, when summoned, or even of its own
accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of
Hephaestos went out of their own accord to their sacred work...then there
would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves
for the lords.' Oh those heathens! They understood nothing of political
economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that
machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day."
--Karl Marx, CAPITAL, Vol. I
In our present society, where humanity is but a cog in a
machine, the proof that the division between mental and manual labor--that
attribute of all class societies--has under capitalism reached its apex, is
self-evident.
With this truth shining forth in increasing tensions,
crises and wars, it becomes well-nigh impossible to have the worker fulfill the
CAPITALISTIC function of machine-made higher labor productivity.
The workers’ antagonism to the machine has traveled a
long way from the time when they simply wished to smash it. Now what they want
to have done with is their very WORK. They want to do something ENTIRELY
DIFFERENT--express all their natural and acquired powers in an activity worthy
of them as HUMAN beings.
They wish to appropriate the science, heretofore wholly
incorporated into the machine while they were turned into its appendage. They
feel that in a much greater way than seems apparent to the naked eye. Their
capacity to engage in a wide variety of activities, change from job to job,
tinker with machines in off hours, create things for their own use on
government-plus contracts is a good BEGINNING to making the machine an extension
of THEIR powers rather than them being slaves to the machine.
All that needs to be done now is that they and their
fellow workers engage in a self-activity so different from their present work as
to make the scientists in the cubbyholes outside of the plants as unnecessary as
is the capitalist inside the factory.
In NO OTHER WAY can a fundamental change in society be
achieved. In ALL OTHER WAYS capital has retained its domination over labor. Marx
was right when he insisted that only when COOPERATIVE labor replaced PRIVATE
labor from the ground up will SOCIAL CONTROL become the natural attribute of
individuals cooperating in labor and who have become thereby truly SOCIAL
INDIVIDUALS.
Otherwise cooperation is a snare and a delusion, that
CAPITALISTIC CARICATURE of social control called private management of industry.
That is to say, it is cooperative labor FORCED INTO THE VALUE FORM TO WHICH ALL
CONCRETE LABORS HAVE BEEN REDUCED BY THE "PLANNED DESPOTISM" OF
CAPITAL.
Just as there is no such animal as “ABSTRACT
labor”--you must be engaged in CONCRETE activity, mining, tailoring, machine
production [and so forth]--so there is no cooperative labor where the autocratic
control over labor sets the pace the workers must follow.
It is the process of REDUCTION of your laboring skill
which transforms the labor process into a process of extraction of surplus
value--that is, unpaid hours of labor. The capitalist’s “werewolf hunger”
for unpaid hours of labor dominates over that labor process AND also over
TECHNOLOGY which is constantly called upon to REDUCE the hours of labor socially
necessary to produce commodities to win the battle of competition on a WORLD
scale.
Let us take another look at the FORM of cooperation.
Under capitalism it takes the form of value. But value in PRODUCTION means one
thing, and in the MARKET something quite different.
In the market it means exchange-value or money and
private property. In production it means the time clock which sees to it that no
matter what your concrete skills you produce so much and so much--a whole mass
of abstract labor no different from that of your fellow workers, no matter what
your individual PRIVATE skills are which fashion CONCRETE commodities.
But the capitalist doesn’t trust the clock in and of
itself to set the pace, so he has a foreman over the belt line. But suddenly you
find that it isn’t just one foreman but a HIERARCHY of control over you. Why?
You can do the work, so why all these composites of a Frankenstein monster?
It is because neither you nor your fellow workers are
INTERESTED in the work. It is a question of FORCING you to labor and it is
because it is FORCED LABOR that such a hierarchy is necessary. They are there to
see that everything is subordinated to that one function, of extracting from you
as much labor as possible.
They are not there because it is not just you but MANY
of you who are working. That is not because labor is social, cooperative. They
are not there because they work, or even know how to very often, but only to
exercise that despotic control which forces all your labors into that value
form.
Now the capitalist tries to identify his despotic
control over labor with the social character of cooperative labor. But that you
know is so much poppycock, only it isn’t a joke because he has all the cards
in his hands and the only thing PRIVATE belonging to you--your capacity to
labor--is of no value outside of the factory. So you continue to sweat it out.
But you are not fooled. You know that the planned despotism in the factory
arises not out of the COOPERATIVE form of labor, but out of the ANTAGONISTIC
relationship between you and he who lords it over you. Marx knew that too, and
that is why he so sharply separated the NATURE of the cooperative form of labor
from its CAPITALISTIC integument or value-form.
1. a) Cooperation, in itself, a PRODUCTIVE POWER of
social labor, is a power due to cooperation itself. b) Cooperation, under
capitalism, is forced into a VALUE MOLD OF UNDIFFERENTIATED ABSTRACT LABOR which
hides not only its concrete character but the division between PAID AND UNPAID
LABOR. Indeed cooperative labor is allowed to function only to the extent that
it is possible to produce SURPLUS value or unpaid hours of labor. That is what
the CAPITALIST'S private property means, the labor of others.
2. a) Cooperative labor, in itself, allows the laborer
to strip off “the fetters of the individual and develop capacities of his
species.” That is to say not you alone make a commodity but you and your
fellow workers. In losing a skill you have also acquired however a new, a social
power.
b) Cooperative labor, under capitalism, necessitates
control by a whole ARMY of foremen, superintendents, straw bosses, big bosses,
etc. Planned despotism thus “takes the forms peculiar to itself,” the
HIERARCHIC structure due first to the capitalists having been relieved of actual
labor and the labor of superintendence, and then due to the necessity of ever
greater masses of abstract labor. REDUCING a human to a cog in the machine you
begin to realize is no small matter and it is this which requires the monstrous
creation of monotony, speed-up, uniformity, listlessness and more speed-up.
3. a) The “peculiar form” of the planned despotism
is also due to the fact that the laborers have sold their INDIVIDUAL, ISOLATED
labor power. But since there are MANY such laborers, the capitalists must make
cooperators out of them, but cooperators who must fructify with their LIVING
labor the value of the past labor incorporated in the machine but which is in
actuality labor of the laborers themselves in alienated form.
And just as that past labor no longer belongs to the
laborers, so the LIVING labor of these cooperators no longer belongs to
themselves, having been sold to the capitalist. These cooperators are now
appended to the SPECIAL WORKING MECHANISM also belonging to the capitalist. This
is no longer just a machine; it is capital, a social relationship of production
established through this instrument, the machine, which has long ago been
alienated from the laborer.
b) So that, while cooperation in itself requires SOCIAL
CONTROL BY MASSES, under capitalism cooperative labor means CAPITAL'S MANAGEMENT
OF INDUSTRY, “which is an attribute of capital as in feudal times the function
of general and judge were attributes of landed property.”
4. Finally, the new power that cooperation, in itself,
is cannot develop freely and fully under such conditions for while it must fit
into the value form, its human capacities are thwarted. The social power of
labor which APPEARS as the productive power of capital is indeed a capitalist
caricature of this NEW PRODUCTIVE POWER WHICH WILL RELEASE ITS ENERGIES ONLY
WHEN IT BECOMES THE NEW CENTER OF GRAVITY OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER.
We can view cooperative labor from another angle, the
division of labor. (We concern ourselves here only with the division of labor
under capitalism.) The SEEMING planlessness of the social division of labor as
it is reflected IN SOCIETY, that is the market, is in truth the direct opposite
IN THE FACTORY where it turns out to be the UNDISPUTED AUTHORITY of the
capitalist.
While the DETAIL functions of the laborer remain a
technical necessity in the manufacturing period, in the movement from
manufacture to machinofacture, the machine sweeps away the technical reasons for
“the annexation of the worker to a detail function.” But while this
undermined the SUBJECTIVE authority of the capitalist, it encrusted the planned
despotism with the OBJECTIVITY of the machine which took over the disciplining
of labor.
It is here, says Marx, that dialectics separates itself
not only from the VULGAR materialism of capitalism, but also from the ABSTRACT
materialism of natural science, and in HISTORY AND ITS PROCESS sees the truth;
there is no development of technology OUTSIDE of the historic process.
And so it happens that technology does not mean the
freeing of the laborer from his function as an appendage to the machine, nor of
the lightening of his labor, nor of any “abstract” development of the
productive forces other than through the sweat of the worker.
The fact therefore is that where the capitalist is there
“in person” or not, or whether the technology “in itself” needs the
detail laborer or a man fit for a variety of functions, the worker is confronted
with an ALREADY EXISTING MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION. He can do nothing
but subordinate himself to IT, TO THIS ALIEN FORCE. Management over social labor
which in manufacture was “purely subjective” is now “purely objective.”
But here, too, is “THE ABSOLUTE CONTRADICTION.” The
nature of modern industry necessitates variations in labor, fluidity , mobility,
while in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old, ossified division of
labor. The latter is the CONDITION of laboring for one separated from his
instruments of labor.
While the workers' revolt moves from the fight against
the instrument of labor to struggles against the capitalistic MISUSE of that
instrument, the capitalist ideologist discovers the “stupidity” of fighting
against the machine which gives him power over nature. In other words, while the
worker discovers that, although it first enslaved him, his tools can gain him
freedom--once the division of mental and manual labor is done away with--the
bourgeois economist tries to spirit away the PRESENT ENSLAVEMENT:
The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from
the capitalist employment of machinery, do not exist, they say, since they
do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist
employment! Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours
of labor, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them...since in
itself it is a victory of humanity over the forces of Nature, but in the
hands of capital, makes humanity the slave of those forces; since in itself
it increases the wealth of producers, but in the hands of capital, makes
them paupers--for all these reasons and others besides, says the BOURGEOIS
ECONOMIST without more ado, it is clear as noonday that all these
contradictions are a mere SHOW of the reality, and machinery considered in
itself, that as a matter of fact, they have neither actual nor a THEORETICAL
existence.*
But the contradictions AREN'T just “show” but the
historic truth. Indeed, there is no technology outside of this HISTORIC
development of capitalism. The abolition of the division of labor would mean its
bursting out of the old value form and AN ENTIRELY NEW MODE OF LABOR IN AN
ENTIRELY NEW FORM WOULD APPEAR. The IMMANENCE of this breaks down entirely the
PSYCHOLOGY OF CIVIL SOCIETY. The worker balks at the productivity of labor as a
CAPITALISTIC function of order, monotony, uniformity, intensity which is
entirely at variance with the NATURE of modern industry which needs variation of
labor, a fully developed social individual.
It shows itself in the antagonisms of anarchy AND
authority, in the order AND catastrophes of a society which lives under a
Damocles sword: the penalty of death hanging over capitalist production for not
having developed the worker’s humanity. But rather than “giving in”
capitalism becomes more autocratic, more hierarchic in structure, more monstrous
in content.
---
* Marx's CAPITAL, Vol. I (New York: International
Publishers, 1967), p. 441.--Ed.
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