How far can workers control their jobs?

Htun Lin states, in the October-November "Workshop Talks" column in NEWS & LETTERS, "Every worker knows firsthand what Marx was talking about in CAPITAL, in the section on 'Cooperation':  that workers guide and direct themselves in a cooperative fashion."  He also asserts, "workers actually manage the workplace...even as the capitalist controls the money and personifies capital's need for accumulation at our expense."

If he's right, current production relations aren't essentially capitalist, and the Marxist-Humanist Perspectives thesis errs when it stresses the need to abolish "alienated labor and the capitalist mode of production."  We merely need to put investment under social control and transform distribution relations, eliminating the middlemen who skim off profits. 

Far from arguing that workers currently "direct themselves," Marx wrote in the chapter on "Cooperation" that their activity is directed by "the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose" by employing "officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labor process in the name of capital."

Contrary to what Lin seems to suggest, Marx was referring precisely to this subjection in the workplace itself--not money management, profit skimming, and investment--when he called the capitalist's plan "purely despotic" in form.

At the dawn of capitalism, Marx noted, "the subjection of labour to capital was only formal."  Although workers were employed by capitalists, they did manage the work process themselves.  Later, however, "the command of capital develops intoŠa real condition of production." 

Marx goes on to trace the emergence of a "specifically capitalist mode of production," in which "the formal subsumption of labor under capital [... is] replaced by a real subsumption."  In other words, the problem is no longer merely that workers are under capitalist control. Their actual labor, activity, is wrested out of their control--fragmented, recombined, and dominated by the rhythms of the machine--in order to more adequately serve capital's drive to expand itself.  I suspect that this is more in keeping with what "every worker knows firsthand."

As his alternative to the present state of affairs, Lin proposes "direct social cooperation" among workers. But if these are specifically capitalist relations, leaving them intact leaves capitalism intact, though with different faces at the top.  This is why, when Marx envisioned what Lin calls "the plan of freely associated workers," what he contrasted it to was the capitalist social formation, "in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite."

He was saying that the real relations of production can be brought under human control only by breaking with the laws of capitalist production to which we all, workers and capitalists alike, are currently subjected. This is why the Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, while appreciating that cooperatives and worker-run enterprises prefigure aspects of socialism, rightly cautions that they "do not constitute the abolition of capitalism" as long as the capitalist production relations haven't been transformed. 

Even within capitalist-owned firms, the cooperative labor process is a harbinger of socialism. And capitalism's creation of a socialized labor force is the creation of a new social power that can bring it down.  But as long as capitalism exists, cooperative labor is neither self-directed activity nor the partial emergence of the new society within the old one.

Labor can become freely associated only by breaking with the enslaving laws of capitalist production.  There is no in-between.

This revolutionary perspective is absent from Lin's piece.  He does mention "the reality of value production being totally replaced by the reality of concrete labor."  But "concrete labor" as Marx used the term is a "reality" even in capitalism--workers' labor is both abstract and concrete--so what "replaced by the reality of concrete labor" means (if anything) is not clear.  But clarity about the future is of utmost importance at a moment when, in order to challenge the dogma that there is no alternative to capitalism, and the accompanying despair, concretely theorizing an alternative is a crucial task.

--Andrew Kliman