Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (18 page)

It is here that the contradictions of capital and of capitalism intersect. It has long been the case that specific trades have often, for example, been strongly and sometimes even exclusively associated with particular ethnic, religious or racial groups in a population. It is not only gender that is involved in shaping distinctions within the division of labour. These associations which continue to be in evidence are not merely residuals from a very complicated past. Many software programmers and developers (an entirely new occupational category) come from South Asia and the Philippines specialises in the provision and export of women domestic workers to many different countries in the world (from the USA to the Gulf States and Malaysia). The extensive migrations of labour that have occurred both historically and in recent times have frequently been channelled in such a way as to link certain places of origin with specific occupations in the receiving country. The National Health Service in Britain simply could not function without the immigration of different groups from what was once the British Empire. In recent years migrant streams (mainly women) from Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and the like) have been recruited wholesale into various facets of the so-called ‘leisure’ industries throughout much of Europe including Britain (everything from cleaning hotels to waitressing and bartending). Mexican and Caribbean migrants specialise in harvesting the crops on both the east and the west coasts of the USA.

The allocation of different people to different tasks is associated with differential rates of remuneration. Ethnic, racial, religious and gender prejudices and discriminations become deeply embroiled in how the labour market as a whole gets segmented and fragmented and how pay gets determined. Jobs that are considered dirty and demeaning, for example, are typically low-paid and left to the most disadvantaged and vulnerable migrants (often those who have no legal status). Skilled worker status is often automatically accorded migrants with software qualifications from South Asia. What is even more invidious is that the rate of remuneration also varies according to gender, race and ethnicity for working in the same occupation and on identical tasks.

Struggles over status within the division of labour and the recognition of skills are in effect struggles over differential life chances for the worker and, by extension – and here is the core of the problem – over profitability for the capitalist. From the standpoint of capital it is useful if not crucial to have a labour market that is segmented, fragmented and internally highly competitive. This poses barriers to coherent and unified labour organisation. Capitalists can and often do deliberately operate a divide and rule politics by fostering and inciting interethnic tensions, for example. Competition between social groups jockeying for position within the division of labour becomes a primary means by which labour in aggregate gets disem-powered and capital comes to exercise greater and more complete control over both the labour market and the workplace. Typical forms of trade union organisation along sectoral rather than geographical lines also inhibit unified action on the part of labour, even when the unions themselves strive to go further than simply serving the interests of their own members.

The historical dynamics of class struggles within capitalism as a whole over skills, their specification and their rate of remuneration is one of the most important histories yet to be properly written from a critical perspective. The following remarks are therefore preliminary.

When capital came upon the scene as a primary as opposed to occasional form of accumulation and found it necessary to gain
control of labour processes in industrial production, it found at hand a division of labour and a skill structure that were strongly rooted in the trades, resting on artisan labour. The ‘butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker’ were the sorts of occupations within which labourers could hone their skills and seek to secure their future social positions. Most of the population in Europe in the early years of capitalism was employed in agriculture (as a landed or landless peasantry) or in services (primarily domestic servants and retainers) to monarchs, landed aristocracy and merchant capitalists. The labour of serving demanded its own brand of interpersonal, domestic and socio-political skills. Town-based artisan labour in the trades embraced a whole range of different occupations, some of which were regulated by a guild and the apprenticeship system. The guild system conferred monopoly power over access to a skill that was based on a specific technical expertise. Carpenters learned how to use their tools, as did jewellers, clockmakers, iron masters, weavers, blacksmiths, tapestry artists, shoemakers, nail and gun makers and the like. Through corporatist guild organisation, groups of workers could assure and maintain a higher standing in the social order and a higher rate of remuneration for their work.

Capital plainly had to do battle with this monopoly power of labour over its conditions of production and its labour process. It fought the battle on two fronts. First, it gradually asserted its own monopoly power with private property over the means of production, so depriving labourers of the means to reproduce themselves outside of the supervision and control of capital. Many different craft workers could then be brought together under the direction of the capitalist into a process of collective labour to produce anything from nails to steam engines and locomotives. While the narrow technical basis and associated skills of the individual tasks did not change that much, the organisation of production through cooperation and the division of labour brought these different tasks together to reap remarkable gains in efficiency and productivity. The costs of commodities in the marketplace fell rapidly to outcompete the traditional craft and artisanal forms of production.

This was the division of labour that was not only extensively analysed but also lauded to the heavens by Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
, published in 1776. In the celebrated case of the pin factory, Smith emphasised how the organised division of labour within the production process led to immense improvements in technical efficiency and labour productivity. By taking advantage of workers’ differing skills and talents, the overall increase in productivity and profitability within what Marx later called ‘the detail division of labour’ within the firm was assured. On this basis Smith went on to infer that the extensive resort to social divisions of labour between firms and across sectors was bound to have a similar effect. In this case, as Marx was later at considerable pains to point out, the coordinating mechanism could no longer be the individual capitalist organising cooperative activity according to rational principles of design, but a more chaotic and anarchistic set of coordinations in which volatile price signals in the market became crucial to determinations of quantitatively rational divisions of productive activity in different firms and sectors. Smith, recognising this, urged the state generally not to intervene in price fixing (except in the case of public utilities and natural monopolies) and to follow a policy of laissez-faire to ensure that the hidden hand of the market could do its work with maximal efficiency. To this day theorists and policymakers have continued to mistakenly place great faith in an ‘efficient market hypothesis’ for the coordination of not only production but also the financial activities that came so badly unstuck in September of 2008. Marx concluded that the chaotic anarchy of the marketplace would be a constant source of the upsetting of equilibrium in prices and that this would render the social division of labour unstable if not crisis-prone.

The other, and I think far more profound and far-reaching, attack upon the potential monopoly powers of labour arose out of the evolutionary path of capitalist-inspired technological change. Much of this evolution directly or indirectly aimed to undermine the power of labour, both in the workplace and in the labour market. The bias of technological change has all along been against the interests of labour and in particular against the kinds of power that labour acquired
through the acquisition of scarce and monopolisable skills. One important direction in capital–labour relations has been towards deskilling, a phenomenon that Marx noted in
Capital
and which was brought back centre stage in Harry Braverman’s influential and controversial book
Labor and Monopoly Capital
, published in 1974.
¹
Braverman argued that capital, particularly in its monopoly form, had a vested interest in degrading skills and so destroying any sense of pride that might attach to working for capital, while disempowering labour particularly at the point of production. There had been a long history of struggle over this. In the nineteenth century the ideologists of capital – Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure in particular – were much cited by Marx as evidence of capital’s penchant for deskilling. Braverman likewise made much of Frederick Taylor’s efforts at scientific management to disaggregate production processes to the point where a ‘trained gorilla’ would be able to undertake production tasks. The ‘science’ involved here was one in which time and motion studies were brought together with techniques of specialisation to simplify all the tasks, to maximise the efficiency and minimise the costs of production in any given sector or individual firm.

Both Marx and Braverman recognised that some reskilling would be required to implement the extensive organisational and technical changes involved in deskilling the mass of the workers. The introduction of the assembly line empowered the engineers who installed it and managed it, just as the engineers involved in robotisation or the deployment of computers had to acquire new skills to undertake their tasks. Critics of Marx and of Braverman have pointed out, correctly, that the writings of Babbage, Ure and Taylor were essentially utopian tracts that were never fully implemented, in part because of intense resistance on the part of workers and in part because the evolutionary path of technological change was and is not uniquely directed to labour control.

New technologies have often called for redefinitions of skill through which certain segments of labour can be advantaged. This turns out to be much more important than either Marx or Braverman allowed. What is on capital’s agenda is not the eradication of skills
per se but the abolition of
monopolisable
skills. When new skills become important, such as computer programming, then the issue for capital is not necessarily the abolition of those skills (which it may ultimately achieve through artificial intelligence) but the undermining of their potential monopoly character by opening up abundant avenues for training in them. When the labour force equipped with programming skills grows from relatively small to super-abundant, then this breaks monopoly power and brings down the cost of that labour to a much lower level than was formerly the case. When computer programmers are ten-a-penny, then capital is perfectly happy to identify this as one form of skilled labour in its employ, even to the point of conceding a higher rate of remuneration and more respect in the workplace than the social average.

In the same way that the evolution of technology has trended through its own autonomous dynamic towards greater and greater complexity over time, so divisions of labour have multiplied rapidly and been qualitatively transformed. This has not been a simple linear evolution, in part because the dynamics of class struggle has been engaged, though more often than not to capital’s advantage. In the US steel industry, for example, the number of specialised (and to some degree therefore monopolisable) skills was very large indeed in the 1920s but became far smaller, particularly after the labour legislation of the 1930s that created the National Labor Relations Board, which had powers to resolve interjurisdictional disputes over which skill was qualified to do what in a particular industry. The contemporary steel industry has a much simpler and more streamlined skill set than was the case in earlier times. On the other hand specialisms in, say, medicine or banking and finance have proliferated, while the emergence of whole new sectors associated with electronics and computerisation has spawned an immense range of new occupations and job specifications. The range of specialisms within the state regulatory apparatus (in the Food and Drug Administration or in all those institutions such as the Controller of the Currency and the Security and Exchange Commission) has also grown astronomically in recent times.

The rapid extension and the explosive increase in complexity of both the detail and the social divisions of labour have become
the
fundamental feature of a modern capitalist economy. This evolution has not occurred as a consequence of overall conscious design and decision (there is no Ministry of the Division of Labour to mandate anything). It has evolved in parallel with technological and organisational changes impelled by the systemic forces earlier identified. And this despite the simplifications of occupational specifications achieved in some sectors of industry (such as steel and cars) and the loss of anachronistic occupations (such as that of lamplighter and, in advanced countries, those of water carrier and rag picker). Significant increases in labour productivity and in the volume and variety of production have been achieved by these means. One further consequence has been increasing economic interdependence within larger and larger populations spread over larger and larger geographical areas and the emergence of an international division of labour that also requires consideration. This implies rising problems of coordination in the social division of labour and the increasing likelihood of cascading disruptions in response to the volatility of market signals. Coordinations through command, control and contractual supply relations back down a commodity supply chain have consequently become more common in certain lines of production: corporate demands for inputs (for example, the car industry’s need for engines, parts, tyres, windscreens, electronics, etc.) are specified and contracted for outside of the market. But with increasing simplification of tasks and increasing complexity of coordinations come increasing risks of misfires and of unintended consequences. This introduces a whole new layer in the division of labour and a vast army of new occupations involving logistical, legal, financial, marketing, advertising and other business services. Questions of security and safety (in everything from airlines to pharmaceuticals and food supplies) also become more pressing, as does the apparatus for surveillance, monitoring and quality control of different activities. Proliferating divisions of labour within the economy are paralleled by proliferating bureaucratic divisions of
regulatory and administrative authority not only within a typical state apparatus but also internally within many institutions, such as hospitals, universities and school systems.