Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (19 page)

The division of labour as a whole has undergone a metamorphosis over the last half-century. As a result, many of the inquiries available to us from nineteenth-century critics like Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber do not address some of the central contemporary issues. Studies of the division of labour in the past largely focused on industrial organisation and factory labour in particular national contexts and the findings of those studies still surely stand. But the increasing complexity and proliferating geographical range of divisions of labour entail a qualitative leap in problems of coordination. Further problems arise because of the proliferation of state surveillance and bureaucratic authority functions and the wide-ranging shifts in the forms of organisation in civil society. Many of these divisions of labour and of authority interlock and feed off each other, while still others acquire a hierarchical position vis-à-vis one another. We are also increasingly subject to what Timothy Mitchell calls ‘the rule of experts’.
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Expert knowledge has always played a critical role in the history of capital and the power of the expert is hard to challenge. Earlier signs of this – the ‘organisation man’, the rule of the ‘mandarins’ and the like – drew attention to an emerging autocratic and hierarchical streak within the division of labour. Arguably, the role of experts has increased exponentially over recent decades and this poses a serious problem for the transparency and legibility of the world in which we live. We all depend on experts to fix our computer, diagnose our illnesses, design our transport systems and ensure our security.

In the 1970s a new perspective was introduced to the discussion with the rise of a so-called ‘new international division of labour’. David Ricardo, appealing to the doctrine of comparative advantage, had long ago insisted on the benefits in efficiency to be gained from specialisation within and trade between countries. The specialisations partly depended on natural factors (it is no more possible to grow bananas and coffee in Canada than it is possible to mine
copper or extract oil where there is none). But they also derived from social features such as labour skills, institutional arrangements, political systems and class configurations, along with the brute facts of colonial and neocolonial plunder and geopolitical and military power.

But there is no question that after 1970 or so the global map of the international division of labour underwent a dramatic set of mutations. The industrial districts that had been the heartlands of capital’s global dominance after 1850 were disrupted and dismantled. Productive capital began to move offshore and the factories of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and then, after 1980, even more spectacularly, China joined the new centres of factory labour in Mexico, Bangladesh, Turkey and many other parts of the world. The West became broadly deindustrialised, while the East and the global South became centres for industrial value production alongside their more traditional role of primary commodity producers and extractors of resources for the industrialising world. The curious feature of these mutations is that industrialisation, which had always been a sure pathway to rising per capita incomes in the past, was now in some instances, such as that of Bangladesh, more associated with the perpetuation of poverty than with the turn to affluence. The same was true for those countries that rose to prominence because of their natural resources in oil or mining. They were plagued by the so-called ‘resource curse’ in which rents and royalties were hijacked by an elite, leaving the mass of the population in abject poverty (Venezuela before Chávez being a prime example). The West became more and more focused on rent extraction through the development of finance, insurance and real estate, alongside a consolidating regime of intellectual property rights, cultural products and corporate monopolies (like Apple, Monsanto, the big energy companies, pharmaceuticals etc.). Knowledge-based activities that drew upon a labour force trained in what Robert Reich calls ‘symbolic labor’ (as opposed to manual labour) also became more central.
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As all these changes occurred, so there seemed to be a slow tectonic shift in the power relations and geopolitical configuration of the global economy. The
flow of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for some two centuries was reversed and China increasingly became the dynamic centre of a global capitalism as the West, after the financial crash of 2008, lost much of its momentum.

So wherein lie the central contradictions in all of this? Plainly, the reversal of wealth flows and the reconfiguration of geopolitical powers pose incidental dangers for global conflicts that were not there before. While these conflicts are rooted in economic conditions and have significant ramifications for those conditions, I do not subscribe to the view that economic and military conflicts arise out of the contradictions of capital as such. The degrees of autonomy that exist in how the territorial logic of state power works within the global state system are far too loosely arranged for any simple economic determinism to work. A major conflagration in the Middle East, for example, would undoubtedly be rooted in the facts of oil production and the different geopolitical and geo-economic interests that cluster around the exploitation of this key global resource, and it certainly could have a huge economic impact (as was the case with the oil embargo of 1973). But it would be wrong to infer from this that the contradictions of capital are in themselves a root cause of any such conflict.

To be sure, also, the increasing complexity in the division of labour opens up new vulnerabilities. Small disruptions in a supply chain can have very large consequences. A strike in a key car-parts factory in one region of the world can bring the whole production system to a halt everywhere. But it can also be more plausibly argued that the increasing complexity and geographical proliferation of ties within a global division of labour provide far stronger insurance against local calamities. In the pre-capitalist past, a failure of the grain harvest in Russia would mean local famine and starvation, but there is now a world market in grains that can be drawn upon to compensate for local failure. There are no technical reasons for local famines in our times precisely because of the way the global division of labour works. When famines do occur (as, sadly, they too often do), it is invariably due to social and political causes. The last great famine in
China, which may have killed some 20 million people at the time of the ‘great leap forward’, occurred precisely because China was then by political choice isolated from the world market. Such an event could not now happen in China. This should be a salutary lesson for all those who place their anti-capitalist faith on the prospects for local food sovereignty, local self-sufficiency and decoupling from the global economy. Freeing ourselves from the chains of an international division of labour organised for the benefit of capital and the imperialist powers is one thing, but decoupling from the world market in the name of anti-globalisation is a potentially suicidal alternative.

The central contradiction in capital’s use of the division of labour is not technical but social and political. It is summed up in one word:
alienation
. The undoubted and astonishing gains in productivity, output and profitability that capital achieves by virtue of its organisation of both the detail and the social division of labour come at the cost of the mental, emotional and physical well-being of the workers in its employ. The worker, Marx for one suggests, is typically reduced to a ‘fragment of a man’ by virtue of his or her attachment to a fixed position within an increasingly complex division of labour. Workers are isolated and individualised, alienated from each other by competition, alienated from a sensual relation to nature (from both their own nature as passionate and sensuous human beings and that of the external world). To the degree that intelligence is increasingly incorporated into machines, so the unity between mental and manual aspects of labouring is broken. Workers are deprived of mental challenges or creative possibilities. They become mere machine operators, appendages of the machines rather than masters of their fates and fortunes. The loss of any sense of wholeness or personal authorship diminishes emotional satisfactions. All creativity, spontaneity and charm go out of the work. The activity of working for capital becomes, in short, empty and meaningless. And human beings cannot live in a world devoid of all meaning.

Sentiments of this sort about the human condition under the rule of capital are not unique to Marx. Similar ideas are to be found in the writings of Weber, Durkheim and Tönnies. Even Adam Smith,
the great champion of the division of labour and celebrator of its contribution to human efficiency, productivity and growth, worried that the assignment of workers to a single task within a complex division of labour was likely to condemn the worker to ignorance and stupidity. Later commentators like Frederick Taylor, less concerned than Smith with ‘moral sentiments’, were less worried: it would be perfectly fine with him if all workers acted like trained gorillas rather than passionate human beings. Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as ‘hands’ only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains.

But, said the more perceptive nineteenth-century critics, if this is how people live their lives at work, then how on earth can they think differently when they come home at night? How might it be possible to build a sense of moral community or of social solidarity, of collective and meaningful ways of belonging and living that are untainted by the brutality, ignorance and stupidity that envelops labourers at work? How, above all, are workers supposed to develop any sense of their mastery over their own fates and fortunes when they depend so deeply upon a multitude of distant, unknown and in many respects unknowable people who put breakfast on their table every day?

The proliferation and increasing complexity in the division of labour under capital leave little scope for personal development or self-realisation on the part of the labourer. Our collective capacity to explore freely our species potential as human beings appears blocked. But even Marx, who is at his grimmest in describing the alienations that arise out of capital’s use of divisions of labour, sees glimmers of possibility in the conditions that capital’s division of labour dictates. It is not, he suggests, all doom and gloom on the side of labour and that in part for reasons that capital itself was bound to furnish. Rapid evolutions in divisions of labour under the influence of strong currents of technological change would require, he argued, a flexible, adaptable and to some degree educated labour force. ‘That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different
kinds of labour required of him: the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn.’
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For this purpose capital would require an educated and adaptable rather than specific kind of labour power and if labourers must be educated who knows what this ‘totally developed individual’ might read and what political ideas he or she might get into their heads? The insertion of the educational clauses into the English Factory Act of 1864 was clear evidence for Marx of the need for the state to step in and on capital’s behalf ensure that some moves were made towards the education of the ‘totally developed individual’. Similarly, while the abuses of women’s employment in the Industrial Revolution were easy to spot and dwell upon, Marx also saw progressive possibilities in the long run for the construction of a ‘a new and higher form’ of family life and of gender relations on the basis of what capital both offered and required of women in the workplace.

Within this formulation lies the question, of course, of what it is that a ‘totally developed individual’ might want or need to know and who is going to teach it to him or her. This is a question that is central to the field of social reproduction, which we will consider shortly. But it is a problem that demands at least a mention here. From the standpoint of capital, labourers will need to know only that which is necessary to follow instructions and do their job within a division of labour that capital devises. But once labourers can read, then the danger is that they will read and dream and even act upon all sorts of ideas culled from an immense variety of sources. For this reason ideological controls upon the flow of knowledge and of information become essential, along with schooling in the right ideas supportive of capital and its requirements for reproduction. But it is hard, if not impossible, for the educated and totally developed individual not to wonder about the nature of the totality of a human society in which their own activity of labouring is but a minuscule part and what it might mean to be human in a world of such fragmentation and partitioning as to make it hard to distil any direct sense of the meaning
of a life. I suspect it was for this reason that even capital allowed that a mild dose of humanist education in literature and the arts, in cultural understandings and religious and moral sentiments might provide an antidote to the anxieties generated from loss of meaning at work. The fragmentations and divisions of labour necessary to the ever-expanding diversity of occupational niches offered up by capital pose serious psychological problems. But what is so stunning about the neoliberal era is how even this mild concession to human needs has been contemptuously thrust aside in the name of a supposedly necessary austerity. State subsidies to cultural activities are cynically dismantled, leaving the financial support for all such activities to the self-serving philanthropy of the rich or the equally self-serving sponsorship of the corporations. Culture sponsored by IBM, BP, Exxon and the like becomes the name of the cultural game.