Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (28 page)

To be sure, skilled and highly trained labour might reasonably expect a higher rate of remuneration than unskilled labour, but that is a far cry from accepting the idea that the higher wage is a form of profit on the workers’ investment in their own education and skills. The problem, as Marx pointed out in his acerbic criticism of Adam Smith, is that the worker can only realise the higher value of those skills by working for capital under conditions of exploitation such that it is, in the end, capital and not the worker that reaps the benefit from the higher productivity of labour.
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In recent times, for example, worker productivity has surged but the share of output going to labour has declined, not increased. In any case, if what the worker truly possessed in bodily form was capital, Marx pointed
out, then he or she would be entitled to sit back and just live off the interest of his or her capital without doing a single day’s work (capital as a property relation always has that option at hand). As far as I can tell, the main point of the revival of human capital theory, at the hands of Gary Becker in the 1960s, for example, was to bury the significance of the class relation between capital and labour and make it seem as if we are all just capitalists earning different rates of return on our capital (human or otherwise).
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If labour was getting very low wages, it could then be argued that this was simply a reflection of the fact that workers had not invested enough effort in building up their human capital! It was, in short, their fault if they were low-paid. Hardly surprisingly, all the major institutions of capital, from economics departments to the World Bank and the IMF, wholeheartedly embraced this theoretical fiction for ideological and certainly not for sound intellectual reasons. These same institutions have more recently similarly embraced the wondrous fiction that the informal sector of social reproduction which dominates in many cities of the developing world is in fact a seething mass of micro-enterprises that need only a dose of microfinance (at usurious rates of interest pocketed at the end of the trail by major financial institutions) in order to become fully fledged card-carrying members of the capitalist class.

For exactly the same reasons, I have profound objections to Bourdieu’s characterisation of personal endowments (which are undeniably of great importance in social life) as a form of capital called ‘cultural capital’.
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While it is perfectly fine to emphasise the role of such endowments in confirming status position in our society and thereby contributing to the replication of class distinctions in the course of social reproduction, to treat this as a form of capital in the sense we are using this term here is confusing if not perverse. It would propose that there is some way of accumulating monetary wealth and income by learning to appreciate Scarlatti (if you are French) and Snoop Dogg if you are American. Where the idea of cultural capital does enter in (but this is not Bourdieu’s point) is in the branding and marketing of goods and places in such a way
as to command a monopoly rent (as in the case of fine wines and perfect tourist destinations). But what we are dealing with here is the manufacture of symbols of distinction which, if they stick, can be a source of permanent monopoly rents and monetary gain. Product differentiation to emphasise that my brand of toothpaste is unique and special has always been a way to avoid the levelling effect of market exchange. Who invents the symbolic world that lies behind the branding of goods and places – a manipulative work that lies at the heart of contemporary advertising and the tourism industry – then becomes critical to the manipulation of human desires for monetary gain. It is, of course, the capitalists who take the monetary gain and who pay for the branding of their products. And in some instances they certainly do not hesitate to attach signs of class and even more emphatically seductive gender images to the qualities of their products. Capital undoubtedly uses such signs of distinction in its sales practices and pitches, but that does not mean that distinction is a form of capital, as Bourdieu proposes, though it does often give rise to monopoly rents if the distinction is unique and original (like a Picasso painting).

Capital and the capitalist state (though mainly the latter) have in recent times taken a deep interest in aspects of social reproduction that affect the competitive qualities of the labour force. If any country is desirous of becoming wealthier by moving up the value-added chain of production into fields of research and development, thereby garnering the wealth to be tapped from command over intellectual property rights, then this depends on having at one’s disposal a well-educated and scientifically qualified labour force which must be either trained at home (hence the immense significance of the research universities in countries such as the USA) or imported from abroad. The education of such a workforce has to begin early in life, which puts the whole educational system in the cross-hairs of capital’s concerns, although, as usual, capital is inclined not to pay for any of it if it can possibly help it. In countries like Singapore and now China strong state investment in education at all levels has been key to their economic success.

The rapidly changing technological context, particularly the progress of robotisation and artificial intelligence already noted, has radically altered the kinds of skills that are advantageous to labour and educational systems have often lumbered awkwardly to keep up with the new demands. More than twenty years ago, for example, Robert Reich pointed out an emergent division between knowledge-based ‘symbolic-analytic’ services, routine production and ‘in-person’ services. The ‘symbolic analysts’ included engineers, legal experts, researchers, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants and other ‘mind workers’, who were primarily engaged in collecting, processing, analysing and manipulating information and symbols for a living. This group of workers, which Reich estimated made up roughly 20 per cent of the labour force in the USA, occupied a privileged position in part because they could practise their trade almost anywhere in the world. They needed, however, to be well educated in analytic and symbolic skills and much of this begins in the home, where, loaded down with electronic gadgets, children learn at an early age how to use and manipulate data and information adequate for an emergent ‘knowledge-based’ economy.
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This group forms the core of a relatively affluent though highly mobile upper middle class within capitalism and one that increasingly tends to segregate itself (and to enclose its processes of social reproduction) in privileged enclaves away from the rest of society. By way of contrast, traditional production workers (for example, in steel and car production) and ordinary service workers have very little future, in part because those are the jobs most likely to disappear and in part because even those jobs that remain are likely to be low-wage with very scant benefits simply because of the massive labour surpluses now available.

The long-standing interest in increasing labour productivity among at least a certain segment of the workforce did not initially encompass all of the worker’s cultural and affective life. Aspects of social reproduction, such as the raising of children or caring for the sick and elderly, continued in many instances and places to be very much the individual worker’s affair and outside of market considerations, as were many of the particular trappings of cultural life. But
with the complexities of capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation, the capitalist state increasingly found itself necessarily embroiled in the regulation and provision of public health, of education, social control and even the cultivation of certain habits of heart and mind conducive to self-discipline and citizenship among the populace at large.

While the whole field of social reproduction is, as Cindi Katz puts it, ‘the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’, it is ‘also a set of structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation with production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension’. The contradictory unity between social reproduction and the reproduction of capital crystallises out as a moving contradiction of singular interest throughout the history of capital. What it is about now is light years away from what it was in 1850. ‘Social reproduction,’ Katz continues, ‘encompasses daily and long term reproduction, both of the means of production and the labour power to make them work. At its most basic, it hinges on the biological reproduction of the labour force, both generationally and on a daily basis.’ It also encompasses the production and reproduction of manual, mental and conceptual skills.
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All of this is achieved on the basis of the individual wage plus the social wage provided by various state agencies (for example, education and health care) and key institutions of civil society (for example, the Church and a wide range of philanthropically supported NGOs).

From the standpoint of labour, social reproduction has a very particular meaning. The labourers receive a money wage and it is their choice how they spend it. What they spend it on and why were, in the early days, of no interest to capital. But that is by no means true today, as we shall see. How much labourers need to survive and reproduce themselves in part depends upon how much labourers and their families and communities can do for themselves. There is a vast amount of unpaid labour absorbed in social reproduction, most of it, as feminists have repeatedly and quite correctly pointed out, traditionally and even to this day being done by women. Social reproduction is for capital a large and convenient sphere in which
real costs are externalised on to households and other communal entities. Its costs weigh disproportionately on different groups in the population. In the case of partial proletarianisation, as discussed earlier for example, almost all the costs of child rearing and caring for the sick and the aged are left to the household labours of peasant or rural societies. Under conditions of social democracy, however, political movements drove capital to internalise some of these costs either directly (through pension, insurance and health care provisions in wage contracts) or indirectly (through taxation on capital to support the state provision of services via a welfare state).

Part of the neoliberal political programme and ethos in recent times has been to externalise as much as possible the costs of social reproduction on to the populace at large in order to raise the profit rate for capital by reducing its tax burden. The argument has been that the welfare state was becoming too costly and that tax relief for capital would stimulate deeper and faster economic growth, which, when the benefits were spread around, would make everyone better off. It never worked out that way, of course, because the rich took virtually all of the savings and passed on none of the benefits (except in the form of some morally questionable therapeutic philanthropy).

Households are not, however, isolated entities. They are embedded in a matrix of social interactions and social relations present in places. Their labours are often shared – in middle-class US neighbourhoods, for example, car-pooling, childcare, the staging of collective events like park picnics, street fairs and block parties are all part of daily life and there is even an associated constituency, soccer moms, who garner political attention. There is a good deal of non-monetary exchange, of mutual aid in evidence, spread across everything from helping to fix the neighbour’s car to painting the patio and helping maintain common spaces for communal enjoyment. How much of this occurs and through what mechanisms can be immensely varied but it is undeniable that in many parts of the world households conjoin in a whole range of practices of mututal support to create some semblance of a common life. Such practices get formalised in the establishment of community associations, ethnic assemblies,
religious organisations and the like, which pay considerable attention to defining and maintaining (sometimes repressively) the appropriate neighbourhood conditions for social reproduction. Such associations can form the basis for larger social movements and it is from them that much inspiration is drawn for the idea that another life is possible to that given by pure market and monetary transactions. While it would seem that the neoliberal assault on state provision of social services might be counteracted by an upsurge of practices of mutual aid, the evidence for the most part seems otherwise – that the individualistic and self-centred profit-maximising ethic through which neoliberalism works (along with other features such as increased geographical mobility) has if anything diminished mutual aid as a feature of a common social life except in communities that define their ties in religious or ethnic bonding terms. None of this is helped by the increasing predilection of consumers to treat their home as a short-term speculative investment rather than as a place to create a solid and settled life. It is also true that the modes of urban living that capital typically produces (particularly with respect to dependence on the car) are not very conducive to the creation of mutually supportive social networks that can encourage more adequate and fulfilling forms of social reproduction.

Behind all of this there lurks an incipient and potentially damaging contradiction that we have encountered before in different guises. Labourers and households are a significant source of effective demand and they play a significant role in the realisation of values in the market. If they are largely producing for themselves outside of the market, then they do not buy in the market and they furnish less in the way of effective demand. This is the problem with partial proletarianisation and explains why, at some point, it often gives way (usually under the pressure of capital) to full proletarianisation. If the welfare state is dismantled, then bang goes a hefty chunk of effective demand and the field for realisation of values shrinks. This is the problem with austerity politics. The contradiction between capital’s rising potential profitability in production and its falling potential profitability due to insufficient effective demand intensifies
as attempts to manage the contradiction between social reproduction and production lurch from one extreme to another.