Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (40 page)

But there is more than a mere kernel of truth in the idea of a central contradiction between revolutions in the productive forces and their conflictual and contradictory social relations. There is, as
we saw in the case of
Contradiction 8
, a deep connection between the technical evolution of capital and the radical transformation of work and of social value. But there are further implications when we address this and other contradictions (such as those arising out of divisions of labour) from the standpoint of alienation. André Gorz has pioneered the way in illuminating these, so I shall simply follow him here.

‘The economic rationalisation of work’ that occurs with the capitalist development of technological powers, writes Gorz, produces ‘individuals who, being alienated in their work, will, necessarily be alienated in their consumption as well, and eventually, in their needs’. The more money individuals can command (and money has the potential, as we have seen, to increase without limit even within individual bank accounts), the more individual needs must increase if those individuals are to perform their economic role as ‘rational consumers’ (‘rational’, that is, from the standpoint of capital). A dialectical relation, a spiral of interactions, is established between the desire for money and an economy of needs promoted within the social order. The idea of a stable good life and of good living according to modest requirements is displaced by an insatiable desire for gaining more and yet more money power in order to command more and yet more consumer goods. The effect is to ‘sweep away the ancient idea of freedom and existential autonomy’ and to surrender true freedom for the limited freedoms of endless striving to participate in and beat the market.
³

Let us unpack the details of this argument. ‘The essential question,’ Gorz writes, ‘is the extent to which the skills and faculties a job employs constitute an occupational culture and the extent to which there is a unity between occupational culture and the culture of everyday life – between work and life. The extent, in other words, to which involvement in one’s work implies the enrichment or sacrificing of one’s individual being.’ The technology of work is on the surface totally indifferent to this question, but, as we have seen, much of the dynamic of technological change has been orchestrated to disem-power and diminish the worker. Such a trajectory for innovation is
deeply incompatible with the enrichment of the worker’s life. Technology does not and cannot give rise to a distinctive culture over and beyond what it itself commands. The violence of technology resides in the way it cuts the link between the person and sensory interaction with the world. It is, says Gorz, ‘a form of repression that denies our own sensitivity’. Tenderness and compassion are not allowed. Nature, as we have seen, is treated ‘in an instrumental way’ and this does ‘violence’ to ‘Nature and to our own and other people’s bodies. The culture of everyday life is – with all the disturbing ambiguity this antinomic creation contains – a culture of violence, or, in its most extreme form, a systematic, thought-out, sublimated, aggravated
culture of barbarism
.’
⁴
This is most obvious, of course, when we think of drone strikes and gas chambers. But Gorz’s point is that it is this that also deeply penetrates to the very core of daily life by way of the instruments we daily use to live that life, including all those we handle in our work.

There is, evidently, a deep longing in popular culture to somehow humanise the impacts of this barren culture of technology. We see that in the way that the replicants in
Blade Runner
acquire feelings, how Sonmi-451 learns an expressive language in
Cloud Atlas
, how the robots in
Wall-E
learn to care and shed a tear while human beings, bloated with compensatory consumer goods, passively float alone, each on their separate magic carpet, above the ruinous world the robots are seeking to order below; and even, more negatively, how HAL the computer in
2001: A Space Odyssey
goes rogue. The sheer impossibility of this dream of humanising technology does nothing to deter its repeated articulation. So where, then, do we go to find a more human way to reconstruct our world?

‘Working,’ Gorz insists, ‘is not just the creation of economic wealth; it is also always a means of self-creation. Therefore we must also ask
a propos
the contents of our work whether the work produces the kind of men and women we wish humanity to be made of.’ We know that many if not most of those at work are not happy with what they do. A recent comprehensive Gallup survey in the USA showed, for example, that about 70 per cent of full-time workers either hated going to
work or had mentally checked out and become, in effect, saboteurs spreading discontent everywhere and thereby costing their employer a great deal in the form of lost efficiency. The 30 per cent who were engaged were mainly what Gorz called ‘reprofessionalised’ workers (the designers, engineers and managers of highly complex technological systems). Are these sorts of workers, asks Gorz, ‘closer to a possible ideal of humanity than the more traditional types of workers? Can the complex tasks they are allotted fill their life and give it meaning, without simultaneously distorting it? How, in a word, is this work lived?’ Can the violence of technical culture be transcended?

Gorz’s answer is discouraging. Technology can certainly be used ‘to increase the efficiency of labour, and reduce the toil involved and the number of working hours’. But this has a price. ‘It divorces work from life, and occupational culture from the culture of everyday life; it demands a despotic domination of oneself in exchange for an increased domination of Nature; it reduces the field of lived experience and existential autonomy; it separates the producer from the product to the point where she or he no longer knows the purpose of what she or he is doing.’ If this is not total alienation within the labour process then what is?

‘The price we have to pay for technicisation is only acceptable,’ Gorz continues, ‘if the latter saves work and time. This is its declared aim and it can have no other. It is to allow us to produce more and better in less time and with less effort.’ There is no ambition here ‘for work to fill the life of each individual and be the principal source of meaning’. This defines the heart of the contradiction within the labour process. In saving time and effort at work technology destroys all meaning for the worker. ‘A job whose effect and aim are to save work cannot, at the same time, glorify work as the essential source of personal identity and fulfilment. The meaning of the current technological revolution cannot be to rehabilitate the work ethic and identification with one’s work.’ It could only have meaning if it released the labourer from drudgery at work for ‘non-work activities in which we can all, the new type of worker included, develop that dimension of our humanity which finds no outlet in technicised work’.
⁵
‘Whether
it takes the form of unemployment, marginalisation and lack of job security, or a general reduction of working hours, the crisis of the work-based society (that is, based on work in the economic sense of the word) forces individuals to look outside work for sources of identity and social belonging.’ It is only outside of work that the worker has the possibility to achieve personal fulfilment, to acquire self-esteem and, hence, ‘the esteem of others’.
⁶

Society at large has been forced to make an existential choice. Either the economic sphere of capital accumulation had to be curbed to allow for the free development of human capacities and powers outside the tyranny of the market and of work, ‘or else economic rationality would have to make the needs of consumers grow at least as quickly as the production of commodities and commodified services’. This is exactly the problem that Martin Ford identifies, except that he eschews all talk of any alternative to capitalist economic rationality. But in this latter eventuality – the path that was actually chosen – says Gorz, ‘consumption would have to be [organised] in the service of production. Production would no longer have the function of satisfying existing needs in the most efficient way possible; on the contrary, it was needs which would increasingly have the function of enabling production to keep growing.’ The result has been paradoxical:

unlimited maximum efficiency in the [realisation] of capital thus demanded unlimited maximum inefficiency in meeting needs, and unlimited maximum wastage in consumption. The frontiers between needs, wishes and desires needed to be broken down; the desire for dearer products of an equal or inferior use value to those previously employed had to be created; wishes had to be given the impervious urgency of need. In short, a demand had to be created, consumers had to be created for the goods that were the most profitable to produce and, to this end, new forms of scarcity had unceasingly to be reproduced in the heart of opulence, through accelerated innovation and obsolescence, through the reproduction of inequalities on an increasingly higher level …
⁷

Need creation took precedence over need satisfaction for the mass of the people.

‘Economic rationality needed continually to raise the level of consumption without raising the rate of satisfaction; to push back the frontier of the sufficient, to maintain the impression that there could not be enough for everyone.’ The stratification of consumption, in which the consumerism of an affluent and parasitic leisure class called the shots and led the way, became crucial to ensuring the realisation of value. This is what Thorstein Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class
, published back in 1899, so brilliantly exposed. But what we now know is that if such a class did not already exist it would have to be invented.
⁸
An alienating consumerism is needed to solve the dilemma of a sagging effective demand produced by wage repressions and technologically induced unemployment for the mass of the workers. The latter, submerged and surrounded at every turn in a sea of increasingly conspicuous consumption, find themselves frantically seeking to maximise their incomes at all costs, working longer and longer hours in order to meet their artificially escalating needs as well as to keep up with the needs of the Joneses.

Instead of working fewer hours, as the new technologies would allow, the mass of the people found themselves working more. But this also served a social end. Allowing free time for more and more individuals to pursue their own objectives of self-realisation is terrifying for the prospects for capital’s continuous and secure control over labour, both in the workplace and in the market. Capitalist ‘economic rationality has no room for authentically free time which neither produces or consumes commercial wealth,’ writes Gorz. ‘It demands the full-time employment of those who are employed by virtue not of an objective necessity but of its originating logic; wages must be fixed in such as way as to induce the workers to maximum effort.’ Wage demands initiated by the trade unions ‘are, in fact, the only demands which do not undermine the rationality of the economic system’. Rational consumption – rational, that is, in relation to perpetual capital accumulation – becomes an absolute necessity for the survival of capital. ‘Demands bearing on working
hours, the intensity of work, its organisation and nature, are, on the other hand, pregnant with subversive radicalism; they cannot be satisfied by money, they strike at economic rationality in its substance, and through it at the power of capital. The “market-based order” is fundamentally challenged when people find out that not all values are quantifiable, that money cannot buy everything and that what it cannot buy is something essential, or is even the essential thing.’
⁹
As the Priceless ads have it: ‘There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there is MasterCard.’

‘Persuading individuals that the consumer goods and services they are offered adequately compensate for the sacrifice they must make in order to obtain them and that such consumption constitutes a haven of individual happiness which sets them apart from the crowd is something which typically belongs to the sphere of commercial advertising.’ Here the ‘mad men’ of advertising (who now account for a large portion of economic activity in the USA) take centre stage to wreak their havoc upon the social order. Their focus is private enterprises and private individuals. Their mission is to persuade people to consume goods that are ‘neither necessary nor even merely useful’. Commodities ‘are always presented as containing an element of luxury, of superfluity, of fantasy, which by designating the purchaser as a “happy and privileged person” protects him or her from the pressures of a rationalised universe and the obligation to conduct themselves in a functional manner.’ Gorz defines these goods as ‘compensatory goods’ which are ‘desired as much – if not more – for their uselessness as for their use value; for it is this element of uselessness (in superfluous gadgets and ornaments, for example) which symbolises the buyer’s escape from the collective universe in a haven of private sovereignty’.
¹⁰
It is precisely this consumerism of excess, this uselessness, that the mad men of advertising have proved so adept at selling. Such consumerism of excess is deeply alien to the satisfaction of human wants, needs and desires. This is a view to which even the current Pope subscribes. ‘The limitless possibilities for consumption and distraction offered by contemporary society,’ he complains in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, lead ‘to a kind of
alienation at every level, for a society becomes alienated when its forms of social organisation, production and consumption make it more difficult to offer the gift of self and to establish solidarity between people.’
¹¹

But, as Gorz notes, ‘functional workers, who accept alienation in their work because the possibilities of consumption it offers are adequate compensation for them, can only come into being if they simultaneously become a socialised consumer. But only a market economy sector and commercial advertising that goes with it can produce these socialised consumers.’
¹²
This is exactly where the revolutionary movement of 1968, with all its vaunted rhetoric of individual liberty and freedom and social justice, ended up – lost in the world of alien consumerism, drowning in a wealth of compensatory goods, the ownership of which was taken as a sign of freedom of choice in the marketplace of human desires.