Gene Coyle wrote:
>Tom, I think you are on to something here. Tell us more.
I wish I knew more and/or knew how to tell it. The point about productivity
transcending labour input comes from the famous 10 pages in the Grundrisse
(pp. 704-714), which have been elaborated upon by, e.g., Moishe Postone and
Andre Gorz in recent years. I've put some of that material up on my website
at: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/dispose.htm
The paradox of hours increasing when they could, more efficiently, be
substantially reduced is in my view a narrative failure, which is to say
what is happening doesn't fit into our habituated ways of talking about what
is going on so we deny what is happening and instead tell a story about it
that will be more readily accepted because of its conventionality -- this is
like the joke about the drunk searching for his car keys under the street
lamp instead of where he dropped them "because the light is better over here."
I want to be quite explicit that such narrative substitution is not
exclusive to defenders of the status quo. For example, my own first response
to Chris Burford's inquiry was to resort to the more conventional, albeit
still critical, account. As a story-teller, as a human being, it is most
important to me that I not lose my audience, which may mean that
comprehensibility takes precedence over truth.
The story missing from our repetoire, the story we cannot tell (perhaps
because we are ashamed to tell it?), is the story about the emancipation
from work. Its absence is all the more remarkable because it is one of the
most basic stories in our cultural tradition. I am referring, of course, to
the story of Paradise. For us, "Paradise Lost" is not a mythological place
we have been driven out of but a story about our experience that we are no
longer capable of uttering (that is to say, Paradise has been driven out of
us).
Instead of potentially as emancipation *from* work, we relate to our
condition absurdly as a scarcity of work, as a scarcity of social
domination. Mainstream economists reassure us continually that, provided we
follow their prescriptions, there will be plenty of work to go around -- as
if more work and not freedom from work is what we should want. Such
"reassurance" is ironic because its point is primarily to confirm our bogus
anxieties about the "scarcity" of social domination and secondarily to
secure our allegiance to a means for alleviating the terrifying scarcity,
for extending and deepening the social domination. It would be comic if the
consequences were not so grim.
I said such assurance was ironic because if I said it was "satanic" some
readers might assume I am some kind of religious nut (instead of just a
literary crackpot). According to some interpretations (which I obviously
favour) William Blake's line about "dark Satanic mills" referred not to
sooty factories or the hypocritical established church but to the
"reassuring" utilitarian calculus that embraces domination and rejects
emancipation. In this Blakian sense, American men are working 4 more hours a
week than they did 20 years ago "because the devil made me do it"! (Maybe
that's what the homily about the devil making work for idle hands *really*
means.)
"From all the works I have read on the subject, the richest nations in the
world are those where the greatest revenue is or can be raised; as if the
power of compelling or inducing men to labour twice as much at the mills of
Gaza for the enjoyment of the Philistines, were a proof of any thing but a
tyranny or an ignorance twice as powerful." Thus wrote an anonymous
pamphleteer in February 1821 in a pamphlet Engels credited Marx for having
"rescued from oblivion" (Capital, vol. II, p. 94 in the Vintage edition) and
which Marx praised as containing "an important advance on Ricardo. It
bluntly describes surplus-value . . . as surplus labour, the labour which
the worker performs gratis, the labour he performs over and above the
quantity of labour by which the value of his labour power is replaced." (Op.
cit., p. 95 [quoted from Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, pp. 238-239]).
This is the same pamphlet Marx cites on page 706 of the Grundrisse
immediately after, and presumably as confirmation of, his own arresting
summary: "Forces of production and social relations -- two different sides
of the development of the social individual -- appear to capital as mere
means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In
fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation
sky-high."
What have we here? "To blow this foundation sky-high"? Hyperbole? Certainly.
Apocalypticism? Wishful thinking? No. In some sense, though, the exclamation
marks a failure of words adequate to describe the profundity of the
contradiction Marx is trying to grasp, namely the "contradiction between the
foundation of bourgeois production and its development." "HOLY SHIT! JEEEZUS
FUCKING CHRIST!" he may as well have been muttering to himself (in German,
though, of course).
Contra-diction -- could it not be, then, that the expression (increasing
hours of work) is somehow "saying the opposite" of what the development is
unfolding (decreasing socially necessary labour time). And isn't this
disjuncture -- a widening gulf, really -- exactly what many of us are
experiencing or anticipating as "crisis"?
"The material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." Kinda scary,
isn't it? Maybe if we just put in a few more hours of overtime at work it
will go away. Welcome to the new millennium.
>Tom Walker wrote:
>
> In my previous post, I gave what one might call my more conventional, das
> kapitalian, view of what's happening with hours. There is, however, another
> interpretation -- call it the grundrisse scenario -- that I think is at
> least as plausible but might seem a bit far out.
> That scenario would be that productivity has become so detached from labour
> input that the expenditure of hours of work as a source of value is
> increasingly a token exercise, but one that remains culturally necessary for
> the valorization of capital. Thus the increase of 4 hours a week could very
> well reflect the social non-necessity not only of those 4 extra hours but of
> a considerable number of the base hours from 20 years ago.
> Or -- to take another stab at it -- men are working 4 more hours to
> *cover-up* the perplexing circumstance that there may be no measureable
> difference in the out!
> !
> put from a workweek having a length of 44 or 40 or 36
> or 32 or 28 or 24 or 16 hours of work. Because of institutional arrangements
> built up around the 40 hour week, to reduce hours so drastically would IMPLY
> either a huge loss in income and benefits or an inconceivable class struggle
> and working class victory. And capital is taking those superfluous hours,
> socially unnecessary as they may be, because 1. this is the way it has
> always valorized itself, 2. society has not yet caught on to the
> fictitiousness of all this superfluous value and 3. as long as everyone else
> keeps doing it, the hours still count as if they were "socially necessary
> labour time".
>
> Chris Burford asked
>
> CNN on stress quotes the National Institute of Occupational Health and
> Safety as saying that men are working on average 4 hours a week longer
than
> 20 years ago.
> Figures presumably for the USA
>
> Yes, figures would definitely be for USA, according to the ILO annual hours
>
> in most other jurisdictions (with a few developing country exceptions) have
> declined so weekly hours would presumably also have declined.
>
> Are they true?
>
> They are in the right ball park. Average weekly hours are tricky because
>
> there are different ways of collecting the data and different ways of
> reporting it. The 4 hour a week increase would probably be for full-time
> employed workers, rather than an across the board average.
>
> Why is it happening?
>
> My call is mismanagement -- a combination of inept labour cost accounting
>
> practices and management credulity toward their own stupid propaganda has
> led U.S. employers to pursue lower hourly labour _rates_ even at the expense
> of productivity. Stanford Business School Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer argued in a
> Harvard Review of Business article a few years ago that most managers don't
> know the difference between labour rates and labour costs (which is the rate
> divided by hourly of output). Apparently a lot of workers are foolish enough
> to work a lot more hours for just a tiny bit more take home pay -- less pay
> even than the added expense of working the extra time.
>
> For more on the mythology surrounding working time see the summary of my
>
> forthcoming chapter at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm or better
> yet see the chapter, "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing:
> populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International
> Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah
> Figart forthcoming from Routledge in February 2001.
>
> and who benefits?
>
> Is there a Satan? Seriously though, there is undoubtedly a short term
>
> accounting advantage to employers roughly equivalent to the real loss
> experienced by workers as a result of what is in effect a "cost shift"
> strategy. In the longer term, that ficticious profit will certainly be wiped
> out as employers (in general) face bottlenecks, labour shortages and pent-up
> unrest. Of course, those who have benefited from the swindle and those who
> will have to pay for the damage are not likely to be the same corporations
> -- tough shit. The closest analogy I can think of is the situation in the
> former Soviet Bloc where managers of state-owned enterprises faced
> incentives to over-value their obsolete and depreciated capital equipment
> and warehouses full of unsaleable inventory.
>
> In my opinion, this has been THE big unreported story of the last 20 years
>
> and a story that the left in North America seems eerily blase about (unlike
> a certain K. Marx who in Das Kapital cited, with admiration, the redundantly
> unequivocal resolution drafted by that very same K. Marx in 1866 for the
> Congress of International Working Men's Association: "We declare that the
> limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all
> further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.").
>
> Tom Walker
> Sandwichman and Deconsultant
> Bowen Island, BC
>
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
