I really shouldn't leave e-mails that I want to reply to on the back burner. The issues get fuzzy & forgotten. So here goes.
I wrote: >> Back in the 1970s, there were people who responded to every event in the same way: "oh, the cat had kittens! we need to build the Party!" That [attitude] should be criticized; it should have been criticized more. Now, I'm responding to what I interpret as a similar attitude from a quite different segment of the lefts, that says "oh, the cat had kittens! we need to restrict hours of work!"<< Sandwichman writes: > Here's what that's about: when there's an elephant in the room and no > one can mention it, someone has to say "hey, there's an elephant in > this room." I don't allow elephants in my room, only donkeys. ;-) > The elephant is that the demand for limitation of the hours of work > played a key role in the growth of the labor movement and the left up > until the late 1950s and early 1960s and plays no role today. What is > that about? The elephant is that the history of the movement for > shorter hours and of the arguments behind that movement seems entirely > forgotten by most people on the left and in labor. What happened? Is > it a coincidence that "The Working Day" in placed in the center of > Volume I of Marx's Capital? Was it intended as mere rhetorical > flourish when Marx drafted a resolution ... The slogan did not drop from the sky, not was it innate in Marx's (or Dilke's or Chapman's or Steward's) mind. Instead, it was the labor movement that spawned the slogan for workweek reduction. Then, the slogan helped unite the movement. I think it's a mistake to think that somehow the slogan alone will help revive the movement. It's a nice slogan, and I agree with it (as I've said before), but mere words get us nowhere: it makes more sense to me to focus on slogans that are currently rising in workers' consciousness, like preventing the rise in unemployment and preventing mass foreclosures. These slogans, which many might see as inadequate, could help create a movement because they have an organic connection with people's everyday experience. This in turn would spawn new slogans, one of which might be reducing the workweek's length. If the latter comes up, that's a good thing (as I've said before). Further, the slogan about reducing the paid workweek does not deal with the feminist dimension of the issue: women often (typically?) work a "double day," working for pay and doing a lot more work than men at home without pay. > I quote the above resolution time and time again. But that doesn't > mean my analysis comes from or is restricted to the one quotation > (from the "Great Man"). My interpretation of Marx's theory closely > parallels Moishe Postone's, which emphasizes the importance of the > analysis of working time in Marx's theory. But my position is not > thereby "marxist". Rather, I have spent considerable time and effort > researching explicitly non-marxist sources that in some respect > corroborate the key focus on working time. Thus the pre-Marx pamphlet > by Dilke, Sydney Chapman's neoclassical confirmation of the dynamic > between the extensive, intensive and value-defining dimensions of > working time, Ira Steward's very American, pragmatic and impressively > independent (of European socialist ideas) eight-hour theory. I don't care if your analysis is "Marxist" or not, especially since that gets into fruitless discussions about "what Marx (really) said." Rather, I care if it makes sense or not. I believe, however, that Marx's ideas help one's own ideas make sense. Again, I don't think reading old books helps with understanding the issues at hand. What slogans actually are organic in working-class life? (Of course, if _you_ want to read old books, there's nothing wrong with that.) > Put simply (albeit metaphorically) working time (or labor-power) is > the pulse of the capitalist economy. Any theory of medicine that > didn't recognize that the pulse expresses the beating of the heart and > that the beating heart circulates the blood would not be worthy of > being called a theory of medicine. One could just as well say that the pulse of the capitalist economy is the flow of money, specifically of surplus-value. If I remember correctly, Marx saw the the flow of labor and the flow of money as dialectically intertwined. Separating out one part and seeing it as the essence of the process produces only a one-sided understanding. Also, Marx himself knew of the limitations of an emphasis on the length of the working week or day or year. CAPITAL's analysis of capitalist work relations does not stop with chapter 10. Once the working day is limited, the capitalists figure out how to increase the _intensity_ of the work process, using machinery, assembly lines, etc. It's too bad that Marx didn't present more analysis of the intensity of work, but it's implied in the chapter on machinery. If I remember, Marx saw the restriction of the workweek as good for the capitalists as a class, because extensively long workweeks undermined the reproduction of labor-power. The restrictions on the workweek could be seen as an early example of social democracy, where a mass struggle pushes the capitalists to do something that's actually in their own best interest, in addition to helping the working class. (As I've said before, I see nothing wrong with social democratic programs and I wish we had more. But I disagree with social democrats about where such reforms come from.) > Condescending remarks about the > "cat has kittens, we need to restrict the hours of work" aside, as you > know, I have been daily serializing lengthy theoretical and historical > discussion of the hours of work question on our blog EconoSpeak. The "cat has kittens" remark is less clichéd than references to "knee-jerk responses." I don't think it's condescending as much as telling you something you don't want to hear, i.e., that sloganeering has severe limitations that should be recognized. > It's > a big topic and I don't have all the answers. Nor do I have the luxury > of pontificating on the matter from an an academic ivory tower. I'm a > clerk/cashier in a small grocery store. Are you saying that I "pontificate" from "an academic ivory tower"? Usually Michael Perelman swoops into to quash such use of characterizations, because all they do is cause conflict and distract from serious arguments. BTW, you should know that small liberal arts colleges are not like the true ivory tower (Yale, UC Berkeley, etc.) It's absolutely true that working in academia limits one's perspective in a lot of ways (while allowing thinking and talking that is taboo elsewhere), but it's better to point out the details of why my statements are wrong (logically, empirically, in method) rather than engaging in blanket insults to shut off criticism you don't like. > But you know, if I did have an academic appointment I would feel a > moral compulsion to listen respectfully to non-tenured scholars rather > than insulting them with unwarranted comments about cats and kittens. > I guess that's just a matter of temperament. I was not insulting you. Instead, I was referring to an _attitude_. Go read what I said, quoted above. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
