Charlie, The limitation of working time is NOT about "how much work needs to be done in this world." It is about emancipation and basic entitlements to provisioning. Not limiting working time will ensure that the work that needs to be done WON'T be done and instead people will be simultaneously compelled to work at substandard jobs and compelled to be idle through unemployment to produce superfluous and even harmful commodities in service to the accumulation of capital.
Upcoming in August, the P2P Foundation blog will be featuring my book, Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line, as its "book of the week." In preparation for that I wrote a brief overview of the book that highlights its proposal for a "labor commons" unionism. It occurred to me while writing it that the "lump of labor" served in effect as a surrogate for the idea of the commons that anti-union propagandists were loathe to identify for fear that mention of it would backfire and gain sympathy for the workers and unions. What workers were asking for with shorter working time was an equitable sharing of both the work to be done and the fruits of labor and this is what had to be perverted into a "hidden motive" and a fallacious belief in a fixed amount of work. While doing a bit of superficial background research on the history of the commons, I came across this wonderful quote from a book by Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Common rights are embedded in a particular ecology with its local husbandry. For commoners, the expression ˜law of the land’ does not refer to the will of the sovereign. Commoners think first not of title deeds, but of human deeds: how will this land be tilled? Does it require manuring? What grows there? They begin to explore. You might call it a natural attitude. Second, commoning is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. Third, commoning is collective. Fourth, being independent of the state, commoning is independent also of the temporality of the law and state. Magna Carta does not list rights, it grants perpetuities. It goes deep into human history. "...commoning is embedded in a labor process"! That's the reciprocal of my idea of a labor commons. Linebaugh's analysis of the commons depends centrally on his reading of the Charter of the Forest (Carta de Foresta), a complementary, economic supplement to the Magna Carta which guaranteed to the common people the right to provision themselves from the Crown Lands, which included fisheries, fields and coastlines as well as treed forests. I would submit that the manifesto of the Owenite Society for the Promotion of National Regeneration took, in effect, a commons perspective on labor, as reflected in its preamble and first article: Monday, Nov. 25, 1833. At a meeting called, at the above time and place, of the Working People of Manchester, and their Friends, after taking into their consideration— That society in this country exhibits the strange anomaly of one part of the people working beyond their strength, another part working at worn-out and other employments for very inadequate wages, and another part in a state of starvation for want of employment; That eight hours' daily labour is enough for any human being, and under proper arrangements, sufficient to afford an amply supply of food, raiment, and shelter, or the necessaries and comforts of life, and that to the remainder of his time every person is entitled for education, recreation, and sleep ; That the productive power of this country, aided by machinery, is so great, and so rapidly increasing, as from its misdirection, to threaten danger to society by a still further fall in wages, unless some measure be adopted to reduce the hours of work, and to maintain at least the present amount of wages:— It was unanimously Resolved, 1. That it is desirable that all who wish to see society improved and confusion avoided, should endeavour to assist the working classes to obtain ' for eight hours' work the present full day's wages,' such eight hours to be performed between the hours of six in the morning and six in the evening; and that this new regulation should commence on the first day of March next. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence -- or no mere rhetorical flourish -- that Marx refers, in Capital, to the Magna Carta as the model for the legal limitation of the working day. "In place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.'" Following is the brief overview of my book that I sent to Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation: The issue I grapple with in *Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line *is not so much "what is the best remedy for unemployment" or even "what is the case for shorter working time" but why and how has one particular set of policy options been excluded from the mainstream discourse. Of course that possibly translates into "why is the *best* remedy the forbidden one?" Perhaps as much as or even more than problem solving, I am fascinated by the notion of taboo and its functioning as *unwritten* prohibition. How is the elusive ban transmitted and enforced in the absence of explicit instructions for such transmission and enforcement? The answer is through stock narratives that operate virtually as rituals, ignoring conflicting facts, inassimilable scientific theories and appalling outcomes. With regard to working time, academic economics has fostered the notion of a self-adjusting, individual choice-driven natural order in which the given hours of work are presumed to be optimal and any interference will lead to a decline in welfare. There are only three or four problems with this tale of a miraculous automatism. The canonical income-leisure choice model upon which it is based has no pedigree in economic theory and has been refuted by the empirical data. The idea is inconsistent with the established and authoritative theory of the hours of labor, presented by S.J. Chapman over a hundred years ago. And the strange "lump of labor" fallacy *claim* – an alleged belief by shorter work time policy advocates in a "fixed amount of work," which is routinely invoked to disparage dissenters – was decisively refuted as itself a fallacy nearly a century ago. One would think that with three strikes against it, the conventional wisdom hours of work and employment would be ripe for reconsideration. But, no, the impasse seems as formidable as ever, with calls for work time reduction relegated to the fringe of policy debate, even in the face of economic crisis, unacceptably high and persistent unemployment and the discrediting of formerly respectable economic myths about efficient markets and the "great moderation." My approach to the issue of work time reduction and its taboo has led me down two tracks. One was recovering and documenting the body of economic thought suppressed by the fallacy claim and/or displaced by the textbook dogma that has grown up around income-leisure choice. The other was tracing the substance and history of the fallacy claim itself. That process has led me to a rather unexpected revelation of what the elusive "lump" in the fallacy claim actually stands for: the commons. In retrospect, it seems simple. If dogmatic political economy is understood as striving to vindicate the rights of property, then the violence of primitive accumulation and enclosure of the commons can only stand as an embarrassment and impediment to that goal – one that must be shunned, evaded and denied. Investigating the taboo on "work sharing" also highlights something about traditional attitudes toward work as a communal activity that has been obscured by the now prevailing industrial-era innovation of wage labor. Not only is it perfectly *reasonable* – and not fallacious – to think in terms of sharing the work, it was formerly ingrained and virtually unthinkable socially to do otherwise. This is not to say that the institutions for carrying out such sharing were necessarily ideal or equitable, or that those institutions *should* have survived the industrialization that finished them off. The lesson we can take from these archaic institutions, though, is that the individualized commodity form of wage labor is not the only or necessarily the best way of organizing and compensating work. The labor commons that I propose in *Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line* is thus not an entirely new idea but is rooted in traditional practices and institutions such as the quilting bee, barn raising and medieval guilds. It is also foreshadowed in the contradictory nature of the modern division of labor and wage system itself, in that the determination of who *does* what and who *gets paid* how much is inevitably controversial and unstable. Early trade unionism, in sharp contrast to today's trade union bureaucracy, took much of its impetus from the much maligned commons view of work, which Samuel Gompers summed up in the phrase: "That so long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of labor are too long." My innovation is to animate the labor commons through a new accounting technique – a method of social accounting that takes into explicit account the effects of work-time variation and distribution on social productivity. The calculations that need to be performed for this new social accounting for time are conceptually easy to explain but operationally complex enough to be feasible only with the advent of the personal computer and availability of spreadsheet programs. Moreover, the technology lends itself to a deliberative solution, rather than to the dictate of experts. On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Charlie <[email protected]> wrote: > There is so much work to be done in this world cleaning up the messes > and liberating all of humanity from material and cultural shackles. > Also, work now requires much less back-breaking toil than ever before. > Yes, let's get back to a 40-hour week and a lengthy vacation, but stress > on idleness and leisure seems misplaced. > > The first job, though, is to get to a world where these choices can be > made - No Rich, No Poor. > > Charles Andrews > > > > > > Exactly, except that Marx goes deeper into the social consequences. > > > ... as Marx looked forward to increase disposable time. > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Sandwichman
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
