LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The primitive accumulation of bodies posted by Richard Seymour

Somewhat tangential to the last post, I know, but worth posting up:

Marx, too, sees the alienation from the body as a distinguishing trait of the capitalist work-relation. By transforming labour into a commodity, capitalism causes workers to submit their activities to an external order over which they have no control and with which they cannot identify. Thus, the labour process becomes a ground of self-estrangement ... Furthermore, with the development of a capitalist economy, the worker becomes (though only formally) the "free owner" of "his" labour-power, which (unlike the slave) he can place at the disposal of the buyer for a limited period of time. This implies that "[h]e must constantly look upon his labour-power" (his energies, his faculties) as his own property, as his own commodity

... But only in the second half of the 19th Century can we glimpse that type of worker - temperate, prudent, responsible, proud to own a watch ...

The situation was radically different in the period of primitive accumulation when the emerging bourgeoisie discovered that the "liberation of labour-power" - that is, the expropriation of the peasantry from the common lands - was not sufficient to force the dispossessed proletarians to accept wage-labour. Unlike Milton's Adam, who upon being expelled from the Garden of Eden, set forth cheerfully for a life dedicated to work, the expropriated peasnts and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage. More often they became beggars, vagabonds or criminals. A long process would be required to produce a disciplined work-force. In the 16th and 17th centuies, the hatred for wage labour was so intense that many prolearians preferred to risk the gallows, rather than submit to the new conditions of work.

This was the first capitalist crisis, one far more serious than all the commercial crises that threatened the foundarions of the capitalist system in the first phase of its development. As is well-known, the response of the bourgeoisie was the institution of a true regime of terror, implemented through the intensfication of penalties (particularly those punishing the crimes against property), the introduction of "bloody laws" aginst vagabonds, intended to bind workers to the jobs imposed on them, as once the serf had been bound to the land, and the multiplication of executions. In England alone, 72,000 people were hung by Henry the VIII during the thirty-eight years of his reign and the massacres continued into th late 16th century. In the 1570s, 300 to 400 "rogues" were "devoured by the gallows in one place or another every year" (Hoskins 1977:9). ln Devon alone, seventy four people were hanged just in 1598 (ibid.).

But the violence of the ruling class was not confined to the repression of transgressors. It also aimed at a radical transformation of the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any form of behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-discipline. The dimensions of this attack are apparent in the social legislation that, by the middle of the 16th Century, was introduced in England and France. Games were forbidden, particularly games of chance that, besides being useless, undermined the individual's sense of resionsibility and "work ethic." Taverns were closed, along with baths. Nakedness was penalised, as were many other 'unproductive' forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse.

It was in the course of this vast process of social engineering that a new concept of the body and a new policy toward it began to be shaped. The novelty was that the body was attacked as the source of all evils, and yet it was studied with the same passion that, in the same years, animated the investigation of celestial motion.

Why was the body so central to state politics and intellectual discourse? One is tempted to answer that this obsession with the body reflecs the fear that the proletariat inspired in the ruling class. It was the fear felt by the bourgeois or the nobleman alike who, wherever they went, in the streets or on their travels, were besieged by a threatening crowd,begging them or preparing to rob them. lt was also the fear felt by those who presided over the administration of the state, whose consolidation was continuously undermined - but also determined - by the threat of riots and social disorder.

Yet there was more.We must not forget that the beggarly and riotous proletariat - who forced the rich to travel by carriage to escape its assaults or to go to bed with two pistols under the pillow - was the same social subject who increasingly appeared as the source of all wealth. It was the same of whom the mercantlists, the first economists of capitalist society, never tired of repeating (though not without second thoughts) that "the more, the better," often deploring that so many bodies were wasted on the gallows. - Silvia Federici, The Caliban and the Witch, pp. 135-7.

Labels: body, capitalism, dead labour, patriarchy, population growth, sexist oppression, terrorism, wage labour, work time, workplace discipline, zombie labour

Friday, July 30, 2010

The right to work (less) posted by Richard Seymour

Nina Power applies the scalpel of socialist feminist critique to the Right to Work campaign in today's Guardian. This is most welcome, because the campaign against the cuts, and against unemployment, should be the topic of urgent debate in the press - which otherwise shows little interest in the concerns of the working class. (Ask yourself this: all newspapers have a 'business' section, overwhelmingly concerned with the doings of chief executives, financiers and multinationals, so why is there no labour section?) Power's basic point is that the slogan 'Right to Work' is problematic because of the way in which it suggests that access to waged labour is itself a sufficient solution, and secondly because of certain connotations that it may have in participating in a discourse that elevates work to "the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too."

Indeed, while I don't completely agree with Power's analysis, there's a real problem here. We have a Tory government that is determined to cut the welfare state, slashing benefits, driving more and more of the disabled off benefits. (On this latter, see Christopher Read's disturbing article for the New Left Project). One of the ways in which this is justified is by means of a moralistic, coercive appeal to work as the alternative to poverty and 'dependency culture'. Work, in this reactionary trope, confers dignity and respectability. Indeed, it is put to us that if we truly respect our elders, we have to find a way to 'allow' older people to stay on in work for a few more years before claiming their pension entitlement, even as youth unemployment soars, and even if this means millions of people die before seeing a single penny of their deferred wages.

To the extent that asserting a 'right to work' could be seen as colluding in this idea, I can see the virtue of Power's alternative 'refusal to work': the right to be lazy, as Lafargue put it. A central component of socialism in its marxist variant is the drive to reduce the burden of compulsory labour on people, using productivity gains to shorten people's working lives and elongate their living hours. Concretely, in the context of a recession with mass unemployment, we can see how this might translate into a real demand: share the work around more equitably, give us a shorter working week with no loss of pay.

So, here's where Power's argument becomes problematic. A central campaigning demand of 'Right to Work' is a 35 hour week with no loss of pay, as affirmed at the 2010 conference. This is not especially radical. The New Economic Foundation goes farther, demanding a 21 hour working week, spread over four days. But given that the average working week in the UK is the longest in Europe at some 41.4 hours, and given that the average worker in the UK performs two months of unpaid overtime each year, a compulsory 35 hour week would be a good start, and constitute a relief for millions of workers. It would, in the marxist lexicon, reduce the rate of exploitation, as well as giving people more leisure time and reducing the demonstrably adverse effects of over-work - the physiological effects described by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level, and the psychological effects described by Oliver James in Affluenza.

The Federation of European Employers, of course, sees things differently. They believe that regulations and social benefits, giving people the right to holidays and sick leave for example, is costing EU businesses too much, and they want to see such entitlements removed so that more time is spent at work and thus more surplus extracted. The CBI, for its part, is committed to maintaining high working hours and its successful lobbying to maintain Britain's opt out of the EU Working Time directive is one of the politico-legal bases for Britain's over-long working week and high rates of exploitation and inequality. So, the Right to Work campaign positions it against the employers, the government, and their moralising drive to force people to work more. We are for the right to work - for access to waged labour - but we are also for the right to work less for the same wage. That can't be accomplished unless the work is shared more equitably, and unless unemployment is systematically attacked.

The demand for the right to work is also a demand to end the ruling class policy of maintaining a certain rate of unemployment (typically 5% in growth periods) to weaken the bargaining power of labour, reduce wage claims and thus supposedly control inflation. It's a demand, tacitly, to increase the share of the social product going to labour. This is important because, as Power points out, the mass entry of women into the workforce in the last forty years or so has coincided with wage stagnation and attacks on welfare, such that the amount of work being done by men and women has increased while the share of the social product going to labour has diminished. New Labour's adaptation to neoliberalism meant that Gordon Brown embraced a definition of 'full employment' as the maximum employment that will place no upward pressure on inflation. That has actually involved consistently high rates of unemployment and is thus inconsistent with the right to work. This means that women in particular are suffering: with the dual burden of domestic and workplace labour increasing the total amount of work performed by women, both the social wage and the market wage have stagnated or declined for millions. Defending the right to work is therefore an important weapon in defending the income of workers, especially the most precariously employed, lowest paid women workers.

Now the Tories' attack on welfare will adversely effect women in two ways. It will drive up unemployment by relieving hundreds of thousands of public sector workers - disproportionately female - of their jobs. It will also reduce help for working mothers and children, further depress the social wage, and make it less easy for mothers to seek paid work. That's why they're pushing the 'family' agenda, as if restoring Victorian patriarchal values will sweep up the social mess created by these cuts. This is why a defence of the welfare state is an essential component of Right to Work's strategy, and is also a vital element of women's liberation.

Lastly, do we need a new slogan to escape the pharisaical connotations alluded to above? I don't know that we do. The right to work is not coextensive with the obligation to work. On the contrary, asserting the right to work is essential for the purpose of reducing the amount of work that people have to do, and increasing the share of the social product they receive for their labour. It is also synonymous with defending the welfare state, so that unwaged work is paid in some sense. It does not entail "working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more" - quite the reverse. Most importantly, I think, the slogan cuts through the hypocrisy of the Tory cuts agenda. As much as they bluster about the redeeming powers of waged work, they are engaged in a programme that systematically attacks the right to work which we defiantly assert. What we need, I daresay, is not a new slogan, but a militant application of the current slogan. There lies the real basis for a movement to liberate ourselves from the burden of compulsory, soul-destroying, exploitative labour.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, exploitation, feminism, labour, misogyny, oppression, sexism, socialism, wage labour, working class

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Women and labour posted by Richard Seymour

One of the projects I'm working on at the moment is the subject of work under capitalism. I have it in mind to write the kind of book that insubordinate types such as yourselves could take to work. It would be a sociological satire, a users' guide to the workplace, a good way of wasting company time, and a resource for the bored, stressed and bullied. It would be a work of explanation and incitement combined. Are you interested yet?

One aspect of the subject that always comes up is the way in which politicians speak of work as dignifying and emancipating. Whether you're a single mother, disabled, or simply unemployed, work is the answer. There's an important sense in which this is true. If you're not in a workplace, there's no one to socialise with, organise with, or fight against. You're stuck with your narrow horizons, enforced by a miserly income. In work, you can get a certain measure of independence and self-respect - sociological studies tend to show that this is what people value about work, and it's what attracts women to jobs even where they are paid less than men, even when the job is emotionally or physically taxing. It's an escape from house-bound drudgery.

But work under capitalism can never be so unambiguously liberating, and I would hesitate to participate in the paeans without at least considering the matter of exploitation, and the way in which oppression can be intensified when intersecting with exploitative processes. In this respect, there was an interesting discussion at yesterday's Marxism meeting featuring Nina Power, Hester Eisenstein and Judith Orr. Those of you who have read Nina's book will know that it is a witty, trenchantly iconoclastic and incisive re-thinking of feminist mainstays on subjects from equality to pornography, its provocative opening line setting the tone for the combative, aphoristic style of exposition that follows. The chapter on the feminization of labour and the arguments therein were the source of mild controversy at yesterday's panel. To be brief about it, the argument is about the limits of female-emancipation-through-work.

The tremendous changes in the lives of women since WWII, with their increasing absorption into the labour force, is in very obvious ways a step forward. The erosion of the traditional capitalist patriarchy in the form of the nuclear family, which allotted to women a largely passive, housebound role in the reproduction of society, is a development that reactionaries have every reason to regret. When Frank Field MP recently said something to the effect that "single mothers don't need benefits, they need husbands", he was mobilising this retrograde, patriarchal version of social solidarity to justify the coming cuts in welfare and public services that working class women especially depend upon. (The Tories are now reportedly upping the ante, looking for up to 40% cuts across departments, though this may be an effort to make 25% cuts look moderate by comparison). Field explained that he was opposed to the emphasis on getting single mothers into work, and that the real issue was to target 'shirking fathers' who refused to find work. He blamed them for the high number of single parents, and said that they should lose their benefits altogether if they refused to take a government offer of work. This would coerce fathers into being productive and responsible, restore the cohesive family unit and serve mothers better than work. Now, this is a break from New Labour's agenda of coercing single mothers into jobs, but it is a break to the right. It is also significant that this anti-feminist, traditionalist, pro-family discourse is being used to bully working class men. It doesn't at all free women from the burden of bearing sole or key responsibility for the raising of children. In fact, it reinforces that role by attempting to restate the traditional status of men as key bread-winners. But what it does is attack the idea that motherhood is a social responsibility, that the feeding, education and raising of the future labour force is something that society has an interest in, and has to share the burden of. It individualises what is a social issue, and in this way discloses the hard, Thatcherite kernel at the heart of the Tories' "Big Society" soft-sell.

Still, despite the potential for emancipation that work can offer, the persistence of oppression reflected in such features as structural wage inequality suggests that it has definite limits. These limits express themselves in a number of ways. First of all, as insecurity, and the way in which this is turned into a virtue ('flexibility', etc). Secondly, as occupational typecasting, in which women are encouraged to take roles that involve emotional labour, 'caring' and 'nurturing' jobs, jobs requiring communication skills, and so on. Thirdly, as the sexualisation of labour, in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional'. Employers don't expect to have to shout at their female employees to dress nicely; they expect women to come prepared, knowing the drill, internalising such requisites as part of their own career mission. And this applies outside work as much in the workplace, ie in social networking sites, which employers and recruitment agencies regularly check to dig up information on CV submissions. Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves. And finally, perhaps, as a conflict between production and reproduction, in which women are expected to manage child birth and rearing in ways that don't burden the employers. This is just one more way in which women are expected to augment the exploitation process by pre-emptively exploiting themselves, by assuming extra hours of labour, by accepting deductions from their income to pay for childcare. The 'labourisation of women', as Power puts it, is a process that has intensified exploitation and reinvented gender oppression. That it doesn't have to be that way, and that the organisation of women in trade unions offers the beginnings of a way out of this deadlock, suggests that these limits arise in part because of a particular organisation of work, perhaps because of the individualisation of work in the neoliberal phase of accumulation, but more broadly because it's capitalism, and capitalism is most efficient when it is most exploitative, and when that exploitation is augmented by oppression.

I suggested previously that the phrase 'work-life balance' inadvertently revealed something about work under capitalism, namely the fact that the majority of one's waking hours are not spent alive, but labouring in a sort of undead capacity. If work and life are separate and opposing modes of existence, then the tendency of the former to increasingly dominate the latter outside of formal working hours, structuring our 'fun', commanding and regulating our socialisation, governing how we conduct ourselves in public, etc., means that capitalism is almost literally sucking the life out of us. That this process is advancing most rapidly for women confirms that the feminization of the proletariat is not automatically a liberation for women - not without the struggle and solidarity it makes possible.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, exploitation, feminism, labour, neoliberalism, patriarchy, profits, sexism, socialism, women

Monday, June 21, 2010

Working for capitalism posted by Richard Seymour

Class is not a thing but a relationship, an antagonism that is situated in production. Sociologists have long tried to understand class by reference to occuptional groupings because one can only identify what class one belongs to by locating oneself within the system of production. It is not a coincidence that workplace sociologists such as Bradley et al have done some of the essential work in restoring class to its central explanatory role in the social sciences. They build on the work of a generation of radicalised social theorists such as Huw Beynon, Theo Nichols, Richard Pfeffer and Harry Braverman, in describing how class power is inherited, wielded in the workplace, and rewarded with a greater or lesser share of profits - as well as how class systems are perpetually restructured as production is reshaped, and work takes on new forms.

Some social theorists maintain a sort of apocalyptic thesis in which technology and the 'knowledge economy' are rapidly obliterating the working class. In this view, work is something antiquated and mechanical, not something that one performs with advanced information technology or, heaven forfend, with the use of skilled knowledge. The worker is a dusty old chap with a spanner, not someone in a pressed shirt sitting in front of an LCD screen. Of course, 'work' has always had a broader meaning than such revisionists allow. The 'working class' has never been defined by a particular skill set, a particular kind of consumption, a particular set of values, sartorial tendencies or gustatory propensities. Therefore the emergence of a white collar proletariat with the ability to use Microsoft Office programmes should not seem counterintuitive - recruitment agencies make a living from this phenomenon. Their class situation is predicated on their relationship to the means of production, which determines how much power and self-direction they will have in the workplace.

In light of this, consider the following talk from Dan Pink, a sort of management guru and former speech-writer for Al Gore. He introduces the topic of 'drive', of what motivates people, and affirms - in a strangely affectless, yet gushing manner - the virtues of autonomy and self-direction in the workplace. It's a mantra for hippy capitalism:

Pink's assertions about what motivates people are not without interest. However, the first thing that strikes one about this little talk is that all of Pink's examples of "cool" workplace practises, wherein workers' productivity dramatically improves upon their being freed from management and the incentives structure, are taken from the software industry. They are taken from a set of employees whose particular role in production is necessarily in some sense both directive and executive. They are an atypical group of workers in this respect. The very fact that it would be possible to give them enough money for cash not to be a motivational issue, and thereafter allow them autonomy in the workplace, means that they are closer to the professional middle class than to the working class. For Pink and those of his persuasion, (and class purview no doubt), this is the future of work. But what the Pinks of this world don't get is that management has an interest in proletarianising such workers, and thus of turning their labour into a routinised series of discrete, mechanical tasks as far as possible.

When new technologies come along, part of the struggle between workers and management takes place over the former's mastery of the subject and thus their ability to resist managerial attempts to oversee, discipline and control their working day. The more managers can get to grips with this technology, or find surrogates and auxiliaries who already have a firm grip on it, the more they can break down workers' tasks into manageable units, the better to surveille, control and extract more surplus value. These processes are already well under way in the IT sector, and in all areas where information technology plays an important role. This is because it is capitalism, and under capitalism managers will always find themselves compelled to exert more control in the workplace, and reduce workers' autonomy accordingly. This might be irrational in one sense, in that suppressing creativity holds back innovation and production - but when has this not been the case under capitalism? When have management ever allowed skills to remain on the shop floor for too long? And when has bourgeois social theory not been available to obscure this process, such that the distribution of rewards and privilege is held to closely mirror the distribution of talent and desert? Only under socialism, in a situation where industry was democratically controlled and not subject to the extraction of profit, would motivations such as creativity, autonomy and altruism be important to production.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, immaterial labour, labour, middle class, ruling class, work, working class

Thursday, June 17, 2010

The power of positive thinking posted by Richard Seymour

Capitalism demands that you change your attitude:

Labels: capitalism, class, dead labour, fun, labour, positive thinking, work

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The dignity of labour posted by Richard Seymour

Beaten, bullied, shoved, kicked, degraded...

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it has uncovered significant evidence of abuse among producers supplying Britain's big supermarkets. The inquiry includes reports from meat factory workers who say they have had frozen burgers thrown at them by line managers, and accounts of pregnant women being forced to stand for long periods or perform heavy lifting under threat of the sack.
It also contained reports from women with heavy periods and people with bladder problems on production lines being denied toilet breaks and forced to endure the humiliation of bleeding and urinating on themselves.
One-fifth of workers interviewed, from across England and Wales, reported being pushed, kicked or having things thrown at them, while a third had experienced or witnessed verbal abuse.
The EHRC said some examples, such as forcing workers to do double shifts when ill or tired, were in breach of the law and licensing standards, while others were a "clear affront to respect and dignity".
Migrant workers are the most affected because one-third of permanent workers and two-thirds of agency workers in the industry are migrants, but British and other agency employees face similar ill-treatment, the report found.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, wage labour, working class, workplace discipline, zombie labour

Friday, February 12, 2010

Gone postal posted by Richard Seymour

'Roy Mayall', the pseudonymous postie who has been justly laying into an atrocious C4 Dispatches documentary, has a very interesting article in this week's Socialist Worker. You might recall him for some of his acuminous prose during the recent strikes, and he now runs a blog called - well, you could guess couldn't you? - Going Postal. He has been a wonderful guide to the machinations of Royal Mail management, and the consequent breakdown of industrial relations within the postal system. The article concerns his popular new book, Dear Granny Smith, which is an attack on the 'modernisation' procedures being driven through by management, and by the government, and the ensuing culture of overwork, bullying, stress, casualisation and poorer performance that results. I think the issue is something that every working person is confronted with. Consider this passage, for example:

Thirty years ago being a postman was one of the best jobs in the world. You were up at the crack of dawn, out in the fresh air, someone that everyone knew and recognised, serving a responsible role within the community, not only as the carrier of mail, but as a kind of watchman for the health of the community too. Someone who always knew what was going on.

These days the job is all relentless pressure, to work harder and faster, to do more duties, to carry more weight. No one has time for community values any more.

A new breed of bullying manager has entered the workplace, arbitrary and aggressive, imposing the new work rates with sadistic pleasure.

All of the joy has gone out of the job.

Though most workers are probably unable to look back to such Halcyon days, the trend of increasing regimentation, bullying, bigger workloads and absolutely despicable, overbearing managers is something everyone faces. A few years ago, I worked for a call centre that was suffering from low returns that was in large part due to poor equipment. Poor equipment meant fewer successful calls, and more chances of failing to deliver on a contract. It meant losing business. The company attempted to get to grips with the situation not by investing in equipment, which would have been costly, but by regimenting work more thoroughly, which promised to raise more money by - in the marxist lexicon - intensifying the rate of exploitation. The company put in place a number of managers at various levels to do this. They did their best to come up with things that workers commonly did that they believed hindered productivity, and drew up a list of rules, including the following:

If you are more than five minutes late for your shift without calling then you will be sent home ... [Employees] who are constantly late as well as those who cancel and no show regularly will no longer be booked for work ... [Employees] should not be leaving their station unless it is break time. If for any reason you do need to get up from your terminal please let your Supervisor know the reason you need to leave your desk [note - this meant you had to ask to go the toilet] ... Mobile Phones must be switched off while you are working. If your phone rings while you are working you will be sent home and not paid for the rest of the shift ... eating is not permitted while you are working, if you are caught eating then you will be sent home and not paid for the rest of the shift.... Please make sure you sit in the seat that has been allocated to you. This is on the shift plan. If you need to move for any reason please check this with your Supervisor first.... You must not chat to other Interviewers between calls. You should be concentrating on the next call you make and not distracting yourself and others talking to other people....

And so, predictably, on. I have seen similar documents in almost every company I've worked in, though in most cases the new dispensation was successfully resisted. The people who actually came up with this shit, I should point out, were largely self-important supervisors who earned only slightly more than those making calls, but whose relative autonomy and authority gave them an exaggerated sense of their importance. They were selected for such qualities, because management systematically weeded out those they regarded as being too 'soft' from managerial roles. At any rate, this sort of thing was possible because call centres are like most private sector companies in being unorganised, and like many service sector companies in relying disproportionately on young, temporary and casual staff. Ideally, such companies would seek the discipline and performance of a full-time crew, with the flexibility and pay structure of a temp crew. This is a model of working that has spread through substantial sectors of private sector employment, and it is taking hold in parts of the public sector, as the instance of the Royal Mail demonstrates, and it is being accomplished through a series of set-piece battles with organised labour.

This is part of a conjunctural process that needs to be understood. There used to reasonable amount of research done into the capitalist work cycle. We have a legacy of classic texts such as Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital, and Richard Pfeffer's Working for Capitalism, the latter building on the insights of the former. They investigated the rhythms of the working day; the de-skilling of workers and the way in which they are carefully denied an understanding of how their role fits into the broader production process; the narrow margin for controlling what one does and how one does it; the Sisyphean repetitiveness of the work; the minor moments of accomplishment puncuating the daily grind; the micro-aggressions of managers; the openly racist way in which jobs are allocated, etc.. I could be wrong, but I think all we've had lately is the anecdotal musings of a rich, middlebrow philosopher named Alain de Botton. We hear an awful lot about consumption, but next to nothing serious about labour. This is an accomplishment of neoliberal ideology, and it is perverse. We live in an era in which work has been intensified, and management are all the more arbitrary and abusive because those are the qualities that the bosses need. We have a situation where workers are constantly refusing to take sick leave because of the well-grounded fear that they will be penalised for it. We have management regularly driving staff to suicide - this happens quite a lot in Royal Mail, by the way. France Telecom isn't necessarily the outlier that people might assume it to be. The process of de-skilling labour, breaking it up into isolated and repetitive tasks, has been advanced into new terrains. We have young people working for free on government initiative, in the hope that this will lead to paid work. We surely need now more than ever to have detailed, reliable studies of working under capitalism, the activity that most of humanity spends most of its waking life doing.

Labels: dead labour, labour, royal mail, work, working class, zombie labour

Friday, March 06, 2009

Blacklisted posted by Richard Seymour

It turns out that construction firms have been buying private data on employees, and using it to blacklist union activists. I can only think that practises like this must be fairly widespread, even in those industries where unions are generally banished.

Informal spying on potential employees is understood to happen on a regular basis. I don't want to name any names, but temp agencies have been known to advise candidates to take care as to what information appears on their Facebook pages, Friends Reunited accounts, blogs or other potential sources of information. Employers scrutinise these sites when reviewing candidates details to see if they are about to hand a contract over to a weirdo or some sort of inflexible, awkward miserabilist. Your blog can get you fired, remember. If you are going to have a Bebo or Hi5 page that is accessible to the public, then the best bet is apparently to project the image of a smiley, outgoing, success-driven, active, sporting, party-hard, go-getting sort of narcissistic dimwit: a miniature celebrity, with friends apparently growing out of every crevice. Employers love that shit.

But this is a serious investment both in terms of the upfront costs and the risk of exposing the company to possibly steep fines. Think about how much profit they must have anticipated conserving just by keeping out 'troublemakers'.

Labels: capital, companies, dead labour, labour, trade unions

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Career Advice posted by Richard Seymour

This is both hilarious and sinister. The article, by someone from 'Careerbuilder.co.uk', advises us - distraught - that "office gossip and banter is costing the UK £43 billion a year". By which is meant, the time spent working could be making companies that amount of profit, assuming the absence of ordinary human interaction didn't reduce productivity. On the basis of this spurious factoid, it offers seven conversational topics to avoid at work. You must never talk about politics, sex, religion, your home life, illness, money, or love. So, basically, 99% of human existence is verboten. But most important of all:

And finally, there will always be people in your job who seem to enjoy stirring things up, complaining about management and trying to draw others into it. If you can't tell people how you feel about discussing these subjects, walk away. Say you have to get back to work or pop out. If that isn't possible, don't pay any attention to what is being said. The best that you can do is to keep out of it.

That's right. If some commie starts riling things up, just smile, nod politely, and back slowly out of the room. Don't, at all costs, get involved.

Labels: dead labour, obedience, work-life balance, zombie labour

Sunday, June 08, 2008

The American Working Class posted by Richard Seymour

Michael Yates:

We don’t have time today to discuss all the various control tactics used by employers: the herding of workers into factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorism, personnel management, lean production—all of which deny workers their humanity, their capacity to conceptualize and carry out their plans, to actually “own” what they make. However, let us look at a sampling of jobs in modern America:

Auto workers: There are about 1.1 million auto workers. Not only are they facing rapidly rising insecurity, they are also confronted every day with a work regimen so Taylorized that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty seconds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body? In this connection, it is instructive to read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead (1992), a startling account of working in auto plants. Hamper worked in an old plant, where the norm was about forty-five seconds of work each minute. He eventually got a job in a new, “lean production” facility. He called it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu (1995), sociologist Laurie Graham tells us about her work routine in one of these gulags. Below, I have skipped a lot of the steps, because I just want to give readers a sense of the work. Remember as you read it that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:

1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN (vehicle identification number) plates from the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code from the bag.
5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the appearance check sheet....
8. Lift the hood and put the hood jig in place so it will hold the hood open while installing the hood stay....
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step one on the next car.

This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break much less learn your workmate’s job so that you can double-up, then rest while she does both jobs. Within six months of the plant’s start-up, a majority of the workers had to wear wrist splints for incipient carpal tunnel. Necks and backs ache from bodies being twisted into unnatural positions for eight hours a day. Supervisors recommend exercises and suggest that workers who cannot deal with the pain are sissies.

What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type of labor—whether it be in beef processing plants or on chicken disassembly lines where workers labor with slippery blood and gore on the floor and on their bodies. And where cuts lead to infections and disease.

Clerks: There are about 15 million clerks in the United States. Many years ago I was on a television show with former secretary of labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim that a lot of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he said that there were a lot of good jobs available, ones in which workers had a real say about their jobs (no doubt referring to the “quality circles” so popular then). One such job was that of “clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, CLERKS! I suggested that perhaps Mr. Reich had never noticed the splints on the wrists of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome. Since that time, I have actually worked as a clerk, at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experience and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers; they are exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are accorded no respect (think about customers on cell phones in grocery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed. The stress level was extraordinary.

Restaurant Workers: There are 11 million of these, growing in number every year. Next to personal care and service workers, those who prepare and serve our food are most likely to experience a “major depressive episode.” Restaurant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown log as many as one hundred hours a week, for less than minimum wage. The pace of the work, the pressure of it are unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Substance abuse is widespread.

Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support: These workers are 23 million strong. They are poorly paid, many in sick buildings, stuck in badly designed chairs, staring at computer screens for hours, taking orders all day long (usually women from men), and often heavily Taylorized. These workers, whose working conditions are satirized so skillfully on the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degradations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment. Here is what my sister said about her work:

I, too, share some of your fears and anxieties. As one of the administrative assistants you talk about, I can relate to the long days of sitting at the typewriter (in years past) and now at the computer. I am sure that is the cause of my neck and shoulder pain and the many headaches from which I suffer. Although I basically like my job and the people with whom I work, after thirty years I am anxious to move on to something else. I look forward to retirement in about three to four years, moving to the city, maybe working part-time, and finding meaningful things in which to participate.

Security workers: Three million men and women watch over others in prisons, malls, gated communities, in occupied Iraq, and on our city streets. This is a type of work guaranteed to be stressful and to generate not only an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest of society but also an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.

Custodial workers: There are 4 million building and grounds workers, many of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds swept and manicured. Often they are hired by contractors who are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken monumental efforts by the SEIU to organize some of these exploited workers, who must often labor in close proximity to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemical fertilizers.

Medical workers: There are more than 13 million people laboring in our hospitals, surgicare centers, and nursing homes, as well as in individual residences. With the exception of those at the top, including health care administrators and most of the physicians, health care is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing has been degraded and deskilled so much that the nursing shortage could be nearly filled simply by the return of disaffected nurses to their profession. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke this summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of woe: sixteen hour days, two weeks straight of twelve-hour days, insane patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health, demeaning treatment by administrators, etc. Conditions only worsen as one goes down the health care occupation ladder.

Labels: american working class, dead labour, work

Monday, March 24, 2008

Body Politic posted by Richard Seymour

Amid the ongoing ideological resuscitation of eugenics and genetic determinism, evidence accrues daily of the way in which class penetrates and restructures biology. The New York Times has published the results of extensive research on behalf of the US government which found growing inequality in life expectancy across the US, arranged by class and race. They attempt to offset this with reference to rightist think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, who assure readers that the poor are dying younger not because they are poor but because they are ignorant. However, the overwhelming evidence is that differences in opportunity, income, diet, and access to health facilities is the cause of the problem. Stephen Soldz points out that there is a PBS documentary series planned on precisely this topic, based on the "mounting evidence that demonstrates how work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can actually get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses."

Of course, it is perfectly obvious that capitalism structures biological processes, and not only by way of its ideological representations of the ideal human type from the eugenics models to Barbie, and the denial that it does so is increasingly untenable. A study by Inas Rashad, 'Height, health, and income in the US, 1984–2005', in the latest edition of the scholarly journal Economics and Biology scrutinises biological outcomes and their relationship, and finds that heights and body mass are closely correlated to economic performance: the taller you are, the higher your income is likely to be, and of course this is correlated to a number of other health factors such as high cholesterol, and diabetes. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the way class structures biology is the fate of human bodies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the turbulent and callous 'transition' period between 1991 and 1994. A study for the same journal in 2006 summarised the overwhelming evidence that the 'reform' process, particularly during the worst years until 1994, had led to vastly increased mortality, especially through increased alcohol poisoning, suicide, and violent death. It produced an increase in 'stunted' and 'wasted' children (children who are too short, or too thin), reduced overall caloric intake, and reduced iron intake, thus leading to haemoglobin failure and higher morbidity. Naturally, these effects were stratified by class, so that there is a strong correlation between child stature and household socioeconomic status.

These are just a couple of examples - examples, I might add, of well-known phenomena, not at all controversial or mysterious. Of course, the idea that biological processes are partially at the mercy of sociological processes has some disadvantages. It disrupts the heroic ideologies of capitalism, which seem to oscillate between the master race doctrines in which a small number of human beings are hardwired for supremacy and the protean doctrines in which one can with sufficient will endlessly remake oneself, boundlessly improve oneself, exuberantly adapting to the dynamic conditions of the market place through sheer strength of will. You get a lot of the latter in quasi-scientific business doctrines such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For them, as much as for a certain specious version of 'postmodernism', the body is a discursive fiction, not in the sense that our conception of the body is itself textual, but in the sense that one can just override bodily limitations through exhortation. Thus, one can work twelve hour shifts, eating miniature sub-standard meals at one's desk, without suffering a nervous breakdown or a heart attack or ageing ten years in one month, because of one's positive attitude to work and achievement. Kapital, in its endless mysticism, just demands this much irrational belief to sustain its reproduction.

Labels: aryanism, biopolitics, body, dead labour, work

Friday, January 04, 2008

The old work-life balance. posted by Richard Seymour

Five million workers in the UK do an average of almost two months worth of unpaid overtime each year. That's worth £25bn to the rich, and five grand to each individual employee. It is probably mainly effected through unofficial pressure from the boss and the adoption of minute linguistic operations such as 'core hours', 'flexibility' and so on. Now, some people don't have much choice but to acquiesce if they want to keep their jobs. But see if you're one of these hard-working, committed team players reaching for the sky, adding value, pushing the envelope, reinventing the wheel, thinking outside the box and all of that? You're a fucking tool! Cut it out and stop making shit difficult for the rest of us.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, exploitation, work, work-life balance