Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 17

 

Summary of Chapter 17: The Structure of the Working Class and its Reserve Armies

An elegant statement of the duality of labor and capital:

Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the working population, and upon which the latter subsists. (261)

The working class is the “animate part of capital,” upon which the operation of all of capital, and the production of surplus value, depends. Though it has independent existence as a class, it is “first of all raw material for exploitation” from the capitalist perspective. “It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.”

B notes the “formal definition” of the working class as “that class which, possessing nothing but its power to labor, sells that power to capital in return for its subsistence.” Though a static definition, this is a necessary starting point for understanding the working class in modern times. Braverman traces the growth of working class as a percentage of working population, over last century, from 50% to over two-thirds.

He argues that “the new mass working-class occupations tend to grow, not in contradiction to the speedy mechanization and ‘automation’ of industry, but in harmony with it” (264). Automation depresses employment in the fields automated, but [because it increases overall productivity] leads to expanded employment elsewhere. “The fastest growing industrial and occupational sectors in the ‘automated’ age tend, therefore, in the long run to be those labor-intensive areas which have not yet been or cannot be subjected to high technology.” [So far!] These are, in Braverman’s time, the clerical, service, and sales fields. The true function of automation is not to replace labor, but to deskill it, and to produce also a “reserve army of labor:”

The mechanization of industry produces a relative surplus of population available for employment at the lower pay rates that characterize these new mass occupations. In other words, as capital moves into new fields in search of profitable investment, the laws of capital accumulation in the older fields operate to bring into existence the ‘labor force’ required by capital in its new incarnations.

He turns to the role of colonialism in disrupting world populations, making them available to the core as surplus population for labor, a global “labor reservoir” (266). Women also have become “the prime supplementary reservoir of labor”, along with families increasingly needing multiple incomes to get by.

Unemployment is not a “problem” for capitalism, but an essential aspect of how it depresses wages and maintains a ready surplus army of potential workers when needed: “Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production” (267). This is not just the unemployed, but the part-time employed, “houseworkers,” migrant laborers, etc.

Marx’s three forms of the reserve army: floating, latent, and stagnant:

The floating form is found in the centers of industry and employment, in the form of workers who move from job to job, attracted and repelled (that is to say, hired and discarded) by the movements of technology and capital, and suffering a certain amount of unemployment in the course of this motion.

B details the importance and growth of this form in the 20^th century capitalist economy. The latent relative surplus population is that which has yet to be drawn into capitalist production; in Marx’s day this was the rural agricultural population, in Braverman’s, that of the post/colonial states. Marx’s stagnant surplus labor reserve is “pauperism,” or the desperately poor; B promises to speak more of this category later.

B quotes Marx on “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,” which “establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital” (Marx, Capital, quoted on page 269). This had seemed to be “the weakest aspect of the Marxian analysis” in the flush growth after the Second World War, but this was no longer the case by the early 70s. He discusses the trends since World War II of male workers moving out of the labor force into the reserve army, and women moving into the workforce; these are only apparently contradictory, as both show the growing importance of the floating and stagnant pools of reserve labor. It also reflects the replacement of higher-paid, more skilled, masculinized jobs with lower-paid, less skilled, feminized jobs, according to the processes he has been outlining throughout the book. He backs this up with data from Victor Fuchs on the stagnation of the higher-paying industrial sector, and the growth of the lower-paying “services” sector. He notes that pay in the service sector is so low that it is below subsistence for a family, and this accounts for the growing number of employed people on welfare, along with the growth of multiple-income families. In addition, many low-income families are supported by less-than-full-time work. Nevertheless, traditional employment statistics undercount “discouraged” workers who have given up job seeking, and underemployed workers.