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.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: The Universal Market

This chapter is a succinct, eloquent, and quite accessible iteration of the classic leftist critique of [formal subsumption]. B points out the rapid growth of market relations, percolating into all aspects of social life and reproduction, largely replacing older forms of organization, in particular the family and community. This is the “universal market,” in which everything is for sale.

It is only in its era of monopoly that the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital. (188)

All of society transformed into a “gigantic marketplace.” This is contrasted with the more limited range of goods which had been available in early industrial capitalism, many of which were raw materials to be made use of by household, farm, etc. labor (e.g., flour instead of bread). The role of the family remained essential before 1810. Family farms produced own food, clothing, construction work, etc.; even many urban families had some livestock or gardens to supplement income. Most of this work was done by women.

But during the last hundred years industrial capital has thrust itself between farm and household, and appropriated all the processing functions of both, thus extending the commodity form to food in its semi-prepared or even fully prepared forms. (190)

This conquest of the labor processes formerly carried on by farm families, or in homes of every variety, naturally gave fresh energy to capital by increasing the scope of its operations and the size of the “labor force” subjected to its exploitation.

Women were transformed from housewives into workers, and many of the new, particularly poorly paid jobs, end up done by woman, doing the same work they had done before, but now being profited off of.

B ties this to the separation of town and country:

the tighter packing of urbanization destroys the conditions under which it is possible to carry on the old life. The urban rings close around the worker, and around the farmer driven from the land, and confine them within circumstances that preclude the former self-provisioning practices of the home. (191)

The availability of cash makes it easy to buy instead of make, and the cheapening of manufactured goods renders home production uneconomic. This is compounded by social pressure, style, fashion, marketing, educational [propaganda/indoctrination], and the loss of the skills which had been passed down through previous generations. The market becomes a source of individualization/atomization, bringing about

the powerful urge in each family member toward an independent income, which is one of the strongest feelings instilled by the transformation of society into a giant market for labor and goods, since the source of status is no longer the ability to make many things but simply the ability to purchase them.

But the industrialization of food and other elementary home provisions is only the first step in a process which eventually leads to the dependence of all social life, and indeed of all the interrelatedness of humankind, upon the marketplace.

Thus the population no longer relies upon social organization in the form of family, friends, neighbors, community, elders, children, but with few exceptions must go to market and only to market, not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but also for recreation, amusement, security, for the care of the young, the old, the sick, the handi­capped. In time not only the material and service needs but even the emotional patterns of life are channeled through the market.

It thereby comes to pass that while population is packed ever more closely together in the urban environment, the atomization of social life proceeds apace. (192)

Acc B, this “often noticed phenomenon can be explained only by the development of market relations as the substitute for individual and community relations.”

The social structure, built upon the market, is such that relations between individuals and social groups do not take place directly, as cooperative human encounters, but through the market as relations of purchase and sale.

Apart from its biological functions, the family has served as a key institution of social life, production, and consumption. Of these three, capitalism leaves only the last, and that in attenuated form, since even as a consuming unit the family tends to break up into component parts that carry on consumption separately.

...like machinery in the factory, the machinery of society becomes a pillory instead of a convenience, and a substitute for, instead of an aid to, competence. (192-3)

Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other.

Corporations come to dominate entertainment and “free” time consumption:

By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit.

The stress and alienation of this system create a “human detritus”:

Whole new strata of the helpless and dependent are created, or familiar old ones enlarged enormously: the proportion of “mentally ill” or “deficient,” the “criminals,” the pauperized layers at the bottom of society, all representing varieties of crumbling under the pressures of capitalist urbanism and the conditions of capitalist employment or unemployment. (194)

Thus understood, the massive growth of institutions stretching all the way from schools and hospitals on the one side to prisons and madhouses on the other represents not just the progress of medicine, education, or crime prevention, but the clearing of the marketplace of all but the “economically active” and “functioning” members of society, generally at public expense and at a handsome profit to the manufacturing and service corporations who sometimes own and invari­ably supply these institutions.

The growth of the service industry

brings into being a huge specialized personnel whose function is nothing but cleaning, again made up in good part of women who, in accord with the precepts of the division of labor, perform one of the functions they formerly exercised in the home, but now in the service of capital which profits from each day’s labor.

He discusses the product cycle, “which invents new products and services, some of which become indispensable as the conditions of modem life change to destroy alternatives.”

In this way the inhabitant of capitalist society is enmeshed in a web made up of commodity goods and commodity services from which there is little possibility of escape except through partial or total abstention from social life as it now exists.

Just as in the factory it is not the machines that are at fault but the conditions of the capitalist mode of production under which they are used, so here it is not the necessary provision of social services that is at fault, but the effects of an all-powerful marketplace which, governed by capital and its profitable investment, is both chaotic and profoundly hostile to all feelings of community. (195)

This is the paradox of expanded social services under the conditions brought about by the universal market:

As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labor, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burdens of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus.

The condition of service sector labor is contrasted to the manufacturing sector:

It is characteristic of most of the jobs created in this “service sector” that, by the nature of the labor processes they incorporate, they are less susceptible to technological change than the processes of most goods-producing indus­tries. Thus while labor tends to stagnate or shrink in the manufacturing sector, it piles up in these services and meets a renewal of the traditional forms of pre-monopoly competition among the many firms that proliferate in fields with lower capital-entry requirements. Largely nonunion and drawing on the pool of pauperized labor at the bottom of the working-class population, these industries create new low-wage sectors of the working class, more intensely exploited and oppressed than those in the mechanized fields of production.

There is the irony that by mainstream economic accounting, this represents a massive growth in the economy, even though it is really just a shift in how and where work is done:

The goods and services produced by unpaid labor in the home are not reckoned at all, but when the same goods and services are produced by paid labor outside the home they are counted.

The work of the housewife, though it has the same material or service effect as that of the chambermaid, restaurant worker, cleaner, porter, or laundry worker, is outside the purview of capital; but when she takes one of these jobs outside the home she becomes a productive worker. Her labor now enriches capital and thus deserves a place in the national product. This is the logic of the universal market. (196)

 

A Bus Ride through San Francisco in 1859

A "Yellow Line" omnibus in front of Gilbert's Melodeon at Clay and Kearny, about 1860. Detail of a photo held by the Bancroft (Online Archive of California)

The horse-drawn omnibus was the first form of mass transit through the streets of San Francisco. This description was written by "The Dictator at the Dessert," a somewhat pompous columnist for the Hesperian, a women's journal in San Francisco.

An omnibus is a type of life. Like the stage it has its entrances and its exits. Passengers come in and go out all along the track, as humanity commences and ends its existence. At each street corner some one pulls the strap. The fee is paid, the cost of the ride is settled with the driver, and the passenger moves by you to the door, as people move to the grave. A little rustling of silk, a compression of crinoline, a staggering along between rows of people who give place to the departing, and each thinking over an obituary; the passenger goes down the steps into that great grave, the city; the door is shut, and on the omnibus moves again like life, until the next one’s time and place are reached, when the same process is re-enacted.

Meanwhile, like life, the vacant seat is soon occupied by another taken up by the wayside; and so the omnibus, like the great congregation of existence, is varying ever, never so full that there is not room for more. If you keep your seat until near, or quite to the station, like him who reaches the “three score years and ten,” the chances are that few or none of those that started with you are still your companions, and you must go down the steps alone, and no one misses you. All along the way you see new faces, and forms, and fashions; no two alike; each on a different errand, each for a different destination; some, the workers, with a little bundle, some with hard hands, some with unsoiled gloves.

Look out of the window as you ride, and life is passing you this way and that; the pedestrian who keeps abreast, or falls behind; the equestrian who dashes by your slow motion like High Flyer or Lecompte; and there, too, is the toiling drudge harnessed to his cart and heavy load, or the donkey beneath his disproportioned burden. You pass the splendid mansion and its luxurious inhabitants; you pass, too, the hovel and its squalid inmates. Your city is humanity, the street you travel is life’s avenue, along which the wheels of destiny still roll you onward. Now the late shower of prosperity may have lain in the dust, or a hot sun may have dried it, and a fresh breeze, or a squall may roll the stifling particles through the open windows—just like life. Close the windows and you stifle with pent up air, and respiration becomes a burden. Open the sashes and the chill winds comes whiffing in, full of colds, cramps, and rheumatism.

Opposite, sits beauty in satin and ribbons, and by your side, ugliness with a disagreeable breath. Here is a subject of sympathetic instinct that makes the ride pleasant, and you regret to see the fair, small hand raised to pull the string; and there is your antipathy, whose touch makes you shrink with aversion, and you bless the fortune that puts him down at the corner—just like life. I often ride in an omnibus for the lessons it teaches me, for the views I get of humanity in that democratic coach—the royal carriage of the people. There I am the equal of the millionaire, and I see him move from the noisy conveyance to the marble steps of his palace with as much indifference as I do the poor Irish servant with her bundle to find entrance to the kitchen by the side door. I listen to the vapid panegyrics of a prim gentleman, in elegant attire, as he talks morality and essays possession of exquisite taste. And I am not surprised if, when looking back after him when he has jauntingly stepped down from the ignoble car, to see him pull the bell at the door where virtue never enters—just like life.

... Yes, the omnibus is a moving panorama; a life on wheels; an age spent in a half hour’s ride; an education at a bit charge; an experience for which you hand the driver a half dollar and get as change, a ride, eight tickets, and – in the evening – a short quarter from the knavish driver. … 

For more on the Hesperian and its editor, Hermione Day, see Marion Tingling, (1980/1981) "Hermione Day and the Hesperian," California History 59 (4):282-289. 

See also: A New York City Cab Ride in 1840

“The Bonds of Telegraphy:” class and gender politics of the urban telegraph

Advertisement for American District Telegraph, by Schmidt Label Co., San Francisco; early 1880s. (Image courtesy of the Bancroft)

I'll be presenting a paper on the urban telegraph this weekend at the Social Science History Association meeting in Phoenix. Here is the abstract:

Despite the well-worn analogy of the early telegraph as a “Victorian internet,” the story of the intra-urban telegraph—which might be called a “city-wide web”— has been almost completely neglected. In the 1870s, the American District Telegraph Company developed a dial-based interface that simplified the use of the telegraph, making possible a network connecting the businesses and homes of wealthy subscribers to a city of services. The interconnectivity provided by the urban telegraph promised both to transform urban space in the bourgeoisie’s image, and to professionalize the occupations—messengers, firemen, police, and hackdrivers—whose services were ordered through the telegraph callbox. More than simply a communication device, the urban telegraph promised to alter the class and gender constellations of advantage and disadvantage relating to public space and mobility.

This paper will focus on how the urban telegraph realigned advantage and disadvantage for both customers and workers, in particular though the provision of dispatched hack service. Telegraph dispatch increased the disadvantage of working-class hackdrivers vis-a-vis their wealthy customers, by constraining drivers’ movements, behavior, and control over the negotiation of fares and acquisition of passengers. At the same time, the urban telegraph brought new advantages to women customers, whose access to public space and mobility were increased, though not without controversy. Although the urban telegraph was quickly supplanted by the spread of the telephone, its story provides insight into the ongoing search for technological fixes for the complicated class and gender politics of urban space.