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.

Smooth City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Smooth Structures

This chapter goes into more detailed discussion of the Reestraat and the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central in London, in order to illustrate the structures or “mechanisms” that produce and reproduce the “perfection” of the smooth city.

It is important to understand that the smooth city does not appear out of thin air, but is the result of all kinds of power structures, political impulses, planning processes, and design choices. (29)

One of these mechanisms is private ownership of land, and investment in redevelopment; this is tied to certain forms of state control and promotion, and results in a lack of certain [democratic mechanisms] to challenge planning and use. Together, local government and private property-holders exert a “matrix of control” (49), policing the use of space, and excluding undesirable or un-“smooth” populations, as well as unapproved practices such as loitering, putting up flyers, graffiti, etc. Boer emphasizes the role of privately-owned parks as a sort of pseudo-public space, where cryptic rules are enforced by private security guards. The generally unspoken but inferred scripts of acceptable and expected behavior in the smooth city are sometimes, in “awkward cases,” spelled out, as in a sign in King’s Cross Central commanding passersby to “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” (52). “Smart city” policing, screening, and scripting dramatically reduce the unpredictability of encounters in the smooth city, as do the rise of delivery and e-hailing apps, which replace the chance of encounter with algorithmic manipulation, turning the smooth city into essentially the opposite of what the city has always been, and the opposite of what most urban enthusiasts and critics have tended to celebrate. However, this may very well appear “perfect” to those who can afford it, and who can follow the script.

B has some interesting passages on the way the smooth city interacts with history and place, through a sort of recasting and hollowing out – place names are preserved, as often are historic façades while the interiors are gutted and redesigned. [I was recently in just such a building in downtown Phoenix, across the street from the Footprint Center, the wind-rippled tile “skin” of which is a rare, actually beautiful (and presumably ecologically beneficial) example of contemporary architecture. Yet, much like with King’s Cross Central, a former industrial zone has been gutted and repurposed, to create a safe, smooth space for the “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” set.] With an eye for material detail, B discusses the acid-cleaning of historical bricks, the replacement of older glass panels with up-to-date glass, and the transformation of Amsterdam streetscapes with new materials according to the rules of the “Puccini method” (24). He concludes with a discussion of how the production, maintenance, and replication of the smooth city is embedded in flows of capital, and how it relies on non-smooth or less-smooth spaces in which it exists in a hierarchy. Examples of these are the peripheral neighborhoods to which those displaced by gentrification have had to relocate; from these neighborhoods come the daily flux of workers who maintain, clean, and labor in the smooth city, and yet are excluded from local politics and decision making. This is true also on a global scale:

The complicated-looking intercom on the gasholder apartment building in King’s Cross Central was assembled in a factory near Shenzhen a few years ago, and will be disassembled by kids in the open wastelands near Accra a few years from now. (57)

The chapter also includes an inset of several pages of collages, using images presumably from the street spaces described, which highlight the attraction and repulsion exerted by the perfected/alienated space of the smooth city.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 5

 

Summary of Chapter 5: The Decline and Fall of Work

V’s summary:

The obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning expands.

“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.” (52) The two opposed terms through this chapter will be productivity, forced upon us from above, and creativity, freely chosen from below. In the current capitalist system, forced labor maintains order and the status quo by confusing and exhausting people.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanised slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, taking to the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is forming; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future.

V traces the etymologies of travail and labor from torture and suffering, respectively. While in the feudal order, the elite eschewed labor as demeaning, the bourgeoisie embrace it:

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand this? (53)

Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly, but today it seems that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.

The point of productivity (as opposed to creativity) is not the transformation of nature, and not self-realization, because Taylorism destroyed the craft spirit of work.

Nowadays ambition and the love of a job done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the stale fart of ideology makes headway, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung. (54)

The aristocracy ruled on the basis of a “unitary myth;” the bourgeois order cannot recreate this, so relies on the fractious reign of competing ideologies, unified by the ideal of productivity.

So what is the function of forced labour? The myth of power exercised jointly by the master and God drew its coercive force from the unity of the feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the fragmented power of the bourgeoisie inaugurated, under the flag of crisis, the reign of ideologies, which can never attain, separately or together, a fraction of the efficacy of myth. The dictatorship of productive work stepped into the breach. Its mission is to weaken the majority of people physically, to castrate and stupefy them collectively and so make them receptive to the feeblest, least virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.

V discusses the role of consumerism and the “leisure explosion” in prompting people to work harder to be able to have leisure. He critiques Maoist China as just “another example of the perfected form of capitalism called socialism.” (55)

Has anyone bothered to study the approaches to work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously not.

[This is an interesting observation in 1967, as Marshall Sahlins would have recently articulated the concept of the “original affluent society,” and Vaneigem might well have heard of this; Richard Lee had finished his dissertation, and Pierre Clastres was conducting fieldwork in South America. On the liberatory potential of modern technology, several of Bookchin’s essays that would later be collected as Post-Scarcity Anarchism would have been coming out in New York during this period, as well. So, despite V’s “obviously not” shrug, such questions were definitely in the air.]

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats.

And yet:

One day, perhaps, we shall see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres. Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. (56)

 

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part Three, Introduction

 Summary of Part Three, [Introduction]: Evolution of Technical Reality

Part three, “The Essence of Technicity,” begins with this brief introduction, which is not listed in the table of contents, and is given the title “Evolution of Technical Reality” only in the header. Sort of a hidden track, you could say.

S lays out the underlying question for part three (167): “what is the sense of the genesis of technical objects with respect to the whole of thought, of man’s existence, and of his manner of being in the world?” His answer to this question will be a “generalized genetic interpretation of the relation between man and the world” (167-8).

He discusses his particular meaning of genesis, which was developed in his other book, as “as the process of individuation in its generality” (168):

There is genesis when the coming-into-being of a system of a primitively oversaturated reality, rich in potential, greater than unity and harboring an internal incompatibility, constitutes for this system the discovery of compatibility, a resolution through the advent of structure. This structuration is the advent of an organization that is the basis of an equilibrium of metastability. Such genesis opposes itself to the degradation of the potential energies contained in a system through the passage to a stable state from which transformation is no longer possible.

He criticizes, or rather questions the relevance in this context, of the evolutionary concept of adaptation, which implies a correction of the relationship between species and environment towards a “functional finality” and a “stable equilibrium,” “which does not appear to be correct in man’s case, perhaps no more than it is for any living being.” He discusses the Bergsonian concept of élan vital as an alternative to adaptation, then announces that the truth is somewhere between these:

It seems that these two opposed notions, as the couple they form, can be replaced, by the notion of the individuation of oversaturated systems, conceived as successive resolutions of tensions through the discovery of structures at the heart of a system rich in potential.

Rather than tending to the final state of stable equilibrium, evolution produces metastability, “going from metastable state to metastable state” (169), and thus charged with potential. S provides a very Simondonian quote, “the potential is one of the forms of the real, as completely as the actual” (168) [which stands in nice contrast to the position of my high school teacher, Mr. Bonfigli, who used to say, “potential means you ain’t done shit yet.”]

[I must have that quote slightly misremembered, because I doubt Mr. Bonfigli would use the word “ain’t.”]

But in any case it is easy to see how this idea of the reality of potential, having real effects in a system, links us to the physical analogy of metastability, and plays a major role in Simondon’s theory of the evolution of technology, as the “discovery” of potential structure.

He lays out another of his historical just-so stories, which will be developed more fully in the next chapter. Human history begins in the magical phase or mode of relation with the world: “in the magical mode the mediation between man and the world is not yet concretized and constituted as standing apart, by means of specialized objects or human beings” (169). The magical phase splits into technicity and religion, which focus on the functions of figure and ground, respectively. This essentially sets up how S will go about answering his initial question, the relation between technicity and other forms of thought (e.g., religion, art, social science, etc.), through this initial family relationship. To the tendency towards divergence in different kinds of thought, must be opposed the thinking of convergence, “a relational function maintaining unity despite this divergence” (170):

The purpose [sens] of philosophical thought, intervening between the two representative orders and the two active orders of thought, is to make them converge and establish a mediation between them. Now, in order for this mediation to be possible, the very genesis of these forms of thought must be known and accomplished in a complete manner on the basis of previous stages of technicity and religiosity... (171)

 

Writing and Identity, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Literacy and Identity

In this brief chapter Ivanič extends the concerns of the previous chapter to the subject of literacy. She notes that there are two ways the term “literacy” is used: the traditional or common meaning of ability to read and write, and the more nuanced and productive meaning, “way(s) of using written language” (58). The latter meaning is the focus here, as this allows for a variety of considerations of how literacy is embedded in social context (59). Ivanič has criticisms for the old “great divide” theory of Ong, etc., which posited a vast cognitive gap between pre-literate and literate societies, as well as for the idea that literacy is “decontextualized” in comparison with face-to-face speech. She points out that this narrows the meaning of “context” to physical presence. In addition to physical presence, she delineates two additional aspects of context: 1) an interactional level of the purposes to which communication is put, and the relationships in which it takes place, and 2) the context of culture (from Halliday), meaning “competing systems of values, beliefs, and practices” which shape and constrain both spoken and written communication (60).

She explores the idea of an “ecology of literacy,” in which various, diverse practices of reading each have their own “ecological niche” (62). The concepts of literacy practice and literacy event are discussed, both of which get beyond the reductionist view of literacy as a “skill,” and also bring into focus the broader social and cultural contexts in which literacy is practiced. She emphasizes the distinction between “the actual, observable practices of individuals, and the abstract, theoretical idea of the practices which are the norm for a cultural group” (67); however, she does not follow Gee (1990) in adopting distinct terms for these. She discusses the problems with verbs like “learn” and “acquire” in relation to literacy, which treat it as a pre-formed ability or resource that students earn or strive for; instead she prefers verbs like “develop” or “extend,” one “extends” one’s literacy practices. “What distinguishes students is not whether they are or are not literate, but the characteristics of the repertoire of resources they bring with them to the task” (70).

Identity is the book’s theme: “acquiring certain literacy practices involves becoming a certain type of person” (67). She concludes with some terminology adopted from other scholars: e.g., Besnier’s distinction between person (or role) and self (individual) as two aspects of identity; some writing (such as a sermon, or an academic paper) foregrounds the person, while other forms (such as personal letters) foreground the self. A quote from Gee spells out the positions of insider, colonized, and outsider in relation to a discourse; notably, “colonized students control and accept values in the Discourse just enough to keep signalling that others in the Discourse are their ‘betters’ and to become complicit with their own subordination” (Gee, quoted on p. 73).

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Of the Refrain.

This key chapter explores the concept of the “refrain,” though Emma Ingala argues, persuasively, that this would be better translated as ritornello (Ingala 2018). Ingala also points out that 1837 is the date of Schumann’s Études symphoniques (and Schumann fittingly reappears throughout the text, as a refrain/ritornello...). The image is Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, very apt because it captures many of the chapter’s themes visually, and because Klee’s writings on art are one of the key interlocuting texts.

The chapter begins with three “aspects” of the refrain: a child whistling in the dark, a circle drawn to organize a space, and a crack opening for a venturing forth. In my initial notes (from who knows when) I labeled these as skip, (which “jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos” (311)), circle, and crack. Ingala terms them “in the dark,” “at home,” and “towards the world.” The central theme is how order is organized to protect against chaos, yet there needs also to be an opening to chaos, to prevent going to far into rigidity and death.

Every milieu is a refrain, “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component” (313). With the example of living things, they delineate four kinds of milieus (exterior, interior, intermediary, and annexed) which exist in relation to it:

Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions.

They then discuss this in term of their concept of transduction/transcoding, clearly based in part on Simondon’s transduction, though expanded in the Deleuzo-Guattarian manner. Whereas S’s transduction, as far as I can tell, connects technical elements through subsequent historical stages of technology, or from one ensemble to another, for D&G, is

the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.

They insist on the difference between rhythm (good) and meter (bad); while the latter is mere repetition, the former is repetition with difference. This is also why, per Ingala, ritornello is a better translation into English (of French ritournelle), than “refrain.” While the latter invokes the repeated chorus of a song, the former is a recurring variation on a theme. So, it would be more like a chorus with at least some of the words changed each time, or a repeated phrase that takes on different meanings in new contexts? Because (as Ingala explains clearly), a home needs to protect against the chaos outside, but also be open to it, or else it becomes a prison. So, there is a structure that delineates a distinct space/time, but must be open and not fully predictable in content, etc. “Meter is dogmatic, rhythm is critical...”

A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the “critical solution of the antinomy.” (314)

(This last is a reference to Kant.) The relation between refrains and territory/territorialization is then explored, through art, territorial motifs, and literature. “Professional refrains,” aka merchant’s cries, are interrogated as a key type. They give a general definition of refrain, which intentionally does not privilege sound:

we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes

(there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). (323)

A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization (something that “has-the-value-of” home). (326)

They classify four types of refrain: 1) territorializing; 2) territorializing refrains that play a certain function in an assemblage 3) the same, in variation with each other, as in nursery rhymes sung differently in different neighborhoods; 4) “refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization: ‘Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won't look back’” (327).

Having drawn extensively on ethological accounts of bird songs, etc., they make an interesting argument for the advantage ethologists have over ethnologists, namely that “they did not fall into the structural danger of dividing an undivided ‘terrain’ into forms of kinship, politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the integrality of a certain undivided ‘terrain’” (328). To an extent it is, specifically, the structuralist ethnology of the mid-Twentieth century which they are criticizing, but more generally they could be making a case for not separating out the animal from the human as different realms to be understood separately (I have in the margin, “cf. Kropotkin,” no doubt for his insistence that anarchists can learn from the study of the natural world). D&G are also criticizing ethologists who rely on concepts like inhibition and release, or instinct, because these are also reductionist and are essentially giving up said advantage. In a larger sense, this is also a reflection of their deeper theme, the non-division of the world into separate realms that operate differently and are understood with different sciences; part of D&G’s agenda is to create one set of concepts and terminology which can discuss ethology, ethnology, economics, geology, linguistics, chemistry, etc. ... And so here, in counter to “instinct,” they proffer their own concepts of rhizomaticity, and “behavioral-biological ‘machinics.’”

They summarize the chapter so far:

We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded, trans-coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to interassemblages, to the opening of assemblages along lines of deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing, Cosmos. (337)

They outline a theory of the stages of classicism, romanticism, and modernism, which bear affinity to the previously mentioned aspects of in-the-dark, at-home, and towards-the-world (and like these, they do not constitute an “evolution” (346)). In my review of the previous chapter I made the error of thinking the refrain/ritornello would play a similar role in music to that of the face in visual art; nevertheless, it is still apt that modernism (in art and music) is about resisting the sort of too-rigid refrain in the second aspect, that risks falling back into fascism or death; and this is the importance of the third, Modernist stage, with its openness to the “Cosmos,” aka the plane of consistency [though fascism is a modernist disease].

They now again classify types of refrains (347):

1) “milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers the other (the piano and the violin)”;

2) “natal refrains, refrains of the territory, where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth, according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby, the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.)”;

3) “folk and popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people, according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultaneously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German, Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.)”;

4) “molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the Cosmos refrain.”

5) “For the Cosmos itself is a refrain,”

6) “and the ear also (everything that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain).”

(Though possibly 4, 5, and 6 were all intended as one type?) After mentioning ears (but not, alas, pursuing the idea of the labyrinth), they reject the “privileging of the ear;” as Ingala stresses, this chapter is not about music, in the sense that music is only one form in which refrains/ritornellos manifest. Nevertheless they end the chapter with a discussion of “the potential fascism of music” (348), and of types of refrains involved in music, and return finally to the importance of Schumann, whose name returns as a closing refrain.

Ingala, Emma (2018) “Of the Refrain (The Ritornello)” in Somers-Hall and Bell, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 16

Summary of Chapter 16: Service Occupations and Retail Trade

The giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although­ heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) is not limited to offices and factories. Another huge concentra­tion is to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade. (248)

The reasons for the growth of the service sector have already been discussed in chapter 13; they fill in for functions previously played by communities, etc.:

the completion by capital of the conquest of goods-producing activities; the displacement of labor from those industries, corresponding to the accumulation of capital in them, and the juncture of these reserves of labor and capital on the ground of new industries; and the inexorable growth of service needs as the new shape of society destroys the older forms of social, community, and family cooperation and self-aid.

B quotes Marx to the effect that a “service” is “nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value.” However, unlike directly productive labor creating objects, in this case no object is created:

The useful effects of labor, in such cases, do not serve to make up a vendible object which then carries its useful effects with it as part of its existence as a commodity. Instead, the useful effects of labor themselves become the commodity. When the worker does not offer this labor directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services.

B notes that the census, etc., are much more lax in their definition of “service work” than his “scientific” definition, including, for example, restaurant cooks, etc. who produce tangible objects, as “service workers.” Part of this is the same old obfuscatory counting which gives the illusion of a shift from production to “service” work. A note on transportation:

Workers in transportation are often regarded as workers in a “service” industry, but if the location of a commodity is taken as an important physical characteristic, transportation is a part of the process of production. And if we do not take this view we fall into insuperable difficulties, because we are forced to extend the distinction between “making” and “moving” back into the factory, where many workers do not play a role in fashioning the object with their own hands but merely move it through the plant, or through the process. The distinction so applied becomes meaningless and even ridiculous. (149)

Management in fact recognizes this when they do time and motion studies on their “service” workers such as chambermaids [cf. In-N-Out!].

All this really just illustrates that capitalism does not care about the “determinate form” of labor, but its social form:

They merely illustrate the principle that for capitalism, what is important is not the determinate form of labor but its social form, its capacity to produce, as wage labor, a profit for the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to the particular form of labor; he does not care, in the last analysis, whether he hires workers to produce automobiles, wash them, repair them, repaint them, fill them with gasoline and oil, rent them by the day, drive them for hire, park them, or convert them into scrap metal. His concern is the difference between the price he pays for an aggregate of labor and other commodities, and the price he receives for the commodities—whether goods or “services”—produced or rendered. (250)

Thus, capitalists do not care about the “determinate form” of the labor, (whether something tangible or intangible is produced), but of the social form, that is, whether this sort of work, which has always been done, has been transformed into wage work from which a profit is extracted. “And this began on a large scale only with the era of monopoly capitalism which created the universal marketplace and transformed into a commodity every form of the activity of human­kind including what had heretofore been the many things that people did for themselves or for each other.”

B discusses Adam Smith’s misunderstanding of service labor as merely wasteful, because in his day it was something capitalists spent their own income on, rather than something they invested in for further profit. B adds that it has been an error among economists of every age to always assume that the most prevalent or growing form of labor of their own time is the most important; it becomes increasingly clear with monopoly capitalism and the universal market that in the end, they are all the same and interchangeable from a capitalist perspective.

He turns to the effects of mechanization and industrial processes in deskilling even this sector, for instance restaurants relying on frozen foods, so they don’t need skilled cooks, they need “thawer-outers” (256). He talks about supermarkets and checkout clerks, describing the beginning of checkout scanners in his day, speeding up and eroding the skill and knowledge needed by grocery checkout clerks who now just wave the produce over the scanner [although it is easily seen how much faster even these “deskilled” clerks of today are compared to the customers in the self-check out line; at my local store they will see you searching for your produce on the screen, walk over, and rapidly push several buttons to get you on your way; so it is notable that even in “deskilled” operations workers still develop situational knowledges and skills, basically out of whatever is available to them in that setting. This is not to argue against B’s point but rather to suggest that human creativity and – whatever the word would be, ability to create situational knowledge and skill? – is unlimited and undefeatable.]

In sum, much of the new service work sector is poorly paid, dead-end work, and it is primarily women who are stuck in it; this puts the lie to the breathless spoutings of “enthusiastic publicists and press agents of capitalism (with or without advanced degrees in sociology and econom­ics)” (258), of Braverman’s day, who touted the supposed societal benefits of the increasing service sector.