When I read Jack London’s short story, “The Apostate” many years ago, the vivid description of young Johnny’s work life, how it affected his body, his movements, made me angry. “In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his hands. This means that he attained machine like perfection. All waste movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every movement of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He worked at high tension and the result was that he grew nervous. At night his muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could not relax and rest. He remained keyed up and his muscles continued to twitch. Also he grew sallow and his lint cough grew worse. Then pneumonia laid hold of the feeble lungs within the contracted chest and he lost his job in the glass works.”
In order to not waste time on unproductive movements, the work area was, and still is, designed to ensure that every movement counts, that every movement a worker makes is not wasted on our own pleasure or satisfaction but connected to production in some way, is a movement that enriches the capitalist; we must become an extension of the machine. As London writes about Johnny, “There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate relationship with the machine.”
This is the reality of work. We are wage slaves, whether the dominant Labor we sell to the capitalist is mental or physical or a combination of both, they buy the use of our life activity for a period of time and the end product of this activity is their possession. They have a right to use this Labor power like any other commodity they purchase, the only difference being that this commodity, our ability to work, our life activity, is the possession of a living human being, exists as part of us, and, through organization, we have managed to place some curbs on its overuse and raise its price.
The Wall Street Journal has an article today about productivity. (1) As I have stated many times before, it is fascinating to read the serious journals of the capitalist class; here they talk to each other about their system and how best to govern it. Productivity is an important issue to them as it is an indication of output per worker.
Productivity in the fourth quarter of 2009 jumped 5.8% from a year earlier the Journal reports; this was the biggest jump since 2002. The increase in productivity comes from a combination of two areas, the paper argues. One is from new machinery and different methods of work, and the other should be pretty obvious to workers, “Fearing for their jobs, American workers are scrambling to produce more for every hour of work.” Says the Journal and refers to this as the “Hustle Factor”. In other words, they are getting more out of every worker. Workers, terrified of losing our means of subsistence, are working longer, faster, doing without this break or that lunch period---anything to stay employed and keep the shelter over ones head and food on the table. We have to be like Jack London’s Johnnie.
The Wall Street Journal is very clear about the issues important to the class it represents. But it is very conscious of the words it uses. The capitalists speak a different tongue that’s for sure. “Most economists think it will be harder to sustain gains built on working harder”, it tells its readers as present gains are due to bosses getting “more work from existing hands”. One bourgeois economist agrees, “I think that most of this (productivity increase) is temporary and it’s particularly dramatic because a lot of people were scared.” Says Dale Jorgensen of Harvard.
The reason the gains are temporary is pretty obvious. As the “existing hands” work faster, longer hours, in greater competition with their co-workers, and perhaps most importantly, in a social climate in which we are constantly in fear of losing our jobs, the result is we get sicker, we “burn out”. We fall prey to alcohol and drug abuse that, in the absence of a social movement seem the only way out, a temporary relief to the stress we feel in such a hostile anti-social environment. Our personal relations deteriorate and our children suffer. We reach a point where this temporary “gain” for the employer turns in to its opposite as we call in sick more often or break down altogether preventing them from extracting surplus value from us; in other words, for them, we become “bad workers” or ”unproductive workers”, or one of their favorites, we become “dead wood”. Worst of all, sometimes the boss has to work.
The US has high productivity, Workers in the U.S., “….have historically been among the world’s most productive.”, the Journal boasts. But we can boast this higher productivity because we are on the job longer than workers in most other industrialized countries. This is one of the objections the US capitalist class has to European style capitalism, workers have too much time off and too many social benefits. The Financial Times would agree of course and attacks the lazy Europeans for not being at work long enough:
“It is also true that there is a direct link between the sluggish state of the European economy and the natives' propensity for taking humungous amounts of holiday. The average American takes just 14 days holiday a year. By contrast, the average Italian takes 42 days off every year and the average Frenchman takes 37 days (and only works 35 hours a week, when he deigns to turn up at the office.) When they are actually at their desks or lathes, the average European produces more per hour than the average American. But because they spend relatively little time working, European productivity per person is well behind that of the Americans.”** My added emphasis.
There are 8.2 million fewer jobs in the US than before the recession began. If the bosses are not hiring and productivity is increasing it is obvious that workers are being driven harder. “I feel like I work harder” says Jamie Barber, a worker at a yarn factory in North Carolina. The process of capital accumulation is felt one way by the boss and entirely differently by the worker.
With the economy picking up a little some of the employers are hiring back the “dead wood” they got rid of earlier. Not only did they cause the recent economic catastrophe, they benefit from it as well as “dead wood” is easier to throw out under such conditions. There is no such thing as a guaranteed job in the free market economy; workers organizations have made it harder to eliminate this “dead wood” under normal conditions but with the leadership of these organizations accepting capitalism and having no alternative to it, they have no answer to the system in times of crisis and accept completely the right of the employers to destroy the productive forces and the lives of hundreds of millions of workers. Back in 1984 the AFL-CIO had this to say: " It is time to reduce the standard workweek, both to provide more job opportunities for an expanding workforce and to resume the historic downward trend in working hours." (3)
The reverse has occurred and the leadership of the workers’ organizations have no answer to it so deeply wedded are they to the free market system. They hope for the good old days of the post war boom that will never return.
The wars abroad, the increased attacks on immigrants like the racist laws introduced in Arizona and that state’s attempt to eliminate ethnic studies courses and fire teachers who have accents, these are all diversions, attempts to scapegoat others and divide the working class and prevent our potential power from making its presence felt. There are wars everywhere according to Washington but the war they keep out of the mass media is the war against their own working class. They terrorize workers daily on the job. They throw people out of their homes and deny us medical care when we are sick. They use racism and sexism and other forms of division to prevent class unity. The continued existence of their system depends on it. As Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
Their serious journals are important for all activists to read. They are honest in them as they are talking to each other. The Journal’s article today makes it very clear how they see us, how they talk about us. We are “dead wood”.
Malcolm X was right about capitalism and racism. But perhaps we should heed the words of Bessie Smith when we consider the system we live in:
“You’ve been a good ole wagon but baby you done broke down.”
(1) Moment of Truth for Productivity Boom: WSJ 5-6-10
(2) FT: In Humungous Praise of Holidays, 12-23-07
(3) AFL-CIO platform proposals presented to the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1984
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