• The Nature of Work

And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker.

Here is the section from my book-in-progress, on how capitalism is changing the nature of work. The emphasis is on how irksome and menial work is being progressively eliminated and that an increasing proportion of the workforce require a post-secondary education:

Capitalism Outgrows Itself

Now let us look at the rich or developed countries. In their case mature capitalism is creating the groundwork for its successor, a far more dynamic and enjoyable economic system where the means of production are collectively owned by those who do the work. Capitalism does this because the machines that result from capital accumulation not only create increasing abundance but also make work less and less like work and more and more like an activity that could be performed for its intrinsic value.

Under such conditions, the claim that we need profit driven capitalists controlling the means of production and forcing us to work for them begins to look increasingly frayed. And as we will discuss shortly, the combination under collective ownership of self-motivated and highly accountable workers and production for use rather than profit would ensure a far greater rate of economic progress than capitalism.

Our greatest achievement so far in taking the work out of work has been to eliminate a lot of the really hard and dangerous jobs. These include swinging a pick and shovel as they used to do down the mines, and in the construction of buildings, sewers, drains, roads and railways; and also lifting heavy loads in manufacturing and transport.

At the same time there has been a large increase in the proportion of people with professional and managerial jobs. In the U.S.A., over 30 per cent of workers belong in this category. This includes teachers, workers in business and financial operations, healthcare professionals and managers who each comprise between 4 and 5 per cent of the workforce. The expansion of this kind of work is also reflected in the increasing education levels. In the U.S.A. 29 per cent of people aged between 25 to 29 years in 2004 had a Bachelors (4 year) or higher Degree.[1] In 2003, 38 per cent of 18 to 24 years olds in the U.S.A. were enrolled in Degree granting institutions[2] while 57 per cent of 25 to 29 year olds had completed at least some College.[3] In the same year just over 40 per cent of Americans in their 30s and 40s had been enrolled in a career or job related part-time or short course.[4]

It is true that a lot of routine and menial work still remains. However, it is not hard to envisage much of it disappearing over the next quarter century. Most factory work will vanish once we develop a new generation of robots that can do finicky assembly work. These will need to be better able to distinguish between different kinds of objects and find them wherever they are rather than simply being preprogrammed to pick up something from a particular location. Then they will need the dexterity of the human hand to manipulate and assemble these better understood objects. At the moment robots are mainly confined to fairly simple tasks such as spot welding, spray painting and moving things around.

Likewise, most of the unskilled jobs created with the expansion of the retail and hospitality sectors will go. Virtual shopping will be a big job killer in retailing. Web sites will get better at graphically displaying their wares and become easier to use. Customers will be able to make better choices as they access third party information about the product and its competitors, and the prices being offered by other retailers. Perhaps shoppers will be able to upload a body scan to on-line clothing shops which can then display a virtual ‘you’ wearing different garb. This will give you a much better idea of what you will look like. You can ensure the best off the shelf size or even ensure a perfect fit through an alteration service or one-off production. Online grocery orders will be filled at a warehouse rather than a supermarket by shelf picking machines. The boxed groceries will be either picked up at local centers by the consumer or home delivered. On-line shops will get better at displaying their wares on their web sites. Labor can also be reduced in conventional shopping with the addition of in-store computers providing information about products to customers and automated check-outs.

Bar service and coffee making can already be provided without humans. The machinery just needs to become cheaper or the labor more expensive. Coming up with a technology to provide automated table service should not be a daunting challenge. You could place an order directly to the kitchen through some electronic device on the table or your own hand-held computer or mobile phone. The order could even be made before you arrive. Maybe machines on the ceiling would lower the food onto your table. In the case of kitchen workers, they are generally doing work that is just as amenable to automation as tasks performed in manufacturing.

Many jobs in the office and administrative support category will go. When you need to make an appointment to see a doctor, dentist, physiotherapist, accountant, tax adviser etc. you will do so on-line with the computer software telling what time slots are still available. When you visit an office you will announce your presence to a computer at the front desk which can then provide directions if required. When you put in an order to a supplier for components or materials the information will be sent directly to the robot in the warehouse which will select it from the shelves. At the same time you will automatically receive an electronic invoice which requires no handling or filing. In many cases even the decision to put in the order can be left to a computer which monitors stock levels and rate of usage.

Snail mail surprisingly still survives but it must go eventually, and with it will go those responsible for handling and delivering it. The typist is another anachronism who will vanish as executives who cannot type retire and voice to text software improves. Then there is that other dinosaur, the bank clerk, who is there to help the old and confused and will disappear with, if not before, the arrival of electronic money.

The jobs we have mentioned make up about a quarter of the total in the United States.[5] The clearly menial and readily automated marketing and sales occupations comprise around 6 per cent of the employed workforce. Almost 5 per cent of all jobs are in waiting, bartending and other food and beverage service occupations. Short order and cafeteria cooks plus dishwashers are just under 3 per cent. The less skilled machine operators and process workers whose jobs are the most amenable to automation make up between 4 and 5 per cent of the employed workforce. The office and administrative support jobs we have referred to make up 5 per cent of all jobs and almost 30 per cent of all jobs in that category. Automation will also impact on more skilled work. However, generally speaking the greater the intellectual content of a job the harder it is to automate and the more likely that at least initially any impact will be confined to the more routine aspects of the task. For example, you still need a surgeon for keyhole surgery but there is less cutting and sewing up.

There is some concern that as the average intellectual content of work increases, a significant number of people with less natural ability will be left out in the cold with fewer and fewer jobs that they can perform. This is a rather pessimistic view when we look at what the great previously-unwashed have managed to achieve in recent times and what we can expect in the future. Education levels are a good indicator of the current general achievement. In developed countries school leavers who fail to finish high school are a shrinking minority. In the U.K., Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Sweden the figures is less than 10 per cent while it is in the low teens in the U.S.A., France and Germany.[6] Just living in a modern industrial society seems to make people smarter as they are confronted by increasingly brain nourishing activities. A few examples will illustrate the point: applying for a job, buying a house, dealing with the healthcare industry, organizing your retirement, cutting through the retail hype to choose a new car, home entertainment system or air conditioner, renovating your house, organizing a holiday on the Internet, trying to figure out how a new electronic appliance works, playing video games, putting in a tax return and deciding who to vote for. Even routine jobs can be more demanding. For example, they generally require you to read and write, carry out a range of verbal interactions with other human beings and be able to use a whole range of machines and appliances without special training. IQ tests seem to confirm that people are getting smarter.[7] We can also expect improved performance in the future as a lot of the conditions that cause stunted development change for the better. These include lack of family support, peer pressure to be an idiot and an inadequate education system. We will also benefit from an increasing understanding of human development and what causes learning difficulties. And over the longer term we can expect to see artificial improvements through mind-enhancing drugs, genetic engineering (induced evolution) and brain link ups to computers.

Cryptic note. See The Mission of Capitalism from Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia.

Lenin's debate with the Narodniks, including that work and Economic Content of Narodnism is pretty central to this discussion. (Was looking for a specific quote I recall on how people are becoming more intelligent with industrialization but no time to find it).

Strongly recommend close study of that stuff for the work DaveMcM is doing.

Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labor increases, is the labor simplified. The special skill of the laborer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity.

Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much larger scale. It supplants skilled laborers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children....

 Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society - the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading - the overall population was getting smarter. And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating. Next to global warming and Moore's law, the so-called Flynn effect may be the most revealing line on the increasingly crowded chart of modern life - and it's an especially hopeful one. We still have plenty of problems to solve, but at least there's one consolation: Our brains are getting better at problem-solving.

We thus see that if capital grows rapidly, competition among the workers grows with even greater rapidity – i.e., the means of employment and subsistence for the working class decrease in proportion even more rapidly; but, this notwithstanding, the rapid growth of capital is the most favorable condition for wage-labor. (emphasis added)

There is a lot here to speak about and not enough time, so I'll mostly confine my thoughts to the previous couple of posts.

Tom is right to catagorise unions as a reactionary/status quo force. Indeed, if a pharmacological company could figure out a way to make a 'distilled essence of union' it would make the perfect sleeping pill.

I'm not so sure, however, that workers no longer see wages as the key thing. It is certainly true that they also see more 'abstract' concerns like flexibility of hours, job satisfaction etc as very real, in fact, concrete issues and unions have missed the boat entirely on this. But if Melbourne is at all representative, there are large swathes of the mortgage belt where people are really squeezed financially. My partner recently attended a meeting dealing with community responses to family violence, in one of the mortgage belt 'burbs in the west, where a hardened member the constabulary said that the most problems the police where having with family violence were in families caught in mortgage squeezes. Money is still a key issue.

But it isn't the only one and this represents a real development. Some time ago, maybe 25 years, a French Marxist called Andre Gortz castigated the French unions for remaining stuck on wages and blind to the need and opportunity to go for reduced hours. It was after reading him that I first understood the sense of Marx talking about workers under communism being able to be a fisherman on a Monday, or whatever, a farmer on a Tuesday, a critic on a Wednesday etc. I'd previously thought this to be a tad romantic until Gortz made me think about time, leisure time as opposed to time we have to work to put food on the table. As I recall, he was arguing for workers to push for a three day week (sounds good to me), on the grounds that this tips the balance in a seven day week in favor of liesure time thereby (largely), freeing workers lives from being controlled/dominated by their job and forcing people to develop more creative ways of using their time. The book btw was Paths To Paradise with the sub title being  On The Elimination Of Work. (I think).

In fact, this is an aspect of the above discussion on alienation and menial work which has not been touched upon. To a considerable degree all/most work can be alienating and menial, in the sense that Tom was developing above, if that is all you do. All work and no play does end up making Jack a very dull boy because it deprives Jack from developing other aspects of himself, other talents...

I'm not happy about the revolutions of Russia, China etc being seen as failures. It seems to me that they were highly successful bourgeois revolutions led by communist parties who were then unable to transform those revolutions into  proleterian ones. The achievements in being able to transform those societies inside several decades was breathtaking. It took the English something like 200 years from the revolution of 1640-1660 to the end of the industrial revolution to achieve the same sort of transformation. What recent history does tell us, perhaps, is that it is not possible to make a seamless transition between the bourgeois revolution and the proleterian. Here it is certainly correct to speak of failure (although it was certainly correct to try.)

Cryptic note. The concept of a "seamless transition" from bourgeois revolution led by (nationalist/communist alliance?) (worker/peasant/intellectual?) party/united front/army including (a few/many/lots of) communists along with nationalists and revisionists and fascists in the leadership to proletarian revolution may have a lot to do with "proletarian ideology" in the sense that "ideology" has always been understood by scientific revolutionary theory - ie illusory consciousness. "Scarcely avoidable" as they say

"Forward to a modern bourgeois society as a necessary preliminary to developing a working class that can abolish wage labor" just wouldn't cut it as an inspiring slogan, but somebody had to do it and they did a lot better than their predecessors while their successors are yet to demonstrate what we can do.

I think the mortgage belt might be large in number but percentage-wise am not sure how it stands. My understanding is that something like 30% of women in Australia don’t ever have children, and those that do are older and older each year. This figure increases every year. The trend is now away from the family unit. The 2 party system exaggerates the role of the mortgage belt perhaps.

There is developing a mobile and independent workforce who are not restricted by the family unit. These workers often change jobs, not always because the pay is better or the job is that much different , but purely because they are bored with where they are - and also because it is now seen as unusual to stay in the same place for too long.

The change in the income and expectations of workers as well as the structural changes to employment in advanced capitalist countries has seen a greater independence for individuals who don’t want to put in the time required to bring up children. They have other priorities. They have a more responsible attitude here I think. The issues these people have are probably  different from the traditional struggles workers waged in the past - and the manner in which they wage those struggles one imagines will be somewhat different also.

We should not just expect more of the same I suspect.

I'm not happy about the revolutions of Russia, China etc being seen as failures. It seems to me that they were highly successful bourgeois revolutions led by communist parties who were then unable to transform those revolutions into  proleterian ones. The achievements in being able to transform those societies inside several decades was breathtaking. It took the English something like 200 years from the revolution of 1640-1660 to the end of the industrial revolution to achieve the same sort of transformation. What recent history does tell us, perhaps, is that it is not possible to make a seamless transition between the bourgeois revolution and the proleterian. Here it is certainly correct to speak of failure (although it was certainly correct to try.)

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence — but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological-belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

...

Hanging together with this too is the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction; these gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes.

Engels Letter to Franz Mehring, July 14 1893

The necessity for promoting "proletarian ideology" (ie proletarian false consciousness) can be understood esoterically from the last para.

PS I don't have time for corrections and expansions either.

I assume peaceful evolution is like peaceful co existence which also seems a contradiction to me. Is peaceful evolution from the same era, I haven’t heard of it before? I thought evolution was revolutionary. I am not sure if revisionism is not paying religious homage to the word revolution every time one speaks. I think there are certain assumptions about change.

Of course it is impossible to restore something that has not been abolished! The transition from capitalism to communism as I understand it is the working class in control of capitalism and transforming it to communism. The bourgeoisie are of course wanting to regain control and will be fighting to “fully restore” what has passed. They may indeed gain control but I imagine it would be short lived and their ability to turn the clock back would be limited. This is not because there is an inherent mechanism to stop them rather because the revolutionary struggle would be too well developed. All history is about revolutionary struggle This struggle will  continue beyond communism. 

What concerns me here is the ability to identify friends and enemies both within and outside the party. This cannot be done if one doesn’t understand the material conditions one lives under. It is also necessary to know where we are going. I don’t think it is that simple to do this. In the transition it may be difficult to assess the capitalist roaders if everyone is looking for a “restoration”.

Changing processes in order to change direction can sometimes be subtle. I haven’t thought a lot about the problems in transition but do think that they will be similar to the problems we are having now and will have when there is a party.

I am not sure what the state of the communist movement is at the moment. Get back to me in 30 years and I will tell you. I do think it is nowhere as bad as people imagine. The ability for ideas to develop and situations to change quickly means that things may be developing without us knowing. The fact that people don't call themselves communists or don't know that they are going to be communists means it would be difficult to identify coming out of low tide. What makes a good communist? Struggle I imagine.

The economic and technological development that has made the working class more sophisticated than ever before has also placed the working class in a better position to actually understand what is going on. Politics cannot exist in a vacuum and if changes are happening at a much faster rate then so is peoples ability think. I think all stages are actually shorter. The massive unleashing of technological forces after a revolution will scare many people.

The fact that other era’s took hundreds of years to come to fruition does not mean that this is mandatory. There is no time allocation for revolutions to succeed. The fact that the bourgeoisie took so long and still hasn’t finished the job does not mean that the working class has to be so hopeless.

The world is developing at a greater rate now than previously (Africa is the exception). The rest of the world in the next 20 years I think will be developed to the stage of advanced capitalist countries. The majority of commodities may cost next to nothing by this time. The ability to produce with negligible cost is very close. The ability to abolish work is therefore also close.

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The longer capitalism lasts then  the shorter the necessary transition period! I think the fact that there may be wrong turns as I stated will slow down that transition. This is not saying that it is a smooth ride and who wants one? The ride will be exciting and the life and death struggle will be an interesting challenge, but I doubt if it will or in fact could take 100’s of years. We don’t have 100’s of years! I think there is an attitude that things move slowly and we can pontificate as there is no pressing need to get on with it. I think not.

I am not sure if we could lose in the long term and what that would mean. Don’t really like to think about that.