Can the Working Class Change the World?

Michael D. Yates

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781583677124
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.

1—The Working Class

In 2017, Daniel Fetonte was elected to the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a rapidly growing left-wing organization in the United States. Fetonte was co-chair of the Austin, Texas, branch of the DSA and had been involved in labor union organizing for many years. However, he had also been employed by the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, the largest police union in the state, with a membership of 21,000 police officers. When DSA members learned of this, many raised objections, arguing that anyone representing cops, who are the perpetrators of assaults, including numerous murders, on working people, especially if they are black, should not be an officer in an organization such as the DSA.¹

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF THE WORKING CLASS

Fetonte has since resigned from the DSA, but the furor over his election to its board of directors raised a more general question, one it seems best to answer at the beginning of a book like this. What exactly is the working class? Is everyone who works for a wage a member of it? Perhaps in an abstract sense, this is so. But in terms of changing the world, this is a useless definition. Police and prison guards have labor unions. They are paid wages and take orders from supervisors. They are clearly workers. But they are not champions of the rights of other employees. Quite the contrary, as all of capitalist history shows. It would be even more preposterous to include principal corporate officials (including lawyers, accountants, and other highly paid shills and apologists for businesses), top political office holders, Wall Street’s elites, and so forth. Those who occupy these positions may have salaries, but they are almost uniformly hostile to everything that might benefit those we normally think of as working class. They will never transform the world except in ways that keep themselves employed, powerful, and rich. To include the CEO of Goldman Sachs in the working class along with farm laborers makes a mockery of the very conception of a class that could create a new world.

By contrast, professional athletes, actors, and musicians, some of whom earn extremely high wages, at least in the United States and a few other countries, are potential allies of radical transformation. They often grew up poor and have sympathy for those who are oppressed, particularly people of color, as evidenced by their support for an end to police brutality in minority communities. In addition, not all of those in these occupations are rich, and they face insecurities like those of most workers. The labor of other relatively well-remunerated employees, such as doctors, engineers, and college professors, is also becoming more like those of most workers. Physicians are as likely today to work for hospitals as to be in private practice. Their jobs and those of other professionals are facing many of the modern forms of corporate control of the labor process—constant surveillance, de-skilling, mechanization—as most other workers have long endured.²

If we assume that a necessary condition to be included in the working class is wage labor, we will miss hundreds of millions who are not paid wages but labor in such a way that capital benefits. Many businesses, often with the participation of colleges and universities, take on unpaid interns. Schools promote this as a reason for students to attend their institutions. They claim that interns will get invaluable experience, opening doors for full-time employment. Businesses, on the other hand, get free publicity along with free labor. To the extent that interns do work normally done by wage laborers, they benefit the employer in the same way as paid workers do.³

A much larger group consists of everyone who works full-time doing unpaid reproductive labor, efforts that are critical for the production of the labor force. Largely comprising women, this group’s work includes not only bearing children but all aspects of childcare, food shopping and preparation, nurturing, family gatherings and vacations, preparation for schooling, chauffeuring, and many other tasks. All this effort greatly profits employers, because they get young people trained in skills companies need but do not have to pay for, such as obedience, literacy, decent health, competitiveness. To exclude the millions who do these things full-time from the working class would be to exclude an enormous number of people with grievances severe enough that they might want to radically transform the world.

Unemployment is a fact of life in capitalist economies, which generate an enormous reserve of unutilized labor. Most members of this pool are without means, and desperate for work and money. It is almost always the case that racial minorities are overrepresented among the unemployed. Given that the unemployed are potential wage laborers, they are part of the working class. There are also millions worldwide who are not in the labor force, which is defined as the employed plus the unemployed. In the rich capitalist countries, discouraged workers, those who had given up looking for work because of limited job availability, rose greatly during the severe financial crisis of the last decade. There are others whose attachment to the labor market is sporadic but who would like a job. As with the unemployed, most of these must be considered in the working class.

Noted economist Samir Amin states that there are three billion peasants in the world today. The peasant rights organization La Via Campesina says that half of the world’s people are peasants.⁴ These are small farmers living in the world’s countrysides. We will see in chapter 3 how the lands of feudal serfs were expropriated to help give birth to capitalism and how such land thefts, backed by state and corporate threats, violence, and dubious legal rulings, have continued to the present day, throughout the world. This has thrown peasants off their land and into despair and rebellion. Small farmers have been committing suicide in many countries, even in rich nations. An estimated forty-seven farmers in India commit suicide every day, crushed by debts, bad weather, falling prices for crops, and the rapaciousness of global capitalists, who buy or otherwise seize large parcels of land and utilize agribusiness techniques to lower costs and undermine the capacity of peasants to compete.⁵ But peasants are not just ending their lives, they are also rebelling. Again using India as an example, rebellions, led by guerillas inspired by the writings and actions of the Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong, have engaged in long-term military actions and land takeovers.⁶ Mao’s inspiration is appropriate, given that he led a successful revolution as the head of a peasant army.⁷

There has been considerable debate as to whether peasants are workers.⁸ They are, for the most part, small farmers and hence not wage earners. Strictly speaking, then, they are not employees. However, given their exploitation at the hands of landlords, their often appalling treatment by the state, and their willingness to revolt, they are potential allies of the working class. And they often engage in some wage labor to make ends meet. Their children take jobs in the cities and send money home. Peasants are typically not far removed from the working class. Their struggles should be universally supported by working people. The worker-peasant alliance Mao Zedong worked to establish in China is a worthy goal today.⁹

The expropriation of peasant lands pushes farmers into the cities of the world. When the Industrial Revolution was advancing across Europe, landless peasants migrated in large numbers to the United States. There, they were absorbed by the new, giant factories owned by the nation’s biggest capitalists, such as United States Steel and Ford Motor Company. Now, however, they cannot all become hands for businesses to exploit directly, because the machine intensity of modern production means relatively lower labor usage. The mechanization utilized in the rich capitalist nations is now used by capitalists in the poor countries. China is a critical center of manufacturing production, with employment of more than 100 million. There are signs that the growth of this workforce is slowing a bit, the result of modern corporate efficiency techniques, including mechanization. As this inevitably happens, China’s reserve labor army will grow, and it will be difficult to absorb its members in formal types of employment.¹⁰

What happens to redundant peasants? They become members of the reserve army and must eke out a living as best they can. In every large city in the world, but especially in the Global South—(a term to describe those countries with relatively low per capita incomes; most are former colonies of the rich nations)—there are rings of slums, teeming with jobless and propertyless people.¹¹ A common way to earn a living in such places is to sell something in what are called “informal markets.” Scholar Martha Allen Chen, an expert on the informal economy, describes some of the types of labor in the informal sectors of the global economy:

Street vendors in Mexico City; push-cart vendors in New York City; rickshaw pullers in Calcutta; jitney drivers in Manila; garbage collectors in Bogotá; and roadside barbers in Durban. Those who work on the streets or in the open air are the most visible informal workers. Other informal workers are engaged in small shops and workshops that repair bicycles and motorcycles; recycle scrap metal; make furniture and metal parts; tan leather and stitch shoes; weave, dye, and print cloth; polish diamonds and other gems; make and embroider garments; sort and sell cloth, paper, and metal waste; and more. The least visible informal workers, the majority of them women, work from their homes. Home-based workers are to be found around the world. They include garment workers in Toronto; embroiderers on the island of Madeira; shoemakers in Madrid; and assemblers of electronic parts in Leeds. Other categories of work that tend to be informal in both developed and developing countries include: casual workers in restaurants and hotels; subcontracted janitors and security guards; day laborers in construction and agriculture; piece-rate workers in sweatshops; and temporary office helpers or off-site data processors.¹²

Hundreds of millions of men, women, and children are doing these kinds of work.

In the rich nations, many of those laboring in the informal economy would be called independent contractors. But in the Global South, to call what those who scavenge garbage dumps in the Philippines for salable items either “independent” or “contractors” is a cruel joke. The same could be said, however, of many taxicab, limousine, FedEx, Uber, and Lyft drivers in the United States. Not to mention those who sell items on eBay and Craigslist. For the first group, a legal fiction is used that allows companies to claim that the workers are not employees because they must lease the vehicles from them and pay expenses. It is ironic that 18,000 New York City cabbies have joined the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) to fight for better pay, conditions, and benefits.¹³ This hardly sounds like a group of independent businesspersons. In addition, they are carefully monitored electronically while driving by their de facto employers.

With most of the categories surveyed here, it has become typical for people to be in more than one of them, either at the same or different times. A woman may be a homemaker and a wage laborer; in fact, this is increasingly common. There are tens of millions in the world who are involuntary part-time workers, meaning that they are partly employed and unemployed. Those who are not in the labor force, and thus neither employed nor unemployed, might seek jobs when economic conditions improve. The two to three billion peasants worldwide often, as noted above, do wage labor at some time during the year. The same goes for the hundreds of millions of informal-sector workers, who may also work for wages when jobs are available. For example, if street sellers of trinkets in Mexico City are offered short-term employment cleaning churches, then they are both working on their own as a seller and for someone else as a cleaner. At one time, I did several types of work during the same period. I was a full-time college teacher, an independent contractor, and a part-time teacher. Such disparate work locations can generate conflicting feelings about one’s class position and the potential for solidarity with others.

SITUATING THE WORKING CLASS QUANTITATIVELY AND QUALITATIVELY

Quantity. Labor expert Ursula Huws has given us an interesting breakdown of work (not workers, but what they do).¹⁴ She devised a table that shows four categories of activity. She distinguishes between labor that benefits capitalists as a whole and work that enriches particular employers. The first helps to reproduce capitalist relations of production, while the second produces profits. Then she counterposes effort that is remunerated and that which is not. We then have 1) paid and unpaid work that reproduces the labor-capital relationship; and 2) paid and unpaid work that increases the profits of individual businesses. The four cells in the Table 1 (below) are labeled A, B, C, and D.

The examples in the table’s cells should be self-explanatory; further elaboration is in chapter 2. Readers will no doubt be able to think of many other illustrations. Huws discusses several complicated conundrums with respect to her tabular breakdown, and these need not concern us here. What is important is that cell C now contains the lion’s share of the world’s labor. As governments everywhere, in alliance with corporate capital, have privatized more and more public services, work in cell A has shifted to C. For example, trash services, school bus drivers, operations of toll highways, and many other state-financed services have been turned over to private, profit-seeking businesses. Similarly, much unpaid work has now been commodified, such as childcare and food preparation, shifting labor from B to C.

TABLE 1.	PAID	UNPAID
Reproduction (help all businesses)	(A) e.g., public school teachers	(B) e.g., homemakers
Profits (help one business)	(C) e.g., autoworker, sales clerk	(D) e.g., groceries self-checkout

What is critical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1. The Working Class
• 2. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 3. Nothing to Lose but Their Chains
• 4. What Hath the Working Class Wrought?
• 5. The Power of Capital Is Still Intact
• 6. Can the Working Class Radically Change the World?
• Notes
• Index