Workshop Talks
July 2000
Freedom as workers and Marx see it
by B. Ann Lastelle
NEWS & LETTERS published Raya Dunayevskaya's 1961 lecture notes on Hegel's
Smaller LOGIC, the first part of his ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHICAL
SCIENCES, in three parts ending with the June issue. I noted in
Dunayevskaya's quotes from Hegel's work two "definitions" of freedom: "For
freedom it is necessary that we should feel no presence of something else
which is not ourselves" (Chapter Two: Preliminary Notion, ¶24); and "...we
become free when we are confronted by no absolutely alien world, but by a
fact which is our second self" (Chapter Four: Second Attitude of Thought
Towards the Objective World, ¶38).
Karl Marx's analysis, and my experience, of labor in the capitalist
production process reveal the absolute opposite of Hegel's idea of freedom.
Marx wrote in the "Alienated Labor" section of his 1844 ECONOMIC AND
PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS as if he had been working beside us in the factory:
"First is the fact that labor is EXTERNAL to the laborer—that is, it is not
part of his nature—and the worker does not affirm himself in his work but
denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and
mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. The worker,
therefore feels at ease only outside work, and during work he is outside
himself...
"His work, therefore, is not voluntary, but coerced, FORCED LABOR. It is
not the satisfaction of a need but only a MEANS to satisfy other needs. Its
alien character is obvious from the fact that as soon as no physical or
other pressure exists, labor is avoided like the plague... Finally...the
activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to
another. It is the loss of his own self."
How many times have we said to one another, "I didn't want to come in
today, but I need the money"? It is not an inner drive for creativity or
self-expression that propels us into action while at work, but the demands
of the production process: a machine jams or breaks down, supplies run out,
a quality standard is not being met. Even the small satisfactions which
might be gained from solving problems on the line are thwarted by
management's drive for productivity and cost savings.
Marx, in his more "scientific" analysis of the capitalist production
process, CAPITAL, continued to emphasize the alien, external nature of that
process. Workers are brought together by the capitalist who purchases their
individual labor powers:
"Their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment
of a connection between their individual functions...are not their own act,
but the act of the capital that brings them together and maintains them in
that situation. Hence the interconnection between their various labours
confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the
capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a
being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose" (Chapter
13: Co-operation).
The purpose of which Marx speaks is the production of surplus value,
profit, and the accumulation of capital. We workers come into the factory
with a different goal: to earn a living. Management uses various tactics to
subject our activity to its purpose: the manipulative, in other words,
process improvement and employee involvement schemes; the financial, that
is, raises and promotions (My supervisor's favorite claim is, "It will look
good on your performance review."); the despotic, or disciplinary measures
up to and including termination.
Over all hangs the threat that if we as a group do not produce the
requisite profit, the line will shut down, the plant will close, we will
lose our jobs. The people who decide what the requisite profit is and how
we are to produce it—what products with what machines on what schedule—are
far, far away from the reality of the shop floor.
Marx described that reality this way: "...within the capitalist system all
methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at
the cost of the individual worker; ...all means for the development of
production...become means of domination and exploitation of the producers;
they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the
level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his
labor by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual
potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is
incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions
under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism
the more hateful for its meanness..." (Chapter 25: "The Accumulation of
Capital").
Marx's perspective for the future was the absolute opposite of the
accumulation of capital and the misery of the working class. His 1875
CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM envisioned a classless society where "the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished," and "labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime
want." Labor is no longer forced; it becomes an expression of our human
creativity. That is an idea of freedom worth fighting for.
|
