Has the microchip short-circuited the classical Marxist view of the seizure of state power by the proletariat? Phil Hearse talked to Andre Gorz, author of Farewell to the Working Class, about the consequences of new technology for the future of socialism.
The title of your book, Farewell to the Working Class, is very provocative. But are we saying 'goodbye' in fact? Surely the decline of the traditional manual working class has been accompanied by the proletarianisation of large numbers of white collar workers. There's also a proletarianisation of intellectual labour. Over the last decade there was an expansion of trade unionisation which was only halted by the capitalist crisis of 1974-5. In other words, this society is still dominated by capitalist power [illegible] their living [illegible] relationship, as part of the proletariat.
No doubt about it. Everything you say is right. When the labour movement was born in the 1820s there was a revolution going on, the industrial revolution. This made it possible for a few people — the first socialists — to envisage a totally different society, one which would be based on the collective appropriation of the means of production, of workers' control of the production process. [illegible] labour. In the Grundrisse Marx opposed disposable time to labour time. And certain key parts of his work say that the measure of wealth is disposable, free time. 'Really rich' is a nation where you work six hours and not twelve hours.
I think the micro-electronic revolution brings us into the same perspective as the first socialists, who said that wage labour was a curse which could be abolished eventually. The new working class has not at all the same relationship to work and its job as the working class in the nineteenth century, the relationship which made it possible to say that socialism was the taking of power by the working class in production and in society. This relation to work has been completely wiped out by capitalist management techniques.
The old industrial working class which had real power on the factory floor, which bargained on almost equal terms with the boss, is gone. The same thing has happened to the production process among white collar workers. Now both are being automated out of existence. You have on the one hand a small stable class of wage earners, and on the other hand a growing class of precarious workers who are unemployed part of the year, or most of it.
This bears out Marx's prophesy that workers would eventually not just do one particular job, but just work. And we have reached a stage where people are indifferent to the content of their work. A majority of the working class would rather not work, would rather just receive an income for not working. So the 'farewell to the working class' is a farewell to the proletariat which identifies with wage labour as a source of power and of social self-recognition. Only the working class aristocracy now identifies with its own work.
You have raised a number of questions. The first is the possibility of the microprocessor revolution leading to the abolition of wage labour. But hasn't it always been part of the Marxist programme, to reduce the working day through the application of technology? According to the traditional Marxist schema, after the seizure of power by the working class we move immediately towards a reduction of labour time, to a gradual implementation [illegible] equals automation plus workers' councils' is a modern rendering of the traditional Marxist programme?
The second question which arises from what you've said is your stress on the identification of the working class with its labour as a source of satisfaction and power. It seems to me that the objective basis for the working class becoming conscious of itself as a class and fighting together as a class is not a particular relationship of satisfaction and identification with its product, but its experience of the wage labour/capital relationship — which still dominates society.
Which brings us to an empirical question. Is it the case that the changes in the labour process necessarily mean that the working class has become any less conscious, any less unified and any less combative?
We are still in a process where work is being abolished. If we keep to the 35-hour week, in the 1990s there will be 30 per cent unemployment. In Japan labour time for the 1990s is predicted to be 24 hours a week. When people work two days a week, the essence of their life is no longer labour, it's no longer the wage relation, it's what they do with their free time. What will society give them in terms of facilities, possibilities, culture, creative potential and social relations which they can develop in an autonomous way?
It can turn two ways. Either they will be allowed to have autonomous, productive, creative activity — that is based on self-managed social relations — or they will be manipulated in a '1984' society. So the emphasis on people's capacity to develop autonomy, to develop autonomous social relations, to develop autonomous productive and creative potentials is essential for the shaping of society to come — and not simply the taking of control of wage labour.
Then there's a second aspect. There's a crucial passage in Capital where Marx says that the self-management by the producers of their relations with each other, does not abolish the sphere of necessity, but just puts it under people's control so as to reduce it to its possible minimum. The sphere of freedom only begins beyond this stage.
I'm trying to say that wage labour is not necessarily something which is ungratifying. I'm saying that in a society like ours — which is not based on a village economy, domestic economy or on autarkic (self-sufficient) communes, but on comprehensive integrated social production — society always has the aspect of a big machine. You can take socially necessary labour and make it more pleasant. You can alleviate people's tasks and make them less boring, but you can never make them 'autonomous', they are 'heteronomous' (ie governed by the laws of others) by definition. Because society is a big machine, because the box made in Glasgow has to fit the screws made in Southampton. Because there are so many inter-dependent processes you need a country of five million people to make one washing machine.
So saying that people will manage the labour process in an autonomous way, through workers' control, setting the rules and submitting them to their power, is eyewash. All they can do is self-manage a technical aspect, where there is a margin of initiative. They cannot consider it their autonomous creative activity. There can be some creativeness in this activity, but it cannot be the thing they identify with and say 'this is my work, this is my product'.
This identity with the product must develop outside the sphere of necessity, the sphere of wage labour, if you want to have a meaningful society with meaningful social relations. That's what I call post-industrial socialism, one where wage labour will be marginalised. If things go on as they are, it will be the majority of the population who are marginalised by one small stratum of privileged workers who have stable jobs, while the majority of the population have nothing.
On the question of whether the changes in the work process have made the working class less combative — certainly not. The capitalist technology and work organisation has destroyed for a long time the possibility of workers being the subject of power in production. Technology is not neutral, it was developed precisely in order to destroy workers' power in the factory. You can win a certain amount of control over working conditions, over the technical process of production on the shop floor. You cannot, as Marx thought in his early period, say that the working class as a whole will feel at one with a single integrated comprehensive social process of production. You have to compare the working class as it is now with an army. It is structured by capitalist management, like an army. It is sub-divided by smaller units, led by what Marx called the 'officers and petty-officers of production'. Of course an army can take power. But as long as the technology of production remains the same, the division of labour remains the same, the sub-divisions of the units will remain the same and those who take power will be the officers. It will not be the soldiers.
So if the working class is to take power, it has to change the organisation of work and the division of labour, and to a large extent abolish it. It has to reintegrate the individual worker into units where they feel they understand what they are doing — which is impossible if you make the components of a washing machine. This is made possible by the micro-electronic revolution, where you have much smaller means of production. And it's possible to recover a certain control and decision-making power over what they're doing. It will not come on its own, but only if we understand that present capitalist technology has to be completely changed, as well as the division of labour.
I would raise two objections. The first is whether there is really going to be a 'collapse of work' so long as there are capitalist social relations. All the technological changes we've seen in the last 100 years have not led to this result. And according to Marxist theory there's a good reason why it shouldn't — which is that the only source of surplus value and profit is the exploitation of living labour power. If that is abolished then profits are abolished as well. Can capitalism abolish work? I think the answer is 'no'.
The second objection is that you seem to be saying that the realm of freedom can only start after the destruction of the division of labour. But why can't we, in the initial stages of socialism, proceed to reduce social labour rapidly, thus gradually expanding free time? It's impossible to destroy the division of labour overnight.
It always turns out that the capitalists haven't read Marx! The capitalists are abolishing labour, they don't know that thereby they're destroying the source of surplus value. What faces us in the future is a measure of automation that will make it impossible for people to live on a wage. Therefore governments and capital will combine to give people an income to buy commodities not related to their work. That's what's already happening.
The necessity of the capitalist system to make income independent of the performance of work is visible to everyone. You are paid for studying. In France we have 600,000 young people trained every year in skills they will never be able to use. Hundreds of thousands of people are paid redundancy money to ensure they give up work. They are trying to get people to retire at 55.
We are going towards a society where commodities will buy people instead of people buying commodities. It's what I call 'dead-living capitalism' — capitalism which is a living corpse. Capitalism which is already dead but keeps up the appearance of the wage relationship and commodity production.
I think that you're saying that capitalism has already realised part of the Marxist project, or is in the process of realising it — the move towards the abolition of alienating labour. I think that the thesis that capitalism will be prepared to pay an increasing part of the working class not to work, even a majority of the working class, is not valid...
The ruling class will be forced to redistribute surplus value more widely or the system will break down, it is breaking down...
But in a period of crisis there's an increasing attack on that redistribution of surplus value — look at Britain. The real income of the unemployed has decreased by 20 per cent in three years, which is precisely a demonstration that the law of value continues to dominate, and that the infinite redistribution of surplus value is not possible because it leads to a collapse of profits.
But what will happen when the work week comes down to 24 hours a week? If people are just paid for that you won't be able to sell anything via [illegible]. This society [illegible] it wants to survive. And it will do so. It's a condition of survival.
What is your critique of the traditional strategy of the working class taking power to solve these problems?
You can't rely on the working class because it's a minority. You have to widen your political base to the increasing number of people who are marginalised by this society — the marginalised sub-proletariat.
Obviously there's a necessity to assemble a popular majority for socialism, which means building an alliance between the working class and other social groups and popular movements. Doesn't this still mean an overall political programme and a political party to cement the alliance?
But my point is that all political parties have become discredited because they are identified with government and not the aspirations of the people. They have become conveyor belts for state power and not for civil society.
When you talk about the state, why can't a new type of state exist — a workers' state based on workers' councils which are federated at a regional and national level, which breaks down the division between the state and civil society?
Yes, but you can't base your worker's councils on wage labour. You have to consider it as a federation of labour-exchange co-operatives. What does it mean if we are Marxists and communists? It means not the exchange of labour for money to buy commodities, but exchanging labour for goods and social services. That's the idea of the new communes that are growing up in Canada and Scandinavia. That you give so many hours to the commune and in return you have credits for goods and services. That is the only way to have autonomously controlled labour and social relations.
[illegible] essentially utopian. Surely you can't immediately abolish the national market and a money economy after the destruction of capitalism. That requires a situation of abundance based on automation — it's more like the initial stages of communism. Otherwise you will revert to a simple barter economy and you will have de-industrialisation.
You are too rigid, I didn't say abolish the national economy, the national market. But you must have scope for autonomously controlled social relations at a local level. Otherwise you will never make the leap from the 'sphere of necessity' to the 'sphere of freedom'.
Farewell to the Working Class by Andre Gorz is published by Pluto Press, £3.95.