The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism

Monthly Review, May, 1997 by Kees van der Pijl

Struggles For Survival

The third way in which the discipline of capital is imposed and resisted has to do with the capacity of the whole social and natural substratum to sustain developed, comprehensive capital accumulation. Here, we are talking about the reproduction of labor power in the broadest sense. In the earlier stages of capitalist discipline, the object is first to obtain a hired work-force and then to have it perform its tasks according to the required job descriptions, on time-scales decreed by management, etc., Now, in the third phase, we are speaking of the conditions - in a fully developed capitalist economy - under which labor power will be available at all in the longer term. There is also the question of the earth's resources and the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere.

The effort of work itself can already lead to such exhaustion that there is no chance of recovery. Japanese production methods in particular have tended to stretch to the limit the total occupation of the personality by the labor process. "The collective work in teams is a method to harness peer pressure to the point of nightmare surveillance."(10) Karoshi, dying on the shop floor, is the ultimate consequence of this particular way of organizing the labor process, which replaces direct management supervision by "teamwork" to achieve the near-impossible.

Now, the patterns of intensive exploitation and surveillance have gradually penetrated the sphere of reproduction as well. Advanced industrial "lean/mean" production methods are rapidly spreading to this sphere. The industrial-capitalist model is replacing other organizational models of social reproduction, such as those drawn from civil service, church charity, neighborly and family assistance, or other non-industrial sources. After having been standardized by processes of socialization, often under state auspices and in a spirit of social protection, the reproduction of labor power too has become subject to cost-cutting and profit maximization strategies copied from, or directly applied by, private capital.

In this densely organized social economy, time pressures reach a point where no single person can adjust his or her body rhythm to the requirements of the task, and "the sovereignty of [personal] time disappears."(11) Both production and reproduction become subject to a generalized micro-economic rationality modeled on the industrial just-in-time pattern. With the division of labor developed to the utmost, the entire social structure is parcellized into units all committed to meeting near-impossible deadlines set by leading global firms. "Standardization" is the core concept, as exemplified by expressions such as "Toyotization of the banks," "McDonaldization of PTT-Telecom," or "lay-days" and "patient logistics" in health care.

Thus capitalist development has reached a stage in which certain discomforts and even extreme pressures associated with "work" are extending into to the broader sphere of reproduction or "daily life," in the sense originally coined by Henri Lefebvre, the social substratum from which labor is recruited.(12) For instance, in the sphere of biological reproduction and communal interactions, older community traditions may survive; but they are increasingly bombarded by the stimuli of commodification which are affecting social relations in general.