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We are now ready to tackle a particularly thorny issue in the analysis of an economic system based on WSDEs. This concerns the division of the employees of every WSDE into two groups with different relationships to the production and distribution of the surplus. The first group comprises the workers who produce surpluses and who also compose the board of directors in WSDEs. They are the workers who directly produce the outputs of the WSDEs—the software programs, shirts, buses, machines, and so on. Every WSDE also employs another, different kind of worker who provides the conditions and ancillary services that enable the surplus-producers to function. I will call these workers enablers.
Enablers include the secretaries, clerks, receptionists, security guards, cleaning staff, and so on who maintain the paperwork and physical spaces that provide the necessary conditions for the first group of workers to produce a surplus. Other types of enablers include managers, lawyers, architects, and counselors who provide still other conditions.
Enablers are just as crucial for the reproduction of the WSDE as are the surplus-producers. However, unlike the surplus-producing workers, enablers do not directly produce the surplus; rather, they provide various conditions for the surplus-producers to function effectively. The enabling group of workers obtains its sustenance and the means to perform its functions by receiving distributed shares of the surplus from the worker-directors. In other words, the surplus-producers need the enablers to be able to produce surpluses, while the enablers need surplus distributions from the surplus-producers/appropriators to be able to perform their enabling functions.
i worry about the potential for creating a two-tier system but, inevitable, i guess
A WSDE-based economic system could thus address the ancient problems of the division of labor and specialization of function. Adam Smith’s pin factory has often been interpreted as a rationalization for ever-more-narrow specialization of jobs, training, and mentalities as necessary for maximizing surpluses and profits. For most of those interpretations, specialization of a function has been treated as identical to specialization of the functionary. Yet that is not the case. Whatever the merits of specialization of function within a division of labor, the merits of equivalently specializing the laborer are dubious. Beyond a certain degree and a certain period of time, keeping one person in one job may reduce productivity and profitability. If a fully rounded personality and a diversely engaged body and mind are connected to personal happiness, genuine democracy, and work productivity, then a WSDE-based economic system with rotation of jobs will be far more fulfilling—and quite possibly more productive—than work has been under private or state capitalism.
reminds of some thoughts i've been having lately about the merits of being a well-rounded human being (not solely for its productive value, but just for unmeasurable value in itself)
Yet workers in most modern capitalist corporations are required by law and/or custom to accept working conditions over which they exercise no democratic control. If they refuse, they can be fired—and the primary option available to them is to work for another employer under similarly undemocratic conditions. For most workers in capitalist systems, there is no democracy in the workplaces where they must spend most of their lives.
[...] The left has always existed in tension between two basic dimensions. On the one hand, the left needs and desires to be concrete and practical, to have its feet on the ground, with direct responses to people’s immediate needs and solutions for today’s problems. On the other hand, it needs to have and project its utopian dimensions. Those include its visions for what could solve not only today’s problems, but rather the underlying structural conditions that keep regenerating them. Utopian dimensions also include a clear vision of an alternative set of structural conditions that people believe might work and are therefore worth fighting for as an alternative to a deteriorating status quo.
Capitalism has generated its own organic intellectuals. In the United States and elsewhere, academic departments of economics have worked to train them at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate courses focus chiefly on capitalism’s extraordinary excellence in allocating scarce resources among competing demands and generating income distributions that justly reward all contributors to production. Graduate economics programs elevate such utopian claims into formalized models that claim to show how and why capitalism yields a general optimally efficient equilibrium that maximizes the welfare of all market participants.
The organic intellectuals of the WSDE movement can present both practical possibilities (as in section 10.1 above) and utopian visions of a socialism that is far more democratic than the standard examples from the twentieth century. By doing so, they may be able to persuade the Occupy movement and the millions it has engaged that WSDEs belong on the agenda for social change. The program for increased WSDEs needs to support and build—in universities, labor unions, social movements, and beyond—the meetings, discussions, courses, and centers that can generate and train organic intellectuals.
The League radicals argued that the priority for Detroit auto workers was how to better working conditions, wages, and benefits, not to settle for fighting against givebacks or commiserating with corporations when their profits were temporarily down. The corporations had to give back, not the workers. The workers needed to control automation rather than be controlled by it. Automation should serve to increase the quality of cars, not profit margins. Winning support for such a perspective required extensive public education. We write at length on how the League struggled to accomplish that intellectual agenda and how it tried to set the rhetoric for discussions of race, class, finance, housing, education, and health.
The organizational focus of the League was the African American worker. But the leadership was not narrowly nationalist or separatist; it understood that fundamental change went beyond race issues. The League understood that interest rates and regulation of commerce were determined by government, but unlike entrepreneurs and bankers, the League thought economic planning should be directed to benefit the average American rather than executives, financiers, and the economic elite. Perhaps the League's most brilliant demonstration of how public resources could be used immediately was its transformation of Wayne State University's daily student newspaper from a socially marginal student organ into a dynamic community voice seeking to influence public policy. The League and its allies gained control of the paper by following the rules of the system. Moreover, their editorial work hewed to the spirit of the First Amendment's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, discourse, and assembly.
Unlike the movement identified with Martin Luther King Jr., the League was secular and urban. Unlike the urban movement identified with Malcolm X, the League initiated direct action to achieve racial equality whenever it thought the conditions were favorable. Unlike the Black Panthers who based themselves on youth and spoke repeatedly of white guilt, the League focused on workers and spoke repeatedly of capitalist guilt. In Finally Got the News, a film produced by the League, John Watson, one of the League's founders stated a major organizational premise: workers, unlike students or street people, had the power to shut down society in a general strike. Students and street people were not to be ignored, but they were not structurally situated to be the engine of social change.
In the pages that follow, we have attempted to relate the history of the Detroit struggle from 1967-1974, taking the activities of urban revolutionaries as our point of departure. We begin with a small core of black revolutionaries who began their political work in this period by publishing a newspaper and organizing in the factories and then led a series of activities which inspired other insurgent forces within the city and beyond. More than anywhere else in the United States, the movement led by black workers defined its goal in terms of real power-the power to control the economy, which meant trying to control the shop floor at the point of production. The Detroit revolutionaries did not get sidetracked into a narrow struggle against the police per se or with one aspect of power such as control of education. The movement attempted to integrate within itself all the dissident threads of the rebel- lious 1960s in order to create a network of insurgent power comparable to the network of established power. This movement, clearly in conflict with the wealth, power, and interests represented by the New Detroit Committee, generated an amazing sequence of separate but interlocked confrontations in the factories, in the polling booths, in the courts, in the streets, in the media, in the schools, and in the union halls.
describe something similar in pano
Increasingly, groups of white workers have begun to voice the complaints and pursue the objectives that black workers began to voice and pursue in the late 1960s. Ideas once limited to Marxists, youth counter-culturalists, and women's liberation groups can now be found on the shop floor in myriad demands and actions for a humane way of life. The capitalist work ethic has been discredited. Men and women no longer wish to spend 40 to 50 years performing dull, monotonous, and uncreative work. They see that the productive system which deforms their lives for a profit of which they have less and less of a share is also one that destroys the air they breathe, wastes the natural resources of the planet, and literally injures or disables one out of ten workers each year. Their rebellion is expressed in extraordinary absenteeism, particularly on Mondays and Fridays, in chronic lateness, in the open use of drugs, in poor workmanship, in repeated demands for earlier retirement, in sabotage, and in the wildcat strike. At the same time, many members of the working class, especially young whites unable to find well-paying jobs, have found. a solution to their employment woes by volunteering for the police and armed forces. White workers who can accept racial cooperation on the shop floor often remain hostile to similar cooperation in matters of housing, schooling, health care, and a whole range of social issues. Whether internal divisions will thwart the development of united class actio:1 is a question that remains to be answered.
The difficult post-war decades had brought one tremendous advantage to the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler): a chance to counter the effects of unionism. Frightened by the radical spirit and mass actions of the late 1930s, the Big Three made a deal with the UAW after the war. Their overriding managerial concern was maximizing profits, and the prime condition for doing that in the auto industry was control of the shop floor. All operations had to be evaluated in terms of worker-hour and worker-minute costs. Time-study experts investigated each job to eliminate wasted motion and to 'invent new procedures for increasing the work load. A worker at the GM plant at Lordstown explained the process in an interview printed in the September 9, 1973, issue of the New York Times: "They tell you, 'Put in 10 screws,' and you do it. Then a couple of weeks later they say, 'Put in 15 screws,' and next they say, 'Well, we don't need you no more; give it to the next man."' This worker was giving a specific example of the way management tried to systematize speed-up on an unprecedented scale. Sometimes the entire assembly line was accelerated either on a permanent basis or for temporary periods. Sometimes the number of operations required of a single person was increased. And sometimes workers were forced to keep up with the precise rhythms of a new machine or tool. Management could not get back to the "good old days" of Henry Ford when workers were not allowed to talk during lunch; but washing-up times, rest periods, job-preparation periods, and other paid non-production times were reduced. The net result of all facets of speed-up was that more labor was extracted from each person during each working hour. This increased tempo of work was not confined to a 40-hour week. The companies discovered that the savings from not paying fringe benefits to additional workers made it cheaper for them to pay time-and-a-half rates for overtime than to increase the total workforce. Compulsory overtime was enforced throughout the industry during the 1950s. Auto workers were made to work one to four hours overtime after finishing their regular eight-hour shift, and many were made to work on Saturdays and occasionally on Sundays.
The only weapon left to the worker was the grievance procedure. If a job was speeded up or an extra procedure added, if safety goggles or gloves were inadequate, if a machine malfunctioned, the worker could not fight it out on the factory floor in a direct confrontation with a superviser. The worker could only write out the complaint, file it with the union "rep," and wait for the complaint to be processed. Meanwhile, whatever the new procedures or safety violations might be, they remained in effect unless they were gross enough to trigger a walkout by all the workers. The grievance procedure became yet another device by which company and union eliminated worker participation in decision-making. The companies and the union had developed a division of labor. The companies looked after the machines, and the union looked after the workers. American auto workers were told by the mass media that they had one of the world's highest standards of living. They were not told that they also had one of the world's highest and most grueling standards of work.