I was going to continue my next post in this series with a continuation of my critique of Mr. Stanford’s definition of money as “purchasing power,” but I came across a more directly political issue that should be addressed.
The webcast is supposed to be an analysis of what the economy should be after COVID. Mr. Stanford’s analysis, however, fails to grasp the specific historical nature of the present economy, which is dominated by a class of employers.
Mr. Stanford’s Continued Ahistorical Characterization of an Economy Dominated by a Class of Employers
I pointed out in another post (part one on the theory of money) how Mr. Stanford tends to identify production in general throughout history with the current economy, which is an economy whose primary aim is accumulating more and more money by means of exploiting workers (and by revolutionizing technological conditions).
Since workers in such an economy are mere means for the increase of money (see The Money Circuit of Capital ), there is often a contradiction between the health of workers and the interests of employers (as I have often pointed out in my posts. See for example, Working for an Employer May Be Dangerous to Your Health, Part One, part of a series of posts on how the health of workers is often sacrificed for the benefit of employers).
Mr. Stanford, however, treats the real economy as if it were some sort of pure labour process in general, producing use values that people need for their lives, or alternatively that the economy in the present is actually or really a socialist economy, where the purpose of work is to satisfy the needs of workers and others. Thus, Stanford says:
The economy is not a thing in and of itself. The economy is what we refer to as the work that people do to produce goods and services and then how those goods and services are distributed and used.
Instead, all members of the institution– faculty, librarians, learning specialists, lab technicians, students, support workers, and administration have the same goal—the advance of human knowledge and creativity in the widest and most comprehensive sense. If that claim is true, then it should follow that all the groups who together make up the university ought to cooperate (not without respectful disagreement) in the determination of the budgets, policies, rules, and goals that guide the institution’s mission. The best ideas emerge through deliberative and democratic argument—no one group knows best just because of the position they occupy in the hierarchy.
To which I responded:
This view is ideology in the worst sense of the term. In a society dominated by employers–including public-sector employers like universities, it is highly unlikely that such workers as “lab technicians, students and support workers” have the same goal–“the advance of human knowledge and creativity in the widest and most comprehensive sense.” Such a view may apply in a socialist organization, but to assume such a situation in universities, which function in a capitalist context, is bound to lead to inadequate policies and theories.
Consider support workers. I worked twice at a university library, once doing my practicum to obtain a library and information technology diploma from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) at the University of Calgary main library, in the cataloguing department. At the University of Calgary, I noted that the work situation was characterized by a very hierarchical, top-down power structure. One worker commented that she would prefer a benevolent dictator to a mean one; of course, but why have a dictator at all? At least this worker recognized that there was a dictator–unlike Professor Noonan.
Stanford, like Professor Noonan, simply ignores the hierarchical and dictatorial nature of relations at work–as if that hierarchical and dictatorial structure did not form an integral part of the present economy.
A Real Trade-off Between the Health of Workers and the Health of an Economy Dominated by a Class of Employers
As a consequence of his characterization (actually reduction) of the present economy to a pure labour process of producing social use values, he incorrectly claims that there is no contradiction between the health of workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers and the economy:
So, you can’t have an economy that is healthy if people aren’t healthy, and this false trade-off between the economy and public health was a giant self-inflicted wound in our response to Covid.
It is hardly a “false trade-off between the economy and public health”–because the current economy includes the sacrifice of workers for the benefit of the class of employers.
Ironically, it is Stanford and not the conservatives whom he criticizes who fails to understand the real nature of the present economy. He states:
Doug Ford [premier or head of the provincial Progressive Conservative government of Ontario] , Jason Kenny [premier or head of the United Conservative provincial government of Alberta] and Erin O’Toole [leader of the official opposition party the Conservative Party of Canada] themselves implied that there was some kind of trade-off between public health and the economy.
For representatives of employers–and unfortunately for workers as well–there is definitely a trade-off between “the economy” (which workers do not control but, quite the contrary, the economy controls the workers) and the health of workers. The health of workers is secondary to the drive for accumulation of more and more profit and more and more money.
Diverse governments of countries dominated by a class of employers have responded differently to the pandemic, in part at least, because of their divergent assessments of the impact reducing the employment of workers will have on the pandemic in the country. Obviously, the kind and extent of workers’ responses to the pandemic also have influenced governments’ responses. However, before the pandemic emerged, governments (and employers) were already involved in making decisions that jeopardized the future health of workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers.
But this time around there was little mystery about the identity of the microbe—SARS-CoV-2 was sequenced almost overnight in January—or the steps necessary to fight it. Since the discovery of the HIV virus in 1983 and the recognition that it had jumped from apes to humans, science has been on high alert against the appearance of deadly new diseases with pandemic potential that have crossed over from wild fauna. This new age of plagues, like previous pandemic epochs, is directly the result of economic globalization. … Today, as was the case when I wrote Monster fifteen years ago, multinational capital has been the driver of disease evolution through the burning or logging out of tropical forests, the proliferation of factory farming, the explosive growth of slums and concomitantly of “informal employment,” and the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to find profit in mass producing lifeline antivirals, new-generation antibiotics, and universal vaccines.
Forest destruction, whether by multinationals or desperate subsistence farmers, eliminates the barrier between human populations and the reclusive wild viruses endemic to birds, bats, and mammals. Factory farms and giant feedlots act as huge incubators of novel viruses while appalling sanitary conditions in slums produce populations that are both densely packed and immune compromised. The inability of global capitalism to create jobs in the so-called “developing world” means that a billion or more subsistence workers (the “informal proletariat”) lack an employer link to healthcare or the income to purchase treatment from the private sector, leaving them dependent upon collapsing public hospitals systems, if they even exist. Permanent bio-protection against new plagues, accordingly, would require more than vaccines. It would need the suppression of these “structures of disease emergence” through revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no large capitalist or state-capitalist country would ever willingly undertake.
To treat the “economy” in its present structure as if it were some pure structure that satisfies human needs, over which some kind of superficial or artificial “superstructure” is imposed, as Stanford does, surely distorts the real nature of the economy in which we live. That social structure has led to immense gains in the productivity of labour–while simultaneously reducing humans and the rest of the natural world to mere means for the ever-increasing accumulation of money (and means of production). Furthermore, if that ever-increasing accumulation of money stops due to an economic crisis (itself a result of the development of a capitalist economy–as Michael Roberts (2009), in his book The Great Recession Profit cycles, economic crisis A Marxist view, argues), then millions workers are thrown out of work and the production of many commodities is reduced.
Covid and the Trade-Off Between the Health of Workers and the Health of an Economy Dominated by a Class of Employers
Stanford’s words continue to ring hollow as he tries, in vain, to separate ‘the pure, good economy’ from the ‘bad, capitalist economy’–within the capitalist economy:
The best thing to do for the economy is clearly to keep people healthy and stop the pandemic and then rebuild and that means protection and that means income support and that means a plan to rebuild once we can back to work. It doesn’t mean sacrificing ourselves for “the” economy, which actually means just sacrificing ourselves for our employers and to even cut their pay.
Some representatives of employers surely did not know what was best for the capitalist economy–whether to shut down for as long as necessary until the number of deaths and infections were reduced, to leave parts of the economy (in addition to essential economic structures, such as food, hand sanitizer and mask production) functioning or to leave most of the economy dominated by a class of employers functioning. But “sacrificing ourselves for our employers” even in normal times is run of the mill. Why is it that there are, on average, over 1,000 deaths officially at work per year and more than 600,000 injuries in Canada (and many more deaths when unofficial deaths are included (see Working and Living in a Society Dominated by a Class of Employers May Be Dangerous to Your Health).
Stanford reminds me of another social reformist or social democrat–an author whom Marx criticized long ago-Pierre-Joesph Proudhon.
From Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1, page 181, note 4:
From this we may form an estimate of the craftiness of petty-bourgeois socialism [such as Proudhon’s], which wants to perpetuate the production of commodities while simultaneously abolishing the ‘antagonism between money and commodities’, i.e. abolishing money itself, since money only exists in and through this antagonism. One might just as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence.
Proudhon treated the market, exchange, commodities and money as permanent features of our lives, but he wanted to eliminate the contradictions that flowed from these social conditions. He generally treated exchange of commodities and money and money and commodities as if they could be treated independently of the class relation of employers and workers.
Stanford, similarly, treats the production of use values within a society dominated by a class of employers as independent of or isolatable from the social contradictions that flow from their production as both commodities and as capital. This production of use values for our needs is somehow the “real economy” and is not subject to overproduction, underproduction, sudden surges of employment and sudden surges of unemployment–not subject to crises. Nor is it subject to exploitation and oppression; otherwise, it would be necessary to admit that the health of workers and the maintenance of an economy dominated by a class of employers are necessarily at odds with each other.
But wait. When workers produce use values in a society dominated by employers, are they not subject to the power of the representatives of the employer (whether private or public)? Are not workers in such situations oppressed and, in the case of the private sector at least, exploited? (The question of whether workers in the state sector are exploited I leave open). It is illegitimate to treat work in a society dominated by a class of employers as if it were not–and that is what Mr. Stanford does.
Stanford seeks to ignore the integrated nature of exchange of commodities for money and money for commodities with the exploitation and oppression of workers, who are treated as mere means for the ever increasing accumulation of money (see The Money Circuit of Capital).
By the way, informally I have been following the statistics on the number of infections and deaths on the website Worldometer for some time (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/). In general, on the weekends, when there are fewer workers at work, the number of infections and deaths decrease, and as the working week proceeds, the number of infections and deaths increase. Undoubtedly there are other factors at work here, but surely one of the factors is, on the one hand, the requirement by employers that their employees work and, on the other, the need for non-essential workers to obtain a wage or salary by working for an employer.
MAYFIELD, Ky. — As a catastrophic tornado approached this city Friday, employees of a candle factory — which would later be destroyed — heard the warning sirens and wanted to leave the building. But at least five workers said supervisors warned employees that they would be fired if they left their shifts early.
For hours, as word of the coming storm spread, as many as 15 workers beseeched managers to let them take shelter at their own homes, only to have their requests rebuffed, the workers said.
Fearing for their safety, some left during their shifts regardless of the repercussions.
At least eight people died in the Mayfield Consumer Products factory, which makes scented candles. The facility was leveled, and all that is left is rubble. Photos and videos of its widespread mangled remains have become symbols of the enormous destructive power of Friday’s tornado system.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that 74 people were confirmed dead in the state.
McKayla Emery, 21, said in an interview from her hospital bed that workers first asked to leave shortly after tornado sirens sounded outside the factory around 5:30 p.m.
Satellite images show the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory and nearby buildings before, on Jan. 28, 2017, and after, on Saturday.MAXAR Technologies via Reuters
Employees congregated in bathrooms and inside hallways, but the real tornado wouldn’t arrive for several more hours. After employees decided that the immediate danger had passed, several began asking to go home, the workers said.
“People had questioned if they could leave or go home,” said Emery, who preferred to stay at work and make extra money. Overtime pay was available, but it wasn’t clear whether those who stayed were offered additional pay.
Supervisors and team leaders told employees that leaving would probably jeopardize their jobs, the employees said.
“If you leave, you’re more than likely to be fired,” Emery said she overheard managers tell four workers standing near her who wanted to leave. “I heard that with my own ears.”
About 15 people asked to go home during the night shift shortly after the first emergency alarm sounded outside the facility, said another employee, Haley Conder, 29.
There was a three- to four-hour window between the first and second emergency alarms when workers should have been allowed to go home, she said.
Initially, Conder said, team leaders told her they wouldn’t let workers leave because of safety precautions, so they kept everyone in the hallways and the bathrooms. Once they mistakenly thought the tornado was no longer a danger, they sent everyone back to work, employees said.
Anyone who wanted to leave should have been allowed to, Conder said.
Elijah Johnson, 20, was working in the back of the building when several employees wanting to head home walked in to speak with supervisors. He joined in on the request.
“I asked to leave and they told me I’d be fired,” Johnson said. “Even with the weather like this, you’re still going to fire me?” he asked.
“Yes,” a manager responded, Johnson told NBC News.
Johnson said managers went so far as to take a roll call in hopes of finding out who had left work.
Company officials denied the allegations.
A rescue worker and a cadaver dog arrive at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory Saturday in Mayfield, Ky.John Amis / AFP via Getty Images
“It’s absolutely untrue,” said Bob Ferguson, a spokesman for Mayfield Consumer Products. “We’ve had a policy in place since Covid began. Employees can leave any time they want to leave and they can come back the next day.”
He also denied that managers told employees that leaving their shifts meant risking their jobs. Ferguson said managers and team leaders undergo a series of emergency drills that follow guidelines of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“Those protocols are in place and were followed,” he said.
A 24-hour hotline is available as of Monday for employees to call about hazard pay, grief counseling and other assistance, he said.
Autumn Kirks, a team lead at the factory who was working that night, denied Monday afternoon on MSNBC that people’s jobs were threatened if they didn’t go in.
But another employee, Latavia Halliburton, said she witnessed workers’ being threatened with termination if they left.
“Some people asked if they could leave,” but managers told them they would be fired if they did, she said.
The first tornado warning passed without any damage, but several hours later, another warning was issued. Once the second tornado siren sounded sometime after 9 p.m. Friday, Conder and a group of others approached three managers asking to go home.
“‘You can’t leave. You can’t leave. You have to stay here,’” Conder said the managers told her. “The situation was bad. Everyone was uncomfortable.”
Mark Saxton, 37, a forklift operator, said that he would have preferred to leave but that he wasn’t given the option.
“That’s the thing. We should have been able to leave,” Saxton said. “The first warning came, and they just had us go in the hallway. After the warning, they had us go back to work. They never offered us to go home.”
As the storm moved forward after the second siren, the employees took shelter. The lights in the building started to flicker.
“I kid you not, I heard a loud noise and the next thing I know, I was stuck under a cement wall,” she said. “I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t push anything. I was stuck.”
Emery, who was trapped for six hours, had several chemical burn marks on her legs, her buttocks and her forehead from the candle wax. She also sustained kidney damage, her urine is black, and she still can’t move her legs because of the swelling and from having been motionless for so long.
Employees who wanted to go home early said they were mistreated.
“It hurts, ’cause I feel like we were neglected,” Saxton said.
Mr. Stanford’s conclusion that there is no trade-off between the economy and the health of workers flies in the face of such tragedies.
Protecting Oneself from Dangerous Working Conditions Versus Having to Work for an Employer to Obtain Money
The same could be said of the Westray Mine deaths (really mass murder) in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1992. What was the Westray Mine Mass Murder? From Tom Sandborn (2016), Hell’s History: The USW’s Fight to Prevent Workplace Deaths and Injuries from the 1992 Westray Mine Disaster Through 2016. page 23:
… the lethal disaster had been made inevitable by Westray management negligence, corner cutting and speed-up, as well as by company decisions to ignore and/ or disable crucial safety equipment. One of the disabled sensors, attached to a machine called a “continuous miner” in the mine’s Southwest 2 tunnel, was supposed to detect methane levels as the explosive gas was released from the coal face by the machine’s excavation. Instead, the unmonitored level of methane reached a critical level and a spark from the machinery ignited it. The methane explosion drove fine particles of highly flammable coal dust (which should have been regularly ventilated out of the mine and/or “stone dusted” with ground rock to make it less volatile, but was neither properly ventilated nor stone dusted), into the air and created a secondary explosion that drove a fireball through the mine’s tunnels, killing the 26 men on the night shift in less than a minute.
The “real economy” (material production through concrete labour) was not separated from the process of pursuing profit, and workers well knew that:
Alan Doyle has bitter memories about the dangerous practices encouraged at Westray. “That mine was a place called hell,” he told me in 2016. “It was run through intimidation. The inspectors were led around by the nose and mainly ignored. Once an inspector caught them with a bulldozer underground with unshielded sparks coming off it. Once the inspector left the mine, the foreman ordered Robbie to take the dozer back underground ‘… if he wanted to keep his fucking job.’”
Workers, more or less consciously, understand that there is indeed a trade-off between the “economy” (dominated by a class of employers) and their own health; otherwise, they would not fear being fired for complaining. This is economic coercion (see my critique of John Clarke, a Toronto radical, who refers to economic coercion as a necessary feature of capitalism and then ignores this fact in his own definition of social problems and social solutions “Capitalism needs economic coercion for its job market to function” (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: OCAP)).
…a study from a skills and employment survey in Britain (Fear at Work in Britain. Gallie, Feldstead, Green, & Inanc, 2013) found that workers’ feared job loss, unfair treatment and loss of job status; available historical statistics for the first two categories show that such fears have increased. In addition, when I took a health and safety course at the University of Manitoba in the early 1990s, the instructors (both government employees and trained in the science of occupational health and safety and inspectors themselves) implied that workers often would not complain because of the economic climate of high unemployment.
Mr. Stanford’s separation of the real economy from the actual economy is a figment of his own social-democratic imagination. His economics is–for social democrats and social reformers, not for workers.
Marx’s dual theory of labour (concrete labour producing use values and abstract labour producing value, which needs to be exchanged for money in order to be or function as value) is much superior for workers to the “economics” offered by Mr. Stanford. Marx’s dual theory of labour connects abstract labour to value and hence money while also distinguishing this process from the concrete labour process of producing use values–but there is no separate existence of the two aspects of labour in a capitalist economy. The money economy and the labour process are necessarily related in a society dominated by a class of employers.
By denying that the economy dominated by the class of employers can be divorced from the “real economy” (concrete labour), Marxian economics acknowledges the experience of workers–that their health and safety and the economy are often at loggerheads.
Conclusion
A pattern seems to be emerging of a social-democratic or social-reformist trick that covers up the real social world in which we live. Mr. Stanford flies to the “real economy” (a fantasy economy that does not exist in a society characterized by the domination of a class of employers and the associated economic, political and social structures and institutions) to hide the fact that workers’ health is often sacrificed for the benefit of both individual employers and for the benefit of the class of employers. There is a real trade-off between the health of workers and the “economy”–as an economy dominated by a class of employers.
There is no such thing as a “real economy” separate from a class economy in a capitalist system. To view such a real economy as somehow existing now is to assume that we need not radically transform the economy at both the macro and micro levels. Why bother if the real economy somehow already exists?
Since there is no such thing as a separable “real economy” in a capitalist economic and political system, unfortunately there is a definite trade-off between the health of workers and the health of an economy dominated by a class of employers.
Of course, if the economy or the life process of workers producing their own lives were to be under their control, this trade-off would be abolished since the lives of workers would be the priority. The production of use values to satisfy the needs of workers-citizens would not then lead to such a trade-off. However, it is illegitimate to assume that such an economy exists in the present; by making such an assumption, Mr. Stanford, like his social-democratic or social reformist comrades, can then avoid the conclusion that the primary task is to abolish the conditions that prevent such an economy from arising.
This is a key trick or method of social democrats or social reformers everywhere. They assume a situation in which what ought to be the case in fact actually is the case. Stanford assumes that the “real economy” somehow purely occurs–as if how workers produce in this society independently of how they are oppressed and exploited and, similarly, how what they produce is distributed and consumed is independent of the capitalist market system.
Of course, it should be the aim of a socialist movement to produce a society where what is produced, distributed and consumed assumes a form worthy of human beings. However, Stanford, by assuming that what may arise in the future exists in the present, eliminates any need for struggling for achieving that goal in the present. If a pure human (and humane) economy can somehow exist in the present, then why bother aiming for the realization of such an economy in the future (with action in the present to achieve such a goal)?
Mr. Noonan, similarly, assumes illegitimately that the abolition of class relations at the university is already an accomplished fact.
This trick does a great disservice to the working class.
The social-reformist or social-democratic left do not seem capable of dealing with the real lives of workers, where their health and welfare are often sacrificed for the benefit of employers.
As Jack Nicholson said in the movie A Few Good Men–“You can’t handle the truth!” Mr. Stanford and his social-democratic or social-reformist followers cannot handle the truth.
Let us look at the behaviour of one private employer in Sweden, which supposedly instituted humanistic methods for helping workers to become more healthy: the private employer Scania, a multinational capitalist manufacturing firm (from page 140, Christian Maravelias, Torkild Thanem, Mikael Holmqvist. “March Meets Marx: The Politics of Exploitation and Exploration in the Management of Life and Labour”. Published online: 2012; pages 129-159):
Scania is an internationally leading manufacturer of heavy trucks, buses and coaches, and industrial and marine engines. It operates in some 100 countries with approximately 34,000 employees [in another source, it says 45,235].. Scania was founded in the late nineteenth century and has built and delivered more than 1,500,000 trucks, buses and engines.
Scania is well known both for its products and for its stable and long-term strategic focus. It has grown organically, primarily through internal financing, and it has remained in the same product category for more than 80 years. This conservatism has been successful, yielding annual profits for more than seven consecutive decades and helped avoid regular lay-offs since the 1940s. Today Scania is regarded a stable and attractive employer known for combining continuous improvement in production with safe and professionally stimulating working conditions.
Workers in Scania were subject to a scientific management system, with a top-down management style. As a consequence, (page 145):
the previous system was associated with high levels of personnel turnover (30%) and illness absenteeism (25%),
To deal with this problem, the union pressured for the development of a lean production model in the style of Toyota (pages 145-146):
the union was able to exercise considerable bargaining power, almost forcing the firm to accept a version of lean production that was aligned with principles of health and well-being.
However, Scanian management turned the situation to its advantage by coopting the process of a move towards so-called health and wellness:
Like many lean production initiatives, Scania’s turn to this kind of system in the 1990s implied an emphasis on self-managing teams, continuous improvement and individual responsibility (see, e.g. Adler, 1993; Adler, Goldoftas, & Levine, 1999; Delbridge, 1995; Delbridge, Turnbull, & Wilkinson, 1992). Despite an emerging concern with well-being, the most apparent aspect of this related to the objective dimension of exploiting labour. As new tasks and responsibilities were added to all factory jobs, Scania was able to extract more value from the salary they paid workers. Making workers take individual responsibility for constantly improving the production process intensified work, as it meant that they had to do more for the same salary: in addition to take responsibility for executing predefined tasks, workers in self-managing teams were expected to set goals and find ways of reaching these goals.
This meant that each team member had dual roles: both as an operator and as a reflective practitioner. As operators, team members carried out more or less pre-defined tasks according to standard operating procedures. As reflective practitioners, they stepped out of these same processes and observed them from a distance to identify opportunities for improvement.
As reported through previous studies of lean production (e.g. Delbridge, 1995; Delbridge et al., 1992; Parker & Slaughter, 1990), the enhanced exploitation of labour and consequent work intensification was deeply related to speed, posing production speed in a tight relationship to production error.
The shift from strictly hierarchical managerial structures to more horizontal managerial structures (with, of course, the hierarchical managerial structure still prevailing “in the last instance”) led to the employer engaging in the exploration of new organizational structures to exploit its working force, a feature characteristic of capitalist firms as they are subject to the dual constraint of the need to exploit their working force while being subject to competitive rivalry from other capitalists (page 132):
The basic problem facing firms subject to increasing competitive pressures is to balance exploitation, which is incremental and may facilitate short-term competitiveness, with exploration, which is radical and might enable long-term competitiveness. The reason for this balancing act is that exploitative pursuits tend to undermine explorative pursuits.
This exploration of new ways of exploiting labour led to a focus on managing the health of workers (page 140):
To deal with problems of high costs and accident levels as well as high levels of production error, illness absenteeism and employee turnover, Scania decided to implement a lean production system inspired by the justin- time and total quality management principles of Toyotaism. This was later combined with investments in health promotion, and it is the emphasis on health in particular which makes this case distinct from previous studies of lean production.
The exploration of control over the health of the workers led, on the one hand, to attempts to control their subjectivity (their “mind set” or their “attitude”) (page 142):
Having the right job skills was only seen to constitute one part of this. Perhaps more reminiscent of previous research on service work (e.g. Callaghan & Thompson, 2002), high performance was just as much about having the right mind-set, that is having the motivation to be an active, committed and ambitious employee. It was acknowledged by managers and workers that this was not an easy task, because a partly new type of employee was required for the lean production system to work properly. Since working the production line was hard work, workers needed to be in
good shape. But since this also involved efforts to enhance output and quality, it required a particular person who was motivated and committed to change and improvement.
On the other hand, the attempt to control the subjectivity of the worker also led to attempts to control life after work through what programs that seemed to benefit workers (pages 142-143):
This approach blurred the boundaries between work and life. In the words of one team leader, ‘being active and motivated is not a capacity you can switch on and off, [y] it comes down to who you are and how you live your life’. Hence, workers were expected to go far in adapting to the system. But if Scania was to live up to its goal of being a ‘responsible and caring employer’ as well as a lean firm, this obliged them to make far-reaching adaptations, which go beyond what has been reported in previous studies (e.g. Adler, 1993; Adler et al., 1999; Delbridge, 1995; Delbridge et al., 1992). The mutual responsibilities of employees and employer were expressed through two company programmes known as the Employeeship and the 24 Hour Employee. These programmes were also pinnacles in the firm’s integration of lean production and health promotion, involving anything from safe machinery to helping employees lose weight.
These programs were not just window dressing; workers were conceived as resources in a similar fashion to the machines and buildings that Scania owned; workers were expected to take care of themselves outside work and inside work in order to increase the productivity of the company, and if they did not productivity would suffer (page 143):
Scania’s objective exploration of labour, which was aimed to enhance productivity, improve quality and increase profits, required them to re-socialise workers by subjectively exploring their lives, bodies and personalities and what potential they offered in terms of being exploited as labour. This was expressed in rather explicit expectations and norms concerning employee lifestyle. To be physically, mentally and technologically equipped to handle their work, one nurse emphasised that workers were expected to keep themselves in a ‘healthy workable condition’ and
show competence in ‘health-related things such as physical fitness [and] mental strength’.
Although there was no formal right for Scania to control the workers’ lives outside work, on a practical level the two programs did lead to pressure to conform to the requirements of Scania to exploit the workers (page 144):
Of course, Scania had no formal right to interfere with what workers did in their spare time, but when a worker’s private life started to impact
negatively on their work, the firm was able to intervene in the opposite
direction, subordinating life to labour. As argued by one line manager:
If one of my employees doesn’t get enough sleep because he plays poker all night, it is his own business – as long as it doesn’t affect his ability to work. But if it does […] – and most likely it will – it is not just his business but my business as well.
Workers were somewhat ambivalent about how they experienced this. In the words of an IT specialist:
a couple of years ago I went through a divorce. I started drinking a little bit too much and somehow my boss found out about this. At first, he didn’t say anything, but after some time he did, and he also explained that he had spoken to a counsellor at the Health Office who he wanted me to contact. I did, and the therapy helped. But it was somewhat creepy to see how my family problems were turned into a work problem.
This worker’s life, then, was subjectively re-socialised and explored to fit the new organisation of production which Scania was objectively exploring in the interest of more intensely exploiting labour.
The far-reaching nature of the employer–employee contract, their shared responsibilities and the blurring of the objective exploration of labour contra the subjective exploration of life was further reflected in the 24 Hour Employee programme. More specifically, this involved a mutual sense of caring, where the programme aimed to show how much the firm cares for its employees, on and off the job, by helping them live healthier. However, this programme also emphasised how workers were expected to take care of themselves during and after working hours. Workers did not necessarily view this contract as consensual, and some workers called it ‘a give-and-take thing’. While Scania promised a safe work environment and helped workers take care of themselves, the firm was seen to expect ‘an awful lot’ in return – that workers ‘live in accordance with its standards’.
Lean production did result in some workers feeling stressed out, but rather than attributing the problem to lean production itself (and the nature of the capitalist firm as capitalistfirm), the problem is identified as an individual problem (a similar approach is the current psychological fad called “mindfulness”–a variant of the ancient Stoical philosophy of disregarding the real objective social constraints on our lives); used by management, this led to manipulation (pages 148-149):
Through a therapeutic and reflective approach, the Health School sought to help workers gain better self-knowledge, set limits and prioritise. Again, this was anchored in an emphasis on individual responsibility, where participants had to accept responsibility for their own life and work. This was important since many participants initially tended to associate stress with outside factors, such as their job being too demanding or managers expecting too much. Hence, the therapeutic process was embedded in a somewhat contested terrain where therapists and participants tried to allocate responsibility and blame in opposite directions. Although therapists sometimes relaxed the responsibilities and performance targets for individual workers in the short term, there was never any doubt that participants were required to adapt to the system should they continue to work for the firm. Indeed, therapy made most participants accept individual responsibility for adapting to the system, who thereby ended up subjectively participating in their own exploitation (cp. e.g. Burawoy, 1979; Delbridge, 1995; Thompson, 1989).
The first step in the therapeutic process was to establish a trustful atmosphere where participants were ready to accept and commit to ‘the fact’ that they have a problem with stress. The second step involved mapping out the daily routines of individual participants and their colleagues. Participants were then taught how to become more aware and reflective about their own behaviour and attitudes, and taught to think in more strategic terms about all parts of their lives. While the integration of lean production and health promotion blurred the work–life boundary, this particular task encouraged participants to make distinctions between work, self and private life, and to define goals for all three areas. According to one health coach, this mindset was pursued in the spirit of helping participants gain control over their lives and ‘feel that their lives were the result of their own conscious and informed choices’ rather than forces beyond their control.
Failing to cope, then, was seen as an outcome of limited self-management skills. Incidentally, life became just a bit more like work. Although this might be seen as an example of skill expansion, we would argue that this chimes less with Adler’s (2007) upgrading thesis than with Thompson’s (2007) argument that multi-skilling does not necessarily lead to up-skilling. Here, the subjective exploration of life did not unequivocally make work more varied, diverse and interesting; it also involved a division, simplification and management of life to make it more appropriate for work.
It should be evident now that working for Scania is a double-edged sword since workers’ health, which involves the whole life of workers and not just the working part of their lives, is used as a means for enhancing the company’s bottom line. Ultimately, Scania follows the same process of subordinating workers’ lives to the pursuit of more money on an ever increasing scale (see The Money Circuit of Capital).
The idealization of the Scandinavian countries by Ms. McAlevey and other social democrats thus does not stand up to scrutiny. Even on the assumption that children have equal opportunity at birth (as Ms. McAlevey claims–without further evidence), when they grow up many become employees–and as employees, they are used by employers as things for obtaining more and more money.
Working lives may in some ways be better in Sweden but in many ways they also may be worse under the social-democratic approach that co-opts workers’ own subjectivity.
This case also illustrates the importance of ideological struggle since employers have many resources to co-opt workers into their own schemes. Organizational struggle in itself is insufficient; it is necessary to engage in a simultaneous struggle both organizationally and ideologically.
In his article published in the social-democratic journal Canadian Dimension on May 28, 2020, “Can We Ever Truly Transform or Democratize the Police? Measures Are Needed to Restrain and Neutralize Police Brutality to Whatever Extent Possible,” Harry Kopyto, ( https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/can-we-truly-transform-or-democratize-the-police) seems to agree much more with James Wilt in the debate between Mr. Wilt and Herman Rosenfeld in the same journal (see my posts, such as Reform or Abolition of the Police, Part One). He argues, in effect, that it is, in practice, impossible to reform the police:
Rosenfeld is correct in promoting legislative and other changes similar to the ones identified above in response to the litany of police violence described by Wilt, but he is wrong in sowing illusions that these measures will change the fundamental nature of the police and “transform” them.
On the other hand, he claims that both Mr. Wilt and Mr. Rosenfeld have something to learn from each other:
In my view, based on a career working as a criminal lawyer and a legal advocate against police abuse for 47 years before retirement, they should both learn to listen to each other because they both have something insightful to say.
I deny that Mr. Rosenfeld has much to teach us about how we are to address the problem of the police in relation to the working class. Mr. Kopyto concedes too much to Mr. Rosenfeld. Indeed, Mr. Kopyto falls into the same position, ultimately, as Mr. Rosenfeld, when answering the question: What is to be done?
For example, Mr. Kopyto concludes his article with the following (despite showing the oppressive nature of the police historically):
On the other hand, Wilt is right to point out that as enforcers of capitalist laws, police forces are inherently violent instruments of class oppression and must be abolished along with the capitalist system they serve. However, in the meantime, until that happens, measures are needed to restrain and neutralize police brutality to whatever extent may be possible [my emphasis].
This is a defensive position. Of course, we need to restrict the powers of the police at every opportunity (but this contradicts Mr. Rosenfeld’s view that we need the police because they protect workers from the theft of their property and from murder–see my critique. Mr. Kopyto does not mention Mr. Roesenfeld’s defense of the police in terms of these two functions).
In martial arts, if you can attack and defend at the same time, all the better. From Alan Gibson (2000), Why Wing Chun Works, pages 39-40 (Wing Chun is a form of Chinese kung fu):
Simultaneous attack and defence.
Simultaneous attack and defence does not only mean doing one thing with one hand, (defending) and something different with the other (attacking). In Wing Chun this happens most of the time. Simultaneous attack and defence also refers to one hand serving two purposes at once.
Defensive measures may, on occasion, be necessary under special circumstances, but it is much more preferable to engage in simultaneous attack and defence in order to win a battle. To engage in purely defensive actions constantly often leads to defeat or at least to a weakening of one’s actions–as has indeed occurred with the rise of neoliberalism and the weak, defensive response of unions in many parts of the world.
Mr. Rosenfeld, with his reformist suggestion of “transforming and reforming the police,” puts off forever the need to take back the protection of our lives from threats to it from others–and that means the major threat that employers mean to working-class lives (something which Mr. Rosenfeld does not even consider) (see Working and Living in a Society Dominated by a Class of Employers May Be Dangerous to Your Health).
But let us return to Mr. Kopyto’s “In the meantime.” This “in the meantime” provides an opening to the social-democratic left to put off forever the abolition of the police. Their position, practically, is to perpetuate the existence of the police. They do not aim to abolish the police as a separate institution until some vague, distant future (Mr. Rosenfeld mentioned 100 years in his article–but it could well have been 1,000 years or 10,000 years–100 years is an arbitrary number chosen by Mr. Rosenfeld in order to postpone aiming to begin the process of abolition today).
I will repeat (and quote) what I wrote in other posts about the difference between the abolitionist stance, which argues that it is necessary to incorporate the goal of abolishing the police in the present if that goal is to be realized.
The movie Rocky III illustrates what I mean. Rocky Balboa (played by Sylvester Stallone), who had lost his title of world heavyweight champion to James “Clubber” Lang (played by Mr. T), was being trained by former heavy-weight boxing champion Apollo Creed (played by Carl Weathers, who won the first match against Balboa in the first movie and lost in the second movie). (There are undoubtedly racist overtones in the movie–see Siobhan Carter’s master’s thesis Projecting a White Savior, the Body, and Policy).
At one point in his training, Rocky said that he would train later. Apollo answers: “There is no tomorrow.” The basis idea is that if you want to accomplish anything in life, you had better not procrastinate–putting off tomorrow what needs to be done today. Social democrats (and the radical left here in Toronto) act like Rocky Balboa did before Apollo Creed criticized him–they believe that socialism can arise in some distant future without explicitly incorporating the aim in the present, just as Balboa believed that he could regain the heavyweight title without incorporating that goal into his present actions. In other words, he believed that he could engage in procrastination.
The social-democratic or reformist left do the same thing. They shift the fight for socialism to some distant future and content themselves with fighting for reforms that fail to challenge the class structure. Their socialism is always pushed into the future as an ought that never meets the present conditions and circumstances; future and present (and past conditions) are severed.
They may indeed achieve social reforms–as they have in the past, but the claim that they are aiming for socialism is untrue–as was Rocky Balboa’s efforts at training to regain the heavyweight championship of the world until Apollo Creed criticized him.
The social-democratic left (and, practically, much of the radical left here in Toronto and undoubtedly elsewhere) consider that it is impossible to aim for socialism by incorporating it into our daily lives. They believe in magic; an aim can be realized without the aim organizing our activities in the present.
Mr. Kopyto’s “In the meantime” provides an opening for social democrats to separate the future from the present and put off aiming for socialism in the present.
Let me repeat from still another post what a real or good aim means (not the pseudo-aim of social democrats who claim they are aiming for socialism). From Democracy and Education (2004):
The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define an activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it terminates—as one’s aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also by the sight on the gun. The different objects which are thought of are means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight; a certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship—he wants to do something with it. The doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. The object is but a phase of the active end,—continuing the activity successfully. This is what is meant by the phrase, used above, “freeing activity”
By contrast, the idea of “in the meantime” that is purely defensive involves an external aim or a pseudo-aim or not really even an aim since it fails to link up the present with the future and the future with the present:
In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the aim leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction.
Mr. Kopyto certainly does not intend to be a reformist, but his “in the meantime” leads directly and practically to such conclusions. His insights, such as the following, then can be dismissed by the social-democratic left:
The police, in Canada and elsewhere, were created to protect property rights and enforce repressive laws that were created and interpreted in the interests of the status quo. Even decades before it became the norm for police to break up demonstrations or target minorities, they were used to enforce criminal conspiracy charges against trade union “combines”. Police forces are not neutral or reformable—they are quasi-militarized with all emphasis on a culture of obedience and none on training to be able to exercise independent and critical judgment. Hence, sexism, racism, xenophobia and a “we-they” mentality run rampant in these institutions of repression. In many cases, as we know, police have been used to deny democratic rights and attack or restrict labour actions.
Why is it not possible to engage in defensive measures while simultaneously engaging in actions that serve to protect workers and other community members? I have already provided some examples of such efforts in the past (see Reform versus Abolition of Police, Part Four: Possible Alternatives)?
There has been a call for defunding the police and using some of the funds to hire mental health workers, social workers and others to investigate violent crimes and to deal with gender- and race-based violence, civil services to engage in traffic services, the enforcement of bylaws and minor offences, and a specialized unit for immediate intervention in violent crimes, with such a unit having all other present functions performed by police allocated to other kinds of people as outlined above, and therefore with a much reduced budget and area for intervening in citizens’ lives (see https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/).
Such abolitionist initiatives need to be sought in the present and not in some distant future. From Ray Acheson, (page 25):
The imperative of now
Abolition is inevitably a long-term, ongoing project of change. But abolition is not just about the future: it needs to start now.
In this moment that we are currently experiencing, this moment of profound shifts in thinking and in action happening across the United States and around the world, it is important to recognise that we are already doing abolitionist work. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and during the recent protests, we have built and enriched mutual aid networks—models of community support learned from, among others, Indigenous, Black, and queer communities. People from all walks of life are coming together to care for each other physically and emotionally. Many of these acts of solidarity and support are being documented through independent media like Unicorn Riot; many of them will never be recorded. But it is happening, and it shows what more we can do.
Mr. Kopyto may not have intended to argue that the police should be perpetuated, but his use of the phrase “in the meantime,” coupled with merely defensive measures that regulate the police in effect defend the perpetuation of the police.
Socialists need to aim for abolition by bringing such an aim into the present–into actions and engagements that institute policies that link the present to the future aim, and the future aim to present actions and engagements.
The Abolitionary 