Muddled Thinking

On Thursday, May 31, an article named "Unionism and Workers' Liberation" by Tom Wetzel was published on Znet that tried, however poorly, to speak to the tasks ahead for the working class. The piece was a veritable stew of differing ideas and positions and is unlikely to help the cause of workers' liberation, even if well intended. Early on he writes "Class is about power that arises in the system of social production." Not very illuminating but also not worth arguing. Next he claims "...there is a vast network of work relations where people are doing things for other people. This is what I mean by social production." That certainly clarifies nothing. A secretary with the boss's coffee? The postal delivery person (mailman in 20th century lingo) with a letter from grandma? A dope dealer selling a fix to a junkie? I guess he's talking about division of labor. No doubt I'm being unfair here but as he began the article with a reference to Marx and since Marx lived during the great expansion of the industrial proletariat and big industry, all commentators thereafter have felt the need to justify including "soft" trades' workers as working class: bureaucrats, service workers, etc. I don't wish to get ahead of myself, but people who are concerned about workers and classes and capitalism really should read the man himself. Mr Wetzel did not include any works by Marx in his references. For example, one might read "On the Question of Free Trade" a speech given by Marx in Brussels in late 1847 and published in February, 1848 for an interesting taste of the man himself. A century and a half after being written it could be published in a periodical today and other than its specificity of being about the Corn Laws one might think it had been written yesterday right down to quoting a preacher on free trade being justified in the Bible ("Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.")! For the curious there is an internet archive of Marx et. al. here. The most amazing thing about Marx is his relevance today. Plus ça change....

From reading Mr. Wetzel's piece it is obvious that he is not a Marxist but he brought Marx up in his first sentence, and since Marx wrote the book(s) on the working class and its struggles, I'd suggest he either promote Marx, criticize Marx, or leave the dead man in peace. In the first book of Capital Marx writes that if one works for wages and produces surplus value for a capitalist then one is a proletarian. Confusion over class(ifying) is not a post-Marxian, post-Soviet, post-20th century problem. In Marx's day there were postmen and telegraphs and railroads and machinery, as well as policemen and professors and drug addicts. Now a taste from Mr. Wetzel himself:

Class systems arise because of structures that give certain people power over others, and over the wealth created, in social production. Of course, some people are children, not yet actively engaged in the social economy in most cases. Others are retired or unemployed. When I talk about social classes I assume that children are a part of the social class of their parents. I assume that retired people are still a part of the class they were in before they retired. This makes sense because the class that people grow up in shapes their life prospects and their loyalties. A person's class situation before retirement will affect things like how long they are likely to live or how economically secure they will be in retirement.

Again, a bunch of words that don't really help. I think he's just worried about covering all bases for the people who will ask "But what about _____ or how about _____?" as though his readers were pre-schoolers with endless streams of questions. By covering too much he explains too little. How about the Google janitor who cashed in after the IPO and then retired at the age of 35 and put the dollars into Treasuries and worries now about the bond market? Did he cross that class line?

The article goes on to specify "...two structures in contemporary America that create a division into classes...": property and the corporation. Since the corporation is merely a legal tool for controlling property, it should be considered a sublisting under property and he should really refer to private property. (As late as the 1980's, during Gorbachev's ruinous reign, public polls in the USSR surveyed opinion about changing the laws to allow land to become privately owned; survey said "No!" by a large margin. Do you suppose Gorby was a mole?) Mr. Wetzel's point here is to talk of the growth of corporations so he can update Marxian classes. The corporation, originally called a joint-stock company, actually predates Marx. And Mr. Wetzel's slide into Frederick Taylor and the birth of industrial engineering implicitly dismisses about two centuries of writing about the improvement of tools and techniques to increase labor's productivity thereby allowing increased extraction of surplus value. Here it seems the point is to justify naming a new class (just like a new species of butterfly) by playing up the growth of some managerial class. So now, according to this analysis, to capitalists and proletarians we must add the "coordinator" class of managers and engineers and other professionals. It's as though, mostly through ignorance I guess, everyone in America has this idea that capitalist = Ebeneezer Scrooge, kind of one owner, one boss, with everyone else being downtrodden. Guess what? There were foremen in 19th century factories and slave bosses as well.

The difficulty is that classes are defined in Marxism by their relationship to ownership of the means of production. And it's not clear that one needs to create classes to explain everything, leaving no stones unturned. When the Bolsheviks were striving for power they killed the Tsar and his family; they didn't look it up in a Karl Marx-endorsed checklist. If the capitalists pay henchmen to keep the workers under heel do we thereby need a new class to explain them? The recently retired CEO of ExxonMobil was paid, including his retirement package, almost a billion dollars for his 12 years of service. Was he a capitalist, a proletarian, a coordinator, or an even newer species? The point is that in the capitalist era the basic class relations are determinative; truly change the fundamentals and you change everything. Structures, or more accurately superstructures, arise and are paid to defend the capitalists: laws and the legislatures that create them and the very legislators that vote on them, police and the armed forces and the courts, including the Supreme Court, to enforce these laws, media to shape the public's attitudes with propaganda, including editorialists and there are no commentators more antagonistic to workers than lefties or reformed lefties. Capitalists are always looking for productivity improvements to lower the cost of labor thus increasing surplus value. In the field of software, easy-to-use progamming tools are constantly being invented to cut the time to produce programs and to lower the skill level needed to create those same programs while the work positions themselves are being outsourced. I recall reading complaints on a tech web site about programmers being turned into proletarians! He should have checked his class card when he first took the job. Thought experiment here: Imagine asking a business owner (capitalist): "If you get down to the nitty-gritty, who in your company is really indispensable?" I'd lay odds the true response would be: "Other than myself, no one." And to every capitalist every other capitalist is only needed until he can buy or crush them all.

More from Mr. Wetzel:

Recognizing the existence of the coordinator class helps us to explain who the ruling class is in the various Communist countries. The Leninist revolutions eliminated the capitalist class, creating systems of public ownership of means of production, but the working class continued to be subordinated and exploited. These revolutions revealed that the coordinator class has the power to be a ruling class.

Now we're getting down to the substance with "coordinators" as the new ruling class. To deal with this adequately would take a book but to begin one must remember that, in Marxian terms, a class is not defined by the individuals or subgroupings which comprise it, or the industries where it works or owns, or the organizations to which it might belong. His statement that after the October revolution that Russian workers continued to be subordinated and exploited doesn't bear scrutiny. The basis of the economy changed where labor-power lost its commodity status, where workers were deliberately recruited for membership in the party, moved into supervisory positions in factories (interestingly, this produced much discussion both within the party and among the affected workers as to whether moving from the shop floor to the office changed their proletarian status!), were given preferential treatment over others (mostly the petit bourgeois elements), where outmoded factories were kept open even with low productivity (this in the 1970s!) so that workers wouldn't be unemployed through the introduction of microelectronics. Throughout most, if not all, of Soviet history, workers, whether in factories or driving buses, had higher wages than professors and doctors.

Mr. Wetzel goes on a bit more differentiating this new class so he can find some who might be workers' allies. Back in Marx's time he thought that proletarian revolution was on the day's menu and ever since every Marxist has been wondering why it's taking so long. But a revolution, notwithstanding how we use the term, is more correctly applied to an historical process than to discrete events. As with the aforementioned proletarianized programmers, the proletariat becomes aware of itself as a class. Think of the middle managers who get laid off with statistically zero probability of finding new jobs that duplicate their previous incomes. Look, we didn't need new classes for cops and soldiers 150 years ago and we don't need new classes for engineers and managers today. Figuring out where individuals and groups fit in and where the historical trends are going and who's going to become friend or foe is difficult but that doesn't change the basic framework. Reading Marx now, in 2006, one is struck by just how contemporary his analysis is.

Lest we forget the title -Unions- we move from the error-riddled preamble where Mr. Wetzel took the wrong turn and we move to his proposals.

Ownership of the means of production by the capitalists is only one of the structures that tramples the self-management of working people. The coordinator class's relative monopolization of conditions for control of work also subordinates the working class. Thus changing the ownership structure of the economy, from private to public ownership, would not be sufficient to liberate the working class. The power of the coordinator class over the working class would also need to be dissolved. To do this, the working class would need to replace the existing corporate and state hierarchies with economic and political institutions that would embody their collective self-management of production and control over social affairs.

And:

If we are to create a society in which the people can directly control their lives, a society in which workers run the industries where they work, the process of self-management must emerge in self-management of mass organizations of working people. The self-managed mass organizations prefigure self-management of social production by workers and the direct self-governance of society by the mass of the people.

It would seem we are going to eliminate engineers and accountants. Or would that be make ordinary workers into engineers and accountants? Or do workers simply talk among themselves and spreadsheets and blueprints will magically appear? It's necessary to understand that in the capitalists' drive to increase productivity one aspect is to dumb down skilled labor. The lower the skill level needed the easier the job is to fill and less wages to be paid. As with the aforementioned programming scenario this tends to increase a low wage work force while creating a small group of highly skilled workers: Mr. Wetzel's experts. But progressives should not take up a seemingly logical step and desire to keep productivity low and average worker skill levels high. Increasing productivity can benefit the working class. The issue is ownership and control. Don't fall for the bait of education is the key to better jobs. Must we eliminate automated machine tools and go back to manually set-up lathes? Do we reinvent the "putting-out" industry of Marx's day? Must we all become medically competent as well?

Self-management, synonym for democracy, is wonderful, but in a country of 300 million people where most things are manufactured overseas and many things are partially foreign-made, just how do shop floor debates regulate production? It's Mr. Wetzel who needs to update his perspective: we are in the 21st century. Worker control sounds great but everything today is intertwined. Representative control and coordinated planning is the only way to go. One hundred years ago this was called a Communist Party. I'm reminded of an old cartoon by Sidney Harris showing two men at a blackboard with equations to left and right and one man pointing to the empty middle and saying: "Then a miracle happens." As a Soviet political economist named Arbatov wrote in the '70s: "Marxists accept the world as it is without reservations." If one reads the writings of Abraham Lincoln one discovers that Marx's American contemporary was aware of the proletariat. Lincoln, and others of his day, wrote disparagingly of "wage slavery" as it was then called. Lincoln's hope was that, in those pastoral days, all would have their own small holdings (ownership society!) as farmers or be small proprietors. But the handwriting was on the wall back then and we can still read it today. The arrow of time is an interesting philosophical and physical problem, but to date no one has been able to turn back history. And grumbling by GM assembly plant workers won't make those alternators arrive if the Delphi workers self-managed an inconvenient vacation.

Mr. Wetzel moves onto unions, bemoaning the "coordinator class" that controls most of them. Specifically his detailed analysis is fine, but he doesn't seem to understand that unions are economic bargaining units, not revolutionary political organizations. Unions accept the class divisions and work to get the best deal for their members within that system. But just as rank and file union members 40 years ago were virulently anti-communist and anti-left and were happy to get the best for themselves without much class solidarity, such as shutting down whole industries in strike support, the unions' leaders were often more interested in their own well-being than even their own members let alone workers in general. Without correct political analysis unions are at best reformist organizations.

Mr. Wetzel doesn't like union dues check-off agreements since it gives the large international and its corrupt coordinators guaranteed income. At the same time he thinks membership should be voluntary but that it's okay for workers to coerce their fellows to join! Bolshevism on the rise! In fact, the history of unionism in the US has some baseball bats in it but as long as they're not Commies it's acceptable. As Mr. Wetzel writes: "In any viable democratic collectivity there will inevitably be constraints on the will of the individual. That's part of democracy." Would that be subordination? Where does one draw the line? Bolshevik coercion is terrorism; co-worker coercion is democracy.

Mr. Wetzel disfavors full-time, paid union officials. I'd think this is more of a technical than substantive issue, the important thing being what those officials do for the membership and the working class. And Mr. Wetzel disfavors not only reliance on the Democratic Party but politics itself. Frankly, electoral politics is a bit of a scam where every few years we get to pick one or another of the capitalists' choices to misrepresent us. But as with unionism itself electoral politics is a school, one of the hard knocks variety, that teaches workers just what they can and cannot accomplish in a liberal democracy. There's a relevant quote from an article in Russia during the Bolsheviks' drive for power: "In order to grasp the bourgeoisie by the throat it is necessary to step over the corpse of Social Democracy." (A current news report tells of graffiti in Iraq: "Democracy killed my son.")

The labor movement needs to guard its independence of the dominating classes - and its independence of politicians, political parties and the state. The strategy should emphasize direct involvement of ordinary people in movements - participatory democracy, and empowerment of the rank and file.

Here Mr. Wetzel conflates politics with electoral politics, totally misunderstands the concept "state" yet talks of participatory democracy. If my old brain can be trusted participatory democracy as a phrase grew out of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which itself grew out of the League for Industrial Democracy and these organizations were developed to coopt frustrated, budding leftists into an outlet that was non-Communist, even anti-Communist. The state is the instrument of class power and if Mr. Wetzel wants workers to truly have power he'd better figure out how to get those workers' hands on the state's apparatus. Or maybe it's in another statement of his: "...the American working class were able to make major gains during the 1930s and 40s because of their power of disruption...." The workers will sit down and pout until they get their way. Just what is this participatory democracy if it's not hierarchical enough to lead 100+ million workers into a position of power?

A fundamental fallacy in Leninism is its inference from the necessity of the organizer, instigator, activist role to the idea of a "vanguard" that concentrates social movement expertise and decision-making control in its hands.

There's so much wrong with this statement, not the least of which is that he is dictating that there will be no dictating. The fundamental issue is that leadership must, in fact, represent the proletarian class interests and not that they take steps without a vote over every issue. To me it seems that Mr. Wetzel is a bit of a utopian socialist and perhaps like idealists of old he should start his own small society. Otherwise he'd best wake up and smell the coffee. Historically, only Communists successfully overthrew capitalists and there's nothing wishy-washy about Communists. Anyone who lived through some of the red-baiting years remembers the taunting of leftists as pinkos, as though one went to sleep a leftist and woke up a Communist, best encapsulated by the 1950's era film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If the working class is to mount an effective challenge to the dominating classes, it must project its collective power throughout the whole of the society. A working class movement needs to develop solutions for the various problems that the society faces...

Lenin wrote that there can be no revolution without a revolutionary theory. Mr. Wetzel says he wants a revolution. He might want to work on the theory a bit, while he's waiting for the magic to happen. I wouldn't have been so carping about his article but it mentions Marx and Lenin and the October Revolution. It would have been nice if Mr. Wetzel had known enough about those men and that era to not misrepresent and so grossly misunderstand them. In many ways during the 20th century the capitalists' best ally in the struggle to keep down the working class was the liberal, anti-Communist left. It offered an escape valve for liberals but never threatened power, you know the kind of power that comes out of the barrel of a gun.