sign in sign up
<<
Home , Labour power, Manual labour, Valorisation

Chapter Six The Class-that-Lives-from-Labour: the Today

Towards a broader notion of the working class The expression ‘class-that-lives-from-labour’ used in this study is concerned in the first instance with giving contemporary validity to the Marxist concept of the working class. With many theories asserting the analytical loss of validity of the notion of class, our designation aims to emphasise the current meaning of the working class, its form of being. Therefore, in contrast to the authors who defend the idea of the extinction of social classes, of the working class or even of itself, the expression class-that-lives-from-labour seeks to update and broaden the concept of the social being that labours, of today’s working class, to comprehend its effective reality, its processes and its concrete form.1 The definition of this class includes a set of analytical elements that I outline below. The class-that-lives-from-labour, the working class, today embraces the totality of those who sell their labour-power, with productive workers (in the sense Marx attributed to this, especially in Chapter VI,

1. The thesis of labour as a on the route to extinction is explored at length in Méda 1997. A more empirical text, where the growing reduction of leads a trend towards the end of work, is provided by Rifkin 1995. See also Pakulski and Waters 1996, which defends the notion of the dissolution of social classes and the loss of their conceptual validity in advanced . Harvie 1997, pp. 192–3, provides a critique of their thesis. Castells 1998, in a dense and wide-reaching study, offers new elements with which to think of the centrality of labour today starting from a contractualist defence of the -. The Class-that-Lives-from-Labour • 81 unpublished) representing the central nucleus. It is not therefore restricted to direct manual labour, but incorporates the totality of social labour, the totality of collective wage-labour. As productive labour directly produces surplus-value and directly participates in the process of -, it plays a central role within the working class, with the industrial as its primary nucleus. Therefore, productive labour, where the proletariat is to be found, in our reading of Marx, is not restricted to direct manual labour (despite it being its central nucleus), but also incorporates forms of labour that are not productive, that produce surplus-value, but are not directly manual. Yet, the class-that-lives-from-labour also comprises unproductive workers, those whose forms of labour are used as a service, either for public use or for the capitalist, and who are not constituted as a directly productive ele- ment, as a live element in the process of capital-valorisation and creation of surplus-value. They are those, according to Marx, whose labour is consumed as a use-value and not as labour that creates exchange-value. They constitute a growing wage-earning segment of contemporary , despite some branches within it being in decline, as we will see below. They are constituted as ‘non-productive, anti-value generating constituents of the capitalist labour process [but who] share the same premises and are built on the self-same material foundations. They belong to those “false costs and useless expenses of production”, which are, nevertheless, absolutely vital to the survival of the system.’2 Given, therefore, that all productive workers are wage-earners and not all wage- earners are productive, an updated notion of the working class must, broadly, embrace the totality of wage-earning workers. This does not deny, as mentioned above, the central role of the productive worker, of collective social labour that creates exchange-value, of the modern industrial proletariat, within the class-that-lives- from-labour, which is evident as the reference draws on Marx’s formulation. But, since there is a growing overlap between productive and unproductive labour in contemporary capitalism and the working class incorporates these two basic dimensions of labour under capitalism, this broader notion seems funda- mental for an understanding of what the working class is today.3 We know that Marx (often in collaboration with Engels) used the notions of proletariat, working class and wage-earners as synonyms, as can been seen in, for example, . But he also often emphasised, espe- cially in Capital, that the proletariat was essentially made up of producers of

2. Mészáros 1995, p. 533. 3. On productive and unproductive labour, and on the meaning of socially-combined labour, see Marx 1994. Mandel also provides some succinct and insightful consider- ations on how to think of the working class today.