The labor process and consciousness

Response to “Apprehensions of the social”, part 1 of 4
By Chris Wright

I had earlier written a reply to "The Tea Party marching toward oblivion", but I made the mistake of writing it in the comments area and my browser crashed.  It was long, so I have not re-written it, but Walker's post "Apprehensions of the social" once again inspires me to take up the questions presented here.

The ideas here are not new.  For what it is worth, Jacques Rancière has already taken up these very categories of the aggregate, the collective, and the individual in his essay "The Hatred of Democracy". Gáspár Tamás has also touched on these themes in his essays on what he calls Post-Fascism, which is focused on "how citizenship is becoming an exclusive privilege."  Gillian Rose also took up these specific concerns in her last works, and it is especially evident in the introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law.  My own work (presented in talks at the first and second US Historical Materialism conferences in New York City in 2010 and 2011) is an attempt to develop a concept adequate to the problems presented here.

The current problems we are seeing I believe have to be understood in relation to significant changes in the labor process and the valorization process, to changes in the spatial and temporal organization of domination.
In other words, if we do not see social movements of the sort which appeared (and which was presented and understood as more or less uniformly the same, as far as the workers' movement was concerned) from the 1840s to the 1940s, this is because we have seen changes in the forms of appearance of the capital-labor relation, that is, changes in the entire cycle of valorization from the labor-production process to the circulation process to the consumption process.  As such, the form of appearance of labor and capital has changed, as has the self-understanding of the constituted social groups.

Each transformation of the labor process is a response to a crisis of valorization, that is, it involves a struggle to reshape the whole valorization process in order to reset accumulation. As Moishe Postone notes in his discussion of the treadmill effect, this involves the long-term secular expulsion of living labor from the production process and its replacement by dead labor, that is, constant capital replaces variable capital proportionally within total capital. Not only does this mean that living labor becomes less and less important for the production of value, it also means that each crisis of valorization becomes more difficult to resolve than the last one. This is against the idea of ascendant/descendant phases of capital common to decadence theory, but it also is not the breakdown theory a la Grossman, Mattick, et al.

Empirically since World War II a point has been reached where more and more dead labor is not animating more and more living labor, which is what happened with industrial capitalism (the breaking down of skilled labor into unskilled labor added lots of workers to the global total for a long time).  Rather, beginning in some industries as early as the 1890s, but really gaining speed after World War II, was the direct application of scientific knowledge to the labor process which not only meant the replacement of living labor with dead, but also less and less expansion in the deployment of living labor relative to dead labor. This was first in the form of chemicalization, but which eventually took the form of computerization, robotics, bio-engineering, etc. That is, we have a host of production processes today in which the R&D spent on scientific and engineering parts of the production process form the core labor expenditure, and the laborer operating the constant capital does not really comprehend the labor process because the labor process is a direct extension of scientific knowledge, that is, a kind of haute bourgeois consciousness.

This is a definite shift from the machinery and tools of the industrial and pre-industrial world, which were generally extensions of a labor process that was an extension of what an individual worker could do.  Any car mechanic could understand an automotive assembly line, the tasks performed, etc., and many assembly line mechanics were their own car mechanics (until computers became key to running automobile systems).  You can't bio-engineer corn in your home chemistry lab. The science involved in a microprocessor plant far exceeds the knowledge of the workers there and even of the programmers who write the code for the software that uses the processors.  The loss of working-class identity politics goes hand in hand with the transformation of the labor process at this point.

The production process has also decentralized.  Several major changes coalesced during World War II and after to allow for a de-densification of production.  Telephone, telegraph, fax, and finally computer networks have increasingly made communication spread over a vast, often wireless, grid.  The development of the independent power plant (coal, oil, nuclear, whatever) and the grid of electrical networks using a rhizomatic structure (Deleuze and Guattari were not futurists, their rhizomatic structures were merely giving theoretical voice after the fact to capital's own structural transformations), onto which you could place a production facility, mall, office center, etc. at will, just by extending the grid.  Gone were the needs for a power plant servicing the production facility.  In transport, the automobile and truck allowed businesses and workers to extend away from rail lines, laterally in space.  Massive changes in oceanic and air shipping also introduced (cost- and time-) efficient global shipping, so that a commodity could have pieces of it produced all over the world, assembled finally in one place, and then shipped further still.

In other words, gone were the massive fortresses of workers. River Rouge at Ford, once filled with 80,000 workers in charge of everything from the power plant to the steel production all the way to the cars that rolled off the line at the end, becomes not only unnecessary but counter-productive.  In fact, after the massive workers' struggles of the first half of the 20th century, these facilities and the cities they reside in are now a concentration that represents a threat to the valorization process and political stability.