The workers have the power

In the second part of a five part series on what we mean by revolutionary socialism, DK Renton explains that workers remain central to capitalism and can overthrow it.

In the first volume of Capital, the socialist economist Karl Marx argued that labour power was how most value was produced, ‘Productive activity is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power … it creates and forms the value of commodities.’ Under capitalism, goods are made to be sold. Someone goes into a shop, and they decide what they’re going to buy to eat – a loaf of bread, a packet of cereal. We ask ourselves which of these products is the better value and a simple unit of comparison comes naturally into our heads. We instinctively compare how much time and in particular how much labour power was needed to produce each item. Thinking as a revolutionary means seeing the workers and understanding what they contribute.

From the importance of labour to capitalism, Marx argued that there was a tendency for capitalism to fall into periodic slumps. Capitalists were competing with one another; one of the main forms this took was bosses increasing spending on their machines, in the hope of achieving some temporary advantage over business rivals. The costs of that expenditure were loaded onto the system then released in periodic recessions, as the least competitive of firms became uncompetitive, were destroyed, and had to be sold off.

In the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote of the ‘rising organic composition of capital’, meaning the tendency of capitalists to spend – over long periods of time – ever more on tools and other investments, relative to what they spent on living labour. Capital’s problem was that profit was created by workers and, without labour, no additional value would be realised. The forcing of workers out of the production process and the bosses’ increased spending on machinery would mean that more money was spent but less profit made. Looking at capitalism as a whole, the rate of profit would tend to decline – making the system creaky and vulnerable. 

Marx did not suggest that profits could only go down. He wrote about capital’s options to make itself more competitive again through depressing wages or expanding foreign trade. Several 20th century Marxists expanded this list, writing about the stabilising consequences of military spending. Others since them, including Michael Roberts, have shown that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a verifiable fact. Capitalism really is declining all around us.

Marx didn’t reach this understanding of workers’ power all at once. On first becoming a socialist, he had quite a different argument for how workers would bring about Communism – it was their poverty, their lack of ties to the system which would cause them to choose a different world. Only belatedly did he come to see that workers might achieve a degree of comfort under capitalism – might own their own homes we would say (although probably on a mortgage), might buy the latest TV, might send their children to university – and yet still hold a place in society which puts them in an antagonistic relationship to the boss class.

Elsewhere, in Marx’s economic writing he had other things to say about class. He wrote about the social reproduction of labour, describing how capitalism had to produce not just commodities but ‘the capital relation itself’, how it enfolds such needs as love, sex, giving birth, childcare, education, food and clothing into a generalised system preparing future generations of workers for their own future exploitation. Alongside all the productive workers, there are in other words millions of other people also contributing to the system. Their work, sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid, keeps capitalism going.

Marx’s insistence that capitalism depends on workers makes you see capitalism differently from those who defend the system. They tell you that it’s the capitalists who make the profits – whether through taking risks, through innovation or through deferring their own proceeds for the business’s sake… But if you’ve ever seen a real-life capitalist, close at hand, they bear as much relationship to these mythical actors as a politician does to the princes and princesses of fairy tales. Marx was keener-eyed and more realistic, when he described capital as ‘dead labour,’ and likened the rich to the monsters of gothic horror, writing that capital ‘only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’

Marx’s ideas became a gift to the whole workers’ movement, influencing a much wider set of people than just Marxists. In the 1860s, the philosopher of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, offered to translate Capital into Russian. In 1968, when students rose up at the Sorbonne and sparked what became a general strike in France, they were influenced by a wide set of revolutionary ideas – situationism, anarchism, and council communism. Few of them had read any Marx. And yet one of their most powerful slogans of their movement was a radical simplification and restatement of Marx’s theories: ‘The boss needs you, you don’t need him.’

Likewise, in 1976, when the leftward-moving Secretary of State for Energy in Harold Wilson’s Labour Cabinet in Britain, Tony Benn, was given Marx to read by his wife Caroline, what he took away from The Communist Manifesto was a core insight, the ‘class struggle’, the belief that workers and bosses could never be reconciled. ‘It is a most astonishing thing,’ Benn wrote, ‘and I felt so ignorant that at the age of fifty-one as a socialist politician in Britain I should never have read that text before.’ Social democracy needed Marxists on their left flank, to keep them loyal to the idea of redistributing wealth. 

The wager which revolutionary socialists make is that if we are going to defeat capitalism, no power will be more essential than that of the workers. They, because of their place in the world of production, have a unique strength which capitalism cannot resist. Even if the number of workers in an individual office or factory reduces, all that happens is that the system comes to depend more on the fewer people who are still doing the work.

And yet, we also must remember the second insight Marx taught us, that capitalism is always trying to push labour out of the system, to make workers fewer, weaker, invisible. Implied in Marx’s vision of the inexorable rise of the organic composition of capital is a second thought, and one more troubling to socialists; that capitalism has always been – in the 1860s and even more so today – a process of shredding labour. In Britain, in 1971, half a million people worked in car production; they manufactured one tenth of the world’s cars. Today less than one percent of car manufacture takes place here. Jobs have relocated, the content of work is different – labour is always changing.

Some become loyal to the external forms of working class social life; they are rightly horrified when ways of life or institutions which workers feel able to control to some extent (unions, football clubs, large workplaces in which workers outnumber managers) change or come under attack. But being nostalgic for old forms of workers’ organising, for cloth caps, fish and chip suppers and male-dominated workplaces, doesn’t make you a better anti-capitalist. It stops you from seeing the new groups of workers who are emerging all the time.

It is right to see workers as central to the system, even if in Britain today more people work as reproducers of labour rather than in production itself. Social reproduction has always consumed vast quantities of labour. At the highpoint of British capitalism, in 1901, 1.8 million workers in Britain worked as domestic servants. They were a larger group even than such vanguards of labour as the 600,000 miners or the 300,000 rail workers. Now, just as then, you don’t need to be a productive worker to be part of the working class.

In 1905, during the mass strikes which broke out in Russian and Poland, Rosa Luxemburg noted a trend for other groups of people to want to join in these protests. ‘This is a gigantic, many-coloured picture of a general arrangement of labour and capital which reflects all the complexity of social organisation and of the political consciousness of every section,’ she wrote before going on to cite groups of people who were joining in the strike wave: ‘rural proletarians,’ ‘an agitated military garrison’, bank clerks ‘elegant’ in their ‘cuffs and white collars’, ‘dissatisfied policemen in a smoke-grimed dark and dirty guardroom.’ 

A group of activists today would probably turn down the help of those dissatisfied policemen. We could draw a distinction between poor peasants and workers and insist that these are two distinct groups. ‘The agitated military garrison’ is again not exactly workers, but the poor in uniform, a potential ally. As for the white-collar clerks, they were not productive workers, but they were in every meaningful sense of the term still workers, owning no capital of their own, employed, at risk of being disciplined or dismissed by their managers.

In January and April 1915 in Glasgow, housewives led protests denouncing rent rises. Their husbands were working in factories under military discipline, they could not strike. The property owners were increasing rent; the housewives’ struggle won the first legal restrictions on rent rises, a partial socialisation of private property which lasted until 1988. The women were not working – but they were part of the class.

You could say something similar about the women’s strikes of the late 2010s, a movement which united ‘women of colour, indigenous, working class, disabled, migrant, Muslim, lesbian, queer and trans women’ to expose the unequal status of women’s emotional labour. As one leaflet put it, ‘The Women’s Strike is a challenge to the assumption that women’s work should be performed for free and always with a smile.’ Few of those involved were productive workers; who can capitalism more easily exclude from the workplace than a disabled woman? Yet if we take Marx’s idea of social reproduction, without the work these protesters were describing there would be no new workers in future. They are part of the totality of the class.

Such struggles point towards the two processes by which class is constantly being dissolved and always being recreated. If Marx was right that capital is constantly undermining workers skills and jobs, we can understand the destruction of the British working class that happened after 1945 and with greatest speed in the 1970s and 1980s – the loss of work from industrial regions, the atomisation that accompanied the destruction of unions, the loss of such wider institutions as workers’ libraries, labour halls, churches and pubs. But what we can also see is that work is constantly evolving, that new people are being brought in, they are sharing their experiences in struggle, and they are changing all the time what it means to be a worker.

The working class is always being made and remade. So long as capitalism continues, the system will always be inviting new people to the stage, placing picks and shovels in their hand (and laser pens and laptops too), and inviting them to audition as capitalism’s new grave-diggers.