Routine and complex labour (2007)

Book Review from the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to make opportunity equal: race and contributive justice. By Paul Gomberg. Blackwell, 2007.

The author of this slimmish book is a black American philosophy professor. He discusses race or racism on nearly every page, at one point making the extreme claim that “Race is class made visible and vicious.” But race is arguably not the main theme of the book. Gomberg believes that “we need to share labor, including the boring work most of us like to avoid, if everyone is to have an opportunity to develop all of their abilities.”

The good news is that the author knows something about socialism and appears to like the prospect: “Imagine a society without markets and their insistence on productive efficiency. Production may be oriented toward meeting needs, not producing whatever can be sold profitably to those with money.” And “We each benefit from the production of needed things because we each receive from the common stock.”

But the bad news is that other passages in the book reveal his confusion about what socialism means: “Market socialism does not abolish this norm [that each advances economically by their own efforts] but shifts the locus of responsibility from the individual to the worker-run firm.” And Gomberg writes about “large working-class socialist and communist parties” in Europe, parties that may be given those labels but actually support some form of capitalism.

Gomberg writes much about what he sees as the division between routine and complex labour, but leaves us unclear about what this distinction is and how it affects society. At one point he says the “division between the organization of labor tasks and the execution of those tasks is the division of society into a class society of laborers and those for whom they labor.” – in short, a society divided into workers and capitalists. But elsewhere he claims that “the division between complex and routine labor is primarily a division within the working class.”

This contradiction can be resolved only if we accept that within capitalism there are two kinds of distinction: between the owners and non-owners of capital and a distinction (perhaps better described as a gradation) between those who supply routine or complex labour, unskilled or skilled, at lower or higher rates of pay, giving orders to other workers or not doing so.

Gomberg’s front cover features a black worker sweeping the stairs. Socialists living in the capitalist world often have to do unpleasant work in oppressive conditions to get money to live. When work is done to meet the needs of people not capital there may be some horse-trading about who does what and for how long. But sociable volunteering, not monetary compulsion, will be the name of the game.

Stan Parker