Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates. Monthly Review Press. 2022. 262pp.
This is a passionately written book by a lifelong critic of capitalism. Yates has an intimate knowledge of how that system works and this collection of essays, extraordinarily wide-ranging in its scope, covers key elements of social and economic development from the organisation of hunter-gatherer societies to the pressures exerted on human society and planetary ecology by 21st century capital.
It reminds us that, for around 95 percent of the 200,000 years or more that human beings have walked the earth, social relationships were relatively egalitarian and non-hierarchical and the ‘earth was a commons, the property of all’, in which people ‘managed their existence in ways harmonious with nature and kept the earth’s metabolism in balance with their own’. It was only when hunter-gatherer societies came to be replaced by permanent settlements of farmers from round about 10,000 years ago that inequality and hierarchy began to set in, resulting in societies based on rulers and ruled, rich and poor, and above all divisions into classes. This led ultimately to the apotheosis of class society under capitalism, to a polarisation where one tiny minority class owns and controls the vast majority of the wealth and the vast majority of people have to work for that minority, selling their energies to them day-by-day in order to survive and often suffering significant tribulations and a pervasive sense of insecurity. His rhetoric in describing this polarisation is often powerful. For example: ‘Workers get a wage in return for converting their life force into a commodity owned by those who have bought it’; and ‘Only profit rules us and those with money will beat down those with none, without mercy or remorse’. And there is much visceral description of the conditions suffered by workers at the cruellest end of the market process, as, for instance, his reference to the more than 800 million farm workers in the world who ‘suffer short-life expectancies, pesticide poisoning, and state-sponsored violence whenever they attempt to organise, and whose working conditions are extraordinarily harsh, and their prospects for decent lives non-existent’.
It is work or, more precisely, employment in modern capitalist society which a large part of this book examines critically and informatively. Chapter titles such as ‘Labor Markets: The Neoclassical Dogma’, ‘Work is Hell’, and ‘The Injuries of Class’ give a flavour of the areas focused on and the author’s approach to them. The author explains how capital’s single-minded need to realise profits necessarily leads to the exertion of managerial control over work and, in the way it is implemented and enforced, often sets up competition between those who carry it out, making work in capitalism ‘a traumatic affair’ and leading to a profound sense of alienation. And he is overwhelmingly critical of this way of organising work – and society – and of the notion that this is the best or only possible way for human society to manage itself. He also points to the insidious role of education systems and their promotion of ideas like individualism and nationalism among people at an early age, causing them to internalise the idea that the existing organisation of society is inevitable. This, he says, makes it ‘easier for capital to control the labour process’ and less likely that workers will collectively challenge that control.
The alternative to all this is what Michael Yates focuses on in the later essays of his book, in particular the final chapter entitled ‘Waging Class Struggle: From Principles To Practice’. He has previously stated that ‘either explicit or implicit in the essays is the belief that both capital and the working class itself must be abolished if we are to achieve a society free of alienation, one marked with substantive equality in all spheres of life’. He has condemned those on the left who think that somehow a fairer and more just society can be established within capitalism, of those who ‘believe that markets are not inherently destructive to social well-being’ and think that something called ‘market socialism’ can ‘embrace markets but control them in the people’s interest’. He has also described the programme of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) led by Bernie Sanders as a ‘social democratic pipedream’. labelling it ‘pathetically utopian’ for the way it limits itself to organising campaigns, electioneering and trade union action in the vain hope that this will encourage ‘a deeper understanding of capitalism’ and lead to ‘full socialism’ via gradual and incremental reforms. What is needed, he commendably argues, is a clear understanding of the need for ‘a more radical perspective’, in which ‘the anarchy of the marketplace should be replaced by conscious planning of what is produced’.
Yet at this point his argument goes unfortunately awry, as, in apparent contradiction to his condemnation of the DSA’s politics, he sets about recommending, in somewhat breathless fashion, a whole slew of ‘radical’ reforms to be fought for and brought in under the existing system: eg, shorter working hours, free universal healthcare, bans on fracking, abolition of student debt, local low-price food production, vertical farming, reparations for slavery, unions and political parties funding ‘eco-socialist’ production, no government support for ‘oppressive regimes’ – to name but a few. And, to make things worse, there is also a significant positive reference to oppressive state capitalist regimes and organisations, past and present, whose policies bear no relation to the socialist objective the author claims to espouse. Here we are talking, for example, about China under Mao, Castro’s Cuba, the USSR under Lenin and Trotsky, the present regime in Vietnam and Maoist rebels in India.
These disjunctions seem difficult to explain. But part of it may stem from the author’s statement of the Leninist notion that workers must be led to socialism (‘new parties must be built (…) leading the working class’) rather than achieving it via democratic action based on majority working class consciousness and understanding. Despite these significant differences, however, there is a great deal we would share about the ultimate vision of the new society the writer articulates in his closing words:
‘What we are, as human beings, is a species than can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment. There should be no workers, no wages, no bosses, no capitalists (…) – only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life. (…) We will take for granted that most profound maxim: From each according to ability, to each according to need. When this necessity is realised, only then will we be free.’
Howard Moss
