[ A review of "Work, Work, Work" by Michael Yates]
[[link removed]]

‘TO LIBERATE OURSELVES, WE MUST REINVENT WORK’  
[[link removed]]


 

Herman Rosenfeld
September 30, 2022
The Bullet
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A review of "Work, Work, Work" by Michael Yates _

,

 

Mike Yates is a long-time Marxist and socialist writer and analyst,
one of the editors of Monthly Review. Over the years he has written
extensively about capitalism, with particular emphasis on the working
class, its life, potential, and role in transforming society. His
latest book, Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle
[[link removed]], gathers a series
of his re-edited essays and articles dealing with various aspects of
work, the working class, its institutions, its contradictions and
potentials, and the broader social relations that drive them.

Yates’s main preoccupation is the following:

“[I]f we are ever to liberate ourselves, we must reinvent work.
Whether we will convert the daily hell that is work today into
something that connects us to other people and the world around us, or
we will descend into the alienation engulfing us” [25].

The essays cover life in modern workplaces, the drudgery and danger of
working in the context of capitalism, how work and the working class
is perceived in mainstream bourgeois economics; contradictions and
hierarchies within the working class, especially racism, patriarchy,
and how they need to be addressed; the rise and tragic decline of an
iconic US union; and perspectives on how to build a movement against
work as we know it in capitalism as well as the system itself.

Capitalism and the Making the Working Class

Yates relies, for the most part, on his varied experience and
grounding in Marxist political, economic, and social understanding.
Against the past concentration of working-class studies on blue collar
workers and the current preoccupation with the most precarious
workers, this thoughtful collection incorporates a genuine cross
section of the working class and all of its strata: blue and white
collar, public and private sector, different levels of job security
and labour market position, and those involved in social reproduction
outside of direct participation in the labour market.

In the chapter “Panopticon,” Yates presents a concise and
effective description and analysis of the historical and contemporary
project of controlling and intensifying the work of workers. This
takes us from the Benthamite monstrosity of the Panopticon, through
the formation of factories, Taylor’s Scientific Management, and the
development and application of the now-ubiquitous lean production
model with its aggressive work intensification.

Yates addresses, as well, the nature of working-class resistance and
the larger strategies that a movement to transform work and challenge
capitalism might take. This ranges across the failure of social
democracy; the nature of the current labour upsurge (and its
limitations); the costs and solutions to the existence of racism and
patriarchy within the working class; the lessons that can be learned
from past and current struggles and social experimentation; and the
critical importance of addressing climate change. He provides an
excellent critique of unions today and insists on a radical critique
of, and alternatives to, the current reliance on social democratic
parties.

But while his analysis contains constructive ideas about how to
evaluate the working-class movement today, it also contains
questionable elements. These include his rather uncritical extolling
of the potential of worker co-operatives and worker-owned business
alternatives within capitalism. and his limited attention to the
dilemma of democratizing and transforming the state. There is also a
problematic assessment of ongoing struggles and experiments, and the
reader will likely want to hear more about his thoughts on how a truly
radical party might come into existence and how it might concretely
contribute not just to policy but also to the development of
working-class understandings, confidence, and individual and
collective capacities.

His critique of social democracy speaks to the tendencies, put forward
by dominant elements in the DSA, that see socialism (and socialist
consciousness) as emerging through an accumulation of successful
social democratic reforms. Aside from this being utopian and idealist,
he sees each and every spontaneous struggle as being a “harbinger”
of a socialist revolution in waiting – an approach that ultimately
undermines the significance and actual potentials of these struggles.

Nevertheless, he quite convincingly calls for social democratic
parties to be replaced by “democratic working-class parties”
oriented to the elimination of the capitalist system as opposed to
this accumulation of modest reforms. In making this case, he singles
out the environmental costs of capitalism as well as the effects on
the lives of the working class. Yates is clear that the pieces of the
system are not separate or independent from the structures and
underlying logic of the larger system, thereby making a wholesale
transformation to socialism essential.

His rich reading of the union movement emphasizes that the current
upsurge cannot be understood apart from the historical weaknesses and
defeats of the labour movement and the working class as a whole during
the neoliberal period. The legacy of that defeat has, Yates argues,
left us with labour leaders that all too often collaborate with
employers and capital as a whole, cozying up to right-wing and
business-oriented politicians. Corrupt and undemocratic practices,
hesitancy in challenging racism and patriarchy in its ranks, and
refusing to take on work intensification and management power in the
workplace – all these have, beyond the attacks from capital and the
state, been central to the defeat of the working class and the
decimation of the movement’s ranks. And, Yates emphatically argues,
this calls for a radical transformation of unions or their replacement
with other forms of collective organization.

While his perspective on the actual state of the union and workers’
movement is tempered by a sobriety rooted in a strong analysis, he
muses about workers developing a different and radically different
approach somehow emerging from the experience of the economic crisis,
the COVID pandemic, and the struggles against police violence of
previous summers. Citing Mike Davis, he writes, “A sense of rage is
boiling over. For this rage to take a leftist and profoundly radical
direction, masses of people will have to force the issue” [162].

Yates is most powerful when he focuses on the role of education, and
in particular, socialist education in its fullest collective content,
as indispensable to building working-class power, organization, and
consciousness:

“Some of us can educate, explaining the world in which we live
clearly and in language that does not look at the working class from
the outside, examining and analyzing it, but as part of it, teaching
while we learn in dialogue with others” [168].

Critical Issues and Questions

Three critical issues seem worth elaborating. They also invite other
crucial discussions.

1. Worker Co-ops

Yates (and others) place great weight on the experience of worker-run
businesses or co-ops. Yet they are not necessarily prefigurative of
working-class institutions in a socialist society. They are, today,
most often cut off from being part of a larger socialist political
movement – in contrast to the German Social Democratic and Communist
co-operatives in pre-WW2 Germany. Left to stand on their own, they
might be important to provide necessary community services denied by
racism or other failures of governments and big capital (as is the
case in Jackson, Mississippi, and was the case in the 1960s with the
various community clinics and spaces provided by the Panthers). But
they don’t necessarily point the way forward for socialists or
provide the kind of experiences that can necessarily teach
participants how to work in a non-capitalist environment. Such
enterprises are subject to the same forces of private market pressures
of competition, profit-making, accumulation, and dependence on
financial markets – all leading to pressures to cut costs and
especially the cost of labour. They generally either fail, stagnate,
or transform into ordinary capitalist enterprises.

Most importantly, they often are based on anarchist notions that the
state can be ignored or surrounded and replaced by social institutions
such as co-ops, and therefore, their advocates avoid teaching about
the necessity of or the means to engaging and working to transform the
state or challenge state power. They don’t, therefore, effectively
raise alternative ways of organizing work or society. Instead, what is
likely to be learned is how to survive as an enterprise in a highly
competitive private market environment, or worse, that collective
experimentation doesn’t work.

2. Key Struggles and Experiences

Participation in key political and social struggles, such as Black
Lives Matter and Occupy (not to mention the Wisconsin rebellion, the
various teachers’ strikes), is important for politicizing young and
other working-class people and building resistance to the most
egregious forms of capitalist inequalities and outrages. But what is
missing in such discussion is whether and how participants and leaders
in these movements develop inclinations to move on to the challenges
of building for socialism.

Even some of the most exciting struggles don’t necessarily lead to
movements or generation of leaders that can work to transform key
state institutions with a longer-term socialist perspective. They can
also generate the converse: a cohort of activists whose goal is
individual upward social mobility, with aspirations to become
integrated into the ruling class strata.

What is missing is a socialist politics and attendant education
operating in some organized way in these kinds of movements. What may
start as radical forms of resistance don’t inherently lead
participants to identify capitalism as the problem and the need to
replace it with a socialist society led by the working class (broadly
defined). That can only be grasped through conscious education
occurring alongside the experience of struggle and experimentation.
Otherwise, the lessons spontaneously learned – and shaped through
fragmented experiences, the framing of the mass media, and right-wing
populism – are mixed and are as likely to lead to depoliticization,
a turn to the right, or a fatalistic acceptance of individual survival
and individual upward social mobility.

Where, then, will workers get to participate in these kinds of
socialist educational experiences, and where will the educators –
hopefully, as Yates implies, increasingly developing out of the
working class – come from? What kinds of institutions need to be
created in order to do this? Absent a socialist party (or parties),
can this be accomplished in the interim – however imperfectly –
through organized groups of socialists with an eye to the future
formation of such a party?

3. Social Democracy and Party Building

Yates calls for social democratic parties to be replaced by
“democratic working-class parties”. But his hopes for what might
lead to the formation of such parties – a problem that has long
stymied the left – remains unconvincing (and none of us on the left
– certainly not I – can claim to have come close to solving it)
The bottom-up experiences he cites either didn’t succeed or were
developed in societies where radicals or socialists were already
running the government. Experimental political initiatives such as
workers’ assemblies and the Richmond Political Alliance could
provide important spaces for building a radical, working-class
political project – with allies – but there are few other such
experiments. And even there, we know precious little about how the
activists building these experiments are doing political education
with workers about challenging capitalism and building toward a
socialist future.

A coming together of various experimental local movements isn’t
likely on its own to build a party. Without a highly organized core of
socialists working to create a different political orientation inside
and around them, the parties such movements have given birth to have,
original intentions aside, drifted toward a social democratic in
orientation.

In moving toward an eventual socialist party (or parties), it seems
that the central task today is to develop capacities to do socialist
education in working-class communities, institutions, and workplaces.
And if this education is not to remain abstract to the participants,
it must be inseparable from participation in critical struggles as
socialists and others working together to develop socialist
orientations in these struggles. It is this that provides the
institutional foundation for radical working-class political activity,
movement-building, class formation, and building the requisite
socialist party/parties.

Work, Work, Work opens the door to a series of other questions not
covered in the book. Should elections be the central fulcrum of
socialist strategy, or should socialist parties refuse to participate
in elections, like some on the far left maintain? What kind of
relationship might there be between electoral participation and mass
struggles to challenge capital, transform institutions, and experiment
with alternatives ways organizing social life? In the US context, even
if the Democratic Party can’t get us to socialism, might it provide
a space to participate in primaries, or is it this an absolute dead
end? Can we, even before getting to socialism, still work to transform
and democratize the state? •

Herman Rosenfeld is a Toronto-based socialist activist, educator,
organizer and writer. He is a retired national staffperson with the
Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), and worked in their Education
Department.

* socialists
[[link removed]]
* Work
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]