Dauvé Gilles (1983)
[Estratto da Gilles Dauvé, Le roman de nos origines, 1983 , Capitolo X, «Crisi e autonomia»; di imminente pubblicazione in traduzione italiana]
Troppo spesso si è adottata la crisi economica come criterio esplicativo. L’integrazione degli operai al capitale è stata spiegata ora con la prosperità (la carota degli aumenti salariali), ora con la depressione (il bastone della disoccupazione). Negli anni Settanta, nell’ambito della nostra corrente, alcuni ritennero che la crisi avrebbe inevitabilmente soffiato sul fuoco della sovversione proletaria; non tanto because poverty pushed the workers to revolt, but because the crisis showed "the fragility of the system, multiplying the opportunities for intervention proletarian" (1).
As for us, we make no apology for the crisis, much less celebrate prematurely 'goodbye' to the capital and the proletariat. Others are seduced by the economic depression and gaze upon the falling rate of profit as if, after passing a certain critical threshold, they must necessarily derive social explosion. Now, the question of the crisis is not an economic issue: the falling rate of profit is only the symptom of a crisis in social relations. Similarly, when Marxism adopts the point of view of capital, wondering whether or not factories are about to close, stripped of its social significance of the crisis.
The Second and Third Internationals have almost always conceived of the class struggle as a factor foreign to the genesis of the crisis. According to this view, when the economic cycle enters a downturn, mechanically the workers are put in motion the action of the latter has nothing to do with their internal wage relationship. In communist theory, by contrast, society is conceived as a unified whole and the class struggle, even when its content becomes a key reform, it is a key determinant of the crisis. In this context, the proletariat is placed in a position to blow up (or not) the social relationship that is involved.
«[...] Those who rely on a crisis of overproduction, with its trail of tens of millions of unemployed in all countries, it is determined that what they call "the taking of consciousness of the proletariat "is dangerously deceptive [...]. The great mass of unemployed will simply look for a job, precisely what is needed to restore the circuit poisonous goods [...]. Of course, Lenin, Trotsky and Marx himself, have sometimes believed to see in the usual cyclical crises revolutionary opportunity, but they never made the necessary condition of the revolution. The reality, however, was to act to deny all hope to do so, quite clearly, at the last real crisis (1929-1933) [...] The practical problems of the communist revolution were not then so much delineated through all the capitalist relations as they are today, when they are tested more and more unbearable as so many restrictions and unnecessary. On this basis, rather than starting from the hitch of the economic, that the working class must organize against the system.
"Gambling on the crisis of overproduction means giving up fight on a terrain that is not the most favorable to the enemy [...] initiatives class that will awaken the revolutionary consciousness, before tens of thousands and then hundreds of millions of workers must be taken from working conditions, not those of unemployment, and political conditions and life, considered in their various aspects. Revolutionary practice, today, finds its meaning in the denial of all the functional aspects of capitalism, and must counter any problems the solutions of the capital of the company's own communist revolution. As long as at least a fraction of the working class will not take this kind of struggle, regardless of the economy of the capitalist economy, not just a crisis ten times more violent than the last to prevent further Arcetri revolutionary consciousness. Why, out of the struggle to transform all structures and superstructures become reactionary and oppressive, even under the best working conditions, there can be no consciousness, nor in the working class nor by the revolutionaries.
"What should serve as a reagent to the working class is not the accident of a major crisis of overproduction, which would regret the 10 -12 hours of hard work in a factory or in ufficio, ma la crisi che colpisce il sistema di lavoro e di cooperazione capitalistico; che, questa sì, è permanente, non conosce frontiere e si aggrava anche in presenza di una crescita ottimale del sistema. Le sue funeste conseguenze colpiscono allo stesso modo le aree più industrializzate e quelle più arretrate, gli Stati Uniti come la Russia e i suoi satelliti. È questa la carta più importante che il proletariato mondiale può giocare. Ed esso ne prenderà coscienza assai più agevolmente in condizioni “normali”, piuttosto che sotto l’assillo della fame.» (G. Munis, Parti-Etat. Stalinisme. Révolution , Spartacus, 1975).
The decisive factor is never block the development or economic growth, but the configuration in such circumstances to assume the social forces. If in 1917-1921, the proletarian assault took momentum from a situation of economic and political crisis, after 1929, despite the arrest (including the partial) expansion of the twenties, the ratio of strength changed radically in favor of capital and of the Western bourgeoisie, as well as the counterrevolution in the USSR. While in the postwar period, although not with the best outcomes, the proletariat was able to take advantage of the political and social conflicts taking place in 1929 but was unable to take advantage depression: when the crisis broke out, the wave of his main assault had flowed, and the world, its defeat had already consumed. Today, the situation is completely different and yet the thesis of Munis its meaning seems to be intact, as evidenced by the behavior of the workers after 1974.
That was the year in which a crisis that manifested itself since then has continued to deepen. It affects the workers both directly (in the U.S., for the period 1979-1980, the purchasing power of wages has been reduced by 10%), or indirectly, as the unemployment heightens the competition with the sons of the middle classes for access to lower clerical levels. Contrary to what had happened in the Sixties, the layer of employees who until then had enjoyed a degree of protection (the adult worker, male, native, qualified and / or unionized) started to see their privileges eroded and now must face, in turn, the experience of job insecurity. The bourgeoisie shakes his crutches in the working world and streamline production by eliminating the less productive sectors and leaving social services to degradation. If at first, to overcome the loss of productivity, the capital had tried to step up the pace of work, causing the spread of strikes wild in the early seventies, from the middle of the decade has begun to restructure to fund the production. For seven years, workers who engage in defensive action, more often than not, receives only partial success. To the extent that the latter is just a response to the attacks of the first, neither the capital nor labor can win. The system's ability to absorb shocks that are unleashed is awesome.
The stakes of the struggle today is primarily the protection of wages and employment. The affair of LIP (2) represents the clearest example of a phenomenon that is characteristic of the phase: the common defense against the closure of factories. This type of struggle that sees employees is in the business community and remain imprisoned within it, had already appeared before the LIP, for example in the textile sector, and not remain confined within the borders of French or Europe: Japan has experienced many moves that have the same characteristics.
Contrary to what the workers of these work-in think or say - at least as far as I know - they do not seek to produce in a different way while still employed, but they are primarily looking for a company They become masters of themselves, waiting to find a true master.
"Outside these walls, we are nothing." (Joe Toja, 49, mechanic at Chrysler in Detroit, explaining why the workers refused to go on strike against their company in difficulties ).
These movements are born as a reaction to industrial reorganization. It happened that the workers of metallurgical example of Baden-Württemberg (1978), they did pay their disqualification in the capital, forcing the owners to guarantee, for employees affected by innovation technological equivalent of a job and a salary equal to the previous one. Obtained after 16 days of strikes and lock-outs 13, involving 240,000 employees, the agreement covers 40% of metallurgical Germans. But these are exceptions: for the moment, the reorganization is still in limbo, and as you know the projects robotics (3), ignoring the pace of its introduction. The question is anything but technical: the degree and timing of robotics, the forms taken by investment and innovation are a function of class relations. From a general point of view, it seems that the capital is no longer able to recycle the labor force that is expelled by the industry, as well as a recycled one time had expelled from the country.
It is clear that the fall in profitability was the result of the constraints on development due to excessive fragmentation of work, and the limits to the reproduction of capitalist totality of the conditions of existence, to the extent that it includes services that are not reproducible as consumer goods manufactured in series. Collective services can not deploy the same productivity of industry, if the State takes charge of them, you do so at the expense of total capital.
One possible solution is to move to a system of automated production, with a definition for its internal consistency ( feedback, self-regulation, planning, rather than simple execution of orders set) (4), in which the machines are "enslaved" or coordinated, in order to develop a system that is self-control. It is not so much to subdue the man, but to make it more productive. Of course, the employee will be supervised more closely, but what matters is that it will fit within an organizational framework that work, even in the absence of monitoring, will be executed in the manner prescribed, being sufficient for that purpose, constraints imposed by the machine.
It is, however only one aspect of the utopia of capital. For example, at the time when the 'job enrichment' was considered a remedy against the "work fragments" skilled worker (Georges Friedman) (5), was attributed to the experience of Volvo (6) a flow excessive, which transcended the very meager results at the social as well as economic: with or without the contribution of electronics, self-proletarian exploitation will never be a mass phenomenon.
To date, however, does not appear that the principal is able to release and allocate the enormous investment that such a restructuring would require. A general devaluation in the context of a social earthquake in the forms can not be foreseen, would certainly make it easier. The devaluation generated by a crisis is more than just an economic fact: it is a reshuffling of the cards within the bourgeoisie, a redefinition of policy, the emergence of new forms of power and new levels of mediation between capital and labor (as can be seen by considering the shock of the two World Wars).
From the perspective of workers, the stakes, as it was during the introduction of scientific work, is not represented only from wages and from work. It is here, the transformation of work itself, that capitalist development would make more consistent and better controlled by the company. It is clear that any simple task can be automated, but the choice is once more social in nature. If you need to transfer the production activity in areas where the workforce is cheaper, what do the increased number of unemployed in the advanced industrial countries? Conversely, if you decide to robotize the factory, how to respond to further requests of the employees? In 1974, the French automobile industry's skilled workers, mainly immigrants of recent date, advancing claims of conventional type. In 1983, the Renault, the OS attached to the painting, mostly second-generation immigrants who wish to continue to live in France, have struggled, in a ward in the process of automation, to obtain the grade as professional workers, which would ensure their relocation once the restructuring is over. Living materials divisions among the workers, unions are reluctant to support them, but can no longer ignore them.
[...]
Notes:
(1) 'International King Kong, "No 1, 1976, p. 3 [GD].
(2) See The myth of self , included in the card: Strikes and labor unrest in the early seventies in Le Roman de nos origines , Pages Marxist of imminent publication.
(3) The term 'robotics' was later replaced by the more correct "computerized."
(4) The reference is to the so-called CNC machines, machine governed by a computer whose diffusion large scale dates back to the eighties of last century.
(5) Georges Friedmann, Le travail en miettes , Gallimard, Paris, 1964, trans. com., work shattered , Community Editions, Milan, 1960. L 'ouvrier specialis (OS, skilled worker) is the equivalent of the so-called mass-worker.
(6) In the late seventies, the Swedish Volvo plants in their introduced a new type of organization of work, based on so-called "islands." Within each island, a single team of workers had the task of assembling an entire vehicle. Questa formula organizzativa si ispirava al «modello Toyota», ideato da Tahichi Ohno e meglio noto come lean production (produzione snella). Tuttavia, «l’esperimento fallì perché questa strategia è efficace solo come parte di un processo comune di produzione capitalista. Funziona laddove esiste una sottostruttura destabilizzata (sregolata) con diversi piani di fornitori di componenti e servizi». Cfr. Karl-Heinz Roth, Il ritorno della dimensione proletaria e le paure della sinistra. Possibilità e limiti delle politiche socialiste nella transizione al XXI secolo , intervento su «post-fordismo», toyotismo e insorgenze proletarie, contenuto in «Quaderni di Contro Informazione», No 5 February 1995. See also Laura Fiocco, The cellularisation workforce and forms of resistance to Fiat's Melfi , in "Links Wobbly 'new series, No 6-7, 1998-1999 and the same author, The effect of kanban in work at Fiat Melfi , available on the website http://www.arpnet.it/chaos /; Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World : Unions in the International Economy, Verso, New York, 1997 and American Labor in International Lean Production (1996), in http://www.countdownnet.info / . [and Gilles Dauvé Karl Nesic have recently addressed these issues in We must still wait , Giovane Talpa, 2006].
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