Part Two, Nasser Paydar
The term social labour is one of the common concepts in Marx’s and leftist literature. Marx himself has used this concept in various texts, most notably in Capital and Grundrisse. Marx’s purpose in using the adjective social for labour is clear. He sees the capitalist labour process as essentially involving the gathering of labour-power sellers under one roof or in the heart of the production process. “The simultaneous employment of a large number of workers in a single place, or in other words, in a single field of labour, for the purpose of producing a certain type of commodity under the command of a single capitalist, historically and conceptually constitutes the starting point of capitalist production” (Capital, Volume 1). In Marx’s words, social labour, insofar as it is related to the critical dissection of the capitalist mode of production, has been used only in this capacity and as a counter-process of individual labour. Sociality here is not only not identical with the sociality of labour in socialism or communism but is in every way its opposite. Capitalist production, in the same way that it is the basis for the worker’s separation from his labour, is the vessel for his complete dissolution in the process of capital’s valorisation and profit production. Sociality here is a community of disenfranchised, self-alienated, powerless, forbidden from intervention, and will-less humans. Humans who lose all their freedom, power, will, and power in the process of selling their labour power and become alienated from themselves, their work, and the results of their work to the point of becoming cogs in the machine for producing surplus value. The capitalist division of labour involves dividing humans into classes, into exploiters and exploited, employers and workers, thinkers and commoners, rulers and condemned, high and low, managers and executives, policymakers and policy-takers, bosses and subordinates, rich and poor, superiors and inferiors, prosperous and deprived. In this division of labour, private interests are separated from the general interest, and the interests of the individual from the interests of society. But this field has a long way to go. Activities that are based on the capitalist division of labour are essentially a kind of demarcation of the human existence of people and their transformation into dead and disjointed cells of the world of things. The fact that people are willing to accept such a job does not change the reality of the situation. The risk of death and deprivation, the compulsion to live and the necessity to continue living, or the metamorphosis and petrification of the values created by capitalism, compels people to accept any job. This same economic compulsion also creates the mental grounds for expressing their desires in them. At the very point of its emergence, capitalist production created a form of division of labour that based the collective existence of the working masses on the deprivation of their free will and the hanging of their collective and individual will on the power of capital and the will of the capitalist. “The cooperation of wage workers is carried out entirely by the capital that employs them. The union of the workers in the form of a productive unit and the creation of a connection between their actions is realized by a factor outside themselves, by the capital that brings them together and keeps them together. Accordingly, the connection of the different works of the workers is mentally the result of a program prepared by the capitalist and in practice it is the authority of the owner of capital, or the will of a powerful and alien to the workers that makes their actions subordinate to itself” (Capital, Volume I).
In capitalist production, the masses of workers employed in different centres of labour are each separately, separately related to capital, it is capital that chains them together, freezes them in its power structure, melts them in the process of its reproduction, atomizes the workers, makes their existence non-existent in its own existence, makes their community its organic body, and makes their role and effect the organic action and passivity of its own existence.
“The workers enter into a relationship with the capitalist, not with each other. Their cooperation begins when the labour process has begun. When they no longer have any attachment to themselves, they become part of capital as soon as they enter the labour process. Those who cooperate with each other are no more than parts of the labour organism and a special form of existence of capital. Therefore, the additional productive power of their collective labour that emerges under these conditions (conditions created by capital) is offered to capital free of charge. A power that capital does not cost and that the worker does not create before his labour belongs to capital, therefore appears as a power that capital inherently possesses…” (Capital, Volume 1)
In the layered place of collective production based on wage labour, the manufacturer brought together many workers under one roof, but at the same time reduced them to obsolete single cells in the process of producing things and concentrated the productive force resulting from the individual work of individuals in the single and superior power of capital. In this regard, the manufacturer imposed the hierarchy of steel deficiency on the working and living conditions of the workers, and behind these changes, it killed the creativity and intellectual excitement of the workers. Capitalist division of labour in the process of its birth and expansion turned the wage slaves into a bunch of immobile and dead nuts and bolts in terms of how to express life and exchange with the surrounding conditions. Bolts and nuts that help the rotation of the production wheel in the work chain, but outside of this chain, they become meaningless and meaningless components.
“If at first the worker sold his labour power to the capitalist because he did not have the material means of production, now his individual labour power refuses to do any work until it has been sold to the capitalist. His labour power now functions only with a delegation that only exists after the sale of power, that is, in the capitalist’s workshop. Since the manufacturing worker is no longer able to work and produce according to his natural talent, his productive activity can only be expanded as an instrument of the capitalist’s workshop. Just as it was written on the forehead of the chosen people that he is the property of the divorced Yahweh, so the division of labour stamps the manufacturing worker with a stamp that crushes him as the property of the divorced capital.” (Capital, Vol. I)
The economic nature of the capitalist division of labour is to further and more deeply assimilate human beings. If the factory unites the labour power of numerous workers in the form of capital and in the capitalist, the capitalist division of labour within society from the very beginning, and especially in the era of large-scale machine industry, completely separates from the workers all the achievements of human knowledge, politics, management, government, property, civilization, science, legal values, power, and everything else, and binds all of these together in the existence of capital as the requirements of the reproduction of capital. With this system of division of labour, capitalist production creates a society whose subjects, first of all, are reduced to will less puppets, puppets that are melded according to the requirements of capital’s profitability, each playing a role determined by capital. Secondly, as far as independent producers and owners of capital are concerned, war, competition, and the struggle for the distribution of profits become the driving force of the social order. “The division of labour within society links the independent producers of goods together. Producers who recognize no authority except competition, except the coercive pressure of mutual interest. A situation like that of the animal world, in which the war of all against all provides the conditions for the survival of all species. The same bourgeois consciousness that values the division of labour within the workshop, the lifelong subordination of the worker to a particular task, and his complete subservience to capital, as an organization of labour that guarantees an increase in productive power, condemns with the same intensity any conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production as an encroachment on such sacred things as the rights of property, liberty, and the genius of the capitalist. It is a very clear and characteristic fact that the apologists of the factory system of production heap the worst reproaches they have on the idea of the organization and planning of labour as a whole.
(Capital, Volume I)
The effects of the capitalist division of labour on the lives of the working masses and all of humanity can be summarized in a concise manner as follows.
1- The imposition of a cancerous, festering tumour called the state on citizens and the transformation of a very large part of the active force of society into components of the administrative, police, military, planning or execution machinery of the capitalist order. The transformation of people into executioners, jailers, torturers, spies, judges, soldiers, police and law enforcement officers of capital or the like, whose only profession, work, life and nature are criminality, evil and the deprivation of human rights from the population with the aim of defending the system of wage slavery.
2- The transformation of the vast majority of citizens, that is, the working class and the subordinate masses, into instruments of the ruling social and productive order. Their degradation into cogs and nuts in the machine of profit-making and capital production. The distortion and freezing of their talents and abilities in the framework of the requirements of the movement of capital and the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.
3- Enslaving workers in individual and separate cells of jobs and professions, tearing people apart based on the type of work and specialization, dividing them into those who will have different living conditions due to their skills, specialization, type of work or occupational background. Transforming workers into individuals who, while suffering from poverty and deprivation resulting from exploitation and the lack of rights stemming from capitalism, at the same time feel a kind of deceptive distinction among themselves.
4- Imposing widespread unemployment on workers in times of crisis, removing them from the circle of production or any type of employment and social activity, depriving society of their intellectual, practical, economic, scientific, human and social productivity.
5- Depriving the largest part of the world’s population of access to various scientific knowledge and education, distancing humanity from the welfare and service results of these knowledge, transforming all scientific achievements and approaches into requirements for the self-expansion of capital, transforming the process of education and acquiring science into a tool for increasing capital’s profits on the one hand and making labour power marketable on the other.
6- Increasingly developing and deepening the separation of planning from production, transforming the vast masses of the working class into unwilling and passive executors of the production process on the one hand and relegating the monopoly of planning to a certain layer of employees, creating a stratum of labour aristocracy, linking the interests of this stratum to the interests of the bourgeoisie, and apportioning the cost of their specific welfare and social facilities on the life and livelihood of the working masses.
7- The development of the huge international market for buying and selling as a circle for converting goods into money and vice versa, and the waste of a large part of humanity by turning them into intermediaries, sellers, brokers, merchants, and shopkeepers, and the destruction and waste of a significant portion of the product of the working class’s labour in the form of tools and means of exchange.
8- Capitalist production always and without exception allocates a very large part of social capital to advance in areas that have absolutely nothing to do with the livelihood, welfare, or civil needs of citizens, but are merely the need for value addition and self-expansion of capital. The labour force employed in these sectors is in fact a force that has been disconnected from the sphere of necessary production and social activities required by society and has become an idle force in terms of its impact on the level of living, welfare facilities, or social maturity of this class.
9- Capital, by its inherent nature and as a natural necessity of its value-added requirements, always excludes a percentage of the population, including the disabled, injured, addicts, prostitutes, smugglers, and the like, from effective and constructive participation in production or other social activities needed by society.
The above-mentioned cases, in addition to others of this kind, are all direct consequences of the capitalist division of labour and the inevitable product of the process of capital reproduction. While the capitalist system, with the further development of technology and the increasing growth of labour productivity, increases the rate of social production enormously, by fragmenting human beings and rendering a large portion of the labour force unemployed, transforming a large part of this force into agents of repression or servants of the bourgeoisie, it reduces the productive capacity of society’s labour in the most profound way. Let us keep in mind that this reduction only indicates the extent of the reduction that occurs in the social product of labour. What percentage of this product the working class obtains as the price of labour power is another matter that is not our concern here. Socialism disrupts this entire relationship and the foundation of these relationships and calculations. By abolishing the wage system and establishing a new collective labour organization, it completely disrupts the division of labour based on capitalist production. In socialism, no individual is an instrument of the social and productive order, no human being will be a cog or tool in the production machine. The talents and abilities of individuals will not be nailed to the scaffolding of production requirements under any circumstances. The participation of all citizens in the work process and the direct presence of their members in the planning of production and all social activities from within the work and life councils are the effective support for the realization and provision of this goal. In the socialist work organization and its council structure, we will not witness the fragmentation of humans and their imprisonment in separate cells of jobs and professions. Titles such as the labour reserve army or the unemployed population will have no external existence. The existence of any form of government over the citizens will be ended, the army, police, government bureaucracy, and any non-Soviet institution will be completely eliminated, the market, trade, and commerce will disappear from the realm of citizens’ lives, certain social productions and activities that are not related to the livelihood and welfare needs of citizens will be put to an end forever, and the material grounds for addiction and resorting to occupations such as smuggling, brokering, and the like will be eradicated. With the help of these developments, socialism returns all that social work that in capitalist society, under the influence of the specific division of labour of capital and in various forms, has been removed from the sphere of useful utilization by citizens, or worse, has been transformed into a parasitic ulcer for wasting the product of their labour, to the body of activity and work of society as a whole. The socialist organization of labour, with its council planning, direct involvement of everyone in this planning, the dispatch of all former capitalists and the security, military and law enforcement servants of capital to the sphere of useful and voluntary human activities, and the guarantee of an equal role for all citizens in decision-making, thanks to all this, completely completes the separation of man from labour and realizes the true unity between man and his labour. When human beings are free, autonomous, with the greatest wisdom, intelligence and awareness, hand in hand, in a council, with a free and conscious assessment, united and collective, determine all their needs and plan their production, distribution and consumption; when people work voluntarily and their voluntary work is defined by their conscious, free and council union. When the free development of everything depends on the free development of each and the well-being, excellence and needlessness of all depend on the well-being, dignity and needlessness of each, then work also acquires its true social and communist meaning.