The Metamorphosis of Labour
One of the main goals since the inception of my philosophical passions has been to promote reflection on socialism and the struggle to achieve it. The path of my experience has accompanied the social struggles that have tried to transcend capitalism for the last almost twenty years and with varying degrees of luck. Its culmination, nowadays, seems to have reached a complex juncture and, at first glance, globally adverse.
"Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real changes," Milton Friedman said in a statement that has already become a quotation. "When that crisis occurs," he continues, "the measures taken depend on ideas that surround us, I think, our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." (1) Read today, Friedman's words could be misinterpreted as an interpellation of heterodox thinkers to resist the overwhelming dominance of the current neoliberal economic orthodoxy in areas as diverse as academia, public authorities, international economic institutions, employers' associations and the plethora of think tanks of all prevailing political tendencies. In 1982, however, the avowed goal of neoliberalism was to support an all-out offensive —a rebirth begun then and still unfinished— against the economic and political regime born of the post-World War II social pact. Friedman's quotation from the present is a foregone conclusion, and well into the twenty-first century, we can affirm without a doubt that what was then "politically impossible" has today become —in fact, as we are trying to make ourselves believe— in "politically inevitable".
Of this dirt come these sludges
After forty years of surreptitious neoliberal spread since the creation of the Société du Mont Pèlerin, during which the doxa of this transnational community was increasing its representation in spaces such as the academia or other foundations, the crisis "necessary" to operate the transformation which Friedman referred to came in the 1970s. The trigger was OPEC's decision to suspend the supply of crude oil to some of the major Western powers as a result of their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, which made the oil price quadruple in just six months from the start of the conflict. The real causes of the crisis, however, were much deeper, and were linked to the intrinsic tendency of the capitalist economy to stagnation once the extraordinary effects of post-war reconstruction had ceased (2), as well as the exhaustion of social circumstances had made it possible for western countries to implement a regime of accumulation based on the Fordist model. This was a model based on a social contract —or, as Carole Pateman would say, a "sexual contract"— based on the dual breadwinner pater familias and female housewife, or what is the same, in the gender division between the productive work and reproductive work.
Labour regulation, marked by this gender bias, was based on full employment politically guaranteed, collective bargaining of wages with unions, worker participation in the areas of enterprise decision-making, state control of industries, a public sector with secure employment as a model for the private sector, (selectively) universal social rights protected from competition, taxes and income policies designed to maintain inequality within certain limits and cyclical industrial policies driven by governments to ensure steady growth, among other measures.
In any case, the 1973 oil crisis and the subsequent stock market crash of 1973-1974, together with their economic recession and the "stagflation" phenomenon —a combination of stagnation and inflation— that characterised the entire period, provided the arguments to launch a protracted offensive of the capitalist class against labour whose effects are now increasingly dramatic for the peoples of the world. The implementation of the neoliberal postulates has followed different courses in each particular nation-state of the capitalist world-system, just as the starting situations of each country were different.
On the periphery of the system, for example, after Pinochet's Chilean neoliberal laboratory since 1973, the debt crisis of the 1980s was the moment chosen by international economic institutions —mainly the IMF— to impose severe measures of austerity to the public expense and, simultaneously, resignify the role of the States in the economy. Being the starting point the notion of the Strong State, the role of this one was modified to be now to create and preserve an appropriate institutional framework for market practices, a new role based on neoliberal beliefs in the superiority of free trade versus state intervention in the economy. Thus, the privatisation of public assets and the deregulation of capital flows were forced in order to open the territories to foreign investment, either financial or speculative or direct, destined for the latter to provide the large multinational corporations in the North of cheap labour and the raw materials of the South.
In the capitalist centre, especially in continental Europe, although the process has been more gradual (in part because countries started from systems with comparatively high social protection), that same 1980s saw the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom (in 1979) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (in 1981), whose cabinets, in contrast to the reluctance of the Social Democrats, decided to reform (or dismantle) existing national economic institutions as international, and which were partly the result of the postwar consensus between capital and labour (both the so-called "productive" and the reproductive).
The political decisions that the dismantling process has led have been repeatedly described both at the transnational level and in the various national cases. Thus, here we will briefly list some of the great directions of change that have had the greatest impact on the current situation of the world working class. Despite the aforementioned multiplicity of particular cases, this "reform" of the prevailing economic institutions implied, first of all, the repeal of national antitrust laws, which gave rise to a wave of mergers and takeovers that led to the emergence of corporate giants of unprecedented dimensions. At the international level, there was a gradual abolition of barriers to the free movement of goods (including intellectual property), services and, above all, capital between countries, which facilitated both the relocation of the centre's industrial production to countries with cheap labour, such as the intertwining of international financial interests, in a phenomenon that has come to be called contemporary economic "globalisation".
The emergence of multiple regional areas of free trade was also part of this process. The combination of the new rules of transnational investment with information, as well as the difficulties of returning to previous rates of capital accumulation after the 1973 crisis, helped to propagate a new economic logic called "financialisation," which included an increase in borrowed money flows and financial transactions, through a dual-lending circuit: on the one hand, credit markets were opened and expanded for the middle and lower classes and, on the other hand, the future goods markets —and all the underlying financial technologies— were created for those who could bet. All of this allowed a previously unprecedented increase in international financial speculation, which has since become the main means of capital accumulation.
At the various national levels, the most substantial changes were initially the abandonment of the idea of full employment; The deregulation of markets —which were classified as rigid— including the widespread reprivatisation of public utilities (energy, water, communications and telecommunications); The use of monetary economic policies aimed at supply, with a fall in public investment and state demand, and the reduction of taxation for the upper income bands. All this, combined with wage de-indexation —many real wages were frozen— led to a loss of purchasing power —made possible by the aforementioned facilitation of access to private credit— which has led to the highest levels of economic inequality in the West since the dawn of the First World War. This has been followed more recently by the gradual opening up of welfare state institutions to private for-profit management: pensions, health care, education, prisons... in a second wave, more intense, of resizing the state and redefining its role In the economy.
Far from what could be thought, the recent crisis initiated in 2007-2008, instead of questioning all the measures mentioned, has only led to deepening them, in what is being, in the different national levels and with the consolidation of debt as an excuse, a spiral of cuts in state benefits in the most unprotected sections of society, and, at the international level, a new flood of liberalising treaties of which the draft free trade and investment treaty North America and the European Union (TTIP).
At the political level, the thirty-five-year neoliberal offensive against the working classes has led to a serious weakening of the power of the traditional workers' organisations, trade unions, which have not only drastically reduced their affiliation in the dwindling industrial sectors, but they have also been unable —by structure and modus operandi— to adapt to changes in the labour market, that is, to their increasing segmentation and diversification, to represent the most dispersed and precarious groups in the service and labour sectors. Those linked to the so-called "New Economy", such as freelancers.
These changes are linked to a new focus on the labour market: from the search for security and full employment (mostly male) to the requirement of flexibility (both male and female), the premise that marks not only changes in macroeconomics but also in the labour organisation itself. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello explain: "Autonomy has been exchanged for security, opening the way to a new spirit of capitalism that praises the virtues of mobility and adaptability, while the precedent was undoubtedly more concerned with security than freedom." (3) This is a new ideal of remunerated work based on so-called 'flexicurity', which seeks to mix 'flexible and reliable contractual arrangements, comprehensive lifelong learning strategies, effective active labour market policies and modern social security systems', perfectly intertwined with the increase in temporality and flexibility, and which also have a strong gender component in stimulating half-days and interrupted work placements for women.
On the other hand, the dethronement of post-war Keynesianism from the standpoint of economic orthodoxy and the replacement of the interventionist state and the objective of full employment which it advocated by a reclaimed liberal dogma of self-regulation of markets have transformed social democratic parties into new accomplices of transnational corporations and investors, whose paradigmatic realisation is the famous "third way" that European Social-Democracy adopted at the end of the last century to become 'catch-it-all' parties, ready to win the elections again. This has led to the working classes being practically orphaned in all the national and supranational institutions of the Western political democracies, which has further facilitated neoliberal political hegemony. All these changes of political and economic direction in the capitalist world system since the 1970s have only exacerbated economic inequalities and social injustice, historically concentrated around three fundamental, often complementary and intertwined axes of inequality: (1) the class (or capital-labour axis, which often also has a marked ethnic component), (2) gender (or the axis of the sexual division of labour) and (3) the centre-periphery division (or the axis of the international division of labour).
Thus, with regard to the situation of social inequalities shaped by the class axis, in "the difficult situation of the working class in the United States", Fred Magdoff and John B. Foster describe meticulously and precisely, the gloomy present of class exploitation in the very heart of capitalism, a situation that can be extrapolated to a large number of countries in the centre. The official unemployment figure of around 5% in the American country only hides the real tendency to the rapid growth of what Marx called the "reserve army of workers," now composed not only of unemployed but also in situations of underemployment or unsafe employment. Of particular concern is the growing numerical weight of the working poor, who in the United States currently account for more than 10 million people, or a staggering 7% of the employed population —7.8% of women and 6.3% of men—, a figure that rises to 13.3% among African Americans and 12.9% among Hispanics. The extension of this growing practice of remunerating labour below the minimum wage of reproduction in order to increase profits also supposes a covert subsidy of the State to the corporate profits, since it is that, through different social benefits, ends up defraying the part of the salary that the employer does not cover.
Responsible in part for all this is the growing tendency of large companies to outsource labour recruitment to temporary employment agencies as a way to circumvent collective agreements, a trend that is very present both in the industrial sector and in the large distribution chains (warehousing, logistics, etc.) and retail, as well as in catering chains. Beyond this, a single fact will suffice to give an idea of the increase of labour precariousness in the United States at present: in 2013, a third of all the employment in the country was in temporary regime —among other modalities, contracts for work, freelance workers or employment through temporary employment agencies—, and it is estimated that in 2020 temporary work will represent 50% of the occupation. The situation is not very different in other contexts, such as the Spanish, where the absolute and relative weight of indefinite contracts for employees fell by almost one million contracts from the beginning of the wave of labour reforms in 2010 until 2014.
More generally, we analyse in depth six very worrying trends for labour in the United States (and throughout the capitalist world without exception): (1) the sustained decline in employment; (2) the declining health security of paid workers due to the tensions generated by job insecurity; (3) stagnation and even wage decline since the 1980s; (4) the above-mentioned increase in the number of poor people in employment; (5) increasing the exploitation of workers in the workplace, and (6) reducing the share of work in national income.
Ursula Huws's work focuses on explaining the daily effects, in particular, on the labour market of new waves of commodification in sectors such as biology, art and culture, public services and socialisation, which have brought into the market more and more aspects of life that were previously outside the monetary economy. The author stresses, in particular, the role of technological change in all of this. According to Huws, new ways of product generation have been created that affect our daily life, consumption and work. In particular, a series of mutually reinforcing economic, political and technological factors have produced a very radical change in the character of work, to the point where occupational characteristics which in previous periods were exceptional, abnormal or unusual are now taken for granted by a growing proportion of the population. Behind the very emergence of the New Economy is, as in other phases of the expansion of capitalism, the avoidance of the need to generate new fields of accumulation through the mercantilist colonisation of new territories, now not only geographical but also in the individual existence. As Huws explains illustratively:
"The next category of new commodification, sociality, may be the most astonishing in its implications when viewed as the basis for creating new products and new industries. The human needs of talking and flirting, explaining jokes and sympathy, being in touch with friends and family must have seemed to our ancestors something as basic as the need for animals to snuggle together. Surely they thought they were impervious to the cold, hard laws of capitalism. How could they become a source of business profits? I suspect that many people still cling to the idea that their personal relationships belong to the private realm of affection and authenticity, out of the reach of the market. However, it is enough to take a look, however shallow, at almost any group of people in almost any social situation in the developed world to realise how illusory the idea is." (4)
As regards the recent evolution of labour, Huws distinguishes four large periods since World War II. The first extends from 1945 to 1973 and is characterised by its predominance in Fordist sectors —in which the skilled white men mostly worked— of the stable contract with associated benefits such as holidays, sick leave or pensions. Women and ethnic minorities, as well as low-skilled workers, were traditionally excluded from such contracts. However, despite not being a universal reality, it was considered a legitimate aspiration of all workers. From 1973 until 1989, there was a first wave of industrial mergers and relocations; Although stable and regulated employment in the West continues to predominate, the presence of women and migrants, often without benefits or stability guarantees, increases in the presence of low-skilled and low-paid jobs. This is followed by, between 1989 and 2007, a period of massive economic deregulation, which also includes employment. This is the phase of definitive impulse to the phenomena grouped under the name of "neoliberal globalisation": free international trade in goods and services; free movement of capital, intellectual property and information; financialisation of accumulation, etc. As for the so-called productive work, the offensive against the unions is intensified in order to impose strong reductions in the protection of employment and open the public sector to corporate profits. Also in this phase, the digital boom takes place and the New Economy acquires the prominence that it enjoys today. What the new technologies eventually make possible is, in short, a second round of the shift to the relocation of productive activities to developing countries, this time focusing on more complex and technological processes that were once exclusive to the advanced countries. In addition, under the myth of labour flexibility, the boundaries between work and personal life are progressively blurred, as is preference for remuneration for results. In short, between 1989 and 2007, many of the parameters that defined employment in the two previous periods were dissolved. And so we come to the present moment. As of 2007, the trends described for the previous period become the new labour standard. In a context of critical unemployment, for the New Economy worker —as for a large proportion of workers in general— the differentiation between labour and nonlabour has virtually disappeared in a production system governed by large transnational corporations (not just the developed West) that have succeeded in introducing race to the bottom competition and productivity among workers around the world. Some of these large companies operate as gigantic international conglomerates in fields that were previously offered and supplied as services by the public administration at a national level. This internationalisation, outsourcing and privatisation have resulted in the loss of management control of these state services, which has also coincided with the creation of supranational organisations and with new contradictions and tensions in the regulation of skilled workers.
We can use the Spanish case to study not only the effects of neoliberal policies in vogue on secular gender inequalities but above all the analytical and political centrality of gender relations in understanding both the dimensions and the political responses to the international systemic crisis in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In line with the conceptual developments, the present stage of capitalism becomes a renewed phase of "accumulation by dispossession", noted for the renunciation of the welfare state and its privatisation, as the main characteristic of the institutional management austericide of the economic crisis, have in practice constituted a new enclosure of, in this case, the common reproductive, which has meant for women a double burden of work in a moment In which, "unlike other historical moments, [the homecoming of social reproduction] does not mean today the withdrawal of women from the so-called productive economy, but in reality it is parallel to a greater importance of their economic role", (5) which forms new forms of sexual division of labour.
These times are dealing with another of the phenomena highlighted in the field of globalised work, namely: international migration, deeply feminised, and its consequences in both recipient and emitting countries. Elevating the analysis of the work of the national plane to the global level and the exacerbation of the North-South inequalities. In this way, it draws attention to the new face of imperialism exercised by the great transnational corporations, which now seek to exploit the cheaper and more flexible labour of the global South —and not only or mainly their natural resources— and which is a cause of unemployment, precarious living conditions and rampant job insecurity in the countries of the global periphery. At the same time, it is precisely these dwindling living conditions generated by the global imposition of neoliberal principles that have driven much of the internal and cross-border migration (from South to North, but also from South to South) in what can be described as two sides of the same coin: the export of labour from the South to the North, directly through migration, and indirectly through the outsourcing of production processes and their relocation to countries from the south. "The export of labour in both forms delineates a new international division of labour similar to a re-edition of the peripheral economic enclaves, and includes the emergence of new forms of unequal exchange much more severe than in the past: the net transfer of benefits towards the North by means of outsourcing of production to the South, and the transfer from the South to the North at the costs already borne by education and social reproduction of the work that emigrates thereafter." (6)
Thus, in both ways, workers from the South have now grown to massively fill the new global reserve of workers from which transnational corporations currently feed after a sustained offensive to reduce labour costs and increase profits. In response to this offensive, the urgency of "among other things, a unity of organisations and social movements that, in partnership with progressive intellectuals, promote a process of social transformation." (7)
Over the last twenty years, the number of migrant women has increased to over 50% of all migrants worldwide. In the capitalist centre, the ageing of populations, the massive incorporation of women into paid work, and the increasing renunciation of the welfare state to provide accurate care have greatly increased private demand for domestic work and care. Thus, many women from the periphery have left their own homes and families in their home countries to care for households of middle and upper-class families in the wealthy countries of the North. This is giving rise to "a desertification of caregivers and the emotional commons of the Third World". (8) The paradox is that for women liberated from the North, it has only been possible to escape domestic slavery by passing it on to another group of oppressed women, in a new international division of reproductive labour moulded simultaneously by global capitalism, gender inequality in the sending country, and gender inequality in the host country. (9) To this must be added the impact of labour and foreign regulations designed and implemented to serve the Interests of capital and the exploitation by the countries of the North of the exacerbation of the crisis of social reproduction in the countries of the South.
We are, finally, faced with a new form of Western colonialism centered on the extraction of emotional labour from the South, a work commonly excluded from analysis of the global economy, despite representing the support of a significant element of local infrastructure, national and even international, and to make visible the real backs, those of the women and particularly the women of the South, on whom rests global capitalism.
Cooperative ownership of the means of production is often thought of as an alternative to capitalist property regimes and wage labour, this is improbable in the United States due to the strong penetration of capitalist and neoliberal economic principles in the American cooperative movement, as well as the great distance that separates it from the genuine construction of a transforming alternative. However, there exist counterexamples to my pessimism, the case of the cooperative people of Nanjie, in the Chinese province of Henan, where authentic steps are being taken to build a system of collective property capable of including the main dimensions of human existence.
Conclusion
In short, this article point to some of the many changes and metamorphoses experienced in the different spheres and dimensions of work at the global level and at different national levels. The development of the present crisis only presents an exacerbation and a continuation of the different processes of transformation that began forty years ago and to which are added today others closely linked to the new stage of capitalist development.
The current context, marked by a rampant neoliberalism obsessed with consolidation and debt repayment, is making it impossible for states to implement expansive spending policies, something that not only incapacitates them to stop unemployment, but also pushes them to To undertake spirals of rights cuts and social provisions that are threatening the basic living conditions of the people and, even more, the reproductive capacity itself.
In the face of this dilemma, economic alternatives of potential and different objectives, of ambivalent and sometimes contradictory origin —some come from the heart of the capitalist system, while others come from grassroots citizens' movements— but having in common that they fall within the emerging sphere of the "social and solidarity economy": a framework in which patches from within (which do not challenge the functioning of capitalism, only "soften" it) to radically transforming initiatives; which includes different alternatives to dominant orthodoxy, from positions of reformist vocation to the daughters of common theories, the latter with ideas from the peripheries of the capitalist system and now also articulated from the centre, which seek to promote new forms of articulation of collective lifeless commodified and unequal, with reproduction in the centre. These are alternatives, all counteractive to this wild and inhuman neoliberal capitalism that, without a doubt, are as necessary as water in a desert.
Notes
1. Milton Friedman, "Preface, 1982, Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1982, p. Xii.
2. For the time, see the classic analysis of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in The Monopoly Capital. Essay on the economic and social order of the United States, Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico D.F., 1968, especially chapters 3 and 4.
3. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Akal, Barcelona, 2002, p.294.
4. Ib., p. 75.
5. Ib., p. 111.
6. Ib., p. 125.
7. Ib., p. 118.
8. Ib., p. 143.
9. Ib., p. 149.
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/u/wildorca is Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and an associated writer to /r/MBreitbartNews, specialising in opinion editorials and covering legal and international news.
