On the need to shift the focus from work — Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop

Nowadays, it is practically impossible to have a conversation with someone without the subject of work coming up. Wherever you work, it is rare for conversations not to start with this question: So? How’s your job? Whether you like it or not, it is true that without selling your labor power in a company or directly on the market, and despite a possible subsidy from the State, you will not be able to move around, pay your rent and make ends meet. In other words, work has become as important as eating or breathing. It is even treated as a matter of course, as if it were something almost biological, a “prebiotic”.

How have we come to this point of naturalizing work?

It is absurd today to deny or ignore the centrality of work in this society. This would be to forget that for capitalism, it is one of its fundamental and constitutive categories. Work, the market, money and the state are not exclusive elements of capitalism. It is true that these elements already existed in antiquity, but in a sporadic and scattered form. Capitalism has incorporated them all into its dynamic of forced and infinite growth, and work¹, as we shall see, occupies this central position. The history of the constitution of capitalism shows us how it, with enclosures² as its starting point, began by creating the figure of the worker. By reinforcing its hegemony, it denatured the traditional daily work of peasants and artisans, transforming them into wage laborers, that is to say, into simple producers of goods in exchange for a salary. Consequently, as pure energy, pure merchandise, they were forced to sell their bodies, their labor power, in order to survive with great difficulty. Thus, with this major anthropological rupture, not only did the “acting together”, the social entity of human beings, begin to be undermined, but the power of the commons was placed at the disposal of the first capitalists, those who owned the land, the first industries and controlled the market. Consequently, the traditional forms of the “metabolism” (Marx) of human communities with their environment have shifted from a common complicity, that of “acting together for”, to that of “earning a living” each for themselves as best they can, exempt from the need to take care of the environment from which we, as a community, have been uprooted. Furthermore, all forms of domination that predated capitalism have been intensified by the very phenomenon of separation and specialization that it has brought about. This is the case of patriarchy, which capitalism took hold of with the witch hunts that broke up peasant communities in the 16th century. Shortly afterwards, women were exempted from productive work in exchange for reproducing the male labor force, without this “work” being remunerated or included in the cost of production of the goods. Later, when she gained access to the role of employee thanks to her struggles, she would continue to bear the burden of domestic tasks in addition to enduring exploitation in the workplace, being treated worse than the man doing the same job³. We can also consider migration, in part, as a continuation of colonization, of the domination of white man over colored man, of the rich over the poor, as an evolution of a colonialism that had once enslaved other peoples in their own territories. Now that their societies have been exhausted and trampled on, they have no choice but to risk their lives in small boats to sell their labor power, clandestinely, in poor conditions and for a handful of lentils (reserve labor for capitalism).

The condition of the worker

a) An overview

It is true that within this social system itself, the struggles of workers organized into societies and then into unions have succeeded in improving working conditions and raising the economic level of the working class. One need only refer to the early 19th century through the accounts of Flora Tristan or Dickens: “long and exhausting working days, miserable wages, ragged and dirty clothes, overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in the factories”. It is true that in our “pedestrian zone of capitalism”, these working conditions seem to have improved, but let’s just say that they have changed. We have more economic means at our disposal, but the screens that inform us, or rather format us, prevent us from seeing other realities in the world. So, if we looked up, we would see this 11-year-old boy dressed in rags, walking barefoot and with difficulty in the middle of a dump full of broken, obsolete or worn-out phones, polyethylene containers, tablets, computers, keyboards and screens of all kinds, old rusty batteries, etc. This is difficult for him because his progress is also hampered by cables of all kinds. From all this waste, he will use the copper, brass or tin when he burns the packaging to sell the metals to the “man with the scales”. This is why, like his colleagues, he quickly becomes intoxicated and ends up destroying his lungs. Further west, in Shanghai, where these screens and other components are manufactured, working conditions are so unbearable that nets have been installed to prevent employees from committing suicide by throwing themselves out of windows.

b) Returning home

Mr. Bookchin warned as early as 1985⁴: ” Technological innovation is advancing at a speed that outpaces all visible changes in the social and political sphere. … the changes that I predicted twenty years ago in Toward a Liberatory Technology and which I naively hoped would serve human liberation, are instead serving the existing order to nurture the domination of man by man. I am referring to a vast restructuring of the entire economy on an electronic basis, to an industrial revolution of an entirely new kind that threatens to replace the human sensory apparatus itself with electronically guided mechanical devices. It must be kept in mind that we are only in the early stages of a series of technical advances that will make the factory and the office obsolete, as well as the traditional farm, that will fuel political centralization and strengthen police control, not to mention the conditioning of the mind and soul by the mass media, which will reach unimaginable levels…’ … “Cybernetic technology, which is still in its infancy, will probably make most American workers economically redundant. I am not engaging in rhetoric. Every decade brings its share of profound technical changes that make almost all types of traditional work ‘useless’. Virtually all operations related to raw materials, manufacturing and services can be carried out essentially by cybernetic devices and, if the logic of capitalism continues, this substitution will become a reality. Even if a few million people are still involved in one way or another in these operations, they will constitute the “margins” of the economy, not its heart. We must face the fact that such a massive substitution of human labor is possible, as well as inevitable if capitalism takes its course.

His predictions have not failed, and thus the domination of the sciences applied to production, appropriated by Capital and suffered by the workers, is today reflected at the level of work, thanks to the New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT). What remains of human labor, even the very presence of human beings, is disappearing, replaced by robots. The personnel themselves are transformed into quasi-automata, in particular so that they do not have to think about anything since all their gestures are millimeter-perfect and simplified to the extreme, dictated and controlled at all times in real time by these same technologies. In the factory, this system makes it possible to control the various workstations much more efficiently than in the old way, with their hierarchies going from boss to boss, from the office to the worker and the machines. Today, with everything connected, computers make it possible to plan and control everything. Gestures, tasks, adjustments, supply, speed, quality, everything can be calculated with the greatest precision. The key words used by managers are increasingly “just in time”, “lean production”, “zero downtime”, “maximum downtime”, “lean production”, “lean production” and “lean production”. zero downtime”, ‘maximum speed’. This leads to a reduction in production costs, i.e. lower labor costs, fewer tasks, less stock, less time for each task. And to achieve these results, the coercion of each worker is increased, as they are connected and therefore constantly monitored as to what they do and do not do. But as this coercion is impersonal, very efficient and precise, it is ultimately better tolerated because it is perceived by the worker as part of the technical system, that is to say something neutral that no longer depends on the whim of the often arrogant and hated foremen. These measures are combined with other management techniques, in which the worker has the impression of being empowered within the company itself⁵. And the most effective of these technologies is that they have succeeded in effectively increasing the contemporary globalization of production chains and the valorization of capital. The interconnected world with data transmission, coordination, speed of transportation, control and traceability of parts, has transformed our planet into one big factory which, in order to obtain the lowest costs for the market, puts the proletarians themselves in competition with each other on a global scale. It is therefore not unreasonable to say that, despite all the union struggles, capitalism is pursuing its logical and forced destruction of the world.

The urgency of rethinking work

As Bookchin rightly said: “But time is not on our side. It is very likely that, if we do not turn to this capacity for intellectual penetration, to this praxis and these forms of organization appropriate to the problems we face, time will work against us. Technological innovation is advancing at a speed that outpaces all visible changes in the social and political sphere.”

Beyond the legitimate and indispensable defense of the working class, can revolutionary syndicalism open the doors to an emancipated society, as our ancestors thought? Is paid or self-employment part of the human condition? Is work the same for women as for men, inside or outside a cooperative? What is the role of technology? Would work have a meaning in an emancipated society? Should we liberate work or liberate ourselves from work? What does an eco-communitarian vision propose in this regard?

We do not have ready-made answers to these many questions, but asking them properly here and now is the first step in initiating the formation of a collective intelligence commensurate with the vital necessity of creating a large-scale ecocommunity movement that encompasses all aspects of life.

a) Our heritage of workers’ struggles

This is not the place to develop the history of our anarchist movement for the emancipation of the workers, but we can identify these same concerns and draw inspiration from their reflections on the concept of work, contextualizing them in the present of advanced capitalism. This is how this interesting reflection is put forward by the anonymous French translators of the Motions of the Zaragoza Congress, containing the programmatic motion on libertarian communism adopted in May 1936, who conclude their preface (written in the late 1970s) with the following words: “The CNT […] found in Franco’s death an historic situation that will not be repeated: the possibility of forming one of the first large organizations of the new era.” The entire youth rebellion seemed to be there, as if in its own house. [But it would have been necessary to […] undertake a critique of the history of [the] defeat, [and] for [the CNT] to attack the modern center of ideology: work. It should have associated with any demand having as its object work the imperative necessity of its abolition. It should have opened itself to the critique of syndicalism and of everyday life.

Going back even further in time, this criticism had already been present in the anarchist movement since the end of the 19th century and was expressed at the Amsterdam congress in 1907: ” The Libertarian Communist Congress […] recognizes that the general economic strike […] recognizes in the general revolutionary economic strike, that is to say in the refusal of the entire proletariat to work as a class, the means to disrupt the economic structure of today’s society and emancipate the proletariat from the oppression of wage labor”, which is reminiscent of Marx’s statement: “Private property is nothing but materialized labor. If we want to deal it a death blow, we must attack private property, not only as an objective state, but as an activity, as labor.”

b) The communitarian warning against trade unionism

“Socialism will not come about through the further development of capitalism, nor will it come about through the struggle of workers, as producers, within capitalism. [All trade union struggles] are necessary within capitalism, as long as the workers do not know how to get out of it. But this always necessarily revolves within the closed circuit of capitalism; what happens within capitalist production can only lead to an ever greater integration into it.”⁶. Moreover, and taking up the fact that we are necessarily in the closed circuit of capitalism, we can ask ourselves this question today: Is it only the rich who are destroying the planet, as many people in the capitalist sphere say, or is it rather a way of life accepted by almost everyone today, which does not make it an expression of “human nature”, but remains specifically capitalist?

To return to the subject of the controversy over work in the tensions between the two currents within the CNT in the 1930s, which would have a different approach to the libertarian communist project: the communalist current and the syndicalist current.

1. The communalist current

Communalism, without yet being eco-communism, proposed a federalist system based on the autonomous rural commune and combined perfectly with the old ideal of village life. It based social relations on anarchist personal ethics and the restoration of the moral values of life off the land. In this context, it was essential to work together to meet immediate needs without going through the wage system, and the union was to have a defensive function and disappear with capitalism.

2. The syndicalist tendency

This communitarian tendency within the libertarian movement remained important until the 1930s, but gradually lost ground to the syndicalist tendency. The evolution of the eminent activist Diego Abad de Santillán is an illustration of this: “In 1925, the communalist Santillán mocked the ‘theorists, this syndicalism based on the materialist conception of history that runs after capitalism, copying its methods and integrating the ’means‘ that it itself creates in the course of its industrial development’.” As late as 1931, it continued to attack modern industrialism⁷, while already in the same year, the CNT had moved from the status of a “means of struggle and resistance” to that of an end in itself. Moreover, it had to be preserved after the fall of capitalism in order to structure the new society (reduction of the role of the commune), and so from 1933-34 Santillán set about systematically undoing the communalist project he had defended. He began by extolling the merits of modernizing the production apparatus: “Modern industry is a mechanism that has its own rhythm. The rhythm of man does not determine the rhythm of the machine; it is the rhythm of the machine that determines the rhythm of man. […] If we start from the workplace, autonomous municipalities are superfluous. …. Economic localism has disappeared and, if it has not already done so, it should be relegated to the museum of antiquities. The factory organization, and not the free commune […] nor the affinity group, must be the core of the future anarchist society] … Concluding in June 1936 that “If we fight the capitalist economic and social structure, it is because in it labor, the basis of everything that exists to make human existence possible, does not receive the primacy to which it is entitled”. It was the representatives of this excessive unionist tendency who were in charge two days after the people defeated the military rebels on July 19, 1936, and who postponed the implementation of the libertarian communist program. From then on, the CNT and UGT unions, despite the difficulties caused by the war and beyond their disagreements, began to rationalize, standardize, concentrate and modernize Barcelona’s archaic industrial apparatus. And they fought to create a competitive national market.

Shifting the centrality of labor

a) Bookchin and trade unionism:

Bookchin, who from the age of 15 to 37 was a stubborn trade union activist until 1948, came to the conclusion, as early as the 1970s, that: “Any radical movement that bases its theory of social change on a revolutionary proletariat – made up solely of workers or of workers and employees – lives in a world that is disappearing, if it ever existed, with the disappearance of the peasant trades and jobs of Latin and Slavic Europe of the last century” … and he anticipated: ”… “We must bear in mind that these technological changes – and the way in which they have occurred – mark the end of all history prior to the Second World War, of this history on which so much of our theory is based. Trade unionism shared with Marxism the firm conviction that the industrial proletariat was the historical subject “of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism” … ” Contrary to the expectations of the trade unionists and Marxists, the proletariat has historically declined at the same time as the factory system and the traditional technology that gave rise to it as a class… “…….

‘So, does it still make sense to talk about a ’hegemonic class’ in a society where the class structure is disintegrating? We must be prepared to define the new emerging issues, such as ecology, feminism, racism, municipalism and the cultural movements that are concerned with the quality of life in the broadest sense of the term, not forgetting the attempts to oppose alienation in a spiritually empty society. Can we ignore the new social movements that have emerged in Central Europe, such as the Greens and the anti-nuclear and pacifist coalitions that transcend so many class lines and so many national boundaries. We must be ready to leave the old ideological trenches, to look with honesty, clarity and intelligence at the authoritarian world that is reshaping itself around us and to take note of the tensions between the utopian traditions of bourgeois democratic revolutions and the rising tide of militarism and centralism that threatens to cancel out these traditions. Can we ignore localist politics, municipal and neighborhood movements, the assertion of democratic rights against attempts to increase the authority of the executive power?

b) Trade unionism and trade unions

We can consider the “class struggle” with the doubts and premonitions of the anarchist Gustav Landauer in 1910 or with the negative role retrospectively attributed to it by Kuztz^8. in “The Double Marx”. Bookchin would no doubt agree with them, but he was not ready to throw unionism overboard.

And for Bookchin, unionism integrated into a communitarian perspective would still have an important role to play: … “It will be permitted to emphasize that I do not say what I say to diminish the importance of gaining the support of the working class for a project of human emancipation, nor do I seek to denigrate the efforts of trade unionists in this direction. Today, a liberation project that does not have the support of the working class is probably doomed to failure: the “blue collar” workers, and even more so if they are united with the “white collar” workers, still represent a considerable economic force…” ….

Thus, for example, the unions in an involved dynamic, with the other tendencies within a communitarian movement, in addition to fighting against worker abuse and for his dignity in the workplace, by demanding the reduction of working hours, the expenditure of forces to a minimum, would work in favor of emancipated labor and would be a condition of its emancipation. In this way, we could free up time, energy and collective imagination, which could be used to strengthen the communist movement in various ways.

Another looming opportunity is the state’s abandonment of public services. The role of trade unionism would therefore be fundamental in order to gradually recover what is public from the State and to take back what belongs to us, that is to say, to hand it over to the municipal assemblies. But there is no doubt that we have many more possibilities for action within the framework of trade unionism to get out of the “closed circuit of capitalism”, that is to say, of work as a means of supporting capital.

c) Cooperatives and communitarianism

Cooperatives, as self-managed work, are still attractive to many activists as a solution to recover the profit of labor for the workers and thus oppose capitalism, but to what extent can they be presented as part of the eco-community project?

Bookchin sees serious drawbacks despite the fact that: “No, I am not opposed to cooperatives on principle. They are invaluable, especially as schools for teaching people to cooperate. I have only tried to show that they are not capable of eliminating capitalism by colonizing it through the multiplication of cooperatives, because these function like capitalist enterprises in many respects, that is to say, they integrate into the market system, whatever the intentions of their founders may be…”.

However, it could play an important role in the communalist social structure:

… “On the other hand, ‘municipally owned cooperatives’ would not be cooperatives in the classical sense. They would not be private cooperatives or federations of private cooperatives. They would be the ‘property’ of a community assembled in a popular assembly. They would therefore function as an integral part of the community, not separately, and would be accountable to it. Not only would they be ‘owned’ by the community, but many of their policies would be decided by the community in assembly. Only the practical implementation of these policies would be the responsibility of each cooperative. ‘…

At the same time, within a communitarian strategy and involved in this movement with their own culture, they could be considered as a place of learning self-management and creative complicity by acting together and also freeing up forces and time to devote to the consolidation of the communitarian movement. With what we know about the dangers of integration into the market, and with great caution, they could also serve as links to the new world to which we aspire.

The decentralization of labor in communalism

Following this line of thought, we will see how Bookchin shifts the centrality of labor to the people’s assembly and the citizen. In other words, he explains the need to remove all power from an autonomous economy to all other aspects of life, as is the case in capitalist society, and give it to the political sphere, that is, to the citizens⁹.

Yes, the vast majority of people must work for a living, and a large proportion of them are productive workers. But many workers are unproductive. They operate entirely within the framework and circumstances created by the capitalist system, such as the processing of invoices, contracts, credit notes, insurance policies, etc. Nine out of ten workers would be unemployed in a rational society in which there would be no need for insurance or any other commercial transaction…” …….

”In a libertarian municipalist society, the assembly would decide the policies of the entire economy. Workers would shed their unique professional identities and interests, at least in the political sphere, and see themselves primarily as citizens of their community. The municipality, through its citizens’ assembly, would exercise control and make the main decisions concerning its factories, and would develop the policies that they should follow, always from a civic rather than a union perspective…”….

Provisional conclusion

These are just a few considerations on the work and role of trade unionism seen through a communalist prism. But for me, it is just a matter of providing some elements that may be unknown to many and that can be used to develop the debate as we move forward in developing our strategy. I consider these elements important given the extraordinary history of revolutionary struggles and perspectives that we have inherited on our peninsula and within our traditions, without, of course, rejecting other experiences in the world.

Travailler comes from the Latin tripalium, a treacherous torture device similar to a cross of three sticks to which a prisoner was tied to roast him over a fire or subject him to other adorable practices. This is why, in its oldest sense, the verb travailler was used in French to mean suffering and misfortune. ↩︎
The term enclosure refers to the process of division or monopolization of fields, meadows, pastures and other communal agricultural land in England by capitalists and spread to the rest of Western Europe. ↩︎
“It is because we are feminists that we are against work.” A feminist group.
“It’s about putting feminist practices into practice among ourselves right now, and systematically opposing sexist and patriarchal behavior. It means demanding that the emotional not be governed by the intrinsically patriarchal and hierarchical work ethic; and, finally, it means wanting us all to learn to take care of each other. Because if everything we love and experience is outside of work, that is where we will define ourselves differently. Let what we define as private burst in from the margins, flooding our lives. We will exist autonomously, that is to say, outside of work, capital and the state.” ↩︎
Murray Bookchin (1985) ↩︎
Employers, using management, know that the problem for workers lies in the traditional organization of companies based on pyramidal management structures. A model that they consider toxic in itself and which produces organizations with superb marble and glass buildings, but without a soul. As a solution to these problems, they create models of self-organization of companies (sociocracy, holocracy, etc.) which, according to them, represent an evolutionary advance, an alternative to pyramidal governance structures and reward-driven work. ↩︎
Gustav Landauer 1911-1919, Iniciation au socialisme ↩︎
The germ of fascism […] lies in everything that requires man to cease being man in order to worship supposedly superior realities or abstractions. [Modern industrialization à la Ford is pure fascism, legitimized despotism. In large, rationalized factories, the individual is nothing, the machine is everything. We who love freedom are not only the enemies of state fascism, but also of economic fascism. ↩︎
In this sense, the “class struggle” can be understood in a completely different way from what is usual: far from working for the downfall of capitalism, it was rather the internal engine of development of the capitalist system itself. The labor movement, always limited to the fetishist form of its interests, has in a way repeatedly represented the progress of the capitalist mode of production, against the unthinking conservatism of the respective capitalist elites. It imposed higher wages, shorter working hours, freedom of association, universal suffrage, state intervention, industrial and labor market policy, etc. as conditions for the development and expansion of industrial capitalism. And the “Communist Manifesto” was the torch that illuminated this historic movement, within the fetishist envelope. ↩︎
Thus, in 1923, the most lucid Marxist thinker of his time, Georg Lukács, wrote about the future “socialist economy”: “This ‘economy’, however, no longer has the function that any economy had before: it must be the servant of the consciously directed society; it must lose its immanence, its autonomy that made it properly an economy; it must be abolished as an economy” [Lukács 1923/1984, p. 289]. ↩︎

Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.