The world is not a collection of isolated individuals; all are somehow connected one with another.
– Aristotle
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
– John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. xvii
Human beings became human by separating themselves from their purely animal, that is to say, unconscious, nature. Even the most complex animals cannot match the accomplishments of humankind, which enable it to survive and prosper in the most varied conditions and climates, under the sea, in the skies, and even in space. Human beings have so far raised themselves above their “natural”, that is, zoological state, that they have mastered their environment to an unparalleled degree. Yet, paradoxically, humans are still controlled by blind forces beyond their control. The so-called market economy is based upon the premise that people do not control their lives and destinies, but are puppets in the hands of invisible forces, which, like the capricious and insatiable gods of old, rule everything with neither rhyme nor reason. These gods have their high priests, who dedicate their lives to their service. They inhabit the banks and stock exchanges, with their elaborate rituals, and make fat profits out of it. But when the gods get angry, the priests panic, like a herd of frightened beasts, and just as unconscious.
The ancient Romans described a slave as “a tool with a voice” (instrumentum vocale). Nowadays, many workers might feel that this description could equally apply to them. We are supposed to live in a post-modern, post-industrial, post-Fordist world. But, as far as the conditions of working people are concerned, what has changed? Everywhere, the gains of the past are under attack. In the West living standards, for the majority of people, are being squeezed. The welfare state is being undermined, and full employment is a thing of the past.
In all countries, society is afflicted with a deep sense of malaise. This starts on the top and percolates down to every level. The feeling of insecurity bred by permanent mass unemployment has spread to sections of the workforce who previously believed themselves immune – teachers, doctors, nurses, civil servants, factory managers – nobody is safe. The savings of the middle class, the value of their houses, are likewise threatened by the uncontrolled movements of the money markets and the stock exchange. The lives of billions of human beings are at the mercy of blind forces, which operate with a caprice that makes the gods of old seem rational by comparison.
Decades ago, it was confidently predicted that the forward march of science and technology would solve all the problems of humanity. In the future, men and women would no longer be concerned with the class struggle, but with the problem of leisure. These predictions were not at all unreasonable. From a strictly scientific point of view, there is no reason why we should not be in a position to bring about a general reduction in the hours of labour, while simultaneously increasing output and living standards, on the basis of the improved productivity gained from the application of new technology. But the real situation is very different.
Marx explained long ago that, under capitalism, the introduction of machinery, far from reducing the working day, tends to lengthen it. In all the main capitalist countries, we see a merciless pressure on workers to work longer hours for less pay. In its issue of October 24, 1994, Time reported a sharp up-turn in the American economy, with booming profits: “But workers complain that for them expansion spells exhaustion. Throughout American industry, companies are using overtime to wring the most out of the US labour force: the factory workweek currently is averaging a near record 42 hours, including 4.6 hours of overtime. ‘Americans’, observes Audrey Freedman, a labour economist and member of Time‘s board, ‘are the workingest people in the world.’ The big-three automakers have pushed this trend to an extreme. Their workers are putting in an average of 10 hours overtime a week and labouring an average of six eight-hour Saturdays a year.”
The same article quotes numerous examples of both blue-collar and white-collar workers from many different industries, who complain of chronic overwork:
‘I’m doing the work of three people,’ says Joseph Kelterborn, 44, who works for the Nynex telephone company in New York City. His department, which installs and maintains fiber-optic networks, has been reduced from 27 people to 20 in recent years, in part by combining what were once three separate positions – switchman, powerman and tester – into his job of carrier switchman. As a result, says Kelterborn, he often works up to four extra hours a day and one weekend in three. ‘By the time I get home,’ he complains, ‘all I have time for is a shower, dinner and a little sleep; then it’s time to turn around and do it all over again’.
As Marx pointed out, increased use of machinery under capitalism means longer hours of toil for those who still have a job. Since the recovery from the previous recession began in March 1991, the US economy has created almost six million new jobs, but in such a way that leaves it two million jobs short. If US companies had hired workers at the same rate as in past expansions, the increase in jobs would have been eight million or more.
The Time article adds:
There is much evidence, in fact, that the US is developing something of a two-tiered society. While corporate profits and executive salaries are rising rapidly, real wages (that is, discounted for inflation) are not growing at all. Indeed, the government has reported that last year real median household income in the US fell by $312, while a million more people slipped into poverty; those officially defined as poor were 15.1 per cent of the US population vs. 14.8 per cent in 1992. Those were astonishing developments for the fourth year of a business recovery that is steadily gaining strength.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out that;
“owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.”[45]
In one of Charles Chaplin’s most famous films Modern Times, we have a graphic picture of life on the assembly line of a big plant in the 1930s. The mindless drudgery of an endless repetition of the same monotonous tasks indeed changes a human being into an appendage of the machine, a “tool with a voice”. Despite all the fancy talk about “participation”, conditions in most factories remain much the same. Indeed, the pressure on workers has been steadily stepped up in recent years. The little things that made life a bit more bearable are being ruthlessly whittled away. In Britain, where the strength of the unions achieved notable advances in the past, the lunch-hour has largely passed into history. Chancellor Kohl informs the German workers that they must begin to work weekends. It is the same picture everywhere.
Instead of new technology improving the lot of the worker in industry, it has been used to worsen the conditions of the white-collar worker. In most banks, hospitals and large offices, the position of the employees is more and more similar to that which exists in big factories. The same insecurity, the same relentless pressure on the nervous system, the same stress, leading to medical problems, depression, the break-up of marriages.
In recent years scientists have returned to the idea of a “man-machine”, in relation to the field of robotics and the question of artificial intelligence. It has even penetrated the popular imagination, as witnessed by a spate of films of the Terminator type, where human beings are pitted against ingeniously constructed automata. This latter phenomenon tells us quite a lot about the psychology of the present period, characterised by the general dehumanising of society, mixed with a sensation that human beings are not in charge of their own destiny, and fear of uncontrollable forces that dominate people’s lives. By contrast, the attempt to create artificial intelligence represents a further advance of the science of robotics, which, in a genuinely rational society, opens up a truly marvellous vista of human advancement.
The substitution of human toil by advanced machinery is the key to the greatest cultural revolution in history, on the basis of a generalised reduction in the hours of work. Nevertheless, there can be no question of ever exactly reproducing human thought in a machine, although specific operations can be done more efficiently by them. This is not for any mystical reasons, or because of an “immortal soul” which allegedly makes us a unique product of Creation, but because of the nature of thought itself, which cannot be separated from all the other bodily activities of human beings, beginning with labour.
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MESW, Vol. 1, pp. 114-5.