rate of exploitation.
To enforce and aggrandize exploitation, the capitalist must discipline the workers. Thus the process of valorization, of creating an expanding surplus value, “in form . . . is purely despotic.” To administer this despotism as the scale of production grows, Marx writes,
He [the capitalist] hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labor. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers, etc.), who command during the labor process.19
Thus the working class is defined not by income layers or education or status but by its conflict-ridden relation to capital and the three major conditions it faces. These conditions of working-class life are important not only as a way to define who is and isn’t working class, but also in terms of the more complex and ongoing process of proletarianization that affects people once thought of as “middle” class.
Three additional points are needed to fill out our understanding of the working class. The first is that “it is the collective worker, formed from the combination of the many specialized workers,” or “labor-power socially combined,” that produces surplus value. 20 Second is that the working class obviously also includes the family and other dependents. Marx writes, “The value of labor-power was determined, not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult worker, but also by that necessary to maintain his family.”21 This is, of course, a nineteenth-century formulation of the patriarchal “family wage” idea that scarcely prevails anymore, but the point is that the class is more than its employed members.
The third condition is that “it is capital accumulation itself that constantly produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population; i.e., a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.”22 This is not only the “reserve army” of the unemployed but also the human basis for an expanding service sector, some of which will produce yet more surplus value. Those who are unemployed, part of the reserve army, are also part of the working class, since directly or indirectly (unemployment insurance, welfare, etc.) they are “paid” out of the value created by labor power.
Marx made a distinction between productive labor and unproductive (of surplus value) labor. On this I agree with Anwar Shaikh and Ahmet Tonac, who argue that the definition of exploitation lies in “the ratio of surplus labor time to necessary labor time. This concept applies to all capitalistically employed wage labor, whether it is productive or not.”23 As the production of goods and services becomes more extended and complex, more workers whose labor is necessary to the process but who do not directly produce surplus value are required. Hence workers who don’t produce surplus value directly, but who conform to the conditions spelled out above, are part of the working class.
Class Formation: A Never-Ending Process
The working class, however, is not a fixed “thing.” Like capital itself, the working class necessarily changes as capital expands, enters new lines of production, and changes the methods of production. As Marx wrote in The Results of the Immediate Process of Production:
But capital is in itself indifferent to the particular nature of every sphere of production. Where it is invested, how it is invested and to what extent it is transferred from one sphere of production to another or redistributed among various spheres of production—all this is determined only by the greater ease or difficulty of selling the commodities manufactured.24
This, in turn, “constantly calls new branches of industry into being,” thus “capitalist production has a tendency to take over all branches of industry not yet acquired.” 25 In Labor and Monopoly Capital Harry Braverman argued that “the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital.”26 Capital’s thirst for new ways to make a profit is unquenchable.
Naturally, the work in these new branches of industry will be different, and the workers employed appear to be different as well. In the United States and most other industrial nations, one symbol of this change has been the longstanding shift from the production of goods to that of services, which have become commodities themselves. Today, of course, this process is global. So, on the one hand, we see a shift of manufacturing from the United States and other Western nations to the industrializing BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations, especially China. On the other hand, we have seen the rise of an intermodal “logistics” industry across the world that moves not only final commodities but production inputs as well. In other words, it is made necessary by the globalization of markets and production. Thus, while manufacturing jobs in the United States have contracted, employment in transportation and warehousing, the heart of “logistics,” has risen from 3.5 million in 1990 to 4.2 million in 2010 despite many advances in technology. The number of warehouse workers alone has increased from 407,000 to 628,000 over those years, a growth of more than 50 percent.27 These workers are now part of what amounts to a global assembly line in which transport and storage are essential parts of the chain of value creation.
Manufacturing jobs in the United States have been disappearing for a long time. From 1990 to 2010 the number of these core jobs fell from 17.7 million to 11.5 million, a loss of more than 6 million goods-producing jobs.28 As mentioned above, many of these are accounted for by the shift of manufacturing to China, India, and elsewhere. But there is another reason for this decline that is built into capitalism. It is found in the concept of relative surplus value, the reduction of the time it takes to create the subsistence of the worker. In the Grundrisse, Marx’s notebooks for the writing of Capital, he said:
In the second form of surplus value, however, as relative surplus value, which appears as the development of the workers’ productive power, as the reduction of the necessary labor time relative to the working day,and as the reduction of the working population relative to the population, in this form there directly appears the industrial and distinguishing historic character of the mode of production founded on capital.29
This is a remarkable piece of analysis, one which virtually undoes the optimistic view of an ever-growing industrial proletariat we saw in the Manifesto. Yet it is a central piece of Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, indeed, the “distinguishing historic character” of capitalism. The class sees its composition inevitably change precisely to the degree to which capitalism increases the productivity of labor, which under competition it must do.
The class has changed in other ways as well. Thompson’s famous statement that “the working class made itself as much as it was made” had a certain validity when this class was being born in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with its self-organized “trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organizations, periodicals.”30 The same was true of the American working class later in the nineteenth century with similar institutions, including the network of independent local and national labor newspapers that so impressed Eleanor Marx when she toured the United States in 1886.31
The expansion of capital into the life of society Braverman described above, however, has meant that many of the functions of the voluntary organizations of the early working class have been commodified (insurance, credit cards, etc.) or taken on by the state (welfare, Social Security). Ironically, the very successes of labor in the class struggle have undermined some of its older forms of organization. There are still various kinds of working-class community organizations—for example, immigrant-based workers’ centers—but today unions are virtually the only organizations that cut across the class. Hence their centrality to socialist strategy, even though they compose only a minority of the class almost everywhere.
Proletarianization
