This is David Harvey and you're listening
to the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, a podcast
that looks at capitalism through a Marxist
lens.
This podcast is made possible by Democracy
at Work.
My last podcast, I talked about the question
of anti-capitalist struggle as it exists at
the point of production, as it exists at the
point of realization in the market, and as
it exists at the point of social reproduction,
which is the social reproduction of labor
power but also the social reproduction of
ways of life and the like.
What I would like to do in this session is
to talk a little
bit more about the question of production
and realization and try to find a little bit
of a way to put much of this together.
The classic way of thinking about this in
Marxist [terms] is to think of the factory.
The factory is the site of collective labor,
which is set up and organized and dominated
by capital and within which value is produced
and reproduced and surplus value is appropriated.
So, this has been the centerpiece of a lot
of thinking.
But, what happens when factories disappear.
We've been through, in the advanced capitalist
countries like the United States and Europe,
a period of deindustrialization in which the
factory has become less and less significant.
So, this then poses interesting question for
us right now: where is the working class and
who constitutes the working class?
I might like to do something, which is a little
bit heterodox: maybe we should take out the
term class for the moment and just say working
people.
The reason I do that is because working-class
usually has a connotation of a certain kind
of labor situation, whereas working people
broadens the question and allows us to reconstitute,
at the end of the day, a different idea of
who the working class is and what the working
class might do.
What they might do and what their powers might
be.
One of the things that has happened through
deindustrialization has been the abolition
of a lot of blue-collar jobs.
The abolition of blue-collar jobs in the United
States and Britain, the two cases I know best,
and in both instances a lot of the abolition
of the jobs had to do with technological change.
The estimates are that about 60% of the job
losses were due to technological change over
the last 30 or 40 years.
The remainder has mainly been due to offshoring,
that is, taking the low-wage jobs and going
to China or Mexico or wherever.
But, with the technological change what we
see is the reduction of labor forces from
very large conglomerates.
For instance, when I went to Baltimore in
1969 there was a very large steel works employing
over 30,000 people.
By the time you get to 1990, it’s producing
the same amount of steel but only 5,000 people
are employed.
By the time you get into the 2000s, it's basically
either closed down or it gets opened up again
with a thousand people.
The Steel Workers Union was a very powerful
institution in the city when I first knew
it in 1969.
But now, of course, it's mainly dealing with
retired people and pensions and things that
and really has very little presence in Baltimore
city politics anymore.
So, with that kind of thing, you kind of say
the working class has disappeared.
But, when you think about it you say well,
maybe it hasn't disappeared.
It's just not making the same things anymore
and it's not caught up in the same activities.
For example, why would we say that making
automobiles or making steel is a working-class
occupation whereas, say, making hamburgers
is not?
In fact, if you look at the employment data,
of course, there’s been a massive increase
in McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken and
Burger King and all the rest, a massive increase
in employment in those areas and those areas
are productive of labor.
It's just they're producing food and prepared
food rather than producing steel and automobiles.
If you look at it, you would say well, actually
this, then, is one of the ways in which the
new working class is being thought of.
And in recent times, what we've seen is the
fast food workers have started to organize
and we've started to see what Marx would call
a class in itself forming around the spread
of those kinds of employment categories.
It's now beginning to become a class for itself.
I starts to go after McDonald's and say they
have to have a minimum wage of [$]15 or living
wage, more than that.
So, there's a lot of agitation going on in
something like fast food production.
But, you're not only dealing with fast food
production.
You're dealing with all the small restaurant
owners and all the rest of it.
I think of New York City not as a city, which
is parasitical in the sense that it actually
lives off the value production, which is created
in large industrial areas elsewhere, but where
actually a great deal of value is created
because when you take some of these employment
such as restaurant workers and the like you
see an enormous increase in the numbers and
an increase in value output and the like.
Of course, this is also a very labor-intensive
area and it will eventually fall before artificial
intelligence and the like.
But, it's still, at this point in time, a
very significant center of employment, which
means that whereas forty years a big source
of employment were the big automobile industries
and steel industry, so it was General Motors
and Ford and the like, now the biggest employers
are [the] Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise
and the McDonald's franchise.
So this is, if you like, one of the new working
classes.
But, of course, it's hard to organize.
A lot of the way labor is temporary.
People work there for a while and leave.
It's a very difficult area.
But, we see now some possibilities of organization,
particularly using social media and the like.
So, there's some possibilities there.
But, another thing occurred to me the other
day, which I thought was actually really very
interesting.
I was just, sort of, watching out of the window
of the airplane as I was leaving Dallas Airport
and I look out and I see this workforce and
I suddenly think about all of those people
who are working at the airport.
Now, in Marx’s category, transportation
is also value producing and so everybody who's
involved in the transport industry and moving
people from one part of the world to the other
is, in fact, part of a productive working
class given Marxist categories.
But then you look at the kind of labor that's
involved.
There all those people who are helping push
the plane out.
There are all those people who are helping
with getting the baggage and baggage claim.
There are all those people inside of the airport.
You look at it and you look at the structure
of the workforce there, it is not well paid
and yet it has a very singular power.
When you look and say what's the constitution
of that workforce?
What struck me, and I’ve thought about this
at every airport I've been to ever since,
is to take a good hard look at who it is [that]
is doing most of the work that makes airports
actually function.
There is a large number of people of color,
African Americans in particular, who are involved.
A lot of Hispanics and some white recent immigrants
from Eastern Europe and Russia and the like
and women.
It suddenly occurred to me that actually here
you have a really interesting way in which
to start to think about the composition of
a contemporary working class, which is that
it is dominated by waged women, waged African-American
and people of color, and waged immigrants,
particularly Hispanics.
And then you say, how well is this population
paid?
And if we include in that, that part, which
is the security population then you kind of
go: well, they're very badly paid and they're
very important but not at all well organized.
So you suddenly think to yourself, and I had
this fantasy, let's suppose all of the workers
at the airport suddenly decided to withdraw
their labor on a day.
Actually, okay, the airport would close down.
Let's suppose six airports in the United States—Los
Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, New York—let's
suppose they all decided to withdraw their
labor on one day.
Pretty soon, the whole country would be dysfunctional.
I think it was very telling that when Trump
took this business of the government shut
down, and decided that it was a good idea
to shut down the government, they shut it
down and then on a particular day there was
an interesting moment, I think is was on Wednesday,
when it turned out that three airports in
the United States couldn't function and so
they had to cancel a lot of flights out of
LaGuardia and a couple more airports because
the air traffic controllers couldn't keep
going anymore.
They’d been without pay for a month and
they just couldn't sustain themselves.
So, the air traffic controllers suddenly found
themselves—interestingly, since beating
the air traffic controllers was one of the
big anti-union moves that Reagan made back
in 1982 or whenever—that suddenly it must
have appeared to Trump and the administration
and everyone else that within three or four
days most of the airports in the United States
would closed down.
If you close down the airports to the United
States, basically you've closed down capital
and you've closed down capital flow.
And that means that, actually, the airport
workers have a tremendous, immense political
power.
If the airport or workers were organized,
you not only would actually then be dealing
with relations between African Americans.
Hispanics. and women at the core of a labor
movement, but you would be actually looking
at an organization of labor, which had the
potentiality to do serious damage to a capitalist
economy unless its demands were met.
Then the question arises: what would the demands
of such a coalition be?
Obviously, to increase wages.
Increase wages to the point where people have
a decent life in a decent living environment
and that would be one of the points.
But also politically, I think an airport workers
kind of configuration would make a really
big difference in terms of actually holding
that country to ransom.
When you think about it, just think of the
few times when we've become close to something
of this kind happening.
After 9/11, people stopped flying and for
about three days everything was quiet.
And then all of a sudden, I remember Giuliani
and even Bush coming on the airwaves and saying:
“please get out and start shopping again.
Please get out and start flying again.”
Because I think they realized, that if the
country didn't actually get back into motion
again and continuity again then there will
be serious losses in terms of capital.
And so, while the immediate response to 9/11
was to shut down and everybody to not go to
work and all this kind of stuff, immediately
afterwards what we find is this push, real
hard push to get us back into work.
Then there was the Icelandic volcano.
I know if you remember this, when the Icelandic
volcano erupted and put so much ash in the
air that transatlantic flights couldn't go
through, for about a week or ten days it was
almost impossible to get from New York to
London except by going down to, I don't know,
Rio de Janeiro and then flying over to Madrid…
you’d have to do something like that to
get there.
So, instead of a volcano, I imagine a volcanic
eruption of the airport workers.
But for that to happen, the airport workers
have to realize that they have a lot of common
interests and that they have common demands
that they would wish to try to articulate
and to win.
And not only those common demands, but that
they would have a commonality amongst themselves
to prosecute those demands and they also have
a commonality of power, a tremendous power
to close the system down and therefore they
would be, it would seem to me, the contemporary
labor force, which would be able to do what
in the past was done by the miners and done
by the auto workers and the like.
So, the constitution of the workforce has
changed.
It would be good if there could be an organization
of bringing together all restaurant workers.
Not only the fast food workers, but the fast
food workers is a good place to start.
So that when we start to think about the contemporary
working-class, it’s no longer the autoworkers
who are in the lead.
It's no longer the miners who are in the lead.
In Britain, for example, I'm not sure there
are many miners left.
Maybe one or two coal pits still exist, but
what was the heart of traditional working-class
politics in Britain, which was a miners union,
was essentially destroyed by a whole series
of moves by Margaret Thatcher, who hated the
mine workers, anyway.
In the end, of course, mining in Britain has
essentially closed down.
So, in the face of this, we have to be prepared
to think about completely new configurations
of the workforce and which is going to wage
struggle at the point of production.
But, notice this struggle at the point of
production is not disconnected from the sorts
of lifestyle, which we're now living and what
goes on at the point of realization.
In the airport workers case, we're talking
about the fact that more and more people are
actually using airlines.
The airline industry is expanding and growing
and has been growing at a very fast rate.
Not so much in the United States, of course,
but in China, for example, they're making
airports all over the place and the flying
public in China is getting larger and larger
so that you're seeing a vast increase in Asiatic
air travel.
This, too, is predicated on the development
of a certain way of life in which we can imagine,
all of the time, that we can move very freely
as long as we have the money to fly across
the Atlantic or fly here, fly there, fly everywhere.
This is, again, a way of life.
This way of life, of course, has all sorts
of consequences.
One of them, I have to say, that we should
be really concerned about is global warming
and greenhouse gas emissions.
I mean, one flight across the continent of
the United States is equivalent to gas emissions
of, I don't know how many thousand cars over
the whole year, but this is a major source
of greenhouse gases.
Now, do we want to continue hav[ing] a lifestyle
where air traffic is central?
So, you see the point here is that the growth
of air traffic is creating a working class
in terms of facilitating that.
But, the growth of air traffic is itself caught
up in questions of realization and questions
of realization that are connected very strongly
to questions of lifestyle and the production
of new wants, needs, and desires.
The want, need, and desire to travel.
The want, need, and desire to be in one part
of the world, rather than another.
These are all sorts of connected questions.
But, here too, I think that what we see is
the need to think through the relationships
between what's going on in the world of realization,
the production of new wants, needs, and desires
and lifestyles, and what's going on at the
point of production.
And how we organize at the point of production
is, therefore, connected very much with what
we will want to do about certain things, which
are happening at the point of realization.
And then, of course, comes the issue of social
reproduction.
I think it's very fascinating that households,
when I was a kid, essentially, all meals were
cooked at home.
Except, where I came from, on Fridays where
we all went to the fish-and-chip shop and
got fish and chips from the fish-and-chip
shop.
But, everything else, all food preparation,
was at home.
Now you've got a situation in which food preparation
is essentially being commoditized and marketized
and most of the food preparation does not
occur at home.
It occurs outside.
Families have a choice.
Takeout from the local restaurant, but now,
of course, you've got all of these organizations,
GrubHub and all the rest of it, which are
actually allowing you to buy in prepared food
elsewhere.
And this, by the way, is happening very quickly.
I was very surprised to see the last time
I was in China massive numbers of bicycles
with people delivering food, Chinese takeout.
And in China, Chinese takeout is now becoming,
if you like, the standard process whereby
food preparation is being actually marketized
and turns into a commodity.
This may or may not be a good thing.
I think, again, we can debate the rights and
wrongs of that.
But, what is most significant is that the
lifestyle, which we're talking about in terms
of the production and the development of these
very large take out organizations and, of
course, the proceeding era where it was the
fast food industries, Burger Kings and McDonald's
and all the rest of it, and the restaurants,
so when you start to put this together into
a picture you would kind of say we have to
really be thinking about the qualities of
a lifestyle the how and why of certain forms
of provision, which occur within these this
lifestyle and what's going on in terms of
social reproduction.
It used to be the situation, where, of course,
women did most of the food preparation in
the home.
But now, if food preparation is not occurring
in the home, then this has actually dealt
a blow to that gender discrimination where
women were essentially stuck in the kitchen
doing all of the kitchen labor.
But now, kitchen labor has been much reduced
by the fact that people dine out or bring
in or buy in their daily food.
So, in all these respects, when we ask the
question: what is to be done?
We have to actually ask ourselves what is
to be done very specifically about the right
of these new lifestyles, the emergence of
a certain powerful form of labor organization
around, say, fast food and around airports
and the like and how the power of that new
labor force can be mobilized in a certain
kind of way for political ends to try to come
up with the transformation of the social order
such as it moves away from being all about
capital accumulation and capital structures
to something, which is much more social and
much more cooperative and much less involved
in the rapid expansion of capital accumulation,
which is one of the other issues that I will
get to in the podcast to come.
Thank you for joining me today.
You've been listening to David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist
Chronicles, a Democracy at Work production.
A special thank you to the wonderful Patreon
community for supporting this project.
