At the occasion of May First, the Argentina-based group La Oveja Negra (‘The Black Sheep’) draws up a balance sheet of past struggles against capitalism and finds a perspective of the future in the present ones.
A new commemoration of May Day, 1886, allows us to remember, share, inspire, debate, reflect and agitate.
We commemorate another anti-capitalist May Day struggle many years ago for which five comrades were executed at the hands of the State and another three sentenced to life imprisonment, later known as the “Chicago Martyrs”.
The anti-capitalist struggle is as necessary today as yesterday for those of us who suffer the consequences of Capitalism in our everyday life: every working day, whether inside or outside of where we live, with or without wages, with or without fixed hours, every time we look for work we suffer the deficiencies, every time our relations with other human beings are mediated by money which turns them into relations between things.
For centuries the proletariat has been waging battles; however, those May days in Chicago were part of a struggle for which proletarians organized with an emancipatory perspective. George Engel, a typographer and anarchist hanged in 1887, expressed it this way: “I do not fight the capitalists individually; I fight the system that gives rise to privilege. My most ardent desire is for workers to know who their enemies are and who their friends are.”
The Chicago comrades and the movement of which they were a part did not simply struggle for the eight hour day. When they referred to “eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of recreation” they were not referring to the leisure we know today. They wanted time for agitation, learning, and fellowship with their peers.
We start from this date that summons us to propose a brief journey through the transformation of capitalist society and the incessant struggle to overcome it.
Industrial Development
At the end of the 18th century, Capitalism definitively turned towards production and profoundly transformed the work processes, reorganizing them, both temporally and geographically. In England all the brutality of this social dynamic is evident in its beginnings. Factory owners had little success in recruiting labor, for this they often had to travel long distances and deprive future proletarians of their livelihoods, crowding them into houses that would make up working-class neighborhoods.
The constitution of the industrial reserve army entailed, in addition to dispossession, a militarization of the whole of social life. The Luddites, “destroyers of machines”, together with resistance movements and revolts were responses to the hunger and misery that began to reign.
To stop the Luddites, the state had to modernize its police; soon the destruction of machines was punishable by death, while emerging trade unionism was tolerated. Laws were passed to regulate both work and civil liberties. With this oscillation between violence and reform, capitalist progress established a method to redirect the anger of those modern slaves, whose attacks were directed against material instruments of production and made no distinction between machines and how they were used.
Later, majority expressions of the incipient labor and socialist movements begin to express great faith in science and machinery, or at least to affirm their supposed neutrality.
The struggles against the fierce capitalist order began to reproduce throughout the world, many of them with a clear reformist content, others with a deeper search for subversion of the social order.
As a result of these struggles, the First International or International Workers Association (IWA) emerged. It resulted from the concrete struggles that developed in the massive practice of the class within the framework of the existing power relations in each country whereby the influences of the different tendencies and ruptures could be either refuted or affirmed. In this sense, the second half of the 19th century constitutes a period of learning and modifications of the revolutionary struggle.
The inaugural statutes of the IWA make a great contribution: “The emancipation of workers will be the work of workers themselves or will not be”. That is, to achieve triumph, the proletariat needs massive common action, while producing a revolutionary theory and methodology that guides it in the struggle. The great objective: the abolition of classes.
In the same sentence we can also read that the struggle for “the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for privileges and class monopolies, but for the establishment of equal rights and duties and for the abolition of all class privilege.” For the first time the proletariat sought to have its own revolutionary project outside the bourgeoisie, but it still was loaded with bourgeois conceptions of politics. While it was the beginning of a quest of its own, it was mostly thought of as a continuation of the French revolution, which they considered unfinished. Equal rights and duties were conceived as a step towards an end to exploitation and even as a revolutionary goal, as a premise for classless society. Its “taking of the Bastille” was to defeat a class conceived as parasitic, a war on one side against another to administer and manage the same society, only under a labor sign.
At the first congress in 1866, in Geneva, the IWA stated that “the restriction of working hours is a precondition, without which all other efforts for emancipation must fail. We propose 8 hours of work as a legal limit of the working day”. In other words, immediate concrete demands were made with a revolutionary perspective. This perspective is what was taken over by radicalized workers in many parts of the world, such as the movement of which the Chicago martyrs were part.
Restructuring
The reduction in working hours was the result of the struggle of generations of proletarians, but it was also inescapable for capital which, internationally and by its own internal contradictions, was attacking the very basis of its reproduction.
The limitless extension of the working day was attacking the reproduction and survival of the workforce, the source of surplus value. At the same time as the day was reduced, capital was transformed to expand its profits with the help of science, with the introduction of machinery, reducing the production time of goods and intensifying the exploitation of work. However, it should be noted that, yesterday as today, while in some countries it is modernized, in others looting and slave labor continues to be required.
In the case of Argentina, the law establishing the eight hour day was enacted in 1929, as necessary legislation for capitalist modernization and for its own regulation. This local example shows, along with so many others in history and in the world, that what at one moment can be a goal of struggle, a direct attack on profit, an immediate and urgent need that cannot be postponed and even energizes powerful revolutionary expressions, at another moment may simply be a right granted to lubricate the capitalist machinery.
This does not mean contempt for past struggles, but an attempt to understand them, to put into tension what is considered a conquest, its relation to a perspective for revolutionary transformation or reform within capitalist development.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century the proletariat in Argentina pushed forward an intense social agitation. Its maximum expression crystallized in the FORA, with its anarchist unionism and its countless propaganda and social agitation initiatives, whose revolutionary purpose was oriented towards the concretization of anarcho-communism.
In this context, the Argentine state’s response to social demands and ongoing struggles, whether in the city or in the countryside, was always repression, imprisonment, exile or death. No improvement in social life was obtained without opposing force to force and, when proletarian energies dispersed, the conquest was quickly lost.
Due perhaps to the geographical characteristics and to the organization of production of the country, as well as to the strong anarchist orientation of federalism and autonomy within the proletariat, the proletariat did not carry out a homogeneous campaign regarding the working day, although there were countless strikes and struggles in this regard.
From the heavy hand of repression, a process of strong integration of the proletariat into capitalism was consolidated. This involved a whole series of transformations in social life, in the State and its laws, as well as in the organizations of the proletariat and in the content of their struggles. In Argentina, it is precisely from the 1930s on, after the defeat of the revolutionary expressions, that the unionist and parliamentary reformism was cemented which later gave rise to Peronism.
In regard to the integration of the proletariat: this is usually understood as an ideological phenomenon, something to do with consciousness, a kind of co-optation, a deception or a persuasion. But we refer to the material conditions of existence: the deepening of the integration of the reproduction of the proletariat class into the reproduction of Capital, based primarily on the development of industry and its high levels of productivity. This process clearly exceeds the local and its maximum expression is what has been called the “golden age” of capitalism, between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s with its increase in production and consumption levels, with its “welfare state”.
The predominant production methods of this period, together with a series of policy measures that were implemented in a large number of countries, constituted what became known as the Fordist-Keynesian model. As always, different realities and forms of production coexist in capitalism between different regions and even in the same region; that is why we try to briefly analyze its determinants, to approach the understanding of social dynamics, and therefore of struggle, general at all times.
The sustained increase in the rate of profit over several decades and the increase (clearly not in the same proportion) of wages in many branches of production enabled social pacification where trade unions played an important role. This situation we can understand as a “productivity pact” between capital and labor that reinforced the process of integration of the proletariat. However, the barriers put in the capitalist valorization itself appear over and over again. The acceleration of phenomena such as the increase in the organic composition of Capital and the declining tendency in the rate of profit pushed the then current development model into crisis and it began to restructure itself more widely in the 1970s. In the context of this process of exhaustion, important expressions of rupture were developed in the proletarian class that would lead to an intense new wave of international struggles in the 1960s and 1970s.
The defeat of the revolutionary movement gave way to capitalist restructuring of production and administration of the economy through different processes. Among them: a renewed technological introduction mainly supported by the “information technology”, the acceleration of industrialization in different regions considered “backward”, the reorganization of work processes and their corresponding legislation, along with the expansion of international markets. Similarly, the relocation of factories through the introduction of free zones allowed access to cheaper labor, less labor, environmental and tax controls which incentivized a new and more efficient international division of labor.
All this led to a transformation of working conditions, which left behind many of the concessions and conquests typical of the productivity levels of previous decades. There was a sharp increase in the precariousness of work and, therefore, living conditions in general. It was structured through different strategies such as easing the use of the labor force (flexibility of the employment contract, but also of schedules, wages and functions); increased unemployment and stabilization of a large reserve army that would never be included in wage labor; execution of standardized and simplified labor processes, with the consequent disqualification of the workforce; income into the labor market for an increasingly massive number of women, expressing the need for more than one salary per family; increase in unregistered work (ranging from the implementation of fellows or trainees in research, to the underground of migrant workers in textile workshops); outsourcing, or outsourcing of certain tasks or phases of production processes that disseminate and diminish employer responsibilities.
These transformations that Capital dicovered while striving to maintain exploitation and domination, i.e. its own reproduction, transformed the reproduction of the proletariat, breaking the strong integration that we described above, leading to important transformations in the dynamics of the struggle and its content.
The Present
Today we can be sure of something that our comrades in 1886 couldn’t be so sure of. The struggle for the eight hour day was a struggle to reduce working hours in a situation where the capitalist earned more by making his employees work longer. Technological and organizational advances made it increasingly possible to produce more in less time. We are outraged by the situation of those who worked and still work more than eight hours today, but are not equally sensitized that someone works less than eight hours under modalities that destroy the human body.
While the basic categories of Capitalism remain – value, work, wages, the commodity, private property, the State – a lot of water has gone under the bridge. Factories are no longer the center of capitalist society, the composition of the proletarian class is not the same as before, the gold standard no longer exists and the proletariat and bourgeois cultures are virtually undifferentiated.
The end of the “golden years” resulted in the transformation of the proletariat in general and a crisis of the labor movement in particular. The centrality of the work in industry and the place of the factory was questioned and meant that the industrial worker was no longer seen as the main protagonist, much less as the vanguard of his class. This meant that all the experience accumulated on the basis of working conditions that made possible the proliferation of large strikes in the workplace, sabotage practices, breakage of machines or tools, organizations of large contingents of men and women that shared labor daily life in the same space, sometimes even life in the same working class neighborhood, is not reproducible under the new conditions.
Clearly, that gave rise to new forms: blocking roads to prevent the circulation of commodities when thousands of unemployed can no longer prevent production, for example. On the other hand, and coincidentally, from that moment on, capitalist industry and progress demonstrated more than ever the devastation it entailed for the planet and for those who inhabit it. More and more movements began to develop against the harmful effects of production on health and the environment. But addressing new problems or, rather, addressing historical problems as something new, does not necessarily lead to anti-capitalist critique and struggle. While workers in production put forward many demands which put into question several aspects of social reproduction as a whole, most of them still cling to a perspective that is based on the level of integration of yesteryear.
To return to the early days of the labor movement or to the welfare state is neither desirable nor possible. The struggles of the past inspire us for the future, but we must take away the drag of progressive nostalgia.
Today Capital continues to pauperize our living conditions. The extension of information technology to more and more areas of work and to social relations in general, as well as isolating measures, worsen the difficult situation faced by proletarians in our day-to-day lives. We must analyze it in order to organize ourselves, if we want to transform reality.
How to carry out resistance, even the slightest sabotage, when all the tools are ours and the workplace is where we live, when the levels of unemployment grow day by day, when we can only meet our co-workers through a screen, when the hours of day do not seem to have boundaries between work and non-work, when repression in the streets is legitimized by the discourse of public health? These are some of the questions we ask ourselves this first of May.
Capitalist restructuring produces the decline of working class identity and the explosion of multiple identities, some of them linked to new forms of proletariat struggle.
The revolts unleashed in different parts of the world in recent decades, as well as the “new social movements”, despite their inter-classist and good-citizenship character that we observe on many occasions, make it clear that the class struggle persists. At the same time they warn us of the diverse character that the proletariat has, and has had. The centrality of social reproduction in struggles reminds us that revolution must involve much more than the certainty of having a roof over our head and food. It must address, not only as a point of departure but as a starting point, the so-called gender issue, race, sexuality, the family, our being part of nature.
In the revolts of our time, now pushed to the background by the global declaration of pandemic, it is very clear that the perspective is not to manage the subject matter of the protests. Only progressive citizens propose nationalization, worker management, referendums, changes in capitalist administration. But there is not a same project that both proletariat and bourgeoisie must defend, while differing on how to manage it. It is not a war of one side against another to manage this society, but to fight capital as a society, a social relation.
Capitalism, because of its own internal contradictions, cannot improve our living conditions. Furthermore, the social unrest tends towards synchronization, because austerity measures in times of crisis are global, because increased exploitation and worsening living conditions are not a national or neoliberal policy problem. Neither the bourgeois choose this scenario nor do the proletarians in struggle choose it. The blind forces of the economy have brought us here. Now it’s important to know what we’re doing, not for the future, but what we’re already doing!
Each context produces different conditions for revolution and generates particular (material, not moral; social, not individual) contradictions. These can give us important signals about capitalist society and how it can be overcome, but the revolution will ultimately depend on what we can do as a class. The struggle is inevitable and necessary, it transforms us and we seek to transform it into a definitive one. Our concern is that class struggle will be able to produce more than just its own continuation.
That is why we are confident that it is so important not only to participate but also to understand, study and discuss the development of the struggles of the present. Because in the possibilities and conditions of these struggles, in their critiques and ruptures, the revolutionary horizon of the present is outlined.