Lecture
At the stage of late capitalism (late industrial society), the capitalist mode of production unfolded the possibilities inherent in it and achieved significant success in economic development. The technical, economic, and social progress of capitalism at its industrial stage created the preconditions for the emergence of new tendencies going beyond the bounds of industrial capitalism. 13.1. The Development of Post-Industrial Tendencies. Already in the late 1950s, the first tendencies appeared indicating a change in the role and significance of industrial production, which had previously served as the adequate material and technical basis of capitalism.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s these tendencies became increasingly evident, and by the end of the 20th century the scale of the visible changes seemed to make it possible to speak not only of tendencies but of an already established new state of capitalist society. What, then, are the most characteristic features of this phenomenon, which came to be called post-industrial society? The most striking changes, whose beginnings can already be traced back to the 1950s, are changes in the sectoral structure of production. The stage of industrial capitalism was characterized by a decline in the relative share of agriculture and extractive industries, alongside growth in the relative share of manufacturing. Late industrial capitalism is the period in which post-industrial tendencies were born. These tendencies manifested themselves most noticeably later, in the 1970s-1990s: the decline in the relative share of agriculture and extractive industries continued, albeit with diminishing intensity, but at the same time a decline began in the relative share of industry as a whole (including manufacturing, not just extraction) due to a significant rise in the relative share of the services sector. Thus, between 1970 and 1990 the share of those employed in manufacturing fell in the United States from 25.9% to 17.5%, in the United Kingdom from 38.7% to 22.5%, in France from 27.7% to 21.3%, and in Germany from 38.6% to 32.2%. The share of employment in the services sector in 1991 was 75.1% of the total labor force in the United States, 64.2% in Japan in 1990, 69.4% in France in 1989, and 70.4% in the United Kingdom in 1990. Structural shifts also occurred within the services sector itself. The growth, so to speak, of traditional service industries (transport, personal services, trade...) proceeded more slowly than the growth of modern industries linked to scientific and technological progress, above all information technology and telecommunications. Sectors of the services industry connected with servicing business — financial market services, banking and insurance, auditing and consulting — as well as "mass culture" industries, grew at a very rapid pace.
The information technology and telecommunications sector acquired special significance because it was not only a fast-growing segment of the services sector but also one that influenced the development of all other branches of the economy. The importance of storing, transmitting, and processing information grew especially with the spread of personal computers, which are now used in every field of activity. Many traditional technological processes were adjusted to take advantage of the possibility of using computers to process information relevant to those processes. The growing role of information technology has been reflected in concepts of an "information revolution," and in the fact that contemporary society has come to be called the information society. A critical assessment of the role of "post-industrial" structural shifts: it is a rather controversial question whether the existing statistics on the sectoral structure of production truly reflect the actual shifts in that structure. For example, from the standpoint of the Marxist approach, freight transport belongs to the sphere of material production rather than to services. The methodology for calculating the value of financial-market services raises considerable doubts. Under the accounting rules in use, the inflation of the volume of speculative operations leads to growth in the GDP attributed to the financial market as well.
However, from the standpoint of the Marxist method, these operations are not productive at all. Moreover, in many branches of the services sector, processes belonging to the sphere of material production account for a significant share — for example, the packaging of goods in trade, food preparation in catering, the manufacture of consumer goods (clothing, footwear, furniture...) to individual order, the repair of durable goods, and so on. There is a counter-argument that, on the contrary, the penetration of information services into the sphere of material production is of greater importance. Data are cited showing that up to 70-80% of the value of goods produced in certain industries is attributable to the value of information services. However, the recording and processing of information has always been an integral part of the technology of material production and has no direct relation to information technology as a distinct branch of the services sector. This would be the same as classifying most of the services sector as material production on the grounds that services are rendered by means of quite material objects — buildings, equipment, and so on. 1 See: Castells M. The Information Age. Moscow: HSE Publishing House, 2000, pp. 206, 284-289.
Another, somewhat harder to pin down, shift characterizing post-industrial tendencies is the change in production technology. There is a growth in the relative share of post-machine technologies, while within machine technologies themselves the role of mechanical processing declines. These changes affect mainly two groups of industries — the branches of material production and the branches of information technology and telecommunications. However, it is quite difficult to conclude that there has been a significant growth in the relative share of post-industrial technologies, since the growth of the services sector's share is also linked to the growing importance of the pre-industrial and industrial technologies used there.
The technologies used in transport, warehousing, trade, catering, hotel services, and repair are predominantly industrial or pre-industrial. Thus, changes in the sectoral structure and in the technological structure of contemporary production do not coincide. While the relative share of industry as a branch has indeed shrunk substantially, the decline in the relative share of industrial (and even pre-industrial) technologies, insofar as it is occurring at all, is proceeding much more slowly. Therefore, in a certain sense, it is more accurate to call contemporary society a "service society" than a "post-industrial society." The most fundamental shifts allowing us to speak of genuine post-industrial tendencies in contemporary capitalism are connected with changes in the nature of labor and its product. The doctrine of "human capital": these shifts are of a rather substantial character, yet they affect a fairly narrow segment of the economy of developed countries. Therefore (as well as owing to the limited nature of the technological shifts noted above), it is premature to speak of a post-industrial society, which does not negate the fact that post-industrial tendencies are developing.
In the second half of the 20th century, the role of highly skilled labor increased considerably, and the layer of specialists and professionals, whose activity involves a substantial creative component, grew. The growing importance of research and development has turned this field of activity into a distinct branch of the economy. The role of knowledge and information in production is intensifying, and along with this the importance grows of specialists who possess this knowledge and the ability to generate new knowledge applicable in production (innovation). Correspondingly, the role of the education system that trains such specialists also grows. Terms such as "knowledge economy," "knowledge-intensive production," and "innovation economy" have come into use. Along with the change in the content of labor, shifts in labor motivation are also occurring. For specialists and professionals, motives such as job satisfaction, the possibility of self-realization and self-development at work, and favorable relations within the team are acquiring ever greater importance among the motives for work activity.
It should be noted that these shifts in labor motivation, which often push the size of earnings into second place, become real only once a certain, fairly high, level and stability of monetary income has been achieved. The growing importance of knowledge and of training specialists, and the substantial growth in spending for these purposes, found reflection in the development of the doctrine of "human capital," which represents human knowledge and abilities, as well as the monetary expenditure on acquiring knowledge, as a form of capital. This doctrine ignores the fundamental differences between human abilities and capital (above all the difference between capital as an external resource employed by a person, and human abilities as a property of the person themselves) — even if the latter is interpreted in the spirit of neoclassical theory, as a sum of money allocated to obtain additional income.
The growing importance of knowledge and information leads to the widespread diffusion of information products, whose nature differs substantially from that of ordinary commodities.
First, unlike material products and services, an information product is not reproducible. It is unique.
Second, in order to supply information products to a large number of consumers, there is no need (indeed it is impossible) to produce anew each time the knowledge underlying the product. An information product, once produced, is not reproduced but replicated, and the greater the demand for a given product, the faster the cost of replicating a single copy tends toward zero.
Third, in consumption an information product (and the knowledge underlying it), unlike things and services, does not disappear.
Fourth, an information product, once sold, is not alienated from its owner but remains at their disposal. Only the copy is alienated (together with its physical medium; or else the physical medium is produced by the consumer of the information product).
Fifth, access to knowledge and information is limited not so much by the scarcity of these resources as by the consumer's ability to make use of them.
The sum of these differences makes the classical notions of the value of a commodity and of the laws governing its movement on the market inapplicable to the information product. Although the movement of information products under capitalism is subordinated to the dominant form of production relations — the commodity form — a great many phenomena accompanying the circulation of knowledge and information go beyond commodity and capitalist relations. For example, there exists a significant segment of knowledge and information provided free of charge, and a noticeable portion of information products is produced without any expectation of subsequent sale or reward. The uniqueness of information products makes it impossible to assess the level of labor expended on their reproduction, and hence impossible to give them a value assessment. Taken together, changes in production technology, in the content of labor and the level of income, and in the associated change in the pattern of needs, are leading to a relative decline in the importance of mass production and a rise in the role of small-batch and individualized production. Mass production itself, even as it persists, strives to give its product individualized features. While remaining a society of mass consumption, post-industrial society is characterized by a considerably more complex structure of needs among a notable part of the population and by the development of its striving for individual variety.
The declining role of mass production, together with the shrinking relative share of industrial branches, weakens the impact of mass industrial production on the process of reproduction of the whole of social capital. Together with the emergence of huge international monopolistic groupings — transnational corporations (TNCs) — the acuteness of the problems of developing highly capital-intensive production declines. All this together allows the state to relinquish direct control over major key enterprises and even over entire branches of production. There is a contraction in the size of the state sector through the privatization of part of the state enterprises (though there is no question of liquidating the state sector altogether). The reduction of the state sector, however, does not diminish the scale of state intervention in the economy. Throughout the entire 20th century there has been a steady increase in the share of government spending in the GDP of the developed capitalist states. This growth has come from increased state spending on science, education, healthcare, social security and social assistance, as well as on military purposes. There is a growing complexity and diversity in the forms and methods of direct and indirect state regulation of the economy.
Public regulation of the economy is developing with the participation of organizations such as trade unions, consumer associations, environmental organizations, and so on. The growing importance within the system of contemporary capitalism of highly skilled, creative labor leads not only to an increase in the relative share of specialists and professionals but also to a strengthening of their role in production. This stratum of workers is acquiring growing influence, and the effectiveness of capital's self-expansion increasingly depends on their activity. Such workers possess considerable autonomy in the labor process, since the very nature of their activity precludes the possibility of direct control by capital over the production process, in contrast to the control secured by subordinating the worker to the system of machines on the capitalist factory floor.
This forces capital to seek other ways of influencing creative workers — through compromise rather than direct dictation. The forms this compromise takes are varied — ranging from the banal "bribe" of relatively high wage rates to tying skilled workers to the interests of capital by giving them small blocks of shares, drawing them in various forms into the working out of management decisions, applying various methods of "humanizing labor," and encouraging and assisting professional mobility, and so on. This compromise currently suits most specialists and professionals reasonably well; many of them, feeling their subordinate position (in relation to the owners of capital), seek to escape it by themselves becoming capitalists — either by founding their own small business or through a share in the capital of large corporations. However, capital does not act toward highly skilled creative workers only through methods of compromise. The need to place the creative potential of specialists at the service of capital's self-expansion also dictates strict control over the aims and final results of creative activity, orienting it above all toward the extraction of profit. Moreover, the struggle for profit also requires methods that objectively hinder free creative activity — the observance of commercial secrecy, the patent protection of knowledge and information, and so forth, including the concealment of negative information about the properties of the goods and services produced.
The growth in the number of personnel whose work is predominantly creative in nature objectively limits capital's ability to give all such workers increased remuneration and a stake in capital. Often the compromise approach toward highly skilled, creative workers becomes merely formal, running up against managers' stubborn unwillingness to give up any of their power in the slightest. Moreover, the disappearance of external pressure on the capitalist system with the collapse of the "world system of socialism" produced a certain reaction — experiments with "humanizing labor," involving hired personnel in management, granting workers shares, and so on, were frozen or even reversed. All this creates new sources of conflict between capital and hired workers performing predominantly creative functions. This conflict has already taken on tangible forms — for example, in the form of the struggle for freedom of information, against commercial restrictions on its dissemination; the struggle for freedom to acquire knowledge (freedom of access to all levels of education); the struggle for open public control over the use of the achievements of scientific and technological progress, and so on. However, most creative workers (especially those employed in the sphere of market transactions — trade,
finance, insurance, or in business services — auditing, consulting, and so forth) still, to one degree or another, tie their interests to the interests of capital. Therefore, the question of how quickly the fundamental social contradictions described here will acquire an acute, socially significant character remains open for now. Post-industrial tendencies lead to the disintegration of capitalist production relations, beginning with the deepest ones. There occurs an undermining, predicted long ago by K. Marx, of the value basis of production, together with the growing importance of the technological application of science and of the new knowledge obtained by its means. The destruction of value as a relation rests on the fact that, in the production of knowledge, the following become blurred:
• objective criteria for the costs of their production (owing to the uniqueness and non-reproducibility of the goods created, and the absence of any basis for a quantitative assessment of the costs of creative activity, which is itself unique);
• objective criteria of the usefulness of the products produced, since this usefulness for the consumer is also unique, individual, and therefore incommensurable with other usefulness. Such a situation arises because creative activity becomes an end in itself, possessing value for the individual in and of itself — but a value specifically for that particular individual. This rules out the possibility of a market-based social assessment of this value, both as a good for the individual engaged in it and as a measure of the costs of production — for to someone engaged in creative activity, that activity is itself the desired result, not an expenditure. At the same time, the goods produced in the process of creative activity — knowledge, information, cultural goods in the broad sense of the word — acquire the same properties of individualized value. The development of creative activity also undermines the relations of exploitation of hired workers by capitalists.
While the formal subordination of labor to capital is largely preserved, the real subordination of workers performing creative functions is being eroded. Capital, as already noted, has no material basis for subordinating the process of creative activity itself, although it is capable of confining it within the framework of capitalist production relations, subordinating this activity to the extraction of profit. The personal computer and the "overcoming of exploitation": some economists and sociologists conclude that the subordination of labor to capital is being overcome, on the grounds that the spread of personal computers creates the possibility of independent work free of capital. In support of this, they cite the more than 20 million so-called self-employed people in the United States who do their work at home. However, such independence is to a large degree (though of course not always) an illusion. Like many representatives of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, such workers are often only formally independent, and their services have value only in connection with a particular capital. In fact, this is a variety of capitalist homework or of dispersed manufacture, manifesting itself in modern forms — for example, outsourcing. One can speak of an undermining of the formal subordination of labor to capital here only in the sense that this subordination takes on forms that reproduce the most archaic relations of capitalist exploitation. It would, however, be a mistake to deny entirely the potential possibilities for freer activity being created by the new role of creative labor in production.
These possibilities are created above all not by the availability of the personal computer, but by the dependence of the effectiveness of capitalist production on the production and technological application of new knowledge. And it is precisely for this reason that the bearers of such knowledge and of the creative abilities ensuring its production potentially — and often actually — acquire a higher degree of independence. For now, however, this is only relative independence, since it is realized within the same limited framework of capitalist production relations — for example, in the form of small business. The whole difference lies in the fact that the hired specialist is compelled to create in order to generate surplus value for the capitalist, while the "self-employed" person is engaged in self-exploitation, using their creative abilities to extract profit for themselves.
The undermining of capitalist production relations is also manifested in the fact that a significant part of the value created in the capitalist economy does not enter circulation on the free market but is redistributed by the state — and the scale of this redistribution grew throughout the entire 20th century. It was only at the turn of the 20th-21st century that this process slowed down, since in a number of developed countries it had already crossed the line at which more than half of GDP is distributed not by market forces but by the state. A further continuation of this tendency would mean an outright rupture between the capitalist character of production and the growing non-capitalist forms of distribution. Capital has stopped short of any further expansion of the scale of social compromise, and has even attempted to reverse it, all the more so because one of the most important incentives for such compromise — the example of an alternative social system — disappeared by the start of the 1990s. Moreover, a fairly noticeable share is accounted for by sectors (the production of natural monopolies; production in sectors turning out products and services with the properties of public goods, and a number of others) where production itself is regulated to a considerable extent neither by the market nor in a capitalist manner. The development of the production of knowledge and information, the growing importance of creative activity, and the development of information technology and telecommunications, however, lead not only to progressive tendencies connected with creating the potential to liberate human beings from the power of capital. At the same time, capital is developing new means of controlling human beings and utilizing their abilities for its own benefit, for the production of surplus value.
Information technology and telecommunications create new possibilities for meticulous control over a person at their workplace, applying, for example, analysis of computer usage (recall the phrase well known on the Internet — "your computer is spying on you"), video surveillance and audio recording systems, and so on. But capital does not confine itself to working time alone. It strives to establish dominion over the whole person, over all of their qualities and abilities. To this end it uses the modern achievements of technical progress and social technologies to manipulate people in their free time, using advertising (forming a cult of consumerism), technologies of political manipulation, and applying the means of mass culture to shape the corresponding consciousness and behavioral stereotypes of the individual.
Contemporary globalization represents a new stage in the development of the internationalization of production and capital.
Often, by equating contemporary globalization with the internationalization of economic relations in general, people manage to find globalization already occurring in the 19th century, or even earlier. However, this is not so. Globalization differs from the preceding stages of the internationalization of production in that:
• The main subjects of the process of internationalization of production are changing. They are no longer national states or national capitals. It is above all transnational institutions that become the "global players": transnational corporations, international economic, political, and military organizations, and, alongside them, only the largest national states, capable of extending their economic and political influence on a global scale
. • Within the world capitalist market, in addition to the market for goods and services, a single world financial market is taking shape, characterized by practically free cross-border movement of capital, which makes the state of national financial markets dependent on the movement of capital on the world market. At the same time, the growth in the volume of circulation on the markets of fictitious capital is outpacing that on the markets of real capital at an enormous rate, which leads to a colossal predominance of the financial market over the markets for goods and services.
• There is a significant reduction in cross-border trade barriers, ensuring freer circulation of goods and services in the world economy.
• The processes described above lead to a weakening of the role of national state regulation of the economy, and create a tendency toward the erosion of national sovereignty.
• The material basis of the processes of globalization is the development of modern global information and telecommunications systems.
Globalization is a new stage in the internationalization of production and capital, characterized by a substantial reduction of cross-border barriers to the movement of goods and capital, by the transformation of large transnational capital into the main driving force of globalization, and by the formation not only of a world market for goods but also of a world capital market. The weakening of the role of national states in a globalizing world economy has given rise to the phenomenon of neo-marketization — the appearance of a return, within the world capitalist economy, to the principles of a free, unregulated market. This is precisely an appearance: although globalization does involve a certain deregulation of the market (especially at the level of international economic relations), this does not mean a return to the era of the free market, say, on the model of the mid-19th century. Rather, an analogy can be drawn with the first third of the 20th century, when on national markets the regulating power of private monopolistic associations prevailed over state regulation. History is repeating itself, but now at the level of the world economy — the largest transnational corporations (TNCs), which surpass a considerable part of national states in economic power, are securing for themselves "free rein" on the world market. Nevertheless, this market is by no means free, but is under the strong influence of these very TNCs. Even the regulatory influence on the world market exerted by the most economically powerful states, and the international organizations under their control, is directed in large part toward protecting the interests of "their own" TNCs.
Transnational capital is capital based in several countries, where the foreign affiliates are comparable in turnover to the parent company. It is organized, as a rule, in the form of transnational corporations, comparable in scale to the economies of individual states.
The growth in the scale of the financial market leads to an increasing dependence of the movement of real capital on the movement of fictitious capital. This dependence is manifested above all through the high volatility (susceptibility to poorly predictable fluctuations) of the financial market, created precisely by its global scale and the gigantic size of its turnover, whose parameters have become almost completely detached from the state of real capital. For example, the market valuation of companies' shares on the stock exchange may deviate from the valuation of real assets by several times over (and sometimes by tens of times), while undergoing significant fluctuations under the influence of minor factors. Exchange prices for commodities can also deviate significantly from the prices of the transactions by which these commodities actually pass from the hands of the seller into the hands of the buyer. Fluctuations in the financial market make the conditions for attracting financial resources into the sphere where real capital is employed highly uncertain, and increase financial risks for producers.
On the other hand, the possibility of making a profit through a surge in share prices orients many companies not toward increasing the efficiency of production and sales, but toward manipulations that have a purely image-related effect and are designed to influence a rise (even if only a short-lived one) in the share price. This state of affairs gives the fictitious capital circulating on the global financial market the properties of virtual capital — a barely tangible reality, subject to change almost independently of the processes taking place in the world of real capital. However, this virtual capital exerts a substantial influence on what happens in the real world. The weakening, occurring during globalization, of international barriers to the movement of capital, goods, and services, is not accompanied by any similar weakening of barriers to the movement of labor.
If the world capital market and the world market for goods and services are a reality, then one can speak of a world labor market only in one respect — capital can take advantage of globalization by migrating from country to country in search of the most favorable conditions for the supply of labor (low wages, absence of trade unions, harsh labor legislation, low level of social obligations). Labor itself, however, is deprived of the possibility of free migration — moreover, the scale of this migration has shrunk over the past two decades, and the conditions have become stricter. One can speak of a world labor market — and even then only with a certain degree of reservation — only in relation to a narrow layer of highly skilled specialists. Capital defends the national segmentation of the labor market, since such segmentation allows it more favorable conditions for the exploitation of labor
. Accordingly, trade unions and political organizations representing the interests of workers fight for the establishment of uniform international standards in the area of wages and labor legislation, in order to deprive capital of the ability to exploit the differences created by national barriers between different groups of hired workers. The development of globalization is reshaping, in new ways, the relations in the world economy between countries at different levels of economic development. Only a very few of the less developed countries, owing to one set of circumstances or another, manage to take advantage of the opportunities that globalization opens up in connection with the freer movement of capital, goods, and services. For the rest, globalization means such a tightening of competitive conditions that they are unable to cope with, and, as a result, their lag in economic development behind the more developed countries deepens. Globalization further entrenches the division of the capitalist economy into a developed "core" and a backward "periphery."
Although globalization has by no means exhausted its potential — for example, the path toward forming a single financial market has not been completed (although a single money market has taken shape, the stock market remains largely segmented along national lines) — its development marks the approaching exhaustion of the possibilities for the forward development of capitalism. The present era can be defined as an era of the consistent expression and triumph of the principles of "bourgeois civilization." The ongoing process of globalization means that the capitalist system is acquiring complete dominance over the world economy. Dominance not in the sense of erasing the differences between the developed capitalist center and the backward semi-capitalist (or even quarter-capitalist) periphery — these differences are constantly reproduced by the developed center, for without these differences the existence of the center would be far less comfortable — but in the sense that the economic structures of the developed world are acquiring a controlling and regulating position in relation to the entire world economy. The developed center of the capitalist world has created a single financial market and has subordinated the movement of capital on a worldwide scale to its control. Capitalism at the center has subordinated to itself all phases of the reproduction process. The reproduction of the labor force, and even of the human being in their entirety, has been placed on a fully capitalist basis. Capital has taken hold not only of working time but also of people's free time, subjecting it to comprehensive manipulation through advertising and marketing, through political technologies, and through mass culture.
The relations governing the processes of creative activity have been shifted onto a capitalist basis (something even industrial capitalism could not achieve). The capitalist system has withstood the powerful and desperate onslaught of forces that tried to set an alternative social system against it. Capitalism has now shed the enemies that could pose a visible threat to its dominance. Such a triumph is, in a certain sense of the word, final. There is really nothing left, on the whole, for capitalism to triumph over further — unless it be the very existence of humanity itself? And in this sense, Francis Fukuyama's ideas about the end of history reflect a shift that has indeed taken place, if one does not take on faith his ridiculous fantasy about a halt in the historical development of humanity with the triumph of liberal capitalism. What has really come to a stop is the history of capitalism itself. There is almost nothing left for it to accomplish. Ahead of it lies a long historical path of descending development. On this path capitalism will have to face the fact that its complete dominance also means the full development and intensification of the contradictions inherent in it. As capitalism acquires a global character, it also gives a global character to the problems it engenders. The threat to global environmental equilibrium, the wasteful consumption of the Earth's natural resources, the economic, political, and cultural conflicts generated by the global imbalance of economic development (the North-South contradiction) — this is far from a complete list of these problems.
Capital's drive toward universal dominance, toward forming a kind of worldwide capitalist "empire," meets with the growing resistance of all those who are drawn, directly or indirectly, into the orbit of capitalist exploitation. Global capital has also given rise to the first upsurge of a global resistance movement. This resistance is quite heterogeneous — like the world that global capital is subjecting to its dominance. On the one hand, we have a movement that can, in the full sense of the word, be called anti-globalist, which opposes globalization from the standpoint of doomed, archaic social structures, and therefore often relies on extremely reactionary ideological and political forces (for example, religious fundamentalism, chauvinism). It presents itself as nationally and confessionally
closed off. But even in this movement there is expressed an objective protest against the destructive impact of global capital on the distinctiveness of national cultures. In recent times, the costs of capitalist globalization have increasingly given rise to a reaction precisely of a conservative, nationalist, and chauvinist character, in the form of a struggle for national-state interests, to which the migration crisis in Europe of 2015-2017 contributed considerably. On the other hand, we have the movement of "alter-globalists," or the alternative social movement. This movement is worldwide and international; it is not divided by national-confessional barriers and does not dream of turning history back. On the contrary, it stands up for the most progressive features of the internationalization of production, against the ugly forms that globalization takes under the influence of capitalist production relations. The contemporary alter-globalist movement is, in ideological and political terms, rather amorphous, and in its present form it will no longer become a successful social project (although, as the historically first stage of the resistance movement against global capital, it has already taken its place in history).
But global resistance to capital as such can no longer disappear; it will change, improve, retreat and then harden and grow stronger again. 13.3. Changes in the Social Structure of Contemporary Capitalist Society. Classical Marxism assumed that the displacement of manufacture and small-scale craft production by large-scale capitalist production, and the displacement of small peasant farms by large capitalist farmers, would lead, within a fairly near historical perspective, to the almost complete disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie as a significant social stratum. The process of the evolution of the social structure of capitalist society, however, proved somewhat more complex than the classics assumed. In the developed countries, the former pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist strata of small producers have indeed virtually disappeared. Although a small number of artisans and craftsmen can still be found, small-scale peasant farming, say, has survived only in a few countries.
However, the petty bourgeoisie has not disappeared. It is true that these are now small producers of a modern capitalist type. In many cases there is no small peasant, but there is a small capitalist farmer running intensive production for the market. Indeed, the very existence of this small farmer is largely a consequence of state policy rather than of the operation of the internal laws of capitalist production. Many small farmers exist only thanks to state subsidies or to a second job in the city that allows them to cover the losses from the farm. Likewise, the independent existence of small business in industry and services is in large part illusory. This small business is entangled in a web of financial, commercial, and technological dependence on large capital, and its fate depends on whether large capital has a need for it — for example, as a subcontractor.
A significant part of small business is independent only formally — the capital of the small entrepreneur has been acquired on credit, and its real owner is the bank that granted the long-term loan, or the large corporation that provided the installment terms; the right to use the necessary technology has been granted by a large corporation; the right to use the trademark has been granted by a large corporation... — and all of this can come to nothing if large capital's interest in the products or services of this small business disappears. By the early 1980s, more than 80% (and sometimes more than 90%) of the economically active population in developed countries held the status of hired workers. This does not mean that all of them belonged to the proletariat in terms of their economic position — among them were corporate directors and high-ranking executives (including those who owned substantial shares of capital), middle managers, who of course act as representatives of the interests of capital rather than of hired labor, persons providing personal non-productive services (for example, domestic servants), and civil servants... But the 1990s were marked by a change in this tendency. A growth began to be observed in the relative share of the so-called self-employed, which includes various kinds of small entrepreneurs and independently working specialists (not working for hire, but performing various work under contract). The growth in the number of the self-employed slowed at the start of the 21st century, and this tendency did not spread any further.
Nevertheless, it does testify to a certain shift in the class structure of contemporary capitalist society. What, then, is the meaning of this shift? We are witnessing the onset of a process of disintegration of the class structure characteristic of classical industrial capitalism. In that structure, the overwhelming majority of the economically active population was divided into capitalists and the proletariat (with the factory proletariat occupying the leading position within the latter), while the petty bourgeoisie, landowners, and persons providing personal services for hire held a less significant share. Now the situation is changing — and not because previously less significant social strata have grown in relative weight. No, shifts are occurring within the internal class structure of both the capitalists and the proletariat; these classes are beginning to generate new, distinctive social groups from within themselves. Within the capitalist class, a tendency that already manifested itself in the first third of the twentieth century continues to develop. Hired managers are becoming an ever more numerous stratum, playing an ever more significant role within the entrepreneurial class. The number of managers is growing at a faster rate than most other categories of employed persons.
These individuals, while formally wage earners, play the role of functioning capitalist-entrepreneurs. Likewise, the role and numbers of specialists and professionals engaged in direct services to business — accountants, auditors, consultants, appraisers, brokers, dealers, and so on — are growing. The fastest growth is seen among managers and specialists serving the financial market. These specialists occupy an intermediate position between capitalists and wage earners. Formally they belong to hired personnel (and to a much lesser extent to the so-called self-employed), and they are not owners of capital — at least not to an extent that ownership of capital would constitute the principal source of their income. However, their functions in production are bound up with directly assisting the self-expansion of capital, with helping to extract the maximum effect, ultimately, from the exploitation of wage labor. With a very significant portion of these specialists, capital shares the fruits of exploitation, granting them, in one form or another (bonuses, premiums, stock options, extremely high salaries, and so forth), in effect a share of the appropriated surplus value. On the other hand, the former proletariat is also undergoing significant changes. Factory workers, who previously constituted the numerically leading group of wage laborers, have significantly lost in numbers and in relative weight (though far less so in their significance).
As this core of the working class has contracted, two other groups of the proletariat have grown: highly skilled specialists and workers, on the one hand, and less skilled and semi-skilled service-sector workers, along with those not fully or only partially employed, on the other. The decline in the numbers of the traditional factory proletariat has given a number of theorists grounds to advance the thesis of the death of the working class. However, this thesis, although its emergence was called forth by a reaction to real problems, is not accurate. The appearance of the working class is changing, its class interests and positions are undergoing transformation, and it is undergoing a process of partial disintegration, but it is by no means disappearing. The production of knowledge and information, and their transformation into technological innovations, is becoming, in late capitalism, the principal condition for the struggle for economic efficiency — that is, for the production of surplus value. Capitalism has always relied on technical progress in its pursuit of profit, but in the present era, creative activity aimed at ensuring scientific and technological progress is turning into a distinct, major branch of the economy. For this reason, the stratum of highly skilled workers and specialists now occupies a special position among wage earners. The self-expansion of capital turns out to be increasingly dependent on the activity of specialists and highly skilled workers, while at the same time capital is unable to directly control the content of the creative process itself. For these workers, as has already been shown above, the real subordination of labor to capital is being eroded, though the formal subordination remains. It is precisely on the formal subordination of labor to capital (that is, essentially, on the capitalists' monopoly over the means of production) that the fixing of their status as wage earners rests.
Thus, for this portion of wage earners, what is characteristic is a contradiction between their growing independence within the labor process (and even the growing dependence of capital on their activity) and their continuing subordination to capital within the framework of existing relations of production. This stratum stands in a special relation to factory workers as well — first, as better paid; second, as subject to less subordination to the discipline of labor technologically determined by capital; and third, as frequently appearing before the workers as an external, alien force — a direct representative of that very capitalist labor discipline. The process of erosion of the former core of the proletariat — the factory workers — is accompanied not only by growth in the relative share of highly skilled workers, specialists, and professionals, but also by growth (though at a slower pace) in the stratum of low-skilled and semi-skilled service-sector workers.
In absolute terms, however, this stratum has a higher number than the highly skilled workers. Wage earners in the service sector, besides their relatively lower qualifications, are also characterized by lower pay (it was precisely the growth of this stratum that determined the overall decline in the wage level in the United States from the early 1970s to the early 1990s), the absence of large labor collectives bound by common interests, and a significant share of employment in pre-machine-based technologies. All this determines both a lower degree of organization and solidarity in this social stratum and a lower degree of awareness of its class interests compared with the industrial proletariat. Only for the most highly skilled groups of service-sector wage earners, mainly employed in education and healthcare, can this conclusion be applied with substantial qualifications. So, do we have the right to exclaim (following André Gorz): "Farewell to the working class"? Even if we are speaking only of the factory proletariat, this conclusion still seems somewhat premature. In the age of globalization, an analysis of the class structure of capitalism can no longer be confined to the most advanced countries standing on the threshold of the post-industrial era. And in the structure of the world economy, both industrial production and the factory proletariat are, for the time being, not losing their relative weight — indeed, it is gradually increasing. This situation, even as applied to the situation in the most developed countries, can be interpreted not as a substantial reduction in the relative share of industry, but predominantly as a territorial redistribution of industrial production within the system of the world capitalist economy from the "core" to the "periphery." But even if we regard the situation in the most developed countries as a sign of a tendency that will in time become characteristic of the entire world economy, even then a farewell to the working class looks premature. First, the significance of industry as the technological core of the economy persists, and hence the significance and influence of the industrial proletariat is substantially greater than its relative numerical weight. Second, the social strata into which the traditional factory proletariat is splitting remain, as before, wage earners — a class standing opposed to capital in terms of its fundamental socioeconomic interests. In this sense, one may say that the working class cannot leave the historical stage as long as capital remains upon it. Here we conclude our exposition of the theoretical picture of the system of capitalist relations of production. However, political economy does not end here. We still have to analyze the specific features of capitalism in Russia and the prospects for those post-capitalist relations that are growing out of the contradictions of the development of late capitalism, which is by no means the "end of history."
GLOBALIZATION — a new stage in the internationalization of production and capital, characterized by a substantial reduction of cross-border barriers to the movement of goods and capital, the transformation of large transnational capital into the principal driving force of globalization, and the formation not only of a world market for goods but also of a world market for capital.
TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL — capital based in several countries, where foreign affiliates are comparable in turnover to the parent company. As a rule, it is organized in the form of transnational corporations comparable in scale to the economies of individual states.
продолжение следует...
Часть 1 Chapter 13: The Beginning of the Disintegration of Capitalism
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