Hi, I'm fairly new to the left communist tendency, so my apologies beforehand if this subject has been flogged enough. The gradual retreat of manufacturing in the west (I have the US in mind) since the 1970s and the tremendous amount of cheap labor once provided by the ex-Soviet states, China and India, has been a perennial topic, but one which has eluded me in terms of building class consciousness. Most of the working class is in the non-surplus value producing service economy, folks at Wallmart, convenience stores, etc. Given that the means of production is virtually absent, in what sense have Marxists been able to deal with this problem of a very small surplus-value producing working class? Furthermore, would the resurgence of industrialization also mean a resurgence of the more traditional class struggle? I've heard reports that China is now giving the cold shoulder to American companies which used it as a cheap manufacturing base, that some are even thinking of returning to US soil in the current atmosphere of the financial crisis. Any elucidation on any of these points would be great appreciated! In solidarity
Welcome to the left communist tendency! The working class today certainly faces a problem of rediscovering its class identity, ad the destruction of traditional working class concentrations has certainly played a part in this. It is difficult to see how the western countries will 'reindustrialise' on any massive scale. However, we have to see the working class as a collective body which produces surplus value on a global scale, and the 'new' or less directly industrialised sectors are still part of the class and have shown their capacity for struggle. Given the extent of the impending attacks on the public sector in Europe and the US, for example, we can expect to see very important movements breaking out among the many different categories in this sector, such as health, administration, education and so on. Don't know whether this answers your question, but hope you will come back for further discussion anyway.
Thank you, comrade. Certainly we have to look at the broader perspective of global surplus-value production, which one again proves that perhaps looking at capital through the lens of the nation-state is misleading. We certainly need to conceptualize the working class (unless this has been done already) away from simply seizing the means of production to something broader. My only worry is that what Marx had called "parasitism"--the service/servant sector of the economy, whether that should be something we in the developed, industrialized West should be focusing on more these days.
Hello auto. I think that if one had all the figures and numbers involved it would be possible to work out the average surplus value for each worker, ie, for arguments sake, the "aliquot" part. But it's an excercise that ignores the overall extraction of surplus value by capital from the totality of labour. One could look at the old Soviet Union for example and see that, while there were no private capitalists as such, the state was the instrument for the extraction of surplus value as a whole. Moreover, this is a growing trend for all the major capitalist nations today, i.e., the state as the real boss. Within this state, all workers, shop workers, industrial workers, health workers, office workers, and so on, are all exploited and even if not directly involved in manufacturing nevertheless contribute by their labour (and their taxes) to the extraction of surplus value. Also, what's called the "service sector" in the major economies includes power, energy and water production that are absolutely essential to capitalism and these alone involve great numbers of workers that are in a position of relative strength should they enter into struggle in any significant way. At any rate, none of this is fixed. The run down of the "old" industries in the capitalist heartlands, mining, steel, auto production has, under the need of increased exploitation and thus the greater extraction of surplus value, led to "outsourcing" involving cheaper forms of labour which can only provide a temporary respite for capitalism and which underlines the global nature of the system and its constant necessity to make more and more out of a constantly diminished and constantly cheaper workforce. One of the major contradictions of capitalism.
