From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Mon Oct 18 2004 - 10:51:06 EDT
>>> In your interpretation, how much freedom can workers lose in the realm of circulation to bargain for wages before they cease to be proletarians at all? <<< Rakesh, Let's use the definition given by M & E in _The Communist Manifesto_: "By proletariat is meant the class of modern wage-workers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live." The most general answer that I can give to your question is that the freedoms that wage-workers have or have not often varies temporally and spatially (examples re the right to strike follow later in this post) but this does not alter whether they remain wage-workers _unless_ the characteristics in the definition above no longer hold. Of course, it is certainly possible for proletarians to cease to be proletarians, i.e. to join (voluntarily or involuntarily) another class. E.g. wage-workers (= proletarians) can be placed in slave labor camps by the state (as happened to many in Nazi Germany). Or, wage-workers can _remain_ proletarians but have rights that in most capitalist social formations are today deemed customary denied to them (e.g. in some Free Trade Zones, workers can't go on strike, join a union, or leave the work site without permission. Indeed, the perimeters of some of these FTZs are, or were, surrounded by barbed wire and the gates are patrolled by armed security guards or members of the military. [btw, these conditions are very similar to those of wage-workers at the Ford Motor Company prior to unionization. Indeed, there were even shop rules at Ford, enforced by the infamous Service Department led by Harry Bennett, that prevented workers from talking to each other either on the job or _at lunch_ in the plant cafeteria.]). Indeed, the 'right' that proletarians have to bargain for higher wages -- absent unionization -- is very limited: as individuals they typically have the right to request higher wages and the capitalist has the right to fire them (in most capitalist social formations, including the US). Unionization (and militancy) or special circumstances arising from the stratification of the working-class and the different demand for labor-power with different skills or in different regions shape the ability of workers to bargain for higher wages. >>> Also, Marx would have heralded the right to strike in comparison to the pompous Rights of Man, no? <<< It is certainly an important right but its presence or absence does not by itself determine whether one is or is not a proletarian. A personal example: I am a wage worker who has the right to strike at one college but not the right to strike at another college (because of the Taylor Law -- a subject Paul Z knows about). Yet, I am no more or less a wage-worker at one college than another. Most, if not all, capitalist social formations limit or deny the right to strike for some segment of the working class. What is noteworthy in this story from India -- besides the fact that the CPI-M was the political force engineering the change -- was that a segment of the working class that had the right to strike was now denied it through the rationalization that IT workers were now deemed by the state to be "essential" workers. Yet, this is by no means unique. E.g. in the U.S. during WWII _no_ workers had the right to go on strike (a policy initiated by the "pro-labor" President, F.D.R.). Also, in the U.S. it is not so uncommon for the state to intervene in private sector disputes by ordering striking workers back to work (for a, so called, "cooling off" period). And, indeed, for most of the history of the US, the state customarily intervened to force workers back to work when striking (sometimes at the point of a gun with militia and sheriffs) when powerful capitalists, like the "robber barons", requested it. Consequently -- like so many other 'rights' that workers have -- this right is in many cases given to workers and taken away by capital and the state when they can get away with it: i.e. like all rights, it is a a custom that has been and continues to be fought over. Workers take for granted rights only at their peril. In solidarity, Jerry
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