Ironically, I think that many of the issues raised in it may have inspired an organizational improvement technique called a sociotechnical-systems redesign approach pioneered by Eric Trist and Red Emery in the 1950’s when they were at the Tavistock Institute in London. According to Ault, Walton and Childers in What Works, “The theory and practice are grounded in the fundamental concept that work gets done more effectively when the separate but highly interdependent social and technical systems that produce the flow of that work are ‘jointly optimized’ rather than more traditional ‘maximizing’ of the technical system at the expense of the social. Among other results, this sociotechnical movement had led to the widespread use of self-managed work teams and other elements of what are now commonly known as ‘high commitment’ or ‘high-performance’ organizations.”

It is very difficult and can be time consuming to implement this process, but the results seem to be fewer alienated workers, and more who get satisfaction from their work activities. This type of reorganization has sometimes been described as an example of democracy in the workplace. My guess is that Marx would not approve of this process, and probably would consider this another means of exploiting workers. I disagree with this perspective as do most people who actually are exposed to people working in these types of organizations. It is difficult to predict was actually develops from the dialectic!!!

“With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value.” Debord.

My own relationship to Marx is a good deal different from yours.

I never bothered to actually read Marx for quite a long time. I was vaguely interested in radical politics throughout my adolescence, but I never went much further than liberal platitudes (opposition to the death penalty or the PATRIOT ACT, for instance). But then I got older, I started working. And I realized that I despised work, even more than I despised high school or church. Somehow, in all that, I got the idea to really read Marx.

It was in Marx that I very much saw the world in which I lived. I never worked in a factory, but the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, for instance, spoke directly to my lived experience. By contrast, I have never read Tocqueville or any of the other great dead whites and felt like they were talking about my life. Rather, they seem adamant to justify the ways of capital to men, by introducing all sorts of ideological veneer. (In Tocqueville’s case, for instance, it isn’t the march of commodification that is the catalyst for “democratization”; rather, it is providence! That is an understanding of the world even more mystical than Hegel’s!)

There is a way that Marx is read, and has been read, that sees him as essentially a Ricardian filtered through Hegel (or vice versa). This is the traditional reading all the way from Kautsky and Lenin to Habermas. It relies, fundamentally, on always presupposing the transhistorical nature of labour. From this reading, then, it is a simple step to nationalizing a few banks and calling it a “workers’ state”, while leaving the drudgery and pointlessness of everyday life hopelessly unscathed.

Yet, there is another way to read Marx, one that views labour as a properly historical category – since value itself is historical, so must be labour. Marx’s theory of value is often treated as transhistorical, but this is not Marx’s actual thoughts on the matter. Indeed, he reminds us early on in Capital that Aristotle could not have a true theory of value because Aristotle did not live in a society of labourers. It is no use to simply redistribute the products of labour, which even Warren Buffett can accept; labour itself must be destroyed. Thus in the Grundrisse:

“It requires no great penetration to grasp that, where e.g. free labour or wage labour arising out of the dissolution of bondage is the point of departure, there machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour, as property alien to it, and as power hostile to it; i.e., that they must confront it as capital. But it is just as easy to perceive that machines will not cease to be agencies of social production when they become e.g. property of the associated workers. In the first case, however, their distribution, i.e., that they do not belong to the worker, is just as much a condition of the mode of production founded on wage labour. In the second case the changed distribution would start from a changed foundation of production, a new foundation first created by the process of history.”

To create a new mode of distribution, there must be a “changed foundation” of production. The “changed foundations” introduced by Lenin, Mao, and company, were not phases of the instauration of communism, but episodes of primitive accumulation tout court. These were capitalist atrocities through and through, carried out by Jacobin parties. Debord: “The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labour.”

Of course, maybe the word “communist” is too corrupted to be of much use. There is certainly something a bit absurd about arguing over what is and is not properly “communist” in the 21st century. But this is only to say that there is a possible society, a possible form of life, where the value-form has ceased to exist, where labour has ceased to exist. Perhaps, as Agamben suggests, such a condition will resist the mediation of such terms altogether; perhaps we should speak of the “coming community”, the “whatever singularity” that rejects such identifications as “worker” and “communist” altogether in favor of simple belonging itself?

So the nomination “communist” is merely for analytical purposes here. Perhaps it obscures the immanent revolt always already carried out by working people. Mario Tronti: “From the very beginning, the proletariat is nothing more than the immediate political interest in the abolition of every aspect of the existing order. As far as its internal development is concerned, it has no need of “institutions” in order to bring to life what it is, since what it is is nothing other than the life-force of that immediate destruction. It doesn’t need institutions, but it does need organization… The concept of the revolution and the reality of the working class are one and the same.”

For me, there is no question of compiling lists of atrocities carried out by Pol Pot and the Shining Path as evidence of the failure of communism. Rather, the revolution is always already where the workers are struggling against their conditions (“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”). The struggle against labour, ie the struggle against capitalism itself, has hitherto been a failure – but the failure of the struggle against labour has been obscured not only by the apologists of capital, but by the false critics of capital (from Lenin to Zizek). Locating the failure of communism in places like the Eastern Bloc already hands an ideological victory to capital, when, indeed, one is simply pointing to a failed method of administering the commodity-form, to a failed method of imposing work. Deleuze and Guattari:

“Those who keep invoking the bloody failure of socialism don’t seem to consider as a failure the present state of the global capitalist market, with the bloody inequalities it involves, the populations pushed off the market, etc. It’s been a long time since the American ‘revolution’ has failed, even before the Soviets’ did. The situations and revolutionary attempts are generated by capitalism itself and they are not going to disappear.”

Nonetheless, income differentials remain glaringly obvious. It seems to me then that studying class in terms of how these differentials might translate into power differentials is where the true significance of class, even if only as a statistical socio-economic class, may lie. And as the possibilities for upward mobility diminish and Americans become less prone to extravagant expenditures with borrowed money, class differences might become more salient and the phrase “class warfare” that gets tossed around on Fox News may become more than just a talking point.

The problem has never been Marxist critique of classical economics. It is simply a mirror image of the ahistorical liberal ideal historicized and exposing the actual relations of power between people who function in a capitalist economy. Marxism is best limited to this: a theory of capitalism. The theoretical system offers only a power-relations approach to economic organization and it is not surprising instituting it as a political ideology resulted how it did: a blatant system of exploitation by those well-born, well-connected or well-suited to sycophancy over those who were not. The problem is thus Marxist politics were a mirror image as well.