Service Workers in the Era of Monopoly Capital A Marxist Analysis of Service and Retail Labour

234 Pages·2021·1.543 MB·English

by  Fabian van Onzen

Service Workers in the Era of Monopoly Capital
Studies in Critical Social Sciences

Series Editor
David Fasenfest
(Wayne State University)
volume 202
New Scholarship in
Political Economy
Series Editors
David Fasenfest
(Wayne State University)
Alfredo Saad- Filho
(King’s College London)
Editorial Board
Kevin B. Anderson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Tom Brass (formerly of sps, University of Cambridge)
Raju Das (York University)
Ben Fine ((emeritus) soas University of London)
Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Elizabeth Hill (University of Sydney)
Dan Krier (Iowa State University)
Lauren Langman (Loyola University Chicago)
Valentine Moghadam (Northeastern University)
David N. Smith (University of Kansas)
Susanne Soederberg (Queen’s University)
Aylin Topal (Middle East Technical University)
Fiona Tregenna (University of Johannesburg)
Matt Vidal (Loughborough University London)
Michelle Williams (University of the Witwatersrand)
volume 12
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Cover illustration: Bust of Karl Marx, 1939, by S.D. Merkurov, at the Fallen Monument Park (Muzeon Park of
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Contents

P reface ix
L ist of Figures and Tables xiv
1 I ntroduction 1
1 C entrality of Service Work in Contemporary Capitalism 1
2 O verview of Book 8
2 H istorical Materialism 12
1 M ethod of Historical Materialism 12
2 M ode of Production and Social Formation 15
3 H istorical Materialist Research 18
3 M arxism, Class and the Service Industry 23
1 M arxist Class Analysis 23
2 M arxist Definition of Class 25
3 T wo Approaches to Class Analysis 27
4 M ain Classes of Capitalist Mode of Production 28
4.1 T he Working Class 30
4.2 T he Bourgeoisie 33
4.3 T he Petty- Bourgeoisie 37
4.4 T he Dissolution of the Petty- Bourgeoisie 45
5 S ummary 49
4 S ervice Labour and Value Theory 50
1 M arxism, Services, Commodities 50
2 T he Commodity- Form 51
3 S urplus- Value and Service Workers 57
4 S urplus Value in the Service Industry 64
5 P roductive and Unproductive Labour 69
6 I ncreased Surplus- Value 71
7 C onclusion 74
5 R etail and the Circulation of Commodities 75
1 C irculation of Commodities 77
2 C irculation Time and Costs of Circulation 79
3 P roduction in Circulation 83
4 C onsumption Time and Consumption Period 85
vi Contents
6 M onopoly Capital and the Sales Effort 91
1 M arx on Commercial Capital 91
2 T he Emergence of Monopoly Capital 96
3 I mperialism and Monopoly Capitalism 103
4 I mperialism and the Split in the Bourgeoisie 105
5 D ependency Theory: Centre and Periphery 109
6 U nequal Exchange 112
7 T wo Stages of Production and Realisation 116
1 S tage One: Production of Goods 116
2 S tage Two: Realisation of Surplus- Value 123
3 P ossibilities for Resistance to Monopoly Capitalism 128
8 A Marxist Analysis of Outsourcing 130
1 B idvest- Noonan: A Case Study in Outsourcing 136
2 C onclusion 142
9 C leaning Workers and Surplus Value 144
1 M olly Maid: A Case Study 145
2 C onclusion 153
10 O rganising Retail and Service Workers 155
1 R etail: H&M Workers in Germany 156
2 C leaners in Struggle 164
3 E xposure Campaigns and Workers Power 168
4 C onclusion 170
11 S ervice, Retail and Transport under Socialism 171
1 W hat Is Socialism?  172
1.1 W orkers Power 173
1.2 S ocialist Mode of Production 179
1.3 S ocialist Planning 185
2 F ood Consumption under Socialism 189
3 S ocialist Integration and Retail Labour under Socialism 192
4 R esidential Cleaning under Socialism 198
4.1 C leaning Outside the Home 201
5 T ransportation under Socialism 204
6 C onclusion 206
Contents vii
12 A fterword 209
B ibliography 213
I ndex 219

Preface

This book is a political work designed to stimulate discussion about service
workers and retail employees using Marxist theory. Although significant num-
bers of people work in the service and retail industry, Marxist economic theory
often still tends to focus solely on factory workers. There is increasingly a need
for Marxist theory to respond to the today’s labour conditions under which
millions of working people live and work. My hope is that this book equips
socialists who are organising service workers with the theoretical tools needed
to make sense of service labour and retail employees. It is primarily a theo-
retical work, which shows how the main works of Marxism—M arx’s Capital,
Lenin’s Imperialism, etc.— can be used to reveal tendencies of exploitation in
the service industry, and potential sites of political struggle for service workers.
The ideas for this book arose primarily through my own political practice,
which I will briefly discuss to give the reader a sense of this book’s background.
When I was twenty- three (in 2010), I joined a socialist organisation in Houston,
Texas. For the next five years, I became an active member and was later elected
to the post of Director of Marxist Education. I helped to organise a weekly
Marxist reading group, which introduced comrades to the works of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and other Marxist writers. One of the things that was very notice-
able was the way that Marxist study strengthened the political understanding
of my comrades. Some of them, after attending the political education course,
started to base their comments, suggestions, and recommendations at meet-
ings on Marxist theory instead of ‘common sense’. As a result, they enquired
into each problem before posing it and considered the ways that a particular
tactic affects the long- term strategy. These comrades became more disciplined,
dedicated, and were of a better quality than before. It was this experience that
first taught me the importance Marxist theory to addressing basic political
problems. A major principle of this book is that Marxist theory should be able
to respond to the actual conditions in which working people find themselves
in order to provide them with tools to transform society. This requires a ‘con-
crete analysis of the concrete situation’ rather than an apriori approach of
deduction from purely theoretical principles.
In the summer of 2012, my comrades and I spent a lot of time supporting
a janitor’s strike in Houston, which lasted an entire summer and involved sig-
nificant amounts of militant civil disobedience. During the janitor’s strike,
I d iscovered that many comrades were unable to apply Marxist theory to clean-
ing workers. Although everyone was supportive of the janitor’s strike, no one
seemed able to apply the Marxist concepts of surplus- value and productive
x Preface
labour to understand their labour- process. In the Marxist education courses
that I organised, comrades were sometimes hostile to viewing service work-
ers as productive labourers and were often unwilling to engage in theoreti-
cal enquiry. Most comrades viewed all janitors as unproductive workers who
contribute to the process of social reproduction, but do not themselves pro-
duce value. Because the janitors are outsourced to private companies such as
Pritchard Industries, the idea that they were unproductive seemed problem-
atic to me. It caused me to start thinking about better ways that Marxist theory
could be applied to workers that do not produce physical goods, but services
such as cleaning. Through reading the work of Nicos Poulantzas, particularly
his Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, I discovered the unpublished appen-
dix to Marx’s Capital, which was my starting point for thinking about how
some service workers could become productive labourers. When one read’s
Marx’s Capital, it is easy to get the idea that only workers who produce physical
goods are part of the working class and that service workers are ‘unproductive’.
Although Marx devotes significant attention to transport workers in Volume
Two of Capital, he does not analyse the process by which service workers pro-
duce surplus- value. In many guides to Marx’s Capital, such as David Harvey’s
Companion to Marx’s Capital and Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economics, this
problem is not addressed in significant detail. Mandel does devote an entire
chapter to service workers in Late Capitalism but holds the view that they are
largely unproductive and unable to produce surplus value. While not all ser-
vice workers perform productive labour, some of them— such as the janitors
on strike in Texas in 2012— do produce surplus- value. It was this lack of sig-
nificant theorising of service workers in Marxism, and the noble struggle of
janitors in 2012, that inspired me to begin thinking about this problem in more
detail. This book will try to adjust some of the basic principles of Marxist the-
ory so that they account for service workers, as well as retail employees.1
In addition to being a socialist activist, I spent many years teaching intro-
ductory courses in philosophy at community colleges around the Houston
area, which had a huge impact on my theoretical development. In these
courses, I often included modules on Marxist philosophy, which introduced
students to the theory of surplus- value and the labour theory of value. When
discussing Marx’s Capital, my students— most of whom were employed in the
service and retail industry— said they found it hard to relate to Marx’s work.
1 I would add that since writing this book, other Marxist- inspired theoreticians have started
addressing this problem— the greatest being Jamie Woodcock, who has written books on call
centre workers and a recent book on the video game industry. Although Woodcock provides
brilliant case studies, his use of Marxist theory remains somewhat limited at times.