Marcel van der Linden - Lines of Debate: the Subaltern and the Proletariat of the World
Marcel van der Linden
is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in
Amsterdam, widely recognized for his work on global labor history. (NB: See Beyond Marx, 2014). In this
interview, Ideas de Izquierda speaks with Van der Linden about
Marx’s conceptualization of the working class and Van der Linden’s efforts to
build on this theory with the idea of “subaltern workers.” He discusses the
challenges of posed by rethinking the current conditions and future of the
“global proletariat” as a key element in strategies for contending power.
Author: Paula Varela
Could you briefly
describe your earlier years as an intellectual your commitment to the study of
the working class and labor movement? Was this interest related to any
political involvement? How are both spheres articulated?
As is not unusual for
people of my generation, my interest in workers and labor movements began
during the global protest waves of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 I
joined a Dutch political group called “Proletarian Left” which was partly
inspired by the ideas of Marxists like Ernest Mandel who emphasized the
interconnectedness of rebellions in the West (Paris ’68), the East (Prague ’68)
and the South (the Tet Offensive in Vietnam). I became an academic labor
historian later, in the early eighties. But the original radical inspiration
has always remained important for me. I would still argue that workers’
struggles and workers’ organizations are of central importance for all efforts
to build a new society based on equality and justice.
In recent years, there
has been a renewed interest by social scientists in various countries on the
topic of workers and labor. Some examples include your book, Workers of the
World, the increasing interest in “union revitalization,” and the emergence of
associations like Strikes and Social Conflicts. What do you make of this
change?
This renewed interest
is not a general phenomenon, I believe. In Northern Europe (Germany, Britain,
the Netherlands, Scandinavia) there is, for example, less interest in this than
in some other parts of the world such as South America, Southern Africa, or
India. The reason for the new interest is obvious: the global economic crisis
and the growth of workers’ struggles in parts of the world. At the same time it
is clear that the growth of working-class resistance is not matched by a growth
of traditional labor movements (trade unions, etc.). According to the
International Trade Union Confederation, the umbrella organization for the
majority of trade unions worldwide, only seven percent of the world working
class is organized and this percentage is not increasing.
The renewed importance
of these issues seems to run parallel to a return to Marx and a growth of the
political left. What is your view on this? How do you see the relationship
between labor scholars, the left (social and political), and Marxism?
Maybe you are more
optimistic than I am. To be honest, I only see a growth of the political left
in relatively small parts of the world. The ‘moderate’ left (e.g. Social
Democracy) is in crisis almost everywhere. Communist Parties are certainly not
doing well either, except perhaps in South Africa or the Philippines. Witness
the historic defeat of the CPI-M in Bengal. The Brazilian PT has quickly
adapted to neoliberalism. The revolutionary left is weak in most countries. The
left has a serious problem, which also became visible in the Occupy movement:
we have no address for many of our demands. The declining power of national
governments makes it very difficult for states to develop their own economic
policies, as was still possible in the 1950s and ‘60s. But there is also no
‘supra-state’ taking over traditional tasks of national governments, to which
demands could be addressed. This vacuum on the ‘top’ is the reason why so many
social-movement demands can only be negative: “we do not want X or Y”, but it
is extremely difficult to develop a convincing positive alternative.
Left-wing
scholars in general should lay the conceptual and theoretical foundations for a
global planned economy based on grassroots (direct) democracy – more as less as
a radical alternative to Friedrich von Hayek’s Mont Pèlerin Society for
neoliberalism earlier on. This means, on the one hand, the thorough and
critical analysis of current problems (agriculture, environment, women’s
rights, unemployment, and so on), and on the other hand the definition of
policy procedures and instruments that could lead to the solution of these problems.
Marx will undoubtedly be a major inspiration in this effort, but at the same
‘Marxism’ has many shortcomings, as my friend Karl Heinz Roth and I have argued
in our recent book Beyond Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
In my opinion, one of
the features of the renewal of labor studies is the crisis of the “social
movements paradigm.” It seems to me that for decades, social scientists hoped
that these movements could challenge neoliberalism in a “post-industrial
society.” Now, with evidence that these movements could not defeat
neoliberalism—and with the growth of the salaried working class—the debate has
shifted. Scholars today are focusing again on workers, but the working class is
being portrayed as powerless, lacking the capacity for social revolution that
Marx envisioned. What are your thoughts on this?
I agree with you that
the social movements paradigm is in crisis. Theoretically it has exhausted
itself, after an early productive phase during which some interesting and
important insights were articulated (the concept of ‘resource mobilization’ for
example is also very useful for labour historians). The majority of the social
scientists studying movements (especially what they called ‘new social
movements’) worked on the assumption that ‘old’ movements were finished, and
that the new social movements expressed a ‘post-materialist’ logic. Since these
scientists lacked (and lack) a serious historical approach, they didn’t see
that labour movements have in the past known similar ‘expressive’ politics as new
social movements in the 1970s and ‘80s.
As I said before, the
working class is central to any project of major social change. But there is a
problem here, that we have to face honestly. Workers’ rebellions have played a
major role in societies where capitalism was not yet fully developed. The
Russian October Revolution is of course the best known example, but we can also
think of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and similar dramatic power-shifts. But
there have been no succesful revolutions, led by the working class,
in advanced capitalist countries (unless we would consider ‘communist’ Eastern
Europe as such, which I do not). The German Revoluton of 1918-19 came close,
and according to many (but not according to myself), France 1968 too.
The
reason probably is, as Wayne Thorpe and I argued in our book Revolutionary
Syndicalism: An International Perspective (1990), the evolution of the
benefits of the interventionist state, that is the enormous increase in the
importance of the collectively useful functions of public administration in the
daily life of the people. In addition to the welfare state there have been the
integrating effects of advanced capitalist relations of production and
consumption (sometimes misleadingly called ’Fordist’) whereby working-class families
not only produce and reproduce labour power for sale, but operate
simultaneously as units of individualized mass consumption, purchasing many of
the consumer goods they produce within a system that permits capital to expand
and workers’ material standards of living to improve. Only under conditions of
strong immiseration, with public administrations collapsing and mass
consumption being undermined, would it be possible for the working class in
highly-developed capitalist societies to develop a revolutionary potential.
In your book, you
propose to rebuild the enterprise of labor history by abandoning Marx’s notion
of the working class and replacing it with the notion of subaltern workers. I
would like to raise a theoretical question and an empirical question in response
to your proposal. In terms of theory, I believe that there are many
“intermediate conditions” described in Marx’s Capital, similar to the ones that
you mention in your book (including domestic work and slavery, among others).
In my view, Marx analyzes the development of these categories as part of the
contradictory process of emergence of wage work. He describes these hybrid
forms as part of the unequal development of global capitalism. Do you think the
treatment of these issues in Marx’s Capital do not address the criticism that
his analysis excludes “grey activities,” or that the presence of these
activities today refute the concept of the proletariat?
I believe that there
is a more fundamental problem. Let me use the example of chattel slavery to
explain. As is well known, Marx engaged with issues related to slave labor in
many passages of his work. Marx was more aware of the contrast between ‘free’
wage labor and slavery than most 21st century Marxists. As an expert on
European antiquity and as a contemporary to the American Civil War, Marx was
very much aware of the slavery problem. The first volume of Capital was
published two years after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865
and 21 years before it was officially proclaimed in Brazil. Marx considered
slavery a historically backward mode of exploitation that would soon be a thing
of the past, as ‘free’ wage labor embodied the capitalist future. He compared
the two labor forms in several writings. He certainly saw similarities between
them – both produced a surplus product and ‘the wage-laborer, just like the
slave, must have a master to make him work and govern him.’ At the same time,
he distinguished some differences that overshadowed all the common experiences
they shared. Let me offer some brief critical comments on them and indicate my
doubts.
First: wage workers
dispose of labor capacity, viz. ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical
capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human
being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of
any kind’ – and this labor capacity is the source of value; the capitalist
purchases this labor capacity as a commodity, because he expects it to provide
him with a ‘specific service’, namely the creation of ‘more value than it has
itself’. The same is not true of the slave’s labor capacity. The slaveholder
‘has paid cash for his slaves’, and so ‘the product of their labor represents
the interest on the capital invested in their purchase.’ But since interest is
nothing but a form of surplus value, according to Marx, it would seem that
slaves would have to produce surplus value. And it is a fact that the sugar
plantations on which slave labor was employed yielded considerable profits,
because the commodity sugar embodied more value than the capital invested by
the plantation owner (ground rent, amortization of the slaves, amortization of
the sugar cane press etc.). So is it really the case that only the wage worker
produces the equivalent of his/her own value plus ‘an excess, a surplus-value’?
Or is the slave a ‘source of value’ as well?
Second: Marx states
that labor power can ‘appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so
far as, its possessor, the individual whose labor-power it is, offers it for
sale or sells it as a commodity. In order that its possessor may sell it as a
commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must be the free proprietor of
his own labor-capacity, hence of his person.’ .. read more:
