Capitalism, Technology, Labor: Socialist Register Reader Vol 2

CAPITALISM, TECHNOLOGY, LABOR: AN INTRODUCTION

Greg Albo

At seemingly every turn, the political economy of contemporary capitalism is being transformed by unprecedented scientific, industrial, and commercial innovations. This new technological infrastructure is most visible in the penetration of the information-communication sector, through the internet, social media, and digital surveillance, into every nook and crack of work and daily life. But the imprint of the new automation is registered, too, in each moment of the circulation of capital: in the electronic bits and bytes form in which credit money is now created, circulated, and regulated; in the robotics and telematics that set the pace of the labor process and direct the distributional logistics of commodity production; and in the algorithms which gather infinite blocks of big data made up of individualized preferences, likes, journeys, and above all track the consumer purchases that facilitate the realization of new production.

As this new phase of value production consolidates and gains pace, its social meaning—and implications for socialist strategy—warrant considered attention. Indeed, there already exists a small library of contending forecasts from governments, corporations, and unions on the ways workplaces are being refashioned; on the new economic sectors that are emerging, from the web-centered sharing economy to the internet of things; on the occupations and jobs at risk of disappearing; on the new STEM and coding competencies that will be necessary to find future employment at all; and on the policy mandates for the redesign of state apparatuses to aid social adjustments to platform capitalism.

A very different remit, one that grounds the analysis of technological change in the capitalist dynamics of work and class, has always guided the Socialist Register. From its very first volumes, the Register warned against the technological fetishism that has accompanied each new cluster of product innovations and production techniques, and rejected the claims that these economic advances offered a technical fix for the class antagonisms and ecological dislocations of the outgoing, archaic era of capitalism. The essays in this collection, drawn from over five decades of the Register’s annual publication, locate the technological transformations of capitalism concretely and directly within the competitive imperatives for capitalists to accumulate without limit. But they also reveal the class and political barriers to this drive: all the new machines in the world cannot ensure the social and economic conditions for profitable accumulation, nor can they contain workers’ struggles for improved wages and limits on the stresses of workplace intensification, or eradicate popular demands for cooperative production that extend to democratic control over technological change.

I.

The impact of new technologies on the working class and the labor movement has always been both controversial and central to the study of capitalism. The founding text of classical political economy, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), opens with a detailed study of the division of labor in the modern pin factory, made possible by the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many. And David Ricardo famously reworked the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) to account for the question of machinery as the First Industrial Revolution gained steam and the displacement of labor became a source of political upheaval. But it was Karl Marx who insisted, in his critique of political economy in Capital (1867), that these developments first had to be located in capitalism as a historically specific mode of commodity production for the purposes of accumulating additional value in the form of profits. In Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s particular social relations of production and property, technological change occupies an especially prominent place.

Both the exploiting and producing classes, Marx argued, are subject to the imperatives of market competition for their self-reproduction. For the working classes, skills and capacities to earn wages in the labor market become prerequisites for obtaining the means of subsistence. For the capitalist classes, market competition compels constant cost cutting to sustain competitive prices, particularly through continual innovation in new technologies in production, new products, and a constant reorganization of work. As early as The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized in capitalism a constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation…. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. This vivid—even futuristic—phrasing still captures very well the general competitive imperatives that compel capitalism to endless accumulation, while inviting us to investigate anew the precise, concrete ways that the means of production are set in motion and a surplus extracted from workers, which vary greatly by firm, across time, and between places.

In the Marxist view of capitalist development, as recently laid out by David Harvey in his Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017), technological change is a systematic and cumulative process of revolutionizing the means of production while simultaneously extending private property controls over value chains that are steadily more interconnected and organizationally complex. Under the pressure of competition, capitalists search out new techniques, organizations, and markets that allow them to increase output and sell more cheaply, attaining extra profit and a larger market share from a competitive advantage in value extraction. Marx conceptualized this as a process of relative surplus value extraction (distinct from absolute surplus extraction, from working longer or more intensively) and identified this tendency as a distinguishing and necessary feature of the capitalist mode of production. Technological change thus raises the productivity of labor such that for a given unit of labor-time input of average quality, the volume of output increases, the total value produced remains constant, and individual commodity prices fall, but the share of value appropriated by capitalists increases (as the value of labor power declines with cheaper goods).

The fetishism that plagues conventional technology studies—not least in discussions of full automation today—is the tendency to explain these results as a consequence of the machines (or electronic devices) in themselves; and from there to posit technical fixes to socioeconomic problems, with heated warnings of the horrors that will unfold absent the necessary social adjustments to the new technological and market conditions. Far too often, social assessment and political calculations degenerate into forecasts either of apocalypse by machine, or of imagined technological utopias now enabled. In contrast, the essays in this volume advance a class analysis of technological change that mediates between the structural imperatives of accumulation, on one hand, and the active agency of workers struggling to shape their conditions of work, on the other, to draw out the specific ways that restructuring impacts on capital and labor.

It is one of the intrinsic features of capital accumulation that in pursuit of relative surplus value and competitive advantage through the adoption of new techniques, wage labor inputs into given labor processes tend to decline. The technical composition of the capital stock is thus typically characterized by a labor-saving/capital-using bias. In the process, wage labor and money capital are reallocated between old and new sectors of production; new producer services emerge to design, manage, and service the more complex capital stock; and more employment is allocated to distributional and commercial sectors as the mass of commodities in circulation expands with the increase in output levels. From another vantage, automation generates a reserve army of labor as employment levels in manufacturing decline and labor demand is redistributed between sectors, occupations, skills, and regions. Yet how this plays out between unemployment, allocations of work time, wages, and new employment is far from determined by technological blueprints set by engineering estimates of capital-labor ratios for specific jobs. These outcomes are always overdetermined by class struggle over the distribution and control of skills, jobs, and restructuring. What we are really dealing with, as Ursula Huws in one of her essays here insists, are new fields of accumulation and struggle.

A further competitive dynamic is unleashed by the dialectic between accumulation and struggle that investment in new techniques generates. Each individual capitalist pursues their own competitive advantage such that overaccumulated capital in some sectors may not be sustained (simply meaning the expected—or even any—rate of profit cannot be met). The various forms of credit capital advanced to firms for investments represents, moreover, not only claims on future profits but also the market validation of investments in particular technologies and organizational infrastructure in workplaces. If a crisis erupts from a decline in markets and profits, the bankruptcies of firms and deterioration of credit conditions create a spiral of idle capital and unemployed labor side by side, with the crisis spreading to other sectors in a common cyclical trajectory of investment–accumulation–crisis–restructuring. Money values in all forms—speculative and loan capital, and productive and commodity capital alike—take a hit. Older vintages of technologies embodied in the capital stock can no longer be valorized, as ruthless competition between firms breaks out to preserve individual market shares. The slaughter of capital values was how Marx aptly described this. Crises thus always force the scrapping and redeployment of investments in productive capital (plant and equipment, infrastructure, logistics, and distribution networks) in an effort to restore profitability, to preserve the money capital necessary to invest in new techniques and capital stock, and to reestablish flows of credit money.

As firms scrap old technologies and adopt new ones in phases of crisis, the capitalist control of the production process, whether in producing services or material goods, raises another set of concerns. Capitalists are driven to redesign labor processes, to introduce new techniques in order to restore profitability, and to increase their control and flexibility in managing workers. Hence newer technologies tend to deepen the social and technical divisions of labor. As Harry Braverman forcefully demonstrated in his Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), there is an incentive for capitalists to ensure that the fewest number of workers gain technological competencies while the largest number are flexibilized in their work deployment and their skills routinized and degraded. The host of technologically enabled developments that have so extended the world market and the international division of labor have taken a number of forms: the intensification of some labor processes into gigantic production sites, accompanied by the outsourcing and fragmentation of others; an increasing velocity in the turnover of fixed capital and the speed at which commodities and money circulate; the facilitation of further appropriations of the wealth of nature, and hunts for economic rents and transformations of labor reserves; as well as an infinite multiplication of new commodities. Technological change, in sum, is never innocent of a very powerful and deliberate class appropriation of the knowledge and self-governance capacities of workers, and at the same time it lays the material foundations for the ideological attribution of autonomous production powers to management and capitalist firms as such.

The confusion that accompanies every fetishization of technology arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the new organizational forms that coincide with technological change: the continual evolution of best means for given ends, as in the crude Weberian sense of instrumental rationality; or a consequence of the economic determinism of the forces of production, as with vulgar forms of Marxism. Rather, as the essays in this collection detail, organizational forms are not given by technologies with fixed technical coefficients of production and immutable social consequences. The introduction and application of new technologies on any substantial scale must always be located in relation to expanded capitalist reproduction, and to the purposes of the capitalist classes that control these technologies as their private property. It is capitalist social relations, as reflected in the class struggles embedded in the particularities of gender, race, and place, that structure the technical divisions of labor of modern firms, while the hierarchies and disciplines that govern labor power and workplace surveillance constitute the social architecture of technological change.

In Capital, Marx observes that [t]echnology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Marx traced these processes from the dispossessions of primitive accumulation all the way to the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor he observed in the techniques of the factory system of his time. But it can be seen today that the processes of dispossession and subsumption have no firm end point, as new technologies find ever more innovative ways to penetrate new spaces for accumulation and squeeze more labor out of labor time (such as the monitoring bracelets and computer logs that add an entirely new dimension of surveillance to the time and work-disciplines of capitalism). It is the error of technological fetishism to see science and technology per se as the solution to the social contradictions of laboring under capitalism, rather than as the evidence of capitalism’s class divisions. The forces of production, it needs to be stressed, are always a result, and not a cause, of social relations. Primacy in social explanation must always be given to social forces and political struggles, not to engineers and scientists in isolated laboratories or, in the fashion of today, to the unique capacities of creative or knowledge workers.

II.

The Socialist Register emerged in 1964 as the postwar era hit full stride in one of the most sustained periods of accumulation in the history of capitalism. The war had delivered a massive and exhaustive restructuring of productive processes—ushering in the dedicated machinery, flow line assembly, skilled workers, and standardized products of the so-called Fordist labor process. This presented a host of new commodities and sectors in chemicals, autos, rubber, appliances, and electronics, to name but a few. With the new technologies having consolidated through the 1950s, the 1960s immersed all the core capitalist countries in a great automation scare of massive job losses as manufacturing employment fell relative to the volume of output and service sector employment grew. This was but one part, it was argued, of a wider managerial revolution that was compelling a general upgrading of skills, expansion of unique engineering and scientific qualifications, and ever more layers of white-collar work in administration, marketing, and finance. The traditional working class, it was argued, was in terminal decline amid the emerging postindustrial society.

In its very origins, the New Left of the 1960s, and the Socialist Register in particular, took as one of their foremost tasks a dismantling of these narratives. In the Register’s first volume, Ernest Mandel offered a sharp rebuke to these theses in an essay titled The Economics of Neo-Capitalism. Here Mandel argued that technological innovation [in firms] … does not automatically flow from technological discovery, but that the postwar period had seen a stepping up of the general rate of technological innovation … [due to] the logical link between technological innovation and the permanent arms race. This produced during the Cold War period a shrinking of the trade cycle and an accentuation of the uneven development between sectors and zones of the world. From this, Mandel offered a quite distinct Marxian explanation of the rise of managerialism in technological innovation and the shortening of the life span of fixed capital … [requiring] more long term cost planning … made possible by the rapid progress of computer techniques and their application to economic calculations. The new productive capacity, in turn, mandated development of the techniques of marketing and planning techniques introduced into the state to rationalize capital investments.

With remarkable foresight to what would prove a central aspect of the crisis of the 1970s, Mandel observed that the more technically sophisticated capital stock revealed a growing contradiction between the needs of neo-capitalist programming and trade union freedom of bargaining for higher wages, which would in turn generate a further massive development of automation, the aim being the reconstitution of the reserve army of labor. It would be necessary in this context to push past the essentially defensive strategy of the trade union movement (against wage restraint, and for freedom of bargaining) … without which the workers will be fighting a losing battle against the technocrats and their employers. What this meant was that socialist strategy could not, therefore, be for or against technology, but rather against the capitalist planning of firms, and should see that workers’ control is a first and essential step toward … management of a socialized economy and toward industrial democracy.

Ralph Miliband’s essay in the 1968 Register, Professor Galbraith and American Capitalism, offered a direct critique of the most forceful and encompassing formulation of the new industrial society thesis, J. K. Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (1968), with its image of vertically integrated corporations controlled by a technostructure of white-collar specialists. Galbraith argued that there was no longer any countervailing power outside the dominant capitalist corporations, and that within the commanding heights of the economy, the new technostructure that emerged from the logic of industrialization had obscured the distinction between employer and employee. Corporate control came to be diffused and shared among a very large group of people—ranging from technicians, scientists, market analysts, computer programmers, and industrial stylists, all the way to more routine white- and blue-collar workers—who bring specialized knowledge, talent, or experience to decision making. Miliband observed that the political remit of such an argument was of a piece with all those who insisted, despite concern for the growing concentration of corporate power under modern capitalism, that the question of alternatives to capitalism had been rendered obsolete by the internal developments of the system itself. [C]apitalism, the argument goes, has been so thoroughly transformed in the last few decades that the need to abolish it has conveniently disappeared. Miliband’s devastating critique thus revealed the basic political contradiction underlying Galbraith’s analysis:

[T]he confusion and bafflement of the latter-day liberalism that Professor Galbraith represents, in regard to an industrial system that it approaches with a mixture of admiration and distaste, and whose basic irrationality, some aspects of which it perceives, it is either unable or unwilling to locate and transcend…. The tone is critical and so is the intent, but the result is all the same profoundly apologetic.

That Miliband’s essay appeared in the midst of the radical political explosions of 1968 was more than coincidence. It captured, far more than did the Galbraithian fetishism of industrial technique, the increasingly diverse class contradictions of the contemporary capitalist system. More than a decade of industrial and public sector militancy had completely shattered the postwar political consensus, and it persisted right though the economic crisis of the 1970s until the profound defeats inflicted on trade unionism in the 1980s, amid the massive wave of industrial restructuring. Fordist labor processes were steadily replaced by the new technologies of microelectronics, which facilitated more flexible production techniques, just in time inventories and workers, the multitasking and multiskilling of core workers, and continual learning. The investments in these new flexible labor processes, moreover, encouraged a so-called hollowing out of old industrial centers, seen in a vertical disintegration of traditional corporate structures into de-unionized greenfield sites, and an internationalization of production chains into low-wage zones. In progressive circles, new theories began to circulate about the meaning of these technological developments and their consequences for the future of work and class formation. On the one side, André Gorz, Stanley Aronowitz, and Jeremy Rifkin, for a few prominent examples, began to bid farewell to the working class and foresee a jobless future, and, thus, to overhaul completely the social agencies and imaginary of any potential noncapitalist alternative. On the other, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, Robert Boyer, and Wolfgang Streeck trumped for revitalized production processes through more egalitarian, skill-intensive, and flexible labor regimes, variously tagged flexible specialization, post-Fordism, and diversified quality production. The latter group, in particular, offered a renewal of social democracy and class compromise founded on the distributional logic of the new technologies.

This was, by now, familiar ground for the Socialist Register in rebuffing technology-centered contentions of a disappearing proletariat, as Richard Hyman put it in the title of his 1983 essay. Hyman took as his target Gorz’s claim, in his Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (1982), that the capitalist rationality embedded in technical development of the forces of production foreclosed the agency of the traditional working class and, at the same time, created a non-class of nonworkers, of all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work. For Gorz, the microprocessor revolution accelerated the process of marginalization, multiplying both unemployment and those employments designed simply to ‘provide work,’ whose only exit was a societal realignment committed to the principles of work less, consume better, live more. Hyman challenged Gorz’s reliance on assertion more than on evidence of complex and uneven changes to working-class occupations and struggles for job controls in the labor process. And he argued that, as with other such futuristic postwork provocations, Gorz’s contained more than a few confusions, not least in calling for the "abolition of work, before going on to insist that work cannot be abolished; or in his bewildering claim that the present forces of production are adapted specifically to capitalist priorities and hence inappropriate for socialism, while going on in subsequent discussion to assume that current technology will be applied largely unaltered within the sphere of necessity in a socialist economy. Still, Hyman granted, Gorz’s argument required socialists to adopt a more detached and critical attitude to the state, very different from those that simplistically sought to ‘socialize’ and manage more ‘efficiently’ the large-scale high-technology apparatus of contemporary capitalism."

In his 1985 essay Marx, the Present Crisis, and the Future of Labor, Ernest Mandel showed that there was underway a fundamental change of structure of the international capitalist economy, with a long-term fundamental shift in the weight, cohesion, and dynamic of wage labor, at the expense of that class. Building on his earlier piece in the 1964 Register, Mandel’s monumental study Late Capitalism (1975) had periodized capitalism in terms of the intersections of cycles of class struggle, technological changes to the capital stock, and long waves of accumulation and profitability within a hierarchical world market. Now, in his Register essay a decade later, Mandel grasped the significance of developments of the 1980s in terms of a growth of wage labor on a world scale alongside a relative decrease of labor employed in the largest capitalist factories. As a result, it was necessary to take into consideration the precise effects of robotization on specific branches of industry that have played a key role in the organization and strength of the working class and the labor movement. And insofar as automated technology is always foremost deployed to increase the conditions of profitability and with the intent of reducing labor’s power of resistance at factory, industrial branch, or societal level, Mandel insisted that labor movement strategies that now embraced national competitiveness and enterprise profitability needed to be rejected in favor of a new focus on a radical international reduction of the working week without a cut in weekly pay … [as an] absolute social priority.

If the essays by Hyman and Mandel reasserted the imperatives of class struggles over the remaking of labor regimes in the workplace, the point of Greg Albo’s 1994 Register essay, ‘Competitive Austerity’ and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment Policy was to challenge the viability of what Albo termed a new social democratic strategy of progressive competitiveness. Conceived as a compromise at a national level with the consolidation of a neoliberal policy regime at a global level, this strategy was to be built on the rejection of a low-wage, low-skill, low-tax road to sustain corporate profitability, in favor of the adoption of new industrial policies encouraging the deployment of new technologies, high-skill workers, and new work organization in high value-added export sectors. But rather than offer a high road to better wages and job security, this path of binding workers into competitive partnerships with the companies, Albo showed, was likely to weaken the capacities of unions to resist concessions. The logic of competiveness was accepted as a parameter for collective action, such that multiskilled core workers are pushed to work longer hours to recoup training investments, while peripheral workers and the unemployed scramble to get enough hours of paid work. In the face of stiffening competition and weak demand, amid a global neoliberal policy regime wherein states were continually cutting back social expenditures while increasing subsidies and corporate tax cuts to expand exports, the progressive competitiveness strategy is forced to accept, as social democratic parties have been willing to do, the same ‘competitive austerity’ as neoliberalism. Breaking with this would require a more inward-oriented strategy that would build on the principle of maximizing the capacity of different ‘national collectivities’ democratically to choose alternate development paths (socialist or capitalist), that do not impose externalities (such as environmental damage) on other countries, without suffering isolation and coercive sanction from the world economy.

By the turn of the millennium, it was increasingly evident that the various high-skill progressive competitive strategies had become little more than a tactical option for a few companies to pursue flexible production when precarity and outsourcing had reached their limits. The connectivity between locationally specific labor processes (even individual workspaces) and the circulation of money and commodities in the world market offered by the information and communication technologies (ICT) could already be seen pushing the boundaries of flexible accumulation even further. An evolving platform capitalism now placed the professional middle class and many skilled workers on perpetual work mode through the internet; contingent workers beginning from zero-hour contracts had to be available for work on a moment’s notice; information was constantly scraped from all sources for possible conversion into a competitive advantage; and value chains, extended across the world market, traced through networks of logistics.

It was with these developing concerns in mind that the 2001 Register, titled Working Classes, Global Realities, focused its attention on the many misconceptions and realities of work in the new economy. The essay here by Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World, was pathbreaking. Arguing that the production of material commodities is only one source of value production in the continuing seismic shifts in the social division of labor, Huws uncovered the ways information workers employed in virtual production were located in the capital relation, and became subjected to the same processes of automation as the manufacturing sector. For Huws, the distinctiveness of the modern cybertariat, compared to traditional office workers, lies in the way that information technologies blur the boundaries between work and consumption, constituting as they do a shifting interface between server and served and, in home computer usage, become an instrument both of production and of reproduction. In this respect, cyber-work repositions gender relations (without overturning patriarchal relations), dissolves old divisions between sectors, and tends to make tasks more standardized and routinized, rather than creative. Even if a new cybertariat is in the making, Huws cautioned, whether it will perceive itself as such is another matter.

In the same 2001 volume, Andrew Ross dismantled the most touted managerial ethos of the new economy: the leveling of workplace hierarchies through flexible communal workspaces with dedicated computer workstations, and the like. The reality of the new flexible style of corporate organization embraced by the software startup culture, as Ross demonstrated in his essay No-Collar Labor in America’s ‘New Economy,’ is long hours of work, falling pay, reliance on multiple job holdings, and lack of union protections. It is of no little irony that the new knowledge factories in New York’s Silicon Alley physically occupy spaces filled by manufacturing sweatshops a century ago. Showing how a new automated Taylorism that monitors webshop workers through keyboard strokes, e-mail and voice-mail snooping, or surveillance cameras is now standard practice on the part of the majority of American employers, Ross posed one of the crucial challenges for both union and socialist organizing in the twenty-first century.

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, the restructuring of capital and work intensified the exploitative patterns identified by Huws and Ross. In her A Tale of Two Crises: Labor, Capital, and Restructuring in the US Auto Industry in the 2012 Register, Nicole Aschoff argued that long-term trends of de-unionization, concessions, and isolation have paved the way for unprecedented concessions for autoworkers with the bankruptcy and bailouts of GM and Chrysler. Aschoff revealed how the major auto multinationals are organizationally so very different than Galbraith’s technostructure. Indeed, the internationalization of auto production, further enabled by the rise of finance, also allowed a decentering of production zones and relations between parts companies and assemblers, in a continual process of reorganization. Aschoff’s conclusion is to the point: [C]apital continually reinvents itself…. If auto unions are to recover from the crisis, they must also reinvent themselves.

In the wake of the crisis, such radical restructuring was hardly limited to manufacturing, as Huws explained in her important 2012 essay also included here, Crisis as Capitalist Opportunity: The New Accumulation through Public Service Commodification. Privatization was in the process making public services themselves … a site of accumulation that is crucial for the continuing expansion of international capital. The impact of opening up of public services to the market for work was creating a new reserve army of information workers who, thanks to the standardization of white-collar work through the introduction of information and communications technologies, are increasingly able to carry out the tasks that had previously formed part of the job descriptions of civil servants or other public sector bureaucrats. With the public sector workforce becoming subsumed into a larger mass of interchangeable labor, it is clear how much there is a need for new forms of organization that recognize the common interests of a global proletariat.

The informational technologies analyzed by Huws are, of course, central to the dizzying speed at which commodities circulate through the massive distributional and retail networks of Amazon, Costco, and the like. These new forms of capital have their cognate in the Walmart Working Class—the title of Arun Gupta’s 2014 essay in the fiftieth-anniversary volume, Registering Class. The Walmart proletariat forms in a matrix of distribution centers, each purposed to serve up to 150 retail stores and to keep ‘commodities in motion’ as quickly as possible from manufacturer to stores. Adapting the industry term for its extreme union avoidance practices, Gupta argued that the Walmart effect is shifting working-class employment from stable medium-wage jobs to a precarious low-wage service sector. Tracing new forms of union organizing in this new economy, from OUR Walmart and the Warehouse Workers Organizing Committee to the Fight for $15, Gupta calls for the rebirth of a strong left … with a vision that points the way beyond wages and consumption to economic democracy, to spur militant class consciousness and create the social space for it to spread.

All the essays brought together here reject the false notions that technologies either bring about postwork utopias or deprive workers of the capacity to struggle and transform their workplaces. And each essay, in its own way, points to the need for a constant renewal of class analysis based on a grounded understanding of the changes in work and labor processes within contemporary capitalism. The final two essays take this renewal of class analysis—a necessary precondition for the renewal of working-class politics—as their point of departure. Bryan Palmer’s Reconsiderations of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization argues that what has led many to see precariousness as class formation is a series of working-class defeats [that] have, after decades of retrenchment, taken on a cumulative character, and the result is a class too often stripped of its seeming capacity to fight, its leadership increasingly characterized by caution and the sensibilities of an ossified officialdom. It is crucial in this context to understand precarity as a continual process of dispossession, Palmer insists, one which has always been integral to the insecurities of working-class life. Since precariousness has always been the fundamental feature of class formation rather than the material basis of a new, contemporary class, then all proletarians suffer precarity and have interests that coincide directly with this class of the dispossessed. In this way, Palmer concludes that there are expanding possibilities for more effective politics based on class struggles in our times.

In Class Theory and Class Politics Today, in the 2015 Register, Transforming Classes, Hugo Radice refutes the thesis of a new managerialism heralding a ‘postcapitalist’ order based on technical rationality and economic efficiency, arguing that on the contrary, the oncefeted managerial revolution has very largely been reversed. Radice goes even further to declare that today it would be hard to argue that there exists a [professional middle] class, in the Marxist relational sense, that is distinct from the working class and the capitalist class. While also taking stock of the polarization and fragmentation of working-class organization, politics, and ideology over recent decades, Radice insists that this signals the need for a critique of the ways class has been understood in the Marxist tradition. Insofar as the continuous technological change integral to capital accumulation transforms the social division of labor both within society at large and within workplaces, a major challenge for class analysis is to develop an alternative understanding of production and labor that can effectively integrate the sphere of reproduction. But, in opposition to the realm of value and capital, also something more: [t]o envision socialism as a realm of freedom, and develop social practices that can begin to realize it … [by starting] from use values, concrete labor, and social needs.

III.

The essays in this collection offer, then, a distinctive socialist contribution to the analysis of class and technology within capitalist relations of production. Across a five-decade span of publication of the Socialist Register, they advance a withering critique of the technological fetishism that has accompanied each new wave of innovation and each new crisis with its associated forced restructuring of capital, labor processes, and class relations. Such misconceptions arise, on the social democratic left as well as the political center and right, from the confusion that the increased concentration of technical and social control over massive fixed-capital complexes by corporations, and a politics of production of individual labor processes that is increasingly opaque and mediated by layers of management protocols, are technological inevitabilities. The essays assembled here point to what is missing in all variants of technological fetishism: both a theoretical understanding of the class dynamics that inevitably distort and circumscribe the process of technological change under capitalism, and the political imagination to see the enormous untapped potential that could be unleashed by enabling popular capacities for democratic planning around technological development and deployment in a different system of production.

As the essays here attest, making the working class today is far removed from a backward-looking quest to reassemble a traditional industrial working class, in the face of new technologies and sectors of accumulation, as more than a few lazy liberal critiques have charged. And it is even less an effort to discover an equivalent to the proletariat under the amorphous—indeed vacuous—conceptual label of the multitude. It is, rather, to insist on a careful class mapping—what Marx called for at one time as a class inquiry—of the tendencies and forces that materialize from specific technological developments in new labor processes and occupational vectors. The digital platforms and distributional logistics of twenty-first-century capitalism offer a landscape of class formation and struggle quite distinct from the coal seams of the Industrial Revolution or the auto plants of the last century.

But if new, even better, class maps can help us clarify the political questions at hand, they do not settle them. New technologies have always provided capacities for individual capitalist groups to control ever-larger masses of capital, whether decentralized into individualized workstations or organized into intricate commodity chains linking nodes of massive fixed investments in industrial, commercial, and financial capital. Being only one part of a chain of value production can easily engender a sense of vulnerability and push workers into productivity pacts with employers that accept the disciplines and stratifications of market competition in return for job guarantees. It is simply not possible to offer a brace of policies—such as work sharing, skills adjustment, or basic income programs, in the common technocratic response to automation for a century now—to offset the impacts of technological change in the hope of a more humane capitalism. More ambitious reforms also need to take up work-time reduction, collective bargaining controls over work reorganization, upgrading of skills and standards to be cognizant of cyber-work, and prohibitions on work surveillance.