Reflection on the Role of the Service Workers in Capitalism and the Communist Movement
In much of the US today, the social role of the greater part of the proletariat is not defined by the traditional functions of agricultural or industrial production, but rather by that of the so-called “service” sector. Discussing and organizing the movement for a socialist revolution in this country, then, is very necessarily connected with analyzing the role of this segment of the proletariat.
Much, but not all, of the labour done in the service sector falls into the category of what Marx’s magnum opus Capital called the faux frais, or “incidentals,” of production. This is work in the capitalist mode of production/economic system which does not produce use values that are commodified, but rather functions to facilitate the circulation of these commodities, goods or services, on the market. Certain elements (one thinks of the infamous revisionists of the MIM(P)) have suggested the service proletariat in the imperialist countries, given their involvement in faux frais nonproductive labour combined with their benefitting from their country’s economics of imperialism, constitute a kind of neobourgeoisie, without revolutionary potential. This is dangerously wrong. In the first place, even as faux frais labour is not directly productive, those who do it are nonetheless subjugated and manipulated by the ruling capitalist class, forced by circumstance and by the policies of the bourgeois state to sell away their time at starvation wages for survival, and they still need and deserve freedom from this. And in the second place, more significantly, those who do faux frais labour are rarely engaged exclusively in such. I will quote here from my notes on the first two volumes of Capital, which I hope to publish on this blog sometime this year:
There is labour which is obviously productive, which produces objects with qualitative use values and thus quantitative economic value; there is also labour which adds use value or qualities of utility (such as convenience, longevity, etc.) and thus quant. value to commodified objects (or phenomena; anywhere I’ve talked of commodities as objects it should be taken as implied that they can also be phenomena, like e.g. a haircut) already existent; there is also labour which does not create use value per se but helps to transmit it under capitalism. These latter two categories blend together in “service” sectors, the latter of the two being “faux frais” labour- labour made “necessary” in a given system of economics without directly producing use value. It is not necessarily easy to draw the line betwixt the two. Sometimes work does not appear productive of value in any obvious way, but it still evidently is because sizable increases in the value of commodified use value-having objects result from its modification of said objects, and workers accordingly are afforded wages and have produced surplus value. There are also instances where labour is productive of a commodified use value, but that value is in a service, a phenomenon rather than an object, and that service itself is a commodity and has a commodified use value (e.g. cleaning). Faux frais labour, which, since it serves to circulate goods and services as instruments of capital rather than to make them, is largely related to selling on a market (e.g. most of what presently makes up retail work), will of course be largely phased out and replaced with more socially beneficial tasks under a socialist economy; nonetheless, though, service workers deserve to share in the value they help create, of the goods they modify and help produce, under socialism…
We cannot divide the proletariat evenly between those in the faux frais roles and those in the industrious ones, as we draw a clear line between proles and bourgeoisie, because the workers who are doing faux frais labour are also, to varying degrees, either producing commodified use-value in the form of services or adding new use-value and thus new surplus value to the existing goods their labour modifies. And so, even as we expect faux frais labour, a major fraction of “service” work, to become obsolete under socialism as democratic centralist economic planning moves us beyond commodity production and circulation for profit, nonetheless the service workers are productive members of the proletariat and must be involved in the socialist movement and must expect to take up democratic sovietist control of their labour in the new economic system to be created.
Marx, of course, wrote principally of the proletariat working in heavy industry. This was right of him, given that they are the principle producers of use value from labour and thus the wealth of society, and also not surprising given he wrote in a time when capitalism was not so developed as it is now, his own country of Germany having been only relatively recently brought into capitalist economics and out of the feudal system of the HRE by the wave of bourgeois revolutions in Europe associated with the French and early liberalism•, and so the “service sector” had not evolved to the extent it has in the modern system of hegemonic capitalist-imperialism, especially here in the imperialist hegemon of the US. He was correct, and we continue, to prescribe the key power in society to the workers who physically produce the wealth of society in use values, goods or services, but it is mechanical and dogmatic to ignore in the call to unify the workers those whose role in production of such is not immediately obvious. The service workers are also a part of the process of producing the use values that are the wealth of society, over which the workers must seize rule through seizing the means of their production upon which they labour. The agricultural and industrial workers produce and reproduce the most crucial elements of the annual social produce, such as food and the means of production for other sectors, and it is logical and correct that an emphasis be placed on building the movement in these areas so that when the revolutionary military campaign begins the institutions of dual power in socialist base areas in this country can seize control of these crucial sectors. But revolutionary potential exists also amongst the service workers.
In particular, such major employers as Amazon and Walmart are known for the grim conditions of their service workers and the discontent this engenders among them. These are areas of rich revolutionary potential which the communists must move to activate with the teaching of class consciousness and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Even so, we cannot ignore psychosocial differences between faux frais work and industrious productive work. I myself, while I am not in the habit nor shall I be of discussing my personal life on this blog, will say this: I have worked both in retail, overwhelmingly a faux frais field, and briefly in smalltime community-based agriculture. The experiential differences cannot be ignored. Certainly the agricultural work was harder physically: I went home every day with shoes caked in mud and cowshit, and on rainy days with the skin under my feet turning cold and pale grey from water leaking into my shoes. Yet I also felt contented and got on well with my coworkers. Retail work is physically easier, but comes with a unique ennui, a unique sense of malaise and discontent that makes it a difficult position in which to find any real satisfaction; Marx wrote that the proletarian labourer under an exploitative and contradictory economic system like capitalism is alienated from the produce of their own labour and thus develops neuroses and an alienated affect; one infers, then, that the effect of alienation is all the worse when one’s life is stolen and wasted not even on producing anything, one’s power of mind and body merely sapped away facilitating the mere shuffling around of use values, not producing anything at all for one’s self or community but simply to further the profits of some hated other.
By contrast, there can be great and genuine satisfaction in a job well done when it is productive and for the right.
In light of this, it must be resolved that we as the working class can only look forward to the obsolescence of commodity production and its associated faux frais labour under socialism, and the resultant migration, guided and protected by the democratic institutions of worker rule, of the workers occupied in such labour into operations where they can instead be employed in fulfilling and meaningful roles making material contributions to the further advancement of the great civilization†.
It is also worth noting, regarding the psychosocial effect of faux frais labour, a troubling cultural phenomenon of current prevalence, which one sometimes even sees mistaken for a kind of class consciousness: the direction of the alienation and discontent of the service workers in so-called “public-facing” jobs into hatred and enmity toward the customer. This must be understood as counterproductive misdirection of righteous class rage into an avenue which is useless and distracting from authentic class struggle. We must not forget, and I say this as a retail worker: the enemy is not the customer, who is nine times out of ten a proletarian just like oneself. The enemy, to blame for every misfortune and psychosocial torment of our position, is the boss, the capitalist class and the institution of capital.
The liberation of the service worker from exploitation under capitalism comes from unification with the rest of the working class, principally the industrial and agricultural proles, behind the leadership of a vanguard communist Party of that working class which can lead the militant campaign to build a socialist republic. This must be guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo and universal lessons of Gonzalo Thought, as the scientific ideology of proletarian liberation.
FOOTNOTES
•Here is a sort of cliff-notes of historical materialism applied to Germany, not intended to be or be taken as an authoritative or expert source: the bourgeois and peasants’ capitalist revolution in France, led by revolutionary liberals like Robespierre and Saint-Just, as well as the counterrevolution of Bonaparte, brought turmoil to Europe and thus the collapse of the decrepit feudalism of the HRE. In the face of this bourgeois-revolutionary end to feudalism, the little German fiefs of the HRE quickly became fledgling bourgeois states under the increasing control of their own capitalist classes, just as the Netherlands and France had done much earlier (and Venice centuries before that). These started out as little microstates which arranged themselves into a loose confederation- this was the system under which Marx was born. As capital (as it tends to do) centralized more and more into the hands of a small group of bourgeoisie as capitalism developed, state power was increasingly centralized in the two largest German states, Prussia and Austria, which subsequently led to the confederation’s reorganization as the bourgeois monarchy of the German Empire under a Prussian dynasty and political system (there had also been an earlier attempt to unify it during the revolutionary wave of 1848, which also brought anti-feudal struggle to Wallachia and Moldavia, but this did not stick, although it was what really cemented the bourgeoisie at the helm of the state in Prussia especially- it was this event that led decisively to the crown and state being in the hands of the capitalists above all others; this happened the year the Communist Manifesto was published, and that volume’s fourth chapter alludes to this final completion of Germany’s bourgeois revolution) and the ascendance to imperialist power of Austria as the kakanian bourgeois monarchy of AustroHungary. The bourgeois state in Germany was later (in the 20th century, after Marx’s death), challenged in class struggle which led to the attempted revolution of 1918, the establishment of dual power and provisional socialist republics in several parts of it by the spartacists and communists under the heroic leadership of comrades like Luxemburg, and sadly ultimately the defeat of that revolutionary movement with the reorganization of the bourgeois state into a capitalist republic, not a capitalist monarchy.
†Here is the very limited way in which the “anti-work” current of anarchist anticapitalism holds some water: it is certainly true that some of the work one is made to do to survive under capitalism is meaningless, demeaning, and alienating. Some of the worst of these psychosocial effects are in faux frais labour, which communism will do away with. And yet that current nonetheless falls flat, in the first place because it believes absurdly that labour can actually be done away with meaningfully, and in the second place because it believes that this would be a good thing- it does not understand, in other words, that labour in which one is fulfilled and in which one feels the validity of what one does and makes, and why, is profoundly necessary to the human mind, indeed is perhaps its defining trait, and that when it is done freely and willingly and for the right it can be a source of great joy. This what we must aspire to see labour become for all under communism.
