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CapitalismandGold DuncanInnes Thedecadeofthe'seventieshasbeencharacterisedbyradicaland oftendramaticchangesinthesphereofinternationalcapitalist relations .Politicalchangesapart,theperiodhasseenamarked escalationinthepriceofoil,ragingworldinflation,recessionsin alltheworld'sleadingindustrialeconomiesandanincreasing tendencytowardspovertyandevenbankruptcyinmany countriesoftheso-calledThirdWorld .Runningparallelwith thesedevelopmentshasbeenthephenomenonofamassiverise inthegoldpriceand,concomitantwiththis,anunprecedented resurgenceofpublicinterestinthemetal . Thecomplextaskofunderstandingtheseseeminglydisparate phenomenaanddrawingoutthelinksbetweenthemhasbeen undertakenbymanyontheleft,butoftenlargelywithaviewto examiningtheirimplicationsforaparticularcountryratherthan examiningtheirimplicationsfortheinternationalcapitalist systemitself .Inthisarticle,Iintendtotryandexplainsomeof therecentdevelopmentsinthepriceofgoldbyreferenceto gold'shistoricalroleinthecapitalistmonetarysystemandby tryingtounderstandtherelationbetweenthechangingformof thatsystemandthebroadercrisesandpressuresthatareinherent intheworldcapitalisteconomy .Althoughthisarticlewillinevit- ablyleavemanykeyquestionsunanswered,Ihopethatthe systematicpresentationofthehistoricalevolutionofgold'srole inthemonetarysystemwillcontributetothedebateaboutthe natureofthepresentworldeconomiccrisisanditseffectonthe monetarysystem . Thefirstsectionofthearticlewilloutlinetheclassical Marxisttheoryofthevariousfunctionswhichmoneyperformsin thecapitalistsystem .Thisexpositionprovidesatheoreticalbasis forthesubsequenthistoricaldiscussionoftherolegoldcameto

Capital & Class. - 1981. - Issue 14

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  • Capitalism and Gold

    Duncan Innes

    The decade of the 'seventies has been characterised by radical and

    often dramatic changes in the sphere of international capitalist

    relations. Political changes apart, the period has seen a marked

    escalation in the price of oil, raging world inflation, recessions in

    all the world's leading industrial economies and an increasing

    tendency towards poverty and even bankruptcy in many

    countries of the so-called Third World . Running parallel with

    these developments has been the phenomenon of a massive rise

    in the gold price and, concomitant with this, an unprecedented

    resurgence of public interest in the metal .

    The complex task of understanding these seemingly disparate

    phenomena and drawing out the links between them has been

    undertaken by many on the left, but often largely with a view to

    examining their implications for a particular country rather than

    examining their implications for the international capitalist

    system itself . In this article, I intend to try and explain some of

    the recent developments in the price of gold by reference to

    gold's historical role in the capitalist monetary system and by

    trying to understand the relation between the changing form of

    that system and the broader crises and pressures that are inherent

    in the world capitalist economy . Although this article will inevit-

    ably leave many key questions unanswered, I hope that the

    systematic presentation of the historical evolution of gold's role

    in the monetary system will contribute to the debate about the

    nature of the present world economic crisis and its effect on the

    monetary system .

    The first section of the article will outline the classical

    Marxist theory of the various functions which money performs in

    the capitalist system . This exposition provides a theoretical basis

    for the subsequent historical discussion of the role gold came to

  • 6The Functions

    of Money

    CAPITAL AND CLASS

    play in the monetary system and also of the reasons for ti

    changing nature of that system over time . The following sectioi

    will provide a detailed analysis of the role of gold in the poi

    World War II phase of capital accumulation, with particular stre

    being laid on the conditions which gave rise to the current cri;

    in capitalism and on the effects of that crisis on gold's role in tl

    monetary system .

    `Money does not arise by convention, any more than ti

    state does . It arises out of exchange ; it is a product of ti

    same.' (Marx, 1973, p. 165)

    According to Marx, the capitalist exchange process (the basis i

    which may be expressed in the syllogism, C - M - C) can on

    function systematically if the commodities which are exchang(

    have as their value a common property, human labour, by whit

    they can be measured against each other. The human labor

    which is embodied in the commodity is measured by social

    necessary labour time . The value of all commodities is thus dete

    mined by the amount of human labour, measured in terms 4

    socially necessary labour time, which they embody and whi

    oppression from some abstract theory of the needs of capital

    the existing 'family -household system' for example, is not the

    only possible way of reproducing labour-power - but at the samc

    time must see the relations of oppression as by now entrancheo

    within the nature of capitalist relations of production . The

    precise ways in which gender division become built into capital

    ism were determined by the history of struggles between men ant

  • REVIEW ARTICLE:

    135

    women,within

    theworking class and within the bourgeoisie .

    Things could have' worked out differently : there was no essential

    logic to capitalist production dictating the present outcome .

    Thus if we were to ask `Is women's liberation possible under cap-

    italism?', we could not expect to find the answer in a theory of

    capital. The problem and its answers are alike historical .

    As a programmatic statement, I found myself very much in

    sympathy with this. But like all programmes, it means different

    things to different people. And what characterises Michele

    Barrett's version of it is the insistence that the historical analysis

    must be one which keeps distinct the economicand the ideolog-

    ical . In the analysis of the family, which is the most substantive

    section of the book, this means a clear distinction between famil-

    ial ideology and household . The ideology of the family presents

    the man as breadwinner, the woman as dependent, and the family

    itself as a haven of privacy beyond the public world of work.

    The household as a material institution, by contrast, is one in

    which women perform their domestic drudgery, and from which

    they venture forth into low paid, unskilled wage labour; as

    Michele has argued elsewhere ('The Family Wage', with Mary

    McIntosh, Capital and Class 11) the working class family with

    man as sole breadwinner is largely mythological . This distinction

    does point to some important questions about the nature of

    female dependency, and the illusion of the housebound house-

    wife, but in the end leads into strange territory . Having made this

    distinction between familial ideology and household, and argued

    for a tension between them, Michele Barrett then has to explain

    the pervasiveness of this ideology which seems so much at odds

    with the reality of the working class household . And here she is

    forced onto an Engels-type argument : that familial ideology

    arose as part of the class practice of the bourgeoisie, and that

    somehow- in a process that is by no means clear to me - the

    bourgeoisie were able to impose this on the working class. The

    conclusion is that familial ideology is part of bourgeoishegem-

    ony. If this were true, it would indeed be reassuring for socialist

    feminists. But can the tensions between working class politics and

    feminism be so easily resolved?

    The argument invites a response at a methodological level . It

    is tempting to enter into debate with the version of materialism

    offered: to argue, for example, that analyses which re-affirm our

    old categories of the economic and the ideological are not the

    best way forward for feminism; to argue that we can hope to

    avoid indeterminacy without falling back on distinctions develop-

    ed within theories which barely touched on the complexities of

    gender. But such temptations should probably be resisted . As

    Michele Barrett herself argues, the issues will not be resolved at

    the level of theory alone, but will depend on an historical analysis

    of the contradictory ways in which the oppression of women

    has become embedded in the nature of contemporary capitalism .

  • 136 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    The difficulty with Women's Oppression Today is that th

    explicit argument - for a historical approach - is very much a

    odds with the implicit message - which would seem to attac

    great weight to methodological imperatives . It could simpl

    provoke further episodes in the debate about the nature o

    marxist feminist analysis in general, and if the experience c

    debates about the nature of Marxist analysis in general is anythin

    to go by, such discussions are unlikely to lead far . But if he

    programmatic statement for the future of feminist work is take .

    seriously, we may be able to free ourselves from the legacy o

    recent years and get on with the task of developing feminist

    analysis .

    Feminist Review aims to develop the theory of Women's Liberation

    and debate the political perspectives and strategy of

    the movement, and to be a forum for work in progress

    and current research and debates in Women's Studies .

    Previous issues of Feminist Review have included : Mandy Snell on the

    sex discrimination legislation, Beatrix Campbell on sexual politics and

    women's liberation, Nicola Murray on Cuba, Veronica Beechey on

    patriarchy and much more . . . education,

    feminist history, feminist campaigns,

    feminism and culture . . .

    Why not subscribe?

    Feminist Review is published three

    times a year. Only 4 .50 for three

    issues for a UK individual subscription

    Only 5 .50 for an overseas individual

    subscription .

    Subscriptions, general enquiries and

    information about institutional and

    airmail overseas rates available from

    Feminist Review, 65 Manor Road,

    London N.16, UK .

  • Reviews

    WORKING CLASS CULTURE-STUDIES IN HISTORY

    AND THEORY

    Edited by John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson .

    Hutchinson (London : 1979) pp. 301, 8.95

    Reviewed by Howard Horne .

    Thirty five years ago Adorno and Horkheimer published their crit-

    ique of the capitalist `culture industry', `Dialectic of Enlightenment' .

    It was an analysis which sought to rescue `high art' from the barbar-

    ous distortions and trivialism of `mass art', and to show the deleter-

    ious effect of mass culture on the emotional and political sensibilit-

    ies of the working class . A subsequent tradition of sociology and

    social/cultural history has attempted to retrieve `culture' from the

    elitist embrace of the Frankfurt School, replacing `culture as aesth-

    etics' with a concept of culture, derived from social anthropology,

    which stresses its meaning as a continuous creative process : Culture

    as `a way of life', a way of making sense of the world .

    It is difficult to locate the authors of Working Class Culture (the

    latest commodity from the prolific collective pens assembled in and

    around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)

    within the Frankfurt tradition of cultural theory . Yet neither are

    they easily situated in terms of the work of British 'culturalism' .

    Much of the text reviewed here represents a sustained theoretical

    critique of Hoggart and, more significantly, Williams and E . P.

    Thompson-those who seize on the title expecting an integrated

    empirical history of the working class to unfold in the pages will be

    disappointed . We must read the qualification contained in the

    subtitle : `Studies in History and Theory' . There is a case studies

    section-sandwiched uneasily between the book's opening and con-

    cluding theoretical considerations-but the central organising intent-

    ion is, as the authors state in the Preface, `to make theoretical dis-

    cussion more aware of its own history and make historical (or'con-

    crete') studies more aware of theoretical debts and dependencies .'

    Thence the subtitle, which would more accurately read `Studies in

    the History of Theory' ; thence the attack on culturalism .

    Chapter 1, `Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working

  • 138 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    class' assesses routinely the ways that sociology has examined the

    post-war working class-it is routine because it reiterates the now

    accepted critique of the `affluence theorists', and the replacement of

    `affluence' by the `rediscovery of class' .

    Chapter 2, `Culture and the Historians', is more interesting, for

    here Richard Johnson opens his expansive attack on the 'culturalism'

    of Williams and Thompson and the `structuralism' of Althusser .

    Thankfully, we learn that there can be no straightforward success-

    ion : `Neither culturalism nor structuralism will do!'

    The criticisms of Williams and Thompson are not new : Accord-

    ing to Johnson, neither writer realises the potential of his intellectual

    endeavours ; neither writer, in operating within a `Marxist cultural-

    ism', is sufficiently cognisant of the structural element of Marxist

    theory-we cannot construct historical cultural explanations around

    a central premise of `experience' because to do so is to ignore that

    social relations have an inner logic which escapes comprehension and

    which operates `behinds men's backs .' `Experience' has its own

    hidden structure .

    Structuralism is also attacked, again for familiar reasons-its

    functionalism, its high theoreticism-but this critique does not rep-

    resent wholesale rejection-in the book's later theoretical explanat-

    ions, where the criticisms are refined and the new definition of cult-

    ural studies elaborated, we are told : `In what follows we try to learn

    from this settling of accounts with our erstwhile Althusserianism .'

    But what do they learn? What is to be the `correct' method of con-

    ducting cultural analysis?

    What is offered for our consumption can be summarised as a

    synthesis of culturalism and structuralism which on first sight

    appears unpalatable if not distinctly indigestible . The new synthesis

    surfaces visibly in Richard Johnson's plea on behalf of the socio-

    logical status of `culture' as an analytical tool :

    `It is important to retain "culture" as a category of analysis .

    By culture is understood the common sense or way of life of a

    particular class, group or social category, the complex of ideo-

    logies that are actually adopted as moral preferences or prin-

    ciples of life . . .Ideologies always work upon a ground, that

    ground is culture . p. 234) .

    One point this quotation immediately illustrates is the writer's de-

    votion to the current sociological vogue for cartographic metaphors ;

    more importantly it sets the `correct' parameters of cultural study-

    the way to recover the economic mediations absent from culturalism

    and the experiential and cultural mediations absent from structural-

    ism . Hence :

    `Any analysis of "working-class culture" must be able to grasp

    the relation between economic classes and the forms in which

    they do (or do not) become active in conscious politics . . .If

    class is understood (as we are told Thompson understands class)

    only as a cultural and political formation, a whole theoretical

    legacy is impoverished and materialist accounts are indisting-

    uishable from idealism .' (p . 223)

    Thirty five years ago Adorno and Horkheimer published their crit-

    ique of the capitalist `culture industry', `Dialectic of Enlightenment' .

  • REVIEWS

    139

    It was an analysis which sought to rescue `high art' from the barbar-

    ous distortions and trivialism of `mass art', and to show the deleter-

    ious effect of mass culture on the emotional and political sensibilit-

    ies of the working class . A subsequent tradition of sociology and

    social/cultural history has attempted to retrieve `culture' from the

    elitist embrace of the Frankfurt School, replacing `culture as aesth-

    etics' with a concept of culture, derived from social anthropology,

    which stresses its meaning as a continuous creative process : Culture

    as `a way of life', a way of making sense -of the world .

    It is difficult to locate the authors of WorkingClass Culture (the

    latest commodity from the prolific collective pens assembled in and

    around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)

    within the Frankfurt tradition of cultural theory . Yet neither are

    they easily situated in terms of the work of British 'culturalism'.

    Much of the text reviewed here represents a sustainedtheoretical

    critique of Hoggart and, more significantly, Williams and E . P.

    Thompson-those who seize on the title expecting an integrated

    empirical history of the working class to unfold in the pages will be

    disappointed . We must read the qualification contained in the

    subtitle : `Studies in History and Theory' . There is a case studies

    section-sandwiched uneasily between the book's opening and con-

    cluding theoretical considerations-but the central organising intent-

    ion is, as the authors state in the Preface, `to make theoretical dis-

    cussion more aware of its own history and make historical (or 'con-

    crete') studies more aware of theoretical debts and dependencies.'

    Thence the subtitle, which would more accurately read `Studies in

    the History of Theory' ; thence the attack on culturalism .

    Chapter 1, `Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working

    class' assesses routinely the ways that sociology has examined the

    post-war working class-it is routine because it reiterates the now

    accepted critique of the `affluence theorists', and the replacement of

    `affluence' by the `rediscovery of class'.

    Chapter 2, `Culture and the Historians', is more interesting, for

    here Richard Johnson opens his expansive attack on the 'culturalism'

    of Williams and Thompson and the `structuralism' of Althusser .

    Thankfully, we learn that there can be no straightforward success-

    ion: `Neither culturalism nor structuralism will do!'

    The criticisms of Williams and Thompson are not new: Accord-

    ing to Johnson, neither writer realises the potential of his intellectual

    endeavours ; neither writer, in operating within a `Marxist cultural-

    ism', is sufficiently cognisant of the structural element of Marxist

    theory-we cannot construct historical cultural explanations around

    a central premise of `experience' because to do so is to ignore that

    social relations have an inner logic which escapes comprehension and

    which operates `behinds men's backs .' `Experience' has its own

    hidden structure .

    Structuralism is also attacked, again for familiar reasons-its

    functionalism, its high theoreticism-but this critique does not rep-

    resent wholesale rejection-in the book's later theoretical explanat-

    ions, where the criticisms are refined and the new definition of cult-

    ural studies elaborated, we are told: `In what follows we try to learn

    from this settling of accounts with our erstwhile Althusserianism .'

    But what do they learn? What is to be the `correct' method of con-

    ducting cultural analysis?

  • 140 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    What is offered for our consumption can be summarised as a

    synthesis of culturalism and structuralism which on first sight

    appears unpalatable if not distinctly indigestible . The new synthesis

    surfaces visibly in Richard Johnson's plea on behalf of the socio-

    logical status of `culture' as an analytical tool :

    `It is important to retain "culture" as a category of analysis .

    By culture is understood the common sense or way of life of a

    particular class, group or social category, the complex of ideo-

    logies that are actually adopted as moral preferences or prin-

    ciples of life . . .Ideologies always work upon a ground, that

    ground is culture . p . 234) .

    One point this quotation immediately illustrates is the writer's de-

    votion to the current sociological vogue for cartographic metaphors ;

    more importantly it sets the `correct' parameters of cultural study-

    the way to recover the economic mediations absent from culturalism

    and the experiential and cultural mediations absent from structural-

    ism . Hence :

    `Any analysis of "working-class culture" must be able to grasp

    the relation between economic classes and the forms in which

    they do (or do not) become active in conscious politics . . .If

    class is understood (as we are told Thompson understands class)

    only as a cultural and political formation, a whole theoretical

    legacy is impoverished and materialist accounts are indisting-

    uishable from idealism .' (p . 223)

    Whether or not Thompson would agree with this summary of his

    conception of class need not concern us here, for we must proceed

    to the next stage of the critique-we must not counter cultural ideal-

    ism with Althusserianism . To do so would destroy the possibility

    (because of Althusser's epistemology) of constructing a meaningful

    model of historical research, further, it would entail the corruption

    of `theory' or `rational abstraction' into a condition or stance of

    `theoretical autonomy'-it would lead us,

    `to neglect the moment of self-creation, of theaffirmation of

    belief or of the giving of consent (which) would, once more

    return us to "pure mechanicity" .' (p . 234)

    Thus in being led towards the `terrain' on which the `map' of the

    `cultural ground' is to be theoretically constructed, we are told that

    we must retain the positive elements of culturalism and explore the

    specific ways, the moments in which creativity and cultural express-

    ion arises from within the structural conditions of society .

    This approach, while not founded upon particularly original

    critiques of existing problematics, is at least stylistically novel . We

    cannot doubt the difficulties of studying `culture', particularly when

    the intention is to simultaneously reform existing theoretical mis-

    conceptions . Similarly, we cannot doubt the worth of John Clarke's

    `refusal to collapse "working-class culture" into some simple, ex-

    pressive, homogeneous entity .' (p . 253) This refusal occurs in the

    concluding chapter of the book which attempts to situate this tent-

    ative, synthetic mode of cultural explanation in general terms-

    to `revisit' the post-war working class free of the constraints of

    culturalism and structuralism .

  • REVIEWS

    141

    But we can doubt the direction in which the conclusions con-

    tained in `Working Class Culture' (and here we can broaden our gaze

    to embrace other output from the Centre) lead in terms of a socio-

    logy of culture-what is doubtful, specifically, is the relation of the

    cultural `ground of transformations' to the `necessities of produc-

    tion.'

    One fundamental question must be : Does such a mode of anal-

    ysis as the one we are offered make sense of culture? (And despite

    two thorough readings of the book, despite their various attempts at

    definition, I am still not wholly clear as to their usage of the term) .

    Does it make sense, for example, in charting the development of

    football since the war (one case study in an unconvincing assort-

    ment which includes 19th . century education, organised youth at

    the beginning of the century, a study of domestic service between

    the wars and `Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40') to state that

    through the increasing commercialisation of the professional game,

    the `general life experience' of the working class is increasingly

    `reproduced inside football-that of "cultural alienation" .' Att-

    ending football matches is no longer, as it once was, a source of org-

    anic collective class identification : It `has lost its partial autonomy

    as a form of popular culture from the economic and cultural forces

    dominant in the rest of society .' (p . 183) As a form of cultural ex-

    pression it has been `rendered irrelevant' by external forces which

    have redefined its role in working class life . But we are not being

    told that football's expressive role in working class culture has ever

    been oppositional: `It was rather a symbolic displacement, produced,

    transmitted and recognised by working-class men as expressive of

    their situation .' (p . 183/4)

    But what of an area of working-class culture, and its analysis, where

    it is difficult not to draw oppositional implications, even if we must

    stop short of ascribing oppositional motives-the eclectic yet highly

    visible world of working-class youth subcultures that John Clarke

    `revisits' .

    It is here that the Centre's own `theoretical debts'- to the 'soc-

    iology of deviance' tradition-beome more explicit . Working-class

    youth culture is always a deviant youth culture : When we refer to

    working-class youth we effectively focus on the stylised, controver-

    sial and visible world of male youth cults. For the Centre, as the

    football supporter is in a position of constant struggle to re-establish

    a meaningful identity in the context of the game, so the skinheads

    struggle for the `magical reconstitution of community', the mods'

    subcultural style was to `subvert the supposed role of the consumer'

    in the heady days of sixties affluence . Working-class youth sub-

    sultures are an attempt to establish control of a hostile world ; they

    are rational responses to a material situation ; they are `cultural

    representations of the class's conditions of existence .'

    But what are a class's `conditions of existence'? How is class

    defined? Is it defined in terms of the changing relationship of youth

    to productive forces and their experience within the productive

    process, or is it defined culturally, through reference to specific

    leisure institutions and to such notions of style? Paul Willis, in his

    case study `Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form',

    makes one very pertinent point as to what the commonly-shared

  • 142 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    continuities of working-class experience may be : `The wage and the

    Thursday afternoon wage packet are an essential element of shop-

    floor culture .' (p . 195) .

    `Working Class Culture' generally avoids the phenomenological

    excesses which have marked other books published by the Centre

    and its students . (See, as an example of the existential extremes to

    which subcultural analysis can be taken, Dick Hebdige's recently

    published `Subculture: the meaning of style .') But the analysis

    remains incomplete and unconvincing . As Graham Murdock and

    Robin McCron once commented on the subcultural method :

    'Subcultural studies start by taking distinctive subcultural styles

    and the groups who are involved in them, and then working

    backwards to uncover their class base .' (Consciousness of class

    and consciousness of generation) .

    . . .a comment certainly applicable to the case studies contained in

    'Working Class Culture' . As Marx stated :

    'It is . in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly

    kernel of the misty creation of religion than to do the opposite,

    i .e . to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms

    in which these have been apotheosized .' (Capital 1, Penguin

    Edition . p . 494) .

    Despite their protestations to the contrary, the Centre's writers

    in general have not foresaken their `erstwhile Althusserianism' . The

    active creativity that, for example, Williams and Thompson stress is

    replaced by a `creativity' limited to the level of implicit symbolic

    subversion-'working-class culture' becomes a structured stylistic

    response to a general structural situation . These responses are sub-

    versive-by-implication, their true meaning eluding the grasp of the

    participants, but their significance does not escape the searching and

    perceptive vision of the Centre's writers who quite happily translate

    this cultural expression and activity into superbly fluent flights of

    symbolic glory .

    Such sociological 'readings' of culture can only exacerbate the

    everyday put-downs of sociologists-no wonder people who may go

    to football matches, become members of youth cults for reasons as

    unsociological as 'enjoyment' and `fun', state that sociologists claim

    they can discover the politically symbolic implications of 'pissing up

    a wall'! Would Thompson see political implications in such an act,

    or would he see the political areas of working class culture as, un-

    fashionably, such institutions as trade unions?

    'Working Class Culture' represents a useful introduction to the

    work and theories of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies .

    But given their sustained output of plausible books ; their (unwitt-

    ing?) construction of the dominant sociological cultural studies

    paradigm ; the way their mode of analysis has filtered down through

    the intellectual atmosphere to provide a powerful mode for cultural

    analysis in the mass media, can there be many of us who have not

    had previous exposure to 'Centre Culture', to the Centre's way of

    making sense of the world?

    Perhaps we should complete the chapter heading from 'Dialectic

    of Enlightenment'-'The Culture Industry : Enlightenment as Mass

    Deception'-and place it in a revised context .

  • REVIEWS

    143

    DEAR COMRADES: READERS' LETTERS TO

    LOTTA CONTINUA

    Pluto Press (London) 1 .95 pb .

    Reviewed by Bob Lumley

    `Once when I was a little "smart Alec", I was very attached

    to a saying of a certain professional philosopher, who used to

    say that when we are interpreting things "We must neither

    laugh nor cry, but understand". More recently I have come

    to feel that this is the biggest piece of shit I have ever heard

    in all my life . No . . . the problem was precisely to laugh, and

    to cry, and to understand .' (Adriano Sofri, General Secret-

    ary, at 1976 Lotta Continua Conference)

    At the conference there wasn't much laughter, very little under-

    standing and a lot of tears . Lotta Continua as an organisation was

    torn apart by contradictions ; workerists and feminists were at

    each others throats. What survived was the newspaper bearing the

    name and an `area' of readers . The new project of the leaders

    entailed submerging themselves in the `movement' and trying to

    creatively develop its contradictions and conflicts rather than re-

    imposing organisational models from above . Sofri called it learn-

    ing to `live with an earthquake', that is hanging on `not to the

    ground, which is slipping away, but to oneself, to one's own

    consciousness, to what we call "individual autonomy" .' Neverthe-

    less, in an important way, the leaders did not disappear nor did

    they continue in their old ways . They became 'opinion-leaders'

    and worked to form a `party of opinion' . Only those who wanted

    to recreate the party disappeared .

    It is worth noting that there were traditions, styles and

    theories that made Lotta Continua capable of this strange meta-

    morphosis from party to letters-page of the `movement' . Anarch-

    ists, anarcho-syndicalists, Luxemburg and others were thought to

    be part of the heritage every bit as much as Lenin, whilst the

    notion of tradition and dogma had no place .Lotta Continua's

    swiftness in starting a campaign in defence of the `framed' Val-

    preda('anarchist ballet-dancer') after the Piazza Fontana

    bombings contrasted with the slow response of the `orthodox'.

    Lotta Continua, moreover, exalted working class creativity above

    the `cunning' of the party . Yet it too took on some of the bureau-

    cratised forms it criticised and made a fetish of the working class

    (the Lotta Continuaimage of the worker has been compared to

    one of those soldiers with bayonets always ready, often found on

    war memorials). Its inability to be organic to movements in

    civil society doomed its attempt to lead struggles, and yet its

    own movementist currents meant that it had to return to move-

    ments themselves when the other `parties' of the so-called extra-

    parliamentary Left built concrete bunkers to keep out the earth-

  • 144 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    quake. Giorgio Bocca, a liberal journalist, observed in his reviel,

    of Dear Comrades : `Sometimes the professors of Il Manifest'

    reproach the pedagogues of Lotta Continua for their oscillat

    ions and contradictions ; however, let's give them credit for still

    being on the field, trying to mediate and explain what th

    majority Left out of complacency or cynicism or through a deter

    minate plan have by now abandoned' .

    For Bocca modern Italian `youth' is a `problem', but he i

    not wrong about the mediating role played by Lotta Continua a ,

    a paper. Crucially it has carved out a political space that i

    `against the State and against the Red Brigades' . At the confer

    ence against repression in Bologna in September 1977 a battl:

    was fought and largely won against the hard-line, militaristic win ;

    of Autonomia, whose actions endangered movements for

    autonomy coming from among women and young people searchi

    ing for a pre-figurative politics. Then, during the Moro kidnaps

    ping, Lotta Continua became the voice of the `party of saving life

    against the reason of State embodied in the Christian Democrat

    and PCI. In its political interventions the paper played an import

    ant role in standing for independence and critical reason an,

    humanitarianism against a wind of conformism . The role is not

    without its contradictions and these have come into the open o~

    the letters page . The range of contributions come mainly from

    certain `area' (three quarters bourgeois, one quarter proletarian

    says Bocca) that includes both sympathisers with `armed struggle

    and pacifists. Recently the editor has been given a suspended sen ,

    ence for publishing a letter from someone supporting the Re .

    Brigades, an act which symbolises a position both of promotion

    of free speech and one which wants to keep open a debate ox

    the tactical, strategic and moral `rights' and `wrongs' of the use o

    violence for political purposes .

    The letters page of Lotta Continua has had this function o

    being the sounding-board for discussions taking place within the

    `movement'. An editing process takes place which gives som

    coherence and continuity to contributions, and which, inevitl

    ably, sets certain political agendas and priorities . Of 8,000 letter

    sent in 1977, 1,000 were published in the paper, and 350 cam;

    out in the book (which is then selectively translated into th;

    English version) . It would be terribly interesting to be a fly-on'

    the-wall during an editorial session to see precisely how and wh :

    decisions are made about what letters are `representative' . What

    does come out at a quick glance at a letters-page is the amount o

    space dedicated to correspondence, and the minimising of headl

    lining and packaging. This is made possible because Lotte

    Continua is a daily, but it also reflects a respect for self'

    expression and an interest in the `small things' of life as well as ii

    the great themes .

    This approach of getting people to speak their minds ant

    bare their souls, and to `laugh, and cry, and understand' togethe

    makes for a form of politics that breaks with the older dominanc ;

    of super-rational leaderism . In this Lotta Continua was not

    inventing something out of thin air, but giving vent to the need ,

    and new forms of politics emerging in the `movement' (For a,

    excellent account of this see Italy 1977-8, Living with an Earth

    quake by Red Notes) . I just want to point to a couple of develop

  • REVIEWS145

    ments; firstly, the women's movement in Italy became generalised

    at a moment of political crisis andgrew against the dominant

    practices of the Left in a more dramatic confrontation than

    elsewhere . Although feminism has mostly adopted class analyses

    as well as analyses of women's oppression,its impact has been

    magnified and made more destructive/constructive than say in

    Britain. Secondly, in similar ways,a `youth culture' appeared as

    an identifiable social phenomenon in Italy onlyin the mid-

    70's when clubs, circles, rock concerts,drugs and a diffuse notion

    of generational difference and conflict combined with a new

    `existentialism' .

    Both these developments have been powerful forces in re-

    defining politics in relation to the personal, and the majority of

    letters in Dear Comrades are about this process. It represents a

    turn away from general ideologies that has had an impact at the

    levels of theory and intellectual practices as well as in forms of

    political militancy and in the living of `everyday life'. Especially

    among the `old' New Left there has been a return to empiricism,

    to the study of what people `really are thinking' rather than

    what they `should be thinking' . Marxism is widely regarded as an

    ideology of regimes and parties, and Foucault enjoys popularity,

    often coming out in Italian before the French edition . Interest

    focuses on the micro-exercise of power and the need for a capil-

    lary contestation . Significant too is the taking up of oral history

    with a particular stress on investigating `culture' (in an anthrop-

    ological sense) : here links run to theHistory Workshop .

    All more

    personal and intimate forms of expressionare the vogue; letters,

    diaries, singing ballads and so on.Several of the Lotta Continua

    letters contain `home-made' poetry, and one says that Cossiga

    definitely does not write poetry.

    Commentators like Bocca, and also the `professors' ofIl

    Manifesto, speak of a crisis of `reason' and a rebirthof 'irration-

    alism' ; they treat the contestation as a problem of pathology

    (underpinned, of course, by unemployment etc). Such an

    approach often leads to the processesof 'criminalisation' that

    have become a key mechanism in the reconstructionof a strong

    Italian State. Although we want no truck with such tendencies,

    we have nonetheless toface the bitter and negative realities

    behind rebellions in society, and identify those forces that divide,

    'disaggregate' and weaken opposition. Earthquakes not only pro-

    voke invention, self-reliance and thesearch for new structures of

    comradeship, but also fears, anxieties and breakdowns. Many of

    the letters in Dear Comradesspeak of suicides, of loneliness, of

    heroin-addiction, and just readingthem is overwhelming emot-

    ionally. In an important way theLotta Continua letters are

    testimony of crisis, confusion and despair, and do not provide

    `ways forward' so much as an airingof problems . Given the

    propensity for people on the Left to feelthey should always be

    positive and look on the bright side (even though they might

    not really have thought the revolutionwas around the corner),

    such openness is a good development. That said, there are other

    tendencies that are self-defeating,such as self-indulgence in a

    romanticisation of a comrade's death and a return to a Catholic

    humanism. Bocca quotes a letter speakingof putting a hand on

    the heart near the breast . in reaction to a death (discretely left out

  • 146 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    by the English translators) ; and Lea Melandri, a libertarian wh

    works on psychoanalysis, writes to the paper criticising the wa

    `Walter is commemorated by comrades with the images of eterna

    Sentiment, an old-age literature which has been so little analyse(

    that it appears spontaneous and natural' . She goes on to say that

    this has serious political implications : `The analyses of fascisr

    and anti-fascism circulating in the movement today-what hav

    they to do with these elementary, highly calculated myths an'

    well-consolidated structures of the Historical Imaginary, which i,

    reality inspire the political behaviour of thousands of people

    . . .until we have given some attention (both theoretical an,

    practical) to sentiment and the imaginary, every condemnation c

    violence can only sound like a deliberate recall to conventiot

    ality, or like expediency'. Melandri's comments point to th(

    deeper continuities of structures of thought and the unconsciou

    that call in question some of the claims to absolute breaks wit'

    an `old politics', and ask for a degree of self-questioning. Tht

    runs against the grain of tendencies for the re-establishment o

    orthodoxies and formulae such as those present in the languag,

    of 'Sinistrese', the jargon of the `movement' .

    A letter from Gandalf the Grey, Wizard in Lord of the

    Rings and FIAT worker, represents the creative handling o

    contradictions and the exploration of cultural exchange acros

    social frontiers . Gandalf writes of his problems of `shoulderint

    the responsibilities' of being a `revolutionary vanguard' : `Thc

    crux of the problem is this : either the revolutionary left find)

    some way of increasing the number of militants on the sho,

    floor, or asking a non-existent vanguard to "shoulder its respot

    sibilities" and criticising them because "they don't take the init

    iative" become senseless, and frustrating for those few comradc

    who still manage to stand the horrors of factory work. Becaus

    the "vanguard" are comrades like the rest, who feel the weight

    of our contradictions, who don't want to be made to feel guilty

    We're tired (at least, I am) of being the same "vanguard" whicl

    "has to shoulder responsibilities", in the same way the Metrc

    politan Indians are tired of "having" to be ironic and witty, an(

    the feminists are tired of "having" to think about liberation, an,

    gays are tired of "having" to worry about sexuality, and even the

    freaks "have" to be into hypodermics and joints. We've got t,

    stop this division of roles . I want to be a whole militant fightin:

    for the liberation of the total human being. I want to be

    vanguard, Indian, gay, freak, and I want to roll joints (I alread

    do) .'

    Gandalf is a seeker after pleasure and good times as part o

    his politics, and this leads him to break with a workerism that ha

    been a limit as well as a strength of the oppositional movement

    in Italy . To quote Sergio Bologna, a leading light of 'operaismc

    who has moved with the changes : `The struggle in Italy ha

    thrown up new forms of insubordinate behaviour . On the one

    hand the people who practice them must come towards th(

    working class. But also the working class . . . must accept the ne :

    trends of opposition, and make them its own . We must breal

    down this idea of a `separate' working class culture . We must

    break down the idea of the factory as a separate politics

    institution' .

  • REVIEWS

    Inthe current situation such a project is still very much on

    the drawing-boards in terms of a political recomposition of the

    proletariat . The lacerations produced by terrorismand the

    turning-inwards and privatisationhave accentuated tendencies

    towards pessimism of the will. The large factory today is under

    attack; FIAT, for example, wantmassive redundancies . (Incid-

    entally, these developments are covered in Red Notes' forth-

    coming book Fighting for Communism-10 Yearsof the

    Struggle at FIAT.) However, for the moment, the employed and

    `guaranteed' are the relativelyprivileged, and the unemployed,

    semi-employed and marginalised sectors,who probably make up

    most of the letter-writers and readers of Lotta Continua, are on

    the outside. Although each letter affirms an identity 'I am . . .'

    and struggle for a collective identity, the social pressures, not

    just in Italy, but at an international level, are in the direction of

    deepening divisions and marginalisation . Above all a reading of

    the Lotta Continua letters drives home this reality, but it is not

    an uncontradictory one. What they show is the strength of

    starting from where people are, discussing their difficulties in

    every shape and form and on the basis of the localised and the

    particular moving towards generalisation . The first step, however,

    is the generalisation of the discussion of problems, and of the

    asking of questions that arise in the conflict with oppression and

    exploitation .

    The collection of letters, Dear Comrades, is highly specific

    to the Italian situation, but raises a number of vital questions

    about everyday practice (what to do if you're a feminist working

    in a newsagent that sells porn ; how to organise in a small village ;

    how to respond to terrorism . . .) Just for this the English trans-

    lators, whose sensitivity to theimmediacy and colloquialism of

    the letters is remarkable, havedone an excellent job . Yet more

    important is the suggestiveness of this approach for political

    interventions of our own . Numerous avenues,from letters-pages,

    to workers' inquiries and oral history are open to exploration .

    THE WOODCARVERS OF HONGKONG : CRAFT

    PRODUCTION IN THE WORLD CAPITALIST

    PERIPHERY

    By Eugene Cooper

    Cambridge University Press (153 pp ., 10.00) 1980

    Reviewed by Colin Filer

    147

    This book helps to fill two holes . First, it is a piece of Marxist

    ethnography, writing rooted in participation, not the kind of

    abstract speculation about `modes' which has marked (and

    marred?) much of the Marxist renaissance in social/economic

    anthropology. Second,it reports participation in the life of

    urban artisans, and not the cultivators who attract the vast

  • 148 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    majority of participant observers (looking for a quiet life?) in

    the Third World .

    Remarking on the way that anthropologists in mainland'

    China, as employees of the Institute of National Minorities, were

    subject to re-education during the Cultural Revolution, the

    author finds it `altogether fitting' that his study 'should reflect'

    a concern on the part of the investigator to reunite the man ot

    knowledge, the anthropologist, with the object of his knowledge

    the labourers and the relations of production in which they inter-

    act' (p . 8). On the other hand, it isn't clear how his participation'

    and reflection differ in the contribution which they make to,

    socialist/communist practice from the kind of 'fieldwork' and

    'ethnography' which have for decades been the tools-in-trade of,

    English-speakinganthropologists, whatever their political'

    complexion. Unless, of course, the use of Marxist concepts in the ,

    text is enough to cast a retrospective red glow over the partic-

    ipation which it presupposes . (Note-for what it's worth

    members of the Association of Social Anthropologists (G .B .) have ,

    recently been asked to contribute books and papers to the 'post

    Gant' reconstruction of the INM library in Peking. The British-

    educated, recently 'restored' Director of the INM-FeiHsiao-

    t'ung-is said in the accompanying blurb to have been hitherto'

    (for 20 years or more) 'unable to practice his discipline' . Butl

    while Professor Fei was 'in the cold'-in1972-Dr

    . Coopers

    heard him 'speak warmly of his experience at a May 7 cadr=

    school where he learned to plant cotton' (p.8) [1]) . Profess-

    ional ethnographers have reason to resist a policy which'

    transforms their special practice into the general and social oblig-

    ation of the intellectual-it puts them out of business, and itl

    takes away their 'freedom' to restrict participation to those lives'

    and labours which attract their 'scientific' (or romantic) interest

    on terms which they determine by themselves. Dr. Cooper keeps,

    his 'freedom' and his business .

    His highly detailed account of the art-carved furniture ind-

    ustry in post-war Hong Kong is meant to modify Samir Amin'si

    account of the 'peripheral formation' by showing that the latter'si

    'disarticulation' may include a 'margin' where some branches of,

    production can 'enjoy the luxury of a relatively laissez-faire

    albeit still export-oriented, capitalist development' (p . 134), ands

    where, in consequence, 'subordinate modes, rather than contin-

    uing to exist in disfigured or distorted forms, may indeed be'

    radically made over in the very image of the capitalist mode of,

    production' (p. 135) . At the 'periphery of the periphery' we find)

    a 'central' form of The Transition ; in Chinese art-carved furniture,

    so Eugene Cooper tells us, there can be identified a period ofl

    'manufacture', originating in the Chinese Treaty Portsin the'

    Nineteenth Century, tied to a growing external market in Europe'

    and America, 'blossoming' in the capitalist hothouse of Hong,

    Kong after 1949, and thus providing the material condition :

    for its dissolution in the decades following.

    This period was marked by both the concentration and the'

    differentiation of production : units of productiongrowing to,

    contain a minimum of 30 workers, while the process of produc

    tion was divided into four specialist occupations-rough carving,,

    smooth carving, carpentry and painting-in the typical propor-

  • REVIEWS

    149

    tion 8 : 8 : 12 : 2. But workers owned their tools, dictated the

    pace and duration of their work, and controlled entry to their

    several trades by arduous conditions of apprenticeship. Many of

    their bosses were still practicing craftsmen .

    In the 1960s, the employers introduced machinery to deskill/

    displace carpenters, and some (the biggest fish in this small pond)

    diversified into the making of Western-style furniture, threaten-

    ing the craft of carving too. Time-wages encroached on the

    workers' preference for piece-work; the money-form began to

    dominate the general relation of employment, rolling back a

    wide variety of payments in kind; workers discouraged their sons

    from apprenticeship; employers sent their sons away to learn

    accountancy and `modern business methods', and ceased to work

    alongside their employees .

    As the lines of class struggle sharpened, the requirements of

    resistance changed the mutual relations of the workers . Formerly

    divided by the place from which they came (Canton or Che-

    kiang), the material in which they worked (rosewood or teak-

    wood), or the substance of their craft (carving or carpentry),

    from 1960 onwards they were more significantly split by their

    allegiance to the Communist or Nationalist cause. Communist

    carpenters joined the union of `carvers'; Nationalist carvers the

    union of `carpenters'. (Begging a question or two, the author

    remarks that `a division of the labour force which was bequeathed

    to the industry in its manufacturing period became the vehicle for

    the expression of political ideologies more characteristic of a

    capitalist mode of production' (p . 17). Through the workers'

    experience of (successful) strikes, the backwash of the Cultural

    Revolution, and finally, the new `understanding' between the

    U.S. and the P.R.C ., the Communist Union went from strength to

    strength, acquiring both numerical and political pre-eminence as

    representatives of labour . The representation of capital stayed

    largely informal, operating through a multitude of `personal

    connections' among the employers.

    But this level of operation gave no special advantage to the

    employers, since a high rate of labour turnover within the

    confines of this small industry aided the formation of a parallel

    'connectedness' among the employees . . .so long, that is, as

    craftsmen did not stray to other branches of production. There

    was a contrast here between the carvers and the carpenters. The

    former sought protection of their craft against the threat of its

    extinction posed by the diversification of the industry which con-

    tained it . 'The latter were persistently being lost to the building

    industry, which, during Hong Kong's `building boom', could

    afford to offer higher rates of pay-and might thereby have been

    partly responsible for the mechanisation of the furniture

    industry .

    Like any piece of detailed ethnography, this book raises

    problems of generalisation which are almost bound to weaken

    any theoretical conclusion it attempts. It does contain a brief,

    though rather inconclusive, discussion of two such questions,

    namely (1) whether Hong Kong is a `social formation' separate

    from mainland China, and (2) what kind of `peripheral formation'

    Hong Kong represents. But there is even less attention given to

    what must, in the light of the book's theoretical pretensions, be

  • 150CAPITAL AND CLASS

    a more important question, namely what position is occupied b

    the art-carved furniture industry of Hong Kong in any genera

    taxonomy of branches of production, which has to be a part c

    any theory of `peripheral formations' or`peripheral accumulation

    In particular, it isn't clear what makes this industry 'marginal' c

    `peripheral'within Hong Kong apart from its apparent failure t

    conform with Amin's general postulates .

    The only other branches of production discussed in the boo

    are building (in the context already given) ; ivory-carving (p . 37)-

    because, unlike wood-carving, it has already been party

    mechanised (by the introduction of dentists' drills) ; porcelai:

    production (p . 132)-because it entered the period of manufac

    ure' before the integration of Chinainto the world market ; an(

    agriculture (p .91)-because there is very little of it in Hon

    Kong. We learn that the ACF industry was one of those tha

    benefited directly from the U.S. trade embargo on the P .R .C'

    in the sense that it protected it from competition in its majc

    market from the better qualityproducts of its reconstructe

    counterpart on the mainland. . . a protection since withdraws

    The author also tells us that `the appeal ofthe finished commot

    ities of the industry was their craft,that is, their carved, natur

    and they were therefore not subjectto competition from an

    western mass-produced substitutes'(p . 13) . But he fails to not

    that their `appeal' lay also, maybe more so, in their nationality

    their `Chinese' quality-a quality that overlaps, and yet is nc

    identical with, that of being 'hand-made' . From the point of vie-

    of use-value, both thesequalities, and others too, might b

    adduced in explanation of developments within the industry

    Finally, we find that the rate of unionmembership among th,

    workforce of this industry is ten timesthat prevailing generall\

    in Hong Kong's industrial sector (65% compared to 6.5%). Bui

    this peculiarity is not elaborated by the author .

    It would be pointless and unfair to cavilovermuch at the,

    omissions, for Dr . Cooper's book is `only' anethnography, and it'

    particularity must complement, and likewisebe essential to, more

    general appraisals of `peripheral accumulation' . One must simpl'

    exercise a certain scepticism over claims that one such minut,

    sector of production (its Hong Kong workforce never rose above

    2,000) can of itself reveal muchof this general picture . On the

    other hand it should be said that ethnographicwork devoted thi

    to branchesof production/reproduction, rather than to place

    (as `communities' etc.), is welcome on its own account, a

    counter-balancing the`norm' in economic anthropology, an,

    therefore helping us to pose correctly questions of the interpla'

    of sectoral and local forms of capital (andits alternatives) .

    Reference

    1 . See Cooper, E. (1973) `An Interviewwith China's Anthro

    pologists', Current Anthropology 14.4 .

  • REVIEWS

    151

    CONTESTED TERRAIN : THE TRANSFORMATION

    OF THE WORKPLACE IN THE TWENTIETH

    CENTURY

    by Richard Edwards

    Heinemann (London : 1979) 4 .50

    Reviewed by Theo Nichols

    This book is very much a product of American debate about the

    labour process, and is characterisedby a certain isolation from

    the European literature-a feature that is all the more unfort-

    unate given the initial American-generatedtransatlantic impact

    of Braverman's work. No reference is made hereto contributions

    on monopoly, trade unions and the labour processby writers like

    Mandel, Mallet, Touraine, Gorz/Bosquet, Herding; or in Britain

    specifically to Hyman, Benyon; or to writings associated with

    the CSE. No reference is made either to the analysis, vast as it is,

    of the `new middle class' .

    At the same time Contested Terrain might well remind many

    readers of Friedman's Industry and Labour-but this meritsno

    mention either . A pity, because it would be interesting to read

    these two books together . Like Friedman,Edwards has a healthy

    concern with `control' and `resistance' . Like Friedman he seeks

    to introduce an historical element (but casts his netwider,

    plotting and illustrating the history of US capitalism by reference

    to a `panel' of companies, AT and T, IBM, Ford, GE, Polaroid,

    Pabst Brewing, Pullman, United States Steel and International

    Harvester) . Like Friedman again, heworks with a core/periphery

    distinction . And just as Friedman'sanalysis `works' through the

    articulation of whatmight be termed a `vertical' dimension

    ('direct control'/'responsible autonomy') and a `horizontal'one

    (dual/internal labour markets, and of course sub-contract)so

    Edwards' analysis operates with a somewhat similar if more com-

    plicated matrix . It is difficult to hold back the thought that

    Friedman himself is by origin Canadian, but whether Contested

    Terrain, and even Industry and Labour,can be located within a

    burgeoning North American tendency or not, the key features of

    Edwards' book, as we shall see, are its stress on control, on the

    one hand and labour market segmentation on the other. The

    interrelation of these is complicated, however. Because of this,

    before proceeding further, and in order to show how Edwards'

    analysis `works', I will break it down into several component

    parts .

    Component One : this is a general treatment of the capital-

    labour relation, helped along in chapter 1 by introducing three

    workers. In this way some common elements are established-

    that workers sell their labour-power in a market and deliver it

    under conditions imposed by capital ;that since what is sold is

    human potential, and what is at stake is the workers' livelihoods,

    control, conflict and resistance are universal, in one form or

    another .

  • 152 CAPITAL AND CLASS

    Component Two : this provides evidence on the actual struc

    ure and historical development of the US economy ; it plots th(

    rise of monopoly, relating this to problems of control in the

    workplace/corporation but also to the rise and fall of anti-truss

    socialism, syndicalism and militancy . Perhaps inevitably, much c

    this is, as they say, `schematic' ; but the core/periphery distinctio,

    is established. (These matters are mostly dealt with in chapter

    `Running Full : The Breakdown of Competition', which deal'

    with the transition to monopoly (1890-1920) and chapter .

    `Seeing the World : Corporations and Monopoly Capitalism')I

    Component Three :this constitutes an elaboration of the cone

    cept of control. Three elements are distinguished : directions

    evaluation, discipline ; and three systems : simple, technical an(

    bureaucratic control .

    Simple Control(the 'one-boss workshop') is detailed i'

    chapter 2 `The Personal Touch : Competitive Capitalism and th

    Simple Form of Control', and the persistence of this is noted it

    the contemporary entrepreneurial firms (11 out of 12 millioi

    enterprises) of the peripheral economy. But this persistence aside

    simple control is seen historically to have extended to hierarchica

    control, whereby foremen, lacking the personal touch of the

    entrepreneur, having only negative sanctions available to them

    and being at some remove from top management, often acte(

    arbitrarily and fuelled disputes (this is described in chapter 41

    `The Crisis of Control in the Firm'). The first four decades of thin

    century are characterised as a period of experiments, beginning ;

    and failures. Brute repression on the shopfloor itself is seen a ,

    being symptomatic of the absence of a viable system of controls

    and the problems now having to be faced are the rising burden o

    non-production workers and the need to re-organise an hithert(

    elite into costly but still committed workers. Out of the exper

    iements/beginnings/failures-and numbered here are welfar-

    capitalism, Taylorism and scientific management, company

    unions, also training for foremen, industrial psychology and busi

    ness schools-is seen to come, from the 1920's, but attaining full

    force only after the Second World War, the re-organisation o'

    work on structurallines .

    `Structural Control',treated in a particular case study by

    Beynon, Armstrong and myself in the guise of 'technico

    bureaucratic control' is treated by Edwards as a general term fog

    two systems, the technical (discussed in chapter 7), and th--

    bureaucratic (chapters 8 and 9). We have, then, a three-fob

    conceptual distinction of control systems-simple control'

    technical and bureaucratic-and each system is representative o'

    one of three consecutive periods. (Edwards really loves threes-

    workers, control systems, control elements, whatever it is-and'

    we have not seen the end of the threes yet).

    Technical control, associated with 'continuous-flow' product-

    ion, epitomised by Ford but going back earlier, can emerge only,

    when the entire production process, or large segments of its, area

    based on a technology that paces and directs the labour force

    Technical control is at its height in the 'feed-back' systems of

    the present-day, which both increase 'direction' by technicall

    means and aid 'evaluation'. But even in its less developed forms,,

    technical control can reduce the 'direction' function of thei

  • REVIEWS153

    immediate boss (foreman) .However, in its earlier period,

    Edwards sees this (apparently) technically-induced interlocking of

    control to homogenise the workforce, including `white collar'

    workers, and to open the door to unionism. It did not, therefore,

    by itself constitute an adequate control system for the `core'

    firm's main industrial labour force.

    Bureaucratic control is essentially a post-war development.

    Edwards is careful to note that it has not completely eliminated

    hierarchical and technical control, rather it is now the predom-

    inant system (pp. 131-2); he also points to its internal contra-

    dictions (pp . 153-61). But the ambit of such control systems is

    potentially vast-job categories, work rules, promotion proced-

    ures, discipline, wage scales, grades, definitions of responsibil-

    ities, and, with trade unions, the bureaucratisation of `joint

    administration' . Bureaucratic control can encompass manage-

    ment, increase the stratification of a firm's labour force, indiv-

    idualise grievances in the same instant that it evaluates them on

    universal criteria, and also, Edwards argues, it avoids excessive

    reliance on negative sanctions through the positive inducement

    offered by `job ladders' (pp . 143-4) .

    Component Four : this concerns segmentation of the labour

    force. Three divisions are held to push the 20th century work-

    force into heterogeneity (whereas in the 19th century, capital,

    having inherited a highly heterogenous workforce, is seen to have

    pushed towards homogeneity). The divisions concern (1) condit-

    ions of employment in the core and periphery (2) the rise of a

    large administrative staff (3) institutional racial and sexual dis-

    crmination. Three labour markets are specified : the secondary

    market (basically casual labour) ; the subordinate primary market

    (including `traditional' working class jobs in mass production ; the

    unionised in lower clerical work, transport and utilities-in fact,

    better paid, more permanent, usually unionised jobs with some

    scope for seniority and advancement, but still of a repetitive,

    routine kind, prone to machine pacing) ;the independent primary

    market (includedhere

    are jobs inthe

    `middle layers' of the firm, foremen and long-term clerical/sales/

    technical jobs; craft workers ; professionals like accountants and

    doctors; up to one third of the total being contributed by those

    in the state sector) . Chapter 9 `Labour Re-divided ; Part 1

    Segmented Labour Markets' contains descriptive material on this .

    At this point the main components should be clear enough :

    One, the control problematic ; Two, the core/periphery distinct-

    ion ; Three, the three control systems, simple, technical and

    bureaucratic ; Four, the three labour markets . However, the

    author believes that labour market `segmentation arises not from

    market forces themselves (e .g . monopoly power [TN]) but

    rather from the underlying uses of labour power' (p. 165). Con-

    sequently, given his insertion into the problematic of control

    (One) Edwards seeks to articulate control systems and labour

    markets (Components Three and Four) .

    Taking up some observations from Piore, he argues explicitly

    that, though job skills etc create different types of labour, 'it is

    the system of control that creates the context within which

    experience, training, schooling, skills and other attributes assume

    their importance', and, admitting the relationship is not perfect

  • 154

    CAPITAL AND CLASS

    or exhaustive, he charts a relationship between simple control and

    secondary market jobs (in small manufacturing, service jobs, retail

    sales, temporary and typing pool office work) ; between technical

    control and subordinate primary market jobs (in auto and steel

    plants, assembly line production, machine-paced clerical work)

    between bureaucratic control and independent primary sector

    jobs (itemised as jobs at IBM, Polaroid, craft work, non-produc-

    tion staff jobs, pp . 178-9) .

    A series of problems arise. There are empirical ones about

    whether the fit between jobs and control systems is yet more

    imperfect than allowed ; about the notion of `representativeness' ;

    and about the similarities (or not) of some of the jobs grouped

    together . There are also problems of how Edwards analytical

    distinctions are, in reality, woven into historical process (which

    must include a cultural `component') . Also about the (thus far, in

    this account) implicit equation of the working class with all those

    in the labour market, i .e . with all sellers of labour-power . These

    sorts of problems are never far from the surface in the book's

    final two chapters. For instance, in chapter 10, subtitled `The

    Fractions of the Working Class', the working class is made synon-

    ymous with wage/salary workers : fraction 1 being `the working

    poor', fraction 2 `the traditional proletariat', and, inevitably,

    fraction 3, `the middle layers' (ie those in the `independent

    primary sector') . This certainly has implications for the hope

    entertained in the subsequent chapter that `once workers raise a

    challenge to the existing system of control in the firm, they

    (which?) will through their experience (which?) be led to see the

    common (is it?) contents of these struggles' (p . 215) .

    More generally, the conjunction of the historical and the

    analytical in this book, and the concentration upon control

    systems, does tend to generate questions about causality, and

    loose ends. For example, that primary market employment rests

    on certain conditions-scale and volume of profits, stability to

    make long-term commitments-is easily lost to sight (even though

    Edwards knows this very well, e .g . p . 183 and chapters 3 and 5) .

    And despite the dominant logic of the book-from distinct

    systems of control to segmented labour markets to class fractions

    (if this is what they be)-Edwards is also, to say the least, most

    prudent to add that `at each step in the logic . . . other forces

    than those deriving from the organisation of the workplace come

    into play' so that `the labour process cannot be the entire

    explanation' (p . 198) .

    For the first step (i .e . from control to labour markets) the

    forces he lists include `unionisation', `the cultural legacy legit-

    imising racial and sexual discrimination' and `employers'

    conscious attempts to fragment their workforces to class forces in

    schooling and family structure to the constraints of technology' .

    For the second step-from markets to class fractions-he lists

    `patterns of ethnic residence and culture' and `the impacts of

    popular media, ideology and political participation' . Quite how

    Edwards terms `the diversity of these influences' could be

    adequately integrated and encompassed within the covers of one

    such book I do not know, nor do I know of anyone who does .

    But they powerfully infuse `the transformation of the Workplace

    in the twentieth century' and are not happily integrated here .

  • REVIEWS

    INDUSTRIALISATION AND THE STATE

    IN LATIN AMERICA

    Edited by Jean Carriere

    Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation

    (Amsterdam) 1979

    Reviewed by Ronaldo Munck

    155

    Edwards'problematic of control leads him to ask

    important

    questions(Three cheers for this?) But there is more than

    one

    sense inwhich the dominating terrain of his

    Contested Terrain

    ought to be contested itself .

    Still, the opening up of a discussion of `issue politics' in the

    last chapter, on `Capitalismor Democracy?', strongly suggests

    that the above is something of which Edwards himself has

    become aware in writing the book and/or in observing the reality

    of modern-day American politics. And, it is always as well to

    remember that if we demand everything at once, we may have to

    wait forever. On the other hand, there is no warrant in this to

    incite thelabour market industry to go beyond Edwards'

    wretched threes. A redundant warning ; it has

    of course, already .

    A collection of conference papers doesnot usually lend itself to

    a sustained and organised theoreticalproject. This book has gone

    further than most similar collections however in organising its

    material around coherent topics .

    The first two sections deal with `industrial strategies and the

    state', with the two central articles discussing the role of the

    state in the capital accumulation process in Chile (Carlos Fortin)

    and Mexico (E. V. K. Fitzgerald) . These two very different cases,

    one a military dictatorship, the other a form of Bonapartist state,

    provide a useful addition to the growingliterature on the topic

    .

    Adolfo Dorfman, a long time student of industrialisation in

    Argentina, closes this section with a broad discussion of the state

    sector, which falls into the familiar trap of supporting this sector

    as a progressive `actor' against imperialism .

    The second section enters directly into a debate which was

    taken up by the CSE in its early days and sporadically revived

    since-the question of imperialism . David Slater puts the case

    that neither import-substitution nor export-oriented industrial-

    isation can bring about a capitalist transformation of the peri-

    phery . Sandro Sideri complements this with a broad reappraisal

    of the `new international economic order', discussing the process

    of regional integration in LatinAmerica as shaped by the strat-

    egies and concrete studies of the transnationals in Mexico (Rhys

    Jenkins) and Venezuela (Fred Jongkind) which really polarise the

    debate on the precise effects of imperialism/dependency in the

    so-called Third World. Jenkins provides ample evidence to back

    up the dependency theorists' view of transnationals as responsible

  • 156CAPITAL AND CLASS

    for the very model of capital accumulation in the periphery-'de-

    nationalisation', repatriation of profits, income concentration

    `marginalisation', etc. Jongkind 's study of Venezuelan capitalists

    based on the questionnaire method, concludes to the contrary

    that `autonomous' national industrial development is taking

    place in that country. He thus questions the traditional Marxist

    emphasis on the constraints placed by imperialism on the indust-

    rialisation process, and would presumably support the Bill Warrens

    line of argument .[ 2 ]

    I cannot take up the arguments of this vast discussion here

    but only point out that it is inserted in a broader debate being,

    taken up in journals such as Latin American Perspectives on the

    resolution (hopefully!) of the `dependency debate' . [ 3 ] From this

    discussion, and Slater's paper mentioned above, I get the impres-

    sion that the classical Marxist debate on imperialism itself is,

    far from resolved . Much can still be gained from re-reading Lenin,,

    Bukharin, Hilferding and Luxembourg. The second point, related

    to the case studies mentioned above, is a certain dialogue of the

    deaf I perceive in discussions over the `national bourgeoisie' .

    This is neither `dead' (Jenkins) nor `thriving' (Jongkind)-quite

    simply, its very conditions of existence are determined by its

    continual reproduction as a subordinate partner to imperialism .

    So, when Jongkind says that `dependency does not appear to be

    a problem for the national industrialists' (p . 207) he is correct for

    a particular country (Venezuela) at a particular moment of accel-

    erated capital accumulation. Not for one moment can this sub-

    jective assessment deny the subordinate position of national

    capital units so clearly outlined by Jenkins.

    The third part of this book-not really reflected in the

    title-discusses variations in labour control strategies throughout

    Latin America. This is an area of investigation only recently being

    opened up by Marxists, but already finding widespread dif-

    fusion.[4] Discussing the case of Brazil, John Humphrey shows

    how the role of the state in capital-labour relations must be anal-

    ysed as an aspect of capital's domination of the working class, in

    the context of a specific pattern of capital accumulation. Jackie

    Roddick discusses the position of the working class in Chile and

    Argentina, since the 1973 and 1976 military coups respectively.

    Her discussion of the Chilean Plan Laboral is reflected in the

    more recent anti-union labour legislation in Argentina. Juan

    Carlos Torre complements her discussion with a brilliant histor-

    ical reconstruction (unfortunately in Spanish) of working class

    struggles in Argentina from 1955 to 1976. The theme of repress-

    ion gives way to that of co-optation and manipulation of the

    working class in Mexico. Together with Kruijt this same author

    provides a most informative outline (again in Spanish) of labour

    relations in a mining enclave-the Cerro de Pasco Corporation in

    Peru .'

    What emerges from these articles, apart from the wealth of

    detailed information, is the obvious need for greater theoretical

    discussion on the role of labour in the `Third World' .[5] Are anti-

    imperialist tasks still posed for the working class in Argentina or

    Mexico, and what do these amount to in practice? Also, partic-

    ularly in the comparison of Chile and Argentina, I can see a need

    for further focus on the internal forms of organisation of the

  • REVIEWS

    157

    working class. The working class in Argentina is not just more

    `militant' and so can resist the dictatorshipbetter, but it is struc-

    tured at the base through organs of proletarian democracy which

    allowed it to recover from even the serious defeat of 1976. The

    outbreak of labour resistance in Brazil in recent years also renews

    the need for taking up the classical discussionof workers'

    councils, etc . i n the context of countries dominatedby

    imperialism .

    References

    1 cf S. Villamil (ed),Transnational Capitalism and National

    Development-newperspectives on dependence, Harvester

    Press (in

    Development-new perspectiveson dependence, Harvester

    Press (in association with the Institute of Development

    Studies, University of Sussex), 1979 .

    2 B. Warren `Imperialism and capitalist industrialisation',New

    Left Review No . 81 (1973) .

    3 Forthcoming issue on `Imperialism and Dependency' .

    4See the journals Newsletter of International Labour Studies

    (The Hague), and Labour, Capital and Society (Montreal) .

    5Cf Robin Cohen `The new international

    labour studies : a

    definition' Working Paper Series No . 27, Centre for Develop-

    ing Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal .

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    No. 11 Industrial Democracy and the Control of Labour

    Nationalism and Class Struggle in Zimbabwe

    Finance Capital and the Crisis in Britain

    The State and the Future of Socialism.

    No. 10 The Value of Value : Rereading Capital

    Education for Emancipation: The movement for Indpendent Worki

    Class Education 1908-1892

    A Short History of the CSE

    Women and the Reserve Army of Labour

    On Amin's Model of Autocentric Accumulation

    A Critique of Brazilian Political Economy

    Word Processing and Patriarchy in the Office.

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    The Economic Policy of the New Chinese Leadership Patrick Tissier

    Labour Time, Work Measurement and the Commensuration of Labor

    P. S. Taylor

    Debate: Theory of the Capitalist State M. Williams

    Strategy: Which Way Out of the Ghetto D. Elson

    Theory and Politics of Michel Foucault Bob Fine

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    Critique of Soviet Economics D. Sayer

    No . 7Valorisation and 'De-skilling'

    : Critique of Braverman T. Elger

    Social Fascism: Workers and Political Parties in the Frankfurt Area 1

    1930 J. Wickham

    Health Policy and the CutsT. Manson

    No. 6

    On the Theoretical Consistency of Sraffa's Economics S. Savran

    Trade Unionism and the Struggle for Liberation in South AfricaD .

    Hemson

    The Anomalies of Capital S. Himmelweit and S. Mohun

    Regionalism: Some Current Issues D. Massey

    Intellectual and Manual Labour: An Introduction to Alfred Sohn-Re

    M. Reinfelder and P . Slater.

    No. 5 In Defence of Value

    : A Reply to Ian Steedman P. Armstrong, A. Gly

    and J. Harrison

    Capital, Fractions of Capital and the State: Neo-Marxist Analyses of

    South African State S . Clarke

    The Soviet Economy in the 1920s and 1930sM . Harrison

    Debate: Trade Union Internationalism and the Supra-National State

    J. Baker .

    No. 4

    The Inflational Crisis of CapitalismMakoto Itoh

    Value and the Theory of RentR. Murray

    Ideology, Crisis and the Cuts K. McDonnell

    British Housing Policy and the Housebuilding Industry M.Ball

    Archive : The Value FormK. Marx .