BLPG Bienefeld

By Manfred Bienefeld

I experienced the dynamism and enthusiasm generated by Robin’s activist scholarship when I joined the Brighton Labour Process Group (BLPG) which focused precisely on that most critical interface between capital and labour, the one that, it turns out that both Smith and Marx saw as the place where labour was likely to be dehumanised, and turned into a pure commodity.

Our group was right to focus on this question since these were turbulent times; times when the “social capitalism” of the post-WWII “Golden Age” was being challenged by a neoliberal counter-attack that was determined to reverse the falling rates of profit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the developed world this counter-attack focused on the war against trade unions, the promotion of technical changes that would undercut the leverage of working people and an endless repetition of the intellectually vapid mantra of free trade and the free movement of capital. By the late 1980s, an unnamed trader in the City of London, summed it all up very neatly when, in response to a question of how he felt about Sweden’s recently enacted first austerity budget, he said that he felt that this was a small step in the right direction, but that much more would be needed, since “people must understand that the financial markets have declared war on the welfare state.”

The lively and fruitful discussions of the BLPG focused on the various ways in which technical change, changing production structures, new forms of ownership and new linkages between working people and the communities in which they lived were creating new threats and opportunities potentially capable of altering the balance of power between capital and labour. But those discussions also opened up a significant rift between different members of the group as regards the degree to which this crisis was primarily technology driven, meaning that falling rates of profit primarily reflected flagging productivity growth rates due to the exhaustion of the “Fordist model” – or of the petroleum/automobile age – in which case solutions had to be sought in speeding up technical change, or, in the case of some Fordist/Regulation School literature, even in demands to moderate wage increases; on the other side of this debate were those who believed that this was primarily a political crisis, reflecting capital’s determination to roll back the gains that labour had been able to make during the “Golden Age” between 1948 and 1974, in which case the primary responses should have been to protect wages and to force capital to live with lower rates of return. While those differences were never fully resolved, the group ultimately chose to focus primarily on new forms of industrial organisation associated with newly emerging technologies – and in this work Robin was always instrumental in ensuring that our discussions would not remain purely academic, but would also include activist links with trade unionists, and even with some ‘progressive’ firms.

For my part, these discussions were enormously important for allowing me to better understand and appreciate the forces driving the widespread relocation of industrial activity from the centre to the periphery over the next three decades. Whereas even many progressives were misled, for a time, into thinking that this industrialisation of the developing world was opening the door to their long term “development,” because in the past industrialisation had been so closely associated with higher wages, more stable employment and greater social protection, a clearer understanding of the intensity of the shop-floor struggles that were engulfing the developed world’s industries at this time, made it much easier to see – and to predict – that this global relocation of production would only provide a basis for the emergence of “developed high-wage societies” such as those associated with the “social capitalism” of the Golden Age, in those countries that were capable of managing their insertion into the global economy so as to retain sufficient sovereignty to build strong national industrial foundations that could eventually allow them to generate and appropriate technology rents. As for the others, they ended up trapped in what came to be known the low wage manufacturing trap, but that should better be known as the low cost manufacturing trap, because their ability to attract, and retain, the necessary foreign investments depended not only on low cost, reliable labour, but also on major subsidies and concessions on the cost of capital, essential services and infrastructure.

Meanwhile the relentless logic of capital continues to reduce the state of working people to “a state that is barely human” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations). And so, almost 50 years after those BLPG discussions, minimum wage earners in the US are earning far less, in real terms, than they did way back then, even as the intensity of work has increased to the point where some workers have almost been turned into cyborgs. Indeed, for Amazon’s warehouse workers, all that is now left is for their GPS controlled chips to be implanted into their bodies – naturally for reasons of efficiency and reliability. The trends are as relentless as they are ominous, as recently discussed in an article on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.

The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.

These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.”

When I read such horror stories today, I am often reminded of those BLPG discussions. We were clearly focusing on the right issues, but we ultimately had no way of influencing the course of history. While we were right to track, to encourage, to analyse and to celebrate instances where technical change, or patterns of labour and community organisation, allowed labour’s power on the shop floor to be protected, or even extended, in certain firms, industries and regions, we were all eventually condemned to see those gains swept aside by the rising tide of neoliberalism as it weakened, or even severed, the ties between firms and their surrounding communities, between citizens and their governments and between workers and their supervisors (AI robots?), their managers and later, the faceless hedge fund owners of their firms.