- RSW 02  Page 15 -

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A Ballad Against Work

Richard Antony, Exeter Left Group, reviews this book from Collectivities, Farabad, India

Last year we got a letter from India, requesting support for factory workers who hadn't been paid for nearly a year. We sent a letter of support. Then a few months ago we received this book from the same people.

There are undoubtedly many studies of modern working practices, but this stands out for a number of reasons. It is very readable. It has a provocative style I haven't seen for thirty years. And it comes from a part of the world we tend not to associate with advanced industries or with revolutionary thinking. However it is precisely the 'developing countries' who are in the front line of new methods of production and the control of workers.

Total Productivity Management, aka 'total quality management', is the latest means to increase the rate of extraction of work. As the Ballad observes: "In the Fordist assembly line the labour process was designed to occupy the workers 45 seconds in every minute. In the flexible production plant, workers are occupied 57 seconds in every minute." Subsequently the Japanese have acquired a new word: karoshi, meaning sudden death due to overwork.

The aim of 'flexible working' is "the eradication of any uncontrolled movement of a hand or the unproductive glance of an eye or the unwanted wandering of a mind." Thus the rate of extraction of workers' output by the ruling class has risen in the last 300 years of capitalism from between 1/10 to 1/4 to 95% nowadays the authors estimate.

But workers are party to their own exploitation. We have been seduced to believe, for example:-

• work makes our lives easier
• work makes the world a better place
• technological research is geared to reduce work
• money simplifies social interactions
• it is a sin to live without working for a living
• the wages we get are equal to our contribution in production

Traditional work-place organisation is based on the idea of reaching agreement with management. Despite much anti-union legislation, unions are still necessary for large concerns to be able to control their workers. As long as socialists lack a more sophisticated analysis of work, they'll continue to be co-opted by the ruling caste, whether this is a 'stakeholder democracy' or the 'nomenclature' of a Leninist Party elite.

Workers however continue to fight back in their own ways. For instance, in Malaysia a factory assembling tiny electronic parts was brought to a halt when one of the women workers saw a ghost through her microscope...

The Ballad Against Work is a critique and an excellent piece of propaganda in a soft-cover magazine format. It holds out no global solutions to the present situation, but the publishers' name, Collectivities, gives an idea of their tendency.

Through the spread of American and Japanese investment, we are all gradually being brought under the same system. The exchange of experience and information is crucial to future struggles.

This slim volume would be a good addition to anyone's collection of quotable works. It can be obtained from [no price on it, send a donation to cover costs]:-

- RSW 02  Page 15 -

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