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Clever and classless and free (US Labor Day huge GYOB megapost)
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 01:15 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
metafilter_feedWho is working class? The United States Labor Day holiday got its start in 1893 with the death of 30 strikers during the Pullman Strike, as pdb points out in another thread. Eugene Debs, one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike and a later candidate for President of the United States, was imprisoned as a result of that strike. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated union contracts that protected nearly half a million federal workers in what a former political director of the AFL-CIO called "the largest act of union-busting in American history." Between 1893 and 2025, the American labor movement was often associated in the popular imagination with post-agricultural industrial work: the coal miner, the dock worker, the laborer on the factory assembly line1. Management jobs and the professions were not considered laborers, but bourgeoisie, leading to a rising and ongoing association between manual labor and anti-intellectualism in the United States that was historically less present in Europe.
The early imagery of the working class is replete with depiction of human laboring bodies, while the mute compulsion driving their labor is most often metaphorically depicted as chains—debt and wages2—do not easily lend themselves to visual representation. Yet at the center of debates over labor is that unbreakable connection between bodies and time. Marx's insight was to change the terms of that economic debate: rather than seeing economic activity as a matter of reasonable, utility-maximizing individual agents making free choices to produce and consume what suits them best, Marx demonstrated that economic activity could instead be seen as a matter of the powerful owners of capital siphoning off the surplus value produced by the workers in order to enrich themselves and promote continuing economic growth—at least until the next moment of economic crisis, when capitalists will be rescued by government, but the poor will suffer what they must. Technological advances resulted in labor-intensive processes being replaced by capital-intensive processes, and resulted as well in reconfigurations of work to the point where not only body-intensive manual labor was replaceable, but also the white-collar work of those whom Robert Reich would describe as "symbolic-analytic labor." The routinization of urban office work produced new sites of economic precarity3 for the further appropriation of value by capital, as well as a hollowing-out of American cities that became places for the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to work but not to live near the urban poor4, who could become a reserve army of the unemployed. The new precariat would inherit the effects of Charles Babbage's efficiency studies and their extension in Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" and later time-motion studies that would determine how many seconds, for example, it should take a secretary to file a document, paving the way for future debates over wage theft, but that also resulted in the invention of the Carnegie Unit or college credit hour. While Adam Smith's labor theory of value was a theory of relative prices (things cost different amounts for consumers due to the different amounts of labor that go into them), Karl Marx's value theory of labor was a theory of relative exploitation. The American boom of wealth and productivity that followed WWII saw the widespread acceptance of the 40-hour work week5 and corresponding increased belief in Americans as consumers rather than laborers, and the 1817 slogan of utopian socialist Robert Owen—"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will"—was largely forgotten. At the same time, increased participation by women in labor markets led to shifts in the American class structure and the rise of "pink-collar work" and other forms of caring and gendered labor, including the recognition that women perform6 a great deal of uncompensated labor. Shifts away from an economy of goods and toward an economy of services also raised questions about the nature of labor involved in producing and consuming services, and about the nature of "experience goods" like movies and education that one pays to consume: how much (and what kind of) labor gets expended in what we typically consider recreation or non-productive behaviors? The commodification of work has resulted in a corresponding commodification of play7 for those fortunate enough to have the time to play. Debates over the commodification of play became more visible in the early 2000s with the phenomenon of goldfarming and the use of coerced labor, and the representation of goldfarming took many back to the old farm-based8 feudal metaphors of digital serfdom. Former Valve games economist and Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has labeled our current economic epoch one of Techno-Feudalism (previously), wherein contemporary capitalists use their platforms as a form of economic coercion over unfree labor. An apparent glaring mismatch in that comparison is that feudal lords held patriarchal responsibility for the well-being and protection of their serfs, whereas today's corporations dismiss any such responsibility as non-economic "externalities," leading to a condition of widespread economic precarity interpreted as individual malady9. Capitalism's unique feature is to atomize the power of the individual but collectivize the workings of capital, so that capital's invisible hand seems irresistible: the message becomes that there is nothing we, collectively, can or should do about the economy. The key line in the Johnny Paycheck song10 is "If I had the guts to say": the rhetorical construction of capital is that it cannot be answered. We are now taught, according to J. K. Gibson-Graham, that "economy" is
The early imagery of the working class is replete with depiction of human laboring bodies, while the mute compulsion driving their labor is most often metaphorically depicted as chains—debt and wages2—do not easily lend themselves to visual representation. Yet at the center of debates over labor is that unbreakable connection between bodies and time. Marx's insight was to change the terms of that economic debate: rather than seeing economic activity as a matter of reasonable, utility-maximizing individual agents making free choices to produce and consume what suits them best, Marx demonstrated that economic activity could instead be seen as a matter of the powerful owners of capital siphoning off the surplus value produced by the workers in order to enrich themselves and promote continuing economic growth—at least until the next moment of economic crisis, when capitalists will be rescued by government, but the poor will suffer what they must. Technological advances resulted in labor-intensive processes being replaced by capital-intensive processes, and resulted as well in reconfigurations of work to the point where not only body-intensive manual labor was replaceable, but also the white-collar work of those whom Robert Reich would describe as "symbolic-analytic labor." The routinization of urban office work produced new sites of economic precarity3 for the further appropriation of value by capital, as well as a hollowing-out of American cities that became places for the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to work but not to live near the urban poor4, who could become a reserve army of the unemployed. The new precariat would inherit the effects of Charles Babbage's efficiency studies and their extension in Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" and later time-motion studies that would determine how many seconds, for example, it should take a secretary to file a document, paving the way for future debates over wage theft, but that also resulted in the invention of the Carnegie Unit or college credit hour. While Adam Smith's labor theory of value was a theory of relative prices (things cost different amounts for consumers due to the different amounts of labor that go into them), Karl Marx's value theory of labor was a theory of relative exploitation. The American boom of wealth and productivity that followed WWII saw the widespread acceptance of the 40-hour work week5 and corresponding increased belief in Americans as consumers rather than laborers, and the 1817 slogan of utopian socialist Robert Owen—"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will"—was largely forgotten. At the same time, increased participation by women in labor markets led to shifts in the American class structure and the rise of "pink-collar work" and other forms of caring and gendered labor, including the recognition that women perform6 a great deal of uncompensated labor. Shifts away from an economy of goods and toward an economy of services also raised questions about the nature of labor involved in producing and consuming services, and about the nature of "experience goods" like movies and education that one pays to consume: how much (and what kind of) labor gets expended in what we typically consider recreation or non-productive behaviors? The commodification of work has resulted in a corresponding commodification of play7 for those fortunate enough to have the time to play. Debates over the commodification of play became more visible in the early 2000s with the phenomenon of goldfarming and the use of coerced labor, and the representation of goldfarming took many back to the old farm-based8 feudal metaphors of digital serfdom. Former Valve games economist and Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has labeled our current economic epoch one of Techno-Feudalism (previously), wherein contemporary capitalists use their platforms as a form of economic coercion over unfree labor. An apparent glaring mismatch in that comparison is that feudal lords held patriarchal responsibility for the well-being and protection of their serfs, whereas today's corporations dismiss any such responsibility as non-economic "externalities," leading to a condition of widespread economic precarity interpreted as individual malady9. Capitalism's unique feature is to atomize the power of the individual but collectivize the workings of capital, so that capital's invisible hand seems irresistible: the message becomes that there is nothing we, collectively, can or should do about the economy. The key line in the Johnny Paycheck song10 is "If I had the guts to say": the rhetorical construction of capital is that it cannot be answered. We are now taught, according to J. K. Gibson-Graham, that "economy" is
a force to be reckoned with outside of politics and society, located both above as a mystical abstraction, and below as the grounded bottom line. . . With the shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society, the economic imaginary has seemingly lost its discursive mandate and become an objective reality. (New Keywords,"Economy" 94–97)In such an "objective reality," labor for the market becomes a priority, and other areas of human endeavor fall away: all education becomes vocational education, with students tracked into different classes depending upon their potential for profitability, the humanities and the arts are dismissed as either unprofitable or luxury goods, and schooling becomes an extension of the factory11. Yet we know that money is not the only yardstick of value, as the apocryphal quotation sometimes attributed to Emma Goldman12 implies. Marxist economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff propose a reading of Capital volume 2 that defines socioeconomic class as a process of appropriation: capitalists appropriate the value of the factory worker's labor at the site of production, but the appropriation of value by different parties can occur at different points in the cycle of production, distribution, use/consumption, and re-production. An independent musician appropriates the value of her own labor by practicing or busking, and a daughter's pleasure in cooking a meal for her elderly grandfather becomes the appropriation of value, as well. Such a reading radically opens up the space of economic possibility by expanding our sense of what value means. Today, if we're going to give our labor the respect it deserves, we might think about the economic metaphors through which we see the world: are we Pareto-optimizing, utility-maximizing agents rationally choosing what we consume and produce—or are we members of communities whose bonds go beyond those of money, seeking to guard ourselves and our loved ones from exploitation, and wanting to put our money, our time, and our labor into the activities and enterprises that sustain those communities? Happy Labor Day! Notes
- Bruce Springsteen, "Factory"
- Johnny Cash, "Sixteen Tons"
- The Bangles, "Manic Monday"
- Stevie Wonder, "Living for the City"
- Dolly Parton, "9 to 5"
- Donna Summer, "She Works Hard for the Money"
- Loverboy, "Working for the Weekend"
- Brass Against, "Maggie's Farm"
- Dire Straits, "Industrial Disease"
- Johnny Paycheck, "Take This Job and Shove It"
- Green Day, "Working Class Hero"
- Sophie Ellis Bextor, "If I Can't Dance"
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