by Wildcat Germany
[Given the recent success
of Free Education movements and higher eductaion trades unions in blocking the
‘Teach Higher’ work casualisations proposals at the University of Warwick, we
thought the below missive from Wildcat Germany was appropriate grounds for
a pause. It’s a little old (1999) but a goody, particularly
because it makes clear that the wage is but one side of the of worker’s role in
capitalism, the other being that worker’s role in production. The argument runs
in part that anti-casualisation battles, which specifically focus on equal pay
for equal work, separate the wage issue from the issue of control of the
production process. From the perspective of production ‘casualisation’ is
meaningless; what is happening is that labour is being organised in a more
fluid, just-in-time, manner — nothing like casualisation at all; rather a highly
organised intensification of surplus extraction. By just focusing on issues of ‘fair’
wage the mysterious veil that coin draws over real relations of production is
doubled — the worker is encouraged to see only how much coin is to be granted
to her, so that she go into the market, and not to question who produced the
value this coin represents in the first place, and in what manner. Attention to
the greater fluidity of labour allows one to develop new strategies of
resistance in which the ‘just-in-time’ worker becomes conscious of her own
mode of organisation and internalises it as ‘just-in-time’ resistance.]
Since the onset of the global crisis of the early 1990s political
discussions about restructuring the welfare state, in which a broad range
of leftists try to take part, have intensified. The capitalist state, bourgeois
parties and left wing tendencies agree in that social benefits should not
depend on life-long waged work any more but be more in accordance with new and
more flexible forms of employment. While the capitalist state wants to motivate
more people to do badly paid and casual work, some groups from the left claim
to campaign against capitalism by demanding a “guaranteed income” (“existence
money” in Germany or “salaire garanti” in France).
Indeed the traditional welfare state is no longer consistent with the
restructured class relations. But do the friends of the “guaranteed income”
really grasp what’s going on? We will start by looking at the debate so far (1)
and then take a look at the real changes in class relations (2) which
provide the material base for the consensus around the restructuring of the
welfare state (3). This will be followed by a critique of the illusions
regarding the welfare state (4) which inform the left’s interpretation of
events and a critique of the concept of politics (5) which informs the
left’s new campaigns.
1. The state of the debate today
In (West) Germany the debate about a different
welfare state and new class relations (“new poverty”, “the end of the work
society”) has been going on since the early 1980s. The first deep post war
crisis of 1974 – 5 had driven unemployment up to 1 million. At first
however this looked like a cyclical phenomenon. In the 1980 – 2 crisis
official unemployment went up from 1 to 2 million. Apparently, full
employment capitalism was over and talk of “structural unemployment” began.
Radical leftists saw so-called “post-industrial mass poverty” as
a starting point for new revolutionary concepts.
The number of people who were still being exploited by capital seemed to
be free falling and the work society looked like it was going to be “out of
work” very soon. Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. At the same
time people said “good-bye to the proletariat” (Andre Gorz, 1980) and tried to
mould the “unemployed”, which had so far been a labour law category, into
a new political actor. At the conferences for a West German
unemployed movement in the early 1980s, leftists came up with the demand for
a guaranteed income in order to break away from the “work for everyone”
slogan and to express their criticism of capitalist waged work. However the
“good-bye to the proletariat” meant that they had lost the revolutionary
social subject. This left them with little choice but to make a demand to
the state on behalf of the “unemployed”. The unemployed movement which many had
hoped for never came.
From the mid-1980s, employment boomed. Most unemployed groups were
saved from extinction only by professionalising and institutionalising with
money from the state and job creation jobs. Radical leftists and autonomists
lost interest in questions of unemployment and exploitation while the state
hoped to solve the crisis in a new economic boom. But the crisis of 1992 – 3
accelerated the changes in exploitation relations and in the composition of
unemployment and casual forms of exploitation. It became more and more apparent
that capitalism is a class society in which proletarians and capital
owners confront each other. In 1993, Karl Heinz Roth’s theses about a new
worldwide proletarization unifying the conditions of the working class across
the planet sparked a debate about the new revolutionary opportunities
which this situation offered. But the majority of the left bowed to
capitalism’s victorious smile, in their theoretical and practical efforts
developing their own version of the “end of history” and saying good-bye to
the revolution in theories about “post-fordism” and “globalisation”.
Encouraged by movements in France and scared by neo-fascist
mobilisations around the “social question”, the radical left rediscovered
society’s class character about one or two years ago. The return of West
European social democracy to power is an indication that capital too is looking
for new forms of mediation, turning away from “neo-liberalism” and considering
new forms of regulation (from the Tobin tax to new welfare state models).
Sailing in their wake are some of those who originally wanted to criticise
capitalism but, out of desperation or false realism, have begun to participate
in the search for new regulations. But nothing is as important today as
criticising this society radically enough to match existing proletarian anger.
Then it would turn out that this world already possesses a dream of human
life beyond state and capital.
2. The new class relations as a political
challenge
Debates about “unemployment” and “employment” often
assume these categories to be two groups of society: One group has
a regular income and one group is “excluded” from the labour market and
has to be supported by the state. This image has little to do with real people
and their biographies. A lot of people do not work but are not “unemployed”
(pupils, retired people etc.), others are “unemployed” and work (off the
books), others are not “employed” but still work (housework, raising children
etc.), still others are available to be exploited by capital but wait abroad
and therefore do not count as “unemployed”. The statistics do not tell us how
capital exploits living labour power. You should keep this in mind when you
read the following sketch of class relations (in Germany). We will only
understand the important changes if we get involved.
After World War II the
unemployment rate went down to less than 1 per cent only from 1961. 1975,
with its annual average of 1 million unemployed, marks the end of the
short dream of full employment. Modern unemployment is not forever for
individual proletarians, but means changing jobs with interruptions.
Statistically, 4.6 million workers were unemployed once in 1975, but
unemployment lasted only an average of 12 weeks.
For the first time in capitalist history the state was forced to pay
unemployed workers an income which covered their reproduction, in order to
maintain industrial peace. Unemployment no longer functioned as a wage-depressing
industrial reserve army. The proletariat quickly discovered the pleasant sides
of unemployment. Many used the dole or requalification schemes to get out of
the factory which everyone hated. The revolutionary left talked of the “happy
unemployed”. After the defeat of the open struggles, unemployment became
a reservoir especially for many of the conflictual workers. Real wages
kept rising and the first experiments with reorganising production failed. The
attempt to use immigrant workers from South Europe as a mobile reserve of
labour power was a failure as well. There was a significant rise of
the immigrant resident population after the official end to the employment of
new immigrant workers in 1973.
During the next crisis, 1980 – 2, unemployment rose to over 2 million,
speeding up turnover in the job market. Half of those who had found new jobs
after being unemployed lost their new jobs again after a while. This
indicated a rise of casual and insecure forms of exploitation. The 1985
Employment Promotion Act (Beschäftigungsförderungsgesetz) opened the door for
an extended use of fixed-term contracts and temporary work agencies. The
reduction of working time by trade union agreements became a Trojan horse
for the flexibilisation and intensification of work. Benefit payments were
subject to several policy changes. For instance when, in the mid 1980s, benefit
cuts had led to a sinking rate of eligibility for unemployment insurance
benefits, the state raised payments for the older unemployed again.
Between 1985 and 1992, three million new jobs were created. Because of
the immigration from Eastern Europe, which rapidly grew after 1987,
manufacturing jobs and poorly paying jobs could be filled with immigrants.
Still there was new shopfloor conflict shortly before German “reunification”.
Employers in the metal industries tried to meet wage demands with one-off
bonus payments; a workers’ mobilisation in hospitals across West Germany
led to improved working conditions and significant pay raises. In the euphoric
political climate of “reunification”, the government was not able to uphold
austerity and welfare cuts but resorted to giant public debts thereby further
fuelling economic growth. The worldwide crisis which set in in 1990 was delayed
by two years by this “special boom” in Germany. The crisis came in 1992 – 3 and
it was deeper than all the previous ones. Massive cuts in employment had
already cut East German jobs from 10 to 6 million by 1992-raising all-German
unemployment to 3 million. In the crisis it rose to over 4 million,
and the cyclical upswing since has marked a sharp break with former
trends:
Jobs: In spite of the recovery, unemployment rose continually until 1997
while the number of “regular” jobs [2] sank correspondingly. Statistically,
only “irregular” new jobs were created: self-employment, work off the books,
social insurance-free jobs [3] etc.
Wages: For the first time, real wages have sunk without rising again.
They also sank in relation to productivity, i.e. wage per unit costs sank.
Benefits: Due to drastic benefit cuts more and more unemployed have lost
their unemployment insurance entitlements and have had to claim social assistance.
The separation between insurance and means-tested benefits is beginning to
break down.
Unions: There has been a breakthrough for capital in big companies:
Trade unions and factory councils pledged to assist in cost-cutting
programmes, wage components were made dependent on the development of
productivity and the sick-rate, factory councils [4] signed company agreements
below valid collective agreements signed by the same unions.
East Germany: East German production has been completely restructured,
serving as a testing ground for new strategies of exploitation. Instead of
raising wages to the West German level, as had been promised in 1990,
collective agreements froze wages at a permanently lower level. At the
same time, wages and conditions have been below existing collective agreements
to an extent unknown in West Germany.
The crisis of 1992 – 3 marked a turning point in the discussion
about the crisis and reform of the welfare state. More than 20 years of
unemployment were finally to act as a pressure to radically intensify
exploitation. At the same time, the working class too has left the ideal of
life-long full-time employment behind. Workers are looking for individual
ways out. Self-employment and work off the books are a result not only of
unemployment but also of many proletarians’ illusionary hopes to get away from
the drugdery of work. When Kohl’s government was re-elected in 1994 it was not
able to take this mixture of fear and hope and turn it into the legitimation
for a radical restructuring of the welfare state. It was too obvious that
the government was serving the interests of the employers, so the “reforms” ran
up against a brick wall. In contrast, the restructuring plans of the new
red/green government, which were immediately announced in the name of the
“unemployed” and “economic prosperity”, are much more dramatic.
3. Restructuring the welfare state: shoring up the new
class relations
Today the programmes of all political parties in
Germany demand some kind of guaranteed minimum income (ranging from “negative
income tax” models to a “civil right” for income). This is a response to
the fact that more and more people in new forms of employment are no longer
covered by the traditional safety nets of the welfare state. On the other hand,
they all agree that the only way of increasing employment is the creation of
more of these new jobs because they mean lower wage costs and more worker
flexibility. The debate is not about the absolute costs of the welfare state
but about its effectiveness in securing exploitation. In capital’s logic,
higher costs in some fields (like early retirement schemes or a guaranteed
income) may be okay because they led to a growth of the total mass of
labour and surplus value. Even long-term payments to a few troublemakers
may result in higher productivity of society as a whole.
The chancellor’s chief adviser Hombach says what the restructuring plans
are all about: So far politicians have tried to adjust employment relations to
the welfare system. Now the welfare system will have to adjust to the labour
market’s new realities: “All attempts at productively using flexibilisation at
the bottom end of the labour market will be in vain if we cannot disconnect the
social security system from the assumption that normality means life-long
full-time employment and the “normal family”, with a working father, a house
wife and children. (…) And we will only be able to use “irregular” employment
to build bridges into the labour market if we do not punish social assistance claimants
for working. Instead of taking away every penny they earn we should turn
additional earnings into incentives.”
Another, often underestimated, reason for the restructuring of the
welfare state is the development of paid non-work by older people. The pension
insurance budget is twice as high as the unemployment insurance and social
assistance budgets added together. With life expectancy rising and
contributions to social insurance sinking, it will mean either lower pensions
or higher contributions. This is why more and more experts advocate a tax-funded
minimum pension. In the framework of a guaranteed income this would be
much easier to introduce.
But why should the red/green government be more successful than its
predecessor in realizing such a far-reaching restructuring of the welfare
state? While the Christian Democrats were always suspected of being “neo-liberals”,
the new government can use the widespread criticism of “neo-liberalism” to
present its policies as a “third way”, avoiding USA conditions.
While the modernisation of the economy is inevitable, proletarians should be
protected by a minimum guarantee. Social peace, guaranteed by social
security and trade union mediation, is a productive advantage of the
German export-orientated economy, and the capitalists do not want to give it
up. However the division of work between state social security and private
precaution is to be rearranged.
This policy promises to create the basis for a new “social
contract” by saving us from the horrors of neo-liberalism. The “Alliance for
Jobs” is one way of bringing about this consensus (there are others like former
critiques of work turned into new pro-work ideologies of “subsistence economy”
or “self-managed enterprises”). The unions participate in this Alliance. While
they said no to state subsidies for low-wage work under the previous
government they co-operate in such experiments now. In the same context, the
boss of the metal workers’ union IGM declared
that young people should be forced to work: “In the long run, there can be no
freedom of choice between turning down an apprenticeship placement and
collecting benefits if there are enough placements available. We (!) will have
to cut benefits for kids who refuse this offer.” If the “social contract” is
a contract, both sides will have to give something-after all it’s for jobs.
At this moment nobody can make exact predictions which changes to the
social security laws will lead to which behaviours by capitalists and by
proletarians. Even the world’s chief economists admit that they do not
understand the current crisis of global capitalism any more. Then how should
welfare state experts know what is to be done? This openness of the situation
creates an opportunity for radical leftist groups to make their own “realistic”
demands to the welfare state.
4. Illusions regarding the welfare state and class
society
The assumptions about the welfare state in the debate
about the guaranteed income derive first of all from personal experience with
using welfare benefits. The welfare state is not judged by its relation to the
class relationship and class struggle-neither historically nor in daily
political activities-but by personal opportunities to live with as little work
as possible. After the failure of the proletarian struggles of the 1970s, the
tendency of collective struggles against work was replaced by the individual
behaviour and lifestyle of the refusal of work. Collecting welfare benefits
gave the subjects of the “new social movements” enough free time for their
political activities. But connections to the struggle against work in the
production process became severed. “Autonomous” became an expression of the
separation from conflicts in the workplace. Apart from the hassle in the
benefits offices, the welfare state was seen as quite an agreeable institution.
This corresponds to two familiar ideas: welfare benefits are income
without work, and this is possible because the welfare state is an
“achievement” of the workers’ movement. These ideas reproduce the exact same
illusions with which the welfare state veils the fundamental class
relationship.
Historically, the welfare state was first of all
a bulwark against the threat of revolution. Since the early 19th century,
when the “dangerous classes” threatened the social order, the bourgeoise talked
about the “social question”. This term theoretically defused the class
antagonism and assumed that it could in principle be solved by social reform.
State-run social security was to guarantee that proletarians would permanently
offer their labour power to capital-without revolting and without starving to death.
On the other hand the workers’ movement also established its own social
security funds to help solidarity among workers. They criticised the
introduction of social insurance schemes by the state as a kind of
expropriation of their self-organised funds. While Bismarck in Germany
established a purely statal social insurance system which was aimed openly
against the workers’ movement, in other countries the state subsidized the
self-organised funds of the trade unions. That move also served to integrate
the workers’ movement into the bourgeois state; but the consciousness of the
opposition between the working class and state-regulated reproduction was
still alive, because the workers’ movement maintained control over its
own funds.
The introduction of any social benefit has always meant more control and
surveillance of individual proletarians: People asking for social benefits must
be registered nation-state citizens, disclose their employment and education
history, etc.
The “achievements” of the welfare state are meant to suppress awareness
of our own strength and collective struggles. Our own self-activity is
replaced by the state, we are atomised by bourgeois law and individual monetary
payments. Capitalism is based on the fact that we are constantly being
separated from the wealth we have produced by our own social co-operation. The
welfare state makes sure we accept this fact and behave as individuals.
The welfare state has completed the project of the nation. At first,
proletarians did not have a “fatherland” indeed-then the claim to social
benefits from “their” state turned them into national “citizens”. German trade
unions were finally fully recognised by the state in World War I when they
were involved in the administration of the national economy and took on the
responsibility of disciplining the workers. Where self-organised funds of the
workers’ movement still existed in other European countries they were handed
over to the state under Nazi occupation. Anyone making appeals to the welfare
state today cannot avoid an affirmative approach to the nation state.
The claim that the guaranteed income has an anti-capitalist dimension
because it is disconnected from waged work is based on the second illusion of
the welfare state: that its benefits are income without work.
For capitalist class relations, it is not so important that each and
every individual is forced to work all their lives but that capital can
mobilise enough work in society as a whole to meet its needs for
valorisation. This societal coercion to work has always depended on the welfare
state as a means of dividing the working class and establishing
hierarchical differences among workers. The guaranteed income does not
contradict this logic because it does not stop the alienation of our wealth but
only serves as an income bottom line: “a factual minimum wage below which
nobody has to work” (as the Co-ordination of Unemployed Groups put it in
January 1999). Anyone who is not satisfied with a mere subsistence
guarantee has only one choice: work!
The development of the welfare state has been based on the opposition of
two different principles: insurance and alms. This drew a clear line
between “workers” and “paupers”. The first have been offered the illusion of
living off their own personal savings in times of unemployment or old age while
the latter have been dependent on (state funded) alms. This insurance fetishism
is tied to the wage fetishism, and like the wage fetishism it veils the fact of
exploitation. In the wage, the appropriation of other people’s work by capital
appears as a fair exchange of work and money. [5]
In the face of mass unemployment, high job turnover and continuing
hatred of life-long work this dual model of state controlled insurance and
state alms has gone into crisis. Those who have enough money join private
insurance schemes, while at the same time more and more proletarians are no
longer entitled to state social insurance and have to claim social assistance.
German social insurance was designed for times of full employment with only
cyclical peaks of unemployment. Social assistance was supposed to be extremely
stigmatising and was not designed to pay for massive unemployment. Politicians
see the crisis of the welfare state as a problem of weak “incentives to
work” and of a “loss of legitimation”.
We have to put both into context: 1) In order to increase the
“incentive” to work, social benefits will have to be rearranged so that even
badly paid work will notably increase one’s income. Of course this carrot is
combined with a stick: workfare programmes against youth and other people
who refuse to work. 2) Claiming social assistance for a short while is to
be less stigmatising so that people will be encouraged to risk self-employment
or other insecure jobs. To that end, the minimum income is to be designed as a “civil
right”. In exchange for that, existing social insurance benefits like old age
pensions could be cut because people are already using private insurance
schemes anyway.
The leftist demand for a guaranteed income appears politically
realistic because it is in line with the second argument (“civil right”)-and
simply ignores the first (“work incentives”).
5. From the “political wage” to the guaranteed income
Some groups ignore the criticism of the guaranteed
income, arguing that it only serves as a demand for mobilizations.
According to them, the mere fact that a guaranteed income would be utopian
in a capitalist society could bring people out into the streets for anti-capitalist
politics. According to them, the guaranteed income should not actually be seen
as a demand but as a strategy of direct appropriation-like the
concept of the “political wage” which was formulated in Italy in the 1970s. As
the “political wage” emerged around militant mass worker struggles and broad
movements of direct appropriation it does look like the most radical concept.
Then just as now the real question is how we understand politics: how do we see
the role of political organization?
In the late 1960s, class struggles in Italy had broken free from the
chains of trade union control. Struggles and wage demands had detached
themselves from the business cycle. That was the material basis of workers’
autonomy. The mass workers’ struggles were the basis of proletarian power
against the factory society, radiating out into the territory: refusal to pay
rent or energy bills, squatting, free shopping in supermarkets etc. The
“political wage” was supposed to unite and homogenise all those struggles. “A
guaranteed wage outside of the factory means making the transition to taking
the commodities, it means appropriating them.” [6]
While Potere Operaio’s theoreticians argued that this strategy meant the
extension of the struggle from the factory to the entire society, in reality it
already marked a reaction to the limits of the wage struggles as well as
the retreat from the factory. With a clever theoretical move, Toni Negri
reinterpreted the loss of proletarian power inside production into a new
form of strength. In his Crisis of the Planner-State (1971)-published as a supplement
to Potere Operaio-he proclaimed the end of the law of value and thus the end
of all material foundations of capitalist domination. [7] According to Negri,
communism was imminent so that “each intermediary step has to be
shortcircuited”. He said that the new movements in the territory (i.e., outside
work) already expressed this: “Appropriation is the particular qualification of
class behaviour towards the state of the defunct law of value.” Therefore he
claimed that the revolutionary movement had to clear away the political power
structure which had remained without a material base, meaning that
“insurrection is on the agenda”.
Later, Negri was to call the new subject of this attack the “social
worker”, as opposed to the “mass worker” of factory production, [8] addressing
the subjects of the new youth movements that exploded in Italy in the 1977
revolt. The isolation of social revolt from class struggle, from the mass of
producers of surplus value, which Negri had expressed and legitimated in his
theory, was the birth of “organised autonomy”. It is the content of all
currents that have called themselves “autonomous” ever since. Today Negri’s
theory of the “social worker” and the productivity of “immaterial labour”
already acting outside of capital is used by “Autonomists” in France and Italy
to support their campaigns for a guaranteed income.
Thus, the slogan of a “political wage” was not a generalisation of
the struggle of all the exploited, but a programme of separation from and
stepping out of the conflict over exploitation. The only way the “political
wage” could be presented as a general strategy was in a vanguardist
and leninist sense. In the above mentioned supplement to Potere Operaio,
Ferruccio Gambino assigns the demand a central, homogenising role:
“Talking about the political wage means that all these offensive, defensive and
also reactionary forces are withdrawn from the capitalist system and
transformed into elements of political class organisation. The political wage
must make it possible to transcend those forms of resistance.” This shows
a vanguardist understanding: the class may lead a multiplicity of
struggles but it does not learn by itself. Homogenisation and political
development can only be brought about by a political organisation.
That is why it is so important to have a central demand: the “political
wage” is a substitute for processes of learning and homogenisation which
do not happen.
Conclusion: Self-emancipation vs. Politics
Today’s proposal to organize around a central
demand is informed by the same understanding of the relation between
proletarian movement and political organization. “But we know that new
movements will hardly emerge on the (casual and flexibilised) shopfloor. The
only place where they can still really constitute themselves is concrete
political struggles where solidarity is experienced in the common project (and
not on the shopfloor as in earlier days)”. [9] It starts from the certainty
that, in the face of “post-fordism” and the “diffuse factory”, autonomous
struggles can no longer exist. Instead of questioning the theories of post-fordism
and criticising their affirmative stance towards capitalist development, they
are used as a theoretical cliché in order to justify the necessity of
mobilizing and uniting the atomised subjects from above. The demands do not
start from real struggles but are deduced from an abstract consideration about
state and income. Therefore they can only see themselves as representatives and
politicians.
Interventions starting from the assumption that the proletariat can
emancipate itself have always been met with the objection that the proletariat
is so extremely fragmented that only a central political project from the
outside could overcome that fragmentation. In 1973, the group “Arbeitersache
München” wrote about its political work with immigrant workers: “Many comrades
have objections to this approach because the foreign workers often change their
jobs and do not remain steadily in one place. We say: this is not
a disadvantage but an advantage. If we think that the workers will be able
to develop patterns of struggle and behaviour then we also think that any
spreading of these experiences through mobility will push ahead the class
struggle. And we are convinced that all these contradictions will produce more
and more struggles in which our task will be one of generalisation and
‘synthesis’. Thinking that the readiness to fight must be the result of doing
subversive work in one department of a factory for ten years completely
ignores the reality of today’s large plants. Moreover it implies that the
proletariat does not have a knowledge of forms of struggle but has to be
taught these in a long process. This is not true-this knowledge exists
but it is covered by many veils. And we are contributing to uncovering them.”
[10]
That is pretty much how we might describe our own tasks today.
Ironically, the same “autonomous” groups who were always critical of the unions
reproduce traditional trade unionist conceptions about the evolutionary
development of struggles (e.g. long education of workers in one factory
department) as evidence that in “post-fordist” structures of production
proletarians can no longer struggle. Today’s changes in the labour market are
usually called “casualisation” as if this explained anything. Most talk about “casualisation”
only refers to a departure from “normal” employment as defined by labour
law regulations, but does not start from the role of living labour and its co-operation
inside the process of production. Therefore this point of view misses
completely how the process of casualisation has expanded social co-operation-a
development which politically appears as the atomization of workers.
However, workers’ struggles and power are not based on legal regulations
but on workers collectively appropriating their own co-operation by fighting
against capital.
Communism as a real movement exists in proletarian struggles which
today are based on a much greater societalisation of production on
a global scale. Ironically, the debates about a guaranteed income
quite rightly assume that communism, i.e. life without coercion to work, is
possible today, but draw the worst conceivable conclusion from that assumption:
instead of tearing down the crumbling walls of the global workhouse they
propose to repair them!
Footnotes:
[1] In English, the most appropriate equivalent term
might be ‘basic income’.
[2] “Regular jobs” in Germany refers to jobs in
which workers hold a dependent employee status and for which workers as
well as employers pay 4 basic social insurance contributions, i.e. unemployment
insurance, health insurance, old age pension insurance and disability care
insurance.
[3] Part-time jobs with a working week of
less than 15 hours and paying less than 630 DM per
month have been contribution-free. Since last autumn, there has been intensive
debate about a reform of these jobs.
[4] Betriebsrat: representative body elected by
the workforce of a company; has some say in company affairs and is legally
obliged to uphold productive peace.
[5] The term “exclusion” reinforces this illusion.
While the “excluded” are seen as being unable to reproduce themselves by waged
work, a job where one is exploited is seen as an opportunity “to
participate in the wealth of society”. The conceptual pair exclusion/inclusion
makes the class relationship disappear.
[6] “Wir wollen alles”, Nr. 19.
[7] English version in: Revolution Retrieved, Red
Notes 1988.
[8] For a critique of that term cf. Roberto
Battaggia: “Operaio massa e operaio sociale: alcune considerazioni sulla
‘nuova composizione di classe’”, in Primo Maggio 14, Winter 1980/81.
[9] “Der schwierige Weg zu einem europäischen
Kampf gegen das Kapital” [The difficult road towards a European struggle
against capital] (invitation to the conference), in Arranca no. 14.
[10] Arbeitersache München, Was wir brauchen,
müssen wir uns nehmen [We have to take what we need], Munich 1973, p. 35.
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