Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.15
Proletarians of the world, unite!
CARDINAL POINT OF THE COMMUNIST PROGRAM: RESOLUTE STRUGGLE AGAINST SPECIALIZATION
In 1952, at the Forlì meeting, our Party fixed as a point of the immediate revolutionary program the “Resolute struggle against professional specialization and the social division of labor, through the abolition of careers and titles", a point that is part of the immediate revolutionary program and of the final objectives of the communist revolution.
Human body is made up of cells that in turn form tissues and organs. Organs work together to achieve a common goal: to ensure the survival of the organism that brings them all together, this human body. This is what biology says. But in the capitalist system of production the organs, muscles and bones of the wage-workers do not have the function of guaranteeing the survival of their own organism, but that of guaranteeing the survival and the needs of the productive organism of capital.
In Part 4, of Book 1 of Capital, Marx sets out the historical development of the process of capitalist production: first through simple cooperation, then with the division of labor within the workshop and manufacture, then with machinery and modern industry. With the constant improvement of the instruments of production and an ever-greater division of labor the bourgeoisie obtains a higher productivity of labor and obtains through it the production of the relative surplus value described by Marx.
But this division of labor condemns the working class for life to perform a partial and accessory task in the production process and to specialize in these partial tasks.
Human body is made up of approximately 650 muscles, 200 bones and 79 organs, of which the brain is the nervous center. Of the 650 muscles that the human body has, capitalism condemns workers for life to tirelessly wear out only a part of them, to their early atrophy and to the fact that the muscular structure of the body does not fulfill its basic functions due to disuse or repetitive and excessive use of a part of it. The same happens with the bones, tendons, joints.
The division of labor entails not only physical but also intellectual mutilation of the worker: “In every society in which production has developed spontaneously — and our present society is of this type — the situation is not that the producers control the means of production, but that the means of production control the producers. In such a society each new lever of production is necessarily transformed into a new means for the subjection of the producers to the means of production. This is most of all true of that lever of production which, prior to the introduction of modern industry, was by far the most powerful — the division of labour. (…) In the division of labour, man is also divided. All other physical and mental faculties are sacrificed to the development of one single activity. This stunting of man grows in the same measure as the division of labour, which attains its highest development in manufacture.
Manufacture splits up each trade into its separate partial operations, allots each of these to an individual labourer as his life calling, and thus chains him for life to a particular detail function and a particular tool. “It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts... The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation” (Marx) — a motor which in many cases is perfected only by literally crippling the labourer physically and mentally.” (Anti-Dühring, Chapter III, Production, F. Engels). “(…) just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. (…) but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation (…)” (Capital, Book I, Part 4, K. Marx).
For the existence of capitalism, it is essential to mutilate the worker so that the sum of these crippled and mutilated workers make up the collective worker: “The one-sidedness and the deficiencies of the detail labourer become perfections when he is a part of the collective labourer.” (Capital, Book I, Part 4, K. Marx).
This limitation and imperfection of the partial worker develops and enriches the parasite of the social body of labor, the Capital: “What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them. (…) This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital. In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers.” (Capital, Book I, Part 4, K. Marx).
A few examples will serve to illustrate this increase in social productive force: satellites orbiting the earth, rockets capable of going to the Moon and back or going to Mars, unmanned drones; supersonic submarines, underwater cables transporting information; robots performing high-precision surgical operations, or entering the bottom of mines, internet with 5G and 6G technology synchronizing operations in distant points of the planet, artificial intelligence controlling production or able to make a medical diagnosis; construction of macro-buildings and ships in a few days, highly automated logistics centers and assembly lines, high-speed trains, driverless cars, nanorobots that administer internally in the body the exact dose of a drug; brain chips that reactivate dead neuronal connections, etc. etc. and all this with a constant reduction of production times for all goods, from the simplest to the most complex.
All these achievements and knowledge are the product of the work of the collective worker as defined by Marx, but which capitalism APPROPRIATES: "The accumulation of Knowledge and of skill, of the general Productive Forces of the Social Brain, is thus absorbed into Capital, as opposed to Labour, and hence appears as an attribute of Capital, and more specifically of Fixed Capital, in so far as it enters into the Production Process as a Means of Production proper." (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, K. Marx, 1857).
While Capital takes over the Productive Forces of the Social Brain, the brain of the working class is condemned to lethargize a multitude of neuronal connections because it is forced to concentrate only on one or several monotonous and repetitive tasks in addition to poor nutrition and intoxication through television, alcohol and other drugs: “How much human feeling, what abilities can a man retain in his thirtieth year (…)? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The worker’s activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep, none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of Nature, much less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human being to the level of a brute?” (Condition of the Working Class in England, F. Engels, 1844).
And the mutilation derived from the division of labor is reproduced in all layers of capitalist society, including those who live by exploiting the labor of others: “And not only the labourers but also the classes directly or indirectly exploiting the labourers are made subject, through the division of labour, to the tool of their function: the empty-minded bourgeois to his own capital and his own insane craving for profits; the lawyer to his fossilised legal conceptions, which dominate him as an independent power; the “educated classes” in general to their manifold species of local narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness, to their own physical and mental short-sightedness, to their stunted growth due to their narrow specialised education and their being chained for life to this specialised activity — even when this specialised activity is merely to do nothing.” (Anti-Dühring, Chapter III, Production, F. Engels, 1877). Capitalism also condemns large sectors of the working class to the specialty of forced inactivity because they are unemployed or unfit for exploitation (children and the elderly).
From its birth, when the cattle breeders were separated from the simple hunters and fishermen, through the separation of trades and agriculture to the birth of the merchant class from which the bourgeoisie arose, the social division of labor has fulfilled a historical function by exalting the productive forces through the historical arc of societies divided into classes by means of the enslavement of the dominated classes. The development of capitalism has verified that the productive forces are ultra-mature to break the current framework of the relations of production and to put an end to the very basis of the division of society into social classes: the division of labor.
Capitalism can only survive at the cost of cyclically destroying the productive forces already created to overcome the crises of relative overproduction of capital and to mitigate the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by restarting the cycle of capitalist production. It is therefore an outdated system. But at the same time, capitalist industry has created the material bases to make possible a drastic reduction of the working day and that all members of society have the time and the means to train (without careerism and in a very different way from how training is carried out under capitalism) in fields hitherto reserved for a minority with the sole purpose of justifying their privileges.
In capitalism, automation eliminates the specialization linked to craft-idiocy, but at the cost of completely emptying the development of the producer, reducing him to an appendix of the machine: “What characterizes the division of labour inside modern society is that it engenders specialized functions, specialists, and with them craft-idiocy. (…) What characterizes the division of labour in the automatic workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialized character. But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft-idiocy.” (The poverty of philosophy, K. Marx, 1847).
From Marx's struggle against Lassalle it became clear that the revindication of the communist revolution is not reduced to the obtainment of surplus value by the individual worker and not even by the working class as a whole, but has a much greater scope and depth. By stripping the means of production of its present quality of capital, the communist revolution will eliminate the idiotizing and mutilating specialization of the worker, but replacing it not by a degrading emptiness but by a continuous and all-embracing development of his faculties and abilities: “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (The German Ideology, K. Marx, 1845).
For this to be possible, the working class, led by its revolutionary Party, must snatch from the jaws of capital all these conquests, overthrowing the bourgeoisie by violence, destroying its class State to its foundations, taking into its hands the means of production, and setting up temporarily the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. And, let the petty bourgeoisie and indoctrinated intellectuals get astonished: the first step that the dictatorship of the proletariat will take will not be only to burn their titles, but to distribute the most arduous tasks among all the members of society.
In this way, with the drastic reduction of working hours that this distribution will imply, the foundations will be laid so that all members of society have the time and energy to deploy to the maximum the capacities of their individual organisms, their muscles and their brains, as organs that will work voluntarily in unison to achieve a common goal: the birth of the collective organism that will bring them all together, the future Communist Society, the Social Man, the Society of Species: without wage labor, without money, without social classes and without the State and in which “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, K. Marx and F. Engels, 1848).
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY– “THE INTERNATIONALIST PROLETARIAN” – January 2025 – www.pcielcomunista.org