1
Labour
E. Paul Durrenberger
Penn State
2005
A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. James G. Carrier, Editor. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar. 125-140.
Introduction
Economists are known for their qualification “all other things being equal,” while anthropologists have made a discipline of the fact that things are never equal. Economic anthropology today is not best thought of as economics in non-Western settings but rather as anthropological approaches to economics in any setting. To meet their material needs, people produce, distribute, and consume goods. Economic anthropology describes the ways in which people produce, distribute, and consume goods, how these systems are organized, how they operate, how they got that way, how they relate to other systems, how people behave and make decisions in terms of such systems, and the consequences of people’s actions for the systems. To understand how various economic systems organize production, distribution, and consumption, we have to understand what the system is, what its parts are, and how the parts relate to one another. Another goal of economic anthropology is to describe these systems in locally meaningful terms that are universally relevant and useful for understanding any economic system at any time and any place (Durrenberger 1996).
Here I will discuss how anthropologists have classified economic systems in terms of the means they use to organize labour for production, the classification of production units according to different roles of labour in them, the role of labour in modern complex societies, how globalization affects the organization of labour, and relationships between people’s involvement with labour and the forms of their consciousness, their cultures.
The role of labour in the classification of economic systems
To understand capitalism, Marx analyzed the role of labor in the process of production. He observed that all useful objects are products of more or less human labor. The amount of labor an object contains determines the value of object in exchange for other objects. The amount of labor an object contains depends on the technology of the place and time and the organization of the process of production. In a capitalist system, money and markets facilitate the exchange of commodities, things exchanged via markets.
While this approach to labour provides a means for understanding the role of labour in any system, Marx argued that the key to capitalism is the understanding and treatment of labor as a thing that people can buy and sell, a commodity like any other. Its value, like the value of any commodity, is determined by the amount of labor necessary to produce it. Thus the value of labor is the amount of labor necessary to produce the things a worker needs for subsistence and to keep working. Capitalism can produce profits when people can organize production in such a way as to pay a worker the value of the worker’s labor as wages and then use the worker’s labor to produce the value of the wages and more. The difference between the value a worker produces and the worker’s wages is profit. Capitalism depends on the organizing labor in such a way that it is possible for the buyers of labor to gain profits by the relationship of wages. This is a social relationship that organizes production in capitalist societies.
Marx’s Capital is a detailed unfolding of his understanding of these relationships in capitalism. Godolier (1972) observes that in some societies, kinship or religion dominates social organization.
Eric R. Wolf (1999) argued that there are three main means of extracting value from those who produce it by their work--kinship, tribute, and capital. Each defines a characteristic mode of production. As long as capitalists own the means of production and workers do not, the capitalist mode appears to be self-regulating because workers are continusously forced back into working for capitalists after each cycle of production is complete. Because they have no access to the means of production, they can never break free of the cycle. He points out the critical role of the state in starting and maintaining this mode of production. Recently (2003) economist Joseph Stiglitz has analyzed the necessity for states to establish and maintain the markets and other relationships that are necessary for capitalism.
These reflections give us a means of developing a comparative study of economic systems. We can arrange any political economy, any social order, in a grid with all others according to how it mobilizes labor. Wolf and others seem largely agreed on a three-fold classification of kinship, tributary, and capitalist ways of organizing labor. In kinship dominated systems such as Godolier (1972) was pondering, relationships of kinship order relations of production. In tributary systems, force organizes the uses of labor. Capitalist systems mobolize labor by conjoining the apparatus of states with property and wage systems. Put bluntly, the state deprives people of any alternative but to sell their labor as a commodity which makes it available for capitalist production and the creation of profits.
Hornberg discusses the global dynamics of energy transfers. If profit is generated by the difference between the value of labor and the value of its product, it is also generated by the difference in the cost and the product of machines. Marx measured the difference in terms of labor time; Hornberg argues for measuring the asymmetries of energy flows (2001:148).
He classifies possible modes of accumulation as 1) plunder, 2) merchant capitalism, 3) financial capitalism, 4) undercompensation of labor for its product by slavery, barter to exchange unequal amounts of labor time, redistribution or wages and 5) underpayment for energy and raw materials for food in relation to labor, fodder in relation to draft animals or fuels in relation to industrial manufacture. He suggests that while some forms may be empirically observable, most are inextricably mixed (2001:69-70). Thus several forms of production may operate in the same economic system at the same time. This raises the question of different kinds of units of production.
The role of labour in classifying production units
The means of recruiting labour has not only been central for classifying political-economic systems but also their component units of production. In capitalist societies in which firms recruit labor via the market, unwaged labor may continue to play an important role in other forms of production such as households whose members provide most if not all of the labor requirements for production.
The Russian agricultural economist, A.V. Chayanov, argued that assessments of labour were central to the logic of peasant households. People produce according to the logic of the balance of the exponentially increasing drudgery of labor and the exponentially decreasing marginal utility of the goods their labour produces. To paraphrase Chayanov, the more people work, the less they want to work more and the more of a need the goods they produce satisfies, the less any additional ones add. When the drudgery of the next unit of labour exceeds the utility of the goods it produces, people stop working. At that point, it is not worth their effort to continue production (Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 2001).
Thus households answer to a different calculus of advantage than do firms. While firms must always compute profits, households have no means of doing so because they pay no wages.
The factors that influence the volume of production are the direness of need and the drudgery of labour. Chayanov conceived of the drudgery of labour as the inverse of productivity. The greater the productivity of labour, the less the drudgery. Thus, in the ascending curve of drudgery of labour, if a new process or technology doubles the amount each hour of work produces, the assessment of drudgery for each additional unit of labour is only half as much. The curve of marginal utility of goods reflects the costs of the new process or technology because it includes the increased demand on the goods produced to compensate for it, for instance by purchasing it or paying interest on a loan.
Anything that affects the productivity of labour thus affects the balance of production for households. If the fertility of land decreases, productivity decreases and drudgery of labor increases proportionally. Chayanov made no distinction between producing goods for immediate use and for sale. If people produce goods for sale, anything that affects the price of their goods also affects their productivity because their objective is the money from the sale. If the costs of transportation to markets are high, productivity declines because people receive less for their goods.
Chayanov did not confine his understanding to agricultural households but supposed that people would follow the same logic of advantage in households that produced crafts or other market wares. The value Chayanov’s analysis is that it is general, but all the factors which affect the utility and drudgery curves have to be locally defined, in terms of the specifics of each example. This means that the analyses must incorporate the effects of the broader political and economic system on productivity and need.
Economists usually assume that fishermen operate according to the logic of profitability the way firms do. In New England, the southern U.S., and the east and west coasts of Canada, diversity characterizes both the processing and harvesting sectors of the fishing industries (Doeringer et al. 1986; Griffith 1993; Marchak, Guppy and McMullan 1987; Apostle and Barrett 1992). The economists Doeringer et al. (1986) found in New England that many fishermen did not exit the fishery when their model predicted they would.
Parallel to the distinction between firms and households, they distinguished a capitalist sector from a kinship sector. Because boats in the kinship sector are family owned and operated and share work, people continue to operate them as long as they can cover their costs. The labor force in the capitalist sector changes with conditions while the kinship sector remains more constant because it can survive conditions that are lethal to capitalists. In some New England fisheries the flexibility of the kinship sector to expand in good times and underemploy people to maintain itself during bad times gives it a competitive edge over the capitalist sector (Doeringer et al. 1986:119).
If people produce for their needs, the more consumers each worker has to support, the more income each worker should produce; the fewer consumers each worker has to support, the less income each worker should produce. The number of consumers each worker has to support is one determinant of the level of marginal utility of values that workers produce. Given the number of workers and consumers in each household and a measure of income, we can ascertain whether the ratio of consumers to workers and other sources of need vary with household income, as we would expect. To assess need, we have to know something about the relevant standard of living. We also have to know all of the sources of demand besides supplying the needs of the people in the household. It makes a big difference whether one is in debt or already owns a farm or boat debt-free. For household economies, all sources of demand on income are equivalent to and on a par with the consumption needs of household members. These are not separate costs of "business."
Firms, in contrast to households, operate in terms of the logic of the amount of profit they can extract via the difference in wages and the value that the labour they hire produces. Even in advanced capitalist systems, household production plays an important role (Durrenberger 1996).
The role of states and labour in firms and modern societies
To understand modern political-economic systems we must understand the politics of capital as well as the economics of politics. The comparative perspective of economic anthropology allows us to re-examine contemporary capitalist economic systems from a different viewpoint than what Stiglitz called the religion of ‘market fundamentalism.’ He characterizes this ideology as a religion because it seems to be impervious to any counter-statements based on experience or reality. It’s premises and conclusions, he suggests, are counter-factual and immune to the self-corrective feed-back between hypothesis and observation that characterizes science.
In his book, Globalization and its Discontents, he is intent to show that markets don’t just exist as forces of nature. They are institutional structures with histories and costs. Markets don’t just exist; the apparatus of states create them and must maintain them. Historical works show just how intense the involvement of states is in creating and maintaining various kinds of markets as well as the role of wages, profits and capital in the process of development.
One view of development envisions an upward spiral of capitalist production that Eric Wolf discusses (1997). People invest capital in technology that increases productivity and thus creates profits that they can use as capital to put back into the process. As the technology develops, it enlarges productive capacity and reduces the labour it takes to produce commodities and thus, their costs as well as protecting the producer’s share of the market. Those who control capital strive to produce as cheaply as possible so they can sell their product for a smaller price and control larger shares of the market. As their market share increases, producers enlarge productive capacity more, and thus increase productivity to further enhance profits, which can re-enter the cycle to develop new technology and reduce labour.
As this process continues, higher producers use profits to increase demand by lowering prices. Thus, there are more profits, more capital, more efficient technology and higher productivity, more production, lower prices, and increased demand. Especially if labor is sufficiently organized to make collective claims, such benefits may be passed along as increased wages. Lower prices mean more buying power and greater consumption that fuels demand. The system spirals upward much in the way Marx envisioned in Capital.
In states in which the owners of capital hold relatively great influence, the anti-social dimensions of market fundamentalism become apparent. Bronfenbrenner, Friedman, Hurd, Oswald, and Seeber (1998) show that the weakness of the labor movement in the United States is due to well organized, massive, and often violent opposition rather than worker disinterest, individualism, or some inscrutable difference between the U.S. and European countries that makes it an exceptional (Vanneman and Weber 1987; Durrenberger 1992a, 1992b, 1994, 1995, 1996). A concerted anti-union offensive is a major cause. Cohen and Hurd (1998) outline a general pattern of worker intimidation that Fantasia (1988) shows ethnographically.
The division between those who own capital and those who sell their labour to them defines two classes (Durrenberger 2000). “Classes,” Zweig explains (11), “are groups of people connected to one another, and made different from one another, by the ways they interact when producing goods and services” in work places, but extending into political and cultural dynamics where rules and expectations that guide the economy are established to suit the needs of the powerful. Different productive roles carry different incomes and prestige, but the most important feature is the different power they confer. Class is not a matter of lifestyle. “It is about economics” (11). Zweig argues that a small capitalist class has the power to organize and direct production while a vast majority of working class people have virtually no authority. On the job, in the market, in politics, in culture workers have little control.
Zweig shows that since 1972 the median income in the U.S. has fallen 20% though family incomes remained unchanged because more people from each household joined the workforce. As companies made record profits, they laid off workers increasing people’s feelings of insecurity. To maintain levels of consumption, working people resorted to unprecedented levels of debt. These changes occurred in spite of dramatic increases in output and productivity per hour of work. As production increased 42% , 60% of the gains went to the richest 1% of families. The bottom 80% got 5% of the increase. As top incomes increased 77%, the bottom 20% of the population experienced income declines of 9%. The poorest fifth of the U.S. population worked 4.6% more and got 4.1 percent less income. The means of this increased appropriation from those who produced it, Zweig argues, is successful class warfare of the capitalist class against the working class.
Global economics and politics
In his 1997 preface to Europe and the People Without History, Wolf understood political economy as the study of “societies, states, and markets as historically evolving phenomena” and questioned whether there is a universally valid analysis of capitalism (ix). He wanted to understand how unstable systems of power to control labor develop, change and expand their reach through time and space over the structures that determine and circumscribe peoples’ lives.
Social configurations, Wolf argued, have always been parts of larger contradictory connections. Since the rise and expansion of capitalism to all parts of the planet, the connections and contradictions have intensified until the system is so complex that it is quasi-random. That doesn’t mean we cannot understand it, but it does mean we cannot predict with any degree of accuracy. Wolf argued that the main causes of this expansion and its effects are the processes by which a social order mobilizes labor. To understand that, he focused on the institutional structures that guide relations of people with each other and with natural environments. The combination of ownership and management of resources with the use of hired labor in factory production enabled capitalism to undo other arrangements. There have been changes in the distribution of factories, markets, the recruitment of recruitment of workers, technology and organization to produce differing mixes of products. In early times the capital of traders financed these arrangements. In recent times computer-based information and control technologies with new means of transportation are decentralizing production and increasing production in households and workshops that are more flexible than factories.