“The specialization of skills leads to the loss of any
image of the totality,” (Lukacs, HCC, p.103)
In just one sentence, the entire substance of Lukacs’s theory of
reification and the fundamental flaw at its core lie pitilessly and irreparably
exposed. The separation (Trennung) of the worker from the means
of production through the violent expropriation operated by the
capitalist bourgeoisie deprives the worker of the product he produces
(“theft of labour-time”), and removes the worker from decisions
regarding when, how and what is produced, in such a manner that the worker’s
living activity is reduced to the mere labour-power of his
activity, to the sheer blind and bestial “effort” (Schmerz, pain – Leid
in Schopenhauer) of this activity. All human production is a process of objectification
of a mental image through the application of human effort (Hegel, Marx). But
when this “effort”, this abstract “power” is removed from the mental image, the
worker necessarily loses all connection between his will and the ultimate
product of his labour or living activity. The mortifying outcome for the worker
is that his living activity becomes pure “form”, mere passive “contemplation”
because the worker does not make any decision about the process and
outcome of production. This de-cision – literally in German, this Ent-wicklung
(!), this “development” or “growth” of the productive process and the
consequent creation of wealth, of the pro-duct - has now been seized by
and lies entirely within the will and control of the capitalist who owns the means
of production - which include not just the tools and the raw
materials used in production but also the labour-power, the naked
force or effort, the “brawn”, that the worker utilizes in production and that
the capitalist purchases with wages. In reality, however, the wages that
the capitalist pays the worker for his naked soul-less labour-power are nothing
but a monetary claim on part of the dead, objectified labour
embodied in the “pro-duct” of the worker’s own living labour.
The reduction of the worker’s living activity to mere “effort” or
“power” (as in “horse-power”) entails the reduction of time to space, of living
reality to a “thing”, a quantity that can be measured. And of
course, the more a human task is “specialized” - the more it is reduced and
fragmented into smaller and more specific tasks -, the easier it is to measure
human living activity in terms of labour-power by simply comparing the “output”
of different workers over a unit of time. Just as human living activity can be
“specialized” into measurable tasks in terms of output, so can the labour-time
experienced by the worker be “spatialized” into chronological time units as
measured by the capitalist employer. It is the “employer”, the
“work-giver” (in German, the Arbeit-geber) who literally gives labour
to the “employee”, the “work-taker” (Arbeit-nehmer)!
Thus, time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing
nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled
with quantifiable ‘things’…: in short, it becomes space, (p.90).
Capitalism is the true “civilization of labour” because the accumulation
of capitalist claims on living labour through expanded production is the engine
and the rationale of this mode of production. The ultimate outcome of this
“specialization” of human labour and of the “spatialization” of human
experienced time is that workers lose “any image of the totality”, of
the “whole-ness”, of the “integrity” of their living activity –
and therefore of their entire experience of social reality, which is thereby
turned into a homogeneous quantity of products or “things” that
can be exchanged according to the “labour-power” embodied in them. This is the
meaning and social reality of “reification” or “thing-ification” (Ver-ding-lichung). Specialization
of human tasks and spatialization of human time in terms of “output” or
“productivity” can be achieved in a capitalist society only through the “exact
calculation” that the industrial capitalist enforces violently on workers by
means of the Taylorization of industrial production. (On Taylorism, see H.
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, as well as A. Gramsci, Americanism
and Fordism.)
But here Lukacs’s genial categorization and theorization of the process
of capitalist reification of social reality runs against a fundamental
difficulty. The difficulty is that capitalist industrial production does not
involve the production of a single, homogeneous product; nor does
it involve a single homogeneous production process! On the
contrary, social production – capitalist or otherwise – involves a myriad products
and a myriad industrial processes that are entirely heterogeneous and whose
products therefore cannot be compared. Worse still, the labour power that goes
in the production of these products cannot be calculated with any degree of
“exactitude” for the simple reason that the living labour that goes into the
production is as heterogeneous and incapable of homologation as are the
productive processes and the products to which living labour is applied!
Lukacs’s own characterization of the Rationalisierung, adopted
almost word for word from Weber’s own presentation in his Munich lecture, Politik
als Beruf, exposes irredeemably the very “emptiness” of his formalistic
understanding of the Weberian concept!
We are concerned above all with the principle
at work here: the principle of rationalization based on what is and can be
calculated….(1) [I]n the first place, the mathematical analysis of work
processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and qualitatively
determined unity of the product. Rationalization in the sense of being able to
predict with ever greater prediction all the results to be achieved is only to
be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by
the study of the special laws governing production….rationalization is
unthinkable without specialization….(2) In the second place, this fragmentation
of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its
subject [that is, the worker]. (pp.88-9)
The insuperable problem with Lukacs’s contention here is that however
much the product itself may be subject to “exact calculation” or to
rationalization, the reality remains that the living labour of workers needed
to produce this product is not and cannot ever be made amenable to any calculation
except the arbitrary one determined politically through politically established
market institutions – precisely because labour power is not a “quantity”
but rather a human experience that can never be turned into a quantity! Living
labour can be “quantified” as labour-power only monetarily, in terms of its
“price” once it is reduced politically to the status of a commodity
like any other that can be “purchased” by the capitalist “in the market”. The
only way to compare and measure this labour power is as a “totality”, that is,
once the products are actually sold and priced “in the market”. But this is an
evident vicious circle! A tautology! Because evidently we cannot make the
“exact calculation” that we argue the capitalist operates for the price of
labour-power until after the capitalist has sold the products on the
market. But, as we saw, the prices of products on the market are determined
supposedly (ex hypothesi) by the labour power that goes into their
production. And yet we know that the “price” of labour power, on which its
exact calculation depends, is also determined by the market! Hence, the market
price of products is determined by the amount of labour power needed to produce
them – but then the price of labour power is also determined by the
market because labour power is a commodity like any other bought and sold on
the market! This circulus vitiosus is obvious and irrefutable.
The reason why Lukacs cannot see or detect the circularity of his
argument is that he constantly relates the homogenization of human living
labour (its reduction to labour-power) to the “totality” of capitalist
production and to the absolute generalization or “universality” of
capitalist commodity production, and therefore of “reification”. He fails to
perceive that “generalizing” a subjective cultural form will never turn
it into an objective, measurable entity!
Thus, the universality of the commodity form is
responsible both objectively and subjectively for the abstraction of the human
labour incorporated in the commodities, (p.87).
But this implies that the principle of rational
mechanization and calculability must embrace every aspect of life (p.91)
In fact, it is not “human labour” that is “incorporated in commodities”
– it is “human labour-power”! But this “labour-power” is not a quantity
at all – because it remains always and everywhere a political category. Clearly,
Lukacs confuses labour-power – the violent constriction or real subsumption
of living labour to capitalist production – with human living labour itself!
Because of this confusion, Lukacs then needs to show that human living labour can
objectively be reduced to labour-power by means of the Rationalisierung
– the specialization and spatialization of human living labour through Taylorist
industrial methods.
However, if this atomization [rationalization] is only
an illusion, it is a necessary one, (p.92).
Once more, Lukacs obstinately confuses political coercion with objective
necessity! If indeed rationalization is “only an illusion”, then there is
no way in heaven or on earth how it can be turned into “a necessary one”,
because an illusion is just that – an illusion, a fantasy whose only
“necessity” is the coercion of capitalist political violence. Lukacs forgets
that necessity and coercion are vastly different notions! He
fails completely to see that this is not possible – that no “exact calculation”
of human living activity is possible (let alone necessary!) except
politically, by means of sheer naked capitalist violence! Labour-power
is not an “objective” social category capable of objective measurement: to the
contrary, labour-power is “objective” – it can be assigned a “market price” -
only as political coercion!
The problem with Lukacs’s notions of reification and rationalization is
that he wishes to elevate them from mere sociological descriptions of political
coercion and violence into inflexible objective “laws” or “forms” of
capitalism. Yet, Lukacs’s very “formalization” of the violent expropriation
of workers and their removal from the decision-making process of social
production under capitalism (the Ent-wicklung, the process of development of
social production) empties the notions of reification and rationalisation of
all political content. In effect, they reify and hypostatize the very political reality that Lukacs intends to
denounce! Hence, Lukacs’s critique of reification turns out to be
“reification to the second degree”!
Of course, it is possible to sheet home this hypostatization of
the notion of Rationalisierung to Weber himself. Indeed, Lukacs adopts piecemeal
(in a long quotation on p.96) Weber’s own characterization of the Rationalisierung
in Politik als Beruf – and he does so quite uncritically, ad litteram,
word for word! – something that Marx himself would never have done and
steadfastly eschewed and denounced as the sheer blind hypostasis of human
reality! Again and again, Weber reduces the capitalist mode of production to a
pure “machine”, to empty “exact calculation”, to “rational technology”, to
“predictability”. What Lukacs is denouncing, therefore, is not the political
violence of the bourgeoisie through “the enforced discipline of the factory” (Weber)
but rather its imposition of the Ent-zauberung – the dis-enchantment of
human living labour. Lukacs decries nostalgically, late-romantically the
“lost totality”, the soul-lessness (Weber again, in Politik) of the
industrial process – the contemplative detachment of the Taylorised
industrial worker from the process of production and from the product – from
the labour process. In effect, Lukacs could not accept the extinction of a
stage of capitalist industrial production that, especially in Germany, relied
on highly skilled quasi-artisanal workers – the Gelernte – who were
being largely supplanted by the new mass workers of assembly-line production organized
around Taylorist and Fordist principles. These were the workers behind the
social-democratic and communist parties that led revolutionary movements
throughout central Europe at the end of the Great War.
Did Max Weber detect the problem with this tautological (circular)
argument? We suspect that he did, unlike Lukacs or indeed Marx. Unlike the philosopher
Lukacs, the sociologist and historian Max Weber was entirely
aware of this uniquely political process by tying the “exakte Kalkulation”
of capitalist market pricing of commodities to the “capitalistic organization
of labour” – and specifically, and most important, to the existence of “free
labour”, and then again finally to “the regular organization of free labour
under the regular discipline [of the factory]”!
However, all these peculiarities of Western
capitalism have derived their significance in the last analysis only from their
association with the capitalistic organization of labour. Even what
is generally called commercialization, the development of negotiable securities
and the rationalization of speculation, the exchanges, etc., is connected with
it. For without the rational capitalistic organization of labour, all this, so
far as it was possible at all, would have nothing like the same significance,
above all for the social structure and all the specific problems of the modem
Occident connected with it. Exact calculation—the basis of everything
else—is only possible on a basis of free labour.' [23] And just
as, or rather because, the world has known no rational organization of labour
outside the modern Occident, it has known no rational socialism. Of
course, there has been civic economy, a civic food-supply policy, mercantilism
and welfare policies of princes, rationing, regulation of economic life,
protectionism, and laissez-faire theories (as in China). The world has also
known socialistic and communistic experiments of various sorts: family,
religious, or military communism, State socialism (in Egypt), monopolistic
cartels, and consumers' organizations. But although there have everywhere been
civic market privileges, companies, guilds, and all sorts of legal differences
between town and country, the concept of the citizen has not existed outside
the Occident, and that of the bourgeoisie outside the modern Occident. Similarly,
the proletariat as a class could not exist, because there was no rational
organization of free labour under regular discipline. Class struggles
between creditor and debtor classes; landowners and the landless, serfs, or
tenants; trading interests and consumers or landlords, have existed everywhere
in various combinations. But even the Western mediaeval struggles between
putters-out and their workers exist elsewhere only in beginnings. The
modern conflict of the large-scale industrial entrepreneur and free-wage labourers
was entirely lacking. And thus there could be no such problems [Problematik] as
those of socialism. (Weber, Intro. to Protestant Ethic, pp.22-3.)
Of course, this regular discipline of the factory is exacted over their
respective workers by the capitalists in competition with one another!
In other words, whereas for Lukacs the Rationalisierung - the
reification of human living activity - is made possible by “the universality of
the commodity form” in capitalist society, for Weber this reification is the
institutionalised product of direct capitalist violence in the
production process (valourization) and then in the sale of the products of
human living labour in the “market” (realization) – where market is
understood not as a self-regulating mechanism but as a specific
politically-regulated institutional form of violence exerted by capitalists over
the working class!
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