Capitalism and Labor

Der Gesellschaftstheorie ist die Arbeit und mit ihr die empirische Fundierung abhandengekommen, der Arbeitssoziologie die Theorie - aufgrund dieses Befundes wurde "Kapitalismustheorie und Arbeit" zum Standardwerk. Die Autorinnen und Autoren diskutieren nun in der aktualisierten englischen Auflage des Bandes die gegenwärtigen theoretischen Ansätze, um Kapitalismus und Arbeit wieder zusammenzudenken.

Autorentext
Klaus Dörre ist Professor am Institut für Soziologie der Universität Jena. Nicole Mayer-Ahuja ist Professorin am SOFI der Universität Göttingen. Dieter Sauer ist Professor am ISF München. Volker Wittke (1957 2012) war Professor am SOFI an der Universität Göttingen.

Leseprobe
Introduction: Theorizing Capitalism and Labor: Challenges for Sociology Klaus Dörre, Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, Dieter Sauer Despite its triumph in the confrontation between the East and the West, doubts concerning the future of capitalism are on the rise. While some point to the ecological limits of economic growth, others emphasize the growing inequality in terms of wealth, life chances, and political influence which calls into question the close connection between capitalism and democracy that countries of the so-called "Global North", or the capitalist centers, have become used to after the Second World War. Under these conditions, it is high time to come to terms with the complex and conflictual relationship between capitalism and labor, and to explore new critical perspectives. Moreover, what role could sociology play in this? After all, the most important lines of friction we envisage today are closely linked to structures and processes, which constitute the very field of labor sociology. How is abstract labor transformed into concrete labor, how is the latter coordinated and controlled, and what implications do the changes which can be discerned on the shop-floor today have for the chances of men and women to take their own decisions about how to work, how to live and how to reproduce their labor power, as individuals and as social collectives? What transformations have occurred with regard to the organizational structures in which labor is performed? If companies take to a disintegration of value chains, outsource parts of their business to other firms or even to individuals, and spread their operations across an ever increasing part of the globe, what effects does this have on power relations between capital and labor, between the "Global North" and the "Global South", and for competition and solidarity among an increasingly fragmented working population? Finally, how can we account for the changing character of the socio-economic system we live in today? If we call it capitalism (as we suggest) what does this tell us about the interrelations between economy, politics, and society? Does the term capitalism refer only to (a specific part of) the economic sphere, or to the system as a whole? Is there one capitalism or a variety of different capitalisms? Has capitalism entered a new phase of development, thus turning into financial market capitalism, and does labor still have a role to play? Questions like these have inspired generations of researchers in labor sociology and beyond. Today, however, they acquire a new urgency: Capitalist development seems to have entered a phase in which crisis has turned from a relatively silent companion of capitalist "innovation" to an overt challenge, as the worldwide economic crisis in the years following 2007 indicates. At the same time, labor is faced by multiple transformations which call into question established modes of production (digitization), employment (precarization), and ways of working and living (as exemplified by a continuous intensification of work and the dissolving of its boundaries, in terms of timing, performance, and work organization). Taken together, these transformations seem to deprive ever more working men and women of the chance to plan and live their lives according to their own wishes, and they provoke fundamental questions: Does capitalism have a future at all? What will and what should it look like? What role will labor play in the future development of this system? This book is based on a collected volume that assembled a wide range of expertise (from predominantly German-speaking countries) in 2012. As we write this introduction to the English edition in the fall of 2017, a new rightist, and in parts fascist, party has just entered the National Parliament (Bundestag), calling themselves "Alternative for Germany". Their impressive electoral success is described by many observers as the revenge of white male workers for decades of neoliberal "reform" and political neglect, thus mirroring the electorate of Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States. Is this the only opposition against the distortions of capitalism to be envisaged today or can sociological research point to lines of friction, to possibilities for intervention, and to potentials of solidarity, which could pave the ground for political movements with an anti-capitalist agenda, striving for a democratization of economy and society? We will return to suggestions for a new direction of sociological critique in the last chapter of this book. At this point, however, it might be useful to move one step backwards and take a closer look at two central questions: What is capitalism and what is labor? 1. What is Capitalism? In sociological discussions, within this volume and beyond, vastly different theoretical approaches are employed in order to define capitalism-if it is defined at all. Depending on the conceptual background, capitalism is presented as a world system, as a specific social formation, as a sequence of accumulation regimes and modes of regulation, like Fordism or financial market capitalism, as a social subsystem, as a society based on economic growth, as a multi-stage process, etc. Such diversity is not accidental. Even when the focus is directed at the set of structural features that characterize any capitalist social formation (rather than at institutional divergence), the social sciences do not seem to provide an unambiguous reply to the question of what capitalism actually is. To put it positively: Whoever asks the C-question today, that is, whoever wishes to scrutinize the specific characteristics of capitalist societies in the 21st century, thus evokes an ambitious research agenda. It can build upon a rather sound theoretical basis, however, which deserves to be recapitulated at the outset of this volume. What is capitalism? When Karl Marx discussed the structures and dynamics of capitalist accumulation, he never used this term. Nonetheless, he analyzed the emergence of a specific and novel way of organizing economy, politics, and society that seemed to take shape, and to accelerate, in the 19th century. According to Marx, an economy can be called capitalist when money (M) is invested in commodities (C) with the goal of obtaining more money (M')-a discovery that can be abbreviated in the formula M-C-M'. Marx assumes that this specific approach to economics dominates the entire social formation "in the last instance". The latter implies that social actors enjoy a certain degree of autonomy but remain ultimately tied in one way or another to the abstract principle of value creation, even when their actions are motivated by completely different goals. The constant struggle to bring contradictory interests, competition and conflict between diverging individuals and groups in line with value creation, and to optimize accumulation, whether by way of innovation or destruction, is an essential driver of capitalist development. For Marx, capitalism is more than just a particular type of economic subsystem; it is a socioeconomic formation whose peculiar dynamism, institutional form, and concrete spatio-temp…