Labor is not a Commodity!

Diesseits wie jenseits des Atlantiks interpretierten Arbeiter die ungezügelte Macht des freien Marktes als eine Bedrohung für ihr Verständnis von Autonomie und Teilhabe. Widerstand gegen die "Kommodifizierung der fiktiven Ware Arbeit" war wesentlich im Kampf für politische, soziale und ökonomische Rechte. Am Beispiel der Bewegung zur Verkürzung des Arbeitstags im mittleren 19. Jh. kann Philipp Reick zeigen, dass weder die US-amerikanische Arbeiterbewegung als Abweichung von einer vermeintlichen Norm gelten noch die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung als Verkörperung dieser Norm verstanden werden kann.

Auteur
Philipp Reick ist Fellow der Martin Buber Society an der Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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Diesseits wie jenseits des Atlantiks interpretierten Arbeiter die ungezügelte Macht des freien Marktes als eine Bedrohung für ihr Verständnis von Autonomie und Teilhabe. Widerstand gegen die "Kommodifizierung der fiktiven Ware Arbeit" war wesentlich im Kampf für politische, soziale und ökonomische Rechte. Am Beispiel der Bewegung zur Verkürzung des Arbeitstags im mittleren 19. Jh. kann Philipp Reick zeigen, dass weder die US-amerikanische Arbeiterbewegung als Abweichung von einer vermeintlichen Norm gelten noch die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung als Verkörperung dieser Norm verstanden werden kann.

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Acknowledgements
Over the past three years, I have spent an enormous amount of time in front of microfilm readers in the basements and backrooms of libraries and archives. I am grateful to all the people who made this experience nevertheless a pleasant one. I thank the staff at Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University for providing an excellent atmosphere for archival research. I also would like to extend my gratitude to the archival staff at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the New York Public Library, the Center for Berlin Studies at the Berlin Central and Regional Library, the Library of the German Federal Archive in Berlin-Lichterfelde, and the Prussian Privy State Archives. I wish to thank Gabi Bodmeier, Katja Mertin, and David Bosold at the Graduate School of North American Studies, as well the entire team at the Library of the John F. Kennedy Institute at FU Berlin and Julia Mayer in particular, who is sadly missed. I also thank Daniel Moure García for his excellent copy-editing service. Research for this book has been funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Research Foundation. The publication has been made possible by generous funding from the Ernst-Reuter-Stiftung, the FAZIT-Stiftung, and the Graduate School of North American Studies. Parts of Chapter 6 have been previously published in Vol. 6, No. 1 (2015) of "Interdisciplines: Journal of History and Sociolgy."
Many people have offered helpful criticisms and suggestions. In particular, I wish to thank M. Michaela Hampf, Thomas Welskopp, and Nancy Fraser, who supervised my dissertation project. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Andreas Etges, Gudrun Löhrer, and Victoria Tafferner, as well as the GSNAS class of 2011, for feedback during an early phase of this project. Many thanks go to Joshua B. Freeman for his support during my visiting scholarship at the CUNY Graduate Center. Finally, I am very grateful to John Connelly at UC Berkeley, who convinced me to become a historian in the first place. Important comments and criticism also came from friends who read parts of the manuscript. In particular, I wish to thank Nils Utermöhlen and Matthias Martin Becker, who first introduced me to Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation in a highly appreciated reading group. I also thank my brother Robert for his comments at a time when he was wrapping up his own dissertation in philosophy. Likewise, I thank my uncle Michael for his support. A very special thanks goes to Franziska Nadler for her healthy distrust of office chairs. To more than anyone else, I am grateful to my parents, who always supported my interest in what Germans call the "breadless arts." I dedicate this study to their memory.
Jerusalem, September 2016
Preface
The past three decades have witnessed an astonishing rebirth of market liberalism. Although it is hardly conceivable for present-day observers, the demand to deregulate markets revolutionized established notions of economic stability and social progress. After all, markets had been anything but free for decades. During Keynesian postwar prosperity, European and North American markets were embedded in a complex system of democratically legitimized control. Labor markets were regulated by protective legislation and strong welfare states; real-estate markets were restricted by public-housing programs; currency markets were governed by an international system of fixed exchange rates. Yet the paradigm of regulated markets dissolved quickly in the late 1970s due to its apparent inability to address the era's major challenge of stagflation. Heavily indebted to the liberal legacy of the nineteenth century, the neoliberal turn of the 1980s thus ended the intermezzo of market regulation. While this free-market renaissance was largely conceived of in the centers of political power across Western Europe and the US, its message was never confined to these regions. From Latin America in the 1980s to the disintegrating Soviet Union in the early 1990s to South East Asia at the turn of the century, the demand to free markets from extra-economic control defined the structural adjustments that transformed the various local, national, and inter-regional economies. Promoted by Western governments and administered as well as sanctioned by powerful international institutions, the free-market creed quickly developed into a global reality. In so doing, it gained center stage in political discourse. Following the transformation of the US subprime mortgage crisis into global financial turmoil, the free-market paradigm tightened its already firm grip as severe budget cuts were implemented in order to restore the confidence of markets. According to then Prime Minister David Cameron, the 2010s thus heralded a new "Decade of Austerity" in the international political economy. And the lesson this decade had to teach was clear: The trust of markets would not be won easily.
Given what Thomas Piketty termed the "sacralization of the market" in today's politics and economics, it is hardly surprising that current social opposition focuses on the notion of self-regulating markets as well. When on May 15, 2011, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Spain in what has become known the Movimiento 15 de Mayo, they did so under the unifying and programmatic slogan: "We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers!" What unites much of present-day protest is the conviction that humans differ essentially from market commodities, and therefore should not be exposed defenselessly to unregulated labor, housing, or currency markets. Rather, societies are expected to provide some means of protection against the intrusion of powerful markets. What the protesters call for is a decommodification of social relations, which would in turn foster the well-being of all-or at least "the 99%"-instead of promote the interests of the few. From Occupy Wall Street in New York to the Geração à Rasca in Lisbon and the Indignados in Madrid and Athens, these movements embrace the idea that the unregulated commodification of natural entities (such as land or genes) and human interaction (such as public health or higher education) threatens the democratic constitution and very existence of their respective communities.
Yet the phenomenon of commodification not only constitutes a central element in present-day economics and social-movement rhetoric, it also provides an important analytical category f…