Between Capitalism and Community by Michael A. Lebowitz

Author:Michael A. Lebowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

CONTESTED REPRODUCTION

Beyond Atomism

The Tragedy of Atomism

Given that the immanent drive and constant tendency of capital is to atomize the working class, what are the effects of this tendency? For the atomized worker, all other workers are competitors; all other workers are enemies insofar as they are competing for the same jobs. All other workers potentially stand between them and the satisfaction of their needs.

Atomized workers may see a logic in joining together with others in the same situation against a “greater enemy,” perhaps against workers of other races and ethnicities. Further, in seeking “their immediate, everyday interests,” they may even identify their interests with those of their capitalist employers. As Engels pointed out, atomization “restricts the workers to seeing their interest in that of their employers, thus making every single section of workers into an auxiliary army for the class employing them.” For example, “The factory worker lets himself be used by the factory owner in the agitation for protective tariffs.” The basis for viewing workers from different countries as the enemy is obvious.1

Underlying all the behavior of wage-laborers within capitalism is that they do not have an alternative means by which to maintain themselves except by selling their labor-power. Accordingly, for the atomized worker, the “worker’s dilemma” within capitalism becomes “do I take a job for lower wages and longer and more intense working conditions or does someone else get it?” Preventing the cooperation of workers is their “division and dispersal,” which, Engels commented, “renders it impossible for them to realise that their interests are common, to reach understanding, to constitute themselves into one class.”2

Left to “isolated, individual bargaining,” the atomistic wage-laborer thus acts like the homo economicus of neoclassical theory, calculating pleasure and pain (as transmitted by price) and considering only that which is rational for him or her as an individual. This is one way in which the real atomism of wage-laborers (which capital strives to produce and reproduce) is reflected in neoclassical theory. Also present is the real counterpart of the logical fallacy of composition: each individual worker attempts to advance his or her individual interest, as if what is true for that worker is all that matters; the result, as the General Council of the First International declared, is that workers as a whole lose.

This is the tragedy of atomism, which is familiar to some in the garb of the so-called tragedy of the commons. As is well known, the latter is intended as a cautionary tale to explain why common property theoretically leads to disaster. Thinking that if I don’t take advantage someone else will, each individual peasant chooses to graze an additional animal on the common fields, and the result is destruction of the quality of the land. The preferred solution for the advocates of this tale is private ownership of the resource in question so that the self-interest of each individual owner is to preserve and improve its productivity (in the case of the parable, the land, but also, among other resources, the buffalo herd, whales, fish, and presumably water and air).

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