Cultures of Fetishism (32 page)

As with his patient and persistent oppositions to Marx’s archive fevers, Engels would rescue Marx from the unfortunate outcomes of his aversion to wage labor. Time and time again, Engels used his own earnings from his job in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester to pay off the debts of Karl and Jenny Marx.

It was in a general climate of roving in and out of desperate financial plights that Marx attempted to illuminate the horrendous working condi- tions endured by the working class. The “secret” of commodity fetishism, suggested in “Alienated Labour” and in earlier chapters of
Capital
, is not fully exposed until Chapter Ten, “The Working Day,” when Marx confronts his readers with the vampirized bodies of the workers who produce commodities for the profit of the capitalist.

* Volume I of
Capital
was dedicated to Wolff.

However, Marx’s head-on confrontations with the realities of the working day could not be sustained. His preoccupation with money seemed to take precedence over the working day of the worker. The gruesome and harrow- ing details of the working day are interspersed with monetary theories, algebraic equations, charts of labor time, and with long sections devoted to the scores of legal documents that had been drawn up to counteract the exploitations of the capitalists.

In order to extract the details of the working day from the massive mounds of monetary theory that entomb them, a reader might labor for several months. Fortunately, we can start out on a simpler footing.

Let us return for just a moment to “Alienated Labor.” In that 1844 paper, Marx repeats the same theme in several different forms. Marx identifies the human characteristics set in motion by the economy—
greed
and the
war among the greedy
—competition.
41
But more importantly, Marx goes on to spell out the several other connections that evolve from that primary relationship, such as the intimate connections between economic value and the devaluation of men, the connections between “all this alienation and the system of money.”
42
As he explains the principles of alienation, it is as if he is elaborating the first principle of the fetishism strategy. “The
externalization
of the worker into his product does not only mean that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists
outside him
, independently, as something alien to him, as con- fronting him as an autonomous power. It means that the life which he has given to the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”
43

It follows that:

The more wealth the worker produces the poorer he becomes.

The more commodities the worker produces the cheaper a commodity he becomes.

The more value the laborer creates, the less value, the less dignity he has. The better shaped his product, the more mis-shapen the worker.

The more civilized his object, the more barbaric the worker.
44

When they assume their places in “The Working Day,” the details of this early paper emerge as momentary flickers in a fiery dominion far worse than Hell. For his descriptions of the horrors of the working day, Marx very often relies on Engels’
Conditions of the Working Class in England
.

Here are some of the things we see:

Nine- and ten-year-old children are awakened from their beds before dawn and forced to work until nearly midnight, “their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.”
45

As a result of their working conditions, adult potters of both sexes become morally and physically degenerate. They grow old prematurely and die pre- maturely. They suffer from rheumatism, attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys. “They are especially prone to chest disease, to pneu- monia, phthisis, bronchitis and asthma.”
46

The production of matches, which requires applying phosphate to the tip of the matchstick, brought with it tetanus, a disease that haunted the makers

of matches. The majority of match makers are children under 13 and young persons under 18. Furthermore, because of the unhealthiness of this occupa- tion, “only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth deliver up their children to it.”
47

In dressmaker establishments, working to death was the order of the day. But this was the situation in any place “where a thriving business” had to be done. Even the hearty blacksmith, when he comes to the city factory to ply his trade, “is made to strike so many more blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many more breaths per day,” and if he is able to fulfill these requirements, he dies at thirty seven rather than fifty.
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“The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night . . . only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.”
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Capitalist production requires labor throughout every one of the twenty-four hours. And since the same person can’t work for the entire twenty-four hours, the problem is solved by the “shift system”— twelve-hour day labor and twelve-hour night labor. However, instead of improving their work conditions, the shift system makes it necessary for nine- and ten-year-old children to work two or three twelve-hour shifts in a row.
50
When the capitalist does agree to shorter hours, he works it out that the laborer works even harder: “what is lost by shortening the duration of labour is gained by increasing the degree of power exerted.”
51
When the law decreed a shorter working day, the manufacturers instructed their “overlookers” to

take good care “that the hands lost no time.”
52

Most manufacturers are fanatically opposed to additional devices to insure cleanliness, to provide adequate ventilation, or to the slight expenditures for appliances that would protect the arms and legs of their hired “hands.” A cer- tifying surgeon for the scutching mills (which are fed flax by rollers in the production of the linen that is used to make coats and other garments) reported that, “The serious accidents at the scutching mills are of the most fearful nature. In many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk, and either involves death or a future of wretched incapacity and suffering.”
53

You might protest after “seeing” all these horrors of the working day, “these working conditions no longer exist. Almost everybody works an eight-hour day with an hour off for lunch and their evenings and weekends free for fam- ily time, leisure, and shopping. There are powerful labor unions that work to keep the excesses of dead capital under control. Children don’t work in fac- tories anymore. There are child labor laws and compulsory education until the age of eighteen.” Yes, all of this seems true enough. But only if you’ve been keeping your “eyes wide shut.”

As Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, put it, “The age of automation and globalization with its race to the bottom among companies searching for lower wages overseas, has savaged the labor movement.”
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Barely one worker in ten is a card-carrying union member. Globalization has already cost millions of Americans their jobs and their pen- sions. Stern concludes, “I don’t think workers in our country have a lot of

time left if we don’t change.”
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The unending race to the bottom was leaving American workers in the dust.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Central America beat out Mexico in “the race for the bottom” of the United States dressmaking indus- try.
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Many of the factories and workshops that were supplying labor- discounted blouses, polo-shirts, dresses, gloves, jackets, and jeans to Wal-Mart, Gap, Sear, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Strawberry were staffed by young women and working mothers from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and San Salvador. However, by 2005, even those count- ries were finding themselves losing out in the race for the bottom. Each day it became more evident that the place in the world that was outperforming and underpricing all of these countries was China.
57

Roger Williams, the president of the swimmer division of Warnaco, one of the world’s largest apparel manufacturers, said, “We will always go to the least expensive places.”
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He predicted that Warnaco would soon be shifting to China.

Most of the garments the average American was wearing in the early years of the twenty-first century were “Made Elsewhere.” If you wanted to know where the laborers from elsewhere came from, all you had to do was read the labels. This labeling from elsewhere applies to almost everything you purchase: umbrellas, watches, sunglasses, tableware, tables, chairs, and almost all of your clothing items. Chances are a great many of them will say, “Made in China.” But if parts manufactured in United States are put into their final form in China the labels could say, “Made in United States. Assembled in China.”

All this “racing to the bottom” is an expression of the
surplus labor
that breeds and nourishes commodity fetishism. It is also an expression of the fetishism strategy in which human beings are transformed into machines, and machines assume the vitalities of the human being. And since, these days, that race very often ends up in China, we have to wonder about the shapes that surplus labor might assume in a Communist nation.

In China, one of the latest surplus labor exploitations are gaming factories, where young men, called “gold farmers,” are hired to play online computer games that revolve around warfare in distant galaxies or medieval kingdoms for twelve hours a day, seven days a week for $250 a month or less.
59
According to David Barboza’s
New York Times
report “Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to the Chinese,” the gaming factories “have come to resemble the thousands of textile mills and toy factories that have moved here from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other parts of the world to take advantage of China’s vast pool of cheap labor.” It is estimated that there are about 100,000 youths “working as full-time gamers, in dark Internet cafes, aban- doned warehouses, small offices and private homes.”
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Their job is to accu- mulate virtual gold coins or other virtual currency that is then purchased by players who don’t have the time, inclination, or patience to plod through the earliest stages of World of Warcraft, Magic Land, Ever Quest, or similar online fantasy games. By paying a couple of hundred dollars or more, the

more affluent can get into the games at the more exciting and usually more profitable, “max” levels. At these levels they can take on world-class dragons and demons by simply trading in the virtual gold coins earned by the gold farmers, who pounded on their computer boards for eighty-four hours a week, using their wits to fight off measly rats and koboids.

In the same month that Barboza described the gaming factory phenome- non, he and co-reporter Daniel Altman wrote, “That Blur? It’s China, Moving Up In the Pack,” a story about China’s announcement that its econ- omy was much bigger than they had previously estimated. Evidently, by the end of 2005, the “race for the bottom” was being accompanied by a “race for the top.” The new financial figures implied that China’s economy had already eclipsed that of France, Italy, and Britain, and was trailing only Japan, Germany, and the United States. It was the fourth-largest economy in the world. China’s gross domestic product was estimated at $2 trillion.
61

The Chinese Academy of Social Scientists has estimated that there are at least 10,000 businessmen in China whose assets exceed $10 million. Yet, despite the fact that China has the world’s fastest-growing economy and a sizable number of multimillionaires, it is also one of the most unequal societies in the world. Each year the gap between the rural poor and the urban rich gets wider. According to a 2003 World Bank report, China ranked hundred and thirty fourth in income per person.
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By 2006, however, China was no longer the “bottom.” The race for the top had created a labor shortage. Wages were pushed up. The ranks of the middle class were swelling. As David Barboza portrayed the situation in the
New York Times
, “On top of a strengthening Chinese currency, this is likely to mean that the cost of consumer goods shipped to the United States and Europe will rise.” Manufacturers were already beginning to go to Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh to produce lower cost goods. A Goldman Sachs economist commented, “We are seeing the end of the golden period of extremely low cost labor in China.” She further noted that though there was “still a lot of cheap labor, Chinese workers are getting skilled very quickly. They are moving up the value chain faster than people expected.”
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In the early years of the twenty-first century, China, technically one of the poorest nations in the world, had become the largest, most populated, and most powerful Communist nation that had ever existed, while at the same time rapidly transforming itself into the epitome of a megacapitalist society that was capable of shaking up the economies of every Western Nation— especially the United States.

Haier, China’s biggest appliance company, nearly snapped up Maytag. China National Offshore Oil Company made a 18.5 billion bid for Unacol Oil, which Chevron took seriously enough to make a serious counterbid.
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The Chinese managed to make the financial markets nervous as they contin- ued to grab fistfuls of U.S. Treasuries and thereby downgrade the value of the American dollar. Then in the middle of 2005, yielding to pressure from the United States, whose trade deficit with China was rising astronomically, the Chinese government decided to end its long-standing practice of tying

the value of the yuan to the dollar and instead let it float “freely” by tying it to several other unspecified countries.
65
The financial pundits of the world disagreed about whether or not this move on the part of China would man- age to restore the faith in the dollar. The one point of consensus was that China seemed to be on its way to supplanting the United States as the premier economic power. Some economists estimated that China could overtake the United States by 2035.