The Financial Times (FT), the standard bearing newspaper of the global capital, recently published an editorial entitled: The biggest threat from cyber warfare lies in the future. The author, Stephen Fidler, responding to reports that the so-called People’s Liberation Army of China hacked into the Pentagon’s computer begins his commentary with this seemingly doomsday scenario: “The lights go out; the internet goes down. Banks close; cash machines fail. Radio and television stations stop broadcasting. Airports and railway stations bar their doors. City streets are jammed with traffic. After a night of uncertainty, power and communications are still blacked out - in fact, they might not come back for months. People start to panic and, as looters emerge, police are unable to restore order.” According to Fidler’s the United States would go from “super-power to third world nation” overnight. The paper goes on to call for greater security measures from the department of homeland security. And maybe (though probably not) these securities measures could prevent an attack like the one recently put on the Pentagon’s system. Secretly embedded in the “nightmare” story told above is the secret of working class power.
Stephen Fidler’s editorial unwittingly explains why the working class is the “revolutionary agent” and it is a lesson that despite all of the lip-service paid to the working class has been long forgotten. Workers are revolutionary not because of what they think, not because they are oppressed, not because they are poor, but because they make the system work and if they stop the system stops.
Fidler is worried about terrorism and international espionage but as a follow up letter to the editor points out cyber-attacks could well be inside jobs. This letter then explains how workers (in the author’s deluded mind they must be foreign terrorist moles) in the IT sector could bring about the above scenario from inside the company. That is they could shut down the functioning of the global capitalist system. He even speculates that many of the Microsoft windows security flaws which are patched up by windows updates could be purposefully placed breaches. Indeed, when Microsoft attempts to limit access to security updates to those who have a “legal” copy of the operating system hacks are immediately posted on the web—the hacks are almost certainly provided by Microsoft workers.
One of Marx’s most important and famous concepts is commodity fetishism, but perhaps even more important is his lesser known concept of the capital fetish—the idea that money makes money is an example of it. Marx explains that workers confront their conditions of work as they would an alien power. Capital --the machines and tools (like computers) -- seems all powerful and we seem weak. But this is the illusion. Capital has no power except what is provided by living labor-- by us going to and doing the work. Marx sometimes refers to capital as accumulated dead labor, and capitalism is then a system in which dead labor dominates living labor.
By theorizing the capital fetish Marx responds to various bourgeois economists who think that capital creates value. Marx explains that capital is not a thing but a social relationship, and if it is a social relationship then it is a class relationship, and if it is a class relationship then it is a relationship of antagonism and struggle. For example: a lawn mower may or may not be capital it depends on the social relationships in which it is used. If Jill mows her lawn with the lawn mower it is not capital. If Jill mows her neighbor’s lawn and gets paid $20 to do it, it is still not capital. The lawnmower is capital if Jill hires a worker to mow her neighbor’s lawn with her lawnmower and her neighbor pays her $20 and she gives the worker $10 and keep the other $10 as profit. The lawnmower is capital because it is used to exploit labor, to extract surplus value from living labor. As a budding capitalist her job is to accumulate more capital. If she is frugal and has the entrepreneurial spirit she will plow that capital back into her business buying more lawnmowers, hiring more workers and mowing the lawns of entire neighborhoods and corporate parks. If Jill has one hundred lawnmowers she can exploit the labor of one hundred workers, instead of “earning” $10 profit from one worker she can pump surplus value in the form of profit from each one, and so on.
As the business gets larger the source of profits becomes more mystified. The lawnmower appears to be everything when it is actually nothing. The lawnmowers appear to be the source of profit – that is the capital fetish. Without the worker it isn’t capital, without the workers the capitalist could not get the $10 as profit nor could the capitalist get the profit from 100 lawnmowers without workers. If the workers stop working there is no profit, if the workers get rid of the capitalist they can keep the lawn mowers. Clearly, the capitalist needs the workers but workers don’t need the capitalist. And here is the revolutionary potential of the working class. If the worker refuses to work for Jill then her mowers are no longer capital, if she can’t get anyone to work thecapital is destroyed because the social relationship is ended. Only workers can end the social relation of capital. The capital relation is terminated at the point of production -- that’s why workers are important and that’s why they are revolutionary.
Historically when revolutionaries sought to organize workers they sought out workers at the point of production in “the commanding heights” -- strategic industries where job actions like strikes could shut down the whole system. They usually organized workers in sectors like steel, auto, rubber, transportation and so forth. But today the commanding heights are quite different. As the editorial in the Financial Times revealed the commanding heights are in IT and other sectors of the so-called “new economy.”
This brings us to the central problem of political practice. What we are beginning to get from the above is a class analysis -- an analysis of the class structure in the United States. But it is only a beginning. In the long term expanding and extending the analysis is essential because it allows us to organize in the most effective way possible. But for the time being it should cause us to re-consider the class position of college students.
When the original SDS fell apart in the late 1960’s nearly all factions agreed on one thing -- students were not workers and workers had to be organized. The result was the destruction of the student organization in an attempt to organize workers, or to organize in the “community.” This was a fatal error that flowed from an incorrect class analysis, and especially of students’ position in the class structure. It is wrong first of all because it is self-evident that students historically have played an important and often leading role in revolutionary and other social movements. And secondly the analysis was based on a persistent but incorrect assumption that students were not, nor would they ever be, workers. According to the old story students would be managers or coordinators of capitalist production processes that exploit workers, but most students will not be coordinators. They will become skilled workers. Organize them into the movement now and we are organizing the working class of the future.
