Recalling Marcuse, Supporting Occupy Wall Street

Proposals for Classrooms and Community Discussions:

Labor, Power, Decommodification Human Rights, and Education

A 90 minute panel, four presenters 15 minutes each, with 30 minutes comments and questions

Charles Reitz, Stephen Spartan, David Brodsky, Patricia Brodsky,

Marcuse and the Workforce as Resource The Great Refusal: Decommodification Charter 2000: A Transitional Program for Labor Reclaiming Public Higher Education for the Public: A Case Study

Workforce:
A Resource! With Programmatic Power!

Labor supervised by global finance capital? When has/will labor supervise itself?

Capital's theory of work:

Free versus slave; Wage-labor only one factor in production a cost to be minimized.... Profit accrues from entrepreneurial skill, technological innovation and risk- taking. Capitalists as job creators!

Labor needs its own theory of work:

the creative force... Thesis #1: Everything depends on labor. Social labor is source of social wealth Employees fund incomes to employers Critical Theory of Work/ Critical Work challenge business-utopian model that market forces will accomplish widespread prosperity

We are recalling Marcuse's strengths, most radical elements, undeterred by our former criticisms his theories of play and art.

Marcuse 1933: Labor is ontologically significant human mode of being in the world: Artists, researchers, intellectuals do work.

Labor occurs in social relationships: Communal project of social beings to meet human needs; promote human flourishing.
As Kellner points out citing Marcuse: the qualitative difference between the free and unfree society, is that of letting the realm of freedom appear within the realm of necessity in labor and not only beyond labor. -- The End of Utopia Marcuse, 1970

Marcuses Labor Theory of Humanism -- Humanist Theory of Labor Marcuse re-thinks a critical philosophical analysis of labor and the human condition and builds an alternative Vision for Labor!
labor as the key activity by which humanity exteriorizes and expresses itself and also humanizes the world.

Social Labor, Social Wealth: Only labor force as a group has legitimate ownership

Just because they stole it doesn't mean they own it!

What makes critical theory critical? What makes radical pedagogy radical? What theory or radical pedagogy without Thesis #2: No criticalis the future for labor? labor theory ofWhat isaction and social ownership! social labor's vision?

Powerless? Driven to its knees?

Future of Labor?

forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society. --Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man

Loss of revolutionary subject? Repressive integration.

What forces, tendencies?

Economic polarization: intensifying inequalities From Revolts to Revolution?

When Labor Stands up, Wall Street and its minions: shout How Dare You! Its Class Warfare!
Power of strike/ general strike: withhold payments to capital. Charter 2000: Transitional Program for Labor. Power of socialism: reduce/eliminate payments to capital.

Class War: Transferring Wealth Upwards, 1984-2007

Prelude to 2008 crash

1986

1991

2006

2007

2007

Distribution of Wealth in Quintiles (page 11 in booklet)

2008

4% 11% 1% 84% Each 20% Nation 1 Perfect equality Nation 4 is USA Today

-1%

Not unforeseen: capital glut. Wealth inequalities impact all institutions: educ; criminal Failure of world's strongest justice; politics; health, etc. financial system to manage assets without destruction & self-destruction

Critical Work:
What is the social mechanism that generates inequality?

Thesis #3: Inequality is not simply a matter of the gap between rich and poor; but of the structural relationships between propertied and non-propertied classes of the population.

Though it is an often underestimated dimension of his work, Marcuse early on addressed the deep roots of the capitalist systems functioning and its crisis: the commodification of labor.
The production apparatus developed under capitalism, propelled by wage labor within the existing form of the division of labor, perpetuates the existing forms of consciousness and needs. . . . the revolutionary working class . . . alone has the real power to abolish existing relations of production and the entire apparatus that goes with it. -- 33 Theses Marcuse, 1947 (emphasis added)

Labor and Value:

This relationship well-known to critical Marxists, but let's go over it with simple hypothetical

Value Added through Labor $300 Input Costs $50 For Quilt kit Output Value $350.

Wage = commodified labor

Critical Work:
(Page 14 in booklet)

Manufacturing sector produced $2,274,367 million in value added. Workforce income: $607,447 m. Income to capital: $1,666,920 m. (36.4%) (63.6%) (Discontinuing publication 2013) Financial and Insurance sector (2005) produced $1,029 billion Workforce Income (2007): $494.5 b. Remainder income to capital (roughly 50%) estimated proportions (roughly 50%)
http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/11statab/banking.pdf

Critical Work: Analyzing data from Statistical Abstract of the United States 2011

>>

U.S. cut and sew apparel workers: Added value produced $7,385 million Workforce income: $3,075 m. Income to capital: $4,310 m.

California garment factory

Occupy Wall Street is challenging the right to the 1% to own and control society's wealth distribution. This is dramatic, yet just the beginning. By raising fundamental questions about wealth distribution and challenging the intensifying inequalities, people can start to rethink the shape of human society. What are the minimal social changes needed to begin liberation of workforce? Jobs? End poverty?

Critical Work and Radical Pedagogy and Charter 2000 are both chiefly pedagogical tools that may serve as helpful discussion documents for Occupy Wall Street. Charter 2000 discusses elements of a common ground political platform that can enable progressive forces to unify and go on offensive. It asks: What are we for? What kind of world do we want to live in, and its response is a coherent draft program.
http://progressiveplatform2000.org/Charter-2000-Platform.htm

David Brodsky will present Charter 2000 as a Transitional Program for Labor to go on offensive: *A positive plan for democratic renewal *A highly detailed program *A long-term project. The core of Charter 2000 is human rightspolitical, social, economic, and cultural.

We have added the need to challenge the wealth production and commodification processes.

Commodity- dependency: No escape except through de-commodification. Commodity-dependency is contrived, not natural or necessary. Market system is: incapable of liberating humanity because it requires artificial scarcity, profitable waste, pollution/destruction of planet.

Eliminate contrived (irrational) market shortages

Decommodify certain minimums: Health care Education Food Transportation Guaranteed minimum income Housing Decommmodification reduces dependency on markets. Social labor is repurposed for social needs, not profit; limits effects of commercialism. Decommmodification IS socialism.

Refusing
the Counterrevolution's Intensifying Inequalities / Terror War
To create the subjective conditions for a free society . . . [we must] . . . educate men and women who are incapable of tolerating what is going on, who have really learned what is going on, has always been going on, and why, and who are educated to resist and to fight for a new way of life.
-- Brooklyn College Lecture, Marcuse 1968

Radical pedagogy rearms people with socialist toolkit.

Features and developments in socialism's past need to be recalled: Labor theory of wealth Social Labor creates social wealth. Stealing it doesn't make it theirs. Labor as human mode of being in the world; Commodifican of labor means commodification of human existence: labor deformed into a instrument of production; social life de-humanized. When will labor reclaim its right to supervise itself? grasp intellectually and politically that which is its own? From wage labor to Public Work: Public sector, public sphere, public interest, public domain: Public Work and Commonwealth!

Once people understand that wealth is a social product and that system of power and privilege of capital appropriators and Wall Street is socially deforming and self destructive, we can begin to act in accordance with Marcuse's central And militant principle: The inner dynamic of capitalism . . . necessitates the revival of the radical rather than the minimal goals of socialism. --Counterrevolution and Revolt Marcuse, 1972

Minimal goals (social democracy)

Liberal perspective = help poor, jobless, argued on basis of fairness It's understandable that we seek these; but as transitional goals not ends in themselves.

Radical Goals:
Marcuse's re-humanized Vision of Labor, Liberation, and Learning: Revolutionary perspective = liberation and flourishing of human species.
Alternative Social Vision: Living labor's promise. A theory of social action and social ownership. A philosophy of human freedom and fulfillment. Sublation of classical philosophical sources: Aristotle: actualization of human species potential; Buddhism/Acquinas: Good Works; Kant: Cosmopolitan Humanism; Marx: Gattungswesen;

Marcuse: multicultural cosmopolitanism: Reclaiming our Common Humanity