Labour as a Commons

* Article: Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies. By Dario Azzellini. Critical Sociology 2018, Vol. 44(4-5) 763–776

URL =

Excerpt

Dario Azzellini:

"Wage labour as such cannot be organized as commoning praxis. ‘Labour’ is generally understood as wage labour, the form most labour is forced to assume in capitalism. In this argument I rely on the distinction between labour and labour power proposed by Marx. Following Marx, labour is ‘the activity of work’, the physical activity or effort of producing use value, while labour power, the ability for labour, is ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form (Leiblichkeit), the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use value of any kind’ (Marx, 1976: 270). Labour and labour power always existed. It is the form of society that determines their characteristics. The capitalist mode of production commodifies use values and turns them into ‘material bearers’ of exchange value (Marx, 1976: 126). The employer purchases the worker’s labour power as a commodity and becomes the owner of the goods produced by that worker. Under capitalism, workers have to sell their labour power to employers in exchange for a money wage. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, labour power is not a commodity like any other: it is a commodity attached to the worker, and without the worker the commodity cannot exist. Labour power exists only as a capacity of the living individual (Marx, 1976: 274). Moreover, it is ‘a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification (Vergegenständlichung) of labour, hence a creation of value’ (Marx, 1976: 270). The surplus value ‘depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour power’ (Marx, 1976: 747). Once the labour power has been acquired it is not a generic potentiality anymore but turns – for the time it has been purchased – into concrete labour. But for the duration that labour power is not purchased and put to work, it is lost forever. This waste of social potential is inherent to capitalism. Thus, governing labour as a commons represents a significant paradigm shift in society (Rifkin, 2014; Wainwright, 2012).

Given that within capitalism labour power is considered an individual capacity, a first step in moving away from the conception of labour power as a commodity is the admission that ‘[r]egardless of whether work is paid or unpaid, the capacity to perform it is the outcome of an intrinsically social, co-operative activity’ (Walker, 2013). The human ability to create is a collective social capability and not an individual gift. It is dependent on knowledge and skills developed by others in the past; on the socially organized systems of preserving and passing them to the new generations; on the cooperation with others; and on the social reproduction of individuals. Treating labour power as an individual commodity exchangeable on the market is a mechanism for the appropriation of collective socially produced value by private entities.

Revisiting the previously cited characteristics of the commons as summarized by Fattori (2011), it can be confirmed that labour as the capacity to create is ‘essential for life’; it ‘connects individuals to one another’; it is a resource that would be best used if maintained and reproduced together ‘according to rules established by the community’ and being ‘self-governed through forms of participative democracy’ (Fattori, 2011). If labour is an inherently social activity that depends on the flow of cooperation within society and is in turn socially beneficial, it follows that the way to make best use of it is to govern it collectively as a commons. WRCs are attempts at doing this on a relatively small scale."