FRANCE
* (TABLES ARE NOT INCLUDED)
What is the meaning of the particular attention we are giving to the workers of these two industrial sectors?
The class analysis we have developed in a report published at the third Congress of our Party (March 1989) led us to classify the labourers of transport and communication among the “proletariat of the service sector” (page 23). We added more precisely that “they are services directly linked to the process of production:
- transport of:
- raw materials (rail -SNCF-, road carriage -truck drivers-, etc.),
- manpower,
- finished and ready to be sold products,
- products within the company or among companies dealing in the same process of
production (fork-lift truck drivers, storekeepers);
-industrial conditioning (particularly in the food industry);
- heavy vehicle drivers;
- industrial cleaning and maintenance”.
Later (page 27), we have dealt with the “semi-proletariat” as follows: “Are also part of the semi-proletariat workers who are not employed for productive tasks, but whose wages and working conditions approximate to those of the working class. They are, for instance, the packers of the mail sorting centres, hospital agents, lower rank employees in public and private administration services”.
Finally, we encountered various difficulties in drawing up a thorough analysis of the tele-communications sector workers.
These lacks in accuracy and errors have to be raised off today, so much as these classes of workers are both numerous and amidst industrial sectors of which economical influence is getting day after day more serious.
Besides, these are sectors in which wide restructuring plans, backed by private take-overs, are taking place along with cuts in appointments and where working conditions are worsening as time goes on. Transport and communication workers have in many ways and more than one time demonstrated their fighting spirit. The 1995 and 1996 massive strikes have largely proved it (see our article published in the former issue of Unity and Struggle).
1. THE TRANSPORT INDUSTRY: A CONSIDERABLE BRANCH OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION
Let us first make it clear that the one feature of the transportation industry lies on the fact that it belongs to the different branches of industrial production. This characteristic tends to be hidden by the expression “services” that the official listings generally employ. Such a lexical designation is linked to the nature of this branch where, unlike the other industrial sides of the economy, the process of production does not result in new material concrete goods. In his specific study of the industry of transportation, K. Marx points out: “The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and this travelling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a usething which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced.
(...) The formula for the transport industry would therefore be:
since it is the process of production itself that is paid for and consumed, not a product separate from it” (Capital, vol.2, The process of circulation of capital, Chapter I: The circuit of money-capital, section IV: The circuit as a whole, International Publishers, New York, 1967, p.54).
(In the formula given above M, C, L, MP, P, M’ and C’ designate each respectively Money, Commodity, Labour, Means of Production, Process of production, increased Money and increased Commodity).
For transport industries, the process of production of this distinctive “commodity” whose useful effect is transfer involves the purchase of the labour forces that will set the means of production in motion.
Trucks, trains, planes, ships and all the necessary fuels, roads, railways and infrastructures out of which no transfer could ever be effected, are the means of production of transport industries.
These items are illustrated in the following overall table:
It stems therefore that the workers who implement the means of production of the industry of transports do create surplus-value that the possessor of the means of production of this industry seize. That is so regardless of the nature of the articles conveyed. Be they men travelling for pleasure or commodities in the process of being produced or else commodities that the industrial capitalist is conveying to be sold in the market.
We speak of “productive consumption” of the useful effect of transport to stress that the value of such useful effect may end up being added to the value of the commodity subject to transportation: “If it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity” (ibid.). This is the case for “the displacement of the object of labour and of the means of labour”, which happens in the frame of the process of production of a given commodity. Carrying raw and auxiliary materials or commodities in the process of being produced from a production site to another belongs to this frame.
On the other hand, since the “use-value (of commodities -note of the authors) is materialised only in their consumption, their consumption may necessitate their change of location, hence may require an additional process of production, in the transport industry” (ibid., Chapter VI, The costs of circulation, section 3 -Costs of transportation-, p.153). It is therefore a matter of “the passage of the finished products from the sphere of production to that of consumption. The product is not ready for consumption until it has completed these movements” (ibid.). This displacement is necessary for the produced commodity to be sold. These are unavoidable costs of production. In this case also, the addition of a productive process results in transferring an additional value to the commodity being displaced.
Individual consumption is unproductive. It is that of a person using a means of transport to move from one location to another; “if it (the useful effect produced by the industry of transport, that is the transfer -note of the authors) is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption” (ibid., p.54)
The displacement of the labour force, as such, is the last case. Here is question of transportation of the workers (labour forces) going to their place of work. This transport figures when the value of the labour force is computed, in the same way as whatever is necessary for the conservation and the recurrence of labour forces. When they claim forcefully to be paid a “transport allowance”, the workers make an implicit demand, that the displacement home-working place and back be fully considered when computing the value of their labour force.
“The exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation” (ibid.).
How does the magnitude of the value that the costs of transport add to the commodities being carried (in the case of productive consumption due to transport) vary?
As for any branch of industry, “the productivity of labour is inversely proportional to the value created by it. (...) The smaller the amount of dead and living labour required for the transportation of commodities over a certain distance, the greater the productive power of labour, and vice versa” (ibid., p.153). It is in direct proportion with the weight of the commodity, with its volume. Yet it rises in equal terms if its handling, its conveying conditions, etc. require additional labour and means of labour. This is namely the case of the transport of delicate products for which specific conditioning and packaging are needed, of perishable or danger causing goods, etc.
The expansion of capitalism went along with a considerable growth in commodity circulation, hence in the industries of transport. “With the development of capitalist production, the scale of production is determined less and less by the direct demand for the product and more and more by the amount of capital available in the hands of the individual capitalist, by the urge of self-expansion inherent in his capital and by the need of continuity and expansion of the process of production” (ibid., p.147).
Capitalism “educes the costs of transportation of the individual commodity by the development of the means of transportation and communication, as well as by the concentration -increasing scale- of transportation” (ibid., p.154). However an ever larger part of social labour must be devoted to this branch. This is expressed by the more and more significant means of transportation used to displace large volumes of goods over long distances with less and less labour forces. This is due, in particular, to the further automation of the process of production in the transportation industry along with an increase in the intensity of labour.
The hypertrophy of the transportation branch is causing serious damages on the environment. Road, rail and air networks constitute the main streams for draining commodities, raw and auxiliary materials and men into markets and sites of production. They, hence, bring about a further uneven growth among regions, countries and groups of countries.
2. THE COMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES
It must first be remarked that K. Marx makes no fundamental difference between transportation industries and communication industries [“(...) the communications industry, weather engaged in transportation proper, of goods and passengers, or in the mere transmission of communications, letters, telegrams, etc.” (ibid., p.53)]. Why so?
Let us start with the case of the company that transports letters, packages, etc., in other words La Poste. Its parenthood with a transportation company is obvious. Indeed, is there any difference between the labour of mailmen, whose tasks are to forward and dispatch letters contained in mailbags that must be transported in trucks, trains or aeroplanes, and that of men working for a transportation company? The differences stand more for the nature of the transported items than for the nature of labour and of the means of labour. In both cases, displacement from one place to another is produced. This change of location requires labour forces ready to set the means of production into action. The specific nature of the objects being transported -namely letters and packs- and mainly the fact that this transportation company must be able to guarantee their distribution from any part to any other part of the country under strict security and steadiness conditions, led this branch of the transportation industry to be entrusted to a company for which the State guarantees a particular status.
In France, royal mail-coach services were entrusted to individuals by the king Henry III as soon as 1576. But it is not until 1801 that the State was officially charged of the whole control of mail transportation. In 1837 was the turn of telecommunications. However, that the State possess the means of productions does not alter the capitalist nature of this company.
The table of the transportation industry shown formerly still holds on the whole for “La Poste” (it is agreed that we are here dealing with the “mailing” operations and not with its financial ones).
(*) Electronics and computers sprung tardily at La Poste. In France, the turning point happened in 1971-74 when automatic sorting centres (ASC) were built. Manufactured by Toshiba, the automatic sorting machines took the place of the manual sorting tasks and the sorting compartments. ASC building plans witnessed a sudden acceleration after the 1973 historical strike during which the workers in the sorting centres (at that time the sorting tasks were manual) played a decisive role. Employing hundreds of sorting workers and packers these centres were truly real factories where collective labour was set on “brigades” scale. Automating sorting and packing tasks reduced the number of labourers and led up to breaking off the brigades in much smaller size teams.
Another large sector is that of telecom-munications. They produce signals (first, optical signals -Chappeís telegraph-, then electric, radio electric signals, electronic flows, etc.). They transform (modulate) them and dispatch them through a variety of means of transmission (cables, hertzian network, satellites) that are related to one another by means of telecommunications networks.
These signals carry messages commonly named “information”. Yet, what we are dealing with is not the content of these information but the process of labour that is needed for their forwarding (in the same way as for the transportation industry: its productive nature is free of the nature of the transported object). The productive labour consists in making that these equipment be constantly available (maintenance) and once activated the signals be dispatched in the best conditions of speed, reliability and regularity (traffic regulation activity). In accomplishing this job, the labourer creates value. The capitalists, proprietors of the means of production, seize the surplus-value. (Here again the content of the messages dispatched is not considered).
ON THE CONSUMPTION OF COMMUNICATIONS AS A COMMODITY
That individual consumption of such commodity is a non productive consumption must be easily understood. Hence, is there any productive consumption of communications as a commodity?
Let us look back again at what we have partly said about transportation that can be applied to communications. The process of production of certain commodities does indeed require that be used, in its general meaning, the industry of communications. Be they companies that deal with telephone connections as well as those that set in movement specific means of transmission, such as TDF, or satellite signal transmission companies, or all of them at once.
Let us consider the industries of television production. Their production (images and sound) must travel until it reaches television receiving sets. The shape in which this production is sold (whatever shape it takes: an inclusive TV licence fee, a subscription or any “free-choice” payment) has no influence on the subject under study here. Moreover, TV images and sound may, themselves, have undergone one or several acts of upstream transmissions before they are set to broadcast (such is, for instance, the case of TV reports being forwarded from the cameraman to the TV studios before broadcast). While they resort to means of production of the industries of communications, these operations add value to the commodity produced by the TV production industry.
The first conclusion to be drawn from this study on overall questions is that the unpaid labour of these two large branches workers, at least those who set the means of production into motion, create surplus-value. They do therefore belong to the working class.
The working class is not homogeneous. Inside these big categories of transportation and communications labourers, there are many objective differences. Thus the conceptions and the behaviours acquire different shapes. Subject to a quasi-military structure and organisation, team work inside the mail sorting centres is different from that of technicians working in an electronic telephone centre. The formers will feel more “spontaneously” closer to the labourers of a large company, whereas for the latters it would be very hard to position themselves inside the working class. These differences may be accentuated at the subjective level. These workers take benefits from their status of State employees or State labourers. The process of private take over going on now throws all of this back over. But the decisive element of consciousness is class struggle through which it progresses. The massive social movements of these last months have considerably helped the mentalities to develop. As it was said by one of the train operators in December 1995: “at the start of the strike, I felt I was a train driver. Later I felt I was a rail labourer. At last, I felt I was a labourer”. That is what “All together against capital!” means.
Workers Communist Party of France (PCOF)
January 1997