Two Concepts: Rand Formula, Alienation - Essay Example

 Two Concepts: Rand Formula, Alienation A b s t r a c t Two concepts dealing with the labor forces in the country are dealt with here: Rand Formula and Alienation. One of these concepts is very particular to Canada while the other is general to the capitalist society and hence applicable to Canada as well. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Block, the trade union movements have got weakened every where including in Canada. Hence the concept of the Rand Formula becomes important. Rating back to 1940s it helped in keeping the unions in tact, by preventing workers from opting out of the unions. At the same time the same formula is alleged to have drained away the militancy of the unions. The technological developments on the other hand, are isolating people more from the society. Impersonal forces are dominating the society. In this context, Marx’s theory of alienation is becoming relevant again in all societies including that of Canada. THE RAND FORMULA is an integral part of the Canadian labor law and is, according to some, the landmark in the history of the trade union movement in the country. But of late, the formula has become controversial. The rightist political forces in the country were always against the Rand Formula and wanted it to be removed out of the labor law. Now even Liberals have started opposing it. The history of the Rand Formula dates back to late 1945 when the 10000-odd workers of the Ford Automobile Company in Windsor, Ontario, struck work. Their demand was for a “Union Shop” or compulsory membership in the trade union for every worker. The strike went on for three months, 99 days to be precise. They resorted to direct action against the employers whom they alleged were anti union. There were mass pickets. The power house of the Ford plant was shut down. Cars produced and ready to roll out to the market were blockaded. The strike began to spread to other establishments. There were solidarity strikes in about thirty other establishments involving almost 10000 workers. Thus the strike threatened to go national when the Canadian Govt. intervened. There were demands for repression of the strike by sending forces. But the Govt. promised the trade unions that there wouldn’t be any repressions, and extracted a counter promise from the trade union leaders that the strike wouldn’t get escalated. Both the unions and employers accepted the proposal of arbitration from the Govt. Ivan Rand, a Supreme Court judge, was appointed as arbitrator. The formula reached at between the trade unions and the employers, under the arbitration of Ivan Rand is called Rand Formula of 1946. According to this formula, the employers are compelled to deduct union dues from the pay check of the workers every month. “Check off” as it is called. The dues thus collected will go to the union. Thus Unions are thus relieved of the tedious job of collecting union membership fee from each and every worker. The worker on his part is forced to pay dues to the union whether he is a member of the union or not. This compulsory membership of the union is called “Union Shop”. This can also be seen as the right of the worker not to join the union against his wish, while enjoying the fruits of collective bargains by paying his dues. The Rand Formula imposes moral duties on the part of the union leadership. There should be no wildcat strikes during the term of any contract. It is duty of the union leadership to avoid such situations. They must disown such wildcat strikes. They must take disciplinary action like daily fines and loss of seniority, against workers who take part in such actions. If the unions fail in their duties described above, the company management can withhold amount collected as union dues from the workers. Though the Rand Formula was an arbitration formula to end the Ford workers strike, it spread to other zones of organized working class. Later it was incorporated into the labor laws of Canada. Thus now it is applicable to almost all unionized workplaces in Canada. It can be considered as a distinctive feature of the organized working class in the country. Though the conservatives and influential business groups were against the Rand Formula, recently even the liberals came against it. The recent conference of Quebec’s young liberals held in Trois Rivieres demanded repelling the formula from the labor laws. The leftist trade unions on the other hand consider the formula as a historical land mark of Canadian trade unionism which cannot be reversed. The controversy is on in Canada. The formula, no doubt, is a historical achievement of trade unionism. But it also had made the union leadership bureaucratic, and interested more in the flow of funds than the workers interests. This situation has drained off the militancy of the trade union movement in Canada. ALIENATION literally means just estrangement. But in a capitalist context it has got deeper meanings. When impersonal forces start dominating the world, Personal alienation starts. Thus we are estranged from the world outside. The capitalist consumerist situational politics makes this alienation acute in the lives of the common people. People become not creators, but just consumers. They don’t even create life, they consume life! People get separated off individually and physically. They spend hours in front of the television, which will take them straight to the consumer market. “In the televised spectacle, distant commodities, things that are brought and sold in the capitalist market, masqueraded as real human qualities , promising the purchaser youth , power , love, Community” (Social Movements in a Global Context, Rod Bantjes, page 74, CSPI, Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.). In such an alienated capitalist society human qualities become “invested in things or mere images of things while human beings were unable to realize these qualities in their own life”. (Ibid) It was Karl Marx who developed a theory to explain the alienated human state in a capitalist society. Marx emphasizes that man is a social being .Every individual is a social being. Thus every individual is forced to enter into relationships with others. Through these relationships and acting together every individual becomes a part of the changes in the society. It is because of this collective efforts to change, that the humanity has got a history where as animals do not have one. “The species-nature of animal is eternal repetition; that of man is transformation, development and change.” (How to read Karl Marx, Ernst Fisher, Page53, Monthly Review Press, 1996) Labor is the bond that creates most of human being’s relationship with each other. Labor is what makes the human beings creators of what they consume. (Only human beings cook food, animals don’t.) But when the society starts producing surplus, there emerges a class which gets free of its involvement in the process of production. They don’t labor, but controls labor and live by their control over the labor and means of production. This class is the capitalist class, and the society this class controls is the capitalist society. “Marx identified two major classes in capitalism: the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie which owned the means of production and the working class or proletariat which exchanged its labor for wages.” (Capitalism, industrialization and postindustrial society, Work, Industry and Canadian Society, Krahn, Lowe, Hughes, page 19) In such a society the workers who produce get reduced to consumers. As the market forces take over the commodities, the workers get alienated completely from what they have produced. The worker first gets alienated from the products he produces as it is owned by the capitalist who only has the right to sell it. The worker has no control over the process of production too. These two aspects of alienation make the worker a mere consumer, which in turn make him alienated from other human beings around. Thus in capitalist societies, the majority of the people are not creators. They are just consumers and slaves of commodity fetishism. The Canadian society being a capitalist consumerist society is not free from this alienation. The alienation can manipulate in different cultural symptoms. One example that researchers point out is the turn out drop in Canadian elections. It was sharpest all through out 1990s.Many researchers attribute this trend to the general weakening of the community relationships among the Canadian people. (Alienation, Indifference, Competitiveness, and Turnout Evidence from Canada, www.politics.ubc.ca ) The alleged alienation of the Western Canada from the rest; the alienation of the aboriginal people from the mainland are all manipulations of the basic alienation in the human relationships in the Canadian society. ================================== Works cited: 1) Bantjes Rod ,Social Movements in a Global Context, CSPI, Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc 2) Fisher Ernst, How to read Karl Marx, , Monthly Review Press, 1996 3) Kahn, Lowe, Hughes, Work, Industry and Canadian Society. 4) Alienation, Indifference, Competitiveness, and Turnout Evidence from Canada, www.politics.ubc.ca ============================================================ Perspectives: Adam Smith And Karl Max A b s t r a c t Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx are classical economists who tried to analyze the capitalist system of production. But the preview of the system leads them into diametrically opposite perspectives. Adam Smith sees capitalism as a dynamic process that creates wealth for the nations. The competitive element involved in the process of production is a creative element according to Adam Smith. But Karl Marx sees the system as exploitative of the hapless workers. He predicts that the exploitative nature of the capitalist system will lead to class war and finally to the replacement of the capitalist system by socialist classless system of society. The interesting aspect that comes to one’s mind while comparing the perspectives of Karl Marx (1818 -1883) and Adam Smith (1723 -1790) is that both these socio-economic philosophers were concerned about the working class and the industrial production. But the role of this class was defined differently by Marx and Adam smith. While Marx professed revolt of the working class leading to the disappearance of capitalism and its replacement by another more human social system called Socialism, Adam Smith professed prospering of the capitalist system, involving the working class. One characteristic of the industrial capitalism is the division of labor among the workers. Adam Smith and Karl Marx had diametrically opposite views on this. In The Wealth of Nations Adam smith argues that division of labor is a very important factor for the success of capitalism. If a worker is made to repeat a single task, his dexterity in completing that task increases, Smith argues. This repetitiveness and the increased dexterity will increase productivity. Thus according to Smith division of labor, or assigning workers to specific jobs will lead to greater productivity and hence the prospering of capitalism. Marx was against excessive division of labor. According to him division of labor was a tactics of the capitalist, to make the worker work more and thus exploit him for more profits. “The development of huge assembly-line factories in early twentieth century epitomized this trend. Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, took considerable pride in recounting how his Model T factory had 7882 specific jobs.” (Capitalism, Industrialization, and Postindustrial Society, Work, Industry and Canadian Society, Kahn, Lowe, Hughes, page 23)These jobs were divided in between, what Ford called, “ordinary” men, “able strong-bodied” men, disabled men, women and children. “ These observations don’t reflect a concern for the disabled workers, but instead high light the extreme fragmentation of the labor process, to the point that even simplest repetitions became a job.” (Abid) The pride of Henry Ford, justifies the arguments of Karl Marx. Karl Marx was a vehement critique of the practices of industrial capitalism. Marx considered human beings as social beings, and found that majority of the social relationships are linked to the labor. But in the factory, the means of production is not owned by the real producers or the workers, but by the capitalist. The capitalist makes the worker produce the products, the real value of which the worker never gets as wages. Thus there is what Marx called surplus value, which turns out to be the profit, pocketed by the owner of the factory. (See Chapter 10, Production of Absolute Surplus Value, Page 414, Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, by Ben Forkes, Ernest Mandel, David Fernbach,) As the surplus value is not shared in between the workers, Marx argues that there is clear economic exploitation of the workers (proletariat) by the capitalists (bourgeoisie). Thus Marx points out a conflict of interest between the workers and the capitalists. It is this conflict of interest that leads to class war, as Marx calls it, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. According to Marxian concept of the development of the society beyond capitalism, the class war will lead to the collapse of the exploitative capitalism and establishment of a socialist classless society. Adam Smith surveys the same scenario of the working relationship in the factory in a diametrically opposite perspective. In his work The wealth Of Nations (1776) he praises capitalism for its ability to produce wealth to the whole nation. (Marx found that the wealth so produced was distributed unequally, making the rich owners richer and the poor workers poorer.) Adam Smith also didn’t approve of the exploitation of the workers. He found the working condition of the British factories of his time very unsatisfactory. But his emphasis was on higher productivity, and how the dexterity of the workers can be used for increasing the productivity. Smith saw a competitive relationship in industrial capitalism and not an exploitative relationship. There is competition between individuals as well as between enterprises. This competition is what leads to creation of wealth. “Thus for Adam Smith, the “profit motive”, was the driving force of capitalism. Individuals and firms in aggressive competition with each other produced the “The Wealth of the Nations”. (Capitalism, Industrialization, and Postindustrial Society, Work, Industry, and Canadian Society, Kahn, Lowe, Hughes, page 21) The Surplus value of the Marxian concept becomes profit motive for Adam Smith. The former is exploitative, while the later is creative, leading to the creation of wealth.—two parallel non agreeable perspectives. Marxian dream of the socialist classless society never came true. The collapse of Soviet block of so called ‘socialist’ countries wiped out even the distant hope of attaining such an ideal non exploitative society. So neither Canada nor any of the capitalist societies can dream of a socialist society. But in the overtly enthusiastic globalization one cannot and shall not allow the market forces to decide solely everything about the lives of the people. Pro-Adam Smith enthusiasts often oppose all sorts of Govt. interventions, and argue for a free play of market forces. That will lead to despair at certain level of the society, certainly at the level of the poor section of the society and will lead to explosive violence too. So a balanced economic policy is always desirable. While allowing the capitalist mode of production and encouraging competition, the state should ensure minimum social securities for all sections of the society. The work space shouldn’t be a total exploitative space. Even Adam Smith recommended better wages for the workers, to motivate them to be better partners in the process of production. Works cited: 1) Forkes Ben, Mandel Ernest, Fern Bach David: Karl Marx, Capital volume 1, Penguin Classics. (Penguin Group, 375, Hudson Street, New York) 2) Kahn, Lowe, Hughes, Work, Industry, and Canadian Society, ======================= Read More