A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control
mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from
exploitation
For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in
markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their
concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to
individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and
facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate
so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in
theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D.
Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle,
offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market.
This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere
veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly
see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive
property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and
propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us
a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every
workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control
mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves
against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of
workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized
by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of
the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos.
In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates
explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in
capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle,
which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that
makes it possible – to a final end.