[PEN-L:6714] RE: Conceptualizing Proletarianization

[Jeffrey Fellows <jfellows@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am completing a PhD dissertation on the possible proletarianization of
US physician labor. The ongoing transition of the US health care system
from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist system of production and delivery
has sparked some debate over the effects on physicians. However, the
debate lacked important empirical support, as well as a (my perception)
proper economic foundation in class struggle over the means of
production, at the point of production.

At this point I am near completion and the results appear quite
provocative. I would be happy to elaborate on this account at a later
date to those who are interested.

For now, my concern is in getting a sense of the appropriateness of
labeling the transformation of physician labor as a process of
proletarianization. While we all understand that using stipulative
definitions is a necessary part of most economic analysis, especially
at the dissertation stage, I do want to get some sense of whether the
"modern" conception of proletarianization (deskilling of a craft form of
labor) is considered conceptually distinct, i.e., as an analytic concept,
from the historical transition of rural agricultural laborers into urban
industrial-wage workers.

My sense is that there is a fundamental distinction, beyond the
simple linguistic referent (Latin) to proletarians as coming from the
land, not so much because of the prior condition (labor aristocracy or
landed peasant) but because of the nature of the variable-capital
component of the means of production that the peasant or craftperson
requires access.

The land, i.e. nature, that is the focus of rural agricultural workers'
activities is itself creative, it can produce some level of value each year,
or planting cycle. While agricultural workers use knowledge and capital to
increase the level of value created, the total value produced is
fundamentally indivisible with relation to the natural and human
components involved in its creation.

Once agricultural workers are denied independent access to the land,
those that are transferred to the industrial sector as wage laborers
utilize means of production (whether considered constant or
variable capital) that represent either dead labor (in physical capital
form) or dead nature (in raw material form). Those who remain on the farm,
so to speak, and earn wages from a capitalist employer continue to apply
capital to a living, productive nature. Of course, the knowledge of
production and determination of the division of labor are
eventually possessed and controlled by the employer, as are the products
of labor and nature, which are sold for profit.

In essence, the proletarianization process not only separated agricultural
workers from the physical means of production (including their general
knowledge of production) and ability to produce a salable commodities,
they were also separated from their direct association with another
creator of value, nature.

On the other hand, the proletarianization of a craft form of labor
involves the separation of the craftperson from their independent access
to the physical means of production, yet these means are without a natural
(living) component. There is no "enclosure movement" analogous to the
privatization of land, and thus capitalists are not inserting themselves
between two living creative producers of value. A labor aristocracy may
be deskilled and disempowered, but is this proletarianization?


I hope this made sense. Comments, reading suggestions beside EP Thompson
and Hobsbawm? Would P. Sraffa's work be of use here?




Comments?

Jeffrey L. Fellows
Adjunct Instructor
Lewis & Clark College
jfellows@xxxxxxxxxx